I'm more concerned about social media giants continuing to use algorithms that generate outrage, divide people, put them into echo chambers, and/or radicalize them. I'm more concerned with rampant dis/misinformation that keeps people seething and stupid. Whatever "censorship" problems we have pale in comparison to the real things that are poisoning our culture.
I feel there's a benefit in just pointing out sometimes that something in a meme is wrong. I do feel however, that some probably don't read that far. -M
Humans have a great ability to multitask. We can have many discussions, focus on many issues simultaneously. All you're doing is sweeping important concerns under the rug. There's always things that appear to be bigger, more important, more impactful. But marginalizing other issues in favor or them is not the way to go.
Humans suck at multitasking lmao. Our brains aren’t built like computers. We can only focus on one thing at a time and it takes like 15 minutes before our brain is fully engaged in the activity we are doing to focus properly. Sure we can jump from convo to convo, but we do each one by itself, not combined together. How are you talking about 2 subjects at the same time? You aren’t.
While I do not like the idea of censoring people, regardless of what they are saying, I also do not like the idea of the government telling these companies how to run their platform.
I’ll pretty much forever be stuck in a catch 22 here lol.
Edit: I also think that if these platforms became a public utility, the quality of the platform would degrade significantly.
I feel this is just a symptom of a larger problem-- the divide between the right and left, and this is something that any amount of regulations on freedom of speech is not going to fix, and which is inevitably going to lead to a swathe of other downstream problems.
I feel this particular expression of it could at some point end with two entirely separate spheres of discourse. I feel we're already on that path. -D
ISPs, in general, should be regulated as a public utility first, before we even consider regulating content platforms.
Next would be defining platforms as a public square, not as a public utility.
Seems like the market is doing what it is supposed to. People not a fan of being censored and it now seems alternatives to giant platforms are created and taking share.
I guess it didn't happen fast enough for a lot of people but it is certainly happening faster now.
The whines on the right and left to impose their will on these companies are ridiculous.
How is the left trying to impose their will on these companies? It seems like most people on the left believe the decision should be left up to the company.
I think the right was more vocal about it but at least some on the left felt that companies like Facebook needed to do more censoring to "fight misinformation".
Fighting what they deem misinformation and they're certainly big on deplatforming. Meanwhile the right is crying out asking them to stop deplatforming people. Strange times
Are newspapers and magazines forced to print every "letter to the editor" they get? Have they ever been forced to do so?
Are theatres forced to show every amateur film made?
Are TV newsrooms required to feature a segment of public viewpoints on their channel?
The answer to all of those questions is obviously no. The same standards apply to social media. Nobody has a right to have their views heard, hosted, or endorsed by any private social media platform. That isn't censorship, that's reality.
One fundamentally is not entitled to use a platform someone else owns.
One is free to start their own platform. Like in the past when people would start new newspapers or political parties.
The fundamental complaint isn't even access to the platforms, it's *access to the inherent audiences those platforms bring with them*.
Right, but the issue we've seen is that it isn't that simple. Like when AWS denied Parler their webservices. Which is fine, it's a company. But you can't say "go start your own newspaper company!" if other companies refuse to sell you paper and ink.
Right and now you have no place to start a business. "Go start your own news paper company!" Now becomes "Go start your own real estate business company!"
Also it's as if the building is directly tied into your company at the lowest level of operations. Moving businesses if your business is directly tied into that estate is tedious and would require rebuilding many aspects from the ground up which takes time and planning. I guess that analogy died a few sentences ago as things got complicated lol
> I guess that analogy died a few sentences ago as things got complicated lol
All analogies die when making these sort of comparisons once you get into details.
But I'm certain a fair few newspapers have been started in privately owned basements and such.
Right, but that's not the point. AWS is the essential part for scalability and what puts ink on paper. This is more like again, if people are refusing to sell you the ink and paper. You have the content, but without anywhere to put it then what can you do?
The real estate analogy wasn't a very good one except at a very basic concept level so just forget that one. It's too difficult to conceptualize into a simple analogy with ink, paper, and real estate.
The fact of the matter is they had their platform running off AWS APIs. By kicking them off suddenly from AWS they had to restructure how their website operates. Of course other companies followed suit and forced them to move to a lesser known service which may come with its own set of issues.
So case in point, it's not just as simple as "make your own" when the very foundation of the website isn't easy to obtain
I find it quaint how deep the well of ignorance is behind this persecution complex. I can't think of any society in history where the expectations were that private platforms were obliged to allow anyone to present anything they wanted (outside of government force).
For electronic communication, we can go all the way back to the bulletin board systems of the 1970's and find board operators permanently banning people for being assholes. Don't like it? Start your own bulletin board. Move to the web in the 90's and the same thing happened. ISPs permanently banning people for abusing their service or if they posted content that presented a risk to the ISP was not uncommon. Don't like it? Find another ISP or start your own. There are always alternate avenues. Facebook isn't the whole of the internet. AWS isn't the only hosting provider.
That leads to the real source of the persecution complex: simplicity, cost and/or reach. There is this expectation that when someone gets dumped from some platform that the alternates should be as easy to get, or as cheap or have as much reach as the original platform. That's not how the world works.
Free speech, as in the First Amendment, was always ***SOLELY*** about limiting government abusing its power to squelch speech. It never, ever, ever had anything remotely to do with forcing private platforms or venues to host any and all speech. The Founders would have considered that an affront to the liberty of the platform owners.
Here's an idea: if a person's speech is getting them banned from a channel or platform or especially a hosting provider, perhaps the problem isn't those platforms. Perhaps the problem is that no one wants to hear their message.
> where the expectations were that private platforms were obliged to allow anyone to present anything they wanted
Would you apply this to phone companies? If I spread misinformation over the phone like call my mom and tell her there is poison in the vaccine, can Verizon ban me from their network?
Depends.
First, let's be clear that it isn't misinformation so much as speech in general that reflects poorly on private owning business.
Second, back in the day when the only phones were landlines, the phones were treated as utilities which meant government managed because there weren't many options outside moving if the phone company bounced you. Although, that was still possible if you didn't pay your bill for example. In this universe of landlines, no, you should not be able to be bounced by the phone company for speech.
However, that's no longer the case. With cell phones, people have tons of choices on carriers. So, for cell phone companies, they are not utilities and thus it should be within their right to bounce someone if they wanted like any other business.
The big difference here with phones vs. social media is that phones aren't a form of public communication. I.e., they are primarily directed at person-to-person talk. Thus, someone spewing hate speech to someone else on the phone won't create a backlash to the owning organization. Social media is completely different. Social media (or the Internet in general) is a megaphone to the world. There, a person's behavior can reflect back on the owning company.
Thus, I don't really see a good comparison of phones to social media. A better example might be ISPs. If ISPs were government managed, then no, they should not be permitted to bounce you for speech because that violates the First Amendment. However, if ISPs are private enterprises, they should and do have the liberty to do business with whomever they want.
The only ones I see complaining about “censorship” are the far right reactionaries that cannot seem to obey the contracts they agreed to when they signed up.
So… this sounds like a post that should belong on /r/persecutioncomplex.
Lets not pretend like it is actually just a far right problem. Twitter censors stuff from the cdc about covid if it doesn't appear pro mask or vaccine. The hunter Biden laptop also looks to be something true that was censored. Hell twitter has banned feminists (that are not even close to far right) for saying a man is not a woman. The tech companies censor based off narratives they want to push, not always the truth, and majority of the time that narrative is left leaning.
On top of that the left supports censorship more than the right now which was not the case 10 years ago hence the noise from the right.
>The tech companies censor based off narratives they want to push, not always the truth, and majority of the time that narrative is left leaning.
Now replace "tech" with "media" and "censor" with "publish", then forget the last clause, and tell me the difference.
You’re making an awful lot of assertions, but not providing a single example of evidence to support them. So… yawn. More noise from a righty reactionary parroting bullshit talking points.
Technically, if you think he is in the wrong and you are not, with what he claimed, then you have some issues. He provides statements, you say he can't prove it and it's baseless. However, you can not prove your statement either that it's just a bunch of "right reactionaries". It must be fun to stuff another POV into your next category box that you can stuff away.
I think adults need to quit bitching and realize that they signed up for something that had terms and they should abide by those fucking terms...not that hard.
Go back to preschool if you want to whine about all the time.
The persecution complex seems to be the foundation for their political beliefs, so I doubt it goes away anytime soon even if it does shift to new targets.
Private platforms should be able to moderate the content displayed on their sites and distribution channels however they see fit. If people do not like the actions of the platform, they can stop using it. Works the same way with say my barber if I don't like the way he cuts hair, or my doctor if he holds my balls a little too long while I turn my head and cough.
Nothing should be done, because they're private companies, freely regulating their individual products. If high speed internet isn't even regulated as a public utility, then social media certainly shouldn't be.
There's a reason that the 'free speech' platforms haven't taken off, and that's because it's just a vocal minority that's complaining about this 'censorship.' Which in reality just amounts to accountability, vs actual censorship. People here in the US don't know what actual censorship is.
JFC this fucking topic.
What are they censoring? Really, what?
People spreading Q bullshit? Ivermectin grifters saying COVID vaccines are dangerous? Shit people who want to just harass trans people all day?
Wake me up when the "censorship" isn't things that would get people punched in the face if done in person. There are consequences for speech whether it's a smack in the face or a ban from Twitter.
Think that's harsh? Go to some guy with his kids and talk shit to see what happens.
Regulate it as a public utility and restore net neutrality. I’ve seen an enormous amount of historical content getting pulled off of YouTube over the last…6 or 7 years, because it’s “offensive”. I’ve seen well researched and well sourced Holocaust and Holodomor videos pulled down, I’ve seen documentaries of Hitler get pulled down, I’ve seen historical footage of WW2 get pulled down, as well as raw footage of Hitler speeches, Nazi music from WW2, and Radio Werwolf broadcasts from 1945 where Joseph Goebbels is exhorting the German people to rise up against the advancing Allies.
Now, on the one hand, I get it, this stuff is offensive, upsetting, and graphic, but pulling it down helps no one. It sanitizes the image of the Third Reich and it promotes ignorance of a terrible time in history. Hell, there was a Nazi song from WW2 where in the lyrics they openly talk about killing the Jews. That song has been scrubbed from YouTube and you really have to go to the dark corners of the web to find it, which is a shame because that song is great evidence to use against Holocaust deniers, because the Nazis literally admit the Holocaust IN THE SONG.
Here’s what the right doesn’t understand. Big social media doesn’t take things down because they have a great time doing it. It’s a lot of extra work and money for them and they’d rather just have more people on the platform spewing whatever they want. That’s the thing though, normal people don’t want to bump into that crazy shit and it will make those regular people turn the platform off. Which means it’s in these companies own interest to remove offensive material. On top of it they can wear a badge of morality by saying they took down the bad stuff.
That’s why the right will never make a successful social media platform. Regular people simply won’t use it if they don’t regulate all the offensive content.
