Trump issues toothless exec order to show donors, fans he's doing something about those Twitter twerps Following a fit of indignation at Twitter's decision to apply a fact check notice to some of his recent Twitter messages, US President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order that purports to limit the liability protection afforded to internet platforms when they take action on user posts. But the nonsensical order …
The USA has solved the deaths problem with a system that doesn't count the all deaths accurately
e.g. George Floyd was not murdered by cops, he had a breathing problem. My state only counts Corvid deaths in hospitals; deaths in nursing homes, deaths at home, or in jails don't count towards the total number.
The USA has solved the deaths problem with a system that doesn't count the all deaths accurately
That'll only work for a little while, the benchmark is comparing the average total death rate for the preceding few years with the current total death rate, the difference can be attributed to C-19 and related issues.
Very difficult to conceal the total number of deaths even if you do fudge the cause of death.
It's not all bad, I have "Make America Kittens Again" installed on Firefox so I can enjoy the stories by looking at the pictures and skipping reading. Politically it's time to flush the toilet as far as I see it but then I'd miss the Kittens because El Reg never posts stories about Borish and Dummanique.
Actually Trump is an interesting character.
Many of the liberal minded el33t will focus on Trump's rhetoric and his banter.
Its all noise.
Remember that expression... "Action speak louder than words!" ?
Lets consider what Trump has done.
Prison reform? Check
Boosted the economy prior to COVID-19? Check
Low unemployment? Check
Low unemployment for minorities? Double Check
Pulled out of Paris Accord, yet US dropped CO2 production and dropped it lower than any other country (percentage wise). Check
Opened talks w North Korea and repatriated US MIA/KIA remains. Check
So I wouldn't say he was the worst. He inherited a mess and while hamstrung, did more that Obama did in 8 years. With one major exception... Obama's administration broke more laws than any other administration in recent history.
I think you'll find History will be kind to Trump, Obama? Not so much.
Yep Mike, and the list is far longer.
- Renegotiated NAFTA
- TPP is toast
- Pressured China on trade (US cannot lose a trade war in any sense, China is exposed)
- Title IX is being eliminated as the constitutional abomination that it is
- Section 230 back on the table
- Removed AHA "mandate" and lowered some cross border barriers in health care
- Failed to start a war
The list is really long.
I was under the impression that they can't do that because they are seen as being official WH documents or something - I recall somebody taking this to the courts last year (I think).
Likewise, he was not allowed to 'block' people on his twit? twat? for the same reason.
Can't be bothered looking for the citations but am sure somebody who cares a bit more than me will find it/them.
I don't think it was official WH docs, it was ruled that he can't block people because he is the president and doing so would be blocking free speech. 'His' argument was it is a personal account. It was ruled that as long as he is the president and is posting anything political anyone can comment on it, just as they can do in real life.
I don't think Twitter can't be held to have to archive government documents, if they are classed as that, that's the WH job. There is the trump twitter archive.
RE: "And who would that be then? "
Anybody else. Including Mitt Romney or another fucking Bush. Even bloody Death with his scythe doesn't want this bugger so keeps Covid 19 away from him. I would never dream of wishing harm on anyone, but these are not normal times and my laughter would be heard across Tennessee if he ends up in intensive care, either from coronavirus, hydroxychloroquine, or bleach. I don't care - anything would work for me. I utterly detest the bastard and there aren't many I can say that about.
Your TDS is showing. You apparent adherence to badly reported statements demonstrates lack of credibility on your part.
To take but one example.
Bleach:
Bleach is a disinfectant
Chlorox and Lysol are bleaches and are thus also disinfectants
Far UVC light is a disinfectant but not a bleach
Therefore all disinfectants are not bleach
The idea that when "disinfectant" was mentioned that "bleach" was intended is logically invalid
I'm not trying for credibility, just stating a strongly held opinion formed over many years of watching this idiot at work, as are you, even if you are hiding said opinion behind an ad hominem. I formed my own opinion by watching and listening to his own words emitting from his own mouth.
I hate the fascist wannabe so stop diverting with silly nitpicks - that's Trumps job.
Correct - there is a big difference between what private companies and government can and can't do.
Twitter is a private company and does not have to offer 1st amendment freedom of speech to anyone. Technically, they can do what they like and if they want to block you, well tough. There have been a lot of useless lawsuits issued and rejected regarding '1st amendment rights (that only apply to government) and Twitter/Facebook. They can delete posts as they see fit and have no obligation to keep them.
Trump, as President (still doesn't sound right!) and, therefore, part of the government, is using Twitter to make proclamations so he lost the right to vet his account. Trump also has to abide by the 1st amendment and cannot interfere with freedom of speech - something he forgets... The White House (government) is responsible for making sure that Trumps idiotic ranting on Twitter is archived for future generations to laugh at.
> He could of course always open up on TikTok.
I noticed that gab.com posted a thread advertising themselves below one Trump tweet. They said they already had created an account for Trump.
Really wish he and his followers took their marbles there. This would improve Twitter considerably.
I don't think you get it.
Taking an action to close a POTUS account would do more damage to the brand that they tried to create.
And Twitter basically said that they would keep accounts of world leaders because of their importance.
