Orange Cunt Finally Booted Off Twitter

[Blue Jam]

Yeah I can't see Trump winning any lawsuit over Twitter, although I do find it utterly amusing that the 'FREEDOM OF SPEECH' people don't seem to realise it can work the other way. 

No business has to serve you if it doesn't want to (outside of protected classes).

It's the whole thing of right-wing people being in favour of free market capitalism until a private company does something they don't like.

[Blue Jam]

Haha.  He's actually gone full on Glinner and is looking into building his own social networking platform.  Brilliant.  Perhaps he could call it Twatter.

I wonder if he's also been out buying loads of sim cards.

[mobias]

They'll probably be fine, nobody cares enough about this shitty little country.

Tell that to Glinner.

[Blue Jam]

They'll probably be fine, nobody cares enough about this shitty little country.

Also we don't have guns.

[El Unicornio, mang]

Lots of his supporters complaining about erosion of free speech, like they'd let someone come in their house or place of business and spout socialism stuff all day.

[Zetetic]

Is Twitter like someone's house or place of business?

Yeah I can't see Trump winning any lawsuit over Twitter, although I do find it utterly amusing that the 'FREEDOM OF SPEECH' people don't seem to realise it can work the other way. 

No business has to serve you if it doesn't want to (outside of protected classes).

The argument is that this isn't appropriate for networks that effectively serve as online public spaces, not that it isn't the case now.

Hence EO 13925 etc.

Even if you believe "but it's a private business" is a good argument in itself, it seems fairly clear that this isn't because Dorsey has had a sudden crisis of conscience about his personal involvement in things that he disagrees with, but because they're trying to show the (new) government that they can comply without actually being regulated.

[El Unicornio, mang]

Is Twitter like someone's house or place of business?

In the sense that it's a private company that isn't obliged to let people say what they want, yes.

[Zetetic]

This is also true of the entire of Canary Wharf, for example.

(And was used to prevent cleaners from protesting in the street outside of their clients' offices.)

The lesson seems to be "put public spaces in private hands and conduct censorship by smoke signals".

[Cuellar]

It reminds me of the time on the Leicester Square Theatre Podcast with Glinner and Iannucci, where Herring brought up Glinner's aggressive attitude to blocking or slagging off people who disagreed with him on twitter. He said something like 'I see it like my garden, it's my garden - if there are weeds in it I'll just get rid of them', but he doesn't seem to see that banning people from Twitter is just this attitude writ large (of course there are other factors when it's Twitter Ltd doing it I suppose, like, 'yes this weed is unsightly and poisoning the other plants, but look at all the people who come by just to look at it and who I can sell souvenirs to while they walk past, should I really get rid of it?')

[sevendaughters]

There is an argument to suggest that, private company or no, Twitter has been adopted as the town square of the global village and as such removal from it is privation of certain rights. A bourgeois society would typically progress along these lines, away from the municipal/public-owned space, toward these.

I don't think this btw and hope he is torn apart by dogs, but maybe more compassionate or long-sighted political thinkers can take up the argument from here.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Yes, I don't agree with that concept either.

[Butchers Blind]

Have they deleted all his tweets?  Surely they should kept for public record for historians to paw over for years to come.

[Fambo Number Mive]

They are archived on various sites.

[El Unicornio, mang]

Glad his stuff has been archived

[Zetetic]

he doesn't seem to see that banning people from Twitter is just this attitude writ large

Because a garden isn't the same as a park, even if the park is privately owned.

[Zetetic]

There is an argument to suggest that, private company or no, Twitter has been adopted as the town square of the global village and as such removal from it is privation of certain rights.

I think the last clause is a bit unhelpful, because it weakly suggests an absolutism entailing that if we acknowledged the public-space nature of major social networks then we wouldn't be able to do anything about absolute wankers in them.

This isn't the case in physical public spaces, of course - we have mechanisms, it's just that they bottom out in something vaguely transparent and accountable. (Which is why we see so much of London's public space, for example, being privatised, enabling both Capital and the State to bypass these mechanisms when it suits them.)

[mobias]

So what happens next then? My money is on a very messy impeachment next week. I've become aware over the last few months of all the interviews with his niece Mary Trump and she's been proven right about most things it seems.
She was interviewed on the Channel Four news last night and she was completely dismissive of the idea that Donnie is going to go off and quietly play golf for the next few weeks.

An amusing thought came into my head the other day that what if Trump flees America to escape justice and takes refuge in Russia with his old pal Putin. That would be a serious shit show and a half.

