I’m gonna predict that this will prove to be one of the most hilariously bad ideas in 21st century politics: [url=GOP freezes Twitter spending after McConnell account locked | AP News]Note that the account suspension that is being given as the reason for the “protest” was restored once the offending tweet was deleted:
But that’s not enough! The GOP will not sit idly by and continue to use this valuable service! They’re gonna teach Twitter a lesson about not being heard and not being seen and fading into irrelevancy via continued absence!
Oh no! This $4.4B company with monthly revenue of $787M will surely cave when they realize that they’ve lost nearly 1/1500th of their income! :rolleyes:
At least, that’s my take on it: hilariously myopic, absolutely without a goal and unlikely to achieve anything other than obscurity for some in the GOP and for some of the GOP’s “positions”.
So… The GOP wants to be able to dictate that a private company allow the GOP to violate their terms of service, and post their tweets that contain threats against specific people’s personal safety.
I’m all for voting with your wallet (which appears to be what they’re doing), but this is the same group that cries ‘freedom of speech’ anytime a republican gets banned from the platform. For a group of people that are not only claim to adhere closely to the constitution but also who’s job it is to work in politics, you’d think they’d understand what freedom of speech does and does not mean, as well as the fact that a private company can deny service to them at any time for any reason.
Twitter could decide that from this point forward there will be now political speak from the Right side of the aisle and they wouldn’t be (legally) doing anything wrong. This “I thought this was America” BS gets old and makes people IMHO look incompetent.
According to Veritasium, as of 5 years ago spending money on Facebook promotion would actually make your engagement go down (basically because you’d end up with more bot followers than real people)
Wonder if anyone’s done a similar analysis for Twitter?
We can laugh at this, but this is actually a very ominous development. Consider the fact that you now have an entire political party that is organizing to effectively punish an editorial decision of a 21st Century information platform/medium. They’re essentially saying “We don’t like what your information, so we are now, as one of the two major political parties, going to aim to shut you down” - not just as punishment, but as a warning to others.
It’s another attempt to work the refs, and I sincerely hope it backfires the way the OP implies. More likely: twitter bows to the GOP, they are emboldened, we find yet another space where the rules just don’t apply to the GOP because they complained very loudly that the rules apply to them.
It’s really, really bad, and I think BPC is correct: twitter will eventually find a way to gracefully get out of this situation, which will probably involve putting up with a lot more right wing shit in the future that attempts to pass itself off as legit political discourse. We’ve already seen how the NYT rushed to post a completely misleading headline that went soft on Trump in the wake of the El Paso and Dayton shootings. This is not our imagination; the erosion of the free press starts first by getting the press used to the idea that it can’t challenge authority without expecting some sort of punishment. A free press that depends on government licenses and monitors faces the risk of having its licenses revoked. A free press that depends on financial investment have investors who find their investments threatened with either financial or political consequences. Freedom of the press begins to decline when authority can force self censorship, even if it’s ever so slight. They’ll get the press used to that idea more and more. They’ll gradually change the value system of the people who work in the press, to accept the new normal.
What are you even talking about? They already unsuspended the account and I doubt anyone expects Twitter to remove their “no publishing threats of violence” rule. This is purely a stunt by the GOP to establish victimhood and remind all their followers of the liberal media bias. Come election time, I’m sure Twitter and the GOP will happily be exchanging money for services.
“The Republican Party, the Trump campaign and other GOP organizations said Thursday that they are freezing their spending on Twitter to protest the platform’s treatment of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.”
Are they going to freeze their USE of Twitter? What a meaningless little “protest”.
From the tone of your post, I’m not sure you realize that the threats McConnell posted to Twitter were being made by a BLM protester towards Mitch. WaPo article:
I agree with folks here on almost everything–except that I think the initial account suspension was bullshit.
As far as I can tell, here’s how it went down:
Some people, very appropriately, protested outside McConnell’s house about all the awful things he’s supporting.
A couple of assholes in the crowd started talking in highly specific language about how they’d murder McConnell.
McConnell’s people videotaped them, and posted the video on Twitter as a means of delegitimizing the protestors as a group.
Twitter banned McConnell for posting threats.
A policy against posting threats is, of course, an excellent policy. Twitter shouldn’t let assholes use its platform to intimidate other people with violence.
But that’s not what happened here. McConnell wasn’t posting the threats in order to intimidate someone with violence. Rather, he was posting the threats to make people aware of attempts to intimidate him with violence. McConnell is a deeply terrible human being, but this specific action wasn’t bad.
If this policy holds true, then anyone who posts the content of the threats should have their account suspended. A protestor in the crowd said, “Just stab the motherf—er in the heart.” Should Tweets reporting that be suspended, since the Tweets contain a threat?
For that matter, one of our board rules is “Do not post threats.” Is anyone planning on reporting this post, given the threat I quoted in the previous paragraph? Does anyone think I’ll get a warning for that paragraph?
Because that would be almost precisely the same action that Twitter took. And as much as I loathe McConnell, I think this sets a terrible precedent.
Then suspend those accounts. I agree with LHoD that the account suspension was bullshit. However, I would point out that there’s no reason to believe that it was some sort of targeting of conservatives. It’s not like Twitter moderating is a shining model of evenhandedness and consistency. They make any number of dumb moderation decisions across the board. Note: I’m not criticizing them, really. Moderating Twitter is a ridiculously gigantic task, and a few fuckups here and there aren’t really anything to launch a boycott over. Although, I should say that I fully approve of Republicans boycotting Twitter.
