Would also like to point to my previous point.
Just because I explained/clarifies my wife beating post does not make my original post ok. Same goes for trump.
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Would also like to point to my previous point.
Just because I explained/clarifies my wife beating post does not make my original post ok. Same goes for trump.
Lol @ that moderation.
Actually I'm gonna delete my last two posts because I have morals and I want to maintain civility. I was giving an illustrative example of a post that, based on a lot of people's interpretations, would have been something that deserved to get deleted or censored based on the rules of the site, even though I clarified after that I meant something different.
What people here are missing about Trump's statement (and why it was censored by Twitter) is that it was intentionally meant to be ambiguous to pander to a wider mass. Trump does this all the time, it's a concept called doublespeak which arose from the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. At the same time, he meant both the violent interpretation as well as the one he's taking now which is as a warning that looting leads to shooting. He does this specifically to appeal to the type of voters he has that actually are violent, while sowing the seeds of discord by his other interpretation because then it shifts the conversation onto arguing what he actually meant.
When Trump said that looting leads to shooting, in that context, he was jerking off all the violent types who actually wanted to see the military shoot on protesters. He was also strongly appealing to those people that actually wanted to shoot protesters. This is all extremely dangerous. Yes, obviously he posted clarification after, like he always does. That's the point.
There are so many examples of this. When he said that the second amendment people could do something about Clinton if she won. Just recently, when he retweeted this video that I mentioned, of a presenter saying "The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat": https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/...55459719892993
Do you sincerely think this pattern of doing the same thing over and over, where he says one violent and inflammatory thing that gets cheered on by the violent sub-population of his supporters, right before he goes "oh no ha ha i meant something else" is an accident? This is why it's dangerous. If there's a portion of supporters, say 10%, who are looking for validation of their violent tendencies from their cult leader, and he tweets out coded messages that absolutely can be interpreted as such, it's exactly the same as if he had outright told people to go shoot protesters. Because, what you're missing because you aren't a part of those circles, is that those same people are going to argue that he only "clarified" after the fact to save face for the politically correct crowd and that he was actually telling them that they should go out and get violent.
And yes, this rhetoric has had concrete effects. Hate crime has been rising in the US every year since Trump was elected: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46189391
Nah man, I agree with your point. That's why I said it really should've been phrased better.
People in a position of power have the responsibility to moderate their speech and avoid misunderstandings.
I get what you mean, and I agree.
I was really just talking about the wording in his original Tweet, not the contents.
Both of your examples of clarification checks are/were absurd. It is not even remotely fair to compare them to that tweet they are that outlandish lol.
It's up to us on an individual level to ensure speech is practiced efficiently whether it's speaking clearly or asking for clarification. I draw the line of speech policing when a body of power steps in and definitively tells you how you should interpret a message. It's absurd. It's been glaringly obvious for awhile now that what the users think a platform is for is so separate from the truth and it's only growing apart further as time goes by. Social media really did die in its ass the moment it got politicized with the boomer invasion of Facebook.
If people are worried about morons being manipulated by ominous vague words on the internet then perhaps vote in people that want to expand not only funding of education but the scope of it along with mental health. Being okay with a private company controlling speech in a medium unrivaled by anything else evidentially just exasperates things and personally speaking is wrong. Again it's the precedent it sets, not the content they are doing it to. The fact that it affects the political world is also very fucking concerning.
I'll put it out there that I'm ambivalent on Twitter censoring the tweet, only because I don't know if it'll backfire. I wonder if hiding the tweet accomplishes the intent of limiting the spread of encouragement of violence or if it'll just cause more people to be pissed.
I absolutely do think that Trump meant all of those possible interpretations by his tweet. It was intentionally ambiguous so that it means one thing to the violent subgroup of Trumpists, and another to the non-violent members as well as liberals who want to say Trump isn't that bad. If you have people applying the argument of "he was being sarcastic" or "he didn't mean that, he was just trying to play the media's game" to his original tweets where he says something ambiguous and potentially violent, what's to say there aren't people using those same statements towards his "clarifications"?
Do you mind addressing that point? Because I think we agree that Trump is a dumbass, he should pick his words better, or that his supporters/Americans as a whole should be smarter. But what are your thoughts on my point that Trump is intentionally choosing his words so that he can send out a violent message while maintaining plausible deniability for liberals and the media and to shift the argument towards his tone rather than the content of his message?
I don't have an opinion on if he is doing that consistently as I don't follow much of what he says. I can only look at this message.
If I were to assume he is double speaking, my first thought would be what does he achieve by sending out this message? I can only logically conclude this. It's a political minefield this situation and any perceived misuse of force, even if it's justifiable use of force, can dog him and his chance of re-election. Obviously that is bad for him. So by laying out the truth that rioters looting correlate with shootings, which you can look at the LA riots for evidence of this (firefighters shot at, rooftop Koreans shooting to deter looters, police and national guard shooting rioters, etc), he is looking to gain support for the potential use of force to control the situation.
Do I think he is inciting individuals to take up arms against looters? No, but I won't lie and I think he would support the notion that store owners should take up arms to protect their property and his double speak could be alluring to that.
So yeah. My thought on that if he is intentionally choosing his words to send an ulterior message, that would be the jist of that message. And quite frankly I don't have much of an issue with it. Riots are fucked no matter what spin you put on it. It's incredibly sad that it has come to this but these riots need to be stopped before more lives are ruined. If they don't want to go peacefully then unfortunately force is required, and Trump will need support for it.
Thing about double speaking that it's impossible to know what he is trying to gain unless he tells us himself. All we can do is speculate.