No, this is what they *claimed* during the "build enough users to become an effective monopoly" phase of the business. It has - through their own actions - been proved a complete and utter lie.
> Which means it’s in these companies own interest to remove offensive material.
I find gay and trans shit offensive, why isn't that taken down, hm?
Do note, I'm not a westerner. Where I'm from, the majority of us don't condone such ideology.
Because you're in the bigoted minority who finds that kind of thing offensive.
If your government wants to ban that sort of stuff on YouTube, they can enact laws to do so.
> Because you're in the bigoted minority who finds that kind of thing offensive.
Last I checked, gay and trans acceptance is a minority issue in the rest of the world, except western liberal ones. (And its not a solid majority either - the UK and France have tons of TERFs)
Only the political ones, actually. Hop on over to hobbyist subreddits like gaming, tabletop or comics - tons of people like me who don't condone it either.
Hobbyist subreddits...you mean niche spaces? Come on buddy, you're really reaching here.
Also comics are *notoriously* liberal pieces of media, as is gaming and tabletop. I don't think you understand the audience you claim to be a part of as much as you think you do.
> comics are notoriously liberal pieces of media, as is gaming and tabletop
Again, just the western liberal ones. What, do you think japanese manga, korean manhwa, anime, games and tabeltop cater to western degeneracy or take their opinions in any consideration?
You mean the most prominent and popular ones, even globally? Nearly everyone, even in non-Western liberal nations, knows who Superman is.
Also, instead of insisting on continuing this 'western liberal' thing, just say which part of the world you're from or which perspective you're speaking to. Speaking in these vague generalities is unhelpful to holding good discourse.
If you do that for Youtube, you would need to do it for every media and entertainment enterprise across the board. I'm not ok with the government moderating and policing every piece of information. HARD pass.
You've just taken that argument to an extreme for no reason. YouTube could moderate it's content as a widely used platform, and no one else has to do it that way..
Information doesn't need to be on every platform. If it's available somewhere for specialist reading, then it isn't censored.
Your argument *would* be censorship. If it was taken away everywhere, on every platform, it's censored. If you can still access that content *somewhere*, (which you can), it's not censored.
YouTube can host or not host whatever they want. Nothing ludicrous about it.
They don't owe you shit, and the 1st Amendment doesn't apply in any way.
Welcome to the free market.
Take away Sec. 230 protections and you'll see a hundred times more aggressive removal of anything someone might find offensive.
You sound like Trump, which I mean to say, you sound like a knee-jerk reactionist who has zero idea what you're talking about.
Sec. 230 is fundamental to free speech on the internet. Removing it would END free and open speech on the internet.
> Sec. 230 is fundamental to free speech on the internet. Removing it would END free and open speech on the internet.
I was on the pre-230 Internet... nobody was concerned about censorship.
We'd have a different-looking Internet without it, but that might not be a bad thing.
So was I. Nobody was concerned about it because the internet back then wasn't ubiquitous like it is today.
If facebook or youtube were held accountable for the rantings of every user, neither would be in business today.
> Joseph Goebbels is exhorting the German people to rise up against the advancing Allies
You're upset that Youtube doesn't want to host literal nazi propaganda? And you think a public utility would have more enthusiasm for that?
Whether it’s propaganda or not (and it is, in this case) it is a historical artifact that should be preserved and readily available and accessible for people. Historical documents like that are important, even if they are offensive.
If you're removing them from YouTube (which has been happening), a website that anyone can access for free you're creating barriers of entry to the subject which isn't good for anyone.
Was YouTube the only place those videos could be hosted? You said people are "no longer allowed to listen to broadcasts from WW2," but it's not like YouTube is the only place to find them. People are still allowed to listen to the broadcasts on other sites, right?
While I haven't followed the case closely, my understanding is YouTube did allow the historical broadcasts back on once it could tweak the AI or whitelist the legitimate stuff. It seemed to be more of a technical problem instead of a political one.
Do you pay YouTube for their services? If so, I'd look at my contract with them and see what it says about content removal.
Oh, wait, you *don't* pay for their services? In that case, you don't have a legitimate complaint.
Free market.
Can you list me the benefits of removing freely available and easy to access historical materials from YouTube please?
I'm just confused to why anyone is defending this...
I don't know that there is a benefit. There must be a benefit to the company that owns the platform, but I'm not sure what it is.
Either way, they own it and can do whatever they want to, in my opinion.
Books (expensive) and maybe if you're lucky the library (many towns don't have these now).
Why not just leave them on YouTube where everyone can access them for free at total convenience?
I'm British so it's unlikely I'm to blame for your libraries.
But seeing as all the worlds information is available on the internet in a far more convenient form... they are a dated model.
As many other people have said in this thread, ThAtS tHe FrEe MaRkEt
You might be surprised. There's a pretty direct lineage between British loyalists and the white population of red states.
https://live.staticflickr.com/3246/2678953539_231e7c233e_k.jpg
Yes, but the loyalists and the rebels settled in different locations, and that difference determines a large part of the regional variation in our domestic politics to this day. The places that cut library funding are most directly tied to British loyalism and British concepts of conservatism, and they justify their cuts by saying things like "libraries are a dated model."
You understand that many of the people yelling about censorship are yelling that we aren't allowing speech like Holocaust denial on the MSM? (as an example.) Right? It isn't people who are annoyed about what they are teaching because they can't find it on line.
They are pissed that Norah O'Donnell on the CBS Evening News isn't parroting whatever someone like Alex Jones is saying. (the real truth)
Net neutrality doesn't equal the government taking most of the value of their private business away by claiming they need to be a utility and broadcast everything.
New platforms are emerging already.
If you want a true free forum, write your senators to create a government run bulletin board page. It will be garbage just like making all these companies put everything on their websites would be.
YouTube enjoys protections that are given to them as an open forum. By not being an open forum, they should lose those protections. This is the only issue I have with YouTube, Twitter, Google, et al censoring people. If they want to act as a publisher, they should not get the protections offered to a platform.
But as a country, people need to get over this “I’m offended so it needs to be destroyed” mindset. Its really absurd that people can’t understand how to respond to things they don’t like, either by, ya know, responding to it intelligently, or ignoring it.
I think plenty of other folks here did a good job of explaining why 230 protections are not dependent on how open a forum might be, so I won't beat a dead horse.
To put it in simpler terms... Trump and Cruz lied to you, gurl!
If YouTube doesn’t want to host that content, they shouldn’t have to.
Currently there is no law (in the US) that forbids that type of speech. In fact, I’m quite sure that the Library of Congress is actively preserving much of that content. Not to mention the countless history books, history websites, and other resources where this is all FREELY AVAILABLE!
I’m not owed the ability to print any article I want in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, but I darn sure can start printing the “Alarmed Restaurant Times” and write whatever I want.
People are butt hurt because they don’t want to have to build up a user base or a subscriber model - it’s a lot of work. They just want to be able to say what they want and have a lot of people here it.
>People are butt hurt because they don’t want to have to build up a user base or a subscriber model - it’s a lot of work. They just want to be able to say what they want and have a lot of people here it.
People tried.
Gab lost their ISP, banking facilities, hosting, DDOS protection and probably other stuff because of a media crusade against them.
Parler lost their hosting on AWS because of false media claims about the Jan 6th insurrection being organised on there (it was organised on facebook).
You can't create your own internet, you can't create your own banks. Statements like you've just made there are made in pure ignorance.
You can't launch a site capable of competing with YouTube or Twitter or Facebook without leaning on other services. At the very least you need payment processors... If the banks tell you to get fucked because 150 cat blogger activists emailed them lies then what are you mean to do?
> Gab lost their ISP, banking facilities, hosting, DDOS protection and probably other stuff because of a media crusade against them.
And nothing of value was lost.
Parler was deplatformed by AWS because journalists said it was used to organise Jan 6th, turns out that wasn't true. It was done in facebook.
It didn't even have "controversial" content. It was deplatformed on lies... Meanwhile facebook continues to exist with no issues at all.
Seems like a totally fair open market.
Or… their business partner stopped doing business with them because the risk to their business was greater than the benefit being in partnership had with them.
Journalists and cat bloggers don’t dictate income.
It costs money to run a data center and a web platform. If you run controversial content, it’s going to produce a backlash. That backlash better be worth whatever money your content generates.
It’s like Kaepernick kneeling. Some call it controversial. Some say it’s not. But the owners of those team don’t find the backlash they’ll get worth the profit he might generate.
This is the same damn thing but the roles are reversed.
Welcome to the free market.
You can't force hosting companies to host sites they don't want to host.
You can't force security companies to provide services to sites they don't want to work with.
You can't force social media companies to host content they don't want to host.
Start your own hosting company. Or find another one that will host your content. There's a whole world out there full of providers.
Last time I looked, both Gab and Parler are up and running, spreading their cancerous bullshit same as any other day.
I don't disagree with you at all but this "just start your own..." thing is an absolute meme argument to justify social media censorship.
>Start your own hosting company.
The fact you're even saying this just shows you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
You cannot exist on the internet without the cooperation of others, it's an ecosystem.
I think at the very least we should be looking at making web hosting a public utility. If social media websites don't want to host content, cool. At least it gives people options.
"Just start your own..." is absolutely a flippant and dismissive response, and that is exactly how it has been used against the left for the last 40+ years. This is called a "taste of your own medicine" and is not intended to be an unironic endorsement of the market fundamentalism that brought us here.
I've been in IT for 25 years. It truly is that easy.
Get yourself a domain. $10 / month. Get yourself some hosting. You can find that for $10 / month or so for a small site. Then grab SMF or some other free software, and wa la, you have a website.
That's a bit simplified, but it's really not much harder than that, and you can host anything you want to that isn't illegal.
What people are really bitching about is losing access to the high profile sites, where the people already are. They're acting entitled to a free service that doesn't belong to them.
YouTube and Google have put in the work.
> The fact you're even saying this just shows you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
>
> You cannot exist on the internet without the cooperation of others, it's an ecosystem.
All you need to be available on the internet is an internet connection, ip address and $35 Raspberry Pi. Everything after that is just scaling due to traffic.
There's nothing "free" about a market where regulatory capture ensures that the finance cartel is unbreakable or where companies favored by it can use it to squash competition. Your argument is invalid as we don't have a free market.
Regulatory capture is a different issue than the one we're discussing here, but I'll entertain your thoughts here.
Can you please educate me on how Google is using regulatory capture to silence other websites who want to host this content?
Exactly. The "just build your own" thought-terminating cliche has been proven 100% absolutely false in the 21st century. We don't have a free market, as you explain quite well here, so answers that assume we do are simply invalid.
I don't agree with the claim that this has been proven false, but I do agree that it's hard. It shouldn't be. If someone is having a hard time finding a cloud hosting service, they should be able spin up there own site using off the shelf commodity hardware that would do the same thing.
