Supposedly, Tyler Cowen wrote this about Twitter’s decision to ban President Trump:
I am fine with their decision. Furthermore I think they made it at exactly the right moment.
But Tyler has an evil twin, Tyrone, who occasionally takes over his blog posts.
Here are my thoughts on “terms of service” and their enforcement.
1. In my case, I dislike comments that include personal attacks, especially when they are personal against other commenters or personal against me. Criticize a person’s ideas all you want, but avoid name-calling and insults. I do not have the capability to enforce this all of the time, so sometimes inappropriate comments do get through. But apart from personal attacks, I have not found myself wanting to delete comments.
2. Terms of service should be clear, not vague. You should try to make it as clear as possible how to distinguish what is ok from what is not. Examples are helpful.
3. When you delete someone’s content, you should have a good answer to the question, “You deleted X, but why did you not delete Y?” Ideally, you should be able to show that your terms of service allow Y but not X.
4. Banning an act is serious, but banning the actor is grave. Banning a person should be a very last resort. It seems right to ban someone only after they have been found multiple times to have posted content that is against your policy, you have warned them that their abuse is excessive and could result in a personal ban, and they continue their abuse.
5. When you ban a person, then you must be able to answer the question of “You banned this person, why did you not ban that person?”
6. My sense is that the main social media companies cannot give good answers to the question of “You took down X, why did you not take down Y?” A big part of the answer is that the enforcement of terms of service is costly. That is my excuse for not getting rid of every single personal attack in the comment section. But apart from that, I hope that my enforcement is not selective.
7. But enforcement costs do not excuse selectively shutting out ideas or people you dislike. As with laws, selective enforcement undermines the legitimacy of terms of service.
Content moderation at scale is really, really hard – if not impossible.
It kinda looks like Tyler is going to be experimenting with some self-enforcement methods. I’m curious to see how/if it works out.
5-6: The social media companies know that they do not have to answer the question. Like most human beings, they act and then rationalize after the action. They enjoy their unregulated exercise of power. They can claim moral superiority and ignore any challenge.
“As with laws, selective enforcement undermines the legitimacy of terms of service.”
Aptly put.
“In my case, I dislike comments that include personal attacks, especially when they are personal against other commenters or personal against me.”
Yes – call you out for collecting social security and Medicare while you rail against lockdown socialism. Give me a frigging break…
I think the coordinated hit on Parlor is scarier than what Twitter did.
It’s nothing new and we all knew it was coming when they started testing that coordination years ago on Stormfront, 8chan, as well as shared private blacklists, i.e. you can see cases where people have been deplatformed across all major platforms the same day and not just big names. That whole saying about first they came, apathy, then then.
In the 90’s the cypherpunk movement understood the value of designing censorship resistant public square technologies, sadly that died with the sharing culture Web 2.0 pushed. Can only hope this sort of open display of power sparks a revival but I’m not going hold my breath.
That is exactly what’s coming, as Big Tech just dumped tankers full of gasoline on the growing blaze of the movement towards decentralization. While there have always been some techies working on the fediverse and other decentralized tech, the potential users had to always doubt if it was worth it, as twitter and other social media already existed and why would these companies damage themselves with bans like this? The left was calling for twitter to ban Trump for years- I think even before he won the election- yet they never did until now.
This will one day be looked back on as the death knell of Big Tech, as they finally laid bare their crazy political plans and the users depart over the coming years. I already avoided all social media and most Big Tech products: I’m now in the process of removing what little remains, such as I’m now typing this in the Opera browser because I’m ditching Chrome and my few Amazon purchases now go to zero.
I switched to Brave, much better now than a couple years ago (soon after Eich was booted by PC-Nazis from Mozilla).
Haven’t yet given up my nearly 20 years of gmail.
Ryan Turner,
Yes. (And Arnold Kling is right about individual censorship/bans).
Google/Facebook/Apple/Amazon put Parler in an impossible situation. By censoring and banning Trump and supporters, Google/Facebook/Apple massively accelerated the conservative switch to Parler, while Amazon gave Parler 24 hours magically to achieve moderation at scale.
See Casey Mulligan’s blogpost, “Updates on Parler’s war with Big Tech” (supply and demand, in that order, 11 January 2021), at the link below:
http://caseymulligan.blogspot.com/2021/01/updates-on-parlers-war-with-big-tech.html
Prof. Mulligan notes a self-serving double standard in policy enforcement by Big Tech:
“The Jan 6 violence and lawbreaking was reportedly organized on Facebook, but Facebook continues uninterrupted.”
I don’t believe it’s possible to craft a set of rules that will settle difficult cases but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying to come closer to a well defined set of rules than we currently are. You will never eliminate judgment calls so it will be important to know who is doing the judging.
I think a quick and transparent appeals process should be established, at least for public figures, even though that will never be possible for every bot.
