Seems like having the president attack Twitter for their speech (adding extra speech that suggests that some shared information is disputed) is the actual violation of Free Speech. The First Amendment says that the federal government can't stifle free speech, which seems like what is happening here.
That's exactly it. Twitter disseminated the president's words as he wrote them to everyone that wanted to see it. They also said it was wrong.
Fundamentally the whole exercise is an attempt to conflate Twitters (first amendment!) right to speak its own opinions with somehow "restricting" the rights of their subscribers. And that's insane. Just look at how many people in this very thread are buying into the frame by discussing what big companies should be allowed to censor, when of course nothing of the sort occurred at all.
It would be different (and fine) if Twitter replied to his tweets with their rejoinders, posting on a level playing field with everyone else. They didn't do that. They abused their position as controllers of the site to insert their opinion into his posts.
Twitter stepped beyond the bounds of being a neutral platform with moderation. They took up the mantle of editor and began editing people's posts. This should disqualify their safe harbour protections under the Communications Decency Act. This has nothing to do with the first amendment.
Um... can you cite the explanation of why the safe harbor provisions of the CDA are conditioned on being a neutral platform? That's not how I understand the law.
You're stretching. Twitter did a fact check on the president and he can't handle it, so he's trying to harm the company using the levers of government. And that is ALL that is happening.
The legalese that you're misunderstanding is just cover. And the proof is that no one wants Twitter to be liable for the speech of its posters, because if they were then Trump (who literally just days ago falsely accused a guy of murder on that very platform) would be thrown off instantly.
No. What we don’t want is for Twitter to have their cake and eat it too. That is, to enjoy all of the privileges of being a publisher (editing posts and saying whatever they want) while upholding none of the responsibilities that eg. newspapers and magazines have to uphold.
If Twitter wants to be a communications service (a la Comcast) protected by safe harbour then they need to act like one. That means if they really can’t stand what Trump tweets then they should ban him, just as Comcast would stop carrying a cable channel it no longer wanted to carry.
These social media companies are incredibly powerful and they need to be reined in. It’s as simple as that. This executive order will soon wind up before the courts and that’s where it should be decided.
Sure they "want" safe harbor protections because it's better not to be sued. But no, they don't "need" it as a platform really. Lacking that, they'd just start banning folks more aggressively to protect themselves.
Which, of course, is exactly what the president's supporters don't want, given his reliance on the platform. I mean, Trump literally (literally!) baselessly accused Joe Scarborough of murder last week. What do we think is going to happen if Twitter genuinely thinks they might be liable for the president's libel?
The cynical goal, obviously, is just to "hurt" twitter in the abstract, by making them look like a risky investment, drive off advertisers, etc... And that's why this is so distressing: here we have the president of the united states using the executive branch to attack a company simply because he's angry with him and not out of any kind of principle at all.
Twitter is indeed censoring on ideological grounds, just not the president in that one particular instance. To say that Twitter isn’t restricting legal publishing of their users simply isn’t true.
I was quite surprised to find this EO rather cogent and fair and reasonable, and while I was poised to vehemently oppose it, having read it, I find myself in support of it. The arguments it makes are legitimate.
I don't know why people are downvoting this. If the president's "attack" counts as censorship then newspapers, writers, and all the rest of us posting here are subject to that same level of censorship.
Personally I think that Twitter inserting their own articles is overstepping their own role. Nobody goes there to view what Twitter writes, nobody goes there to care about Twitter opinions. Them doing this forfeits their status as a public square, now they are publishing their own editorialized content, and not as Tweets but as privileged inserts in others Tweets.
The laws of America already provide a way to resolve that though. If one company is becoming too powerful and unfairly damaging competition because of it, anti-trust exists.
Arguably twitter isn’t even that powerful except that the president uses it as an official communications platform. Before this current administration, Twitter was circling the drain. It was an afterthought in modern social media. The president pretty much singlehandedly made twitter as important as they are today. If the president doesn’t like twitters TOS he could switch to Facebook and have an even greater reach than he does today. So it’s hard to argue that twitter is actually the problem, but if they are, the easy answer is stop using their platform and switch to a competitor.
