Cont: The Trump Presidency: Part 22

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Captain_Swoop said:
Trump tweets

The men and women of the National Guard have been doing a great job fighting the CoronaVirus. This week, I will extend their Title 32 orders through mid-August, so they can continue to help States succeed in their response and recovery efforts.
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An important detail this leaves out - the extension was due to massive outcry over his earlier plan to end their deployment one day before they would qualify for additional federal benefits.

The Trump administration is extending the federal deployment of more than 40,000 National Guard troops aiding coronavirus relief efforts in nearly every state and federal territory, reversing plans for an earlier cutoff following bipartisan backlash and pressure from top defense officials.
The federal government will now keep funding National Guard troops across the country through mid-August, President Donald Trump tweeted Thursday. The administration was previously planning to terminate the deployment on June 24 — one day before thousands of Guard members would have qualified for key retirement and education benefits.
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"I'm not screwing you over after all. Aren't I a great guy?"
 
Armitage72 said:
"I'm not screwing you over after all. Aren't I a great guy?"
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Like the canard in the Israel-Palestine "butbut we can't hold HAMAS to the same standards as Israel and the USA!"

Or, as I've said, like dealing with a special needs kid in elementary school. "Little Donald didn't hit anyone today, and had no meltdowns, and didn't call the teacher any of the horrible names he's picked up from his high school brother and his mates! Okay, he took Timothy's snacks from him, but he gave them back so quickly once Ms. Johannesen talked to him! Must be something in the water. Either way, this calls for another gold star!"
 
Section 1. Policy. Free speech is the bedrock of American democracy. Our Founding Fathers protected this sacred right with the First Amendment to the Constitution. The freedom to express and debate ideas is the foundation for all of our rights as a free people.

In a country that has long cherished the freedom of expression, we cannot allow a limited number of online platforms to hand pick the speech that Americans may access and convey on the internet. This practice is fundamentally un-American and anti-democratic. When large, powerful social media companies censor opinions with which they disagree, they exercise a dangerous power. They cease functioning as passive bulletin boards, and ought to be viewed and treated as content creators.
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This is like saying "diversity is a cornerstone of American society" in one paragraph, and "we cannot allow Negroes or Chinamen in our country" in the next.
 
Now I see there are protests, riots, and looting over there due to yet another death of an unarmed man by a cop.

Be a nice time (again) for the President to start acting Presidential.

(I think he may have tweeted about it.)
 
Trump Retweeted
The White House
@WhiteHouse

President @realDonaldTrump is directing the Attorney General to work with states to enforce their laws against deceptive business practices.
"The states have broad and powerful authority to regulate in this arena."

President @realDonaldTrump just took executive action to fight online censorship by tech corporations, including social media platforms.
"Today, I am signing an Executive Order to protect and uphold the free speech and rights of the American people."

The Trump Administration is making sure your taxpayer dollars don't go to social media giants that unfairly repress free speech.
 
Trump signs executive order targeting Twitter after fact-checking row

US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order aimed at removing some of the legal protections given to social media platforms.

It gives regulators the power to pursue legal actions against firms such as Facebook and Twitter for the way they police content on their platforms.

President Trump accused social media platforms of having "unchecked power" while signing the order.

The order is expected to face legal challenges.

Critics and several legal experts says the US Congress or the court system must be involved to change the current legal understanding of protections for these platforms.
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52843986
 
Quote:
Section 1. Policy. Free speech is the bedrock of American democracy. Our Founding Fathers protected this sacred right with the First Amendment to the Constitution. The freedom to express and debate ideas is the foundation for all of our rights as a free people.

In a country that has long cherished the freedom of expression, we cannot allow a limited number of online platforms to hand pick the speech that Americans may access and convey on the internet. This practice is fundamentally un-American and anti-democratic. When large, powerful social media companies censor opinions with which they disagree, they exercise a dangerous power. They cease functioning as passive bulletin boards, and ought to be viewed and treated as content creators.
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Safe-Keeper said:
This is like saying "diversity is a cornerstone of American society" in one paragraph, and "we cannot allow Negroes or Chinamen in our country" in the next.
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The problem as I see it with this is that Twitter is not stopping Trump from expressing or debating his ideas...or lies. Twitter is not censoring him: none of his tweets have been removed nor are they telling him what he can or cannot say. They are simply providing a link to a fact checking site...which is Trump's real peeve. He does not want anyone to ever so much as suggest that he may be wrong.

This petty little man has the thinking of a child. It is who he is. As the Bible says: And a little child shall lead them.
 
Captain_Swoop said:
Trump Tweets

We have just reached a very sad milestone with the coronavirus pandemic deaths reaching 100,000. To all of the families & friends of those who have passed, I want to extend my heartfelt sympathy & love for everything that these great people stood for & represent. God be with you!
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**** you, Donald. You lying, hypocritical, sack of human waste.

You should be grateful there is no god, not least the sadistic, spiteful, fundi conservative one. If there was you would have been fried by lightning dozens of times by now. Probably long before you ever managed to get to the White House.
 
blutoski said:
OK, let's review the damage. It has been signed and published:

[Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship]
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In substance it appears to be largely the same as a leaked draft version I read last night.