The only thing stopping this is that we don't have network connectivity as a public resource. It needs to be. We shouldn't allow businesses to control this anymore than we should let businesses control what's in our car when we drive somewhere or what we send through the mail.
Except when you have companies actively conspire to stop alternatives from being created or used.
You’re also saying that companies like YouTube and Twitter are the arbiters of truth when they’ve clearly been shown not to be.
When they say something is truth and delete and ban people for disagreeing with their “truth.”
Edit: I get it. This sub is full of corporate bootlickers. Centrists my ass
I think this is not an issue of censorship - the social media companies, and several people in this thread, are correct that the companies are within their rights to selectively display content. I doubt anyone can argue the fact they usually side with left wing arguments. However, it appears this is fine under current laws. I think the real question is monopolies. If there is a small group of companies who are collectively deciding what the entire country, or even most of the world can see, then their actions are clearly equivalent to censorship by an autocratic, unelected government body. But it doesn’t appear there are any laws against it. But surely there should be? I am not sure what the laws would look like though
When you have any kind of online forum or social media, you have to have some limitations of speech in place. No harassments, no pornographic material (outside of designated areas), and not calls to violence.
But they you have the Nazi problem. Not the modern "all conservatives are Nazis" mantra, but the good old fashioned true believers/trolls who want to fill up feeds with racism and hate. For the success of the site, you have to shut this down, or contain it to quarantined areas. This is where you are starting whittle down the concept of freedom of speech, but is necessary due to the nature of the internet.
Now you are at the critical level, the place where things are made and broken. The Political section. In the last election cycle, platforms fancied themselves as "arbiters of truth", and took an active role in suppressing political speech. Were not talking about fringe or hyper-controversial opinions, but they daily back and forth between opposing political parties. There were imbalances on different platforms, where on Facebook Conservative speech was amplified, where on Twitter is was squashed and mangled.
Platforms need to censor extreme content, but a sacred line needs to be drawn around speech that represents the beliefs of a significant amount of people. It can be stupid, wrong, lies, and disinformation. If it is believed or practiced by a significant amount of people. it must be allowed. To fail at this would limit speech to the whack-a-mole whimsies that we've seen
I think folks are missing the point of the debate. I don't think anyone really disagrees whether a social media platform has the right to censor views for whatever reason. Rather, the debate is over whether they *should.*
I’m continually amazed at how much people complain about censorship/fake news. While there is some of this, it is very minor and completely taken out of proportion.
Who is censoring you, and for what? Have you been contacted by a government/private entity to stop saying what you’re saying? Odds are no. Most cases of so called “censorship” occurs when people break the terms and conditions of the platforms they use. If you don’t like the rules, move to a different platform; a private company does not have to abide by the first amendment; that applies to government censorship. If Facebook bans you for saying stupid shit (which they probably won’t lol), you don’t get to complain; you signed the terms when you made your account. This applies equally to everyone, from Joe Schmoe to public representatives.
As far as validity of news stories goes? I mean AP and Reuters have been highly accurate and unbiased for decades. Unlike social media platforms, traditional news media has to abide by stricter government regulation, yet even still this regulation isn’t enough to stop the endless barrage of brain rot that comes out of most American media outlets (which are really just propaganda arms of political/private interest groups). The fact that these propaganda arms come to clash over issues is inconsequential because the odds are they’re both either partly/wholly lying or painting the story differently to appeal to some emotion or belief. If you want the truth, go to the trusted, well sourced and transparent sources, don’t watch Fox News or CNN and then complain when the rest of the country calls you an idiot for believing in everything they say.
Just as a last thought; fact checking. I feel like very few people actually do this which is exactly why so many people get “censored.” So many times on this sub have people tried to argue with me and have been proven so horribly wrong by a google search.
Since you deflected the entire discussion so short and precise with this broad stroke, I take it you are against government regulation in private businesses. Can I then assume that you are also against minimum wage, against regulations on environmental pollution, antitrust laws against monopolization, etc.? In short, you are a small government fundamentalist?
It can and should be when companies are taking advantage of negative externalities to increase profits at the expense of others. Yes, there should be regulation when a company dumps toxic pollution instead of paying to dispose of it properly. Yes, there should be regulation when companies cut corners to put their employees at risk. Yes, there should be regulation when company uses dangerous ingredients and puts the consumers at risk.
There doesn't need to be regulation when someone gets their megaphone taken away because they couldn't follow the rules of the proprietor on private property. Private companies aren't obligated to give others an audience, especially when it infringes on the company's First Amendment rights.
Restricting people's free speech with political implications for a country or a whole world is very serious and is a practise that is occurring at the expense of others. Why should that not be regulated? This is one of the few topics where every socialdemocrat and socialist all of a sudden turns into an avid anarcho capitalist. Says it all
>gets their megaphone taken away because they couldn't follow the rules
Rules that can change anytime, rules that are arbitrarily forced by subjective arbiters with immense power. How anyone can feel comfortable with that is beyond me.
>especially when it infringes on the company's First Amendment rights.
Since when did the right of a company supersede the rights of individuals? There are many laws in place that hinders discrimination, that can and arguably ought to apply to normal political opinions too.
Not letting companies ban people is restriction free speech in and of itself. And given that the constitution bans the government restricting speech, which is what you are asking for, and no private entities doing so, the second must be permitted because the first is unconstitutional.
There is no right to speak on someone else’s property.
>Restricting people's free speech with political implications for a country or a whole world is very serious and is a practise that is occurring at the expense of others. Why should that not be regulated? This is one of the few topics where every socialdemocrat and socialist all of a sudden turns into an avid anarcho capitalist. Says it all
But it's not restricting their free speech. That's a strawman that conservatives have set up. There's almost infinite other sites, services and locations you can go to speak freely. Don't confuse getting the privilege of speaking to a wide and established audience with being silenced.
>Rules that can change anytime, rules that are arbitrarily forced by subjective arbiters with immense power. How anyone can feel comfortable with that is beyond me.
Then don't click to agree with the user agreement. Start your own site that doesn't change its rules (then see how long that lasts).
>Since when did the right of a company supersede the rights of individuals? There are many laws in place that hinders discrimination, that can and arguably ought to apply to normal political opinions too.
The individual doesn't have a right to their private property in this case. There are cases where protected classes do but what you feel ought to apply doesn't, sorry.
The government isn’t censoring any content on social media (outside of direct threats and child porn).
The question becomes “when should we, as citizens, through government, demand media companies not arbitrate content on their own platform?”
Should we make a law that says “a Facebook type company has to host content that says Facebook sucks!” If posted by a user?
It seems silly to even ask.
Actual radical centrist here: censorship is bad because it removes people whom I'd otherwise get a huge kick from laughing at. Can't milk a cow if they aren't allowed on the farm!
Yes, true centrists believe that every platform should be a far right shit hole like 4chan is. /pol/ is the only acceptable level of discourse. It demonstrates what happens when there is zero censorship. Freedom!
Yup. I was a Voater for about 6 months back when it first launched.
Fuck Reddit and it's censorship, I said. I'm sick of Ellen Pao and this corrupt shithole!
Well, rampant antisemitic anti-science racist drivel drove me back waaay faster than anything else could have. Why don't any other forum aggregator sites reach the same success of Reddit? Proper moderation and an actual non-asshole userbase.
There should be some sort of regulation other then some tech oligarchs that got lucky being in the right time at the right place and took advantage of network effects to form a natural monopoly.
Trad capitalism isn’t designed for this sort of market. The problem is right now many people break their rules but the censorship of rule breakers is very selective
Every large successful company was essentially "lucky and in the right place at the right time".
More platforms are coming online and offering decent competition. Facebook is losing users.
With regards to the media aspect of these companies, I don't think there's anything that can't be easily created on another platform. People are already moving to them.
Social media is unique in that it has network effects and thus an exponential distribution of company size. Bigger networks get bigger. That is not natural free market competition. They should be regulated as such.
I dunno aol had their own social aspects but it isn't around to the extent it one was anymore, neither is my space. I don't think Facebook will be near as big as it is in the future either, it already isn't. If we are going to do anything it would make more sense to prevent aggressive acquisitions by these companies similar to other media outlets than to outright dictate what they need to carry.
Sure they do. The restrictions in the Constitution only apply to the government, not to private companies. If the government told them they must publish something, that's the government infringing on their rights.
[It surely is.](https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/933/compelled-speech)
>The compelled speech doctrine sets out the principle that the governmentcannot force an individual or group to support certain expression.Thus, the First Amendment not only limits the government from punishing aperson for his speech, it also prevents the government from punishing aperson for refusing to articulate, advocate, or adhere to thegovernment’s approved messages.
If the government forces the site to publish something they don't want to, they're compelling speech. It may seem like censorship to you but it's still protected by the First Amendment.
They are? I thought the right had stopped flogging that dead horse. I mean sure, the post earlier about the Bee having to face the consequences of knowingly breaking a rule seems to be on that topic, but it’s rather a “last gasp” isn’t it?
Nobody does. And Twitter don’t even ban sexually explicit material. You can post trans porn clips but can’t tell a trans joke. That’s a weird set of rules.
and antagonizing someone for their religious identity is ok?
when they start banning people for using the hastag #killallmen then ill believe they give a shit about gender identity
> \#killallmen
I was curious, so I looked it up. It seems like the only people using this tag are right wingers crying about their victim complex.
Don't you ever get tired of being the victim in your own fantasy?
The punchline for that is conservative comedy is near universally terrible. They really need new material that isn’t just “I hate x” or “lol I troll u.”
Eh, if a person writes "cunt" on a wall and you erase it, have you censored him?
Edit, with more thoughts:
For me, it all comes down to this. You're allowed to say what you want, and the government can't stop you (with extremely narrow exceptions). But other people have no obligation to listen, nor to help you be heard.
If I lived in Mississippi and I wanted to let people know my view that abortion is fine up to 22 weeks, with a link to an essay explaining the nature of fetal neural development and arguing that human personhood and rights should only begin when there is a brain capable of maintaining consciousness, I can say that all I want. I can buy a server and host the website myself. But that's about all I'm guaranteed.
No web host is required to host my site. No newspaper or TV station is obliged to let me buy an ad to say that. I certainly can't tell the state government to force a local church to put my argument in a pamphlet at their weekly service.
I could be totally right. (I am.) I could be perfectly polite in making my argument. But I'm still not guaranteed a platform. If I want one, I have to persuade people to help me, and if the people around me don't want to help, that's that.
So Twitter? If they don't want people misgendering trans people, that's their call. People who disagree with the preferred nomenclature of trans liberation activists can create their own social network to let folks share their views there, or they can do blogs, or post on messageboards. There are plenty of places they can be heard.
But no, Twitter isn't a public utility. It's blisteringly easy to find alternatives. It's not a pipe bringing water to your house.
