161–170 of 366 posts
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Wasn't Biden president when Trump was banned from Twitter?
Not yet. In any case, Presidents retain their title as President for life.
It is interesting how much influence Peter Thiel has on the main players of social media: via Facebook as an early investor and ex-board member and via Twitter with his ex-coworker from Paypal days Musk. He’s very explicit in his book about the power of monopolies and now you see this consolidation of social media companies under a specific group of closed people. WSJ reported Thiel being involved with Musk on this t…
Dorsey has always been part of the crop of Enlightenment-liberal tech CEOs, which includes Larry, Sergey, and Zuckerberg. It got memory-holed pretty quickly, but these guys were dragged kicking and screaming into the new illiberal consensus that it was their job to decide what users are allowed to talk about. At a certain point, they bowed to the emerging illiberal consensus, for fear of both political and employee-revolt consequences. It is business, after all.
(I was at Google for the first half of the last decade, and it was eerie to see the employee culture slowly get colonized by the culty illiberal-left perspective)
Culture is weird, and can shift dramatically between equilibria. Now that the conversation has shifted, a lot of these figures feel like they have cover to start expressing their beliefs again without those who disagree being able to gin up any financial consequences.
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I think that mob incitement is an excuse used for selective enforcement of the rules. If you're on the left, you're clearly operating under different rules: https://twitter.com/LoriLightfoot/status/1523844510735908864
Lori Lightfoot is neither on the left (she is squarely a centrist), nor the President of the United States claiming that the election was stolen.
Jack is showing that he’s unprincipled. He doesn’t shape his decisions around principles, he shapes his ostensible “principles” around his decisions. The question they (Jack, but also Elon) ask themselves is not “what’s the principled decision to make?” but “What’s best for me in this moment?” and in the moment Trump was banned, banning Trump was the best decision for Jack. And now the best decision for Jack is not t…
Principles are compressed representations pointing to virtue, not things in an of themselves to be reified and held.
Is there just a different set of free speech rules for the rich and powerful? If I incited violence on the platform, I doubt Elon or Dorsey would be letting me come back after a ban.
Of course there is. Twitter's owner appoint managers who hire people to oversee censorship on the platform. These choices themselves are already biased towards the owners' interests and points of view. If you add to this ability of rich and powerful people/organizations to harass or influence Twitter, the bias is even stronger.
Having said that - the tweet Trump was suspended for:
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...
does not seem like an incitement of violence.
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Politicians don't have the right to be on a private website. They already have official channels to communicate. Twitter has every right to ban Putin, or Trump, or Duterte, etc.
Where did I say that politicians have the right to stay on a private website? Yes, Twitter has the right to ban people. As do restaurants not serve certain people. But if a restaurant decides to not serve Jews let's say, I will obviously condemn them. If you believe in free speech you should have absolutely condemned Twitter when they banned the president.
They'll have serious legal problems pretty quickly for doing something so illegal.
> If you believe in free speech you should have absolutely condemned Twitter when they banned the president.
I believe in free speech and property rights. Which means if Twitter decides someone can't be on Twitter anymore due to their actions then that's their right. And if Twitter's new ownership makes some different decisions on who's allowed to be on Twitter, that's also their right.
Take a look at the two tweets that twitter used to justify the perma ban of Trump. It's weak, at absolute best. https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio... On January 8, 2021, President Donald J. Trump Tweeted: “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated…
Before this turns into a culture-war-fest consider this: if Twitter is to be a global platform, it probably should NOT take political sides and if it is to censor anyone permanently, it should mostly adhere to local courts and similar entities. It's not about Trump or United States. It's about everyone else. World is a really messy place. It's not very easy generally to decided if in a political conflict one or other…
Twitter should enforce their ToS no matter who breaks them.
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Yes. I still view Twitter (back when I was on it) as a private business. Like a pub. Chat rubbish, cause trouble, get thrown out. At the time of the elections, do you remember all the memes about how Twitter was just a tiny portion of voters and that the vast majority were not even on Twitter? Twitter is not a town square or a centre of free speech. It's a small dive bar in the corner of the city. Cause trouble, get…
Ban everyone you disagree with. Yeah, that will lead to great things.