If the executive order Trump plans to sign tomorrow is what the Washington Post reports—an effort to increase the odds Twitter will be sued for Terms of Service-violative content it leaves up...
...doesn't that give Twitter even more justification to ban Trump from the platform?
...doesn't that give Twitter even more justification to ban Trump from the platform?
That is, if Trump is in fact saying that he wants to stop shielding Twitter from lawsuits over the sort of content he posts daily, wouldn't that only underscore for Twitter that the *most* protected (currently) ToS-violative accounts—a list Trump *tops*—must be the *first* to go?
Twitter already *massively* polices content, whether to avoid lawsuits or simply uphold some aspect of the Twitter environment it feels is encoded in its ToS hardly matters. But it makes one *huge* exception: Trump. Isn't Trump giving Twitter every reason to *stop* exempting him?
All this is apart from whether what Trump plans to do is legal. None of it sounds like it'd stand up in court—though with all the Trump judges running around pretending to be lawyers, who knows. But what I'm saying is, Twitter's argument to ban Trump is getting better and better.
If what Trump tries to do is to create a mechanism whose final aim is prohibiting Twitter from "editing" posts, it'll be nearly impossible for a court to distinguish adding a link (impermissible to Trump) from deleting a tweet (permissible to Trump, as it never happens to *him*).
And even in that case, Trump would be way overplaying his hand by basically saying to Twitter, you can either *delete my tweets* or *ban me* but you can't put innocuous light-blue-text links under any of my tweets. With that sort of ultimatum, why *wouldn't* Twitter just ban him?
What it comes down to is what I said earlier today: Trump is getting *better* treatment from Twitter than anyone in America—and it's only his derangement that causes him to think he's being treated unfairly. Twitter should show him what *being treated like everyone else* is like.
