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I'm sure I'm in the minority on this website, but I think anything the President posts on social media should be kept in place. Yes, I think he posts bad thing

I'm sure I'm in the minority on this website, but I think anything the President posts on social media should be kept in place. Yes, I think he posts bad things sometimes, promotes violence, posts racist comments. But...he's the President. He's not like all the other users of Facebook/Twitter, and different rules should apply to him. Essentially the people who want his posts removed are forcing their own opinion of right and wrong on the President of the United States. His opinion, right or wrong, is of national importance. What he says is a matter of historical value, showing the culture of America and its leadership at the time. It provides a check on power, letting the citizens know what their President thinks on certain issues and allows them to form their own opinions on whether the President is a leader they can get behind or try and vote out.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
zepto 6y ago
I couldn’t agree more. Regardless of how bad he is, it is absurd to Muzzle the president in this way.
- komali2 6y ago
  Muzzle is a strong word to use to describe a man who can call a press conference that will be attended by every major national and international news organization at the drop of a hat, and, failing that, can send an SMS to every phone in the USA.
  - zepto 6y ago
    Not really. We are afforded a window into how he thinks outside of these channels that are managed by his aides. Muzzling that denies us insight into who he is.
    - komali2 6y ago
      > into who he is. Is more info like that really useful?
      - zepto 6y ago
        Obviously so. There are republican and church leaders who are now condemning him since his “looting and shooting” tweet. His tweeting continues to influence people’s perception of his character.
holler 6y ago
I agree with you but why only the President? This gets at the frequent HN topic of big tech censorship vs freedom of speech. Why should we forcibly remove any posts at all? Why should _Insert_Big_Tech_Company_ get to tell me what's right and wrong as opposed to letting me make my own determination by reading it? When we remove censorship, we also invite others to critique and counter ideas that are deemed "incorrect".
- bluedevil2k 6y ago
  Well, you kind of do get to make your own determination...you can choose not to use _Insert_Big_Tech_Company_ if you want to.
  - holler 6y ago
    That has nothing to do with a user not seeing a post that a tech company felt needed to be censored.
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    for instance, one can use one's own app: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump/with-rallies-halted-and-tweets-fact-checked-trump-campaign-turns-to-smartphone-app-idUSKBN2391FT https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump/with-r... “The most important, golden thing in politics is a cellphone number,” said Parscale, who ran Trump’s digital efforts in 2016 before leading the 2020 campaign. “When we receive cellphone numbers, it really allows us to identify them across the databases. Who are they, voting history, everything.”
jaitsu 6y ago
Of international importance, I would say.
scaryclam 6y ago
If he posts from the official POTUS account, I'd support that. Anything from his personal account shouldn't be treated any differently at all.
- 0x8BADF00D 6y ago
  It will be, because of who he is. Anyone with large amounts of clout and following will not be subject to the same rules of the platform.
- nrmitchi 6y ago
  I completely agree with the theory here, however he is, and has been, treating personal accounts as "official" accounts for a while. Anything posted through those means should be maintained as a historical record. I agree with how Twitter handled it; they made it clear that it was in violation, hid it by default, however kept it. In my mind, I need to consider a situation as if the president tweets out something that _clearly_ violates ToS; such as something overtly racist, or a direct threat. As a 100% fake example: > "I am encouraging the Military to use live ammunition tonight in DC. Anyone out after curfew deserves to be shot on site!" The fact that this was by the president is 100% important, and needs to be available to be seen by anyone that wants to see it. Anything less is a huge safety risk, and in my opinion, if a platforms removes that content it constitutes gaslighting the public.
  - nocturnial 6y ago
    If you want to maintain a historical record, shouldn't those tweets or whatever be archived using the presidential records act at the source? This way a private company doesn't decide or is responsible what gets archived/deleted/censored/annotated but it always gets archived using what worked for every document produced by a president for decades. I think you have a point of it being archived but I think you're wrong about who should archive it. At the moment the president tweets official policy (maybe debatable, but let's assume it is), so those tweets should fall under the presidential records act and be archived by the white house staff. Then it doesn't matter if they are later deleted by whatever social media company, or even if are censored or have a fact check attached to them. The original message is stored and kept. (well, at least in theory)
a_c_s 6y ago
I think the idea that the office of the President confers with it the ability to flout norms, rules & laws is a dangerous one. Monarchs are above the law: a president should be required to follow every law & every rule to the same degree as any other citizen.
- Loughla 6y ago
  I don't know why you're being downvoted. You're right. He should have access to special information, and be involved in the world in ways regular citizens can't (meeting with terrorist organizations to work on peace, for example). But the laws of the land should apply to everyone, equally. I have no idea why that would be a controversial opinion.
king_magic 6y ago
So if a President yells “fire” in a crowded movie theater, we should all sit and sing kumbaya just because he’s the President? No. The President isn’t above the law, and he shouldn’t be above the rules of social networking sites as well. There are plenty of ways to archive and memorialize offensive/racist/vile posts from a President. The news media will do a fine job of that. No exceptions, no mercy: if a President oversteps, they should be forcibly muzzled just like the rest of us.
- Orou 6y ago
  > forcibly muzzled just like the rest of us Yikes. I'm not sure that sort of rhetoric is really helping your argument.
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  Censoring the president hurts the Ammerican people more than censoring a normal individual. Closing our eyes and ears to the presidents actions and statement doesn't make them go away, or meaningfully disincentivize him. If the president were to announce a racist policy or glorifies a violent military action, we should know.
  - king_magic 6y ago
    > Censoring the president hurts the Ammerican people more than censoring a normal individual. I don't buy that a single bit. Any sort of "censorship" on social media of a sitting US President (heck, even a former President) is going to be a major international news event.
