To Republicans, their feelings matter more than facts — which explains why they rail against “cancel culture” whenever a conservative/Republican is moderated by a social media platform or otherwise called to account for their speech. But whenever an actual example of censorship of speech shows up — especially liberal/progressive/Democrat speech — those same Republicans fall awfully silent.
All of this crap about revoking 230/finding a way to control moderation on social media isn’t about “censorship” in the sense that Republicans want to stop censorship from happening. Their “revoke 230” claptrap and moral panic hullabaloo about “censorship” is about conservatives wanting the right to “free reach” — to be awarded a free platform and audience without anything like “consequences for their speech” or “the right of association preventing compelled speech” getting in the way.
Some Democrats might be guilty of this thinking. But they’re doing a damned better job of hiding that fact. Republicans don’t give a fuck any more. To them, fascism seems a lot more appealing now that they’ve gotten that blood-soaked taste in their mouths.
Um…what? I read that article three different times and I still can’t figure out whether it’s for or against even a partial application of intermediary liability on services like Twitter. A little clarity might be nice here.
We think a 15 and 16 yr old dating is okay, but cheer on the headline that the older boy who had photos of a young girl is going to be a sex offender for life.
I wouldn’t cheer that headline without context. The sex offender label should mean something other than “had sex with someone a couple years younger than me when I was a kid” or “pissed in public”. It should be reserved for sex crimes of the worst variety — rape, child porn (distribution and creation), and the like — committed by adults. Marking at least one dumb teenager with that branding for life because they had sex with another dumb teenager or took a nude pic of their slightly younger lover isn’t something anyone should be celebrating.
Now, if we’re talking about someone like convicted rapist Brock Turner…yeah, label fuckers like that all the live-long day. They fuckin’ deserve it.
No, this situation is attempted censorship. Hell, it might even be a successful attempt — after all, if Viet Tran knows he has police and prosecutors watching him closely after his humiliating-to-the-state victory in court, he might think twice before sharing any documents in the future if he has the absolute legal right to share those documents.
Y’all want to talk about censorship? Here’s your opportunity. But know that you won’t be taken even the least bit seriously if you conflate this situation — this attempt at using governmental power as a way to shut someone up — with Twitter banning someone for posting, say, anti-queer slurs.
What is outright misleading is the assertion that the virus may have been deliberately engineered - which would require some pretty damn extraordinary evidence to become believable.
Also misleading: the assumption that the virus was deliberately released. The Chinese government wouldn’t order the release of the virus because the virus would affect Chinese people. I doubt even the Chinese government would willingly risk infecting millions of its own citizens just to attack the rest of the world for…reasons. (That sounds more like a North Korea thing.)
Also unlikely is the idea that the virus was deliberately released by someone inside the lab. Again: That is possible, but I can’t think of any good reason anyone other than a complete sociopath would do that.
So yeah, the two most plausible explanations are that COVID-19 jumped from animal to human through the kind of everyday contact possible in China or the virus somehow infected someone inside a lab and said someone transmitted the disease to others without knowing. Anything else is either implausible or humanly impossible.
Under Knight v. Trump, anyone CENSORED by Twitter lost their first-Amendment right to participate in a discussion of official policy.
No, they didn’t — they lost the privilege of taking part in such discussions on Twitter. Nobody has a right to use Twitter. And Knight v. Trump dealt with the idea of a constituent being blocked by a politician on social media and thus being unable to “participate in a discussion of official policy”. The actions of Twitter itself never entered into the picture because the blocks were decisions made by a user — i.e., Trump.
the primary point was that having arbiters of what is "true" invites inevitable abuse
Having no arbiters at all invites bullshit to flow freely — which is why right-wing media has no real “sieves” to filter out facts from bullshit. For all their biases and whatnot, “centrist” and left-wing media does tend to filter the bullshit. If that approach doesn’t comfort your ignorance, that’s a “you” problem.
