https://twitter.com/BenBurgis/status/1347966744166596608
They basically waited until he had no real power, and in many ways, this is an empty gesture. It's not like they did this shit after Charlottesville. I mean, I guess he could craft an executive order between now and the inauguration, but I'd imagine Biden would just undo it.
However, the fact that a bunch of tech companies can just remove the person who is supposed to be the most powerful person in the world from direct communication with the public should also be concerning.
In conclusion, nationalize Twitter. They suck and their investors deserve it.
They basically waited until he had no real power, and in many ways
More specifically, they waited until they knew which party was going to be leading the congressional committees that oversee them for the next few years. Everyone thinks this is a reaction to the buffalo guy, but I think it's a lot more likely that it's a reaction to the Georgia runoffs.
I agree with what you said, but I don't get Twitter's thought process here.
I would bet money that the Republicans get majorities in both chambers of Congress following the 2022 Midterm elections and that the Republican will be elected President in 2024. The point is, Twitter removing Donald Trump is likely going to light a proverbial fire under a lot of chud politicians. They will do whatever they can to settle the score, once they have this power.
I agree. I think even more than an empty gesture it's just a move to protect their ad sales before any companies pulled out.
I think it is to ingratiate themselves to the current power structure. I guess it could help protect their ad sales at this point, as well
I think a lot of why I feel rather jaded and apathetic about the whole ban thing is partially because we've always known they both had the power to but they actively chose not to because it was very likely more profitable to not do so. It's more than just an empty gesture to ban him, especially banning him on the dozens of other platforms he didn't even use. It's blatant marketing and PR right now and soooo many people are going to come away having conscious or subconscious positive thoughts about those brands. Fucking Letterboxd banned him. I'm not going to say they saved face, cause afiak Twitter finally did it after multiple high level people were going to quit. . There are a lot of companies using this moment to further their reach and image.
It's obviously bad to censor people, and I don't think there is a clear or obvious way to prevent people from inciting legit hate crimes and unjustified violence. But I do know giving the power completely into corporations hands is a recipe for disaster and has serious consequences.
I'm saying it's an empty gesture because if they were serious about preventing harm, they would have done these bans after Charlottesville. I agree that doing it now is about PR, which is why I am saying it's an empty gesture.
yeah definitely agree, i was just riffing off that figure of speech.
The left will never be truly safe from censorship, should they wish to do so. Even if we have our own platform on our own servers, they can always just get the ISPs to block it.
You'd be surprised. A bullet through the head has historically been a good way to do just that.
I will scream so loud that any projectile will vaporize upon nearing my head
In that case, you'll be doing the bullet's job as your own head dissolves.
you're talking some mad shit for someone within screaming distance
I get that Twitter is trash and tech companies (and just companies in general) have way too much power and we should probably nationalize them or whatever, but this site going really hard into being upset over a bunch of fash getting banned from stuff is really scary to me because those same people have been spreading all the hate and misinformation that gets people like me (Trans) and other minorities fucking murdered and bullied and doxxed. The same people we've been banned over and over again for defending ourselves from. I feel like if I could only use my logic brain, I would agree with all of you, but I've seen too many communities only give a fuck until it hurts cishet white dudes and I'm afraid this site is going in that direction.
Sorry if this is dumb.
this site going really hard into being upset over a bunch of fash getting banned
What I've seen is:
- A strong majority of people laughing at/cheering on fash getting banned (just as they cheered on fash getting dead the other day)
- Maybe half saying "yeah that's fun and all, but look what they're doing to leftists at the same time; corporations shouldn't have this power"
- No significant group going full :freeze-peach:
Where people are leery over this, I'm seeing that squarely directed at corporate power over social media, not at sympathy for chuds.
First they came for the Chuds, and I laughed, because a guy tazzed himself in the balls...
technicalities get blown out of proportion. it is dumb that we rely on private corporations to enforce norms. it is dumb that we can't create a state-run social media platform that we control. it is dumb to pretend that social media is just a frivolous product and not the main home of public discourse.
however it is also dumb to ignore context, and dumb to fight context-ignorers (reactionaries, in this case) with "don't talk about anything except how trump being banned is good." yes it is extremely good, but... technicalities.
the banning was good. the reason it happened (so fucking late. should have been years ago!) is because of tech companies.
if something horrible works out in your favor, that doesn't mean you don't have a problem. it just means a chunk of the collapsing building fell on someone pointing a gun at you. taking it as a warning to GTFO is still important.
This actually made me "get" the reaction here a little better, thanks!
It’s not dumb! I totally agree with you, and I think hate speech / speech inciting violence has good reasons to be stopped.
I think more than anything it’s a symptom of the capitalist hellscape that this censoring of the literal president came from a private company, not democrats or republicans. A lot of people are saying “womp it’s just Twitter who cares” but it was his most used comms method, and he’s effectively shut up since.
