So far as I can tell, the original government complaint doesn’t provide specific examples of the speech that pissed off those now-former eBay employees.
the thing that has worried me the most was the potential for private actors to envelope what I felt should be public spaces into private spaces for private profit
For what reason should Facebook and Twitter, and the services that were the most popular social interaction networks before those two took off (e.g., MySpace, LiveJournal), be/have been considered public fora for any reason other than popularity? If the U.S. government were to seize the means of social media production by turning Facebook and Twitter into actual public fora, what should happen to those services if and when they decline in popularity? And what should happen to the services that replace them, especially if they’re running on open source protocols? I mean, should the U.S. government be allowed to seize every single U.S.-based Mastodon instance if the collective of Masto instances known as the Fediverse somehow becomes more popular than Twitter?
Now is a good time to remind everyone than when asked about what content they want to protect from moderation, conservatives inevitably answer with the vague notion of “conservative content” or an allusion to that idea.
But they never get specific about what that phrase means. And they know exactly why. To use a popular copypasta/tweet…
Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes? Con: LOL no…no not those views Me: So…deregulation? Con: Haha no not those views either Me: Which views, exactly? Con: Oh, you know the ones
if a platform becomes an essential component of the nation's infrastructure for public discourse, the rules should change
If a platform were that essential, it’d be run by the government by now. But it’s not, so it’s not. Social media services are not public utilities and they are not essential for discourse, communication, or anything else.
MySpace was once the most popular social interaction network. It could’ve been considered “essential” in the same way Twitter and Facebook are now. But now it’s not “essential”. Nothing lasts forever; one day, even Twitter and Facebook will face the end of their relevancy.
And popularity alone is what you what to hinge regulations on?
When protocols are the foundation for discourse, then anyone is free to select the service they use.
Even when they’re not, people are still free to select which service they use, if they use one at all. That’s how we know Twitter and Facebook aren’t as “essential” as you want to claim they are: Anyone can choose to not use them. I choose not to use them, for example, and I still keep up with discourse and communicate with other people just fine.
if the government wants to use Twitter, they should be compelled to publish in such a way that Mastodon instances are given equal and non-discriminatory access to those announcements
For what reason should the government be forced to post all its speech on every possible platform and through every possible protocol if it chooses to use Twitter for the same reason?
I’mma just handle all your most recent comments in this one for clarity and conciseness.
I find it very suspect that a corporation, other than one that qualifies as "Press," should be granted broad speech rights, particularly when those rights include an ability to restrict the ability of others to speak as they wish.
No company in cyber- or meatspace can be forced to host third-party speech it doesn’t want to host. If that fact somehow “restricts” your free speech rights, your rights weren’t all that “open” to begin with.
I am much less concerned about restricting the ability of a purely facilitative "carrier" service (like Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, etc.) to restrict the legal speech of its users
GMail, you can get away with calling a “carrier” service. (Even then, I’d still be wary of doing so.) Facebook and Twitter, not so much. As Mike pointed out, “carrier” is about transport; Facebook and Twitter don’t qualify as carriers because they host speech. Whether anyone reads that speech doesn’t make the services carriers.
we frequently impose on commercial entities an "obligation to serve" in a non-discriminatory manner
And Twitter, Facebook, etc. all work under those rules. They’re not allowed to boot people only because they’re Black or they’re gay. But political affiliation is not a protected class; until it is, those services are free to boot people for posting political speech (you know the kind…) that those services don’t want to host.
I don't see how the distribution, for profit, of packets of data via social media sites, email systems, or any other interchange systems, differs enough from the distribution of any other good to require that their distributor be granted a right to control the content of what it distributed.
Facebook and Twitter don’t transport speech to your home, brick’n’mortar stores, or even other websites. It stores that speech on its servers and waits for someone to access it. When that happens, the speech remains on the servers for others to access. I wouldn’t call Facebook and Twitter “distributors” so much as I would call them “facilitators of communication”—and unlike phone service, neither Facebook nor Twitter are required for communication between two or more people on the Internet.
