American Election

Not that you'll take any bleedin' notice but....
Stop Postal Votes except for the elderly and disabled
Postal voting is ‘wide open to fraud’ and should be scrapped in its current form. Judge Richard Mawrey, who sits in judgment on election fraud cases, previously said ballot-rigging was now a ‘probability’ in some parts of Britain due to the extension of postal voting.

 

What did he actually say that ticked that box though? I saw that he kept on about the stolen election and getting people to March in the Capitol but didn't see anything about actual violence.

I thought it was that there was a chance he would incite further violence before the Biden was made official on the 20th?

 

When and where was that quote from?

 

https://petition.parliament.uk/archived/petitions/258370

 

Does he still think that since the review held a number of years ago? I can not find him repeating those comments since.

 

There’s a debate, both morally and legally, there to be had as to whether social media platforms are responsible for the content that they host. Ironically Donald Trump actually blocked section 230, which would have ensured the platforms had taken responsibility for the content they hosted.

Trump broke the rules on election specific policies, Covid specific policies, disinformation, threats against groups of people, inciting violence, among others. Whether you agree with those charges is somewhat by the by. There are plenty of examples of providers deciding what content is fit to grace their platform. Plenty of social media networks do not allow pornography, should they be forced to?

But let us not forget that Trump was using these platforms to commit actual crimes (or incite violence), and a very real risk that he would continue to use these platforms to commit the same crimes.

 

A number of years ago...?
3? How many elections have we had since ?

 

His comment is from 2014, last time I checked we are in 2021

 

This petition was submitted during the 2017–2019 Conservative government

 

But the quote is from 2014.

 

I don't see that but whatever.....

 

Currently they're not responsible though am I correct?

I'm genuinely interested to know which tweets actually incited violence. The definitely incited scepticism about a lot of things and probably an element of rebellion against the establishment (as others have without being banned) but actually encouraging violence specifically. Not sure.

 

Section 230 is a pretty archaic piece of legislation that is complex, and probably doesn’t fully encompass the array of things that a platform host should and shouldn’t be responsible for. In short, it needs revising, but they are not responsible for content posted by third parties, but do have a responsibility to act on illegal material.

I think it can be fairly argued that, in conjunction with his speech to the massed hordes in the morning, his tweet “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long” can only be seen as an endorsement of the violence, and inciting further violence. These things don’t necessarily have to be explicit to be clear cut.

There is also a blog post from Twitter which I think is reasonably transparent in how they came to their conclusion: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension.html

 

There's no incitement if violence in those tweets and nothing illegal.

I suooose if they can want to extrapolate those tweets to the nth degree and assume meaning then they can do but they are causing themselves problems in the future without being accused of inconsistency.

Given those two tweets you could probably justify "incitement of violence" from absolutely anything!

 

“There’s no question the president formed the mob, the president incited the mob, the president addressed the mob. He lit the flame,” said Elizabeth Cheney, the No3 House Republican.

Trump told the crowd, ""If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."

"Big protest in D.C. on January 6th," Mr Trump tweeted. "Be there, will be wild!"

I think it's the combination of him encouraging people to protest at the Capitol - using language that was clearly a dog whistle to those inclined towards violence - and the likelihood that he would encourage further violence at Biden's inauguration.
Twitter is clearly worried that it may be used by Trump to incite further violence and wants to avoid it's platform being associated with that.

 

And the government response on that link deals with the issue in a measured and proportionate way. There were a small number of constituencies in which it might have been a problem and rules have been tightened since that petition.
All of which is several light years away from postal voting in general being 'rigged on a massive scale'.

 

It's now emerging that the assault on the Capitol was far more threatening and dangerous than initially reported. This makes grim reading.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/capitol-riots-senators-lawmakers-help-police-b1785079.html

 

Would you say that people who encouraged the protests in the summer, which also turned violent in a minority of circumstances, should be held to the same account of encouragement to protests and silently implying violence?

 

I think the violence and destruction we saw in the protests earlier this year was largely and correctly condemned pretty much immediately.

There’s almost inevitably a fringe of any protest that is going to do something that is to be condemned. That thing may be large, or it may be small. Heck, any large gathering of almost any type is going to produce some kind of event to be condemned - and that is not usually the direct aim of the protest.

I do think though that this one is different. It’s reasonably clear to most bystanders that Trump has had a direct hand in effectively rearing a violent movement. There was a, small but legitimate, chance that we could have had the execution of Nancy Pelosi live-streamed in front of our eyes. This isn’t really on the same scale as the issues we saw in the summer.

Trump knows full well that the aim of this group is essentially armed insurrection. As @Offcomedun above mentioned, he says "If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore." - it is, again, reasonably clear and obvious that Trump sees stoking this fire as his last hope of power, regardless of the civil risks that brings about.

As to whether this is the thin end of the wedge - I hope it isn’t. I think there are legitimate grounds to de-platform Trump - regardless of which, it is a private platform and they possess the ability to make and enforce their own rules (as it should be! A nationally governed social media platform sounds grim). And I would hope they would act consistently across any national leader that behaves in this way.

As to whether this is too much power in the hands of private enterprise, maybe it is! This broadly links into the whole topic of net neutrality, which is going to be a really big issue in the next few years.

 

I think you're dead right about the condemnation but in this instance it's not really the point. Were the people who incited that.....arguably more directly than Trump....removed from social median. If not, why not?

As for scale. I belive 19 people died and there was over 1BN dollars of damage during the summer, so while I wouldn't want to get into glib numerical comparisons I don't think the scale of the summer should be minimised. It's whether accountability and the rules are applied consistently.