> Twitter literally claims that "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.

Well, no, they didn't claim that. They claimed the two tweets, taken together, were the straw that broke the camel's back.

And, yes, I think you could reasonably make the claim that the tweets were innocuous if you throw out the context of the President inciting a violent insurrection on Congress. But, we don't have to blind ourselves to that prior context. Given it, and given the way a number of people received those comments and have been actively organizing for violence around the inauguration since then, it doesn't seem to be to be a close call.

> taken together

Taken together primarily, along with numerous other tweets in secondary. It wasn't just those two.

Sure, I agree, but I thought that was kind of implicit in the phrase "straw that broke the camels back". This was the latest individual thing, sitting on a mountain of other things, that finally caused the dam to break.

Could you clarify you position here? I can read your comment a few ways:

1. The president did not incite violent insurrection.

2. None of the presidents actions meet the legal standard for incitement. Full Stop.

3. None of the presidents actions meet the commonly understood definition of incitement. Full Stop.

I think an argument could be made for 1. I’d struggle with 2 or 3. IANAL but let’s consider:

> So we’re going to, we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, I love Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’re going to the Capitol and we’re going to try and give… The Democrats are hopeless. They’re never voting for anything, not even one vote. But we’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.

> So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I want to thank you all. God bless you and God bless America. Thank you all for being here, this is incredible. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Please stop. He went on for two months about how the election was stolen (with no evidence), talked about the 2nd amendment and "how it could solve this", and then sent proxies to talk about "taking it to Congress," not to mention literally thousands of other lies.

Enough with the gaslighting - this was entirely justified.

??? lightgreen was saying it wasn't incitement. nemosaltat, whom you replied to, was -arguing- with lightgreen. nemosaltat said that he was pretty sure it met the legal standard for incitement. Maybe he doesn't say it quite as strongly as you would like, but you can hardly call this "gaslighting".

Do you realize you don't have to literally say "let's be violent and attack people" in order to incite violence?

Do you realize that anyone can claim “incitement” of violence since it’s completely subjective and therefore probably very dangerous thing to be using as a way to determine “guilt”.

In fact I don’t like the tone of your comment and I feel it might be setting some people off.

How about we keep the responsibility with the people actually physically doing the crime. People make their own decisions.

Your logic would dictate the person doing the crime takes no responsibility since they were incited into doing it.

> Do you realize that anyone can claim “incitement” of violence since it’s completely subjective and therefore probably very dangerous thing to be using as a way to determine “guilt”.

That's false. The standards for incitement according to the SCOTUS are defined in the Brandenburg Test and are _famously_ narrow. They include a subjective test of the speaker's intent, and an objective test.

- Subjective: Speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action" (this means, was the speaker intending to produce imminent lawless action).

- Objective: Speech is "likely to incite or produce such action"

In an incitement case here, the objective test is absolutely easy. The crowd broken into the halls of the Capitol, violently disrupted a session of Congress, and killed a police officer. Any lawyer would have no problem arguing in court that the speech that morning was "likely" to incite imminent lawless action.

The harder test is the subjective test of the speaker's intent. Here, we need to show that Donald Trump intended to incite imminent lawless action. That's typically a very hard test, because we can't read minds. But we can use circumstantial† evidence to piece together enough of a picture to allow a jury to convict.

† circumstantial evidence is used all the time to determine intent for crimes in courtrooms all over the United States, and is completely valid evidence. Don't raise "but that's circumstantial!" as a defense, because circumstantial evidence is completely valid.

You didn't disprove anything I said. I said nothing about making a legal case in court and proving. Notice the word claim? Additionally, just because the law is in court doesn't mean it's good or not dangerous. You still NEED a subjective proof to determine guilt. This means the law is inherently flawed because it will be used in a biased way and risks being used to attack certain individuals.

I don't care even a little bit about how you feel of the "tone" of my comment. You're being extremely disingenuous, and using terms like "guilt" and "crime" which do not apply to the current situation. The current situation is: Twitter as a corporate entity believes that Trump's tweets directly led to the events at the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the election and directly incited violence. The vast majority of Americans agree, but Jack Dorsey's opinion is the only one that matters.

By your logic a mafia don who says "it'd be a lot better if [enemy boss] wasn't alive" resulting in an assassination didn't incite violence, and the responsibility should lie with the "people who did the crime" because people make their own decisions. This is a colossally stupid take.

