"We start from a position of assuming that people do not intend to violate our Rules. Unless a violation is so egregious that we must immediately suspend an account, we first try to educate people about our Rules and give them a chance to correct their behavior. We show the violator the offending Tweet(s), explain which Rule was broken, and require them to remove the content before they can Tweet again. If someone repeatedly violates our Rules then our enforcement actions become stronger. This includes requiring violators to remove the Tweet(s) and taking additional actions like verifying account ownership and/or temporarily limiting their ability to Tweet for a set period of time. If someone continues to violate Rules beyond that point then their account may be permanently suspended."
Somewhere a counter was just incremented. It's going to be amusing if Twitter management simply lets the automated system do its thing. At some point, after warnings, the standard 48-hour suspension will trigger. Twitter management can simply simply say "it is our policy not to comment on enforcement actions".
They've suspended the accounts of prominent people many times before.[1]
I would imagine that accounts of "important" people are handled personally rather than by automated algorithm. As Jack Dorsey points out in this[0] Joe Rogan podcast, the reported tweets by public or algorithm are manually checked at some point.
Approx. 4000 employees of Twitter all around the world. Every day 100k (edit: 100M) tweets are sent. The reports of tweets that violate the platform policy are (reported by public) enter a queue. These are then inspected by personnel hired by Twitter (number varies proportionally to the scale reports in the queue).
The personnel then go through a series of steps to take an action such as making you verify again, delete those tweets, suspending the account, or in the last resort ban the user permanently.
It was just* MySQL for a lot longer than you might imagine. They were switching over to Manhattan (in-house DB, similar to FB's Cassandra) when I left, dunno the current state of affairs.
* highly customized and sharded, required team of senior MySQL DBAs to maintain, but still just MySQL.
Better leveraging Twitter's reporting feature is probably the most neutral way to solve this.
When a tweet is deemed response-worthy, they should post the report numbers. Value in numbers shields them in many ways and could legitimize their actions as a neutral party. Then, if they miss something, they can simply say there weren't enough reports. This will then empower the feature in the future.
I suggest this as active Reddit moderator with a community of 40,000+ subscribers who regularly has to enforce rules and uses auto-mod to help manage reports and shares that with the community.
-----------------------
You can report tweets for:
(1) Being not interested in it (you just get redirected to a mute or block button)
(2)It's suspicious or spam
---> The account is fake
---> Includes a link to a potentially harmful or phishing site
---> Hashtags are unrelated
---> Uses the reply function to spam
---> Something else
(3) It's abusive or harmful
---> It's disrespectful
---> Includes private information
---> Includes targeted harassment
---> It directs hate against a protected category (eg race, religions, gender, orientation, disability)
---> Threatening violence
---> They're encouraging self-harm or suicide
(4) It's misleading about politics or civic events
---> It has false information about how to vote
---> It intends to suppress or intimidate someone from voting
---> It misrepresents it's affiliation or impersonates an official
(5) It expresses intentions of self-harm or suicide.
-----------------------
It's pretty good but I would suggest the very simple following updates:
- Updating the main issue (It's abusive or harmful) to (It's abusive or encourages violence or destruction of property)
- Adding a sub-issue to (It's misleading about politics or civic events) with (A political official is supporting false or unsubstantiated information as definitive truth.)
- Adding a sub-issue to (It's suspicious, spam, or false) with (It's supporting false or unsubstantiated information as definitive truth.)
- Adding chevron icons (>) as a visual cue that each main reporting issue has many sub-issues
This doesn’t work for political tweets. Look at replies to even Trumps benign tweets and you will see 50% of the population would hate other guy no matter what they tweet. Every single tweet of Joe Biden and Trump will get flagged no matter what they were tweeting.
The article you linked to was over 8 years ago at this point - it was years closer to the founding of Twitter than it is to the present day. I don't think that can be considered relevant to their current enforcement regime.
Only accounts with a large reach get fact checked. Unfortunately, leftist lunatics don't have the same reach as him, so they aren't ever going to get fact checked. (Just banned for violating the TOS.)
Edit: Don't understand the sentiment. Are there any radical left accounts with as much reach as the POTUS, that engage in similar behaviour that I am not aware of? If they exist, they should be trivial to link to. Looking at the top Twitter accounts, they consist of Barack Obama, YouTube, Modi, Bill Gates and a bunch of celebrities. Are any of those folks radical left? Will Lady Gaga or Katy Perry be opening the 2021 Superbowl halftime with "Internationale?"
I think you're being downvoting because your first sentence appears to be calling all leftists lunatics when (correct me if I'm wrong) you're actually saying "there are no leftists who are quite as loony and prominent as Trump so there is no easy comparison".
> I think you're being downvoting because your first sentence appears to be calling all leftists lunatics when (correct me if I'm wrong) you're actually saying "there are no leftists who are quite as loony and prominent as Trump so there is no easy comparison".
I think so. The GP's use of the term "leftist lunatics" reads as a right-wing shibboleth to me.
Outside the US, I hear "looney left" and related terms used all the time by political moderates to describe any leftist groups outside the political mainstream, with a similar connotation to "alt-right", though it's a meaner phrase. It's derogatory towards them, but not towards the left in general.
Inside the US, "looney left", "communists", and "traitors" are all used by the political center-right and right-wards to describe any leftist group. Any reference to the left is intended to be derogatory.
If they were going to "leap at the chance" to suspend Trump, then why haven't they already? He's been treading in the grey area of their ToS for years.
Conflicting interests between how much they disagree with him politically and how much money they directly make off of his traffic (and less directly via traffic from everyone complaining about the controversy).
Twitter's business model is totally reliant on controversy. They want to treat/control, but not cure/extinguish.
Which is a separate reason that twitter's ethically conflicted in making almost any judgment calls on what's "allowable" speech.
Additionally, the nature of mud-slinging politics requires that ones opponents "follow" his online presence in able to attack. So if Trump leaves Twitter, not only do his followers go to whatever new platform he does, but so must his adversaries.
Yes, double standard to protect Trump. Who has for years twitted violent stuff, racist stuff, and Twitter had let it slide. I don't get this weird victim mentality of Trump folks. Trump has been treated with kid gloves by Twitter. Meanwhile, the largest broadcast network is literally Trump's state media.
> Somewhere a counter was just incremented. It's going to be amusing if Twitter management simply lets the automated system do its thing. At some point, after warnings, the standard 48-hour suspension will trigger. Twitter management can simply simply say "it is our policy not to comment on enforcement actions".
I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter has exempted Trump's accounts from all automated moderation. However, I'm half expecting them to ban him about twelve seconds after he leaves office.
I would never let a machine automate any decision regarding Trump's account, considering that any action would be scrutinized by the entire world and could have massive repercussions...
So definitely not "a counter incremented somewhere". This is a political decision.
> However, I'm half expecting them to ban him about twelve seconds after he leaves office.
At the top management level, they are probably weighing the possibility that he never leaves office (a plausible scenario at this point), and how that scenario affects their bottom line.
They probably don’t want US institutions to dissolve into full-blown autocracy... But on the other hand, if that were to happen, then it would be better for the stock price if they hadn’t burned all bridges with the new leader for life.
You can bet that Zuckerberg is making the same calculus - except that he seems to have chosen a side. Facebook is no longer pretending to care about preventing autocracy. They are betting on the GOP coup succeeding, and are building bridges accordingly.
Note: no amount of downvoting by the alt-right fringe lurking here will make the facts go away. Downvote away since you don’t have the courage to write down and justify your true beliefs. You are an embarrassment to the technology community. You are the spineless, petty, cowardly foundation upon which all autocracies are built.
You've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly lately. That's not cool. Emotions are inflamed right now, and that makes it more important, not less, to follow these rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'd love to live in this world, but it is not one I think anyone can afford to live in. This man is a true narcissist who has very little respect for the office, the institutions he's responsible for, or more than half the country. All sorts of things that were very far from reality are no longer.
But I would love to be able to agree with you. That would be a better world. But the world we live in is where the President says "when the looting starts, the shooting starts," a racist dog whistle to the 1960s, who "jokes" about staying past any term limits, where enablers in Congress and in the media allow him to toe the line of criminal behavior with no accountability as long as it benefits them. That's reality. I wish it were different, but I cannot take your position and reconcile it with what's in front of us today.
It's not about what Trump does. It's about what everyone else does. He's very good at getting attention with stunts that have no practical or legal effect. This includes signing executive orders, which sounds like doing something but it's not necessarily so.
So you need to look at scenarios where other people do stuff, and why it happens. Are there orders he can give and will people follow them? If not directly due to an order, how does it happen?
Trump barely has support now, nothing close to the widespread popularity he’d need to refuse to leave office. There’s about a 0% chance the Supreme Court goes along with it, and without an election the Presidency automatically transfers.
He’d also have to be astoundingly popular among the Secret Service for them to betray their oaths. His military support would tank, and him, his family, and administration would be in constant fear for their lives. IMO, he’s just not that insane, stupid, or popular enough to even try.
I think you're basically making an "it can't happen here" argument, and I wholly disagree. I worry this kind of thinking effectively guarantees it will happen here eventually, because it relies on dynamics that govern legitimacy remaining the same as they have been in the past. The way it would happen is specifically if the dynamics of loyalty and who has legitimate authority change, and we've seen over the last four years that that's 100% happening. The only question is how deep the distrust of institution goes and how far the people in key positions will go to defend a President they are loyal to. If you can convince enough people to distrust the process of picking the President, you can create enough chaos to break apart the forces that would normally counter that kind of thing.
Look at any nation that underwent major coups; factions form, and it tears the organizations you've listed apart at the seams. Because a conflict of legitimacy exposes those seams, and those seams are absolutely present today. A Secret Service agent, an army colonel, armed militia, border patrol agents—if they can be made to believe the results of the election are illegitimate, they may consider the best way to fulfill their oaths to be stopping the "illegitimate" president from taking office. They will think of themselves as the ones stopping the coup.
I'd love to believe that all of those dynamics you're describing are the same as they were 20 years ago. I'd also make your argument then. But they aren't anymore. It can happen here.
I won’t claim it could never happen here, societies change and we could certainly drift to a place it could. The Dem candidates that advocated packing the Supreme Court scared me for this reason, that’s part of how Maduro seized complete power.
Trump now though? Nobody fears him, the majority disrespect him, government bureaucracy openly defies him. He doesn’t even have the House, nor enough Republican support to pass laws to enable a power grab, nor a Supreme Court loyal to him before the constitution.
They didn’t pack the Supreme Court, it’s still the same number. They did appoint a bunch of textualists and originalists, not just die hard conservatives. That makes it harder to drive progressive change through the judiciary, but the legislative branch was always the better option.
Actual court packing is a terrible idea, last attempted by FDR, at great political cost. Hearing candidates actively propose plans for doing so boggled my mind.
Well enough to pass some policy, but not enough to seize power through popularity. He’d undoubtedly lose significant (I’d wager most) Republican voters, and all semblance of a mandate.
The idea drives a lot of clicks and ad views though, so I’m sure we’ll see many more speculative articles before the election.
I wonder if anyone in history has managed to seize authoritarian power with only 40% support. I vaguely remember an example in the 1930s in central europe somewhere.
I appreciate your point but do you see an actual path for him to do so here? It’s a different form of government, in a different era, with a much more informed populace aware of those consequences.
Maduro did it in Venezuela recently, that’s actually a more apt comparison as he packed their Supreme Court to do so.
My concern is that we may see the same dynamics as the reconstruction era. White liberals may lack the stomach for the kind of serious reform that would preserve democracy in the face of a white supremacist bloc gradually eroding voting rights and the rule of law. I wouldn't expect a Hitler-style dictatorship but we could see one-party rule.
- Informed populace. Really? It seems to me that propaganda and disinformation are rampant. The rise of radio broadcasts parallels the rise of National Socialism in Germany. Hitler understood the power of this new form of media, and used it to build a superior propaganda apparatus. The same thing is happening now with the combo of cable news and social media.
- Supreme court is now 5-4. The last two nominations do meet the bar of independence and due process. Neither do dozens of federal judge appointments that the Senate is railroading in unprecedented numbers.
- The entire GOP is compromised. Those who are not aligned with Trump have resigned. Remember Paul Ryan? Everyone who is left is fully aware of the new marching orders: absolute loyalty to Trump and his family. Breaking the law is ok - you will be protected. And if the law gets in the way, change it.
- The DoJ is compromised. For example, Federal charges were dropped against Michael Flynn, a federally indicted accomplice of Trump. That has never happened before.
- The election system is compromised. See the revelations by whistleblower Reality Winner. Note that no action has been taken - except exceptionally harsh prison sentence against Winner in retaliation for leaking the fact that the elect infrastructure is under attack.
- The FBI is compromised. Trump and his family have been under surveillance since the 1980s as known associates of the Russian mafia. It’s the only plausible explanation to the FBI leaving him, a known criminal, entirely alone, while choosing to sabotage Clinton with Comey’s eleventh hour announcement.
- ICE is now effectively a para-military operation loyal to Trump personally.
- The Treasury has been compromised by Russian agents since 2015. With Trump appointees now in charge, things have only gotten worse.
- Multiple state legislatures are compromising beyond repair. For example Missouri is deeply corrupt, and effectively controlled by the GOP in perpetuity regardless of popular vote. There is a vicious circle of electoral impunity leading to more dismantling of anti-corruption regulation, which allows more shady practices to tip the electoral scales even further. In Georgia, the secretary of state used his authority to “disappear” thousands of ballots and get himself fraudulently elected as Governor.
- Let’s not even get into the countless state and city police agencies that are infiltrated by white supremacists.
Would you be interested in a bet on this? I’m fascinated by people who have strong convictions on things that I think the mainstream populace would put an incredibly low weight on, like, how’d you get here?
I’d love to hear what constitutes your majority of news sources. And also where you live broadly. I almost can’t imagine someone outside of SF who ready HuffPost daily to believe this.
I’d give you 20:1 odds and happily take the bet. I’m very curious how seriously convinced you are about this, as it’s about as far outside what even my extreme leftists friends believe. Not to try and be macho or anything, but I’m very curious how strongly you believe this, or if you are mostly acting as a bellweather, trying to sound an alarm very early on a trend you think others miss.
Primarily the Constitution and the Presidential Succession Act. While there are some ambiguities that need to be resolved there is definitely no scenario in which the sitting President continues.
In order for trump to make a military coup and disband elections, he need more than the title of office. Even for something like sending in the military in order to push demonstrators, you need the direct support of the military. Is there any evidence that he as that kind of support?
Without such support, all the can do is push peoples buttons. He can ask the national guard to go to the location, which the national guard will likely accept in order to look helpful and useful. He might be able to impose a curfew, through the courts will fight him there. He might even be able to impose rules against large gatherings, which again the courts would fight him over. But I don't see how officers and generals would accept an order to start shooting civilians. Even if we disregard the moral question, just the liability risk from "just following orders" makes me question how much control a president have over the military to do acts which the law and common understanding of the law says are illegal. Intentionally killing your own civilians is a pretty major step for any nations military.
Sending in the national guard is naturally still a terrible idea as someone is likely to get shot accidentally. There was a good reason why the 9/11 military posted at airports wielded guns with empty magazines. Trump has likely the ability to cause accidentally shooting when the looting starts by placing the wrong people at the wrong location with the wrong training and wrong gear. He has a much harder time to accidentally cause a military coup and disband elections.
During his 'The president has total power' gaffe he at one point said something along "I am president, the president isn't a person, but the office. I have the office now. Then the next guy will have the office..." You know, the kind of thing a dictator would say. Sometimes I feel like defending him due to people's over reactions when I wouldn't otherwise.
The context for this is also that although Democrats wanted Obama to use executive orders to advance their agenda, Obama understood that future presidents would use his use of executive orders as precedent for their own--regardless of to what party they belong.
That’s awfully ungenerous to your fellow HNer. Maybe it would be better to wait for his response to your question (“Why is that?”) rather than answering it yourself.
If I had to guess you're the kind of person who always thinks you're the smartest guy around. You know absolutely nothing about this person, just went on this rant against a strawman to feel intelligent.
Yes, that’s always a possibility. I try to check myself for this kind of behavior, and I don’t think that your description is accurate, but of course you never know for certain.
Vladimir Putin talks about his office in a similar way. Yet he's managed to hold it for 20 years even though the Russian constitution was supposed to limit him to two four-year terms.
At least since Augustus, dictators have been diligent in paying lip service to law and established tradition while trampling over both.
They become pundits making mid 6-figures on TV and go on the lecture circuit making 5-figures per speech. Not a bad life for someone who doesn't need to be right.. ever.
There are as many sources as there are experts on the topic... If you had bothered to even google "autocracy expert trump" you would have dozens of sources already.
1. Sarah Kendzior. PhD on the topic of autocracy (specifically Uzbekistan). Investigative journalist on the topic of corruption in the Trump administration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Kendzior
And yet Obama jailed journalists and worked towards instituting Socialist ideas - which include a ruling class.
Meanwhile, Trumps only "autocrat" proof is words? He talks snit... What has he done to become a King? Nothing he's done so far isn't powers used by previous Presidents - including Obama.
What actual has Trump taken to expand Presidential powers? And what steps has Trump taken to become a King?
Because until actual actions are taken... words are just Trump talking shit. Which he's allowed to do...
He's neutered the justice department[0] and he's packing the federal judiciary with ideologues to the exclusion of sober-minded jurists. He's firing inspectors general tasked with oversight of the executive.[1]
What do you mean by socialism? What socialist ideas did Obama institute? What is the "ruling class" within socialism?
Regarding Trump: what do you make of him removing the inspector general who had opened an investigation against Pompeo? What do you make of him pushing out Jeff Sessions because Sessions recused himself from the Muller investigation?
Put another way: what would count as stepping toward autocracy, other than an explicit suspension of Congress or the like? Barring outright coups, these things happen incrementally. See Hungary, Brazil, etc.
I don't see anything about jailing them - and I remember reading a story awhile back about but can't find it. So if I'm wrong on that point, I stand corrected.
With that said - Obama definitely attacked journalists from DC. Spying on them, following them, etc.
> Trump removing various people
Those people work at the Presidents discretion. All previous Presidents have fired staff at various stages for various reasons.
Trump is a businessman who is known for firing people... You may have seen his Reality TV Show. His catch line? YOURE FIRED!
> The final vote was ten in favor and ten opposed, so Adams, exercising for the first time his Constitutional authority to break a tie, settled the matter in favor of the president’s exclusive removal power.
> The president’s authority to dismiss an appointee is now settled law, but with the text unclear, it had to be settled by the First Federal Congress.
> autocracy
Trump doesn't have the "unlimited powers" of a King or a Dictator though... you can claim it but he's got the same power as those before.
You could argue about "incremental" movements... but Trump hasn't moved the needle any further that I know of. Previous Presidents? Definitely... but Trump has been using everything previous Presidents have used - from Obama on back.
I did too, but the funny thing about "this time is different", is that sometimes it is true. Consider the fact that Trump is the only president that said he would not respect the results of an election if he lost. Also consider the dramatic backsliding in democracy we've seen in other countries throughout the world in the last decade. Vladimir Putin never explicitly called himself Emperor for Life, but for all practical purposes, he is just that.
At the end of the day there is no such thing as "the law". They are just words written on paper.
I heard those things too. This is the first time I've considered it even slightly plausible. I'd give it a 20% chance that he calls on his most fanatical base to march armed on DC if he loses the election.
Go check into the Qanon cult and similar circles. There are conservatively probably a few hundred thousand people in this country that would take up arms against the (literal) baby eating pedophile illuminati. All he has to do is say "the storm is upon us" and provide instructions. "Where we go one we go all."
Can any constitutional scholars comment on what happens then? What if he as commander in chief orders the military to stand down? Would they obey him or protect the constitution? What about the national guard? Local police? What would any of these agencies do if removing Trump required opening fire on tens of thousands of Americans?
Reagan, Clinton, and Obama were much more broadly popular than Trump, but the thought of them attempting this and having any chance of success is laughable. I don't even think Bush II could have pulled it off right after 9/11 at the peak of his popularity and with his powerful religious right base.
Trump on the other hand has a fan base unlike any I've ever seen. If you don't believe me research Qanon. There's a shockingly large group of people who worship him as something almost akin to a prophet. I'm sure there's some percentage who would die for him. It's a bit disturbing.
I agree that it's unlikely, but it is plausible.
Personally I think he will leave office, but what he has accomplished is to pave the way for an actual future dictator.
If the COVID recession plus unlimited QE results in further divergence between the real economy and the financial economy I could definitely see real fascism or totalitarian socialism winning some day. As I've been saying for a while, which one we get probably depends on which side is able to field the most compelling demagogue. I don't think people will care about left or right as long as there are pitchforks being handed out.
I think it's impossible to predict whether he makes such a call, it's the realm of psychology. What's the trigger? Let's say he loses the election. Does his decompensation happen so fast and so hard that he turns into Jell-O? Or does he rage tweet (or go on Facebook or TV or all of the above) that the election is rigged, illegal, invalid, and must be challenged with violence, before it's too late?
shrug
At that moment it is less about law than it is about character of other leaders. Does the Vice President, who is still the VP following his own election loss, contradict the POTUS' election fraud claims and call for violence? Necessarily on the table is 25th amendment and/or impeachment. A call for violent revolution to achieve the dissolution of constitutional order is unquestionably a violation of oath of office for any elected official.
People are conditioned to think that an impeachment would take a week or more. If Congresscritters actually get scared? They can follow strict rules of order and still get it done very quickly. Hours. The real impediments to speed are physical presence in the chamber. Not opposition. They will not wait for TV cameras, spectator chairs or tickets to get printed. If they really believe the POTUS is trying to incite an overthrow of the government, which is what autocracy means, they know full well they are inside the blast radius of imploding power.
POTUS is a legal term, and no law gives them power to prevent senators from entering either capitol chamber. Each house has their own rules who can enter. They each keep their own Sergeant at Arms.
IF a POTUS can use force to stop them, it is extra-constitutional, and at that point this person is not POTUS but something else.
> Since assuming office in January 2017, Trump has made at least 27 references to staying in office beyond the constitutional limit of two terms. He often follows up with a remark indicating he is “joking,” “kidding,” or saying it to drive the “fake” news media “crazy.” Even if Trump thinks that he’s only “joking,” the comments fit a broader pattern that raises the prospect that Trump may not leave office quietly in the event he’s on the losing end of a very close election.
OTOH people who hated Bush Jr. thought there was a good chance, and some evidence, that he'd find a way to stay in office past his term. Same with Obama.
When Trump leaves office he will be open to an enormous amount of investigation, litigation and prosecution. I don't know how probable it is that he tries to stay in office, but I don't think it is zero. Twitter planning around that possibility seems be less likely.
I'm not certain that is true. Wouldn't the most effective way to profit from the presidency be to cultivate your persona as a twitter troll, and tip someone off when you are about to make a market moving tweet so they can place a leveraged bet?
I don't think insider trading law would apply, but in any case we seem to have established that he's above the law and can't be impeached. He, or friends beholden to him, could be trillionaires by the time they leave office.
It would certainly explain why he continually makes inflammatory statements about China and everything else, without seeming to consistently pursue anything.
Matt Levine regularly says that US insider trading law is a mishmash of precedent and that it does not require an "equal playing field" but rather that's a misconception. He's also more than once mentioned that you can trade on your own intentions legally, and that illegal trading is generally based on misusing information that belongs to someone else. Finally, I essentially got the idea of people front-running the tweets from one of his columns, so I know it's occurred to him, but he wasn't quite so blunt about it.
The SEC is irrelevant if there's no specific law against it, never mind that there's no evidence anyone can prosecute for anything even if it was a crime.
As far as making money for someone else, doing a "friend" a favor is not the same thing as charity, nor is laundering money through a proxy. If you hypothetically give away a trillion dollars without receiving anything in return formally that doesn't mean you haven't bought something. Ownership is only the convention that other people think you own something, backed up by some sort of written records somewhere.
Yes, but recall we are talking about my expectation that he will prefer cashing in to trying to be President for life (which in my estimation would be thwarted by every other part of government anyway). He may well be doing such things now, but he can't really cash in on favors owed until he leaves office.
> My personal estimate is zero. He can't really cash in until he leaves office.
This seems true for a normal president, but Trump has never been shy about self enrichment even while in office, so it's not clear what incentive there is for him to leave.
they are already cashing in. look at jr's book deal. look at ivanka's trademarks in china. look at funneling money into their properties. there's myriad graft in that family.
I don't think you appreciate the magnitude of what is happening in the US at the moment.
The federal government is being stripped for parts, as we speak. Entire agencies have been gutted. Industrial conglomerates can literally regulate their own industries - for a price. Foreign leaders can influence foreign policy - for a price. Federally endicted criminals can get out of jail as if nothing had happened - for a price.
The level of grift and corruption is unlike anything the US has ever known. If Trump remains in power - which he is absolutely planning to do at all cost - it will only get worse. The end game for him is to create a new dynasty of oligarchs - at the same level of the Saudi royal family or Putin. Compared to that, the book deals and talk shows are nothing - crumbs. He wants to join the club. And that requires staying in power so that he can 1) continue stealing billions from the US public, and 2) continue corrupting the federal government to stay out of jail.
I agree that this system is more fragile than most people think; somehow almost preferring automatic government than the tediousness that functioning democracy requires. And sometimes people get a rude reminder of this.
I do not agree that the scenario you're talking about is probable (which is indicated by plausible). Perhaps you mean possible? Sure, but in that case it's also possible money instantly has no meaning, there is no Congress, there are no states, there are no judges or generals, there are no prison sentences, there are no laws at all whatsoever. Nothing matters, everything is possible.
That is a sense of unpredictability a society does not trend toward no matter how ill it is.
But try to understand that completely ending all constitutional order is not how revolutions tend to progress. Even in the U.S. civil war, there were two (federal) constitutions in place for two sets of states. There was order, even in that chaos.
I agree Trump has autocratic tendencies. But he is a weak minded fool. He will not make for a strong autocrat, he even contradicts himself and dithers too much for this. He is Side Show Bob. He's a distraction. To succeed he would need a very high percentage of authority, trust, and compliance - and there's just no way he's going to get that.
I question whether he even does something to sabotage the election. On January 20th his term of office expires. At noon he is not the POTUS if there's been no election. Further, there's no House of Representatives, because their term expires on January 3rd. And 1/3 of Senators are not Senators. But at 12:01pm on January 20th, there is a person who will become POTUS without an election. And that's the President pro tempore of the Senate. Following that, the states will surely already be figuring out how to reinstitute the House through either appointments or new elections. It's not up to the federal government. But to pass new laws, including a new election to make up for the delayed one, we'll need a Congress.
That has never happened. I can tell you many examples from history, things that are way more likely than any of this. Including from American history. Some of those things are violent, even in fact violent for just one person, that are way more likely than autocracy.
Trump's best chance is for the election to proceed.
So, while you can't for sure predict what's going to happen next, just try to have some imagination for rare events that have happened rather than events that have never happened. Trump is a chickenshit asshole but that's like, the least remarkable or interesting thing going on here, because he's been a chickenshit asshole his whole life - not news! And that doesn't really highly qualify (or disqualify) him as an autocrat. He's not going to be one because he's just too incompetent and steps on his own dick every chance he gets. Just try to calm down, let him have enough rope to hang himself, and he will.
During the Colfax Massacre during Andrew Johnson's presidency, there were two factions that claimed they had won the gubernatorial election for Louisiana. They both tried to set up governments. White Democrats murdered freed black men and Republicans in the streets. The President at the time was sympathetic to the south's cause and only reluctantly sent in the army to take charge of the situation.
This is already part of American history. You're describing some amazing world where people follow the rules even during chaotic situations, and I guarantee that will not happen if there's a contested Presidential election with Donald Trump on the losing side. It will be a lot more like the racist South trying to claw back its power, because his most ardent followers are exactly the same kinds of people. He doesn't need to be good at being an autocrat, he just needs to encourage enough people to support him no matter what, and eventually he'll encourage someone who IS good at it. So you're right that he is not the risk, alone, but he's not alone. He's surrounded by enablers, criminals, and domestic terrorists who have a vested interest in his success.
> I question whether he even does something to sabotage the election. On January 20th his term of office expires. At noon he is not the POTUS if there's been no election. Further, there's no House of Representatives, because their term expires on January 3rd. And 1/3 of Senators are not Senators. But at 12:01pm on January 20th, there is a person who will become POTUS without an election. And that's the President pro tempore of the Senate. Following that, the states will surely already be figuring out how to reinstitute the House through either appointments or new elections. It's not up to the federal government. But to pass new laws, including a new election to make up for the delayed on, we'll need a Congress.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but how would there be "no election" to that degree? Rather than a single, centrally-coordinated federal election, doesn't the US have 50 state-coordinated elections (emphasis on the plural)? So to truly cancel the elections in November, you'd have to have buy in from all 50 state governments. In a slightly more realistic (yet still unrealistic) scenario you'd still have a POTUS, but one elected by electors from the states that held elections, and there'd still be a House of Representatives, but only with members from states that didn't participate in the cancellation.
I suppose the situation would be similar to what must have happened during the Civil War.
You are correct. It's federally mandated as to the date, but it's up to the states to administer the elections. And if POTUS were to "cancel" it - well it would get a good deal messier than I've suggested, and really wanted to avoid.
Let's say a few states agree to the cancellation? For POTUS and VPOTUS, they need 270 Electoral College votes to win. If states drop out, it's decently likely no one gets to 270. That means the House chooses the president, the Senate chooses the VP. In the House, each state gets one vote. I repeat, one. In the Senate each senator gets a vote. This has happened before and it can take a while. It could possibly take weeks. Also, the Congress that decides this is the new one, not the old one. So some election needs to happen because House terms, every single seat, expires on January 3. Do they have quorum? Did enough states elect House members to have a sitting Congress? shrug
Most states are likely to still be red states in the 2020 Congress, so if the decision goes to the House, Trump will probably get another term. Again, each state just gets one vote.
> If states drop out, it's decently likely no one gets to 270. That means the House chooses the president, the Senate chooses the VP. In the House, each state gets one vote. I repeat, one.... Also, the Congress that decides this is the new one, not the old one. So some election needs to happen because House terms, every single seat, expires on January 3.
But I'd imagine that the states that dropped out of the election would actually get zero votes, and and those would be the states most closely aligned with the president.
> Most states are likely to still be red states in the 2020 Congress, so if the decision goes to the House, Trump will probably get another term. Again, each state just gets one vote.
But like I noted above, the red states would be the ones that would be more likely to follow Trump's lead an drop out of an election. I only count 24 red-tinted states on Wikipedia's map, so a few drop outs would actually hurt the Republicans.
But if it got to the red states picking that, would they be obligated to pick an official presidential candidate? I'd hope the Republicans would at least pick a president that isn't as deranged as Trump. On the other hand, Trump's derangement isn't a completely bad thing, because it leads him to pursue his objectives incompetently.
>But I'd imagine that the states that dropped out of the election would actually get zero votes, and and those would be the states most closely aligned with the president.
Right. So you can't assume that outcome. You have to figure out some edge case that would cause toss up states to either drop out, or have their Electors challenged. I think it's less likely a state cancels elections, than having their Electors challenged, even though neither has happened.
>But if it got to the red states picking that, would they be obligated to pick an official presidential candidate?
Yes 11th amendment. House must choose from the top three receiving EC votes.
I agree with you. But what Trump is doing is, he's paving the way for a real autocrat, by breaking down the norms and systems that keep an autocrat from being able to function.
The headline is misleading. The "statement" is a Twitter thread, and it doesn't say anything about banning or not banning everybody. The body of the article concedes that it only "heavily implies" they'll never ban him. And that was three years ago. Some stuff has happened since then.
Maybe. But there's probably a business model out there this is simply a Twitter clone that waits for the Trump account to move there, and bang, instant success.
There is and they (Gab) get an okay number of likes on every one of his posts promoting it. [0] Also Facebook is now well positioned to be his next platform if he moves off twitter.
Trump isn't moving to Facebook, regardless of Zuck's attempt to pandering to his childish outbursts. Twitter is precisely suited to Trump's micro-tantrum thoughts, where Facebook is orthogonal. I would argue that the brevity of Twitter, and the adversarial nature of it, made Trump and the imbecile-right (e.g. not conservative -- it's a bunch of flag wavers who have close to zero political lean of knowledge...they just want to hate).
P.S. I know this comment is auto-dead, and that's okay.
Out of all the social networks, isn't Facebook the one that has the most Trump supporters? Twitter is notorious for being full of the woke left. Most people only find out about Trump's tweets because they get reported somewhere. Facebook is nowadays the preserve of older moms and pops.
Useful to know that this specific selective application of editorial bias by Twitter, was after Trump's executive order [1] on preventing online censorship of free speech.
>"...
Twitter now selectively decides to place a warning label on certain tweets in a manner that clearly reflects political bias. As has been reported, Twitter seems never to have placed such a label on another politician’s tweet.
.."
When a car manufacture represents their 18-wheeler fleet as a 'passenger cars' -- we understand that this is a lie and demand corrective action.
When twitter manufactures opinions and hides them as 'public forum discourse' -- we are supposed to be ok with that?
I would be ok if their manufactured opinions are displayed to paid subscribers only, who want to care what Jack Dorsey thinks about President Trump, obamagate or Brexit.
Is everything that disagrees with Trump now "political bias"?
I'm not even from the US and I know what "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" means and what outcome it envisions.
> When twitter manufactures opinions and hides them as 'public forum discourse' -- we are supposed to be ok with that?
What are these opinions? Can you speak them out loud? Which opinions are being hidden? Can you write down the message of these opinions in plain words?
Could you write down these opinions as if they were your own, without violating HN's house rules?
The outcome was clear the moment a president mentioned the use of the national guard in dealing with demonstrations.
Using the military to quell civil unrest means people getting shot. Last time in 1992 on the order of George HW Bush, the resulted was 50 dead and 2000 injured.
Unless a person is talking about using the military to assist with natural disasters, the person is envisioning the violence of "when the looting starts, the shooting starts".
You cannot not have bias when you are talking politics. For Tweeter’s case, one would need to look at statistics for how many tweets from each sides are getting flagged. If one side is getting all the flake then it means that side is evil and other side is holy. In politics, this is not possible over long term if democracy is in full effect.
WRT "... Is everything that disagrees with Trump now "political bias"?.."
I think much of the media (bbc, reuters, vox, cnbc, msnbc, abc, cnn, buzzfeed, huffingtonpost, twitter's leadership) basically are the propaganda arm of the anti-Trump Coup.
The use a multi-level approach to execute and to protect it:
- to keep legitimacy of their disinformation efforts, keep 10-15% of the reporting as 'neutral', and then flood the 90% of the time with anti-president message.
This tactic allows for what I call: Plausible Deniability.
When you confront these propagandists about the majority of their disinformation compaign, they point to the '10%' and then claim plausible deniability ('eg we do not do everything wrong)
- Use War propaganda tactics [2]. With emphasis on 4 (We are defending a noble cause, not our particular interests!) and 5 (The enemy is purposefully committing atrocities; if we are making mistakes this happens without intention)
- instigate unrest (and there are a number of tactics to do this, as we are seeing being unrolled)
When you use the above decomposition, it is, at least for me, easy to see what is going on and why.
With regards to:
>".. Could you write down these opinions as if they were your own, without violating HN's house rules?.."
Sure.
So let me re-iterate the context
Trump's tweet:
>"...
....These THUGS are dishonering the memory of George
Floyd, and I won't let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz
and told him that the Military is with him all the way.
Any Difficult and we will assume control, but when looting starts, the
the shooting starts.
Thank you.
..."
The twitter suggests that the above is glorifying violence.
I think that an opinion, it is a wrong opinion.
And leads to more violence.
I would interpret Trump's message as:
- Laws will be enforced. Help to local police is on the way
(in the form of National Guard that Tim Woltz mobilized [1]).
- Physical harm to Innocent people and their property will lead to shootings.
I would interpret Twitter's handling of this as:
we do not want law enforcement to enforce laws. Loot all you want, it is your right under the circumstances.
This is amazing news, and I hope Twitter adopts this policy for all rules violations. Much better than deleting tweet or banning accounts, this lets people decide what they want to see. (Except for obvious spammers etc. which should probably be banned.)
Even better would be if there were user-configurable "lists", whereby you could decide upfront what you want / don't want to see (like many sites do right now with NSFW content) - the default filter would be very "protective" (no porn, no violence, no gore, no hate speech) but users could turn off any or all of these "filters". The next step is the addition of user-curated "lists" / "filters" (e.g. "no democrats", "no republicans", "no vegans", "no dog lovers", ...).
If we're being honest, Twitter is basically a machine that glorifies violence. It rewards it at the platform and algorithmic level.
An endless volume of tweets under every charged trending topic violates these rules, which are being surfaced and promoted by the platform. And it enables mob mentality like nothing we've seen before.
Moderation is mostly just theater, especially as long as the platform itself is quite literally encouraging the core behavior.
Twitter's design is fundamentally broken beyond repair.
Your Twitter feed is yours. It's like your home territory. People feel like they're entitled to defend this territory. Twitter assists inflammatory media as it attempts to invade this territory, originally with retweets, but more recently with algorithmically selected tweets coming from people who you didn't follow, selected for "engagement". But it does more than that. When you defend your territory, your defense ends up on someone else's feed as a provocation.
The original model worked, with tweets from your followers only, and no retweet support except copy and paste and the letters RT. The current model is cursed.
What Twitter needs is algorithmically enforced moderation. So when a twitter reply calls for extremism, the user will then be prone to see more calls for peace in reply to that comment. Or when somebody asks for dox on a subject, the user then sees tweets mentioning all the previous times doxxing went wrong and innocent people were hurt. The user would not know this was taking place, but they would avoid radicalization and echo chambers currently happening on Twitter. Also instead of showing the opposition to break their thought bubble, which probably wouldn’t be helpful, the user sees their own side, just more moderate and centrist. If no tweets showing moderation exist, twitter could use a bot that appears to be a real human to make these moderating tweets. Most of these twitter conversations are bots anyways.
I think the best solution is not algorithmic enforcement, but algorithmic augmentation of group ban-lists.
So like having hashtags in your profile, you could include ban-lists there, and your preferences would be calculated (and people could see what your filters were).
Yes, this wouldn't solve the issue of filter bubbles but the Twitter's algorithms could augment how to weight people's ban-lists with actual mentions/RTs - so I would see someone on only one of my ban-lists but got a lot of RTs/mentions I'd see it. If I find I'm not seeing stuff I should, I could alter my lists
I'd be curious to know a little bit more about what exactly you're referencing here. This does not in any way describe my experience with Twitter, though I understand that's a single anecdote.
It is not so much the platform as the general internet medium. It lends itself to narcissism. Humans are more gratuitous when speaking to another in person. More attentive to inflections, reactions, emotions, etc.
They made clear when they introduced this that the “view tweet anyways” approach applies only when the public interest for an account of a public official outweighs the significant harm they consider to be done by allowing what you describe for all users in general. I don’t expect they intend to change their mind on that.