Now, if you applied these arguments to Internet access providers (or ISPs, if you prefer the widely accepted jargon), you would have a far more pertinent point.
I am fully aware of the value of content moderation and often regret that better moderation isn't available.
Every comment of yours to date seems to fly in the face of that assertion, but carry on.
My objection is to the channel itself imposing moderation without my consent or input.
Some people object to having objectionable content (e.g., racial slurs) tossed onto their timelines and being forced to moderate that themselves. Service-side moderation tends to help cut down on how much that happens.
I would not even object to Facebook, Twitter, etc. providing a moderation service to accompany their channel -- as long as I could opt out of it.
“I don’t mind all the spam that would hit my mentions and all the work I’d need to do so I could keep my mentions spam-free. Really, I don’t!”
…said no one ever.
If content moderation was optional and competitive, I think we'd see a great deal more useful innovation in moderation systems and much happier users.
No, what you’d see are very few users opting out of such moderation after their timelines are flooded with spam, porn, spam porn (those sick fucks…) and every other kind of objectionable content. The average social media user will never want to moderate their experience without service-side moderation to help prevent a lot of the bullshit that would need moderating. They’d either let their timelines get destroyed or they’d move to a service that actually tries to moderate bullshit.
here in New York, it is completely legal for women to expose their chests in public. So, how can a service justify banning the portrayal of something that is legal in this state?
Under this logic, a New York–based service meant to be used by children would have no way of banning pictures of topless women. I hope you see exactly how fallacious that argument is now.
A service is allowed to pick and choose what kind of speech it will and won’t host. The government can’t (and shouldn’t be able to) make it host any kind of legally protected speech. If one Mastodon instance wants to ban Harry Potter–related content because J.K. Rowling is a TERF but another Mastodon instance allows it for the same reason, that is well within the rights of both instances. No one has yet explained why the government should be telling one of those instances that they’re wrong.
individual New Yorkers, who might be offended or disturbed by exposure to this legal behavior, should be free to choose moderation services that shield them from such unwelcome sights
If they don’t like how a given social media service moderates access to lewd content, they can go to a different service. They’re not entitled to make Twitter work a certain way for the sake of their individual comfort and convenience.
One way to avoid non-optional moderation that enforces implicit and often unrecognized bias would be to ensure that individuals, not channels, are the ones who select the moderation regime.
Again: Average social media users aren’t going to want to play moderator. They’re going to want to post memes and bullshit with friends. Making them moderate their experience to the degree that they’re doing the job a social media service would’ve largely done for them won’t make them more appreciative of moderation. It’ll make them leave that service for one that gives a good god’s damn about the user experience.
I object to the providers of channels which have become important components of our nations' infrastructure for public discourse imposing their idea of appropriate discourse on the rest of us
Two things.
That’s the price you pay for using third-party services.
If they were as important as you say they are, they would already be government-owned public utilities—but they’re not, and they could shut down tomorrow without the government being able to stop those shutdowns.
if moderation is to be done, it should done optionally and with the user's approval
Twitter shouldn’t need to get approval from a billion people before it can punish people who post racial slurs. It shouldn’t need to get approval from any user to do that—especially the user being punished for being a racist dick.
The exclusion of some, simply because most approve of that exclusion, is not a compelling case for exclusion.
And if Twitter were a democratic republic, you might have a point. But it isn’t. So you don’t.
Twitter is a privately owned interactive web service. It doesn’t require a majority of its users to say “ban this speech plz” before it can refuse to host certain kinds of speech (and the people who would post that speech). It isn’t a democracy—it’s a tyranny, and one you’re not entitled to be part of even if you play by its rules.
I am trying to distinguish between what should be the subject of regulation and what should not.
