To be fair, it has been quite a while (not in our lifetime AFAIK) since we had a sitting president with such antisocial behavior tendencies. It was uncharted territory.

Bill Clinton? Bush? Obama? Not at all uncharted territory.

What happened between 2016 and 2020 in the name of making sure people understood that supporting Trump would not be tolerated truly boggles the mind.

For three years they used the FBI to threaten his family and jail his friends under an investigation into what we now know was a political campaign weapon falsified by the Clinton campaign. And the FBI knew that immediately as well. With Adam Schiff out there every day swearing that behind closed doors with the intelligence community he knew of big things that were going to come to light any day now.

But it worked. The political weapon did exactly what it was supposed to do.

Moreso than the right, it broke the left into the hyper-defensive ideological mess that it is right now. Fully embracing things that were mere crackpot ideas of their most wild-eyed constituents in the Obama years.

Yes. It was not his racist statements or his incompetence. It was what Adam Schiff did. For pete's sake, FBI literally handed him the 2016 election.

What racist statements? Please say "rapists and murderers".

James Comey said a true thing - Hillary Clinton was under investigation for using a personally owned and possessed BES for official state department communications, which she destroyed when the FBI wanted to review its contents because what she was doing was illegal and a huge security problem. She was never charged.

And then the FBI went on to pretend well after they knew otherwise that the Clinton-fabricated Steele dossier might be legitimate.

How many times did Bill Clinton go to Epstein's island? Are you OK with pedophiles?

Non-sequitur. We are talking about Trump

Trump: "I’ve known Jeff [Epstein] for 15 years. Terrific guy, He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side."

Apparently Trump is OK with pedophiles.

That's a very well thought out conspiracy theory.

Do you think we are all stupid?

Is it so hard to believe that this argument eventually actually prevailed within the organization?

Yes? I'd speculate the discussion in fact went something like this:

1. Trump supporters have been made an example of by keeping a bunch of them in jail for years for the crime of walking through a building;

2. There are enough court cases and grand juries outstanding against Trump that one of them will eventually get him and he'll be banned from running again;

3. In any case, a plausible primary rival for Trump has emerged (DeSantis) who has enough flaws of his own (anti-vaxx, anti-woke) that we can use him as a punching bag for the next few years;

4. Trump was allowed back on Twitter but is still playing on his own platform;

Therefore:

We can safely win some PR points by pretending to give a crap about freedom of expression by letting Trump back on our platform.

>the crime of walking through a building;

Why are you introducing inflammatory irrelevant misreprentations of the facts instead of addressing the point of my question?

That’s a reference to the dozens of Americans detained for over a year with no charges or due process. I would pick a different hill to die on.

Not that I believe you can show me anyone in prison for, or being charged with, "walking through a building," but the point of my question was whether it was impossible to believe that a change in policy at Meta could possibly be the result of good-faith reconsideration of the debate. Instead I got fanfiction with irrelevant agenda-fueled talking points. I'm not dying on any hills, I'm asking why the distraction instead of just considering the possibility that someone might agree with him. Getting this much flak about it is wild.

I addressed the point of your question directly by offering a plausible alternative explanation for what's going on here.

No, you wrote fanfiction about cartoon villains, without explaining at all why it's not even possible that this policy change could have come about through internal reconsideration of the merits of the ban within Meta. I don't know why you bothered, but it has nothing to do with my question.

It sounds like you weren't really asking a question, so much as indirectly asserting your opinion, and expecting everyone to agree with you. Or rather, putting the burden on others to prove that it didn't happen the way you think it happened. Which in my opinion happens to be a fairly naive interpretation.

It's beyond debate that big tech is dominated by liberals who hate Trump. This discussion is searching for an explanation for why up until recently these people regarded Trump as Hitler, where even allowing him to speak on their platforms was violence and terrorism, and now they're like welcome back, let's make "informed choices"! Do you really think the leftists in Facebook suddenly got wise and are now thoughtful, balanced centrists? Sorry that you don't like the way I presented the argument but what you're proposing lacks credibility.

> the crime of walking through a building

This is really the most nuanced understanding that you can muster

*who has enough flaws of his own (anti-vaxx, anti-woke)*

I don't love this correlation.

