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I remember watching a very strange segment on American news about a man who owns a mattress and pillow company who was banned from Twitter because he continuous

• lallysingh 6y ago
  Well there was the attempt at violent overthrow of a government... That's one difference.
  • throwaway894345 6y ago
    Personally I think it's a security problem that Pillow Man's LARPer mob constituted a credible threat to our National Security. This doesn't seem like cause to restrict speech. (Of course, Twitter is technically a private platform, but it's also the de facto public square as I discussed elsewhere in this thread, and the property we ought to care about is that free speech is protected in the public square).
    • lallysingh 6y ago
      I think the Free Speech problem is really a problem of automatic amplification by platforms that have motivations sometimes opposed to the well-being of the speakers or listenrrs.
      • throwaway894345 6y ago
        Maybe, but even then the "free speech problem" should never have become a "national security problem". National security aside, free speech works pretty well when the public square isn't privatized by a handful of entities with the same general business model (using outrage to sell ads), which is perhaps your very point.
  • fareesh 6y ago
    Seemed like one of the poorest attempts I have ever seen, is it really being treated as a serious one?
    • lallysingh 6y ago
      The defenses were so poor it was a coin flip whether it would succeed.
      • konjin 6y ago
        What would success have looked like? Stealing the original copy of the constitution and using whiteout to change the bits they didn't like?
        • kibwen 6y ago
          Success for them would have looked like apprehending the legislature and coercing them into throwing out the votes of states that didn't go to Trump. And this is charitably assuming that their chants of "hang Mike Pence", along with the gallows they erected out front, might have only been for show.
          • konjin 6y ago
            My version of editing the constitution is vastly more likely to happen than whatever fever dream this is.
            • kibwen 6y ago
              Perhaps you're so naive that you think that a murderous mob successfully overthrowing an elected government is unprecedented in US history? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_1898 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_189...
              • konjin 6y ago
• majormajor 6y ago
  The dominant strains of consternation about 2016 were that social media had been abused to propagandize voters into voting for Trump, that the electoral college was a problem, that democratic politicians needed to listen to rural white voters and target them more, and that Clinton was a we-should've-seen-this-sooner hugely flawed candidate. The vote count being fraudulent, the idea that fellow citizens had stolen the election, wasn't an ongoing discussion in December 2015, January 2016, etc... It's curious you think that people claiming Russia hacked the vote totals in 2016 were "far more influential" than the people who've been shouting "stop the steal" when only one of those groups of people convinced folks to march and riot to try to "take back" the election. The message against Trump after his election was "resistance," a message which accepts that Trump won the election, but sought to keep people engaged to try to minimize what he could do. I challenge you to find those people you think were continually organizing events to get Trump's election overturned.
• mcguire 6y ago
  At what point did those who made the "vague accusation of hacking" storm the United States Capitol in a coup attempt?
  • fareesh 6y ago
    Do people really believe that it was a coup attempt though? I see people framing it that way but always assumed it was political exaggeration
    • PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
      What term would you use for an event, even if if doomed to fail, that involves at least hundreds of people outside (and then inside) of the building where the vice-president is present, chanting "Hang Mike Pence" ? Do you think it's just some of kiddie protest party? Do you think they didn't mean it? Do you think that because it wasn't 100,000 people it doesn't count? Do you think that because they didn't have the army on their side, it can't be an attempt at a coup?
      • fareesh 6y ago
        The term LARP comes to mind
      • generalizations 6y ago
        "Coup D'etat: a sudden decisive exercise of force in politics" That doesn't fit the captiol protest very well. Sudden? Decisive? Exercise of force?
        • PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
          It is unclear how the "alternative outcome" of January 6th might have gone. I'm a little skeptical that there was a carefully thought out and plausible "alternative outcome", but the sort of thing that some people have suggested was that the trump supporters would have taken control of the certification process in some important way (with or without actual violence towards various existing government members). This would have then led to Trump declaring some kind of emergency, the certification process would have "finished" with a different outcome, and a new winner of the election would have been declared. As I said, I am not sure I buy that anyone with half a brain thought that a plan could work, but there seems to be some supporting evidence that something like this had been imagined by at the very least some of the people at the protest. How far into the Trump administration that might have gone, I don't know (or if went into it at all). Had something like that happened, it would definitely have been a decisive, sudden show of force in politics.
• jjcon 6y ago
  I do think there are stark differences between 2020 and the 2016 elections BUT I still agree with everything you said.
• froh 6y ago
  Maybe it also stems from the global diversity of the employees in said companies. To the European eye the idea of allowing any and all public utterance feels like a free ticket to disaster. Deliberate and carefully crafted representation of "reality", and indirect communication via various "trusted channels" is part of winning elections anywhere. The carefully and orchestrated use of mass media in the 1920s and 1930s, skillfully crafted to lead the electorate to certain political choices, was later used to even accept certain political atrocities (internment camps in the beginning, war and industrial mass murder later). So to protect the electorate (!) from being grossly misled, many European countries in the aftermath of the 1940s decided to counterbalance the freedom of speech with rules what is not freedom of speech. And yes, the details are tricky and courts have to decide. Is that ever in the public debate in the USA? Reasonable limits to free speech? Here is a fairly straightforward example from the German penal code: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stgb.html#p1333 https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st... https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__130.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__130.html
  • ameister14 6y ago
    >So to protect the electorate (!) from being grossly misled, many European countries in the aftermath of the 1940s decided to counterbalance the freedom of speech with rules what is not freedom of speech. That's a very generous way of looking at it. In the West, I would say that it would be more accurate to look at it through the lens of the cold war, though. Communism and radicalism were to be prevented and so freedom of speech was necessarily curtailed. In the East, it was likewise curtailed, ostensibly to 'protect the youth' and 'prevent disinformation' but with more potential for immediate consequences. >Is that ever in the public debate in the USA? Reasonable limits to free speech? Sure. It's been debated a lot, actually. Laws have changed significantly over the last hundred years, almost entirely to the expansion of free speech side.
    • retrac 6y ago
      Here in Canada, we have laws which don't originate from cold war paranoia. They're just attempts to cool the heatedness of elections. For example, you can't campaign before the official election season begins, and there are limits on how much you can spend, and how much people can donate, there are limits on polling close to the election, it's illegal to reveal early results in the eastern parts of the country (where polls close earlier) to the western parts until all polls are closed, and so on. Many Western democracies have laws like this, which would be incompatible with the American First Amendment, but which are basically intended to foster democratic health, and aren't particularly authoritarian.
• throwaway894345 6y ago
  While I agree, one predictable counter-argument is that Twitter et al are private organizations with a legal prerogative to ban whomever they like (freedom of association). This is true, but we should think about how this was intended to work and the property that this was designed to protect: the original idea was that you had a decentralized network of communities that could individually excommunicate whomever they liked (freedom of association) but any individual was still allowed to participate in the broader network, the public square. Now, social media has become the de facto public square--a small group of social media companies hold dominion over an overwhelming amount of our speech--worse, these companies coordinate with each other to behave as a single large entity. We shouldn't get distracted by the fact that Twitter is a de facto public square and not a de jure public square, because we want to protect the functional property. We can do that either by regulating Twitter like we would regulate the public square, or we can do it by breaking up this powerful trust of corporations (I favor the latter).
