I find this disingenuous. This is his latest position on the matter of succession[1]:
"Even though I totally disagree with the outcome of the election, and the facts bear me out, nevertheless there will be an orderly transition on January 20th"
Why does Twitter want to prevent him from making such a statement on his Twitter account? Would that not be calming the situation, if anything?
The genius of Trump's tactic of saying everything (continuously contradicting himself) is allowing everyone to cherry pick useful bits to support (or oppose) any given narrative.
The part that says there's "an orderly transition of power". Trumpers will forever believe that the election was stolen, but they can believe that from the comfort of their homes, they don't need to go out and attempt to overthrow the government because of it.
If any tech company were to try to suppress the "facts" that support the "rigged election" narrative, that would only reinforce the their beliefs.
It's one thing to say there will be an orderly transition of power, but the events of yesterday already made that statement false, and those events were incited by him. So saying something calming out of one side of his mouth doesn't excuse what he's saying out the other side.
> they don't need to go out and attempt to overthrow the government because of it
Yeah, they do.
The election is what defines the legitimate government; if it really had been falsified[1], then anyone who participated in the falsification would be a usurper, and the government instated by the falsified election would be fake. If something like this actually happened, then it would hardly be insane to consider it your patriotic duty to put a stop to it.
The metaphor is overused as hell, but it is apt: Trump shouted "fire" in a crowded theatre, and now he's acting all surprised that a few people got trampled in the rush to get out.
Anybody who believes him at this point obviously has brain worms, but being a notorious liar doesn't exempt you from libel and sedition laws. It is also irrelevant whether the mob sincerely believes the election was stolen, or whether they're using it as an excuse; slander is still slander.
[1]: Using ad-tech to manipulate the way people vote, as the Cambridge Analytica conspiracy theory alleges, is not falsification.
Being a notorious liar actually does excuse you from libel. From Tucker Carlson to Elon Musk, the defense is that nobody reasonable would take them seriously.
I disagree. The constitution says that state electors elect the president, not the people. They did just that. The election is now legally binding, whether there was widespread fraud or not.
Yesterday, Trump still had an unlikely but legal way to prevent Biden from becoming president. Today he does not, so it makes no sense to push any further.
> The part that says there's "an orderly transition of power".
This has been Trump, forever. He strings together contradictions in every sentence he can, and when he can't, he makes sure to contradict or make a random topic change within the next sentence.
Why does he do this? It's a rhetorical trick. That means every time he speaks, most people find something in it that they want to hear. He makes sure not to say anything specific unless it's obvious that he's embellishing it; then if you don't like what he says, it sounds like it was a joke or off the cuff. This has been his whole platform. Say so many things, with so many interpretations, with so little factual basis, that most people can find something they like, and almost no one can pin him down for saying something awful. You just expect him to be grandiose and full of shit, and he is, so it's hard to be upset, as long as you find him charismatic.
If you've ever read Seveneves by Neal Stephenson, it's very similar to JBF's rhetorical style (scary similar). Big ideas, many ideas, full of contradictions, and fluidly swapping between possible interpretations to convince as many as possible, and demonizing anyone who figures out what your doing. It's nasty.
Of course I want to hear that there will be an orderly transition. I do not necessarily disagree with your general analysis, but what are you implying here? That he is still hedging a plot for a coup? Doubtful.
The fact of the matter is that until yesterday, it made complete sense for Trump to cause a huge scene to scare the electors into tossing the election. Today it does not, the election is over, there is no recourse. Trump has nothing to gain from any further unrest.
Late getting back to this response, but I think it's still relevant.
> but what are you implying here? That he is still hedging a plot for a coup? Doubtful.
I think that you are giving him credit he's not due. He's not someone who creates and executes long term, complex plans. He acts on emotion; whatever he's feeling right then, and takes actions that will coerce people into feeling the same way.
He's angry that Biden won and that the certification of the vote is going to happen. Thus the certification is bad, and anyone going along with it is bad, so he says whatever will make the crowd think it's bad.
> The fact of the matter is that until yesterday, it made complete sense for Trump to cause a huge scene to scare the electors into tossing the election.
No, that's not a fact. This was never going to happen. The electors were never going to get scared and overturn the will of the voters. He's a simpleton; he didn't like that he was losing, so he demonized everyone involved with that bad thing that he doesn't like. This is something he's been doing his entire life, and it's effective as long as he has the money, influence, and smart people on the payroll to shape his vitriol and gusto into reality.
If somebody said "your democracatically elected government has been taken away but you should just go home," would you? Would the Trump supporters that raided the capital yesterday? The reason they will forever believe that the election was stolen is because Trump continues to say that the election was stolen.
People spent years de-legitimatizing the 2016 election by claiming that Trump colluded with the Russian government. There were even stories published by mainstream media outlets that Russians hack election machines.