But back to a premise put by the author:
"So when Twitter adds a fact checking notification to Trump's tweets, as it did for the first time on Tuesday, it can do without taking on editorial liability if it believes the material is objectionable, whether it's protected speech or not."
Trump's EO will stand and its not as toothless as the law professor things.
While the law is vague. Objectionable is a open ended statement. The courts would favor the plaintiff if someone sued them.
The law itself is flawed and should have been removed or rewritten long before Trump hit office.
Its like the CAN-SPAM act. Which actually made it possible for spam to continue and provided spammers protection.
Zuckerberg actually gets it.
What do you think will happen if these companies get sued and found to be monopolies in their space?
I find that the Chinese Government is reprehensible over their treatment of Hong Kong as well as how they lied to the world about COVID-19. Should we then sign a petition to tell Twitter to take down their account(s) or FaceBook?
Imagine if you're a Christian and all of a sudden your posts espousing your faith were censored because the guy censoring your posts was an atheist ? He found them objectionable. (Or vice-versa)
Do you think that that site deserves to still receive the blanket immunity?
Remember, Twitter , FB, Google are defacto monopolies.
Trump may do foolish things. He's unpredictable. But you can bet he ran this past the lawyers in his administration before he signed it.
Just saying!
Mine's the flame retardant jacket. (Which is probably going to give me cancer...)
But back to a premise put by the author:"So when Twitter adds a fact checking notification to Trump's tweets, as it did for the first time on Tuesday, it can do without taking on editorial liability if it believes the material is objectionable, whether it's protected speech or not."
Trump's EO will stand and its not as toothless as the law professor things.
I'm.. not sure. See also my favorite copyright attorney's take on the matter-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVhFeobdMv8
Who also thinks it's a bit toothless. But it's still an EO. And presumably to gain teeth, it would mean amending legislation, ie 230 to clarify 'objectionable', or just remove shielding.. Which would open up a whole other can of worms. But I also think Twitter's created this problem by editorialising, and it's in a somewhat unusual position given it's become an/the official channel for the thoughts of POTUS.
So just blocking this meme has been removed by a moderator POTUS would create PR problems. So in this case, it decided to replace the tweet with a 'fact check' statement, which would seem to be editorialising. So someone at Twitter's interpretation of the 'facts'.. Which in this case, Twitter got totally wrong, ie there have been plenty of problems with mail-in ballots in the US and pretty much everywhere it's used. Then there are apparent double standards, ie comments that could easily be considered objectionable coming from Twitter's own general counsel & head of integrity. So there's a rather apparent political bias at Twitter.
But we're also living in interesting times, so the US has an election in November and there's this virus thing. Traditional in-person voting seems doable, just might take a little longer to queue*. But there's also a lot of fear around the virus, so will that fear disenfranchise voters? And if so, is that fear higher or lower in one side's voting population, which could obviously skew the results. Especially as I've seen a few pollsters saying Republicans are possibly less concerned than Democrats.
*My local primary school has spray painted a bunch of lines on the path outside the school, with letters presumably as class** identifiers. They're not exactly 2m apart, and the letters are sprayed at the school entrance end rather than the end of the lines, which is an interesting use of queue theory.
**Not that kind of class..
Except he didn't and hasn't.
The Executive is simply not permitted to rewrite the law. The Congress writes laws, the Presidentdoes not. End of.
The courts will strike it down because to do otherwise is telling the next Democratic president they can close down the Republican party for being terrorists or something - it's the same kind of thing.
This is a sop to his base. Many will read the headline now, go yee-haw and never notice that in law it never existed.
The danger is that it's clearly part of him trying to build a narrative to explain a future loss at the polls, and potentially incite serious violence.
"Many will read the headline now, go yee-haw and never notice that in law it never existed"
Like his vote winning promise to re-open the coal mines. Since he became President, US coal usage has dropped by over 15%. I suspect that none of the mine re-openings or saving/increasing miners jobs has actually happened. I wonder how many of those miners will vote again for him? Or might they notice the lack of new mines and jobs?
If Twitter had balls, they's simply apply their T's and C's equally to the Twatter-in-Chief as it would to any of us plebs. Twatter-boy would have his account serially suspended, and by now he'd be banned.
If Twitter had balls....
Although I must say that the article's update indicating that they actually took down one of Twatter-boy's posts shows that they may be growing at least one...
If he doesn't like it just stop tweeting DRUMF! It's a private company and they can do anything they want!
No they can't do anything they want.
Sure they are private companies.
But they still have to work within the law.
Now suppose this were Obama and not Trump.
Obama would have had the IRS perform endless audits on the company, and all of its executives.
Don't believe me... just ask Lois Lerner
Not to defend Trump, but his EO will stand. Why? Because all it would do is strip a shield that prevents them from getting sued.
BTW, if someone sues the US Government over this EO... it will take years and it will end up in tSCOTUS. Obama had a record number of his EOs deemed illegal well after the damage was done.
Here. very little damage will occur.
"It's a private company and they can do anything they want!"
Within the law. They; Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Google straddle a legal technicality, where they are not publishers, but are editing and choosing what content can be published on their platforms. Trump absolutely should resolve this issue as Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Google have become far left echo chambers to content they agree with, and intolerant to legal content they disagree with.
