Meta Ending Suspension of Trump’s Accounts

[steponlego]

I'm not ending my suspension of Meta though. Sorry, Meta.

[bediger4000]

Shows very openly that The Elite are treated differently than ordinary, middle or lower class people.

[advisedwang]

I wonder how much of this is fear that Facebook won't be able to maintain views throughout the 2024 election cycle if users are forced to other platforms to follow Trump.

[ss108]

Sounds like they deliberately want to help him win again in 2024.

[thinking4real]

“The public should be able to hear what politicians are saying so they can make informed choices.”

Oh that’s hilarious. After tech companies stifling a sitting president, now they are going to straight faced claim this like it means a damn thing.

This is insulting to users’ intelligence.

[papito]

The HackerNews crowd really needs to figure out how to deal with the cognitive dissonance of "the business can do no wrong while chasing the profits" and "but ma' freedoms".

[0xy]

It's a coincidence this happened after the midterms. Totally not a political decision at all.

[rootusrootus]

To be fair, it has been quite a while (not in our lifetime AFAIK) since we had a sitting president with such antisocial behavior tendencies. It was uncharted territory.

[krapp]

I love how everyone just uses the term "sitting president" verbatim now when making this argument, as if the prospect of a president losing their social media accounts is supposed to fill us with dread, sitting or no. It's almost become like a verbal tic.

Everything that president said and did was covered by the press around the world, an army of spokespeople and a million online sycophants. He isn't (and certainly wasn't) "stifled" by the banning of his social media accounts. Really, tech companies bent over backwards to accommodate him, gave him far more slack than they would give you or I. And even then he had to cross the line twice.

Hell, he's still the frontrunner for the Republicans in 2024, and the last anyone heard from him was that he was selling NFTs.

The narrative of Trump being silenced by big tech isn't working, find another one already.

[refurb]

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading this sentence from the "Oversight Board".

https://www.oversightboard.com/news/226612455899839-oversigh...

The Board found that the two posts by Mr Trump on 6 January severely violated Facebook's Community Standards and Instagram's Community Guidelines. "We love you. You're very special" in the first post, and "great patriots" and "remember this day forever" in the second post violated Facebook's rules prohibiting praise or support of people engaged in violence.

This seems like a ridiculous stretch of "praise of support of people engaged in violence" when right before "We love you." is "We have to have peace. So go home."

It's pretty clear this was a post facto decision - Trump needed to be banned, so let's see if we can come up with something to ban him for.

[stonogo]

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

[akomtu]

If corps are people, then it's men with multiple personalities disorder, with the number of personalities sometimes reaching tens. A few years ago one group of neurons (VPs) was in charge, and they believed that free speech is bad. Today another group of neurons has taken control, and they believe that free speech is good.

[amanaplanacanal]

Is hating someone who tried to overthrow an election and seize power for himself radical now? Maybe this really is the worst timeline.

[LinuxBender]

I used to share that opinion but as emails and DM's between three letter agencies and the social media platforms have been leaking it's harder to defend corporations. I will defer to Shoe for some details. [1]

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdjQWuJeVqE [video][13 mins]

[JaimeThompson]

Is it okay for me to dislike Trump because of the horrible GOP party platform he supported?

[lazzlazzlazz]

It was insane that this ever happened, honestly. I'm interested to hear what history decides, but it's hard to sympathize with.

[cma]

Didn't he break rules normal people would be banned for?

[peterashford]

Obviously, your intuition differs, but my view (as a New Zealander) is that Trump absolutely broke the terms of use of the platforms he was on and deserved being banned. Free speech means that you can't be imprisoned for your political views, not that everyone owes you a platform.

[bowmessage]

Meta finally realizing that folks will happily migrate to other platforms to read what they are interested in. I wonder if they'll change their stance on censorship of certain medical information next?

[lern_too_spel]

Did they realize this two years ago when they said that the suspension would last two years? https://about.fb.com/news/2021/06/facebook-response-to-overs...

If you got this wrong, consider if you got your medical knowledge wrong too. Try talking to your doctor for medical advice.