There are of course limits to rule-based moderation, but I don’t think they’ve nearly reached the limits of it. Twitter could certainly provide a more consistent, transparent, predictable moderation. I don’t think they really want to though, perhaps because they feel they don’t have a choice. They face enormous pressure to, say, ban Alex Jones (or ‘StopTheSteal’ content), but perhaps any general standards that would be stringent enough to ban them automatically would be ‘too strict’ and force them to ban people/things they’d rather not, or that would induce backlash for being too harsh. Discretionary moderation allows them to respond ‘flexibly’ to the, let’s face it, often arbitrary, inconsistent, and irrational pressures of public outcry (and threat of regulation looming behind it) and their own workforce.
Arnold, sorry, too little too late. There will be no new rules for a long time, if ever.
The barbarians have always relied on the cancelation of their enemies and the implicit support of those who sell their souls to survive.
Good luck.
I’ve said recently to close liberal friends with whom I can still have rational discussions that in the past year two things came close to radicalizing me (a libertarian-leaning moderate conservative Trump rejector) into hopping on the MAGA bandwagon: the Democratic embrace of rioting and anarchy, and the slippery, many-headed beast we call Cancel Culture.
When I tell my Deplorable friends that the right response to events is to bring a better message and win the next election, they call me a word that starts with a C and rhymes with “buck” and say that in the future people like me simply won’t be allowed to spread our better message. While I think they are still somewhat overselling the broth, I think three factors go a long way to justifying the sentiment:
1. The norm that maintaining freedom of speech obligates us to cope with speech that disgusts us is dying.
2. After a brief, beautiful and weird adolescence, the Internet has congealed from a million independent Mos Eisley Cantinas making merry mischief on each other into a planetary megamall dominated by a tiny number of big-box stores run almost entirely by overt leftists or capitalists getting rich in the rope trade.
3. Intersectionalism (or something closely related to it) provides an intellectual basis to delegitimize my participation (as a privileged white male) in the political process as anything other a seal, clapping and barking in agreement with approved authorities. If I cite Dr. Roland Fryer, it’s not because I believe in his methodology and data, but because I’m a white supremacist, witting or otherwise.
I am not ready to give up completely because I believe that the worst parts of this are still a feature more of the liberal elite than the population at large. There is probably far more support for defunding the police among white millennial women with humanities Ph.D.s than there is among black men who drive for GrubHub. But I think the challenge is very serious and we need to focus a lot more on driving a wedge between these groups.
+1 excellent, thank you.
I’m probably less thoughtful than you, but I made the leap to MAGA from an adamant never-trumper after the events of the spring/summer. I had to hold my nose to get there, but still no regrets.
(the violent thugs that rioted at the Capitol do not represent the other 74 million of us that love law enforcement and peaceful protests)
>—“(the violent thugs that rioted at the Capitol do not represent the other 74 million of us that love law enforcement and peaceful protests)”
Hans, I believe you when you say they don’t represent you but I don’t believe you when you say they don’t represent Trump.
Why do you think think those rioters were so convinced that they did represent Trump and were doing his will?
Why do you think it took Trump so long to make that first video appeal for them to go home with no criticism of them and the kind of gushing affection for the rioters that he usually reserves only for Kim Jong Un. Ben Sasse has said that he talked to White House aides who were in the room and told him that Trump was glued to the TV and not understanding why the others around him didn’t think the storming of the Capital was a good thing.
When Trump finally made the second video disavowing the violence and agreeing to a peaceful transfer of power, it was only after he had been told he was about to lose his support among Republicans in the Senate. That one looked like a hostage video and clearly was not written by him.
He scheduled that rally (where Rudy told them to prepare for “trial by combat”) for exactly the time optimal for whipping them up and sending them to the Capital to “stop” the proceeding which he described as “the steal.” And all this in an environment where his most rabid supporters (just the ones most likely to show up) were disagreeing on such things as whether or not Mike Pence should be hanged or shot by firing squad. He had long been saying his political opponents should be arrested for treason.
You can and should oppose Critical Theory and BLM riots but you don’t need Trump to do that. Defining Trump as the alternative to that will only help the movement you are hoping to stop.
You can and should oppose Critical Theory and BLM riots but you don’t need Trump to do that. Defining Trump as the alternative
Being old enough to have lived through the events of last summer, I regret to inform you that Trump was literally the only alternative. Mostly because of the issues The Snob points out above.
Basically, you’ve got it backward. Few people actively defined themselves by “aligning with Trump”. But if you oppose those Movements, the movements quite literally align you with him. As a White Supremacist and a Nazi.
“Being old enough to have lived through the events of last summer, I regret to inform you that Trump was literally the only alternative.”
How so? In the voting booth? Maybe (I don’t think so but won’t relitigate the merits of non-voting), but otherwise, one needn’t ‘align with’ Trump to oppose anything on the left. The robustness of the non/anti-Trump right (or perceived lack thereof) will be a factor in the long term credibility of the right going forward. The more everyone falls (or fell) in line behind him, the worse it will be (maybe it makes no difference, but at the very least, there’s no positive side to it).
People really need to learn that it’s ok to hate more than one thing.
