Either way it should be entertaining to watch.

yeah, not sure what will happen, strange times we are living is all that i think :P

Many are not amused. Bringing down a whole country irrevocably will not be amusing even for those on the outside.

Executive decrees are legally meaningless, and the media playing along with him are This is just yet another distraction from the 100k, and growing, death toll due largely to his inaction. Same goes for the recession his team has cultivated. The official figures, which understate the problem considerably, admit to over 40M out of work. Those figure will look good retrospectively once his team is able to build the full-scale depression they seem to be aiming for.

His modus operandi over many decades has been to stir up as much of a mess as people around him let him and then try to find a way to personally benefit from the destruction. Nowadays that circle of damage extends to much of the country and yesterday he increased his advocation of street violence. There are now major riots in several cities, with vandalism, looting, arson, and now a bit of shooting. My hunch it is to consider agent provacteurs to a lesser extent since people with any sense don't burn down their own neighborhood.

I expect that this is not about Twitter per se or even social control media in general but a way of blocking or invalidating the upcoming election. Again, bringing down a whole country irrevocably will not be amusing even for those on the outside.

Twitter. The courts have ruled in favor of technology companies, especially those in social media, before when it comes to Section 230.

Trump is exerting power he does not have on a problem -- Conservatives are censored, which is a fallacy because right-wing publications dominate places like Facebook -- that does not exist.

The inmates are running the asylum.

Up till now, Facebook and Twitter have been able to claim that they are a "platform" and not a publisher. This has allowed them to make a fortune out of people's posts without taking any responsibility for the content. The best of both worlds, you might say.

But the pandemic has forced them to exercise some control to stop outright dangerous memes from propagating. This means, as Trump has pointed out, that they are now acting as editors. Will this cause the courts to change their mind about things, I wonder?

Perhaps a bit ironic but POTUS uses Twitter to spew his poison to the masses. I wonder if he will be exempt from censorship, likely not...

The courts won't see it because executive orders have no legal weight. It is just bluster on his part. However the part in question, section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), now enshrined as law as 47 U.S. Code § 230, provides that protection.

It's a mess because on the one side social control media want to have it both ways, operate as a publisher but keep protections as a platform. On the other side, it as contrapak wrote. Various political groups keep pushing the goal posts further to one side while, without basis, proclaiming a bias in the oposite direction. One is entitled to one's own opinion but empirical facts are empirical facts. Giving lies and opinions equal valence to provable facts is costing the country. As the craziness spreads, it is costing the rest of the world too.

I'd prefer to see a return to the ideals outlined by the late John Perry Barlow back in 1996. At the time these seemed self evident but really that attitude needs to be recaptured. It lead to great economic growth for more than a decade. Pinching everything off, as we have seen, leads to the opposite.

Those ideals date from a time when cyberspace belonged to hackers and idealists. Most of those people were anarchists, whether they identified as such or not. The basic idea of anarchism is that you don't need laws because most people are prepared to be reasonable most of the time, and disputes can always be settled by argument or social pressure. It works well enough when you have a society of like minds, but that never lasts for long. As the society becomes more prosperous, others want a share of the cake.

As soon as big business moves in, anarchism no longer works, because these people are not interested in finding a way to rub along with their neighbours. They want money and power, and they soon found ways of monetising cyberspace. It makes me smile now that back in the '90s, we saw government as the only real enemy and never thought about big business. People would never have surrendered their privacy so totally and peaceably to any government as they have to Facebook.

Very interesting point Hazel. Here in the US, big business owns the government, or at minimum has a tremendous amount of influence, so we have 2 entities vying for our personal information. I don't do social media at all and try my best not to provide personal data unless I have to.

These days, data = $.

This is the right attitude. There's no point using Facebook.

Most people don't know what Facebook and other platforms do with their data. They join these "communities" and it makes them happy so all is well, or so they think. I once joined Twitter using a burner account and after about 3 or 4 months got so disgusted I deleted the account. If you think people get ugly on forums, Twitter is like a huge troll-fest of jackasses.

Take it from me, Hazel, if you are viewing it from this side of the big pond, there's nothing at all entertaining about it.

Here's are a couple of legal perspectives from one of my favorite websites:

https://abovethelaw.com/2020/05/dona...e-wants-to-do/

https://abovethelaw.com/2020/05/mark...the-president/

I really wish you people would leave your politics at home.

Everyone's a loser in that battle.