It's strange that they picked such a poor way to justify the ban when they could have made a significantly stronger case, and in doing so could have convinced millions more people that they are trying their best to apply policies evenly. For example, I have a hard time imagining why they chose to specifically quote "American Patriots", as if that somehow contributes to the straw that broke the camel's back. Perhaps they have a strategic reason for going about this how they did, but I think it will have some negative 2nd/3rd order effects. that they haven't yet realized.

I imagine we are still only in the early days of the conflicts that are to come in this sphere (and I'd include just about every company and political faction in them, unfortunately).

(Also because apparently I have to state this explicitly in every comment related to Trump: I do not support Trump, his supporters, the recent events that occurred at the capitol, etc etc)

Person says bad things to whip up a mob - Twitter unsure to take him seriously or literally.

Mob actually materializes and several people die - Twitter sure they now have to take him literally

After he basically commanded them to "Stop the Steal", I said that Facebook and Twitter would ban him. I also said that nuclear war was also on the table. If he is so unAmerican that he would actually tell his mob to attack the Capitol buildings, he really doesn't care about America at all. Being as petulant as he is, nuclear war is very much on the table. That's how crazy this situation is.

I believe tribalism is a vestigial trait most harmful to modern humanity and it should be discouraged whenever possible. We have changed our environment faster than evolution can keep up, so we are going to have to use our conscious minds to compensate if we are to stand a chance at long-term survival. This needn't be limited to genetic modification. Society can be modified, and it starts with one mind.

I think since he cowered so hard during his concession, he's done playing tough guy. He'll hand out medals and pardons and then run away.

I can't believe how much like "Animal Farm" this whole thing played out. Almost verbatim with the constant attempts to scapegoat Snowball/Antifa.

Although given that 80% of republicans think the election was stolen (and 40% of the population), this is just the start. I don't think Civil War is an exaggeration any longer, unless the Biden admin clamps down on the armed insurrection boiling over in the reddest parts of the country.

Better to try and understand the complex psycho-social-economic factors that lead to this situation. Without a clear understanding of how a problem came to be, how can it be fixed?

Judging from what Pelosi has been doing, you are not alone with that concern. I hope there are enough people in between him and the actual button that would decide his order was unlawful.

> High-ranking national-security officials have spent the last 24 hours scrambling to figure out how to keep their commander-in-chief, Donald Trump, from inciting further violence at home, spilling national secrets, or sparking last-minute confrontations with international foes.

> The concerns in the upper echelons of the administration’s national-security community range from fears inside the Pentagon that the president will do or say something that effectively throws the U.S. into a military confrontation with another country to anxieties in the intelligence apparatus that Trump will divulge classified intelligence on his way out, according to four officials who spoke with The Daily Beast about the matter. All requested to remain anonymous in order to speak more openly about the discussions.

> "This isn’t a hypothetical anymore," said one senior administration official. "This is real. What happened yesterday changed the calculus. People are concerned about [the president’s] state of mind."

https://www.thedailybeast.com/after-capitol-riot-trump-offic...

I find it surprising that they enabled the account again at all after the 6th.

I suspect two factors went into the calculus this time: he has proved himself desperately dangerous AND he's got less than 2 weeks left in his term.

Yelling "fire" in an open field vs a packed cinema are obviously are easy to interpret. There's a whole bunch of grey area in the middle.

Trump is the ONLY reason I'm on Twitter. There is literally no other benefit I gain from being on Twitter. Also, people only ever respond to me if I tweet against Trump's policies. If I say anything about science or tech or humanity or art or say some interesting ideas, nobody listens to me. Nobody retweets me. Nobody follows me. It's like talking to a wall.

His term is over, and my reason to be on Twitter is over.

So from Twitter's standpoint they don't have much to lose by doing the right thing and banning him with only a little more than a week left.

If they had banned him 2 years ago they'd have lost 2 years of my ad revenue.

