81–90 of 1001 posts
Not every day a sitting President threatens a media outlet for exercising their freedom of the press, but it's not the first time it's happened. Of course, most Presidents have been constrained by some modicum of understanding that their oath to uphold the Constitution applies to the whole thing.
"Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices" Reddit is the best example of that. I don't want to defend him but look at every single news and politics related sub from /r/news, /r/worldnews, /r/politics etc. But that happens here too. Honestly I blame the upvote downvote system more. Reddit and HN are both really wrong with it
Free speech is not just an American constitutional right; many countries throughout the world consider free speech to be a human right. So, yeah, many of us get a bit worked up when people are kicked off platforms, because they are being silenced, sometimes to the point of being shut out of the modern internet entirely (when their rights to a DNS address are comprehensively removed). Hate speech and lies are terrible…
The problem inevitably has flared up: Twitter's head of integrity leading this push has previously tweeted that Trump is a Nazi and accused the flyover states of being racist. https://twitter.com/Liz_Wheeler/status/1265463081997484032 This isn't going to end well, and unless Twitter is going to exercise this impartially (which is impossible given a human is involved), they are going to lose their platform status, and…
What’s “platform status”?
Wasn’t it Voltaire who said “ I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it ”? Nonetheless, this is pretty much par for the course for what the world has come to expect. Edit: It turns out that though phrase is often attributed to Voltaire, it was actually Evelyn Beatrice Hall, as noted by the poster below, to whom I am grateful for the correction.
Would he defend your right to say it in his living room , though? (Let's also not lose sight of the fact that Trump hasn't even had his tweets deleted or censored in any fashion. Just a note added underneath.)
I’d also like to see social media and search engines legislated as utilities... but I’m in the EU so my opinion scarcely matters, to be perfectly honest.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And this is specifically on a tweet calling the validity of the election into question. It's blatantly wrong, but he needs his base to believe him when he says the election is rigged.
Mail-in ballots make it much easier to commit voter fraud, I don't see how anyone could possibly argue to the contrary. https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/26/review-tr...
Many states already do mail-in ballots and they're much more secure than the sketchy voting machines currently in use: https://qz.com/1783766/these-voting-machine-security-flaws-t...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And this is specifically on a tweet calling the validity of the election into question. It's blatantly wrong, but he needs his base to believe him when he says the election is rigged.
Mail-in ballots make it much easier to commit voter fraud, I don't see how anyone could possibly argue to the contrary. https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's also admitted that voter suppression is the main reason Republicans even get elected[0]. God help us if we ever get a competent authoritarian into office who's cunning enough not to say the corrupt part out loud. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/30/trump-vot...
To your point, Trump being out in the open with his BS is probably what his base likes. I have family members who think that he is a great president, go figure. BTW, I view most politicians from both parties, DNC, and RNC to be corrupt, controlled by special interests. Not to go to far afield here, but I will vote for either a democrat or republican based on public records of who their donors are. Turns out that base…
The other half is to realize that in the US representative democracy, the people who change policy are the ones who are dedicated enough to the task to make a career out of it, at the expense of other things they could be doing. Because the system isn't managed by the will of the people; it's managed by the will of the subset of the people who put the (quite large amount of) effort in to be known and heard. Most Americans don't even do the base work of showing up to vote in every election (and the turnout numbers are too low to explain that effect by voter suppression alone).
Those with other things to do and not enough time to be devoted full-time to policy-craft label those who do "special interests."
The NRA is a special interest, but so is the ACLU. And the NAACP. And the AFL-CIO. And the EFF.
This case is an exception. Twitter drew a line in the sand. It is in exactly the right place.
The PoTUS is threatening to shut down elections in November: he seems to be doing everything in his power to have a national emergency then when people can't vote, to shut down post offices, and to ban voting by mail. Any other problems with the PoTUS, we should address in the ballot box and through citizen activism (not through corporate activism). But when the PoTUS tries to shut down the ballot box or shut down citizen activism, that's different.
I don't think he's likely to be successful, but I didn't think coronavirus would hit us this hard either. In January, it was a manageable billion-dollar problem. We did nothing. Now, it's a multi-trillion dollar problem. Right now, Trump trying to cancel the election is a manageable problem too; by his personality, if he doesn't get traction, we're done. He'll move on. But if he does get traction, we'll have a completely different scale of problem on our hands.