It's quite possible a court may rule in the future that a social network that hosts government channels can't universally ban someone from those channels
It’s also possible that Republicans will control enough state legislatures and Congressional seats to amend the Constitution so that such a ruling wouldn’t fly in the face of at least a few decades of First Amendment jurisprudence.
I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for it. But I won’t stop you if you want to.
when Twitter terminates someone's account, they are a state actor, if they are censoring discussions on pages of elected officials
No politician — be they a candidate for any given office, a mayor, a state senator, a Congressperson, or the actual goddamned President of the United States — is entitled to use of private property they don’t own as a personal soapbox. No person has that “right”.
Twitter isn’t a state actor; it didn’t become one because it banned Donald Trump. To believe otherwise is to believe the United States federal government can compel Twitter to carry its speech in any and all contexts and situations. No court in this country (except maybe in Texas) would ever rule on such a situation in a way that will give you or anyone else the right to free reach (i.e., an audience).
Name one American citizen who was directly and explicitly censored by anyone from any level of the United States government — i.e., fined, imprisoned, or otherwise prevented from speaking their mind by a local/state/federal government agent or agency in direct violation of the First Amendment — for saying “COVID-19 came from a lab”. Please note that a social interaction network banning someone from the service for saying “COVID-19 came from a lab” is not censorship because, as Judge Brett Kavanaugh pointed out, “A private entity … who opens its property for speech by others is not transformed by that fact alone into a state actor”.
Under Trump, the theory that the [COVID-19 virus] originated in a lab was deemed "misinformation" and people lost their accounts for it.
Under Trump, people drank a pool cleaning chemical because they thought it was the miracle drug Dear Leader had talked about on TV. That the orange dipshit may have gotten this one right — and “may” is carrying a lot of weight there — doesn’t make him any less of a lying conman who cares more about himself than anyone else in the world. (Shit, if he could throw Barron under the bus for all the New York investigations, Old 45 would do it in a heartbeat.)
Right now, the theory that COVID-19 was created (or at least being studied) in a Chinese labratory and escaped by accident is plausible. That said: The theory being plausible doesn’t make it a fact. That only happens if and when evidence can corroborate the theory — something that hasn’t happened yet and sure as hell hadn’t happened when Old 45 made his claim.
defamation, truth-in-advertising, fraud, and perjury laws come close
All of those have as much to do with fact-checking, fairness in speech, or neutrality towards speech as Candlejack has to do with rope safety. Now try again and don’t be so godda
My adversary (not enemy) is those who ignore the abuses of power and subjectivity inherent in "fact-checking."
How do you feel about liars and the media outlets who enable the lies by repeating those lies verbatim without challenge or criticism — e.g., outlets that repeat Old 45’s Big Lie and acting like it’s the absolute truth?
People got banned for "lying" about the origin of COVID when they aid it came from a lab.
As of now, the origin of COVID-19 remains a mystery, beyond the fact that it originated in China. To say “it came from a lab” is what you might call Schrödinger’s information: It is neither truth nor lie until the evidence comes in. But if a website wants to call that statement “false” or “misleading” — or “the absolute God’s honest truth” — it has every right to do so.
Making anyone a "fact checker" with censorship power invites incredible abuses of power.
And if Facebook fact-checkers could actually censor anyone — i.e., if they could stop people from saying “COVID-19 came from a lab” any- and everywhere other than Facebook — you might have a point.
if the politicians could actually find illegal content in the fact checks, then they wouldn't need to write new laws to make Facebook pay for daring to contradict them
Key word: “could”. That they haven’t should tell you something.
other right-wing news outlets, although equally biased, have been gaining credibility with audiences
No, they’ve been gaining popularity for telling lies that comfort ignorance and confirm preëxisting biases. Popularity is not the same as credibility, or else InfoWars would be considered a credible news source.
The term "expressive" simply means that you are putting thoughts into words. But "fact checking" goes beyond this. It is a declaration of who is objectively correct, and who is objectively incorrect.
