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Donald Trump's 'communications' platform permanently taken offline
- ivanstame 5y agoIt's so disgusting to see Big Tech playing politics and saying what is true or not. That shit should not be allowed.
- tyleo 5y agoAre you referring to something in the article or is this a general statement about big tech? I’m curious because I read the article and couldn’t find the instance of “big tech playing politics” you are talking about.
- TaupeRanger 5y agoHe's upset that FB and Twitter banned him for inciting a violent riot and fomenting rage/doubt about an obviously free and fair election.
- syshum 5y agoThe fact that the "communications platform" needed to be created is by product of big tech playing politics.
- ivanstame 5y agoJust a general statement and a feeling about how they often abuse their "rights", and those "fact checkers" that I have an issue with.
- roenxi 5y agoTrump was banned for a political interpretation of things that weren't happening on the platforms he was banned from. The topic of Trump's communication is intimately tied to the politics of the big tech companies.
- brink 5y agoWhile I agree, this is not a good spot to get on that soapbox. That's not what's happening here.
- makomk 5y agoThis seems like it's pretty directly tied to Big Tech's control of what's allowed to be said on their platforms - as I understand it Trump set this up after he was banned from Big Tech as a way to try to get the message out, similar to the standard HN refrain that it's not a big deal because people can just set up their own websites. This seems to show just how ineffective that is in reality even for the aggressively populist previous president of the US and how important Big Tech's control over the political narrative actually is.
- oneeyedpigeon 5y agoI'd be interested to know more about what type of content Trump published on his own blog, that proved unsuccessful. As someone observing from the UK, my assumption is that it was probably more long-form content. I wonder if comments were even possible. It wouldn't surprise me if short chunks of content, such as tweets, were far more popular with Trump's base than longer articles. Edit: I see there are what I assume to be a couple of examples from his blog. They look very much like individual tweets. This turns it into quite an interesting case, one of a handful of examples I've seen where someone publishes the equivalent of their own twitter stream, on their own site. I used to have a great example, but I can't for the life of me now find it! In the case I've seen previously, the content was syndicated from the site to twitter — obviously, Trump doesn't have that option. Edit2: It's Tantek Çelik's blog I'm thinking of: https://tantek.com/ https://tantek.com/
- true_religion 5y agoIt also hurts that Fox News, the most popular news channel, is owned by his political opponent in the conservative field. All other news channels spent the last 4 years barred from even attending his press conferences so they can’t be on his side. Finally, he spent his last weeks of his presidency alienating his most hardcore supporters (e.g. the proud boys, parlor). Had he thrown them the smallest of bones then they might still be on his side rather than feeling betrayed as they do today. Basically all this show is if you aggressively shoot yourself in the foot, don’t be surprised to find you now have no foot.
- derpyaphap 5y agoAgreed. Facebook's handling of the "fringe conspiracy theory" that COVID may have originated in a lab says everything we need to know about how destructive of a force for they have become.
- IgorPartola 5y ago> It's so disgusting to see Big Tech playing politics and saying what is true or not. That shit should not be allowed. It’s so disgusting to see a billionaire screw regular people out of money while spreading FUD, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and sexism while telling outright lies. That shit should not be allowed.
- busterarm 5y agoNo that's the thing. According to our laws it _should_ be allowed. It should not be _tolerated_. That's the difference. That's what a healthy, mature society does. If you make it not allowed, then you're giving enormous power and control of your society to whoever the arbiters of truth are. Right now that's social media/tech companies who are completely unelected and serve their own interests.
- IgorPartola 5y agoI am so glad you brought up tolerance [1]: > The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly paradoxical idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
- busterarm 5y agoExcept that has nothing to do with what I actually said. I said be intollerant. That's the opposite of your retort. Intollerance isn't the same response as forbiddance. It's nice how you completely ignored my argument in favor of your talking point -- and a complete non-sequittur it was. Let's keep that shit to Twitter please.
- IgorPartola 5y agoMy point is that if the laws allow intolerance then our ability to be a tolerant society will go away sooner or later. This is why I have no problem with laws that forbid hate speech, such as hate speech exhibited by Trump.
