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from the goose-in-one-hand-is-worth-taking-a-gander dept.
Twitter may Tag Rule-Breaking Trump Tweets:
Twitter said Thursday it could start tagging tweets from newsworthy figures such as US President Donald Trump that break its rules, while stopping short of deleting them.
The one-to-many messaging platform used extensively by Trump to fire off comments, some of them inflammatory, said it is exploring ways to add context to tweets considered to be of legitimate public interest but which violate its terms of service.
"Twitter is exploring ways to provide more context around tweets that violate our rules, but are newsworthy and in the legitimate public interest," the company said in an emailed statement.
[...]Twitter's trust and safety chief Vijaya Gadde [...] said during an on-stage interview at a Washington Post technology forum in San Francisco that Twitter was looking at ways to "put some context around it so people are aware that that content is actually a violation of our rules and it is serving a particular purpose in remaining on the platform."
Tweets that go too far, such as threatening someone with violence, would be removed no matter who posts them, according to Gadde.
The rules don't have to be followed if you are "newsworthy", but the rest of us have to abide by them. Got it.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @01:21PM (5 children)
That's literally their job, anything else is just the equivalent of a strongly worded letter.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @02:01PM
Threatening violence on Twitter is not. That's why they have things called Formal Communication Channels, and a smart President might recognize that there are pretty good reasons for them and reasons to not implusively throw out whatever is floating through the President's brain at that moment. But I wouldn't expect our current Twit In Chief to understand much about that.
(Score: 1, Troll) by jmorris on Friday March 29 2019, @03:24PM (3 children)
Yeah, twitter needs to send their "trust and safety council" to a "Theory of Government 101" class. It is illegal for me to threaten to blow your effing head off, because the government claims a monopoly on the use of violence. By definition it means President Trump, as a Head of State, IS allowed to threaten the use of violence. There are legal limits on that power against citizens (in the "Free" countries, rules differ elsewhere of course...) but in International Relations accepted International Law puts few limits on what is considered OK. After all countries can legally do a lot more than talk smack, they can legally roll armor columns into each others territory.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @03:30PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday March 29 2019, @04:50PM (1 child)
It's much more complicated than that, and sadly, there's been so much "interpretation" of the US Constitution that at this point it's just a nice old document. (Which could bring up a huge discussion about whether we should remain true to the constitution, and I'm not making statements either way.)
The president can declare military "action", but supposedly only for 60 days, then with a 30 day withdrawal. They like to redefine military assault as "police action".
I'm not going to babble on; here's a great read: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/war_powers [cornell.edu]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @05:35PM
You're right, as it stands the constitution is something to be worked around rather than with, at least when alcohol was banned they had the balls to do it properly rather than rely on the ability to regulate interstate trade.
That way the states would decide rather than the judiciary.