To the European eye the idea of allowing any and all public utterance feels like a free ticket to disaster.
Deliberate and carefully crafted representation of "reality", and indirect communication via various "trusted channels" is part of winning elections anywhere.
The carefully and orchestrated use of mass media in the 1920s and 1930s, skillfully crafted to lead the electorate to certain political choices, was later used to even accept certain political atrocities (internment camps in the beginning, war and industrial mass murder later).
So to protect the electorate (!) from being grossly misled, many European countries in the aftermath of the 1940s decided to counterbalance the freedom of speech with rules what is not freedom of speech.
And yes, the details are tricky and courts have to decide.
Is that ever in the public debate in the USA? Reasonable limits to free speech?
Here is a fairly straightforward example from the German penal code:
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st...
This is true. However, the part nobody wants to talk about is that it didn't just happen in Germany.
That's a very generous way of looking at it. In the West, I would say that it would be more accurate to look at it through the lens of the cold war, though. Communism and radicalism were to be prevented and so freedom of speech was necessarily curtailed. In the East, it was likewise curtailed, ostensibly to 'protect the youth' and 'prevent disinformation' but with more potential for immediate consequences.
>Is that ever in the public debate in the USA? Reasonable limits to free speech?
Sure. It's been debated a lot, actually. Laws have changed significantly over the last hundred years, almost entirely to the expansion of free speech side.
Many Western democracies have laws like this, which would be incompatible with the American First Amendment, but which are basically intended to foster democratic health, and aren't particularly authoritarian.
The rules he was talking about though are more to do with the limitations on speech that can be considered insulting, transgressive or hateful. They also include constitutionality of political parties in general, disparaging the president, and many other things.
Dishonest claims about the legitimacy of the 2020 US federal election are a lot more dangerous, as is obvious from the Jan. 6th terrorist attack on the US Capitol.
Either of those precludes a good faith argument.
Twitter is only used by 22% of Americans as of 2019 [1]. If Twitter banned me I wouldn't even know about it for several months because that's about how frequently I log in. It's important to a certain kind of "very online" person but from my POV it's as inessential as Pinterest or Twitch.
I think that Twitter's perceived importance has been exaggerated beyond its actual user numbers because the previous US President used it so heavily. It was also an easy, cheap, reliable way for other publishers to churn out content. "Trump Tweets Something -- We React" was a daily staple for TV and written publications for 4 years. But 78% of Americans get along just fine without using Twitter itself.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/10/share-of-u-...
No, Twitter has a monopoly on people who use Twitter. If you decoupled the users from the technology (e.g., by way of some common protocol that allows human communication networks to span social media platforms), Twitter would probably vanish overnight (surely losing out to a competitor with an "edit" button).
> Twitter is only used by 22% of Americans as of 2019
In what world is it okay for one company to monopolize much of the communication of 22% of Americans? Especially since Twitter isn't some neatly isolated system, but rather its effects spill over into the outside world; consider how often traditional media cites Twitter (not only with respect to Trump's own Tweets) or even Twitter's role in BLM protests/riots and the Capitol Hill riot. Twitter's reach pretty clearly far exceeds its own user base.
Moreover, Twitter and other social media giants often act in concert, so it's not "just Twitter" or "just Facebook" that we need to be concerned about, but also these giants acting in their mutual interests.
Your recollection seems at odds with reality. There has been a Senate inquiry with conclusions at odd with your recollections. The Mueller report came to conclusions at odd with your recollections. A reminder: that report, while not indicting the president or his team in anything in particular, found what it considered incontrovertible evidence of Russian interference designed to favor the election of Trump. The Senate report came to the same conclusions, even more strongly stated.
As for your claim that the people espousing this view being "far more influential than a man who sells pillows", I think you'd need to establish a metric for "influential", since it is far from clear precisely what you mean.
Furthermore, the sense that some people had regarding Russian interference in the 2016 elections never resulted in violence or death (certainly not directly). Nobody claimed that the election had been "stolen" (that's a direct quote from a large number of people regarding the 2020 elections). There was just a sense of unease and disquiet that the election may not have been fair but the result was accepted anyway.
The standard for 2016 is therefore whether or not Russian interference occured, which two high level US government reports have confirmed took place.
In fact, this is exactly what was alleged in many court cases. These cases were not allowed to move forward, however, because of procedural issues, not the merits of the case (standing, mootness, and latches).
If it's true, where is this evidence? It hasn't been on Fox. It hasn't been on OAN. It hasn't been on Newsmax. What's been presented has been uniformly debunked in ways that I find completely convincing. If this is as big as it's claimed to be, you don't shut up just because a judge says you don't have standing.
I haven't found a statistical summary, but I've just surveyed the status of all the cases on several neutral sites (ABA, Ballotpedia and others). I don't see how it is possible to draw any conclusion other than a deeply incompetent legal team with no convincing evidence failed to get a single in-place ruling that supports their wild claims.
and ctrl+f "standing" = 16 results (6 cases).
Bowyer et al. v. Ducey et al.
Wood v. Raffensperger et al.
