I believe someone posted in another thread that moderation wouldn’t be sufficient. Without the 230 protection they could be sued and have to spend money defending any statement their users made. That potentially makes it too risky to run a social media service at all.
But you are right that Trump doesn’t understand what he’s doing and that at a minimum all his tweeting would be banned.
Oh yeah, I’d lay money on Parler moving to a Russian server. Then it’ll be even easier for Vlad to spread disinformation to the MAGAts. And identity theft will be like taking candy from a baby.
Plus, the problem with Masterpiece Cakes was that they weren’t treating people the same. Their standing deal is, anyone can walk in, pay some amount of money, and get a wedding cake. Except if the person who walks in is gay, and then they can’t.
Twitter, by contrast, is (finally) holding Trump to the same standards as everyone else. They’re not kicking him off because he’s Trump; they’re kicking him off because he violates their terms of service, same as they’d kick off anyone else who violated their terms of service.
Man, do you keep your goal posts on wheels so that they can be moved at any moment?
Donald Trump has a whole press team, it isn’t Twitter’s fault he’s too stupid to use any method of communication other than “mash out something incoherent on the toilet and hit send”
I doubt there’s room in there for a press team.
Nonsense. He’s got the yugest toilets you’ve ever seen. People tell me they’re the Best Toilets ever! 
I’m telling you, that whole Internet Of Things stuff is going too far
Trump is just the start; they need to take down Republican accounts.
Ha! There has to be a new way to say “take a dump” in there somewhere, akin to “dropping the kids off at the pool.”
Say what you want but I think this kind of stuff is troublesome, I mean you get deplatformed, websites taken down, blocked from App Store, publishers won’t publish books, web servers won’t host your website, maybe tv news stations stop reporting at all from certain people.
Sure Republicans are on the losing end of it at the moment but the tide can always change, seriously not sure on all the legalities but nobody else finds this kind of stuff worrisome at all?
It’s called the Church Of The Free Market which all Republicans are worshipers of. Sucks when your God smites you.
I don’t find it worrisome that criminal activity is being sanctioned. What I find much more worrisome is the belief that anyone should be able to say anything they want, anywhere, at any time, with the full authority of their position being used to assert blatant lies, without any consequences whatsoever. To quote the motto of the Washington Post, “democracy dies in darkness”.
What!? The alternative is having a madman rally thousands, perhaps millions, of people to try to violently overthrow America’s system of free elections — and install the madman as a dictator.
Which would almost certainly crash the world-wide economy. China would be the best candidate to emerge as the world’s leading superpower… unless the increasingly senile madman decides to launch every missile in the US arsenal.
So, no. I’m not worried about a few media companies deciding to try to avoid that by using some very basic, and legal measures. It’s just good fucking business.
But that didn’t happen, I just think it’s a myopic point of view to think everything is all well and good when it’s happening to people you don’t like now, I’m thinking further in the future, things can change rapidly. I don’t have the solution either but I do feel it’s problematic.
What’s worrisome is the monopoly that a few large companies have over public media and information.
But whatever one thinks of stopping Trump fomenting violence by limiting his ability to communicate, the ability of democratically unaccountable monopolies with extraordinary control over communications infrastructure, like Facebook and Google, YouTube’s parent company, to silence political speech is exceptionally dangerous. It also sidesteps the underlying problem – that it’s their dominance and business model that promotes conspiratorial, fake and violent content to millions.
Trump is not the first demagogue America has seen and he won’t be the last. But his power is amplified by a corrupted information ecosystem created by Google, Facebook and media barons like Rupert Murdoch.
Those who came to the Capitol to riot sincerely believed they were stopping the subversion of American democracy because an entire information ecosystem encouraged them to discount any political or media institution that told them otherwise.
The good news is Republican and Democratic attorneys general in 48 states have filed historic antitrust suits against Google and Facebook, seeking to break them up, and the Biden administration and many in Congress seem wide awake to the pernicious role of social media platforms, particularly Facebook and Google, in the fraying of America’s social fabric.
So you think the ban is because people don’t like Trump? It isn’t because he’s a lunatic trying to take over the country by force?
There’s no question that Big Tech has too much monopoly power, and that’s what made the oligolateral deplatforming so effective. I welcome conservatives finally starting to see the problem with monopolies, though I expect they’ll just try to take control of that power for themselves rather than limiting and distributing it.
But even if we broke up (for example) AWS and spread the footprint among a hundred clones, all of those clones would still be exposed to shaming campaigns and possibly criminal liability for hosting violent, treasonous content. It doesn’t immunize anyone from censorship, as long as we still have laws against assault and insurrection.
That’s just how the 1st Amendment works. If you don’t own a “press”, then you depend on the good graces of whoever does (and their risk tolerance for violating criminal and civil law). The era of “free” social media has caused people to forget this, but it’s always been that way.
Sure. This time they acted for good. Nobody is disputing that.
But…
Apparently 40% of US adults still approve of the madman. And the military and police forces are overweighted with these morons. And a hundred US Reps are supporting his attempts to overthrow the election. So, please, don’t blandly say, “But that didn’t happen.”
We are by no means in the clear yet, but the intervention by self-interested (and not stupid) corporations has been a major, unexpected, blessing for American democracy.
Let’s get the madman out of power before doing major handwringing about corporate power. It’s just another couple of weeks.
What’s most concerning to me is not that this or that social media may interfere with the notional freedom of speech of its members, but rather, how the hell it even became acceptable that world leaders would try to administer their perceived duties via Twitter. It’s like the presidential motorcade being headed by a fucking clown car, and then leading the whole entourage into an actual circus.
Social media probably has a social purpose for government officials, such as publishing PR photos of them reading stories to preschool children (assuming said official can actually read), or other such ‘soft’ stuff as public figures should be seen to do. It’s insane that it has become part of the actual mechanism of politics and government administration itself.