As I said, you’ve got it backward. Few people actively defined themselves by “aligning with Trump”. But if you oppose those Movements, the movements quite literally align you with him. As a White Supremacist and a Nazi.
No matter how much you might say “I hate Trump”, you will be called a Trumpist, a racist, and a white supremacist if you oppose the Wokists. And you’ll be cancelled.
That is to say, you’ll be cast out into the void with Trump and all the other deplorables. There’s no space on that bus for you Mark Z.
The turning point for me was when CNN’s Chris Cuomo said, “Please, show me where it says protesters are supposed to be polite and peaceful.”
That was the crossing the Rubicon moment. And, then to watch it in real time while the media denied it, apologized for it and then dismissed it as mostly peaceful.
Sorry, but you’re not gonna ever be able to get on board with that. Completely vile and insulting.
You could add that Biden’s response to the event was to call the cops defending his fellow legislators racists and to defend BLM rioters. Then Biden stated he thought CARES act funding should be explicitly given out basis on race.
I don’t want to “get you on board with that” Hans. I just want you to realize that, not only is Trump not the only alternative to riots, he routinely celebrates and encourages riots and violence when they are in support of him. Trump certainly doesn’t think his supporters need to be “polite and peaceful.”
Can’t help but notice that you didn’t even bother to disagree that the rioters attacking the police in the Capital were allied with Trump and he was allied with them even if those rioters didn’t have your personal support.
I don’t watch Chris Cuomo and CNN and you probably shouldn’t either.
Good comments by The Snob. I’m in pretty much the same boat.
1. Trump did receive repeated warnings.
2. This isn’t a 1st Amendment issue; Twitter is a private company and can choose to do business with whomever they wish.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that there is a Constitutional principle at stake. As Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson observed, “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.” Just as no one has the right to yell “fire” in a crowded theater, no one has the right to incite others to pour gasoline on a crowded theater that is already burning. A good argument can be made that Trump was doing just that.
People on the far right are currently planning armed demonstrations on January 17th and 20th. Keeping Trump off Twitter at least until those dates have passed seems to me to be a reasonable precaution.
FIRE!!!!
Heard zero, zip, nada from you when the Democrats said the same or worse about the 2016 election. Do you need quotes on what they said or are you good? And, when it comes to inciting or condoning violence, do you need evidence of what was tolerated over the summer?
Also, it would be helpful if you provided quotes on what precisely Trump, Cruz and Hawley said that represented an incitement of violence. The latter two are now being threatened to be put on a no fly list.
https://youtu.be/olefVguutfo
“Heard zero, zip, nada from you when the Democrats said the same or worse about the 2016 election.”
Clearly, I was asleep during 2016. I totally missed it when Hillary Clinton, backed by left-wing media (i.e., the mainstream media), spent the two months following the election recycling debunked conspiracy theories about how the election was stolen. Nor do I remember her or her son, Hillary Jr., threatening to primary congressmen who refused to echo her claims of voter fraud. I can’t even remember the times that she tried to strongarm state officials into changing election results. And, though I’ve wracked my brain, I have no memory at all of the times she demanded that Joe Biden, the Vice President, reject electors that were pledged to vote for Trump. Gosh. I missed so much.
“And, when it comes to inciting or condoning violence, do you need evidence of what was tolerated over the summer?”
I definitely did not sleep through this summer’s violence and I spoke out against it and wrote against it at the time. Getting into a pissing contest about which side’s riots and rioters are worse is beside the point. Rioting is bad. Rioters are bad.
Trump probably could not be convicted in court for inciting a riot; he did not clearly say: “March to the Capitol building, break in, search for Mark Pence and hang him, kill a cop, and liberally smear human feces around.” However, here’s a timeline of tweets and statements from Trump and his supporters:
Dec. 19, Trump: “The BIG Protest Rally in Washington, D.C. will take place at 11:00 A.M. on January 6th… StopTheSteal!… will be wild.”
Jan. 1, Gohmert: “The bottom line is, the [Supreme] court is saying, ‘We’re not going to touch this. You have no remedy.’ Basically, in effect, the ruling would be that you got to go to the streets and be as violent as Antifa.”
Jan. 6, Giuliani: “If we’re wrong, we will be made fools of. But if we’re right, a lot of them will go to jail. So let’s have trial by combat.”
Jan. 6, Trump’s rally speech:
“There’s never been anything like this. We will not let them silence your voices. We’re not going to let it happen. Not going to let it happen.”
“We will not take the name off the Washington monument. We will not. Cancel culture. They wanted to get rid of the Jefferson Memorial, either take it down or just put somebody else in there. I don’t think that’s going to happen. It damn well better not. Although with this administration, if this happens, it could happen. You’ll see some really bad things happen.”
“Republicans are constantly fighting like a boxer with his hands tied behind his back. It’s like a boxer, and we want to be so nice. We want to be so respectful of everybody, including bad people. We’re going to have to fight much harder and Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us. If he doesn’t, that will be a sad day for our country because you’re sworn to uphold our constitution.
“Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. After this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down. We’re going to walk down any one you want, but I think right here. We’re going walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators, and congressmen and women. We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.”
