If we're honest a lot of his tweets violate twitters content policy and they do so blatantly. I wonder if they'll ever have the guts to straight up hand him at least a temp ban.
I understand this route. The President of the United States already has a gigantic platform, so it's not like he'll just go away like @nero did. This gives Twitter a chance to annotate his hate with facts, and hopefully reach his audience. Banning him just makes him a martyr, without lessening his reach.
I do wish the UI was a bit... angrier. The friendly light blue doesn't exactly scream "misinformation!"
But as they say, sunlight is the best disinfectant. Removing him from Twitter won't make him or his base any less hateful. It's a constant reminder that he needs to be removed. I think if Twitter and news organizations just started ignoring him, many people would forget how horrible he is.
I disagree, giving certain folks a platform only raises them up and legitimatizes them. Didn't the Reddit folks discover that shutting down hateful subreddits prevents them from popping back up effectively? I believe this is the citation[1].
Yeah but... this is the President of the United States we're talking about, not a random Reddit user. He's already been raised up and legitimized. I don't think that study applies... in fact, I don't think any study applies, since this is the first time we've ever seen this.
> I disagree, giving certain folks a platform only raises them up and legitimatizes them.
Who do you believe should have final say over which person or group of people can have a platform, and who can't?
Should it be whoever owns that particular platform? Should it be the government? Should it be the court of public opinion? I've yet to see a compelling argument for deplatforming that answers this question, because what is acceptable to society has large grey areas that are constantly shifting. I think the intentions are nothing but wonderful - I'm very glad that communities like those in the report you cited, and many similar ones, no longer exist on Reddit. The problem as I see it is that censorship lowers visibility of hate speech very effectively, but if anything seems to strengthen people's convictions that they are right about what they believe. Hateful subreddits may disappear, but is that clear evidence that the people that participated in them changed their minds about what they had expressed online? I find that conclusion dubious at best.
I see this issue most strongly with conspiracy theorists, which seem to be a dime a dozen in 2020. Censorship is nothing if not evidence that what someone is saying is true - see the recent "Plandemic" viral video as a great example.
Deplatforming is, like I said, well-intentioned, but like so many "solutions" it is obsessed with the symptom of the disease, not the cause. It is based on the very old but very wrong notion that 'if only everyone believed what I believe, all the world would be at peace'. That notion is the cornerstone of religious dogma and has been the justification for religious conversion, forcible or otherwise, for millennia. There are proven ways to moderate people's beliefs through civil discourse. The issue is that it is so time consuming, unsatisfying, and thankless (not to mention that you don't get to play moral superiority games) that I'm not surprised people would rather just throw down the banhammer instead.
“The more you tighten your grasp, the more star systems slip through your fingers.”
Censoring the point of view of others merely lends credence to their point of view. Unless you find a way to censor them completely, you will cause more and more people to lose faith in your ideals.
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Why is the president driving around in a motorcade, has VORFAHRT everywhere, sharpshooters, AF-One and so on, while you have to wait at red lights, and being searched at airports?
I would argue that misinformation via the web has only metastasized over the past decade and the deplatforming efforts have been comparatively minimal.
> the deplatforming efforts have been comparatively minimal
Compared to what?
From my perspective the tech censors are already on thin ice - I actually don’t see how they could ramp up efforts much more without facing serious opposition.
I think arguing based on outcome misses the more fundamental point. The president is a citizen. When Angela Merkel speeds she gets a ticket, and when she goes to the supermarket she stands in the queue (which she actually literally does herself regularly, in contrast to Trump I suppose).
So regardless of whether banning him is good or bad in terms of exposure or whatever, he's a user on the platform and he ought to be treated as such. If Trump wants to speak as the president with authority I assume he has the white house press department at his disposal.
Jack Dorsey has spoken about this on Joe Rogan's podcast, and he basically says that it was a judgement call where they weighed the public interest in the tweets against the violations of the tweets.
Alas, this is what The People democratically voted for; and with our current voting system, the will of us 49% who don’t want to hear it counts for nothing u_u
Removing it from the normal tweet status is separate from preserving them. They could archive them and disable replies, retweets, quotes, and so on. They could remove it from feeds. They could frame it differently.
I know for a fact my aunt mails in ballots for her husband, her father and her mother. Claiming that there is no mail-in voter fraud among 300 million Americans is quite absurd in my opinion.
It's a bit absurd when claims of rampant mail-in voter fraud come without evidence from a New Yorker in the District of Columbia who votes in Florida by mail.
One, why haven't you reported your aunt for voter fraud? Voter fraud is a very serious issue and it seems to me that you're letting a criminal go free. This can be easily verified by telling the government and having the three others confirm who they voted for.
For two, if she is mailing in the ballots, then is she forging their signature as well as collecting their SSNs? Or are they simply signing on the ballots themselves agreeing to the votes? In which case is that truly fraud or not? If she's forging signatures then she's also committing identity theft which is a very serious issue, one that I hope you agree deserves reporting.
When you have become one of the de-facto news sources for a sizable portion of the population, it does sort of become your job.
Whether it’s good that they have become a news source or not is a valid question. But right now, they are, and I think preserving the president’s tweets seems like a pretty easily defensible decision. Even if it is also (or primarily) motivated by their own business interests.
Giving him a platform in the first place is what necessitates the consequent fact checking. If they didn't distribute his lies they wouldn't need to contradict them. Many media outlets have stopped airing Trump's statements live, because doing so is essentially unethical.
That is inevitable. Trump will one day not be president. And one day while not president he will bitch tweet in a way that dramatically and clearly violates the terms of service. Twitter will have reached its Rubicon with respect to Trump and the public interest / head of state exception they've carved out, and they'll have to make a permanent decision.
There's nothing I'd rather say on my deathbed than "I was really good for the shareholders." Seriously, life is too short. Ban the president. Go down in history. Be someone. Jack or whoever will die being nothing more than a low-tier mascot for the long dead American dream. But banning the president... it would be very literally epic.
What I really want to say on my deathbed is "I lived a great story," so IMO it's a no brainer.
What do you mean "interact"? He virtually never posts any responses, the account is close to broadcast-only. There's also no real interaction in the replies: even if you manage to scroll past the kneejerk responses and product spam thriving on controversy, what are the chances you'll find anyone to actually interact with?
He retweets racist nonsense constantly. If you want to add "re-tweeted by the President of the United States" to your resume, you just have to keep @-tagging him with conspiracy theories about Biden, and there's a decent chance he'll take the bait.
I do wish the UI was a bit... angrier. The friendly light blue doesn't exactly scream "misinformation!"
But as they say, sunlight is the best disinfectant. Removing him from Twitter won't make him or his base any less hateful. It's a constant reminder that he needs to be removed. I think if Twitter and news organizations just started ignoring him, many people would forget how horrible he is.