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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

> a lot of mainstream political speech in the US and EU will be censored by these policies

Such as?

How many times have you seen Donald Trump called a Nazi? You dont think it a stretch to have twitter ban people for supporting certain policies? Twitter does seem to lean quite heavily left, does it not?

What about the rise of the right in the EU? What about "undesired" stories about actual problems, large and small scale, caused by migrants? Pretty important topic, I would think, yet we already have communities self censoring all over the internet, what is stopping twitter from applying these laughably nebulous rules to hide a side of discussion on this topic too?

Well, when the president praises Nazi's as 'very fine people', what do you expect? Also, when the European far-right whips up fear and bullshit beyond all proportion against groups of the EU's own citizens, what do you expect?

Yeah, like, those are actually the extremist groups with ties to terrorism that this kind policy is designed for. It’s not Twitter’s fault that mainstream politics has gone haywire... I mean maybe it is, but point stands

See, that's the sort of thing he's talking about precisely. You've already made your mind up about Trump's comment, and detracted the conversation entirely. Next thing you know, you and other Twitter users all make a big hoo-ha about a relatively benign comment because you think it's offensive, and decide to report it to Twitter for it to get banned. There is nothing hateful about his statements, and you really should re-evaluate your critical reasoning (or news sources, if you took them for their word on it rather than evaluating it yourself) if you think it does.

Here, just look at it in its entirety:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmaZR8E12bs

Case in point: "And I'm not talking about the neo-nazis and white supremacists, because they should be condemned totally"

Moving back. Political speech, commentary, opinions and debate need to be uncensored entirely, no exceptions, if you are to have a democratic society. Otherwise, you're just thought-policing people into thinking/acting into the norm. Sure, harassing someone over a political view won't fall under that, but the key qualifier there is "harassing". I'd go so-far as to say that any platform that is open to the public needs to be punished for silencing any sort of political speech. That is undemocratic, for lack of a better word. Because it shuts-down general debate.

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