“You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong … I know everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building. To peacefully, patriotically make your voices heard.”
Jan. 6 during riot, Trump: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!”
Jan. 6 during riot, Trump refused to send in the National Guard.
If you’ll look at what I posted, I didn’t mention either Cruz or Hawley, nor do I believe that they should be put on a no fly list.
“Trump probably could not be convicted in court for inciting a riot”
Exactly. All the rest of your comment is just hypocritical filler. We spent four f*cking years on Russian collusion and election tampering. Based on that standard, is it not reasonable for Cruz and Hawley to question the massive changes to the the voting rules during a pandemic? Or, should they they be forever linked to rioting that they had zero to do with?
“We spent four f*cking years on Russian collusion and election tampering.”
How does any of that justify Trump’s repeated attempts to overturn an election by threatening federal and state officials? How does it justify his attempt to use his mob to pressure Congress? How does it justify is non-response and, later, weak response to the riot?
“Based on that standard, is it not reasonable for Cruz and Hawley to question the massive changes to the the voting rules during a pandemic?”
Cruz and Hawley keep creeping back into this. What is your opinion of Laurel and Hardy?
“Cruz and Hawley keep creeping back into this.”
Um yeah…because they are being tarred and feathered in the media and among Democrats. It’s 100% hypocritical.
Don’t care about Trump. He’s gone in a week or thereabouts. But seriously, be consistent for the love of god. His election fraud allegations were just as silly, but no sillier than what we’ve seen over the last four years.
Cruz and Hawley deserve to lose their seats in the next election for knowingly lying to the American people. Neither man is an idiot and each surely knew that Trump’s cries of voter fraud were bogus. Each was hoping to claim Trump’s supporters when the President leaves office. That said, they should not be subject to illegal “tar and feathering.”
“Silly” is not the word I would use to describe the actions of a President who:
– Threatened members of his party with retaliation if they didn’t help him try to overturn an election
– Tried to strongarm state officials into changing election results
– Encouraged the Vice President to ignore his oath to defend the Constitution and arbitrarily disqualify electors
– Intimidate Congress by organizing a rally and ordering the mob to march to the Capitol building while Congress was counting electors
– Refuse to quell the riot
Yes, the Democrats did lots of bad things. The BLM and Antifa rioters did lots of bad things. I pointed it out at the time. I wrote about it at the time. None of that justifies what Trump did.
Your arguments are little more than grade school whines of, “Well, they started it.”
“How does any of that justify Trump’s repeated attempts to overturn an election by threatening federal and state officials?”
I haven’t followed any of it, and I don’t even have an opinion on whether there was fraud because I lack the time, resources, and motivation to take on such an undertaking (and no, just accepting appeals to authority isn’t investigating yourself).
I believe the winner of the election is whoever the the people running the military say the winner is, and that getting the most votes helps but is only important if those people care. I could never imagine a scenario where Trump got the military on his side, so it’s irrelevant if or how much fraud there is. I could tell from the moment the networks called it that it was over no matter what the circumstances surrounding voting were, and didn’t bother to investigate further as there were no actions I planned to take either way.
I didn’t even vote because I judged the hassle of changing registration to a new state to be less important than spending the equivalent time with my family or getting me new house ready.
Trump has filed some cases, as is his right. He has asked people to take certain actions, as is his right. I’m unaware of him kidnapping anyone and putting a gun to their head.
A mob of people pressuring legislators to do things, including going into state and the capitol building houses, is pretty march par for the course. We can go down a google search list to find plenty of that.
If the election wasn’t stolen (which, again, I don’t have a stance on), then I think Trumps rhetoric is reckless and selfish, and that it can indirectly lead to exactly what we saw. But Trump never asked those people to do that, nor do I suspect he believed they would (this may be a big error in judgement on his part).
It’s not so different from Biden saying he condemns violence, but calling the United States irredeemably racist and peddling conspiracy theories like systematic racism and critical race theory (which, remember, he personally endorsed during his debate with Trump). If these theories are true and the US is that terrible of a place, why don’t you have a moral obligation to violently oppose it!
That people believing the election was stolen or the the 1619 project is a real accounting of history and the present day would take the obvious leap to violence is predictable, even if the people peddling this stuff deny that violence and even don’t want it. So if you want me to say that it’s all very dangerous and reckless stuff, fine. But if Trumps guilty of “incitement”, so is everyone. It’s baked into our damn system root and stem.
I care more about the leftist kind because it actually effects me…every damn day. Especially since this pandemic started there isn’t a single damn day where I can even pretend its not a problem. Literally everything is within their reach.
Trumps stuff has never affected me. Not one single time has something he’s done had a negative impact on me or my family.
It didn’t affect me on Jan 6th either. The worst case outcome is that a bunch of politicians I don’t like anyway for a whole bunch of reasons unrelated to election fraud would more or less get what was coming to them. Have you seen what these people have been doing for the past year? I wouldn’t risk my or my families welfare for revenge, but I wouldn’t care if it happened.