Moderation shouldn’t be regulated beyond non-discrimination laws. The government shouldn’t be in the business of ordering services like Twitter and Facebook to host (or not host) certain kinds of speech. If you have any good arguments to the contrary, you’re not making them right now.
any moderation would be optional and implemented at the edges of the network since there would be no central component that could impose global moderation
Mastodon is a protocol, and yet the admins of each instance have the same right as Twitter and Facebook to moderate speech on those instances, regardless of what other instances do. (And they’re free to federate—or not—with instances that have different rules.) There is no “central” Mastodon instance or ruleset, yet instances can still engage in the service-side moderation of speech. That’s how Protocols Not Platforms should work—whether you like it or not.
With all that said, I (still) have One Simple Question for you. Yes or no, Bobby: Do you believe the government should have the legal right to compel any privately owned interactive web service into hosting legally protected speech that the owners/operators of said service don’t want to host?
Yes or no: Do you believe the government should have the legal right to make you host legally protected speech that you don’t want to host on property that you own?
I’ve often referred to Nazi propaganda and such when I’ve asked people if they’d like the government to make them host offensive speech. I do it for a reason: to provoke a gut reaction. Nazis are the accepted baseline for human evil, followed closely by serial killers, Big Oil CEOs, and M. Night Shyamalan¹. Saying “the government should make Twitter host all legal speech” means I can throw the Nazi door wide open as an example to go along with that One Simple Question few people ever answer directly.
But beyond the provocation of that question is a more important one: If someone chooses to host Nazi propaganda, should they be forced to take it down, and under what circumstances should that takedown occur? It’s easy to look at the Archive’s hosting of historical Nazi propaganda and say “understandable, have a nice day”. But take a shitpit like Stormfront posting modern Nazi propaganda as a recruitment tool: If the hosting company behind Stormfront doesn’t have a problem with such speech, and none of the speech crosses a line into illegal/unlawful, who the fuck is anybody to demand that speech be taken down?
I’ve always said that I think even the worst people have the right to speak their mind. That includes actual, factual, honest-to-God contemporary Nazis. No platform should be forced to host legally protected speech—and any platform willing to host offensive-yet-legal speech shouldn’t be forced by law to take it down.
¹ — I’m kidding, of course. MNS is only mid-tier evil.
people still have the right to think for themselves
In my experience, people who tout “being a free thinker” as a major personality trait are the kind of people who end up sucked into cults, wrapped up in conspiracy theories, and scammed out of their money. You’re not a “free thinker” or else you’d pay attention to the scientists instead of some nutter on YouTube who found one document out of a million that confirmed their biases and made a video about it titled “PROOF THE GOVERNMENT IS TRYING TO MAKE YOU BILL GATES’ 5G BITCH”.
Being a free thinker means confronting, and possibly accepting, facts that discomfort your biases and change your worldview. Being a dumbass means looking only for those “facts” that comfort your biases and confirm your worldview. If you’re already predisposed to distrusting the government, you’re going to be susceptible to believing anyone who tells you the government is evil to the core in every way—including its public health arm. Once they’ve got their hooks in you, you’re going to be “open-minded” enough to their bullshit that you’ll never question it.
Look for the facts that challenge you and make you uncomfortable. Question the facts that validate your biases, but don’t dismiss them only because they do so. And for fuck’s sake, stop giving undue deference to the people who only ever confirm your worldview; they will never challenge you.
Translation: “Sure, this disease has killed thousands of people under the age of 60, but who cares? It’s also killing off thousands more people above the age of 60. I say that’s reason enough to French kiss potential disease vectors.”
A simple “yes” or “no” would’ve sufficed, but you had to go further, didn’t you.
the government should not be able to compel "any" privately owned service to host speech, however
Corollary to a famous saying about the word “but”: Whenever someone says “however”, you can disregard everything that came before it.
the government does compel common carriers, such as telephony providers, to carry speech without moderation
And if services like Twitter and Facebook were common carriers, you might’ve had a point. But they’re not. So you don’t.
I think the government should be free to compel at least some web services to refrain from moderation of legal speech -- but only some, not "any."
Such an act would be unconstitutional, but that’s not important right now, and I’ll get to why it isn’t important soon enough.
If one establishes a purportedly neutral, agenda-free channel for communication, and if that channel is successful in becoming an important part of the infrastructure for public discourse, I believe that the government should be free to declare it a common carrier and constrain its ability to moderate legal speech.