This is correct. The type of person that stormed the capitol will perceive this as an escalation. I’m sure that’s not what we need, but I’m also sure that there is no good way out of this mess.

Who cares? The type of person that stormed the Capitol has shown they are impervious to reality. Time to stop the appeasement.

Never let a good crises go to waste.

It's clear that people are trying to make this into a cultural moment where you either distance from / renounce Trump (which is almost costless given the immanency of his term's end) or you're treated as an unrepentant enemy of civil society. We're seeing pro-Trump hubs being systematically purged in various ways from a variety of platforms right now, and the symbolic value of moves like this is what's paramount.

Will these bans carry over and will they start to affect any who oppose the bans or simply parrot what he says elsewhere?

Will these spawn new social media sites or will they damage existing ones or do both? This is all so fascinating and frightening at the same time. People may want to claim there is no government interference but these sites have for many years recently reacted to the threat of it which in turn effectively is what is happening now.

I am just find this all so bizarre but I think these sites figure they can act now simply because in a short time he will not be in his position of power and lose the bully pulpit which he can use without them

And everyone was totally okay with Dems storming the Senate 2 years ago during the Kavanaugh hearings. Twitter allowed all the Antifa accounts to stay on their site. Even the Iranian ruler who calls for assassination is allowed.

Anti-Kavanaugh protestors did the exact same thing 2 years ago. Maxine Watters, AOC, Ayyana Presley all did the same. Madonna literally said she would blow up the White House.

Double standards + cognitive dissonance.

However, suppose that Bill Clinton, George Bush, or Barack Obama had declined to attend the inauguration of there predecessors. That would surely trigger a crisis worthy of de-platforming. We’ve become somewhat numb to this sort of thing.

I guess my second draft would have said, "We’ve allowed DJT a platform because he is the President of the United States. In light of all that he has said on Twitter over the last 10+ years, though, he is guilty of inciting hate and violence among his followers. [Cite myriad tweets and cases.] We were going to wait until he left office to suspend his account. In light of his most recent tweets indicating that he would not attend the inauguration, we think it prudent to move up this timeline..."

The middle management & line workers of Twitter can monetize their small Twitter stock portfolios pretty quick without shifting the market all that much. Jack, on the other hand, would take a major hit if he tried to sell off his.

Dumping him now allows Twitter to virtue signal and avoid looking like an enabler of literal violence, all while giving up virtually nothing in return.

Kind of like how his cabinet members are now resigning. No big loss for them, as they’ll be out of a job shortly anyway. Might as well "stand up to him" while they still have the opportunity to reap political kudos.

So perhaps it is a huge stretch to some, but we need to remember it is also not a stretch at all to many, especially given the recent events. Therein lies the danger.

But that was my immediate first thought, and likely that of a large number of folks.

The full comments in the post detail similar reasoning.

Update: As many people have pointed out (and as the Twitter post mentions), the 2nd tweet could also be interpreted as emphasizing that it would be safe to commit further violence at an event that he won't be attending. This is certainly a much more grave concern than the one I mentioned above.

But now as I write this, I do realize, he didn't need to announce his no-show 12 days beforehand, he can just quietly not show up on the day, so this tweet does seem to be more of a signal to... well, incredibly, it's a signal for the members of his cult that they can attack the inauguration!

What excuse do the Democrats have for threatening another impeachment when 10 days isn’t even enough time to follow the process to completion? Not to mention that such a thing would no doubt rile up Trump supporters.

Part of me agrees with you that there is no point at this point and it'll just anger his base. The other part remembers just how much power the president has and thinks at this point worrying what his base thinks is pointless. Anyone left can't really get any more riled up.

Encouraging a violent attack on the US Capitol building seems like a pretty good excuse to impeach.

What are your feelings on someone encouraging people to join a BLM protest that ended in violence? Are they culpable?

What are your thoughts on the mayor of a major city allowing people to create an "autonomous zone" that ended with two murders? Are they responsible?

So much of the argument against Trump hinges on "he knew this would happen."

