This tweet, while in bad taste IMO, was a threat to those who are planning to continue looting and burning buildings in Minneapolis.
I’m not sure if you’ve seen the videos, but there are full scale riots. Rioters completely looted a Target and burned it nearly to the ground.
Is “shooting” the answer to that? Probably not. And hopefully the National Guard is not going to do that.
But at the end of the day, this is the commander in chief making a public statement, and Twitter is editorializing it. Make of that what you will.
The danger in the idea of "just find another X" is that, if you are willing to believe that the action in question justifies an open platform's prerogative to censor, then it follows that every alternative platform do the same. This creates black holes, if you will, that are incredibly easy for dissenters to fall down.
I'm not saying that I support Trump's message. But, as a society, we have to be nuanced about this and figure out what constitutes a right to use on massive platforms like Twitter. Twitter isn't just some dinky website. If you are worried about Russians/Chinese/Republicans swaying elections on social media, then you'd better be worried about how Twitter itself picks and chooses what you see.
After all, exactly how many levels down will we go?
Twitter: You can pay your own hosting fees.
Namecheap: Your users can find you at your IP address.
AWS: You can run your own server hardware.
Intel: You can build your own CPU.
Electric Co.: You can generate your own electricity.
VISA: You can take payments in cash.
Hospital: You can use your own butterfly strips and an ibuprofen.
United States: You can find your own country.
Advocating violence (or whatever you want to call it) on Twitter directly affects their bottom line, and enjoyment of the site for other users.
More simply: A toxic environment repels advertisers, users and investors.
Using Namepcheap/AWS/Intel/Whatever for the same purpose does not affect those companies bottom line, or otherwise affect the user experience for other customers.
With that logic, how exactly is the president(or anyone in authority whether it be a governor, police chief, etc.) supposed to threaten use of force on any communication platform? It seems like mass communication is needed, which inevitably involves advertisers and investors, thus an exception should be made for situations like this where the president's message goes against the interest of Twitter.
What you are saying about Twitter could be applied to TV networks, radio stations, and just about any other medium or platform that people use. They are all funded by advertisers, investors, etc. Should we really be entrusting billionaires in determining which messages from the government we should and shouldn't be hearing?
> Using Namepcheap/AWS/Intel/Whatever for the same purpose
My analogies might not be totally applicable(though all analogies fall apart to some extent), but that doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't applicable at all. A web host like AWS, for instance, could conceivably receive enough flack from investors and segments of the public for hosting undesirable content, in which case it might be their interest to let go a customer publishing that content using their services. Of course, that is far less likely than with something like Twitter.
More accurately, the alternatives would be something like CNN or iHeartRadio, or possible alternatives to Twitter.
There are sort of alternatives to Twitter, though you have to admit that Twitter's approach and audience size is quite different from, say, someone's forum using vBulletin. Nevertheless, there are mainstream alternatives such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and perhaps TV and radio, but that's not to say that they aren't likely to make a similar choice to Twitter, if it is generally agreed upon that Trump's message is bad and either shouldn't be seen or shouldn't be engaged with. Since they have similar financial incentives, it's not totally unreasonable to think that these mainstream platforms would follow suit if Trump decided to abandon Twitter and start posting solely on one of these alternatives. Whether or not you agree with Alex Jones, he was banned from all these platforms in coordination. It's absolutely possible that the dominoes would fall, and non-mainstream alternatives like Minds or Gab or Mastodon aren't necessarily viable alternatives if their audience is incredibly small.
>What you are saying about Twitter could be applied to TV networks, radio stations, and just about any other medium or platform that people use.
To a degree. But those businesses don't have positive social interaction as their core value proposition (reason to exist). People don't go to CNN.com for the purpose of being social. Thus anti-social behaviour on CNN doesn't affect their core value proposition in the same way.
>A web host like AWS, for instance, could conceivably receive enough flack
True, but groups organizing to lobby for a political/social purpose is a bit of a different beast altogether than one users actions directly affecting other users. In other words, there's no way (absent a bug/failure/poor design) that one users' usage of AWS should directly affect my usage of AWS.
All I'm saying is that social networks are very different from the other examples because they are, well, social.