…based on facts at hand, yes. If someone says “the 2020 election was stolen” and offers no proof of this claim, they’re objectively wrong until and unless they can offer that proof. Fact-checking their asses — “the claim has no evidence to back it up” — is declaring them objectively wrong based on the fact being declared. And that declaration is an expression of an idea, a thought, a statement of fact. It is thus protected by the First Amendment no matter how much you or anyone else wants to nuke fact-checking that doesn’t favor your orange god and his alt-right acolytes.
during this week's news cycle, we have learned that the fact checkers are backing off of their previous decisions, which is something that can't actually happen
Except they can. Everybody can.
When we have a specific set of facts, we fact-check against those. When a new verifiable fact enters the set, we fact-check against the new set — and if our previous fact-checking is upended by that new fact, we can say so without losing credibility. (“When we checked this last week, we were unaware of [x]. Now that we are aware of [x], we have updated our story.”) But if a fact comes along that makes you uncomfortable, and you refuse to correct your mistake because of your own discomfort in having to admit you’re wrong, that’s when you fuck things up.
If you can’t say “I was wrong”, you’re an asshole. (Same goes for “I don’t know” and “I forgive you”.) Any weak-minded shithead can claim they’re right in the face of evidence that says otherwise. A strong-minded person can admit they’re wrong. Which one are you?
In other words, the fact checkers were fraudulently holding out their opinion as immutable fact.
So what? Every right-wing “fact-checker” does the same thing. Hell, Donald Trump’s entire post–November 2020 political career has been about fraudulently holding out his Big Lie as immutable fact. What are you gonna do, file a lawsuit?
If you use your opinion to falsely censor others, then the so-called fact checkers should pay a price for the shoddy work.
As soon as you can figure out what law to charge them under and how to route around that pesky-ass First Amendment what protects fact-checkers from government interference in their speech? You let me know how big the punishment should be and how it should be enforced. Until then: Fuck off back to Gab, Koby.
The First Amendment protects fact-checkers regardless of whether they work directly for the organization/person being fact-checked. Show me the law, statute, or “common law” court ruling that says otherwise — because you’ll be doing more to prove it than the shithead lawmaker discussed in the article.
Also: Repealing Section 230 may be constitutional, but having the right to do a thing doesn’t make it the right thing to do.
Green energy isn’t going to replace industrial energy over night. Why not focus on cleaning what we have as we work on greening tomorrow?
Because that would prevent energy companies from making the kinds of profits they make now — and we all know executives will not give up their hard-“earned” money without a fight. Not sayin’ it ain’t worth pushing for, but don’t expect it to happen any time soon…especially if your precious demigod Trump somehow gets back into office or one of his ass-kissing acolytes wins in 2024.
We don’t have to agree on individual aspects of cause and concern to come together to find solutions.
No, we really do. While individual people have a role to play in helping prevent climate change disaster, we know who the biggest threats are — and it isn’t regular jackoffs like you and me. If you think making people like us do more to curb their effect on the environment is the solution, and I think making people like Big Oil/Big Energy executives do more to curb their companies’ far, far, far, far, far larger effect on the environment is the solution, we’re going to keep arguing past each other. We need to agree on the primary driver of global climate change — corporate pollutants and the executives who don’t give a shit about changing that fact — before we can start agreeing on actual solutions that will have a greater effect of slowing down global climate change than does your individual decision to recycle plastic bottles.
we still have the issue of what do we do in the far north when it’s 20° below or the south west when it hits 110°
We say “this is the effect of global climate change”, point at the biggest pollutants, and tell our leaders to make them stop fucking up the planet.
Right path, long way to go.
Weren’t you the one who said we should…and I quote…“focus on the now with the environment"? Why are you so worried about the “long way to go” if you think we’re not even supposed to care about that? I mean, after all, you said…and I quote…“On the geological scale of time any influence on temperature is statistically insignificant.”
On the post: Washington Post Runs Bizarrely Ignorant Opinion Piece Claiming Florida's Content Moderation Law Is Constitutional
To Republicans, their feelings matter more than facts — which explains why they rail against “cancel culture” whenever a conservative/Republican is moderated by a social media platform or otherwise called to account for their speech. But whenever an actual example of censorship of speech shows up — especially liberal/progressive/Democrat speech — those same Republicans fall awfully silent.