Secondly, the real point of impeachment probably isn't to remove, so much as it is to give the Senate a credible threat to use to rein Trump in. I opposed impeachment (both times --- on the politics, not the merits) but seen in that light it makes a lot of sense.

Worse, the old tenant has the nuclear codes.

I wanted to ask what if something big happens now, like an ISIS attack, but I suppose this administration has been so dumb the last 4 years, someone else lower in the chain of command can deal it it.

On the topic of chain of command, from Obama's latest book:

> What I was quickly discovering about the presidency was that no problem that landed on my desk, foreign or domestic, had a clean, 100 percent solution. If it had, someone else down the chain of command would have solved it already. Instead, I was constantly dealing with probabilities: a 70 percent chance, say, that a decision to do nothing would end in disaster; a 55 percent chance that this approach versus that one might solve the problem (with a 0 percent chance that it would work out exactly as intended); a 30 percent chance that whatever we chose wouldn’t work at all, along with a 15 percent chance that it would make the problem worse.

Actions have consequences.

Context matters.

I'm guessing (well, this is what I would do) that Twitter followed the trail of likes/retweets of those Trump tweets, and perhaps it revealed an overwhelming surge in number of additional tweets/accounts that were seriously planning to organize violence, and they wanted to stop it before it continued to propagate.

Read this carefully. They are looking at the actual response to these tweets. Not their own personal feelings. The actual effects on other Twitter users.

It’s a correct (late) call, but using these quotes will read to those who disagree as "we have nothing we just want to shut him down" which is unfortunate.

The actions of his followers this week have finally tipped the scales too far.

This smells like some extremely transparent opportunism after all they‘ve earned with 45.

it is odd to me

Without the important balance between left and right, it’s going to be a free for all on both sides, with each amping each other up to retreat further and further into extreme parts of their respective sides. Twitter just inserted a nuclear bomb into the already delicate fault lines between left and right.

Words are never in a vacuum. The way they are interpreted matters. And it's false to claim you can't control how people are going to interpret what you say. Especially not when you've spent years training particular subgroups to interpret things exactly the way they are.

This move is long overdue. Trump has been using this sort of language to promote stochastic violence for many years. It's not to Twitter's credit that they had to see the Capitol building overrun by insurrectionists before understanding that it's real and has been going on for years.

But the analysis of the effect of those specific tweets is accurate.

I think it's important to understand that Twitter needs to be very conservative here. All social media banned Trump, and twitter really is the last place his voice can be heard (via a famous privately-owned social media organ). Well, if Trump tweets "I'm gonna nuke Iran" tomorrow they don't want to be the place Trump announces this.

He's the POTUS !!!! He can be on more or less every media outlet on the entire planet in a few seconds if he so chose.

That is a far better argument for permanently suspending his account than what they cobbled together.

> Due to the ongoing tensions in the United States, and an uptick in the global conversation in regards to the people who violently stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, these two Tweets must be read in the context of broader events in the country and the ways in which the President’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence, as well as in the context of the pattern of behavior from this account in recent weeks.

Should it be weak, on just what you are looking at? I mean, yeah. You don't have to look hard to find that this is more than "merely" plausible. Odds are ridiculously high that the tweets were more fanning of flames.

This is weak justification and anyone with a non-partisan mind, or does not suffer from such an extreme bias agaist the target of this ban should be worried about the future of online censorship.

However I am sure this will simply fall on deaf ears as Never Trump's will celebrate with out even considering the bigger picture, and Trump supports will view this just further evidence the system as rigged against Trump

The ironic thing is this will do nothing to clam the most extreme of Trump supports most of whom have already been banned from twitter anyway, if anything this is tossing gasoline on the dumpster fire

Of course it is. They’ve been itching to ban him since day one but held off due to the negative PR of saying "the president of the US isn’t allowed on our platform" and the obvious fuel to the "bias in tech" fire. I’m not even mad, we all knew this day would come.

