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Comment by wildmusings | Hacker News Reader

Okay, suppose I have an account, @potustweets, that just repeats the President’s statements. Are you going to ban that too? The words of the elected leader of the most powerful country of the world are by definition newsworthy and worthy of discussion.

Or are you implying that they are allowed, but only with commentary that condemns them? Then you are discriminating based on opinion. You are turning Twitter into a platform in which only certain opinions are allowed, even though the prohibited ones have the support of half of the United States. There is no way around this. You must allow the words of the President.

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You're not getting the point. They're not banning people, they're banning content. If the president tweeted: "Negros are inferior" that would be banned. If you tweeted "Negros are inferior", it doesn't really matter where you copied the tweet from, it will be banned too.

Hold on, you dont think it absurd that, by the logic in your post, if I retweet something as newsworthy as the president tweeting "negroes are bad", that I will be banned as well?

This is exactly the kind of myopic mindset that makes me worry about twitter censoring speech. Not to mention how easy such censorship is to abuse in order to, say, craft a narrative...

Freedom of speech doesn't protect you to spreading hate and fear. And, of course, there's a difference between tweeting "the president said <...>" and copying it verbatim.

If you want to bring freedom of speech into this as a legal concept, then it does protect “hate and fear”. Twitter is not bound by such legal requirements, but they do claim to allow open political discourse.

> If you want to bring freedom of speech into this as a legal concept, then it does protect “hate and fear”.

Legally, nothing protects "hate and fear". That defeats the entire purpose of having laws.

> Twitter is not bound by such legal requirements,

How so? Every company is bound by legal requirements.

1. You're totally wrong about free speech in America. In the United States, "hate speech" and fearmongering are totally legal and protected by the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has repeatedly and overwhelmingly so ruled.

2. Twitter is not bound by SUCH legal requirements, i.e. the requirement to allow freedom of speech among its users. The First Amendment only legally constrains the actions of the government (with very few exceptions, irrelevant here).

Repeat the statements - sure, ban them if they cross the line, even in quoting. You can always report on the statements instead. "Xyz harassed S, used slurs while taking about P, and ..." can be still talked about as things that happen without repeating the insults word-for-word.

If you're not reporting verbatim, you're adding an opinion.

True, but I don't think very relevant in this case. You can always link to a transcript on another service, or your own hosting, but it doesn't have to be on twitter. On the other hand, twitter adds an opinion almost by default. Which sentence you choose, how you cram it into 140 chars, what do you normally tweet about, where you tweeted from, who you are - these can be used to guess your opinion in almost every case.

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