Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/05/28/heres-whats-in-trumps-ex.html
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i don’t want to be the first comment. come on people.
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Everyone repeat after me “I pledge to never vote for another Republican for the rest of my life.” It’s very liberating.
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His feelings trump all facts.
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I hope this backfires on him.
If he actually succeeds in somehow protecting speech online (he won’t, he’ll make it more toxic to speak freely or just easier for nazis to and fuck everyone else over), Twitter could redeem itself by starting another service that fact checks every tweet Trump has ever made, and doing 10 a day, and paying to have it broadcast on the billboard in Times Square
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Please, please, please.
Ain’t gonna happen, but you just gave me some good-dream fodder.
There’s probably some clause in the ToS that says twitter has the right to remove your account for any reason. Seriously, what’s 45 gonna do? Force employees at gun-point to re-enable his account?
Ugh. Now I have nightmare fodder too.
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Does the real estate swindler who wants to date his daughter know the difference between an order for a Big Mac and large fries and an order for dictatorship?
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The provisions regarding the FTC could raise additional legal questions, as the FTC is an independent agency that does not take orders from the President.
So… it hinges on ordering the FTC to do something, but the FTC doesn’t take his orders and already essentially rejected this plan once before, presumably because of that.
That’s so Trump! ™
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A good way would be for multiple companies and platforms to sue the Trump Administration. TOS are clearly outlined and spell out what is allowed and what isn’t, free speech is great and all but when doing so on a platform a person is still subject to the TOS. If i were Twitter i would love to take him to court and show that what he tweeted about the mail in voting was incorrect and them fact checking him was not infringing on his free speech.
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He’s right, for the wrong reasons, and taking the wrong actions based on that. The media control exercised by social media conglomerates in, in fact, bad. But the solution is decentralization and fragmentation (whether by carrot or by stick- incentives or regulation). What you definitely don’t want to do is try and unconstitutional restraint on companies because they pointed out you’re full of shit.
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We need to update the saying “Don’t pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel” - How about “someone who buys servers by the truckload”?
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Yes. Yeeeesssssss. Good. Goooodd. Search your feelings. Let the hate flow through you. Use it to achieve unlimited power! Heehheeeheeeeh.
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“you see, we need to ensure the right of the people to attack religions they disagree with, to lie to the public and perpetuate conspiracy theories and harmful untruths, and to menacingly demand non-essential tonsorial services even at the expense of public health and welfare.”
–thomas jefferson, 1787
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This nonsense probably won’t have any meaningful effect on an entity like Twitter or Facebook, but what about entities who don’t have essentially unlimited litigation funds to defend themselves against lawsuits alleging “bias” against conservatives?
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“…consult with state attorneys general on allegations of anti-conservative bias.”
So he wants to ensure that future conversations are “properly” biased against bias. That’s fair. /s
The Trump First Amendment™: Free Speech Is My Speech.
TrumpSpeech: Ensuring that all is speech is unbiased, but some speech is more unbiased than others.
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Twitter has always justified keeping Trump’s account on the basis that whatever he says is newsworthy, no matter how toxic, and the public has a right to hear it. And also it generates a tremendous amount of attention and engagement. So basically it’s good business.
As soon as it becomes bad business for their platform – when he becomes a liability, as he clearly is becoming – it’s going to be harder for them to justify keeping his account. Business is business, and when he starts costing them money instead of generating it, well…
Also, how has no Republican seen there’s the inevitable consequences of giving “the other side” (i.e., Democrats, progressives, socialists, etc.) these tools to cry “unfair to me” and sue a media outlet they don’t like? Is Fox News fair to progressives and socialists? Does it limit their ability to have their views fairly presented? No? Well that sounds like a bunch of lawsuits to me…
Thanks, Trump!
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Does fact checking qualify as infringement (assuming that there is even a dust mote of merit to Trump’s idea in the first place)? I mean the big issue I see is that blocking Twitter’s limp-wristed response to this stuff would also infringe on freedom of expression. On top of that (to take Twitter’s example) nobody is forcing anyone to click on the fact-checking link.
It’s all about creating grounds for legal action and creating lists (just like McCarthy) and it is so very authoritarian and Trumpy. That said, I can’t even see the Supreme Court upholding something like this.
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It doesn’t but Trump perceives it as Twitter attempting to censor him, which is why i hope they take him to court and legally hand him his ass.
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And yet again, everyone looses except the currently sitting president.
This seems right out of the playbook how to win an election in as authoritarian-leaning head of state, IMO. How apt that the tweet which started it was about the upcoming US election.
- pick a fight with an enemy which seems to strong for you
- pick a fight with an enemy who has a reputation on both extreme sides of the political spectrum to be horrible, and a good bit of unease (see 1) in the middle
- pick a subject of the fight where basically all agree that your enemy has a bad reputation (for different reasons)
- confuse everything as good as you can by using arbitrary terms and re-defining meaning of words
- don’t even attack yourself, but delegate, and try to do so even with (barely) plausible deniability
- attack on other legal fronts to further confuse and blackmail your enemies
- attack on non-legal, but financial fronts
- fuck up all the other enemies even if you can’t hit the big ones at the beginnging
- change the rules, because you fucking can
- profit.
I think we are at step 5, today. I also might have missed some steps.
Personally, I fully expect action also against GGL and APL coming up. Not only FB and TWT.
Oh, this is a very hot take. I might reconsider if I see a reason to. Right now, I fully expect twitter to roll over and present it’s belly, because they know the drill…
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If this goes anywhere, this will be the beginning of the end of places like the BBS.
If we remove a user for violating the provisions of our community guidelines, and they have a mechanism to sue for that removal, then just the cost of defending from that challenge alone is sufficient to make running a forum a nonstarter, even if we were to prevail.
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