Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence”

The service that hosts the accounts of all branches of the US military, all major weapons contractors, all three letter agencies, and many foreign militaries, governments, and world leaders guilty of all manner of war crimes, and this is where they draw the line for violence. Really interesting.

This is using past violence as a threat of imminent violence while the other accounts you mentioned will generally reference violence indirectly or in the past tense. That is an important distinction.

He is the commander in chief. He has the capability to threaten violence.

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.

As commander in chief he has many ways of communicating with the nation. Threatening violence on Americans on a private platform that explicitly forbids such actions is expressly not allowed and Twitter is well within their rights to “editorialize” it.

This argument lacks so much nuance, yet I see it in every thread where a communication platform dictates who can and can't be heard.

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.

> it follows that every alternative platform [will] do the same.

No, it does not. Particularly not in the case of Twitter. And the proof of this is self-evident in the alternatives to Twitter that exist today.