Twitter already does hide NSFW ("objectionable") content behind a click, removing it only when it violates the platform rules of conduct.
They evaluated and rejected hiding "violates Twitter policies" content except in the rare cases where they deem it necessary for the public interest to retain that violating content behind a click barrier.
I'm not actually against the idea, but arbitrary blocklists would accelerate bubbling people away from anyone who could possibly think differently from them, which has its own issues.
Unfortunately, you're bubbling away people who believe in free speech and free thought as well, and there are probably a lot more of those.
edit: Adding a bit more, the people being bubbled away will likely tend to just isolate. You might think you like that idea, but having spent some time in isolation, I will attest that it kind of messes with your head. You lose your "phase lock" with society on a lot of different norms, small and large. The stereotype of the "dangerous loner", though not always fair, attests to this reality.
If you want to keep someone as a useful member of society and not a tragedy-of-the-day, you have to keep talking to them.
Technically this is not even bubbling, at least not how google implemented it, as I understand. Im not on Twitter but if anyone knows, does this action by twitter actually bubble Trump away form people who otherwise would have seen his feed?
And by freedom of speech and thought, how about for twitter? Arent’t they a private company?
It seems that this freedom of speech and thought is such a vague concept that gets twisted and turned according to whoever wants to make a point. Let’s have a definition to what exactly it is to cover and then we’ll talk. And no goalpost moving after the definition please:)
But then the people who are open to such things stay exposed, while detaching from anyone else, thus ensuring that they spiral ever further into their own viewpoint. That's how you create radicals.
Yeah, bubbling is not a magic solution. But why amplify these voices? And why on your “private” platform? A lot of unchecked toxicity can lead to Twitters demise. They set some rules to mitigate for that. Seems ok to me for that to be done for Trumps opponents too.
Remember trolls wreaking havoc on forums? Didn’t they have the right for free speech too and nobody complained when rules were added to try to contain them?
All tweets containing muted words will be omitted from your timeline, or if they show up in a thread you're viewing, hidden in-place with a button to reveal. I use this feature liberally. Twitter would be unbearable without it.
Youre right. Before twitter took this step I was unable to decide whether to read the president's tweets. Every morning I am forced by twitter to read trumps tweets. Thank goodness this is no longer the case. /s
Given that the president is invested with enormous power and has proved both able and willing to upend others' lives for political ends, pretending that he's just another random e-celeb seems kind of disingenuous.
Well the problem then is the overgrowth of executive power in the past two decades. Unfortunately, literally everyone was silent on that during both the Bush and Obama administration as well, and now are complaining that their chickens have come home to roost.
I don't know about you but I voted for Obama and regretted it when this happened [1]:
> National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, Pub.L. 112–81. This NDAA contains several controversial sections (see article), the chief being §§ 1021–1022, which affirm provisions authorizing the indefinite military detention of civilians, including U.S. citizens, without habeas corpus or due process, contained in the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), Pub.L. 107–40.
Not to mention his failures to uphold the principles that he ran on: gitmo, whistleblower protections (vis a vis Manning, Asange and Snowden), massacres of civilians ("drone strikes"), etc.
Just because you haven't been watching, doesn't mean that this hasn't outraged the people who do. All of that stuff was covered by NPR at the time, so it's not like any of it was a secret.
The world where -- when I call out presidents for abuse of executive power -- I'm met with various justifications for why 'my guy' is doing the right thing. It's ridiculous. Whether it's Bush's response to 9/11 and his wars or Obama's record executive orders, every time I bring these up, I'm met with justifications for why it's okay this one time.
This assumes a basic ability to identify double standards and refuse them on principle. And this country really can't do that right now. Republicans are at a whole new level of hypocrisy than the ordinary variety in American politics. Mitch McConnell said it is obvious that we cannot have a supreme court candidate seriously considered during a presidential election year - when it's the black man in the office. And then this year when asked about what happens if there's vacancy he says unquestionably they will ram the candidate through.
This sort of double standard, smirked at, and then dismissed with "both sides are bad" type whataboutism, is uncivil. It's a betrayal. It's a violation of the social contract. And it's only made worse because the Obama candidate who was refused even a hearing? Orrin Hatch, a multiple decades Congressional Republican, had previously told Obama that he should pick Merrick Garland. It was expressly not principled, and then they boast about this.
Were this truly an actual rule, it means no judges can be confirmed if the political party of president and senate differ. It is cynical and hyper-partisan, and there is no person from either party who has been more vile in this regard than Mitch McConnell. In all ways that matter he's worse than Trump, not least of which is, he's actually competent. The country has consistently become more partisan while he has been majority leader. It doesn't correlate with presidents, it correlates with him.
This is such a cliche, and yet simultaneously someone in this thread is saying we don't have to worry about the current President becoming a dictator because of the zillion times previous Presidents were accused of wanting to seize power.
How do you think these contradictory cliches thrive alongside each other?
Dorsey has explicitly stated that because user-defined filters will lead people to remain blissfully unaware of ideas that challenge their own, he does not want Twitter to follow that path.
It's a tough call. In some sense, for any global website that doesn't want to impose its own moral code upon the world, it makes the most sense to be hands-off and let users judge for themselves what to see and what not to. On the other hand, doing so would amplify the echochamber effect that's already strongly present on Twitter.
We can hope Twitter adopts and enforces policies equally across the board, but they won't and I don't think they can either.
As an example of how they won't do so, consider that there are people literally organizing violent riots and destruction of property on Twitter right now, and they have not been banned or had their tweets/accounts hidden. Ilhan Omar's daughter was caught doing so herself, amplifying rioting supported by Antifa and DSA (Democratic Socialists of America), as documented in https://thepostmillennial.com/ilhan-omars-daughter-shows-sup.... While hundreds of people are inciting violence and using Twitter to organize violence in Minneapolis, the company has done nothing to stop it, and yet they're willing to block Trump's tweet on the theoretical enforcement of laws against criminal rioting? Clearly this is a discriminatory bias in action.
As for how they can't do so: Twitter is a Silicon Valley company. It mostly employs young, far left liberals. Its internal culture is heavily influenced by where it is located and the people it employs. Their Hateful Conduct Policy (https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hateful-condu...) is also subject to that cultural/political influence. For instance, this policy notes that "misgendering" is not allowed. But if you're on the other side of the transgender debate, and feel that pronouns should be based on biology-derived gender, and don't think trans women and biological women should be lumped into a group, then you might be banned. Put another way, Twitter has encoded political stances into their operating procedures, and there's no escaping that even if they expressed a wish to treat their customers equally across the board.
There are only two ways out. One option is that Twitter admits it is biased, that they do discriminate against certain viewpoints, and that they do exert editorial control over their platform. The other option is that they return to viewpoint neutrality, avoid censorship/blocking, and only do so to the minimal extent explicitly required by law.
>people literally organizing violent riots and destruction of property on Twitter right now
>Ilhan Omar's daughter was caught doing so herself
Apparently, retweeting a list of supplies to help protect yourself from bodily harm from violent police is "literally organizing violent riots and destruction of property"
I get what you're saying, but the flip side of it is that such actions are aiding, enabling, and abetting a crime (in this case, a large number of crimes). The "protect yourself from bodily harm" bit is what enables these rioters to avoid dispersing and ceasing violent destruction of property. And it is obvious from numerous tweets from various DSA and antifa handles that these two groups are very much amplifying and glorifying destructive rioting. This is real material violence, not theoretical violence, and therefore Twitter needs to shut it down if they have a problem with theoretical violence that they think Trump's tweet glorifies.
Calling police "violent" for wanting to stop blatant opportunistic theft and terrorist behavior (e.g. deliberately cutting gas lines to create big explosions) is a stretch. I would call the initial policing incident that tipped off the protests violent, and I would call the destructive rioting violent (as opposed to the initial peaceful protesting). Both acts deserve condemnation and consequences in my view.
Rioting, looting, and even torching buildings is not the close to the same level of violence as police killings, driving down protestors, or threatening people with guns. Tweets endorsing or even glorifying the former don’t come close to be as dangerous as tweets excusing the latter. Don’t pretend like these two are equivalent.
It’s possible to have bias without editorialising, as far as I know Twitter only hides, deletes or bans. It doesn’t edit, the fact checking is appending.
How is appending not editing. If I append a statement to the end of your comment that contradicts your earlier point without your permission, how is that not editorial?
> How is appending not editing. If I append a statement to the end of your comment that contradicts your earlier point without your permission, how is that not editorial?
Hi, I think you're wrong. Here's the proof: I haven't edited your comment, but by replying I have just appended a statement to it without your permission.
But it can change the meaning. For instance, if I write a tweet that says "I like the joker character" and twitter appends my tweet saying "People that like joker might shoot up a movie theater", you've changed the intent and meaning completely from what was intended... The media tends to do this kind of thing a lot when they take a speech and add their own commentary to change what was said. Appending/elaborating on what someone says makes them your words, not the original authors.
> But it can change the meaning. For instance, if I write a tweet that says "I like the joker character" and twitter appends my tweet saying "People that like joker might shoot up a movie theater", you've changed the intent and meaning completely from what was intended...
So? No one has a "right to the last word," so that when they speak, everyone else has to shut up so their words will be the exclusive influence on their audience.
It's important for free speech that people be able to point out when someone has lied or spread misinformation.
That's certainly wrong. A reply by an ordinary user using the ordinary mechanism is a very different thing than an official editorial note which carries the imprimatur of the platform. And of course they added code to hide it by default, which is an additional level of control which beyond any sort of replying.
They don't have to change the original wording to exercise editorial judgment and power. This seems kind of obvious?
> That's certainly wrong. A reply by an ordinary user using the ordinary mechanism is a very different thing than an official editorial note which carries the imprimatur of the platform.
Sorry, no, It's not wrong. Twitter's reply using a new mechanism it created may be different than one made by an ordinary user, but that difference doesn't turn their reply into an edit.
> And of course they added code to hide it by default, which is an additional level of control which beyond any sort of replying.
Yes, and it's their right to do that.
> They don't have to change the original wording to exercise editorial judgment and power. This seems kind of obvious?
I never said they weren't moderating their platform (which they have every right to do in any way they see fit). I was merely disputing the weird conflation of "reply" with "edit."
There is an original painting of a pipe. Under it I append the comment: "This is not a pipe".
Have I edited the painting and created a new painting? Is it a single art, or a separate painting and a comment? Do I need additional copyright permissions to create a derivative work, or can I use a painting licensed under Creative Common no derivative in order to create my own version of the Treachery of Images? When I publish it, who is the information content provider as defined by section 230?
> There is an original painting of a pipe. Under it I append the comment: "This is not a pipe".
You're wondering off and getting lost in the weeds with your example.
Twitter replied on its platform using a new mechanism that it created. Trying to twist that reply into an "edit" (with the implication that it's some kind of illegitimate corruption of the work replied to) is drifting towards a denial of free speech and other nonsensical implications.
> When I publish it, who is the information content provider as defined by section 230?
> Understanding section 230’s history is essential to informing the current debate about the law. And that history tells us that one of the main reasons for enacting section 230 was to encourage online services to moderate content....
> Section 230’s “findings” states that the internet offers “a forum for a true diversity of political discourse.” Nothing in section 230’s history, however, suggests that this goal requires platforms to be “neutral.” Indeed, section 230 allows platforms to develop different content standards, and customers ultimately can determine whether those standards meet their expectations. [Emphasis mine.]
According to section 230, it is only relevant if it changes the meaning of the original content. If it's clearly different content, then it's clearly different content.
> But if you're on the other side of the transgender debate
Then you follow twitter's rules on its platform. You're free to misgender people elsewhere.
Moderation, even moderation and policies you personally disagree with does not rise to the level of "editorial control" under the law.
> While hundreds of people are inciting violence and using Twitter to organize violence in Minneapolis, the company has done nothing to stop it, and yet they're willing to block Trump's tweet on the theoretical enforcement of laws against criminal rioting?
Are you certain that no tweets from protestors glorifying violence have been removed? Notably, none of the tweets you mention are condoning violence, so you're actually insisting that twitter hold $random_internet_people_on_the_whole to a higher standard than the president.
You want twitter to take "Bring milk to a protest" more seriously than "when the looting starts, the shooting starts". That's not Twitter's bias showing, that's yours. Under this interpretation, I believe twitter would also have needed to remove tweets organizing the recent Hong Kong protests. Is that what you want?
The neutral companies, such as utilities, online hosting or financial providers serve nearly everyone with little objections - they defer to the law rather than any internal policies. The more selective companies such as newspapers and TV channels are expected to restrict who can get published.
By representing itself both as an open platform and as a company with progressive values, Twitter has put itself into an awkward in-between spot and is bound to create such controversies.
Twitter and Facebook are starting to approach the threshold of 'public good' wherein at least, there would need to be rules or regulations.
If TW and FB did not actually regulate their content - we would see this exposed much more quickly. Foreign/Russian interference in elections would immediately force Congress to act, there's just too much power.
Aside from the ambiguities of 'how and what to police' we do have the added complexity of the nature of 'large, ostensibly public platforms' managed by private companies.
The argument is that it's getting there. It's the leading platform for public debate in the US right now. Journalists spend their days refreshing their Twitter feed, so the effect isn't just in the size of Twitter's platform but its influence.
Twitter is a plague on public discourse. We'd be better off as a society if it were never invented. If I knew how to put the genie back in the bottle, I would advocate for it.
It’s absolutely not. I don’t follow anything political, neither Obama nor Trump. Among 1200+ people I follow are all from AI/ML/biotech/space research. Most of them are academics. I throughly enjoy my feed and it’s my go to place to stay up to date as well as some fun nerdy conversations. Tweeter is a hammer, use wisely.
it's easy enough - make it a paid-for service and regulate - read ban - free versions.
not going to happen because apparently people paying with their attention instead of dollars in manipulative ways is just fine. the argument goes that they can always not read it, but that's a false dichotomy in social networks and why i'd like to see twitter, google and facebook get labeled as utilities.
I'd love to see ISPs become utilities, which would be the first step.
Disclaimer: I work for Google, this represents my personal opinion, not that of my employer, etc.
Google, the search engine, I could see being a utility. The rest is iffy. Now, how you disentangle that from the rest of the business... I can either see it being impossible or essentially already done (depends whether you think their existing ads system is biased in some way that regulations/utilit-ification would change - I'm not in ads, I wouldn't know).
Twitter and Facebook as utilities... I mean, I'm not sure I buy it. What kind of utility is it? A utility is something I imagine to be somewhat required by society. A search engine is kind of required in modern society. Facebook and Twitter are incredibly easy to do without.
POTUS is on Twitter. If you want access to his tweets, you absolutely must use Twitter.
Maybe it's a policy problem of the US in particular and politicians in general instead of Twitter/Facebook being an utility. As is, status quo is for me that they're utilities for that single reason.
This POTUS is a huge abnormality that I hope can be forgotten to the annals of time and a jail cell. I would hope not to use him as an example of anything that represents normalcy, like accessibility of his tweets.
I'd love to be a fly on the wall when a legal team responsible for supporting this narrative has to tackle the issue of regulating the platforms as a public utility, but not the Internet providers that carry them.
I think you'll quickly lean in the opposing view after reviewing those viewpoints, because if Twitter was a utility it would have been declared one at some point in the previous 11 years.
My point is that websites are fundamentally different from resources you extract from the environment and the eagerness by some to treat them as such is specious.
A number of countries are directly demanding they remove content that is considered "terrorist" or in some way an incitement to violence. Realistically, they have no choice but to have policies that forbid any such content on the platform.
France, for example, recently passed a law demanding that various illegal content be removed in 1 hour or 24 hours, or face enormous fines: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52664609
The high-road leads to where we actually want to be.
I was thinking about what you said in the other thread about trolls, and I think you're off-base. Trolls aren't zen master ego busters, they're the self-hating jerks they seem to be. The "zen master ego buster" story is just another layer of the ego trip.
The high-road leads to Trump agreeing with you that we need to prevent the spread of fake news to protect society. Then, as the duly elected leader sworn to protect society, he takes on that solemn duty and tasks the agency he controls, the FCC (the entity usually tasked with controlling media content), to make sure that all fake news and entities peddling fake news are permanently squashed so that they will not interfere in the upcoming election.
It's a risk. It's not a mistake. I appreciate they are trying to thread a very difficult needle. I'd argue democracy's continued survival is predicated on being able to both have a flattened playing field where every voice is accessible and like-minded people can find each other easily (what the Internet has enabled so far), and a way of inoculating people against lies intended for malicious manipulation (which the Internet has also enabled). Getting there, if we can, will be messy and ugly. Failing will be fatal to the idea that people can effectively self-govern.
We'll, they're certainly escalating. I don't think that Trump actually wants to shut Twitter down, nor does he want to get banned there. The banning would rile up his base, but it would do so at the expense of his primary channel of communication. This action puts the ball back in Trump's court and asks him how far he wants to actually go.
Well that's the ridiculous part of all this. Anyone with $20 and a half hour to spare can whip up their own blog on their own domain and post anything they want. As far as accessibility goes, that website will be 100% equal to Twitter.
These private platforms are only being conflated with public infrastructure because people have such a narrow view of what constitutes "the internet." It's ridiculous for a politician's primary means of communication to be over a private platform to begin with. Could you imagine if Clinton only talked to the press via AOL chatroom? The fact that we're debating it as though Trump is being censored by CSPAN just shows how much the abnormal has become normal.
It has as least as much to do with not fact-checking the claims of people you agree with. Politics is replete with lies. Remember "all 17 intelligence agencies"?
The idea of neutral just-calling-balls-and-strikes fact-checking in politics is a fantasy. The only thing that actually works is debate.
By choosing what to fact-check you can make any agenda. In practical terms there really isn't an "objective truth discoverable by journalism".
I'm pro slander tho, twitter should be able to pin a tweet in every account saying trump has small hands. Americans in general don't see how great chicanery is for a country.
Because, for better or worse, the sources of truth that normal people historically relied on for their barometer of what is true or not have been democratized by the internet.
We live in a world where a substantial number of people believe the earth is flat, that 5G cellular is a mind control scheme, that vaccines cause autism, that COVID-19 was created by a political party, that the concept of climate change is manufactured, or that major national crises are actually just actors being paid to further a political narrative.
Most of these ideas aren't new, but in decades past you might have heard about them from a conspiracy-therorist neighbor, a low profile website, or an alternative magazine with little reputation of its own.
Now, these ideas are spread on the exact same platforms as objectively truthful / scientifically sound media. Your Youtube conspiracy theory channel is right next to the BBC's videos. Your viral Facebook post could be from the New York Times, or it might be from a propaganda organization - or worse, an account that looks like a normal person but which was specifically created to spread misinformation that seems plausibly truthful.
Credibility is distributed and anyone can publish to a huge audience, which is wonderful sometimes, and othertimes deeply problematic, because the viewer often doesn't know enough to distinguish fact from fiction and can't trust the publisher at face value anymore.
Its uncharted territory. The cost to distribute is zero, and ideas spread far and wide - but that means that there are equally as many incredible sources on any given topic as credible ones, and telling the difference is hard, and sometimes not knowing the difference is dangerous. Dunning-Kruger writ large.
The question is, if it's hard to figure out who you can trust, then who can you trust to decide what's fact and what's fiction?
I think trusting any one person or organization to decide is dangerous. Everyone has biases, including the people making decisions at Twitter.
I'd prefer to see the arguments for both sides clearly laid out - "Here are the arguments for and against". Ideally anyone would be able to contribute to either side. Maybe giving each argument its own HN-style discussion.
Everyone has biases, including the people making decisions at Twitter.
Sure, but many things being discussed are beyond biases at this point. POTUS tweets and says completely false things every single day. This isn't downplaying things he disagrees with or spinning, it's flat out lying and/or denying they even exist.
There was a long thread here on HN about HCQ, and some were asking for proof that HCQ does not work. No, that is completely the opposite of how science, and drug research in particularly, works. Drugs are considered non-working until proven otherwise and never the other way around.
I'd prefer to see the arguments for both sides clearly laid out - "Here are the arguments for and against". Ideally anyone would be able to contribute to either side. Maybe giving each argument its own HN-style discussion.
I understand what you're saying, but I shouldn't have to prove 1+1=2 every time I want to have a discussion. Let's take vaccines for example. They have been proven safe and effective many times over. They do not cause autism. In this case, what is the other side of the argument? On my side it's tons of peer reviewed research and on the other it's a few quacks with falsified/misinterpreted/unreplicable/bad science. What is there to actually argue? This is where I normally get frustrated because there are so many topics that can be vigorously argued in good faith, but if we can't agree to some basic 'this is how the scientific method works' then what's the point.
I support vaccination because on aggregate they're best bang for buck in medicine that we have.
The most compelling argument I heard from detractors is that a) Vaccines have been tested/developed on people in Africa who were not told of the dangers of experimental treatments
b)Some vaccines contain trace amounts of metals like mercury.
Both a and b are True. In what way is the person that holds such views unscientific.
When I was child, I was literally vaccinated with a re-used needle. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.
I don't understand why you can act like vaccines have never hurt anyone ever, and claim it as the scientific view. To me this seems equally as absurd.
> a) Vaccines have been tested/developed on people in Africa who were not told of the dangers of experimental treatments
Running medical trials on unsuspecting people is wrong whether it's a new drug or vaccine. It also has little to do with the well proven safety vaccines.
> b)Some vaccines contain trace amounts of metals like mercury.
Ah, the classic anti-vax 'toxins' argument. I said that vaccines have been proven safe time and again (which they have). I never said they don't have trace amounts of stuff often found in much larger amounts all around us in the environment [1].
> When I was child, I was literally vaccinated with a re-used needle. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.
There was a time in not so long ago medical history that things like needles were reused. It wasn't specific to vaccines.
> I don't understand why you can act like vaccines have never hurt anyone ever, and claim it as the scientific view
Talk about moving/making up goal posts. Nowhere did I claim that no one was ever hurt in the history of figuring out how vaccines work. What I claimed is that vaccines today have been proven safe over and over again. They also do not cause autism.
I appreciate it. I'm honestly surprised its initial reception has been so unpopular, but I suspect people think I'm somehow advocating for censorship... I'm not at all, and think that's obvious, but c'est la vie.
> Most of these ideas aren't new, but in decades past you might have heard about them from a conspiracy-therorist neighbor, a low profile website, or an alternative magazine with little reputation of its own.
> Now, these ideas are spread on the exact same platforms as objectively truthful / scientifically sound media. Your Youtube conspiracy theory channel is right next to the BBC's videos. Your viral Facebook post could be from the New York Times, or it might be from a propaganda organization - or worse, an account that looks like a normal person but which was specifically created to spread misinformation that seems plausibly truthful.
My intuition tells me that knowledge of conspiracy theories is now mostly (in terms of awareness) spread through mainstream media articles asserting that "conspiracy theorists believe <x>". Now I don't spend all that much time in that corner of the internet, but I spend enough time in /r/conspiracy that I have a half decent feel for what the general consensus is on the topics covered in the media, and the way the media describes the "beliefs" of "conspiracy theorists" is incredibly untrue, at least as far as /r/conspiracy goes.
Think about it: do you think all the reporters that write on such topics, and in turn all the people in forums like Reddit and HN, actually know what they're talking about? Or might it be more likely that heuristics in their subconscious mind are feeding information up to the subconscious, that was not once fact-checked?
Pay attention when reading the news or forum comments, observe for yourself how many people speak as if they know things that are literally unknowable, such as events in the future, or the contents of another person's mind. Go through each comment in this very thread and see how many you can count.
There is something very interesting going on, at scale.
Conspiracy theory-type ideas are a threat, but I just want to add on that many partial truths or inaccuracies or falsehoods appealing to biases spread even more easily too. Depending on your side of the debate, you can make well-cited cases for or against minimum wage increasing unemployment, or immigration lowering wages. I haven't researched, but I bet mail-voting fraud too. To the point where the real truth isn't even clear, but people don't recognize the uncertainty.
I'm not sure if this ever hasn't been an issue, but it kinda comes to the heart of fact-checking. I think treating the kinds of falsehoods that get spread online as just obvious conspiracy-theories by nutjobs puts your guard down for things that sound and feel right, but are wrong.
I also think that poor general education has also been exposed. People lack general science education and critical thinking skills. Just look at all the 'gotcha' posts of people giving scientists a hard time for changing their positions as new information is learned, when that is exactly what a scientist is supposed to do.
The other part drives these conspiracy theories is not just that they share a platform with legitimate sources, but also the algorithms. Someone clicks on a single story that is borderline conspiracy out of curiosity, and now they are served them at every turn. It's easy for a person to get lost and think that what they are being pushed is the entire world.
By the way, I think you're being downvoted because of this statement:
We live in a world where a substantial number of people believe the earth is flat, that 5G cellular is a mind control scheme, that vaccines cause autism, that COVID-19 was created by a political party, that the concept of climate change is manufactured, or that major national crises are actually just actors being paid to further a political narrative.
I've noticed there is a contingent on HN that do believe in some or all of these things.
Only about half of Americans say they would get a COVID-19 vaccine if the scientists working furiously to create one succeed, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
If accurate, half of people thinking that is a ton, and a huge issue.
As I suggested in my first post, though, not all studies are created equal.
This one could be accurate, but I'm not jumping straight to 98% certainty based on two articles. Survey design matters, and high confidence must be earned.
I shouldn't have said I take issue with the claim. It would have been more accurate to say I don't know that I trust the claim implicitly.
What a lot of people are realizing now is that these democratized news sources are both sometimes a lot less credible than the corporate media, and sometimes a lot more credible than the corporate media.
When you can have people gather clips of text/video to show a corporate media entity contradicting itself, or hiding relevant facts when reporting on a situation, etc. in real-time, it becomes it becomes clear that it is not merely a bias, but in many cases an agenda which drives them (an agenda which may be political, or may merely be the pursuit of ratings and scarce advertising dollars).
So you don't think mainstream media lies too, all the time, like politicians? RussiaGate is still unproven and by all definitions, a conspiracy. What makes them any more allowed to shill but individuals cannot?
I'm not claiming mainstream media is perfect, by any means, but mainstream media is often beholden to broadcast standards, or at minimum they can't be so nonsensical as to turn away advertisers. There's plenty of room for influence in mainstream media, but at the very least the number of players is limited and the implicit biases widely known. We can all make a short list of who the left/center/right media brands in our respective countries are.
Doing that with the many thousands of Youtube channels or many millions of Facebook/Twitter accounts broadcasting alleged facts is difficult, if not impossible, especially when the cost of obtaining a new account is essentially zero.
^ Exhibit #1, typical progressive elitism, moderated with a carefully thought last word as to signal the rest of the group he is not actually a bad person.
Because people don't engage in critical thinking and many are predisposed to consider statements made by people in positions of high authority as fact.
Very few statements are entirely true or entirely false. So let's not pretend like "fact-checking" is an ideal.
Whoever is doing the "fact-checking" wields great power that can very easily be abused or subverted, similar to the ministry of truth in 1984. This is what people are concerned about.
And while that is clearly an extreme, even a small bias in the fact-check is greatly amplified given the number of users on Twitter/Facebook/etc.
Mail-in ballots have been linked to voting fraud in the past. See the 2017 Dallas City Council and the 2018 North Carolina congressional race for example.
Maybe if twitter wants to start fact-checking Trump, don't start with him tweeting that water is wet.
There was several hoster that ban pornography and white supremacist hosting content.
> financial providers
Templeton fired the lady that was choking her dog while calling the police because an African American man was bird watching. He also asked her to leash her dog.
It's a private company. I don't believe Trump is under a protected class to get special perks.
One can also check easily-discoverable recent US military policy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23347453
to discover that those who think these things through don't condone "looting ⊃ shooting".
Isn't it a long standing thing that the US Military use of force rules in warzones are generally more restrictive than the policies for use on their fellow citizens by police back home?
One obvious example of this is simply ammo. Military bullets don't expand as much as bullets available to cops or civilians. A military bullet is explicitly not allowed to be an expanding hollow point which really messes you up.
There are all sorts of international agreements on not using certain types of things in war - types of bullets are no exception.
Military "bullets" (they're called rounds, actually) are designed to be optimized for performance in a warfare environment. That means accuracy, and range. A hollow point round is design to expand and be a stopping shot - with one round - and not continue to travel large distances, which puts other people at risk. Cops can carry those because if they're in a crowded environment firing a hollow point round at a threat means less risk to anyone else who isn't a threat.
>There are all sorts of international agreements on not using certain types of things in war - types of bullets are no exception.
Yeah no one will care about this once an actual near-peer war kicks off.
A bullet is a bullet, a round refers to the whole package - bullet, powder, case, etc. I'm referring to just the bullet part.
You're probably right on overpenetration though.
> accuracy
For accuracy up to a few hundred rounds you likely want boat tail hollow point, not a steel penetrator. Just look at the loads for prs, cmp, etc. Military bullets are not made to be the most accurate.
> Yeah no one will care about this once an actual near-peer war kicks off.
Probably right, though restrictions on bullet types have been around for like over a hundred years, and most modern US bullets adhere to the spirit of that.
It's also worth pointing out that there are a whole bunch of those international agreements that the US hasn't signed. Cluster bombs, for example.
There's an argument for using hollow point bullets on sidearms in civilian environments. There's a lower probability of "over penetration". For a high power rifle in a military environment, such a thing is less of a concern.
But for the sorts of conflicts the US is involved in they are often working in situations with a lot of civilians present. There are also frangible rounds other than those also more destructive to humans. And above all the best way not to accidentally shoot civilians isn’t to have ammunition that makes it less likely to penetrate something else if you miss (this is after all a failure of training) but sane rules of engagement about when you can shoot.
Correct, hollow-point ammunition is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions. This has always baffled me since large caliber and high explosive munitions (120mm HEAT rounds from an Abrams) are regularly used against soft targets in combat, not to mention things like hellfire missles or JDAMs. That's the rules of war for you.
It's mostly because this isn't true, though lots of people love to wax on about what they think is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions. I've heard all kinds of stuff like this over the years, such as "you can't fire a 50 cal at a human" etc.
hollowpoint restrictions date back to the 19th century (hague convention), not the geneva convention. And yes that is addressing international war.
It explicitly prohibits frangible/flattening/expanding ammo in war. The US hasn't signed that, but in practice they adhere to that part of it (but yes exactly as you point out, only for "war" not "anti-terrorism")
Hollowpoints are banned under Geneva because the injuries they inflict are less treatable by medics. Same reason buckshot and such is restricted.
In a civilian environment, the hollowpoints don't penetrate through walls and bodies as easily, meaning less risk of bystanders being harmed - and the local hospital has a lot more kit than your field medic.
My understanding was that hollow point bullets allow the shooter to hurt someone without risking the lives of the people behind them. Not hurting “people just behind [your enemy]” is presumably less a concern in a war zone (than in a civilian setting) because they are presumed brothers in arms.
Doesn't that mostly have to do with the amount of training, responsibility, leadership etc. that comes with military hierarchy? It can still get pretty bad (coverup and/or violence wise), but it seems that at least they have some sense of the relationship between violent actions and their consequences.
>sense of the relationship between violent actions and their consequences
exactly. Whatever you use in warzone you're risking that the same can be used against you, thus all the conventions on warzone weapons usage and prisoner treatment. Thus all the training, so that your soldiers wouldn't cross [too frequently] the redline to trigger the response.
I remember reading for example that in WWI new young soldiers, i think in Russia, were sometimes issued old style non-flat 3-edged rifle attached combat knives. Whether the knife is flat or 3-edged wouldn't make any difference during the actual stabbing and the immediate time after that. Where it makes all the difference is outside of the immediate combat situation - those non-flat knives would make for unnecessary horrible very hard to heal wounds, and thus if you were found with such a knife on a battlefield you'd be killed right there instead of taken POW. So the older soldiers would make sure that the newbies would promptly lose the knives.
The situation is similar to hollow-point bullets - they create those horrible wounds without any tactical benefit on actual battlefield.
Coming to US from USSR/Russia where history is full of wars, i was initially stunned to learn that the barbaric hollow-points are ok in US. After some time here, i think one reason for that is that police here aren't really subject to the "relationship between violent actions and their consequences", plus the "dominant force" doctrine which has fear as a significant component, and the possibility of hollow-point dovetails to that like icing on the cake. In some sense that fear is the main tactical benefit.
I’m pretty sure the US has been involved in a fair number of wars in it’s short existence but it’s by far not alone in using hollow point ammunition domestically. The UK has notably been involved in wars near continuously and uses it domestically. What about the Russian police?
Basically if the argument is that it’s too dangerous to shoot at your enemies in war you probably shouldn’t be shooting it at your own citizens. Which I think is our point of agreement?
it definitely wasn't using it back then in USSR and nor in the 199x. I don't know about the last decade - quick googling shows that the hollow point have been introduced for police use during the last 10-20 years in several European countries.
In this context it makes sense to mention the USSR AK-74 5N7 "tumbling" bullet which was called "poison" bullet by Afganistan mujahideen for its bad quickly infection developing wounds. It is a jacketed lead with steel core inside bullet with few millimeters of air pocket in front. That air pocket made it kind of "a bit" of hollow point without fully triggering that classification. Due to that air pocket it would also easily tumble upon entry into the body thus creating disproportionally massive damage to the surrounding tissues which resulted in very hard to treat and easily gangrene developing wounds and thus it was called the "poison" bullet.
This isn’t very helpful which part would you like me to look at and how does that compare to actual rules of engagement in modern conflicts versus those used by the police?
Would you feel the same if Twitter were purchased by Rupert Murdoch and Twitter hid tweets that Fox considered not true?
Remember that it's only a matter of time until ownership changes or another larger platform gains traction, perhaps even one owned by a foreign government with significantly different ideas of what is "true", IE TikTok.
His feed has been getting worse recently, and the publicity of his misbehavior has been escalating. Maybe he's acting out more because it's an election year. Bit of a chicken/egg issue that I wouldn't want to get stuck defending either side.
But the fact of the matter is that the Citizens United ruling grants private corporations the right to free speech. He can continue to use Twitter, but they've literally got the right to campaign against him, editorialize, shadowban, or straight up ban him. He could choose to follow the site's rules, or run off to Gab. But he's doing it for attention and his tantrums and Twitter's non-enforcement actions are getting him a lot of that.
Citizens united foes not grant private corporations anything. Their freedom to say what they like was determined to already have existed. Citizens united just stops lower courts from enforcing any law that violates this freedom.
I'd like to see a system like this: if your tweet is blocked for a reason, all you have to do is find a tweet that's worse than it is for that same reason, that is not already blocked. If the moderators agree then yours is unblocked and the other's is. Maybe disputes with the moderators' decision can be public, so people can see which way the wind blows with the particular social media platform.
Lots of people here will propose ways of gaming this system, such as setting up fake accounts where they make worse tweets. I don't want to pre-argue with them by making this post really long though. I think that starting with this design it's probably possible to tweak it to encourage honesty.
Leaving aside the logistical and gamification reasons why this would be a bad idea – you’d also be creating an incentive structure for people espousing marginally offensive content to actively seek out and engage with more extreme positions? It would result in radicalization, not moderation, even if it worked as intended.
Twitter is well within the rights to do this, but I have seen tweets from blue check marks essentially calling for violence and Twitter didn't remove them. So, does that mean Twitter actually -supports- those view points now? If Twitter is going to police people, it needs to be across the board. Otherwise it's just a weird censorship that is targeting one person and can easily be seen as political.
Everyone is applauding this because they hate Trump, but take a step back and see the bigger picture. This could backfire in serious ways, and it plays to Trump's base's narrative that the mainstream media and tech giants are colluding to silence conservatives (and maybe there could even be some truth to that.) I know the Valley is an echo chamber, so obviously no one is going to ever realize this.
Erm, what? This is just not true, and is a false dichotomy. Moderation is hard. Always has been. Stuff will slip through the cracks.
POTUS has the most popular (and currently most controversial - note, that's _controversial_ not _extreme_ or some other morph) so it's easy to see why Twitter are on top of it. Other blue-checked accounts, whilst more "important" than unverified, just simply don't compare to the importance and prevalance of POTUS' account.
Maybe right leaning users have a higher propensity to say offensive/harmful things?
I'm not being facetious. Isn't this something the right is actually proud of? I mean, they actually boast about not being "politically correct" (something the rest of the western world calls "common decency").
Just about every other editorial on right leaning outlets that complain and moan about political correctness?
Oh, and actual self-identified right leaning HN/Redit users. Just ask, many of them will be quick to tell you (some version of) "political correctness is BS".
(To be clear, I know not all right-leaning people think this way, but a very large proportion do).
Just so I'm clear, are you arguing that avoiding political correctness is not a core tenet of a large part of the conservative base? I thought it was a badge of honor for many?
i am arguing that who is politically correct depends on time and context. There was a time when the left was politically incorrect conpared to the mainstream. It has nothing to do with political observation.
"Political correctness" is complete garbage. This is an opinion shared by a wide variety of people across the political spectrum (as well as by the majority of people who eschew politics all together). Belief in free speech and free expression is not a "conservative" position - quite the opposite. Ironically (and unfortunately) the authoritarian identitarians who currently control the Democratic party and large portions of legacy media have pushed many people who believe in free speech towards Trump (or just out of the political system all together) with their toxic demands for adherence to "political correctness".
Almost the entire American right wing media is continually hate- and fearmongering about their perceived political opponents, actively and/or knowingly spreading disinformation, and has been for my entire adult life, at least as long as I've been paying attention, which is going on several decades. That's their only move, give people enemies so they don't actually have to propose solutions to anything. It's easy to give people enemies, much harder to actually solve complicated problems that require getting everyone on board. There used to be a more intellectual, reality-focused American right wing (and still is, but to a vastly smaller degree than just a few years ago). But now Alex Jones has replaced William F. Buckley and modern Republicans are much more likely to know about Rush Limbaugh than Edmund Burke. Buckley and Burke would get tarred and feathered as RINOs nowadays and that's really saying something.
That's not an opinion or a judgement, that's just reality, as much as 1+1=2 or the sky being blue. It doesn't require interpreting anything or contextualizing anything. It's obvious and plain as day, and eyes and ears and integrity and maturity are all that are required to perceive it. I absolutely believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that any reasonable application of any reasonable rules of moderation concerning threats, abuse, and misinformation would have much more impact on a typical Trump supporter in 2020 than anyone else (still faithful in 2020 folks, that's the type of person we're talking about here), and that that would be almost certainly the fault of the individual, and not biased moderation. The only way moderation would affect both sides equally would be if both sides were the same, or composed of the same sort of people.
But both sides have never been the same, and that's more true now than at any time since the Civil War. Except that now Republicans identify with Confederates instead of Lincoln and his ideals, and somehow Democrats flipped from representing Evangelical rural Southerners to representing the industrialized, urban, and successful parts of America, that were represented by Republicans in Lincoln's day.
