....yeah pipe bombs are dangerous but seroulsly everyone made them in high school.
I’m glad to see that you agree the ones (it was a lot more than just the one guy) who brought zipties and pipe bombs should go to jail, and that the ones who assaulted or killed the LEOs should also be harshly punished, but I have to agree with Stephen on this one: What high school did you go to? No one in my high school built any pipe bombs before they graduated as far as I know; it certainly wasn’t common or common knowledge there.
Except in the minds of those few lone people that did the bad things the rest just strolled around and took pictures aimlessly taking trinkits.
It was a lot more than just a “few lone people that did the bad things.”
That’s still illegal.
Remember that woman was also a person who wandered into the ground and she paid a price shot dead and unarmed.. Like to know how that happened.
She didn’t “wander[] into the ground”. Just watch the video. She, along with hundreds or thousands of others, went to the barricaded doors that led to the hiding congresspeople and VP, and broke the glass in those doors. At that point, she climbed over two men to get through the broken glass and the barricade shouting, “Go! Go!” During this, you can see a plainclothes agent of Pence’s Secret Service pointing a gun in that direction shouting for them not to go any further. After the woman passed through the doorframe, she was shot and knocked backwards from the impact. Yes, she was unarmed, but there was no way the agent could have known that, it was known that there were others who were that were present, and she broke into the location where his VIP and many other government officials were hiding or evacuating.
This was far from “wandering”; this was a deliberate attempt to break into somewhere she clearly wasn’t supposed to go despite being explicitly warned not to at gunpoint.
The thousands of others that did not set foot into the captial were there to protest for election integrity and the elimination of election fraud and laws that were changed leading up to the election that were unconstitutional and jeopardized its integrity.
The people who did not even try to enter the Capitol are irrelevant to this discussion. The people who did were breaking the law, and many of them attempted a coup. They’re the ones we’re talking about. You can defend the people who stayed outside until the cows come home, but it will have no effect on the arguments being made here.
Also, courts have explicitly ruled against those claims. There was no problem with the integrity of the election, no election fraud, and exactly one unconstitutional change to a law that didn’t affect many votes.
But the supreme court skirted their duty, broke the constitutional responsibility.
No, they did not. Under the Constitution, Texas has no standing to bring a case about other states’ election laws. The Supreme Court has no duty to hear a case where the plaintiff lacks standing to bring that case.
Though Justice Alito and Thomas said the case had merit to be heard
No. Alito and Thomas said that they felt the Supreme Court lacks the discretion to not hear a case where the Supreme Court has original jurisdiction (such as when one state sues another like here), regardless of whether or not that has actually has any merit at all. They did not say that the case had any merit whatsoever, and they explicitly said that they would not grant the requested relief.
John Roberts dismissed it not for merit but for no standing when 33 states sued and they had standing.
Actually, only one state sued (Texas); the other 32 merely joined as amici to file a brief in support of the lawsuit. They were not plaintiffs.
As for standing, as I mentioned above, under the Constitution, one state cannot sue another state over the latter’s election laws. The Constitution explicitly leaves pretty much every aspect of the voting and vote-counting process to the individual states. And an Article III judge (including those on the Supreme Court) cannot rule further on a lawsuit if the Plaintiff(s) cannot show that they have standing to bring the lawsuit in the first place. In order to have standing, you must be able to show that you yourself have a legally cognizable injury that can be redressed by the court. It is not a high bar, but it is a critical one. Texas could not reach that low bar. That means that they cannot be the one to bring suit over the alleged injury, so the case is fatally flawed. If your neighbor gets punched by someone, you cannot sue that person over that incident because you received no injury from it.
Have an actual trial that takes a look at the evidence instead of the constant dismisals of you filed late or you have no standing.
Here’s the thing. Judges have looked at the evidence. In every case they did look, they found that the evidence a) was inadmissible in court, b) only showed the vote-counting process proceeding normally and lawfully, or c) was contradicted and outweighed by other evidence presented and thus presumably false. The evidence was so bad that there was no need to go to a trial.
Plus, most of the cases didn’t allege fraud of any sort (which includes all of the lawsuits dismissed for lack of standing or filing late), and, with one singular exception with little impact, every one of the law changes were ruled to be constitutional as a matter of law by judges, and matters of law are generally decided well before trial if there’s no material dispute about the facts of the case.
congress do something about this election fraud and last minute changes to laws that compromised and broke constitutional law and probably most likely handed the presidency to the wrong person.
As mentioned above, the Constitution leaves most details about how to hold an election and count the votes afterwards to the individual states, and pretty much everything else is set in the Constitution itself. That means that Congress can’t actually do anything about the things you alleged. It’s a purely state and local issue.