Your post is full of straw man arguments and I'm not sure if you're being intentionally disingenuous, or just have a very poor understanding of political events in general and Twitter's ability to moderate their own platform. Come back if you want to have a real discussion.

Wooooosh the point of me saying that was that ANYONE can label your speech as incitement bud. Again, your tone sounds pretty violent to me and I think you need to be removed from this platform. See how stupid and ridiculous this logic is?

Twitter is being prodded by government officials and working in monopolistic collusion your silly claim about it being a private entity is completely moot. If this is the road you want the US to do down you reap what you sow.

Did you attack someone based on my post? Don't be dense.

No one acted violently after reading your comment, but people did act violently after reading Trump’s Twitter. If you have an example of someone’s Twitter being taken down for inciting violence were no violence occurred, let us know!

How about the opposite where actual dictators are allowed to incite and not get taken down? https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2019/09/18/twitter-sa...

Paywalled, cannot read, sorry.

> No one acted violently after reading your comment, but people did act violently after reading Trump’s Twitter.

Consider this example.

John fired Andrew from the job. And told him, please do whatever you want to get your job back. Andrew took his shotgun and killed ten top managers.

Deaths of ten people is a direct consequence of John actions. John actions might be irresponsible, but was not inciting violence.

Same way Capitol hill events were a direct consequence of Trump actions, but Trump did not incite violence.

It happens all the time. Possibly a majority of all twitter bans over the last 5 years fit that description. Say racist thing like "Muslims should stay out of the USA" get banned by twitter for "inciting violence against a protected group".

In a way, all political advocacy consists of incitement of violence. Any law not ultimately backed up by the credible threat of violence is just a suggestion. If you don't pay your taxes for long enough, eventually federal agents with guns will come to take you to jail, and if you resist, they'll kill you.

That is a wild misrepresentation of the facts.

That was the second of two tweets, that they are taking together. This was the other

"The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”

They explain the context and how these tweets are being interpreted.

Ok, so it looks like the two tweets were:

"The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!

"To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th."

I fail to see the issue with these tweets. He is not planning to attend an inauguration because he will not be inaugurated President? Is that such a huge problem? Is it even something that the incoming President was requesting? And what is the issue with the other tweet?

This is a bizarre hill that Twitter chose to spend 10% of their market cap on. It seems like there must have been something else that they could have picked that would have made more sense.

If you insist on trying to identify a handful of tweets that justify this, you're going to be disappointed.

The problem is the totality of his behavior. Watch the first 20 minutes of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6uSYhyFao4

I think it's some of the following factors:

- President Trump’s statement that he will not be attending the Inauguration is being received by a number of his supporters as further confirmation that the election was not legitimate and is seen as him disavowing his previous claim made via two Tweets (1, 2) by his Deputy Chief of Staff, Dan Scavino, that there would be an “orderly transition” on January 20th.

- The second Tweet may also serve as encouragement to those potentially considering violent acts that the Inauguration would be a “safe” target, as he will not be attending.

- The use of the words “American Patriots” to describe some of his supporters is also being interpreted as support for those committing violent acts at the US Capitol.

- The mention of his supporters having a “GIANT VOICE long into the future” and that “They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” is being interpreted as further indication that President Trump does not plan to facilitate an “orderly transition” and instead that he plans to continue to support, empower, and shield those who believe he won the election.

- Plans for future armed protests have already begun proliferating on and off-Twitter, including a proposed secondary attack on the US Capitol and state capitol buildings on January 17, 2021.

> He is not planning to attend an inauguration because he will not be inaugurated President? Is that such a huge problem?

It's pretty significant as it hasn't happened since 1869.

The fact that he's being censored based on how some people interpreted what he said is troubling.

John Lennon was murdered because of how someone interpreted Catcher In the Rye. Do we need to lock up Salinger for inciting violence too?

> Do we need to lock up Salinger for inciting violence too?

This is patently disingenuous. Twitter didn't jail the President for inciting violence. They said he wasn't allowed to Tweet anymore.

Could the publisher of Catcher in the Rye have decided to stop publishing it based on that? Yes, they could.

