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I have a different kind of thought here.

Doesn't this make you think about how dependent (or interwoven) our government is on private / commercial companies to communicate with us?

I.e. for an entity with such a role in our lives or organization of society, it actually has very few ways to disseminate information of its own, don't you think?

If the government didn't have access to TV, newspapers, internet provided by companies, how would someone in charge tell us something?

Telephone chain? Emergency broadcast system? Town crier? Post office?

I think actually it tells you how little day-to-day power the government has over our lives aside from when you run afoul of the law.

It's definitely a take away for me as well, it shows that private control of communications is a powerful weapon, and it also is revealing how self-serving the politics of most people are.

The "right" typically, is in favor of less government, more private industry, etc. They typically feel the government intervening in the dealings of private industry is reprehensible. Yet look at what some of those voices are calling for now. Crying about "de-platforming"--no it's a private company making a choice. As expected, most people have no actual principles and really only claim to believe in something for as long as it's serving their own interest. If you suggested we have some mandates around communications companies and government access to them right now a bunch of "republicans" would be on board even though it stinks of state controlled media.

Also, it's quite interesting how much of the seriousness of these blows for this administration stem from their painting the "mainstream media" as an enemy. The POTUS has a significant communications apparatus available to it outside of social/new media/, but this administration has alienated those other sources so significantly they cannot even use them effectively.

There is, in fact, no recognised principle by which the propriety or impropriety of government interference is customarily tested. People decide according to their personal preferences. Some, whenever they see any good to be done, or evil to be remedied, would willingly instigate the government to undertake the business; while others prefer to bear almost any amount of social evil, rather than add one to the departments of human interests amenable to governmental control. And men range themselves on one or the other side in any particular case, according to this general direction of their sentiments; or according to the degree of interest which they feel in the particular thing which it is proposed that the government should do, or according to the belief they entertain that the government would, or would not, do it in the manner they prefer; but very rarely on account of any opinion to which they consistently adhere, as to what things are fit to be done by a government.

~ John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)

>Yet look

You had me going until that point.

I was expecting you to say something more like 'look at what happens when private industry intervenes in government'

The right does not actually work for “less government.” Look at Trump’s agenda: more regulation of immigration, tariffs on China, regulations on media, etc. You are stuck in the past.
Those right wing positions are just bread and circus for the masses.
Many liberals, like myself, are appalled by deplatforming as well and are rethinking our support for the modern left. It is an peculiar era indeed where championing freedom of speech, a core part of the Enlightenment philosophy that gave birth to liberalism, is condemned as being right wing.
I’ve always seen this as a primary function of the postal service. The government should defend and maintain it as the essential medium of communication that it is. It’s not as fast as most forms of modern communication, but it handles a lot of essential tasks efficiently.

On a somewhat related note, never underestimate the bandwidth of a sneakernet.

Absolutely, and this is my go-to argument any time someone says that the USPS is obsolete/unprofitable/archaic/redundant/etc.

The point of the USPS is that the government can always correspond with any of its citizens, with an organizational service guarantee.

But even postal longhaul trucking is private contracted, even if it's not to one giant entity.

Same for rural route carriers.

I mean, they have their own websites and the postal service.

But the real answer is, too large of a population of the USA believes the free market is more efficient than government.

I don’t know if that is right or wrong, but it definitely leads to an outsized reliance of the government on private companies.

> too large of a population of the USA believes the free market is more efficient than government.

People believe this because it is actually true.

But its mechanism of operation is competition. It doesn't apply to monopolies or highly consolidated markets, which can be as inefficient as any government.

This has obvious implications for the subject at hand.

This is nothing new. It has always been that way. The only thing is there hasn’t ever been a person/president that is so bad at being human that companies wanted to distance themselves from him. That is also because these companies are not media companies. Even now I am sure if he speaks the traditional media companies will carry his message.
I'm not actually sure of that the news media are willing to carry every message.

From where I'm sitting (In Australia) the US news media seems to be quite free and happy to limit their coverage of output from the White House. Now the news media are commercial companies and I'm guessing their thinking is that they don't want to broadcast material that their audience finds distasteful or unappealing so they limit what they broadcast.

My first reaction to the banning of the President was to wonder how I get an unedited account of what (however bizarre) he is saying and it's proving to be somewhat difficult. Maybe he's given up and gone back to playing golf so nothing is being said.