FWIW I agree with George Washington that political parties themselves are the poison pill that repeatedly divides and screws up America, and that our current system is fatally flawed because it naturally leads to a two-party system, and that two-party systems by definition lead to more corruption and shittier governance. Just because one party is clearly criminally corrupt doesn't make the other party the goodguys, but until (if ever) we get rid of FPTP voting, it's a "pick the lesser evil" situation, and hoo boy is one evil obviously lesser than the other one.
Both are owned by the same oligarchs, it's a pretend lesser of evils game that just pendulum swings back and forth every few election cycles and it amazes me people still fall for this kind of rhetoric. Then again, most people fell for Russiagate hook line and sinker too... and when we increasingly get the evidence about how false it was, crickets... The entire democratic party fell for disinformation just as easily as the republicans did. Stop kidding yourself.
The Quillette article posted as evidence above says exactly that:
"Perhaps conservatives are simply more likely to violate neutral rules regarding harassment and hate speech. In such case, the observed data would not serve to impugn Twitter, but rather conservatives themselves."
Offensive to whom? By definition, a conservative has a bias towards keeping things as they have been. As such, we should expect a conservative's sensibilities to be more along the lines of our parent's or grandparent's (or maybe even great-grandparent's) generation.
So look at it this way: are the things that conservatives say outside the bounds of common decency of the 1980s? 1950s? 1930s? Then ask if the kind of things that left-leaning users say are outside the bounds of common decency of the 1980s, 1950s, 1930s.
You say that political correctness is just common decency. Your grandparents probably had a different standard for common decency in their day.
The overall trend is that justice and respect for human dignity has steadily, undeniably, increased over the last several hundred years. Therefore, generally speaking, I would say that yes, a modern 30-something has more "decency" than one of 50, 75 or 100 years ago.
To be totally clear, I don't fault my grandparents or other people that are products of these eras. They aren't necessarily bad people. And certainly, the measure of "common decency" would, of course, be different then.
I just can't wrap my head around longing for a time when society was more constrained/repressive/intolerant. Yes, there are things I think were better in the past, but they are the exception.
(side note: this is not to say I don't think political correctness can go too far, it certainly can. There are exceptions to everything).
To say that respect for human dignity has increased over time is very subjective. While I think many would agree with you a large portion of society would not.
An example: Traditional values would say that modern men have less respect for human dignity given the rise in single motherhood. Out of respect men were expected to stick around and help raise a child.
No everyone is going to agree that we are moving in the right direction. It's important to remember that when engaging in political discussions. That people are not often acting out an evil agenda. They are just going with what they think is right.
Discussions on what is the best way forward for society are far more fruitful than the way politics are generally discussed online. Where the other side is evil and it should be obvious to everyone that they just want to see the world burn.
>To say that respect for human dignity has increased over time is very subjective.
No. No it isn't. That's patently ridiculous. Almost every decade of the past couple hundred years has consistently seen better human rights (in the Western World at least).
We're talking about: the elimination of slavery, establishment of women's rights, childrens' rights, elimination of colonialism, elimination of authoritarian rule by non-elected persons, elimination of torture, the right to freedom of speech, the right to a fair trial, single digit illiteracy, near zero deaths due to hunger, reduced systemic oppression against minority groups, reduced systemic oppression against non-traditional sexual orientations, universal access to free basic healthcare (caveat: every western country except the US), universal access to free basic education, and, in my lifetime alone we've added access to affordable and near-instant worldwide communication with the right to use it anyway we see fit (within reason). [0]
Now, how (besides the environment) have things gotten worse from a human dignity standpoint in the west?
The one example you gave was indeed a decent one. I know there are other good ones but there's absolutely no way they will add up enough to tip the scales so that you can argue human rights and dignity have gotten worse overall.
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[0]: The list provided contains generalizations about "Western Countries". The list is incomplete/imperfect in that there will be some exceptions/caveats. In other words, yes I'm sure someone could find something there to nitpick but it's generally true in the big picture.
If one wants to figure out how your question could be answered, I think the question to ask oneself is, would someone from the 19th or 18th century think we have more or less regard for human dignity than they did? And if they would think we have less regard for human dignity, why would they think that and what argument would they make?
You use 'dignity' to mean, I think, that an individual has been granted autonomy. So a woman is now free to sleep around, terminate her pregnancies at will, and live her life however she pleases; she has rights. To you, she is being treated with dignity because she has autonomy. But that is not, I think, the way the 19th century mind thought (obviously this is a generalization; but think in terms of the kind of person who would have defined what 'common decency' meant in 19th century America). Dignity back then had to do with comportment and behaving well. What you call 'dignity' they would call 'licentiousness', and it would be considered the antithesis of dignity. One of the words for such a woman was 'indecent'.
You can argue that political correctness is just the decent way to speak, but to assume that it is 'common decency' is to assume an awful lot, especially when using that phrase to put down approximately half of the US electorate. The disagreement on just what constitutes 'common decency' is the exact issue here. One cannot resolve the issue by appealing to it. Conservatives and liberals have a different idea of what is offensive/harmful and what is decent because they have different fundamental values.
Or at least some of them do. A whole bunch of people on all sides are just engaging in thoughtless tribalism and mood affiliation. You are not one of the thoughtless ones, obviously. :)
I really don't understand the intuition behind using a prescription on American conservatism. It's like if I wanted to explain the Tories or the Whigs to you, I began with some lofty statement about intellectual principles.
Maybe conservative america needs to appeal to people smart enough to start their own tech companies, so they can compete in the free market to do things the way they like.
They actually do, there is alt-right Twitter aka gab.ai, alt-right Youtube aka Bitchute, alt-right Facebook aka Vkontakte, a boatload of "bulletproof" hosters and domain registrars. They even have their own TV stations (OAN, parts of Fox News), radios and podcasts.
For just about anything you want the alt-right has their "free speech" alternatives. The thing they are whining about is that the reach of these alternatives is way, WAY lower than the reach of the companies/projects of the alt-right. Almost as if the free market actually works and people deliberately choose to not engage in platforms dominated by alt-right hate mongers...
Or the other more logical reason being that free speech platforms are typically only clones of more poput platforms which don't offer any more features or increase ease of use.
I think it's completely possible for a popular pro free speech platform to exist provided it is able to be more user friendly or have some other killer feature.
The problem with the offshoots is that they instantly turn into cesspools. I don't think it's that conservatives do social media less it's that associating themselves with values they disagree with isn't popular. Even the conservatives that agree with the people "saying the quiet bits out loud" know that it's tactically dumb to align yourself with them.
Maybe companies should be idelogical neutral instead? Or do you also think liberal America should start to appeal to conscientious and patriotical people so they can have their own armed forces and police?
Anytime that someone says 'you' on the internet, the actual you should assume that they aren't speaking about the actual you specifically, but to the collective you that makes the argument that corporations are people.
Companies have some of the same rights as people. Why should we expect companies to be neutral when we don't expect people to be neutral? Governments must be neutral, including armed forces and police, but even then neutrality doesn't mean letting one group break rules (laws in the case of government) with impunity just because they're the ones who most frequently break those rules.
Liberals have a stranglehold in Tech. This will probably never change, its not the result of a conspiracy its simply an emerging phenomenon that arises from the over representation of traits like openness and curiosity in left leaning people. However, this is not fair nor good for the nation and it floors me that this is not obvious to any fair minded person. There are other sectors of society that have symmetrical proportions of conservatives. Farming, for example. Should farmers choose to feed only conservatives? Of course not. This isn't about left and right, its about a modicum of empathy, of fairness to all, including people who think differently.
My grandparents were farmers; my parents programmers.
Remember nearly everyone used to farm, including the ancestors of liberals. Today's right wing "family farmers" are the people who were most stubborn or least able to learn new things as their way of life shrank and not the representatives of farming in general.
I am not sure I get what you are trying t say here. Whatever way we came to the demographics the fact remains that different occupations have very different proportions of liberals and conservatives so we best able to treat each other fairly because we need each other to function as a society.
Because corporations have disproportionate effect on the public and their mandate is to make money not proseletize whatever brand of BS the CEO happens to believe in.
It is a tough problem. I think social media companies should treated more like utilities than publishers and should not be held responsible for their content beyond removing illegal materials. I think they should provide their users with the tools they need to moderate their feeds themselves, with an emphasis on transparency and user control. We do not need Twitter and Facebook to protect us from each other.
I may have used the wrong term. I do not mean utilities in that sense, I mean they should act as carriers rather than publishers of information. That is more like the phone company and less like the NY Times.
If the Internet companies want common carrier protections like generally not being responsible for user actions, they have to act like a common carrier.
I'm saying this as someone who thinks Twitter in general is stupid, Trump behaves like a clown on Twitter and the best outcome would be if everyone stopped using Twitter.
But you cannot have it both ways, and in that particular issue he is right.
Companies cannot be neutral. They have a base just like any politician. Twitter has acutely recognized - I believe - that their base is libera, and it's important to go along with that base. Would Twitter be as popular if a conservative was running it?
What difference would it make if Twitter was run by a conservative or a democrat as long as they were not meddling with the content? And if they are meddling the content, do you not think that this very dangerous given their dominance as a medium of speech? Just run the thought experiment, imagine that Twitter's leadership held political positions you abhorred and was free to boost or suppress speech, what Dorsey calls the "global conversation", in order to advance those politics. Does that sound OK to you?
I think we are in agreement. I don't want Twitter meddling with content, regardless of who runs it. My opinion is that the outrage would be different if it were run by a conservative. The American two-party system seems to require us versus them, even in how twitter is run.
Ideological neutral by whose standards? If conservatives tend to violate TOS more frequently and get blocked/banned, then that is neutral. They are simply enforcing their TOS based on the content.
Do you really think that the 50% of the population that is conservative is really much more prone to asshole behavior? Does that really make sense to you?
When the 50% you're talking about was notorious for calling people snowflakes and betas, yes I do believe they are more prone to advocate for violence, racism, and hate speech.
Yes, I am. Both parties have assholes and both parties have great people in roughly equal proportions. The exact shape of the insults the shitty people throw at each other does not matter .
I think the Quillette piece is overstating its evidence to make a rhetorical point. 1) They're only measuring the last enforcement step. 2) n=22 is really small. 3) They're measuring (suspended|trump) and are asserting the relationship is causal. If you download their dataset, you find these 4 people listed under the "supports trump" column: Alex Jones, American Nazi Party, David Duke, Richard Spencer. I think most everyone can agree these 4 weren't suspended because they are conservative or voted for Trump. (The other instances probably aren't partisan either, but not everyone will know about those people)
> database of prominent, politically active users who are known to have been temporarily or permanently suspended from the platform. … Of 22 prominent, politically active individuals who are known to have been suspended since 2005 and who expressed a preference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, 21 supported Donald Trump.
The Vox piece isn't an "admission" that their moderation is biased. Twitter's CEO is "admitting" that the politics of the developers is heavily liberal:
> “We have a lot of conservative-leaning folks in the company as well, and to be honest, they don’t feel safe to express their opinions at the company,” Dorsey said. “They do feel silenced by just the general swirl of what they perceive to be the broader percentage of leanings within the company, and I don’t think that’s fair or right.”
This link doesn't say what you claim. It's Dorsey talking about the internal social environment at Twitter's offices, not Twitter's moderation policies.
I’m not convinced by the arguments from your first link. As stated by the article itself, a difference in the number of left-leaning vs right-leaning bans does not prove the standards for censorship are different depending on what side of the political spectrum you fall on. It could be that conservative content violates rules more frequently than liberal or centrist content.
It goes on to say this can’t be possible because it would mean that conservative content would have to violate rules at 4x the rate of others, and that statistically its highly improbable. Why? It’s a known problem that Twitter has a lot of accounts that are fake accounts from bad actors trying to sow discord in the US political system, and those tend to be right leaning. Didn’t Twitter relatively recently do a purge of a large number of accounts that were deemed fake? That could easily skew the numbers, especially because those accounts tend to engage in the kind of rhetoric that gets you banned.
And then the article points to cases where liberal leaning content doesn’t get banned even though it should. I can also find cases where conservative content violates the rules yet it didn’t face consequences, most prominently the president’s account. It’s not just liberals who get a free pass, so I’m not sure what that proves.
Is it possible there is a bias in how Twitter sensors content? Sure. But that article makes it sound like they have a data driven, mathematically rigorous proof that it’s true, and I don’t think they meet that mark.
>This is just not true, and is a false dichotomy. Moderation is hard.
It's absolutely true, and has absolutely nothing to do with moderation "being hard". As someone who absolutely opposes Trump, but also absolutely opposes our many wars and global bombings, I'm horrified on a daily basis (and have been since 2009 when I joined Twitter) by open calls for violence against a wide variety of countries from Syria to Venezuela to Iran. When has Twitter ever suspended anyone (let alone a public figure, or even Trump himself, who has called for violence against other countries many times) a single time for openly calling for violence against the people of any of the countries? The answer is never. Its beyond absurd, bordering on delusional, to pretend that Twitter's actions here weren't nakedly political and have absolutely nothing to do with a standard against, "fomenting violence".
> If Twitter is going to police people, it needs to be across the board.
One way to look at this is that that's exactly what Twitter has started doing. The president violated the TOS, and got the treatment prescribed under the TOS. His EO yesterday essentially asked for everyone to be treated in accordance with the TOS, so he's (ironically) getting exactly what he asked for.
It remains to be seen whether, in compliance with the EO, they apply this to everyone in a transparent and uniform way from now on. I hope they do.
Wait, Trump, the guy who had a platform plank complaining about his predecessors' use of executive orders as "power grabs" [0], actually issued an executive order about Twitter's TOS?
It's nothing new. Politics is a team based sport. My brother calls Obama "King Obama" but is still a huge fan of Trump. I've discussed some of this stuff with him: in his eyes, Obama did stuff he shouldn't have, so Trump can do stuff he shouldn't.
That's optional though. The modern media, in the interest of money, has done a good job of causing the population of the US to miscategorize themselves into D/R. If it instead focused on human welfare, then we wouldn't be in this mess.
This so much, I think as people strength in their own opinions has weakened they have replaced it with this us/vs them mentality where you must agree with them in all issues. At root, a narcissistic culture where lack of personality and individuation is overcompensated by external signalling of virtue.
"Oh look at those soyboys, we are so much masculine than them."
"Oh look at those rednecks who voted for Trump, why can't they get a college education."
First case, Why so insecure that you constantly need the other to reaffirm yourself?
Second, Why do you need to reaffirm your college education was actually worth something? (Many cases, sad to say but they should sue to get your money back)
I recently read "The Organized Mind". I didn't expect it to be a book on ethics, but it certainly did impact me that way, and caused me to alter an enormous number of faulty mental behaviors, and allowed me to see abuse in language.
> "Oh look at those rednecks who voted for Trump, why can't they get a college education."
This right here is an example of why it's so easy. Part of what I'm reading there is fundamental attribution error. A person, anywhere right now, that can't get a college education in the US is dealing with a lot of headwind. Our education system is punitive, starting with an A and stripping you of points all the way through, causing undue stress, knowing that if you fail, you probably won't have the money to move forward, and will have great difficulty. Rich people get a free pass on this. Put a system like this together and the reason that people can't get educations is situational, not dispositional. We as a society must do better.
I mentioned miscategorization already, which is something that our brains naturally do when seeing people different from us, and requires intentional mental unbundling to see all humans as the same category. This is why racism is so common as well; without intentional work, humans will find categories by which to judge outsiders.
Our social media breaks human relationships because far too many interactions are decided publicly, through shame, rather than through communication. An enormous emotional abuse crisis in the US has now reached the highest levels of society, both private and public, and I certainly put enormous amounts of blame not on the companies that make social media sites, but because our brains are simply not well-tasked to deal with it. Further, the end of comprehensive mental health, particularly CBT and emotional withholding and the damages that they cause so many people and relationships.
I have a strong feeling that in the coming decade, there will be studies in cognitive psychology demonstrating the connection between stock markets and wealth and the base level fear/reward circuitry of the brain, delaying and reducing ethical and social cognition. Causing a focus on economic power rather than social conformity, and thus damaging society.
Regardless, I apologize for blathering, I think about this stuff a lot.
I wonder if there is a relationship between the level of competitiveness that a people have for sports with the level of competitiveness that they have in politics and other aspects said people’s lives.
Competitive behavior seems to desire to highlight differences amongst the in-group versus the outgroups. Competitive behavior also excels at drumming up visceral desire to act regardless of whether the desire is rational or whether the act truly and completely satisfies the desire.
Why is it difficult to immediately associate with the largest in-group i.e. all of humanity / all of life itself / the objective truth?
Why not fight a group that has no members i.e. poverty (that which makes and keeps people poor as opposed to the poor), hunger, homelessness, poor health and disease, intolerable / harmful discomfort (difficulty breathing, too much heat, too much cold, too dry, too wet, etc.), pollution, and death (untimely or all death period)?
> I've discussed some of this stuff with him: in his eyes, Obama did stuff he shouldn't have, so Trump can do stuff he shouldn't.
This is a terrible line of thinking. I'm no Trump fan, but there's a ton of things neither Trump nor Obama should have done as president, and excusing one with the actions of another doesn't make a bad act good.
I can understand how people can rationalize some of his failures, but, the second time around, how can someone vote for a guy who has failed on delivering on a very simple and basic campaign promise, one that he can do that unilaterally?
“The country wasn’t based on executive orders,” Trump said at a South Carolina campaign stop in February 2016. “Right now, Obama goes around signing executive orders. He can’t even get along with the Democrats, and he goes around signing all these executive orders. It’s a basic disaster. You can’t do it.”
I know I'm probably pissing in the wind here, but I was looking forward to a president ceding some of his power back to congress, so this one really sticks in my craw. Oh well.
Because, while this is not true of individual republicans, republican party media strategy has been based on positional ethics for a long time. Free speech is good when it is our free speech. Executive orders are bad when they are your executive orders.
Both parties do this. For instance, Republicans are generally the party of "states' rights", but Democrats are jumping up and down about how the federal government shouldn't overrule the rights of liberal states now. Things like the fighting the FCC trying to prohibit states from making their own net neutrality rules, or legalizing marijuana, which is still technically illegal nationwide according to the federal government.
Generally, if you run the federal government, you don't want states objecting to your agenda. And if the opposition is running the federal government, you insist on your right to do things at the state level.
Watching Democrats and Republicans make the exact same arguments depending on whose in power is absolutely hilarious, and it leads to great soundbites, like those of Trump and McConnell talking about what the President should and shouldn't do... depending who the President is.
Every law called "the Civil Rights Act" passed with overwhelming Republican support. All but one passed with more Republican support than Democratic support. The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 received 80% of the republican vote in the house, but only 61% of the democratic vote.
Current party lines blur to to the point of falling apart in the context of the 1964 Act, because it was a huge precipitating event for politicians switching parties (particularly Southern Democrats becoming Republicans). You can't directly map "Rs voted for the Act" onto party membership today: there was a very different mix of platforms at that time, only loosely comparable to what we have now.
This is the real answer, due to the civil rights movement the DNC lost the south due to the less civil minded parts of the party switched to the republicans.
That makes literally no sense. Republicans supported the civil rights acts of 1957 through 1968 with supermajorities, by far larger margins than democrats did. How can it be that "due to the civil rights movement," "less civil minded" people switched from a party that voted for the Civil Rights Acts, to the party that voted for the Civil Rights Acts by even larger margins?
The realignment of southern democrats is due more to the fact that, once segregation--which democrats tolerated and republicans didn't--was off the table, they were more aligned with republicans on other issues, such as religion, gun control, abortion, business regulation, taxes, etc.
You are either willfully cherry-picking facts here or being ignorant. This info is widely available and it was the racists south that was against the civil rights movement and the union states pushed it through. When the 64 law passed the DNC had 21 out of 22 confederate senators, 1 of whom voted for the act. GOP had 1 southern senator, who voted against it.
Looking at the union numbers, DNC had 46 senators of whom 45 voted for the act while the GOP had 32 of which 27 voted for it. So in union numbers the DNC senators voted 98% for it, while GOP did so with 84%.
As a result of this both parties changed. The DNC took a stand for civil rights and the southern democrats left. At the same time the GOP got a lot new members that influenced the party and created the new power base for it. Later GOP close victories all relied on the previous southern democrats.
Bigger picture, it is clear that the party depending on the south needs to cater to a voting base that is not very positive to civil rights movement, and the opposite for a party that wants to hold the north. It is important to understand that the DNC took a stand here that lost them the south long term because it was the right thing to do (in their minds).
So your theory is that "racists" left the DNC because it "took a stand for civil rights" and decamped to the party that had taken a stronger stand for civil rights for the 100 years preceding that? How does that make sense?
You are also not really correct in claiming that "later GOP close victories all relied on the previous southern democrats." The 1976 Carter-Ford election was pretty close, with Carter winning by 2% overall. In North Carolina, Carter won by 10 points, while he won New York by less than 5 points. Regan won North Carolina by 2 points and New York by 3 points 1980.
It's no doubt that Republicans gained a decisive advantage in the south eventually, but that happened decades later.
You crossed into breaking the site guidelines here. Please don't do that regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. It just makes the thread even worse.
You’re pointing to elections that happened more than three decades after the Civil Rights Acts of 1957-1968. That doesn’t support your point that the parties’ positions in the Civil Rights Acts was critical to those results. Couldn’t it be that those results are the product of things that happened during the 1990s, such as Democratic support for affirmative action?
As to the scare quotes, I’m using them because you’re using the term to refer to people who voted for Bush, it just Storm Thurmond.
That's an overstatement, which has been popularized by Democrats to distance themselves from their longstanding coalition with southern segregationists. The key Civil Rights Acts were passed from 1957 to 1968. The political alignments on various issues haven't changed much since FDR. Democrats were on the liberal alignment with respect to government regulation, business freedom, taxes, education, immigration, social welfare, religion, gun control, etc.
Contrary to your statement, the Civil Rights Acts were not a "precipitating event for politicians switching parties." That doesn't even make sense--why would politicians who were against civil rights join the party that much more strongly supported every Civil Rights Act from 1957 to 1968?
The realignment of southern democrats actually occurred much later. Nixon did not win a majority in any southern state--to the extent he won with a plurality, it was only because the Democratic vote was split between Humphrey and Wallace. In 1976, Carter won with the same east-coast south/north coalition that long voted Democrat; with Ford winning the west coast and mid-west. Reagan won almost every state, but his margins in New York were larger than his margins in Alabama or the Carolinas. Reagan did blow out Mondale in the south in 1984, but I'm not sure how much that tells us. Even by the time of Clinton, he won Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Georgia, not to mention Arkansas.
I think the more accurate take is that the political realignment of the parties on "civil rights" issues happened more in the mid-late 1980s through 1990s. And it happened because the nature of the "civil rights" debate morphed over that time. The battle fronts during the 1980s and 1990s was not eliminating de jure and overt discrimination (the aim of the 1950s and 1960s legislation republicans supported), but measures like affirmative action, which sought to use the power of government to shape private conduct to eliminate existing inequities. That of course maps very cleanly onto longstanding republican versus democrat positions.
(I'll give another example of situations where political alignments change because the issue has changed rather than the "mix of platforms" of the parties. On the abortion front, for example, a significant amount of the debate has moved from talking about whether it should be legal at all, to talking about whether religious organizations should be required to provide healthcare coverage for them, whether the government should support them with public funding, etc. If you're a consistent libertarian, you might have found yourself more aligned with Democrats back in the early 1990s, but more aligned with Republicans today.)
You normally have the facts on your side, or else you make generous and clear concessions. What is happening here? You are saying such incorrect (or confusing) things.
In point of fact, Democratic presidential candidates began to lose in Southern states because of integration well before the 1970s. Formerly-Democratic Southerners splintered from the Democratic party for explicitly segregationist reasons, and carried several Southern states under a third-party banner, in two different presidential elections (1948 and 1968).
(One of them, Strom Thurmond, is a direct counterexample to your argument that the Civil Rights Acts were not a "precipitating event for politicians switching parties." At least according to Wikipedia, he switched his affiliation to Republican because of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.)
Is this, like, something you haven't read about yet? Or do you have a strong argument that explains the above, which I don't get yet?
I think you’re overlooking some of the context of this thread. It started when someone said that republicans invoked states rights to justify opposing the Civil Rights Acts. Following that up with, “the Civil Rights Act was a huge precipitating event for southern Democrats to become Republicans” falsely reinforces the idea that Republicans opposed the Civil Rights Acts, when in fact they supported it overwhelmingly. Nor does it make sense to say that southern segregationists would leave the Democratic Party in response, to decamp for a party that supported the Civil Rights Act even more strongly.
Some Democrats like Thurmond did switch in 1964, because once Democrats abandoned their support for segregation, they found they shared other principles with Republicans. But focusing on those isolated instances overlooks and downplays the deep alliance between Democrats and segregationists. Woodrow Wilson, a pioneer of modern progressive “governance by expert bureaucracy” re-segregated the federal workforce. Segregationist Democrats were a key pillar of support for FDR’s New Deal. George Wallace was a segregationist, and also a New Dealer, a champion of labor who called for expanding Social Security. From 1930-1970, the Democratic coalition was glued together by the New Deal, with northern Democrats agreeing to look the other way at what southern Democrats were doing. (I use 1970 as the end date, because those alliances were in place even by Carter’s time: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/jimmy-carters-racist-camp.... Carter would not have won without the South.)
In fact, a minority of Republicans in the 1960s, like Barry Goldwater, did make overtures towards anti-integration forces, in an effort to win southern votes. But they never managed to dismantle the Democratic New Deal coalition in the south. That didn’t happen until much later. And at that point, two major things had happened. Southern states has transitioned from agricultural to industrial. The economy of places like Georgia had boomed by drawing businesses from northern states with lower taxes and less regulation. At the same time, the focus of the “civil rights” movement changed. It moved onto very different issues like affirmative action. I happen to support affirmative action, but it’s hard to deny that it’s an ideologically very different thing than the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Its the class “negative right” versus “positive right” dichotomy that’s always divided conservative versus liberal thought.
The reason I take an exception to the characterization above is that through omission framing, it attempts to tarnish Republicans for something they were on the right side of, while absolving Democrats of something they were for a long time on the wrong side of. It also falsely equates very different civil rights policies. It goes to Biden’s “[Romney] wants to put y’all back in chains” rhetoric. No, it was Democrats who wanted to do that. Romney, and modern Republicans, don’t want to use the power of government to affirmatively erase historical inequities. But it was the Romney-type pro-business Republicans that were a bulwark of the Civil Rights Acts.
Thanks for the response! I get how this thread is about framing and partisanship and that is the part that is boring for me. I am more interested in the broader topic of the realignment, and I think you are articulating the clearest and strongest version of your argument that I've heard. I'd recap it as follows:
1) Democrats were the party of white ethno-nationalism, starting in the 1800s.
2) Democrats abandon that plank by the 1960s, joining with longstanding Republican efforts and overturning Jim Crow.
3) Much later, for unrelated reasons, the South becomes Republicans.
Is that about right?
I agree with #1 and #2. I disagree with #3 and I don't see how the facts support it.
First, there's the "much later" part of #3. Here [1] are presidential voting records for the 13 states of the confederacy. In every case but Missouri, there is a) a period of near-uniform Democratic domination from 1880-1944, b) a string of Democratic losses, and at least two Republican victories, by 1972.
(Yes, Carter won several of those states after Nixon's disgrace. To some degree I contest the conclusions you're drawing there: so did Hoover, Clinton, etc to lesser degrees. I acknowledge that many of these states were purple in the 1970s, but I don't think that supports the timeline of #3 in context.)
Second, there is the claim of "unrelated reasons". The idea that "a minority of Republicans in the 1960s" made overtures to segregationist Dems is equivalent to saying "Nixon didn't do anything like the Southern Strategy", right? (Or were you talking about regional races?) Doesn't that assertion, in turn, hinge on the idea that "states' rights" (to pick one example) is not an overture? If so, I would call it a weak argument.
First: the timing of the transition. Let’s take Alabama. In 1960, it voted for JFK, who was perceived as weak on civil liberties. Then in 1964, it went Goldwater because LBJ didn’t appear on the ballot. In 1968, it voted for Wallace, who was not a Republican, he was a New Deal Democrat. In 1972, it voted for Nixon. But Nixon won almost every state, including New York. In 1976, Carter blew out Ford in Alabama, winning by 13 points, compared to his 2.5 point margin in New York. That shows the Southern Democratic contingent was alive and well as of 1976. It voted for Reagan in 1980, but by one point, compared to Reagan’s 9 point margin in the rest of the country. Carter ran more closely with Reagan in Alabama than he did in New York.
The question is: if the 1964 Civil Rights Act caused a mass exodus from Democrats to Republicans, why was a Democrat outperforming in Alabama compared to New York even by 1980? Democratic support for the Civil Rights Acts May have broken the “solid south” but that doesn’t mean those people became Republicans—who also supported civil rights. Other things needed to happen.
What those things were: they’re related but not the same as “civil rights.” “Civil rights” isn’t a single policy, but a range of policies with different ideological implications. Republicans strongly opposed de jure discrimination, and supported civil rights laws that eliminated such discrimination. But by the 1970s, the fight had moved to different issues: forced bussing, affirmative action, etc. And the race riots of the 1960s, and skyrocketing crime in cities, made “law and order” hot-button issues. Nixon and Reagan capitalized on southern views on those policies.
Saying that Nixon’s “southern strategy” was rooted in opposition to “civil rights” is a very Democratic way to look at the issue. Nixon helped champion the 1957 Civil Rights Act through Congress. He never backtracked on that. What he did was promise disaffected southern Democrats that he would not use the force of government to integrate private society, and would maintain law and order. (So did Carter, by the way.) It’s maybe fair to say it was an appeal to southern racism, but it was not ideologically inconsistent with his support for the civil rights act, and ideologically consistent with conservatism in general. (I happen to agree that you need affirmative action to erase previous discrimination. But I think it’s not intellectually honest to pretend that opposing affirmative measures to equalize society is on a continuum with opposing measures to eliminate de jure discrimination. They’re categorically different things.)
Apart from that, some reasons were in fact unrelated. Starting in the 1970s, the southern economies moved from agricultural to commercial. Southern states realized they could outbid northern states for business though low taxes and low regulation. Southern cities like Atlanta and Charlotte boomed during this period. That dissipated the New Deal sentiments that had previously tied the south to Democrats.
If you asked me what caused the modern Republican “solid south,” I would not say “the civil rights acts.” I think that an unwarranted attempt to tar modern conservatism in with segregationism, which is especially galling because New Deal liberals were in an alliance with segregationists at that time. I would say the proximate cause is the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, and the economic development of the south as being reliant on low taxes and regulation as a way to outcompete the north.
Sure, I won't deny that it's a much more complex situation than my two sentences. But I'm not sure how "realignment unfolded across the next decade or two" contradicts the 60s civil rights actions "precipitating" that realignment.
You made a much broader point than what you've retreated to:
> Current party lines blur to to the point of falling apart in the context of the 1964 Act, because it was a huge precipitating event for politicians switching parties (particularly Southern Democrats becoming Republicans). You can't directly map "Rs voted for the Act" onto party membership today: there was a very different mix of platforms at that time, only loosely comparable to what we have now.
In the 1950s and 1960s, as today, Democrats were the party of social welfare, regulation, big government, higher taxes, etc. And republicans were the party of big business, tax cuts, religion in schools, etc. Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx haven't voted for a Republican since the 1920s.
Apart from that, the way you phrased it makes it seem like southern democrats defected to the Republican Party because the democrats supported the 1964 civil rights act. That misleadingly implies that republicans didn't support the 1964 civil rights act (even more strongly)--otherwise, why would southern democrats defect to the Republican Party? Standing alone, it's an assertion that makes no sense, and it subtly tars Republicans as somehow having opposed civil rights.
What happened instead is that the issue changed. "Civil rights" in 1964 meant eliminating discrimination at lunch counters and on busses. That victory was won decisively. By the 1980s and early 1990s, the front had moved to things like affirmative action and racal quotas: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1991/01/15/q.... That triggered a realignment, based on pre-existing ideological lanes. The same republicans who supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 could, entirely consistent with their ideology, oppose affirmative efforts to eliminate racial disparities.
The GP's focus on the republican party over the individual voters is misplaced in a historical context [1], but holds for the alignment of modern day voting blocs [2].
You forgot to mention that Lincoln was also a Republican while pretending that the party names of decades ago have anything to do with the party names currently.
First, the specific claim was that Republicans invoked "states rights" to oppose the Civil Rights Acts, which is just demonstrably untrue.
Second, we're talking about the 1960s, not the 1860s. By that time, the Democrats were already the party of FDR and JFK, and Republicans were already the party of Richard Nixon. JFK won the Carolinas, Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana, and beat Nixon in Alabama and Mississippi, because it was perceived that he had a poor record on civil rights.
The idea that the “party labels flipped” is just blatant historical revisionism. By the 1950s and 1960s, Democrats were the party both of African Americans (who switched from Republicans during the FDR era), the War in Poverty, and southern segregationists. What happened is that, at some point, support for outright discrimination became unviable, and the battle front moved to other issues, such as affirmative action. That naturally fit into Democrats’ willingness to use the power of government to address social inequities.
> First, the specific claim was that Republicans invoked "states rights" to oppose the Civil Rights Acts, which is just demonstrably untrue.
I have since changed it to “conservatives”, which is the ideology that supported Jim Crow and opposed the Civil Rights Act regardless of what the party name happened to be.
I think if you use the term southerners you'd be good. We've consistently opposed civil rights and affirmative action. And we were more Democratic in the 60s and more Republican today.
That's still inaccurate. Republicans in the 1930s-1960s were ideologically conservative. Southern democrats, meanwhile, were in many respects ideologically liberal, for example supporting the New Deal: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/new-deal-democrats-rep....
> There were conservative tendencies in American politics before the 1930s, but the modern conservative movement was founded on opposition to the New Deal. The segregationist Democrats, on the other hand, were for the most part eager supporters of the New Deal—provided it was administered in a way that would exclude African Americans from most of its benefits. You do not have to take my word for it—consider the votes: on labor reform, on entitlements, on financial regulation, etc. If the southern Democrats were “conservatives,” then the New Deal was passed on conservative support, which is a very odd claim to make.
> Every law called "the Civil Rights Act" passed with overwhelming Republican support.
The PATRIOT Act is hardly a champion of many patriotic things. Names mean... very little, so I'm not sure your point.
"Every faction in Africa calls themselves by these noble names - Liberation this, Patriotic that, Democratic Republic of something-or-other... I guess they can't own up to what they usually are: the Federation of Worse Oppressors Than the Last Bunch of Oppressors. Often, the most barbaric atrocities occur when both combatants proclaim themselves Freedom Fighters."
I don’t believe the Democratic Party has ever advocated that states should have no rights, so I don’t see how your argument makes any sense. Of course in a specific instance they could advocate for states rights.
Don't worry... he also criticized Obama for golfing too much, and has gone golfing more frequently than Obama.
And Senate Republicans have openly asked judges to resign so they can be replaced by conservative judges, and their justification for why it's okay to do this so close to an election but it wasn't okay to confirm Garland so close to an election literally amounts to "Obama's a Democrat, Trump's a Republican."
> And Senate Republicans have openly asked judges to resign so they can be replaced by conservative judges, and their justification for why it's okay to do this so close to an election but it wasn't okay to confirm Garland so close to an election literally amounts to "Obama's a Democrat, Trump's a Republican."
It's worse than that. There were at least three high ranking Republican Senators who said that if Clinton won the election, they would go her entire 4 (or 8) years without confirming any Supreme Court nominees, keeping any vacant seats open until there was a Republican President again to fill them.
As distasteful and unprofessional as it is, it is their right. If the Senate, and its Senators, for whatever reason decide not to act, there's nothing the President can do. It's distasteful, but it's neither illegal nor out of character.
To be fair, the judges asked to resign (really retire) are conservatives. It's the same reason Ginsburg hasn't retired despite her health issues -- everything to do with which party would be nominating her replacement.
The next time the Democrats control the Senate and the Republicans the whitehouse, I wouldn't expect them be interested in confirming any judges right before a Presidential election either.
In past times there was a thing called compromise. Not very familiar anymore, I know. Instead of leaving a seat empty for the next ten years until the same party controls the Senate and the whitehouse (and not knowing ahead of time whether it'll be yours or not), the President can nominate a moderate which the opposition party Senate might confirm for the same reason. Better a moderate now than the other guy's candidate later.
But when you're looking at electoral math that says you're about to have even odds of taking the whitehouse and probably won't lose the Senate, that doesn't really apply.
That's probably the most insightful and (to my mind) intelligent assessment I've heard when asking that question. It eliminates any handwaving about "tradition" or "precedent" - and gets right down to the fundamental elements of power and control, and risk.
There is a worse side effect that comes from conservatives feeling that they have been silenced, as people feel like they have less and less say in a political process they are more and more likely to start employing means outside of it. The real risk here is that if more and more outlets for conservative voices are silenced, whether for good cause or not, this will reinforce the narrative that many of them have that they are the defenders of the truth and right and there is a vast conspiracy operating to seize their guns, deprive them of their rights, and whatever else they can imagine. As that happens there becomes more and more moral justification and greater and greater need there is seen to employ violence in end of their goals.
Ultimately the more and more "dangerous" opinions and people who share those opinions are silenced the more and more dangerous they become in reality.
EDIT:
The nature of this comment is intended to be observational not advocational.
Do you believe it’s more dangerous to:
A: Remove a post encouraging violence with the risk it’ll anger a group of people?
Or...
B: Keep it and let it reach 80 million followers?
There’s plenty of evidence that many sites (twitter included) allow violent speech from specific groups because they’re worried of the political backlash. These groups still complain about being silenced just the same, despite blatantly violating the TOS.
It doesn’t work. You’re just giving dangerous and violent people a platform to organize, encourage and enable violence. As a platform owner, you can’t just hope they’ll behave if you treat them nicely.
Alternatively - if those pushing the far-right violent rhetoric don't have as much of an audience, their support may fade because they don't have a platform.
It is an interesting question. Although de-platforming reduces the reach of a group does it increase the overall vitrol of the group, or the level of extremism?
Although it may mean fewer people become part of the community it would also mean that those that remain with it are now more isolated from the outside world and increase the precieved level of persecution? Would this then correlate with an increase in action?
I don't know the answer to this, it seems logical to me that each of these answers would be yes, but I definitely think it is a topic worth investigating and discussing.
When the president says "we will take over", and that "the shooting will start", that seems (to me) to be fairly authoritarian (right-leaning) rhetoric.
Our laws explicitly forbid the national military "taking over" in such situations -- the national guard (state military) is who is supposed to be deployed.
Wikipedia says: "In 2006, Congress passed the 2007 National Defense Authorization Act, which gave the president the authority to mobilize National Guard units within the U.S. without the consent of state governors."