Richard when I was in grade school I had a bully that beat me up. I was a pretty non-violent kid, and I did what the adults all told me which was to not fight back and just tell the adults. It never did much good as we both got detention and it didn’t stop the bullying.
One day when discussing my Mom pushed me to the floor. I tried to get up and she pushed me back down. She kept doing this until I violently resisted her. She said it was because in the real world there are bullies some of whom this is the only thing they understand, and I need to live in the real world. I later got into a fight with that bully and hurt him and he stopped bother me.
That’s reality. I’ve seen nothing in the adult world that leads me to believe its fundamentally any different then the school yard. If anything, it’s less honorable in a lot of ways.
“Cruz and Hawley deserve to lose their seats in the next election for knowingly lying to the American people. Neither man is an idiot and each surely knew that Trump’s cries of voter fraud were bogus.”
Fraud conspiracies…bogus
Fraud…not bogus.
Understand the difference?
Cruz and Hawley were concerned with voter fraud after the rules about mail in voting were substantially modified. That’s not unreasonable, sorry.
Even as a Texas Republican, I’m not a fan of Cruz. But seriously, find something real to indict him on or vote him out other than this rubbish. Maybe it’s time to go back to your pet losertarian causes of opening the borders, ending the drug war and the completely inconsequential police reforms like ending qualified immunity?
“Fraud conspiracies…bogus. Fraud…not bogus. Understand the difference?”
There are reasonable questions about the integrity of our elections. Trump and Wednesday’s rioters have made those questions toxic and may have made it politically impossible to address them.
I’ve noticed that MAGA arguments often mirror those of the Left. Both are heavy in ad hominem attacks, what-about-ism, deflection, projection, claims of victimization, and attempts to shout down the opposition. In part, that’s due to MAGA’s adoption of Saul Alinsky’s tactics, but I think that there is a striking similarity in ends and well as means. Both want to use government coercion to advance their ideas and interests.
“Trump and Wednesday’s rioters have made those questions toxic and may have made it politically impossible to address them.”
Indeed. Thank you Captain Obvious.
https://youtu.be/4rm5EkIj_XE
And he insists on proving my point about MAGA and the Left. Mirror images.
“And he insists on proving my point about MAGA and the Left. Mirror images.”
Fair enough, but you might be missing one minor detail. One side has the MSM, academia and big tech on its side, while the other does not. That was kinda my whole point all along.
MAGA, of course, being the first right-wing group that had to face a hostile media.
asdf, you’re engaging in some cosmic goalpost shifting. How do reconcile your ‘might makes right’ dismissal of all criticism of Trump’s post-election lunacy, while being so morally indignant at the (unevidenced) prospect of Democratic voter fraud? Is your position basically that you like Trump’s policies, so how he stays in office makes no difference, whether by democratic election, arbitrary fiat by the Supreme Court, or military coup?
I’m morally indignant over what these people have done. I honestly don’t know whether there was election fraud or not. I don’t care. I’m mad because of the things they have been doing that affect my family for a long time, and especially mad over what they’ve done lately in the pandemic.
Let me tell you what I did on the morning of the riot. I drove my parents to a local pharmacies to see if we could get on a “no-show list” for the vaccine because so many of the people that the left was dying to put ahead of them won’t take it and sometimes you can get it if you can show up within 15 min of a no show. We read about that happening at a pharmacy in DC. I couldn’t get any info from my local health department and I figured we should go in person since we would get a better response that way.
You see my Dad is 72 with Type 1 Diabetes, a bad heart, immunocompromised, no spleen, and several other issues. My mother also has a bad heart and a pacemaker. They live with us and I want to get them the vaccine as soon as possible. We are all worried about the virus effect on them and the whole family has had to shut down living in a lot of ways because we don’t want to bring it home to them.
But I’m not a priority for the left. The first crack the CDC got at it put the old dead last. Then MAGA populists and the Trump CDC complained and they backed off to age 75, but my Dad is out of luck there. My leftist Governor adopted the CDC guidance so I was shit out of luck. Biden also endorsed the CDC guidance that screwed my Dad.
So the morning of the riot I’m trying a Hail Mary while Congress, who has ALL GOTTEN THE SHOT, including fucking young and healthy AOC, while the rest of us plebs have to wait until they deign to ALLOW us to get the thing (remember, they won’t allow us to just like PURCHASE the goddamn thing, it has to be doled out by them for political favors).
All because some fuck at the CDC who thinks he’s multiple people and genders and wants to defund the police decided that the old were “too white”. Yeah, go look it up.
Trump, meanwhile, just announced that over 65s can get it. I can thank Trump for that. What can I thank those assholes for. They literally tried to kill my father because he’s white.
This after a year of literally having every single aspect of my life intruded upon during a pandemic that literally didn’t have to be at all (no FDA and the whole thing is over by the summer). All for a bunch of hysteria and health policy theater.
After they debated $600 checks to the plebs while racking up $4t in debt this year (that’s 50k for a family of four BTW). No, most of is went to scam PPP loans that all got “forgiven” amongst other pork of an outrageous quality I don’t even have time to write about because I have to go to bed. Thank God Biden is planning another Corona stimulus bill where he plans to explicitly give the money out to non whites.
