Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

There seem to be some upside down priorities here. Many folks seem to be arguing that its an unacceptable form of censorship for a private platform to annotate content it allows others to post. Meanwhile, I'm seeing barely a mention of the fact that the President of the United States has threatened to use government power to shut down an entire sector of the economy devoted to communication. The latter is almost certainly a violation of the Constitution. The former, almost certainly not.

Mhm.

Also missing from the parts of the discussion i've yet read, is the question of what sort of software we're using.

At the risk of using a buzzword, decentralized comms could reduce the risks of constitutional shutdown. And maybe even be better.

I hope they name it mastodon.gov

Perhaps they see it as targeting a political figure because of political differences rather than trying to prevent the spread of misinformation. I'm not seeing any annotations on a number prominent members of Congress spreading misinformation.

Where in the US Constitution does it say presidents cannot threaten companies? Obama had his share of threats. I'm sure they could find a suitable legal issue with Twitter targeting Trump while ignoring members of Congress.

"Obama had his share of threats."

Cite two.

That is exactly how I see it. I see it as silicon valley employees taking it upon themselves to try to get the last word in with Trump's message. Linking to CNN and WP was just beyond the pale.

> Where in the US Constitution does it say presidents cannot threaten companies?

The Articles of the US Constitution aren't an enumerated list of illegal actions. It's the wrong place to look for limitations of presidential power.

I love that our expectations of the current president are so low that we will use excuse them because "the previous presidents did it too!" You aren't actually saying what he's doing is legal; you are simply increasing the importance of precedent over the statutory restraints of power -- it's a very dangerous argument to make.

A quick Google found two:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/07/obama-tax-inve...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-obama-financials/obama-th...

Not sure this will support the original commenters point, as these "threats" have a basis in reality and appear to be good causes unlike Trump's, but these are "threats" by Obama at least according to the journalists involved.

Edit: why the downvotes? I am showing that the Trump supporter above is full of shit, Obama's "threats" were for good causes

Because that's how far we've gone from reality. The word censorship has lost almost all meaning in online arguments when people are trying to argue that what Twitter did constitutes censorship while Trump publicly threatening them with shutdown somehow does not.

It's become increasingly obvious that the argument around censorship has never been actually about censorship but rather as another political bludgeon you can use to beat your opponent over the head with by scoring some easy points since censorship = bad. They ignore the power dynamics at play which is what makes censorship possible.

> The Articles of the US Constitution aren't an enumerated list of illegal actions. It's the wrong place to look for limitations of presidential power.

The US Constitution is indeed an enumerated list of federal governmental powers, including the President's. At least that is the standard interpretation. Obviously there are an infinite number of ways those enumerated powers might manifest themselves but the overall scope and nature of the powers is indeed limited by the US Constitution.

You might have avoided the downvotes if you had made it clear what your point was. As it reads without the edit, it sounds like you're arguing the opposite of what your edit says.

Edit - to be clear I did not downvote

Thanks for the reply. I had thought putting quotes around threats and including "appear to be good causes" would be enough. Lesson learned!

You aren't disproving my statement.

I was being particularly pedantic because it was relevant to my parent comment.

The Articles of the Constitution are affirmatively defined positive powers of the branches of government. They are not affirmatively defined negative powers.

The Bill of Rights (the first 10 Amendments) are closer to that, but they don't specifically talk about The President and their scopes have had to be interpreted by courts to determine (1) are the rights they guarantee applied to {all people, all US residents, all US citizens, etc} and do they protect against {US government, state/local governments, other private citizens, etc}.

Well I guess we are in agreement but I found your formulation confusing. In particular "It's the wrong place to look for limitations of presidential power" is what I was responding to.

Given your followup I now understand what you were saying.

Also not in the Constitution that you can't yell "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, but decent human beings understand that that's not to be done.

> its an unacceptable form of censorship for a private platform to annotate content it allows others to post

It is an unacceptable form of censorship to hand over our modern day equivalent of the public square to private companies, and then allow them to police what people say in it.

Freedom of speech was always intended to be protected in public. The Internet is now our equivalent of the public space. It is time this problem is solved once and for all, and the Internet is now reclassified as both a public utility and a public space.

Yes, those of us with technical know-how can argue that personal websites are that equivalent. But this is depriving those that see Twitter, Facebook, et. al. as a public platform, of the right to have their voice heard. A tweet is now the equivalent of a placard on the street. Do we really want to censor that because we messed up in how we allowed the Internet to be run?