All of this crap about revoking 230/finding a way to control moderation on social media isn’t about “censorship” in the sense that Republicans want to stop censorship from happening. Their “revoke 230” claptrap and moral panic hullabaloo about “censorship” is about conservatives wanting the right to “free reach” — to be awarded a free platform and audience without anything like “consequences for their speech” or “the right of association preventing compelled speech” getting in the way.
Some Democrats might be guilty of this thinking. But they’re doing a damned better job of hiding that fact. Republicans don’t give a fuck any more. To them, fascism seems a lot more appealing now that they’ve gotten that blood-soaked taste in their mouths.
On the post: Are Partial Liability Rules The Path Forward For Intermediary Liability Regimes? Lessons Learned From Brazil
Um…what? I read that article three different times and I still can’t figure out whether it’s for or against even a partial application of intermediary liability on services like Twitter. A little clarity might be nice here.
On the post: Judge Dumps Iowa Prosecutors' Attempt To Jail An Activist For Sharing A Law Enforcement Document With Journalists
I wouldn’t cheer that headline without context. The sex offender label should mean something other than “had sex with someone a couple years younger than me when I was a kid” or “pissed in public”. It should be reserved for sex crimes of the worst variety — rape, child porn (distribution and creation), and the like — committed by adults. Marking at least one dumb teenager with that branding for life because they had sex with another dumb teenager or took a nude pic of their slightly younger lover isn’t something anyone should be celebrating.
Now, if we’re talking about someone like convicted rapist Brock Turner…yeah, label fuckers like that all the live-long day. They fuckin’ deserve it.
On the post: It's Not Personal: Content Moderation Always Involves Mistakes, Including Suspending Experts Sharing Knowledge
Always trust a troll to break a rules system by any means necessary.
On the post: Judge Dumps Iowa Prosecutors' Attempt To Jail An Activist For Sharing A Law Enforcement Document With Journalists
To everyone who thinks moderation is censorship:
No, this situation is attempted censorship. Hell, it might even be a successful attempt — after all, if Viet Tran knows he has police and prosecutors watching him closely after his humiliating-to-the-state victory in court, he might think twice before sharing any documents in the future if he has the absolute legal right to share those documents.
Y’all want to talk about censorship? Here’s your opportunity. But know that you won’t be taken even the least bit seriously if you conflate this situation — this attempt at using governmental power as a way to shut someone up — with Twitter banning someone for posting, say, anti-queer slurs.
On the post: Fact Check: Yes, Fact Checking Is Totally Protected By The 1st Amendment
Also misleading: the assumption that the virus was deliberately released. The Chinese government wouldn’t order the release of the virus because the virus would affect Chinese people. I doubt even the Chinese government would willingly risk infecting millions of its own citizens just to attack the rest of the world for…reasons. (That sounds more like a North Korea thing.)
Also unlikely is the idea that the virus was deliberately released by someone inside the lab. Again: That is possible, but I can’t think of any good reason anyone other than a complete sociopath would do that.
So yeah, the two most plausible explanations are that COVID-19 jumped from animal to human through the kind of everyday contact possible in China or the virus somehow infected someone inside a lab and said someone transmitted the disease to others without knowing. Anything else is either implausible or humanly impossible.
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
No, they didn’t — they lost the privilege of taking part in such discussions on Twitter. Nobody has a right to use Twitter. And Knight v. Trump dealt with the idea of a constituent being blocked by a politician on social media and thus being unable to “participate in a discussion of official policy”. The actions of Twitter itself never entered into the picture because the blocks were decisions made by a user — i.e., Trump.
Having no arbiters at all invites bullshit to flow freely — which is why right-wing media has no real “sieves” to filter out facts from bullshit. For all their biases and whatnot, “centrist” and left-wing media does tend to filter the bullshit. If that approach doesn’t comfort your ignorance, that’s a “you” problem.
