No. Nothing is ever this simple. Even cursory search would show that this is an ongoing saga linked to LEOs displeasure with encryption. I am not a fan of Trump personally, but no reason to let it cloud your judgment.
It literally is about Trump being angry that Twitter fact checked his outright lies about mail-in voting.
There are absolutely other powers that stand to benefit, or are pushing the agenda as well, but to claim it's not a result of Trump's hissy fit is ridiculous.
This was being proposed by Barr and co a few months ago, the current Twitter debacle (A tweetacle? Tweetgate?) just happens to be an excellent case to push it forward with support.
Before that it was proposed repeatedly by several Democrats, especially during the Birther nonsense.
I guess it's a good thing I already said other parties had an interest in the topic at hand.
Unless you know something I don't, Barr doesn't have the power to sign an executive order. Neither do any of the Democrats. There's exactly 1 reason the executive order was signed and it wasn't Democrats or Barr, nothing I stated was inaccurate. Appreciate the downvote because you don't like reality.
I think you are assuming that the order is a cause rather a convenient excuse to pursue a specific agenda. I appreciate the approach, by a person signing it is just a convenient lightning rod. Note that it seems to be working very well.
A convenient excuse for what? The president doesn't need an excuse to sign an executive order, he needs exactly 0 permission from anyone to do it. This isn't some new law drafted by congress that needs political cover to move through the process, it's an executive order.
The DOJ report that was just released was the result of a year-long investigation by the anti-trust division of the DOJ. While it's release my have been accelerated by Trump's executive order, it certainly wasn't caused by Twitters recent fact checking, and it doesn't directly address some of the points in the executive order. Rather it focuses more on "big sites aren't doing enough to combat crime" than "conservative voices are being suppressed".
That's just one scenario. The more broader one is tech companies refusing to adhere to preventing federal crimes from being committed on their platforms.
At the end of the day, it's expensive to police your platform so they went with the immunity route.
They're a platform, andaren'taspecifically vested law enforcement organization.
Think about it. What you're really asking for there is for these companies to become part of the apparatus, which means by definition they can no longer be seen as private businesses and arguably, become unfit to do anything on.
Imagine a world where law enforcement is given access to an oracle by tech companies capable of spelling out every individual who broke any law in any jurisdiction at anytime, anywhere today, so long as they use the platform.
If you don't already feel uncomfortable, or see why that would impact the desirability/feasibility of the system already, you're probably not trying very hard. You're basically handing law enforcement a tool capable of handing reign of the country over to the auspices of prosecutorial discretion.
The one thing that has kept LE in check has always been the high price tag of due process involved with depriving someone of their rights. This means it is strongly confined to only that potential pool of people that generally meet the criteria for clear and present threats to society (your agreement as to the priorities over time may beg to differ, bit the point is it is fundamentally limited to a very small fraction of the population). With the integration possible through tech, you cannot afford to happily hand over records in digital format. It is simply too bloody dangerous a tool in the wrong hands.
Furthermore, no one wants to accept that sometimes societal goods are bundled with the empowerment of bad use cases since malicious actors are equally buoyed by societal infrastructure. I don't see people clamoring for TV manufacturers to start recording the inside of homes because there may be pedophiles in them. I don't see people swarming in droves to say "eavesdrop and surveil me" once they know that is essentially what goes on in tech. No one wants that. They grudgingly accept it because no one else wants to or can figure out how to implement something without that that also allows the type of information propagation people actually want, which is for people they want to know more about them to have greater access, and the rest to actually require substantial effort to get at that information.
You are right. Even parent post is right in a sense that there multiple reasons. I think your explanation covers tech sector perspective ( they are in a sweet spot now and don't want to lose it ). I maintain that the main reason it is happening is the steady push to make policing easy again.
Why isn't the market holding Facebook accountable for the numerous transgressions we've seen coming out of that company over the last several years? Because people don't understand or care how the money is made, which fundamentally undermines the argument that the market is always right.
From broad, repeated invasions of online privacy to numerous scandals involving state-sponsored disinformation campaigns, Facebook shows time and again that they are not responsible corporate stewards of the internet.
Zuckerberg has got to be one of the least popular Fortune 500 CEOs and yet he's completely invincible, investors don't want to touch him.
So how do you propose to hold such a company accountable if not through regulation and oversight?
I don’t believe this is true. If an Icahn-like activist investor shorted FB and successfully triggered a mass sell off tanking FB stock, it would be really hard for Zuckerberg to survive that pressure, and he’d be financially incentivized not to. You’re right in that the board doesn’t have the power to oust him, but collective investor action could. It’s hard to find people who want to rattle one of the most consistently performing tech stocks, though. Unfortunately, I think the chance of something like this happening is nil.
Facebook was fined $5,000,000,000 by the FTC for what the president's chief executive of campaign's company (Cambridge Analytics) did: they used military info ops on American people in an election.
And now they want editorial control over publicly owned information services?
Why don't they (the installed alt-right) go claim that the government deserves editorial control of the papers as well?
Clearly that's the issue needing attention here; not obstructing an obstruction investigation.
You assume that they have the same values and definitions of transgressions. That just plain isn't true no matter how "obvious" it is that something is or isn't one.
Besides blaming them for being unable to stop state actors is a bizzare form of victim blaming - complicity would make sense sure but not inability to stop it. Asking to be both stronger than and weaker than states at the same time is an unusual demand.
My friend... Tucker Carlson was the most watched news anchor in all of America last week. It is apparent that a good portion of the population doesn't find Facebook's decision to allow free speech at all objectionable.
Have you considered that the reason why most people are okay with Facebook not punishing president Trump is because many people agree with him? Have you considered that -- facebook having more active users than twitter -- that facebook is more representative of the United states than your feelings?
Twitter is known to be mainly popular among the media, who -- shock and surprise -- don't like trump and lean liberal. Facebook is popular amongst the rest of us. Is it possible in your worldview that other people may not think like you?