Social media censorship roundup

[BigV]

Oooookaaaay..... let's /keep/ talking about this.

At 12 a.m. Thursday, President Trump retweeted a video in which a supporter says, “The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.”

At 12:53 a.m. Friday, he followed this up by referring to riots in Minneapolis and saying, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

From The Washington Post

Twitter for its part, flagged the tweet in a way that hid the tweet from at:realdonaldtrump and required the reader to click a link to reveal it. The action by Twitter also prevented anyone from liking the tweet or retweeting it without comment. Stymied by this, the same tweets were posted by the at:POTUS account, and they received the same treatment by Twitter.

Twitter appeared unfazed by the threat. This morning it flagged a tweet by Mr. Trump suggesting that protesters in Minneapolis could be shot — a message that the company said violated policies against glorifying violence. (The tweet, which is still online, is accessible only after clicking through a warning message.) That came after the social network fact-checked a tweet this week by Mr. Trump about mail-in voting — “we knew from a comms perspective that all hell would break loose,” a Twitter executive explained — and has continued labeling tweets by others as potentially misleading.

From The New York Times


Twitter Places Warning on a Trump Tweet, Saying It Glorified Violence

The president’s tweet, which implied that protesters in Minneapolis could be shot, could not be viewed without reading a brief notice, and users were blocked from liking or replying to it.
....

These actions by Trump... Are they desperation? Ignorance? True belief? wtf? I think this fits perfectly with Trump's past behavior where he's said "Don't believe what you hear and see, only believe what I tell you." (I paraphrase). He and those he's gathered around him reflexively revert to their mother tongue under stress: doublespeak.

First Amendment scholars said Friday morning that Mr. Trump and his allies had it backward and that he was the one trying to stifle speech that clashes with his own views.

“Fundamentally this dispute is about whether Twitter has the right to disagree with, criticize, and respond to the president,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “Obviously, it does. It is remarkable and truly chilling that the president and his advisers seem to believe otherwise.”

This fight with Twitter is definitely stressful for Trump.