Saturday, 9 January 2021

Just a thought: Trump’s Twitter ban

In January 2021 Twitter took down the account of Donald J. Trump as a result of his many lies, which eventually turned into violence.

By not accepting the outcome of the voters will, he became somewhat of a firestarter for what culminated in the run on the capitol.


By shutting down social media accounts that encourage violent behaviour, those platforms want to remain an advertiser friendly environment. That is their business after all.

Understandably, as companies do not want to place their ads in a place which promotes acts of hatred and violence.

Yet extremist folks, such as Trump himself or various other political personalities complain, this would be an act of censorship.


First of all: Violating the terms of use, which clearly do not allow the promotion of violence, is a valid point to get kicked out of almost any place. This does not only apply to social media but also almost everywhere else. 


Second and more important, social media platforms  are businesses and as such , they decide what their platform looks like. They are allowed to do whatever the laws do not explicitly forbid. When they want to delete one's account, they surely will. Usually those platforms do not even need a good reason to do so.

Surely this becomes problematic when a lot of people use such an infrastructure to get their information but this is a problem of the people too much relying on things like Twitter and Co.

If you do not like this, then leave or stop complaining when someone finally pulls the plug on your social media account! Nobody forces you to use something like Facebook.


Such companies are no samaritans after all and have no obligation to provide their platform to you.

This is not censorship, it is business!

If people like Trump would have a clue on private companies, they would accept this and move on!


Lastly is the usage of social media always rather time intensive.

Many surveys conclude that people spend a lot of time there.

1 to 3 hours per day is quite normal these days (https://www.broadbandsearch.net/blog/average-daily-time-on-social-media#post-navigation-1).


Or in other words: If your president spends more time on Twitter than on his doing his job, he is doing it wrong anyways. 

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