Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence”

Twitter is well within the rights to do this, but I have seen tweets from blue check marks essentially calling for violence and Twitter didn't remove them. So, does that mean Twitter actually -supports- those view points now? If Twitter is going to police people, it needs to be across the board. Otherwise it's just a weird censorship that is targeting one person and can easily be seen as political.

Everyone is applauding this because they hate Trump, but take a step back and see the bigger picture. This could backfire in serious ways, and it plays to Trump's base's narrative that the mainstream media and tech giants are colluding to silence conservatives (and maybe there could even be some truth to that.) I know the Valley is an echo chamber, so obviously no one is going to ever realize this.

> If Twitter is going to police people, it needs to be across the board.

One way to look at this is that that's exactly what Twitter has started doing. The president violated the TOS, and got the treatment prescribed under the TOS. His EO yesterday essentially asked for everyone to be treated in accordance with the TOS, so he's (ironically) getting exactly what he asked for.

It remains to be seen whether, in compliance with the EO, they apply this to everyone in a transparent and uniform way from now on. I hope they do.

Wait, Trump, the guy who had a platform plank complaining about his predecessors' use of executive orders as "power grabs" [0], actually issued an executive order about Twitter's TOS?

0 - https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-10-19/trump-...

It's nothing new. Politics is a team based sport. My brother calls Obama "King Obama" but is still a huge fan of Trump. I've discussed some of this stuff with him: in his eyes, Obama did stuff he shouldn't have, so Trump can do stuff he shouldn't.

I can understand how people can rationalize some of his failures, but, the second time around, how can someone vote for a guy who has failed on delivering on a very simple and basic campaign promise, one that he can do that unilaterally?

“The country wasn’t based on executive orders,” Trump said at a South Carolina campaign stop in February 2016. “Right now, Obama goes around signing executive orders. He can’t even get along with the Democrats, and he goes around signing all these executive orders. It’s a basic disaster. You can’t do it.”

I know I'm probably pissing in the wind here, but I was looking forward to a president ceding some of his power back to congress, so this one really sticks in my craw. Oh well.

Because, while this is not true of individual republicans, republican party media strategy has been based on positional ethics for a long time. Free speech is good when it is our free speech. Executive orders are bad when they are your executive orders.

Both parties do this. For instance, Republicans are generally the party of "states' rights", but Democrats are jumping up and down about how the federal government shouldn't overrule the rights of liberal states now. Things like the fighting the FCC trying to prohibit states from making their own net neutrality rules, or legalizing marijuana, which is still technically illegal nationwide according to the federal government.

Generally, if you run the federal government, you don't want states objecting to your agenda. And if the opposition is running the federal government, you insist on your right to do things at the state level.

Watching Democrats and Republicans make the exact same arguments depending on whose in power is absolutely hilarious, and it leads to great soundbites, like those of Trump and McConnell talking about what the President should and shouldn't do... depending who the President is.

Conservative support of "states' rights" has always been a dog whistle for restricting civil liberties.

Civil Rights Act? States' rights issue. Same–sex marriage? Let the states decide. Abortion? States should be free to ban.

Edit: swapped "Republican" with "Conservative", since the parties' ideologies have shifted over time.

> Civil Rights Act? States' rights issue.

Every law called "the Civil Rights Act" passed with overwhelming Republican support. All but one passed with more Republican support than Democratic support. The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 received 80% of the republican vote in the house, but only 61% of the democratic vote.

Current party lines blur to to the point of falling apart in the context of the 1964 Act, because it was a huge precipitating event for politicians switching parties (particularly Southern Democrats becoming Republicans). You can't directly map "Rs voted for the Act" onto party membership today: there was a very different mix of platforms at that time, only loosely comparable to what we have now.

That's an overstatement, which has been popularized by Democrats to distance themselves from their longstanding coalition with southern segregationists. The key Civil Rights Acts were passed from 1957 to 1968. The political alignments on various issues haven't changed much since FDR. Democrats were on the liberal alignment with respect to government regulation, business freedom, taxes, education, immigration, social welfare, religion, gun control, etc.

Contrary to your statement, the Civil Rights Acts were not a "precipitating event for politicians switching parties." That doesn't even make sense--why would politicians who were against civil rights join the party that much more strongly supported every Civil Rights Act from 1957 to 1968?

The realignment of southern democrats actually occurred much later. Nixon did not win a majority in any southern state--to the extent he won with a plurality, it was only because the Democratic vote was split between Humphrey and Wallace. In 1976, Carter won with the same east-coast south/north coalition that long voted Democrat; with Ford winning the west coast and mid-west. Reagan won almost every state, but his margins in New York were larger than his margins in Alabama or the Carolinas. Reagan did blow out Mondale in the south in 1984, but I'm not sure how much that tells us. Even by the time of Clinton, he won Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Georgia, not to mention Arkansas.

I think the more accurate take is that the political realignment of the parties on "civil rights" issues happened more in the mid-late 1980s through 1990s. And it happened because the nature of the "civil rights" debate morphed over that time. The battle fronts during the 1980s and 1990s was not eliminating de jure and overt discrimination (the aim of the 1950s and 1960s legislation republicans supported), but measures like affirmative action, which sought to use the power of government to shape private conduct to eliminate existing inequities. That of course maps very cleanly onto longstanding republican versus democrat positions.

(I'll give another example of situations where political alignments change because the issue has changed rather than the "mix of platforms" of the parties. On the abortion front, for example, a significant amount of the debate has moved from talking about whether it should be legal at all, to talking about whether religious organizations should be required to provide healthcare coverage for them, whether the government should support them with public funding, etc. If you're a consistent libertarian, you might have found yourself more aligned with Democrats back in the early 1990s, but more aligned with Republicans today.)