You're also willfully ignoring the fact that _just before_ those tweets the President had incited a violent insurrection that attacked Congress and then praised them saying: "we love you" and "you're special". As I said before, we don't have to be blind to the prior context. This reductionist thinking that we must take these two tweets entirely on their own and devoid of context isn't something I'm going to participate in.

> You're also willfully ignoring the fact that _just before_ those tweets the President had incited a violent insurrection

And we have a justice system to deal with insurrectionists and we have a democratic process with our elected representatives to remove leaders from office. This involves due process and respecting rights honed over 200 years of jurisprudence. It's not done in a corporate backroom by a couple executives with zero public accountability.

Would you be equally supportive if Twitter had deployed a private army of mercenaries to police the Capitol? What's happening here is the digital equivalent. You're busy thanking them because you support what they did. Some of us are stepping back and asking the question: wait, who controls these soldiers and what checks and balances are there on their power to police us? It turns out Twitter owns them and the checks and balances are none. If that doesn't concern you then you're missing the big picture.

> Would you be equally supportive if Twitter had deployed a private army of mercenaries to police the Capitol?

I'm done with this conversation as it doesn't seem to be productive or in good faith.

Propaganda doesn’t need to be explicit; it’s clear the intent of these messages, just like the veiled messaging in his incitement speech.

It’s clear that once something like a violent insurrection happens the companies previously giving a platform to the one who incited the insurrection are going to give a lot less leeway on anything he says.

Seems odd that this is seemingly hard to understand. If the violence didn’t happen, and he wrote those two tweets he’d still be on Twitter.

But it did happen and that’s changed the game

You can say anything is a coded message and claim it means whatever you want. The tweet that prompted the initial ban literally said "go home and be peaceful". That is supposed to be an incitement to violence?

Lots of violence happened during the protests this summer too. Should we assume that everyone tweeting about being peaceful then was also sending coded messages supporting the violence?

Are we really going to go with the logic that violence occurred, therefore anything tweeted prior to the violence was an incitement to the violence? And if it appeared to say the opposite of that, then it was actually a coded message that means whatever is politically convenient for us to have it mean?

You can keep claiming it’s one tweet if you like, but you know this is disingenuous. It’s 1 tweet + 4 years of destabilising lies + 1 incitement to insurrection

Propaganda over the ages has been studied very closely, there are known techniques. His incitement speech was a textbook example [1]. Why on earth would anyone give him the benefit of the doubt? He’s a wannabe tyrant.

[1] https://twitter.com/sethabramson/status/1347908845281095680 - A good deep dive on his incitement speech

How does your outburst relate to my comment? What obligation does twitter have to give anybody a voice? Especially a voice that has incited a violent insurrection. I don't see how Twitter are struggling to maintain user trust, except for those that believe violent insurrection is a good thing.

The outburst was a reaction to the question of why people would give him the benifit of the doubt. He was entrusted (non violently, but begrudgingly by some Americans) with the ability to command the United States' nuclear arsenal. Violent insurrection is how the republic that governs the people who operate Twitter was started, there can be good parts of it. I don't trust that Trump incited the violence, nor that it's a good idea to blame him and dismiss objection.

> Violent insurrection is how the republic that governs the people who operate Twitter was started, there can be good parts of it

So you're comparing the insurrection that happened last week, in a mature, functioning democracy to the overthrow of rule-from-afar by a king? Are you sure that a violent insurrection in America, today, could be a good thing? An insurrection is usually to replace the embedded status quo. What should democracy be replaced with that's better? Do you believe totalitarianism/fascism is really a better system? Because that appears to be Trump's preferred system of government.

> I don't trust that Trump incited the violence

He staged a rally called the "Save America March" with a speech loaded with violent imagery and threats to "weak republicans" with phrases like "We have someone in there who should not be in there and our country will be destroyed and we're not going to stand for that" with repeated phrases like "fight like hell", giving the impression that there were similar marches around the country, etc. etc. all carefully crafted to make it seem like today was the day that, if the mob didn't do something about it, they would lose democracy itself. Making it appear that the election was still ongoing, putting it in the present tense, and that in 1 hour's time, it would all be over. He even laid out plans for what he would do in office going forward, like a State of the Union speech. It was all timed to finish 45 minutes before the electoral college votes were due to be counted.

This was after Guiliani had called for "trial by combat".

