6 thoughts on “Trump’s Executive Order”

  1. Well we’ll see – contrary to what the whiners say it is no way a violation the first amendment, and he’s correct in saying the social media (just like every other form of media) sensors conservatism. The Trump administration (whether it’s Trump himself or his lawyers) has a better understanding of the Constitution that any of the last 3 administrations.

  2. Even if it won’t stand up in court, Trump has finally done something which mainstreams what’s going on. Of course, there’s the “build your own (500 billion $) platform” folks, but I think the best way around this is using anti-trust law.

    One thing that continues to perplex me – how can 50 percent of the country consider themselves right to centrist right but only one cable channel is consistently appealing to a right leaning audience?

  3. how can 50 percent of the country consider themselves right to centrist right but only one cable channel is consistently appealing to a right leaning audience?

    Intelligence is the vector sum of mathematical and verbal ability. Assume these are randomly distributed. The audience (consumers, citizens, the general population) will be evenly divided between those better at verbal skills and those better at numerical skills.

    The sub-population that self-selects for journalism, broadcasting, “story telling” will skew heavily toward those who are better with verbal ability, spinning narratives. Provoking outrage or evoking sympathy. Numbers and trends and cycles and comparatives and quantities are all simply weapons of influence and persuasion to these sorts of people. It’s not dishonest, usually. It’s just that journalists don’t grasp and react to numbers as effectively as they grasp stories. And so it happens that these groups also skew “progressive”, seeking an ideal fantasy scenario of good guys beating bad guys and outcomes with all living happily ever after.

    Politicians, in general, are also good at speeches and slogans. They are, like journalists, verbalists.

    And half their audience is happily buying the product the verbalists are producing.

    The OTHER half of the audience tends to hear or watch or read the news and start SCREAMING! “NO, wet streets do NOT cause RAIN, you morons! At least look at the recorded times, for ghod’s sake!” ( Feynmann) “It’s bad? HOW bad — like when you told me about shark attacks? Worse than cancer? Like AIDS?”

    At very best only half the audience knows what I mean when I use a term like “vector sum” …

    Nearly everybody is conservative about matters they understand, and understanding usually is accompanied by an appreciation of the measures and quantities, profits and losses, risks and prizes — the NUMBERS — associated with a topic. The half of the audience that uses and likes and appreciates numbers quickly gets disgusted with verbalists in both professions, journalism and politics.

    But try to tell that to a verbalist. “What, half the audience? Half full, half empty, half-a-loaf … That’s not all that much, is it? ” Honestly, they just don’t get it.

    I don’t know, but I have hopes, that one of the reasons Trump seems such a rude and clumsy Twitter composer is that he is actually – invisibly, in the background somewhere – a numbers guy.
    He comes on stage with little words in short sentences and slogans and nicknames … And somewhere in Trump’s office is a wall covered in the sorts of charts and graphs that Ross Perot used to bring to the lectern. Perot was a numbers guy who tried to win votes by using numerical communications. Perot crashed bigly. I hope — don’t know, only hope — Trump has watched and learned.

  4. One thing to consider is that much of this censorship ability is due to the meddling of various governments in human communication. Both the EU and China have mandated implementation of censorship. And there’s DCMA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) in the US which mandates that providers must implement a lot of infrastructure for removing videos. My belief is that we wouldn’t be having this trouble in the first place otherwise – most of these companies wouldn’t bother to implement it on their own.

    Perhaps, any such reform of law should include some sort of response to these mandates?

  5. With respect, looking to the writers of Reason (basic a group of wannabe socialists who want to smoke dope) for a cogent opinion on constitutional law is probably something of a fools errand. Of course I could be wrong, but I suspect that since the Executive Order in question deals with the interpretation of Section 230 (which is obviously within the scope of executive action), it is likely that the court will do as it has done in the past…agree that the Executive branch is acting as intended under the Constitution. Given the behavior of the various tech titans, it is almost impossible to argue that this is the outcome that congress intended, which gives the court even more reason to grant some latitude to the Executive in this matter.

    I agree with several other commenters that anti-trust law is the best way to pursue this, but that could easily take a decade or more, and given the currently murky status of most anti-trust law, the results are by no means clear.

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