Unless the content is called out for inaccuracy, bigotry, etc the user may not even be aware of the issue they create. Like if someone retweets a claim they believe but it is flagged as misleading and fact checked that might be the first time their views were checked and they might recognize their beliefs are wrong and rethink things. But they often won't and I think that is as much part of the problem. Trump won't rethink his position because a tweet was fact checked, he will attack the fact checker and supporters will do the same thanks to his example. There is no self reflection or awareness when called out and the poster becomes defensive, refusing to accept their comment as fake news or bigotry.
If conservatives feel they are being silenced but cannot recognize that the views 'censored' are often bigoted, racist, or simply unpopular or abhorrent outside their bubble, then what do you to? If you call out blatant racism you are less likely to find the user recognize their racism, apologize, and not use such language again and more likely to be called a snowflake and have that behavior turned up a notch. If the original comment is then downvoted by the community or removed by mods then it will enforce that persons view that they are being attacked. This is incredibly common on Reddit where users often include a 'bring on the downvotes' type edit after stating something intolerant or clearly false.
The solution is not to allow these views and opinions to sit unchecked but to recognize a modern civil society must be intolerant of intolerance and moderate appropriately. Downvote and report racist comments. Apply fact checking to statements, even those you believe or feel to be true as that is a sign of bias. If the user doubles down, move on as there is no value in arguing with someone putting their feelings and beliefs/bias above facts and reality. Perhaps when society or their online community turns their back on their comments they will finally have the time to reflect on why and recognize their behavior was unwarranted and unwanted.
The problem with your response if you've fundementally divided the world into the fearless, social justice serving left and the corrupt, evil, fascist, right. It can be assumed that the far right is not going to change their mind at any point; however the majority of the world isn't far right or far left. Many people are moderates that could go one way or the other.
By designating everyone who doesn't agree with you as "the right" that can't every act in good faith and is irredeemable you galvanize the more moderates. This incident won't have a substantive impact on the far right, but it may cause a change in opinion in more moderate voices.
Essentially be advocating this black and white extremism you hurt your cause and play into the very narrative that those on the other side are saying.
I'm sorry reality has taken such a fascist bent but it's not my fault, it's just something we have to contend with now. But your both-side-ism is morally reprehensible in the context of what's happening right now.
What exactly is happening and how can you really say that the reality is now fascist? It sounds like you've already made the both-side-ism implicitly yourself.
Would you please stop breaking the HN guidelines with ideological flamewar and personal attacks? It's not what this site is for, you do it all the time, and we've warned you several times over several years. In fact I'm surprised we haven't banned you yet, and if you keep this up we will.
I'm not a pure conservative, but I expect I hold several views you'd find repugnant and label as "conservative". For instance, I am strongly pro-life. Another one: I believe deeply in the existence of God (and other supernatural beings).
I am, therefore, a bad-faith actor, if I'm following right?
Conservatives in this country believe in "small government", "individual freedoms" and "separation between church and state" until a large slice of their electorate turns out to be religious fundamentalists, then they start mandating transvaginal ultrasounds in order to get an abortion etc...
Does that sound like intellectual honesty or good faith?
My question was, in fact, in good faith. I wanted to know if you would apply your generalization to me, as the way it read it seemed to me like it would.
Apparently it doesn't, so I guess I didn't get what you meant.
I tried to go back and reread it, but it's flagged now and I don't see a way to.
I think your example is actually closer to intellectual honesty than you think it is.
"Small government" is not "no government".
To a pro-life conservative, abortion is murder.
I've yet to meet a conservative who doesn't think the government should be involved in preventing murder.
Requiring you look at the victim before killing them is a pretty pathetic protection against murder, but it's probably better than nothing.
I'd guess from your framing that you support abortion rights. If so, I can certainly see why this would look like intellectual dishonesty to you, but as I argued above, I think that's due to not understanding the people you're talking about well enough, at least in this case.
The valley being an echo chamber doesn’t necessarily mean those implementing this have their heads in the sand.
It can’t be all perfectly achieved, but to do nothing, as they were before, could be now determined to be a worse case than providing these annotations to flagrant misuse by the highest impact profile that they can’t do away with entirely.
The legal issue is that their legal protection from defamation and libel under section 230 requires them to moderate "in good faith". If they only selective moderate accounts, then that protection may not survive in court.
...but I think a greater concern we can all agree on, is that for the type of communications that Twitter does - Twitter is effectively a monopoly. The people being censored here can't even themselves go to any alternative platform, because there's really no other platform at that scale for that content format.
...that's a bigger problem, because it gives Twitter the power to shape global communications unilaterally. Something no corporation should have the power to do.
I think, broadly, that censorship should be regulated by democratically elected bodies - not corporations.
There is no requirement under section 230 to moderate content in good faith. Selective moderation does not affect their liability. This law was passed democratically, for exactly this purpose.
>"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." This federal law preempts any state laws to the contrary: "[n]o cause of action may be brought and no liability may be imposed under any State or local law that is inconsistent with this section."
It's literally written into the law in section 230 (c)(2)(A)...
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of — any action voluntarily taken in __good faith__ to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected
...and that specific requirement has been specifically referenced in Trump's recent executive order.
It reads like the specific action taken must be in "good faith" and has nothing to do with selective enforcement. The "Fact check" label also shouldn't fall under "restrict" or "availability".
I struggle to see how a policy of selective enforcement can be deemed to be taken in "good faith." If you only enforce speed limits against a disadvantaged minority group, are those individual enforcement actions made "in good faith" (even if each person was actually speeding?)
My understanding is that (c)(2)(A) is only about liability for the act of moderation itself, e.g. suing Twitter because they banned you. If they did that in bad faith you could hypothetically maybe sue them for it, but there would need to be a cause of action, which there normally wouldn't be.
'gnopgnip may be referring to the much broader liability shield, for the content that you do not remove, which is provided by (c)(1) and has no good-faith requirement. That is Twitter's main "legal protection from defamation and libel" that you mention above.
Trump's executive order suggests that the (c)(1) liability shield could go away if you don't meet the (c)(2) good-faith requirements, which I gather is not considered a strong legal position.
The thing with selective enforcement is that then anyone with claims against Twitter can claim that their moderation attempts are all in bad faith, because they are selective - thereby opening them up to libel.
Maybe, but did you read my post? You need a cause of action. It is not libel to moderate someone's tweets, so even if § 230 does not protect them you can't sue them for libel based on their moderation.
This is absurd. Twitter is a corporation and can choose to present their product as they see fit. And nothing about them is essential. Twitter could go bankrupt and the world would not hurt at all. There are absolutely plenty of ways to disseminate information.
Twitter only has about 150 million daily active users. That's 1/3 of the population of the USA. There is no way in hell Twitter could ever be considered a monopoly when less than 2% of the world's population even uses their platform actively.
>The people being censored here can't even themselves go to any alternative platform, because there's really no other platform at that scale for that content format.
What about setting up a blog on whitehouse.com? Most normal people can't get the same audience, but Trump's not normal.
>If they only selective moderate accounts, then that protection may not survive in court.
Even assuming there was a service moderating by purely political guidelines, I don't see how 230 would stop applying. Otherwise, a lot of websites will be screwed. For instance, any website run by a political party that allows comments.
>that's a bigger problem, because it gives Twitter the power to shape global communications unilaterally. Something no corporation should have the power to do.
The solution to a monopoly abusing its power isn't to write piecemeal law curtailing things as they come up. The solution is to get rid of the monopoly (breaking it up, making it so competitors join the market, etc).
But this order isn't about monopolies. It's a party plank and rallying cry.
The issue is that the rules are being enforced selectively. Just this week Twitter fact checked Trump's opinion on mail voter fraud by linking to other experts' opinions. It seems more like a move to influence the election rather than enforcing the rules.
Let’s entertain the possibility that Twitter is doing this to influence the election.
So what?
There’s no law prohibiting these types of businesses from supporting a political candidate. They could plaster a huge “Vote For X” banner at the top of every person’s profile. Don’t like it? Don’t use it.
It’s not like Twitter is tax-exempt which would prohibit it from endorsing candidates like Churches.
By the same argument, Google could exclude a political candidate from their search results entirely, or bolster a fabricated news story claiming the candidate was a child-molsting satanist to the top of their results. Would you also consider that acceptable?
These companies have become, for many, infrastructural. For these companies (who also sell advertising) to take these kinds of actions would essentially be them bypassing campaign finance rules to give MASSIVE contributions of free advertising to candidates. I think its fair to argue that that would be unacceptable interference.
I certainly wouldn't like that they took such an action, even if I liked whatever candidate they were stanning for. It would come off as pretty classless to most people I think.
But should it be illegal? IMO -- no. If this is the hill that some company wants to die on, let them try. Why not?
Thought experiment: If there was a political candidate running on a platform to destroy the internet, I think it would be perfectly reasonable for internet companies to vouch for the competition.
> It’s not like Twitter is tax-exempt which would prohibit it from endorsing candidates like Churches.
Twitter is not tax-exempt but is certainly lawsuit-exempt to a large degree. The entire reason twitter has not be sued into oblivion for the actions of it's users is because of the protections Section 230[1] grants them.
But here is the pinch. Section 230 protection applies only as long as you act as platforms for 3rd party speech. But when they start plastering "Vote for X" banners on their websites of their own violations, they go from being platforms for 3rd party speech to 1st party publishers. That effectively removes the Section 230 protections twitter enjoys.
I much as I hate to say it, Trump might be right this once. Twitter has stopped being a neutral platform enforcing consistent policies for quite some time now.
> But here is the pinch. Section 230 protection applies only as long as you act as platforms for 3rd party speech. But when they start plastering "Vote for X" banners on their websites of their own violations, they go from being platforms for 3rd party speech to 1st party publishers. That effectively removes the Section 230 protections twitter enjoys.
That's not at all how section 230 works. Section 230 protections. Section 230 provides protection from liability over what their users post. Whatever content they have of their own on their site is completely out of scope as far as section 230 goes.
> The issue is that the rules are being enforced selectively.
It's not only acceptable but actually ethically correct to hold those with more power to higher standards of responsibility.
It's therefore not only acceptable but actually ethically correct to enforce these rules more proactively against the President of the United States than some Russian bot account.
Depends on what's being done with those resources.
Example 1 - Drumming up support for a war with Iran. No it's not correct to direct resources to where they are most effective. (According to me.)
Example 2 - Trying to get homeless people in SF back on their feet. Yes, direct resources where they are most effective. (Again, according to me.)
But in example 1 if we ask the same question to a war hawk in congress, they'll give you the exact opposite answer. In example 2 if you ask Ayn Rand, again you'll get a different answer.
No one is objectively right or wrong in any of these cases.
Quite clearly the question implied "all other things being equal" or "all other factors aside", "what would you do?".
It's funny. I went out of my way to de-politicize the question in order to further the discussion and you promptly re-politicized it in order to muddy it. I suspect it's because you know exactly what I'm getting at. You've avoided the core question no less than 3 times already.
I'll try one more time. Please resist the temptation to play word games or make it political:
If Twitter has limited fact-checking capabilities is it not correct — regardless of politics — to direct those resources where they are more effective?
Therefore (again, regardless of politics), Twitter's actions follow perfectly reasonable logic: that Trump's Tweets would face more scrutiny than say, mine.
Thus, your claim that "the rules are being enforced selectively" can easily be accounted for by Occams Razor: It makes perfect sense that more visible accounts face more scrutiny. It would be highly illogical for Twitter to do otherwise.
But you have to remember, they are going to pay more attention to people that have a lot of followers vs the person with 3. Limited resources trying to deal with the people that have the most impact makes sense to me
Personally I think they are just trying to call out a moron. But so what if you are trying to "interfere" with the election. Corporations are allowed to interject their own beliefs and politics too
Selective enforcement happens everywhere in the internet. For example if you go to T_D in Reddit, they will absolutely delete any anti-Trump posts. Does this mean Reddit is influencing elections ?
Opinions that particular subreddit and its moderators aside, that's not really about a site enforcing a policy selectively. Moderators are usually volunteers, and as far as I know, Reddit doesn't have a policy saying they should be neutral. As long as they do stuff that is within the bounds of Reddit's policies, moderators can be pretty arbitrary or capricious.
Has Twitter committed to two sidism neutrality, or has it, like reddit, made no statement about their political affiliation?
If it hasn't, does this mean they are free to ban every conservative viewpoint from their platform, like T_D does for liberal ones? If not, why are we letting T_D behave in such a way?
Because the people who run Reddit have said many, many times that as long as moderators enforce the site-wide rules, that mods (and users to an extent) have the freedom to run the subs however they see fit, post whatever they wish, and yes, by golly, call people by terms dubbed by some as "hate speech"
They are finally stepping up and enforcing their ToS. I can see this response as a followup to the EIO signed yesterday as an example of what they might have to do if the interpretation of existing law is changed and platforms become liable for content they host. Like, that would induce harsher restrictions on posting and modding content though it would be complicated if that also made twitter a publisher. Their model may no longer be viable at that point as they could be sued for leaving up violent or misleading content AND sued as a publisher for what they take down.
It's within their rights to do take these actions, fact checks and hiding/deleting tweets, to protect their ecosystem. If it is questionably legal because it may influence the election, then I haven't seen the law it is breaking. I see a better argument for showing Twitter promoting Trump's feed to drive clicks as an in kind donation which could quickly break legal campaign donation limits.
Twitter has taken a stand here and I do think they should apply their policies evenly. Will they effectively apply this to everything or even have the capacity built out now to do so? I doubt it. They are a business who needs user engagement to drive profit from ads. If they constrain their most clicked tweets it could lower their revenue even if initially those tweets get attention for being removed.
Eh? Do you have any examples? This is nothing new, Twitter has been applying this standard to tweets for a very long time (it's part of their ToS!). It usually results in deleting your tweet or an outright ban. The only difference here is that they've kept the tweet up since they deem it to be in the public's interest.
There are tons of examples. Look in almost any thread and there are people calling for public hangings of politicians, assassinations. The "guillotine" crowd. People telling people to burn down the city. Some people saying anti-Semitic stuff...I've reported a lot of this. Twitter usually comes back and say they found it wasn't in violation of anything. There are other politicians, such as Chinese officials, Iranian officials the Twitter has not policed or marked as misleading despite them being outright anti-Semitic or propaganda.
"Violence" against property doesn't really compare to killing people, IMO.
I don't really even think property damage should be included in the definition of "violence" and maybe Twitter agrees with me.
She also didn't say what to burn down. Trump was very clear that looters are who he wanted shot. Burn it down is a common saying that can mean anything from literally burning stuff to just tearing down a system in order to rebuild.
> "Violence" against property doesn't really compare to killing people, IMO.
That's the kind of thing that results in the insidious left-wing bias of sites like Twitter. Moderators who don't believe that property damage is a blatant violation of peoples' rights, but do believe peoples' rights are violated by mere words alone, and moderating in accordance with such views.
Property damage is absolutely a violation of people's rights, which is why property was added to the constitution. Outrage does not negate a business owners rights.
There is no equivalence between property damage equivalent to killing, much as there is no equivalence between a random twitter user “calling for the guillotines” and the commander of the armed forces threatening to unleash a massacre. It is beyond bad faith to argue otherwise.
Let me make sure I understand your position properly - are you saying that it is insidious left-sing bias to believe that people's rights can be violated by mere words alone?
The entire purpose of Section 230 is to provide protection against civil liability for platforms who publish mere words from their users. Is your position, then, that if we remove the insidious left-wing bias from our political system, there's no need for Section 230 because platforms can never be liable for the mere words that they republish?
Are all of the commentators who are asking for Twitter's Section 230 protections to be removed, including the president, part of an insidious left-wing conspiracy?
It's been a couple of hours - in general, saying stuff like that actually does in fact get Twitter's content moderation to kick in and force you to delete the tweet, and I regularly see folks who aren't conservative get temporary suspensions for it.
She posted that tweet more like 11 hours ago. Since that time it has become somewhat infamous - I've seen it in my deliberately not-politicized timeline and separately here on HN. What is the chance their content moderation team hasn't seen it?
Let's compare that to "when the looting starts the shooting begins".
Which is an observation, and which is a directive? I think that is the key question that Twitter is dodging. They want to editorialize with their opinion as to which is which, but not for everyone.
Hacker News frequently threatens censorship, prevents users from responding for several hours, etc. Do you think they should have that right since it is their platform?
What if a person said it as opinion: Looting has the potential to initiate shootings. Are we looking at an opinion, an observation, or glorying violence.
If I said that, it's an observation. If the chief of police said that, it's an implied threat. This is because I don't have the power to initiate shootings, while the chief of police does. There is a power differential, and statements can be viewed in the context of the person making them.
This is why phrases like "we should nuke them from orbit", which might be calls to violence if made by a head of state, are generally seen as satire, because there's no chance of me actually nuking someone from orbit. Context matters.
If some hypothetical person said it as an opinion or an observation, you'd have to look at Twitter's policy and try to understand the spirit of the law. Threats are a direct form of pro-violence speech, and glorifying violence is an indirect form of pro-violence speech, so it seem to cover a spectrum to me.
But whichever way they interpret it, all that really matters when it comes to fairness is that they are consistent.
If we look at a very non-hypothetical person named Donald Trump, he wrote "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" immediately after "I won't let that happen" and "the Military" and "we will assume control". Without context, the words could be just an opinion or observation, but in the context he used them, that's not a reasonable interpretation. You don't mention sending in the military (who have guns, obviously) and then mention shooting as a total non sequitur in the next sentence.
If somehow improbably he meant it to be an opinion or observation, he phrased it terribly, and Twitter is within their rights to interpret it how he wrote it.
I am pretty sure you would disagree if someone started smashing your front door or car. It is at best technically true in a deeply misleading way like calling a surgeon "a professional cutter and organ remover from the helpless".
There is an implied threat and cohersion to it of "do it or else" or "I can break you too". That is the violence against the person. Smashing your own car in front of somebody's house wouldn't include that threat as it is their property to what they wish although it would make you look crazy.
This is not quite true, losing property can cause real material harm to someone. If my house burns down and I'm on the streets, there is a real chance of harm to my person. Also now apparently words can be violence and cause the cancellation of someone..pretty sure it's all up for grabs now.
It wasn't explicitly calling for violence but Elon Musk's recent tweet [1] calling for "politicians & unelected bureaucrats" to be "tarred, feathered & thrown out of town" certainly was trending in that direction and could easily have been interpreted as a call for violence, or at least assault, by some sections of Musk's vast (35 million) collection of followers. Especially when the particular 'unelected bureaucrat' that Musk had been most vociferously complaining about and attacking, the Alameda County Health Officer, had been named in numerous news reports.
Would the same happen if Theil owned Twitter, and fact checked, etc. Joe Biden? IMO we would see the opposite, and liberal politicians calling for Twitter to be taken down. One person's soap box is another's tabloid.
Do you have any examples of liberal politicians calling for social media platforms to be taken down for fact checking or enforcing their terms of service? Simply saying "in my opinion they'd do the same thing" is not convincing.
I'm not trying to convince you. I'm stating my opinion which you happen to disagree with. There are no liberal politicians that I can find calling for fact checking because, for now, Twitter is working in their favor.
Liberal politicians would be smart enough to call for decentralized syndicated social media solutions. Democrats aren't a party that needs constant media attention in order to polarize America.
> Would the same happen if Theil owned Twitter, and fact checked, etc. Joe Biden?
No, it would not, because generally left-wing people don't spread lies with the intention to dissuade people from voting (quite to the contrary, the left wing is fighting for people to have the right and means to vote) or call for storming the White House and start shooting.
Different side of the coin. They often spread lies to persuade people to vote for them. Almost everyone in politics is full of it.
If you believe your side is the good one and the other is bad, it's probably because it's part of your identity. And that prevents you from thinking about it honestly and results in more polarization. Once you accept they're all full of it, you will think more clearly. And you'll have better dialogue with opposing viewpoints.
You could say requesting dox is a form of violence. But it's a lot less violent than ordering the military to shoot people. It's reasonable that a policy of removing tweets that glorify violence would catch one but not the other.
''But it's a lot less violent than ordering the military to shoot people.''
You know, he is president, that gives him right to use or threaten with violence if he thinks that safety of country is seriously in danger. If you think that he is breaking constitution there is court to decide about that.
> ''But it's a lot less violent than ordering the military to shoot people.'' You know, he is president, that gives him right to use or threaten with violence if he thinks that safety of country is seriously in danger. If you think that he is breaking constitution there is court to decide about that.
That's actually not true. There are legal bounds to what violence he can and cannot threaten. The President is not a dictator, in which case you would be correct. And we don't have to wait for a court to decide that the order is illegal. Members of the military are actually supposed to refuse illegal orders, not obey them blindly like good little Nazis.
> Unfortunately, what you are saying lead to anarchy.
That is a big, and unjustified, leap. Can you explain this assertion?
> You just said that we live in democracy.
I didn't say that, though it is a statement I'd agree with.
> In democracy disputes are settled in court.
This is not actually required to be a democracy. I'm not sure where you get this idea from.
Many things are already settled, either in law, the constitution, treaties, or, yes, court decisions, but do not require further court decisions. One of those is this: Military members are not obligated to follow illegal orders, and can actually be held accountable for failure to disobey.
''Military members are not obligated to follow illegal orders''. Ok, but this is not clear situation. Violence exists, therefore it needs to be stopped. Police station is burned down. Once police is not able to stop violence using military is only option.
Police (and the military if they're being used as a police force) do not have the authority to fire on looters. It would actually be illegal. And an order to do so is, as a consequence, an illegal order.
Regarding the burning down of the police station, that is a different kind of violence and a violent response from the police would've been more warranted.
agreed, im not saying this is equal to trump, but i don't think anyone here downvoting me would want to be doxed by someone with 2.1 million followers, regardless of if she is a comedian or not.
Which is violence: Doxing, or using the information to call in a swat team? If the swatting occured, it was the Doxing which directly led to it. It's a loaded gun.
If you read the replies to Trump's tweet on Twitter, half of them are whining about Kathy Griffin. She's their favorite example of how Twitter has a liberal bias today. Maybe you coincidentally picked the same example as them.
I listen to both sides, and I don't pay attention to what people say on twitter too much (it's the not "real" world). again, I'm not saying this tweet is equal to what trump said, it's clearly not --- But if someone had harmed or killed one of these kids because of this dox, I'm not sure your objections would stand. And with 2.1M followers, that is in realm of possibilities
> If Twitter is going to police people, it needs to be across the board. Otherwise it's just a weird censorship that is targeting one person and can easily be seen as political.
There is no such requirement.
Twitter is well within its rights and ethically totally clear to "police" a sentiment from the President of the United States, while letting much more severe sentiments from egg accounts go un-policed.
Moderation isn't an algorithm, a binary condition, applied perfectly to an input set to get a deterministic output. It's subjective, and that's both OK and correct.
> ethically totally clear to "police" a sentiment from the President of the United States, while letting much more severe sentiments from egg accounts go un-policed
I'm pretty conflicted on this issue overall, but I don't think it's entirely nuts to hold the President of the US to a higher standard than many other accounts.
When someone is high profile they will be treated differently. That's just the nature of being high profile. Trump has said a lot of things that would have gotten you or I banned if Twitter noticed. Twitter let Trump slide for a long time, and is finally moderating some of the most egregious examples.
And to be clear, anyone calling for violence should also have similar actions taken against them. But, me shouting get out the guillotine to my 10 followers is different than POTUS saying the same thing.
I’ve seen hundreds of extreme violence towards cops including death and worse. I’ve reported many and nothing happens. Some have many likes and retweets including by blue check marks. The justification of violence and racism towards a certain race and to cops is Alex Jones conspiracy level stupid. The bias is insane to any regular person
It will absolutely backfire. Twitter is now going to editorialize re: their users' content. It's impossible to do this without being perceived as being biased, and twitter is already a partisan hellscape, it will only exacerbate the situation.
Instead of being the police, Twitter should do what Rotten Tomatoes does. There are plenty of people - journalists and researchers analyzing the facts behind what celebrities say. They should analyze what the analysts say and display a score.
Even better, directly link the research on the topic, from both sides. Instead of drawing a conclusion on behalf of everybody, give people what they need to draw their own.
That's what already happens. Look at the comments on any prominent person's tweet and you'll see people going back and forth about what's right and what's false.
No one needs to do anything here. People can research and find stuff out for themselves, and come to their own conclusions.
The problem then becomes, who decides which tweets to fact-check? If most politicians at the higher levels are liars, singling out a few of them is unfair even if Trump is notorious for it.
Twitter can clearly not fact-check every single tweet on its platform. But what if they did it for every tweet (maybe from a verified account) that X people report for being untruthful? Trump would look bad even if Twitter held everyone to the same standard, and the blue checkmark would come with some responsibility not to lie, so why not?
Who decides which Tweats to fact-check:
If someone is famous enough, you can bet that there will be at least one reporter frothing for the opportunity to be counted among trusted fact-checkers. Twitter might have to figure out a balance among reviewers but thats a lot less work than fact-checking each message.
There's also the question of who it is that is predicting violence (or giving a dog whistle signal to his followers that violence is OK.) This is not a blue check mark living in his mom's basement predicting (or asking) for violence, it's the chief executive of the United States.
It's important context to note that Trump's tweets are the most widely publicized. As such it should be self evident as to why they would focus their limited resources to policing tweets such as his.
I imagine other factors have to do with the technicalities of executing on this, and the user’s visibility and “viral-ity”. On the technical, you can automate the job and have awkward success sometimes if you don’t get a human to intervene and verify what the algo’s flag as potential violation tweets. Now considering the user, the user’s number of followers, whether they are public figures (so because elected, celebrity, activist, etc. reasons) or whether the tweet has gone viral (regardless of the user’s pre-existing popularity). These kinds of things influence because someone with visibility and audience making calls to violence or some other questionable act is distinct in how actionable others around the world are to react to such a figure making questionable statements. So it’s not a matter of policing everyone, because there’s a lot of nuance and challenges. And the answer isn’t to give up because that’s just cowardice in the face of a big social challenge. We’ve got to carefully experiment and wisely assess these cases.
I think many people aren't taking into account the visibility of Trump's twitter. Trump making violence-glorifying or factually incorrect or medically dangerous tweets is far different from other twitter user's or even other blue-check-mark users because his reach is far wider than the vast majority of those users. Further, Trump has an established track record of doing this repeatedly. Those two facts establish a clear and rational basis for targeting his tweets specifically.
Completely agree with your second point though (not that there is any collusion to silence conservatives - but that this whole situation will be taken that way and used to energize that base).
There is video of Twitter employees admitting there are on-going efforts to silence "shitty people" on the platform. It's quite clear who these "deplorables" or "shitty people" are.
What is the most annoying about this, though, is the tweet they chose to "Fact Check". (I use quotation marks because "fact checking" by linking to CNN and WaPo is not fact-checking at all, rather an appeal to a different authority.)
The tweet they chose to police is speculation about the future. If I say the boiling point of water is 50 degrees, you can fact-check that. Its an objective truth that water boils at 100c.
If I say mail-in votes will cause election fraud, you cannot prove or disprove that statement. All you can do is show me someone else's statements, opinions, and predictions on the matter.
Given that Trump says so much objectively false stuff, it annoys me they didn't go after one of those tweets instead.
You catch the most flak when you're over the target...
> If I say mail-in votes will cause election fraud, you cannot prove or disprove that statement
I'm not sure I believe that claim. I think that looking at past history of voting fraud shows pretty conclusively that _vote by mail_ fraud has always been a very low percentage.
Sure, it's possible that _some_ fraud might happen, but looking at data from Oregon, it's happened two times in twenty years (_from my reading of the conservative database that was linked somewhere yesterday -- sorry :) -- I might be off by an order of magnitude, but it's still small_). That seems like an _extremely_ low incidence rate, and seems a small price to may for the idea that maybe more people will be likely to vote, due to not having to stand in line at polling places, deal with vote suppression efforts, or even just because it's more convenient to fill it out on your own schedule ahead of time.
Now, many will say that states like CA and other large states, who haven't had a large-scale rollout of vote-by-mail with the history and planning that Oregon had, will face more fraud than Oregon did. I think that's actually a very believable point -- we are not going to have a perfect rollout. However, I'd also like to point out that we've had two decades of electronic voting machines that have been proven to be absolutely insecure, as well as numerous cases in other states of voters who have been unable to vote because their polling places were under-staffed or closed too early.
Voting by mail is a proven method that scales well to ensure that larger portions of the populace have the opportunity to vote. It's being considered in light of wanting to limit in-person gatherings. It very unlikely that it's some conspiracy to promote fraud.
> I think that looking at past history of voting fraud shows pretty conclusively that _vote by mail_ fraud has always been a very low percentage.
If fraud was committed successfully, it's not going to show up in the data. You won't know at all. It's like saying "there's no evidence of a cover-up". Well of course there isn't, that's the point.
I've heard plausible methodologies for carrying out mail-in vote fraud that would be undetectable. E.g. mail containing ballots being diverted/"lost". I can neither prove nor disprove this is happening though.
I agree that electronic voting is an even worse idea than mail-in voting.
Everyone cheered in the streets when Obama sent in the SEALs to kill Bin Laden. Violence is tolerable if people don't empathize with the victim, apparently.
There is absolutely some truth that the mainstream media and tech giants are colluding to silence conservatives - the truth is that the mainstream "conservative" position in the US happens to involve behavior that runs afoul of neutral content norms (don't threaten people with violence, don't call them racial slurs, don't dox people, etc.) disproportionately more often than people with other political beliefs. Sure, there are some people of other political persuasions who are "essentially" calling for violence, but there's a large gap between "as MLK said, a riot is the language of the unheard, so I can't condemn it" (and even that is hardly a universal position among non-conservatives) and "I, the actual commander-in-chief of an actual military, am telling that military to use violence against my own people" + "We all think this is good and proper, do it."
This is an uncomfortable, rude, politically incorrect truth - but we're not going to have a productive discussion about "silencing conservatives" if we can't admit it.
It is absolutely possible to advocate for the political positions of conservatives (looking through the 2016 GOP platform, for instance - limited government, federalism, avoiding trade deficits, repeal of Dodd-Frank, auditing the Fed, right-to-work, opposition to abortion, support for the electoral college, removing gray wolves from the endangered species list, etc., etc.) without behavior that runs afoul of the norms. If there's a case where Twitter suspends someone for opposing Dodd-Frank, then we should absolutely criticize Twitter. (And I think there's a legitimate discussion to be had about where the line is about criticizing the government's pandemic response vs. spreading misinformation, for instance.) But saying "Conservatives really like to advocate for shooting people without due process, Twitter doesn't permit the advocacy of shooting people without due process, therefore Twitter is biased against conservatives" is more of a statement about conservatives than about Twitter.
HN should have a setting so that the most downvoted posts show up at the top of the page... That would save me a lot of scrolling to get to the unpleasant but accurate content.
> I have seen tweets from blue check marks essentially calling for violence and Twitter didn't remove them
As a Twitter user, I've been concerned with this as well. Clicking on the Minneapolis riots "trend", roughly 1/3 of the top tweets were promoting violence while the overwhelming majority of the remainder were merely sympathetic toward the violence, with only a small sliver denouncing the violence. Note that I don't follow violent or far-left accounts (generally a-political tech accounts, and I'll unfollow people who have especially authoritarian or hateful views in either direction), yet these are overwhelmingly promoted to me (in general, not just in the particular case of the MN riots) either in trends or in the random "here, have this extreme, toxic Tweet from another follower of someone you follow" Tweets that Twitter tosses into my feed. I'm not sure that Twitter is actively promoting extreme left-wing views (it could be that Twitter's user base is really just so far left that its algorithms just can't find any moderate content for me or something), but I don't blame anyone for thinking it does.
EDIT: I'm aware this is a controversial topic, but I'm curious if I'm being downvoted because people don't believe my characterization of my timeline/trends or because my tone was less than thrilled with the volume of left-wing tweets I'm shown or something else. I'm a heretic and I don't deserve my Internet Points, so take them away, but indulge my curiosity about your specific objections! :)
It's because lots of people don't want to admit the issues with the current state of affairs with big-tech social media, such as lopsided and selective enforcement of the rules...
The enforcement of rules in rarely applied with 100% accuracy in any realm. Not because the rule enforcers support some infractions, but because they have limited manpower and must prioritize their tasks.
I think you also have to know if the tweet was reported. Obiviously twitter isn't going to read all tweets so only ones that are reported can they act upon.
I don't think any reasonable person would think that Twitter supports violence simply because they aren't removing posts from people who don't matter. When you have limited resources, you have to apply them in a way that has the most impact. Making sure the President of the United States is adhering to their ToS seems like a good place to start.
Remember that Twitter gets something like 500 million tweets per day. If it took someone working minimum wage 15 seconds to decide whether or not a tweet violates their ToS, Twitter would spend 30 million dollars a day on this, and the results probably wouldn't even be that good. So they don't do that, instead focusing resources where they will have the most impact.
I am also pretty sure they are not trying to censor conservative viewpoints. If Joe Biden starts telling people to go shoot looters or that Mitch McConnell murdered one of his aides, I am sure they will add a little note to those tweets.
You are technically correct, however the same logic applies to every type of enforcement.
Ideally the enforcement of every rule should apply to everyone equally, but in practice we see the police behave differently towards different people, we see tax audits and penalties applied mostly to people without the means to defend themselves and we see how apparently the law and government rules don't even apply to Trump. The world still goes on and we somehow deal with all of this.
Twitter enforcing their own rules is just going to be more of the same.
> If Twitter is going to police people, it needs to be across the board.
That assumes that all users on Twitter are equal. By Twitter's own rules [1], there are two classes of users. Elected officials are held to a different standard. That's why this tweet is hidden behind a click, rather than removed. That's why Trump hasn't been banned despite repeatedly violating the TOS that he agreed to when he signed up for his account.
It makes sense to me that if elected officials (a tiny fraction of the population who already have a much bigger voice than the common citizen) are allowed to break the plebeian rules, then social media platforms should be more willing to point out when they're doing so.
To be fair, in regard's to Trump's Twitter account, a Federal judge has already ruled that Twitter absolutely may not remove his account, and likewise, he may not block people who insult his spray tan, because it's a de facto public forum for interacting with the POTUS.
In the part where it was declared a de facto public forum for interacting with the POTUS. It is implied that Twitter would face consequences for violating the rights of the population to redress grievances directly with their elected leader in the forum, in this case, it being a Twitter account. The US National Archives also weighed in and said they would sanction Twitter if the account is removed before the end of his Presidency.
Ah okay, you're implying something more nuanced than I originally understood you to be. Preventing trump from making any more tweets ("banning him") would be okay, but deleting the account and all existing tweets wouldn't.
Ironic that a microblogging service leads to lack of nuance. who would of thought?
My first read of trump's tweet was explaining the national guard has to move in because 'looting leads to shooting'. As in, we have to restore order to avoid more people getting shot. At the time Trump tweeted this, there was already one death from a pawn store owner shooting a looter.
So depending on your priors, your PoV, Trump was either promoting violence or trying to quell violence.
culture of 140 characters = more confusion, more division, more tribalism. If we valued well written, long form writing from our leaders we wouldn't be in this mess. Instead, we value twitter and leaders who make great slogans and can push people's buttons in 140 characters.
Don't be so disingenuous. The phrase is famous and it obviously is obviously not intent on trying to quell violence. I know to be contrarian and radically 'rational' is popular among tech types but it doesn't mean you have to bury your head in the sand when what is being said is so clear.
"The phrase is famous"? I don't recall ever hearing it before. Could you stop assuming that we all know what it is intended to mean, and that we are therefore burying our heads in the sand, and actually explain what you think it means and why it means that?
[Edit: Reading further down the discussion gives some context. That's... disturbing. Still, you are also assuming bad faith on the part of others, and that's not how things are supposed to be done on HN.]
yes the phrase is famous, but the tweet was not clear at all. Trump was talking about bringing in the national guard, and who is doing the shooting is totally up to interpretation. You can reasonably read that tweet as "we need to establish order before the shooting starts" That does not imply the national guard will be doing the shooting.
As much as I hate Trump, this isn't a "Trump thing". This was someone with a large following who was very clearly and overtly threatening to turn a situation into a bloodbath.
Twitter regularly hides violent tweets. It is just algo based and nothing to do with conservatives. I mean, it may seem biased if conservatives are posting a lot of violent tweets
Twitter has literally bend over backwards for Trump. They have said that they will not remove him not matter how much he violates their ToS. If even after that it is seen as "silencing their voice", you know it is a bad faith argument. Just the other day he retweeted something heinous about "dead Democrats" and Twitter let that tweet stand. At some point, don't you have to live up to some principles instead of always be scared of bad faith arguments ?
I'm just going to say again that I can't for the life of me understand why people are in agreement that this tweet glorifies violence. It is a call to stop being violent lest violence increase.
Looting always leads to shooting. This is a simple fact.
I'm horrified that so many people think me saying that is glorifying violence. I don't understand it in the slightest. Seeing this tweet by Trump get silenced absolutely convinces me that there is a conspiracy. Not so much against the right, but against truth.
It was used by a racist police chief in reference to black protesters during the _civil rights movement_, which I think we can all agree is on the right side of history. The parallels are pretty clear to me, I’m not sure what you are missing here
> He can be both racist and correct that looting generally leads to shooting.
It appears as though you are deliberately misinterpreting this statement to confirm your biases.
This statement is obviously intended to be interpreted as “the state will shoot looters (and possibly other protesters) when there is looting during a political protest”. If you genuinely don’t see it this way after considering all of contextual history of racial violence and injustice, it must benefit you to have your head in the sand
I say with great confidence that Trump is too stupid to know this. Maybe Stephen Miller his far right aide did and pushed the line as a dog whistle but tbh I never heard of it either till now.
I think the realistic truth is that Trump doesn't really have a precise idea about what he's saying quite a bit of the time. His defenders rush in, and shape his words into their best possible light, and of course his opponents shape his words into their worst possible light.
Which version did Trump mean? Almost certainly neither: his modus operandi has been to say many vague things, and gauge the reaction to determine his next steps. Part of this process means simply speaking a LOT, and saying things that are vague and inflammatory. What better way to read a reaction than to ensure you create a reaction in the first place? In this sense, his words only have as much power as we keep giving them, and yet no one one seems to have learned this lesson.
You seem intelligent and well-spoken. I believe that when you say "looting always to leads shooting" you mean something like "when people are looting, it's unfortunately almost inevitable that there will be violence." (Please correct me if I've got you wrong.) When Trump says it, he doesn't tend to mean anything in particular. As usual, he's trying to drum up controversy.
And so, there's a difference in context between when you might say it, and when the president says it. It's not simply the case that I believe you hold a genuine belief, and that Trump is pressure testing his next controversy. It's also the case that you're a private citizen, willing to explain and qualify your claims, while Trump is the head of country, intentionally saying inflammatory things during difficult times.
[edit]
Apologies, I actually had no idea there was a particular history to the phrase "when looting starts, shooting starts"
My only nit with what you said is with this: "when people are looting, it's unfortunately almost inevitable that there will be violence."