Whether you sit on the left, the centre, or the right, the current situation is not right. Google wields enough power to affect elections, and has spoken about trying to influence elections in their favour. If it's bad when the Russians do it then you should be equally outraged when Google's CEO is recorded talking about doing it.
"far left echo chambers"
Yes, I don't use Facebook but my wife says it's absolutely full of memes like "A spectre is haunting Europe", "Débout les damnés de la terre", "The US administration are all faceless imperialistic running dog paper tigers" and "The State shall own the means of production, distribution and exchange."
The problem with all these sites in reality is that they allow people to publish any old bollocks, even the US President, and there are plenty of stupid and malicious people (even the US President) that swallow it. But trying to shoehorn in your own ridiculous left wing conspiracy theory is just adding to the noise.
The difference is that right wing speech tends toward hatful ranting about race and religion. This is generally not tolerated on any platform (outside the xChan forums) so it gets removed. Is this bias against the right or the fact that the right spouts more intolerant speech? A few cases where content has been moderated vs the vast quantity of posts that are not doesn't really point to censorship of the left. Don't spout bigoted bullshit and you won't get your posts removed. It's not difficult, and social media has no requirement to allow hate speech under any form of amendment.
Social media straddles the line and has legal protection because without some form of protection they would be sued into oblivion every time someone posted an item that upset someone else. Enough people try it now, imagine what it would be like without Section 230?
Trump's EO is just playing to the fanbase. The FCC has no authority to do anything to a website, the FTC has the authority to act against 'unfair and deceptive acts' but, as this is just cry-baby talk, nothing will be done here either. The AG could become annoying with anti-trust investigations etc. but that is already happening to a certain extent and the Section 230 bit of the order is pretty much word spaghetti. Twitter is liable for what it posts but not the posts of others - in this case it posted a fact check on Trump's inaccurate rant about postal voting... I can't see how that could possibly be affected by 230 and removal of posts that violate Twitter's T&C's is perfectly within their rights with or without 230. The only meaningful bit of the EO is the part about not spending government money on Ad's - good luck with that in an election year!!
Social media straddles the line and has legal protection because without some form of protection they would be sued into oblivion every time someone posted an item that upset someone else.
Yeah, and I get mightily upset by just about all of tRump's utterances. Hell, if it weren't for Section 230, I'd be rich!
So, you're a Trumpette, you follow Trump, you believed he'd bring you $20/month health care and drain the swamp, make America great again, lots of catchy phrases dreamt up by his marketing guys, perhaps you thought he'd be Reagan MkII? You swallowed the lies hook line and sinker. As a Republican you'll typically be older, and have the illness that age brings, and as a result, the next wave will probably kill you and your friends.
So understand that your death is intentional. It's planned by Republican strategists, the same guys that made the catchy lies, planned your death.
Take a look at the US cases. Notice new cases peaked about April 3rd/4th in the USA. The incubation period is 11 days. Those cases were seeded 11 days earlier.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
Now take a look at the Republican messaging from 11 days earlier:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-restrictions.html
"Trump Says Coronavirus Cure Cannot ‘Be Worse Than the Problem Itself'...The president, ...says restrictions will be reassessed"
So, just as you were breaking the exponential spread, the Republicans were already trying to undermine quarantine. It could be over by now, done with. See France? It had its peak the same day, and its done now. That could have been you if Republicans weren't intentionally keeping this going.
You know how after School shootings, Republicans tweet "thoughts and prayers blah blah blah now is not the time to act blah blah"? Until it became a daily occurrence and now they don't even get mentioned in a tweet now? Kids get shot, so what, says Fox News.
Well you won't even get a 'thoughts and prayers'. The other 100,000 didn't. You won't even get a mention on the Fox News Chyron.
So, if it's the older population that dies then there goes the Congress, the Supreme Court, and much of the Executive branch including the guy at the top. Not to mention many of the top corporate guys.
Unless this the result of younger operatives in the party, someone didn't think this through. Or did I read your post wrong?
(this might be a whoosh but ...) Gaslighting means trying to undermine other people's perception of reality: presenting false information to people in a manner which makes them doubt their own memory, understanding or perhaps even sanity. Etymology is from the play "Gas Light" by Patrick Hamilton in which the protagonist interferes with the gas supply (used for lighting) to his house to convince his wife that her perception that everything is getting darker was her encroaching insanity.
You're only a real person to the GOP if you're a rich white guy
There are a few other less absolute filters, including
Over a certain age.
Claim to be "Christian" but ignore major parts of New Testament teaching. Or some parts of Jewish.
Straight.
Dislike brown people and all foreigners - AKA "patriotic"
"So, if it's the older population that dies then there goes the Congress, the Supreme Court, and much of the Executive branch including the guy at the top. Not to mention many of the top corporate guys."
No, the people you mention will all be fine. They will have access to daily testing and the very best medical care money can buy.
Grandma and grandpa Joe Public, however, are screwed.
Your points are well taken. But here's the thing: The Repos are killing off their own supporters. The older, WASPy folks more susceptible to the virus, the MAGATs wandering around demonstrating to "open up America", the folks congregating in Wisconsin bars after their Governor's stay-at-home order extension was thrown out by a Republican state Supreme Court at the behest of the Republican legislature (Separation of Powers? Yeah...we've heard of it....); all these things will result in killing Republicans to a much larger degree than they will kill off Democrats. Republicans are already a minority party1; these actions appear to point to an end result of making them an even smaller minority. If this were unintended, it points to the stupidity of the Repo's shortsightedness. And if it were intentional, it points to the stupidity of the Repo's thought processes.
