
It’s unclear what Section 230 executive order will do to social media companies - jbegley
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/trump-executive-order-section-230-twitter-fact-checking
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dang
The main thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23342161](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23342161)

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ardit33
Nothing.... the President is not a king and can't order people/companies to
de-exist and can't be above the congress....

At most there will be courts involved, and the order will be considered null
and void. Similar to many of his executive provisions that got declared
invalid by the courts.

This is just a narcissistic/rage hissy fits, or just another attempt to create
noise and detract from the real issues of this country is facing now.

Basically another political show/childs play from our president

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nostromo
> Nothing.... the President is not a king and can't order people/companies to
> de-exist and can't be above the congress....

You may want to read the article.

He's not saying Twitter "can't exist" (and why would he? It's his platform of
choice.) -- it seems like they're going to say that if social media companies
start editing content, they're no longer platforms and instead publishers, who
can be sued for their content.

This could be very problematic for Facebook, Twitter, and Google, who would
suddenly be open to a lot of lawsuits based on their users' content.

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lr
The easy thing to do is to have two policies: one for politicians, and one for
everyone else. The policy for politicians will be one that holds their actions
to a much higher standard than everyone else. The policy can say that metrics
will be used to determine if the statements by the politician are false or
misleading, and if a certain threshold is reached, they can/will(/should!) be
banned from the site. They can provide a detailed analysis about how they came
to the conclusion to ban the user.

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Ididntdothis
Who is a politician and who isn’t?

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lr
Thanks for the point of clarification: Elected officials, which should be easy
for any social media company to determine, especially since, at least on
Twitter and Instagram, they have "verified" profiles.

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_jal
Why does anyone pretend this is about anything other than changing the
subject? He's approaching an election with a crashed economy and a plague he
doesn't know how to handle. His range of motion thus far has been limited to
yelling, whining and changing the subject, and the first two are not working.

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kyledrake
Does anyone have an actual link to the text of the order itself?

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stevula
This is the alleged leaked draft from the other day:
[https://kateklonick.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/DRAFT-
EO-...](https://kateklonick.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/DRAFT-EO-
Preventing-Online-Censorship.pdf)

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Johnjonjoan
"While signing the executive order on Thursday, the president said he would
shut down Twitter if his lawyers found a way to do it. "I'd have to go through
a legal process," he told reporters."

Cutting off the nose to spite the face

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function_seven
Assuming he could nuke Twitter off the face of the planet, I wouldn't see it
as nose-cutting. His 80,430,710 followers would follow him to Facebook or
Instagram. Or even Gab.

His direct pipeline would remain intact.

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michaelmrose
You say this very glibly but are you sure the question doesn't deserve more
thought?

Everyone has a twitter account? How many people would you lose in transition
just via friction? If he spewing hate via twitter to spewing hate via
instagram/facebook then facebook might ultimately find themselves pressured to
do something about it especially if a major US company had been cratered in an
obvious repressive act of tyranny. Zuckerberg might lack in character and
backbone but do you really believe all its employees are equally lacking?

If he moves to the neo nazi land of gab might even less of his followers
follow? Can gab even handle increasing its userbase by 80x?

Do you think the nature of the platform doesn't matter at all as far as
engagement or value of engagement? People engage on twitter a lot already even
without the president. Familiarity implies normalcy. On twitter his crazy crap
is bookended by all the more normalcy of people's regular lives. If it was
surrounded by white supremacists and crazy it wouldn't carry the same cache
and would turn off a good chunk of the moderates.

I'm going to call it. He can't pull the trigger on Twitter even if he was
allowed because it would reduce the effectiveness of his messaging by half.

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function_seven
I wrote the "assuming he could" preamble because I agree with you that he
can't pull the trigger on Twitter.

And you're probably right about the atmosphere on Gab not allowing him to use
that platform to get the same reach.

But Facebook. That's a platform with more subscribers than Twitter. _Way_
more. 3 times as many in the U.S.

So, going with the premise that Trump _was_ able to nuke twitter, how quickly
do you think Zuckerberg is going to pick a fight with him if he decides to
post there 30 times a day instead of at twitter? I'm not so sure all that
much.

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michaelmrose
I guess one question is why isn't he using facebook right now if its an even
better platform?

Facebook is now that thing that I only ever log into on my computer when I
want to talk to family members and ignore people sharing dumb things.

