Some quick thoughts about the social media companies suspending Trump’s accounts. /1 nytimes.com/2021/01/07/tec…
The platforms should have a heavy bias in favor of leaving political leaders' speech up. Not because platforms owe this to political leaders, but because they owe it to the public. /2
Knowing what political leaders are saying is crucial to the public’s ability to hold those leaders accountable for their decisions. /3
But there are limits to this principle. A political leader who uses his account to incite imminent violence is causing harms that can’t be countered by speech and can’t be undone by a future election. /4
When the platforms reasonably conclude that a political leader is engaged in this kind of activity, they’re justified in taking his posts down—and in suspending his account, at least if he persists. /5
To take an account down in these circumstances is not an affront to free speech, as some have suggested. To the contrary, it’s the responsible exercise of a First Amendment right. /6
So I disagree with the people saying the platforms should have taken Trump’s accounts down a long time ago. And I also disagree with the people saying the platforms shouldn’t be suspending the accounts now. /7
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Laura Poitras says the Assange indictment poses a grave threat to press freedom. She's right. 1/x nytimes.com/2020/12/21/opi…
It doesn’t matter whether Assange himself is a properly described as a journalist. He’s being charged for acts that are integral to national security journalism. 2/x
The Assange indictment was part of the Trump admin’s effort to constrain and demonize the press—an effort that also included describing journalism as fake news, describing journalists as enemies of the people, and embracing foreign tyrants who murder reporters and activists. 3/x
I didn’t respond to @paulkrugman's original tweet because I assumed it was just a bad tweet and that he’d figure that out on his own. But now I'm realizing that a lot of the events that defined the past 19 years for people like me didn’t even register with him. THREAD
The problem with the argument he makes here is that it doesn’t recognize that most of the "anti-Muslim sentiment and violence" was *officially sanctioned*. Focusing narrowly on hate crimes stats has the effect of moving all of that out of the picture.
For example, hundreds of Muslim men were rounded up in New York and New Jersey in the weeks after 9/11. They were imprisoned without charge and often subject to abuse in custody because of their religion. None of this would register in any hate crimes database.
I don’t think DOJ is going to get its prior restraint against the bookstores, Simon & Schuster, or John Bolton. Still… (1/x)
Events of the past few days really make you wonder whether it might not have been better if the Bush and Obama DOJs hadn’t persuaded courts to defer blindly to the executive branch’s classification decisions. (2/x)
Maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to argue, as the Bush and Obama DOJs did, that government employees never have a First Amendment right to disclose info the executive branch has classified. (3/x)
We need to do more to ensure that the public and press are getting timely access to reliable and complete information about the pandemic and about government’s response to it. (1/x)
We filed it b/c the WH has issued misleading and inaccurate statements about the pandemic even as it has imposed restrictions on the ability of CDC employees to speak to the press and public. (3/x)
Many thoughtful people wrote about the talk that Zuckerberg gave at @Georgetown. But I’m wondering whether, even after Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony yesterday, people really get how crazy it is that Zuckerberg is casting @Facebook as champion of free speech. THREAD:
Zuckerberg got some basic things right. Advocacy for social change is impossible without the right to speak freely; social media can be a powerful tool for calling attention to injustice; censorship meant to protect minorities has sometimes ended up silencing them instead.
But the rest of what Zuckerberg had to say about free speech and Facebook was mainly wrong. One error at the center of his speech—and also of his testimony—involved his effort to equate Facebook’s effort to “give people a voice” with “free speech.”