121–130 of 131 posts
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Every bit of it is done under the assumption that "freedom of speech only applies to the government ", which is quite technically true. However, I don't really see how it would have been possible for the authors of the Constitution (since Twitter is a US company, and Alex Jones is a US citizen, it's within scope) to foresee that the greatest danger to freedom of speech would not be the government. Honestly, we're pro…
> Honestly, we're probably at the point in our existence as a nation where we have the least freedom of speech I think McCarthyism would like to have a word with you. People have always been persecuted socially for socially unacceptable beliefs. If you said "I want to eat babies" 100 years ago, your friends wouldn't associate with you, just as they wouldn't now. 100 years ago you could say "I think people of the same…
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That's like saying: Alex Jones is free to grow his own food on his land as much as he pleases. This supermarket has a policy not to sell food to people who violate our terms of service regarding hate speech.
The supermarket is free to not sell to any particular person on the basis that they constantly engage in hate speech. It gets murkier when they start banning classes of people or ban someone for something that puts them in a protected class, but any supermarket that banned Alex Jones for hate speech would be well within their rights.
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Every bit of it is done under the assumption that "freedom of speech only applies to the government ", which is quite technically true. However, I don't really see how it would have been possible for the authors of the Constitution (since Twitter is a US company, and Alex Jones is a US citizen, it's within scope) to foresee that the greatest danger to freedom of speech would not be the government. Honestly, we're pro…
> Honestly, we're probably at the point in our existence as a nation where we have the least freedom of speech I think McCarthyism would like to have a word with you. People have always been persecuted socially for socially unacceptable beliefs. If you said "I want to eat babies" 100 years ago, your friends wouldn't associate with you, just as they wouldn't now. 100 years ago you could say "I think people of the same…
The effects of that persecution are completely different. Sure, in the past you were more likely to be physically attacked for certain socially unacceptable beliefs. But nowadays, you're more likely to suffer long-term damage if you speak too controversially without taking great pains to hide your real identity, and even if you do the people who you anger with your speech may attempt to dox you anyway.
It's funny (in the sad way) that there are so many people of all types who will use certain "weasel" tactics themselves, but when their opponents use the same tactics, they scream "that's wrong, that's unfair, that's dirty". Almost like "the ends don't justify the means" has been perverted into "the ends justify the means only towards my opponents but never towards me".
I don't have evidence, no. But that's because this is a casual discussion for me.
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This is the same reasoning that leads to people getting banned from a service for a reason, and then given a cold shoulder and absolutely no information about why . Perhaps this is fine in situations where the banned entity is a malicious actor, but it presumes a zero false-positive rate. My opinion is, if even one person is wrongly punished without recourse (other than rolling the dice with social media) then the wh…
Who, other than you, says that twitter must be just? The world would be a completely different place if companies were required by law to be just.
For example, when it comes to publicly-available services such as this, we often hear about people referring to "Twitter's freedom of speech" in terms of censorship of its users, which boggles my mind. Twitter provides a publicly-accessible service that allows users to post short entries, and when they prevent someone else from posting something, it basically amounts to "Twitter's right to free speech is more important than the user's ability to speak" and that seems a bit counter-intuitive.
If Twitter's policies are unjust, then Twitter does not deserve the level of influence that it has. My opinion is that such a service could not have been foreseen by the writers of the Constitution. In their day, the greatest threat to freedom of speech was the government. Remember, they had just fought for their independence from England. I don't think they could have envisioned a world where the greatest threat to free speech would come from the private sector.
And if we're not careful, we're about to be making it worse. As it stands, platform operators are not generally liable for the things they automatically publish on behalf of their users, outside of certain highly egregious things (such as child abuse imagery), and even then only if they don't follow the proper procedure with regards to reporting to law enforcement, etc. If that ever changes, expect freedom of speech to be null and void in context of the Internet.
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Then run your own hosting company and accept money via Bitcoin. You can't just force third party companies to do whatever you want.
hate speech and racism absolutely are political, they are only outside of the overton window. i despise racists as much as anyone but i don’t trust anyone with the authority to police permissible opinions, and i think anybody who does is naive and short-sighted. if you construct these frameworks for suppression, they will be used against you by your enemies the second they have the opportunity.
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maybe you haven’t noticed, but people have been going after hosting companies and payment processors lately to shut down people they find politically disagreeable. we are increasingly less and less free to host our own speech.
> shut down people they find politically disagreeable It's not that. Hate-speech is not political. Racism is not political. Morality is not all that political. Shutting down someone who denies shootings and is abusive to the victim's families and spews racism is not a political move. People should condemn disgusting hate speech regardless of their political affiliation.
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That's not abusive behavior though. It's just a conspiracy theory.
It encourages abusive behavior. Victims of mass shootings have been harassed by Alex Jones fans trying to call them out for being "crisis actors."
Your line of reasoning is no different from blaming video games for mass shootings.
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It encourages abusive behavior. Victims of mass shootings have been harassed by Alex Jones fans trying to call them out for being "crisis actors."
He didn't even call for any harassment of these alleged "crisis actors" let alone call for their murder. If you are going to blame mass shootings on ungrounded speculation then we've got to censor half of the internet. Your line of reasoning is no different from blaming video games for mass shootings.
People know video games are fictional, and the worlds they portray aren't real. Alex Jones, meanwhile, doesn't present himself as a fictional character, rather he convinces people that what he says is true, and the world he describes is the real world, so he's more of a charlatan or demagogue. One doesn't have to directly and explicitly call for harassment to be responsible for having inspired it.