“If a bar becomes the most popular hangout in town, the government should be free to declare it a public forum and constrain its ability to moderate legal speech.” That’s your logic as applied to meatspace instead of cyberspace. If you still agree with your logic…well, as I said, I’ll get to that soon enough.
something like a web service for "conservative" or "liberal" discussion, or a service hosting topical discussions, such as "dog breeding," should not be compelled to carry content not fitting that service's charter
What makes their rights more worthy of protecting than the rights of services that claim to be (but in practice rarely are) “free speech zones” or whatever?
services like Twitter, Facebook, and a very few others, have grown to the point where they are, in fact, essential elements of our nation's, if not the world's, infrastructure for public discourse
They’d be actual public utilities if they were so essential that they couldn’t be allowed to fail/shut down. But they’re not. Twitter could go down tomorrow and we’d all find new services to use. Same for Facebook.
If Twitter were to close down tomorrow—no warning, no prior notice—what could the federal government actually do to keep it from shutting down besides seizing the means of production (i.e., Twitter’s servers)?
These channels are distributors of general discourse, and, like many other distribution systems, they have many of the characteristics of "natural monopolies."
But they’re not “natural monopolies”. They’re not even monopolies of any kind. Twitter and Facebook compete with each other and aren’t owned by one company or the other. And despite not having the same reach as those two, plenty of other social interaction networks—both services and protocols—exist and compete against the Big Two. Popularity is not the sole signifier of a monopoly, no matter how much you want to think otherwise.
they can be reasonably regulated in the same way that we regulate telephone companies, electric and gas distributors, or operators of our water and sewer supplies
No, they can’t.
To regulate social media, the government would need to regulate speech—or, more precisely, what speech could be posted on what service. Put the constitutional question aside and ask yourself this: Do you want the government telling you what speech is “acceptable” to host on a service you own and operate? Do you want the government to make you host anti-queer propaganda, pro-Nazi memes, and other such bigoted filth?
The logic of compelled hosting of speech always breaks down here because no one wants to be told they have to host stuff they don’t want to host. I doubt you’d be much different in that regard…unless you’d actually prefer to have the government force you into hosting racist memes that compare Black people to monkeys.
the real danger is not in the regulation of a few, exceptional services, but rather in attempts to write or enforce rules that apply to all providers of discourse-based services
The law would have to be written that way to ensure it doesn’t get picked apart for being biased against bigger companies. Using popularity as the sole determining factor of whose rights get trampled upon will always result in a complete shitshow.
we recognize that not all communications channels are significant enough to warrant regulation
For what reason, other than size/popularity, should Twitter and Facebook be regulated but Parler shouldn’t?
we should seek to regulate as little as possible even when regulation is justified
“…except when it comes to the Big Two of social media, then we need to regulate the fuck out of them even if regulation isn’t justified.”
rules that might apply reasonably to Twitter or to Facebook's public channels should not apply to a Facebook group that I host for discussions between fellow alumni of my high school
Why not? The group is on Facebook. Being on an open-to-the-public service should mean private pages still fall under the same regulations as publicly visible pages.
I can't give you a Yes or No answer
No, you could. But you don’t want to go on record as saying “the government should make Twitter host racist bullshit because free speech” by answering “yes”, which is largely what your answer was saying anyway.
it depends on the nature and power of the service
Again: Other than size/popularity, what makes Twitter and Facebook more deserving of regulation than Parler, Gab, or any given Mastodon instance?
the mere fact that a service is privately owned is, I think, insufficient to determine if it should or should not be subject to regulation
Assume that you own a Mastodon instance. Regardless of any factors such as size/popularity, should the government have the right to make you host Ku Klux Klan propaganda “or else”, even if the rules of your service ban such speech?
Tell that to the families of every person under the age of 60 who died of COVID-19, both before and after vaccinations were available. Tell that to the families of every child under the age of 18 who has died of COVID-19, too.
