Thoughts On Trump's Executive Order Against Twitter
Note: This was originally written in late-May to early-June.
On Thursday, May 28th, days after Twitter added a "fact check" to his tweet about mail-in voting leading to voter fraud, President Donald Trump finally dropped the hammer on Silicon Valley by signing an executive order basically revoking the liability protections the social media platforms and all websites in general have under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, saying that the social media sites claim to be platforms but they act as publishers instead, which is completely true. And Twitter ended up proving him right 24 hours later when they falsely flagged a tweet for "promoting violence" for Trump saying "When the looting starts, the shooting starts" in response to the latest race riots over yet another "unarmed" black man dying in police custody, this time in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
I do have a few thoughts on this. Ultimately, I agree with President Trump doing this even if this is a double-edged sword.
First off, this needed to be done. The internet has expanded the public square not just exponentially, but infinitely. The social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube(and MySpace before them) have furthered that expansion. With that expansion, Silicon Valley has amassed a lot of power when it comes to politics, commerce, entertainment, etc., especially over the last ten years. Perhaps too much power as these companies have made billions of dollars over the years as technology has become more and more advanced.
Basically, these companies are part of the public square whether they like it or not. The US court system has ruled that President Trump's Twitter account is a public space where he couldn't block anyone.
Second, this should have been done much sooner, like in 2018 after Alex Jones was banned by every one of the Silicon Valley websites just for being Alex Jones. Any excuse they made for banning him is just that, an excuse. This was a prime example of the social media sites having too much power where the CEOs of these "private" companies(that just happen to be publicly traded on the stock markets) can collude with each other and decide on the haves and havenots on their public platforms(since they happen to live near each other in the same neighborhood in their Silicon Valley fiefdom in a tiny section of California). Even though Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has stated that having a presence on social media is a right.
A private company offering a public platform to anyone that wants to post their thoughts on a particular topic has no business telling the public what they can and cannot say on those platforms. Especially when these same companies are colluding with foreign governments to censor people and even put people in jail for "offensive" posts on those platforms. And I'm not talking about China or Saudi Arabia, I'm referring to the wannabe fascist tinpot dictators like New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardean, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. And Great Britain as well, although hopefully British Prime Minister Boris Johnson will try to overturn some of their "hate speech" laws now that Great Britain has left the German Fourth Reich that is the European Union.
Even though the rules on these sites are not being applied in a fair and equal manner to every user regardless of their personal symbolic status, it needs to be pointed out that it isn't just conversatives like Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopolous(the original canary in the coalmine on Twitter because of Leslie Jones), Laura Loomer(Facebook/Twitter), Lauren Southern(Patreon for being on a boat trying to block illegal immigrants from entering Europe), Gavin MacInnes(Facebook), Tommy Robinson(all major sites like Jones), Paul Joseph Watson(Facebook), and Owen Benjamin(Twitter for telling David Hogg to grow a pair) that are being targeted and banned from these social media sites for what amounts to be bullshit reasons. Moderates, classical liberals, and even people on the left were banned or suspended under these same rules, which are enforced and defined the same way the US Supreme Court defined pornography, the "I know it when I see it" argument.
The biggest example is feminist Meghan Murphy, who was suspended by Twitter and later banned for simply saying "Men aren't women" and doubling down on that statement because it violated their "hate speech" rules for "misgendering" transgender people. Murphy considers herself "trans-exclusionary", meaning that she doesn't believe that transgender women should be treated the same as biological women because trans women are biologically still men.
Another example is Carl Benjamin(aka Sargon of Akkad), a British YouTuber who calls himself a classical liberal and a liberalist. He was banned by Twitter for various trolling and shitposting(not for posting "I wouldn't even rape you" at Labour MP Jess Phillips, which has been misconstrued by the media and other far left nutjobs as a "rape threat" when it really was not) and by Patreon for saying that the alt-right white nationalists were acting like white n-words(using the actual word)(i.e. acting just like the very people they rail against).....on YouTube.....on a livestream as a guest on someone else's channel, even though the rules only apply to posting on Patreon.