I would say that looting is violence. I would further add three things. 1. that self defense is justified when violence against your person and property is committed. 2. Even more importantly, it is the job of the police to stop these violent crimes, at gunpoint if necessary. 3. Even more tellingly, if anybody here's livelihood or home was getting looted that person would be calling the police to do their job.
Other people will perceive it as glorifying and advocating violence regardless of how you or I see it. You can rightfully be horrified but it doesn't change the fact that this tweet arguably increases the probability of more violence happening. There is at least one person that read this tweet and interpreted it as a call to violence and that is the problem. Words matter and should be used carefully.
Because the exact phrase has historical context [1] in a sense of: if you loot, we shoot. Clearly it wasn’t said in a sense of: looting inevitably leads to violence.
That makes it sound like Trump used it in a similar fashion.
Looting will and must lead to the police taking action to do their most basic job—protecting the life and property of the people. This means almost certainly people will be shot, some guilty, some innocent.
You ever watch how the police behave in some cities when there's looting and rioting because their team won a football or hockey championship. Because that absolutely proves that looting and rioting apparently don't have to lead to police action. They can stand by, or join the celebrations.
Shooting should not be the starting point of law enforcement. Shooting should be a last resort. Implying that looting indiscriminately means shooting is a call to violence.
He never said it was the first resort, or that shooting should or will be indiscriminate. I'm done here. You're not arguing. You're simply begging the question.
Fascist language is generally constructed to externalize blame. That doesn't mean its calls for "peace measures" are not calls to harm those people. Trump has been inciting racist violence for years. Take your head out of the sand. Context matters.
Only so much as the media and government lets twitter have this within their rights. If it was Peter Theil running Twitter, I don't believe we would see the same reaction from the media.
China is the leader here, let's briefly study how they do social media -- this will show where US is going.
They review everything after an account gets so many likes. The platform is responsible. One day I was doing something dangerous on a live stream -- immediately banned for 48 hours and got a human message. Posts with factual errors about current events -- immediately removed, on pain of platform liability. Human reply. No AI.
The platform is liable for what is published on the platform in the same way a newspaper is liable for what is published in the newspaper.
The liability is changing and so yes Twitter is going to police people.
I don't quite understand the "if you don't like it leave" theory. Is it really so unreasonable for people to want to influence the way the established platform works rather than switch and be alone on a new platform. Nobody is going to bother coming with you to Gab.
You could make a similar argument about selling on Amazon. They have rules that you must obey if you want to sell products on their marketplace. If they were not allowed to moderate the content and curate it, then the amazon marketplace would be less appealing to customers and sellers.
Twitter should be able to moderate and curate it's content to protect their brand image. If they don't challenge lies on their platform and remove toxic content, Twitter will become less attractive platform for both individuals and advertisers.
Clearly rhetorical, but the reason is that's where the audience is. They will tolerate a lot for that reason but there's presumably some limit. I would not be surprised if whenever Trump leaves office, he announces he's leaving twitter for some twitter clone he's a part owner of geared for conservative audiences. He might be big enough and important enough to his supporters for this exodus to actually be meaningful.
Don't think he'll do it until he loses an election or his 2nd term is up though.
> ....These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!
Disclaimer text:
> This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about glorifying violence. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible. Learn more
"Learn more" links to this page about "public-interest exceptions"
You should investigate the racial history of the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” and also consider whether property crime deserves loss of life.
This is not an isolated incidence of property crime. This is utter destruction more akin to waging a total war against a particular district of Minneapolis. It's a form of terrorism.
Property -- in the form of business and services -- is essential to life. There is no absolute distinction between the two, despite what some pretend. These people are breaking property in their own community and then expect investors or the very government they're protesting to step back in and rebuild.
> Property -- in the form of business and services -- is essential to life.
While that can be true in a literal sense at times, I don't believe shop lifting electronics from Target would have that effect. Even the destruction of local businesses, while indeed terrorizing, is not lethal.
Violent rioting would be something that might require a lethal response, but stealing, looting, robbing, plundering -- no.
> These people are breaking property in their own community and then expect investors or the very government they're protesting to step back in and rebuild.
So you believe that what is right, instead of investing and rebuilding, is that these people should be killed?
> Even the destruction of local businesses, while indeed terrorizing, is not lethal.
Tell that to the poor immigrant family whose business, and thus livelihood in this country, was destroyed. This is how we get roof koreans.
Why don't these rioters go stand with guns outside the state capitol or city hall or police dept? Instead of disrespecting the memory of George Floyd. I hope his death isn't used to defend people's 'right' to steal TVs without getting caught. That would be really really really sad.
You don't have the moral high ground here. Terrorizing and instilling fear in your local community is wrong, whether it comes from the state through the police or your fellow countrymen through riots. Just as an appropriate response to the officer who killed Mr Floyd would have been violence, so is violence towards the rioters. We can't honestly say that just because the police are thugs, thus we ought to also let others be thugs. Both can be wrong.
I don't think I will be able to convince you that no one else should be shot or killed so I won't be participating in this argument anymore. I can't have an ethical argument with someone who doesn't value human life.
Right -- I think it's wrong to pick and choose who should be punished for terrorizing communities, and some only believe the police should.
This is not a question of 'valuing human life'. It's about appropriate responses to violence. It's a basic principle of justice that those who commit violence no longer deserve to have their full set of rights respected in the eyes of the law or society. This is how we justify all sorts of things, from basic fines, to jail terms, to full-scale war.
To be clear... I also think no one else should be shot and killed, which is why no one should be lotting or setting things on fire.
> Why don't these rioters go stand with guns outside the state capitol or city hall or police dept? Instead of disrespecting the memory of George Floyd.
Because, unlike the white anti-COVID-restriction protestors that did this, these protestors would be killed for trying something like that. Wake. Up.
You don't live in the same nation as african americans. You are protected in a way that you don't understand.
I am a brown man who would also be the target of police violence so I do live in quite a similar world.
And I will not be forced to come up with an answer to the ridiculous false dichotomy of having to choose between police restraint and having the right to keep my own property. The answer is both and not either or.
No, but nor should they be allowed to get away with it. They should be stopped and charged with a crime. But in the process of being stopped and arrested, their chances of being shot are not negligible, especially if they resist.
If you steal a TV, yeah honestly. There's a difference between stealing food or money to feed yourself or provide for your family and stealing luxury goods. I have lots of sympathy for the former, very little for the latter. The latter is a form of terrorism meant to intimidate businesses many of whose owners are likely members of your own community.
I don't understand the modern desire to excuse theft. Theft is a form of terrorism; it is not okay, and is really high up there on the list of serious crimes that damage society.
That's interesting. I interpreted it the exact opposite way. That looking at the words - they don't seem so bad, so the liberal-minded HN users downvoted to keep the details away.
When facts/information doesn't align with one's agenda, some people have a terrible habit of trying to have it hidden/banned/removed/etc.
You would think in hackernews of all places, we'd upvote the comment to see exactly what trump wrote so that we can decide for ourselves when it was "glorifying violence". Sadly, many here don't want that to happen.
I think because it just restates what's in the link being discussed, when the link is not inaccessible nor behind a paywall. There are a lot of people who think that's bad form on HN. That's my guess. People trying to force everyone to "read the articles" on HN.
As someone of mixed ethnicity who, if I was there could easily be victimized by a senseless mob to whom I owe nothing and have committed no crime against.. yea I am not happy with how the mainstream media promotes and covers this story, downplaying the victims of the chaos and sympathizing with outpourings of anger even if illegal. To clarify, looters should not be shot, law should prevail, and the policeman involved in the original incident should be investigated.. but the mainstream media is to my mind basically behind the looters, and I know if by chance I or someone like me were to be caught in the crossfire and killed, the mainstream media, posturing as champions of justice, would just implicitly shrug. So yea I can't help but feel disaffected by this coverage, no matter how vile the originating incident.
> The Rodney King verdict and the ensuing riots are often framed as a turning point for law enforcement and the African-American community. But it's also the single most significant modern event for Korean-Americans, says Edward Taehan Chang, professor of ethnic studies and founding director of the Young Oak Kim Center for Korean American Studies at the University of California, Riverside.
> The nearly weeklong, widespread rioting killed more than 50 people, injured more than 1,000 people and caused approximately $1 billion in damage, about half of which was sustained by Korean-owned businesses. Long-simmering cultural clashes between immigrant Korean business owners and predominately African-American customers spilled over with the acquittals.
I'm on the side of the protesters here, don't get me wrong. But the media sweeps under the rug how often the rage from these events gets taken out on Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, etc.-owned small businesses. There is a narrative the media wants to peddle (black versus white), and these complexities don't have any place in the media narratives.
No, of course not. But the reason why minority communities tend to be the victims of property damage during riots is the same as the reason for the riots in the first place.
> No, of course not. But the reason why minority communities tend to be the victims of property damage during riots is the same as the reason for the riots in the first place.
I disagree, and I think that's a pernicious viewpoint. Americans tend to downplay the real antagonism and differently-aligned incentives that exists between different minority groups, in an effort to paint things as a matter of "whites versus everyone else." But, for example, Asians are treated very favorably by the police. (The incarceration rate for asian Americans is something like 1/6 of the rate for white Americans.) Saying that the problems they face are the same as those faced by other minority groups is erasing their individual experiences.
For a second there I thought we might blame the people who burned down buildings for burning down buildings.
Thankfully you saved it with "but muh system".
>Why do you think that the rioters were in koreatown during the rodney king riots?
Because there's incredible racist animosity against Asian people in the black community.
Some people (you) are currently pretending this isn't the case, and that it was just a crazy coincidence that blacks targeted Korean businesses during the LA riots, resulting in _half_ the monetary damages of the whole event.
This movement is about centuries of unjustness. To me, it is appropriate that the occasional bystander and business is overlooked. That doesn't mean that if you were my sibling, or friend, or business that I wouldn't be entitled to express personal pain. But the magnitude of my pain is nothing next to the pain that's led up to this, and no it wouldn't be appropriate for it to get remotely equal attention.
Sure, ideally bystanders and local businesses (in particular) would be spared. But nothing about the historical events leading to now is ideal.
Where was this movement when Justine Damond was shot in the gut by a black cop in Minneapolis? I don't recall any protests, let alone riots or burning down the city.
And if your expression of pain includes looting booze from a liquor store or a TV from Target, what exactly are you trying to say? By the way, those bystanders and local businesses owners are people of color too.
> Noor was ultimately arrested and charged with second-degree manslaughter and third-degree murder following an eight-month investigation by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the Hennepin County Attorney's Office. In April 2019, Noor was convicted of third-degree murder and manslaughter, but acquitted of intentional second-degree murder. In June 2019, Noor was sentenced to 12.5 years in prison.
It seems like the system ended up working to a degree, at least putting the murderer behind bars. So why would one expect significant protests?
The outrage in these cases isn't over a white cop killing a black person per se, it's that the system immediately moves to protect the murderers because they're cops. Rather than arresting the criminal, fellow corrupt cops were stationed outside of his house to protect him. That the main perp has finally been charged is a product of the protests rather than the justice system moving slowly - witness that the conspirators have yet to be charged. Anyone who believes in law and order should be sympathetic to the protestors, even in spite of race.
Furthermore, ascribing the motives of a few looters onto the whole protest is ridiculous. Especially as at least some of that destruction was led by agents provocateurs.
That shooting was an isolated incident, and someone actually went to jail for it, for a long time. That doesn't happen when a white cop shoots a black person.
That shooting wasn't part of a system of institutional and deep rooted racism. Neither was it part of a system where white cops routinely harass black people with no basis other than the colour of their skin; where white cops use horrifyingly excessive violence and all too often murder black suspects, bystanders and innocents - a system where the perpetrators of that violence and murder are almost guaranteed to face no repercusions at all. A system of ingrained inquality that spans decades.
Black people are harassed, racially abused, set upon and shot frequently by white cops in the USA - and the videos we see pretty much on a daily basis in the news and on twitter are only the tip of the iceberg.
As someone in the UK, the the inequality and racism that still exists in the USA, "land of the free", is mind boggling, sickening even. Something has to change, so yes, I can fully understand protests and rioting.
> Unfortunately, both you, the media, and the looters keep forgetting the events are, as you said, history.
But history can be important. Literally everything that's known and has been done is now history, including recently committed crimes.
The history that we're talking about still has clearly identifiable painful consequences in present-day communities, so it's not something that can just be filed away and ignored as no longer relevant.
What does "history" mean? The suffering of innocent bystanders in past riots is history. In a year the innocent bystanders of these riots will be "only history".
Many of the immigrants who have created new businesses in the US have experienced terrible histories themselves, but they have been able to put these behind them, because their antagonists are not in the US.
I don't think historic injustices should be simply ignored, but the problem is even more severe when the systemic abuses your community is experiencing is not only in the past, not only occurring in the moment, but there is realistic prospect that conditions will to improve.
Private companies militarizing police forces never face liability, and sworn, armed officers belong to unions, and neither of those seems on a course to changing.
It is a completely untenable situation for American citizens to be extra-judiciously killed by government employees. Rioting doesn't help, peaceful protests don't help, you can't even respectfully kneel during the national anthem without being treated as though you're rejecting everything about the country. Petitions? Hunger strikes? Self-immolation?
If it were purely history, we wouldn’t be seeing the violence, injustice, and disparity we see today. The problem is that isn’t “history”, it’s ongoing.
What about this event indicates racism was involved? Because the cop is not behind bars? That is most likely due to union rules and procedures which have to be followed.
It could have all been ended before the rioting started if the police officer was charged for his actions. Obviously looting is wrong but peaceful protests obviously aren't working either.
They were fired and will face the justice system, which while it normally moves slowly, will move a little faster in this case thanks to top down pressure.
I don't see how in a country with independent judiciary anything more can be done.
> They were fired and will face the justice system
If I shot someone on video[0], I would be charged with a crime, likely homicide, that day and in jail until a bail hearing. At which point I might have the option to leave jail until my trial.
In this case the officer was arrested 3 days later (about an hour ago at time of writing), and only due to pressure from both citizens and politicians. Without that, it may have taken longer to charge him, or he may not have been charged at all, just like the other multiple times this officer killed someone.
That's a double standard. The police should serve the people, not be above them or immune to oversight.
Conservatives are too busy playing victim on social media to be worried about how African Americans are unfairly targeted and killed by police. They're mad that the President isn't allowed to encourage it.
They were already evading justice before the video came out (the internal police analysis was obviously false). Pantaleo was never charged for Garner's death. In other cases we have seen video evidence excluded from trial and officers walk.
I'm not remotely confident that this will lead to convictions.
Update, the cop was just charged with third degree murder and manslaughter. They could have acted faster, but at least they're acting. I hope they make an example of the guy, but I have my doubts seeing how other similar situations went at trial.
It could have all been ended when the bystander peacefully asked the police to stop putting the knee on Floyd's neck. Obviously violence is never the answer, but it's hardly surprising in this case.
He's been arrested after 3 days of rioting. I'd like to see the other 3 arrested as well, since they're accessories.
Oh, and I want a perp walk. All the usual stuff that happens to other people. And then it's time to talk about the doctrine of qualified immunity and a whole lot of other things.
You are enabling a fascist government. You are complicit.
This is the strategy to vilify any movements from the people: focus on how they are acting violent, when this violence is very well in proportion to the enemy’s first move.
I know this may be a difficult thing to accept for some people on this site, since it is at its core a tech investment site, but no amount of financial damage would be "proportional" to systemic excusal of murder.
You are naive to think mass riots, looting and arson won’t lead to deaths. Someone with respect for human life wouldn't set fire to a building or repeatedly punch a disabled lady in a wheelchair in the back of the head and take her purse. Already at least 7 people have been shot. 63 people died in the 1992 LA riots.
> A restaurant caught in the crossfire of unrest in Minneapolis Thursday night has sent a powerful message to its followers on social media: “Let my building burn.”
> Sadly Gandhi Mahal has caught fire and has been damaged....Don’t worry about us, we will rebuild and we will recover. This is Hafsa, Ruhel’s daughter writing, as I am sitting next to my dad watching the news, I hear him say on the phone; “ let my building burn, Justice needs to be served, put those officers in jail”. Gandhi Mahal May have felt the flames last night, but our firey drive to help protect and stand with our community will never die! Peace be with everyone.
Sure, but ideally the function of the state is prevent the formation of senseless mobs through even-handed treatment and a well-functioning justice system. When it fails to meet those expectations, people turn to other means to defend themselves and enact retribution.
This is human nature and the entire story of our history. Aeschylus even wrote about it:
I think there is an issue where a minority of people live very sheltered lives in the kind embrace of the state, so they have a very difficult time accepting that actually, the experience is shit for a wide swath of other people who have the same right to be protected.
the policeman involved in the original incident should be investigated
Oh give it a rest. We saw him kill the man, he can sit a cell and prepare for his trial like any other killer. If you don't like what people int he media say find different commentators or stop listening to pundits altogether.
I am sick to the back teeth of people complaining about 'the mainstream media', when Fox News and Sinclair broadcasting are two of the biggest companies in TV.
> Oh give it a rest. We saw him kill the man, he can sit a cell and prepare for his trial like any other killer.
He can sit in a cell while being investigated. The fact that it is all on camera just makes it a quick investigation. But everyone gets due process. (also EVERYONE there needs to be investigated, not just the killer)
The investigation lead to an arrest today. That's how the system works. And it worked in this case.
Where was your rage for Justine Damond? Shot by Officer Mohamed Noor from the passenger seat of his police cruiser, across his partner. Where were the riots?
Also, when people complain about MSM they are including Fox and Sinclair. It's all corrupted and meant to drive a narrative instead of presenting objective views from both sides. It's not up to MSM to tell us how to think about events. Their job is to report the facts. Hardly any of them do anymore, if they ever did.
It's amazing to me how the system can send 4 cops to take someone into custody immediately over an alleged passing of a fake $20 bill, but when there's video of a homicide taking place despite the pleas of the victim and the intervention of bystanders, and more video shows that the initial report submitted by the cops in question was a lie, everything has to slow right down while we wring our hands over the rights of the cops.
Also, when people complain about MSM they are including Fox and Sinclair.
First time hearing about Justine Damond.. But black officer goes to jail and white family gets 20 MILLION dollars... Maybe it's media bias but in a sick way that seems to underline bias in the system.
That is literally the law of the land. Read into castle doctrine and duty to retreat. Business owners have the legal right to defend their life on their property with deadly force if left no choice (i.e. a mob has surrounded you)
At any rate his tweet was ambiguous, he could have meant shooting naturally follows looting, not that he was ordering the guard to execute civilians.
This entire event is effectively self-defense from a community that has felt terrorized by the police for decades.
It could've been easily prevented by actually arresting someone that committed abject murder, but the city and the police chose to instead defend a man who has killed multiple people in the past and got away with it scott-free. So when people feel like justice no longer exists, there should be no surprise that they get angry.
It doesn't help that the police also employ agent provocateurs whom help incite riots and looting so that they can use more violent tactics with glee.
Could it have? I don't know. What is encouraging is that in the past they would have put the officers on paid leave and treated them with deference while the investigation took place. In this case they were promptly fired within 48 hours of the incident by the police chief.
There were also a lot of statements from police leadership that this incident wasn't acceptable or normal police procedure which is a drastic change from in the past where you had people staying silent or even defending and rationalizing the perpetrators actions.
The looting and rioting weaken a cause that after many years of being in the spotlight seemed to have reached a tipping point of overwhelming agreement.
> So when people feel like justice no longer exists, there should be no surprise that they get angry.
I think this is the key here. The whole BLM movement has been going on for years and, for the most part, it seems like a lot of people are more aware. It doesn't seem like anybody from the top cares to do anything about it though.
I'd like to say, as well, that this is a statement of fact that can be observed by looking at media coverage, testimonial, historical and fictional books on the topic of the black experience in america. To deny this is a direct attempt to re-write history to justify an accumulation of power amongst the hands of a specific, ever-shrinking elite.
Things are, ultimately, knowable. Its not "political" or up to "opinion".
I think we need to be very careful before throwing around that word - it's something the authorities band around a lot, usually when it fits their political narrative. I don't think we should any further dilute the term.
I think it's ludicrous to call a spontaneous out-pouring of despair and anger, after being wronged so badly for so long, an act of "terrorism".
Thankfully that’s not what I said. I said that was the rationalization of a terrorist, and it is. Committing violent acts against third parties to gain attention for some grievance is inexcusable, and if your rationalization is that “it works”, then perhaps the best response is to ensure that such tactics never work so as to eliminate the incentive to engage in them.
Not to be flippant but, to your point, Civilization has always allowed a profitable "pillage" option if your units are on an enemy title. This is a feature of struggle.
And if that’s the answer we’re going with—that looting businesses is part of a general violent insurrection—then Trump’s threat to suppress that insurrection with military force becomes more justifiable, not less.
If you see the community, or the people, as a single organism. Then yes it is reacting in harmful way to an attack. And it is hard to control where the harm is directed.
Not at all. If looting and vandalism is “the action of a few”, then it doesn’t make sense to characterize it as “self-defense” on behalf of some collective “organism”. It’s like you switched sides and started arguing my point in the middle of the argument.
> If looting and vandalism is “the action of a few”, then it doesn’t make sense to characterize it as “self-defense” on behalf of some collective “organism”.
Then we'll have to agree to disagree, opportunists don't exist without a crowd.
What is the point of your comments? You mention the community as an organism that can't control where the harm is directed, that is acting in self-defense. But the people looting, breaking windows and throwing stones are individuals that chose to participate in violent riots. They are not acting in self-defense.
Sure. If you mistreat a dog for long enough and then let it loose in a playground it may very well react by mauling random children. Usually the end result is the dog getting euthanized because it’s not capable of living peaceably within society anymore, so I’m not sure that’s really the analogy you want to go with here. I would expect grown adult humans to have better judgment.
> This entire event is effectively self-defense from a community that has felt terrorized by the police for decades.
To put it with MLK: A riot is the voice of the unheard.
The systemic issues of the Black (and other foreigner) community across the Western societies, especially with police and laws specifically designed to target them (e.g. almost all drug legislation), have been ignored for way too long. I'm no friend of rioting myself but I will not judge upon those who have deemed it necessary to be finally heard.
> It could've been easily prevented by actually arresting someone that committed abject murder, but the city and the police chose to instead defend a man who has killed multiple people in the past and got away with it scott-free
I don't know if it could have been prevented by arresting just this murderer, as it's far from an isolated incident.
I do however think it could have been prevented by an edict from the top years ago, issuing a zero-tolerance policy for harassment, abuse and murder by police officers, with focus on clearly racially motivated incidents. I'm fom the UK, so don't claim to understand american politics, but I just don't understand why something like that hasn't happened, especially when Obama was president.
Yes, one only need to compare the police treatment of predominantly white, armed brigades storming government buildings in Michigan to what happened to the first wave of predominantly black, non-violent protests in Minneapolis to understand there are other forces at play here.
Or Oregon, where they took over a government facility, barricaded themselves in there, started armed patrols, fortifying and securing themselves in there...
... and were left alone for weeks, or more. Given some slaps on the wrist. And the tax payer footed the bill for the cleanup.
I know it is "never too late" for things like this to happen, but it's definitely late.
One of the main reasons for bad things to happen is the lack of education (which, in turn, leads to resist to change) and, therefore makes people prone to believe to unbelievable things.
Social platforms like Twitter should have long had things like "fact checking" ANY statements and should have restricting not only violence glorifying posts, but also the ones with racial or sexual discrimination and all the others .
It is late, but I like seeing it happen at least for the person with the most "glorifying" record in dividing a society.
Yeah, the whole reason we have public education is that democracy requires a knowledgeable voter base. When social media companies were just starting out, I get why they weren't fretting about societal effects. But even if we go by business metrics, a collapse of democracy would probably be bad for their businesses. It's past time for social media companies to take responsibility for their negative externalities. And that definitely includes all sort of "negative information value" content.
Yeah, there's a difference between educated and knowledgeable. But I don;t agree on the reason of existence of the public education system - its not about the voter base, it's about improving not only yourself, but the society as well (as improving society secures in a way improvement of you and your offspring).
I don't find social media companies responsible for the user generated content, but I do find them responsible for making it damn too easy to spread fear and then doing nothing about it. Or, as in case of some, promoting the division.
That's a good reason to have public education, of course. But it's a nice-to-have. Democracy cannot function without educated voters.
Agreed for sure on the second point. They turned everybody into publishers with global reach and still haven't really thought about what previous publishers did to make sure that power was used responsibly.
> But even if we go by business metrics, a collapse of democracy would probably be bad for their businesses.
But the ride the will be extremely profitable and business have shown to care more about short term than long term. Some examples are Nestle guzzling ground water during droughts, Johnson's baby powder with talc, the entire oil gas and coal industry, Pacific gas and electric company, etc.
Knowing closely two countries: USA and Mexico, I just know that people in the know and with the means to do so (top %1+) just avoid public education like the plague. (Up to high school, then it's just a matter of going to a top college.)
At some point you have to consider the history of public education and it was just a tool for controlling and repressing individual thought, give busy work to lower class kids so they stay out of trouble, don't grow up to question the system. What is usually taught there? Obey authority at all cost, getting status symbols from authority is most important (not actually learning), do not interact with people different from you (why the grade separation? shouldn't people learn at their own pace?), learn not what interests you, just follow the damn syllabus choosen by someone else, don't stand out, just memorize stuff, don't read actual primary sources, just the predigested/rehashed summary. I mean, sure there might be exceptions but it's pretty much the same everywhere
What countries you think are doing a great job and why?
Depends a lot on where you are. I went to public school and it was a solid education. Most of the kids in my extended family are getting a public education and they're doing fine, too.
I agree it could be better, and it some places it could be a lot better. But when compared with the alternative -- no public education at all -- you'll see why it's a necessary foundation to democracy.
and should have restricting not only violence glorifying posts, but also the ones with racial or sexual discrimination and all the others.
Do you think tweets that make derogatory references to Karen's or "tech-bros" should be deleted?
Should a Tweet that says, "There will be no peace as long as there is no justice for the centuries of white supremacy and centuries white people oppressing all other peoples." be banned? What about a Tweet saying, "There will be no peace as long as their is no justice of centuries of Jewish puppet-mastery and Jews oppressing all other peoples"?
I'm OK with restricting racist and sexist posts in the public square -- as long as the censorship is applied equally to all ethnicities and sexes. And if the censorship was applied equally, a lot of Tweets from "anti-racist" activists would need to be censored.
And there is the crux of this argument, at least as it pertains to HackerNews. Which is the palpable fear that white supremacy focused rhetoric will be marginalized and de-platformed.
I'm not saying every single opinion should be redacted (opinions should not be redacted - they are simply statements of who you are and what are your values), but (false) fact statements and clear/open calls for racial and sexual discrimination, etc.
the moment society started to see social media as a source of news, the battle was lost. nobody ever used myspace to stay fresh on the situation in the balkans.
That would make sense if every message were placed on hold before publishing while it got reviewed. But this is a real-time system. And even then, there are often multiple sides to events.
Is it a hard problem? Sure. Can they get everything? No. But that doesn't mean that they can't quickly act to minimize the total impact. As with many things, 80% of the value can be gained with 20% of the work.
The hard question is whether 80% of the value is available. If you restrict 80% of the worst offenders, but the selection of the 80% is biased in some obvious way, that may be worse than doing nothing at all.
I'm not saying it's easy, but effort should be made as it is important. If you see the real-time voice recognition on the new Pixel phone, the technology for this type of action might not be that far away.
I disagree that Twitter has been missing "fact checking". Instead I think the problem was bots.
Take an obviously absurd political viewpoint, which nowadays has to be really absurd. Here's an example: Tom Cruise should be president of the United States. Scientology will make America great again.
Sounds pretty fucking absurd, right? But throw in 50 million bots on Twitter and Instagram pretending to be Americans who think Tom Cruise should be president, and now your once absurd view point simply becomes "the other side of the aisle." It's of course all fake.
Unfortunately this exploits the minds of otherwise kind hearted people that do really want to give you a chance to hear you out. It is how democracy should work after all. But the current reality is this "other side" is basically just white supremacists. Full stop. They're not all rotten people, plenty of them were goaded into embracing the hatred because the internet, and all those fucking bots, makes it look normal
WW2 taught us to shut down Nazis right away. Zuckerberg and Dorsey have utterly failed as Americans.
Snopes is a dumpster fire and the content editors consistently show a weak grasp of logic. Fact checking on a mass scale is a pipe dream and a massive minefield of false positives.
Although I might support this because I despise Twitter and support anything that might quicken it's demise.
All they have to do is get on gab.com if they want a completely free speech platform.
Strangely Trump and his ilk haven’t jumped over to Gab yet. Perhaps because they don’t want to be associated with what actually happens to a platform that allows unrestricted free speech.
Is the POTUS clearly inciting violence or is it another instance of people having a wild interpretation of what he said? I'm so tired of this dynamic that I don't even bother anymore.
> These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!
Worth noting that this is a quote from former Miami Police Chief Walter Headley. In '67, he said the phrase "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" during racially charged protests.
> Is the POTUS clearly inciting violence or is it another instance of people having a wild interpretation of what he said?
The POTUS unambiguously quoted racist Miami police chief Walter Headley who called for violence against African Americans during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. This couldn’t be a more clear example of inciting violence.
You do know that he was talking about MS13 gang members who had murdered people. People need to stop reading media spins and watch actual full un-edited footage.
If you truly believe in what they are doing, then buy their stock and prop up the price, because it is plunging right now. Words alone are about as useful as clapping for healthcare workers.
Even nonviolent protest was never intended to be peaceful. Not in they way many people would use the word “peace”, anyway.
“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’”
That’s MLK in his letter from a Birmingham jail. Who was completely devoted to nonviolence. Even he made abundantly clear that nonviolence does not equal a lack of pressure or tension.
One literally says that they will send military and says there will be shooting. The other doesn’t put the word violent near the word revolt at all.
Of course, everything is subjective. It all depends on how many people interpret something in a particular way. You’re not objectively wrong, but I don’t believe the majority of folks reading share your same view.
For anyone who doesn't want to click, Twitter quarantined (you can click "view" to see it, however engagement is disabled) a Presidential tweet in which he calls on a mayor to "get a city under control", threatened to send in the national guard, said the military is behind the governor, and said that if there is difficulty they will assume control. His specific reference to violence occurred at the end the tweet, which he ended saying "Any difficulty, and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!"
This is very interesting to watch unfold in real-time.
I find it fascinating the President of the United States is ranting about 1st Amendment violations with regards to a private business. Pretty sure there is nothing in the 1st Amendment that says he is guaranteed the right to tweet.
I hope Twitter takes this a step further the next time he violates their ToS and gives his account a 48 hour suspension.
I understand why Trump is picking this fight but I can't help but feel Twitter hold the power. Sure Trump has been a big driving factor in Twitter really hitting mainstream but I would be surprised if he was still adding huge value to the platform. If anything banning Trump would be the biggest thing to ever happen to Twitter as he wouldn't let it go.
However I can't see a way for Trump to win such a fight. It could go all the way to the SCOTUS but if they sided against Twitter it would affect literally every big social media platform in the US which I can't see happening.
Zooming all the way out I don't see why Twitter really care about such a fight as there is no way Google and Facebook (to name just two) would let things go against Twitter as it would be devastating to them as well.
With free speech it gets interesting how you interpret it. One interpretation, which I think Trump is using, is that "laws come last". There is a principle that says free speech should be protected and laws only come to cover the cases where the principle can be infringed. So twitter, in this interpretation, would be correct according to current law, but would stand on the wrong side with regards to a higher value of upholding the principle.
However there is another interpretation which says that ability to remove someone from your private business is also an expression of free speech. And that private companies as well as individuals are free to choose who they do business with. But there is one nuance here - this is better served under another principle which is "freedom of association". Freedom of association states that you can refuse to deal with anyone you don't like. However in USA this principle recently lost its value after certain group of Christians were not allowed to refuse baking a cake for a gay couple. So it seems there are certain protections.
But then there is a third thing which is that in some countries (and I am not sure here about USA) the president has the right to send a message using any media channel he sees fit, and the media channel cannot refuse. Informing and communicating with the public is one of president's duties and refusing to send his message infringes upon it. If USA has such a law and if Twitter could be interpreted as a media platform then it could be against the law for Twitter to do what it is currently doing. Unlikely thou, as twitter has a team of lawers and likely they were consulted beforehand.
> Zooming all the way out I don't see why Twitter really care about such a fight
Companies are ran by people and those people take political sides. Twitter is on the democratic party side, and the election season is coming. I predict we will se a bigger coordinated effort spanning Google, Youtube, and Twitter, and some other big corporations as we get closer to USA president election date.
> But then there is a third thing which is that in some countries (and I am not sure here about USA) the president has the right to send a message using any media channel he sees fit, and the media channel cannot refuse. Informing and communicating with the public is one of president's duties and refusing to send his message infringes upon it. If USA has such a law and if Twitter could be interpreted as a media platform then it could be against the law for Twitter to do what it is currently doing. Unlikely thou, as twitter has a team of lawers and likely they were consulted beforehand.
I looked into what powers the President of the US has in regards to sending a message and from what I found there are only specific rules (not sure if they are laws) for TV and radio to broadcast Presidential messages unaltered when asked.
Even if one was to interpret those rules to include the internet as well surely that would fall onto ISPs in that they must give unrestricted access to government services such as whitehose.gov rather than giving the President unlimited power of literally any US-based website?
I am sure if Twitter bans Trump's account he would push forward that he has unlimited power to communicate via any website he pleases although I have no idea how that would play out in the courts. It certainly goes against the small government position the Republican party talk about for businesses.
> Companies are ran by people and those people take political sides. Twitter is on the democratic party side, and the election season is coming. I predict we will se a bigger coordinated effort spanning Google, Youtube, and Twitter, and some other big corporations as we get closer to USA president election date.
I also think this. Seems Facebook has picked their side with Trump.
Me thinks Twitter has been planning for this outcome for a while now which is why they have held off on banning his account. I wouldn't be surprised if they take the step to ban him sometime in the not too distant future.
As President, or any public figure, you are responsible not only for the intention of your words, but also every feasible interpretation of your words, as well as the impacts of your words, regardless of intention.
I say this not to imply that Trump didn't know that this statement could be taken in multiple ways, but to remind people that even if it can it doesn't matter. It's tragic this has happened, and also tragic to have a leader who reacts to the situation in this way, and that a large swath of the country applauds him for it.
Vague and menacing threats are much more thuggish behavior than emotional reaction to the killing of an unarmed civilian.
As for what Twitter is doing, I'm curious whether they follow this path to it's logical conclusion, which is, eventually Trump being banned from Twitter. He's a huge driver of traffic for them, but perhaps they're thinking about life after Trump at this point, months away from the election.
Every feasible interpretation? No way. That’s not gonna work. No one would be able to say anything. At best people would talk like ex Fed chair Greenspan. Undoable.
Yes, every feasible interpretation. That doesn't mean you can't say anything without multiple interpretations, but it _does_ mean that, if you are called on another interpretation of your words, then you spoke unclearly. You need to clarify your meaning and apologize if it was flagrant.
Yes, that is a lot of overhead for communicating. That's what I believe we should expect of our elected leaders. Sadly, nearly half of voting Americans don't seem to agree with me.
It is a complicated issue. And quite frankly, I think the policing issues are a flash point triggering unrest over the deeper seated inequality in our society. So it is hard to address the issue directly as the actual number of deaths are not very prevalent. But to answer your question, here is an article comparing DOJ activity under Obama and Trump:
I'd rather the systems of thought control be built on logic and values, some greater purpose, rather than some line drawn in the sand based on some American partisan signal. But I guess this whole thing will forever be political.
I don't think that was a political line. It was a line between this president and all past presidents regardless of political party.
The logic/value in this case is, speak clearly and own your words. For example, if many people think you implied a subset of the population should be shot, you may have misspoken and should clarify it, not get mad at them, dismiss them, or even worse, double down.
Vague and menacing threats are admittedly thuggish behavior, but I think it's hard to argue that it's more thuggish than burning down a police station.
I believe there’s a suitable MLK speech in which it explains property violence in response to human violence is an attempt to push the majority to action using loss of property when it is clear loss of life means nothing.
Given that it’s clear literal loss of life meant very little to people but property damage gets multiple multiple news coverage and POTUS coverage etc etc. it’s hard to consider burning down a police station when the police killed someone on camera to be completely improper. All attempts to appeal peacefully to the people who are supposed to deliver justice have failed, and in fact, those who are supposed to deliver justice have done the unjust thing...
I think I’d be upset that this happened, but I’d lie the blame on the feet of the original people in authority who decided not to investigate and bring into custody someone who had killed a man on camera while people were begging him for mercy.
The people in authority are responsible for maintaining a stable, peaceful society, where police don't kill people for no reason and hooligans don't run around smashing things. When the peace is broken, they can't push it off onto other people. They've failed, and the responsibility for that failure lies wholly with them.
I also agree that we can't blame the hooligans; I don't think the kind of person who burns down a police station has a sufficient moral compass to be blamed. But that doesn't diminish the need to urgently stop them.
I agree that there is a need to respond to the ongoing property damage. Unfortunately, the ongoing property damage is in response to an ongoing injustice- the person who killed a man is still walking free and has not been charged or arrested for killing someone pleading for their life on camera.
My understanding is that he still hasn't been brought into custody. In that case it makes attempting to stop the protests through authoritarian means instead of addressing the original problem makes it... rough.
This is not how legal jurisdictions and due process work. I'm not an expert, but if the suspect has fled to another state at this point, this is likely a federal matter that will need FBI involvement.
But, I'm glad you two came to an understanding. Gives me hope.
Well of course it isn't "more thuggish." The use of "thug" was done on purpose. It is a known racist dog whistle. Trump's racist followers know exactly what he means when he says "These THUGS are..." They replace that with the n word. It's just as a society we don't allow them to say the n word any more, so they've replaced it with a myriad of dog whistles.
What I'm saying is that, in their minds, every single person in that mob is a "thug," and everything they're doing is (in your words) "thuggish."
But the mob of white folks in Charlottesville? Nothing thuggish there. That's just white folks protesting against being oppressed by minorities.
I would call any group of people who burns down a police station, or breaks into a Target and starts stealing stuff, thuggish. The mob of white folks in Charlottesville did not, as far as I know, do these things.
I think this person is actually not a troll, just has some ideas that are maybe not fully thought through. I see evidence of an open mind by the poster elsewhere on the thread. Let's try to have patience with other people.
Yes. Yes I would. I wouldn't be surprised if that speech was written by a white person who doesn't understand the meaning behind it. I guarantee Obama fully understands how that term is an epithet.
So then he would have recanted when called out and the Whitehouse wouldn't have stood by the language - https://www.usatoday.com/story/theoval/2015/04/29/obama-whit.... Either he thought the word was appropriate or wasn't able to control his staff writers and spokespeople.
I'd say he likely used it as an appeal to people who view things like this through a racial lens. He was trying to draw a line between most black people and those who would physically attack police officers.
