86 thoughts on “From Twitter Safety: Donald Trump’s Twitter Account has been Permanently Suspended”

  1. To be perfectly honest, I do think that his twitter feed is a historical document and ought to be made available to the public to read.

    I mean, I understand the arguments why he can’t have access to it anymore and I understand the arguments for why it shouldn’t be readable for the next few months or so…

    But I think it should be readable in the future.Report

      2. Do you mean the Trump presidential library, Gentleman’s Club, golf course, bar, grill, discount Only Available on TV store and gift shop. You can have your favorite trump tweet printed on any pair of edible underwear, oxygen tubing or sleeveless t shirt.Report

          1. “Thank you for purchasing 3 combo pack Trump brand Ipecac/ Enema’s. Would you like to just give him more money for nothing in return? Just drop it in the Trump tip jar.”Report

          1. In Tokyo, there’s a famous tourist attraction called the Robot Restaurant, where they put on a show involving robots fighting each other while you eat mediocre food. I didn’t care much for it. It was extremely loud, and the robots were basically just animatronic parade floats rolling back and forth.

            But before the show, they put you in a delightfully garish waiting room, and it has the most amazing bathroom. There’s faux gilding, and rhinestones! So many rhinestones! I went in and immediately thought, “This must be what Donald Trump’s bathroom is like!”Report

      3. The Trump Presidential Library will consist of 10,000 remaindered copies of The Art of the Deal; a few copies may persist into The AfterTimes, but most survivors will be illiterate anyway.Report

    2. I believe that the Presidential Records Act, as amended, required Twitter to maintain permanent copies. This is the kind of thing that the Legal Department gets paid their big bucks to know in advance and insist be done — failure to comply is a “risk the company” sort of thing.Report

        1. Half of patreon’s problems come from stuff like Mastercard/Visa saying “if you have people doing the following things, you won’t be able to use Visa/Mastercard” and then Patreon saying “nope”. Not really a legal issue, not really.

          Aella Girl on twitter (warning, she’s a cam girl though her twitter account is mostly worksafe otherwise) has a nice discussion about this sort of thing:

          Read her whole thread. It’s interesting.Report

  4. There seems to be a race whether some of Trump’s more vocal followers can cancel their Twitter accounts before they are banned.

    Reportedly, Apple has given Parler 24 hours to implement a moderation scheme or the app will be removed from the App Store. For those who don’t remember, Apple’s terms of service allow them to remove installed copies of the app from the phones if it’s banned from the store.Report

    3. I wonder if there was a similar ban wave targeting accounts inciting and coordinating the left-wing insurrections we saw over the summer. Probably. I trust Twitter to be even-handed in enforcing this kind of thing. It’s weird that I can’t recall anyone making a big deal over it, though.Report

          1. I’m actually surprised by this. I know the CTU leadership has shown itself to be pretty vile in the past, but I did not expect them to find their Twitter account calling for a lynching.Report

  5. I sensed a great disturbance in the Force, as if 75 million twits cried out, and were silenced.
    But it was just gas.Report

  8. On the whole Platform vs. Publisher vs. Club question… I’d consider introducing a new test for platform status: an open standard. That is, if the content generated on your platform is fully open for other services to write to, consume and distribute and curate… then you are a platform. Breaks-up the thorny/sticky issue of network effect and competition.

    You can keep club status up to a certain point… beyond a certain number of subscribers, we’re obviously not a club so either a publisher or platform… so decide if the value of a monopoly of a limited set of users/content is more important than the value of a large platform business where the content/users are not monopolized.

    There’s a lot more with regards content ownership and privacy… but moving towards business friendly models that offer protections where protections are warranted, keep competition in the forefront, and allow a platform to monetize its platform status as it gives up its user/content network/monopoly.Report

    1. I don’t have a problem with the idea but I’m not sure it addresses the issue driving the argument. Like how does it change the incentives of any business that accepts platform status? And while I don’t think platforms should be liable for the torts of the content posters I’m also not sure the price of protection should be allowing mass misinformation or acting as a channel for commands to engage in criminal activity.

      The operative question is who has discretion, the business (which may act capriciously) or the state via regulatory incentives. To paraphrase Rush, even if that state is telling platforms they may no longer decide they still have made a choice.