And as another example of collusion, Patreon CFO Jacqueline Hart, who used to work at PayPal, allegedly got PayPal and another payment processor, Stripe, with help from a far left censorship group calling itself Sleeping Giants(a group that acts no different than the Parents Television Council and similar conservative groups, using the very same tactics as the PTC), to drop their support of SubscribeStar, a competing crowd-funding site that Benjamin went to after he was banned by Patreon and other content creators and people that support those content creators went to in either support of him or in protest against Patreon or both.
Not to mention these rules also target independent content creators because they challenge the narrative pushed by the political establishment and the corporate legacy mainstream news media. For example, Independent journalist Tim Pool(who first became well known from covering the Occupy Wall Street protests and co-founded Vice News), who considers himself on the left but politically homeless because the Democrats have gone insane, was suspended by Facebook for posting the name of the alleged "whistleblower" Eric Ciaramella(which led to the boring Impeachment hearings) because both Facebook and YouTube considered posting the "whistleblower's" name as a "threat" on that person's life. Because of that, not only did Pool have videos deleted by YouTube where he mentioned the "whistleblower's" name even though other people including US Senator Rand Paul directly mentioned Ciaramella, YouTube even deleted a video that C-SPAN posted where Paul mentioned the whistleblower's name and Pool also had a video deleted by YouTube where he reported on Project Veritas' expose of Pinterest being biased against pro-life conservative groups.
As I've stated on numerous occasions, censorship ultimately creates more interest in the person or product being censored. I've mentioned Married...With Children becoming Fox's first hit show about 30 years ago after some nutjob tried to get the show banned. Also, censorship is not only arguably an act of violence against the person being censored, it creates more violence. Studies have shown that violent crime drops when violent content is released. And censorship only confirms a person's beliefs by driving that person underground or into an echo chamber where everybody is of the same mind. As George R.R. Martin said, "When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say."
And besides, these companies never needed these stupid rules in the first place, since they all have the block button or the mute button in some capacity. What's the point of even having those two options? If you don't care about what I say or do, then why should what I say or do even bother you? And vice versa, if I don't care what you think, then why should what you think even bother me in the first place?
For example, if Anita Sarkessian truly didn't care what Carl Benjamin thought about her, then she should never let anything Sargon has ever said about her ever bother her. When she pointed him out sitting in the audience at a panel she was part of at VidCon in 2017, it showed that she does care what he and other opponents of her say about her and didn't like it.
Third, this should have gone much farther than just the social media websites. The executive order should have basically been applied to almost the entire business of the internet since they all engage in censorship in some form or another, specifically focusing on these types of businesses....
-The web domain hosts like GoDaddy and CloudFlare(the latter pulled the Daily Stormer off their registry shortly after Charlottesville just because the CEO of CloudFlare woke up one morning and decided to just do it on a whim)
-The payment processing sites like PayPal and Stripe
-The crowd-funding sites like Patreon, Kickstarter, and GoFundMe
-Apple and Google's app stores
-The credit card companies, specifically MasterCard(since Patreon admitted to the guy that runs the site Jihad Watch that MasterCard pressured them to delete his account for no legitimate reason)
-The banks, specifically Chase Bank(Chase has closed the checking accounts of certain conservatives because of their politics)
Basically, certain types of businesses should have to remain politically neutral in how they do business at all times. It wouldn't be right if your landlord shut off the water or electricity to your apartment even though you almost always pay your rent on time because he or she heard about a private conversation you had with a neighbor and didn't like something that was said in that conversation, even if it wasn't about the landlord themselves.
However, the reason I feel it's a double-edged sword is because of something I mentioned in my 2019 Fuck You List. That something being Sacha Baron Cohen's speech to the Anti Defamation League late last year where Ali G/Borat/Bruno called for Mark Zuckerberg and other social media CEOs to be thrown in jail for hosting content he personally disagrees with.
