Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

Is no-one going to talk about how this is explicitly what "freedom of speech" means? That Trump is one of the few people that "freedom of speech" doesn't apply, because it's protection FROM HIM doing exactly this kind of thing.

Twitter has every protected right to criticize the president (which they should have been doing a whole lot more of but that's a different discussion). That's the whole point of "freedom of speech" in our Bill of Rights. Our government literally cannot do what Trump wants to do, and to try to say that he can is to explicitly say that the Constitution is meaningless and void.

(I've moved my comment to the intended parent comment): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322672

Except that leftists and libs have their own sort of low-value hateful garbage. Which usually doesn't get censored or "fact-checked" on Twitter.

True, but Twitter's hypocrisy doesn't relate to my point. But you're totally justified in that confusion, because my comment that you're replying to somehow ended up on the wrong parent. Here it is in the correct location:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322672

Edit: To clarify, I'm saying it doesn't relate because my point is that deleting hateful garbage off a private platform isn't censorship, and Twitter should fix their hypocrisy by deleting all hateful garbage with equal veracity, rather than the alternate fix, which would be to allow it all.

> Trump is one of the few people that "freedom of speech" doesn't apply

No, Trump is one of the few people that the first amendment of the constitution of the United States doesn't apply. Free speech is broader than any specific law, whether you think people deserve it or not.

You mean the first amendment being trampled on by a president threatening legal action against a private company?

There's an extremist viewpoint on free speech that it is a categorical good, divorced from any societal utility or harm, which elevates it almost to a point of religion.

It's always interesting to me when I observe it in action, because not even the US legal system---a system that, among the systems of the world, enshrines free speech as more untouchable than most nations---agrees with this absolutist premise.

If Twitter's going to have a fact-checking feature, using it exclusively for Presidents and not the userbase at large feels like a fine use of it.

> Except that leftists and libs have their own sort of low-value hateful garbage.

Any of similar prominence to the President of the United States?

The first amendment isn't a catch-all freedom-of-consequences thing; if (to use a straw man argument) Twitter did not remove ISIS propaganda, the US government would shut down.

While technically proclaiming the virtues of joining an army to fight for them can be considered freedom of speech and should be protected, in practice it's not because they're a deplorable terrorist organization.

This argument makes me pretty uneasy, since it seems like it can essentially be used to censor whatever you want. If e.g. the people fighting for climate justice get branded as ecoterrorists, wouldn't removing their 'propaganda' be ok under that line of thought?

I think the right to free speech isn't some enshrinement of the right to spew garbage, but the realization that restrictions of free speech can very easily be turned against 'good' causes.