You bring up an interesting point with Obama's usage of the word, and I would agree that he knew what he was doing when he used it. As does Trump.
When I think of thugs, I think of premeditated stick ups, protection money rackets, and intimidation.
A riot is dangerous, unpredictable, and unwise (imo), but I wouldn't characterize it as thuggish. It's clear to me the reason that word was used was to appeal to his base, who are eager to put a label on these protestors as a way of dehumanizing them.
FWIW, even in the most far-right audiences I know of, I don't recall a single instance of people taking issue with the "rioters'" reactions against the police force.
I see a focus on the looting and destruction of private property that is unaffiliated with the police: a Target and an Autozone in particular. If anything, I'm seeing broad support for what's happening with regard to the MLPD.
This is not a simple partisan issue. Not even close.
One angle I don't see discussed: I wonder if Trump commits to more risky/bombastic/divisive plans as president because he feels confident that he can directly frame them and control the narrative by using his audience on Twitter, and he feels emboldened by how immediately Twitter is able to deliver the reactions. If there's a chance this is true, I can especially understand Twitter wanting to have no part in this. It would be fucked up to force anyone like Twitter to be the ones working to support this if they didn't want to be the ones doing it and associated with it.
I've said in the past that if Twitter had a "dislike" button in addition to the "like" button and only showed the cumulative score (like reddit or HN), Trump would've gotten much less gratification from Twitter due to lower net "likes" and would've given up Twitter entirely, which would almost certainly have altered his behavior.
Trump playbook:
1)cause problem
2)throw a fit, bluster, and lie to get his base riled up
3)gain minor concession from opponent and/or back down
5)claim victory
It's way too late for that, though. I left twitter more than five years ago (can't remember the exact date) when it became clear it had became a gathering place for ordinary fascism and you could not have a reasonable discussion without having extremists harassing you. And this started long before Trump's election (in France, we have a name for that : the fachosphere).
I'm willing to give it an other chance if they implement proper moderation (because in the end, I love talking with people very different than me, especially if they are of different political views, provided they're willing to discuss and don't just want to harm opponents), but I'm afraid the harm is done, and everyone is radicalized, now.
I have no idea what this is even supposed to mean. But that's what fascism is — right wing authoritarianism built around a leader cult merging racist populists with a corporate elite, directing state violence at marginalized/demonized groups. Which is what Trumpism is.
There's a political illiteracy in our politics (I'm including Canada, but more prevalent in the US it seems) that says fascism is hitler himself and the swastika and nothing else.
Which makes their confidence in their literacy so bizarre. koheripbal's reaction to the uncontroversial observation is to first convince himself that it must be wrong and then project a specific and fantastical reason to explain why we have observed it. He really thinks he has figured something out.
So the person who literally defends the right of citizens to be armed to defend themselves and right for their speech is an authoritarian destructor? Man I used to think HN consisted of intellectuals with more logic. I guess I was wrong.
So I have a question about this. Does free speech apply to platforms like Facebook and Twitter? I would have thought that a website owner has a choice about the content of their website, even if that content is user generated. Surely they could remove any tweet they wanted and not be sued?
It depends. And the problem that people have is that social media companies want to be both publishers and platforms.
For example, T-Mobile is a platform. They aren't responsible for anything you say when on the phone, using their network.
CNN is a publisher. They are responsible for anything that gets posted on their website, and can get sued accordingly.
Social media companies want to choose what is posted on their website, but also not be held responsible for anything that is posted on their website. They want the perks of being a publisher, and the perks of being a platform.
Obviously there are arguments made on both sides. But that is the general disagreement, if I understand correctly.
> CNN is a publisher. They are responsible for anything that gets posted on their website, and can get sued accordingly.
This isn't true though. CNN/NYTimes/etc can't be sued for 3rd party comments on their site. CNN is also allowed to filter what comments make it on their site. These are not opposing ideas.
The briefest investigation of the comments sections of local news sites explains what they're not only afraid of, but perfectly rationally expecting amd shrewdly avoiding.
I don't follow much local news this days, can you share an example?
I grew up reading the NYTimes online and thought that the discussion section offered great debate. I think it might have become a case of it is too expensive to moderate? Do people just post ads and spam? Because in my mind, active discussion is always good
The "publisher" vs "platform" debate is a false dichotomy without any basis in the actual law. The two concepts are not mutually exclusive under Section 230. A newspaper is responsible for the content they "publish" but if I comment on one of their articles they are not responsible for what I've said on their "platform".
> It depends. And the problem that people have is that social media companies want to be both publishers and platforms.
> For example, T-Mobile is a platform. They aren't responsible for anything you say when on the phone, using their network.
> CNN is a publisher. They are responsible for anything that gets posted on their website, and can get sued accordingly.
Also T-Mobile is a point-to-point communications platform, while CNN is a broadcaster.
Social media seems like a new thing that doesn't have directly analogous antecedents. It's a high-impact, wide-reach broadcaster that has little to no editorial control. Before it, broadcasters lacking editorial control were marginal and low-reach.
I still find this to be such a silly comparison, really.
CNN is a publisher.. they pay people to be on TV, they pay people to write articles. Of course CNN (the company) is liable for what it puts out, because they are literally creating 100% of the content and paying people to do it. So if they are slandering someone with no basis, it's logical to say "Uh CNN is literally paying people to write lies to mislead people".
Now let's take a site like HN. People post articles here, people comment on articles. HN isn't "creating" any of the content like CNN. So obviously some random person posting a story or commenting complete bullshit is not HN's goal.
Now what's the argument... that as soon as HN starts to flag something as misleading, remove "spam" (who determines what is a spam article?), then suddenly they are put into a publisher realm and can get sued for what is or is not on there?
I mean.. to me that is LAUGHABLE that someone wants to argue as soon as a site like reddit/twitter/hn starts to do anything to the content they treated like a publisher and are liable for the content. This already happens a billion times a day across all those platforms anyway.
perhaps there aren't two sides.. that there is a genuine third form: the publisher-platform -- one which best describes both how these platforms do operate, and how they should do so.
When you have billions of users wanting to post content you can hardly be a publisher in any traditional sense; nor will the gov./society/users let you be a platform.
I think there is a distinction between just creating content on a platform, vs. actively recommending content and surfacing it to people not already explicitly following the person.
The latter is a type of tacit endorsement that to me, falls under the guise of "publishing", even if it's done in an automated fashion.
This is precisely what Trump's executive order targets. Section 230 of the CDA gave websites and social media networks a little wiggle room in the platform vs publisher stance. They could moderate as they see fit without being liable for the content on their sites. Now that's being weakening, or more precisely becoming more well defined by the FCC. There will be strict requirements to be considered a platform, one example of which is needing to have a well defined terms of service and strictly follow that all across the board.
This is incorrect. Section 230 does protect certain entities. It removes liability from certain types of content.
A website that contains both first party and third party content has section 230 protection on the third party content, but none on the first party content. There is no legal basis for the idea of "publisher" as different from "platform". If a website makes a modification to a specific piece of content, they may lose section 230 protections over that particular piece of content, but they retain it on all other 3rd party content.
The FCC cannot change the requirements to gain "platform protection" because there are none, because section 230 applies to content (like a tweet), not entities (like "Twitter").
One thing I've always been curious about - if a site receives third party content, but also is assigned copyright to that submitted content as part of the T&C of submission, does that make it first party content? I would hope not, as I think the assignation of copyright does not imply the immediate ability for the site to review the content of that submission.
I'm not a lawyer, but no. Section 230 has nothing to do with copyright. It only asks if the content was created by a third party. Licensure doesn't change the creator.
The 1st Amendment does not apply to private platforms, except perhaps if Twitter was denying access on protected attributes (race, gender, etc).
Anyone can be sued for any reason. It is extremely unlikely a suit against Twitter for moderation will succeed. In theory they have the legal ability to remove all GOP politicians, knitters, or fast food companies from their platform.
The newest Executive Order about Section 230 means the FTC can enforce anytime Twitter doesn’t follow their own stated policies. So Twitter will just adjust their policies to give themselves more latitude. Even this is legally murky and will take years to be resolved in court.
"Freedom Watch's First Amendment claim fails because it does not adequately allege that the Platforms can violate the First Amendment. In general, the First Amendment 'prohibits only governmental abridgment of speech,'" the court wrote, citing a previous opinion issued by the D.C. Court of Appeals. The judges went on to say that "'a private entity who provides a forum for speech is not transformed by that fact alone into a state actor.'"
The service that hosts the accounts of all branches of the US military, all major weapons contractors, all three letter agencies, and many foreign militaries, governments, and world leaders guilty of all manner of war crimes, and this is where they draw the line for violence. Really interesting.
Well, in political science and sociology, one of the most common definitions of the state is that it possesses a monopoly on legitimate/lawful violence.
Violence conducted via the military or police, according to regulation, is lawful.
But violence conducted by citizens, or by members of the government or military that is not according to law/regulation, is not lawful.
I'm not saying Twitter's drawing the line exactly right, but it's somewhere in the right vicinity.
Presidents are also commanders in chief; a civilian that has ultimate control of state’s violence monopoly. Still the distinction between lawful/unlawful applies.
Minnesota does not have stand your ground laws. Instead, they have duty to retreat laws (basically, you can use deadly force to protect your life, not property).
"Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts"
I think Trump's saying that if things get out of control, law enforcement will start shooting. If I understand your post correctly, this would be lawful...
Well, it is not legal to shoot someone for stealing in Minnesota so I'm not sure how this would be lawful violence. He would need to have said something like "when the looting starts, we will attempt to arrest anyone that we see, if they then threaten the officers' lives instead of stopping or running away, then the shooting starts".
It is NOT legal for the Minnesota police to shoot a citizen that they believe is committing a crime unless their life or another person's life is under direct threat.
Well, yes - you're of course right. And Trump should have said something different, like you suggested. I'm not defending the tweet in any way. I was suggesting that the tweet was in alignment with the idea that the state has a monopoly on violence. But I think I read crazygringo's comment too fast and didn't really digest the emphasis on lawful/legal/regulated violence. In other-words, I derp'd.
Twitter didn't draw the line at promoting violence (which is a line I can agree with), they drew the line at a prediction of mail-in voting resulting in fraud.
This is using past violence as a threat of imminent violence while the other accounts you mentioned will generally reference violence indirectly or in the past tense. That is an important distinction.
> He is the commander in chief. He has the capability to threaten violence.
Actually no, he doesn't have the capability to threaten institutionalised violence against US CITIZENS which might have or maybe want commit a crime which is not capital and don't even lead to to much jail time.
If he would have the right to do so he would be an authoritarian leader and the US no longer a democracy.
Even if the national guard is dispatched they can just arrest people, not shoot them down (except if that people try to shoot down the national guard, which they don't).
As commander in chief he has many ways of communicating with the nation. Threatening violence on Americans on a private platform that explicitly forbids such actions is expressly not allowed and Twitter is well within their rights to “editorialize” it.
What is a realistic solution though? Police == violence, we might want to pretend that's not true, but it is. The threat of greater violence (a.k.a. police attacking you, throwing you into jail or even killing you) is what keeps lesser violence (individuals looting, murdering) at bay in civilized, democratic societies.
For the most part, public shame is a bigger driver of everyday behavior than threat of violence. And threatening to shoot people (and conceivably ask questions later) is very different from announcing a policy whose violation will result in arrest and prosecution. It's called due process, and it's what separates a legitimate government from, e.g. rule by organized crime.
> Police == violence, we might want to pretend that's not true, but it is.
I disagree, and point to a distinction that I learned from an essay of Christopher Hitchens. He described this as (paraphrasing) the distinction from the worldview of Hobbes versus the worldview of Locke.
Hobbes was of course the author of Leviathan, which viewed strong government as the barrier between an ordered society and a brutal state of nature ("the war of all against all"). Entrust a monarch with very strong authority, because the alternative is civil war at all levels of society.
Locke, writing somewhat later, advocated for separation of powers and constraints on the power of the state in general. In particular, the need for the entire state, including a possible monarch, to follow the law.
So, I would argue that the function of the police is to enforce laws, which are arrived at by a social negotiation, and that equating police with violence is mistaken. The threat of police violence is not what holds people in check. Rather, people are held in check by their recognition of the value of the system of justice and laws.
This viewpoint can explain why people have such a strong reaction to police who break that social contract.
Correct. And a lot of this violence is a direct result of institutional systemic violence. Violence breeds violence in other words. This is terrible for the economy in general, but capitalists found a way to exploit violence and fear: the weapon industry thrives on violence and fear.
The solution is for MPD to do their fucking jobs and arrest the murderer.
This entire thing is happening because they refuse to simply arrest a man that has been caught on camera slowly murdering a man, simply because he is a cop.
Even if they arrested him and let him bond out (which is what would happen to any non-police individual in this scenario) there would have been zero destruction. Zero.
Yeah, enforcing the law is the worst. If we just got rid of the police I for one would be much better off because all of your property would become mine.
Not sure if the story has fully made the rounds, but there was a whole panic during all this rioting about a kidnapping that took place. The police had just fled from the police station, and suddenly the same people who were burning down the station were desperately trying to contact the police to save a kidnapping victim.
We absolutely need to reform the police, but I really can't understand people who think we should abolish them. What is your plan to handle these situations?
This argument lacks so much nuance, yet I see it in every thread where a communication platform dictates who can and can't be heard.
The danger in the idea of "just find another X" is that, if you are willing to believe that the action in question justifies an open platform's prerogative to censor, then it follows that every alternative platform do the same. This creates black holes, if you will, that are incredibly easy for dissenters to fall down.
I'm not saying that I support Trump's message. But, as a society, we have to be nuanced about this and figure out what constitutes a right to use on massive platforms like Twitter. Twitter isn't just some dinky website. If you are worried about Russians/Chinese/Republicans swaying elections on social media, then you'd better be worried about how Twitter itself picks and chooses what you see.
After all, exactly how many levels down will we go?
Twitter: You can pay your own hosting fees.
Namecheap: Your users can find you at your IP address.
AWS: You can run your own server hardware.
Intel: You can build your own CPU.
Electric Co.: You can generate your own electricity.
VISA: You can take payments in cash.
Hospital: You can use your own butterfly strips and an ibuprofen.
I see what you're getting at but it's not really a valid comparison.
Advocating violence (or whatever you want to call it) on Twitter directly affects their bottom line, and enjoyment of the site for other users.
More simply: A toxic environment repels advertisers, users and investors.
Using Namepcheap/AWS/Intel/Whatever for the same purpose does not affect those companies bottom line, or otherwise affect the user experience for other customers.
With that logic, how exactly is the president(or anyone in authority whether it be a governor, police chief, etc.) supposed to threaten use of force on any communication platform? It seems like mass communication is needed, which inevitably involves advertisers and investors, thus an exception should be made for situations like this where the president's message goes against the interest of Twitter.
What you are saying about Twitter could be applied to TV networks, radio stations, and just about any other medium or platform that people use. They are all funded by advertisers, investors, etc. Should we really be entrusting billionaires in determining which messages from the government we should and shouldn't be hearing?
> Using Namepcheap/AWS/Intel/Whatever for the same purpose
My analogies might not be totally applicable(though all analogies fall apart to some extent), but that doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't applicable at all. A web host like AWS, for instance, could conceivably receive enough flack from investors and segments of the public for hosting undesirable content, in which case it might be their interest to let go a customer publishing that content using their services. Of course, that is far less likely than with something like Twitter.
More accurately, the alternatives would be something like CNN or iHeartRadio, or possible alternatives to Twitter.
Right. Which is why I think Twitter has chosen the best (of nothing but bad) options in handling this. That is, carry the message (since it is newsworthy) but annotate it.
>What you are saying about Twitter could be applied to TV networks, radio stations, and just about any other medium or platform that people use.
To a degree. But those businesses don't have positive social interaction as their core value proposition (reason to exist). People don't go to CNN.com for the purpose of being social. Thus anti-social behaviour on CNN doesn't affect their core value proposition in the same way.
>A web host like AWS, for instance, could conceivably receive enough flack
True, but groups organizing to lobby for a political/social purpose is a bit of a different beast altogether than one users actions directly affecting other users. In other words, there's no way (absent a bug/failure/poor design) that one users' usage of AWS should directly affect my usage of AWS.
All I'm saying is that social networks are very different from the other examples because they are, well, social.
I'm sure you didn't mean it, but inserting "will" misrepresents what I was trying to communicate. A more accurate word would be "should" or "obligated to". Saying that they will follow in taking adverse action is more prescriptive than what I meant. My fault, not yours.
There are sort of alternatives to Twitter, though you have to admit that Twitter's approach and audience size is quite different from, say, someone's forum using vBulletin. Nevertheless, there are mainstream alternatives such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and perhaps TV and radio, but that's not to say that they aren't likely to make a similar choice to Twitter, if it is generally agreed upon that Trump's message is bad and either shouldn't be seen or shouldn't be engaged with. Since they have similar financial incentives, it's not totally unreasonable to think that these mainstream platforms would follow suit if Trump decided to abandon Twitter and start posting solely on one of these alternatives. Whether or not you agree with Alex Jones, he was banned from all these platforms in coordination. It's absolutely possible that the dominoes would fall, and non-mainstream alternatives like Minds or Gab or Mastodon aren't necessarily viable alternatives if their audience is incredibly small.
Everyone is on board with each private platforms freedom to choose its content until it goes against their personal opinions: then, all of a sudden, the spaces of privately owned corporations are instead treated as if they belong to the public.
Net neutrality is important, because the digital infrastructure of the Internet is the "streets" of the digital world. Freedom of speech needs to be protected there, but when you're signing up for a free-of-charge social network that survives on advertising, you are literally soapboxing in a Walmart -- and it can't possibly be the civic duty of this metaphorical corporation to allow you to stay in there and disturb their business, rather than redirect you out into the street, or into your own place of business.
How about this for neutrality: When Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders end a post with "the shooting starts", they can get flagged for glorifying violence as well.
American citizens should be shot in the same circumstances any other citizens should be shot, like when all other reasonable countermeasures fail and they are posing a credible treat to other people's lives.
There are two different questions here, which are only tangentially related.
First, are there circumstances in which a citizen could apply lethal force to protect life and limb? Obviously yes; shooting someone trying to light your house on fire is certainly something that is both plausible and plausibly legal.
Second, is it appropriate for the political leader of a nation to imply that people committing a crime will be shot for it on the street? Not "we will deploy the national guard to provide safety and security to the citizens" but "looters will be shot". I think the answer here is obviously no, that is not appropriate.
I'm not going to defend that part of the statement, it was obviously wrong to anyone with more than 2 brain cells if interpreted literally. However the situation has rapidly declined to a state where I personally think the use of non-lethal force is justified, and lethal in the case of an imminent threat (ie. armed and threatening or literally firebomb in hand). A number of dwellings and business have been set on fire, in addition to the police precinct. These are individuals (and some large corporations) that are unrelated, and those taking advantage of the chaos and creating more should be punished appropriately. Obviously appropriate measures do not involve shooting people.
I will also add that this is also a case of tensions boiling over. While that doesn’t justify the arson, meaningful reform to defuse long standing tensions would be a wise move.
I'd also argue the recent pandemic and subsequent crash of the economy has an underplayed role in the riots. When many haven't left their homes (much) in months and have been laid off, it's no surprise they'd be looking for an excuse to get out and focus their energy. People are desperate and stressed and it makes for some abnormal dynamics.
There are better options than killing people. Even shooting legs is better than shooting to kill.
I will never advocate violence on your own citizens because that creates a never ending cycle of violence and vendettas. It’s as stupid and fruitless as populist politics
> Even shooting legs is better than shooting to kill.
No it isn't. Legs are hard to hit compared to center-mass, and the only reason you should be shooting at somebody is if you need to because they are an imminent threat; therefore you should be aiming for a part of the body that you have a higher probability of hitting and that, having been hit, has a higher probability of effectively stopping the threat.
An alternative interpretation is that he was simply observing that violence begets violence, rather than encouraging it. My take is that he was deliberately ambiguous in order to taunt his opponents whilst also giving himself plausible deniability.
You can not take someones life to defend your property in Minnesota. There are not "Stand Your Ground" laws afaik. A use of lethal force must be intended to protect someone's life.
“Stand your ground” isn’t about defending property with lethal force. Stand your ground is about whether or not you have a duty to attempt to flee (if possible) before applying lethal force. Castle doctrine is a similar rule, but more narrowly scoped to your own home. Without stand-your-ground, you have to demonstrate that you tried to, or were incapable of retreating before applying lethal force.
That being said, there are very few states of the union where applying lethal force to protect property is legal. Texas is the only one I know of. In Texas you could shoot someone to protect property even if you feel that your life and limb are not at risk, but that’s not the norm in other states.
All states allow some level of force to stop a fleeing felon, the well named “Fleeing Felon” rule, but Tennessee vs. Garner limited this to non-lethal force. So you could tackle a fleeing robber legally, but shooting one would be illegal outside of Texas.
Now Minnesota only has castle doctrine and stand your ground from your own vehicle. If one reasonably feels that life and limb are at risk in Minnesota you can apply lethal force, but if you’re outside of your home and car you have a duty to attempt to retreat first. In my opinion this makes shooting at looters to protect your business a dicey proposition legally, as arguably you should have just fled.
As always, I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
That's very interesting information, thank you for taking time to research this and explain it in a friendly and informative way. I am from Texas, so I admit most of my knowledge comes from my own state's laws. If I'm not mistaken we are in agreement that the looters lives should not be at risk in this situation and that Minnesota law will likely not protect an equivalent of what the Korean population did in LA during their riots, when they took to protecting their shops by getting on their roofs with rifles.
That’s an implausibly charitable interpretation, especially given that Trump has repeatedly expressed positive sentiments towards police violence, and advocated for the death penalty for citizens accused of crimes. He paid $85k to take out a full page ad calling for the Central Park five to be executed.
This is also the same guy who promised to pay the legal fees of anyone who attacked protesters at his rally, and suggested that we should shoot migrants crossing the border. It strains credulity to believe that this time Trump was just asking people to not loot.
I think he probably meant exactly what everyone thinks, but you can shoot things other than bullets. Rubber bullets and gas canisters are also “shot.” He could have even been referring to the rioters shooting. I’m sure it would have been worded better if it wasn’t on Twitter, but that’s definitely on him.
The point is if you’re going to censor the president (or anyone, IMO) you should give them the full benefit of the doubt first.
This is the same word games that edge lords use to avoid social consequences; there’s no “I was just kidding” excuse when the president of the United States of America discusses the use of lethal force on American citizens.
It would be fine if it's: if they loot arrest them and if they treat to prevent this by using weapons like guns then you can shoot them if there is no other way.
The US is a federated country. The governors of the states have the ability to call in the National Guard to protect their state if they can not use Local/State law enforcement.
If and ONLY if that doesn't work can the State Legislature/Gov formally ask the President for help by calling on the Insurrection Act.
It's actually one of the core tenets of federalism.
Target is minor, they blew up a police station. That’s terrorism level attack. Police should have had control of the situation, they allowed it to happen
I kind of see it backwards from that. Police are an understandable target, given the situation. The police killed someone. But Target didn't do anything.
If I'm not mistaken, being commander in chief doesn't mean that you're above the law. No US law that I'm aware of allows you to threaten mass execution of US citizens.
He may be commander in chief, but even commanders in chief have to follow certain laws / moral rules.
Just observing his behavior during speeches and such, it should be obvious to anyone that Trumps mental state is... abnormal, and needs to be corrected.
Twitter isn't owned by the president or the federal government; Trump has many other legally established venues for his public announcements (whitehouse.gov, for instance). If he prefers to use a private company to speak to the public, he has to abide by its rules - in that regard, he is no different from any other Twitter customer.
Shooting people is not even remotely a correct response to looting. It's why someone might be court marshalled, or dishonorably discharged.
The funny thing is...I remember back when we held the US President to a higher standard than say, the worst soldier in the National Guard. Just because he is making a public statement does not remove the ability of the platform to fact check or accompany it with the idea that it's wrong. News broadcasters can freely air Trump speeches and pair them with fact checks.
If trump would like to not be editorialized, he should post this statement on the White Houses's site. The fact of the matter is that he uses twitter for the audience, the claps, the viral followers. Twitter is not a public place, he is using their service for their service and to reach their users. They have every right to make statements on this and enforce their rules.
> he should post this statement on the White Houses's site
All "microblog" type posts made by a president should be posted directly through the White House's own web site, and not be communications through a commercial service.
> Rubber bullets can blind or kill. Tear gas hurts like hell.
So... don't go looting? It's supposed to be a deterrent. Maybe you'll think twice about burning down your local target and autozone if there is a risk of being blinded. You'll be perfectly fine as long as you don't reach for your molotov cocktail and baseball bat to go join in the "fun".
The person who smashed the windows of the Autozone, starting its destruction, was decidedly not a protestor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-evjkVfJ7HY . There is some speculation regarding his identity, but even without a full investigation, his actions and attire out him as not part of the crowd.
Don't kill innocent black people then? The looting is a consequence. It's not as if looting happens everyday for no reason. People are angry and do certain things to express their anger. It's not fair for one side to protest peacefully when the other side resorts to violence for non-threats.
Don't kill innocent people of any color. Punish police who do. Everyone can agree on that.
"Looting is a consequence" is a poor excuse, looting/arson is not the correct way to express anger, you harm people who have nothing do with the problem or solution. Stop excusing their behavior.
Bullets don’t have names on them and tear gas doesn’t discriminate between peaceful protestors and looters. The use of force should be a final response, not an initial one. It can and does hurt innocent people, inciting even more violence.
Peaceful protesters should not be anywhere near commercial zones being looted and burned. Why would a peaceful protestor choose to protest at Target and not the local Sheriff/Police headquarters?
Rubber bullets are a emergency tool if normal anti riot told don't work and the police is atacked work thinks like molotophcocktails. They easily cause major permanent damage like blindness and like work gun it's easy to get the wrong person by accident of groups are involved.
That's a fair point. I'm not defending Trump's tweet, but it seems defining violence glorification is arbitrary. It would be funny if Twitter adds a rule that says you can be an organization whose whole purpose is to make devices that kill people as long as you don't glorify making devices that kill people.
The president is the most visible face of the government. Of all the ones you mentioned, it's the only one people actually vote for. What he says and does has the most impact. So I don't find it "interesting", I find it entirely reasonable.
People in the United States do not vote for a president. They vote for an elector who in turn will vote for the president. This is an important and often left out detail in how the American political system works, in theory it could have protected us from the current dumpster fire.
My ballot has the candidate’s name on it, not some elector. If electors conspired to change the outcome, the people would rightfully consider it nothing more than a coup, regardless of the 18th-century design of the electoral college.
One, the electoral college itself is tied to the political power of many low population states, so any serious adjustment to this process is a pretty dangerous subject for some states, making any country wide changes very hard to start.
Two, the shift to direct election of the president (minus the electoral college) was not a planned change. If one day in the 19th century everyone decided to change, then scrapping the EC would've made sense. Instead it has been a slow process happening over at least a century to arrive at our modern system, hence the presence of vestigial artifacts like the electors themselves.
Three, the process of how electors are selected is delegated to the states, which is part of why it took so long. So for example Pennsylvania and Maryland went to a system by which one party won the entire state at once in 1789, while it took South Carolina until 1860 to abandon per district results. Maine never adopted the winner takes all approach, and assigns two votes by district and two by the popular vote tally.
Well said, but I'd like to restate and emphasize a point you stated:
the Constitution specifies that States (not The People or citizens or voters) shall choose their electors.
As you said, allocation of electors by states has been played with in different ways based on different election/ voting methods, but there's actually no constitutional requirement for States to hold a general election at all.
It's entirely up to the state legislatures, who have all since delagated the responsibility to a statewide vote.
From Article II:
"Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors..."
That's it- the rest covers how many electors each state gets.
It's questionable as to what theoretical limits the modern SCOTUS might place on this power to delegate, but they've already said that voting must adhere to "one person, one vote" principles, and have hinted that the states can't delegate the power externally (from the state). But they've never explicitly "locked-in" the requirement that any state hold a general election at all.
You’re right that there’s no hard constitutional requirement that electors vote for for whoever won the popular vote in their state or district, but there is absolutely a strong cultural expectation that electors act faithfully. Also, it’s illegal in many states for electors to act faithlessly.
I think this is a bit like saying that the UK has no constitution because it’s not written down. It’s technically true, but it comes nowhere close to the actual lived experience of the people in that jurisdiction, who absolutely believe they live in a constitutional society.
The electoral college as a system for weighting the votes of people based on where they live is unjust in my opinion, but it’s well-understood as part of the rules of the system as it exists today. The mechanics of that system where the electors are humans who cast votes instead of just points that get tallied is a formality we could get rid of.
The Founders would fundamentally disagree, and so would I.
Our government repeats the motif of filtering down the raw passion and energy of the populace as a whole through a smaller, generally much less numerous group backed with the implicit assumption of good faith and sense.
The faithless elector was to the Founder's one of the last bulwarks against bestowing the highest office in the country to someone so repugnant, that an isolated bunch of people, accountable to no one but their own conscience, politely discussing the matter came to the conclusion it just couldn't work out. The idea that a President could get that far by mere populism and charlatanism may seem daft, but in that time, you didn't have background checks. You couldn't sniff out who someone really was, and if you knew the right people it was easy to get paraded in front of a populace that would eat up anything you fed them as long as there was enough spectacle to keep their attention. Odds are, it wouldn't be a problem. Everything would go just fine. However, the Founder's were well read on the ills of Greek and Roman poli, and the traps of demagoguery, and cults of personality. Their solution was the application of well-intentioned moral reasoning. We've all experienced the excitement of an idea that sounds great in a crowd, to later go home and say, "Now wait a minute." Same basic principle. In such an important decision, if it is really the right answer, no one will refuse,yet if it isn't, the stakes are high enough where the presence of that last chance is warranted.
The political party system completely undermined the entire intent behind the College, and many people never really try to transplant themselves out of the modern mindset, back to the time period to understand it. Nor do they realize just how important careful consideration of the person holding that post was. Think about it.
That President did not have the most capable Armed Forces in the world at his disposal. They did not have the capability to essentially make or unmake law via Administrative law and control of Alphabet soup of national regulatory agencies we have today. That President was not sitting atop the world's largest nuclear arsenal, or at the nexus of arguably one of the most well-funded intelligence and law enforcement apparatus in the world. In comparison to the Presidents of today, Abraham Lincoln was absolutely right. "No man can do any great harm in four years". Nowadays, given the level of interconnectivity between world governments, and the technological capabilities that are at our disposal, it stands to reason they might have balked at having a President in the first place. We don't know for certain. We can only guess.
I'm not certain anyone will find any of what I'm saying rhetorically convincing, but the main point I'm making is it is dangerous to dismiss the past without really understanding why what was done was done. The thinking behind the College was completely rational for the time, and arguably, even more rational and relevant today assuming your values and philosophies are more or less consistent with those of the Founders, who were so helpful as to write them down in generous volume that we may benefit from their endeavors today.
At least, I think so, and I've spent more time than I like to admit trying to understand the topic myself. Which is kind of silly, after all, to be ashamed of doing so, seeing as it is one of the single most important things to do for those who come after us.
To his wife,Joh Adams wrote:
>"The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain."
These Founders. These visionaries so loft in their ideals, dedicated their intellectual lives to the laying of a Foundational edifice that would stand the test of time. No Internet or easily accessible mobs of fairweather supporters did they have. No refuge in trivial pseudonymity were they blessed with. No instant feedback loops, or access to the happenings of the entire world at once to cherry pick what works and what doesn't. In spite of the vices and and repugnancies of the society of the time (which I will not whitewash or dismiss), these men demonstrated a commitment to the future few of their descendants, and increasingly few nowadays truly demonstrate. The preservation of personal liberty, and national unity unrivaled in degree or ferverence in administering. Abraham Lincoln himself likened it to the closest thing we should have to a National religion[2]. To cherish and preserve the liberties we enjoy do those who come after. Before you toss aside the fruits of the labor of people who in their time dedicated so much time to trying to think, reason, compromise, and do things well; it behooves you to at least understand their context, and to carry a paltry mockery of what they had to offer forward that you may learn and reap the fruits of a life we haven't had to spend as they did.
I'm sorry, but the flippant dismissive nature of your response just really doesn't do the import of the issue justice. I'm not trying to be condescending or patronizing (though that may end up being how it ends up coming off). I'm merely pointing out that it isn't some 18th century foppish hat to be cast aside. If you can't demonstrate an appreciation for why it was there, or show any indication you've put thought into whether or not it's mutation from it's original intent has actually been a net negative, it is difficult to take your assertion seriously. Then again, I can count on both hands the number of people I've met who will even entertain that level of debate or thought, and only one hand is necessary for the number who have straight up admitted they do it out of a personally perceived sense of duty.
In short, check your damn history and show your work if you expect to be taken seriously. I can't emphasize it enough. If everyone else's liberties aren't important enough to you to do so, I don't know what else would be.
Just read them. It's man years of interlocution to make, far less to read and process, and far easier to get a hold of now.
These aren't easy or trite issues by far, and if nothing else, you have to work to build empathy and compassion to both sides to be able to have any realistic chance of being able to credibly take a stab at making decent policy.
I can forgive a man who decides against me on the grounds he actually did the footwork to understand, but his character lead him to a different conclusion. However I cannot abide by what seems to pass for sound policy nowadays.
I'm not sure that's an accurate portrayal of the history of the matter. It wasn't at all a carefully considered scheme, it was thrown together slapdash, the option that none could hate but also none loved.
You cite Federalist 68, but forget that less than a year later Hamilton was gaming the electoral college.
The founders were humans. They had flaws and disagreements. Many parts of the Constitution are borne more out of political expediency than grand ideals, and the operation of the Electoral College is not exempt from these caveats.
>The faithless elector was to the Founder's one of the last bulwarks against bestowing the highest office in the country to someone so repugnant, that an isolated bunch of people, accountable to no one but their own conscience, politely discussing the matter came to the conclusion it just couldn't work out.
Thank you for taking the time to illustrate many points. I appreciate the informationa and further explanation.
States can apportion their electors however they choose, but generally their votes are cast in a "winner take all" manner.
This setup is (in a way) a consequence of the Great Compromise, and would serve to reduce the electoral influence of more populous states even if elector votes were cast proportionally with respected the state's popular vote.
It's not accurate to say that people in the US vote for electors.
It’s not actually that important. In many states it’s illegal for the elector to vote for something other than the popular vote and in the others it’s unheard of to go a different way and it would be made pretty quickly illegal if it happened.
Yep, but given that it doesn’t happen, it’s not really relevant as some kind of IAmVerySmart comment claiming that people don’t vote for the US President. They effectively do.
Depends on the Twitter regulations, war is generally not illegal. Summary capital punishment usually is unlawful; though there are exceptions. So I was trying to account for that.
You can make the case that humans often engage in threats to prevent violence.
Having seen a few people threaten each other, and not get into a physical fight. But to walk way.
I would say it can be preferable to actual fists thrown.
Words are not violence.
'Trump's phrase "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" is an unattributed quote of Walter Headley, Miami's police chief in 1967. It was a threat to citizens who were upset that police had terrorized a black teenager by holding him over a bridge.' (https://twitter.com/mattsheffield/status/1266246092393336838)
The OP means that Trump didn't use quotation marks or mention that it was a quotation. (I myself didn't realize it was a quotation.) There is no attribution or quotation marks in the tweet.
I found the attribution of the quote very informative and am very surprised it is currently downvoted. My own summary of the tweets is also downvoted, not sure what I could/should add to it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23347395
I tried to neutrally summarize the tweets, in case people wanted to know what they said without clicking.
100K people dead and this guys priorities are Twitter and coming up with ways to throw more fuel on a dumpster fire of race relations and police brutality. Bravo.
One thing that's fascinating about this is how Twitter has become so centered around political discussion (& histrionics). It's become the backbone of the sort of inside-baseball of politics. The lightning rod at the center of both politics and Twitter is Trump. Trump is such a powerful force because he can bend the ridiculousness of the twitter conversation to his will. He's perhaps an outcome of all the incentives of the social network.
So limiting Trump is to me a kind of commentary on Twitter itself. Maybe something like a Trump is the end-game of a Twitter-like network?
“ ....These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”
This* Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about glorifying violence. However, @Twitter has determined that it will allow terrorists, dictators, and foreign propagandists to abuse its platform.
*Referring to an attached picture of a Khamenei tweet about Palestine
Framed it quite well. A good summary should note if there is significant complexity involved in the statement, not take a biased framing of the situation, and give no indication that they have done it.
Right, which is why "improving one's soul" isn't the only meaning of jihad. This is pointed out in the article I linked.
> The word jihad comes from the Arabic jahada, which is perhaps best translated as "struggle," "effort," or "striving."
This can also be verified with a dictionary or encyclopedia.
> Jihad is an Arabic word which literally means striving or struggling, especially with a praiseworthy aim.
> Jihad, also spelled jehad, in Islam, a meritorious struggle or effort. The exact meaning of the term jihād depends on context; it has often been erroneously translated in the West as “holy war.” Jihad, particularly in the religious and ethical realm, primarily refers to the human struggle to promote what is right and to prevent what is wrong
We can twist the word to focus on violence to accommodate some political objective, but that wouldn't be accurate.
When the tweet in question also talks about Palestinian independence, it's not talking about "internal jihad". It's talking about violence. And when it talks about "even if death", it's talking about being killed when engaged in violence, not about when engaged in peaceful resistance.
That's amazing. Of all the horrific thing people post to Twitter all day long, a vague statement about Palestinian independence is the "best" whataboutist comparison Trump could find to match his own threat to open fire on the country he is sworn to defend.
I don't think the Khomenni tweet is a valid comparison to Trumps (for other reasons) but lets be honest — This tweet is anything but a "vague statement about Palestinian independence", since it directly references and advocates for Jihad and Martyrdom.
but "jihad" and "martyrdom" are the same things we talk about when we pump up our soldiers to fight in our wars. what's the difference between that and how we talk in the US about what an honor it is to lay one's life down for his country?
every country and every army in the world tells it's soldiers that sacrificing their lives for the sake of the war they are fighting is honorable and noble and that their families, friends, and nations are proud of them for doing so. how is that so much different than telling soldiers they will be rewarded in heaven for being martyrs? For those who are religious, if you sacrifice your life for the greater good (for the good side in a war between good and evil), isn't that a good deed? and don't good deeds get you into heaven?
Oh, I agree. That's totally fair. In fact, I agree with everything you wrote.
I was just taking issue with describing the Khomenni quote as a "vague statement about Palestinian independence" when it's very clearly a direct call-to-arms. Whether or not that call-to-arms is justified (or not) is orthogonal to the point I was making.
but the Israeli army targets and kills far more civilians than Hamas and related groups do (just look at how many civilians were killed during the Friday protests the past few years).
> Of all the horrific thing people post to Twitter all day long, a vague statement about Palestinian independence is the "best" whataboutist comparison Trump could find
You're thinking the best example is the one that should obviously be removed. But that's not what he's after, because then they'd just remove it. What he wants is something it would be maximally contentious for them to remove.
