Slashdot Mirror
Why Does Twitter Refuse To Shut Down Donald Trump? (vortex.com)
Lauren Weinstein writes: The conclusion appears inescapable. Twitter apparently has voluntarily chosen to 'look the other way' while Donald Trump spews forth a trolling stream of hate and other abuses that would cause any average Twitter user to be terminated in a heartbeat. There's always room to argue the proprietary or desirability of any given social media content terms of service — or the policy precepts through which they are applied. It is also utterly clear that if such rules are not applied to everyone with the same vigor, particularly when there's an appearance of profiting by making exceptions for particular individuals, the moral authority on which those rules are presumably based is decimated, pointless, and becomes a mere fiction.
Would you rather Twitter shut down no account ever, apply a sort of white-listing policy, or something in the middle?
Because that would be unimaginable CENSORSHIP?
You stupid leftist idiot.
Did a libtard SJW submit this story? They really hate free speech.
Twitter could be destroyed, or at least heavily damaged, by the republican party if it took a side. Also, like it or not, Trump is the leading republican candidate.
...But if I was him, I'd give Trump all the rope he needs to hang himself with.
Free speech is free speech. Everyone else is free to ignore it. If a radical idea catches on, so fucking what. Twitter should not be shutting down Donald Trump and Lauren Weinstein should quit whining about it like free speech is some sort of threat.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
Deal with it. Just because you aren't voting for a person in a election doesn't mean every opinion of theirs must be silenced at all costs. Give them enough rope to hang themselves if you think someone is such a monster...
Just because you don't agree (or are insulted) with the man or his policies doesn't mean he should be censored. When he begins calling for the gruesome death of all people who don't agree with him (e.g. ISIL), then we will have something to talk about. The only reason this article has ANYTHING to do with Slashdot is cuz Twitter. Can we get back to technology stuffy, please?
The very asking of the headline question reeks of "freedom of speech as long as it's the right one".
People should be able to discern speech the agree with vs. speech they don't on their own after considering every opinion made.
Speech "carriers" have all the right to censor the speech in their media as they see fit (not being the government and all) but the very moment the prevent someone to speak their mind on their platform (no matter how radical they may sound) they forfeit their right to call themselves "a bastion of free speech" and become the same as every other news media: a place to broadcast the views of their owners and target audience, no more, no less.
In conclusion, every company have the right to pick and choose what they want to enable to be said on their property but as soon as they choose to censor they become yet another biased source just like every other else.
Being a candidate gives you the right to email above-top-secret information in the clear and not immediately go to prison... why wouldn't it allow you to post "supposedly" bad stuff on twitter?
Can we stop calling opposing political opinions "trolling" and "hate speech"?
The word has lost all meaning at this point.
Unless people actually think Trump is doing what he is doing for the lulz and purely to bother people.
Calling Trump a fascist and demanding he not be permitted to speak is such delightful irony that I pray the writer did it on purpose. Or, they are missing the point of liberal, modern civilization so badly that they should go back to school. And, no, I don't approve of Donald Trump. He can go hump an a-bomb for all I care.
I live in Poland. I use Slashdot for a long time.
I remember first Obama campaign and pathetic political propaganda on Digg. Not just bad, it was really pathetic.
Looks like you will never learn, now there is a huge anti-Trump propaganda on Slashdot.
Twitter should shut down his account? What about facebook? Google?
Why this community is so brainwashed?
Fuck building a wall. Just put high powered lasers that will incinerate anything that crosses the line. As for illegals already in the country, we should send SWAT teams to raid to their homes.
Also, we should require valid legal resident documentation in order to rent a home.
Twitter gets to decide how they like to enforce their policies, and shutting down honest discussion and posting of truth on a political or social issue by someone, candidate or not, would be shameful, and drive people away from Twitter.
Nobody has shown proof of a Twitter ToS violation by Trump on Twitter.
The guy's team posted some Tweets which became controversial; However, all the tweats claimed to be "Racist" appear to not be racist, unless you have a colored interpretation driven by a politically biased agenda against Trump.
Anti-trump bloggers describing Trump's postings as ToS violations are "Seeing what they want to see".
Because a guy who is going out of his way to show his complete contempt for everything from the Bill of Rights to basic human decency will just make things so keen.
What do you suppose would happen if someone like Trump were elected President? Do you think the Supreme Court and Congress would just take a holiday and let him play out his Fascist dictator fantasies? His time in the White House would be horrible for everyone involved. Congress would spend most of its time dispensing with his vetoes, defunding any department he tried to turn to whatever idiotic or evil plan (if you can call what he does "planning") he had in mind. The Oval Office would resemble Nixon on steroids, as it would be the first time in over forty years that a POTUS had almost no friends on the Hill. About the only place there would be activity would be the Federal Courts and SCOTUS as Congress and everyone else that Trump screws takes his Administration to court, likely ending in impeachment for any of a dozen flagrant, even proud high crimes and misdemeanors.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
to do just that. Every time he says something nutso his poll numbers go up. Thing is, white working class America knows something is wrong, but they don't know what to do about it. They don't believe in the income inequality fairy, but they do know that they're losing ground. Their kids aren't going to college, or if they are they leave a public university with $60k in debt. They haven't seen a raise in years that wasn't immediately eaten up by price increases.
