Their TOS have specific "Glorification of Violence policy", which aims to prevent the glorification of violence that could inspire others to replicate violent acts and determined that they were highly likely to encourage and inspire people to replicate.
Further, the claim that Twitter "Silenced" the President of the United States, a man who literally has a press room in his house, and could have a room full of reporters convened at any hour of the day to speak to. He could issue any statement from official whitehouse channels and it would instantly be disseminated across every news outlet around the world.
He chose not do those things, because he is a coward. The quintessential Keyboard Warrior/troll who likes to rile up people safe from any counter argument.
I don't have a horse in that race, but it is disgusting how people defend this blatant and obvious bias as perfectly normal thing.
Let's not forget how it was Trump's DHS that was mistreating folks on the border back in the day. Is it still Trump calling the shots on the border? Is it still Trump wanting to bring manufacturing to the US instead of China? No, Biden is now implementing the same policies as Trump, except in blue flavor instead of red.
Get over yourself thinking your political party salute has meaning. They're all the same assholes. Twitter and Facebook are not against violence or hate, they're against whoever doesn't agree with them.
0: https://redd.it/jpuxrv (warning: politicalcompassmemes humor)
1: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr...
Twitter was in the news every day. They profited massively, but now that his presidency is over there is no interest anymore.
Twitter, same as every other corporate entity, benefited from Trump's tax cuts. They went years without silencing him, despite cries that his posts were dangerous. They -wanted- to keep him on their platform; he kept millions engaged with it. They even created 'world leader' exceptions -just so they wouldn't have to apply their own terms of service against him-.
It is disgusting how people act like this is bias against Trump/the GOP, when it's so obvious that the bias flows the other way, and it took an actual armed invasion of the US Capitol for these companies to finally step up and do something.
It is unfortunate how personal biases stop you from understanding the danger to society from unchecked 'private companies'. Trump haters are ok with it so long as Twitter and Facebook silence him but too shallow to imagine that one day they'll silence the politician they support.
The 4rth was shot in the chest by secret service, and the 5th was the police officer that later died of injuries.
He has been effectively silenced. (And at least in the case of Twitter, it was definitely not for glorification of violence given the two tweets they cited in their blogpost)
We'll ignore for a second that just because he can't post on twitter doesn't mean that you can't find things he's saying on twitter - so that would be the first place. 30 seconds of searching and they've got 4 posts about trump in the last 48 hours.
Fox News? OANN? Newsmax? He's on almost daily and not exactly difficult to track down if you want to.
Sure you don't get his diarrhea of the mouth for 18 hours a day, but that's a far cry from being silenced.
I've been mislead too many times by filtered stories to have any trust in them.
After the 2016 election, the left ginned up enough hatred that some bloke attempted to gun down a Republican representative [1]. It passed with comment but not any particular shock. This is a good example of the routine (happened in 2011 against a Democrat) level of violence in US politics. The US famously resorts to action when passions are high. Trump simply wasn't inciting anything violent, especially against that high baseline.
Twitter's actions are unjustified, and it is highly likely that all the big tech companies are thinking like this, they are known to be left-leaning. This is a wake up call to the right that these companies are threats. Any right wing government anywhere in the world that ignores the tech companies is at risk of them becoming powerful and effective politically opponents - that is a much bigger thing than people have cottoned on to. This move was big.
[0] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_baseball_shootin...
Quite easily. Freedom of speech is freedom from government suppression of that speech - it's quite clear in the constitution. Freedom of speech doesn't mean I or anyone else has to give you a platform to speak from.
This isn't crazy or unprecedented. We don't give unlimited contractual rights to landlords. You'd end up with a virtual serfdom otherwise. So we grant tenant rights exclusive of any contractual terms. Past time to do the same for social media participants.
Freedom of speech and freedom of association mean that Twitter has the right to put or not put whatever it wants on its website.
"Over 43% of the internet is consumed by Netflix, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple"
Not only that but some of these companies collude to limit access both from competition and political opposition.