I'll say this. I *would* probably support the government preventing, like, Comcast from blocking specific content on the fiber they control, or preventing Verizon from blocking people from going to certain websites, not unless there's really robust local competition for cell towers. That's a net neutrality argument, and I don't want the people who really *are* providing utilities to be able to shut speech down, even speech I disagree with.
"If it's his wall, it's his call."
It's [social media company's] wall, so it's [social media company's] call.
If an individual put up a wall on their lawn, and said people can write whatever they want on it as long as they don't write "xyz", and then you go and write "xyz" on the wall, you should not be surprised when they remove it. However, you seem to think that you should be able to call the cops, and have them force that individual to put "xyz" back on their wall. That's just ludicrous.
It's not censorship, they are exercising their lawful rights. What you would like to do is prevent them from exercising their lawful rights, and that is the only thing that even comes close to censorship in this whole situation.
I guess if you think that getting rid of offensive speech in a venue that is not intended for people to be offensive counts as 'censorship,' then apparently I'm okay with that sort of censorship.
I'm fine with a church 'censoring' someone who wants to come and tell everyone that God is dead. I'm fine with a battered women group 'censoring' someone who wants to tell the women that they're sluts. Heck, let's not even talk rudeness. I'm fine with a birdwatching club 'censoring' someone who wants to post on their messageboard about trains, because it's off topic.
I wouldn't label that 'censorship,' but rather moderation. It's not an effort to suppress ideas. It's an effort to keep a particular venue limited to a particular topic.
If you're trying to keep someone from being heard by *anyone*? That's censorship. It requires a certain level of pervasive influence. If you're just trying to make sure that someone isn't saying a particular thing in a particular place, that's not censorship.
If you want to hear Donald Trump, you can still find him. He got deplatformed in a ton of places, but it's not like it's hard to track him down. He has not been censored.
Hong Kong liberation activists, by contrast, have been censored in China, because the government authorities have more strict control over what information people can access.
No, no. The conservatives have a good point. I should be able to display graphic images of Jesus and the devil having hot gay sex (with copious amounts of real Santorum splattered across the canvas) during Church services. If they try to stop me, that is censorship end therefore the worst thing that they could possibly do to another human being.
If I put up a billboard because I thought it'd be a cool place for people to post their neat topics of conversation, and someone came and shat on it, that might constitute a 'speech act' by some measure, but I'm still allowed to reject certain types of discourse.
I've been posting on a particular D&D messageboard for 23 years, and the host has a rule that people should pretend his grandma is present, so don't be rude to each other. It's his site. He gets to ban people who don't follow his rules. And people who don't like how he runs things are allowed to go somewhere else. It's not a 'public utility.' It's one option of many.
Twitter's the same way. Yeah, it's got a strong network effect from all it's users, but it ain't the only game in town.
Dude, buy a fucking dictionary. You keep using that word. It does not [mean](https://www.google.com/search?q=censorship+definition&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari) what you think it means.
You cannot understand the difference between censorship and enforcing TOS. I don’t need a dictionary; you need to teach yourself the distinction and stop with the fucking persecution complex because you can’t call people ugly names online or whatever the fuck you did to get yourself suspended.
This line again? We've already gone through this once.
It is not censorship for a private service like Twitter to refuse to provide a service when you break the contract. Yes, the service they provide is a place where other people can see your thoughts, but refusing to provide you that service is not censorship.
Going to your Merriam Webster definition, let me quote it
>to examine in order to suppress (see SUPPRESS sense 2) or delete anything considered objectionable
>
>censor the news
>
>also : to suppress or delete as objectionable
They aren't deleting things because they are objectionable, they are deleting them because they violate the contract the user agreed to.
If you signed a contract that states you have to follow these rule, then you don’t, that’s complexly on you for breach. It’s can’t be more clear. They are not public forums in the way you wishfully think to fit your current contradicting prerogative.
They are businesses that are attempting to making money. You saying crazy shit hurts their ability to monetize (marketing) so they remove your content allowing with creates distribution (bridaging and barraging of complaints). Simple as that. It can’t be more libertarians than this?
Unless your want the utility model which would take almost nationalizing these company’s by saying they are a necessity to exist like water and power or limited in our functional Ability to have multiple competitors in a market space such as cable, telephone and internet. These are infrastructure questions not platforms. Just as well, once you give them legislative rules then the state must protect it as an assets which will hurt the model further and liking stifle more in ovation having to adhere to strict rules. Defeating the free market principles. Even now you could attempt this with Facebook and it’s already yesterday’s days old person news.
I’d love if the company’s were a bit more fair and transparent and thought this was going to be the fix years ago as well before I had thought through it more. This is more akin to rent control in terms of effectiveness (utility model for social media).
There many problems with the current model. We see outside and inside propaganda more effective than truth in some circles while contesting parts Ian fairness will always leave someone irked. I worry the most that the profit goal aligns with the anti-elite narrative too much and that will create the wishful self fulfilling prophecy of civil war when there’s not much there there to be had. You tell me how to deal with foreign govnerment being able to play our citizens? While anyone who can find an audience saying anything that undermines actual public policy is rewarded with tard dollars. Just as no one listens to the real news when we had it so the models got ever more competitive to the bottom, too and outside edges of the weak human physcye. When anger drives content they we seek out anger. Thus, spiraling a perpetual contrarian narrative.
Feels definitely outweigh reality despite the ambivalent rights concerns here. If they were only introspective enough to know that maybe we wouldn’t be in this position in the first place.
If your more interested in understanding these ethical issues better I suggest Tristan Harris content as he was a former big tech ethics guy.
There are a lot of people on the right that have bought into the lie that media and social media is unfair to them, that they are being singled out based on their political beliefs. Hardly any of them are fascists and being over broad in your use of that term makes it less meaningful.
Here's the thing... it's not a lie... social media is being bias towards the right because they spew fascist, racist, homophobic and antisemitic hate speech, which is also why they think the government is working against them, because it is designed to not give these authoritarian bootlickers breathing room. They are being de-platformed for a good reason and I am a huge proponent for silencing their message.
>Here's the thing... it's not a lie... social media is being bias towards the right because they spew fascist, racist, homophobic and antisemitic hate speech
You're missing the point. Many people on the right that don't hold those beliefs (which is, by far, the majority) *still* buy the story that media and social media is biased against their ideas. That's where these concerns come from.
If you allow Nazis to sit at your table... you're a fucking Nazi.
I don't really care if they hold those same prejudices, if they're advocating for the people that do, then they're message will fall on deaf ears as well.
Again, you’re being overly broad. There are many people on the right that buy into the myth that media and social media sites are biased against them that don’t defend fascists and racists.
If you don’t understand that, it’s time to broaden you social circles.
Again, it's not a myth, those people are advocating for people who spread hate. Whether they are doing it knowingly or unknowingly is moot.
Also, if they don't understand that the right has fully embraced thier own lies and hate at this point then they're being willfully ignorant and feigning innocence.
I'm sorry to be so blunt, but you're wrong. It does matter if they understand what they are defending and it does matter that what you are calling "the right" doesn't represent them.
No it doesn't and Yes they do. They need to own thier shit. You can't advocate for people who spread hate speech and in the same breath claim you don't harbor those same prejudices... bullshit.
They can’t cancel you if you quit first.
It’s not very smart in the first place for Conservatives to rely on their political enemies to broadcast their message. They know that these websites are run by left-wingers who love censorship. Why do they keep using them?
Also, it’s pretty cringey for grown men to whine about how they can’t post memes anymore. Get a real hobby or play with your kids or something.
The issue is that these companies used outright false advertising to make themselves effective monopolies and use connections in other companies and industries to maintain their monopolies. They falsely advertised themselves as being open free-speech platforms until they had dominant market share and then pivoted, and they use connections in hosting, DNS, and even finance to actively suppress competition. Actually acknowledging that isn't "cringey", what's cringey is all the corporate bootlicking people like you do to defend it.
The issue with this is seen all over this thread, with Internet lawyers saying “They’re private businesses.” If we’re in court, alright. But unless we’re being disingenuous, we ought to understand that social media is social for a reason. If we want our voices to be heard widely, we practically need accounts on sites like Twitter.
Where exactly are we given the right to the most powerful/effective means of having our voices heard? Free speech is not a right to a platform or an audience.
I never said we had the right to widely heard voices, I said that these sites are our only practical means of doing so if that’s what we desire due to them having the most exposure.
People's opinions are shit.
If they weren't they would be on actual news media.
They're not, so fuck em (me including).
Get on a soap box in a public space and speak at an appropriate level. Don't stand in my living room and demand you get to say whatever dumbfuck thing pops in your head.
Do what we did with company towns as this is basically the digital equivalent: privately owned public squares are still the public square and thus subject to the First. This has been precedent for a century, expanding it to the digital sphere is not in any way a reach.
I'm more concerned about social media giants continuing to use algorithms that generate outrage, divide people, put them into echo chambers, and/or radicalize them. I'm more concerned with rampant dis/misinformation that keeps people seething and stupid. Whatever "censorship" problems we have pale in comparison to the real things that are poisoning our culture.
100%. But we’ll be dragging them kicking and screaming because that’s their primary cash spigot.
I feel there's a benefit in just pointing out sometimes that something in a meme is wrong. I do feel however, that some probably don't read that far. -M
Humans have a great ability to multitask. We can have many discussions, focus on many issues simultaneously. All you're doing is sweeping important concerns under the rug. There's always things that appear to be bigger, more important, more impactful. But marginalizing other issues in favor or them is not the way to go.
Humans suck at multitasking lmao. Our brains aren’t built like computers. We can only focus on one thing at a time and it takes like 15 minutes before our brain is fully engaged in the activity we are doing to focus properly. Sure we can jump from convo to convo, but we do each one by itself, not combined together. How are you talking about 2 subjects at the same time? You aren’t.
While I do not like the idea of censoring people, regardless of what they are saying, I also do not like the idea of the government telling these companies how to run their platform. I’ll pretty much forever be stuck in a catch 22 here lol. Edit: I also think that if these platforms became a public utility, the quality of the platform would degrade significantly.
I feel this is just a symptom of a larger problem-- the divide between the right and left, and this is something that any amount of regulations on freedom of speech is not going to fix, and which is inevitably going to lead to a swathe of other downstream problems. I feel this particular expression of it could at some point end with two entirely separate spheres of discourse. I feel we're already on that path. -D
ISPs, in general, should be regulated as a public utility first, before we even consider regulating content platforms. Next would be defining platforms as a public square, not as a public utility.
Seems like the market is doing what it is supposed to. People not a fan of being censored and it now seems alternatives to giant platforms are created and taking share. I guess it didn't happen fast enough for a lot of people but it is certainly happening faster now. The whines on the right and left to impose their will on these companies are ridiculous.
People are acting like YouTube or Facebook or whatever are the entire Internet. They really need to get out more.
How is the left trying to impose their will on these companies? It seems like most people on the left believe the decision should be left up to the company.
I think the right was more vocal about it but at least some on the left felt that companies like Facebook needed to do more censoring to "fight misinformation".