    - s1artibartfast 6y ago
      I agree that banning trump would be a major news event. How does that relate to my statement that you quoted? The president can announce war, policies, and executive orders. Normal individuals can not. Preventing individuals from seeing these announcements is obviously more impactful than whatever the typical citizen is saying. Even if the speech is violent, hateful, or racist, it valuable to see it. Perhaps even moreso because of the content,
malloreon 6y ago
Make him post from @potus. His personal brand is not important.
VMisTheWay 6y ago
Disagree here. Traditional Media MIGHT let a politician lie, with a mention of the incorrectness during the article/segment. But a politician having unfettered access to provide propaganda is not allowing leadership, if anything it's getting closer to single party control.
krastanov 6y ago
Tweets were not deleted, you are using a strawman. Tweets were marked up with warning messages. It is perfectly sensible to mark as "factually wrong" a message that says "the sky is green" and as "inciting violence, but has to be kept for historic reasons" when the message is quoting a known oppressor and making threats.
- nrmitchi 6y ago
  Early today Zuck was quoted as saying: > If you really believe that a post is going to cause people to go to go do real-world violence, then that’s not the type of thing that I think we should have up even behind a warning I believe this may have been what OP was referring to
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  I think the issue that Twitter is running into now and is going to run into is that they're not applying this in any manner that could be deemed consistent. Do a quick search for "kill the" and you'll find endless tweets without the warning. You could make the case that Twitter only has to enforce this for accounts of importance. Yet there are plenty of officals who have tweets calling for violent jihad, the killing of homosexuals, so on and so on that have been made since the first warning... and that label has still not been applied. Twitter is editorializing, and I greatly fear they are going to ruin Section 230 for all of us.
- chrischen 6y ago
  To play devil’s advocate, one could use propaganda by only telling truths. This is done by selective truth telling. Can’t twitter’s selective truth telling be considered propaganda, even if the facts it present are not strictly incorrect? For example if Twitter decided to annotate people’s tweets about coronavirus with a “fact” about it originating from China, it wouldn’t be untrue, but it would appear such notices would serve some public opinion shifting effects no? How they select what facts and what tweets to even annotate could be used to pushed an agenda through careful selective information control.
johannes1234321 6y ago
I think it has to be kept around as record and for accountability. Twitter however shouldn't feed it into timelines.
rojobuffalo 6y ago
Flagging is distinct from removing posts. Removing seems obviously wrong for the reasons you give. Flagging is probably ok, maybe even the right thing to do.
saeranv 6y ago
To a certain degree I agree with you, although I think it should be practiced in conjunction with Twitter's strategy of flagging/hiding tweets. It seems like a good way to ensure the racist/violent/fake content can be moderated in some fashion. I think it's actually very useful, and informative for people to know what their president is thinking, and frankly, how idiotic he is. The world would be in a much worse position if he was silent, and his supporters were able to deceive themselves that he was competent.
- chrischen 6y ago
  His posts are polarizing though, which means a good half of the population may just accept and agree with it as much as one half shakes their heads. Actually Trump knows this and is saying and doing what his base wants to hear. Believe it or not prior to politics he was quoted to support gay rights and abortion. He panders to the religious right and is trying to play left and right against each other by dividing, because that cements his right wing base. So such action taken by the left allow his supporters to dig in. It gives him publicity and he doesn’t care that it’s negative in the eyes of the left because he obviously isn’t pandering to the left in any way.
nsajko 6y ago
Counterpoint: the POTUS has plenty of opportunity to get his voice heard independently of Twitter and Twitter has a right as to what they will publish. I agree that public officials' correspondence should be archived and publicly available, though, related funny story: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/10/trump-papers-filing-system-635164 https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/10/trump-papers-filin...
nocturnial 6y ago
> but I think anything the President posts on social media should be kept in place. When you said the president, did you mean _the_ president? I'm sure you know facebook is active in other countries. So when you say they should make an exception for the president, I think you actually meant _your_ president. I'm hammering on this distinction you've made because you could've as easily made the case that anyone could post what he does. You didn't. You made an exception for president X of whatever nation and that's fine. It's also fine that you mention the _national_ importance. The problem is that you probably won't apply that rule equally when you consider that facebook operates in several countries. Some with presidents, some without. Some with a working democracy and a rule of law, and some not. If you think he gets a free pass because he's _your_ president, that's fine. But don't expect people in other countries to follow your reasoning because we didn't elect him, we don't even want him and he's not special to us to deserve a free pass.
- bluedevil2k 6y ago
  Calm down man, you're reading way too much into my use of the word "President" and trying to twist the words into some anti-Trump rant. The article was about Trump, my comment was on the article linked to here.
  - intended 6y ago
    Not the same user - but that IS the issue. Bolsanaro for example, says false things - would you know if you weren't brazillian? How would FB achieve fairness in its policy if it put a flag on Trump and didn't on Bolsanaro, or other even worse world leaders? What about some Random leader of a tiny nation somewhere who believes in witchcraft? There are calls being made here which seem easy to Americans, but the processes behind it cannot be reapplied at scale. How do Social Media firms handle that? How does anyone morally balance that out?
  - nocturnial 6y ago
    I apologize if I came on too strong. But my comment still stands, if our/your/whatever elected leaders are just people like us. Why treat them differently or expect facebook to treat them differently? Your reason of him being elected doesn't make any sense to me. Saying it's the president makes even less sense. What about mayors, governors in the US? Do they get the same leniency as you give to president?
damnyou 6y ago
You're correct that he should have a different standard applied to him, but it should be higher than normal, not lower.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