It seems that breaking up monopolies as in the past is not viable with tech empires like Twitter / FB, therefore some type of regulation in this area is where the focus needs to be, and I say this as someone who usually takes the libertarian position.
Facebook doesn't control whether you pick up the phone and call your friend to voice your opinion. Twitter can't prevent you from driving to your local bar and telling your drinking buddies what you think of the president. Then again, the bar owner can kick you out of his establishment if he disagrees with your thoughts and gets sick of listening to you.
Because again, your freedom of speech doesn't mean a business has to host you.
We are truly in uncharted waters at this point: historically, your newspaper comparison would have made sense, but it simply isn't applicable anymore.
At what point do we need to acknowledge that these platforms are the public square? When they control 99+% of online speech? When there is a worldwide quarantine meaning that people head to the internet to speak to each other, and meeting up isn't even an option? When being banned from one implies being banned from all of them?
Increasingly, there are difficult questions that we need to answer around this: Does this argument imply that even if all speech was transmitted through Facebook's servers, that wouldn't change the calculus around what "freedom of speech" means? How does this interface with laws worldwide? How does this interface with morals worldwide (the morality of the coastal US is not as universal as many people would like)? Is it morally acceptable for all businesses of a particular kind to collude wrt refusing to serve a particular person? Would it be morally acceptable for every business of every kind to collude wrt refusing to serve a particular person, whatever the reason?
Arguing from this place of finality by appealing to the way things currently work means that people get to ignore these questions. Not to mention that failing to look at changing circumstances is usually a bad idea: omnis conventio intelligitur rebus sic stantibus. This sort of argument generally reads a bit like rules lawyering to me: even if this is how the law works in letter today, it seems to be against the spirit of the law and broadly self-interested ('as long as the people getting banned are people I think deserve it, I'm all for letting the social media companies decide').
How about this example instead: Do phones have to serve you? Phone companies are user communication companies, after all. Seems like an appropriate analogy. Whereas a newpaper is more of a publishing company.
Yes, but there is the other side of that coin: a newspaper (as in the company) can get sued for libel or other such things, precisely because they have editorial control.
It's seems that social media companies would like to have their cake and eat it too. They are explicitly protected from their users content (thanks to section 230), and yet they seem to flex this immunity by arbitrarily blocking users, often without recourse. IIRC they have even occasionally flipped between being publisher or a platform depending on the question.
To be fair, there is no winning for large social media companies, either they preform this filtering and everyone hates on them, or they don't and everyone hates on them. I do not believe there is a perfect way to block only people who everyone agrees should be blocked, as every method has both false positives and false negatives.
So yeah, it made sense at the time, since government was the big player historically, but we're looking at a different situation now.
I'm quite certain that's not true. Papers in the 1700s had just as much dominance in speech as social media does today.
https://csac.history.wisc.edu/document-collections/themes-of...
I think HN has a gross overestimation of twitter's influence. There are 7.9 Billion people on the planet, and 185 million daily active twitter users. I can't say I've ever once gotten my news from twitter and don't plan on ever starting. In my social circle I've got exactly 2 people who use twitter daily.
The important difference is that less than a billionth of what people communicate was through those newspapers. Nowadays? Maybe half is the the internet and most of that is through the big players (e.g. Facebook).
That's quite different to having a handful of internet giants, who seem to act similarly.
It's also different to having a huge Murdoch controlled network of media a firms.
Twitter is a US platform first and foremost. It doesn't make sense to compare the total number of Twitter users against the number of people on the entire planet. According to Statista:
> Social network Twitter is particularly popular in the United States, where as of January 2021, the microblogging service had audience reach of 69.3 million users
https://www.statista.com/statistics/242606/number-of-active-...
That is about a quarter of the US population. Your 185/7900 figure is off by an order of magnitude.
...nevermind, I just realized that US is a union of States where a repossession man just casually walk into front yards and tow away a Camry from debtors.
