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.

Everyone is on board with each private platforms freedom to choose its content until it goes against their personal opinions: then, all of a sudden, the spaces of privately owned corporations are instead treated as if they belong to the public.

Net neutrality is important, because the digital infrastructure of the Internet is the "streets" of the digital world. Freedom of speech needs to be protected there, but when you're signing up for a free-of-charge social network that survives on advertising, you are literally soapboxing in a Walmart -- and it can't possibly be the civic duty of this metaphorical corporation to allow you to stay in there and disturb their business, rather than redirect you out into the street, or into your own place of business.

How about this for neutrality: When Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders end a post with "the shooting starts", they can get flagged for glorifying violence as well.