Bottom line: Repos are stupid.
Q.E.D.
1Must clarify: Repos are a minority party in numbers; they would never allow actual minority people to join their little club, except as tokens or figureheads (ref. Clarence "Lapdog" Thomas, Ben Carson, Herman "I don't have facts to back this up" Cain).
The UK Libel laws exist for a reason. The reason is that the only way of dealing with the period equivalent of a twitter hate mob spreading nasty rumors was to publicly challenge the person responsible to a duel. If the person refused, they would be forever branded a coward in polite society and would cease to be welcome pretty much anywhere.
If they came along to a duel then the protocol was not shooting both at the same time, but the aggrieved party would shoot first, the offender would accept this and then take his shot if he was still alive. The idea is not to shoot somebody with a ~.75 caliber pistol ball at 12 paces, but to persuade the person that actually apologising and desisting from upsetting the other person would be a jolly good idea. If they did apologise, that was the end of the duel.
Dueling was thoroughly illegal even at the time; it was just effectively the only option going to protect your reputation. Hence, the libel laws penalties were upped to the point that you could legally destroy somebody to provide an alternative to a pistol ball. However, equally the aim remained not to destroy somebody but to persuade the person that apologising, admitting that their claims were without actual foundation and they'd made their claims and stopping was their best option. And if they came to that conclusion before even upsetting the person, so much the better.
Hence, you'll note that if you publicly apologise and admit that your claims were baseless in the UK that's a bar against legal action being taken against you. You only end up in trouble if you double down on your baseless claims.
Very poor quality trolling.
"truth" is an absolute defense against libel or slander, so if you can prove what your saying is true then your fine. For instance, I could say that you are tremendously ignorant of the facts that pertain to the UK libel laws and just making things up, and you couldn't possibly sue me because it's factually indisputable.
If you prefix something with "in my opinion" then it's a matter of your opinion so even if your opinion is not actually correct then your fine as if sued you could simply say "My bad, I was wrong" and it's effectively impossible to prosecute you.
The only time you can get sued really is if you make a claim that does not have a factual basis, claim that it's true and then refuse to acknowledge your error.
It is quite amazing: whenever you think it can't get worse, time and again the Tremendously Stable Genius proves that it can do "worster".
Now I start to wonder, when will the time be that the gun toting libertarians draw the conclusion: this is why we have the 2nd amendment, this is the tyranny our founding fathers feared. Well, it's not going to happen for the true tyranny is state-imposed health insurance etc. /sarcasm
....These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!
Not sure that tweet can be fact checked by Twitter. Maybe by a psychiatrist.
IANAL, but,,,,,
The problem for the big social media platforms may not be that this executive order may or may not be effective in and of itself. Their big problem is that it weakens their protection on one of the more contested powers on their platforms: their ability to edit or even delete self-published material, even though anything published may well not be illegal/obscene/whatever at the location of publishing.
Trump is, by far, not the only one that has run into the rather...haphazard.. and uniquely US-centric morality of "staff editing" that takes place on social media platforms. He's simply one of the top-profile ones, who doesn't have to run the infamously opague and boobytrapped hurdles to figure out what in your post has offended the Powers that Be on your social platform of choice so that it doesn't get published, or even gets you an appointment with the Banhammer.
Between the litigious nature of US society, and the rather sizeable group of people who feel Offended by censorship actions on social media platforms, the indirect effect ( and possibly actual purpose) of this executive order is the threat to open the floodgates to a deluge of lawsuits which up until now were blocked by that lovely little special protection of those social media platforms. Death by Papercut....
Trump himself may be the self-evident embodyment of the "cockwomble", but even while he may not be the brightest bulb in the bunch, his handlers are not stupid. And the threat of a ton of lawsuits that cannot be directly attributed to the Presidents' Office is a lovely little crowbar.
And so subtle that most news outlets have missed this implication outright.
"...whether or not such material is constitutionally protected."
The law allows for stifling constitutionally protected political and other speech that Social Media companies don't like. OK. It is now, 30 odd years later appropriate to ask whether that right and protections afforded by para 230 should be ejected, modified, maintained or indeed more tightly interpreted.
This is a reasonable discussion, completely independent of who is POTUS. The issue was swept under the rug because the players overwhelmingly favour Democrat Party causes.
IMHO, putting this whole discussion back in the Overton Window is a good thing.
The very fact that we can now have the conversation again is a plus.
The "it's their platform" brigade with their absolutist view of property seem unaware that abridging property rights for the good of the commons is a really common act of government and indeed the administrative branch. Weighing freedom of expression in the de-facto forums of public discourse over absolute property rights is a trade off.
Google is a gatekeeper of the Internet's store of knowledge and also an effective monopoly. Curating political content is not their job and doing so is counter productive in a free society.
... and yet the debate continues.
SCOTUS spends a lot of time balancing between separate rights. This will be another such case.