Look, I hate these people. Apparently everyone does because Congress has had a rock low approval rating for a long time. I wouldn’t care if they died. And I wouldn’t care is someone couped them.
Trump isn’t that person because he’s a reality TV bozo. But if an actual Ceaser existed, I would give zero fucks about them wiping this lot out. I personally wouldn’t risk direct action with my families welfare, but I would not oppose it, and if it came out on top I would be a supporter.
>–“But if an actual Ceaser existed, I would give zero fucks about them wiping this lot out.”
Yeah, but if an actual Caesar existed, he would do what he wanted not what you want.
@Greg G @asdf
Let’s focus on bigger issues – where should the Trump presidential library be located and what exhibits should it contain?
I’ve got 4 bold ideas to kick things off:
1) make it the first true international presidential library. I’m thinking we locate it near a border wall, but on the Mexico side. After all, they paid for the wall, right?
2) make it a Trump resort destination rather than just a library. I wanna sip a margarita by the pool, golf and get a fake orange tan whilst learning everything about the Trump era.
3) definitely want a Trump University wing as part of the resort and library. Flipping real estate is so profitable for the middle class…the more we learn, the more effective we will be at this craft.
4) how about a “grab um by the pussy” interactive exhibit?
Excellent ideas Hans.
Should definitely also contain a Make Your Own Charity…(with yourself as the beneficiary) exhibit.
And a golf tournament where the winner is the one who cheats the most and the trophy is a framed fake Time Man of the Year magazine cover with yourself as Man of the Year.
Also an exhibit where you give Trump a sycophantic compliment and receive a Medal of Freedom.
They complained for three years that Russians hacked the election and dragged Trump through a kangaroo impeachment trial. There were riots following the 2016 elections in most liberal cities, something you can Google in 20 seconds. Jeez man, believe your lying eyes.
And the fact that “they” did bad things proves what? That what Trump did was as “perfect” as his Ukrainian letter?
It proves only that bias is a powerful thing in politics and most people are perfectly happy to cheer on something they would be furious about seeing their opponents do, or vice versa.
“MAGA, of course, being the first right-wing group that had to face a hostile media.”
Yep. And, the losertarians will continue to be the Washington Wizards of the political world. Looking forward to watching you squander your draft choices for yet another year…
A lot of people make the statement that Amazon, Google and other companies are private companies and can do business with whoever they want. For example, Amazon can cut Parler off simply because they no longer want to do business with them. I’m not sure this is the case. Let me start by saying I’m not a lawyer so I could easily be wrong.
Amazon provided Parler with web services and Parler paid Amazon for those services. In doing so Amazon and Parler entered into a contract. This has several implications.
First – Both companies are obligated to fulfill the terms of the contract. Neither side can simply terminate the contract except in accordance with the contract.
Second – The government has a legitimate role in enforcing contracts.
In order to abrogate the contract, Amazon would have to show that Parler violated the terms of the contract. This would lead to three questions.
1. Is the contract written clearly so it is possible to determine if Parler violated the contract?
2. Did Parler violate the terms of the contract?
3. Are the terms of the contract enforced equally among all the companies that pay Amazons for hosting services?
If the answer to any of these three questions is no, then Parler should be able to sue in a court of law, for damages (the loss of hosting services must have cost them millions).
I’m not sure how this would apply to individuals that subscribe to a service such as Twitter.
I could make the case that Trump provides Twitter with free content that sells a lot of advertising and in return Twitter provides Trump with way to post his ridiculous tweets. I don’t know if this makes for a contract.
If any lawyers read this I’d appreciate knowing if what I said makes any sense.
“I could make the case that Trump provides Twitter with free content that sells a lot of advertising and in return Twitter provides Trump with way to post his ridiculous tweets. I don’t know if this makes for a contract.”
I’m not a lawyer but I know the answer to this is no. With respect to Parler and Amazon, good question. I’d guess from how things have gone that Amazon’s contract with Parler allows them to suspend service at will or in accord with some defined terms of service (maybe they refunded their latest fee, I don’t know), otherwise I’d expect Parler to have taken legal action.
I’m not a lawyer, but I did go to law school before I switched to economics. The doctrine you’re looking for is that of the common carrier. Which is that a company that provides a generic sort of service like transportation or communication must accept all paying customers.
Thus, an airline or phone company can’t refuse service.
Facebook and Twitter get around this because they’re free, but I don’t see why it shouldn’t apply to them as ubiquitous communication technologies. It should definitely apply to Amazon as a wholesale supplier of computing power.
Un-selectively enforcing Dorsey’s rules would require him to have locked the New York Times out of its own account in October for having quoted audiotapes of Melania Trump.
And the NYT would have been locked out of its account in September for having reported Donald Trump’s taxes too.
The only way that Dorsey’s rules are compatible with journalism, in fact, is to enforce them selectively.