What bothers me is there have been plenty of tweets all summer long by Democrats and others cheering on the protests which, to put it lightly, caused a bit of violence and certainly didn’t help in the spread of Covid.

And there is of course the recent tweet where AOC said the point of protests is to make people uncomfortable. There is definitely more than one way someone could interpret the meaning of "uncomfortable", for sure. I just wish Twitter and other big tech companies would apply the same principles across the board instead of selectively playing the "well if you consider it with THIS context..." game.

I sold my TWTR shares and advise others to do the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Modern_use_in_c...

It is the standard way of writing the century in many European countries/languages.

As far as I can tell, there are two general viewpoints:

a) Censorship is bad, free speech is good. You should counter bad arguments with better arguments.

b) There are types of speech, which are proven to lead to violence in the long-run. Also, some things can be proven as untrue. Lies are bad.

I have to say, I agree with both of those points. I think group A is missing the point, that there are echo chambers and people radicalizing within their filter-bubbles up to the point of literal terrorism, while group B is missing that the power to censor can be misused by bad actors in the future and that silenced people will not just change their mind.

Is there a proper answer for someone like me? Where should I stand on this? I am leaning towards group A, while acknowledging that radicalization does happen and dearly worrying about perversion of words like "truth" or "fact" ("your/my truth", "alternate facts").

We've witnessed the fallacy of this argument. It assumes a level of rationality that has been proven to be unreasonable to assume. The problem isn't that "better" arguments aren't reaching people. Rather, we have watched people exercise an incredible ability to discard overwhelming evidence and embrace narratives that have literally zero evidence to support them (or, in fact, have been repeatedly disproven and debunked).

In that kind of environment, "counter bad arguments with better arguments" is hopelessly naive.

Also, there's another dimension which I think gets immediately thrown on the floor when these discussions come up. Very rarely are people calling for controls on what can be said at any time. Instead, it's controls on what can be said to large amounts of people. Group b folks, such as myself, are not saying that we're concerned about dinner conversations. We're concerned about speech that is being amplified in a way where there's a civic responsibility to ensure that the harmful messages are not being amplified.

If it's an open vox populi platform, and if something isn't illegal (as in quotable in law), why should a platform have its own police? Leave it to, err, police? Of course, that opens up a question of whose police and laws if the platform is global... However, my point is, if the platform is non-moderated, why censor on your own?

But it's pretty complicated. Defining intolerance, eliminating bots, etc. Not an easy task.

If a company is so powerful that their moderation policies are effectively censorship, then there is definitely a serious free speech concern. The solution is to break up the monopoly so that no one company is that powerful.

Yes. Get rid of newsfeed algorithms that optimize recommendations for engagement.

It won't solve our current problem, but that's what cause it. They took pg's Fluff Principal and weaponized it.

They're forcing Trump to join some more right-wing friendly site. Those are way more saturated with conspiracy stuff. In effect, Twitter is inadvertently exposing his audience to way more false information, achieving the exact opposite of what is ostensibly the goal here.

Well as far as politics is concerned.. the US Government (and other governments) should make their own twitter like platforms which every active representative has an account, and ANYTHING (barring pure illegal) can be posted.

It doesn't even need to have an actual user base, it can just be somewhere to go to see what your politician is thinking.

In terms of the average person? There is no solution for one that is owned by a corporation. An offshoot of the above is the government could make a social media site that is covered under "free speech that the government cannot take away" and anything not blatantly illegal can be posted/said. I would not advocate for this though.. I think we have plenty of options.

But the one for politicians only is something that should be seriously considered.

I was also getting at the fact, that Twitter, being a private company or not, basically became infrastructure and was thinking about how it should behave, whether that would be enforced by laws or not.

It would be a humongous loss to weaken or lose freedom of speech.

As someone who lived in USSR, I am am always on the side of the freedom of speech. Of course I never supported Trump, but I think the consequences of normalizing censorship will be far more damaging then whatever he has to say.

Once you’ve lived in a totalitarian state it is obvious. I hope people who didn’t live in such states would look at the world history and learn.