Which freedom of speech are you referring to? Because if you're thinking of the first amendment, then the people who decided that are the ones who wrote it, and it's pretty clear in the text.
I think that is disingenuous. Twitter said "specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter" [0]. It wasn't his brand of politics it was how his supporters were interpreting him and incitement of violence like what was seen when his supporters stormed the Capitol.
[0]: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...
How about we get rid of these 'white privilege' theories, because people are interpreting it as if every single white person is somehow inherently racist and evil?
Ya know, that mob that followed the beck and call of a man who still refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy and results of democratic election?
Yeah I think that was the one...
Of course not, just like the Jan 6 incident wasn’t. An insurrection involves intent to overthrow government, not merely protest.
I think both of those platforms should have editorial discretion.
Honest question: Why? It is a bit my outside perspective that the US has too big of person cult thing going. Not just in politics and independent of brand.
We can tolerate the existence of nazis, but there's no obligation to give them a platform.
And what's the recourse when the same forces collude to shut someone or some group out of the hosting platform for wrongthink? Build your own server farm? Build your own cloudflare? Build your own DNS? How far do we go in allowing tyranny by a loud and powerful minority? If we can regulate corporations to prevent corporate monopolies, perhaps it's appropriate to implement loose regulations against social monopoly. Collusion to silence an entire set of viewpoints by unilaterally associating them with a minority of extremists is quite literally oppression.
I don't believe that "violent overthrow of the democratic process" specifically is a valid political position. I am comfortable discriminating against it. I am also comfortable with private parties exercising their constitutional rights to freedom of expression.
> Build your own server farm? Build your own cloudflare? Build your own DNS?
Yes, or find someone else to do business with. Or... change your behavior so it is less objectionable to those companies.
I consider a free society to be a competitive marketplace for ideas. Some ideas thrive and grow, others wither and die. The first amendment is a mandate for minimal governmental regulation so the forces of competition can evaluate ideas.
> How far do we go in allowing tyranny by a loud and powerful minority?
We don't allow it at all, that's why these companies are able to set these policies and issue bans. Exercising first amendment rights is not tyranny.
> If we can regulate corporations to prevent corporate monopolies, perhaps it's appropriate to implement loose regulations against social monopoly.
It's not and whatever the concept of "social monopoly" is can only make sense if there is one party controlling all social expression, which is obviously not the case. You could also call this "social discrimination" and reuse the ideas of protected classes. But political views are not (and IMHO should not) be protected. This would be the equivalent of picking winners in the free market of ideas.
Regulating social consensus and private beliefs is itself tyranny. The constitution is clearly designed to prevent exactly that outcome.
> Collusion to silence an entire set of viewpoints by unilaterally associating them with a minority of extremists is quite literally oppression.
This is not "literally oppression". There is no evidence that there was any collusion, only that violent overthrow of democratic processes is widely objectionable to many corporations and individuals. That many independent organizations came to the same conclusion is evidence that the system is working and that the idea itself has failed in the marketplace of ideas.
Trump did not advocate for a violent overthrow as far as I know.
> I consider a free society to be a competitive marketplace for ideas
That requires those ideas to be heard. If everyone segregates into their own political bubbles there will be no competition of ideas, just endless echo chambers.
> It's not and whatever the concept of "social monopoly" is can only make sense if there is one party controlling all social expression, which is obviously not the case
Eh?
The people controlling the big corporations that control most communication in the English speaking online world are of very particular political leanings. They might not control all expression but they certainly control most of it.
> But political views are not (and IMHO should not) be protected. This would be the equivalent of picking winners in the free market of ideas.
I don't see how preventing the silencing of some ideas is equivalent to picking winners.
I'm not necessarily saying political views should be protected, just disputing the validity of your logic here.
> That many independent organizations came to the same conclusion is evidence that the system is working and that the idea itself has failed in the marketplace of ideas.