Taking away the social media websites' immunity from liability is opening Pandora's Box so to speak. By arguably making it easier for conservatives like Alex Jones to sue the social media sites to get their accounts on the sites reinstated(by suing for defamation of character), it also means that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube could now be held liable if somebody livestreams themselves committing a crime, whether's it something like that guy that murdered Roanoke, Virginia TV reporter Alison Parker and her cameraman Adam Ward live on Facebook(and on air on their TV station while they were filming live) in June 2015. Or like Gavin Long murdering three police officers and wounding three others in Baton Rouge in July 2016 after being allegedly inspired by the YouTube channel The Young Turks(and watching Micah Xavier Johnson beat him to the punch earlier that month in attacking and killing several police officers in Dallas, as Johnson was allegedly inspired by Long himself). Or even livestreaming their own mass shooting like in Christchurch last year.
As much as I don't want more frivolous lawsuits clogging up the court system, as I stated at the beginning, this executive order was a necessary move even if it didn't go far enough and should have been done much earlier.
Our country was founded on the principle that everyone should be able to speak freely without fear of persecution or even prosecution. When those fears are allowed to exist, then people can only express their opposition with anger and hatred, which could eventually lead to violence.
Point is, if it is fair to say that the Christian baker in Colorado should have decorated the cake the way the gay couple wanted it even if the decorations violated the baker's religious beliefs as a cost of doing business in the United States of America, then it is equally fair to say that YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites should allow anyone whether they're an American citizen or not to post whatever's on their mind without consequence(banned, suspended, or even fired from their job because of pressure by the virtual lynch mobs of people who deliberately look for anything to be outraged by because they have a pathological need to be offended and outraged) under that same cost of doing business in the United States of America.
Our country's founding principles should be protected at all times and not just from the government. Private companies should not be holding the public square hostage because the billionaire authoritarian oligarchs running those companies want to be tyrannical moral busybodies.
It's time for America and our so-called allies to embrace an Internet Bill of Rights that expands the reach of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights to the Internet and the companies that help to keep it running smoothly.
On Thursday, May 28th, days after Twitter added a "fact check" to his tweet about mail-in voting leading to voter fraud, President Donald Trump finally dropped the hammer on Silicon Valley by signing an executive order basically revoking the liability protections the social media platforms and all websites in general have under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, saying that the social media sites claim to be platforms but they act as publishers instead, which is completely true. And Twitter ended up proving him right 24 hours later when they falsely flagged a tweet for "promoting violence" for Trump saying "When the looting starts, the shooting starts" in response to the latest race riots over yet another "unarmed" black man dying in police custody, this time in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
I do have a few thoughts on this. Ultimately, I agree with President Trump doing this even if this is a double-edged sword.
First off, this needed to be done. The internet has expanded the public square not just exponentially, but infinitely. The social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube(and MySpace before them) have furthered that expansion. With that expansion, Silicon Valley has amassed a lot of power when it comes to politics, commerce, entertainment, etc., especially over the last ten years. Perhaps too much power as these companies have made billions of dollars over the years as technology has become more and more advanced.
Basically, these companies are part of the public square whether they like it or not. The US court system has ruled that President Trump's Twitter account is a public space where he couldn't block anyone.
Second, this should have been done much sooner, like in 2018 after Alex Jones was banned by every one of the Silicon Valley websites just for being Alex Jones. Any excuse they made for banning him is just that, an excuse. This was a prime example of the social media sites having too much power where the CEOs of these "private" companies(that just happen to be publicly traded on the stock markets) can collude with each other and decide on the haves and havenots on their public platforms(since they happen to live near each other in the same neighborhood in their Silicon Valley fiefdom in a tiny section of California). Even though Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has stated that having a presence on social media is a right.