[Icehaven]

So at what point exactly does a privately owned platform have to be considered a public space subject to the right to free speech purely because enough people use it? I mean if I either went on Twitter or created my own social media site and told everyone to invade the Houses of Parliament I very much doubt I'd get done for inciting anything because nothing would happen, no one would even notice and my right to free speech would therefore remain unaffected. When the American president with 80 million followers does it on one of the most widely used social media sites in the world and it has dire real life consequences including 5 people dying, it's gone way past being a 'free speech' issue. With great power comes great responsibility and all that, and Twitter using their great power to remove some of Trump's is far more responsible than getting caught up in debates about free speech.

[Blue Jam]

Does this mean that Farage and other cunts who use inciteful language like "take the knife to these people" will now have to watch what they say. I see he's tweeted about it but he must be thinking he could be next.

Funny how, as all of Trump's supporters are so bravely disowning him now all his lovely power has been taken from him and he's outlived his usefulness, Farage is still sucking up to him. What does he hope to achieve with this?

EDIT: Laurence Fox also still sucking up to him. Not only did he hop on the grift train as it was rolling out of town, he's also failed to realise that Trump is a busted flush.

[Zetetic]

With great power comes great responsibility and all that, and Twitter using their great power to remove some of Trump's is far more responsible than getting caught up in debates about free speech.

It might have been a bit more responsible to have done this some time ago, before those "dire real life consequences".

But they didn't do that because, as a private company, they looked at the costs of doing so (including backlash from the government at the time) and decided "nah".

So at what point exactly does a privately owned platform have to be considered a public space subject to the right to free speech purely because enough people use it?

There probably isn't a point that can be defined exactly, and it's absurd to try to find one.

[TheBrownBottle]

I think 'using social media platforms to try to provoke armed sedition' is the point at which 'free speech' becomes moot.

I've no issue with censorship or deplatforming when the person is trying to provoke violence.

[Zetetic]

Again though, that was some time ago.

If anything, the tweets being cited as the final straw are largely innocuous, and fairly typical of "we've lost this time but we're not going away!" talk.



It's fine to be happy about all this in itself - I'm really not trying to take that away from anyone.

It's the post-hoc attempts to justify it on the basis on some sort of principle, like private ownership or the idea that Trump had seriously crossed a line as of yesterday, that I think are a bit... stupid.

[El Unicornio, mang]

I mean, Trump is still free to go to any public space in America and say what he wants. He hasn't been deprived of any constitutional rights or freedoms, he's just had his social media account suspended. My friends have had that done to them for posting photos or even drawings of naked people, let alone spewing hate speech to millions.

[TheBrownBottle]

Yeah, I agree that the tweets were relatively innocuous for Trump.  But his actions the other day cornered them.  It felt like an arse-covering exercise - they were going to ban him after that 'temporary' suspension.

[popcorn]

I share the suspicion that it's terribly easy for these social media giants to suddenly find Trump objectionable and remove him now. But I do think it's possible that if his supporters had stormed the Capitol and caused such mayhem two years ago it would have triggered the same set of deplatforming dominos. It makes sense that the straw would break the camel's back now, because it's only now that he and his followers are on the back foot that he's incited his nutjobs to go on the rampage.

[Ferris]

I share the suspicion that it's terribly easy for these social media giants to suddenly find Trump objectionable and remove him now. But I do think it's possible that if his supporters had stormed the Capitol and caused such mayhem two years ago it would have triggered the same set of deplatforming dominos. It makes sense that the straw would break the camel's backnow, because it's only now that he and his followers are on the back foot that he's incited his nutjobs to go on the rampage.

Yeah agree with this. They're not banning him due to some philosophical discussion of the ethics of his last 2x 280 characters. His incitement finally lead to real-world violence. At that point, allowing him to post further (and maybe have that happen again) becomes untenable.

[Zetetic]

I mean, Trump is still free to go to any public space in America and say what he wants.

It seems important that even the US doesn't protect openly advocating "imminent lawless action".

[Zetetic]

But I do think it's possible that if his supporters had stormed the Capitol and caused such mayhem two years ago it would have triggered the same set of deplatforming dominos.

I think they would have been very worried about the government reacting with something like EO 13925, but with more time and teeth to actually bring it to bear.

[Zetetic]

His incitement finally lead to real-world violence.

This is an interesting claim.

[idunnosomename]

lol what are these nutcases on



also since she won her rep as being "trump lady" shes gonna have a helluva time now lol