It’s also possible that Republicans will control enough state legislatures and Congressional seats to amend the Constitution so that such a ruling wouldn’t fly in the face of at least a few decades of First Amendment jurisprudence.
I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for it. But I won’t stop you if you want to.
No politician — be they a candidate for any given office, a mayor, a state senator, a Congressperson, or the actual goddamned President of the United States — is entitled to use of private property they don’t own as a personal soapbox. No person has that “right”.
Twitter isn’t a state actor; it didn’t become one because it banned Donald Trump. To believe otherwise is to believe the United States federal government can compel Twitter to carry its speech in any and all contexts and situations. No court in this country (except maybe in Texas) would ever rule on such a situation in a way that will give you or anyone else the right to free reach (i.e., an audience).
Now go back to Parler.
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
I have One Simple Challenge for you.
Name one American citizen who was directly and explicitly censored by anyone from any level of the United States government — i.e., fined, imprisoned, or otherwise prevented from speaking their mind by a local/state/federal government agent or agency in direct violation of the First Amendment — for saying “COVID-19 came from a lab”. Please note that a social interaction network banning someone from the service for saying “COVID-19 came from a lab” is not censorship because, as Judge Brett Kavanaugh pointed out, “A private entity … who opens its property for speech by others is not transformed by that fact alone into a state actor”.
On the post: Fact Check: Yes, Fact Checking Is Totally Protected By The 1st Amendment
Under Trump, people drank a pool cleaning chemical because they thought it was the miracle drug Dear Leader had talked about on TV. That the orange dipshit may have gotten this one right — and “may” is carrying a lot of weight there — doesn’t make him any less of a lying conman who cares more about himself than anyone else in the world. (Shit, if he could throw Barron under the bus for all the New York investigations, Old 45 would do it in a heartbeat.)
Right now, the theory that COVID-19 was created (or at least being studied) in a Chinese labratory and escaped by accident is plausible. That said: The theory being plausible doesn’t make it a fact. That only happens if and when evidence can corroborate the theory — something that hasn’t happened yet and sure as hell hadn’t happened when Old 45 made his claim.
On the post: Fact Check: Yes, Fact Checking Is Totally Protected By The 1st Amendment
All of those have as much to do with fact-checking, fairness in speech, or neutrality towards speech as Candlejack has to do with rope safety. Now try again and don’t be so godda
On the post: Fact Check: Yes, Fact Checking Is Totally Protected By The 1st Amendment
How do you feel about liars and the media outlets who enable the lies by repeating those lies verbatim without challenge or criticism — e.g., outlets that repeat Old 45’s Big Lie and acting like it’s the absolute truth?
On the post: Fact Check: Yes, Fact Checking Is Totally Protected By The 1st Amendment
As of now, the origin of COVID-19 remains a mystery, beyond the fact that it originated in China. To say “it came from a lab” is what you might call Schrödinger’s information: It is neither truth nor lie until the evidence comes in. But if a website wants to call that statement “false” or “misleading” — or “the absolute God’s honest truth” — it has every right to do so.
And if Facebook fact-checkers could actually censor anyone — i.e., if they could stop people from saying “COVID-19 came from a lab” any- and everywhere other than Facebook — you might have a point.
On the post: Fact Check: Yes, Fact Checking Is Totally Protected By The 1st Amendment
Oh, I’m sure some people would love for that to be the case (coughtrumpcough), but it isn’t, so they can all go fuck themselves.
On the post: The Flopping Of Trump's Blog Proves That It's Not Free Speech He's Upset About; But Free Reach
I repeat: Go back to Parler, asshole.
On the post: The Flopping Of Trump's Blog Proves That It's Not Free Speech He's Upset About; But Free Reach
I’d rip on you at length, but…
…with that sentence, you have killed the last remnants of your credibility in this discussion. And I’m bored of dealing with your bigoted ass anyway.
Go back to Parler, asshole.
On the post: Fact Check: Yes, Fact Checking Is Totally Protected By The 1st Amendment
Key word: “could”. That they haven’t should tell you something.