Furthermore, as also mentioned, any presented evidence of alleged election fraud was either false or mistaken as found in several courts, and courts have ruled that those law changes were not unconstitutional. As such, there was no evidence of election fraud, and there were no law changes that compromised or broke constitutional law. (There was one thing ruled unconstitutional, but it involved a minuscule amount of votes.) Also, Congress can’t actually do anything about unconstitutional state laws. Only state legislatures and state or federal courts can do anything about those. This is another case of federalism and separation of powers at work.
As for having an effect on the election, if you combined all the proven instances of voter or election fraud with all the votes that would be thrown out absent the disputed law changes, Joe Biden still would’ve won. The margin was just too big.
They don’t get to decide to speak or not. They get to decide who gets to speak on any platform(s) they own as private persons or not. Just go to Gab, 4chan, 8kun, or (when it’s back online) Parler if Twitter and Facebook ban you from their platforms. Maybe make your own platform.
Also, a lot of people believe Trump was being insincere/weak in his “disavowal”, and I didn’t see him tell anyone to be peaceful.
It's kind of like saying that the telephone company can ban you from using a telephone because you still can walk outside and talk to people.
Not at all.
If you’re banned from Twitter, there’s still Facebook, Gab, Parler, Reddit, YouTube, 4chan, 8kun, private Mastadon instances, etc., all of which provide more-or-less the same service that Twitter does and via similar means. Not to mention the rest of the internet is still available to you. If the telephone company bans you from using their phone lines, you can’t use the telephone at all.
Twitter actually hosts users’ content on their property. A telephone company merely transmits it through their property.
The nice thing about free speech and the Constitution is that the rules are already written. They don't change and morph depending on who did or didn't win an election.
That is true, and they definitively say that a private person like Twitter can ban whomever they want for whatever reason they want whenever they want from their privately owned and privately run property (their platform).
If there was a coordination between twitter and democrat officials, then clearly this was a 1st Amendment violation.
I wouldn’t say “clearly”, but it’s not impossible. However, 1) I haven’t seen any evidence that there was any such coordination, and 2) only the Democratic officials, if anyone, would have violated the 1A—Twitter would not be liable for any allegations of a 1A violation.
That is a false dichotomy. A platform can be a publisher, a platform has the right to moderate content on its website freely, and a publisher can be held not to be liable for what people say on their website if they didn’t—in part or in whole—create or develop the content, receive exclusive rights to publish the content, or hire someone else to create or develop the content. There is no law, let alone two, that says that someone can’t claim to be both a platform and a publisher. Furthermore, there is no law that makes a distinction between platforms and publishers.
Let’s say that it is censorship. That’s just a purely semantic argument that makes no difference. If it’s legal and not done with government power, it’s not a free speech issue.
I haven’t seen evidence that anyone else is in any position to make better decisions, least of all the government.
Also, what “competition” have they removed? Trump wasn’t a competitor to Twitter.
Basically, there’s no evidence that I can see that there’s even a problem that actually needs to be solved here, let alone a better solution than the one we already have.
There have been multiple, recent court cases, including at least one from the Supreme Court, that have explicitly ruled that large platforms have no such duty at all, and §230 pretty much makes such a thing impossible. As a result, I’d say the courts would not rule that way.
Twitter is not equivalent to a publicly owned street in front of a store. It’s a privately owned location. If you’re protesting on a privately owned street without permission from the people who own it, you can legally be removed against your will and cited for trespassing or even causing a disturbance.
But really, the more apt comparison wouldn’t be a person protesting on a street at all. This would be where the union guy is protesting inside the store.
No, the 1A doesn’t protect all political speech (see Brandenburg and defamation, which may well be political speech).
No, there was no censorship here. Trump can take his speech somewhere else.
No, social media are not publicly owned platforms; they are privately owned platforms that are unfettered by 1A restrictions, which solely prevent the government from restricting or forcing speech. Private corporations are not restricted by the 1A.
No, there is no meaningful, relevant dichotomy of platform and (primary) publisher. They can be both, and it changes nothing.
No, there was no pretzel-twisting here—it’s backed up by well-established legal principles, social principles, and simple logic.
“Yet rather than Google, Apple, and Amazon punishing Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube, they punished Parler with no real chance for it to address their "concerns".”
I somewhat agree with this, but what hasn't been said is that Google told Parler to change its policies a while ago (not just recently). So Parler did have a chance to address at least Google's concerns. And didn't.
As I recall, around the time that Google actually removed Parler, Apple was warning Parler to make changes or get out. So Apple also gave Parler a chance to address Apple’s concerns.
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
Re: Re:
I’m glad to see that you agree the ones (it was a lot more than just the one guy) who brought zipties and pipe bombs should go to jail, and that the ones who assaulted or killed the LEOs should also be harshly punished, but I have to agree with Stephen on this one: What high school did you go to? No one in my high school built any pipe bombs before they graduated as far as I know; it certainly wasn’t common or common knowledge there.
