You've been flaming up a storm on HN. That's against the rules and I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
The local forces failed (rather told to stand down) in Minneapolis. You really think they'd let the city just burn to the ground before bringing federal agencies?
> It can reasonably be interpreted as: "once people are willing to break the law and start looting, it's not long before there are also people shooting"
That's definitely not it.
Walter Headley, Chief of Miami Police during the 1968 Republican National Convention. On the eve of the convention, he gave a press conference where he said this exact phrase. It wasn't an observation that crime begets more crime. It was a threat.
In the general case: yes, absolutely. But in the specific, to make that claim for an individual account requires a high burden of proof. Some people are just stupid or trolls, not necessarily part of an astroturfing operation.
> It doesn't unequivocally say that at all. It can reasonably be interpreted as: "once people are willing to break the law and start looting, it's not long before there are also people shooting"
This is not a reasonable interpretation of the president's words. The previous tweet said that the military is standing by. There can be no mistake: Trump is saying that he will order the US military to kill Americans.
The thing about Trump supporters that baffles me is, they have the common sense to understand when some his claims are false or hurtful, because they make up excuses for them: they're ambiguous, he was just checking if we were paying attention, etc. even when he refuses to back down and absolutely denies the excuses. But they still enjoy having their prejudices, fears and hates validated whenever Trump's tweets align with their view.
Really? "When the looting starts, the shooting starts"... in reference to THUGS (which we all know what he means by that euphemism). Can't tell if you're joking, but either way it's in poor taste.
Well, looting had already started hours before he'd posted this.
That being said - the President of the United States, just stated on one of the largest social media platforms used in the U.S., that citizens of the U.S. are now to be shot. From his words, immediately. It could even be viewed as "they should've already been shot at"
If you don't understand how this is glorifying violence, I don't think you can be made to.
I'm reading the tweet more like 'I will authorize the use of deadly force by the military against the looters'. Although I could see several interpretations
But I think the real thing people aren't able to come to grips with is how Trump uses the media in such a style that gives him all plausible deniability, builds outrage AND builds support. All at once.
I am not in favor of looters, but note that
https://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-19-15.pdf
emphasizes the necessity of graduated response.
I presume state militia units share the doctrine (Figure 2.1) that lethal response is only called for in the face of an armed threat, and that it must be the minimum response necessary.
(found by googling four words: national guard crowd control; 2nd page of results)
Have you looked up the context of that quote? Here is where that quote originated from Miami Police Chief Walter Headley. It’s very clear the implication is the use of law enforcement and police brutality.
“In declaring war on 'young hoodlums, from 15 to 21, who have taken advantage of the civil rights campaign,' Headley said, 'we don’t mind being accused of police brutality.'
'They haven’t seen anything, yet.'
Headley said Miami hasn't been troubled with racial disturbances and looting because he let the word filter down, 'When the looting starts, the shooting starts.'"
> FoxNews.com and FoxBusiness.com do use moderation in an effort to maintain a safe and respectful environment in our online community. If your comment or username includes vulgar, racist, threatening, or otherwise offensive language, it will be removed.
It's disingenuous to compare political speech to, for example, copy/pasting the N word a dozen times. It seems reasonable for a "neutral" platform to allow "moderation" of the latter, but perhaps not the former.
> Where have Fox News editorialised (sic) users content?
not
> Where have Fox News editorialised (sic) users political speech?
so my reply should in no way construe my opinion of what is or is not political speech.
Now that we've established that Fox News does in fact editorialize user content, we can move on to the original question of whether or not they should now
> be liable for suit for anything posted by commenters to their online articles
Sorry, you don't just get to decide what is a larger point in some discussion.
The law is capable of distinguishing between ideas, including whether content is good-faith speech or trolling. Pretending the two are the same and that a law could not possibly allow for a platform to moderate the latter without sacrificing its "neutrality" seems unreasonable.
I think it is a valid question that could be scrutinized in court, but there is no need to be obtuse about the fact that these are different categories of speech that the law could treat differently specifically with regard to how it would categorize ("neutrality" of) a platform on the internet, not whether or not the speech is entirely forbidden period.
> You keep going back and forth between 'political speech' being the same or different, but you hallucinated that as having anything to do with the discussion.
I definitely never varied my own view on this. You most likely misinterpreted my first comment and the quote ">", or worse, you're being intentionally dishonest.
In any case, go read the EO. Right now, your opinion amounts to, "Trump bad, therefore removing a comment that spams racial slurs is the same as editorializing a comment that states a political opinion."
Under section 230, Fox News is not liable to suit if someone not affiliated with Fox posts illegal content on their comments on their website.
They are liable to suit if Fox News employees post illegal content on their website.
Twitter has the exact same treatment under the law today. It’s not liable for suit when Trump tweets lies about Joe Scarborough. But if @jack or @TwitterSafety tweeted the same lies, it could be sued in court for libel and section 230 would not be a defense.
Fox and twitter are already equal in eyes of the law today.
Exactly. Politics is the mind killer. Would they have the same opinion if Twitter was a right-leaning Trump-mouthpiece that was disproportionately quelling left-leaning voices? Take a step back and recognise you can agree with Trump's action and not necessarily admire the man.
We don't have to speak in hypotheticals here. There are plenty of examples: voat, gab, TD, etc. What laws are/were being pushed by liberal politicians to use the force of law to shut them up?
Please do link to government documents or quotes from elected officials.