What I find most amusing is that the CDA was an attempt to reign in pr0n on the internet and lots of it was struck down. pr0n has driven internet tech despite the CDA.
The discussion of whether social media has become the de-facto Town Hall Square is front and center now, and it seems Zuck is one of the few who grok what's happening and where it might lead.
They didn't edit his post, it is there unedited. He's claiming ability to suppress the surrounding links. In a similar way he claimed he could block followers. He lost that claim in court.
I think the next big test for social media will be the Minnesota, autozone window smasher case. They web can smell blood.
https://heavy.com/news/2020/05/jacob-pederson-auto-zone-cop-not-umbrella-man/
"Jacob Pederson Is Not the AutoZone Umbrella Man, St. Paul Police Say" (a denial that he's the named policeman).
The video of a caucasian man with a hammer and mask and umbrella smashing autozone windows one by one. An apparent agent provocateur to give cause for police to attack the protest.
The man is wearing a full breather mask, black shirt black pants, black umbrella, black boots, black rucksack. Respirator appears to be a Honeywell, $252 mask:
https://www.grainger.com/product/HONEYWELL-NORTH-Full-Face-Respirator-3A183
Pursued by a black man in pink t-shirt, white short pants, untied black boots, smoking a blunt and carrying a pizza box. T-shirt has 'bringing back the village' on the back and pizza box has 'delivery delivery' on it.
Random people are claiming window-smasher is a police officer, Jacob Pederson, St Pauls police are denying its him.
There is a second video, a continuation of the first, the pink guy is still with him, the man in black uses the umbrella to hide the hammer as he puts it away in his backpack. Pink guy is not as confrontational and appears to now be walking alongside the man in black without either trying to escape the other.
https://tuckbot.tv/#/watch/gsl79n
It all looks dodgy as hell.
Pink guys roles is ambiguous, he only pretends to be carrying a pizza early on, later on its tucked under his arm. How many other people do you see wearing bright pink? He seems to be a cartoon black man right down to the untied boots, and spliff, yet clean t-shirt. Easily identifiable pink.
As they leave, police are tear gassing the protests, so its very handy the man-in-black has that full respirator on!
These two would be clear targets for arrest. Yet they were not arrested. And they are clearly identifiable.
So, you see lots of people with cellphones and cameras videoing this incident. There will be lots of footage available. The social web will tear it apart if it isn't suppressed.
Remember the fake Joey Salads Trump video?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE9-EIJSCc4
Double check everything anyone tells you.
This executive order is meant to support democracy. A democracy can only work if people can take informed decisions, we allowed google, youtube, facebook and others to monopolize information sharing between people. If they actively suppress information or tag certain information as being bad, it restricts the way citizens can inform themselves. The steps president Trump took are appropriate.
Lefty lawyers may cry victory because it can not be enforced, but these companies know loopholes will get fixed and if they continue to serve as a platform exclusively for supporting leftist and CCP views, several of them might end up in anti-trust litigation and will get broken up.
Some of us have never got close to any of the main social media platforms. We have not caught the SMA (social media addiction) Virus and hopefully we never will.
Like one other post, I think that the world would be a better place if they simply ceased to exist.
Fat chance of that so I'm keeping around 100m away from it all just in case.
This 73 year old wanker (not fact checked) has managed to lie and cheat through his life to get himself rich, a media star of his own TV show and now POTUS trying to sign into the constitution laws that stop people saying not nice things about him. He literally does not give a fuck any more. If he died tomorrow he would die with a smile on his face.
His campaign polices come straight from Jacob Zuma; the reason he wants to stop mail-in-ballots is so he can give his voters free fried chicken outside the voting booths when they tick the right box.
He does what he wants, he says what he wants and nothing and nobody will stop him. Even if he is pulled up in court and made accountable, by the time the case is completed he will most likely be dead from old age.
Have any of the media ever asked him "Do you honestly give a fuck about anything or anyone other than yourself?"
I blame the parents.
He's received $130 million from selling the secret service full rack rate rooms. He's probably made the same from Republicans and Pence and foreign governments currying favor booking his hotels. Yet he still had to borrow $11 million on a really long 30 year mortgage in order to buy her house off his sister (next to Mar a Lago). He's broke. Money defines him, he wanted to pretend to be a billionaire.
This is a man worried his shit pile is about to collapse on him.
I bet when the smoke settles, they'll find he's skimmed off hundred of millions from the bailout money to keep his 'empire' going.
Sure he's trying to get police to shoot black people and kill a bunch of old white people with a deadly virus, but what's the point if he is broke? The guy isn't defined by the hate he can spread, or the division he can do, his self image is based on money, and he has none.
You see Steve Mnuchin? I think he gets as thin as the skin on the dollar bubble they're inflating. He is soooo skinny now. He knows its all gonna pop. You can see him wasting away.
They're all churning out the hate on auto pilot. I don't think its fun for them, they just don't know what else to do when its all going wrong.
Obama was always going to be a difficult act to follow. Restored confidence on the dollar, united the world around the US. How do you follow that? Spew hate on Twitter?? Nobody hangs on his words like they did on Obama, even Twitter now adds a 'parental bullshit advisory' on his tweets.