zepto 6y ago

I couldn’t agree more. Regardless of how bad he is, it is absurd to Muzzle the president in this way.

komali2 6y ago
Muzzle is a strong word to use to describe a man who can call a press conference that will be attended by every major national and international news organization at the drop of a hat, and, failing that, can send an SMS to every phone in the USA.
- zepto 6y ago
  Not really. We are afforded a window into how he thinks outside of these channels that are managed by his aides. Muzzling that denies us insight into who he is.
  - komali2 6y ago
    > into who he is. Is more info like that really useful?
    - zepto 6y ago
      Obviously so. There are republican and church leaders who are now condemning him since his “looting and shooting” tweet. His tweeting continues to influence people’s perception of his character.

holler 6y ago

I agree with you but why only the President? This gets at the frequent HN topic of big tech censorship vs freedom of speech. Why should we forcibly remove any posts at all? Why should _Insert_Big_Tech_Company_ get to tell me what's right and wrong as opposed to letting me make my own determination by reading it? When we remove censorship, we also invite others to critique and counter ideas that are deemed "incorrect".

bluedevil2k 6y ago
Well, you kind of do get to make your own determination...you can choose not to use _Insert_Big_Tech_Company_ if you want to.
- holler 6y ago
  That has nothing to do with a user not seeing a post that a tech company felt needed to be censored.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  for instance, one can use one's own app: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump/with-rallies-halted-and-tweets-fact-checked-trump-campaign-turns-to-smartphone-app-idUSKBN2391FT https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump/with-r... “The most important, golden thing in politics is a cellphone number,” said Parscale, who ran Trump’s digital efforts in 2016 before leading the 2020 campaign. “When we receive cellphone numbers, it really allows us to identify them across the databases. Who are they, voting history, everything.”

jaitsu 6y ago

Of international importance, I would say.

scaryclam 6y ago

If he posts from the official POTUS account, I'd support that. Anything from his personal account shouldn't be treated any differently at all.

