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Comment by tboyd47 | Hacker News Reader

They probably have been doing this for a while, and this was just the first time they got called out for it.

Regulatory action has been in the works for some time. Whether or not it goes through depends only on politics. The mainstream media already doesn't like them for eating their lunch. Twitter has nothing to lose by doing this. It will damage Facebook's brand identity as being a "free speech" platform, but that's about as factual as Google's "don't be evil" brand or Apple's "privacy first" brand.

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Actually, Twitter has one massive thing to lose: Section 230. Already, senators are taking this as the perfect reason to repeal or reform 230, and that would directly impact twitter.

Remember how there were hearings about 230 just two weeks ago? Twitter just shot themselves and their arguments for 230 in the foot with this. Which again begs the question from an investor's point of view: What did you expect was going to happen? Did you seriously not think this would affect the 230 debate?

Repeal of section 230 would probably result in Twitter blocking a lot more things than they do now.

Which is why we need reform: 230 liability protection needs to be extended only to those entities that only remove illegal content and nothing else, period.

So if I ran a chess forum, I could not remove posts about horse racing without losing my section 230 protection? Or posts advertising boner pills? Once I decide to allow people to post on my forum, for any reason, I have to allow every single post that does not violate the law, or I lose 230 protection?

Which hopefully would spell the end of Twitter, in a shocking positive twist for human civilization.

Perhaps Twitter is being set up as a sacrificial lamb to quell the Techlash. In that case, I'm wrong.

But I don't think Section 230 will be repealed. The US government doesn't want to destroy the tech giants. It wants to use them to expand its global influence.

Ya, they have. Every major social network censors constantly and they get called out all the time but because the censoring favors a liberal agenda the mainstream media doesn't want to talk about it because they're also hugely biased (as are tech companies). Read Left Turn by Tim Groseclose or watch one of many people who talk about. I always like Larry Elder's perspective [1][2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJAQ2QB6WVQ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-CugJieq2I

Yeah, remember when they didn’t let anything about Wikileaks get shared on their platforms?

This time they went too far though. Banning Alex Jones? He's a crackpot. Banning Mila Yannipopoulus? He trolled people. Censoring Trump tweets? Ok... Censoring the very much anticipated October surprise involving Hunter Biden? No way.

I don't think anyone either on the left or the right thinks this move was a good idea. It will just make the Hunter Biden story blow up even harder.

Streisand effect in 3, 2, 1...

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