"This 73 year old wanker (not fact checked) has managed to lie and cheat through his life to get himself rich"
Actually, his initial wealth was his daddy's money. Which he lost. Trump is living proof of that old adage "The fastest way to make a small fortune is to start with a large one". Hell, the idiot even managed to lose money owning a casino!
No one seems to know what the illegal act was though. When being arrested, the arresting officer is supposed to tell you why you being arrested as well as reading you your rights. From the live video feed, neither of those appear to have happened. The reporter has since said that the arresting officer said he was "only following orders".
So was Eichmann. It sometimes seems that post WW2 Prussian mentality has sprung up in the US police.
I remember a talk by an Army officer about conditions in Iraq in which he mentioned in passing that the rules of engagement were so strict that soldiers had less discretion on the use of lethal force than civilian police in England.
Sorry I can't come up with some penetrating comment, but that's basically how I feel.
Again note they are not stopping you reading anything.That exaggeration alone qualifies him and his supports as WAB's.
Twitter are just pointing out that what you're reading is highly suspicious, if not an outright lie.
Given the astonishing reverence in which the Office of the President is held by Merkins (It must be true, he wrote it) that seems rather a mild comment.
... anything very much at all, apparently.
Given that Trump has an entire national TV station devoted to spreading his every lunatic utterance, his problem is not that he does not have the technical apparatus to communicate to the masses.
Lines one, two and three for Sanguma ... Line one are lawyers claiming to represent the fine citizens of Nebraska asking for a retraction. Line two is similar from the Piltdown area of East Sussex. Line three is a preemptive call from the Order of Florida Man who make absolutely no claim on the genetics of the idiot in chief, despite the fact that he shoots himself in the foot on a daily basis.
Thanks for the laugh. I gave you an upvote for it.
Piltdown Man
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man
The Piltdown Man was a paleoanthropological fraud in which bone fragments were presented as the fossilised remains of a previously unknown early human.
Nebraska Man
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebraska_Man
They then passed the tooth along to William K. Gregory and Dr. Milo Hellman, who agreed that the tooth belonged to an anthropoid ape more closely related to humans than to other apes. [...] According to these discovered pieces, the tooth belonged neither to a man nor an ape, but to a fossil of an extinct species of peccary called Prosthennops serus.
The author wrote:
On Wednesday, coincidentally, the US officially surpassed 100,000 COVID-19 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University, meaning, if all figures are to be believed, America is home to 28 per cent of global coronavirus deaths and four per cent of the world's population.
And more than 40 million people in the States have claimed unemployment benefits during the pandemic. ®
Updated to add
Overnight, Twitter hid a Trump tweet, posted amid civil unrest in Minneapolis and elsewhere over the killing of George Floyd by a police officer, that said the US military should open fire on people on American soil. The tweet "violated the Twitter Rules about glorifying violence," according to the social network.
First the comment about COVID was completely off topic. I work for a global company. So far in the US none of our employees have succumbed to COVID. However in the UK, I know of 1 death of a young coworker due to COVID. How the UK handled COVID was abysmal. So why publish this fact on an article about Trump's EO? (Clearly its to evoke an emotion and shows bias)
The second thing about Twitter.
Anyone with any common sense would see that these officers crossed the line and should be charged. This is one of a handful of cases where there is evidence that the officers broke the law. Yet we have rioting in the streets. Note, this isn't just people doing a protest march or hanging outside the police station. But people actually looting and causing mayhem. Some armed.
Do I agree with Trump's tweet? No. However that doesn't mean his tweet should have been censored.
BTW, US Military can't operate within the US. National Guard troops can. That's something lost on many, including Trump.
@DoctorPaul
By Kent State, I assume that you are referring to the Ohio National Guard. Most of the time National Guard units are under state control, though the federal government can put them into US service.
@Miketfr
During the 1967 riots in Detroit, the Michigan National Guard went in to restore order. As was common at least then with National Guard units, they were under-trained. I don't think the Guard then had training in riot control, and certainly their fire discipline was deplorable. Some poor guy was shot when he lit a cigarette while standing in a dark window.
The US then sent troops for the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions. I doubt they had been trained in riot control, but they were otherwise far better trained, and they improved matters as the Guard had not.
It is certainly unusual for regular troops to be used for such purposes, but it does happen.
Do you really fail to see the link between the death count and the tweets concerned? The proposal and fight over mail-in ballots is a result of a risky situation. The death count helps to indicate why the situation is risky. Without the high death count, there would not be a situation leading to the call for mailing ballots. Without that call, there wouldn't be this argument among political figures about the legitimacy of doing that. Without that argument, the tweets that are the subject of the article would not exist.
Public Health is a local and State matter. This is why we see a NYC Commissioner of Health and hear so much from DeBlasio (Kaiser Wilhelm) and Cuomo on the matter. If you want to see badly handled SARS-Cov-2 response, look no further than NY and NJ. Those two states alone skew the US statistics massively.
Cuomo sentenced old people to death by ordering aged care facilities to re-admit Covid19 positive patients, despite thos facilities being ill-equipped to deal with infectious disease. 5-10,000 dead. For this knowing and despicable act he should be publicly pilloried and run out of public life forever
Is this the same D Trump that wanted to ban people replying to his tweets because he did not like what they said.....one rule for him and another for the masses.