You say "independant", but there are strongly dominant cultures in those organizations and the people admitted to them are from a specific subset of the population. They might be somewhat independant in that Facebook doesn't decide what Twitter does (though I expect there's cross-polination of people moving back and forth between them), but they're both drawing from mostly the same pool of people and ideas.
I expect that Trump supporters, for example, have little influence in Facebook the company.
If Trump really wants to get his thoughts out to the world, he can host his own website and publish them there. He can write letters to the editors of news sites and see if they’ll publish them. He can do TV interviews - any network would kill for those ratings right now.
Or he can stand outside and yell.
No one is entitled to a privately owned platform publishing their demonstrably violent rhetoric, even if they’re famous. Media platforms have always been allowed to be gatekeepers of whatever content they choose; the internet age didn’t change that.
The population of the USA is continuously rising. This is not an achievement. All it takes is an unusual voter turnout and a somewhat close election.
> because he isn't their brand of politics.
No. They banned him because at that time they determined that his violence encouraging speech was a real danger to society.
> he is a former US President - we aught to know what he thinks, even if we disagree or think it's outlandish - no?
Also no. Traditionally, former presidents live a more private life to pave the way for a new generation of politics. And even if you think he should be able to continue to influence the day-to-day political news, he has the ability to release press statements and contact any media outlet he wants.
Trump literally is an example that being banned from social media does NOT limit his public speech. Anything he puts out is discussed in mainstream media. Just a few days ago we were informed of his utterly stupid idea of using cancel culture to protest cancel culture.
1. The second - and third, for that matter - most voted for President is Obama (69.5 and 65.9M votes). Trump is the fourth (62.9M votes)[1].
2. He was not banned because he wasn’t ‘their brand of politics’, he was banned for inciting violence against the terms of those platforms. You can certainly argue Twitter and Facebook had - and have - a very inconsistent enforcement approach for those policies. But that’s not what you are saying.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden...
Your other point is based on your own personal political biases, which just furthers my point about these platforms controlling the release of information (or disinformation) to the general public.
Just imagine if Twitter was a Right-Wing organization, and decided to silence the current President. How would that change this discussion?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...
For that to happen, though, the current president would have to do something that was at least colorable as a violation of terms and services. I haven't heard even right-wingers claim that this is so, so far. (But maybe I just haven't heard, not being one who listens to those circles.)
Biden has not, to the best of my knowledge, said anything that could sanely be considered incitement to violence. Banning him would not be in the same category as banning Trump. It would be much more blatantly political, because the excuse would be much more transparent.
Are we to just ban politics from these platforms wholesale?
Is lying against Twitter's TOS? If so, then you have a sensible point. But I kind of doubt that it is...
You may not use our Products to do or share anything:
* That is unlawful, misleading, discriminatory or fraudulent.
Joe Biden's rhetoric regarding the Georgia State voting laws is clearly 2-3 of those. Why has he not been banned yet?
And the incitement of violence thing has been debunked pretty clearly. If one guy at Twitter can decide something was inciteful just because that's their opinion - despite all evidence presented during Congressional Hearings, then we're far more lost than previously assumed.
So he aught to be able to grab a soap box and stand on your lawn every day and preach? He is a former US president so you are proposing he can go onto private property and say whatever he wants at any time.
> How can we, as a society, claim to value free speech, yet allow social discourse platforms to censor and silence political enemies?
Because you misunderstand free speech. Is the government going to arrest you for posting on twitter? No. However no one is required, not even the government, to provide you with a platform to speak on.
You want free beer speech. Speech without paying for it. Speech without restriction of any kind by anyone at any time. Why should we care about that?
Just using Twitter and Facebook for example - they've silenced the second-most voted for President in American history, because he isn't their brand of politics. Regardless what you think or feel about the guy, he is a former US President - we aught to know what he thinks, even if we disagree or think it's outlandish - no?
How can we, as a society, claim to value free speech, yet allow social discourse platforms to censor and silence political enemies?