Comment by hypersoar
5 years ago
We'll, they're certainly escalating. I don't think that Trump actually wants to shut Twitter down, nor does he want to get banned there. The banning would rile up his base, but it would do so at the expense of his primary channel of communication. This action puts the ball back in Trump's court and asks him how far he wants to actually go.
let the white house spin up its own activitypub instance, then.
shouldn't public communications occur on public infrastructure?
Well that's the ridiculous part of all this. Anyone with $20 and a half hour to spare can whip up their own blog on their own domain and post anything they want. As far as accessibility goes, that website will be 100% equal to Twitter.
These private platforms are only being conflated with public infrastructure because people have such a narrow view of what constitutes "the internet." It's ridiculous for a politician's primary means of communication to be over a private platform to begin with. Could you imagine if Clinton only talked to the press via AOL chatroom? The fact that we're debating it as though Trump is being censored by CSPAN just shows how much the abnormal has become normal.