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
> 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.
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.
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.
> they're no longer platforms and instead publishers, who can be sued for their content
They could and have been sued all along. Plenty of people file inane lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter and Google all the time for content that gets posted on their services. I wouldn't be quick to imply that these lawsuits would result in successful outcomes for the plaintiffs would it not have been for the existence of Section 230.
>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.
You don't think it's a problem that a platform which controls the information that reaches millions of eyes, acting as a mouthpiece for the president, applies a totally subjective "fact check" disclaimer based on an uncharitable interpretation of the president's tweet, while pretending to be politically neutral?
And while ignoring similar misstatements from other politicians on both sides of the aisle?
The issue here, and I cannot stress how dangerous this is for society, is that an entity which gatekeeps information for millions of eyes, is pretending to be a neutral party while overtly manipulating the messages of politicians from one political party.
This creates a manufactured consensus which is influences policy and elections according to the whims of a handful of high level managers/executives at Twitter. It's an abhorrent concentration of unnofficial, unchecked soft power and it was hugely irresponsible and unethical for Twitter to publicly pick a side without a massive disclaimer.
This isn't even getting into the holes in the "fact check". What a joke. How much hubris do you need to believe that your tech company can act as an arbiter of truth?
You and I see different problems here. To me, the problem is a platform (and therefore legitimacy) has been granted to someone who abuses that power at every turn.
We (those arguing against you) are not empowering Twitter as the new POTUS, merely trying to minimize the current one’s ability to cause damage via lies and hateful rhetoric. (Things you or I would have been banned for years ago)
There will come a time to deal with Twitter’s societal overreach too.
There is simply no objective definition for either of these concepts and if you may be fine with Twitter having this kind of power now, but you may regret it if the shoe is ever on the other foot.
Having a corporate arbiter of truth is antithetical to a free society, especially when creating one's own platform is impractical because of network effects.
Who is going to fact check the fact checker? Effectively Twitter has the final word because this is their platform - not because they are correct, and if these political squabbles had an objectively correct answer then we wouldn't have multiple parties.
People are find with it right now because it's en Vogue to hate on the president, but that doesn't mean the fact checking is justified or even honest - and I reiterate, the dangerous part here is that people implicitly take Twitter to be an authority when they absolutely are not. Their fact check isn't even accurate, but people don't tend to question what they want to hear.
Twitter's role is a neutral party - the same way that journalists are ultimately doing a disservice to society by editorializing everything while claiming to be neutral. It is dishonest and divides society from the top down.
If Twitter really cared about the "lies and hateful rhetoric" they would have put their money where their mouth is and banned him years ago. It's just a meaningless gesture to drum up more drama, more clicks, more views.
This seems overly simplistic to me and premature. You are declaring "null and void" something that you haven't seen (at least I was unable to find the actual text just now).
Obviously any President has lots of legal options when deciding how any law is applied and interpreted.
It appears that this is a shot across the bow from a political standpoint or to use another military metaphor, Trump is attempting to shape the battlefield on this issue and there are indeed lots of legitimate issues regarding Section 230.
> actual checks and account balances from bribes right? Just another mafia state style leverage play here.
Not that things cannot be significantly improved or that I'm not extremely disappointed with our level of political executive leadership, but if this is what you think a mafia state is, I wonder what you would call the situation in other countries where things are significantly worse.
The world runs on self-interest and leverage, people seem to have forgotten that. The current climate screams this reality.
The zero-sum game disciples are in power and calling the shots. I don't personally subscribe or believe in that ideology but it cannot be denied that the current state of the world is steeped in it.
In game theory, if the other side cheats and your side keeps cooperating, you will lose every time. There is a great little game theory game that highlights it here called The Evolution of Trust [1].
Dismissing this as some petty doom-to-fail attempt to fulfill some narcissistic desire would be foolish, as recent presidential history, from GW and especially through Obama has shown us the levels we have allowed executive overreach to rise. Obama designed the blueprint for achieving things without Congressional approval.
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.
"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."
Hm, if I wanted to do it I would hit them with the federal FOSTA-SESTA law targeting their complacency with sex worker's profiles, and also coordinate with states to levy charges related to hosting child pornography and failing federal record keeping obligations (2257a), then use that to assume their normal financial transactions are illegitimate so leveraging wire fraud statutes, and then hit them with securities fraud statues because they lied/omitted information about all those issues to their shareholders, have the SEC freeze their stock, really prepare to get civil forfeiture laws challenged by freezing their domestic assets too under the assumption of illegality in separate charges against their assets instead of Twitter itself.
Twitter should be able to beat all of it, but the point would get made and shareholders would bounce as soon as they could.
Don't forget to seize the website in the process.
None of this represents my opinion. It would be negligent to not notice the tools already exist.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not sure most of them would, especially if it was Gab or something more obscure still. Ironically I think initially at least to get the message across he'd rely on coverage of whatever platform he chose to vent on coming from his other bugbear: mainstream media.
Good point. It would be some fraction and not everyone. It just occurred to me that I follow him on Twitter, but would never create a Gab account. Hell, I don't log into Facebook anymore, and he wouldn't be enough of a reason to start doing that again.
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?
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.
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.
Yeah, that's the truly horrifying thing here. As others are pointing out, the EO itself is just theater, precisely because the actual first amendment of these companies and their employees protect them from the government (or have so far, anyway). To wit: Twitter has the same right to tell you the president is lying that the president does to speak via tweet in the first place.
The thing that strikes me is that the political tribe that crows about this stuff constantly, when faced with an actual attempt by the executive branch to control the speech of private entities... is absent.
Where is the HN libertarian debate squad now? Fucking crickets is all I hear. I despair for society.
(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.)
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.
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.