I am so, so tired of everyone apply "conservative" to outright nonsense. We should say "republican" or "trumpian" instead.
There is nothing conservative in many of the far-right ideas, by any definition of the word. If the idea or opinion is:
1) Based on pure hate
2) Based on treating a protected class badly - you know, the whole reason we have class protections
3) Based on NOTHING AT ALL, no facts given, other than sometimes a turtles-all-the-way-down derivation of other crazy opinions, and sometimes with a "make it true" initiative bringing up the rear. Speculation is not a position. Speculation is not a position. SPECULATION IS NOT A POSITION!
those are NOT Conservative. Those are crazy. Especially #3, employed all the time by the current POTUS.
I personally believe the Conservative movement has actually been wildly successful over the last several decades, and the country has shifted significantly to the right.
Now, all that remains is the crazy. That is all the right has to differentiate itself, and they're going all in.
Anyway, TLDR: crazy is not Conservative, please use Trumpian or Republican if that fits. Also, speculation is not a position :)
If I’m reading that correctly, it’s a completely misleading assertion by @WhiteHouse. It appears as though this is in response to the quote of the original that was also reported. Given that the quote is adding a comment on to the original text, their ruling makes sense to me.
That said, it looks like they’ve hidden it as well now. So maybe they see it as an attempt to circumvent the TOS and are treating it the same way.
A plain non-technical reading of the email from Twitter doesn't describe the structure you're suggesting - so it's possible that Twitter's email template is not properly rendering the structure of the tweets.
This seems like an escalation. How would both sides continuing to escalate play out?
Trump would probably get banned at some point, especially if his tweets start to endanger rank-and-file Twitter employees (inspiring death threats, etc.). How likely is he to get injunctive relief if he gets banned?
I don't think Trump has thought this conflict through completely.
Given that this is an election year, I imagine that he is absolutely going to intentionally try to get himself banned - then spin the whole "liberal-bias-censorship" card.
...and it might work. These sorts of stories play riiiight to the centrist/libertarian/independents - whom he's grooming to not be afraid of showing up in person to the election booth in November.
I wrote this on the duplicate topic here, copying as I believe it matters:
I know it is "never too late" for things like this to happen, but it's definitely late.
One of the main reasons for bad things to happen is the lack of education (which, in turn, leads to resist to change) and, therefore makes people prone to believe to unbelievable things.
Social platforms like Twitter should have long had things like "fact checking" ANY statements and should have restricting not only violence glorifying posts, but also the ones with racial or sexual discrimination and all the others .
It is late, but I like seeing it happen at least for the person with the most "glorifying" record in dividing a society.
> Trump is intentionally or inadvertently quoting former Miami Police Chief Walter Headley. In December 1967, months before riots broke out during the (Nixon) Republican National Convention, Headley said “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” at the announcement of a new “get tough” policy for policing black neighborhoods. Headley promised to use shotguns, dogs, and aggressive “stop and frisk” tactics in a bid to reduce crime. “We don’t mind being accused of police brutality,” the New York Times reported him saying at the time. “They haven’t seen anything yet.”
Twitter should maliciously comply with Trump's executive order. Suspend his account, and post a banner saying that it was suspended in compliance with President Trump's Executive Order.
We have laws in the UK that curtail speech like that, "Inciting violence" is a crime.
Which I agree with to some extent, you're not innocent of a crime because you convinced a person to harm another, just because you were too cowardly to get your hands dirty yourself.
But the US is rather famously not British, so I'm not sure if it's a relevant thing to add to the discussion.
I'm also on the other* side of the Atlantic from this circus, but a little googling over lunch led me to the "Brandenburg Test" for when "Inciting violence" is no longer protected by the 1A. (NB: 1A is an entirely different subject than Twitter's TOS, which I addressed in the original thread)
Briefly: speech which both incites imminent lawless action and is likely to produce such action fails to be protected as US "free speech".
In this case, my IANAL analysis would be that the tweet had imminent application, but would be unlikely to produce action,
for reasons given in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23347453 (tl;dr lethal force is the last resort of a well-regulated militia when restoring public order)
There's plenty of "speech" criminalized in the US: many crimes are just matters of conspiring to X, or fradulently X... which may have been conducted entirely in speech.
The relevant kind of speech for "free expression" is that which seeks to express an idea/opinion/belief of the speaker.
That isn't criminalised in the UK as far as I'm aware, and would fall under the EHCR protections in any case which are in UK law as the human rights act.
You could even argue that Copyright law itself, and particularly the DMCA provisions, are a violation of free speech.
Obviously practically this wouldn't be possible, but if I were to write down all binary digits that my blu-ray of John Wick has, give it to a friend, and they wrote those digits down in their computer to watch the movie, that would be illegal for copyright violation.
I'm not arguing that we shouldn't have copyright in any capacity (though I do think that US's model is especially draconian), just giving an example of a curtailment of free speech that isn't really controversial.
If you want to go all absolutist reductio ad absurdum, you would argue that even treason (in the form of divulging state secrets) is protected by free speech.
Part of the issue is if you're hostile to the speaker, you can interpret a call for peace to mean a call for violence. Try to imagine for a moment, that this comment was not made by an evil racist orange man, but someone you like... maybe Ghandi. If Ghandi said: "Looting leads to shooting." Which interpretation would you more likely choose?
1. Please don't loot, it escalates violence and people will get killed
2. Let's kill all the looters
Whether it's Trump or Ghandi, we're imagining we know something about the internal state of the speaker's mind that we don't know.
This seems like attempting to weasel-word. If Ghandi said "We have a lot of guns, and looting leads to shooting", it's a lot more clear that the meaning is (2). Trumps tweet didn't just say that one sentence, it said, in order:
* "the Military is with [the governor]"
* "any difficulty and we will assume control"
* "when the looting starts, the shooting starts"
There's a clear causal relationship between these three statements, this is not a plea for peace, it is a threat of violence.
A threat of violence and a call for peace are not mutually exclusive.
Regardless, all that's in evidence is the federal government is going to back the state and if this keeps going people are going to die. Anything else is something you've imagined/projected into someone else's mind.
> The leader of the United States encouraging law enforcement and the military to shoot American citizens for looting
That's an extremely literal interpretation of his words. Most people would interpret that phrase to mean "you better think twice before looting because I'm not going to sit idly by and let you do it" but in the form of a vaguely threatening, yet catchy rhyme.
> The phrase was used by Miami's police chief, Walter Headley, in 1967, when he addressed his department's "crackdown on ... slum hoodlums," according to a United Press International article from the time.
> Headley, who was chief of police in Miami for 20 years, said that law enforcement was going after “young hoodlums, from 15 to 21, who have taken advantage of the civil rights campaign. ... We don't mind being accused of police brutality."
> The National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence found that Headley's remarks and policing policies had been a significant factor in sparking the riots.
> Headley died four months after the riots. The Times in its obituary noted his policies had caused "growing resentment" among black Miami residents.
Our President fully understands the gravity of those words. This is what he wanted to say. This is what he meant. This is what he believes. This is WHO HE IS.
There are many ways I would describe Donald Trump, but “deeply knowledgeable about American civil rights history” is not one of them. I can almost certainly guarantee you that Trump’s statement was not intended as an homage or reference to a Miami police chief from the 1960’s.
Two paths here:
- Trump is old enough to conceivably remember such quotes, he doesn't have to have a deep knowledge of American Civil Rights history, just a few memories of catchy rhymes
- If Trump is not penning his tweets, then the choice of quotation is even more likely to be intended
I think it’s entirely possible that he remembered a catchy rhyme. I don’t think that supports the theory that he is deliberately referencing Walter Headley. Lots of people repeat catchy sayings without even knowing and endorsing who originally said them or even what those sayings originally meant.
>Lots of people repeat catchy sayings without even knowing and endorsing who originally said them or even what those sayings originally meant.
This I disagree with, particularly since he doesn't have to consciously "know" or acknowledge anything explicitly for him not to understand the basic import of the statement.
I don't think anyone's saying he's capable of giving a brief one paragraph statement for an SAT question concerning Civil Rights activism in mid-20th century Florida, cause biases and prejudices don't need that much formal verification to commerce
So by that logic, would you agree that anyone who cites “shouting fire in a crowded theater” in discussions about free speech is in favor of imprisoning pacifists for distributing pamphlets?
So you might remember about a year back, a doctor got rather violently removed from a United Airlines flight after boarding because they overbooked the flight. There was a joke about it afterwards, some gallows humor: “Not enough seating? Prepare for a beating.”
I remembered that admittedly tasteless joke because (a) it rhymes and (b) it’s pretty violent and offensive, which makes it somewhat vivid. And honestly, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” hits the same notes.
The President keeps surprising me. Like, I keep thinking I have an accurate mental model of him being generally hateful and clueless and instinctive, but then things like this happen and underscore to me that he is deeply knowledgeable and sophisticated with these kinds of historical cultural references. So, still hateful, but not a dummy. That phrase was not an accident.
Agreed, it was not an accident. He hired Miller and Gorka. Also not by accident. Gorka left after Bannon, but Stephen Miller is pretty knowledgable as well as open about his views on race and fascism, and often seems involved in messaging strategy.
> That's an extremely literal interpretation of his words
Yes, which is better than a reasonable interpretation of his words would show them to be, because going beyond a mere literal reading to consider the deliberate historical reference and the implicit subtext makes the statement worse, not better.
People are choosing to give him plausible deniability because he's white. If Obama sent a tweet calling for Republicans to die, all politicians whether Democrat or Republican would forcefully condemn him.
He's really not a mastermind genius playing 4-D Chess. He is openly calling for violence, and has already inspired terrorists to mail bombs to prominent politicians, and people are choosing to play dumb about how evil he is.
> People are choosing to give him plausible deniability because he's white.
People are choosing to grant him deniability even when it is rather implausible because (insofar as race is relevant, there's other things that work similar for some that aren't race-related) they are white racists and his deniability on that point is also their deniability when he is speaking to their interests.
Probably depends on what you think of the intentions of the person. Some people think Trump is the devil and assume he means the worst-case thing when he says something, others look at it in other lights.
Previous US presidents were careful with their words, as they know people will interpret them in different ways if they aren't crystal clear. Trump just does stream-of-through -> keyboard -> twitter, and we get to see the results. Which tends to leave lots of what he says open to interpretation based on the perspective of the reader.
> Most people would interpret that phrase to mean "you better think twice before looting because I'm not going to sit idly by and let you do it"
What do you base the knowledge of how most people will have interpreted this statement on?
The historical experiences of different classes of people can have a profound impact on the perspectives they have in relation to the government. An 80 year old black man might have a very different relationship with governmental authorities than a 30 year old Latino, or a 40 year old Caucasian.
Do you think it is morally wrong for a store owner to protect his store using guns? Do you think it was morally wrong for the Koreans to sit on their rooftops with guns to protect their stores from looters during the LA riots ( https://warisboring.com/the-legacy-of-the-roof-koreans-28-ye...)?
If the "people" you reference are incapable of telling the difference between movies/games and the POTUS threatening violence on his own people (and arguably a majority of the country), than this is exactly why Twitter needs to do what it's doing.
So on the one hand people can tell the difference between presidential tweets and movie violence... but on the other hand they take all his tweets and interpret them in the most literal way?
If you're not familiar with the phrase, "sword rattling" is something you do when you're trying to avoid conflict. If you want to attack someone, you just do it.
It is literally the president’s job to command the military. If he gives a warning that looting will lead to shooting, it is not glorifying violence. It is a statement of fact.
And looting always leads to shooting, regardless of who is saying it.
Next, the 4th, 5th, and 6th amendments to the United States constitution. Telling armed forces to shoot unarmed people because they happen to be looting (e.g. when there is no imminent threat to life) is summary execution and unconstitutional.
The Posse Comitatus act only applies to the Army and Air Force. It's DoD policy to pretend that it also covers the Marines and other branches, but AFAIK not a legal requirement. Even then, the Insurrection Act gives the Feds power to use the military as law enforcement in case of severe civil unrest (like the LA riots)
Sure and let's ignore the fact that if anyone stayed in those shops and tried to prevent protestors from "protesting", they'd just be peacefully left alone by those violent criminals because... Some random X-th amendment?
How about martial law, seeing as we're throwing around unrelated legal laws and concepts?
Either way, these ridiculous "protests" indicate a complete break down of society and the government should be sending in the military to arrest people.
The national guard does not work like that. Also, no the military cannot just shoot people on the spot for being in the area of looting, it is not a "statement of fact." You just made this up and pulled it out of thin air so don't respond with "well prove it" or some other BS. Quit being a racist troll and reflect on your hateful little life.
> It is literally the president’s job to command the military.
Even if one views the Tweet as a legitimate military command, which it is not, unless the government has seized Twitter with just compensation as required by the 5th Amendment, it is not Twitter's obligation to ignore its own standard sfor the purpose of relaying such orders by the President.
Otherwise, except as to explaining why Twitter opted for the public interest notice rather than simple removal, the President’s job is irrelevant here.
> If he gives a warning that looting will lead to shooting, it is not glorifying violence.
That doesn't follow from the preceding, and the statement as written glorifies violence, both potential future violence and specific historical violence by the government against it's citizens, in much better the same way (though far more proximate historically and thus much worse) that it would if Trump said “Kill them all, and God will know his own.”
> It is a statement of fact.
It is quite possible to state a fact (or make a threat which one has the power to declare execute, which is more the case here than statement of fact) while glorifying the outcome that would be produced and/or the past historical antecedent which is invoked.
Well, so do you censor things like Dr Dre’s 187 because it might be interpreted as inciting violence against (corrupt) police? A public figure of renown among fans.
Media companies have applied censorship or content warnings to rap music and other art forms - voluntarily or otherwise - for decades without a word of protest from those people determined to make the case for the POTUS' immunity to Twitter's rules
Two notes: 1) I am not Jack Dorsey and Twitter is not my product, so I'm not sure why you said "you". 2) Dr Dre is not the president of the United States and does not have the authority to direct law enforcement and the military... surely you see the difference.
I think Dr. Dre is a sensible human being who's able to distinguish between art that he made 30 years ago and his current hypothetical circumstance, in which he would presumably act w/ the the dignity, prestige and responsibility of the office.
That’s a good thought experiment. They might. It seems they would under current rules. Maybe can run for mayorship somewhere and see what happens when he tweets.
You know, the answer is yes and no. Yes the president has more legal authority and perhaps moral authority, and greater reach, but don’t underestimate the authority of people within their circles. Be it a J Gotti ot Suge Knight.
> The leader of the United States encouraging law enforcement and the military to shoot American citizens for looting, that's the line.
Is this supposed to be bad? I actually wish that our own PM had done the same. I am sure that the citizens of a lot of countries that live under the rule of criminal syndicates, looters, and highwaymen would agree.
It seems that the US citizens are fine with state mandated violence as long as it does not include them. Nothing happened regarding https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21018041 for example.
It is bad because the value of human life (even people you don't like) is infinitely greater than material goods. A looted store can be repared, restocked, rebuilt. A dead human stays dead forever and yields a mountain of grief around him. They are not comparable at all.
> It is bad because the value of human life (even people you don't like) is infinitely greater than material goods
The human life of the people looting your property is more important than the well-being of you and your family who will be in debt after that, I see.
Regardless, this seems to be your personal value, something that I (and most people that I know) do not seem to share - even the US constitution and laws do not seem to share it, after all it is legal to shoot someone invading your home. I have no grief to give to someone who died while trying to invade my home and loot my property. They are dead due to their own choices.
> A looted store can be repared, restocked, rebuilt
For free? It can be a lifetime's worth for some. Are you willing to pay it out of your own pockets? If there were enough people willing to do so I would support your statement, but that does not seem to be the case.
> The human life of the people looting your property is more important than the well-being of you and your family who will be in debt after that, I see.
Your argument here seems to be that human life is worth less that the value of looted goods. So, if someone looted a TV, you think their life holds less value than a TV?
I want to interpret your reply charitably, but I’m really struggling with this sentence.
The answer seems self evident: Yes. Obviously. Without a doubt of course a human life (even a life that is doing something like looting) is worth more than the value of what it’s carrying.
Should we stop someone looting things? Yes. Should we kill them just over the theft? No, of course not.
Having been around that culture quite a bit, I think it's safe to say that quite a few people believe that yes, personal property has enough of a sanctity/value that it's worth capital punishment to enforce that as a societal norm.
The logical hole in this is that when one traces back "why" personal property has such a high value, the only source of its value comes back to it being thought of as an inseparable part of the life-experience of the person who owns it. To contrive an example, let's say someone's a pre-computer author (i.e. before easily duplicable backups), writing one of those life's-work novels, and they have a single copy of the manuscript of their magnum opus - to threaten to destroy the manuscript is to threaten their life's work; to threaten everything they poured their life's passion and effort into. It's conceivable that to destroy it might literally kill them by driving them to suicide.
But that's exactly the hole in the logic: at it's most extreme where property really is equatable with the value of a human life, the only thing that gives this property any absolute moral value is the value of the human life and passion that went into building it. If you've then got a conflict between "a holder of property" and "someone who wants to destroy that property", really it's just a threat on your "life".
--
One is then simply asking a question of whether it's justified to take another person's life to protect your own.
Most secular ethics frameworks say no; christianity and buddhism repeatedly and explicitly say no, over and over again, including direct quotes from christ himself.
> Your argument here seems to be that human life is worth less that the value of looted goods
I do not subscribe to the notion of universal value. I do think however that for someone the value of looted goods can be greater than the random person who looted them, surely you must also agree with this.
Anyway, looting has effects in the real world too, it is not only "oh no, I lost some value", it is "they looted my shop so my family might go hungry".
> Should we stop someone looting things? Yes. Should we kill them just over the theft? No, of course not.
If we have the option to stop them (along with the rest of the looters) without killing them then sure.
> I do think however that for someone the value of looted goods can be greater than the random person who looted them, surely you must also agree with this.
Oh, no! I absolutely don’t agree with this! I would actually stop interacting with someone who agreed with that sentiment, mentally tagging them as a sociopath with no respect for human life.
Do you really believe that there is no human on earth that believes that the value of the goods looted from them is higher than the one who looted them? If so (no offence intended) I think that you might be detached from society.
> mentally tagging them as a sociopath
You would discriminate against people solely due to their feelings - something which they have no control over and does not affect you?
I think there exist such people. I think they are sociopaths. I would not interact with them.
> You would discriminate against people solely due to their feelings
Absolutely not! We were talking about beliefs and values, not feelings. I harbor no ill will against anyone for their feelings. As you say, feelings are mostly not under one’s own control.
But what you believe is well within your own power. If one believes a human life is worth less than some material possessions, then yes, I would remove that person from my life. That’s not a feeling. That’s a choice.
In that case you certainly agree with "I do think however that for someone the value of looted goods can be greater than the random person who looted them" then, despite refusing it earlier.
> We were talking about beliefs and values, not feelings
This part was about sociopaths actually. Having certain feelings is enough to be a sociopath. Do you think that people choose to have ASPD?
> That’s not a feeling
Not feeling sad and not caring when some random person (it can even be someone from your own family) dies is related to feelings however. Something that is probably enough to get you considered as a sociopath by some.
> That’s a choice
Beliefs are a choice now? You do not choose to believe in something, rather, you get convinced due to some event, and this is often not possible depending on your feelings. I do not think that someone can believe that the life of someone who looted their store is all holy and important when they can't feel an emotion when someone dies.
> I would not interact with them.
Mind if I ask why? What would you (or society) gain if you refuse to interact with them? You would discriminate against them just for believing in something?
If your entire store gets looted or burned down, completely eviscerating your livelihood (potentially leading to homelessness for you and your family) or threatening your well being and safety then it's probably not about one guy carrying a TV.
First, looting doesn't imply imminent harm or threat to someone. Majority of looting involves destruction of property but not harm or death to people. If you think someone should be shot because they stole / destroyed some property, then I don't know what to tell you.
Second, we're not talking about individuals protecting themselves or their property. We're talking about the police / military shooting looters, and again not specifically in protecting themselves or others from harm.
Third, this is calling for summary judgement and execution without trial. Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?
> looting doesn't imply imminent harm or threat to someone
Sure it does. If it did not everyone owning property would go to the entrance and physically block it. In addition it implies imminent threat to the well-being of these that have their property taken away from them.
> If you think someone should be shot because they stole / destroyed some property
Under normal conditions I would support shooting them only if it is the only/safest way to stop them (either from committing the act or from running away).
> Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?
Except the ones that are shoot while they are looting are provably guilty.
Are you against the police shooting someone that threatens the life of an innocent?
Edit:
> We're talking about the police / military shooting looters
You pay your taxes so that the police / military protect you and your property.
> Are you against the police shooting someone that threatens the life of an innocent?
To be honest, how you make the jump from looting and destroying property to someone's life being threatened is beyond me.
If the looters are about to harm someone, and there was no other non-lethal way to stop that then fine. This is certainly NOT what people are objecting to.
I'm not sure how to make it more clear. Looting for the most part destroys property. Destroying or stealing property doesn't justify killing. Having your property taken away doesn't imply a threat to you. I mean c'mon, if that's the standard then we should just execute every petty thief and vandal.
> To be honest, how you make the jump from looting and destroying property to someone's life being threatened is beyond me.
From "this is calling for summary judgement and execution without trial. Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?"
> Destroying or stealing property doesn't justify killing
This is not some universal truth as you try to make it to be, but rather your personal morals.
> Having your property taken away doesn't imply a threat to you
As I said before "Sure it does. If it did not everyone owning property would go to the entrance and physically block it. In addition it implies imminent threat to the well-being of these that have their property taken away from them."
The looters are looting while using the threat of violence.
> if that's the standard then we should just execute every petty thief and vandal
As I said before "Under normal conditions I would support shooting them only if it is the only/safest way to stop them (either from committing the act or from running away)."
What is the point of repeating the same statements over and over?
> It seems that the US citizens are fine with state mandated violence as long as it does not include them. Nothing happened regarding https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21018041 for example.
I don't think it's fair to paint this as unique to US citizens. I'd go as far as saying this is generally true across the world, with few people protesting state sanctioned violence abroad, and significantly more people protesting domestic state sanctioned violence.
I don't think that's unusual. I think it's normal that we care more about our own lives than we do others lives, we care more about people dying at home than we do abroad.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it is normal human behaviour. A good example of this is watching how peoples perceptions of this latest coronavirus unfolded.
There's too much going on in all of our lives to have time for every bad thing happening elsewhere. You pick your battles. That's ok. You still have to live your life for yourself at the end of the day, nobody else is going to live your life for you.
I think that you forgot to mention that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21018041 was an act done by the US military, and it was not the only one of its kind. I would understand if most USA citizens did not give a shit if it was done by a 3rd party, but it was done by their own military which they fund via their own taxes.
> few people protesting state sanctioned violence abroad
I was referring to their local state committing acts of violence abroad. As you correctly note, the example mentioned is not the only one of its kind. This happens far too frequently. It falls into the "every bad thing happening elsewhere" bucket.
Why would that be bad exactly? Anyway, I am glad that you did not have to survive through something like that.
> What is better is to have a functional police system that responds proportionately.
In times of mass-looting? I doubt that even the most functional police system could be able to help.
That being said we are talking about the extremely dysfunctional American police system. I doubt that they can change it into a functional one within an hour. What would you suggest for right now?
Because shooting looters is disproportionate. You arrest them and charge them for burglary, and then determine mitigating factors. The looters aren't shooting people. As for why it is bad to kill someone that isn't a killer, we have to go back to general moral philosophy and common law. Extremely generally, aside from the moral cost of taking a life, it's also because it is systematically escalatory that invites a further escalatory response.
> Anyway, I am glad that you did not have to survive through something like that.
Me too, but I fail to see the relevance. I understand that someone living through that might make someone more willing to shoot looters, but that doesn't mean it is proportionate or appropriate.
> In times of mass-looting?
Yes, in times of mass-looting, it would be better to have a functional police system that would be able to arrest, charge for burglary, and then determine mitigating factors by looking at the overall context. And I agree, our current police system is not up to that task.
> What would you suggest for right now?
I think we should not move past that the answer is not right now, but a few days ago - we should not have a system where it is even thinkable that police officers can kneel on people's necks and kill them. That exposed that it is a dysfunctional American police system (in that area and many others). Societal cohesion does not operate based off of the overwhelming strength of a police system, but common trust, mores, and belief in the overall system. If you break those bonds by kneeling on someone's neck and killing them, then many other things can break as well.
As for right now, the aim is to re-assert control in a non-escalatory fashion, and then let justice-driven investigations run their course. That's the right thing to do.
> You arrest them and charge them for burglary, and then determine mitigating factors
This is not possible to be done in scale in a mass-looting situation.
> The looters aren't shooting people
The looters are looting while using the threat of violence.
> As for why it is bad to kill someone that isn't a killer, we have to go back to general moral philosophy and common law
You say that as if it is some form of universal truth. I do not share your personal morals regarding this.
> Yes, in times of mass-looting, it would be better to have a functional police system that would be able to arrest, charge for burglary, and then determine mitigating factors by looking at the overall context
Certainly, but my argument is that no police force on the planet would be able to handle mass-looting in scale and in the way that you propose. This is like saying "just stop putting bugs in your code".
Anyway, this whole thread is about trump saying that he will send the military if the governor is not able to handle it his own way - which is likely similar to the way that you are proposing.
> the aim is to re-assert control in a non-escalatory fashion
How are you planing to do that? Especially in a way that has the least amount of looting happen.
We wouldn't be here at all if the police were allowed to address this properly. It either wouldn't have escalated, or they'd be overwhelmed and the army would have had to have been called in to assist. I don't understand why this is so complicated. People pay taxes to be protected from such violence. It's the reason we're told to shut up and go to Somalia when we complain about taxes. But when it comes down to it, nothing happens. Local acts of terrorism and people are left to defend themselves, possibly without the capability to own a firearm too.
I am raising this question because many think that looting is the right thing to do and it allows avenge of George Floyd. I personally think that it hurts George Floyd's cause and only creates more divide. Violence is not the answer to society's deep racial issues.
Thanks I guess for citing the definition of a Riot. I think that's a better word for it.
Isn't the US a federated country? Surely it's up to the local police to ask for help from other police if they wish to, and then perhaps ask for help from the national guard, not the other way round?
And isn't it state governors who control the national guard, not the Federal president?
I assume the Waco types will be out there opposing "The Feds" trampling over state rights?
The US has a federal system, but people are guaranteed basic rights within it. If the local government can’t or won’t protect those rights (the police abandoned one of their five precincts to the looters!), the feds have the right and duty to step in.
The cost-benefit is not that clear-cut. Attempting to protect material at the cost of civil unrest, likely wounded protesters and police officers, possibly even more death. Sounds like taking a step back might have been the best of all the bad options.
More importantly though, the government should be more concerned with the cause than the symptom. Arrest the officer and this goes away.
It’s terrible that folks are looting and taking the focus away from the problem, but it’s also shameful to evoke George Floyd’s name to shame them without making mention of the officer who started this mess.
With innocent people being harmed, and at least one killed, I think they should. Letting this get out of control is not the best option, as tensions are already high from covid, and this could be a feedback loop to more unneeded violence, with unintended victims caught in the cross hairs.
With a gas line possibly being cut, and ~170 business burned down, this is spiraling out of control [0]
I mention the gas line (though I don’t know if this a fair comparison) for the potential of chained explosions like the one in Merrimack Valley [1]
Regardless, I think many are using the protests as an excuse to loot, and let off steam from the tensions of lockdown, in addition to its obvious main reason.
I'm sorry, but technology does not exist in a vacuum insulated from the rest of the universe. An implementation of any given application, its code, its infrastructure, and its services may be apolitical, but as a platform that is used for communication it is important that conversations be had about how these platforms are used. Perhaps you can bury your head in the sand and pretend that society is not falling apart at the seams due in large part to the spread of misinformation across any number of internet forums and social media services, but I think the rest of us may have an opinion that is inimical to ignoring the problem.
I don't necessarily agree that this article is not appropriate for HN, but I do agree with the parent that, in general, it is not an appropriate venue for political discussions.
That is not to say that political discussions shouldn't be had -- simply that they shouldn't be had everywhere. In particular, different venues are appropriate for different discussions, and in my opinion we don't benefit if all spaces consist of homogenized topics.
If I want to discuss and learn about tech, HN is a good venue for that. If I want to learn about cooking, I might go to Youtube or Chowhound. If I want to delve into politics, I might go to NYT or Reddit.
However, when I'm searching for a recipe for banana bread, I don't care to discuss politics in the comments of that post, nor do I consider that preference to be burying my head in the sand. Adjustments to the amount of baking soda, or the replacement of bananas with plantains, yes; "orange man bad", no. Not because I don't agree, or because I am ignoring politics, but simply because it's not the place to have that conversation.
Twitter is definitely allowed to do this, legally, but seems like a pretty short-sited decision. There's no way that poking the bear like this is going to lead to anything except a more highly regulated platform.
> There's no way that poking the bear like this is going to lead to anything except a more highly regulated platform.
How? Attempts at regulating Twitter's ability to fact-check on their own privately owned platform would almost certainly fail a First Amendment challenge, and the Democratic House isn't gonna go a long with new laws to crack down on it either.
I’m now fully expecting republican mega donors coming together to trying to gain control of Tweeter as strategic asset. At $23B market cap it’s fairly easy target given there are already other major investors wanting to see Dorsey out. There already had been movement to buy off super cheap local radio stations and turn them in to conservative media at scale. Republican think tanks understands the immense value of building media channels and they have ton of money sloshing around. I can imagine Twitter with new CEO banning all tweets from Joe Biden because they are all deemed factually incorrect or misleading.
I hate to have anything even vaguely in common with Trump, but there is some sense in this.
The platforms have been shadow-banning (a particularly egregious policy), censoring, and otherwise shaping the content on their sites for a good while now.
At the same time they claim to be merely a 'pipe', conecting content producers, and consumers.
They can't have it both ways.
This 'executive order' is obviously a spiteful, and frankly, unbelievable-that-it's-legal move by this, man, but there is still a germ of truth to it.
For me, tagging content, but still making it generally available, is far less sinister than disappearing it, or only presenting it to profiled users, etc, etc.
Any modern pipe connecting consumers to producers is going to rely on some sort of matching algorithm to map the two. If they just used some sort of dumb FIFO -- user retention and advertising dollars would disappear.
Like it or not, there are political ramifications in that algorithm no matter how hard it tries to be neutral. Even platforms that stay 'hands off' are shaping content and it's almost impossible for them not to while retaining what we've come to expect from a modern platform.
I find it clever that Twitter is not deleting the tweets, but simply adding their opinions about it.
I don't know if you can call "censure" when your messages are still visible to the public, but the "editor-that-is-not-really-an-editor-but-sort-of" simply adds a banner saying "yeah, sure, right."
I can't wait for Trump to protest the flagging, and Twitter to respond that "flagging tweets while letting them visible" is just expressing their free speech. Surely Trump supporters are all in favor of free speech in a free country, right ?
yes we support free speech but if they are editiorializing then section 230 no longer applies to them. we should prosecute them for all the child exploitation and other crimes such as defamation on their platform
and these are all in the last 5 minutes. Selective enforcement doesn't put Twitter in a good light and doesn't seem like something that is in the best interest of their company. Also it is a bad look that their head of site integrity was saying vile stuff about the other half of America.
I really dislike Trump and will definitely vote against him. I don't get the overwhelming support for actions like this from Twitter.
This particular selective moderation is functionally equivalent to Twitter giving their backing to an actual, real-world riot and associated calls to murder cops whilst hiding behind Section 230 in order to avoid any liability. That seems... inadvisable, though obviously popular with the political faction most of their employees come from.
It's not equivalent to that at all. They deleted his Tweet because it explicitly called for gun violence against protestors. That's the ostensible reasoning. Can you see why it might be problematic for the president of the nation to do that?
Twitter has become the example of right vs left. I don't think this tweet "glorifies" violence, but my opinion doesn't matter, only Twitter's. That herein is the problem. It would be interesting if Trump left twitter and made the journalists follow him to some other platform.
It's perfectly okay that you hold the opinion that the tweet didn't glorify violence. Your opinion is objectively wrong, but you're allowed to hold it.
Objectively - how is this advocating for violence? I have not been following this deeply but it seems like there is already serious violence occurring where dozens of people have been charged with probable felonies and buildings have been set on fire? Isn't it the responsibility of the local government to protect private property? It certainly seems like the situation is out of hand when a police station is burned to the ground.
The National guard has been dispatched in similar situations e.g. Rodney King riots. Ostensibly the reason for the deployment is to "ensure peace"
I understand Trump walks a thin line, but in my opinion he is very skilled at never literally advocating for violence or overtly racist actions.
I absolutely do not condone excessive force against anyone, but I fail to understand how this specific tweet is glorifying violence. I'm just trying to understand
The phrase Trump uses is a direct quote from a police chief who was explicitly giving the OK to his police officers to kill protesters.
Much as I hate the over-use of the term "dog whistle" this is the exact thing it means. It has plausible deniability, but to the intended audience it sends a clear message.
This might be helpful for the context. Mark Zuckerburg went to Fox News and Trump tweeted about how Facebook will not do the same. Zuckerburg also had Xi Jinping's book on his desk at some point.
This is great! Now we can have a real conversation about free speach, net neutrality and so on...hopefully Trump will get some some abusive dmca notifications as well. That would be gold!
Hiding the tweet instead of removing it seems like a good compromise to me, but I think this sets a pretty difficult precedent for Twitter. Once you start hiding tweets like this, you are implying that any high profile tweets you don't hide are not classified as glorifying violence. And every time you hide a tweet for glorifying violence, people who supported that tweet will show examples of other tweets which were not hidden to show that it should not have been hidden/removed. Seems like an impossible standard to uphold given the amount of people glorifying violence on their platform.
Too late for that. They have for many years. This is only the most visible form of control.
Corporations spend enormous amounts of money every year on exactly this. I believe lobbying politicians to take their side and the shaping of media coverage has had an even larger impact than hiding a tweet behind a click.
Hopefully they’ll just kick him and his acolytes off the platform. I’ve not met people so drunk on hero worship that they forgo facts and reason as I have when speaking with my trump supporting friends and family. And now he’s trying to sway elections by using misinformation? Openly using the pulpit of the highest office to spread patently false rumors? His fear mongering is harmful and has been violating Twitter’s terms for years but hey I guess it was good for business until recently... still good for them.
I think it's interesting how he's threatening China about HK on one hand, but on the other hand being a lot more literal and aggressive towards his own people.
He seems to be fairly aggressive against other countries:
> Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!
> To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE
He sounds more like a super villain from a comic than a president.
I think he does not know how to handle the moves being made by China to advance its territorial claims in this chaotic moment. That would explain Donald's domestic diversions.
China is pushing outward toward Hong Kong and Taiwan, in simultaneous fashion. In the former, we have the national security law. In the latter, we have new and uncamouflaged threats that China will use military force in Taiwan if it cannot control the island peacefully.
If Trump keeps our attention away from the China problem, it won't affect the stock market and we won't focus on its impacts on the world economy.
Trump is just a big bully who loses courage when he gets pushback. Look at how nice he is to the North Korea guy while constantly bashing and demonizing other leaders of democratic countries.
On the other hand, if he was indeed in their shoes he would have never made it and be deposed near instantly. The only place a Trump can thrive is in a democracy.
Ah so now they are "people"? The people who loot should be arrested and tried. Once you start using force many innocent people will be caught in the crosshairs, this will only further escalate the situation.
This "if I back off, I will show weakness" mentality is precisely what leads so many police officers to use excessive force despite being surrounded by bystanders pleading for mercy on behalf of their fellow citizens.
When the people have to resort to violence to get public servants to do their jobs and relieve the wounds of injustice, the only appropriate response is to give them justice.
Lastly, I remind you that the public did not initiate the use of force in this riotous controversy. A police officer did.
You will show weakness and that weakness will be exploited again. How is that debatable is beyond me.
Police are allowed to use violence, that's their reason for existing, if that violence was misused it can be handled in non-violent way, that's what society is built around. It might not be instant or easy, but that's the difference between civil discourse and terrorism.
It's not OK for the police to terrorize people. If they do so repeatedly, their authority can be revoked. I might remind you that people tried protesting this peacefully a couple of days with the conventional things like signs and chanting and got tear-gassed for their efforts.
This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.
It just seems like you're failing to acknowledge the logical consequences of the idea. If the looters in Minneapolis are conducting a civil war, military force against them is justified and appropriate.
A great many people in this country feel they're already having military force deployed against them and that police are little different from an occupying army, so officially militarizing he conflict would just mean different colors of uniform and cleaner rules of engagement.
As a practical matter, a resort to military force in a domestic theater signals a failure of governance. And to the extent that it is attempted, it will further erode the support of the military for the civilian command; many veterans and active-duty personnel have no faith in the commander-in-chief, and history suggests that in such cases many troops choose to remain in their barracks.
To be sure, insurrection could have dangerous and bloody consequences, but that's why people are rebelling against it. Different people are rebelling for different reasons across the political spectrum; folk on the left are angry about the deaths of people like George Floyd or Breonna Taylor, folk on the right are angry about the death of people like Duncan Lemp or Randy Weaver. There are big differences between different groups because of differing notions about race, property, the social order, history, and so forth, but there's a wide consensus that the status quo is oppressive both at home and abroad and that regular folk feel trampled upon.
Was it not just weeks ago that the President, in response to heavily armed demonstrations in statehouses, was tweeting out 'Liberate Michigan! Liberate Wisconsin! Liberate Virgina - your 2nd amendment rights are under attack!' Now he threatens military force when a different group of people rise up against a different perception of tyranny. There's plainly a big disagreement in this country about what constitutes liberty, where life ends and property begins, and so forth - ideological questions that can be reasoned out to some degree, but highlight quite different basic premises held by people of different birth and experience. History is in many ways the tale of such fundamental disagreements.
Notions of justification and appropriateness are ultimately appeals to a higher authority - civic, judicial, parental, political, or religious. Once the nature and legitimacy of authority itself comes into dispute, differences are resolved by other means. In this historical moment people are choosing to seize authorship of their own lives rather than dully play the roles that were written out for them. Make of that what you wish.
You know, I recall a group of old white guys looting circa 1776. They attacked a boat in Boston Harbor, spilled a bunch of tea. IIRC, that turned out pretty good for a lot of us, not so much for King George.
Would you have preferred that never happened? Sometimes violence and revolution are justified. JFK said "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
The DA could've made this peaceful by simply filing charges. I mean it's a pretty open/shut case here. All 4 police officers need to be thrown behind bars for life. He should be held accountable for the looting/violence because his actions of trying to cover this up and let it just 'go away', led to the escalations.
The people in 1776 didn't loot random places, they only attacked the people abusing them. Also they didn't loot, they just poured it all in the sea to ensure the company suffered losses, they didn't do it to enrich themselves. That is very different from what is happening today, if these people only attacked the police station and left the other places untouched I would have more sympathy for them.
