Eric Boehlert: Banning Trump is already working -- Twitter should've done it years ago

[babylonsister]

https://pressrun.media/p/banning-trump-is-already-working

Banning Trump is already working — Twitter should've done it years ago
Incalculable damage
Eric Boehlert
3 hr ago

snip//

The clear and present danger Trump presented became glaringly obvious following his election loss when he used Twitter to launch a vicious, sustained attack against free and fair elections in this country. Climbing onto his authoritarian throne, Trump thundered about the "stolen" election, and spent months spreading the Big Lie about how his landslide victory was taken from him by "corrupt" Democrats, and even some disloyal Republicans.

"I hope Democrats, and even more importantly, the weak and ineffective RINO section of the Republican Party, are looking at the thousands of people pouring into D.C.," Trump tweeted on the eve of the murderous January riot. "They won't stand for a landslide election to be stolen."

Still hiding behind a faux-libertarian ethos of "free speech," Twitter did nothing as the specter of political violence grew. Foolishly positioning itself as a personal outlet for Trump and arguing that because he was President of the United States, Twitter was in no position to police him, the company refused to act in the nation's best interest.

Only after Trump returned to Twitter following the January 6 mob attack and again seemed to incite his followers, did Twitter finally ban him permanently.

Can you imagine the state of the nation if Trump had been allowed to use Twitter over the last 10 days and whipped his followers into an anti-inauguration frenzy, demanding they once again descend on the nation's capital to do battle in the streets to stop Biden's swearing in? The threat posed by Trump's radical followers isn't going away. But we can say the national temperature has dropped since the mob attack. Following Trump’s ban from social media platforms, there have been no bouts of political violence or mass gatherings.

Since Twitter banned Trump, with Facebook, Snapchat and others quickly following, there's been a welcome decline in lies and political misinformation found online. Not only was there a 78 percent drop in election fraud misinformation online, but the amount of discussion around the topic plummeted following Trump's forced exit. "Mentions of the hashtag #FightforTrump, which was widely deployed across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media services in the week before the rally, dropped 95 percent," the Washington Post reported. "#HoldTheLine and the term ‘March for Trump’ also fell more than 95 percent."

Our long national Trump Twitter nightmare is over — several years too late.

[ariadne0614]

1. He's on The Stephanie Miller Show right now. n/t

[dlk]

2. There is a new cabinet position for science and technology

I’m hopeful there will be a long and hard look at tech media