Trump's base of support is insane, but somewhat independent of control by Washington (versus the Democratic party electorate which loyally votes for the chosen leader). The establishment is finally asserting its power to lay down the law. Unfortunately, the country is spinning out of control for reasons they can't or won't manage so this will only be a band-aid though it's gonna hurt for us.
It really isn't. Trump unilaterally desired to use a private service as his main medium of mass communication, while he also unilaterally decided to not only shun his standard and traditional media of mass communication.
If he wanted it, he had at his disposal all media in the whole world to address the public.
But somehow he chose to use a free service provided by a single and very specific private company which also has a very public and clear list of service terms and conditions.
To make matters worse, in spite of his individual choice of using the private company's service as his exclusive medium of mass communication, somehow he also threatened the company with judicial and criminal persecution if they didn't abused by his very personal and unorthodox choices and preferences, which rendered his continuous use of the service as a major liability.
Thus it's pretty obvious that no, a corporation like Twitter cannot discipline the speech of a US president. What we have seen is a president that, due to his individual lack of judgement and insistence of exclusively using a private service while ignoring every single alternative there is in the world proceeded to violate the service's terms and conditions, thus resulting in the service being terminated.
I haven't seen any reference regarding any email service, and to me that sounds something between unbelievable and an absurd excuse in light of the criticism of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email service.
And moreover doesn't the white house operate their official email service?
Regarding Facebook, all I've seen is a notice that an official page that wasn't used at all was suspended for a week. Does a temporary suspension of an account that's not used count as manipulating speech?
I understand the need to grasp as straws to find any excuse for outrage, but you have to do far better than that.
It was in a former title of this page, and if you'd followed the link and read the tweet you'd see it was about a service called Campaign Monitor:
> Email Marketing | Email Software | Campaign Monitor
That's the strap line for their website. Like many here, I often read the comments, sometimes without reading the linked site, but when commenting it does help to follow the link first.
With the utmost sympathy for those who have experienced coups and aware of the crap "enlightened" governments pull around the world...
I do want to say that gatekeeping and shaming of the form "using [word X] is insensitive to the people of real [word X]" is one of the trends that is amplifying division in the US. There's probably a better way we can acknowledge worse problems without inadvertently damaging discourse.
That said... an attempted coup can take many forms.
This was not on the same level, but I don't think it's helpful to deny that the objective of these guys was to overturn the election and they had institutional support from the President, legislators, and it appears the Capitol Police. Off duty cops and military were in the crowd. It just wasn't sufficient or well enough planned.
In my opinion, what we witnessed is the farce part of the classic quote: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."
Was it clumsy? Yes. Doomed to failure? Absolutely. But make no mistake, had the crowd encountered some of the members of congress they dislike it would have ended much more poorly.
I don't think it's much of a stretch to call it an uncoordinated, ham-fisted attempt at a coup.
How is that not an attempted coup d'etat?
Take Milton Friedman for example. Right wing right? No, liberal. He believed in free markets and the power of free enterprise, but he also believed unions were important as an expression of individual freedom of association. He even advocated a negative income tax for low earners so he was a redistributionist.
I still think that would be far better than a basic income, but I digress.
edit: to put it another way, it unveils that one of the identifying principles of the ideology is not a principle but a convention, upheld so long as its convenient.
Hypotheticals, don't count. Hints don't count. Dogwhistles don't count. Impassioned political speech doesn't count.
The fire in a theatre quote that everyone seems to know is even from an overturned case. (Schenk v US)
The Brandenburg case that overturned Schenk held:
If a threat is not immediate
OR
If it's non-specific/ non-literal
Then it's not criminal incitement, because it's protected free speech.
Interpretations of "what Trump meant" don't count, even if you believe with all your heart that he meant something other than the literal words spoken.
We have never seen that be applied to the internet but in principle twitter is very much the modern day town square of discourse.
The suit argued that Trump blocked the plaintiffs after they criticized the president, which constituted "viewpoint discrimination.” Being that the President’s Twitter, @RealDonaldTrump, is a public forum, that would be in violation of their First Amendment rights to free speech. U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald in Manhattan agreed with the plaintiffs.
Ref: https://mashable.com/article/trump-unblocks-twitter-accounts...
That doesn't mean that Donald Trump is entitled, either as an individual, or as POTUS, to have a Twitter account.