Vaccines save lives. Your selfishness puts them in danger. Get vaxxed, wear a mask, and stop thinking your convenience and comfort are more important than other people’s lives.
The unvaccinated are not causing the virus to mutate.
They’re giving the virus what it needs to mutate: fresh victims and time. And they’re doing that out of sociopathic selfishness. Is wearing a mask when going to Walmart really worse than having a breathing tube shoved down one’s throat?
On the post: Superior Court Dumps BS Charges Brought Against New Jersey Homeowner For Her 'Fuck Biden' Signs
The First Amendment: Fuck you right back, dickcheese.
On the post: Exec That Tried To Send Critical Reporters A Dead Pig Blames 'The Drinking Culture At eBay'
See also: Activision Blizzard.
On the post: Exec That Tried To Send Critical Reporters A Dead Pig Blames 'The Drinking Culture At eBay'
So far as I can tell, the original government complaint doesn’t provide specific examples of the speech that pissed off those now-former eBay employees.
On the post: House Republicans Introduce Ridiculous, Contradictory, Unconstitutional Package Of 32 Bills About Section 230 And Content Moderation
Now now, they haven’t earned their L yet. That comes after all these bills crash and burn.
On the post: Senator Klobuchar Proposes An Unconstitutional Law That Would Kill Legions Of People If Trump Were Still President
For what reason should Facebook and Twitter, and the services that were the most popular social interaction networks before those two took off (e.g., MySpace, LiveJournal), be/have been considered public fora for any reason other than popularity? If the U.S. government were to seize the means of social media production by turning Facebook and Twitter into actual public fora, what should happen to those services if and when they decline in popularity? And what should happen to the services that replace them, especially if they’re running on open source protocols? I mean, should the U.S. government be allowed to seize every single U.S.-based Mastodon instance if the collective of Masto instances known as the Fediverse somehow becomes more popular than Twitter?
On the post: House Republicans Introduce Ridiculous, Contradictory, Unconstitutional Package Of 32 Bills About Section 230 And Content Moderation
Now is a good time to remind everyone than when asked about what content they want to protect from moderation, conservatives inevitably answer with the vague notion of “conservative content” or an allusion to that idea.
But they never get specific about what that phrase means. And they know exactly why. To use a popular copypasta/tweet…
Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views
Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes?
Con: LOL no…no not those views
Me: So…deregulation?
Con: Haha no not those views either
Me: Which views, exactly?
Con: Oh, you know the ones
(All credit to Twitter user @ndrew_lawrence.)
On the post: Senator Klobuchar Proposes An Unconstitutional Law That Would Kill Legions Of People If Trump Were Still President
Then your answer is “yes”.
If a platform were that essential, it’d be run by the government by now. But it’s not, so it’s not. Social media services are not public utilities and they are not essential for discourse, communication, or anything else.
MySpace was once the most popular social interaction network. It could’ve been considered “essential” in the same way Twitter and Facebook are now. But now it’s not “essential”. Nothing lasts forever; one day, even Twitter and Facebook will face the end of their relevancy.
And popularity alone is what you what to hinge regulations on?
Even when they’re not, people are still free to select which service they use, if they use one at all. That’s how we know Twitter and Facebook aren’t as “essential” as you want to claim they are: Anyone can choose to not use them. I choose not to use them, for example, and I still keep up with discourse and communicate with other people just fine.
For what reason should the government be forced to post all its speech on every possible platform and through every possible protocol if it chooses to use Twitter for the same reason?
On the post: Senator Klobuchar Proposes An Unconstitutional Law That Would Kill Legions Of People If Trump Were Still President
I’mma just handle all your most recent comments in this one for clarity and conciseness.
No company in cyber- or meatspace can be forced to host third-party speech it doesn’t want to host. If that fact somehow “restricts” your free speech rights, your rights weren’t all that “open” to begin with.
GMail, you can get away with calling a “carrier” service. (Even then, I’d still be wary of doing so.) Facebook and Twitter, not so much. As Mike pointed out, “carrier” is about transport; Facebook and Twitter don’t qualify as carriers because they host speech. Whether anyone reads that speech doesn’t make the services carriers.
