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Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin

(107,063 posts)
Mon Jan 11, 2021, 05:59 PM Jan 2021

A Trump Ban Is Easy. Fixing Facebook and Twitter Will Be Hard

For months—years, really—people have asked what it would take for Facebook and Twitter to ban the policy-violator-in-chief from their platforms. Hate speech, doxing, and dangerous disinformation on Covid evidently weren’t enough. Oh, they put (easy-to-ignore) warning labels on some tweets and posts, and even took the stray one down. But exiling him from the platforms? No. He is the president, after all. Long ago (well, 2015), when he said hateful things about Muslims that would boot mere mortals from Facebook and Twitter, the platforms decided his newsworthiness was more relevant than his toxicity. (They didn’t say this, but their own political interests were also in play—the president controls bodies that regulate those platforms.) They set some “limits,” but those limits never seemed to be invoked.

That changed this week, when Donald Trump dispatched a cosplay mob of thugs and toy soldiers to take the Capitol—and they actually did. While he gave the actual marching orders in person, the invaders who came to Washington were fed by Trump’s avalanche of false claims and incitements on social media, hardly mitigated by warning labels or notices that other, perhaps more reliable sources were reporting something else. And on Wednesday, as the Capitol Rotunda was being breached and the Electoral College count interrupted, Trump was tweeting love notes to the terrorists.

Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg made a battlefield decision: They temporarily suspended the president’s account. Millions of users have had multiday penalties for relatively tame outbursts. But actually triggering a violent riot that halted the certification of the next government? That would keep Trump off Twitter until the next morning. Facebook’s hold was initially for 24 hours.

The next day, Mark Zuckerberg took the larger step of banning Trump “indefinitely and for at least the next two weeks,” just in case he might trigger the actual overthrow of the United States government. That would mean no Facebook for The Donald until the safe arrival of the Biden administration (at which point all the president’s tweets will be produced not by a maniac, but maniacally cautious wonks). Cynics also noted that it happened to be the same day the Senate turned blue, a development that provided some incentive for Facebook to ease its relentless pandering to conservatives. A friend of mine tweeted that the decision was like “kneeling down to end a football game.” (Twitter did not extend the suspension, and on Thursday evening Trump tweeted a video grudgingly admitting he might not be president after January 20. But I suspect by then he probably will gnaw through the short leash Twitter is presumably allowing him, and suffer a longer ban.)

https://www.wired.com/story/plaintext-trump-ban-easy-fixing-facebook-twitter-hard/

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A Trump Ban Is Easy. Fixing Facebook and Twitter Will Be Hard (Original Post) Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin Jan 2021 OP
Bingo. marble falls Jan 2021 #1
Fixing Facebook and Twitter will be easy compared to fixing the BAT-SHIT CRAZY people, and... AmyStrange Jan 2021 #2
 

AmyStrange

(7,989 posts)
2. Fixing Facebook and Twitter will be easy compared to fixing the BAT-SHIT CRAZY people, and...
Mon Jan 11, 2021, 11:35 PM
Jan 2021

-

that will be almost impossible.

They're the REAL problem, not Facebook or Twitter.

(notice I wrote "almost" impossible)
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