Jack decided he did not want to sell his services to a man fomenting Sedition. How come people want Capitalism and Religious freedoms to not bake cakes for gays yet their shocked when billionaires businesses refuse service to domestic terrorists? Those decisions were not made lightly, preventing a bloody coup is deserving of a Medal of Freedom. I doubt Jack, Jeff and Mark give a dam what they think. Trump can use the $300 Million his base gave him to fund Parler and build their own hosting service, pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
While everybody is focused on First Amendment Rights by Trump, we are missing the bigger picture here: House Lawmakers Condemn Big Tech’s ‘Monopoly Power’ and Urge Their Breakups https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/06/technology/congress-big-tech-monopoly-power.html Do you REALLY think these corporations care about "risk of inciting violence" when lot more dangerous groups and individuals around the world use their platform daily to organize lot more deadly attacks? You think they really care about "preserving the integrity of democracy" when far more dangerous and sinister messages have been passing around those platforms on a second-by-second basis? No what they are doing is a sophisticated veiled lobbying move. Trump is on his way out. There is no more revenue that can be extracted from him. He is yesterday. There is a new boss in town and the new boss is hitting their pocketbooks by threatening to break them up and this new boss has control of BOTH houses, the Senate AND the House of Representative. It's time to show the new boss their usefulness if they need to be allowed to remain big. If you break up their "monopoly power", the next time when some "lunatic" is "inciting something that threatens something else", they might not be able to do anything because they won't be as far-reaching and effective... You let us have our "monopoly power", we can do your bidding like what we did this time. And in this day and age of social media where people FB each other when they are just sitting right next to each other and nobody knows how to handwrite their names anymore, we can be far more useful than press conferences and televised speech (who watches the television nowadays?) to get your propaganda err uplifting messages to heal America out to the people... That's why the concerted efforts in silencing Trump when he has violated their "TOS". Like I said before, it's Corporate America at its finest! It's amazing what you can see when you follow the smell of money. It never fails.
The problem I have with the tech companies involved in social media is that they gave the like of Trump, Brexit, Cummings, Bolsonaro, Salvini and a few other sociopaths in the world a political win. We had people who should be in therapy being elected everywhere, mostly thanks to the disgusting and probably illegal practice by bastards like Cambridge Analytica with the permission of Facebook. It's their fault we even had to deal with those people. Facebook and Twitter gave and still give a propaganda platform to dangerous, ignorant, deviated minds. So yeah... Screw all social media. But if they all acknowledge this, and do anything to stop it all from happening again, I welcome any move. Although I will never join them again. I came off those platform for good in 2016 because of Trump and Brexit propaganda disgust, and my happiness improved.
Technically, its not a private company. It has millions of shareholders. That said, the BOD made the call. That's their job. We'll see what the stock does. Kmiklas made a good point about pissing off 74 MM people. Will that affect the bottom line? Who knows. Ya know I get tons of mail from various class actions on stocks I have owned over the years. (Most of the stocks I probably owned for less than a day lol, I guess they haven't figured that part out...) As crazy as this sounds, I bet if TWTR stock drops, those lawfirms that specialize in shareholder litigation, and there's a bunch of em, they'll go after Twitter. I know you guys are gonna say blah blah blah.... but I'm telling ya, those lawyers will sue for anything. You watch.
I think that's an overstatement. I would think that most Trump followers have now had enough of him. Only his ardent supporters are pissed off. Fuck 'em.
LOL some of you really believing Trump is a domestic terrorist...That liberal propaganda machine is doing an excellent job. Just cant wait for another good-ol-boy career politician turned millionaire via exploiting America to foreign interests to take that office huh? And many of us don't think Twitter should be forced to allow Trump to use it...but by banning him they damn sure pissed off millions of people that are currently closing their accounts as to not support a company that is so ridiculously biased towards the left. Make no mistake about it...the democrats are the empire in this country.
The division is real. Both sides think the other is retarded and can’t possibly understand their point of view.
I mean yeah. True. But the thing you've gotta remember freddy, a lot of those 74MM voted for Trump, not for Trump, but because they are fed up with DC and all its BS. My instincts say a large percentage aren't going to appreciate Silicon Valley controlling things. I might be wrong.
Twitter has been in a horrible position for the last 4 1/2 years. They've already pissed off millions of people by letting Trump use their platform to spread not only lies but some pretty reprehensible content in the form of personal attacks on guys who died for their country and their families, judges, disables folks, women... And it would have been the final straw for millions more if they didn't do something about the undeniable fact that the capitol was attacked and people were killed, including a police officer, by people who wouldn't have been there but for the false narrative Trump has been spewing about "massive election fraud" using their platform. They may well lose money because they can't get those folks back. That may only mean that from a business decision perspective they should have enforced their TOS on Trump earlier, not that they shouldn't have enforced them now. As I alluded to earlier, you really need to define what the value per customer to Twitter is for one of the hard core Trump denialists? Do they really contribute much to Twitter's revenue? Are they big spenders at Twitter's online advertisers? Do Twitters advertisers want them as customers? Purely from a business point of view, now is probably the very best time to rip the bandaid off on this, take a small hit and some negative but at least given the circumstances defensible press, and move on to reclaim the market they've lost already by enabling Trump.