And Twitter, Facebook, etc. all work under those rules. They’re not allowed to boot people only because they’re Black or they’re gay. But political affiliation is not a protected class; until it is, those services are free to boot people for posting political speech (you know the kind…) that those services don’t want to host.
Facebook and Twitter don’t transport speech to your home, brick’n’mortar stores, or even other websites. It stores that speech on its servers and waits for someone to access it. When that happens, the speech remains on the servers for others to access. I wouldn’t call Facebook and Twitter “distributors” so much as I would call them “facilitators of communication”—and unlike phone service, neither Facebook nor Twitter are required for communication between two or more people on the Internet.
Now, if you applied these arguments to Internet access providers (or ISPs, if you prefer the widely accepted jargon), you would have a far more pertinent point.
Every comment of yours to date seems to fly in the face of that assertion, but carry on.
Some people object to having objectionable content (e.g., racial slurs) tossed onto their timelines and being forced to moderate that themselves. Service-side moderation tends to help cut down on how much that happens.
“I don’t mind all the spam that would hit my mentions and all the work I’d need to do so I could keep my mentions spam-free. Really, I don’t!”
…said no one ever.
No, what you’d see are very few users opting out of such moderation after their timelines are flooded with spam, porn, spam porn (those sick fucks…) and every other kind of objectionable content. The average social media user will never want to moderate their experience without service-side moderation to help prevent a lot of the bullshit that would need moderating. They’d either let their timelines get destroyed or they’d move to a service that actually tries to moderate bullshit.
Under this logic, a New York–based service meant to be used by children would have no way of banning pictures of topless women. I hope you see exactly how fallacious that argument is now.
A service is allowed to pick and choose what kind of speech it will and won’t host. The government can’t (and shouldn’t be able to) make it host any kind of legally protected speech. If one Mastodon instance wants to ban Harry Potter–related content because J.K. Rowling is a TERF but another Mastodon instance allows it for the same reason, that is well within the rights of both instances. No one has yet explained why the government should be telling one of those instances that they’re wrong.
If they don’t like how a given social media service moderates access to lewd content, they can go to a different service. They’re not entitled to make Twitter work a certain way for the sake of their individual comfort and convenience.
Again: Average social media users aren’t going to want to play moderator. They’re going to want to post memes and bullshit with friends. Making them moderate their experience to the degree that they’re doing the job a social media service would’ve largely done for them won’t make them more appreciative of moderation. It’ll make them leave that service for one that gives a good god’s damn about the user experience.
Two things.
That’s the price you pay for using third-party services.
Twitter shouldn’t need to get approval from a billion people before it can punish people who post racial slurs. It shouldn’t need to get approval from any user to do that—especially the user being punished for being a racist dick.
And if Twitter were a democratic republic, you might have a point. But it isn’t. So you don’t.
Twitter is a privately owned interactive web service. It doesn’t require a majority of its users to say “ban this speech plz” before it can refuse to host certain kinds of speech (and the people who would post that speech). It isn’t a democracy—it’s a tyranny, and one you’re not entitled to be part of even if you play by its rules.
Moderation shouldn’t be regulated beyond non-discrimination laws. The government shouldn’t be in the business of ordering services like Twitter and Facebook to host (or not host) certain kinds of speech. If you have any good arguments to the contrary, you’re not making them right now.
Mastodon is a protocol, and yet the admins of each instance have the same right as Twitter and Facebook to moderate speech on those instances, regardless of what other instances do. (And they’re free to federate—or not—with instances that have different rules.) There is no “central” Mastodon instance or ruleset, yet instances can still engage in the service-side moderation of speech. That’s how Protocols Not Platforms should work—whether you like it or not.
With all that said, I (still) have One Simple Question for you. Yes or no, Bobby: Do you believe the government should have the legal right to compel any privately owned interactive web service into hosting legally protected speech that the owners/operators of said service don’t want to host?