  • philipkglass 6y ago
    Twitter has a monopoly on things that work exactly like Twitter. That's all. I'm a lot more sympathetic to arguments about how Google and Facebook have a worrying degree of control online, because services owned by them are used by an absolute majority of English speaking people. Twitter is only used by 22% of Americans as of 2019 [1]. If Twitter banned me I wouldn't even know about it for several months because that's about how frequently I log in. It's important to a certain kind of "very online" person but from my POV it's as inessential as Pinterest or Twitch. I think that Twitter's perceived importance has been exaggerated beyond its actual user numbers because the previous US President used it so heavily. It was also an easy, cheap, reliable way for other publishers to churn out content. "Trump Tweets Something -- We React" was a daily staple for TV and written publications for 4 years. But 78% of Americans get along just fine without using Twitter itself. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/10/share-of-u-s-adults-using-social-media-including-facebook-is-mostly-unchanged-since-2018/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/10/share-of-u-...
    • throwaway894345 6y ago
• pfraze 6y ago
  This is a pretty biased take on what's been happening. The 2020 election's fraud claims were thrown out by courts. They were entirely evidence-free. Even Lindsey Graham gave a concise speech on the night of 1/6 explaining precisely how false those fraud claims were. The 2016 election involved Russia hacking the DNC and leaking their emails, which became a centerpiece of the election debate ("Hillary's emails!"). It also involved Trump publicly asking for Russia to leak the emails, and then (once elected) firing the head of the FBI and saying in an interview with Lester Holt it was because Comey was investigating any possible ties with Russia. The response to 2016 was the Mueller investigation. The response to 2020 was an attempted insurrection. One of these is not like the other, and you're attempting to paint a false political logic behind how the two have been treated.
  • unishark 6y ago
    There were nationwide protests against the election result in 2016. They blocked the highways here in california. People also disrupted confirmation hearings back then.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
      Those protests mostly fizzled out with a week or two of the election results (even before all state results were certified). "Disrupted confirmation hearings" seems fairly different to me from "smashed windows and doors to gain entrance to the US Capitol while hundreds of people chanted "Hang Mike Pence!".
      • unishark 6y ago
        Different in some ways, of course, same in others. Ultimately I'm just seeing the same news with one side one-upping the other. They weren't even the first armed group to try and defy the government in the last year, though perhaps the most ambitious.
        • PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
• PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  > From what I recall the 2016 election was frequently attributed to some vague accusation of hacking from Russia but the same standard was not applied at the time, nor is it applied today. The people espousing this view were eventually proven inconclusive in all the different inquiries into the matter, and they were far more influential than a man who sells pillows. Your recollection seems at odds with reality. There has been a Senate inquiry with conclusions at odd with your recollections. The Mueller report came to conclusions at odd with your recollections. A reminder: that report, while not indicting the president or his team in anything in particular, found what it considered incontrovertible evidence of Russian interference designed to favor the election of Trump. The Senate report came to the same conclusions, even more strongly stated. As for your claim that the people espousing this view being "far more influential than a man who sells pillows", I think you'd need to establish a metric for "influential", since it is far from clear precisely what you mean. Furthermore, the sense that some people had regarding Russian interference in the 2016 elections never resulted in violence or death (certainly not directly). Nobody claimed that the election had been "stolen" (that's a direct quote from a large number of people regarding the 2020 elections). There was just a sense of unease and disquiet that the election may not have been fair but the result was accepted anyway.
  • fareesh 6y ago
    I was referring to the fact that none of those findings concluded that the outcome of the 2016 election was affected. That is the standard that's being applied for 2020 so I was applying the same standard.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
      The standard for 2020 is whether the alleged fraud actually took place at all. There is no court-worthy evidence that it did. Some would say there is no evidence at all. The standard for 2016 is therefore whether or not Russian interference occured, which two high level US government reports have confirmed took place.
      • twitchreplyfor 6y ago
• bccdee 6y ago
  Few people if any ever seriously alleged that Russian hackers intervened in the administration of the 2016 US federal election. Rather, the assertion was that Russian agents spread disinformation on media platforms, and that was found to be largely true. Dishonest claims about the legitimacy of the 2020 US federal election are a lot more dangerous, as is obvious from the Jan. 6th terrorist attack on the US Capitol.