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Re:Conservatives flock to Parler, claiming censorship on Fac... by matwood on Sunday November 15, 2020 @07:47AM (#25100769)
I agree. I don't envy the position these platforms were put in. The platforms already had policies, but those did not foresee a time when the POTUS would act this way. When someone on the platform with the reach and power of POTUS says things that are objectively false (and potentially dangerous), how should those be handled? I'm not talking about dissenting opinions or a favorable way to look at a topic, but the equivalent of 1+1=3.

There was this ideal of the internet with information being freely distributed and available, that people would seek out truth. What we have seen though is that large groups of people just believe whoever has the bigger microphone.

Re:Conservatives flock to Parler, claiming censorship on Fac... by dragonwriter on Sunday November 15, 2020 @11:13AM (#25102232)
> The platforms already had policies, but those did not foresee a time when the POTUS would act this way

Yes they did. In fact, in Twitter's case, they explictly altered their policies so that the failure to take action against this very same POTUS would no longer be a blatant failure to enforce it's generally-applicable policies.

Twitter has apparently had something of a change of heart about that blatant favoritism, and adopted completely new rules to reign in the monster their own rule change created on their platform, but it is not at all the case that the rules that were in place until recently were not crafted with this kind of Presidential action in mind; not only was it generally in minf, the rules were, in fact, created to license this kind of action for the benefit of this specific President, without allowing a level playing field for his opponents.