341–350 of 367 posts
I'm not weighing in on whether these kinds of tweets should or shouldn't be allowed, but genuine question: how does this violate rule #1? Is it the use of the word 'cunt'? I don't see how the harassment was based on race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orietntation, gender identity, relgiious affiliation, age, disability or serious disease. Potentially that Palin is a woman, they've decided that 'cunt' could be b…
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The answer is much simpler than you are making this appear. Sending an email is a private communication. Sending a tweet is a public communication. Your email provider is not a publishing platform any more than the paper store or the USPS is a publishing platform. Twitter is a publisher, although as an Internet publisher disseminating user generated content, they are protected by law from the typical liability that p…
Email, ActivityPub, and Wordpress are decentralized publishing communication standards. Email one-to-many distribution / spam being the thing youre ignoring. Facebook and Twitter are proprietary, centralized, and closed systems. Shifting the conversation from publishing to the audience, completely glosses over the actual minutia at hand.
OP meant to say publishing platforms not communication provider because of course there is absolutely no natural monopoly for email providers, but clearly natural monopolies for social networks.
Spam is a nuisance. It’s simply not how someone reaches 100 million followers.
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From your last paragraph the term you are looking for is "common carrier". Email goes over common carrier networks between private hosts and so is pretty close to a common carrier network. Twitter isn't and doesn't. Maybe there should be a way for web services to provide a similar service with similar protections.
Twitter has denied that it is a publisher in court. It is a Common Carrier in effect, and has benefited - to the detriment of its competitors - from common carrier protections. Any time Twitter has been called to account for what it publishes, it claims it's not a publisher. Give them what they want.
Any discussion of “common carrier” is entirely orthogonal, and basically nonsensical in the context of something like Twitter.
“Common carrier” generally arises as a trade-off for a government granted monopolies based on limited access right-of-ways. This was true for railways, and true for telephone wires. Why would this apply to a random service like Twitter?
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And some if it is plain hateful. Distasteful, and inflammatory. [1] Not all words need to be respected. Sometimes people need help, and sometimes they ask for it in subliminal ways. And of course it's a provincial US issue. The entire internet as we know it cannot exist without provincial US law holding it together, and a provincial US economy to keep it online. We own the internet. We own Microsoft. We own Android.…
> And some if it is plain hateful. Distasteful, and inflammatory. [1] Saying what's "distasteful" is about arbiters of taste, and we shouldn't allow that. John Waters was "distateful" at some point, Rock music was, famous painters were, Henry Miller was, tons of movies, and tons of other things besides. Inflammatory stuff, doxing, etc, should be punishable under common law (libel, privacy laws, etc). Hate on the othe…
I was making the comparison because you were comparing the internet to the world. You can't (read: shouldn't) really do that. The internet is an American invention built with selfless American principals and ingenuity. Gifting it to to the world is one thing, but assume it's for the worlds benefit (as you did in your OP) is naive. The internet, as the free world knows it, is an American invention built in an American image using American resources in an American economy with American resources. It isn't compatible with Chinese or Iranian or Russian politics, and they struggle with that. That's their problem.
When I said "they don't care as much as you do" I meant to say "they don't care as much as you do about them." In other words, you're fighting for the rights of a populace that won't fight for it's own rights. Instead they'll stand by and watch you die in vain. There is no martyr-ism in giving the Chinese civil rights. They don't understand it and they don't want it. They want a strong labor market. They want cheap goods. They don't care about being able to call out jews on some insecure gab loaded with technical debt that prevents them from being secure. They simply don't fucking care. So you making any argument on their behalf is wasted. Especially on someone else in the US. Lets talk about the internet we created for ourselves and when the Chinese get off their asses and contribute to it we can worry about them. Banggood and Alibaba doesn't count. They never will. They are B class companies and in the absence of an A class company they would still rather look for another A to shadow than become one themselves. That's their business model and it ensures their survival in an unstable market. We don't worry about those problems because we don't have too.
So worry about us. You're trying to assert your first amendment right as a consumer over mine as a content aggregator. Our rights are equal in the scope of the law. Maybe because Facebook is publicly traded there is recourse for you, but demanding FB "switch off" content moderation for the first amendment is short sighted. You signed a fucking agreement. Period. If you want to post about how jews are awful, do that on your own dime. Not Zuck's, and certainly not mine.
If your shit didn't stink so bad maybe someone with a brain and money would come hang out with you.
The rule of thumb I use is to ask: if someone had shouted this in a supermarket or bank line, what would happen? Internet communities should aspire to be more like local communities. If you're a jerk in real life, people will show you the door. Making this about grand abstract concepts like free speech or censorship is internet fun for people who like to debate. But it's overcomplicating the situation. Twitter is jus…
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Seems like a very pertinent distinction to modern democracy / society. Unlike in the 1800 when everyone could just go the the town square or publish their own pamphlet and have almost equal reach, today most discussion happens in 2-3 outlets: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. Whether those started as private companies, whether those are not public goods, etc, should be irrelevant. They have de facto captured a big chu…
There are a lot more than 2-3 outlets some of which have completely different and less restrictive acceptable use policies. For example I understand Reddit is huge, although I don't use it myself. And there's always email.
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>Why would Youtube or Twitter have to? Because combined, Google, Twitter, and Facebook have an effective monopoly on modern public discourse.
No they don't. Those companies can't erase you from the internet, only from their own individual platforms that they own and operate. A "monopoly" would imply that without the use of these sites you could not be heard, but this is obviously false, not only because there are many other similar sites out there, but also because nobody is stopping you from creating your own blog or platform or whatever you like. No, you…
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>how you know that he dismissed her ideas because of her gender? If Sarah Palin was a "he", he wouldn't have called her a "cunt" and a "whore".
I call male politicians cunts and whores all the time! How can you assume this?
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There are a lot more than 2-3 outlets some of which have completely different and less restrictive acceptable use policies. For example I understand Reddit is huge, although I don't use it myself. And there's always email.
The most popular websites in the U.S. where users share content are Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram (Facebook's subsidiary), Reddit, Twitch, then arguably Imgur which is more a hosting site of images for other services, and maybe even iTunes for podcasts. You can monetize your content on most of these sites but if you get banned from say YouTube, your audience just dropped from the whole country to say half of…
And for those that just want to get their message out, well it's never been easier or cheaper to start a web site on any number of different hosting services. If they can't manage to gain an audience on their own site then their content is crap. The percentage of traffic on other sites is completely irrelevant; any user can jump to another site with literally a single click.
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They blocked the account but as you can see from the bottom of the screenshot in the article the account could be reinstated by deleting the tweet in question. If the author is honestly saying they no longer stand by what they posted 9 years ago they could easily just delete it and move on. That raises a bunch of different questions about what Twitter are doing to change history, and the way they represent their plat…
I'll go one step further: by forcing them to act upon it, instead of deleting/hiding it and notifying the user, Twitter is engaging in behavioral training, like you would train a dog.