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Comment by shostack | Hacker News Reader

The problem is with situations like where our President tweets gifs promoting violence against people and news organizations, or attempts to instigate nuclear war via Tweet. Trump is obviously a gold mine for Twitter right now from both a growth and ad revenue standpoint (not even getting into the bot side of things), so they have a very vested interest in looking the other way.

There's also a lot of dangerous precedent that could be set if they were to block the POTUS.

So do we just say "no violent speech unless you've somehow managed to get elected"?

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> There's also a lot of dangerous precedent that could be set if they were to block the POTUS.

What would that be? If anything I’d think that would be a good thing that no one would be above the rules.

It’s not like he doesn’t have other communication methods.

He could go and join Gab with all the other scum.

Would you support banning Obama for creating war with Assad, if he commented about it on Twitter?

I don't deal in hypotheticals. However I think there is a big distinction between tweeting about a war vs. actively trying to instigate one via Tweet.

Obama instigated war with Assad. If he was more active on Twitter he'd have done so via Twitter. It's not a huge stretch to imagine this.

I’ll be more direct - yes. I would absolutely support banning any person, regardless of station, from the platform for violating its rules. Trump would still be the president without Twitter, we’re not talking about impeachment here.

Would you be happy to exclude police, military and government from Twitter as a result of this? We license them to use force on our behalves.

I would absolutely support banning any person, regardless of station, from the platform for violating its rules.

And you're aware that includes all members of government, who are given a mandate for a monopoly on violence? Sorry this wasn't clear from your previous answer.

> The problem is with situations like where our President tweets gifs promoting violence against people and news organizations, or attempts to instigate nuclear war via Tweet.

That is spectacular. Our current culture war is THE reason why the Left is losing.

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