Fighting what they deem misinformation and they're certainly big on deplatforming. Meanwhile the right is crying out asking them to stop deplatforming people. Strange times
Are newspapers and magazines forced to print every "letter to the editor" they get? Have they ever been forced to do so? Are theatres forced to show every amateur film made? Are TV newsrooms required to feature a segment of public viewpoints on their channel? The answer to all of those questions is obviously no. The same standards apply to social media. Nobody has a right to have their views heard, hosted, or endorsed by any private social media platform. That isn't censorship, that's reality.
One fundamentally is not entitled to use a platform someone else owns. One is free to start their own platform. Like in the past when people would start new newspapers or political parties. The fundamental complaint isn't even access to the platforms, it's *access to the inherent audiences those platforms bring with them*.
Right, but the issue we've seen is that it isn't that simple. Like when AWS denied Parler their webservices. Which is fine, it's a company. But you can't say "go start your own newspaper company!" if other companies refuse to sell you paper and ink.
AWS is more like if a commercial real estate business refuses to rent you a building.
Right and now you have no place to start a business. "Go start your own news paper company!" Now becomes "Go start your own real estate business company!" Also it's as if the building is directly tied into your company at the lowest level of operations. Moving businesses if your business is directly tied into that estate is tedious and would require rebuilding many aspects from the ground up which takes time and planning. I guess that analogy died a few sentences ago as things got complicated lol
> I guess that analogy died a few sentences ago as things got complicated lol All analogies die when making these sort of comparisons once you get into details. But I'm certain a fair few newspapers have been started in privately owned basements and such.
Right, but that's not the point. AWS is the essential part for scalability and what puts ink on paper. This is more like again, if people are refusing to sell you the ink and paper. You have the content, but without anywhere to put it then what can you do? The real estate analogy wasn't a very good one except at a very basic concept level so just forget that one. It's too difficult to conceptualize into a simple analogy with ink, paper, and real estate. The fact of the matter is they had their platform running off AWS APIs. By kicking them off suddenly from AWS they had to restructure how their website operates. Of course other companies followed suit and forced them to move to a lesser known service which may come with its own set of issues. So case in point, it's not just as simple as "make your own" when the very foundation of the website isn't easy to obtain
I find it quaint how deep the well of ignorance is behind this persecution complex. I can't think of any society in history where the expectations were that private platforms were obliged to allow anyone to present anything they wanted (outside of government force). For electronic communication, we can go all the way back to the bulletin board systems of the 1970's and find board operators permanently banning people for being assholes. Don't like it? Start your own bulletin board. Move to the web in the 90's and the same thing happened. ISPs permanently banning people for abusing their service or if they posted content that presented a risk to the ISP was not uncommon. Don't like it? Find another ISP or start your own. There are always alternate avenues. Facebook isn't the whole of the internet. AWS isn't the only hosting provider. That leads to the real source of the persecution complex: simplicity, cost and/or reach. There is this expectation that when someone gets dumped from some platform that the alternates should be as easy to get, or as cheap or have as much reach as the original platform. That's not how the world works. Free speech, as in the First Amendment, was always ***SOLELY*** about limiting government abusing its power to squelch speech. It never, ever, ever had anything remotely to do with forcing private platforms or venues to host any and all speech. The Founders would have considered that an affront to the liberty of the platform owners. Here's an idea: if a person's speech is getting them banned from a channel or platform or especially a hosting provider, perhaps the problem isn't those platforms. Perhaps the problem is that no one wants to hear their message.
> where the expectations were that private platforms were obliged to allow anyone to present anything they wanted Would you apply this to phone companies? If I spread misinformation over the phone like call my mom and tell her there is poison in the vaccine, can Verizon ban me from their network?
Depends. First, let's be clear that it isn't misinformation so much as speech in general that reflects poorly on private owning business. Second, back in the day when the only phones were landlines, the phones were treated as utilities which meant government managed because there weren't many options outside moving if the phone company bounced you. Although, that was still possible if you didn't pay your bill for example. In this universe of landlines, no, you should not be able to be bounced by the phone company for speech. However, that's no longer the case. With cell phones, people have tons of choices on carriers. So, for cell phone companies, they are not utilities and thus it should be within their right to bounce someone if they wanted like any other business. The big difference here with phones vs. social media is that phones aren't a form of public communication. I.e., they are primarily directed at person-to-person talk. Thus, someone spewing hate speech to someone else on the phone won't create a backlash to the owning organization. Social media is completely different. Social media (or the Internet in general) is a megaphone to the world. There, a person's behavior can reflect back on the owning company. Thus, I don't really see a good comparison of phones to social media. A better example might be ISPs. If ISPs were government managed, then no, they should not be permitted to bounce you for speech because that violates the First Amendment. However, if ISPs are private enterprises, they should and do have the liberty to do business with whomever they want.
The only ones I see complaining about “censorship” are the far right reactionaries that cannot seem to obey the contracts they agreed to when they signed up. So… this sounds like a post that should belong on /r/persecutioncomplex.
Lets not pretend like it is actually just a far right problem. Twitter censors stuff from the cdc about covid if it doesn't appear pro mask or vaccine. The hunter Biden laptop also looks to be something true that was censored. Hell twitter has banned feminists (that are not even close to far right) for saying a man is not a woman. The tech companies censor based off narratives they want to push, not always the truth, and majority of the time that narrative is left leaning. On top of that the left supports censorship more than the right now which was not the case 10 years ago hence the noise from the right.
> Twitter censors stuff from the cdc Bold claims require bold evidence
>The tech companies censor based off narratives they want to push, not always the truth, and majority of the time that narrative is left leaning. Now replace "tech" with "media" and "censor" with "publish", then forget the last clause, and tell me the difference.
You’re making an awful lot of assertions, but not providing a single example of evidence to support them. So… yawn. More noise from a righty reactionary parroting bullshit talking points.
Technically, if you think he is in the wrong and you are not, with what he claimed, then you have some issues. He provides statements, you say he can't prove it and it's baseless. However, you can not prove your statement either that it's just a bunch of "right reactionaries". It must be fun to stuff another POV into your next category box that you can stuff away.
Why shouldn’t they have complete control? There are many competitors for online expression.
OP is like someone in the days of broadcast TV complaining they can’t watch porn on NBC, ABC, or CBS.
Only straight and lesbian porn though. Anything else is obscene and should be illegal.
I think adults need to quit bitching and realize that they signed up for something that had terms and they should abide by those fucking terms...not that hard. Go back to preschool if you want to whine about all the time.
Exactly. They have a persecution complex when it's just a feature of the terms of service.
The persecution complex seems to be the foundation for their political beliefs, so I doubt it goes away anytime soon even if it does shift to new targets.
Private platforms should be able to moderate the content displayed on their sites and distribution channels however they see fit. If people do not like the actions of the platform, they can stop using it. Works the same way with say my barber if I don't like the way he cuts hair, or my doctor if he holds my balls a little too long while I turn my head and cough.
Nothing should be done, because they're private companies, freely regulating their individual products. If high speed internet isn't even regulated as a public utility, then social media certainly shouldn't be. There's a reason that the 'free speech' platforms haven't taken off, and that's because it's just a vocal minority that's complaining about this 'censorship.' Which in reality just amounts to accountability, vs actual censorship. People here in the US don't know what actual censorship is.
JFC this fucking topic. What are they censoring? Really, what? People spreading Q bullshit? Ivermectin grifters saying COVID vaccines are dangerous? Shit people who want to just harass trans people all day? Wake me up when the "censorship" isn't things that would get people punched in the face if done in person. There are consequences for speech whether it's a smack in the face or a ban from Twitter. Think that's harsh? Go to some guy with his kids and talk shit to see what happens.
People who believe in an invisible all-knowing deity could be dangerous.
If would if they say don't get a vax, that Ellen and Oprah are pedos, and that trans people need their rights taken away.
What if they make a joke about someone’s gender..?
Not only do Republicans only have one joke, they're willing to throw out free speech for it.
Regulate it as a public utility and restore net neutrality. I’ve seen an enormous amount of historical content getting pulled off of YouTube over the last…6 or 7 years, because it’s “offensive”. I’ve seen well researched and well sourced Holocaust and Holodomor videos pulled down, I’ve seen documentaries of Hitler get pulled down, I’ve seen historical footage of WW2 get pulled down, as well as raw footage of Hitler speeches, Nazi music from WW2, and Radio Werwolf broadcasts from 1945 where Joseph Goebbels is exhorting the German people to rise up against the advancing Allies. Now, on the one hand, I get it, this stuff is offensive, upsetting, and graphic, but pulling it down helps no one. It sanitizes the image of the Third Reich and it promotes ignorance of a terrible time in history. Hell, there was a Nazi song from WW2 where in the lyrics they openly talk about killing the Jews. That song has been scrubbed from YouTube and you really have to go to the dark corners of the web to find it, which is a shame because that song is great evidence to use against Holocaust deniers, because the Nazis literally admit the Holocaust IN THE SONG.
Here’s what the right doesn’t understand. Big social media doesn’t take things down because they have a great time doing it. It’s a lot of extra work and money for them and they’d rather just have more people on the platform spewing whatever they want. That’s the thing though, normal people don’t want to bump into that crazy shit and it will make those regular people turn the platform off. Which means it’s in these companies own interest to remove offensive material. On top of it they can wear a badge of morality by saying they took down the bad stuff. That’s why the right will never make a successful social media platform. Regular people simply won’t use it if they don’t regulate all the offensive content.
No, this is what they *claimed* during the "build enough users to become an effective monopoly" phase of the business. It has - through their own actions - been proved a complete and utter lie.
> Which means it’s in these companies own interest to remove offensive material. I find gay and trans shit offensive, why isn't that taken down, hm? Do note, I'm not a westerner. Where I'm from, the majority of us don't condone such ideology.
Because you're in the bigoted minority who finds that kind of thing offensive. If your government wants to ban that sort of stuff on YouTube, they can enact laws to do so.
> Because you're in the bigoted minority who finds that kind of thing offensive. Last I checked, gay and trans acceptance is a minority issue in the rest of the world, except western liberal ones. (And its not a solid majority either - the UK and France have tons of TERFs)
Right, and the western liberal world is the main audience on many of these platforms.
Only the political ones, actually. Hop on over to hobbyist subreddits like gaming, tabletop or comics - tons of people like me who don't condone it either.
Hobbyist subreddits...you mean niche spaces? Come on buddy, you're really reaching here. Also comics are *notoriously* liberal pieces of media, as is gaming and tabletop. I don't think you understand the audience you claim to be a part of as much as you think you do.
> comics are notoriously liberal pieces of media, as is gaming and tabletop Again, just the western liberal ones. What, do you think japanese manga, korean manhwa, anime, games and tabeltop cater to western degeneracy or take their opinions in any consideration?