You didn't see this sort of reaction in 2000, and that was far far closer.

1984 Two minutes of hate is real, so very real, and it's quite sad how most people welcomed this into the world.

I've deleted my social media, twitters years before, and have divested myself completely from other platforms. There is nothing to be valued, gained or such,

The Internet should always be a decentralized, fragmented piece of human technology. The more centralized it becomes, the more authoritarian it is. And the orgs that become in control point the finger at others to show off how it's not them.

--

I hold no opinion on Trump, but these tech companies have to much power and it's a game of bidding where they can creep more and more into our lives and general lobbying to make the case that life is "better" with them here then it ever was before.

I can't say if it really is.

The tech giants only have power when users give it to them. Trump could’ve negated their power very easily, without legislation.

Okay, let's retroactively suspend John McCain for singing "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran" on a hot mike.

President George W. Bush should be suspended for invading Iraq on false or flimsy pretexts, resulting in 6,000 American soldiers killed and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

Obama lied when he said "you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan" eleven times and this turned out not to be true (90% anyway). Shouldn't the social networks censor patently false and misleading statements by a very influential leader?

Ronald Reagan said something about launching the nukes on the USSR, I don't remember the exact quote. Cancel him off social media.

Et cetera.

</parody>

The harm in censorship is that it actually reduces the flow of communication and information, for future historical records as well as for the present.

The problem is the printing presses we're using today are not owned by the people who use them, and can be confiscated without warning or recourse.

The consequence will be the end of liberal society, but society will demand it.

And one man's "harmful communication" is another woman's useful communication.

Since your comment is egregiously wrong and, in my opinion, harmful, I'm going to delete it so that it doesn't mislead people about the harms of censorship.

See where I'm going with this?

I say my opinion, you present your side, and we can debate, or move on, but we have both had our say (albeit, at varying shades of grey on HackerNews ;)

The notion of "harmful tweets" is a very 2020s phenomenon but the concept goes back thousands of years. There's a reason our Bill of Rights is strongly inspired by Voltaire, Descartes, and other (then) modern thinkers.

"I disagree with what you say, but I will give my life for your right to say it."

It feels as though we've backslid from that ideal.

"Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient." Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions, and other controlling bodies."

https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir

> Study shows that in the process of eradicating extremism, the minds of Uygur women in Xinjiang were emancipated and gender equality and reproductive health were promoted, making them no longer baby-making machines. They are more confident and independent. https://t.co/lykDhByEiL

https://twitter.com/ChineseEmbinUS/status/134724760209453465...

Political speech is practically always incitement to violence:

According to Weber, the state is a "human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory." [1]

And political discussions are about what the state should do (executive decisions, laws, etc), that is, in which cases it should coerce people, who should it coerce, and what should it do with the result of that coercion (e.g. taxes). Coercion ultimately leads to violence if the coerced individual doesn't surrender.

So, I can't take this "incitement to violence is bad" thing seriously. Because if they truly believed that, then all political speech should be banned.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/state-monopoly-on-violence

In the years since then, what was once a constellation of internet platforms has shrunken and consolidated to only a handful that are the de facto gatekeepers.

Legally, of course, nothing has changed since then. But it's willfully ignoring the unprecedented power of major platforms in shaping popular dialog to compare them to a local supermarket escorting someone out.

It’s not. It’a a bunch of rich people in California. If you want a public utility for communication and socializing, go help build one. Contribute to Mastodon or the rest of the fediverse. Write to representatives (or become one yourself) and propose legislation to fund a public tool that is actually owned by the people. It could even be part of the fediverse!

But asking Twitter to do any random thing someone wants because they are a big company is insane and is going to cause us nothing but pain.

The only reason is these companies are "new" and were not viewed as much more than a toy until a few years ago and now we’re seeing the consequences of that.

Today it's rich people in California, once it was rich people building railroads and pumping oil.