Twitter is that thing that chimes 2 seconds after someone I am interested says
something interesting.

I don't think they are the same thing at ALL.

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function_seven
They're not the same, that's true. What drew him to twitter was exactly what
you describe: people get notified 2 seconds after he sends something out. The
whole use-case of following public figures. That wasn't a thing (as far as I
know) on Facebook back then. You had to have a 2-way connection ("be friends")
with each person you followed. (I think? I may be misremembering.)

It's how he won the presidency.

But now the power structure is different. The President and his followers can
turn Facebook into something akin to twitter just by using it that way. The
mechanics of any given service aren't written in stone. Facebook could easily
ping your phone whenever someone you follow posts something new. Or Instagram,
Snapchat, etc.

~~~
michaelmrose
Even if HE used it that way it would still most likely be pinging me about
useless crap. Trump can lose the presidency faster than facebook can turn into
twitter.

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ordu
Politicians are trying to turn everything into politics. A politician was
caught on a lie? The lie is insubstantial, because an accusation of a
politician is politics by definition, isn't it?

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api
Little to nothing. The point is to troll and stir controversy in order to get
attention. The man literally built his entire career on that, and
unfortunately it works extremely well.

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kerkeslager
So, at this point, the Covid 19 death toll has surpassed 100,000. Even if we
can only attribute a small fraction of those deaths to Trump's complete
negligence and mishandling, Trump's actions have led to more deaths than
September 11-- _Trump has literally killed more Americans than Osama Bin
Laden_. So I don't think we need to talk about Section 230 to show that he's a
terrible president.

That said, I'm having trouble seeing how Trump is wrong in his application of
Section 230. Section 230 was intended to protect free-speech platforms by
allowing them to eschew editorial control without being held responsible for
what users say. If Twitter starts exercising editorial control, then doesn't
that mean that they should be held responsible for what's said on their
platform? This strikes me as Twitter wanting to have their cake and eat it
too: they don't want to the legal liability of editorial control, but they
don't want the bad PR of allowing free speech on their platform.

If we're actually basing our laws and their enforcement on principles, then we
a) have to decide whether Twitter is a content platform or a communication
platform, and b) we can't just abandon our principles because Trump
accidentally says something correct.

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nojito
One thing is for sure.

No more ability to cut costs like they have had the luxury to do so thus far.

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torrzza
It would be really funny if Twitter decided to just ban Trump's account
outright. Preferably some three or four weeks before election.

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hn2017
Who knew that the right wing would be the one trying to limit free speech of
private companies??

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ed25519FUUU
How does this limit the free speech of private companies? Does a company have
free speech?

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newacct583
> How does this limit the free speech of private companies? Does a company
> have free speech?

Yes! And very broadly so:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC)

(Which, as much as it pains me as a hippie liberal to admit it, is probably
the best decision in context. Enshrining even things like corporate election
finance as "speech" makes is VERY clear that government regulation of actual
opinion on behalf of private entities is verboten. At the time none of us saw
Trump coming, but if the price for protecting a twitter correction is a bunch
of Comcast-funded PACs? Yeah, I'll pay that.)

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ed25519FUUU
I'm reminded of this cheeky comic from 2009[1], which shows Obama in the caves
Mt Doom with the ring, inscribed on it "executive privilege" and "state
secrets". Not wanting to forfeit its power, he decides to keep it. Now here we
are, with executive orders flying out the door.

Slowly, surely, we have allowed an unprecedented growth in executive action.
Haven't we decided already that it's okay to be in a perpetual state of war
since 2001? Why have we allowed the military industrial complex keep us
embroiled in foreign wars for half of our lives?

And if you want a glimpse at how powerful and non-partisan this complex is,
look at the pushback the president received when he tried simply to pull out
of Syria.

1\. [http://thisishistorictimes.com/2009/02/one-ring-to-rule-
them...](http://thisishistorictimes.com/2009/02/one-ring-to-rule-them-all/)

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remarkEon
The pushback about the Syria pullout was absolutely insane to me. If there was
a conflict that was going to trigger a NATO Article 5 invocation that was it.
Russia, Syria, Turkey (a NATO member for reasons that escapes me) ... it all
had the feeling of a trigger point, and _still_ people wanted us to keep
lobbing missiles and sending troops to a conflict we had no business being
involved in.