> Yes, those of us with technical know-how can argue that personal websites are that equivalent. But this is depriving those that see Twitter, Facebook, et. al. as a public platform, of the right to have their voice heard. A tweet is now the equivalent of a placard on the street. Do we really want to censor that because we messed up in how we allowed the Internet to be run?

Disagree, because street space is limited, whereas there are a multiplicity of websites you can go to. It isn’t just a matter of personal websites. There’s a Twitter-like, Gab, which can be used. The president and his multi-million dollar campaign apparatus could easily strike a deal with Gab to host some more Gab servers and get their message out via Gab to anyone of their twitter followers who wants to sign up.

Never mind that Trump is not actually being censored on twitter in any way - his message still went out to all his followers, simply with an appended notice that Twitter itself considers the message to be factually wrong.

EDIT: this is like saying that the President has the right to publish whatever content he wants in a specific newspaper. Back in the day, a city might have a dozen newspapers - they could each print what they liked and if they decided not to print a person’s letter to the editor, that was no violation of free speech. Or if they print the letter to the editor with a note explaining they disagree with it, that certainly doesn’t violate free speech either.

This issue goes beyond Trump. People have been de-platformed on various social media sites. Twitter has taken on the role of the virtual public space. Twitter is performing a public service in their publishing of tweets. People that don't see it that way are still living in the dot-com bubble. The Internet has grown beyond what anybody had imagined. People don't go out and protest anymore because they do it online.

We will never see protests of the 60s and 70s scale today in person. People do what they did back then online. And they don't go out and protest because they feel like their voice is being broadcast enough through social media. And yet to have that censored by private companies is unacceptable when that in the modern day use case.

> this is like saying that the President has the right to publish whatever content he wants in a specific newspaper

Nobody sees a news-paper as a public space. The fact that anybody can make a social media account and instantly publish information that can be read by anybody, and the fact that people conceptually now see public profiles as public spaces, means that we need to treat them that way.

> Nobody sees a news-paper as a public space. The fact that anybody can make a social media account and instantly publish information that can be read by anybody, and the fact that people conceptually now see public profiles as public spaces, means that we need to treat them that way.

This just doesn’t make sense to me. Ever since the first anti-spam technology was deployed, online web forums and mailing lists have employed moderation. There’s law on this going back to the early 1990s when AOL and CompuServe had to moderate their platforms. Nothing has really changed except that there are more options and more ways to get the message out than ever before.

Want a public space? Simply get a server and throw up a phpBB or wordpress or mastodon or gab or GNUSocial instance and you’ve got your own space. As president, trump could easily get the word out via email to his millions of registered supporters and they would flock to the new space and post there.

These laws made sense in the pre-social media days.

The fact that 3 billion people (from a quick Google search) are now using social media means that the goal posts have changed. 3 billion people are using the services of private companies to make their voices publicly heard. They think that they are exercising their right to freedom of speech by using something so accessible and ubiquitous. As accessible as public squares used to be.

To turn around and say "sorry, social media might be really easy to use and might be the primary form of communication for most people in the first world, but private companies should be able to control that" is very disingenuous.

The reason this is so tricky is that there is simply no historical precedent for this level of hyperconnectivity. But I certainly reject the idea of using the old laws of public vs. private companies to dictate how we as a society use the publicly accessible and readable internet.

> This issue goes beyond Trump. People have been de-platformed on various social media sites. Twitter has taken on the role of the virtual public space. Twitter is performing a public service in their publishing of tweets

People who have been de-platformed can always go to Gab (I know they had issues being dropped a few times but my understanding is they have adopted a decentralized approach and resolved it). It is freely available on the internet. The only reason people are using Twitter instead of Gab is that the marketplace prefers the lightly-moderated Twitter to the complete free-for-all of Gab. Edit: again, Trump is a billionaire, he could easily fund more Gab servers and blast it out to his followers and get his message out.

> People don't go out and protest anymore because they do it online.

I invite you to visit Washington DC whenever the virus is over and see the large in-person protests that regularly happen in the nation’s capital.

Never mind that there’s a physical riot / protest going on yesterday and today over police brutality, today, in Minneapolis.

> And they don't go out and protest because they feel like their voice is being broadcast enough through social media. And yet to have that censored by private companies is unacceptable when that in the modern day use case.