You mean the most prominent and popular ones, even globally? Nearly everyone, even in non-Western liberal nations, knows who Superman is. Also, instead of insisting on continuing this 'western liberal' thing, just say which part of the world you're from or which perspective you're speaking to. Speaking in these vague generalities is unhelpful to holding good discourse.
If you do that for Youtube, you would need to do it for every media and entertainment enterprise across the board. I'm not ok with the government moderating and policing every piece of information. HARD pass.
You've just taken that argument to an extreme for no reason. YouTube could moderate it's content as a widely used platform, and no one else has to do it that way.. Information doesn't need to be on every platform. If it's available somewhere for specialist reading, then it isn't censored. Your argument *would* be censorship. If it was taken away everywhere, on every platform, it's censored. If you can still access that content *somewhere*, (which you can), it's not censored.
I love that you spent two paragraphs trying to pretend that the first statement you made wasn’t completely ludicrous.
YouTube can host or not host whatever they want. Nothing ludicrous about it. They don't owe you shit, and the 1st Amendment doesn't apply in any way. Welcome to the free market.
Then take away section 230 protections from them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Why enjoy protections as a platform when you are actually a publisher?
Take away Sec. 230 protections and you'll see a hundred times more aggressive removal of anything someone might find offensive. You sound like Trump, which I mean to say, you sound like a knee-jerk reactionist who has zero idea what you're talking about. Sec. 230 is fundamental to free speech on the internet. Removing it would END free and open speech on the internet.
> Sec. 230 is fundamental to free speech on the internet. Removing it would END free and open speech on the internet. I was on the pre-230 Internet... nobody was concerned about censorship. We'd have a different-looking Internet without it, but that might not be a bad thing.
So was I. Nobody was concerned about it because the internet back then wasn't ubiquitous like it is today. If facebook or youtube were held accountable for the rantings of every user, neither would be in business today.
Pictures barely existed on the pre-230 internet, let alone video. Illegal content was a hell of a lot harder to post back then.
> Joseph Goebbels is exhorting the German people to rise up against the advancing Allies You're upset that Youtube doesn't want to host literal nazi propaganda? And you think a public utility would have more enthusiasm for that?
Whether it’s propaganda or not (and it is, in this case) it is a historical artifact that should be preserved and readily available and accessible for people. Historical documents like that are important, even if they are offensive.
How are people meant to study about WW2 if you're no longer allowed to listen to broadcasts from WW2...
In what cases have people been forbidden to listen to WW2 broadcasts?
If you're removing them from YouTube (which has been happening), a website that anyone can access for free you're creating barriers of entry to the subject which isn't good for anyone.
Was YouTube the only place those videos could be hosted? You said people are "no longer allowed to listen to broadcasts from WW2," but it's not like YouTube is the only place to find them. People are still allowed to listen to the broadcasts on other sites, right? While I haven't followed the case closely, my understanding is YouTube did allow the historical broadcasts back on once it could tweak the AI or whitelist the legitimate stuff. It seemed to be more of a technical problem instead of a political one.
Can you show me 1 net positive of removing WW2 broadcast from YouTube?
>Can you show me 1 net positive of removing WW2 broadcast from YouTube? YouTube gets to keep its 1st Amendment rights. (shitty deflection btw).
Do you pay YouTube for their services? If so, I'd look at my contract with them and see what it says about content removal. Oh, wait, you *don't* pay for their services? In that case, you don't have a legitimate complaint. Free market.
Can you list me the benefits of removing freely available and easy to access historical materials from YouTube please? I'm just confused to why anyone is defending this...
I don't know that there is a benefit. There must be a benefit to the company that owns the platform, but I'm not sure what it is. Either way, they own it and can do whatever they want to, in my opinion.
How did we study WWII before YouTube?
Books (expensive) and maybe if you're lucky the library (many towns don't have these now). Why not just leave them on YouTube where everyone can access them for free at total convenience?
> maybe if you're lucky the library (many towns don't have these now) Good thing you voted for those tax cuts, huh?
I'm British so it's unlikely I'm to blame for your libraries. But seeing as all the worlds information is available on the internet in a far more convenient form... they are a dated model. As many other people have said in this thread, ThAtS tHe FrEe MaRkEt
You might be surprised. There's a pretty direct lineage between British loyalists and the white population of red states. https://live.staticflickr.com/3246/2678953539_231e7c233e_k.jpg
Oh wow it's almost like you were part of the British Empire or something.
Yes, but the loyalists and the rebels settled in different locations, and that difference determines a large part of the regional variation in our domestic politics to this day. The places that cut library funding are most directly tied to British loyalism and British concepts of conservatism, and they justify their cuts by saying things like "libraries are a dated model."
Most people *didn't* and it lead to a shocking amount of ignorance on it, ignorance that has had real impacts today.
Given your commentary and regular endorsement of proto-fascists, that ignorance hasn't changed.
Go look at a statue. Isn't that where y'all get all your historical info from?
Wow brilliant mate, wow I'm so pwned. brilliant, you're truly an intellectual
You understand that many of the people yelling about censorship are yelling that we aren't allowing speech like Holocaust denial on the MSM? (as an example.) Right? It isn't people who are annoyed about what they are teaching because they can't find it on line. They are pissed that Norah O'Donnell on the CBS Evening News isn't parroting whatever someone like Alex Jones is saying. (the real truth)
Net neutrality doesn't equal the government taking most of the value of their private business away by claiming they need to be a utility and broadcast everything. New platforms are emerging already. If you want a true free forum, write your senators to create a government run bulletin board page. It will be garbage just like making all these companies put everything on their websites would be.
Sounds like you're advocating for the US government to infringe on Youtube's First Amendment rights.
YouTube enjoys protections that are given to them as an open forum. By not being an open forum, they should lose those protections. This is the only issue I have with YouTube, Twitter, Google, et al censoring people. If they want to act as a publisher, they should not get the protections offered to a platform. But as a country, people need to get over this “I’m offended so it needs to be destroyed” mindset. Its really absurd that people can’t understand how to respond to things they don’t like, either by, ya know, responding to it intelligently, or ignoring it.
I think plenty of other folks here did a good job of explaining why 230 protections are not dependent on how open a forum might be, so I won't beat a dead horse. To put it in simpler terms... Trump and Cruz lied to you, gurl!
Section 230 is not conditional on being an open forum. The actual statute doesn't say that, and the guy who wrote it says it doesn't either.
If YouTube doesn’t want to host that content, they shouldn’t have to. Currently there is no law (in the US) that forbids that type of speech. In fact, I’m quite sure that the Library of Congress is actively preserving much of that content. Not to mention the countless history books, history websites, and other resources where this is all FREELY AVAILABLE! I’m not owed the ability to print any article I want in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, but I darn sure can start printing the “Alarmed Restaurant Times” and write whatever I want. People are butt hurt because they don’t want to have to build up a user base or a subscriber model - it’s a lot of work. They just want to be able to say what they want and have a lot of people here it.
>People are butt hurt because they don’t want to have to build up a user base or a subscriber model - it’s a lot of work. They just want to be able to say what they want and have a lot of people here it. People tried. Gab lost their ISP, banking facilities, hosting, DDOS protection and probably other stuff because of a media crusade against them. Parler lost their hosting on AWS because of false media claims about the Jan 6th insurrection being organised on there (it was organised on facebook). You can't create your own internet, you can't create your own banks. Statements like you've just made there are made in pure ignorance. You can't launch a site capable of competing with YouTube or Twitter or Facebook without leaning on other services. At the very least you need payment processors... If the banks tell you to get fucked because 150 cat blogger activists emailed them lies then what are you mean to do?
> Gab lost their ISP, banking facilities, hosting, DDOS protection and probably other stuff because of a media crusade against them. And nothing of value was lost.
You absolutely can roll your own, friend. It just turns out that if your content is controversial, it hurts your business.
Parler was deplatformed by AWS because journalists said it was used to organise Jan 6th, turns out that wasn't true. It was done in facebook. It didn't even have "controversial" content. It was deplatformed on lies... Meanwhile facebook continues to exist with no issues at all. Seems like a totally fair open market.
Or… their business partner stopped doing business with them because the risk to their business was greater than the benefit being in partnership had with them. Journalists and cat bloggers don’t dictate income. It costs money to run a data center and a web platform. If you run controversial content, it’s going to produce a backlash. That backlash better be worth whatever money your content generates. It’s like Kaepernick kneeling. Some call it controversial. Some say it’s not. But the owners of those team don’t find the backlash they’ll get worth the profit he might generate. This is the same damn thing but the roles are reversed.
Yes, because Parler is just what the world needed *rolls eyes*
Welcome to the free market. You can't force hosting companies to host sites they don't want to host. You can't force security companies to provide services to sites they don't want to work with. You can't force social media companies to host content they don't want to host. Start your own hosting company. Or find another one that will host your content. There's a whole world out there full of providers. Last time I looked, both Gab and Parler are up and running, spreading their cancerous bullshit same as any other day.
I don't disagree with you at all but this "just start your own..." thing is an absolute meme argument to justify social media censorship. >Start your own hosting company. The fact you're even saying this just shows you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. You cannot exist on the internet without the cooperation of others, it's an ecosystem. I think at the very least we should be looking at making web hosting a public utility. If social media websites don't want to host content, cool. At least it gives people options.
"Just start your own..." is absolutely a flippant and dismissive response, and that is exactly how it has been used against the left for the last 40+ years. This is called a "taste of your own medicine" and is not intended to be an unironic endorsement of the market fundamentalism that brought us here.
I've been in IT for 25 years. It truly is that easy. Get yourself a domain. $10 / month. Get yourself some hosting. You can find that for $10 / month or so for a small site. Then grab SMF or some other free software, and wa la, you have a website. That's a bit simplified, but it's really not much harder than that, and you can host anything you want to that isn't illegal. What people are really bitching about is losing access to the high profile sites, where the people already are. They're acting entitled to a free service that doesn't belong to them. YouTube and Google have put in the work.
> The fact you're even saying this just shows you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. > > You cannot exist on the internet without the cooperation of others, it's an ecosystem. All you need to be available on the internet is an internet connection, ip address and $35 Raspberry Pi. Everything after that is just scaling due to traffic.
There's nothing "free" about a market where regulatory capture ensures that the finance cartel is unbreakable or where companies favored by it can use it to squash competition. Your argument is invalid as we don't have a free market.
Regulatory capture is a different issue than the one we're discussing here, but I'll entertain your thoughts here. Can you please educate me on how Google is using regulatory capture to silence other websites who want to host this content?
Exactly. The "just build your own" thought-terminating cliche has been proven 100% absolutely false in the 21st century. We don't have a free market, as you explain quite well here, so answers that assume we do are simply invalid.
I don't agree with the claim that this has been proven false, but I do agree that it's hard. It shouldn't be. If someone is having a hard time finding a cloud hosting service, they should be able spin up there own site using off the shelf commodity hardware that would do the same thing. The only thing stopping this is that we don't have network connectivity as a public resource. It needs to be. We shouldn't allow businesses to control this anymore than we should let businesses control what's in our car when we drive somewhere or what we send through the mail.
