In this case, he has chosen to become semi-dependent upon an independent organization.

He is the President of the most powerful country in the world. He could call a news conference and make himself available to the people. Those who wish to hear what he has to say can come, listen, and cover his story.

Furthermore, whitehouse.gov is accessible to everyone. RSS is a thing.

True, if Trump could've set up a blog or even a Twitter type feed on whitehouse.gov.

Mastodon for the potus? Now there's an idea.

Surely it would be scarier if they were forced to broadcast his message no matter what?

I think the scary part is that there isn't some sort of government-ran way for politicians to talk to their constituents in this day.

Nothing stopping him starting his own blog. He could probably appoint a Secretary of Important Presidential Lying and everything, make it nice and official.

Its called a press conference

No, it's scary that the president has chosen some private company's dumpster fire of a web site to address the nation.

Well, yeah that's kind of my point. The best way for the president to directly reach people is through these tech companies. That's how powerful they've become. What's the alternative for direct communication?

TV, emailing his supporters, texting them, Parler, etc.

Only Parler is similar to the direct communication of Twitter where anyone can choose to see it. And he is indeed using it to post the removed video.

Plenty of presidents before him have functioned just fine without Twitter, I'm not sure why people are outraged about a single channel of communication, among a sea of countless others, not being available to him is a problem.

It's Twitter, youtube, and Facebook. Obama used both FB and Youtube to get out messages.

And in addition to those three, he still has plenty of other avenues with which to communicate. Again; email, text, Parler, WH.gov, his own personal website, press conferences, TV stations, so on and so forth.

Obama is just one president in a sea of 45 presidents over the course of 231 years. They all managed just fine without tech companies, and Trump will manage to find a way.

Information needs to move fast today. It was the norm for news to travel slowly in the past. Today the president needs to be able to speak quickly to people.

Besides whitehouse.gov, which he should've been using, he has no other way to quickly, directly communicate to any constituent that wants to see his message.

Nothing's stopping him from holding a televised press conference, and he's still not banned from YT or FB.

The video has been banned from FB and YT.

Which means he's not banned from them and is still perfectly capable of using them to "speak quickly to people".

US postal service?

Oh wait...

The alternative is whitehouse.gov or maga.gov or whatever. Does Trump use Twitter/Facebook because they are powerful or are they powerful because Trump uses them?

As well as every press organization in the US.

It's ridiculous that people are actually trying to argue that the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth has no effective way to communicate with the public outside of Twitter.

From my perspective, it was Trump that made Twitter relevant for me.

What's scary about it? Companies are under no obligation to provide a platform for you to say anything.

> It's scary that three tech companies can censor a president like this.

Somebody must to do the job, and republican party was clearly useless for that.

Not censoring him before has lead to this insanity, a woman killed today and thousands of really misguided people that will end in jail. Fortunately they were white and the police got confused whereas deciding between friend or foe; I don't think that the outcome would have been so restrained in case of a majority of black people trying to assault the capitol.

It would be so much better for the only media available to be controlled by the government! /s

What a good idea, let's all have Big Media that doesn't have to provide a source for the information in their publications /s

We live in the information age, why is it so hard for a newspaper to add "example.com/news/1234/sources" to the bottom of the article to give us a nice little Harvard format list of references to all the claims they make?

How so? Let's take it to the extreme, suppose he called on his followers to murder group XYZ. Should Twitter allow that? If the answer is no, then it's not 'scary' at all that such a message could be censored.

If you're saying that this particular message shouldn't have been cancelled, different discussion.

But you literally have a mob which stormed and broke into the capitol of the US, with armed guns, and explosives being found, all of which directly linked to the president lying for weeks, instigating things and calling on his followers to rise up, now obviously resulting in risk of violence and at least one person getting shot in the neck. The notion that such lies should continue to be freely posted on a platform that has basic rules in place just because it's the president, is insane. If the president is insane and it's causing violence, you can't just sit back. (insert obligatory WWII/Hitler reference if you will)

Lastly, he has plenty of communication channels. What's scary is if a private company like Twitter or any other news outlet got forced to publish whatever the current person in power wanted to say on their platform.

If he called on people to murder another group, I would want to know that. What if I'm in the group to be murdered?

I wanted to see what he said that was so bad it had to be removed. But I couldn't, and I didn't know where else to look. So I'm left in the dark. I had the know-how to go to Parlor, but not everyone does. It just seems unfair that tech companies get to decide if the average Joe gets to see a message from the President or not. Trump should have normalized posting his messages on whitehouse.gov or something to avoid this.

What's scary is that the Cabinet and Congress are standing back and breaking their oath to defend the US Constitution, allowing the President to lead a coup against the United States.

Presidential alert text messages to all Americans

There is no attempted coup occurring at all. And it is not an insurrection. It's a protest.

When the left does it, even if they're hyper violent, it's called a peaceful protest. When the right does it, it's a coup and insurrection.

Yeah right.

> When the left does it

Wait, the left forcibly occupied the Capitol at the behest of the defeated candidate with the overt goal of using threat of violence to get the election results disregarded?

When?

With all the riots that have happened in 2020, it feels they struck while the world was weak in order to hold countries to ransom. Whether that was the goal or not isn't that important, but it has certainly had the effect of making countries around the world spend more money on policing when they could have spent that money more effectively controlling the pandemic.

maybe if the left were willing to actually challenge power instead of sacking churches and burning down wendy's in poor neighborhoods we'd have a credible path to healthcare by now. the lesson of 2020 & the omnibus are that if politicians are not scared they will ignore you.

It's incredible how easy it is for you to wear reality-bending goggles and throw generalities like "No one complained when there were fires and property damage during BLM protests", and that what happened today was "peaceful".

You can grasp the next "fact": that the Trumpites were peaceful, this was an Antifa false flag operation (you can find doctored evidence of this on Twitter). If you can lie to yourself about that, then you can go to sleep at night feeling that you're the moral one, that you're the one still on the correct side of humanity...

For what its worth, I think all of them were in the wrong. Whether you're armed with Molotov cocktails or conventional firearms, you're armed and a threat. The blm/antifa riots were just as much riots as what happened today. Everyone involved in those events that did not disperse when things got violent should be treated as a criminal, regardless of who's "side" they are on.

It's not a gang, it's a club.