If you have Twitter shares, you may consider dumping them. The company has an issue, and the problem is not the banning of the President of the United States, but that Twitter has the ability to actually do that. In any company’s history, you look for the inflection point when things begin to change. Samsung has its own history (that meeting in Germany – “change everything except your wife and children” ), Google (add the search box in toolbars), etc. Those advanced the companies.
Twitter, unfortunately, will see the opposite after the BIG Ban. It has frightened world leaders and everyone knows that on Twitter, there is only one Grand President – Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO.
Why we buy newspapers with faces of politicians on the cover pages is not because they are the smartest or useful or coolest or respectful people in the land. We buy those papers because even when they are not making sense, we want to know because they decide the future for most people via policies.
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I voted against Trump; he is an exceedingly flawed leader. But he is the President. Warehousing him out of Twitter cripples the aspirational perception of Twitter. Yes, your “bias test” before you can lead Twitter? Why not filter him and allow whatever you want the world to see to be seen from his feed.
The opinion of Angela Merkel, German Chancellor, mirrors the one I have maintained here: “the chancellor considers it problematic that the accounts of the US president have been permanently blocked…While tech giants were right not to ‘stand back’ and were justified in red-flagging Trump’s tweets, banning his account altogether was a step too far”.
Trump was permanently booted off the platform on Friday because of the ‘risk of further incitement of violence’ after his supporters stormed the US Capitol while Congress was certifying his election defeat.
Merkel – a longstanding critic of Trump – said she was ‘furious and saddened’ by the rampage, but her spokesman Steffen Seibert said today that ‘the chancellor considers it problematic that the accounts of the US president have been permanently blocked’.
‘The fundamental right to freedom of opinion is a fundamental right of elementary importance,’ he said.
‘This fundamental right can be interfered with, but through the law and within the framework defined by the legislature, not according to the decision of the management of social media platforms.’
While tech giants were right not to ‘stand back’ and were justified in red-flagging Trump’s tweets, banning his account altogether was a step too far, he said.
He added that social media bosses ‘bear great responsibility for political communication not being poisoned by hatred, by lies and by incitement to violence’.
We will continue the debate.
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When I read Merkel’s reaction earlier today, I just laughed, because I saw this thing from the beginning. I wrote the other day that ‘dumb people’ won’t know the implication of banning a president, and some were busy picking offence. It’s not about having opinions, but anyone who has lived long enough to make sense of how the world works would know that Twitter goofed when it did that.
Political leadership is the pinnacle of all accomplishments, after politics, nothing higher to aspire. Why? Because every other human endeavour draws its existence from politics, that’s why you cannot not hate politicians, you must find ways to get along.
The only way to ban a president from using a media would be via a legislation, which will then have force of law; the people elect members of the congress, so once a law is passed, it becomes people’s mandate, with the courts there to adjudicate on what is and is not.
So, where did Jack Dosey derive his powers from, Twitter guidelines? This is where you know the difference between letter B and cow leg! Sorry, Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, no mere mortal has power to decide who’s inciting violence or preaching peace, you must test both in courts, else it’s just personal opinion.