Twitter / Facebook, etc. are full of people from all sides saying whatever they like.....but there needs to be some rules for ALL to abide by, otherwise society just falls apart and it is everyone for themselves. Now I am not religious (unlike Mr D Trump....cough, I believe him!), but I am sure that there is no religion that says "I am alright, so sod you", but I could be wrong!
Well yes.
Look at who signed the order.
He reminds me of that unflattering term for managers as "Nappies"
Like such people he's full of s**t and always hanging round the back of an issue to make some cheap points.
I think this is what Trump is hoping for.
The people who post vile, hateful and usually wildly inaccurate information are the ones who have most to gain from this. They don't want people encouraged to check their sources.
Usually the more sane among us are happy for people to question and have debate about opinions.
If this ever happens (i don't believe it will) expect a lot more outright lies and misinformation on the internet. You won't be allowed to question it.
I also agree with someone elses comment, his inital tweet wasn't amended, or deleted. It was just suggested that you might want to check the facts. If that scares him so much - you have to wonder why....
How can you get both sides of a story if you are being forcefed the side of the narrative that the people who control you want you to hear, the germans thought hitler was brilliant in the 1930`s and if you were a german during these times he probably looked good coming out of a war. so if we allow all social media companies to carry on pushing just the side that either the bots programmers or the socially inept call centre workers point of views are and be hidden from the world just because you are different and may need a little more proof.
"How can you get both sides of a story"
That's exactly Trump's endgame, to make sure you can't. Classic dictator tactics, he has denounced most of the news media as "fake" and told his supporters to get their news from him, which worked as long as Twitter was playing ball and not treating Trump's account the same as all the others
Such bastions of freedom and democracy like Putin, Xi, Kim, Khomeini, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Park, Peron. etc executed (key word) this sort of malarkey. The MAGAts cry out about how their rights, both real and imagined, are being taken away by the "libtards" but they say nothing when the ornageman does it. Hypocrisy? Ignorance" Bigotry" Old fashioned stupidity? Take your pick.
But the nonsensical order doesn't really do much at all. As Eric Goldman, law professor at Santa Clara University, put it in a phone interview with The Register, "It's political theater."
Political Theater is tRump's stock-in-trade. It is the only thing he does well (for small values of 'well').
Anonymous because a lot of people's brains short circuit at "I agree with Trump" but I had the same thought. Twitter, FB and the like exercise a lot of editorial control in practice, acknowledging that and getting a handle on it isn't a bad thing regardless of what sparked it or who did it. Social media is still young and turbulent, I think this is actually a reasonable part of the feeling out process despite how it came about.
If you disagree, imagine <politician you hate here> had instead chosen to quietly become the referee of what's allowed on one of the large platforms and tell me again you disagree. Because they control the entire conversation, not just what they and their reporters publish like traditional media, even a subtle agenda could be disastrous.
Would a president of the USA push for an amendment to the constitution of the USA that requires a presidential candidate to take a sociopath test - and be declared as /not/ a sociopath - before being allowed to be their president? I'm sure the current president could pass, of course ;)
..or were around in the early days of the WWW back in the '90's when online companies first got it.
Or are aware of the mountain of case law since, well 1934, on the subject.
In a nutshell , once a comms company is no longer a simple transmitter of information from source to destination, but starts making editorial decisions on the information it transmits, its no longer a Common Carrier. And a shed load of FCC and other regulation kick in. And a world of pain from essentially unlimited legal liabilities.
Twitter and Facebook both crossed that line in the last year or two and will soon discover the hard way just how wide ranging the lawsuits they will be hit with will be. Its going to be tort lawyers / class action lawsuit heaven as social media companies becomes personally liable for absolutely *everything* that is posted on their platforms once they lose the Common Carrier Exemption.
Maybe the guys at Twitter should have asked the old hands at AT&T's legal dept just how many battles they fought over the decades to make sure they never did anything that might jeopardize their common carrier exemption status. Even the Consent Decree battle was less important in the bigger scheme of thing.
Nice rant. Unfortunately for your argument, the big IntraWebTubes AntiSocialMedjia companies are not considered common carriers, and never have been. (ISPs were, for awhile, in the US anyway ... and probably will be again, but that's not what we are talking about here.)
Sorry but that is shoddy reporting. The tweet did not say that and misrepresenting it like that demonstrates that The Register is putting clicks ahead of accuracy; a woeful lack of integrity and demeaning the journalistic credibility of the entire site.
Twitter hasn't taken action against people that actually are glorifying violence, by supporting or even encouraging the riots and looting; claiming that the tweet in question is in breach of their glorifying violence rules is a clearly political act in itself. Their choice, but The Register should not be joining them, let alone creating its own false news.
Excuse me? Are you hard of reading, Cederic? The section of the tweet referenced said "Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts."
How could you possibly interpret that as anything other than as ElReg reported it?
Odd how he manages to drop these 'dog-whistle' quotes (not for the first time) in his tweets yet somehow it's explained away as meaning exactly the opposite.
Where does the phrase 'When the looting starts, the shooting starts' come from?
"There is only one way to handle looters and arsonists during a riot and that is to shoot them on sight. I've let the word filter down: When the looting starts the shooting starts," Headley said, according to a New York Times report from 1970.