On the post: Devin Nunes' Lawyer Loses (Again) On Blatantly Silly RICO Lawsuit Against Google For 'Anti-Conservative Bias' In Search Results
That’s no way to talk about Peter Thiel.
On the post: Devin Nunes' Lawyer Loses (Again) On Blatantly Silly RICO Lawsuit Against Google For 'Anti-Conservative Bias' In Search Results
At some point, Devin Nunes needs to take the Biss out of those lawsuits if he ever hopes to win even one of them.
On the post: Senator Klobuchar Proposes An Unconstitutional Law That Would Kill Legions Of People If Trump Were Still President
Yes or no: Do you believe the government should have the legal right to make you host legally protected speech that you don’t want to host on property that you own?
On the post: Freaking Out About Nazi Content On The Internet Archive Is Totally Missing The Point
I’ve often referred to Nazi propaganda and such when I’ve asked people if they’d like the government to make them host offensive speech. I do it for a reason: to provoke a gut reaction. Nazis are the accepted baseline for human evil, followed closely by serial killers, Big Oil CEOs, and M. Night Shyamalan¹. Saying “the government should make Twitter host all legal speech” means I can throw the Nazi door wide open as an example to go along with that One Simple Question few people ever answer directly.
But beyond the provocation of that question is a more important one: If someone chooses to host Nazi propaganda, should they be forced to take it down, and under what circumstances should that takedown occur? It’s easy to look at the Archive’s hosting of historical Nazi propaganda and say “understandable, have a nice day”. But take a shitpit like Stormfront posting modern Nazi propaganda as a recruitment tool: If the hosting company behind Stormfront doesn’t have a problem with such speech, and none of the speech crosses a line into illegal/unlawful, who the fuck is anybody to demand that speech be taken down?
I’ve always said that I think even the worst people have the right to speak their mind. That includes actual, factual, honest-to-God contemporary Nazis. No platform should be forced to host legally protected speech—and any platform willing to host offensive-yet-legal speech shouldn’t be forced by law to take it down.
¹ — I’m kidding, of course. MNS is only mid-tier evil.
On the post: As The White House (And Others) Blame Facebook For COVID Vaccination Rates, Health Officials Are Blaming Fox News
In my experience, people who tout “being a free thinker” as a major personality trait are the kind of people who end up sucked into cults, wrapped up in conspiracy theories, and scammed out of their money. You’re not a “free thinker” or else you’d pay attention to the scientists instead of some nutter on YouTube who found one document out of a million that confirmed their biases and made a video about it titled “PROOF THE GOVERNMENT IS TRYING TO MAKE YOU BILL GATES’ 5G BITCH”.
Being a free thinker means confronting, and possibly accepting, facts that discomfort your biases and change your worldview. Being a dumbass means looking only for those “facts” that comfort your biases and confirm your worldview. If you’re already predisposed to distrusting the government, you’re going to be susceptible to believing anyone who tells you the government is evil to the core in every way—including its public health arm. Once they’ve got their hooks in you, you’re going to be “open-minded” enough to their bullshit that you’ll never question it.
Look for the facts that challenge you and make you uncomfortable. Question the facts that validate your biases, but don’t dismiss them only because they do so. And for fuck’s sake, stop giving undue deference to the people who only ever confirm your worldview; they will never challenge you.
On the post: Senator Klobuchar Proposes An Unconstitutional Law That Would Kill Legions Of People If Trump Were Still President
…fucking what
On the post: Senator Klobuchar Proposes An Unconstitutional Law That Would Kill Legions Of People If Trump Were Still President
Translation: “Sure, this disease has killed thousands of people under the age of 60, but who cares? It’s also killing off thousands more people above the age of 60. I say that’s reason enough to French kiss potential disease vectors.”
On the post: As The White House (And Others) Blame Facebook For COVID Vaccination Rates, Health Officials Are Blaming Fox News
Hello, Mr. Dunning-Krueger.
On the post: As The White House (And Others) Blame Facebook For COVID Vaccination Rates, Health Officials Are Blaming Fox News
I’d prefer not to become a vector for a deadly disease, thanks.
