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I agree with you that counterfactuals are hard (and often pointless) -- but it is worth noting that it would have only taken a small shift in public support for

I agree with you that counterfactuals are hard (and often pointless) -- but it is worth noting that it would have only taken a small shift in public support for Republicans to have kept control of the Senate -- for example, ~50K votes in the Ossoff/Perdue runoff, or alternately ~14K votes in the same race in the general election. That's an incredibly tiny shift, and one that could have been geographically isolated to a single state. Additionally, I'd imagine a shift toward Republicans that fell short of Trump winning the presidency would have led to more unrest on Jan 6, not less.

DSingularity 6y ago
Maybe they are often pointless but I think in this case it would be helpful if we found out the main drivers for these decisions. Let’s not undermine the significance of techs decision to censor here. The potential blowback could be in tens of millions of users abandoning these platforms for alternatives. So should we give them credit or was this a political decision? Maybe the DOJ will drop its cases against big tech. Maybe the senate/congress will stop calling the CEOs to testify.
- grzm 6y ago
  You’re looking right past the likely cause and jumping straight to the reaction. Ignoring the context is not useful. Twitter, Facebook, AWS, and others didn’t act ex nihilo. To flip it around, do you think Twitter, Facebook, and AWS would have taken these actions if protesters hadn't broken into the Capitol on January 6? I think it's unlikely. Twitter and Facebook have taken little action in the past four years even when there were many calls to do so, and Twitter had already come out and said that they'd subject Trump's account to normal TOS review after he leaves office. So something happened that caused them to change their decision. In this case it's not hard to see that the proximal and stated cause is sufficient to explain their actions.

DSingularity 6y ago

Maybe they are often pointless but I think in this case it would be helpful if we found out the main drivers for these decisions. Let’s not undermine the significance of techs decision to censor here. The potential blowback could be in tens of millions of users abandoning these platforms for alternatives. So should we give them credit or was this a political decision? Maybe the DOJ will drop its cases against big tech. Maybe the senate/congress will stop calling the CEOs to testify.

grzm 6y ago
You’re looking right past the likely cause and jumping straight to the reaction. Ignoring the context is not useful. Twitter, Facebook, AWS, and others didn’t act ex nihilo. To flip it around, do you think Twitter, Facebook, and AWS would have taken these actions if protesters hadn't broken into the Capitol on January 6? I think it's unlikely. Twitter and Facebook have taken little action in the past four years even when there were many calls to do so, and Twitter had already come out and said that they'd subject Trump's account to normal TOS review after he leaves office. So something happened that caused them to change their decision. In this case it's not hard to see that the proximal and stated cause is sufficient to explain their actions.