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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

> effectiveness of deplatforming

... or the danger of giving unelected, unaccountable ideologues this much power over elements of our actual government.

Sorry, what's the "danger" here? He's still doing press conferences and the Republican party is still actively cancelling members who dare to disagree with him. Folks on Fox, one of the most mainstream media companies, still refer to him as the president. For being deplatformed, he's sure got helluva platform.

Bush and Obama are still called Mr. President by some people.

See https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/47505/what-is-t...

Yes, and it's appropriate to address Trump with the same honorific. But referring to him in present tense as "the president" is quite different than addressing him as "Mr. President", and it's the former that raises an eyebrow

Curiously, your link suggests that Trump liked people calling him Mr. Trump even while he was president, where that was seen as passive aggressive when done to Bush II.

Which is it that they’re actually doing? Do you have evidence to show that?

I don't at all see how making it slightly more inconvenient to see what a politician thinks is remotely a danger to your government.

25 years ago this wasn't an option at all. Now you get to see what he thinks any time you like, just by pressing a few buttons

This is an extremely interesting point. One could argue that the degree to which one is "platformed" is relative to the rest of society, but it's also inescapably true that if you wind the clock back 50, 100, 200 years, the level of platform someone like a presidential candidate had, was spectacularly lower.

It's weird how people are still acting as if Donald Trump has been effectively erased from existence by the all-powerful, Orwellian jackboot of the deplatformers, when here we all are in a thread whose OP is an article by NBC News covering his weblog.

I mean... we're all supposed to be terrified of the example that's been made of Trump but he seems to be doing just fine.

>this much power

... or the power that's been building for twenty years without a peep from right-leaning people who all of a sudden care about this topic because it finally affects them

What actual government do these carefully-unnamed ideologues have power over, exactly?

Unelected?

I don’t think the comment is in reference to Trump, it’s in reference to social media platforms.

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