The other side undermining the election results after they lost is not exactly new.
The difference is that there are 250 million documented user engagements with confirmed Russian propaganda pages. Those are the numbers provided directly from Facebook: 76 million on Facebook and 187 million on Instagram. That's a lot of likes, comments and shares.
There is a huge difference between saying "the winning campaign worked with a foreign government to spread disinformation" and "the votes were rigged. If you ignore the fraudulent ballots I won in a landslide."
There's also a long running argument in American politics about voter registration. Over the years both sides have had victories but after the elections no one claims the results of those elections were fraudulent.
Sacking the Capitol Building to prevent certification of an election is certainly new, though. I remain horrified at the level to which republicans genuinely think these situations are equivalent.
Hillary Clinton conceded she lost the very next day. There was an orderly transition process from Obama to Trump that started on the second day after the election. Compare that "undermining" to what the GOP and Trump are doing.
I don’t know of any mainstream stories about actual votes being changed/hacked but there’s tons of evidence that Russia hacked state voter databases and manipulated online media for their benefit. We also have significant evidence that the trump campaign tried to collide with Russia (he even published those self incriminating emails on Twitter).
Few people cast doubt on the votes themselves however in 2016 and that Trump was the legitimate winner.
In this case there is zero evidence of widespread voter fraud after being litigated through the courts and acknowledgement as such by many republican Secretaries of State, senators, etc.
> Why does Twitter want to prevent him from making such a statement
Sorry, but that framing is disingenuous. Trump was suspended when he incited a mob to march to the capitol and "fight" to "stop" a joint session of congress, who then invaded and sacked the seat of government of the United States.
Later, after all this, he posted (for the very first time ever!) that he'd accept the results of the election. So... that's good. But it's not why he was banned.
Trump didn't even acknowledge he would agree to a peaceful transition of power until today when he lost all avenues (however imaginary) of staying in power.
Quotes:
--- start quote ---
The General Services Administration Administrator, Emily Murphy, initially refused to issue the "ascertainment" letter declaring Biden the "apparent winner", on the basis that the election result was disputed. The declaration would mark the official start of the transition. Withholding it denied the Biden transition team full funds, secure office space, and access to agencies
Biden had also been denied daily classified national security briefings.
Further, the State Department denied access to communications from foreign leaders, leaving the Biden team to communicate through other unofficial channels.
-- end quote ---
Ah, how nevertheless an orderly transition this is, indeed.
Despite the circumstances, I don’t think it sets a good precedent in the future. Many reasons for this, not least of which is when you have a criminal continuing to give evidence publicly you let them keep going...
I think these platforms just don’t want any possibility that they are responsible for inciting a riot in the future. Purely an ass-covering move, just as it was to continue to platform him when he had power over the DoJ.
If you want any other behavior you’d have to clarify the immunities and/or expectations around platforming government officials explicitly in law, and I am afraid what this congress would come up with.
Well Twitch “censors” (aka moderates their platform) all the time and Trump is not the first account on Twitch to be disabled, so certainly Twitch would argue that they are applying “the same rules for everyone.”
More broadly, I disagree with your use of the word “censor.” Trump can say whatever he wants. But it doesn’t follow that if some company doesn’t want to publish his book or stream his video that it’s censorship.
Some places don’t have moderation (parler). Other places do (Twitch). That’s fine.
> At the moment where they make their platform public, they have no political nor moral authority to say what’s good or bad.
So anything that is "public" cannot have moderation? A chess forum has to allow Osama bin Laden to post his political rants? Should it be illegal to run a website with moderation?
> Tomorrow if the leadership changes, they can on the contrary censor everything but not Trump and you’ll have nothing to say then.
I'll say the same thing I am saying today: it's their own platform and they can moderate it however they want. If I don't like their moderation, I am perfectly capable of going elsewhere.
Probably preemptive, after YouTube removed a video of his and Facebook / Twitter deplatformed him entirely twitch is the next biggest somewhat-mainstream platform he could use to share that video or others.
Am I the only one who finds the whole situation bizarre?
Edit: I will be more blunt since some replies show they don't understand what I find weird:
Why do you need a private social media company to stop your president from planting terrorism in your own country because he thinks the election is fake instead of congress/government/whatever??!
That’s what you get when you elect a tabloid celebrity billionaire to the most important office in the world. I’ve been mostly disappointed with our selection of candidates for a long time, but I never thought I’d see that. It’s as if nobody outstanding even wants the job. Literally Idiocracy.
>It’s as if nobody outstanding even wants the job.
I think the issue in 2016 was too many people wanted the job. You can agree/disagree whether the primary field included 'outstanding' people, but the sheer number of candidates allowed the loud mouth to stand out.
You're right. The unspoken tragedy is that a large number of candidates should be a good thing. Any primary system that can't endure a significant number of candidates is the wrong system. Both parties have broken primary systems that need to be thrown out and re-made for the modern era.