      Edit: unless maybe I’m misreading you and the price isn’t giving up discretion, but rather creating interoperability with competing platforms?Report

      1. Well, so much for my plan to cut/paste/send to Ajit Pai with a note: problem solved in a comment, dude.

        I guess I’d put it this way, we should stop ignoring that there aren’t tech races to establish platforms/protocols with winners/losers. On the one hand, we want to encourage Tech Races, and we live with winners/losers. But we still have to make sure that when Winners win they monetize the value not the moat. So at some point having won the network-effect race, we allow the monetization at the transaction level, not at the network level… so phase 2 of a healthy capitalism allows other folks to build businesses on top of platforms that are regulated to provide platform status.

        It’s a bit like electricity vs. electricities… or a phone network vs. networks… that’s what the original 230 was meant to address… the network backbone… but we’ve moved forward from mere electricity to mere communication protocols to mere network exchanges… and the network exchanges can be local/small/curated or broad/open/transactional. When you win, you win the transaction war… but at the expense of the curated content/data owner wars.

        That’s why I’m not a simple repeal-230 guy… there are rewards and incentives we want to keep, and incentives we want to discourage… with the idea being that you monetize the value not the monopoly.Report

  10. Sometimes freedom dies in small doses mostly hidden from view…other times it dies big in full view of people watching it and cheering.Report

    1. Last I checked private companies could pretty much do whatever they want, especially when they decide an client has violated their terms of service. Not sure that’s an impingement on freedom however.Report

      1. These companies are, essentially, monopolies. Most of the times the left has been very anti monopoly. What gives? These platforms have massive user bases and a certain subset is being negatively impacted by deplatforms, etc. where migrating new a new/different platform is a challenge (now impossible since Parer is gone)Report

        1. Under US anti-trust law, being a monopoly is not illegal. But being classified a monopoly in court makes certain business behaviors illegal. The first step in any anti-trust proceeding is to define the market that has been monopolized. Back in the 1990s, everyone was surprised when the federal courts agreed that “desktop computer operating systems” was a market. Once they did, there was no question about Microsoft engaging in illegal behavior, the only question was what the remedy would be. I am fairly eager to see what “market” Facebook is accused of monopolizing.Report

      1. You live in Seattle, right? Or was that a different Jesse? Anyway, right now Seattle has a fairly significant problem with people literally crapping on the commons. Not quite in people’s homes, but close enough. And a lot of people in your ideological vicinity are saying that stopping them from doing so would be limiting their freedom.

        So…you’re not wrong about this particular issue, but man, that’s an unfortunate choice of metaphor.Report

          1. They tried public restrooms, they were taken over and used for drugs, dealing, and (IIRC) prostitution.

            What they need is housing and social services.Report

              3. If you have space, but are effectively barred from using it, you don’t actually have space now, do you?

                (I am painfully aware of the NIMBYs in the area)Report

              4. I’m probably just overly cynical/bitter about my own tribe and housing construction policy but I feel like that reasoning lets local government, and NIMBY off the hook too easy. The space is there. The technology exists. The economics are sound. There’s no mountain blocking construction, no surging ocean burying the land.

                People are crapping in the parks and the sidewalks because too many well off, comfortable and by and large liberal people don’t want housing density, use their votes and influence to block it via regulation and tell themselves “hey I toss those bums a fiver when I see them at the intersection, that’s enough money for a tent and drugs so my conscience is clear”.Report

              5. I hear ya. I’m just saying that it doesn’t really matter why the space is not accessible at the moment, just that it is, and until that is dealt with, you don’t have space.Report

  11. How big do you think the intersection is between people who applauded Masterpiece Cakeshop and people whining about the Trump Twitter ban? My money is on a null set.Report

    1. “Let’s establish a rule.”
      “Okay, let’s establish it.”
      “Let’s apply the rule.”
      “Okay, let’s apply the rule.”
      “Let’s apply a different rule elsewhere.”
      “Let’s not.”
      “WHY DO YOU HATE RULES, HYPOCRITE?”Report

      1. “I’d like a cake.”
        “No, and there are no other cake shops in the world.”
        “I’m going to complain about this on social media.”
        “Go ahead, there are many platforms with equal market influence.”Report

