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Why Twitter Hasn't Banned President Trump (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Amid vocal calls for the company to act, Twitter today offered its first explanation for why it hasn't banned President Donald Trump -- without ever saying the man's name. "Elected world leaders play a critical role in that conversation because of their outsized impact on our society," the company said in a blog post. "Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial Tweets, would hide important information people should be able to see and debate. It would also not silence that leader, but it would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions." In its blog post, Twitter reiterated its previous statement that all accounts still must follow the company's rules. The statement seemed to leave open the possibility that it might one day take action against Trump's account, or the accounts of other world leaders who might use the platform to incite violence or otherwise break its rules. "We review Tweets by leaders within the political context that defines them, and enforce our rules accordingly," it said. In response to the claims that Twitter doesn't ban President Trump because he draws attention -- and ad revenue -- to the company, Twitter said: "No one person's account drives Twitter's growth, or influences these decisions. We work hard to remain unbiased with the public interest in mind."
I understand a lot of people don't like him but its not like he makes random posts with the n word or anything like that.
Twitter rejects its own rules. The Twitler in Chief is the best advertisement they could have. They'd never shut him down, he's making them millions. Money trumps contracts or ethics.
Learn to love Alaska
Twitter hasn't banned Donald Trump because he has done nothing to warrant banning.
Being an assclown with opinions that you don't like is not a justification for banning someone. Otherwise the Internet would be quite empty.
Amazing how for some people, their only desire is to silence those they disagree with.
I believe it is very important to expose the jackass for what he is and not to hide him. Hiding Trump's mutterings would be far more dangerous to our democracy than anything he tweets.
People are getting tired of twitter's extremely biased censorship.
Gab.ai is a real alternative. Trump has over 40 million followers. Twitter is already hurting.
If Trump leaves, how many people will follow Trump over to Gab.ai?
I hope you are trolling. I would hate to think anybody could be that ignorant.
There is Donald J. Trump's personal account, and then the POTUS account.
Ban Trump's personal account, and force him to use the POTUS account.
[End Of Line]
Oh yeah, right. Like if the POTUS can't post on Twitter he'll have no way to communicate with the nation. So taking away his Twitter account would "silence" Donald Trump.
Christ, I only wish it were so.
Yeah, nuclear war threats should be issued via SoundCloud or Tindr. Accusations of crossed boundaries via MySpace, and threats of suicide via Diaspora.
Too soon?
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Can you link said tweet ? Of course you can't since he never threatened nuclear war.
He just factually stated that the US nuclear arsenal is both functioning and bigger than a certain other country's which is both unproven and smaller.
Stating facts is not a threat.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
"Trump was never considered racist before he ran for president"
The hell he wasn't. The complaints have been many over the years about his unwillingness to have black tenants, for example.
The implicit message is literally "The US' nuclear arsenal is one of the biggest in the world and proven to work". It's a simple fact. You can't even deny this fact. That's it.
Reading more than that into it says more about you than it does him.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
Exactly the kind of bullshit article I've come to expect from The Verge, as they continue to push far-left clickbait in a desperate attempt to remain relevant. They're approaching the level of BuzzFeed at this point. What's incredible is that anyone continues to pay attention to the ham-fisted Trump condemnations that are now the bread and butter of these publications, and apparently the only kind of article they're capable to producing. Online journalism has become so lazy it's almost unbelievable.
Far left and far right as two sides of the same coin here. Most reasonable leftists on the other hand share the opinion of the reasonable right wingers. Let the man speak and let everyone make up their own mind what he says.
That's not a Trump problem, that's a media problem. More so that media are chasing that "always first" "always sweet-sweet ad revenue" and so on. Welcome to the shitshow that always-on 24hr news media has created, and welcome to the ever increasing irrelevance that the news media has helped create. It also doesn't help that there is very low public trust of the media in general, or that when people point out that they have indeed fucked up, engaged in unethical practices, or whatever else. The media's response is to screech "IT'S NOT US! IT'S YOU!" Queue this up with Journolist, Gamejournopros and so on all pushing narritives, talking points, and so on. Or media outlet's directly handing off their news stories to political parties to make sure that the "story narrative is correct."
Om, nomnomnom...
Donald Trump threatens nuclear war on Twitter in order to distract from his obvious treason.
Trump threatens nuclear war...with words...which were mocking a tinpot dictator. That same dictator on the other hand who's country has kidnapped women from S.Korea and Japan and pressed them into harems for the military and senior officials of the government. That has fired missiles over Japan, and has Japan on edge enough that not only are they considering a full or partial rewrite of article 9 - that's the section that says they can't have a pro-active military, only self-defense. That they're also considering going nuclear as well, and people are supportive of it. But Trump's the problem...
