Cont: The Trump Presidency: Part 22

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Captain_Swoop said:
Trump Tweets

@Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is today criticizing Twitter. “We have a different policy than Twitter on this. I believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online.” Did Twitter criticize Obama for his “you can keep your Dr.”?
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The boy robot pipes up. How cute. **** him.
 
Bob001 said:
Twitter etc. are private entities. I don't think they could be sued for "political bias" any more than the NY Times, MSNBC, Fox News, Mother Jones, National Review, etc. Gawker was sued for publishing private sex tapes. And the DOJ doesn't sue anybody for political bias, and it wouldn't have anything to say about a civil suit by one private party against another.

The real issue is that if the media companies lose their identity as an analog of the phone company, they would be responsible for everything that appears on their sites, just as the NYT is. Anybody who is offended or aggrieved by anything anybody posted would be able to sue Twitter, not the poster, for libel, invasion of privacy and whatever other grounds their lawyers could come up with. In effect, Twitter, Facebook etc. would become publishers, legally liable for everything they publish. The other side is that if Congress tries to change the laws, court cases would go on for years, maybe decades. It took 10 years for the DOJ to break up Bell.

I think Jack Dorsey ought to call out Trump by banning him and all of his enablers and even the word "Trump" from his site. Nothing Trump could do could take effect before the election. I bet Orange Man would change his tune.
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Maybe I worded that badly. They can be sued by a private citizen, such as we saw Thiel do with Gawker. Right now, they're protected pretty much across the board, even if they're exercising some actual editorial activity, such as closing accounts of white supremacists. The Nazis can't sue, because the argument is, Facebook is just acting in good faith.

The purpose of this EO is to give the federal government arbitrary power to decide which complaints can go ahead because they were in bad faith, because they were judged to be political speech instead of just ordinary business operations. Political speech will not be shielded.

The bias I'm referring to is within the administration. I'm confident they're only interested in exposing FB, Twitter, Reddit, Snapchat, &c to lawsuits from conservatives.

My feeling isn't that any lawsuit will come of this, but rather, that FB will just say, "To heck with it, we're going back to a completely neutral platform, no more policing content. We never wanted to do it anyway and now we have a solid excuse to scrap it."
 
Captain_Swoop said:
Trump Tweets

MAIL-IN VOTING WILL LEAD TO MASSIVE FRAUD AND ABUSE. IT WILL ALSO LEAD TO THE END OF OUR GREAT REPUBLICAN PARTY. WE CAN NEVER LET THIS TRAGEDY BEFALL OUR NATION. BIG MAIL-IN VICTORY IN TEXAS COURT TODAY. CONGRATS!!!
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Pray tell, oh Orange Excrescence, why the GOP and not the Dems would perish.
 
Trump Retweeted

Lara Trump
@LaraLeaTrump
Looting is not protesting. Burning down local homes and businesses is not protesting. How sad that the memory of #GeorgeFloyd has been lost in all of this.
 
Norman Alexander said:
I think it will backfire grandly.

If Twitter are going to be held responsible for everything bad said about Trump on their platform, they will not want to attract a billion lawsuits. The subject of Trump, and all his accounts will simply be turned off. Post anything with the word "Trump" in it and it will vanish. Post anything pro- or anti-Trump and it will vanish. Twitter will be reduced to being static Tik-tok.

Fully justified too. They are not subject to First Amendment rules so they are not obliged to publish what they are told, or not publish what someone else wants. Like all newspapers, they can publish and be damned, or simply not publish. Their choice. And by far the easiest is to not publish.

There's likely to be an app (change) for that.
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Just to clarify: they're not at risk of being sued for the original content. They're at risk for being sued *if* they do something that's deemed as not politically neutral. The GOP is currently barred from suing them for 'bias'.

The fastest course of action for the social media platforms to avoid risk is to just stop policing content. That way there's zero exposure to complaints about biased editorial or political activity on the platform's part.

I expect they're all having high level meetings right now asking, "What would happen if we just stopped fact checking entirely? Will our profits go up or down? If down, would it be less than if we were sued by a state?"
 
The Great Zaganza said:
Twitter can, and probably will, use this Order to claim that they cannot be held responsible for anything being posted on their platform, since the President told them to censor nothing.
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This is my concern yes.

Specifically, that they will use this to wind down their content monitoring. No more deleting accounts for uttering threats, no more deleting Russian bots. No more deleting white supremacy content.

FB in particular has been under the microscope for the working conditions of their content monitoring farms. High depression and suicide rate. I suspect they've been looking for just this sort of excuse to cancel the project entirely.
 
blutoski said:
This is my concern yes.

Specifically, that they will use this to wind down their content monitoring. No more deleting accounts for uttering threats, no more deleting Russian bots. No more deleting white supremacy content.

FB in particular has been under the microscope for the working conditions of their content monitoring farms. High depression and suicide rate. I suspect they've been looking for just this sort of excuse to cancel the project entirely.
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I don't think they'll be able to do that. Whatever is the result of the EO it will only apply to the US, Facebook et al will still have to moderate content for other geographies. They'll also still need to monitor filth in the US as well, I can't see US conservatives accepting un-moderated sex on social media.
 