I think the media companies are in a very difficult position. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter have been placed in a position of a primary outlet for any number of public personalties and as such have a degree of moral responsibility to clearly and without alteration transmit the words of those personalities. The problems start when the personalities use the platforms and the comment systems associated with them not as a conduit for information but as a soapbox to persuade people to believe dangerous falsehoods and organise illegal activity.

The question is, where is the line drawn.

Can I post fiction on Twitter? Of course, and there are many authors who do just that, posting stories in small chunks. Can I post satire? Yep, the Onion does this regularly, with their audience fully understanding that what they read is not factual. Can I post blatant damaging falsehoods about identified people? Well yes, but I'm guessing that I could be facing deformation charges, and I'd probably be reported to twitter and banned.

So the line is drawn, post what you like, but don't cause damage with false information. This again raises the question, should the news media broadcast the words of public officials if those words are false and potentially damaging?

In an ideal world we would have a well educated public with finely tuned bullshit detectors who would be able to safely consume unedited false content, being able to determine for themselves what is and isn't true. Unfortunately in most countries we have a significant proportion of the population who are unable to determine attractive falsehood from fact which leaves the news media in the position of editing/censoring words to try to limit damage.

Expropriation and war-production act type solutions were always sufficient incentives/threats.

Once again, case law/legal theory just hasn't caught up yet.

It'd be interesting to see if today, a TV station says "We're disabling the emergency broadcast system to pre-empt our (either rational or irrational) fear of misuse."

How long till fcc/govt mechanisms have the broadcast antenna turned off? Or the station seized, or whatever the solution is.

Is the answer the same if, hypothetically, a foreign "influenced" station does the same thing as a war breaks out?

Or, what if a station "ghosts" the system. Just turns it off without announcement?

Apply the same questions to everything else you listed above.

I presume (and hope) the pentagon knows these answers.

If there's a place for RSS, surely it's here.
We're very much dependent on private companies who of course have their own rights too... but that raises all sorts of questions.

I support these folks right to manage their own service as they see fit, but it's also hard to ignore that if enough decided they would act in bad ways, there would be serious consequences.

The President can send a Presidential Alert to all cell phones. This cannot be turned off by the user.

https://www.wired.com/story/presidential-text-alert-fema-eme...

Trump's campaign emails are not government comms. The campaign is a business that raises funds to pay for Trump's political campaigning, although lately it seems some of that money has been going on paying off debts from his previous campaigns (https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyl...).

As for all the other Trump social media, there are official government accounts for everything that platforms probably couldn't ban quite so freely. The only reason they've been able to remove Trump is that he chose to use his own personal accounts instead.

Not specific to Trump, but:

Honestly, the campaign de-platforming (especially the last-minute ad-pulls) might concern me more than the head-of-state censorship.

Trump can put out whatever bullshit he likes on whitehouse.gov. The public servants/administration staff that do that have to understand that if they disagree with what he wants to put out, they can object through official channels, and if that is not enough, quit.
They've deleted Trump's tweets on the official channels. He is now banned from posting anywhere on Twitter.
I'm reminded that for quite a while, the Library of Congress archived all published tweets.
One thing that is a little tangent to what you said:

Maybe the government should create a video hosting service. It should host any legal content. There would be keyword search, and ability to iterate though all videos but that would be the extent of content discovery.

Then other people could use that service as the back end and build content discovery on top of it.

It would reduce the big barrier to making your own video streaming service with your desired content discovery algorithms since the government service would handle storage and streaming.

All our phones have an emergency alert systems enforced by the telecoms and phone manufacturers that you can't turn off.
No. Do you forget that the White House has its own website? Trump is 'dependent' on Twitter only because he won't take the effort to write a memo.
For official communications, the government maintains rights to take over broadcast and cellular bandwidth as well as other channels to communicate directly. This isn't a deplatforming of the government, it's of Trump's political campaigning, which is supposed to be done as a private citizen.
Their power comes from their ability to make or enforce laws on anyone, including people working at those private companies. They don't need to control the actual means of communication.

All the services banning Trump only after he is well and truly done with the presidency tell me that government power still works just fine.

Trump’s private political organisation has nothing to do with the government though. This is a relationship between a private citizen (and associates) and a private service provider. Beyond ensuring both adhere to the law, government has no role here.
That doesn't leave many communication channels open. It was probably not a great strategy to build a brand completely on the backs of third parties you don't control.

