Cont: The Trump Presidency: Part 22

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Apparently this is the warning users got when they clicked on the link in trump's mail-in fraud tweets.
On Tuesday, President Trump made a series of claims about potential voter fraud after California Governor Gavin Newsom announced an effort to expand mail-in voting in California during the COVID-19 pandemic. These claims are unsubstantiated, according to CNN, Washington Post and others. Experts say mail-in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud. Link
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There was also a link in a tweet I saw to a recent article in Fortune magazine:
In reality, vote-by-mail fraud is exceedingly rare in the United States. The right-leaning Heritage Foundation maintains a database of all recent instances of recorded voter fraud and found just 204 reported cases involving the fraudulent use of absentee ballots over the past 20 years— only 143 resulted in convictions. That means that over the last two decades, about 0.00006% of total vote-by-mail votes cast were fraudulent—far from the rampant manipulation that the President often describes. Fortune link
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blutoski said:
...Trump believes that adding a [content questionable] link to his tweets is political interference...
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What exactly do you find questionable? I get the impression you're implying vote by mail IS prone to fraud or theft, etc. Is that correct? Do you have a reference because I haven't found that.
 
Minoosh said:
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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Just to explain their thinking, from what I can tell:

These platforms were granted a legal immunity from being sued by users, with the understanding that they're just a tool for users to communicate with each other. Up to now, if somebody said, "I want to sue Twitter for something on their site," the DoJ would have to throw out the case.

So the idea is, let's see if we can put the fear of being the next Gawker into the platforms. At the administration's discretion, they can expose the platforms to trillion dollar lawsuits if they think the platform has gone beyond just policing for offensive content and actually inserted political bias.

And whether there's a lawsuit or not, the EO would forbid the federal government from advertising on a blacklisted 'biased' platform. That's billions of dollars of business at Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and others.

Since it's reactive and discretionary, the reality could be that they cow these platforms into giving conservative posters carte blanche, or even just shutting down their offensive content management entirely, in order to avoid losing federal advertising dollars and avoid a GOP SuperPAC riding their ass for the next 10 years.
 
newyorkguy said:
Apparently this is the warning users got when they clicked on the link in trump's mail-in fraud tweets.

There was also a link in a tweet I saw to a recent article in Fortune magazine:


What exactly do you find questionable? I get the impression you're implying vote by mail IS prone to fraud or theft, etc. Is that correct? Do you have a reference because I haven't found that.
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I don't think all those quotes were from me... Are you asking about the last one that has my handle on it?

...Trump believes that adding a [content questionable] link to his tweets is political interference...
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If so:

No, *I* don't think the link is political interference. What I'm saying is that the EO has granted the federal government a license to label it as such, if they feel like it, and that this is a danger to the social media platforms heavily biased in favour of Trump's preferred content creators.
 
ponderingturtle said:
Here is the american bar association disagreeing

https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/government_says_trumps_tweets_are_official_presidential_statements

the white house says so.

"White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Tuesday President Donald Trump's tweets are indeed official statements.

"The President is the President of the United States, so they're considered official statements by the President of the United States," Spicer said, when asked during his daily briefing how they should be characterized. Spicer did not indicate whether that included both of the President's Twitter handles: @realDonaldTrump and @POTUS."

https://www.cnn.com/2017/06/06/politics/trump-tweets-official-statements/index.html
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Captain Swoop: Do you monitor both of these accounts? You don't specify which account the tweet was posted under. I'm not sure it matters, but I'm curious.
 
blutoski said:
Well, this is what I'm talking about... "Spicer did not indicate whether that included both of the President's Twitter handles: @realDonaldTrump and @POTUS."

I think it's *not* clarified, meaning clear as mud, as they say.

What I'm disputing is saying it's 'clarified', given nobody has complained that he's deleting tweets. My feeling is that the WH is trying to have it both ways.
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He may delete his tweets but that does not mean they are removed from the official record.
 
Lawyer Leonard French goes through the draft version of the latest Executive Order to see what sort of difference it would make.

It's a little over an hour and a half long.

The upshot, it has pretty much no effect other than perhaps preventing Federal branches from spending money advertising on Twitter, and most of it makes no sense whatsoever.

 
Captain_Swoop said:
Trump will win the election. You are all ******.
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I'm terrified at the prospect. But the nihilistic side of me almost salivates at the prospect. Why? Because I'm becoming increasingly convinced that America must undergo the kind of ruinous debacle as occurred in Germany in May '45. Just as the Nazis had to pay the price for their folly, so too must the xenophobic racists in America.

It seems a hard and painful lesson is required in order to set things right. If Trumpism and the compliant GOP are nipped in the bud now, the sickness will not be sufficiently innoculated against. A frightful reservoir of resentment will remain, and the divisions in American society will only fester. Four years is insufficient for the 'old guard' of fearful white supremacy to kick off into the well deserved Hell it warrants.
 
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Lurch said:
I'm terrified at the prospect. But the nihilistic side of me almost salivates at the prospect. Why? Because I'm becoming increasingly convinced that America must undergo the kind of ruinous debacle as occurred in Germany in May '45. Just as the Nazis had to pay the price for their folly, so too must the xenophobic racists in America.

It seems a hard and painful lesson is required in order to set things right. If Trumpism and the compliant GOP are nipped in the bud now, the sickness will not be sufficiently innoculated against. A frightful reservoir of resentment will remain, and the divisions in American society will only fester. Four years is insufficient for the 'old guard' of fearful white supremacy to kick off into the well deserved Hell it warrants.
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Rasism isn't Trump's main problem. Trump is dick in basically every aspect. He hates everyone, except himself. And if anything, he doesn't care about minorities. It's not something haunting him in sleepless nights. Twitter is.
 
SezMe said:
He may delete his tweets but that does not mean they are removed from the official record.
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Is that stored somewhere? How would a citizen access it.

I'm not trying to be a jackass, I'm asking sincerely. What's this public record you're referencing?
 
The Land of the Free - Now with government regulated social media.

I guess Trump learned something from China after all.
 
For Immediate Release
STATEMENT BY FCC COMMISSIONER JESSICA ROSENWORCEL ON EXECUTIVE ORDER
WASHINGTON, May 28, 2020: According to press reports, an Executive Order the White House plans to release today would call for the Federal Communications Commission to propose rules about when and how social media companies may edit content online without forfeiting their protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Section 230 protects social media companies from legal liability for the material their users post. In response to these reports, Commissioner Rosenworcel issued the following statement:

“This does not work. Social media can be frustrating. But an Executive Order that would turn the Federal Communications Commission into the President’s speech police is not the answer. It’s time for those in Washington to speak up for the First Amendment. History won’t be kind to
silence.”
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https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachm...DK0sMWiF1wFkhIc47pO2wdxXo9PfX7iYBYW0mJrh2QXRA
 
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