0x8BADF00D 6y ago
It will be, because of who he is. Anyone with large amounts of clout and following will not be subject to the same rules of the platform.
nrmitchi 6y ago
I completely agree with the theory here, however he is, and has been, treating personal accounts as "official" accounts for a while. Anything posted through those means should be maintained as a historical record. I agree with how Twitter handled it; they made it clear that it was in violation, hid it by default, however kept it. In my mind, I need to consider a situation as if the president tweets out something that _clearly_ violates ToS; such as something overtly racist, or a direct threat. As a 100% fake example: > "I am encouraging the Military to use live ammunition tonight in DC. Anyone out after curfew deserves to be shot on site!" The fact that this was by the president is 100% important, and needs to be available to be seen by anyone that wants to see it. Anything less is a huge safety risk, and in my opinion, if a platforms removes that content it constitutes gaslighting the public.
- nocturnial 6y ago
  If you want to maintain a historical record, shouldn't those tweets or whatever be archived using the presidential records act at the source? This way a private company doesn't decide or is responsible what gets archived/deleted/censored/annotated but it always gets archived using what worked for every document produced by a president for decades. I think you have a point of it being archived but I think you're wrong about who should archive it. At the moment the president tweets official policy (maybe debatable, but let's assume it is), so those tweets should fall under the presidential records act and be archived by the white house staff. Then it doesn't matter if they are later deleted by whatever social media company, or even if are censored or have a fact check attached to them. The original message is stored and kept. (well, at least in theory)

a_c_s 6y ago

I think the idea that the office of the President confers with it the ability to flout norms, rules & laws is a dangerous one. Monarchs are above the law: a president should be required to follow every law & every rule to the same degree as any other citizen.

Loughla 6y ago
I don't know why you're being downvoted. You're right. He should have access to special information, and be involved in the world in ways regular citizens can't (meeting with terrorist organizations to work on peace, for example). But the laws of the land should apply to everyone, equally. I have no idea why that would be a controversial opinion.

king_magic 6y ago

So if a President yells “fire” in a crowded movie theater, we should all sit and sing kumbaya just because he’s the President? No. The President isn’t above the law, and he shouldn’t be above the rules of social networking sites as well. There are plenty of ways to archive and memorialize offensive/racist/vile posts from a President. The news media will do a fine job of that. No exceptions, no mercy: if a President oversteps, they should be forcibly muzzled just like the rest of us.

Orou 6y ago
> forcibly muzzled just like the rest of us Yikes. I'm not sure that sort of rhetoric is really helping your argument.
s1artibartfast 6y ago
Censoring the president hurts the Ammerican people more than censoring a normal individual. Closing our eyes and ears to the presidents actions and statement doesn't make them go away, or meaningfully disincentivize him. If the president were to announce a racist policy or glorifies a violent military action, we should know.
- king_magic 6y ago
  > Censoring the president hurts the Ammerican people more than censoring a normal individual. I don't buy that a single bit. Any sort of "censorship" on social media of a sitting US President (heck, even a former President) is going to be a major international news event.
  - s1artibartfast 6y ago
    I agree that banning trump would be a major news event. How does that relate to my statement that you quoted? The president can announce war, policies, and executive orders. Normal individuals can not. Preventing individuals from seeing these announcements is obviously more impactful than whatever the typical citizen is saying. Even if the speech is violent, hateful, or racist, it valuable to see it. Perhaps even moreso because of the content,

malloreon 6y ago

Make him post from @potus. His personal brand is not important.

VMisTheWay 6y ago

Disagree here. Traditional Media MIGHT let a politician lie, with a mention of the incorrectness during the article/segment. But a politician having unfettered access to provide propaganda is not allowing leadership, if anything it's getting closer to single party control.

krastanov 6y ago

Tweets were not deleted, you are using a strawman. Tweets were marked up with warning messages. It is perfectly sensible to mark as "factually wrong" a message that says "the sky is green" and as "inciting violence, but has to be kept for historic reasons" when the message is quoting a known oppressor and making threats.