What do you mean? Genuine question. I am not implying that anti-vaxx and anti-woke always go together if that was your takeaway. Only that those are two attributes for which the leftist media will attack DeSantis.

Yes, just a few years ago Gavin Newsom was an anti-vaxxer: https://calmatters.org/commentary/2022/01/gavin-newsoms-mand....

I love how everyone just uses the term "sitting president" verbatim now when making this argument, as if the prospect of a president losing their social media accounts is supposed to fill us with dread, sitting or no. It's almost become like a verbal tic.

Everything that president said and did was covered by the press around the world, an army of spokespeople and a million online sycophants. He isn't (and certainly wasn't) "stifled" by the banning of his social media accounts. Really, tech companies bent over backwards to accommodate him, gave him far more slack than they would give you or I. And even then he had to cross the line twice.

Hell, he's still the frontrunner for the Republicans in 2024, and the last anyone heard from him was that he was selling NFTs.

The narrative of Trump being silenced by big tech isn't working, find another one already.

Yet they never mention how significant "a sitting president tried to void an election and overthrow a democratically elected government" is.

> Everything that president said and did was covered by the press around the world, an army of spokespeople and a million online sycophants.

Except virtually everyone I spoke to was unaware of what his final posts on social media on jan6 were, they were not covered, and they were lied about for years with no way for the public to see that in fact he called for people to go home peacefully on jan6.

You can say things like this, but they carry more weight when they're true.

I saw his tortured video of asking the crowd to go home on January 6th, on TV, and then many times elsewhere. He made multiple takes, and himself inserted the line about "loving" the insurrectionists. What are you TALKING about? What lies? Be specific.

> Except virtually everyone I spoke to was unaware of what his final posts on social media on jan6 were, they were not covered,

And who are these people you've been speaking to? Clearly they're living under rocks.

> and they were lied about for years with no way for the public to see that in fact he called for people to go home peacefully on jan6.

"no way for the public to see" ??? This is nonsense - he first called for people to go home on Jan 6 via a televised announcement, then repeated that on social media, before being banned. The TV announcement was covered and broadcast by multiple TV networks.

Just 3 seconds of Googling brings up this youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_JxN9CwIMU

Oh and it's CNN coverage, of all networks!

If corps are people, then it's men with multiple personalities disorder, with the number of personalities sometimes reaching tens. A few years ago one group of neurons (VPs) was in charge, and they believed that free speech is bad. Today another group of neurons has taken control, and they believe that free speech is good.

It’s the same neurons. They just realized that alienating half the country is bad for business.

It's a coincidence this happened after the midterms. Totally not a political decision at all.

Trump-endorsed candidates underperformed in the midterms and in previous elections. Trump talking hurts the party. If anything, keeping him off the platforms until after the midterms helped Republicans.

Maybe they underperformed because the platforms he used to win in 2016 banned him? Make no mistake, Trump won in '16 because of Twitter & FB reach.

Trump endorsees also underperformed in 2018 and 2020. There’s a pretty clear trend. Trump won in 2016 because of his reach on Facebook and Twitter, yes—he was novel and his win was a black swan. But he and his candidates also did poorly in subsequent elections, after the novelty wore off, because of his social media reach.

They "underperformed" because his own party establishment thwarted the efforts of candidates he endorsed.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading this sentence from the "Oversight Board".

https://www.oversightboard.com/news/226612455899839-oversigh...

The Board found that the two posts by Mr Trump on 6 January severely violated Facebook's Community Standards and Instagram's Community Guidelines. "We love you. You're very special" in the first post, and "great patriots" and "remember this day forever" in the second post violated Facebook's rules prohibiting praise or support of people engaged in violence.

This seems like a ridiculous stretch of "praise of support of people engaged in violence" when right before "We love you." is "We have to have peace. So go home."

It's pretty clear this was a post facto decision - Trump needed to be banned, so let's see if we can come up with something to ban him for.

The HackerNews crowd really needs to figure out how to deal with the cognitive dissonance of "the business can do no wrong while chasing the profits" and "but ma' freedoms".