As long as the rules he came up with to censor the New York Post are never enforced against the vast majority of journalists, then journalists can keep making a living.
–“Supposedly, Tyler Cowen wrote this about Twitter’s decision to ban President Trump:
I am fine with their decision. Furthermore I think they made it at exactly the right moment.”–
I suspect they decided to ban President Trump because they had an excuse to do so and he no longer effectively has the power to retaliate against them.
Yes. I imagine that some within Twitter are ideologically on the left and led the charge, some moderates caved to pressure, and some on the right were stifled, or pushed out. Twitter CEO Jack, I view him as a villain, but to his credit he is talking about this and answering questions more than he has to and more than others.
As PowerLine folks note, many EU leaders think banning Trump was “too much”.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/01/its-a-sad-day-when-the-german-chancellor-has-to-lecture-us-about-free-speech.php
Lots of elites, both el-Dems and el-Reps (GOPe? RINOs? I now call them el-Reps because they side with their college educated elites), dislike Trump’s style.
Arnold’s guidelines are excellent:
#1 Against personal insults – I am too, generally. But I also believe in Tit for Tat. Anybody who insults Trump, personally, should be ready to accept a personal insult from Trump.
Elites hate any anti-elite insulting them; and pretty much accept elites hating and insulting others. I hate this double standard by el-PC-Nazis far more than disliking the personal insults.
#2 Clear Terms of Service – very important, but not done by Twitter in this case
#3 X but not Y – an excellent idea to be able to show; totally absent in this case
#4 Serious to ban act, grave to ban actor – Twitter often labeled Trump tweets. I think his account was warned enough. Tho the claims of election fraud have NOT been answered by the elite Deep State. See also how Harvard is banning a conservative
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/01/the-purge-of-conservative-voices-proceeds-apace.php
#5 Ban this person, why not that person — seems like a repeat of #3, tho with person ban rather than content. Should need even more justification.
#6 Enforcement of terms of service is costly – it’s not clear how true this is; it seems like an excuse. Example: have a “report violation of service terms” so the users can report it. Then have a moderator decide, publish decision – and those who reported on a non-violation get a note about reduced believability (there does have to be some way to reduce false accusations).
#7 Selective enforcement undermines the legitimacy of terms of service – it is exactly the selective enforcement which is the goal. And it’s a terrible goal.
Putin with Khodorkovsky – all the rich oligarchs are guilty of tax violations and other crimes, but such are accepted UNLESS it’s “too much”, or if they go against Putin. With Xi in China – where is Jack Ma?
With so many laws, “nobody is innocent”. Thus Flynn was afraid his son was guilty of something, which I guess he was (don’t know), but it’s enough for most to “stay in line”.
Note that none of Trump’s associates were tried for Russian Collusion, but under investigation they did find other crimes.
Sec. of State Clinton was obviously guilty of mishandling Top Secret documents, yet no indictment, much less trial.
Selective enforcement is outrageous. But Dems support it and have long been supporting it.
The Dems have also been supporting the demonization and dehumanization of Reps, not just Trump.
Democrat Derangement Syndrome.
In the second of your links somebody makes the point that “Harvard itself ranks the United States last among developed nations in electoral integrity, yet if someone, including Representative Stefanik, might discuss Harvard’s own work they are barred from working in connection with Harvard.”
Which is exactly what we expect.
As an example of what’s acceptable under the Elmendorf standard we could present this from Nancy Pelosi: “Our election was hijacked. There is no question.”
This statement from Pelosi, because she’s in the Democratic Party, does not and cannot, per Elmendorf, “bear on the foundations of the electoral process through which this country’s leaders are chosen.”
Nothing that Stacey Abrams has claimed or will claim in the future is prohibited under the Elmendorf standard.
Here’s an example of what’s perfectly fine from Jimmy Carter: “There’s no doubt that the Russians did interfere in the election. And I think the interference, though not yet quantified, if fully investigated would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016. He lost the election and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.”
Randomly today YouTube put to the top of its page a clip of the election certification in 2000 where the Black Congressional Caucus called the Florida count illegal, that black votes were stolen, that the certification should be stopped, and then they stormed out of the chamber to the applause of the Democrats.
Nothing is new.
asdf, It is not “randomly” and it is not “its page.” YouTube puts at the top of *your* page the videos it expects will interest *you.* I’ll give you $100 for every progressive that you can find that saw that video at the top of the page when they pulled up YouTube.
I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not.
I wasn’t logged into YouTube and I had cleared all the cookies in my browser. It also didn’t appear in the section that normally suggest videos based on my past content (which never has news of political stuff because I don’t watch that stuff on YouTube), but rather in the section below it that normally has news videos usually of the current events variety and don’t appear to relate to my viewing habits.
The video did have a lot of views and so perhaps was selected for general consumption because its “trending” rather then specifically selected for me.
But I concede I don’t know much about how all this works and you might be right.
“I’ll give you $100 for every progressive that you can find that saw that video at the top of the page when they pulled up YouTube.”
Lol. Please cut a check to asdf for exactly zero dollars and zero cents.