- smitty1e 5y agoIt's trivial to say that these petty tyrannies "should not be allowed". It's quite challanging to craft a suitable rule that human craftiness can't subvert which would protect the idea of the First Amendment for all time. Programming is hard. Writing good law is really hard.
- kmos17 5y agoWhat should not be allowed is a president attempting a coup by asking his supporters to attack the seat of our government to try to overturn an election he lost, using obvious lies and propaganda. Oh wait in fact it is not allowed as per our constitution! He was de platformed for that, not for his politics.
- nanna 5y agoI must say I laughed when I landed on Trump's great alternative to Twitter. It really was just a tragic blog theme. Not very surprising that it didn't last long.
- zozbot234 5y agoFull title was actually: "Donald Trump's 'communications' platform permanently taken offline. Sad!" It got abridged to comply with BBC and HN guidelines about editorializing.
- Moodles 5y agoBut BBC News is totally neutral. Aren’t we glad where our taxes are going?
- md_ 5y agoThe idea that Trump will reach a larger audience by returning to some fringier social media platform than he could with his blog is quite counter-intuitive. It seems to me that a blog with proper (mainstream) social network "share" buttons can reach a significantly greater audience than an account on, like, Parler, Gab, or Yo. My best guess here is that Brad Parscale couldn't figure out how to implement "share on Twitter" or "share on Facebook" buttons, which might not be that surprising.
- meheleventyone 5y agoI believe they originally had shared the blog posts on Twitter but had accounts/tweets removed as it’s pretty transparently circumventing Trumps ban.
- md_ 5y agoThat makes sense if it's like "@fromthedeskofdjt" sharing posts. But I'd be surprised if having a "share" button where readers can share with their smaller circle of friends would be problematic. In comparison, if you go to Gab, you only reach users of Gab--and signups are generally a much higher bar for users than resharing.
- Moodles 5y ago> But I'd be surprised if having a "share" button where readers can share with their smaller circle of friends would be problematic. Well that’s what happened.
- meheleventyone 5y agoTrue, definitely agree that reducing friction would have helped a lot but I think there wasn’t much organic interest either. There’s a lot of (mocking) hot takes from Parlor and Gab on Twitter for example. Whereas I didn’t see any pickup from Trumps blogging. I think it’s was also a content thing in the case of the blog. Twitter Trump was more interesting than blog Trump even if you don’t like him.
- deleted 5y ago
- swiley 5y agoI was hopping the whole trump thing would show people why separating platforms and protocols are important and would result in widespread adoption of things like mastodon. Instead we got fucking parlor and people's parents got tricked into publishing photocopies of their state IDs. "Apps" can't die soon enough.
- tbrownaw 5y ago> result in widespread adoption of things like mastodon. Instead of government officials publishing on Twitter or Facebook directly, the feds should have their own Mastodon instance with everyone's work accounts, and that can get federated out to the other platforms. Use their weight to make accepting federated content a clear feature, rather than supporting one specific private platform.
- true_religion 5y agoI’d just want to point out that both Trump and Biden are “people’s parents”. In fact, they are people’s grandparents. Considering we are continually being ruled by septuagenarians, maybe we can adjust our assumptions about what older people are capable of.
- swiley 5y agoRegardless of their capabilities they get targeted by this sort of thing pretty aggressively and "App Stores" seem to do little to stop it.
- drewzero1 5y agoThis is a fair take, but a double-edged one as well. We definitely need to give older folks more credit. At the same time, maybe it isn't the best situation to be ruled primarily by people's grandparents.
- true_religion 5y agoI don’t disagree but at least in the US, the eldest generation is the largest voting block. And they have the perk of having influenced society for 50+ years, laying down an attractive track record of achievements, and most importantly convincing the next largest voting block (their children) to have roughly the same ideals. Although the young skew away from their grandparents ideals, people who are in their 40s and 50s tend to vote similarly.
- swiley 5y agoZero top-level comments with a non-negative vote count. That's nice.