A private company offering a public platform to anyone that wants to post their thoughts on a particular topic has no business telling the public what they can and cannot say on those platforms. Especially when these same companies are colluding with foreign governments to censor people and even put people in jail for "offensive" posts on those platforms. And I'm not talking about China or Saudi Arabia, I'm referring to the wannabe fascist tinpot dictators like New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardean, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. And Great Britain as well, although hopefully British Prime Minister Boris Johnson will try to overturn some of their "hate speech" laws now that Great Britain has left the German Fourth Reich that is the European Union.
Even though the rules on these sites are not being applied in a fair and equal manner to every user regardless of their personal symbolic status, it needs to be pointed out that it isn't just conversatives like Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopolous(the original canary in the coalmine on Twitter because of Leslie Jones), Laura Loomer(Facebook/Twitter), Lauren Southern(Patreon for being on a boat trying to block illegal immigrants from entering Europe), Gavin MacInnes(Facebook), Tommy Robinson(all major sites like Jones), Paul Joseph Watson(Facebook), and Owen Benjamin(Twitter for telling David Hogg to grow a pair) that are being targeted and banned from these social media sites for what amounts to be bullshit reasons. Moderates, classical liberals, and even people on the left were banned or suspended under these same rules, which are enforced and defined the same way the US Supreme Court defined pornography, the "I know it when I see it" argument.
The biggest example is feminist Meghan Murphy, who was suspended by Twitter and later banned for simply saying "Men aren't women" and doubling down on that statement because it violated their "hate speech" rules for "misgendering" transgender people. Murphy considers herself "trans-exclusionary", meaning that she doesn't believe that transgender women should be treated the same as biological women because trans women are biologically still men.
Another example is Carl Benjamin(aka Sargon of Akkad), a British YouTuber who calls himself a classical liberal and a liberalist. He was banned by Twitter for various trolling and shitposting(not for posting "I wouldn't even rape you" at Labour MP Jess Phillips, which has been misconstrued by the media and other far left nutjobs as a "rape threat" when it really was not) and by Patreon for saying that the alt-right white nationalists were acting like white n-words(using the actual word)(i.e. acting just like the very people they rail against).....on YouTube.....on a livestream as a guest on someone else's channel, even though the rules only apply to posting on Patreon.
And as another example of collusion, Patreon CFO Jacqueline Hart, who used to work at PayPal, allegedly got PayPal and another payment processor, Stripe, with help from a far left censorship group calling itself Sleeping Giants(a group that acts no different than the Parents Television Council and similar conservative groups, using the very same tactics as the PTC), to drop their support of SubscribeStar, a competing crowd-funding site that Benjamin went to after he was banned by Patreon and other content creators and people that support those content creators went to in either support of him or in protest against Patreon or both.
Not to mention these rules also target independent content creators because they challenge the narrative pushed by the political establishment and the corporate legacy mainstream news media. For example, Independent journalist Tim Pool(who first became well known from covering the Occupy Wall Street protests and co-founded Vice News), who considers himself on the left but politically homeless because the Democrats have gone insane, was suspended by Facebook for posting the name of the alleged "whistleblower" Eric Ciaramella(which led to the boring Impeachment hearings) because both Facebook and YouTube considered posting the "whistleblower's" name as a "threat" on that person's life. Because of that, not only did Pool have videos deleted by YouTube where he mentioned the "whistleblower's" name even though other people including US Senator Rand Paul directly mentioned Ciaramella, YouTube even deleted a video that C-SPAN posted where Paul mentioned the whistleblower's name and Pool also had a video deleted by YouTube where he reported on Project Veritas' expose of Pinterest being biased against pro-life conservative groups.
As I've stated on numerous occasions, censorship ultimately creates more interest in the person or product being censored. I've mentioned Married...With Children becoming Fox's first hit show about 30 years ago after some nutjob tried to get the show banned. Also, censorship is not only arguably an act of violence against the person being censored, it creates more violence. Studies have shown that violent crime drops when violent content is released. And censorship only confirms a person's beliefs by driving that person underground or into an echo chamber where everybody is of the same mind. As George R.R. Martin said, "When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say."
