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Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

(techcrunch.com)
707 points patd | 1 comments | 27 May 20 12:21 UTC | HN request time: 0.211s | source
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Finnucane ◴[27 May 20 14:20 UTC] No.23323695[source]▶
It's pretty obvious that DT is not going to shut down the very platforms he relies on for his political survival. Even he's not that stupid. Nor does he have any real regulatory authority that could be employed that wouldn't also bite him back. So this is just him trying to bully the platforms into letting him say whatever without being exposed to any criticism or being called out for bullshit.
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ojnabieoot ◴[27 May 20 14:31 UTC] No.23323889[source]▶
The salient comparison is Bezos and WaPo. Even if Trump can’t attack a newspaper directly, he can (and has) attacked other business ventures to try to force censorship - hit AWS hard enough that Bezos interfere with his newspaper to get Trump off his back. Given yesterday’s WSJ story about Facebook, it seems to be working.

One tactic I think is likely to come from Barr and the DOJ is a corrupt selective enforcement of anti-trust laws - decide Twitter and AWS are monopolies but Facebook and Microsoft are not.

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1. dathinab ◴[27 May 20 14:56 UTC] No.23324314[source]▶
Twitter being a monopoly but Facebook not would be totally ridiculous in more than one way.

EDIT: Just to be clear I'm not saying your post is ridiculous, but Trump is. And yes the following is somewhat sarcasm END EDIT.

Let me guess next Mercedes and BMW have a oligopol on cars and china will be classified as a company with an monopol on cheap products.

The crazy/scary think is that I believe Trump would totally cable of doing it if he get's the legal power and time to do so...