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Comment by stonogo | Hacker News Reader

Is it so hard to believe that this argument eventually actually prevailed within the organization?

Yes? I'd speculate the discussion in fact went something like this:

1. Trump supporters have been made an example of by keeping a bunch of them in jail for years for the crime of walking through a building;

2. There are enough court cases and grand juries outstanding against Trump that one of them will eventually get him and he'll be banned from running again;

3. In any case, a plausible primary rival for Trump has emerged (DeSantis) who has enough flaws of his own (anti-vaxx, anti-woke) that we can use him as a punching bag for the next few years;

4. Trump was allowed back on Twitter but is still playing on his own platform;

Therefore:

We can safely win some PR points by pretending to give a crap about freedom of expression by letting Trump back on our platform.

>the crime of walking through a building;

Why are you introducing inflammatory irrelevant misreprentations of the facts instead of addressing the point of my question?

That’s a reference to the dozens of Americans detained for over a year with no charges or due process. I would pick a different hill to die on.

Not that I believe you can show me anyone in prison for, or being charged with, "walking through a building," but the point of my question was whether it was impossible to believe that a change in policy at Meta could possibly be the result of good-faith reconsideration of the debate. Instead I got fanfiction with irrelevant agenda-fueled talking points. I'm not dying on any hills, I'm asking why the distraction instead of just considering the possibility that someone might agree with him. Getting this much flak about it is wild.

I addressed the point of your question directly by offering a plausible alternative explanation for what's going on here.

No, you wrote fanfiction about cartoon villains, without explaining at all why it's not even possible that this policy change could have come about through internal reconsideration of the merits of the ban within Meta. I don't know why you bothered, but it has nothing to do with my question.

> the crime of walking through a building

This is really the most nuanced understanding that you can muster

*who has enough flaws of his own (anti-vaxx, anti-woke)*

I don't love this correlation.

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