On Friday afternoon, Trump tried to defend his remarks, tweeting, "Looting leads to shooting, and that’s why a man was shot and killed in Minneapolis on Wednesday night - or look at what just happened in Louisville with 7 people shot. I don’t want this to happen, and that’s what the expression put out last night means...."
He probably doesn't want to see it happen in the same way that John Gotti doesn't want to your family get hurt, i.e. it's a threat.
He's also stated that he didn't know of that reference.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-calls-george-floyds-death-a-terrible-thing-2020-05-29/
Perhaps you can agree with him that George Floyd's death is a terrible thing?
Me, I agree with Barack Obama, that people that burn down buildings and loot premises are criminals and thugs.
https://nypost.com/2015/04/28/obama-calls-baltimore-rioters-criminals-and-thugs/
Cederic, you seem to be either the most gullible person posting to ElReg, or a worse troll than our bob. Either way, what do you think you are going to accomplish here? Do you really think that you are going to change the mind of anybody reading your words? Or do you just find it fun to post garbage and potentially waste peoples time?
Gullible? I don't get that. Help me out here, who's the gullible person? The one that reads something and understands its context, or the one that goes "I hate this man, he's evil, I'm going to believe this misrepresentation of what he said even though it makes no logical sense and goes against all of the available evidence"?
I'm not expecting to change anybody's mind. I just don't inhabit echo chambers. I disagree with the interpretations and representations being posted, and post evidence to support my disagreement. Something I notice that all the people downvoting me and personally attacking me are not doing.
Hitler was nice to his dog. And Goebbels was his Reich Minister of Propaganda.
Trump's tweet isn't a misinterpretation by anyone than you. It's a quote from 1967 Miami police Chief Walter Headley. Trump, and every other white American, knew what he meant.
Sad, aren't they.
I also have a history of being misquoted and attributed statements that I never uttered and motives that don't exist.
It's weak minded people who think they can mind read and impose their own confirmation bias on what they hear, subtly changing the words and meaning in their heads to resolve their own cogdis.
I truly understand you.
This post has been deleted by its author
Where at any point in this discussion did I say I admire Trump? The only politician whose views I've said I agree with is Barack Obama.
I don't need help. I'm not the person struggling to read, comprehend or think. I'm just not standing quietly by while others lie about someone else. Maybe autism helps with this, that innate sense of fairness, the ability to think with logic rather than just emotion. But hey, at least I'm not making personal attacks.
Actually you are. You just don't know it.
In some fields the ability to literally only read what's on the page is an asset.Proof reading instruction manuals comes to mind. Or being a criminal defense lawyer so you can ignore what are clearly implied threats being made by your client would be another (which is sort of what is happening in your defense of Trump)
In this environment you're inability to infer, to read between the lines, is a major handicap.
I have a lifetime of experience of being wrongly told that I mean X when I say Y, by people that think they can read between the lines, that tell others lies about me as a result. You'll have to forgive me if I've started countering this behaviour where I see it.
If reading between the lines means pretending that someone said something that they didn't, that they've subsequently stated is not what they meant (as well as not what they said) and that conflicts with their actual actions, I'll keep my so-called handicap thanks.
I'm slightly deaf too, would you like to mock me for that as well?
> No, it's not a handicap. Reading between the lines is confirmation bias by another name.
The inability to read between the lines, gain inference, or observe from another point of view (empathy) are signs of sociopathy.
Well I hope you're getting the help you need.
So you're a British Trump admirer. You don't think Covid 19 is also some kind of conspiracy as well by any chance?
Again those "clarifications" don't mean what you think they do.
"I would show empathy but..."
For those readers who don't get the reference (I suppose you may be thinking that was a "joke") lack of empathy is a marker symptom for autism spectrum disorder or antisocial personality disorder.
Now putting a bunch of both groups together to see how they interact would provide some interesting (and potentially hilarious) viewing.
You should probably quit while you're behind.
"The whole world has had enough of Trumpy's meaningless rants and ramblings."
Be careful what you wish for ... If that's reason enough to nuke his so-called "social" media accounts, said "social" media would have to get rid of most of their more vocal subscribers. Even the ones whose rants and ramblings you personally agree with.
"May you live in interesting times." —NRAACS
I would be happy to see the back of any rants and ramblings regardless of side even if I agree with the side they are on. It's the reason that, despite being an atheist, I detest Richard Dawkins.
Social media has given a platform to the most irrational, the loudest and most extreme views and the extremists, who know it well, are leveraging it to the harm of us all. Though I personally do not use Facebook, I'm uncomfortably aware that conspiracy theory nonsense turns up in my wife's "feed" (is that the word?) and on several occasions I have had to painstakingly prove to her that there are people of her own political views who spout nonsense. The facts of what is going on are bad enough without people on all sides making things up for clicks.
It's even affecting print journalism - Ian Hislop just forensically took to pieces the entire Cummings story on HIGNFY, including the Spectator publishing a deliberately misleading article by his wife. And once upon a time the Spectator was worth reading.
Says the man(?) posting AC.
Freedom of speech.
Not just for nice people.
But let's stop this. Twitter didn't censor his tweet. They simply put a fact check label on it warning it's probably BS.
The actual removal of the second one is at the sites discretion. Just like every other social media site.
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