Thursday, May 28, 2020

ok.

i'm going to guess that this executive order is going to be political theatre. again - he gets my hopes up, but he's not going to follow through with anything substantive.

the claim from the whitehouse is that twitter is engaging in "political bias". but, so what? they own the servers - it's their private property. they have no legal obligation to maintain neutrality. and, that's the actual legal fact, here.

i think it's a lamentable reality, but it's the current legal order.

so, what is he doing, then? he's just riling up his base.

as mentioned repeatedly, i'd like to see a total reversal of the way this is approached legally, but it would require overturning the courts, so it would need to go through congress, and i don't see any hope of that going anywhere. 

just about all he can do is post a tweet condemning the censorship on twitter, and that's about all you're going to see actually happen.

there's a lot of ways that the state can approach something like this if it doesn't want to nationalize the servers, which is what i'd actually argue for. the thing is that trump isn't going to be interested in anything like that because it would undo his own relevance. i'm approaching this from a very idealistic perspective about the sanctity of speech; he's just looking to maximize marketing reach. 

it does open a lot of questions, though, about how speech advocates move forward in restricting corporate censorship, in the future. but, don't think trump is an ally, here. he's just in it for himself.