So I generally do support the ban, but I don’t support the libertarian/fash techlords that did it.
Yeah you're totally right. I think everyone arguing against you is making good points, but at the core of the issue it is SCARY that a private company with zero accountability can censor an elected leader.
Yes he's a bad president, but this sets a bad precedent.
if twitter were a chinese company censoring Xi their CEO would be fucking executed which is 100% unironically a good thing
People here are quick to celebrate the banning of the fash and forget that the people who do the banning are people who believe in horseshoe theory unironically and people who view the left as no different and no less bent on destroying civilised society as the fash.
Not to mention that the tech companies themselves are very fascist adjacent
facebook enabled genocide in myanmar, catalysed Trump's rise, and refused to ban hate speech from right wing loonies in India. they don't get off so easy
TFW you just wanted to perv on your classmates but you accidentally destroy the world
if you know anything about that sick zuck, you know he probably gets off on that. and literally nothing else.
I think a lot of us see the suspension and banning of social media accounts as a minor issue. After all, usually it’s people on the right grumbling that their bigoted or inflammatory content has been taken down... But there is something deeply dangerous here, and I don’t think Facebook and Twitter bans should be treated as a small issue at all. Especially in the age of coronavirus, where the physical ability to “publicly assemble” has been restricted, social media is the public square. Crucial political organizing takes place there, public figures are held to account there, news is spread there. Dramas that affect the fate of giant companies or even nations can even happen on Twitter (I mean that: Donald Trump can create a diplomatic crisis with a single tweet and Elon Musk can wipe out billions in value for his shareholders.)
This means, as many have noted before, that the public square is now quite literally privatized. It is not a commons. It is owned by shareholders and controlled by billionaires. And decisions about who gets to speak and whether they will be heard are no longer governed by the rule of law. They are governed by the opaque “community standards” of a private corporation whose mandate is to maximize shareholder value.
Can we take a moment to appreciate the radicalism of what has happened? Private companies now have a powerful gatekeeping capacity over public speech. They are, effectively, governments. But they are not democratic governments. You do not get to vote on Facebook’s community standards. You did not elect anybody to the lawmaking body. Decisions about how speech will be policed take place in dictatorial institutions ruled over by creepy billionaires. When public speech took place mostly outside, decisions about what could be heard were made by courts, and subject to the First Amendment. Now, because the United States gives almost limitless power to corporations to set their “terms of service,” the power to abridge the First Amendment has been handed over to private companies...
Is there a plausible version of Facebook or Twitter that is compatible with a democratic society? I think so, but it would require them to be nationalized and their governance structure radically overhauled. In the absence of that, the only hope is in finally developing an alternative, not-for-profit, democratic social media platform.
We’ll definitely get fucked and banned randomly on all platforms as we’ve seen – but it’ll be predictable in the sense that it’ll be an obvious reaction to something that happened and not Jack Got Mad And Banned All Leftists.
Seems like a problem either way?
Watching the right wingers get fucking owned by these tech monstrosities decades of their economic philosophy created with nearly zero self reflection on any of their part is real big brain hours. Or all of a sudden they're all trust busters. That being said I agree with everything Ben said here.
It's a big problem that these companies have so much power and so little accountability, but that's been the case for a long time. These bans are an effect of that, not a cause. It's not like libs complaining is what gave them the power, and it's probably not even why they made this decision, it's purely incidental.
Usually we've been the ones facing the worst of this unaccountable power, but in this instance we aren't, which is nice. I say take the win, but also we should keep in mind that this changes nothing and in the future they'll go back to fucking us instead. But in the meantime might as well shitpost and gloat, it's not like that's going to make things any worse.
rarely is it so apparent that capital imposes the symbolic order and everything else melts into air
In the same day, manchin reverses his stance on second checks because the stock market went down when he said he was opposed. The contradictions are heightening and mammon grows hungry, monsters are coming.
Bad take. Fash can get frozen peaches in Siberia, regardless of who puts them there lmao
This isn't "free speech, even for fascists." It's "we're in bad shape if corporations get to decide who's able to communicate to the masses."
good take. if this is your canary in the coal mine, you really got some catching up to do.
im even starting to feel that being forced off the giant corporate platforms might be beneficial...all this shit leads to is a delusional belief in the power of #activism.
the left in 2020 after 5 years of shitposting is a nothing compared to what it was in the early 20th century under eugene debbs.