If you haven't seen the full transcript of his speech, I would encourage you to dig it out. The incitement is absolutely plain as day. It's textbook propaganda and was designed to rile up the crowd to believe they, the "real Americans" (like Hitler's "real Germans"), could stop what he was decrying as a fraudulent election.

I get it that if you're a Trump fan or a Republican, you may be willing to give more of a benefit of the doubt. But to a non-partisan (I'm not American, but deeply concerned by what I can see from my part of the world) it's plain as day.

>I get it that if you're a Trump fan or a Republican, you may be willing to give more of a benefit of the doubt.

I'm neither.

>But to a non-partisan (I'm not American, but deeply concerned by what I can see from my part of the world) it's plain as day.

I am an American, non-partisan, who shares mutual deep concern.

We're going to go with the logic - and evidence - that Trump has been doing this for years. Even before he was president he was threatening violence if he didn't win the nomination. [1]

So it is spectacularly, flagrantly, and most of all utterly unconvincing to suggest that he - I don't know - misspoke? Didn't mean it? Was widely and unfortunately misinterpreted by an angry crowd he just happened find himself in front of with kindness and good will to all men in his heart?

None of that is even remotely plausible.

Twitter, Amazon, Facebook, etc are perfectly justified in shutting him up, for the safety of all Americans, and very possibly the rest of the world.

Once we've dealt with this threat, we can come back and have a debate about media control in all of its forms. And when we do that we can include the trad media too, because they have a lot to answer for.

But for now there are more pressing problems. Whether or not Twitter did the right thing isn't anywhere close to the top of the list.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/trump-warns-s...

Sure, once we've won the War on Terror, you'll be able to get on a plane without taking your shoes off again and we'll shut down the NSA program to spy on everyone. Once we end the scourge of drugs, we'll restore your 4th amendment rights and end civil forfeiture. The people who take your away your rights to bolster their own political power have always been very conscientious about giving them back later.

Conflating multi decade long concerns with the remaining few days of a presidential term is hardly a useful comparison.

A tech company banning a user isn’t equivalent to a new law on the statute either.

Multi-decade concerns start out as immediate concerns. If you only care about freedom when it's easy and convenient to protect, you just plain don't care about freedom.

Loss of Twitter use isn’t loss of freedom. No laws have been changed. He’s just lost access to a private company’s services. It is not the same as any of the things you list

If you think this is about Trump's freedom to tweet, you've sorely missed the point. It's about our freedom to hear differing points of view and make up our own minds about them.

If a handful of corporations with mostly homogeneous ideologies control who is allowed to talk to the public, then we don't have any real choice when it comes time to vote. We only get to choose from a pre-approved list of options that all have to conform to whatever Twitter and Facebook deem is acceptable. Twitter and Facebook et al are unelected and accountable to no one. That's not democracy. That's a corporate dictatorship with sham elections.

> If you think this is about Trump's freedom to tweet, you've sorely missed the point

I really haven't. Trump is the only western leader to have been banned from the mainstream social media platforms. You can't claim this is the thin end of the wedge, this is a reaction [by those platforms] to the risks to western democracy in its entirety. They gave him four years of rope to hang himself with, it was only a direct attack on democracy itself that caused this action.

> If a handful of corporations with mostly homogeneous ideologies control who is allowed to talk to the public, then we don't have any real choice when it comes time to vote.

Trump has all the means of communication that any previous president has had. All he has to do is stand at a lectern and talk and it will be broadcast on national television.

Again, he wouldn't have lost the access that he had if he hadn't tried to directly attack the entire system of democracy itself. All the other lies he's told over the years were allowed to be seen.

> corporate dictatorship

That's a laughable leap, sorry. If he hadn't incited a violent insurrection, and if he wasn't a few days away from the end of his tenure then we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Let me put this another way. Do you think everybody, no matter what harms they cause, deserve a voice on all platforms? Would you expect Twitter to host the voice of Hitler?

Ultimately, they are private companies, they have no obligation to balance, fairness, access. It seems the state forcing corporations to do their bidding would be far more of a slippery slope than the president, who has tried to actually destroy democratic process, being banned from a platform.

You claim it's clear, yet the majority of protestors that showed up in DC DID NOT storm the capitol.

How is it it's clear to so many people on the left that Trump was inciting violence, when that wasn't the case for most of his supporters?