And besides, these companies never needed these stupid rules in the first place, since they all have the block button or the mute button in some capacity. What's the point of even having those two options? If you don't care about what I say or do, then why should what I say or do even bother you? And vice versa, if I don't care what you think, then why should what you think even bother me in the first place?
For example, if Anita Sarkessian truly didn't care what Carl Benjamin thought about her, then she should never let anything Sargon has ever said about her ever bother her. When she pointed him out sitting in the audience at a panel she was part of at VidCon in 2017, it showed that she does care what he and other opponents of her say about her and didn't like it.
Third, this should have gone much farther than just the social media websites. The executive order should have basically been applied to almost the entire business of the internet since they all engage in censorship in some form or another, specifically focusing on these types of businesses....
-The web domain hosts like GoDaddy and CloudFlare(the latter pulled the Daily Stormer off their registry shortly after Charlottesville just because the CEO of CloudFlare woke up one morning and decided to just do it on a whim)
-The payment processing sites like PayPal and Stripe
-The crowd-funding sites like Patreon, Kickstarter, and GoFundMe
-Apple and Google's app stores
-The credit card companies, specifically MasterCard(since Patreon admitted to the guy that runs the site Jihad Watch that MasterCard pressured them to delete his account for no legitimate reason)
-The banks, specifically Chase Bank(Chase has closed the checking accounts of certain conservatives because of their politics)
Basically, certain types of businesses should have to remain politically neutral in how they do business at all times. It wouldn't be right if your landlord shut off the water or electricity to your apartment even though you almost always pay your rent on time because he or she heard about a private conversation you had with a neighbor and didn't like something that was said in that conversation, even if it wasn't about the landlord themselves.
However, the reason I feel it's a double-edged sword is because of something I mentioned in my 2019 Fuck You List. That something being Sacha Baron Cohen's speech to the Anti Defamation League late last year where Ali G/Borat/Bruno called for Mark Zuckerberg and other social media CEOs to be thrown in jail for hosting content he personally disagrees with.
Taking away the social media websites' immunity from liability is opening Pandora's Box so to speak. By arguably making it easier for conservatives like Alex Jones to sue the social media sites to get their accounts on the sites reinstated(by suing for defamation of character), it also means that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube could now be held liable if somebody livestreams themselves committing a crime, whether's it something like that guy that murdered Roanoke, Virginia TV reporter Alison Parker and her cameraman Adam Ward live on Facebook(and on air on their TV station while they were filming live) in June 2015. Or like Gavin Long murdering three police officers and wounding three others in Baton Rouge in July 2016 after being allegedly inspired by the YouTube channel The Young Turks(and watching Micah Xavier Johnson beat him to the punch earlier that month in attacking and killing several police officers in Dallas, as Johnson was allegedly inspired by Long himself). Or even livestreaming their own mass shooting like in Christchurch last year.
As much as I don't want more frivolous lawsuits clogging up the court system, as I stated at the beginning, this executive order was a necessary move even if it didn't go far enough and should have been done much earlier.
Our country was founded on the principle that everyone should be able to speak freely without fear of persecution or even prosecution. When those fears are allowed to exist, then people can only express their opposition with anger and hatred, which could eventually lead to violence.
Point is, if it is fair to say that the Christian baker in Colorado should have decorated the cake the way the gay couple wanted it even if the decorations violated the baker's religious beliefs as a cost of doing business in the United States of America, then it is equally fair to say that YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites should allow anyone whether they're an American citizen or not to post whatever's on their mind without consequence(banned, suspended, or even fired from their job because of pressure by the virtual lynch mobs of people who deliberately look for anything to be outraged by because they have a pathological need to be offended and outraged) under that same cost of doing business in the United States of America.
Our country's founding principles should be protected at all times and not just from the government. Private companies should not be holding the public square hostage because the billionaire authoritarian oligarchs running those companies want to be tyrannical moral busybodies.
It's time for America and our so-called allies to embrace an Internet Bill of Rights that expands the reach of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights to the Internet and the companies that help to keep it running smoothly.