On the post: Fact Check: Yes, Fact Checking Is Totally Protected By The 1st Amendment
No, they’ve been gaining popularity for telling lies that comfort ignorance and confirm preëxisting biases. Popularity is not the same as credibility, or else InfoWars would be considered a credible news source.
…based on facts at hand, yes. If someone says “the 2020 election was stolen” and offers no proof of this claim, they’re objectively wrong until and unless they can offer that proof. Fact-checking their asses — “the claim has no evidence to back it up” — is declaring them objectively wrong based on the fact being declared. And that declaration is an expression of an idea, a thought, a statement of fact. It is thus protected by the First Amendment no matter how much you or anyone else wants to nuke fact-checking that doesn’t favor your orange god and his alt-right acolytes.
Except they can. Everybody can.
When we have a specific set of facts, we fact-check against those. When a new verifiable fact enters the set, we fact-check against the new set — and if our previous fact-checking is upended by that new fact, we can say so without losing credibility. (“When we checked this last week, we were unaware of [x]. Now that we are aware of [x], we have updated our story.”) But if a fact comes along that makes you uncomfortable, and you refuse to correct your mistake because of your own discomfort in having to admit you’re wrong, that’s when you fuck things up.
If you can’t say “I was wrong”, you’re an asshole. (Same goes for “I don’t know” and “I forgive you”.) Any weak-minded shithead can claim they’re right in the face of evidence that says otherwise. A strong-minded person can admit they’re wrong. Which one are you?
So what? Every right-wing “fact-checker” does the same thing. Hell, Donald Trump’s entire post–November 2020 political career has been about fraudulently holding out his Big Lie as immutable fact. What are you gonna do, file a lawsuit?
As soon as you can figure out what law to charge them under and how to route around that pesky-ass First Amendment what protects fact-checkers from government interference in their speech? You let me know how big the punishment should be and how it should be enforced. Until then: Fuck off back to Gab, Koby.
On the post: Fact Check: Yes, Fact Checking Is Totally Protected By The 1st Amendment
The First Amendment protects fact-checkers regardless of whether they work directly for the organization/person being fact-checked. Show me the law, statute, or “common law” court ruling that says otherwise — because you’ll be doing more to prove it than the shithead lawmaker discussed in the article.
Also: Repealing Section 230 may be constitutional, but having the right to do a thing doesn’t make it the right thing to do.
On the post: Fact Check: Yes, Fact Checking Is Totally Protected By The 1st Amendment
I haven’t seen a pile of shit that big since the last time I watched Jurassic Park.
On the post: The Flopping Of Trump's Blog Proves That It's Not Free Speech He's Upset About; But Free Reach
Ain’t no such thing.
Because that would prevent energy companies from making the kinds of profits they make now — and we all know executives will not give up their hard-“earned” money without a fight. Not sayin’ it ain’t worth pushing for, but don’t expect it to happen any time soon…especially if your precious demigod Trump somehow gets back into office or one of his ass-kissing acolytes wins in 2024.
No, we really do. While individual people have a role to play in helping prevent climate change disaster, we know who the biggest threats are — and it isn’t regular jackoffs like you and me. If you think making people like us do more to curb their effect on the environment is the solution, and I think making people like Big Oil/Big Energy executives do more to curb their companies’ far, far, far, far, far larger effect on the environment is the solution, we’re going to keep arguing past each other. We need to agree on the primary driver of global climate change — corporate pollutants and the executives who don’t give a shit about changing that fact — before we can start agreeing on actual solutions that will have a greater effect of slowing down global climate change than does your individual decision to recycle plastic bottles.
We say “this is the effect of global climate change”, point at the biggest pollutants, and tell our leaders to make them stop fucking up the planet.
Weren’t you the one who said we should…and I quote…“focus on the now with the environment"? Why are you so worried about the “long way to go” if you think we’re not even supposed to care about that? I mean, after all, you said…and I quote…“On the geological scale of time any influence on temperature is statistically insignificant.”
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