Unless you’ve got a vpn running, they will find you and feed you whatever you’re craving.
> I wasn’t logged into YouTube and I had cleared all the cookies in my browser.
asdf, the tracking goes far beyond that. As Hans says, google is clearly tracking people by their IP address: I’ve even seen searches in Duckduckgo, an alternate search engine that I’ve been using since I abandoned google search last year, lead to related videos showing up for me in the mobile youtube app, which I’m not signed into. That’s one of the reasons I’m ditching all remaining Big Tech products over the coming months, very few of which were in my rotation already.
@Wallace
Possible.
Again, it appeared in a section of my YouTube that doesn’t normally provide anything related to tracking my browsing habits. It’s basically the “trending” general news section, which has plenty of things that make sense as “hot thing people in general are viewing right now” and very little sense “based on my browsing history.”
I could be wrong, but I’m not convinced this was an algorithm thing. I think its just that given current events, a lot of people viewed this video and it went to the top.
William Voegeli: “Looters tore apart Chicago’s North Michigan Avenue shopping district in August, resulting in 13 police officers being injured and the arrest of more than 100 people, because of rumors spread on social media that police had shot an unarmed 15-year-old on the South Side. What actually occurred was that a 20-year-old convicted felon, subsequently charged with two counts of attempted first-degree murder, was wounded after he fired on police officers.”
As the looters were using Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook and YouTube, it makes sense to go after Parler. Everything makes sense if you just get on board.
Like this tweet from Biden: “No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protestors yesterday that they wouldn’t have been treated very differently than the mob that stormed the Capitol. We all know that’s true–and it’s unacceptable.”
This alternate reality in which “we all know” that the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle was immediately suppressed is Biden’s reality. No one can tell him any different.
No one can argue with Seattle’s mayor that CHAZ, as she said, “is not a lawless wasteland of anarchist insurrection, it is a peaceful expression of our community’s collective grief and their desire to build a better world.” (“Seattle is fine. Don’t be so afraid of democracy.”)
This was her police chief: “We don’t want to exacerbate or intensify or incite problems that are going to lead to harm to the officers or the people who are standing by.”
And the mayor again: “For as long as I can remember, Capitol Hill has been autonomous–it’s always been a place where people go to express themselves freely.”
Obviously it’s unacceptable now to hark back to these forgotten figures of the dim and distant past, just as it was unacceptable at the time to point out these guys are nuts.
But if it’s never acceptable, at any time, to mock the Seattle Times (“Free snacks at the No-Cop Co-op. Free gas masks from some guy’s sedan. Free speech at the speaker’s circle, where anyone could say their piece. A free documentary movie–Ava DuVernay’s ’13th’–showing after dark”) or the New York Times (“The entire area was now a homeland for racial justice–and, depending on the protester one talked to, perhaps something more”) then the result is this alternate reality in which the leader of the free world can’t be told what no one is ever going to tell him.
I linked the Voegeli op-ed that you quote from. It is particularly brilliant. It explains that the left has the ability to be rather brazenly hypocritical and simply stifle any meaningful objections and ignore a vast quantity of unmeaningful objections.
I’m often sad that Arnold Kling is not as popular a public intellectual as so many others. This is a great example of his good thoughts and why I like coming here to read him.
It’s also a great example of almost exactly why so few can follow him.
Does Arnold support or oppose Twitter’s decision? He clearly doesn’t say.
Perhaps his quote from Tyler implies he agrees?
But his note on evil twin Tyrone implies Arnold isn’t sure if this was an evil post.
Tyler calls Tyrone his evil twin, but Tyrone writes mostly Politically Incorrect (anti-PC) stuff — implying Tyler thinks being anti-PC is sort of being evil. (I read Arnold far more than Tyler, now.)
Intellectual leaders need to take a stand one way or the other on issues they want to be thought leaders in. Arnold’s push towards criteria about an issue, rather than a judgement about a specific case, is … refreshing. And intellectually stimulating. But not what those who follow thought leaders are usually looking for.
Sometimes it’s one way, sometimes the other. This is true, and part of strong imperfection.
So which way is it in THIS case?
Subversive poll of the day. Given that he deliberately makes himself difficult to understand, is it worth trying to figure out what Tyler Cowen really believes?
A) Totally worth it.
B) I’d rather read Heidegger.
Kling presumes Big Tech is entirely sincere about being politically neutral, and content moderation is just a hard policy to get right where everyone is happy. I’m surprised and disappointed that Kling gives the tech companies such an undeservedly charitable interpretation. The big tech companies aren’t politically neutral at all, they have actively been tilting the scales for the Democrats and against the Republicans. The tech companies aren’t formally admitting their political motives but they aren’t subtle about it at all.
The political left has the cultural power to act in a hypocritical fashion to gain political leverage and just ignore or stifle accusations of obvious hypocrisy. I’d highly recommend this well-written essay on the subject:
https://www.city-journal.org/about-whataboutism-and-political-hypocrisy
Remarkable post and will look forward to your future update. Do you accept advertisers?