It was a lot more than just a “few lone people that did the bad things.”
She didn’t “wander[] into the ground”. Just watch the video. She, along with hundreds or thousands of others, went to the barricaded doors that led to the hiding congresspeople and VP, and broke the glass in those doors. At that point, she climbed over two men to get through the broken glass and the barricade shouting, “Go! Go!” During this, you can see a plainclothes agent of Pence’s Secret Service pointing a gun in that direction shouting for them not to go any further. After the woman passed through the doorframe, she was shot and knocked backwards from the impact. Yes, she was unarmed, but there was no way the agent could have known that, it was known that there were others who were that were present, and she broke into the location where his VIP and many other government officials were hiding or evacuating.
This was far from “wandering”; this was a deliberate attempt to break into somewhere she clearly wasn’t supposed to go despite being explicitly warned not to at gunpoint.
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
Re: Re:
The people who did not even try to enter the Capitol are irrelevant to this discussion. The people who did were breaking the law, and many of them attempted a coup. They’re the ones we’re talking about. You can defend the people who stayed outside until the cows come home, but it will have no effect on the arguments being made here.
Also, courts have explicitly ruled against those claims. There was no problem with the integrity of the election, no election fraud, and exactly one unconstitutional change to a law that didn’t affect many votes.
No, they did not. Under the Constitution, Texas has no standing to bring a case about other states’ election laws. The Supreme Court has no duty to hear a case where the plaintiff lacks standing to bring that case.
No. Alito and Thomas said that they felt the Supreme Court lacks the discretion to not hear a case where the Supreme Court has original jurisdiction (such as when one state sues another like here), regardless of whether or not that has actually has any merit at all. They did not say that the case had any merit whatsoever, and they explicitly said that they would not grant the requested relief.
Actually, only one state sued (Texas); the other 32 merely joined as amici to file a brief in support of the lawsuit. They were not plaintiffs.
As for standing, as I mentioned above, under the Constitution, one state cannot sue another state over the latter’s election laws. The Constitution explicitly leaves pretty much every aspect of the voting and vote-counting process to the individual states. And an Article III judge (including those on the Supreme Court) cannot rule further on a lawsuit if the Plaintiff(s) cannot show that they have standing to bring the lawsuit in the first place. In order to have standing, you must be able to show that you yourself have a legally cognizable injury that can be redressed by the court. It is not a high bar, but it is a critical one. Texas could not reach that low bar. That means that they cannot be the one to bring suit over the alleged injury, so the case is fatally flawed. If your neighbor gets punched by someone, you cannot sue that person over that incident because you received no injury from it.
Here’s the thing. Judges have looked at the evidence. In every case they did look, they found that the evidence a) was inadmissible in court, b) only showed the vote-counting process proceeding normally and lawfully, or c) was contradicted and outweighed by other evidence presented and thus presumably false. The evidence was so bad that there was no need to go to a trial.
Plus, most of the cases didn’t allege fraud of any sort (which includes all of the lawsuits dismissed for lack of standing or filing late), and, with one singular exception with little impact, every one of the law changes were ruled to be constitutional as a matter of law by judges, and matters of law are generally decided well before trial if there’s no material dispute about the facts of the case.
As mentioned above, the Constitution leaves most details about how to hold an election and count the votes afterwards to the individual states, and pretty much everything else is set in the Constitution itself. That means that Congress can’t actually do anything about the things you alleged. It’s a purely state and local issue.
Furthermore, as also mentioned, any presented evidence of alleged election fraud was either false or mistaken as found in several courts, and courts have ruled that those law changes were not unconstitutional. As such, there was no evidence of election fraud, and there were no law changes that compromised or broke constitutional law. (There was one thing ruled unconstitutional, but it involved a minuscule amount of votes.) Also, Congress can’t actually do anything about unconstitutional state laws. Only state legislatures and state or federal courts can do anything about those. This is another case of federalism and separation of powers at work.
As for having an effect on the election, if you combined all the proven instances of voter or election fraud with all the votes that would be thrown out absent the disputed law changes, Joe Biden still would’ve won. The margin was just too big.
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
Re:
They don’t get to decide to speak or not. They get to decide who gets to speak on any platform(s) they own as private persons or not. Just go to Gab, 4chan, 8kun, or (when it’s back online) Parler if Twitter and Facebook ban you from their platforms. Maybe make your own platform.
Also, a lot of people believe Trump was being insincere/weak in his “disavowal”, and I didn’t see him tell anyone to be peaceful.
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
That’s still censorship since it was done under government influence.
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
Re: Re:
I’d also add that censorship could involve use of violence to suppress speech, but simply removing you from the premises is not.