What they want and need is the Nordic Model. But they haven't got a chance. Most of these guys spend 2 hours a day commuting to their shitty jobs listening to Rush. They spent their childhood being told that if you work hard and play by the rules and don't get ahead it's your fault. Heck, when the millennials started complaining about the 60 hour work weeks with no benefits or job security or even food security they scoffed at them. They don't want help. They were told they could make it on their own. The keep getting told this by billionaires and their media outlets. I've tried reasoning with them but it's no go. They've got an answer for every point I make spoon fed to them by those same billionaires.
But they still know something's wrong. Trumps the only man they got.
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You mean convict. Presidents removed from office via impeachment are not sent to jail.
Why so much hate toward Hitler, Shlomo? Hitler did nothing wrong. God bless his soul - he was one Great Man to stand up against the evil and speak the truth. A true martyr.
The "establishment" (who make up the majority of both Houses) Republicans are not exactly in his corner. I doubt they'll play along with anything that they think would be detrimental to their party, and especially their own jobs when mid-term elections come around.
You're pretty optimistic.
Suppose Trump's elected. The House is going to be Republican no matter what -- and any surge of right-wing support sufficient to elect Trump is likely to swing down-ticket races rightward too, so you could very well see the Senate go Republican too.
Let's walk through a more realistic scenario:
Who appoints new justices to the Supreme Court? Oh, right, El Presidente. The sitting Justices are aged 61, 79, 79, 67, 82 (!), 77, 65, 61, and 55. Wanna add four years to those numbers and bet there are no vacancies?
Why is this? As a Congressman, my job is to get re-elected. If my party's Presidential candidate wants to build the New Berlin Wall or an English Language Reeducation Camp (or a DeMuslification Faith-Based Organization), it'd be counterproductive to do anything else for a Republican Congressman to do anything other than support it enthusiastically. Otherwise I get primaried out and replaced in the midterms with someone who will support it.
And the third Administration of the past Three in which a POTUS has complete unfettered access via the intelligence community to the dossiers of all his political opponents. The difference is that neither Bush II nor Obama appear to have seriously abused this power. (Thanks, Mr. Snowden! If they had, the journalists in posession of your data dump would have found it and blown the whistle by now!)
You mean, "the Federal Courts, where the Attorneys were replaced by party loyalists as is customary for every administration, a Supreme Court in which at least one, and possibly three or four, Justices have been replaced by Trump nominees and confirmed by a narrow-majority Republican Senate, and a Congress full of people who would never impeach a President from their own party under any circumstances, on pain of being primaried out of office before the midterms."
Do I think Trump's electable? No. Do I think he should be banninated from Twitter? Hell, no.
Are the Legislative and Judicial branches capable of stopping a rogue Executive? Absolutely capable of doing so, every day since some time after the close of the Civil War until the present and straight on through January 21st, 2017.
Do I think, that the specific case of a Trump-appointed Judiciary and a Republican Legislature will be willing to stop him in, say, September 2018? September 2020? Regrettably, I do not. And that's the $10 trillion dollar gamble.
> Do you think the Supreme Court and Congress would just take a holiday and let him play out his Fascist dictator fantasies?
You're just frightened because they've let Obama do just that - but that's ok because you support and take part in his socialist fantasies.
... and remain a viable place for people to voice their ideas.
If Twitter becomes a progressive hug box then that's all it will be... and its value as a company will be very low.
This is a mistake a lot of social media outlets are making recently. They think "oh we want to get rid of all the things that look icky to some people"... the problem is that "the internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it." which means if twitter censors people... they will appear to large portions of the user base as "damaged"... and they will be bypassed.
Twitter cannot ban something like trump because he's clearly very popular with a large number of people.
What is more, Twitter is letting ISIS say what they want... how crazy do you have to be to think Trump should be censored but ISIS shouldn't?
Nutty people.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The thing is that Trump isn't really a Republican. He's an artifact of the open door Republicans have. In any other election he'd be the latest Ross Perot, an independent candidate. But because the GOP has spent the last eight years enthralled to a pack of wingnuts, the biggest wingnut of them all now has a chance to win the nomination.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Do you think the Supreme Court and Congress would just take a holiday and let him play out his Fascist dictator fantasies?
I think we've Godwined this far enough. I think the US Supreme Court would do the same thing they did for Obama when he played out his Fascist dictator fantasies.
The Oval Office would resemble Nixon on steroids, as it would be the first time in over forty years that a POTUS had almost no friends on the Hill. About the only place there would be activity would be the Federal Courts and SCOTUS as Congress and everyone else that Trump screws takes his Administration to court, likely ending in impeachment for any of a dozen flagrant, even proud high crimes and misdemeanors.
This is a huge thing that is missed. If Trump gets elected, it'll probably be the best opportunity this century to curb the power of the US Presidency.
I hate Donal Trump but I also have a brain. Saying "some Mexicans crossing the border illegally are felons and rapists" is not racist, it's true and an actual political problem. What Democrats (and idiots) HEAR is "all Mexicans are rapists and felons." It's not like he's tweeting "white power" or something blatantly racist.