Pearson et al. v. Kemp et al.
Feehan et al. v. Wisconsin Elections Comm'n et al.
Texas v. Pennsylvania et al.
Gohmert et al. v. Pence
ctrl+f "laches"
Tyler Kistner et al. v. Steve Simon, et al.
Their recollection matches my recollection of events.
> There has been a Senate inquiry with conclusions at odd with your recollections.
The results of that inquiry weren't released until 2020.
> The Mueller report came to conclusions at odd with your recollections.
That report wasn't released until 2019.
That means there were at least three years of unverified allegations, swarming around - espcially prevalent on social media - sans ban hammers, censorship, etc., etc.
The 2020 election's fraud claims were thrown out by courts. They were entirely evidence-free. Even Lindsey Graham gave a concise speech on the night of 1/6 explaining precisely how false those fraud claims were.
The 2016 election involved Russia hacking the DNC and leaking their emails, which became a centerpiece of the election debate ("Hillary's emails!"). It also involved Trump publicly asking for Russia to leak the emails, and then (once elected) firing the head of the FBI and saying in an interview with Lester Holt it was because Comey was investigating any possible ties with Russia.
The response to 2016 was the Mueller investigation. The response to 2020 was an attempted insurrection. One of these is not like the other, and you're attempting to paint a false political logic behind how the two have been treated.
"Disrupted confirmation hearings" seems fairly different to me from "smashed windows and doors to gain entrance to the US Capitol while hundreds of people chanted "Hang Mike Pence!".
That doesn't fit the captiol protest very well. Sudden? Decisive? Exercise of force?
>That doesn't fit the captiol protest very well. Sudden? Decisive? Exercise of force?
Tell that to Brian Sicknick's[0] family.
Or did you miss the part where five people died and dozens were injured?
Or the smashed windows to force entry into the Capitol building, with some explicitly saying they were there to overturn the results of the election.
Let's see. A mob overpowers the assembled security without warning. That's sudden. Check.
An armed group stormed the Capitol, assaulted police and other folks, and by their own claims, wished to injure, take hostage and/or kill elected officials. Exercise of force. Check.
That same group did so, again based on their own claims, to overturn legally certified election results. Political motive. Check.
So please tell me, what doesn't fit the term "coup d'etat"? Or in this case, attempted coup d'etat?
Note that just because it didn't succeed doesn't change the facts or the intent.
If I walk into a bank and demand money, I'm still a bank robber even if I don't actually get any money. The analogy is fairly exact.
[0] https://ktla.com/news/nationworld/what-we-know-about-the-5-p...
As I said, I am not sure I buy that anyone with half a brain thought that a plan could work, but there seems to be some supporting evidence that something like this had been imagined by at the very least some of the people at the protest. How far into the Trump administration that might have gone, I don't know (or if went into it at all).
Had something like that happened, it would definitely have been a decisive, sudden show of force in politics.
Start before the election with attempts to suppress Democratic voting (I did not know this, but apparently mail-in ballots are known for leaning Democratic---"Red mirage and blue surge" or something.), then attack the legitimacy of the election, both in the legal system and in public statements (increasing the latter as the former failed), further make semi-covert calls for illegal actions on the part of various officials associated with the election, and finally call for and support a protest (specifically including the more extreme supporters) at an event that is largely a formality. Yes, I think the whole course of events satisfies the definition of a coup.
Not a competent one, of course. A competent coup would have called in National Guard or military forces to suppress the rioters and at the same time sequester the members of the House and Senate in an undisclosed location for their own protection. Then declare a national emergency, place National Guard or military forces in state capitols and large cities---at that point violence becomes inevitable and the coup self-sustaining. (This isn't exactly a genius mastermind plan; it's how it's done all over the world.)
That does require the cooperation of the military, which Mr. Trump never really had, though.
Some of us are still wondering, though, why there were only Capitol Police at the Capitol. It seems likely that had the protest been another group, significant riot control forces would have been in place.
The vote count being fraudulent, the idea that fellow citizens had stolen the election, wasn't an ongoing discussion in December 2015, January 2016, etc...
It's curious you think that people claiming Russia hacked the vote totals in 2016 were "far more influential" than the people who've been shouting "stop the steal" when only one of those groups of people convinced folks to march and riot to try to "take back" the election. The message against Trump after his election was "resistance," a message which accepts that Trump won the election, but sought to keep people engaged to try to minimize what he could do.
I challenge you to find those people you think were continually organizing events to get Trump's election overturned.
From what I recall the 2016 election was frequently attributed to some vague accusation of hacking from Russia but the same standard was not applied at the time, nor is it applied today. The people espousing this view were eventually proven inconclusive in all the different inquiries into the matter, and they were far more influential than a man who sells pillows.
There seems to be a very disproportionate level of enforcement towards offenders on the social media platforms, and this seems to stem from the personal politics of the people working there.
If the employees at these companies had the opposite politics, I am quite sure the rhetoric around this issue would be framed in terms of authoritarianism. Are you not allowed to criticize your government anymore in the USA? I find that to be quite incredible.