Trump’s tweet are considered to be part of the official presidential archive in the Library of Congress and can’t be deleted. That’s why nothing is removed and they couldn’t just ban him outright.
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They can just keep doing the whole lot of nothing that they have done in the over 10 years he’s been on Twitter spouting his hateful bile.
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Oh geez here we go. Now where will we find out about presidential policy?! It got so much more nuanced when they bumped tweets up to 280 characters!
Man, I really do hope he’ll quit Twitter in a huff. If nothing else, it means I won’t have my newsfeed clogged with reposts of people arguing with his tweets. Twitter used to at least be entertaining. Now it’s 90% political echo chamber, no matter how carefully you choose who to follow.
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Yet he deletes tweets constantly.
He does not give two shits about presidential record keeping.
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Yeah - he doesn’t even have the wit to be a Deagol. He’s almost tall enough to be a troll. They were quite dim.
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But then they’d be doing Nothing, and they’re actually, finally, doing Something!
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I believe he subsequently made sure they fired those guys. So no one is keeping the records, now.
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The government is supposed to keep the records, not a private company. The President is entitled to keep a copy of everything he writes, like anybody else, and, as @ficuswhisperer said, he is legally required to preserve and maintain those records. Twitter is free to delete his tweets or to ban him from the platform for not complying with the terms of service that he agreed to when he signed in.
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Not quite useless. It may have no real effect, but no-one’s opinion should be beyond question, and they are actually doing it, yaaay.
No, seriously, I believe the whole balance of what is versus what you are supposed to believe must be swayed by little things like this, and we should celebrate it.
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If I had the billions necessary, I’d buy Twitter and just shut it down. I wish Bezos had done that instead of buy the Washington Post.
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It’s only “Political” now because americans have allowed the fascist right to politicize every neutral topic down to how often and short you should trim your toenails.
If there’s anything the right is good at, it’s shutting down discourse and disenfranchisement of voters. And allowing those nazi freaks to politicize practically every topic ever means that there’s no room for people to disagree civilly. It’s all dogwhistles now. Because nobody had the guts and the will to shut down all the bullshit when it started.
Saying “oh we have to listen to the nazis. We have to be nice to them. Otherwise they won’t be nice to us” as if fascist sociopaths ever intend to be a part of civil society in the first place.
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As far as keeping old tweets, what @Barradeno sez. But even if they weren’t allowed to detwete his leets, they’d have no obligation to keep publishing new ones; they have an absolute right to delete his account.
Twitter loves you to think they don’t have a choice, because the choice they’ve made is indefensible and they know it. If they ban Turmp now, they take responsibility for every evil thing they’ve done on his behalf, and that’s a lot. Twitter, of all people, know what kind of an angry mob it would summon up.
No one thinks Fox News has been forced by law to act as a mouthpiece for Turmp. The idea is ridiculous. But Fox News has more legal obligations regarding its output than Twitter does; and Fox News exercises some editorial control over what it publishes on his behalf. Compared to Twitter, Fox News is Émile fuckin’ Zola.
I’m not saying Twitter shouldn’t be free to publish Turmp’s filth. I’m saying they are free to publish whatever they want – great – but for that exact reason, they can’t blame anyone else for the despicable outcome they’ve created. So don’t let them. Treat Twitter as you would treat Fox News, because it is worse.
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I’m pretty sure the Right and the Left are chock full of politicizing hacks and the rest of Americans who believe this to be the sad domain of petty loosers are too busy trying to live their lives in peace to actively try to stop the BS machines on either side.
You think of twitter as a publisher?
There is some nuance to it, and I would steer far clear of saying that if we were talking about legal definitions for regulatory purposes. As I say, that’s not what I’m talking about here.
Twitter puts messages in front of a large number of people’s eyeballs. The messages are not individually addressed as with email – it’s not simply a medium for private communication. If you read N tweets per day, none of them are created by Twitter, but Twitter’s choices govern which N tweets you see. They make choices for you to see tweets that neither you nor the author explicitly decided you should see.
So, yes, they have significant publisher characteristics. It’s irrelevant if their only editorial agenda is “engagement” – promoting the formation of mobs is intrinsically political. And it’s irrelevant that their editorial decisions are automated at the coal face, because finding ways to cheap out on your responsibilities doesn’t affect what they are.
In general, Twitter can’t police its own platform because it simply doesn’t employ enough people, and would collapse if it did. We can skip the question, for now, of whether that makes anything OK.
But when it comes to Turmp that point becomes absurd anyway. They can’t say “we don’t have the resources to keep track of what he’s doing”, when everyone in the world knows what he’s doing. There’s no reason why they have to treat his account the same as everyone else’s. In fact, their policy is already to treat him exceptionally by not holding him to their generic standards. They’re already giving him special attention. It’s a purely editorial choice whether that involves pressing the “delete user” button.
tl;dr: Twitter may or may not be a “publisher” for nazis and anti-vaxxers, but it is 100% a publisher of Turmp propaganda.
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It is political. Social, cultural, economic etc. it’s all political. Always. If you don’t “make it political” you mean that the political agenda that exists suits you or you are so cowed by hegemony that you can’t critique power.
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Except Bezos isn’t a good guy either. We can’t look to billionaires for solutions to the problems that they made. That’s like looking to Congress to self-regulate their perks. The foxes can be allowed to run the henhouse, but it never works out well for the hens.
His threat to start governmentally regulating “social media” basically says it all. Seize the means of discourse. Where does that put us on the Overton window? How many steps aways from “containing” “undesirables”?
“Had”? They still don’t. They will bend the knee. He’s the leader they want, after all.
Yep, but they won’t. They don’t want to. It would be taking a stand against the GOP’s monster, and they love the GOP. He’s Twitter’s monster too.
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For those curious about Mastodon
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There is no law preventing Twitter from enforcing their own guidelines for speech on their own platform, even when that speech comes from the President.
The constraints governing Twitter’s actions here are calculated political considerations, not legal ones.
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Why does twitter even bother? The orange buffoon is practically their company mascot by now.
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