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Twitter suspends Trump's campaign account TeamTrump for violating its rules

reuters.com

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Re: Twitter suspends Trump's campaign account TeamTrump for violating its rules

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Important to remember, these companies did this not from an outpouring of ethical or moral considerations, but because the next president will not tolerate them. Edit: To be clear, I support the bans and would have loved to see them earlier. I am not lamenting them.

Can you share any evidence of that?

Isn't it obvious. There are a number of time trump violated the terms and conditions of various platforms with his content.

There are numerous instances where activists have pointed out glaring breach of T&C, nothing was ever done, because it was good for business

Re: Twitter suspends Trump's campaign account TeamTrump for violating its rules

#55

Frankly yes. A tolerant society does not tolerate intolerance.

I don't think you've understood what an insane idea that is.

Who defines intolerance? Historically that's the people in power.

In the 50's that was the US government and powerful people like CIA Director J Edgar Hoover and Senator Joseph McCarthy who used their power to root out leftists, branding them as communists. They said free america could not tolerate the intolerant leftists because socialism and communists were inherently intolerant.

The USSR did this by sending people who questioned party agenda straight to the gulags. "By going against party thinking, these people are pushing for an intolerant society that is stratified with the class structures of old. We need to get rid of them before they ruin our perfect tolerant society."

The same logic is used to try to stamp out Muslims in countries like India right now and other places in the world historically. "If we leave the intolerant Muslims around, they'll bring forth Jihad and enforce Sharia law on everyone. The Koran is very intolerant about how non-muslims should be treated, we need to force them out because their intolerance is a threat to tolerance everywhere."

Literally every Christian country post-Martin Luther in the middle ages used that logic to wage wars on other Christian countries. Not just Christian vs. Christian of course. It's why countries in the past fought against each other over religion so much. When intolerance is defined as views that I don't agree with, it becomes kill or be killed world.

One of the best features of the enlightenment thinking is the concept of tolerance. One of the fundamental principles of Western thought. It's literally the reason why non-Christians can live in formerly Christian countries without being persecuted. It's why we accept people thinking about other government types other than an absolute monarchy.

The fact that you can say that statement without irony is honestly so scary to me.

Re: Twitter suspends Trump's campaign account TeamTrump for violating its rules

#56

Frankly yes. A tolerant society does not tolerate intolerance.

A tolerant society that doesn't "tolerate intolerance" (your words) is an intolerant society. We are heading toward authoritarianism.

> We are heading toward authoritarianism.

We had a coup attempt on Wednesday! We're already there. This is the attempt to recover. Maybe it won't work. I'm not super hopeful. But in a country where the president can aim a riot at congress, his ability to tweet doesn't really seem like the freedom we should be most concerned about.

Re: Twitter suspends Trump's campaign account TeamTrump for violating its rules

#57
post #7

Makes sense. They just set a policy and he immediately attempted a workaround. Let's have the free speech discussions debated through representatives. I can agree that violence should be removed by platforms immediately, and that "Stop the Steal" did promote just that.

Here is better explained article on "The Washington Post".[0]

P.S. He is also removed from Mastodon[1] too:

> The page you were looking for doesn't exist here anymore.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/08/twitter...

[1] https://mastodon.social/@realDonaldTrump

Re: Twitter suspends Trump's campaign account TeamTrump for violating its rules

#58
post #30

Something that isn't being talked about anymore: Trump chose twitter. He chose to stay on it, to use his personal account, to use it as his primary method of communication. US presidents have the biggest, loudest loudspeakers available at their fingertips. Obama's administration had a whole protocol about how to use Twitter as one of their official comms medium and not have it be a de facto one. Biden is so far follo…

Yeah, Trump should have used whitehouse.gov to share his thoughts, and if people want to follow they can use a whitehouse.gov RSS feed or whatever.

Somehow, most other elected officials manage just fine. Trump had even more potential reach. He chose to put all this power in Twitter's hands.

Y'all should be thankful this failed authoritarian was so incompetent.

Re: Twitter suspends Trump's campaign account TeamTrump for violating its rules

#59

Most of the discussion seems to be centered around freedom of speech and enabling dissenting voices, no matter how violent, but I think we're missing the bigger picture here. This represents a vast check on presidential power that exists purely in the hands of these incredibly wealthy and powerful social media executives. I don't necessarily disagree with Twitter's decision given the events of the last few days, but…

>strips Trump of a major source of power for him I think you are trying to make a reasoned argument and engage in meaningful debate, but can we really make the argument that the person with the nuclear codes, in control of a budget of trillions of dollars, receives any power from a free online publishing tool?

Right, it's more of a convenience.
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