The Discourse on the post-coup tech platform rejection of violent fascism is giving me hives so I just have to get my ~hot take~ in here.

Sorry for the massive thread; Pascal’s apology applies.

Everybody loves to talk about “precedent” when a decision is made like kicking tr*mp off Twitter or pa*ler off of AWS, usually when making some fallacious slippery slope argument about what this “precedent” will mean for some completely non-comparable follow-up situation.

In some narrow colloquial sense, I admit there’s a precedent being set, in that when an analogous situation arises, the decision makers in that situation might do their research and look at this preceding (hence: “precedent”) event, and base some reasoning on it.

But this is a rhetorical trick—maybe one that those making the argument are playing on themselves as much as they’re playing it on you—because they’re trying to get you to consider the word in its legal-jargon sense: that future decision makers *must* consider these events.

This often goes along with the frankly bananas implication that by “setting the precedent” the decision makers (tech platforms or whoever) are arrogating to themselves a power which they did not *already have*, and it is thus dangerous and opens the door for future abuses.