221–230 of 776 posts
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Any examples of Milo making a racist remark? Afaik his criticism is mainly towards certain cultures. Not races.
Given that there is such a high correlation between religion, race and cultural background I don't think it's always possible to say that racism is fine but bigotry and xenophobia aren't. They are all inextricably linked.
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Yeah and for Alex Jones: The government has ‘weather weapons’ Chemicals in the water are turning frogs gay Robert Mueller is a demon, and also a pedophile The Sandy Hook shooting was staged Hillary Clinton is running a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/14/alex-jones-5-most-disturbing...
The government has weather weapons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_Modification_Con... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_warfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Popeye Chemicals in the water are turning the frogs gay. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-environment-potomac/sex-c... For Mueller, Sandy Hook, and Pizzagate, Alex Jones speculated and reported on these existing conspiracy theories.…
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Legitimate question, is free speech guaranteed on Facebook's platform? Or do they get to decide what content is okay and what isn't?
"Free speech" doesn't apply to private entities at all. They have full rights to refuse service to someone for whatever reason they want to, same as any other business. Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1357/
Facebook is a de facto monopoly in the social networks space, and it's deciding to deny service to specific individuals based on their political opinions. It's not something I'm willing to shrug off as unimportant.
And I have to disagree with xkcd too on this one. Protecting the freedom of speech means setting limits to the freedom of others to harm you when they don't like what you say. People are free to disagree and switch channel/ unfollow/ stop buying a newspaper/ etc. But harassment and mobbing are a different matter.
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> The word "fringe" used to mean something a lot more, well... fringe Did it? How many people do you think were interested in old school conspiracy theories like Area 51 [1] or the protocols of the elders of zion [2]? Henry ford printed half a million copies of the latter! >how exactly are Milo Yiannopolous and Paul Joseph Watson "dangerous"? I think "dangerous" is probably not quite the right word. They're dangerous…
> How many people do you think were interested in old school conspiracy theories like Area 51 [1] or the protocols of the elders of zion [2]? Henry ford printed half a million copies of the latter! I think most of the people were interested in it for entertainment, just like people are interested in horoscopes for entertainment. Or would you argue that all these newspapers that had horoscopes in them pushed fringe co…
If it doesn’t, what are we all doing here? What is the First Amendment even supposed to protect? Meaningless entertainment?
Yet if it has power, it must be possible for it to be both good and bad, or otherwise we could improve humanity by just posting randomly generated text.
So the distinction between meaningless “speech” and somehow possibly malign “acts” is somewhat arbitrary.
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> It is exerting editorial control in this case. > Hence, they should be liable for the speech that they do allow. I see this sentiment often on HN, as if the latter somehow logically and necessarily follows from the former. It doesn't, and if that is what you advocate then you should justify it with proper arguments.
The argument is about whether Facebook is a platform or a publisher. This discussion has been going on for years and not just on HN. Being a platform, like ATT telephone lines, bring certain protections from lawsuits of content. The core of net neutrality is also based on a similar idea; with net neutrality, platforms (cable companies) can not between distinguish services (like throttling Netflix). In the exact same…
Facebook is no different in this respect.
You make it sound like platforms are these wild west environments where anything goes. It's not like that.
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> The word "fringe" used to mean something a lot more, well... fringe Did it? How many people do you think were interested in old school conspiracy theories like Area 51 [1] or the protocols of the elders of zion [2]? Henry ford printed half a million copies of the latter! >how exactly are Milo Yiannopolous and Paul Joseph Watson "dangerous"? I think "dangerous" is probably not quite the right word. They're dangerous…
> allowing those views on your platform make you complicit Every faction since the dawn of history has said that the views of the other factions are objectively harmful. What is it that blesses SV neo-something-or-other as the one true faction that has finally discovered the objective truth?
They are self-anointed by nature of being de facto gate keepers of the global information flow.
Similar to how the Church used to be the gatekeepers of information, and were compelled to silence "blasphemous" ideas that they didn't like.
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That's not what the above poster said, and you know it. You say "marginally", "anyone", "mocking". But the people in question aren't anyone, and they aren't just mocking. There are specific cases of them calling on their fans to harass private citizens. Anyone with some semblance of awareness of US law knows free speech is not without limits. No one is entitled to online speech, believe it or not.
I suppose you’re aware that it’s not unknown for members of the trans community to “call on their fans to harass private citizens”. Would you like them banned too? In fact, Milo has been the victim of many such calls for harassment. To be clear, I had personal interactions with Milo many years ago when he ran a technology magazine in the UK. I’ve never met a more unpleasant individual and I would be happy to never he…
And you're free to raise that issue on its own merit when it happens. You're also welcome to report it to the social network it's posted on for moderation/banning. This does not change anything about banning Milo.
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> No one is entitled to online speech, believe it or not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_Internet_access
This is not relevant. Some people get the right to internet access. They don't get the right to say what they want where they want without moderation.
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I think Farrakhan is a really tough case. First, he's cartoonishly anti-semitic and has been for years. He's as much of a hate monger as any of the other people who were banned and that's enough reason to ban him. That given, he has also materially supported vulnerable populations in a way that few organizations have. He has pushed very hard for black people to be proud of their blackness and to create narratives in…
So you've established that it's desirable for black people to be proud of their blackness. Is it desirable for white people to be proud of their whiteness? If you allow for one of these and not the other, you'd be a racist.
Mirror tests work when the things being swapped are actually, in relevant context, similarly situated, but that is simply not the case in Black vs. White identity.
Abstractly, there's nothing wrong with positive White racial identity, but in the real world, that doesn't exist as free-floating thing detached from White supremacist ideology.
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> It is exerting editorial control in this case. > Hence, they should be liable for the speech that they do allow. I see this sentiment often on HN, as if the latter somehow logically and necessarily follows from the former. It doesn't, and if that is what you advocate then you should justify it with proper arguments.
The argument is about whether Facebook is a platform or a publisher. This discussion has been going on for years and not just on HN. Being a platform, like ATT telephone lines, bring certain protections from lawsuits of content. The core of net neutrality is also based on a similar idea; with net neutrality, platforms (cable companies) can not between distinguish services (like throttling Netflix). In the exact same…
Thanks for the clarification, but I don't find it convincing.
I disagree with the underlying premise that we should clump social media into (only) two categories (platforms and publishers) where if you exercise any editorial control you are immediately categorized as "publisher" (category that is appropriate for an entity that explicitly and deliberately chooses everything it publishes) and where only "platforms" are protected from lawsuit about their users' content.