A lot of people still argue that Charles Manson should have been freed as well.

I mean it's not like the guy ever killed anyone. /s

> They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form

It comes off like this statement is what big tech really has a problem with.

I don’t think you can really pick this part the way you are approaching it. There were many many other tweets that added up to this, and Twitter really didn’t decide that any particular tweet was a problem until people chose to be violent after reading them.

I'm aware of the wider context, and I didn't mean that in complete seriousness. I was just pointing out the extremely one-sided bias on display. We've had our cities burned down and dozens of people murdered in the name of leftist causes, and all we get is denial that the violence is even happening, or baseless claims that it's all committed by alt righters who somehow flourish in zones controlled by violent leftists. CHAZ de facto seceded from the Union, and Portland was borderline in that respect. While the riot in the Capitol was very serious and reprehensible, it was not even remotely a coup and the overall level of harm was low compared to the violent harm constantly caused by and celebrated by the left all last year. It's abundantly clear that violence is good and healthy as long as it's committed by the left, and it's okay to stamp out groups that find that abhorrent. The tech giants do not have the slightest problem with violence. They have a problem with their political opponents. This is a political power grab that is affecting thousands of people who have not committed any crime.

I'm all for prosecuting people and groups that have actually committed violence. In the court system, not by unaccountable decrees from the billionaire ruling class, and not with collateral damage involving thousands of innocent people.

I think a lot of what you’re saying is not true.

I say this living in Seattle. Nobody burned down my city. Chaz was pretty interesting; I visited and talked to people there. It was not a threat to the Union. :)

The things you seem to think are abundantly clear are not clear to people who lived through the events you’re hearing about.

OK then add this to context, they had also just determined that pipe bombs had been located in 4 places (Capital area, RNC Headquarters , DNC Headquarters, and in a pickup truck bed). So if someone who was revered and you felt wrong enough to stage a potential coup or insurgence for wasn't going to be some place and still hadn't condemned your behavior, yet those who were permitted to do the wrong (in the mind of the insurgence) you were just given a green light and location. That is where it breaks down. He was also stating he was moving platforms, so then those who were prepared to perpetrate the violence would know where they could celebrate it with the person they felt had been wronged.

Now personally I took more umbrage with the fact that he hadn't been kicked off previously, I personally Don't think that the previous comments should have ever been allowed to be made on the platform since he should have been removed for TOS violations.

Also for those asking how this should impact businesses going forward, a smart company should have a mitigation plan in place for any similar issue. It would have been strange if this was the first occurrence, but just look back a few years for 8Chan. This isn't the first time, especially for an application that a bunch of the users had used since QAnon had gone there previously.

This thread started out talking about on what grounds a vendor like AWS might refuse service to a service like Parler, and what those who run companies might want to do to mitigate this risk.

You switched it to talking about on what grounds Twitter might refuse service to the President of a country or other powerful person. Which you got lots of takers to discuss that, but it seems like a very different discussion to me.

Maybe it was the part where he directed an angry mob to the steps of the Capitol building?

Sigh.

Sigh.

Wow, the contrived reasoning in that Twitter statement is beyond belief:

Trump: "I totally disagree with the outcome of the election [...] there will be an orderly transition [...] I will not be going to the Inauguration"

Twitter's interpretation: I don't think the election is legitimate, therefore I disavow my statement that the transition will be orderly, therefore you should commit violence. Also, since I won't be at the inauguration, you're free to do terrorism there without risk of harming me personally.

> Twitter literally claims that "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th." was the straw that broke the camels back [0]. That isn't an objective bar.

When President Trump published this tweet, he knew full well extremists are actively planning to attack the inauguration on January 20th.

There isn't a clear, objective bar in this kind of situation. Jack Dorsey, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos each decided for themselves if they were willing to stand by and allow Trump and Parler to continue along the path of inciting violence on January 20th.

The people voted to remove Donald Trump from office and he wouldn't and still does not accept it coupled with his calls to violent action. If he's willing to drag the entire country I can only imagine what he would try to do to a company that defied him, Trump is an abuser. While any of these companies could have taken action, I understand to some extent why they did not. It doesn't make it right, doesn't mean I condone their lack of response, but I can see why a company did not go heads up with this person and waited for the appropriate time to take action.