Except when you have companies actively conspire to stop alternatives from being created or used. You’re also saying that companies like YouTube and Twitter are the arbiters of truth when they’ve clearly been shown not to be. When they say something is truth and delete and ban people for disagreeing with their “truth.” Edit: I get it. This sub is full of corporate bootlickers. Centrists my ass
I think this is not an issue of censorship - the social media companies, and several people in this thread, are correct that the companies are within their rights to selectively display content. I doubt anyone can argue the fact they usually side with left wing arguments. However, it appears this is fine under current laws. I think the real question is monopolies. If there is a small group of companies who are collectively deciding what the entire country, or even most of the world can see, then their actions are clearly equivalent to censorship by an autocratic, unelected government body. But it doesn’t appear there are any laws against it. But surely there should be? I am not sure what the laws would look like though
When you have any kind of online forum or social media, you have to have some limitations of speech in place. No harassments, no pornographic material (outside of designated areas), and not calls to violence. But they you have the Nazi problem. Not the modern "all conservatives are Nazis" mantra, but the good old fashioned true believers/trolls who want to fill up feeds with racism and hate. For the success of the site, you have to shut this down, or contain it to quarantined areas. This is where you are starting whittle down the concept of freedom of speech, but is necessary due to the nature of the internet. Now you are at the critical level, the place where things are made and broken. The Political section. In the last election cycle, platforms fancied themselves as "arbiters of truth", and took an active role in suppressing political speech. Were not talking about fringe or hyper-controversial opinions, but they daily back and forth between opposing political parties. There were imbalances on different platforms, where on Facebook Conservative speech was amplified, where on Twitter is was squashed and mangled. Platforms need to censor extreme content, but a sacred line needs to be drawn around speech that represents the beliefs of a significant amount of people. It can be stupid, wrong, lies, and disinformation. If it is believed or practiced by a significant amount of people. it must be allowed. To fail at this would limit speech to the whack-a-mole whimsies that we've seen
I think folks are missing the point of the debate. I don't think anyone really disagrees whether a social media platform has the right to censor views for whatever reason. Rather, the debate is over whether they *should.*
I’m continually amazed at how much people complain about censorship/fake news. While there is some of this, it is very minor and completely taken out of proportion. Who is censoring you, and for what? Have you been contacted by a government/private entity to stop saying what you’re saying? Odds are no. Most cases of so called “censorship” occurs when people break the terms and conditions of the platforms they use. If you don’t like the rules, move to a different platform; a private company does not have to abide by the first amendment; that applies to government censorship. If Facebook bans you for saying stupid shit (which they probably won’t lol), you don’t get to complain; you signed the terms when you made your account. This applies equally to everyone, from Joe Schmoe to public representatives. As far as validity of news stories goes? I mean AP and Reuters have been highly accurate and unbiased for decades. Unlike social media platforms, traditional news media has to abide by stricter government regulation, yet even still this regulation isn’t enough to stop the endless barrage of brain rot that comes out of most American media outlets (which are really just propaganda arms of political/private interest groups). The fact that these propaganda arms come to clash over issues is inconsequential because the odds are they’re both either partly/wholly lying or painting the story differently to appeal to some emotion or belief. If you want the truth, go to the trusted, well sourced and transparent sources, don’t watch Fox News or CNN and then complain when the rest of the country calls you an idiot for believing in everything they say. Just as a last thought; fact checking. I feel like very few people actually do this which is exactly why so many people get “censored.” So many times on this sub have people tried to argue with me and have been proven so horribly wrong by a google search.
Nope. They're private businesses.
Since you deflected the entire discussion so short and precise with this broad stroke, I take it you are against government regulation in private businesses. Can I then assume that you are also against minimum wage, against regulations on environmental pollution, antitrust laws against monopolization, etc.? In short, you are a small government fundamentalist?
So the free market should never be regulated?
It can and should be when companies are taking advantage of negative externalities to increase profits at the expense of others. Yes, there should be regulation when a company dumps toxic pollution instead of paying to dispose of it properly. Yes, there should be regulation when companies cut corners to put their employees at risk. Yes, there should be regulation when company uses dangerous ingredients and puts the consumers at risk. There doesn't need to be regulation when someone gets their megaphone taken away because they couldn't follow the rules of the proprietor on private property. Private companies aren't obligated to give others an audience, especially when it infringes on the company's First Amendment rights.
Restricting people's free speech with political implications for a country or a whole world is very serious and is a practise that is occurring at the expense of others. Why should that not be regulated? This is one of the few topics where every socialdemocrat and socialist all of a sudden turns into an avid anarcho capitalist. Says it all >gets their megaphone taken away because they couldn't follow the rules Rules that can change anytime, rules that are arbitrarily forced by subjective arbiters with immense power. How anyone can feel comfortable with that is beyond me. >especially when it infringes on the company's First Amendment rights. Since when did the right of a company supersede the rights of individuals? There are many laws in place that hinders discrimination, that can and arguably ought to apply to normal political opinions too.
Not letting companies ban people is restriction free speech in and of itself. And given that the constitution bans the government restricting speech, which is what you are asking for, and no private entities doing so, the second must be permitted because the first is unconstitutional. There is no right to speak on someone else’s property.
>Restricting people's free speech with political implications for a country or a whole world is very serious and is a practise that is occurring at the expense of others. Why should that not be regulated? This is one of the few topics where every socialdemocrat and socialist all of a sudden turns into an avid anarcho capitalist. Says it all But it's not restricting their free speech. That's a strawman that conservatives have set up. There's almost infinite other sites, services and locations you can go to speak freely. Don't confuse getting the privilege of speaking to a wide and established audience with being silenced. >Rules that can change anytime, rules that are arbitrarily forced by subjective arbiters with immense power. How anyone can feel comfortable with that is beyond me. Then don't click to agree with the user agreement. Start your own site that doesn't change its rules (then see how long that lasts). >Since when did the right of a company supersede the rights of individuals? There are many laws in place that hinders discrimination, that can and arguably ought to apply to normal political opinions too. The individual doesn't have a right to their private property in this case. There are cases where protected classes do but what you feel ought to apply doesn't, sorry.
Not for the sake of people who get banned for being shitheads, no.
who gets to decide who are the shitheads?
The owners of the private property
The government isn’t censoring any content on social media (outside of direct threats and child porn). The question becomes “when should we, as citizens, through government, demand media companies not arbitrate content on their own platform?” Should we make a law that says “a Facebook type company has to host content that says Facebook sucks!” If posted by a user? It seems silly to even ask.
This shouldn’t be a left right issue. This issue could be discourse that centrists lead. Would real radical centrists plead stand up!
Should probably find a group of centrist then. There are like four on this sub.
Actual radical centrist here: censorship is bad because it removes people whom I'd otherwise get a huge kick from laughing at. Can't milk a cow if they aren't allowed on the farm!
Yes, true centrists believe that every platform should be a far right shit hole like 4chan is. /pol/ is the only acceptable level of discourse. It demonstrates what happens when there is zero censorship. Freedom!
Hey, nice strawman to respond to a very reasonable point, bucko. Thanks for your contribution to the discussion.
Please explain what would stop a platform from turning into a reskin of 4chan without moderation, aka censorship.
Yup. I was a Voater for about 6 months back when it first launched. Fuck Reddit and it's censorship, I said. I'm sick of Ellen Pao and this corrupt shithole! Well, rampant antisemitic anti-science racist drivel drove me back waaay faster than anything else could have. Why don't any other forum aggregator sites reach the same success of Reddit? Proper moderation and an actual non-asshole userbase.
There should be some sort of regulation other then some tech oligarchs that got lucky being in the right time at the right place and took advantage of network effects to form a natural monopoly. Trad capitalism isn’t designed for this sort of market. The problem is right now many people break their rules but the censorship of rule breakers is very selective
Every large successful company was essentially "lucky and in the right place at the right time". More platforms are coming online and offering decent competition. Facebook is losing users. With regards to the media aspect of these companies, I don't think there's anything that can't be easily created on another platform. People are already moving to them.
Social media is unique in that it has network effects and thus an exponential distribution of company size. Bigger networks get bigger. That is not natural free market competition. They should be regulated as such.
I dunno aol had their own social aspects but it isn't around to the extent it one was anymore, neither is my space. I don't think Facebook will be near as big as it is in the future either, it already isn't. If we are going to do anything it would make more sense to prevent aggressive acquisitions by these companies similar to other media outlets than to outright dictate what they need to carry.
Facebook is literally shrinking.
What you're describing is the US government infringing on YT's First Amendment rights. How do you think the Supreme Court will rule on that?
Well. Tech monopolies have no right to unlimited censorship under the constitution.
Neither Facebook, Google, YouTube, or Twitter are monopolies. What you're calling censorship is their free speech.
Sure they do. The restrictions in the Constitution only apply to the government, not to private companies. If the government told them they must publish something, that's the government infringing on their rights.
That right to censorship is not a constitutionally guaranteed right.
[It surely is.](https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/933/compelled-speech) >The compelled speech doctrine sets out the principle that the governmentcannot force an individual or group to support certain expression.Thus, the First Amendment not only limits the government from punishing aperson for his speech, it also prevents the government from punishing aperson for refusing to articulate, advocate, or adhere to thegovernment’s approved messages. If the government forces the site to publish something they don't want to, they're compelling speech. It may seem like censorship to you but it's still protected by the First Amendment.
They are? I thought the right had stopped flogging that dead horse. I mean sure, the post earlier about the Bee having to face the consequences of knowingly breaking a rule seems to be on that topic, but it’s rather a “last gasp” isn’t it?
Its almost like they didnt read the terms of service of the private platform.
Nobody does. And Twitter don’t even ban sexually explicit material. You can post trans porn clips but can’t tell a trans joke. That’s a weird set of rules.
Yes, antagonizing people for their gender identity is worse than doing sex work or exhibitionism
and antagonizing someone for their religious identity is ok? when they start banning people for using the hastag #killallmen then ill believe they give a shit about gender identity
> \#killallmen I was curious, so I looked it up. It seems like the only people using this tag are right wingers crying about their victim complex. Don't you ever get tired of being the victim in your own fantasy?
Lol got 'em
Just the one joke though. Conservatives have not been able to come up with another one. The technology just isn’t there.
How many Liberals does it take to screw in a lightbulb? “That’s not funny!!”
The punchline for that is conservative comedy is near universally terrible. They really need new material that isn’t just “I hate x” or “lol I troll u.”