Om, nomnomnom...
Decades ago, before he got into politics, I studied Trump quite a bit. I read all his books, which explained his thinking although ghost writers wrote the words. I've paid more attention since he started wading into politics and making some outrageous statements. He's not that complicated and his major ideas have been written about extensively.
When he makes public statements, keep in mind he LOVES to get press, he craves publicity. Good press or bad press it doesn't much matter, he just wants to be in the news. Raising his profile both advances his business / agenda and simply feels good for him. There were 16 Republican candidates who were generally more classically qualified than him, yet he got all the attention, and that's a big part of what won him the presidency.
He also loves HUGE, and spectacular! People joke about him always saying everything is going to be "yuge", the biggest, the best ever, and that joke is because he actually does that. He builds hotels huge, with gold plated stuff everywhere. That's his personality. He loves the biggest, the best, going to extremes - and then emphasizing the "yuge" in his PR.
There are a few other things, but those two go a long way to understanding whatever Trump says publicly.
The guy who thought "I used to think the Klan were OK, until I found out they smoked pot" was a funny thing to say in reply to being asked what he thought of the KKK in the context of a confirmation hearing, which eventually led to a Republican majority committee rejecting his nomination as a federal judge? No, never.
Decades ago, before he got into politics, I studied Trump quite a bit. I read all his books, which explained his thinking although ghost writers wrote the words. I've paid more attention since he started wading into politics and making some outrageous statements. He's not that complicated and his major ideas have been written about extensively.
When he makes public statements, keep in mind he LOVES to get press, he craves publicity. Good press or bad press it doesn't much matter, he just wants to be in the news. Raising his profile both advances his business / agenda and simply feels good for him. There were 16 Republican candidates who were generally more classically qualified than him, yet he got all the attention, and that's a big part of what won him the presidency.
He also loves HUGE, and spectacular! People joke about him always saying everything is going to be "yuge", the biggest, the best ever, and that joke is because he actually does that. He builds hotels huge, with gold plated stuff everywhere. That's his personality. He loves the biggest, the best, going to extremes - and then emphasizing the "yuge" in his PR.
There are a few other things, but those two go a long way to understanding whatever Trump says publicly.
One of the other things being that Trump is a winner, Trump is always a winner, no matter what the facts say, no matter if the photographs show that the size of his inauguration crowd was pitiful, it was actually millions strong, the biggest in history because Trump is ALWAYS a winner. One of the easiest ways of getting on Trump's bad side seems to be to call this into question. As for what won him the presidency, it wasn't just that he got all the attention, it was that a large portion of the electorate judges candidates by charisma, entertainment value, looks and superficiality, not by competence and whether they think this person can actually deliver. Trump's public record on business competence is laughable, his habit of cheating his contractors out of their pay is a matter of public record, all this is easily discovered if you just bothered to run a simple web search and it cast severe doubt upon how likely he was to deliver what he promised but the electorate ignored that because Trump is 'charismatic', 'entertaining' and because he's a 'businessman'. I didn't even have to run a web search to find out the guy had bankrupted several Casinos, I already knew. What kind of business wunderkind bankrupts not just one Casino but a whole string of them? ... and why would anybody in their right mind think such a man is fit to lead their country?
We have always been at war with Eastasia.
Seriously, the one of the things that Donald Trump has been known for is racial divisiveness, going back decades.
Perhaps Donald Trump's first claim to fame, when he was in his 20s in the 1970s, was being sued by DOJ for violations of the Fair Housing Act for discriminating against tenants on race. The infamous lawyer Roy Cohn was brought on for that case, and Trump launched a ridiculous $100 million counter suit.
In 1989 there was the case of the Central Park Five, where 5 black and latino teens were accused and convicted of brutally raping a white woman in Central Park. In response, Trump ran full page ads in the NYC newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty for New York, referring to muggers and murderers and pretty clearly alluding to the Central Park Five for the cause of execution. Turns out that those black and latino teenagers were railroaded, the police extracted false confessions, and they were wrongly convicted, as confirmed 14 years later by DNA evidence and the capture of the actual rapist, Matias Reyes. Of course, Trump never backed down when confronted more recently with the truth that the political crusade of his earlier years was tainted by false convictions heavily bogged down by racial undertones, and refused to even accept that the Central Park Five were wrongly convicted.
Then there is Trump's more recent claim to fame as being the main champion of the utterly ridiculous conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not actually born in America but Kenya instead and thus was an illegitimate president. If I have to try to walk through the racism pouring through that hogwash, then it really isn't worth bothering because you won't read it anyway. Especially when you consider that Obama's original presidential rival, John McCain, literally was not born in any of the States proper within the United States, but rather the Panama Canal Zone, where his Navy Officer father was stationed. There was never any serious movement to consider McCain an illegitimate presidential candidate on the grounds of not being a naturally born American, despite the circumstances of McCain's birth being on much less clear legal grounds than those of Obama.