In particular, subparagraph (c)(2) expressly addresses protections from “civil liability” and specifies that an interactive computer service provider may not be made liable “on account of” its decision in “good faith” to restrict access to content that it considers to be “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable.” It is the policy of the United States to ensure that, to the maximum extent permissible under the law, this provision is not distorted to provide liability protection for online platforms that — far from acting in “good faith” to remove objectionable content — instead engage in deceptive or pretextual actions (often contrary to their stated terms of service) to stifle viewpoints with which they disagree. Section 230 was not intended to allow a handful of companies to grow into titans controlling vital avenues for our national discourse under the guise of promoting open forums for debate, and then to provide those behemoths blanket immunity when they use their power to censor content and silence viewpoints that they dislike. When an interactive computer service provider removes or restricts access to content and its actions do not meet the criteria of subparagraph (c)(2)(A), it is engaged in editorial conduct. It is the policy of the United States that such a provider should properly lose the limited liability shield of subparagraph (c)(2)(A) and be exposed to liability like any traditional editor and publisher that is not an online provider.
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Like I said, if they're serious about enforcing this, he's just shot himself in the foot.

Example the First:

Although we can’t be everywhere at once, here are some of the kinds of comments we’re going to do our best to curtail:

Promoting your own brand, product, or blog. So you’ve got a climate change solution that will simultaneously solve world poverty. Great. Send it through our contact form.
URLs and links. This is often considered spam, so to be safe we just don’t usually allow it.
Impersonating authors or other commenters. We can’t believe we have to say this, but: Don’t do that.
Comments that make it clear you didn’t read the article. Enraged that we didn’t mention X in a story about Y? If you’d made it past paragraph two, you’d see a very well thought-out discussion of that X you hold so dear.
Comments that are completely out of left field. Sometimes discussions veer off a bit, but are still related to the original subject. That is fine. Hijacking the conversation to promote off-topic commentary is not.
Threats — no matter how vague — against the author or other commenters. Things can get heated. Think before you casually mention your foe’s home address.
Racism, sexism, homophobia, you get the drift. Call us the PC Police, fine, but don’t say we didn’t warn you if you are banned or deleted.
Language. Filthy words are not just offensive. They’re boring. Be clever.
Trolling. If you’re just out for a good trolling and are not contributing meaningfully to the conversation, we’ll be pushing you back under the bridge.

Q. Why are you censoring comments?
A. We are very transparent in what is and isn’t allowed on our forum. Any opinion is welcome here, but we do not tolerate hate speech, racism, bad language, etc. If you believe something was unapproved by mistake, feel free to contact us using our online form.
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Where was that from? The official Comment Policy of One America News Network. Very little of that falls under the ambit of “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable.”

Anyone want to do Infowars now?
 
The Twitter Thing. Lots of speculation about what's going on.

1) Trump's a jackass who does not like "nasty women" or media companies correcting his provable lies. He's acts like a baby.

2) Intimidating Twitter (and others). One of the more obvious takeaways is that this is a threat to get Twitter to "back off."

3) Orange Man's team has framed the election as Trump vs. Media/Deep State/Social Media rather than Joe Biden. The media/Deep State/Social Media are not only more unpopular than Biden, they're more unpopular than Trump. Twitter has already become part of how the election is "rigged" against him.
 
quadraginta said:
**** you, Donald. You lying, hypocritical, sack of human waste.

You should be grateful there is no god, not least the sadistic, spiteful, fundi conservative one. If there was you would have been fried by lightning dozens of times by now. Probably long before you ever managed to get to the White House.
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You don't think Trump actually wrote that, do you? Something this unimportant was left to an underling.
 
Horatius said:
Anyone want to do Infowars now?
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The question is whether the administration wants to do Infowars. Note that the mechanism of enforcement is at the Attorney General's discretion. Barr gets to decide which platforms lose protection for 'editorializing'. It's a judgement call as to where exactly a platform has stepped over the line from protecting users to engaging in politics. Trump believes that adding a [content questionable] link to his tweets is political interference. I can't imagine he hasn't hobnobbed with the DoJ to see if they're on board.

I see Facebook deciding it's not worth locking horns with a GOP super PAC, and just dropping their post suppression algorithms entirely. It was all PR anyway, now they have a plausible out.
 
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Safe-Keeper said:
This is like saying "diversity is a cornerstone of American society" in one paragraph, and "we cannot allow Negroes or Chinamen in our country" in the next.
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An executive order AFAIK applies only to actions taken by those in the executive branch of the U.S. government. They have zero influence over Twitter. I don't know what Trump is whining about; as far as I can tell social media has done much more to advance the "conservative" (really "radical") cause than it has to promoting good government, respectful dialog etc. I'll read more to make sure I'm getting it right but the effect is essentially nothing as far as regulating Twitter goes.

ETA If Twitter wants to insert a link I would think that is totally within its rights as a platform for public expression. What delusional thought process leads Trump to believe otherwise? As I have so many times in the past, I speculate about whether *this* will be the hill Trump chooses to die on. But as someone mentioned before, it's a distraction, his specialty.
 
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quadraginta said:
So what. He provided his imprimatur. He owns it.
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That's because he wants us to believe he wrote it. He's 'showing empathy'...only I don't think he wrote it because
1) empathy is not in a narcissist's nature and
2) he said nothing yesterday when we reached 100K dead. He was too
busy playing the victim of Twitter himself in his self-obsessed little world.
3) criticism for not acknowledging it finally got someone on his staff to post it
for him.

I give him as much credit for that as I do for writing Art of the Deal.
 
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