I am looking for reasonable explanations for this, but keep coming up blank. I grew up in a country where this sort of censorship and fact hiding was the norm, and hated it.
I now live in a country that is much freer, but for the first time since 1938, no longer has an active US ambassador, with no replacement in sight, since President Trump fired all US ambassadors to foreign countries on the afternoon of his inauguration... [0]
[0] - http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trum...
Title appears to be clickbait. The original AP story [1] says this restriction applies to the agency's social media accounts. It does not say this restriction applies to employee's personal social media accounts, as thehill.com implies. This is the relevant section from the AP article:
> Emails sent to EPA staff and reviewed by The Associated Press also detailed specific prohibitions banning press releases, blog updates or posts to the agency's social media accounts.
[1] https://www.apnews.com/5ada25fc57b44a0989e681d6dc2a3daf/Trum...
This is surprisly reasonable compared to what I thought it was going to say when I heard about it first from others. The first I heard it was "A total media blackout" on the EPA and other departments.
This article just says, that buzzfeed says, that goverment employees can't post on Twitter and Facebook claiming their personal opinion is policy. Unless I misread something, let me know if I did, or if this article is just wrong.
Edit: Other sources indicate other kinds of communications are stopped also, it seems that it could be totally nefarious or just part of some kind of re-organization. Are scientific papers block or not? Everything seems confused, but the general tone seems to be hugely negative, what do know for certain?
It's downright impressive how comic-book-evil this administration is. Next up, the white house will presumably be moved to a volcano base with overly large ventilation shafts.
(forced to use a side account to comment on this)
You have to look at it from the Trump teams point of view. They honestly don't see that the 'free speech' argument holds water. They see it as abuse of a public position to spread falsehoods.
Basically EPA employees in the Trump Team's view are perpetuating climate alarmism ( again in the TT view ).
So they are stopping that.
Just flip it around just for a second. I'll choose an equivalent that would cause liberals to shut down the twitter of an official.
Imagine a Department of Health official was tweeting photos of aborted foetuses and keeping a tally "350 aborted this month. #whatawaste".
There would be calls to stop that official speaking out.
This is so terrifying. Fixing environment that was destroyed takes a very long time. Public land and parks that were given to companies can probably never be taken back. Not to talk about mountains that were mined. All this might be gone forever for some silly, antiquated mining or similar.
OK, I just watched for at least the 20th time some republican tell a TV audience that EPA regulations have gotten "way out of control" and no one will ask "EXACTLY WHICH REGULATIONS?"
Just to add a reality check, the epa isnt some noble organization , they are highly political and often incompentent.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/08/10/431223703/...
Also happening with the National Parks Service [0].
[0] http://gizmodo.com/national-park-service-banned-from-tweetin...
The irony of Trump mandating a no-social-media policy is palpable.
Best guess is the group in the EPA isn't toeing the line he set, so he's keeping a lid on things while he cleans house.
I've heard people say that this was a reaction to some tweets that an employee sent out about the inauguration crowd sizes. If so, that would be a pretty heavy-handed way to discipline that single employee.
Free speech gone in less than a week. Say what you like but he gets shit done.
I didn't know we had so many HN commenters that are experts at the inner workings of Presidential transitions and for a fact know what's going behind the scenes of the current transition. In some cases they somehow know individual thoughts and motivations of people they likely don't know.
This reminds me of the observation during the 2016 campaign that "Trump is the kind of person who brings a flamethrower to a stick fight".
I'm consistently amazed at the number of Trump supporters on this site.
Why was this even posted here on HN? I don't think it's okay that HN should become a microcosm of the political economy of the United States. Well, for whatever it's worth, I hope California gets serious about secession.
I was curious if a case could be made for First Amendment rights, but I just re-read it...
"Congress shall make no law regarding..."
I guess Executive Orders can bypass all of that.
1984 here we go
We went through this sort of censorship of government scientists and departments in Canada with the conservative Harper government: http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/faq-the-issues-around-muzz...
The US should not put up with any, even a temporary form of such censorship of the parts of the government that are doing scientific research and environmental stewardship. There should be another march in a week or two to support scientific freedom. Trump does not determine scientific truth, peer review and the scientific method does.