Trump signs executive order targeting protections for social media companies

I've grown to hate Twitter's complicity in... whatever the hell we should call the political world we live in right now, but right now I'm just amused. Because I'd like to think the people who created Twitter or are working there probably have a conscience and Anti-Trump leanings, but they've let him get away so much that they are now part of the scum they probably despise.

You know how people can be reserved in the real world but say the weirdest shit on Twitter? Honestly, Trump is such a coward, I think without Twitter he wouldn't have dared spit the venom he's been spitting left and right, because he would've had to go in front of a lectern to be heard instead.

I'm sorry but you have a fundamentally flawed model for how Trump (and many in the GOP) think about the world.

You're operating under a principle that says that people are essential equal in terms of rights and that there is a moral obligation to consistency. The old Golden Rule, and everything. Under that framework, it's stupid to punch someone in the face unless you also want to get punched in the face, because your principle of equivalence says that you should be prepared to receive anything you give.

But these people have an entirely different model. There is no right and wrong. No fairness, no consistency. It is simply a model of power. If you have the power to do a thing, you can do a thing. And if others don't have enough power to do the same back to you, their loss.

You wouldn't get irate that the Earth pulls the moon out of its orbit more than the moon affects the Earth. It's not "unfair" that the Earth has more mass. It is simply a fact, and that fact determines how those planetary bodies act.

The mentality of authoritarians is the same with respect to power. The universe has granted power to some and not others, and the only moral code is to use what you have to do what you can get away with.

It's confusing, because these people often use words like "right" and "fair", but they are using them purely as tools of power for the effect using the words has on others, and not under any actual belief in them. My kids when they were toddlers would cry "not fair" any time they didn't get their way, because they learned that claiming something was unfair was sometimes an effective strategy to sway parents. It's the same thing.

I think it may actually be a way to empower companies to gain more access to information. If the companies are responsible, then they will want to sue the users for violations and personally identify them. A side effect is that they will have some government agency deciding what is acceptable or not. Much like China.

Absolutely. To get a slice of that thinking. Here's Rush Limbaugh:

(backstory: Trump has been repeatedly peddling an absolutely baseless claim that his TV critic Joe Scarborough murdered his employee couple of decades back. Her husband is now pleading that Trump is causing irreparable damage to their family). Anyway, here's Limbaugh:

“The thing here is when you get to Trump and his conspiracy theories, he does it in a really clever way,” he proclaimed. “And this is where people don’t get the subtlety of Trump because they don’t think he has the ability to be subtle. Trump never says that he believes these conspiracy theories that he touts. He’s simply passing them on.”

Asked by his producer whether he thinks “Trump cares whether Scarborough murdered anybody or not,” Limbaugh replied that the president doesn’t care but is tweeting about it “because it’s out there.”

“So Trump is just throwing gasoline on a fire here, and he’s having fun watching the flames—and he’s having fun watching these holier-than-thou leftist journalists react like their moral sensibilities have been forever rocked and can never recover,” he concluded.

To repeat my comment from a different thread:

If we accept corporations as people, I wish some of the ones with actual power had the backbone to do a bit of civil disobedience, instead of rolling over at the first sign of trouble. Twitter should double down and add a fact-check sticker to every single Trump lie, past and current — to hell with lawsuits and the FCC. Otherwise, we'll "maybe parts of this sound reasonable" our way straight into a goose-stepping, thought-shaping, Republican-ruled dictatorship. Surely, even the people who scoffed at this idea a few years ago can see this future taking shape.

I am aghast that there's any support for this in the once-countercultural Silicon Valley. It's abhorrent and shameful, and it makes me fear that maybe the gravity well is already too large to escape. Meanwhile, people like Zuckerberg and Musk are tripping over themselves to appease the ruling party.

(Just a reminder that earlier today, Trump retweeted a video declaring that "the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat." I suppose this is one of those good old fashioned Republican values that our liberal bias works so hard to suppress.)