omg, the dude incited a mob to go storm the Capitol and commit an act of terror against this nation, and we’re talking about slippery slopes or lines being drawn... he did not get banned because of some unpopular opinion or unsavory comments...he is the leader of the country inciting his deranged mob to commit violence, and they have shown that they will 5 people died. They were targeting officials. Let’s understand the magnitude of what happened. he shouldn’t be on any forms of social media, period
We should not. Social Media let everything Trump did go. That SM made an exception for inciting insurrection should not be worrisome. It is the exception that makes the rule.
I regret to inform the tweeter: If you come into a diner with your shirt off, yelling obscenities, turning over tables, and throwing glassware around, injuring patrons, you may well get barred from several nearby restaurants. And yes, gasp, it could happen all at once. I doubt that will happen to anything I care about, because I don't choose to support people who act like that. There are already left-wing activists who've had their accounts suspended, and they deserved it. There have been left-wing posters on this very site permabanned, and yet, here I still am enjoying the site. Rules matter. Civil society matters.
That a few very powerful decision makers have the ability to effectively remove a group’s presence on the Internet should be a cause for concern, apart from the question of whether Trump deserves to be heard or not. As our lives are increasingly lived in a digital world that is owned by private power, the protected rights that we have in the public sphere would seemingly become less and less important relative to the lack of rights that we have online.
Once again.... The President has operated for years and years without social media. We should enact law to keep them off of social media. At any given moment, if the President wants to speak to the people, he can go in front of a camera. It's worked this way for years... I get the point, but this should not be an issue.
Concerning sure... watching these powerful companies flex in unison is scary. I find facebook and their radicalizing algorithms to be a menace to the fabric of society... watching them escape any real punishment from the Cambridge Analytica scandal is fing infuriating, so watching them ban 45 hardly registers. I'm not sure what the alternative is at this very moment. Allow the continued incitement of violence on your platform? Obviously not. But it should put everyone on notice that one can be silenced and perhaps next time the reasoning is less solid, and makes a case for a forced breakup of these tech giants and media mega conglomerates alike.
I hear that, to some degree. The flexing in unison was a bit shocking to me as well. Since so much commerce happens online, I would be insincere to simply say, "well you can always photocopy a newsletter and mail it out via USPS." But if anyone acts in a way that severely threatens these companies' liability calculations or business models, I don't see how you turn that off. Naively, I wonder if the argument has to become public versus private internet. I shudder to think of a government-run social media platform, LOL, but one could try that, complete with traffic cops and parking tickets, etc. It would end up being a not-small branch of government, and conservatives would still hate it if they couldn't post memes of hanging opponents, etc.
If a Democrat president tries to get his followers to kill members of Congress, I will not be upset if private companies ban him from their platform.
They are different companies that share something similar - incitement of violence crosses the line. There are powerful check on these companies as a group - the government, the users. If they ever crosses a line that is unacceptable to either or worse, both, I’m sure they will see consequences that they would not like.