As another modern example, the protests in Hong Kong didn't involve looting. Instead the protesters were very well behaved except against what they protested against, and thus got a lot of support. Looting and destroying random property will just ensure that people will cheer when you get smashed by the police or military.
>if that violence was misused it can be handled in non-violent way
This is demonstrably false for the genre of police crime in question. When the people being murdered react with violence, it is unrealistic to brush that away as evil because those people aren't exclusively using the proper legal channels instead.
Looting and even property damage is different from violence, and when it happens to a business it's different from when it happens to a person.
It's not that you should like or always accept such things, but the unpleasant part of being robbed is the fear of violence, besides which the lost property itself is usually a transient annoyance. Actual violence against your person is a great deal worse.
You're allowed to defend your person with violence. I think you understand quite well that I am drawing a distinction between your person and property, and that while you can certainly resist being robbed to the extent that you feel personally threatened, your property is of distinctly secondary importance. In the case of corporate property, it's of tertiary importance for reasons I hope are obvious.
> Once you start using force many innocent people will be caught in the crosshairs, this will only further escalate the situation.
I don't have a dog in your fight, but you are aware that "arresting them" is literally done by force, right? And from what I hear, whether you send in the National Guard or a militarized police force is primarily a political difference, not so much a question of escalation.
> Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!
And that's bad because...? We can't succumb to lawlessness if people don't respect the law and expect no penalties. If they did the same thing at Area51 and were shot, would you say it's the fault of the guard who swore to protect their post just as the National Guard does? Is the value of civility not greater than a single life?
The 2nd amendment was intended to keep people with a healthy fear of one another. The equation is clear - to take another's property means one must risk something even more valuable; one must risk their life. It's that inequality that preserves order and to try and rebalance the equation by cancelling out the ever-present constants and insist life is above both liberty and prosperity, then you are fundamentally altering the social construct in untenable ways.
So then why don't we just have the police shoot on sight for any suspected crime? Police get called to store theft, just shoot the suspect. Police get called to vandalism, shoot first.
I don't follow the logic that a crime against property should become a capital crime just because it is down by a large(unorganised) group of people. Furthermore, the constitution guarantees a fair right to a jury trial, no matter how egregious, and police or the national guard shooting to kill looters goes against that.
Should drug smugglers be shot too? They are also going against societal order.
A rebellion is different, if you have to deploy the military because people have overpowered the police then it is no longer just a normal crime scene. Normally people would just disperse when that happens, but if they tried to attack the military in the same way they attack the police then what would you expect?
> It can reasonably be interpreted as: "once people are willing to break the law and start looting, it's not long before there are also people shooting"
That's definitely not it.
Walter Headley, Chief of Miami Police during the 1968 Republican National Convention. On the eve of the convention, he gave a press conference where he said this exact phrase. It wasn't an observation that crime begets more crime. It was a threat.
In the general case: yes, absolutely. But in the specific, to make that claim for an individual account requires a high burden of proof. Some people are just stupid or trolls, not necessarily part of an astroturfing operation.
> It doesn't unequivocally say that at all. It can reasonably be interpreted as: "once people are willing to break the law and start looting, it's not long before there are also people shooting"
This is not a reasonable interpretation of the president's words. The previous tweet said that the military is standing by. There can be no mistake: Trump is saying that he will order the US military to kill Americans.
The thing about Trump supporters that baffles me is, they have the common sense to understand when some his claims are false or hurtful, because they make up excuses for them: they're ambiguous, he was just checking if we were paying attention, etc. even when he refuses to back down and absolutely denies the excuses. But they still enjoy having their prejudices, fears and hates validated whenever Trump's tweets align with their view.
Really? "When the looting starts, the shooting starts"... in reference to THUGS (which we all know what he means by that euphemism). Can't tell if you're joking, but either way it's in poor taste.
Well, looting had already started hours before he'd posted this.
That being said - the President of the United States, just stated on one of the largest social media platforms used in the U.S., that citizens of the U.S. are now to be shot. From his words, immediately. It could even be viewed as "they should've already been shot at"
If you don't understand how this is glorifying violence, I don't think you can be made to.
I'm reading the tweet more like 'I will authorize the use of deadly force by the military against the looters'. Although I could see several interpretations
But I think the real thing people aren't able to come to grips with is how Trump uses the media in such a style that gives him all plausible deniability, builds outrage AND builds support. All at once.
I am not in favor of looters, but note that
https://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-19-15.pdf
emphasizes the necessity of graduated response.
I presume state militia units share the doctrine (Figure 2.1) that lethal response is only called for in the face of an armed threat, and that it must be the minimum response necessary.
(found by googling four words: national guard crowd control; 2nd page of results)
Have you looked up the context of that quote? Here is where that quote originated from Miami Police Chief Walter Headley. It’s very clear the implication is the use of law enforcement and police brutality.
“In declaring war on 'young hoodlums, from 15 to 21, who have taken advantage of the civil rights campaign,' Headley said, 'we don’t mind being accused of police brutality.'
'They haven’t seen anything, yet.'
Headley said Miami hasn't been troubled with racial disturbances and looting because he let the word filter down, 'When the looting starts, the shooting starts.'"
Well, it is a private company's site, so I would assume the corporation. If I walked into a Starbucks and started being rude to patrons, I can easily be removed on a whim. Just because it is a place that encourages social interactions does not mean that they have to allow interactions they do not like. I do not see the difference here.
Twitter is used for formal announcements because Trump himself has decided that it is a good place to make them, not because Twitter has placed themselves in that position. Granted, they make like being in that position and it probably benefits them greatly due to the increased ad revenue and engagement, but they can also make the decision that his presence is not worth the vitriol it generates. He can easily choose another avenue (Facebook, Reddit, News media, etc) to make announcements if it is no longer the best choice for him.
I believe this is called a nationalization. And here I was, thinking nothing Trump could pull would be surprising, but actually Trump nationalizing Twitter would do the trick.
So people not liking the head of the country talking about having people shot by the military is "taking themselves way too seriously"? Only one side is bringing death and lethal action into the discussion, not sure why you mentioned "both sides".
It is also fundamental to keep up public order. That's not even close to being mutually exclusive to my statement. Nor is the obvious answer to your second question. You're engaging in hostile, bad-faith argument.
My argument is that looter, who is willingly committing a crime, shouldn't expect people on the other side to stand by. If it's bad faith to keep up public order and guard private property, then so be it.
If looters know that if they don't obey to orders nobody will punish them, that's flat-out enabling such behaviour. People who are willing to loot don't care about niceties, they're just looking for opportunities.
The main problem is that "loot/shoot" could be abused by shooting peaceful protesters and we need safeguards to clearly separate protesters from looters.
However, IMO it's on protesters to single out looters, stop them and, ideally, give them to police. In my country, it's usual for protest organisers (legal or not) to make a point that any bad behaviour will be reported to police and they'll do whatever they can to help out police. Thus police is more relaxed and thugs don't have as many opportunities. If the crowd would be defending thugs.. Well, now that is "glorifying violence" :/
Kind of telling how you insist that protestors "maintain order" of their flock to protect property, when we see the police do no such thing concerning their own when they kill a citizen.
The US president threatened to send the military into a state to shoot looters among a huge, out of control protest that started over a police officer murdering an innocent citizen. Who the fuck is taking this "too seriously" at whom we should "laugh"?
The comment was directed at Jack and Donald, two people taking themselves far too seriously.
However, I am willing to extend the scope of the guffaw to the comment bombers on HN who, themselves, might be staring too hard at the bug in the script, rather than stepping back some distance to consider the architecture.
May peace, wisdom, and a great weekend find all, despite the nitwits.
Twitter was 'kind of' dying before Trump. Now its a pretty nice place with people to follow (Some sort of network effect?). But its too far from being open, requires phone number, lacks 'RSS' and etc.
I wish he moved to Mastodon. Decentralized, open source. It only needs users
Imagine all the devs and supporters of Mastodon trying hard to come up with a pretext why it is okay to block him from the network via technical changes.
It's pretty established that individual Mastodon nodes are able to impose the rules they want and network with whichever Mastodon nodes they want. And many popular Mastodon nodes have stricter rules than Twitter, so it would hardly be surprising if they shunned someone who broke rules on Twitter.
110% I wouldn't federate with any node that allows that sort of posting (from Trump or anyone else). I run a a mastodon node precisely because I don't want to deal with the racism, homophobia, and transphobia so common on twitter.
This how Donald Trump won in the first place. People just won't learn. They can continue bubbling themselves by losing the next election too and get shocked.
This seems like a dubious foundation for Twitter to start with. If Trump controls the National Guard there is a definite public interest in knowing when he is likely to deploy the National Guard. It'd be headline news after the fact; it should be telegraphed beforehand.
Trump might be bluffing, but Twitter can't possibly know.
It's interesting Twitter finally started taking a stand in Trump's last year as president, I wonder if it's because they hope he'll get ousted and they won't have to deal with the backlash from him for too long. Or it's just a marketing ploy, perhaps customer count was falling.
I'm not trying to valorize Jack, but why is it so hard to believe they just finally feel some level of responsibility? While you should always keep an eye out for more banal motivations, at some point one can only tolerate so much.
I agree that Jack is well-intentioned, but I think he's making a huge mistake by choosing a half measure. Twitter's current policy allows Trump to claim he's being silenced while simultaneously allowing him to get his message out to his Twitter followers. It's the worst of both worlds.
Twitter should either let him tweet whatever he wants or ban him.
I think what you're seeing is Twitter building a track record that will allow them to effectively ban him. Take a look at Reddit, they've been following the exact same track for /r/the_donald. They're not interested in trying to make sure Trump stays on twitter, they're just interested in creating the trail of evidence that when they do kick him off they can talk about how incredibly tolerant they were.
At this point I feel like Twitter is _trying_ to push Trump's buttons. 4 years of not censoring Trump's tweets and now all of a sudden they have an ethical obligation? Which straw broke the camel's back?
"Lets spread outrage to lure poor people to go out in the middle of a pandemic and maybe then we could also justify to shoot down some of them also as a bonus. Either the hate, or the virus, will take them."
Is this the plan?
This looks more and more like than if the goal would be moving from saving most people possible to culling people in the undesired groups and focusing in saving people in the correct groups. First targeting the more gullible and vulnerable to make them to try unsafe remedies (that only really ignorant people would fall for), then telling people that masks are useless or harassing people that uses it, and now this.
Communities are dumb by default, but are composed of smart people. I would love to see Spike Lee, or Whoopi Goldberg, or Michelle Obama, or Jay-Z to ask people to be smarter than that and keep themselves chill, cold thinking and safe. Going out in a rioting mass at this moment only does a favor to racist people. Don't fall for that.
1. So suspending rights and allowing cops/the military to be the judge, jury and executioner is somehow okay? These are citizens, no matter how your thinly veiled racism is clearly making you think they're not.
Twitter's problem is that Trump wants to pick a fight, and there's no good way to avoid it.
Trump's base is not on Twitter. Fact checking tweets provides more grist for the outrage mill, and the media which his base consumes amplifies the conflict and not the substance. So the tweets will get worse and worse.
It's impossible to give Twitter good advice, it's a horrible position to be in.
They should honestly just cross the rubicon and suspend his account. Playing both sides like they have will only prolong the conflict. Trump and the outrage mill alike will still find things to interpret as fighting until Twitter just pulls the switch.
Trump chose Twitter as his platform; they never chose him. His tweets have been central to his political presence and his ability to immediately alter the country's (and world's) discourse about current events. It would be humiliating for him to lose that platform, because he embraced it voluntarily.
Except it wasn't glorifying violence. Like at all. He was not saying that if looting continues then police would start shooting, that's a twisted and strained interpretation.
He was stating simply that looting begets violence, meaning that the looting must be stopped before things become more violent. It is a call to action to those who appear content to let the looting run rampant as if it's somehow OK or justified.
In such an escalation both protestors and counter protestors would be shooting, so bringing the situation under control quickly is in the best interest of the protestors and the community as a whole.
It is a clear example of the dangers of allowing Twitter to moderate when such an egregiously bad interpretation of Trump's tweet triggers moderation.
Trump seems to think Twitter is a public service within his domain, rather than a private company with its own agenda & governance. I'm glad Twitter is responding to him, I respect them for the position they're taking.
In addition to his executive order [1], Trump has threatened to delete his Twitter account [2].
I don't think any of those are the same at all. That's like banning someone from using a refrigerator and telling him he can use picnic coolers instead.
As an elected official and part of a giant bureaucracy the US president has a right to make proclamations, and the media has the right to criticize, refute and contradict. Where this gets delicate is with a person who holds enormous power and is literally leading the administration. People want to hear what this leader has to say, and censoring/hiding/second guessing what this person says is arguably undemocratic.
Trump is irrelevant here, it could be any elected official or administration leader. Pompeo or the US military could be considered to 'glorify violence' with their statements, does this give Twitter the right to hide their tweets? This is a free speech issue at the heart of democracy, and Twitter keep overstepping their S230 remit.
But twitter is a private business or isn't it? Twitter users must agree to Twitter TOS isn't it?
Your freedom of speech is also Twitter's freedom of speech and if you don't like that someone uses their freedom to calls you on your bullshit - then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .
POTUS has whitehouse.gov if he thinks that private business does not let him say what he want's to say.
Section 230 'hands off' service provision rather than editorializing is the issue here as well as rights to free speech whoever you are.
The fact Trump enrages most people is a separate distraction. This is a downward slope to more censorship by large unelected global corporations and their political proclivities and goals.
I don't think it's fair to call this censorship because of the amount of transparency twitter is showing. Something like shadow banning people is probably inappropriate most of the time, but now that trump signed the eo twitter is responsible for the content on their platform, so they've got to protect themselves from legal liability.
No, a private company putting up a warning the that President of the United States is advocating the execution of protesters for looting is not censorship.
I don't have time to explain to someone for the umpteenth time how this is different, and even within the "well golly Twitter is a big company, maybe it's a public utility" argument, the president is a much more unique position and situation than the average user.
The President could talk about how he thinks we should execute our fellow citizens, or call our political rivals skanks, or tell us that Coronavirus will magically disappear by Easter, or that hydroxychloroquine is a miracle cure, all by standing up his own microblog platform and blast it from S3 or Azure. He could hold his press conferences and bullshit to the whole nation, or set up email distros... all things he has done or could do.
Please, for the love of society and sanity, stop throwing around 1984 references every time someone shuts someone else up. Read the goddamn book.
Exactly. Not to mention that what Trump tweeted about has long been the single workable solution to widespread looting.
Protests are fine. Mayhem and larceny, however, are not. Violence against lawbreakers is absolutely enshrined as acceptable, and that isn't going to change for the foreseeable future. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with Trump's tweet, certainly nothing overriding the First Amendment.
Further, Twitter is absolutely in the wrong to portray itself as passing some kind of absolute judgement on the President's views, and in fact that it is above the Presidency. It is NOT a neutral platform.
Twitter must be a victim of the toilet paper shortage because they just wiped their ass with Trump’s executive order.[0]
Jokes and politics aside, is this a smart business move on Twitter's part? I'm curious how they envision this playing out. I'm really not sure what I expect to happen; Trump may be a fool, but he's stubborn and persistent. There are also politicians on both sides of the fence who are at odds with social media right now--and often Silicon Valley in general. (See: encryption)
I have no doubt Twitter put a lot of thought into this. Does anyone have insight into what Twitter expects to happen? Also, what would they expect to happen if they opted not to label/hide/whatever some of Trump's tweets?
Part of the reason people hate FB and don't use it, is that their leadership is afraid to make risky decisions for the benefit of their users and the quality of their platform.
He's not moving anywhere and any Twitter controversy gets more people to tweet about that controversy... Until he forces a significant part of his followers to leave, it's not a bad situation for Twitter to be in.
> Until he forces a significant part of his followers to leave, it's not a bad situation for Twitter to be in.
That would force them to stop complaining, and there is a lot of value, and money to be made, in whining all the time and playing the victim constantly. So it won't happen.
Or worse, in terms of discourse. I suppose twitter is awful for something as complex as political debate, but removing an entire half of a political spectrum would only serve to further divide our country, something which the real demagogues of the world would love to capitalize on.
They're not half of a political spectrum. I can get on fine with most conservatives despite disagreeing with them, but Trump's most vocal supporters are part of a cult of personality rather than a complex polity. The divisions are already there, all the appeals to reason and fellow feeling have been exhausted.
Removing Trump would not remove entire half. (Assuming there's even a half) Some would move, majority would be just fine with occasional screenshots from another source, and lots would find a different celebrity to follow.
I would suggest that maybe Hillary Clinton's campaign and candidacy alienated many people in the center. In my mind, that seems to be the simplest explanation for the existence of Obama-Trump voters.
I think the Obama-Trump voters were a result of 8 years of partly empty promises. (He did a lot, but people hoped for much more. Yes we can / yes we scan.)
He could, but it would be a bit like Reddit/voat situation for an independent platform. Otherwise where can he go for remotely comparable publicity? IG/FB? I don't see FB working with his style of communication and it's not as easy to embed in news as Twitter. Ig would be closer.
People on Twitter are mostly not voting for Trump. Trump voter demographics are roughly white male rural middle-income evangelical non-college-educated over-50, and this does not overlap much with Twitter user demographics (80% millennials).
So Trump has nothing to lose on Twitter, so he can't lose. The goal for his tweets is to make a big story, and Twitter intervening makes it an even bigger one.
While the demographics non-overlap is true, it's not an insignificant number listening to him either. But he gets something else from Twitter: famous (verified) people involvement which amplifies what he's saying, and the profile being public to the world in a trivially news-embeddable form. I believe it matters and if he got a separate blog-like site where he can post, the reach and reuse of his posts would not be even close to what it is now. (and he'd possibly be less motivated without seeing the number of likes)
So far every legal analysis of the order draft I've seen is "it's not enforcible, mentioned agencies fought not to regulate things like that, looks like it was written just to appease him". Once the regulation is realistic, (likely needing senate involvement) Twitter may be worried.
It does impact the stock, and that's likely a part of the reason it took Twitter so long to take even the smallest action against his violations of their rules. The President is using the threat of allowing social media companies to be held liable for their content, as retaliation against Twitter. The stock was down 4.5% yesterday and is trading lower in the pre-market session.
To be honest I actually think this has a lot more to do with the fact that Dorsey has been an absent CEO. The only person who really has the authority to pick this fight is Dorsey and he hasn't been engaged enough in running twitter to care. This was observed through all sorts of side-effects where Twitter was basically failing to innovate for the past few years. Now the activists got involved and forced Dorsey into actually running the company he's finally in a position to pay attention and act on these things.
Hiding = processing, so Twitter generates new content by filtering parts of the original content. Therefore, Twitter is a publisher and should be held responsible for all of its content. This should have been a no-brainer.
What kind of utterly ridiculous policy is hiding posts for “glorifying violence?” So if I write a post about the Bangladeshi independence war, saying how great it was that we beat those damn Pakistanis, my post would get hidden?
So if I say it was great that India came in with guns blazing in 1971, killing thousands of Pakistani soldiers to liberate Bangladesh, that is a view that should be censored?
Because violence is one of the fundamental political and sociological forces in the world, and preventing people from talking about it in the abstract--as distinguished from targeted threats of violence to specific people--is completely off the reservation. As a Bangladeshi, I have a country because people like my uncle went to war and killed a bunch of Pakistanis. I bet Polish people are glad that Americans gunned down millions of Germans in the 1940s. Steven Spielberg's "Munich" was an amazing account of Operation Wrath of God--glorifying the assassination of terrorists that killed 11 members of Israel's 1972 Olympic team. Violence is often a proper subject of glorification.
In practice, I strongly suspect the Twitter isn't actually applying the policy as written. Instead, they're applying the policy selectively, based on ideological biases.
So is twitter going to hide tweets that have incited and glorified the riots in the first place? I haven’t seen consequences for the antifa and DSA accounts that are responsible for these riots. It certainly seems like Twitter has a double standard.
Oh, but it is. It is when the prominent troll is also POTUS.
You and Twitter may want it to not be politics... But unfortunately both doing nothing and doing something are political moves by Twitter HQ, I'm afraid.
There's nothing preventing Trump for saying 'I made a hasty remark in a moment of anger, and will maintain a more thoughtful and respectful tone in the future.' It's inarguable that Twitter has been very, very accommodating of him and tried the hands-off approach for a long time while explaining their reasons for doing so to their other users.
Selectively fact checking things that are arguably opinions rather than factual claims in the first place, using flimsy evidence, whilst leaving actual factual misinformation to spread is definitely picking sides.
Not fact checking is only picking a side once you have decided to fact check. Before all of this twitter could claim to be a medium of communication. There isn't implicit trust that something is true because it is written on paper, posted on a billboard, or appears on TV. By choosing to mark tweets as true or false, they are no longer just a medium of communication. We can now imply that if twitter does not mark a tweet as false, they are endorsing that tweet as true.
There has to be a line somewhere, otherwise the implication is that nobody can be held correct by fact checking. Snopes and Politifact do a pretty good job, IMO. I think this just touches on the fact that the GOP and Trumpists in general are more likely to engage in distorting the truth or outright fabricating lies.
or perhaps you use it against the most egregious offences by users with a high number of followers. not much point fact checking my tweets because at worst I could misinform 6 people, perhaps if it was retweeted a lot it would then be fact checked. Trump's verbal/typed diarrhea gets everywhere.
Sounds like maybe you should take the hint. It's not "taking sides" to point out that you're glorifying violence if you as the president are threatening to deploy military force against protestors.
I've done my own share of protesting (living in Eastern Europe forces you to do that sometimes) and we never resorted to looting. If we had done so I would have expected the powers that be to take some counter-measures that would have involved more than strong verbal reprimands, yes.
If by 'we' you're referring to the entirety of Eastern Europe, Russia has a well known history of employing agent provocateurs in order to affect protests or other movements. This isn't isolated to just Eastern Europe either, considering Italy has a history of this as well.
Needless to say there's also been some reporting and concerns of provocateurs among the protesters here as well using it as an excuse to inflame riots or start looting.
I live in Romania, not Russia, and you're correct, the powers that we protested against also employed agent provocateurs. They were easy to spot though (youngish, like 17-18, looked like they belonged to some football ultra movements) and the other protesters took almost immediate action against them (isolating them, mostly).
You may find this thread interesting, as it concerns the allegation that the property destruction taking place yesterday (edit: Wednesday - I just remembered it's already Friday) was initiated by a police officer. https://twitter.com/AricToler/status/1266196890649088000
The looting in Minneapolis is a) rather ancillary to the larger protests against the police, b) an American tradition going back to colonial times, and c) a mix of opportunism and antipathy to US hypercapitalism. A few small stores have been damaged but the destruction has mainly been targeted against corporate retail outlets.
Different places have different forms of political outcry. Protest by destruction of commercial property was a well-known component of American colonial resistance to Britain. (Consider the Boston Tea Party, for example.)
Personally I have never been part of a riotous protest, but in an academic sense I believe that destruction of commercial property does more to force a change in police activity than destruction of police cars and other public property (things that ultimately belong to the people themselves).
You can bet that there are more powerful people in the business community there, than on the police force.
I don't believe this is actively in the mind of most rioters, but I think it is part of the reason that rioting has a major impact on American politics.
You're right, I mixed the two. In any case I think my point still stands; in most European countries both would be addressed with police batons and in case of violence rubber bullets and tear gas. From his tweet I don't think he was thinking about rubber bullets.
No it wouldn't. Most cases of looting in Europe are just forgotten about because it's done by minorities in countries like France or UK and it's a controversial topic to talk about so police and governments would rather just pretend it doesn't happen.
Shooting rubber bullets at rioters and looters is standard practice pretty much everywhere in democracies, and in non-democracies they tend to go straight to lethal ammo.
He attacks people on Twitter and pretends he can literally do what he wants without consequences — whether from the government and rule of law or in this case, a private company.
You’re getting downvoted for a fair call out. There’s a deeper rot in this country where a select group believes freedom and fairness is something they can own and define, screw reality or objective fact. Anything else is biased and a conspiracy paid for by Soros, Obama, Hillary, Muslims, Hispanics, and the “swamp”.
If Twitter sucess to fight for the truth without exposing bias they will be the most remarkable heroes of the 2001 century and could begin a whole change of behavior of websites regarding fake news and hate speech
That's fun. Twitter did shut up foreign presidents a couple of times before, but I guess this is the first time with the president of USA. That's ballsy as fuck. Impertinently, even. Totally not ok to do, but fun to watch.
censoring the commander in chief is an active act of aggression against the american people. not only should we repeal section 230, we should view twitter as a hostile power.
we should study twitters deep ties to the saudis and china. and jack should be investigated. they also should no longer be protected by section 230 and therefore should be prosecuted for the child exploitation they host
Don't you have press conferences in your country? You know, where a leader or political figure can express their policy decisions without having to abide by private website ToS.
section 230 was a special provision that was passed to protect the fledgling internet 25 years ago. i don’t think it’s crazy to think it needs updating or repeal.
I don't see the problem, just reject the special privs for twitter and treat it like a publisher. It should be fairly simple, either you do not moderate at all (and your not responsible for whatever people say on your platform) or you moderate and therefore you publish. It aint that hard. Twitter clearly moderates, that's fine, so it should be treated as a publisher, not as a public 'facility'. Simple.
Or perhaps we should take a step back and design a new set of rules that can allow Twitter and other companies to moderate without having to be responsible for the content. I feel like there’s a false dichotomy being portrayed here that’s unnecessary.
This kind of logic makes life hopelessly complex. It's a very simple rule that does not need 'special adjustments'. Just stick to the rules we agreed upon and face the facts. Twitter is now a publisher. You cannot bend the rules everytime you don't agree with them.
So all platforms that have moderators (reddit, 4chan, FB, etc) are considered publishers now? What would actually be defined as a platform in your model?
4chan hardly moderates. If Twitter wants to cater to people that want some kind of filtering just allow those people to enable a filter. Problem solved.
A platform should not moderate at all. Only remove clearly illegal stuff. For the rest, offer filters for people that want to have them (or better, design a protocol: <content-label type="trump">) so it can be built into browsers.
That way you can have both: free speech and optional filtering. And you can be a platform instead of a publisher.
(edit: I added some elaboration on a possible solution )
But they aren't generating the content, users are. Why should they be responsible for what you say? And it's their platform, why are you entitled to it insofar they can't moderate?
Can Amazon not kick people off their servers without being responsible as a publisher? At what point can a company no longer decide what happens within their ecosystem?
I thought we appreciated freedom of speech in the US, and that includes freedom to ignore speech.
> I thought we appreciated freedom of speech in the US, and that includes freedom to ignore speech.
That's precisely the problem: freedom of speech.
It's starting to seem pretty clear that people with certain views are getting moderated, censored, sanctioned, and generally have their speech policed and restricted on Twitter.
People with different views are not being policed in the same way, even when they violate the same rules (see for example the Iranian president who never got moderated despite tweeting genocide ethnic cleansing threats on a regular basis).
Freedom of speech is precisely the issue, precisely what's at stake here.
Twitter is restricting the freedom of speech of right-wing users, then pretending they're just a neutral user-content platform.
They can't have it both ways.
Personally, I think free speech protections should apply to big platforms like Twitter, or else we risk the de-facto elimination of free speech in our time, since the contemporary town square happens to be owned by a private corporation.
In fairness, Trump's tweets are not about actually doing anything, they are more about getting votes. So arguing the feasibility of suggestions outlined in a Trump tweet kind of misses the point.
No. This man holds the office of the POTUS. There are certain responsibilities that come with it. The officeholder cannot make deadly threats publicly and expect everyone to just shrug it off.
You seem to be arguing throughout this thread that the President's comment is akin to saying "red sky at morning, sailors take warning." As if he's predicting a rain storm. But he's not just some guy at the marina, he's the President. It's also useful to look at what he isn't saying. He isn't calling for an investigation into the death or the lack of prosecution or the racial divide in the country or acknowledging the rage and anger of the non-white community that keeps being treated differently from the white community. His followers will hear this statement, "when the looting starts the shooting starts" as a dog whistle call "it's OK to start shooting." Or further, "I expect you to put this slave revolt down."
But again, it's an observation, not a statement of fact, nor a declaration. "When a black person is killed is when the looting starts" How is that statement any different that what Trump said? As much as you want to editorialize and censor, you can't twist a statement to fit your narrative.
It was a message, directly to law enforcement, that he thinks it’s okay for them to shoot protestors so long as there is looting. I can’t see how anyone would see that as anything other than a crime against humanity
No, I don't think it was. A plain reading of the quote does not direct anyone, to do, anything. It is an observation. Just like it was your observation (and opinion) that it said something different.
The questions are this: Who is right? Who decides that?
Honestly, I can't figure out what the tweet means. "Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts." From a plain reading I think he's saying when the feds take control they will shoot looters.
I think it means that Trump doesn't understand that he can't just march the Army in there at his sole discretion.
But if the situation escalated to the point that federal troops were needed (at the request of the state), then yes, there is almost certainly going to be shooting. You don't expect that a stern look from the Army is going to do the job.
Twitter. It is a private company. If he doesn't like Twitter, rather than complain about Twitter on Twitter he could move to Gab where most of his followers are.
I don't know why you're getting down voted. Trump's words are a quote of someone who believed that "... it’s okay for them to shoot protestors so long as there is looting."
Trump is very much saying he believes looter should be shot.
To be clear here: Looting is not a capital offense. It's stuff. No TV/car/stereo is worth killing a person over. You have insurance for these things (hopefully).
Though laws vary widely in the US, in CA the punishment is about a year in county jail, give or take:
To be clear here: it's not just "stuff." In innumerable ways, the looting and rioting is resulting in loss of material items that cannot be replaced. Case in point: https://twitter.com/wakiyan7/status/1266350546249629699
So you chose to conflate the loss of irreplaceable Native American artifacts and historical records with the loss of a life, on a thread discussing material items?
I get that this is emotional, but that was not warranted. The rioters have destroyed the historical records of a Native American tribe and I'd like to think that they've suffered enough. The point was to show that it's not only cheap Target things being lost here.
To be clearer still: Minnesota does not have stand your ground / castle doctrine laws - you can't protect "material items" with deadly force, no matter how valuable or irreplaceable. Instead, there is are Duty to retreat laws.
I have recently looked into conceal carry, and many states DO NOT allow you to shoot someone who tells you they want your wallet. If they do not seem like a threat to your life, you are not allowed to use lethal force. Obviously, things can later be argued in court.
I was not arguing in favor of shooting anyone. I was simply pointing out that dismissing the destruction in generality as "stuff" is in error and minimizing the effect. Don't lose objectivity in the face of tragedy.
"During her own presidential campaign, Ms. Klobuchar faced continued protests, as well as some calls to drop out of the race from local black leaders in Minneapolis, after news reports found numerous faults in the prosecution of a black teenager named Myon Burrell while Ms. Klobuchar was the prosecutor."
I'm going to give Trump a C grade on communication on this one. A better Tweet would have been something like, "Minneapolis is why we need the second amendment and stand your ground laws." Followed by calls to Congress on nationwide concealed carry reciprocity, stand your ground, etc.
I have taken down this same argument you made elsewhere on this topic and I ask that in addition to your not arguing about something that didn’t happen and how you hypothesize people you cannot name would react, that you make the argument just once and not paper all over a topic with exact copies of it.
I think it’s a threat directed at private gun-owning citizens that would be willing to take the law into their own hands. I’m old enough to remember the L.A. riots, where the police essentially peace’d out and let the resulting storm “work” itself out. It was God-awful for everyone involved, from the looters to the business owners to the innocent bystanders watching idly by.
Trump is warning the looters that they are taking their lives in their own hands, not just against the police, but against other private citizens protecting their property.
"a threat directed at" I'm not trying to be pedantic here, forgive me, but I reiterate that it was an observation. Any meaning beyond that is your own. The statement stands as it is, any interpretation by Twitter is editorializing.
That’s a bubble of reality distortion surrounding the public facing messaging of the man. That is not the expectation for the Office of the President. He won. He got to the top office.
This is my comment on the other HN thread about this:
> The phrase was used by Miami's police chief, Walter Headley, in 1967, when he addressed his department's "crackdown on ... slum hoodlums," according to a United Press International article from the time.
> Headley, who was chief of police in Miami for 20 years, said that law enforcement was going after “young hoodlums, from 15 to 21, who have taken advantage of the civil rights campaign. ... We don't mind being accused of police brutality."
> The National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence found that Headley's remarks and policing policies had been a significant factor in sparking the riots.
> Headley died four months after the riots. The Times in its obituary noted his policies had caused "growing resentment" among black Miami residents.
Our President fully understands the gravity of those words. This is what he wanted to say. This is what he meant. This is what he believes. This is WHO HE IS.
I think that you’re right about Trump’s motive. It’s all a PR game to keep him in power, even and especially when he says nasty stuff. If you try to argue with it as if it was reason then it will be like punching a cloud.
Under that mental model, it’s hard to predict how this will play out. I don’t know how this Twitter action will affect the psychology of his supporters. It will be interesting to watch!
I think he would have done so if he could. In the end the US president has a lot more power then president's in other democratic counties but still he's constrained by the law.
On the contrary, the way the US constitution works is the government has no power at all, except granted by the constitution or laws passed by congress that are constitutional. The question is - which law empowers him to do so?
You are both mistaken. Laws are written by people, and the constitution is a piece of paper. The legislative body that passed these laws just heard arguments from the House that the President attempted to extort a bribe from a foreign allied government using taxpayer dollars, and on the other side they heard the President argue that not only is he within his rights to refuse handing over any and all evidence of that crime, it's not even a crime because if he believes it will benefit his election, and he believes his election will help the American people, ispo facto he cannot be removed from office.
The Senate agreed with the President and decided not to remove him for this conduct. Not only that, he cannot be indicted for said conduct because the Justice Department has a policy stating they cannot indict the President. For instance in the Mueller investigation they documented no fewer than 10 instances of obstruction of justice by the President, a federal crime. The lead investigator in that case also testified under oath that the President was not truthful in his answers to investigator questions.
This has emboldened the President to argue in court that not only is he immune from indictment, he's immune from any and all investigation.
So the question is not which laws constrain the President, nor is it which laws empower the President. At this point after all that, the question is: "Who is going to do this for the President, and who is going to stop him?"
Looting is a reasonable form of protest? George Floyd’s death is horrific, and I pray justice is served, but communities cannot be destroyed in pursuit of that justice.
Some of this reminds me of Koreatown during the LA riots. If authorities don’t step in, militia’s will rise up to defend their families and livelihood. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots#Destruc... I think it’s reasonable that a community would defend itself when attacked, but when the National Guard is purposed for that protection, why shouldn’t they be called in?
Parent stated that the military was being called in to shoot protesters. No one has ever suggested that action or would consider it reasonable. Implying that was what anyone else was suggesting is insulting and disingenuous.
The severity of the looting relates to how justified the use of violence against it is. It obviously does not relate to how justified the glorification of that violence is.
The Boston Tea Party was a deliberate provocation. If the protesters here are trying to incite a violent revolution, I suppose that's their right in some sense, but all of us who don't want a revolution have a right to be put out by it.
Replying to krapp: violent armed protest protected by the constitution is explicitly targeted at the government in response to loss of freedom. That may be justification for attacking a police station, but not local businesses.
Sure, but in a country where the bar for legitimate protest is set by Constitutional law at "mass armed violence," everything else seems like fair game.
Using the dog-whistle racist term "thugs" (in all caps, no less) and proclaiming that you are going to shoot people is escalation of violence. Notice not one other public leader is talking about shooting people-- in fact, the mayor and other local officials are expressing empathy for the rioters and pleading with them for peace.
Trump knows this language will only provoke people and make the situation worse (or he ought to, and certainly any competent, relevant advisor would). He absolutely is glorifying violence.
It's long past time to regulate social media like a phone company, natural monopoly, or common carrier. The DOJ needs to break them up for violating the public trust, then limit their ability to refuse service to law abiding citizens moving into the future. Government has every right to force companies to be neutral platforms through regulation. It's time to revoke/enforce section 230, especially the "good faith" clause.
Anyone who says that "Twitter is a private company that can refuse anyone" has never ran an actual company. There are plenty of rules against companies discriminating. That argument is the same argument used by Democrats against the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 which a Republican majority congress passed (82% of republicans voted yes).
Remember when this forum was up in arms about NET NEUTRALITY? Remember when the big bad ISP was going to censor you? Remember when all the sites went black because thats what the ISPs would do? Now the sites that went black are all committing the censoring. All the sites that went black track every movement you make online. Who needs DNS when you have outgoing link tracking and like buttons on every page.
Social media is about to be regulated. Its about time.
You can have a monopoly and not abuse your power, or you can have your monopoly broken up. The Sherman Antitrust act still exists. Law still exists. There are already multiple anti-trust investigations underway by the states, and the DOJ.
There is bipartisan support to break them up. Ask Warren.
Section 230 lets providers like social media companies publish user-generated content without having to review the content first. For example, if you libel someone on Twitter, that is your problem, not Twitter's problem. If you take away Section 230 protections, social media as we know it probably dies. Instead of a real-time pulse on what people are thinking, you'll just get what looks like the letters to the editor section of a newspaper. People who are already celebrities will not be censored, but you will be because you're too small to be worth the risk of being liable for. That means any grassroots political movement, no matter what side of the ideology spectrum it falls on, has no place to start. Be careful what you wish for.
I'll also point out that if Section 230 protections are removed, Donald Trump loses more than anyone. Nobody is going to carry his messages if they can be sued for their content. He'll have to make his own Twitter. His press conferences won't be broadcast live because the liability is too high. It is hilarious to me that Donald Trump is probably the largest beneficiary of Section 230 and he's the one that wants to remove it.
Section 230 is what lets the little guy exercise his or her right to free expression. It gives them a platform where they have an opportunity to let their opinion rise to the top. It saves them from having to buy their own printing press and build their own audience. Nobody is going to buy you a printing press if they're liable for everything you say. So what happens is you don't get to talk anymore.
"We start from a position of assuming that people do not intend to violate our Rules. Unless a violation is so egregious that we must immediately suspend an account, we first try to educate people about our Rules and give them a chance to correct their behavior. We show the violator the offending Tweet(s), explain which Rule was broken, and require them to remove the content before they can Tweet again. If someone repeatedly violates our Rules then our enforcement actions become stronger. This includes requiring violators to remove the Tweet(s) and taking additional actions like verifying account ownership and/or temporarily limiting their ability to Tweet for a set period of time. If someone continues to violate Rules beyond that point then their account may be permanently suspended."
Somewhere a counter was just incremented. It's going to be amusing if Twitter management simply lets the automated system do its thing. At some point, after warnings, the standard 48-hour suspension will trigger. Twitter management can simply simply say "it is our policy not to comment on enforcement actions".
They've suspended the accounts of prominent people many times before.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions