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Twitter employee deactivates Trump account

bbc.co.uk

111–120 of 185 posts

Re: Twitter employee deactivates Trump account

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's much more than a statistical anomaly. It's a rather large group of people, some quite famous and powerful. Lea DeLaria: "Or pick up a baseball bat and take out every f-cking republican and independent I see" Madonna: "I’ve thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House." Mickey Rourke: "I’ll meet [Trump] in a hotel room any motherf-cking day of the week and give him a Louisville slugger." Bow Wow: "@realD…

No please. There's enough room to discuss incidents of actual violence. I'd like to see them, backed up by sources. It would be interesting to compare statistics. 7 celebrities talking shit does not equate a massive, unified, violent left-wing movement in the US with conspiracy-like powers and tactics to censor the right. I think the right is pretty well represented in the US.

7 celebrities "talking shit" (encouraging violence) and being applauded for it. And there are more than 7, but I thought 7 would sufficiently illustrate the point.

Measure the support for the movement by the number of people who celebrated those remarks. A lot of people.

Re: Twitter employee deactivates Trump account

#112
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. I've been lucky enough to be self-employed for a bit, but if you walk into any bay area startup nearly everybody will be a vitriol against Trump and conservatives very publicly. It is not even subtle. I'm the kind of person who actually enjoys a debate, and my lack of PC offends some. If I were an employee, probably would be problematic.

Reason is that the political debate is no longer right vs left in the US. Trump and his posse have proven to be compulsive liars. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/23/opinion/trump... This means there is little left to debate.

> compulsive liars

Politics is all about lying and people do it on all sides all the time.

It feels compulsive because the MSM keeps covering Trump so much, and never offering comparisons to show that its not out of the ordinary on the other side.

Re: Twitter employee deactivates Trump account

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's much more than a statistical anomaly. It's a rather large group of people, some quite famous and powerful. Lea DeLaria: "Or pick up a baseball bat and take out every f-cking republican and independent I see" Madonna: "I’ve thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House." Mickey Rourke: "I’ll meet [Trump] in a hotel room any motherf-cking day of the week and give him a Louisville slugger." Bow Wow: "@realD…

Eminem isn’t a good example. He hates politicians and Hollywood “elites”, and Trump is both

The quote I used from Eminem was about sexually assaulting Ann Coulter. Does he routinely talk that way about political pundits?

Re: Twitter employee deactivates Trump account

#114
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are literally nazis promoting themselves on twitter without censorship There's all kinds of genocide being promoted on Twitter, and the so-called Nazis are literally the only ones being censored. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander says I. Either Twitter - a for profit entity - is a common carrier or they impose editorial standards, they can't be allowed to get away with playing both sides as it…

“So-called nazis”, huh?

I'd prefer a term such as "white supremacist" since the NSDAP isn't actually a thing anymore. But we both know that the word can mean anything these days. And we all know they're not the only ones with disturbing or distasteful ideas.

Remember that Twitter was OK with ISIS using it, right up until it started to affect ad revenues, then they made only a half hearted attempt to stop them. Their actual ideology is only, make money.

Re: Twitter employee deactivates Trump account

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

? The "appropriate" size and role of the federal government is still a very worthwhile and earnest point of debate, and that is a classic left/right issue.

Sorry but nobody is for small government. Nobody is for a balanced budget. It is a farce. We all have two piles: a. Things we want the government to do b. Things we don't If you're for a balanced budget, you'll oppose current tax cut plans and demand government cut spending. The problem is of course where do we cut spending? Find me a dollar of "waste" and I'll show you someone who benefits from it. Can we please sto…

> Find me a dollar of "waste" and I'll show you someone who benefits from it.

So if people always benefit from every dollar spent...why should we ever stop government spending...oh wait, hasn't this been tried before?

Re: Twitter employee deactivates Trump account

#116
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your solution is to shutdown the person who disagrees with you?

No, it’s to stop the flow of sewerage into the water supply. Stop pretending Trump is some sort of rational participant in a Gentleman’s debate.

And you are the judge of what is sewerage? I don't care for Trump one way or the other, since I'm not even an American or living in the US, but this moral superiority pretense has to stop.

Re: Twitter employee deactivates Trump account

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's see how your logic extrapolates.... I frequently come across Socialists and Communists promoting their violent, hateful ideas. We can't let this go on in the name of free speech. After all, Communism murdered over a hundred million people in the 20th century. All Socialist and Communist propaganda - including all images of Mao, Che Guevara and the hammer & sickle - must be banned from all platforms, to avoid th…

The fundamental difference is that one is an economic ideology from which the genocidal ideas can be separated, and the other is a genocidal ideology. National socialism is an ideology for which certain types of people cannot exist, and such it is wholly incompatible with modern societies. Compare this to the fact that socialists and communists have been part of peaceful modern political systems. It is not that diffi…

Yep, national socialism sounds like this new "non-racist" ideology that says that white people are oppressors and thus they can be discriminated against...

Re: Twitter employee deactivates Trump account

#118
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America's extreme leftists (AKA SJWs) aren't center-right. They want socialism, they want to silence everyone who disagrees with them, they are willing to use any tactic (including censorship and even violence) to get what they want, and yet, in a startling lack of self-awareness, they consider the center-right half of the country "Nazis". This attempted act of censorship by an ex-Twitter employee is a fairly tame ex…

All of America's extreme leftists would probably fit in a 200sqm hall, with room to spare. Why worry about a statistical anomaly? Just because they have Tumblr accounts? :) (For the downvoters, prove me wrong, how many votes did a far left party get in US elections in the past 20 years? Does the US even have a far left party? :) )

There are a lot more than the far right, as evidenced by the recent protests around the country by BLM and Antifa. And the recent trend of fighting free speech on college campuses doesn't seem to be limited to a few institutions.

Re: Twitter employee deactivates Trump account

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So now we can debate whether they (Nazis, or whoever) should be allowed to use a platform, allowing themselves to be identified and dealt with by the law. In that regard there is no global consensus. And arguments for and against can be quite compelling. We know that attempting to suppress ideas can have unintended consequences.

I am against censorship, however as an European I agree with our country's constitution that says freedom of speech is granted only as far as hate speech isn't involved. Of course who should have the power to identify hate speech and censor content and what the definition of hate speech is, that's debatable. However a platform like Twitter is also private property, another right protected by the constitution and peop…

> says freedom of speech is granted only as far as hate speech isn't involved.

I see this all the time on HN, mostly Europeans. This is false. US freedom of speech is universal, including Nazi or hate. There is no such clause that prohibits hate speech. That's Europe's thing.

Re: Twitter employee deactivates Trump account

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the creation of more competing social media outlets Like gab.ai? Not allowed on iPhones. Perhaps Twitter could be considered a media company with editorial discretion, but Apple? Either treat these giant SV companies as utilities, or break them up.

Why wouldn't Apple have editorial control over their own private marketplace?

For the same reason electricity providers and ISPs shouldn't be allowed to. The companies that make products essential to modern society shouldn't be allowed to decide who can participate in modern society.
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