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From the relevant Tweet, when clicking the Comment button:
Why can’t you Reply to this?
We try to prevent a Tweet like this that otherwise breaks the Twitter Rules from reaching more people, so we have disabled most of the ways to engage with it. If you want to talk about it, you can still Retweet with comment. Learn more
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Captain_Swoop said:
Trump Tweeted

CHINA!
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This is the kind of thing that Trump is going to be blurting every 10 minutes, suddenly sitting up in his sickbed.
 
Stacyhs said:
Oh, god....you little *****. Get over it. You're not Obama. Never have been and never will be. You are **** on the bottom of his shoes.
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I understand his point, though. He's not comparing himself to Obama as a president in that tweet. He's comparing Twitter's treatment of Obama's false statement as different than how they treated his false statement, and saying that means their fact checking is not neutral or in good faith. And therefore should not shielded by 230.

He's wrong because the policy was implemented later, it's in appropriate to compare past and current content management to look for fairness, but I do understand where he's going with the tweet.
 
Guybrush Threepwood said:
I don't think they'll be able to do that. Whatever is the result of the EO it will only apply to the US, Facebook et al will still have to moderate content for other geographies. They'll also still need to monitor filth in the US as well, I can't see US conservatives accepting un-moderated sex on social media.
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You have a point.

The risk still stands, though, that they can be granular about it. No more fact checking political claims in the US, problem solved.
 
It's been remarked that trump sent the original 'shooting starts' at 1am Washington time. After Twitter actioned it he apparently retweeted it using the official White House Twitter account. Twitter actioned that one too.

As posted by Captain Swoop, an hour ago trump tweeted a one word tweet:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
CHINA!
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WTH? :boggled: As football's John Madden used to say: "The wheels are coming off the wagon!"
 
Norman Alexander said:
I understand where you are going, but there's a double negative backflip here. The other way is to moderate EVERYTHING on their forums. Heavily. So they never get to be liable for defamation. So, as I said, Twitter could simply blank out everything Trump. Black hole the lot of it. No Trump crap => no defamation by him or to him. Go back to kitten recipes only. It's a private company. How is anyone but them going to force them to publish what they don't want to publish?
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Just to clarify: the activity that would be exposed to legal action would be the moderation itself. There are some US state AGs that have been chomping at the bit to sue social media platforms for biased moderation, but 230 protects them. Deleting Trump's content but not, say, Hilary's content, would be exactly what they're talking about.

This is why he tweeted a comparison vs how Twitter handled Obama's false information on Obamacare.

If the idea is to delete false posts, OK, delete Trumps, but to eliminate the danger they would also have to delete Obama's.

My feeling is that they'll prefer to just opt for pulling back on moderation rather than increase and further complicate it.
 
In the middle of everything else, Fox News reports:
U.S. equity markets slid Friday morning as investors await word from President Trump over how his administration will respond to China tightening its grip on Hong Kong...The president said he would announce Friday how the U.S. will proceed. Fox News report
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Matthew Cline said:
There's so many tweets every day that there's no way they could possibly moderate every single one of them. And even if they somehow could, the moderates are still human, they'll periodically make mistakes and let something through that Twitter would be liable for.



If they lose the liability protection of CDA 230 it's not just in regard to one subject, they lose that protection for everything in all contexts (that is, moderting Trump's tweets wouldn't make them liable only for things regarding Trump). Without that protection, moderating at all would legally make them a publisher, and as a publisher they'd be liable for any defamatory tweet by anyone about anyone, because they'd legally be the publisher of those tweets. Prodigy was found to be a publisher because it removed comments containing vulgar language. Their efforts to remove vulgar language had nothing at all to do with what they were sued over, yet they still lost the lawsuit because those efforts to remove dirty words legally made them the publisher of a comment containing no dirty words.
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My (amateur) interpretation of the EO is that they are not looking to eliminate a platform's 230 protection entirely, but rather, they want to carve out a special space for moderation activity that is not 'in good faith'. Which I interpret to mean 'bad for conservatives specifically.'

As Guybrush Threepwood mentioned, the GOP still wants to keep porn off the platforms.
 
phiwum said:
Not really. It indicates a reluctance to abide by an executive order. She expressed that reluctance, yes, but if he fires her, it won't be for exercising her free speech rights.

A president has the right to put people in place who are aligned with his policies (I'm *NOT* speaking of the IGs here!). That said, of course the quoted commissioner is right and the Senate would be right not to confirm a lapdog who would carry out Trump's orders without question.

Of course, the Senate will confirm any damn fool Trump nominates. At worst, he has to nominate the person twice apparently. But were they to have some sort of moral fortitude, they would be right to exercise it.

ETA: All of the above presumes that FCC Commissioners can be fired at will by the President. Since the commissioner quoted is a Democrat, I doubt that is correct. I did not realize she's a Democrat before writing this.
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It may not be necessary to fire her, now that I think about it. The FCC is currently 3 Republicans, 2 Democrats. They can just vote partisan, and FCC staff will be bound to comply with the EO.
 
blutoski said:
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This is why he tweeted a comparison vs how Twitter handled Obama's false information on Obamacare.

If the idea is to delete false posts, OK, delete Trumps, but to eliminate the danger they would also have to delete Obama's.
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Wait a minute. What false posts about Obamacare? Policy disputes are hardly the same as accusing a commentator of murder. Obama never said or did anything comparable to what Trump does every morning.
 
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