271–280 of 352 posts
Careful there. A judge calling Twitter a "public square" might ultimately lead to an extension of Marsh v. Alabama whereby social media platforms will not be able to censor political views they dislike. Slippery slopes and all that.
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I've noticed there are a lot of rude replies under most of Trumps tweets. I'd think it would be normal to block that kind of thing but I guess it's an odd situation - Twitter wasn't really designed for the president of the US. For example - just the most recent https://twitter.com/ronrobiins/status/999283009957318656 - presidential ain't what it used to be.
To be fair, no president was this rude. at least, not in public.
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Do his Gmail emails need to be open to all the public? His Slack messages? His Facebook posts? I don't see how anyone, president or otherwise, can't chose whom they send messages to.
He can certainly send private emails, Slack messages, or even Twitter DMs. What he can't do is publicly broadcast his tweets to the world, and then exclude people from them on political grounds.
Are they really public in that case?
The President can share information with 1 person, 2 people, 3 people, or 336m people (the number of Twitter users). But he can't share information with 335m people?
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> A mouthpiece yes, but an official way to "make policy" no Sorry but you are wrong. Trump's administration has stated that his tweets are official statements. Meaning, he can't block people who reply to his tweets. https://www.cnn.com/2017/06/06/politics/trump-tweets-officia...
Huh, I stand corrected. Good find.
https://twitter.com/RealPressSecBot
For those who don't want to click, it collects Trump's tweets in real-ish time, and reframes them into images of official-looking messages. The latest one as of the time I post this comment begins:
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 23, 2018
Statement by the President
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Do his Gmail emails need to be open to all the public? His Slack messages? His Facebook posts? I don't see how anyone, president or otherwise, can't chose whom they send messages to.
> Do his Gmail emails need to be open to all the public? His Slack messages? His Facebook posts? If they are being used to conduct official business, most likely yes. They will need to comply with federal regulations for data retention, public disclosure (or confidentiality as the case may be), etc. You may recall another candidate who was running for president in 2016 getting raked under the coals for using personal…
I thought the other candidate was raked over the coals for jeopardizing national security?
In any case, I speak of Trump's "government" Twitter, "government" Gmail, "government" Slack, and "government" Facebook. (IDK how such a distinction is made, but I would like to compare apples to apples.)
Wait, any public official? So the elected school board members in my town can't block me on Twitter if I go on crazy racist tirades, as long as they're political in nature? How about the dogcatcher? He can't block PETA animal rights screed accounts? And doesn't being forced to let cranks interact with prominent accounts increase those cranks' visibility? Is that forcing the prominent person to promote speech with whi…
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Huh, I stand corrected. Good find.
See also @RealPressSecBot, which hammers home the point: https://twitter.com/RealPressSecBot For those who don't want to click, it collects Trump's tweets in real-ish time, and reframes them into images of official-looking messages. The latest one as of the time I post this comment begins: THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE May 23, 2018 Statement by the President And then puts the tex…
https://twitter.com/RealPressSecBot/status/99928406869604761...
Careful there. A judge calling Twitter a "public square" might ultimately lead to an extension of Marsh v. Alabama whereby social media platforms will not be able to censor political views they dislike. Slippery slopes and all that.
The judge didn't call Twitter a “public square”, they called the space created by the @realDonaldTrump account a “public forum”; that's a critical difference.
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To be fair, no president was this rude. at least, not in public.
LBJ was a well known asshole. Did you actually think about your statement before you wrote it, or just assume that it would be true?
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>I think the more interesting part of this is the ruling that the president's "personal" twitter account is an official government instrument. Didn't the administration state that Trump's tweets are official statements a while back? That might be a big reason why. Edit: Yup, they did. https://www.cnn.com/2017/06/06/politics/trump-tweets-officia...
Ah, that changes things significantly. While I'm still concerned about the potential application of this case onto others, the ruling is far more reasonable imo.
* If you are a government official, and
* If you have an account on a social-media network, and
* If you use that account to make official statements in your official capacity as a government official, then
* You must follow the rules government officials are subject to with respect to channels for official communications in their official capacities.
Among those rules are: you have to let the general public see what you're saying, and give them the opportunity to reply and comment, and cannot prevent them from seeing, replying or commenting simply because you don't like their opinions.
This should be completely unsurprising, but apparently a lot of people on HN are surprised at this.
(another fun and as-yet-undecided-by-a-court question is whether it's legal for him to delete tweets, since there are also record-keeping laws which typically require official communications to be preserved, and apparently HN is surprised at that too, judging from some of the other subthreads here)