Pushing the United States one step closer to totalitarianism, 44-year-old Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and his board of directors, voted to ban 74-year-old President Donald Trump, blaming him for causing the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol Hill riots. Calling Trump’s Twitter account “severe violations of our Civic Integrity Policy, the Section 230- protected social networking company became judge, jury and executioner banning Trump from Twitter where he had over 88 million followers. “After close review of recent Tweets from @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” Twitter said in its own Tweet. Violating its censorship provision under Section 230, preventing the company from third-party liability for hosting content, Dorsey has finally crossed the last line.
Whatever one thinks of Trump’s Tweets, no matter how crazy or off-the-wall, Twitter under Section 230 has no right to censor content. Until a court of law under the U.S. Constitution gives Trump his due process before stripping him of his First Amendment rights, Twitter has breached its charter under Section 230. Apart from the mass hysteria in Democrats and media circles, Dorsey has no clue what prompted the riot on Capitol Hill that delayed voting on President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College final certification for several hours. When Trump spoke in the morning of Jan. 6 at a rally, the YouTube video showed that he did not ask anyone in the audience to trespass, vandalize or commit any crimes. He simply told the crowd the same story about how the 2020 election was stolen from him. Democrats and the media repeat the mantra that “there was no evidence of voter fraud.”
No one on Twitter let alone anyone else knows anything about what really happened on Nov. 3. If you listen to Democrats and the press the Nov. 3 presidential election was the most honest election in U.S. history. If you listen to Trump backers, you’d think something nefarious went on. When highly respected Chapman University Constitutional Law Professor John Eastman wrote the Supreme Court brief for the State of Texas Dec. 11, he said that universal mail-in ballots made it impossible to prove fraud. So when Democrats and the media repeat “there was no evidence of fraud,” that’s the point, there was no evidence satisfactory to a court. But if the evidence was sufficiently camouflaged, it would take a meticulous, painstaking investigation to make any conclusions. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tx.) asked Congress to allow a 10-day Congressional investigation: He was laughed at.
Twitter cannot say with any certainty that Trump caused the Jan. 6 melee. What can be said for sure is that certain Trump supporters decided to break the law and invade the Capitol. Trump surely can’t be responsible for the actions of a small minority of his followers. Nothing Trump said in his speech encouraged anyone to break the law. He encouraged his audience to protest lawfully, to voice their opinions, not to trespass, vandalize and engage in malicious mischief in the Capitol. “Our public interest framework exists to enable the public to hear from elected officials and world leaders directly. It is built on a principle that the people have a right to hold power to account in the open,” Twitter said. What does that have to do with engaging in egregious censorship when Twitter is banned under Section 230 from doing it.
Twitter can’t point to one thing Trump said that would be considered obscene. Nothing about racism, nothing about the Holocaust, nothing about White Supremacy, noting about anything so offensive, so intolerable, so indefensible that it must be stopped. “However, we made it clear going back years that these accounts are not above are rules and cannot use Twitter to incite violence,” Twitter wrote. Again, Trump never told anyone to break the law or invade the Capitol, only to protest. Twitter didn’t ban Black Lives Matter when its said they would burn down New York City if it didn’t get what it wanted. “If this country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down the system and replace it . . . “ said Hawk Newsom, head of New York’s BLM. Where was Twitter’s outrage and ban of Hawk Newsom when looting, arson and anarchy swept across New York City?
Denying Trump his First Amendment rights and due process is an outrageous abuse of one of the biggest monopolies in the world. Unless Twitter can point to Trump ordering his followers to commit crimes or violate civil decency standards, they have no right under Section 230 to ban Trump from Twitter. Dorsey said Nov. 17 in the Senate Judiciary Committee that Twitter made a mistake to censor the New York Post story about President-elect Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s China business dealings. “We recognize it as a mistake that we made, both in terms of the intention of the policy and the enforcement action of not allowing people to share it publicly and privately,” Dorsey told Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). What’s Dorsey going to say now? Oh, I made another mistake? Twitter has been swept up in Democrats and the media’s mass hysteria over the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riots.