It’s not a question of laws used, more psychological factors. Some people seeing those statements made by twitter may believe them blindly. We need people reading into important topics like this and forming opinions without being bated. Part of the problem you’ll also see in this thread. The downvotes here set the tone for the comment the viewer is about to read. Why is it’s view changed at all? Nothing this commenter said was offensive yet on some sites their comment would be hidden entirely.
What statement was made by Twitter that could be followed blindly? All I saw was "Get the facts about mail in ballots".
You can only infer a bias on that based on your own preconceived notion about Twitter's biases. A completely ignorant and unbiased individual may just as likely think "Twitter wants to show me why Trump is right" as they are to think "Twitter wants to show me why Trump is wrong".
If you really want to have people
> reading into important topics like this and forming opinions without being bated (sic)
then you should be all for this kind of neutrally positioned link to more information. I'm certainly open to entertaining alternatives, though.
The existence of the link in the first place. You have to be pretty far removed from reality to not know Twitter execs have a left lean to their bias. So the a completely unbiased person will notice that only some tweets show this link and could build a bias based on other psychological factors, such as wanting acceptance from a seemingly majority of peers.
I am for neutrality. I’m also a realist. IFF they could pull this off universally, in that all tweets are subject to these same fact checks, then I’m all for it. Removing personal biases of the person doing the fact checks will be a challenge but we can achieve this through multiple fact checkers with specific biases. Like the bulls and bears statements you find with stocks. But we cannot achieve this, we lack both the peoplepower and technology given Twitters scale. Short of it being universally applied to all accounts it can’t meet the definition of neutral. Therefor, don’t do it at all. Instead someone else using Twitter can reply to his tweets with the fact check. This keeps Twitters hands and potential biases entirely out of a very complicated topic.
Well, they have posted many times on their position on Trump, which is a left leaning position. Then, rather quickly they throw this fact check on one of his tweets. Regardless of what their actual intents were the actions to me look a bit shady. Especially since the fact check comes down to “no evidence”, which is completely different then proven false.
If tech companies instead shut down people clamoring for unions and worker rights then you'd see the left rushing to introduce measures like the one signed by Donald Trump right now. So this is really a bipartisan issue and not just a right wing one, we should all work together to regulate the power of big tech. They might be mostly well-intentioned today, but it is best we regulate them before they have a chance to turn bad.
That's an entirely subjective opinion - and one that should ideally be left up to voters and/or their elected representatives, not to any single individual (like our president, or unelected bureaucrats in the FTC/FCC/etc.). And I continue to maintain that it's insanity to be terrified of Twitter's power when the government can order any one of us killed or locked up indefinitely and there are zero consequences when they screw up.
Does Gab silence liberal views? Bans, shadow-bans liberal accounts? Puts "fact checking" marks on their posts? If they do, then liberal politicians are more than welcome to take action.
> If the intent is to punish critics and suppress the speech of party opponents, then yes. Any authoritarian can justify their actions in abstract and general terms, but context matters.
This is literally what Twitter has been doing. Trump's order puts an end to it.
> We don't have to ignore it, but we also don't have to accept an autocrat's temper tantrum by fiat as an answer.
Exactly why Twitter needs to be stripped of their 230 protections.
> The purpose of the First Amendment is to prevent the government from infringing freedom of speech - the President is attempting to use government power to infringe freedom of speech, to do exactly what the First Amendment was created to prevent.
This is the government upholding free speech. Twitter's policies and their selective enforcement of such run directly contrary to the underlying tenets of free speech. This holds Twitter accountable for their "un-American" practices.
Although it may be hard to see through the vitriolic debates currently raging, this will be a net win for the internet. This will encourage decentralisation in so far as there is now a soft power cap on these big tech companies.
> This is literally what Twitter has been doing. Trump's order puts an end to it.
Debatable, on both points. There have been studies[1] that show that accounts are banned, but it's not necessarily because they are conservative accounts or conservative content. In a civil or criminal case, causation must be established. In this case, the president is making it very much more expensive for certain companies to defend themselves.
This EO is more likely to hurt YouTube than Twitter because it has the ability to get the Federal Government to no longer approve grants to Google subsidiaries and for government agencies to stop advertising with them.
> to be stripped of their 203 protections.
You mean The Communications Decency Act, Section 230?
> Twitter's policies and their selective enforcement of such run directly contrary to the underlying tenets of free speech.
That's interesting. Government law enforcers and prosecutors have the ability to use prosecutorial discretion. Are you saying that the government should be able to select who they prosecute, but that private organizations should not be allowed discretion to enforce their own contracts?
If ISPs (where content in a pipe is pretty close to comparable to Common Carrier standards) can't be held up to the standards of Net Neutrality, how can social media companies (where content is much more subjective to interpret as violations of their contract)?
> this will be a net win for the internet
That remains to be seen. I can see it being another tool where the executive branch gets to unilaterally change the definition of which internet companies get protections, not leveling the playing field.
> This will encourage decentralisation in so far as there is now a soft power cap on these big tech companies.
More likely there will be some obvious "unintended consequences" similar to what happened after Trump signed the FOSTA bill in 2018[2] (hint: multiple dating sites, including Craigslist sections, closed up shop). It will very likely increase the cost of being a user-generated content host to the point that only a very select few companies would do it and they will all require arbitration clauses in the ToS to avoid extremely expensive litigation of the CDA230 rules. I expect a handful of forums and lots of news comments sections to close due to this "free speech" Executive Order.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Justine_Damond