Do note that none of this includes the racial issues surrounding Trump in his more recent political run and what he has done as president.
And for a kicker, Fred Trump, Donald's father, was arrested after a KKK riot in Queens in 1927.
"No one person's account drives Twitter's growth..."
That's true, because Twitter has no growth. The number of users flattened out about two years ago - any growth since 2015 is minimal, and possibly faked. Meanwhile, Twitter continues to bleed money. Twitter is in a slow-motion death spiral, and desperately hoping that someone - anyone - will buy it.
Twitter doesn't dare block Trump's account, because they could instantly lose all Trump followers as users. Twitter currently has around 300 million users. Trump has 46 million followers. So they could lose more than 10% of their users in one blow, and that would be the beginning of the end.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Eternal September really did turn out to be eternal.
Eh, it's not all bad. Yesterday I managed to convince a few Americans that the Wombles were a real youth movement in the UK in the 80's.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Actually in a nuclear standoff pointing out your country has a very large nuclear advantage over a potential attacker is likely to cause that attacker to think again.
And of course Bill Clinton made a very similar statement.
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/07...
CLINTON'S WARNING IRKS NORTH KOREA
Published: July 13, 1993
TOKYO, July 12- The North Korean Government accused President Clinton today of provoking it with threats of war after he warned that the United States would retaliate if North Korea developed nuclear arms.
The statement by the Communist Government of Kim Il Sung came just hours after it handed over what it said were remains of 17 American soldiers killed in the Korean War.
On his weekend visit to South Korea, President Clinton warned that if North Korea developed and used an atomic weapon, "we would quickly and overwhelmingly retaliate."
"It would mean the end of their country as they know it," he said. 'Rash Act' by U.S.
The North Korean Government lashed back today through its Korean Central News Agency, monitored in Tokyo.
"The United States must ponder over the fatal consequences that might arise from its rash act," the statement said. "If anyone dares to provoke us, we will immediately show him in practice what our bold decision is."
North Korea has denied that it is developing nuclear weapons but has banned inspections of two sites suspected of being nuclear installations. Last month, North Korea backed off from its decision to drop out of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, but the issue of site inspections was left unresolved. Further talks on the matter are to begin Wednesday in Geneva, where Washington is expected to press North Korea to accept inspections or face consequences that could include economic sanctions.
And so did Obama
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
President Barack Obama delivered a stern warning to North Korea on Tuesday, reminding its "erratic" and "irresponsible" leader that America's nuclear arsenal could "destroy" his country.
Kim Jong-un, the North Korean dictator, claimed to have tested a submarine-launched missile last Saturday. A photograph showed the weapon flying out of the sea, although there was no independent confirmation that it had been fired from a submarine, as opposed to a sub-surface platform.
"We could, obviously, destroy North Korea with our arsenals"
Barack Obama
But North Korea already has between six and eight nuclear warheads that could be mounted on a missile. If the regime does perfect a submarine-launched system then it would, in theory, be able to launch a nuclear attack on the American mainland. This would require a submarine being able to sail within missile range of the US.
Mr Obama gave warning of the possible consequences. "We could, obviously, destroy North Korea with our arsenals," he told CBS News. "But aside from the humanitarian costs of that, they are right next door to our vital ally, [South] Korea."
Mr Obama said that America was improving its own missile defences. "One of the things that we have been doing is spending a lot more time positioning our missile defence systems, so that even as we try to resolve the underlying problem of nuclear development inside of North Korea, we're also setting up a shield that can at least block the relatively low level threats that they're posing right now," he said
Full marks to Obama for pointing out that a single 50's era ICBM launched from North Korea is very likely to be intercepted given current US missile defences as well as pointing out that the US could level the whole country, i.e. that MAD applies even if you can build enough missiles to get one through.
Of course when Clinton and Obama did it th
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
"Elected world leaders play a critical role in that conversation"
OK. I can get behind that. Elected leaders have a bigger say than just some scrub. Their influence is more impactful, so they should be given some leniency on what they say.
If their views are so important that they are allowed around the rules, why are they allowed to delete their tweets then? I don't mean 10 seconds after they clicked post and saw they made a massive spelling error. I mean why is Trump allowed to go back and retroactively delete every tweet he made praising people he backed but then lost their elections?
Fuck you Twitter. You are full of shit. The only reason you haven't blocked our retard in chief is that he keeps views coming to you for those sweet advertising dollars.
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson
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