The media and the scandal/scrutiny vacuum with Trump off Twitter

Any particular reason you're avoiding my earlier post pointing out exactly why Fredrick is full of shit?

 

This has nothing to do with my argument. I agree Twitter has the right to ban Trump from posting. Twitter can ban anybody it wants to ban. My point was newspapers are beholden to Twitter. I am saying in response to Twitter silencing opinions of many, newspapers should have nothing to do with Twitter.
As far as a newspaper electing to not run an article saying somebody should be murdered, yes, they like Twitter can elect to not run that story. I am agreeing Twitter can do whatever it wants. I find it troubling newspapers see no problem using a company that bans free exchange of ideas. Trump has been banned, yes; how many others have been banned as well?

Somebody at Twitter is arbitrarily deciding if somebody is spewing false information. If the Twitter censor decides it's wrong, the post is denied. Newspapers should want no part of select censoring.

 

Fredrick is not an honest man.

 

I agree with you on one point: The truth is that they'd be doing their reporters a favor by banning them. How many careers have been torched with an ill-timed, ill-considered tweet?

 

If you’ve got a reporter that can’t handle Twitter without blowing up his career, you’ve made a very poor hire.

Seriously. It’s not hard.

 

True. But Twitter is a very good conductor of fatal jolts of electricity to careers.

 

Mostly to people who deserve it.

I've worked with one guy who lost his job because of his social media activity. He richly deserved it. The company should have been thankful that he showed his stupidity there before he could do it in a way that reflected on the newsroom.

 

Well, as for a message board being a private company and having the right to ban anyone it wants, I had an interesting experience with Facebook in November. Two days before Thanksgiving, I posted a cartoon showing turkeys protesting, carrying signs reading "Eat More Chikin," "Beef : It's What's For Dinner" and "Turkey Lives Matter." Facebook took offense. They notified me I was in violation of their community standards and if I posted any more of these insensitive cartoons I would lose my privileges. Then they attached a box to my post that, for some reason, repeated the results of the November election. Now, yes, of course, this is comical. But it also reveals that the Facebook bots who actually do the screening and banning are clueless and were not programmed with a sense of hum0r. If they found my Turkey cartoon objectionable, what else might they find objectionable? If one of the turkeys had been carrying an "Arrest Trump" or "Praise Allah" sign, would the bots have deemed the cartoon acceptable? More recently, I posted an interview with three of the migrants being allowed to enter the U.S. under Biden's new policies. Facebook notified me it contained information "out of context," and added the box repeating the results of November's election. The only "information" the interview contained was what the migrants said, which was basically that they left home because of gang violence and inability to find jobs to support their families. So what in this case triggered the bots? Who knows. But this censorship process is arbitrary and seriously flawed. Yes, I know, this is tangential to the Twitter case, but I'm not on Twitter so Facebook is my only experience.

 

You should have named this "My Cuomo" thread.

 

And, quite frankly, he's largely disliked personally by the electorate. That began before Covid (Gov. Andrew Cuomo's popularity hits new low, poll says) and continues today (https://www.wkbw.com/news/state-new...tings-down-from-october-across-new-york-state). Hillary Clinton is a brilliant, accomplished woman, but not a likable one, as we learned in 2016. Had the Democratic machine not high-roaded her onto the ticket and let Biden run — the usual script for the VP of a two-term president — it'd be a very different world today.

 

I'm not defending Cuomo here--generally not a fan of the guy and while I thought he was a cognizant and forceful leader at a time when there was no national leadership to speak of, it is abundantly clear he made a fatal mistake with the nursing homes--and agree he's not a preferred candidate of the establishment. But 2016 made it abundantly clear that being hated by a plurality of New Yorkers endears you to the rest of the country. And nobody took Trump seriously as a candidate, either, in 2015. Thirty percent of Republican voters said there was no way they'd support him (QU Poll Release Detail). We now know about 95% of those people are stone-cold liars. Trumping his way thru his fuckups and spinning it as the rare Dem showing some backbone is going to help Cuomo, if he wants it to.

 

Or don't be active on social media and focus on your work. Twitter is an addiction, and people with large followings get off at the idea that they have a personal army who will soak up their bullshit.