I wonder how much of this is fear that Facebook won't be able to maintain views throughout the 2024 election cycle if users are forced to other platforms to follow Trump.
The HackerNews crowd really needs to figure out how to deal with the cognitive dissonance of "the business can do no wrong while chasing the profits" and "but ma' freedoms".
Trump-endorsed candidates underperformed in the midterms and in previous elections. Trump talking hurts the party. If anything, keeping him off the platforms until after the midterms helped Republicans.
Trump endorsees also underperformed in 2018 and 2020. There’s a pretty clear trend. Trump won in 2016 because of his reach on Facebook and Twitter, yes—he was novel and his win was a black swan. But he and his candidates also did poorly in subsequent elections, after the novelty wore off, because of his social media reach.
To be fair, it has been quite a while (not in our lifetime AFAIK) since we had a sitting president with such antisocial behavior tendencies. It was uncharted territory.
What happened between 2016 and 2020 in the name of making sure people understood that supporting Trump would not be tolerated truly boggles the mind.
For three years they used the FBI to threaten his family and jail his friends under an investigation into what we now know was a political campaign weapon falsified by the Clinton campaign. And the FBI knew that immediately as well. With Adam Schiff out there every day swearing that behind closed doors with the intelligence community he knew of big things that were going to come to light any day now.
But it worked. The political weapon did exactly what it was supposed to do.
Moreso than the right, it broke the left into the hyper-defensive ideological mess that it is right now. Fully embracing things that were mere crackpot ideas of their most wild-eyed constituents in the Obama years.
What racist statements? Please say "rapists and murderers".
James Comey said a true thing - Hillary Clinton was under investigation for using a personally owned and possessed BES for official state department communications, which she destroyed when the FBI wanted to review its contents because what she was doing was illegal and a huge security problem. She was never charged.
And then the FBI went on to pretend well after they knew otherwise that the Clinton-fabricated Steele dossier might be legitimate.
Trump: "I’ve known Jeff [Epstein] for 15 years. Terrific guy, He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side."
I love how everyone just uses the term "sitting president" verbatim now when making this argument, as if the prospect of a president losing their social media accounts is supposed to fill us with dread, sitting or no. It's almost become like a verbal tic.
Everything that president said and did was covered by the press around the world, an army of spokespeople and a million online sycophants. He isn't (and certainly wasn't) "stifled" by the banning of his social media accounts. Really, tech companies bent over backwards to accommodate him, gave him far more slack than they would give you or I. And even then he had to cross the line twice.
Hell, he's still the frontrunner for the Republicans in 2024, and the last anyone heard from him was that he was selling NFTs.
The narrative of Trump being silenced by big tech isn't working, find another one already.
> Everything that president said and did was covered by the press around the world, an army of spokespeople and a million online sycophants.
Except virtually everyone I spoke to was unaware of what his final posts on social media on jan6 were, they were not covered, and they were lied about for years with no way for the public to see that in fact he called for people to go home peacefully on jan6.
You can say things like this, but they carry more weight when they're true.
> Except virtually everyone I spoke to was unaware of what his final posts on social media on jan6 were, they were not covered,
And who are these people you've been speaking to? Clearly they're living under rocks.
> and they were lied about for years with no way for the public to see that in fact he called for people to go home peacefully on jan6.
"no way for the public to see" ??? This is nonsense - he first called for people to go home on Jan 6 via a televised announcement, then repeated that on social media, before being banned. The TV announcement was covered and broadcast by multiple TV networks.
I saw his tortured video of asking the crowd to go home on January 6th, on TV, and then many times elsewhere. He made multiple takes, and himself inserted the line about "loving" the insurrectionists. What are you TALKING about? What lies? Be specific.
The Board found that the two posts by Mr Trump on 6 January severely violated Facebook's Community Standards and Instagram's Community Guidelines. "We love you. You're very special" in the first post, and "great patriots" and "remember this day forever" in the second post violated Facebook's rules prohibiting praise or support of people engaged in violence.
This seems like a ridiculous stretch of "praise of support of people engaged in violence" when right before "We love you." is "We have to have peace. So go home."
