In times of civil unrest and violence
On the one hand Marion Millar is charged with a crime for disbelief in trans ideology on Twitter, on the other hand Trump is banned from Facebook for two years. Which of the two is really a threat to anyone?
Facebook has extended former President Donald Trump’s suspension for two years and says it will only reinstate him “if the risk to public safety has receded.”
The decision comes after Facebook’s Oversight Board told the company it was wrong to impose an indefinite ban on Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
Facebook says it is setting new rules for public figures in times of civil unrest and violence, “to be applied in exceptional cases such as this.” Trump has received the maximum penalty under those rules, “given the gravity of the circumstances” leading to his suspension. Because the company took his Facebook and Instagram accounts down on Jan. 7, they will remain suspended until at least Jan. 7, 2023.
I’m seeing some “Don’t gloat lefties it will be your turn next.”
That could be true, but it’s far from necessarily true. It’s pattern-detection, but there’s more than one pattern here. The pattern could be: “I know, let’s just silence everything we dislike.” But it could also be: “This guy actually incited a riot that got people killed and came way too close to a literal successful insurrection so we really need to stop giving him this particular channel.” If it’s “everything we dislike” then yes, we’re all vulnerable, but if it’s “he’s an ex-president who incited what almost became an insurrection” then we’re not. Patterns are important, but so are particulars.
Trump says he has the best particulars.
Facebook’s decision “is an insult to the record-setting 75M people, plus many others, who voted for us,” Trump said in an emailed statement, misstating the number of votes he received in the 2020 presidential election. (It was just over 74 million votes.) He also continued his baseless attacks on the legitimacy of the election.
So he’s saying it’s an insult to the people who didn’t vote for him as well as the ones who did. Nah. He tried to spark an insurrection in order to steal the election, so no, I don’t consider myself insulted by measures to curb his ability to try that again.
So, a lifetime ban then.
I’ll just state for the record that if any of my favorite politicians try to start a coup they will no longer be a favorite politician and I will be more bothered by the coup attempt than their presence on Facebook; pretty much like I am not bothered by no longer being friends with a certain Madonna/Joan Crawford devotee.
Yeah, well I don’t gloat anymore, cancel culture is bad. Trump is a glaring exception and should’ve been cancelled when he started threatening nuclear war on Twitter.
He should have been cancelled in 1980, permanently. :P
Presumably he’s claiming that many folks who support him didn’t vote, but anyone who’s studied election demographics will tell you that’s less true of him than of almost any candidate in living memory. The GOP in general has been winning partly by generating an increasingly fervent passion in an ever-shrinking segment of the population. Coupled with the gerrymandering and voter suppression tactics, the math has been enough to give them the semblance of being a party with a significant claim to popular support. His non-voting supporters are probably smaller, at this point, than his voting ones.
YnNB, we can but hope. He’s malicious enough to live forever though.
Funny thing about his record number of votes, it was beaten on the same day by Biden, who set a considerably bigger record. Some people are just very poor losers, that’s really what all this comes down to.
I took YNNB to mean that the risk to public safety would never end.