In Canada (where I'm from) our party leaders are elected by the party members. Whenever there is a change in leader, there is some party convention and paying members of the party are asked to vote. Anyone can pay to be a member, but it's not a public vote like in the states. I wonder if this produces better or worse candidates? With our parlimentary system, we also don't vote for our Prime Minister, we vote for our local representative.
I think it's obvious if the US worked this way, the Republican party wouldn't have selected Trump. Perhaps you end up just electing the same old boring white guy time and time again.
In 2015 Jeb Bush used the massive amounts of cash he had on hand to corner all the Republican campaign operatives. Democrats spent the years between 2008 and 2016 making sure there wasn't going to be a repeat of 2008 where Obama got the nomination instead of Clinton.
You can think of election cycles as a series of games of rock paper scissors. Not uncommon for the winner of the primary to be a guy that can't win in general. Scissors beats paper in the primary. Goes up against rock in the general and loses.
There's always lots of people who want to be President. Certainly way more than the 20 or so who showed up in primaries.
The issue was that a relatively large number of them had financial support and sizeable backing within the Republican party until late in the campaign. That's less likely to happen if there's one outstanding candidate. For example, it didn't happen in 2020, not because nobody else wanted to be President, but because the GOP overwhelmingly agreed that Trump was their best bet.
Just about anybody else running then had more decency and common sense and aptitude for the job.
The problem is, Trump = big ratings for the media on both sides. MSNBC is as much to blame as Fox. It's also imho partially the DNC's fault (the left has less choices), and they picked a flawed candidate who would've never won against any of the RNC choices.
She had a criminal on-going investigation, which true or not should've been like, woah, let's maybe put someone else in, who might not be indicted.
The entire system is fubarred and there's plenty of blame to go around, I don't know where we go from here, and I highly doubt a Biden administration is going to bring much joy either to a lot of American's who are suffering.
I do hope we make it harder for something like this to happen again (for fascists to take such strong control in America).
To be fair, all previous presidents were effectively banned from social media because they had the sense not to use it.
Nothing prevented this president or any other president from just opening a 24x7 conference call line where he can just blather whatever he feels like at any time to anyone listening.
While I never liked the man I never found my self in the rabid dislike corner that I think far too many existed within.
However I have no sympathy for him as his actions are ridiculous on any level let alone as President. Being a Libertarian I am not a fan of big government and I am certainly not a fan of anyone suggesting what he has with how to do deal with an election outcome he does not like.
Sorry, this is not how we are supposed to work and I am actually disappointed that Congress hasn't just pulled the plug as a whole since the debacle started to unfold. Pence has shown he can be put in place, he will be a modern day Ford if not for a short period of time but he should take mantle if not just for the few weeks we need him.
The sad part is this elections are frauds has been building for years and both sides are to blame for creating an environment so poisoned that all elections that don't turn out right are considered unjust. Now we have reached the final stage which is violence.
> World's most powerful country's president is peddling fake election conspiracy theory
I mean, even back in 2016, he made it clear that he won't accept the results of any election he didn't win. (And then went on to spend the next year spreading lies and conspiracy theories about how he actually won the popular vote.)
He's just following through on past behaviour. In a country with less robust civic systems, this is the sort of rhetoric that you can leverage into becoming dictator-for-life.
As much as you don't like him, he is still the president. Platforms are way too full of themselves these days! It's shameful that SV is now the biggest censor there ever was! And platforms need to learn from the past - by silencing voices, they actually create the image of a martyr, of a persecuted person giving him even more power among his followers! I have people post vulgar and offensive stuff on my Facebook wall - I never block or delete them, never attack back, etc. The stoicism of being able to tolerate people you don't like is the thru humanism and the true liberalism, not the opposite! The Commies used to pull out the tongues of people who they didn't like and who they turned into existential enemies. And let me express this type of mentality by quoting Stalin: "When there's a person, there's a problem. When there's no person, there's no problem." This is where we ended up! No civil discourse! We no longer agree to disagree! And this applies to both sides, of course! And if we look in the past, this never leads to a good ending!
Let me see if I learned my lesson from the Facebook post: Censorship is bad, nobody should be making decisions for other people, monolithic tech companies are bad. People should have rights and saying this should be a thing people can do. Hurting people is bad, unless we need to hurt them to stop them from hurting other people (or things). Neutral Discourse Provided.
"Even though I totally disagree with the outcome of the election, and the facts bear me out, nevertheless there will be an orderly transition on January 20th"
Why does Twitter want to prevent him from making such a statement on his Twitter account? Would that not be calming the situation, if anything?
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/07/trump-transition-of...
EDIT: I misread Twitch for Twitter. Alternatively, I'm prescient and this was posted in the wrong thread.