nrmitchi 6y ago
Early today Zuck was quoted as saying: > If you really believe that a post is going to cause people to go to go do real-world violence, then that’s not the type of thing that I think we should have up even behind a warning I believe this may have been what OP was referring to
vorpalhex 6y ago
I think the issue that Twitter is running into now and is going to run into is that they're not applying this in any manner that could be deemed consistent. Do a quick search for "kill the" and you'll find endless tweets without the warning. You could make the case that Twitter only has to enforce this for accounts of importance. Yet there are plenty of officals who have tweets calling for violent jihad, the killing of homosexuals, so on and so on that have been made since the first warning... and that label has still not been applied. Twitter is editorializing, and I greatly fear they are going to ruin Section 230 for all of us.
chrischen 6y ago
To play devil’s advocate, one could use propaganda by only telling truths. This is done by selective truth telling. Can’t twitter’s selective truth telling be considered propaganda, even if the facts it present are not strictly incorrect? For example if Twitter decided to annotate people’s tweets about coronavirus with a “fact” about it originating from China, it wouldn’t be untrue, but it would appear such notices would serve some public opinion shifting effects no? How they select what facts and what tweets to even annotate could be used to pushed an agenda through careful selective information control.

johannes1234321 6y ago

I think it has to be kept around as record and for accountability. Twitter however shouldn't feed it into timelines.

rojobuffalo 6y ago

Flagging is distinct from removing posts. Removing seems obviously wrong for the reasons you give. Flagging is probably ok, maybe even the right thing to do.

saeranv 6y ago

To a certain degree I agree with you, although I think it should be practiced in conjunction with Twitter's strategy of flagging/hiding tweets. It seems like a good way to ensure the racist/violent/fake content can be moderated in some fashion. I think it's actually very useful, and informative for people to know what their president is thinking, and frankly, how idiotic he is. The world would be in a much worse position if he was silent, and his supporters were able to deceive themselves that he was competent.

chrischen 6y ago
His posts are polarizing though, which means a good half of the population may just accept and agree with it as much as one half shakes their heads. Actually Trump knows this and is saying and doing what his base wants to hear. Believe it or not prior to politics he was quoted to support gay rights and abortion. He panders to the religious right and is trying to play left and right against each other by dividing, because that cements his right wing base. So such action taken by the left allow his supporters to dig in. It gives him publicity and he doesn’t care that it’s negative in the eyes of the left because he obviously isn’t pandering to the left in any way.

nsajko 6y ago

Counterpoint: the POTUS has plenty of opportunity to get his voice heard independently of Twitter and Twitter has a right as to what they will publish. I agree that public officials' correspondence should be archived and publicly available, though, related funny story: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/10/trump-papers-filing-system-635164 https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/10/trump-papers-filin...

nocturnial 6y ago

> but I think anything the President posts on social media should be kept in place. When you said the president, did you mean _the_ president? I'm sure you know facebook is active in other countries. So when you say they should make an exception for the president, I think you actually meant _your_ president. I'm hammering on this distinction you've made because you could've as easily made the case that anyone could post what he does. You didn't. You made an exception for president X of whatever nation and that's fine. It's also fine that you mention the _national_ importance. The problem is that you probably won't apply that rule equally when you consider that facebook operates in several countries. Some with presidents, some without. Some with a working democracy and a rule of law, and some not. If you think he gets a free pass because he's _your_ president, that's fine. But don't expect people in other countries to follow your reasoning because we didn't elect him, we don't even want him and he's not special to us to deserve a free pass.

bluedevil2k 6y ago
Calm down man, you're reading way too much into my use of the word "President" and trying to twist the words into some anti-Trump rant. The article was about Trump, my comment was on the article linked to here.
- intended 6y ago
  Not the same user - but that IS the issue. Bolsanaro for example, says false things - would you know if you weren't brazillian? How would FB achieve fairness in its policy if it put a flag on Trump and didn't on Bolsanaro, or other even worse world leaders? What about some Random leader of a tiny nation somewhere who believes in witchcraft? There are calls being made here which seem easy to Americans, but the processes behind it cannot be reapplied at scale. How do Social Media firms handle that? How does anyone morally balance that out?
- nocturnial 6y ago
  I apologize if I came on too strong. But my comment still stands, if our/your/whatever elected leaders are just people like us. Why treat them differently or expect facebook to treat them differently? Your reason of him being elected doesn't make any sense to me. Saying it's the president makes even less sense. What about mayors, governors in the US? Do they get the same leniency as you give to president?

damnyou 6y ago

You're correct that he should have a different standard applied to him, but it should be higher than normal, not lower.