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Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
851–860 of 1001 posts
Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
#852Not 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.
Is Twitter a media outlet? If they want to be classified as such it might make them susceptible to slander lawsuits
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Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
#853Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's even more concerning than that. Threatening to shut down private companies -- not for limiting speech, not for refusing to distribute speech -- but for exercising their own right to free speech alongside the free speech of others (in this case the president). There is no right to unchallenged or un-responded-to speech, regardless of how you interpret the right to free speech.
Attaching a disclaimer to the speech of another though is not straightforward. Will they get into the business of fact checking everyone over certain number of followers? Will they do it impartially world-wide? How can they even be impartial world wide given the different contradictory points of view, valid from both sides? Cyprus? What’s the take there?
Twitter's not the supreme court, and they don't have to set a universal maxim to act.
Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
#854Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have struggled with both points of the argument for a while now. In general, I'm inclined to agree with your assessment that this would be a glaring overreach on the side of the feds. It's also apparent that social networks have a tendency to cater massively to one side of the increasingly divided political spectrum, as proven with experiments like Gab. I've always liked the idea of having a Twitter clone that base…
FWIW, the BBC World Service podcast "The Compass" [1] has an excellent series on free speech by the veteran BBC journalist Robin Lustig. I highly recommend it. He covers tech companies, universities, blasphemy laws, etc. [1] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p035w97h/episodes/downloads For me, free speech is fundamentally about trying to rectify the injustice of an imbalance of power between those in authority and t…
> FWIW, the BBC World Service podcast
The BBC is the last place I'd look to understand free speech. There is a reason why orwell based the ministry of truth on the bbc.
Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
#855I think this is going to be a discussion thread that is almost inevitably going to be a shitshow, but anyway: There are people who advocate the idea that private companies should be compelled to distribute hate speech, dangerously factually incorrect information and harassment under the concept that free speech is should be applied universally rather than just to government. I don't agree, I think it's a vast over-re…
A private company that has a monopoly on speech is no longer a private company, it's essentially an unelected and unaccountable part of the permanent government. You need to think about entities based on their properties, not the labels that are attached to them. That ought to be obvious to people who program for a living; think of a private company with a speech monopoly as the good old .txt.exe scam. You're attachi…
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals disagrees:
"Despite YouTube's ubiquity and its role as a public-facing platform, it remains a private forum, not a public forum subject to judicial scrutiny under the First Amendment," the court said."
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/youtu...
Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
#856There seem to be some upside down priorities here. Many folks seem to be arguing that its an unacceptable form of censorship for a private platform to annotate content it allows others to post. Meanwhile, I'm seeing barely a mention of the fact that the President of the United States has threatened to use government power to shut down an entire sector of the economy devoted to communication. The latter is almost cert…
Because that's how far we've gone from reality. The word censorship has lost almost all meaning in online arguments when people are trying to argue that what Twitter did constitutes censorship while Trump publicly threatening them with shutdown somehow does not.
It's become increasingly obvious that the argument around censorship has never been actually about censorship but rather as another political bludgeon you can use to beat your opponent over the head with by scoring some easy points since censorship = bad. They ignore the power dynamics at play which is what makes censorship possible.
Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
#857It seems like any remotely political post on HN gets flooded and upvoted with provable incorrect comments. Twitter team which is doing "fact checks" is severely biased and factually wrong. Twitter's "Head of Site Integrity" Yoel Roth boasts on his LinkedIn that he is in charge of "developing and enforcing Twitter’s rules". > “He leads the teams responsible for developing and enforcing Twitter’s rules” Here's a few of…
So he’s biased. Does that mean him fact checking is wrong ? Sure, we should demand accountability on both sides, but it’s hard to be completely neutral.
Did you read my comment in full? I provided 5 different sources (all liberal too) that Twitter's "fact checking" is 100% wrong.
Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
#858I think this is going to be a discussion thread that is almost inevitably going to be a shitshow, but anyway: There are people who advocate the idea that private companies should be compelled to distribute hate speech, dangerously factually incorrect information and harassment under the concept that free speech is should be applied universally rather than just to government. I don't agree, I think it's a vast over-re…
I think it's even more concerning than that. Threatening to shut down private companies -- not for limiting speech, not for refusing to distribute speech -- but for exercising their own right to free speech alongside the free speech of others (in this case the president). There is no right to unchallenged or un-responded-to speech, regardless of how you interpret the right to free speech.
> There is no right to unchallenged or un-responded-to speech
There are forms of government where certain forms of speech cannot be challenged. Well, not safely anyway.
I should know, I lived for 20 years in that sort of place (Eastern Bloc kid).
Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
#859Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps they see it as targeting a political figure because of political differences rather than trying to prevent the spread of misinformation. I'm not seeing any annotations on a number prominent members of Congress spreading misinformation. Where in the US Constitution does it say presidents cannot threaten companies? Obama had his share of threats. I'm sure they could find a suitable legal issue with Twitter targ…
> Where in the US Constitution does it say presidents cannot threaten companies? The Articles of the US Constitution aren't an enumerated list of illegal actions. It's the wrong place to look for limitations of presidential power. I love that our expectations of the current president are so low that we will use excuse them because "the previous presidents did it too!" You aren't actually saying what he's doing is leg…
> The Articles of the US Constitution aren't an enumerated list of illegal actions. It's the wrong place to look for limitations of presidential power.
The US Constitution is indeed an enumerated list of federal governmental powers, including the President's. At least that is the standard interpretation. Obviously there are an infinite number of ways those enumerated powers might manifest themselves but the overall scope and nature of the powers is indeed limited by the US Constitution.
Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
#860Trump sees what social media companies did: they murdered democracy and inserted themselves as a surrogate.