Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence”

They fucked this up so badly.

They could have just banned him and said "It's a free country and they felt like it."

Instead they're trying to high-road, and it's.. such a mistake.

We'll, they're certainly escalating. I don't think that Trump actually wants to shut Twitter down, nor does he want to get banned there. The banning would rile up his base, but it would do so at the expense of his primary channel of communication. This action puts the ball back in Trump's court and asks him how far he wants to actually go.

let the white house spin up its own activitypub instance, then.

shouldn't public communications occur on public infrastructure?

The high-road leads to where we actually want to be.

I was thinking about what you said in the other thread about trolls, and I think you're off-base. Trolls aren't zen master ego busters, they're the self-hating jerks they seem to be. The "zen master ego buster" story is just another layer of the ego trip.

It's a risk. It's not a mistake. I appreciate they are trying to thread a very difficult needle. I'd argue democracy's continued survival is predicated on being able to both have a flattened playing field where every voice is accessible and like-minded people can find each other easily (what the Internet has enabled so far), and a way of inoculating people against lies intended for malicious manipulation (which the Internet has also enabled). Getting there, if we can, will be messy and ugly. Failing will be fatal to the idea that people can effectively self-govern.

The high-road leads to Trump agreeing with you that we need to prevent the spread of fake news to protect society. Then, as the duly elected leader sworn to protect society, he takes on that solemn duty and tasks the agency he controls, the FCC (the entity usually tasked with controlling media content), to make sure that all fake news and entities peddling fake news are permanently squashed so that they will not interfere in the upcoming election.

Well that's the ridiculous part of all this. Anyone with $20 and a half hour to spare can whip up their own blog on their own domain and post anything they want. As far as accessibility goes, that website will be 100% equal to Twitter.

These private platforms are only being conflated with public infrastructure because people have such a narrow view of what constitutes "the internet." It's ridiculous for a politician's primary means of communication to be over a private platform to begin with. Could you imagine if Clinton only talked to the press via AOL chatroom? The fact that we're debating it as though Trump is being censored by CSPAN just shows how much the abnormal has become normal.