I can just imagine him raging around his office or jet unable to get the adulation he clearly needs to function. He's going to age pretty quickly this next year.

> That doesn't leave many communication channels open

Other than the literal press office inside his house staffed by correspondents of all major worldwide news outlets. How will he let us know what he’s thinking?!?!

> It was probably not a great strategy to build a brand completely on the backs of third parties you don't control.

How do you suggest emailing people without third parties? That includes your ISP. Your DNS domain provider. Your datacenter. Your hydro company. Your bank. etc. etc.

I don't understand this logic. Surely the President of the United States has someone on his team who can setup a Wordpress server. His followers and the media would read it there. Most people don't even read his tweets on Twitter.com but they see them quoted in news articles. If writers take them from DonaldJTrump.com instead, what's the difference?
Interesting that their excuse is basically:

"They weren't using us that much, so we don't see the problem."

Edit: the confirmed suspension is only one of their many services, so maybe the HN title's a bit misleading?

^^ yes, I'd argue it was. As the tweets say, I've only confirmed that one provider of many has pulled the plug. I'm looking into the others.
Yes, the title seems to be misleading. At this point, it's pure conjecture. Basically, some people (at least) are no longer getting emails from his campain. It's unclear if they've just stopped sending them or they've been suspended, or sombody accidentally broke something.

It appears the one mentioned account disabling is an unrelated Trump venture.

Any word about AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile?
Utilities are under regulations that typically prevent abrupt termination and sometimes require particular reasons for doing so. Not sure if his campaign would be covered under any relevant regulations, but nonetheless, it’s not likely a telecom is going to shut them off if they’re paying and they’re not otherwise legally compelled to do so.
I dont have the book to hand, but what I remember from "Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook", cutting off communication lines (internal and external) is one of the first things to do in a coup. Because that severely limits the governments and attached agencies response, and confuses the members of the public in support of the incumbent. Next step is to detain all people in power opposed to you and occupy the legislative while cutting off physical halls of power to the un-initiated. Then you declare yourself as ruler (ideally using legal loop-holes available to you by controlling all, normally separated, powers). It all has to be done quickly as alternative communication lines will be established quickly and the outranged masses wont be controllable if they still have hope to restore the old regime.

There was a bit of talk of the storm on the Capitol to be something of a coup. But they did not cut off communication lines and lacked a lot of the organization you need to follow the coup d'Etat protocol. Although storming the Capitol was a display of power that is not in line of how I believe a democracy should be governed, but calling it a coup was a hyperbole in my opinion.

Putting the two together, if the president looses access to communication lines and then is being removed by the legislative and parts of the executive (vice-president), then that actually looks a lot closer to the definition of a coup as I see it.

Although separate ownership of all the media that is closing down on Trump would imply a coordinated shutdown of communication is close to impossible, weirdly the group-think makes it happen. And although it might not be centrally planned as it would happen in a traditional coup from the 20th century, the process is remarkably similar.

So I think if POTUS is removed from office now, then the US will need to get ready for a lot of disrupting semantics from the Trump supporters for a long time. Just because you cannot hear them _now_, does not mean it is solved. If there is momentum it will come back. Potentially worse. This could develop into the Dolchstoßlegende [0] of the US.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the-back_myth

The enforced transfer of democratic power from someone who really, really doesn’t want to go, and whose sycophants spout lies and propaganda regarding their victimhood at every opportunity, might look like a “coup” to those on their side. But there is simply no viable alternative.
Potentially even more interesting information further down the tweet thread: https://twitter.com/DaveLeeFT/status/1347724205379309568

Trump's campaign claimed $69k in email marketing expenses paid to SendGrid, but Twilio/SendGrid has no record of a Trump campaign account. Upon further investigation they found that they do have accounts for his private businesses. Not necessarily a smoking gun for campaign finance violations, but sketchy enough looking that I'm curious to see what further investigation turns up.

Could be creative or professional services expenses. What’s the hourly rate for a high end propaganda copywriter?
See https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/8/22221683/trump-tried-to-ev... for screenshots of various tweets Trump made from other accounts that were quickly deleted by Twitter. One of the tweets talks about building their own platform. Another talks about Section 230. And another about the "radical left" silencing half the country.