On the post: Senator Klobuchar Proposes An Unconstitutional Law That Would Kill Legions Of People If Trump Were Still President
A simple “yes” or “no” would’ve sufficed, but you had to go further, didn’t you.
Corollary to a famous saying about the word “but”: Whenever someone says “however”, you can disregard everything that came before it.
And if services like Twitter and Facebook were common carriers, you might’ve had a point. But they’re not. So you don’t.
Such an act would be unconstitutional, but that’s not important right now, and I’ll get to why it isn’t important soon enough.
“If a bar becomes the most popular hangout in town, the government should be free to declare it a public forum and constrain its ability to moderate legal speech.” That’s your logic as applied to meatspace instead of cyberspace. If you still agree with your logic…well, as I said, I’ll get to that soon enough.
What makes their rights more worthy of protecting than the rights of services that claim to be (but in practice rarely are) “free speech zones” or whatever?
They’d be actual public utilities if they were so essential that they couldn’t be allowed to fail/shut down. But they’re not. Twitter could go down tomorrow and we’d all find new services to use. Same for Facebook.
If Twitter were to close down tomorrow—no warning, no prior notice—what could the federal government actually do to keep it from shutting down besides seizing the means of production (i.e., Twitter’s servers)?
But they’re not “natural monopolies”. They’re not even monopolies of any kind. Twitter and Facebook compete with each other and aren’t owned by one company or the other. And despite not having the same reach as those two, plenty of other social interaction networks—both services and protocols—exist and compete against the Big Two. Popularity is not the sole signifier of a monopoly, no matter how much you want to think otherwise.
No, they can’t.
To regulate social media, the government would need to regulate speech—or, more precisely, what speech could be posted on what service. Put the constitutional question aside and ask yourself this: Do you want the government telling you what speech is “acceptable” to host on a service you own and operate? Do you want the government to make you host anti-queer propaganda, pro-Nazi memes, and other such bigoted filth?
The logic of compelled hosting of speech always breaks down here because no one wants to be told they have to host stuff they don’t want to host. I doubt you’d be much different in that regard…unless you’d actually prefer to have the government force you into hosting racist memes that compare Black people to monkeys.
The law would have to be written that way to ensure it doesn’t get picked apart for being biased against bigger companies. Using popularity as the sole determining factor of whose rights get trampled upon will always result in a complete shitshow.
For what reason, other than size/popularity, should Twitter and Facebook be regulated but Parler shouldn’t?
“…except when it comes to the Big Two of social media, then we need to regulate the fuck out of them even if regulation isn’t justified.”
Why not? The group is on Facebook. Being on an open-to-the-public service should mean private pages still fall under the same regulations as publicly visible pages.
No, you could. But you don’t want to go on record as saying “the government should make Twitter host racist bullshit because free speech” by answering “yes”, which is largely what your answer was saying anyway.
Again: Other than size/popularity, what makes Twitter and Facebook more deserving of regulation than Parler, Gab, or any given Mastodon instance?
Assume that you own a Mastodon instance. Regardless of any factors such as size/popularity, should the government have the right to make you host Ku Klux Klan propaganda “or else”, even if the rules of your service ban such speech?
On the post: Senator Klobuchar Proposes An Unconstitutional Law That Would Kill Legions Of People If Trump Were Still President
Tell that to the families of every person under the age of 60 who died of COVID-19, both before and after vaccinations were available. Tell that to the families of every child under the age of 18 who has died of COVID-19, too.
Vaccines save lives. Your selfishness puts them in danger. Get vaxxed, wear a mask, and stop thinking your convenience and comfort are more important than other people’s lives.
On the post: As The White House (And Others) Blame Facebook For COVID Vaccination Rates, Health Officials Are Blaming Fox News
They’re giving the virus what it needs to mutate: fresh victims and time. And they’re doing that out of sociopathic selfishness. Is wearing a mask when going to Walmart really worse than having a breathing tube shoved down one’s throat?
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