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
Re: Re: Meanwhile and relevantly,
Google very much does allow side-loading/alternative app stores on Android devices.
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
Re: Definitely Censorship
Not at all.
If you’re banned from Twitter, there’s still Facebook, Gab, Parler, Reddit, YouTube, 4chan, 8kun, private Mastadon instances, etc., all of which provide more-or-less the same service that Twitter does and via similar means. Not to mention the rest of the internet is still available to you. If the telephone company bans you from using their phone lines, you can’t use the telephone at all.
Twitter actually hosts users’ content on their property. A telephone company merely transmits it through their property.
That is true, and they definitively say that a private person like Twitter can ban whomever they want for whatever reason they want whenever they want from their privately owned and privately run property (their platform).
I wouldn’t say “clearly”, but it’s not impossible. However, 1) I haven’t seen any evidence that there was any such coordination, and 2) only the Democratic officials, if anyone, would have violated the 1A—Twitter would not be liable for any allegations of a 1A violation.
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
Re: Re: To all conservatives whining censorship:
That is a false dichotomy. A platform can be a publisher, a platform has the right to moderate content on its website freely, and a publisher can be held not to be liable for what people say on their website if they didn’t—in part or in whole—create or develop the content, receive exclusive rights to publish the content, or hire someone else to create or develop the content. There is no law, let alone two, that says that someone can’t claim to be both a platform and a publisher. Furthermore, there is no law that makes a distinction between platforms and publishers.
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
Re: Re: To all conservatives whining censorship:
Let’s say that it is censorship. That’s just a purely semantic argument that makes no difference. If it’s legal and not done with government power, it’s not a free speech issue.
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
Re: Re: Re: Just own it...
I haven’t seen evidence that anyone else is in any position to make better decisions, least of all the government.
Also, what “competition” have they removed? Trump wasn’t a competitor to Twitter.
Basically, there’s no evidence that I can see that there’s even a problem that actually needs to be solved here, let alone a better solution than the one we already have.
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
Re: Re:
There have been multiple, recent court cases, including at least one from the Supreme Court, that have explicitly ruled that large platforms have no such duty at all, and §230 pretty much makes such a thing impossible. As a result, I’d say the courts would not rule that way.
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
Re: Re: Re: Re: Free speech
Twitter =/= the Internet
The internet wasn’t built or run by the government.
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
Re: Re: Free speech
Twitter isn’t a monopoly. There are plenty of other social media sites out there. Nor is it a public utility.
On the post: Small Idaho ISP 'Punishes' Twitter And Facebook's 'Censorship' ... By Blocking Access To Them Entirely
Re:
FTR, we are not inherently opposed to 8chan’s existence, and we never said that ISPs should be able to block anyone.
On the post: Internet-Connected Chastity Cages Hit By Bitcoin Ransom Hack
Re:
To be fair, I’d be nervous about using force to remove anything right by my genitals.
On the post: Some Thoughts On Twitter Pulling The Plug On Trump's Account
Re: Re: Like claiming you don't have protections from unicorn ca
Then your 1A concerns are with the government official, not the homeowner who actually kicked you out.
On the post: Some Thoughts On Twitter Pulling The Plug On Trump's Account
Re: Re: Re: Occam's Razor
Twitter is not equivalent to a publicly owned street in front of a store. It’s a privately owned location. If you’re protesting on a privately owned street without permission from the people who own it, you can legally be removed against your will and cited for trespassing or even causing a disturbance.
But really, the more apt comparison wouldn’t be a person protesting on a street at all. This would be where the union guy is protesting inside the store.
On the post: Some Thoughts On Twitter Pulling The Plug On Trump's Account
Re: Occam's Razor
No, the 1A doesn’t protect all political speech (see Brandenburg and defamation, which may well be political speech).
No, there was no censorship here. Trump can take his speech somewhere else.
No, social media are not publicly owned platforms; they are privately owned platforms that are unfettered by 1A restrictions, which solely prevent the government from restricting or forcing speech. Private corporations are not restricted by the 1A.
No, there is no meaningful, relevant dichotomy of platform and (primary) publisher. They can be both, and it changes nothing.
No, there was no pretzel-twisting here—it’s backed up by well-established legal principles, social principles, and simple logic.
On the post: Some Thoughts On Twitter Pulling The Plug On Trump's Account
Re: Brandenburg was decided wrongly
I still agree that Trump’s comments ought to be 1A-protected under Brandenburg, especially if they can’t prove intent.
What people decide to do with the speech is irrelevant.
On the post: Some Thoughts On Twitter Pulling The Plug On Trump's Account
Re: Re:
As I recall, around the time that Google actually removed Parler, Apple was warning Parler to make changes or get out. So Apple also gave Parler a chance to address Apple’s concerns.
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