The problem is today's printing presses are not owned by the people who use them, and can be confiscated without warning or recourse.
The consequence will be the end of liberal society, but society will demand it.
There are still plenty of conservatives around. If Twitter isn’t enough for you, you’ll find them also on the nation’s most popular broadcast channel, Fox.
And they can make their own damn platform. It’s a free country, and that includes the freedom of private business to tell them to go away.
It like people already forgot that followers of the president committed an domestic terror attack right after attending his rally.
Here is the video where the terrorists crushed an officer to death: https://twitter.com/joshscampbell/status/1347749675777011714
The doors were definitely not open at the beginning, which everyone who watched it live clearly saw.
What he did see is a violent mob who forced their way into the building and a police which was outnumbered and not prepared.
Neither of these facts are in dispute by anything that I said.
All I was saying was that it did not start after the rally, but during.
Doesn't matter that some may have been there earlier. The vast majority went there after the rally. And of them a significant portion conducted or threatened violent actions against the capitol, police, politicians, and the free press.
Crazies on /pol/ and elsewhere use the term acceleration to celebrate actions by either side that move society closer to violence. This move by twitter will be welcomed by them.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/08/politics/capitol-police-o...
Also, a terror attack doesn't need to kill people.
And one man's "harmful communication" is another woman's useful communication.
Since your comment is egregiously wrong and, in my opinion, harmful, I'm going to delete it so that it doesn't mislead people about the harms of censorship.
See where I'm going with this?
I say my opinion, you present your side, and we can debate, or move on, but we have both had our say (albeit, at varying shades of grey on HackerNews ;)
The notion of "harmful tweets" is a very 2020s phenomenon but the concept goes back thousands of years. There's a reason our Bill of Rights is strongly inspired by Voltaire, Descartes, and other (then) modern thinkers.
"I disagree with what you say, but I will give my life for your right to say it."
It feels as though we've backslid from that ideal.
“I hate Bob” is fine.
“Bob should die” isn’t.
Some tweets don’t need to exist because it might lead Bob to be killed, especially when said by someone with a cult-like following.
"Bob, I am coming to kill you" or "Bob I'll kill you if you don't do X for me" a court would say is probably a credible threat, which is already illegal.
Why do we want to shift the responsibility of deciding how to police speech to private companies?
Sticks & stones.
However some jokes already are illegal or at the very least will get you in trouble, for example there’s one word you can’t joke about in airports.
Another point would be who decides what is or isn't a joke or hateful?
Do you want the companies to decide what the correct speech is, would you like a government panel to police speech?
Currently, I like illegal speech being the only rule because it gets murky otherwise.
So we agree. Trump’s tweets were pretty credible, don’t you think?
This whole mess this week happened because of one person who incited violence.
This whole mess happened because of the instigating of the media and the riots all year.
This event did not appear out of nowhere, there was major tension building and there still is.
> "I disagree with what you say, but I will give my life for your right to say it."
FYI none of the people you cited ever said that. This is a 1906 quote by Evelyn Beatrice Hall that has been misattributed to Voltaire.
“Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient." Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions, and other controlling bodies.”
Disallowing companies from banning users would be forcing those companies to carry content they disagree with, thereby removing their right to free speech.
If they want the protections the phone company gets, they need to act more like the phone company.
I can even prove it.
That's how it works. Right. Now.
We need the 1A because we don't get to choose our government, we do get to choose our internet messaging platforms and they choose to work with us.
Some of Trump’s tweets are also newsworthy, of course. But the format of direct communication without context to millions of followers is a big part of how he was able to spread and maintain such a false view of reality.
Before, any statement from a president was reported on, and usually presented with additional context that includes fact-checking where possible, by a broad range of left- and right-leaning news outfits. That’s no guarantee that batshit-crazy lies don’t get through, as we saw with Iraq WMDs. But it generally provides better safeguards. Trump can still call a press conference, or even put out videos from the White House, any time he wants to. It is not a hardship. I’d argue that he liked Twitter precisely because he controlled the information, and could rely on people to take him at his word.
I realize that I’m painting kind of a rosy picture here, since so many trump followers already hate and distrust the media. But presidents got by without Twitter before trump and if it came down to it, whitehouse.gov is just as easy to check for new statements that aren’t edited by the MSM. And I think this is too little, too late from Twitter as well—they never should have made a separate set of rules for him. I don’t think your “future historical records” holds water here, since every tweet he’s made is already archived elsewhere, unless you were getting at something different.
As a similar thought exercise to yours, if in the administration’s view the election was stolen, that surely counts as a national emergency, which qualifies the president to “tweet” whatever he wants over the emergency broadcast system. There are plenty of other avenues he can use.
https://today.uconn.edu/2020/10/study-2020-protests-shows-di...
The BLM riots resulted in 19 dead, and thousands of properties damaged. It's equivalently true to say "Trump protests/rallies are mostly non-violent", since the majority of them (probably rivalling the 96% in the article you mention) have had few issues with violence until the recent insurrection. But that would just be a vacuous talking point.
1. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/man-accused-of-rapin...
Okay, let's retroactively suspend John McCain for singing "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran" on a hot mike.
President George W. Bush should be suspended for invading Iraq on false or flimsy pretexts, resulting in 6,000 American soldiers killed and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
Obama lied when he said "you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan" eleven times and this turned out not to be true (90% anyway). Shouldn't the social networks censor patently false and misleading statements by a very influential leader?
Ronald Reagan said something about launching the nukes on the USSR, I don't remember the exact quote. Cancel him off social media.
Et cetera.
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The harm in censorship is that it actually reduces the flow of communication and information, for future historical records as well as for the present.