Twitter trump ban then enthuses about8/18/2023 ![]() I hope you are being safe in Berlin, and not missing Luxembourg too much. What would be your definition of ‘privacy’ in this hyperconnected, non-stop, data-mining, automated and personalized world?” However, I believe its definition has morphed and evolved during the last 10-15 years into something new. Sergio, writing from Berlin, though he lives in Luxembourg and is originally from Mexico (TMI!), says, “The word ‘privacy’ has become a buzzword that everyone uses nowadays whenever talking about the risks of Big Tech. That happened with anti-vaxxers, Holocaust denial, and now Donald Trump’s attempts to destroy democracy.įor now, of course, Zuckerberg is right when he says, “The priority for the whole country must now be to ensure that the remaining 13 days and the days after inauguration pass peacefully and in accordance with established democratic norms.” But after that, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey have-in a term both utter a lot-“a lot of work to do.” Typically, Facebook defends a given outcome until enough people get disgusted at what is allowed to happen on its platform. The company should more methodically examine the results of its policies, which in many cases scream wrong. But Facebook has things backwards when it invokes its own rules, as if it were referring to a tablet that some wonky Moses handed down. Time and time again, when explaining why someone terrible remains on the platform, Zuckerberg invokes the company’s policies. The choice that the platforms face has little to do what is legal, and everything to do with what is right. In the past few years, however, it has been hard to look away from the consequences. Twitter positioned itself as “the Pulse of the Planet.” Zuckerberg set out to build Facebook as the ultimate personalized newspaper. But as their platforms grew, so did their ambitions. The vision was to enrich people’s lives by letting them know what their friends were up to. When Facebook and Twitter began, neither founder suspected that their creations would be used to change public opinion, and certainly not to poison the body politic in the way Donald Trump did. Everyone would feel better, and fewer employees would threaten to quit because they feel that they are working for Satan. But that shortfall might challenge the company to concoct more wholesome features that would bring people back-and not feel so angry when they did use the service. Maybe in the short term people would not log into Facebook quite so much. And on Wednesday, as the Capitol Rotunda was being breached and the Electoral College count interrupted, Trump was tweeting love notes to the terrorists. While he gave the actual marching orders in person, the invaders who came to Washington were fed by Trump’s avalanche of false claims and incitements on social media, hardly mitigated by warning labels or notices that other, perhaps more reliable sources were reporting something else. That changed this week, when Donald Trump dispatched a cosplay mob of thugs and toy soldiers to take the Capitol-and they actually did. (They didn’t say this, but their own political interests were also in play-the president controls bodies that regulate those platforms.) They set some “limits,” but those limits never seemed to be invoked. Long ago (well, 2015), when he said hateful things about Muslims that would boot mere mortals from Facebook and Twitter, the platforms decided his newsworthiness was more relevant than his toxicity. Oh, they put (easy-to-ignore) warning labels on some tweets and posts, and even took the stray one down. Hate speech, doxing, and dangerous disinformation on Covid evidently weren’t enough. For months-years, really-people have asked what it would take for Facebook and Twitter to ban the policy-violator-in-chief from their platforms.
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