  13. I just made a similar comment on another thread, but it belongs here more. These moves greatly increase the likelihood of a Trump news network. He craves attention, and he has followers, but if he’d remained on Twitter he would have been just another noisemaker. But this gives him a cause and a need for a new platform.Report

    2. Well he would have to be able to run a money making business which has never been his strong point. At some point at least, he would try to do it with other peoples money. But that is the free market.Report

      1. Alternately, why should I care if Trump starts his own news network? How would it be different than what Fox News has been doing for the last five years?Report

    3. These moves greatly increase the likelihood of a Trump news network.

      What will Trump’s role at this network be? License the use of his name for $X million per year? Provide all the extra cash that will be necessary to keep it afloat for the first few years? Hands-on management like Murdoch in the early days? Live on-screen daily talent? Once per week pre-recorded heavily edited show?

      You could convince me about the first one. The others, those seem like huge stretches for today’s Trump.Report

    4. (Mis-hit the report and not the reply button again, gah. I’m having a day.)

      There was a thread on Twitter some weeks back detailing how this would work: That Trump could demand – and get – an exclusive contract with Newsmax or OANN that would basically break their bank as they couldn’t bring in the ratings to support it. My added thought was this turns Trump from content to competitor, even more so now after Wednesday.

      And in any case, I’m not sure how much of a network presence he’ll get camped out in Rio or Moscow. RT guest contributor?Report

  14. Well he would have to be able to run a money making business which has never been his strong point. At some point at least, he would try to do it with other peoples money. But that is the free market.Report

  15. The only thing more annoying than the people whinging about “ThE fIRsT aMeNdMeNt” is knowing that most of the whingers know full well that it doesn’t apply here, and that they’re just winding people up and fundraising.Report

  17. Hilarious. Apple and Google just pulled the Parler app because it has too many posts encouraging violence.

    Pulling a social media app where conservatives can freely incite violence against politicians and media personalities will, of course, only widen our already existing divisions. Think about that…Report

    2. But that will only make them mad. When they get mad they might make a lot of violent threats. Which would be bad. So they have to have a place to make all their fun violent threats or…ummm….Report

      1. The New York State Bar Association has nothing to say about who is or isn’t a lawyer in New York State and doesn’t discipline them, unlike some states that have what is called a “mandatory bar association.” Lawyer status is regulated by the state court system. (The administrative setup is unclear to me and uninteresting unless you face potential bar discipline or represent someone who does.) NYSBA is essentially a trade association and business networking outfit that NY lawyers may join or not as they see fit. Although I haven’t studied NYSBA’s rules on membership, I assume it can dump members it finds undesirable, and that its in-house lawyers know what hoops it has to jump through to do that.
        That said, other than embarrassment, the main effect of being thrown out of NYSBA is that you are no longer eligible for member discounts on publications, continuing legal education, and what-have-you. I’m not so sure about sponsored insurance.Report

  20. Unintended Consequences:

    I started a Twitter account this summer that would automatically give a snarky reply back to anything Trump put out on Twitter. I grew the account to over 100,000 followers quickly and was selling anti Trump and pro democrat shirts, hats, and trinkets. His Twitter just got banned and now my main source of growing this account and business is done. What can I do to continue to monetize this account or is it over? Thanks in advance.

    Further down the thread:

    I will try with Eric and Ivanka and see how it goes. I’m not sure how much more time I want to invest with less than 2 weeks left of him being president. Trumps was also extremely easy I could just tweet something simple like What about the kids in the cages every 7 tweets. It didn’t matter what he tweeted about people would still engage with my content.

    I’ve tried with Democrats that are active and have large followings but Twitter bans those almost immediately. I don’t know if it’s political bias or their followers are quicker to report me.

    I’ve been wondering if there are going to be weird side effects to banning Emmanuel Goldstein.

    There’s a lot of catharsis that comes in keeping him around and, if Trump is skilled at anything, it’s in maintaining the two minutes for just another 15 seconds more.Report

    1. Signature Bank is posturing: they are closing Trump’s two personal accounts with them. According to his disclosure forms, Trump has personal accounts (ie, checking, saving, money market, small trust) at several US banks. The big break with US banks happened years ago, when they quite lending money to Trump, the Trump Organization, or any projects in which those were involved.

      I don’t recall the FDIC rules about demand deposit accounts at all. I’m not sure that Signature can arbitrarily terminate client accounts.Report

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