Wow. I just looked at his twitter and he just went balls to the wall with this glorifying violence thing. Twitter literally has to censor those posts if they want to be seen as credible with their previous decision.
My god it would be hilarious if it wasn't real. Good luck America.
I would be surprised as well if he was actually telling people to take up arms against looters, but as you mentioned, I don't think he would side against anyone doing so. But his message is meant to lend support and validation to people who do hold more violent opinions. Obviously, when he said that second amendment people could do something about Clinton, it was extremely unlikely that someone would actually be able to assassinate her. But there are lunatics who absolutely fantasize about doing so, or at least someone else doing so, and he was firing up such violent rhetoric. Same with his comments on the Unite the Right rally, when he said there are "good people on both sides". Sure, one might argue that he was talking about the people who weren't waving Nazi flags and talking about Jews replacing them. But do you think those same far-right neo-Nazis looked at that statement and came to the same conclusion, or did they see it as a coded message of support?
That's why his speech matters so much, and why focusing on what he "actually" meant is a deflection of the actual problem. It doesn't matter how you and I interpret his words, because we aren't the audience. It matters how dangerous people who he's pandering to are interpreting it, which is as a message of support sent with a wink. Because, after all, if these lunatics who would go out and get violent, commit hate crimes, etc., see these messages as support, does the argument of how normal, well-adjusted people like you and I interpret them even matter?
w.r.t. twitter, I fundamentally dislike how people are approaching the matter.
All these comparisons people are drawing between twitter and sc2mafia, like twitter is just an innocent website moderating their content, are deeply mischaracterizing twitter. Twitter is so much more than a website. Twitter is an empire of information. When twitter decides to take down a "Free Palestine" account saying things bordering on anti-semitism, that's so different from a mod on sc2mafia taking a post down because they think it's offensive. Twitter, facebook and youtube have an incredible degree of power over how the modern masses attain and process information, both inside and outside America. Please stop saying stuff like "it's just a company. If you don't like the product, then don't partake in it. That's how capitalism works", as if the businesses, politicians and other public figures on Twitter have the freedom to simply emigrate to another website.
Views I'm hearing of what consitutes "freedom of speech" are too narrow-minded. People are subscribing to the absolutist view that it simply means governments controlling what people say should be forbidden. Governments controlling what we talk about isn't just bad because of the obvious stuff like rights and shit, it's bad because massive institutions of power shouldn't have the right to guide human discourse. They should not have the right to control what information we see. Morally, this is an infringement on our agency. The choices we make are determined by the information we receive, so by tampering with that information, they tamper with our agency. If an institution ends up having such power, it is the responsibility of that institution to remain neutral and not tamper in our discourse. That is why it's bad for the government to censor things, even if they're only censoring misinformation / hateful ideologies that are objectively bad for society.
Making a post hidden does not functionally mean much in the grand scheme of things. It's about the precedent this sets - that the information on their platform is theirs to do with what they please. If these social media sites want to crush a particular political perspective for the greater good, it is their god-given right to do so. This is where the shortcomings of a short-sighted interpretation of "freedom of speech" start to show. If you simply view freedom of speech as forbidding the government to make any sort of speech regulation, you may even believe the state forcing these social media companies to be neutral is an infringement of freedom of speech in itself.
I don't think there's any perfect solutions for the situation regarding twitter. But I think ideally, twitter shouldn't be able to tamper with content or accounts unless the content can be interpreted as infringing on the law, and that social media sites in general should be forced to adopt algorithms that only choose what you are shown based on a set of neutral, publically agreed upon criteria i.e. popularity and recency for example. These social media sites should be treated as virtual equivalents of the "public square" and regulated as such. It's terrible that bad people can generate speech encouraging people to do bad things, but bad people have always been able to do that.
Private ownership only applies to a point. If you own a small plot of land for your house, I think it's fair enough to say you own that plot of land. However, noone can "privately own" all the land of a nation, for example. That's just feudalism. I feel the same way about these social media sites. We should not talk about the major shareholders of twitter and facebook like they actually own these things. It simply doesn't make sense for 10-15 people to possess so much power by right. It's fundamentally an absurd notion that you can be entitled to such power without strict public accountability. It makes as much sense as someone "owning" all the land of a nation.
You must spread around reputation before giving it to yzb again.
Nope, not as far as I know. It wasn’t necessary.
The mere threat of violent is apparently enough to deter those rioters. They did shoot rubber bullets in other places, though.
I don't think it's as black and white as you're putting it either, though I'll admit I don't really have any practical solutions for the situation. I think that platforms like Facebook or Twitter are much different from a so-called public square in that they allow messages to have an unprecedented reach compared to even 20 years ago, along with an inherent inequality in how much an individual's message can be amplified. Keep in mind, for instance, that incitement to riot is illegal under federal law in the US. If Trump's tweet could be interpreted, even by a select few, to be an incitement to riot, does it not go against your clause of "infringing against the law"?
Back to the unprecedented reach, looking at Trump's Twitter account you'll see that he has 80 million followers. Let's say a paltry 0.1% of those followers are his supporters that interpret his tweet as being a call to commit violent acts, or at the very least, an endorsement of such. That's 80 thousand people that see his tweet as being strictly violent rhetoric, and I think 0.1% is actually a very, very conservative number. Find me a public square where you can instantly reach 80 thousand people with a violent message.
You're right that this sets dangerous precedent, but at the same time I have no idea how to solve it in a way that also protects the public good. Trump's EO certainly takes a step directly in the opposite direction, by weakening laws that protect social media sites from being liable for the content their users post, meaning that this kind of censorship will be significantly more possible in the future. And, as I've mentioned before, this is really worrying when you also consider that Trump has stacked federal courts in his favour like no other president in the past has done.