No, no they're not. If you or others personally perceive them as utilities, you have skewed perception of reality. I mean not even the ISP you're using to access them aren't considered utilities. It's funny that the same people who applauded Pai for the net neutrality thing are the ones complaining about 'big tech censorship'.

Now, maybe they should be, and should be regulated as such. Maybe we should have a conversation about delegating services which are key to our social fabric to what are just private companies. But that's somewhat orthogonal to the issue at hand.

Additionally, should be noted: if the government attempted to coerce or strong-arm Twitter to keep Donald Trump's account online, that would absolutely be a textbook 1st Amendment violation.

Corporations are legal persons, and have constitutional rights under the 14th Amendment. Coerced speech is not free speech.

They are not though. They are just private companies. We can argue until the cows come home about how people see them, how they use them, how they feel about them... but at the end of the day they are just private companies.

I agree that we should consider whether that should remain the case. But right now... it is the case.

It's crazy naive to not see the implications of this

This is a President who wouldn't even use the designated @potus account because he is so narcissistic he wanted the follower count for himself.

Regardless, if Trump wants to, he has official means (through whitehouse.gov) to issue statements. He choose Twitter when he had other options.

If the second point is not true anymore... it's going to start getting regulated like a utility. Your electric and phone providers can't simply decide to stop serving people it doesn't like, and likely, Twitter won't either.

* A world where they weren't the arbiters of truthiness, and were a place that supported 'free speech'.

* A world where they decide what posts to show, and it's their job to moderate the platform.

The decision to take the second approach is actually a pretty recent development. These companies can no longer hide behind the 'we are just a platform for free speech' line of thinking, because they have now decided that's not what they are about.

Definition of Liberal used to be: "Willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one's own; open to new ideas. Relating to or denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise."

I am still a liberal. But I am not the current liberal.

Let’s spend some time reading books, maybe we can go back to solving illusive pedophile rings online when we are better educated as a species.

What an unusual POV

civil rights movement: not liberal

Vietnam war protesters: not liberal

Where did you find these liberals? The don't seem to have much in common with the liberals I know.

It's almost a 180 turnaround from the days when the Democrats represented the "common working man" and the Republicans were the party of rich CEO's and business owners.

The left soon will control all three branches of government, after an election that many people question, has been simultaneously advocating for censorship of its political adversaries, more draconian civil rights removals under the guise of COVID. The inevitably resulting destruction of more people's livelihoods will create more desperate people. I hope you realize where this is all going. Because its obvious more people will be revolting if this continues, and will organize to resist. Censorship and oppression is not the answer. Letting people voice their grievances, is the last peaceful outlet before actual violence.

I definitely get the "my company - my rules" POV. The First Amendment doesn't apply to private spaces.

Then again, I'm not convinced that moderators ought to have the power to control what sorts of ideas are interrogated publicly (e.g. in the company of strangers). It's particularly problematic when the social climate at the companies that control these platforms is synonymous with the Progressive echochamber, but it's also hard to imagine any body that would be qualified to police ideas.

One of the worst things to happen this decade is the rise of social echochambers, where groups of people intellectually isolate themselves amongst likeminded people, writing-off dissenters as evil strawmen. The groupthink in these echochambers is nudged further to the extremes by the loudmouthed activists who control what ideas people are comfortable expressing. Large groups isolating themselves in these constantly drifting echochambers leads to the problems we saw this week in Washington. I fear making the platforms synonymous with these echo chambers will only make this problem worse.

Anonymity and free expression have historically been some of the best qualities of the Internet. Anyone can say - and think - anything, and share those thoughts with everyone. That's always included snark, parody, and similar absurdities. People don't always mean what they say - they often might not even know _if_ they mean what they say.

Those same qualities make it particularly vulnerable to misinformation and conspiracy theories.

Figuring out how to help people understand what's likely to be true without censoring the kinds of ideas people can openly express is one of the great challenges of our time. I really hope we solve it.

Really not sure how I feel about this though... weighing between the benefits of allowing open speech on "town square" Internet forums versus enforcing their right as a private entity and removing his violence-inciting self.