It's pretty clear this was a post facto decision - Trump needed to be banned, so let's see if we can come up with something to ban him for.
Yes? I'd speculate the discussion in fact went something like this:
1. Trump supporters have been made an example of by keeping a bunch of them in jail for years for the crime of walking through a building;
2. There are enough court cases and grand juries outstanding against Trump that one of them will eventually get him and he'll be banned from running again;
3. In any case, a plausible primary rival for Trump has emerged (DeSantis) who has enough flaws of his own (anti-vaxx, anti-woke) that we can use him as a punching bag for the next few years;
4. Trump was allowed back on Twitter but is still playing on his own platform;
Therefore:
We can safely win some PR points by pretending to give a crap about freedom of expression by letting Trump back on our platform.
Not that I believe you can show me anyone in prison for, or being charged with, "walking through a building," but the point of my question was whether it was impossible to believe that a change in policy at Meta could possibly be the result of good-faith reconsideration of the debate. Instead I got fanfiction with irrelevant agenda-fueled talking points. I'm not dying on any hills, I'm asking why the distraction instead of just considering the possibility that someone might agree with him. Getting this much flak about it is wild.
No, you wrote fanfiction about cartoon villains, without explaining at all why it's not even possible that this policy change could have come about through internal reconsideration of the merits of the ban within Meta. I don't know why you bothered, but it has nothing to do with my question.
If corps are people, then it's men with multiple personalities disorder, with the number of personalities sometimes reaching tens. A few years ago one group of neurons (VPs) was in charge, and they believed that free speech is bad. Today another group of neurons has taken control, and they believe that free speech is good.
Hate requires energy, Biden, Fauci, Trump, XJP, Zelensky, Putin or whatever idiot is not worth my hate. So yes, if you have nothing better to do than hate person you never met in your life and who never personally did anything to you other than some intepretation spread by your favorite MSM, you are radical by my standards. I could understand someone who harmed you or your family, but hating some distant politician looks quite immature.
And the problem is not really even that these people hate him, they can have whatever opinion they want or even hate him, the problem is that they project their hate even here in what should be civil discussion forum on users with different opinion, so much for "democrats" who can't stand different opinion and downvote/censor any opposing views.
I used to share that opinion but as emails and DM's between three letter agencies and the social media platforms have been leaking it's harder to defend corporations. I will defer to Shoe for some details. [1]
Probably because I didn't see it. We don't come close to seeing everything.
IIRC, this isn't the first time you've responded to a moderation comment by pointing a finger at someone else. I'm happy to answer questions to satisfy curiosity, but not when they're a way of rejecting moderation. We need you to follow the rules here regardless of what anyone else is doing.
If someone else is breaking the rules and escaping moderation (because, as I said, we don't see everything), they'll get caught and moderated eventually. If you want to give us a heads-up by flagging or by emailing hn@ycombinator.com, that's welcome. But please don't take it as an excuse to break the site guidelines yourself; that only makes everything worse.
When writing those witty comparisons, do you ever stop and think about the millions of human beings that were murdered by actual fascism, or do you pretend that you actually give a damn and are fighting an internet fight against fascism?
Well, at least Twitter did have a rule which allowed people the US gov't had on sanctions list to have accounts. As well we had other heads of state protest bans on other heads of state.
Obviously, your intuition differs, but my view (as a New Zealander) is that Trump absolutely broke the terms of use of the platforms he was on and deserved being banned. Free speech means that you can't be imprisoned for your political views, not that everyone owes you a platform.
It does mean more than not being imprisoned. For example, if the government came to Facebook and told them to remove all posts by a certain politician, violations of the platform’s rules notwithstanding, I believe that would also be a violation of America’s first amendment.
They said his comment "We have to have peace. So go home. We love you. You're very special." and "from great patriots who have been badly, unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love in peace. Remember this day forever!"
As "praising or supporting people committing violence".
He literally said "we have to have peace" and "go home" and that, to you, is "deserving being banned"?
Meta finally realizing that folks will happily migrate to other platforms to read what they are interested in. I wonder if they'll change their stance on censorship of certain medical information next?