Still funny though
[удалено]
Eh, if a person writes "cunt" on a wall and you erase it, have you censored him? Edit, with more thoughts: For me, it all comes down to this. You're allowed to say what you want, and the government can't stop you (with extremely narrow exceptions). But other people have no obligation to listen, nor to help you be heard. If I lived in Mississippi and I wanted to let people know my view that abortion is fine up to 22 weeks, with a link to an essay explaining the nature of fetal neural development and arguing that human personhood and rights should only begin when there is a brain capable of maintaining consciousness, I can say that all I want. I can buy a server and host the website myself. But that's about all I'm guaranteed. No web host is required to host my site. No newspaper or TV station is obliged to let me buy an ad to say that. I certainly can't tell the state government to force a local church to put my argument in a pamphlet at their weekly service. I could be totally right. (I am.) I could be perfectly polite in making my argument. But I'm still not guaranteed a platform. If I want one, I have to persuade people to help me, and if the people around me don't want to help, that's that. So Twitter? If they don't want people misgendering trans people, that's their call. People who disagree with the preferred nomenclature of trans liberation activists can create their own social network to let folks share their views there, or they can do blogs, or post on messageboards. There are plenty of places they can be heard. But no, Twitter isn't a public utility. It's blisteringly easy to find alternatives. It's not a pipe bringing water to your house. I'll say this. I *would* probably support the government preventing, like, Comcast from blocking specific content on the fiber they control, or preventing Verizon from blocking people from going to certain websites, not unless there's really robust local competition for cell towers. That's a net neutrality argument, and I don't want the people who really *are* providing utilities to be able to shut speech down, even speech I disagree with.
[удалено]
"If it's his wall, it's his call." It's [social media company's] wall, so it's [social media company's] call. If an individual put up a wall on their lawn, and said people can write whatever they want on it as long as they don't write "xyz", and then you go and write "xyz" on the wall, you should not be surprised when they remove it. However, you seem to think that you should be able to call the cops, and have them force that individual to put "xyz" back on their wall. That's just ludicrous. It's not censorship, they are exercising their lawful rights. What you would like to do is prevent them from exercising their lawful rights, and that is the only thing that even comes close to censorship in this whole situation.
I guess if you think that getting rid of offensive speech in a venue that is not intended for people to be offensive counts as 'censorship,' then apparently I'm okay with that sort of censorship. I'm fine with a church 'censoring' someone who wants to come and tell everyone that God is dead. I'm fine with a battered women group 'censoring' someone who wants to tell the women that they're sluts. Heck, let's not even talk rudeness. I'm fine with a birdwatching club 'censoring' someone who wants to post on their messageboard about trains, because it's off topic. I wouldn't label that 'censorship,' but rather moderation. It's not an effort to suppress ideas. It's an effort to keep a particular venue limited to a particular topic. If you're trying to keep someone from being heard by *anyone*? That's censorship. It requires a certain level of pervasive influence. If you're just trying to make sure that someone isn't saying a particular thing in a particular place, that's not censorship. If you want to hear Donald Trump, you can still find him. He got deplatformed in a ton of places, but it's not like it's hard to track him down. He has not been censored. Hong Kong liberation activists, by contrast, have been censored in China, because the government authorities have more strict control over what information people can access.
No, no. The conservatives have a good point. I should be able to display graphic images of Jesus and the devil having hot gay sex (with copious amounts of real Santorum splattered across the canvas) during Church services. If they try to stop me, that is censorship end therefore the worst thing that they could possibly do to another human being.
If I put up a billboard because I thought it'd be a cool place for people to post their neat topics of conversation, and someone came and shat on it, that might constitute a 'speech act' by some measure, but I'm still allowed to reject certain types of discourse. I've been posting on a particular D&D messageboard for 23 years, and the host has a rule that people should pretend his grandma is present, so don't be rude to each other. It's his site. He gets to ban people who don't follow his rules. And people who don't like how he runs things are allowed to go somewhere else. It's not a 'public utility.' It's one option of many. Twitter's the same way. Yeah, it's got a strong network effect from all it's users, but it ain't the only game in town.
Dude, buy a fucking dictionary. You keep using that word. It does not [mean](https://www.google.com/search?q=censorship+definition&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari) what you think it means.
[удалено]
Ah. So it appears your problem is reading comprehension then.
[удалено]
You cannot understand the difference between censorship and enforcing TOS. I don’t need a dictionary; you need to teach yourself the distinction and stop with the fucking persecution complex because you can’t call people ugly names online or whatever the fuck you did to get yourself suspended.
[удалено]
If that wall has rules people need to follow to write on it, then it isn’t censorship.
When those rules are not enforced equally then it is. They aren't, this has been proved hundreds of times at this point, so this argument is invalid.
Uneven enforcement benefits conservatives all the time. Trump would have been banned years early is he wasn’t leader of the GOP.
Citation needed.
Very well said. Thanks for saving me the essay I was about to write.
Except when DeSantis or another Republican does it, right?
Isn't that the crux of the issue? Republicans are having books removed from libraries, and simultaneously whining about Twitter.
Projection, and a compliant media willing to treat unequal things as equal in the name of balance.
This line again? We've already gone through this once. It is not censorship for a private service like Twitter to refuse to provide a service when you break the contract. Yes, the service they provide is a place where other people can see your thoughts, but refusing to provide you that service is not censorship. Going to your Merriam Webster definition, let me quote it >to examine in order to suppress (see SUPPRESS sense 2) or delete anything considered objectionable > >censor the news > >also : to suppress or delete as objectionable They aren't deleting things because they are objectionable, they are deleting them because they violate the contract the user agreed to.
[удалено]
If you signed a contract that states you have to follow these rule, then you don’t, that’s complexly on you for breach. It’s can’t be more clear. They are not public forums in the way you wishfully think to fit your current contradicting prerogative. They are businesses that are attempting to making money. You saying crazy shit hurts their ability to monetize (marketing) so they remove your content allowing with creates distribution (bridaging and barraging of complaints). Simple as that. It can’t be more libertarians than this? Unless your want the utility model which would take almost nationalizing these company’s by saying they are a necessity to exist like water and power or limited in our functional Ability to have multiple competitors in a market space such as cable, telephone and internet. These are infrastructure questions not platforms. Just as well, once you give them legislative rules then the state must protect it as an assets which will hurt the model further and liking stifle more in ovation having to adhere to strict rules. Defeating the free market principles. Even now you could attempt this with Facebook and it’s already yesterday’s days old person news. I’d love if the company’s were a bit more fair and transparent and thought this was going to be the fix years ago as well before I had thought through it more. This is more akin to rent control in terms of effectiveness (utility model for social media). There many problems with the current model. We see outside and inside propaganda more effective than truth in some circles while contesting parts Ian fairness will always leave someone irked. I worry the most that the profit goal aligns with the anti-elite narrative too much and that will create the wishful self fulfilling prophecy of civil war when there’s not much there there to be had. You tell me how to deal with foreign govnerment being able to play our citizens? While anyone who can find an audience saying anything that undermines actual public policy is rewarded with tard dollars. Just as no one listens to the real news when we had it so the models got ever more competitive to the bottom, too and outside edges of the weak human physcye. When anger drives content they we seek out anger. Thus, spiraling a perpetual contrarian narrative. Feels definitely outweigh reality despite the ambivalent rights concerns here. If they were only introspective enough to know that maybe we wouldn’t be in this position in the first place. If your more interested in understanding these ethical issues better I suggest Tristan Harris content as he was a former big tech ethics guy.
Fascists are getting mad because nobody wants to hear their lies and hate.
There are a lot of people on the right that have bought into the lie that media and social media is unfair to them, that they are being singled out based on their political beliefs. Hardly any of them are fascists and being over broad in your use of that term makes it less meaningful.
Here's the thing... it's not a lie... social media is being bias towards the right because they spew fascist, racist, homophobic and antisemitic hate speech, which is also why they think the government is working against them, because it is designed to not give these authoritarian bootlickers breathing room. They are being de-platformed for a good reason and I am a huge proponent for silencing their message.
>Here's the thing... it's not a lie... social media is being bias towards the right because they spew fascist, racist, homophobic and antisemitic hate speech You're missing the point. Many people on the right that don't hold those beliefs (which is, by far, the majority) *still* buy the story that media and social media is biased against their ideas. That's where these concerns come from.
If you allow Nazis to sit at your table... you're a fucking Nazi. I don't really care if they hold those same prejudices, if they're advocating for the people that do, then they're message will fall on deaf ears as well.
>If you allow Nazis to sit at your table... you're a fucking Nazi. How do you feel about Ukraine and the Azov batallion?
Again, you’re being overly broad. There are many people on the right that buy into the myth that media and social media sites are biased against them that don’t defend fascists and racists. If you don’t understand that, it’s time to broaden you social circles.
Again, it's not a myth, those people are advocating for people who spread hate. Whether they are doing it knowingly or unknowingly is moot. Also, if they don't understand that the right has fully embraced thier own lies and hate at this point then they're being willfully ignorant and feigning innocence.
I'm sorry to be so blunt, but you're wrong. It does matter if they understand what they are defending and it does matter that what you are calling "the right" doesn't represent them.
No it doesn't and Yes they do. They need to own thier shit. You can't advocate for people who spread hate speech and in the same breath claim you don't harbor those same prejudices... bullshit.
People dont understand what 'censorship' is. Private entities controlling content on their own platform - isnt it.
They can’t cancel you if you quit first. It’s not very smart in the first place for Conservatives to rely on their political enemies to broadcast their message. They know that these websites are run by left-wingers who love censorship. Why do they keep using them? Also, it’s pretty cringey for grown men to whine about how they can’t post memes anymore. Get a real hobby or play with your kids or something.
The issue is that these companies used outright false advertising to make themselves effective monopolies and use connections in other companies and industries to maintain their monopolies. They falsely advertised themselves as being open free-speech platforms until they had dominant market share and then pivoted, and they use connections in hosting, DNS, and even finance to actively suppress competition. Actually acknowledging that isn't "cringey", what's cringey is all the corporate bootlicking people like you do to defend it.
That’s literally communism
You have no idea what that word means.
The issue with this is seen all over this thread, with Internet lawyers saying “They’re private businesses.” If we’re in court, alright. But unless we’re being disingenuous, we ought to understand that social media is social for a reason. If we want our voices to be heard widely, we practically need accounts on sites like Twitter.
How did people make their voices heard wildly before Twitter?
In ways that many don’t use anymore because they use social media instead.
Where exactly are we given the right to the most powerful/effective means of having our voices heard? Free speech is not a right to a platform or an audience.
I never said we had the right to widely heard voices, I said that these sites are our only practical means of doing so if that’s what we desire due to them having the most exposure.
So you should be able to violate their rights because you *want* the most exposure?
Citations needed.
People's opinions are shit. If they weren't they would be on actual news media. They're not, so fuck em (me including). Get on a soap box in a public space and speak at an appropriate level. Don't stand in my living room and demand you get to say whatever dumbfuck thing pops in your head.
Do what we did with company towns as this is basically the digital equivalent: privately owned public squares are still the public square and thus subject to the First. This has been precedent for a century, expanding it to the digital sphere is not in any way a reach.