Either way, this is a huge deal

If it matters I'm not an American citizen, have never set foot in the US (even though it's a country I admire in many ways, just right now I'm reading a selection of Anti-Federalist papers in order to try and understand it better), have grown up as a kid in Ceausescu's one-party state Romania and I have to tell you that this doesn't look good.

[1] https://twitter.com/BrandonStraka/status/1347592064322719744

However, I also prefer anarchy to oligarchy: People have even specifically demonstrated that Trump was receiving special privileges which prevented him from being banned, and they did so by getting themselves banned for tweeting copies of his tweets.

You know what? I don't think anyone I would support has a problem clearing that very low bar.

Maybe people should be less concerned that Trump got banned for being a lying, traitorous piece of shit and more concerned that he was ever president in the first place.

(viewing HN in logged out mode is much faster thanks to the caching)

Let us just go a small step further and let facebook and twitter choose the next presidents.

Especially if you watched the testimony from that professor explaining how Google shifts search results to push GOTV in certain distinct counties while excluding others. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSTHgoaVtSw

Massive Big Tech conglomerates must be busted through antitrust enforcement and Section 230 must be updated to ban predatory algorithms which have inflamed 7 years of sectarian chaos and violence.

It's not a free speech issue: It's about Too Big To Fail. They have too much power, beyond that of even the world's largest governments. This cannot stand.

They're merely a successful platform.

[0]: https://nypost.com/2019/11/03/aoc-tweets-her-support-for-ant...

Edit: Oh, damn, I had just seen the Twitter Safety and just assumed that this was linking to that, not to a separate blogpost. As many people have pointed out it was for these two tweets:

On January 8, 2021, President Donald J. Trump tweeted:

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

Shortly thereafter, the President tweeted:

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

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

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

I think it’s clear about controlling the narrative.

In the end what this will do is kickstart more of an echochamber on another service, they’ll diverge and we’ll get people in one camp on one platform, the other camp in the other. Except they’ll be more extreme on both sides as moderates tail off.

They are already openly planning violence: https://twitter.com/slpng_giants/status/1347609631527489537?...

What the hell happened to us?

That's pretty clearly a veiled threat taken in light of all his other statements and the violence from just days ago.

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

Imagine living in a society where saying either of these things is a banning offense. To all the censorship apologists here: you've given unelected and unaccountable people at big tech companies the ability to decide what people can say in public. Is that really the world you want to live in?

You have things backwards: they haven't and in fact I do and already do.

What gives Twitter the right to decide what can be said via its software is the first amendment to the US constitution. Which is a world I live in and do want to live in -- it's stronger and better than the "free" speech guarantees in Europe.

The first amendment prevents elected people from deciding what people can and can't say in public.

And twitter banning someone doesn't actually control what they can say "in public", merely on Twitter. I don't use twitter and I heard about this from one of those other channels.

Throughout US history the person with the press has been able to decide what is printed on its press. Today there are more opportunities to be heard than ever before.

Well, this is what they promote: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146 . They promote content that results with engagement since thats most profitable for them, above all else. It just so happens that emotional fake novelty spreads the most and leads to maximum engagement.

Optimizing for engagement above all else is what has lead to that unhealthy, toxic environment. Monsters have been created, and they are out of control. It doesn't matter who social media companies ban, or what was actually tweeted: if there is a way to interpret it in the most emotionally charged, exciting way, it will eventually be reinterpreted that way, just like a game of broken telephone.

So, for this specific case: OK, Twitter, got you. We happen to be on the same side, but your reaction makes me migrate my (non-existing, for the same reasons) twitter account to something else.

IMHO, we need to ban every government and their agencies from relying on commercial services only: A minimalistic message routing protocol should exist that governments require participants in their market-place to support.

Given that, "Is that really the world you want to live in?" ... Yes.

Gotta love people -- on a news site made for people who tinker with computers -- thinking in binary and not having nuance.