201–210 of 367 posts
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Is Mastercard required to do business with the Bernie Sanders campaign, even though his stated policy goals might harm their business?
Why would Mastercard be required to do business with the Sanders campaign?
Unaccountable censorship of expression by our main communication providers is incompatible with Democracy. Communication is often a natural monopoly, and you can't just "start a competitor" to Twitter and have the market fix the problem (see gab.ai). If we're going to have censorship on the big platforms (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) and backbone providers (ISPs, Cloudfront), us normal human beings need…
Expression is not public communication. Are you not conflating freedom of speech with freedom to be heard/reach an audience? Even 2 centuries ago, the US government wouldn't intervene to force newspapers to publish the op-eds of hateful people looking to grow their followers. Why would Youtube or Twitter have to?
As always, the question becomes: who decides which people are to be silenced?
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> Yet the cool part about the United States is: it’s OK! Dude, no, no it’s not ok. It’s not ok to have a culture where insults are encounter and ok. Insults can quickly lead to threats. Are often lies and manipulation. Are often racial or sexist or homophobic. And we as a society shouldn’t just stand by and allow it. What is gained by allowing insults? Honest question. Why should we be ok with them? Now i do have to…
If you mean on a legal level, it's less about what is gained by allowing insults than it is what is lost by disallowing them. That is, it becomes trivial to ban criticism by labeling it an insult. On a social level, there is something to be gained from insults: authenticity. Perhaps it comes down to personal preference, but I would rather live in a society where people can speak their mind (and potentially face socia…
My father was the Mayor of a medium sized city and stirred controversy from time to time, and was a favorite target of the local press. He loved it- he took some of the cartoons most designed to poke at him and framed them and put them on the wall in his office.
The give and take is part of the vital breath of democracy- thin skin isn't a useful trait to have in the public square.
He is still beloved by many of the same press on a personal level due to his steady persona and good humor, regardless of the level of agreement with his political views, something sadly missing in the modern political firmament.
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So how do you feel about blog platforms or other service providers that allow posting user-supplied comments on their platform? Should companies and non-profits all be required be to expend resources to keep your hateful comments available to the world? How do we determine what's spam? What's advertising? What's XSS? You have a first amendment right to type any of these things into an input box. Does that mean the or…
The big, ostensibly neutral, communications monopolies need their censorship practices heavily regulated. People with private blogs needs to be absolutely free to control commenting however they would like. I believe that we can respect both of these positions easily, 99% of the time, with our court systems deciding on some of the grey in the middle.
What counts as a "private" blog? That seems like an arbitrary distinction.
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I’m confused. What technology did twitter replace? Oh it didn’t? This is completely new, the ability to communicate to this many people at once? Okay so what ancient rights are being trampled exactly? If anything we probably need to be censoring people on Twitter right now as it doesn’t seem to convince anyone of anything other than that the people on the other-side of their argument are sub-human. Edit: Also, it alw…
In Q1 of this year, twitter had 68 million monthly active users in the US [0]. Hard to tell how many of them follow political discourse. But that’s 20% of the population (give or take) and it’s a substantial fraction. I’m not sure how but I want that fraction to get before appropriate rights are defined and adopted. The US common carrier rules were only enacted in 1934 [1] so it took a while before phone companies we…
Twitter themselves say monetizable active users are around 40% of worldwide monthly active users. Your statista link links to that. That takes your percentage of US down to 8%. Account for Twitter exaggerating or missing out on anything and the number of users who don’t follow political discourse and you’re likely below 5%.
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Expression is not public communication. Are you not conflating freedom of speech with freedom to be heard/reach an audience? Even 2 centuries ago, the US government wouldn't intervene to force newspapers to publish the op-eds of hateful people looking to grow their followers. Why would Youtube or Twitter have to?
>Why would Youtube or Twitter have to? Because combined, Google, Twitter, and Facebook have an effective monopoly on modern public discourse.
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Unfettered access to information requires unfettered access to incorrect information. The power to decide what's "correct" will be abused to block correct information that damages someone powerful.
And what is access? Access of parties to shove information down my throat? Access for parties with deeper pockets to drown out real information? If information would be in a book and I could go to a library and seek it out - don't ban anything! But if messages are replicated in covert manner with lots of money thrown at news anchors, op-ed writers, sponsoring, bribes, syndication, SEO it is a different story. And mon…
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Why would Mastercard be required to do business with the Sanders campaign?
Large corporations hamstringing reformist politicians rubs some people the wrong way. The major nonhuman players have always participated in politics, but when they prevent others from participating in politics it's seen as another line being crossed.
Twitter has those, too, like having to carve out an exemption in the rules for Trump's account, or accusations of bias that lead to Congressional hearings.
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Right, so the hypothesis is that we can’t have unfettered access to information.
Is it okay to put plans for building nuclear centrifuges on the internet? No.
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So who do you propose gets to spoonfeed the masses with their okayed content? That is a terrifying argument.
Even if one were in favor of unfettered access to information generally, it doesn't logically follow that an individual publisher such as Twitter is obliged to offer or facilitate unfettered access. The WSJ isn't obliged to offer access to fake stock listings alongside the real ones. And unless you are okay with your bank providing unfettered access to your ID, account number and PIN, I'd imagine that you are not in…
The difference between WSJ and Twitter is that the WSJ has competitors (NYT, Politico, even Fox News and crazies like Infowars) whereas Twitter does not. We live in a world (unfortunately) where the President of the United States and his administration heavily relies on Twitter - it's no longer someones backyard social group. For Twitter to play the censor is no longer acceptable, although we still expect twitter to keep its users safe from harassment and mobs.
So yes, it's unacceptable for Twitter to play the censor or ban people from public service announcements or policy statements by their elected officials. If Twitter is going to facilitate administration statements and my local government agencies letting me know critical information, they are no longer an entirely private platform.