So the reason they aren’t going out in person is because they aren’t being censored. Look at what is going on in Hong Kong over the past year if you want to see what happens when people in the modern internet-connected world are actually angry. You get millions on the street, not just posting online.

> The only reason people are using Twitter instead of Gab is that the marketplace prefers the lightly-moderated Twitter to the complete free-for-all of Gab.

No. The reason people are using Twitter is because most other people are using Twitter. The network effect is very real and very strong on social media.

If you wanted to protest something, would you go to the least populated public space that people are gathering, or the most populated?

We have allowed the most highly populated places where people share ideas, to be controlled by a private company. That is not in the spirit of freedom of speech in the slightest.

An individual website is not the internet.

Anyone who uses the internet has a choice of millions of websites. Everyone using twitter and seeing the twitter notification on Trump’s tweets knows that twitter placed it there. If they were outraged, they can use Google and find alternative social media sites like Mastodon or Gab.

Trump could do the same.

There is simply no comparison to a “public square” since there are easy, accessible alternatives to get the messages out over the internet.

If you want to talk about “public square”, perhaps the easiest comparison would be internet access itself. If ISPs cut off Trump’s internet connection for posting wrong think, that could be seen as a free speech issue I think. But even banning him from any specific individual website is simply a matter for that website’s owner to decide.

> No. The reason people are using Twitter is because most other people are using Twitter. The network effect is very real and very strong on social media.

Trump has millions of followers on his email lists. He could send out an email or SMS tomorrow inviting his followers to begin posting on a new Donald Trump Gab or Mastodon server. Edit: heck, he could even post it on his twitter!

He chooses to post on twitter instead. He doesn’t even try to use an alternative website.

This is not about restricting his free speech, this is about him trying to drum up controversy.

One factor is that Trump says a lot of dumb things, and almost none of them are true.

Instead he seems to say whatever outrageous thing that can get attention so he's the center of the news cycle. Once again, it worked.

When he actually does something to silence twitter, I'll be upset too. But I'm not falling for the "big crazy talk ploy" again.

I already said this goes beyond Trump. Others have been censored before, and they won't be the last. Trump is the only person in a position to actually do something about it.

They don't have a choice of millions of websites. Like I said in another comment in a thread with you, the network effect is real. People go where there are other people. Nobody goes to an empty street to protest. What would be the point in that? We have allowed the most populated spaces for people to express their opinions to be controlled by private companies.

Trump has an email and SMS list with millions of supporters. He can also post on facebook whenever he wishes, or address the nation in prime time speeches that will be carried on TV channels and live streams. He can also continue to post on twitter, as twitter didn’t delete any of his tweets, so he can use network effects on twitter and simply post Gab or Mastodon links and try to get his enormous base of followers to use another platform.

His speech is not being suppressed. In fact, he’s probably the person who has the least problem in the entire country of being heard or noticed.

Edit: by the way, ask MySpace, AOL, MSN, or other failed once-popular social networks how well the “network effects” worked out. People know how to use a different website if they actually care to do so.

Trump could set up an alternative to twitter tomorrow using his billion dollar fortune as seed capital. The technology is already out there - GNUSocial, Gab, and Mastodon.

Look at theDonald.win as an example. Reddit banned their forum, so they created a new website where they can post.

Trump has the audience of millions to create a right-wing only website where his followers can chat together if they wish, or he could encourage his followers to join Gab.

Hot off the press:

> President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order aimed at social media companies on Thursday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters Wednesday evening, a move that comes as the president and his allies have escalated their allegations that companies like Twitter and Facebook stifle GOP voices.

https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2020/05/27/trump-executive...

Obviously you can't see beyond Trump. I'm trying to make a point about freedom of speech on the Internet, and you can't see beyond "orange man has money". There are broader issues at stake here than partisan politics. The next decade could shape the rest of the century. I certainly don't want that century to be dictated to by private companies whose only guiding principle is profit.

Trump supporter? I cannot wait for Trump to be gone. If I were a Trump supporter, I would refer to him as President or President Trump. More like person who is not triggered just by the mere mention of Trump.

I never even insinuated Obama's threats were not for good causes. Part of being a president is to execute laws and regulations which includes threats of action.

Since I have no doubt someone will take my "President" comment above out of context, I will not refer to a political figure by their former position title. To me, wishing/expecting to be referred by their former position is akin to using it as a title of nobility and expecting to be treated as nobility.

I think it will improve the debate a lot to have a concrete policy to discuss, rather than guesses about what Trump might do.