I can see a future where something like this becomes default in most countries. Unthinkable just a few years ago.
We've been doing this for a while: https://www.cnn.com/2015/05/07/politics/uk-elections-media-b...
Uganda bans social media ahead of election
51–60 of 76 posts
Re: Uganda bans social media ahead of election
#52This is wonderful, and I hope my country follows suite. We already have laws banning election campaigning in the 24hrs leading up to the elections, but there's no way to control that on social media.
Shutting off FB, Twitter, and Insta during that 24hrs is a great idea.
Re: Uganda bans social media ahead of election
#53Twitter’s official statement on this is one for the history books: https://mobile.twitter.com/Policy/status/1349059275461685250
I don't think so. There's a big difference between a reactive censorship of a single powerful person by Twitter and the proactive censorship of an entire population of people with very little power by a government -- both functionally and philosophically. Trump can summon a press conference 24/7 and have his message broadcast to the entire world. He controls publication on multiple personal and government websites. W…
Trump wasn't banned before the elections. He wasn't banned after Charlottesville, and then wasn't banned for 3.5 more years while he continued to undermine American institutions. He was only banned after refusing to accept the election results and inciting insurrection with conspiracies.
People are /really/ reaching for something that isn't there. To be clear, I don't think Twitter is "the good guy", but the comments in this subthread are very disappointing.
Re: Uganda bans social media ahead of election
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Double standards are bad. Principles should matter more than your biases.
I'm trying to make the case in my comment above that I don't believe the situations are equivalent and thus there is no double standard. (You can of course disagree with this and I'd be interested in your argument) There is one standard for leaders who promote documented conspiracy theories and another for blocking an entire country's access to social media in an effort to alter the outcome of an election.
The leaders who tirelessly promoted Russian influence conspiracy theory and supported violent riots last year are somehow not blocked.
Re: Uganda bans social media ahead of election
#55Twitter’s official statement on this is one for the history books: https://mobile.twitter.com/Policy/status/1349059275461685250
It's strange how they think they are part of an open internet movement.
Maintaining the illusion is an important part of any propagandists toolset. Of course your enemies will see right through it, this kind of content is produced for the people you have thoroughly cut off from all other sources of information. It reenforces the the true believer's inner narrative that they are a part of GoodGuyInc.
Re: Uganda bans social media ahead of election
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think so. There's a big difference between a reactive censorship of a single powerful person by Twitter and the proactive censorship of an entire population of people with very little power by a government -- both functionally and philosophically. Trump can summon a press conference 24/7 and have his message broadcast to the entire world. He controls publication on multiple personal and government websites. W…
Trump wasn't banned before the elections. He wasn't banned after Charlottesville, and then wasn't banned for 3.5 more years while he continued to undermine American institutions. He was only banned after refusing to accept the election results and inciting insurrection with conspiracies. People are /really/ reaching for something that isn't there. To be clear, I don't think Twitter is "the good guy", but the comments…
This after repeatedly violating rules that tend to get other uses banned.
Re: Uganda bans social media ahead of election
#57Discussed a couple days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25704433
with an informative top comment from a Ugandan HNer.
Re: Uganda bans social media ahead of election
#58Twitter’s official statement on this is one for the history books: https://mobile.twitter.com/Policy/status/1349059275461685250
Are the people running Twitter high 24-7 or just during election season?
Re: Uganda bans social media ahead of election
#59I can see a future where something like this becomes default in most countries. Unthinkable just a few years ago.
When they were shutting down the internet during the arab spring uprising?
Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Re: Uganda bans social media ahead of election
#60This doesn't look good for Twitter, but comparing blocking an entire country from social media a few days before an election and blocking a few leaders who have clear ties to inciting violent riots via conspiracy theories seems like a false equivalence. Instead of justifying censorship as "good" or "bad" in some essential fashion, I think it's important to be clear about the context. EDIT: In fact, Twitter has done m…
> clear ties to inciting violent riots https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1347302588434284544 Twitter selectively enforces their rules, largely targeting conservatives.
What you've linked to is a splicing of several segments of video which attempts to link together events, groups, places people and organizations most of which are not actually linked together. For example:
* A person says "looting", and in a following or preceding segment another person, on another channel at another time says "Antifa".
* An image of cars on fire in the background, and segments by some anchors or pundits saying that protests are important, or should not be polite.
So, while I'm no fan on MSNBC, CNN etc., and think they're being rather hypocritical with their treatment of the confirmation protesters - that clip is just under-handed smearing by its author and by you.