I mean, so what if we know corporations get to decide what speech to allow? Last I checked, we don't control the actions of our enemies. We can no more stop twitter from banning left wing accounts, slapping foreign media labels on everything, just as we cannot stop reddit from banning r/cth. The thing we can control is our response and in the case of the subreddit, it was chapo chat. If anything, we should expect repression, not hope and pray the tech overlords don't turn their reaper laser on us after they're done with the fash. It's likely gonna happen too if we take our ideas seriously.
agreed 100%.
so long as we have the freedom to purchase domains, organize programmers and operate servers, we have available to us everything the internet offers: a means of communications.
if marxism in america gains any serious traction within our lifetime, theyll come down on us much harder for organizing workers en masse than they do on the right for vandalizing congress.
twitter is a front facing marketing campaign. our presence in the news can do that work for us..........but we're so far away from being a political precense that this twitter shit is what we talk about.
if this is your canary in the coal mine, you really got some catching up to do.
Who can you point to getting removed from social media that is on the level, or even close to the level of, the current president of the United States? The concern is not that they removed this specific president, but that they can remove any current US president at all. It's not contradictory to find it funny that the right is getting owned by their own opinions on private property rights and also be concerned by the fact that this represents a new level of power that we have not truly seen before, or at least not so publicly.
the left in 2020 after 5 years of shitposting is a nothing compared to what it was in the early 20th century under eugene debbs.
I think that's debatable. Debs got, what, 1 million votes in a country of maybe 100 million? Bernie -- admittedly not a full-on socialist, but hey, we've had a century of anticommunist propaganda and two red scares since Debs -- probably got proportionately more in the 2020 primary. And there's been a whole lot more political activity than just posting.
he was more successful than the libertarian party while campaigning from prison. he peaked at 6% in 1912
And there’s been a whole lot more political activity than just posting.
honestly coming up blank here. like what? some demonstrators are protecting communities from eviction I guess?
Debs was a boss, no argument here. His courtroom "fuck you I'm not sorry" speech is probably second only to Fidel's, too.
I'm only suggesting that Bernie in 2020 (not libertarians in 2020, lol fuck those losers) had at least comparable support, if not proportionately more support.
honestly coming up blank here. like what? some demonstrators are protecting communities from eviction I guess?
Electoral organizing is organizing, even if you personally disagree with that use of time and resources. And there's been significant amounts of leftist electoral organizing in the past five years (just measuring it from when Bernie kicked off his 2016 run is a sign of how valuable these efforts can be). Plus, if you want to write all of that off as insufficient, this summer we did just have the largest wave of protests (many of which were at least proto-leftist) this country has seen since Vietnam.
Nothing -- we were in this same bad spot yesterday, too. The point isn't that there's a new development here. The point is that because it's in the news and we're all feeling out the right take on the situation, the right take is "oh fuck we shouldn't let corporations control who gets to speak in the public square."
The article you shared seems to make it out like some sort of new or radical development.
It's absolutely a radical development. Media ownership is more unified than ever, and it's easier than ever for corporations to just shut down or ignore big segments of unpopular public discussion.
As for new, I guess it's "new" in the sense that it's really metastasized in the past decade, but now we're just talking about what "new" means in this context. When this problem came about isn't as important as what to do about it.
When this problem came about isn't as important as what to do about it.
Correct. This should be the main focus, not whether people think the issue is trivial or whatever.
I feel like theres something wrong with calling online spaces the 'public square.'
you know how the term 'free market' evokes a deceptive image of how capitalism is just like a small town where three family owned grocery stores compete and the business with the best service thrives and blah blah blah. the term 'public square' evokes a similarly deceptive image of the 'free market of ideas'; where everyone gets a chance to speak and the best ideas win out.
obviously online spaces are important but I feel like for a while now we've been confusing shitposting with the real work of organizing(hint hint #forcethevote)
this is more or less a pedantic criticism but given how fruitless our online precense has been, maybe we should seriously reevaluate the value of social media.
worst case scenario this is just another minor blow imo. doesnt everyone just coalesce into their echo chamber anyways?
Trump can make a presidential alert show up in your mobile phone, which is a feature that you cannot opt out of. This framing that he has lost a major line of communication because he got banned from social media is silly and unnecessary to make the point.
It is horrifying that this power is in the hands of a few oligarchs. But that didn't begin yesterday and I'm not going to not laugh at my enemy being on the receiving end of a ban just because that ban is illustrative of said problem with tech oligarchs' power.
Twitter is going to get real stale once everyone who deviates from the Overton window gets banned smh
I'm betting it can survive indefinitely on:
- Sports news (every big sports story breaks on Twitter, and tons of player drama starts there)
- "Acceptable" political discussion (plenty of political snipping isn't too far right or left)
- Stuff going viral more easily than posts from other social media sites
You mean that corporations have more power than the president since they can effectively prevent him from speaking on a private platform? :shocked-pikachu:
he didn't even "egg on" the riots, he was just doing his trumpian "while the election was stolen it's so unfair folks, but you have to be lawful and orderly"
