From what I recall Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez questioned Zuckerberg, she questioned along the anecdote of: If I purchase ads on Facebook saying Republicans support the Green New Deal (but they don't), will Facebook take the ads down? I often see these clean, easily provable anecdotes from those who support some kind of suppression of speech. I worry though: often the truthfulness of real world statements are difficu…
Twitter to ban political advertising
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Re: Twitter to ban political advertising
#542Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not pedantry at all. Look at F1's battle with cigarette advertising for a concrete example. Certainly, explicit advertising is easy to stop, but there are many ways of advertising things surreptitiously. A great example of this is Ferrari's evolution to avoid the F1 cigarette ban. They started with the word Marlboro on the side of their car, then they moved to a barcode that resembled a pack of cigarettes, and n…
What point are you trying to make? The system seems working as intended if Ferrari is going to such great lengths to avoid explicit advertisement. There will always be those who break laws, doesn’t mean that we should stop making laws.
Laws don't have anything to do with this thread?
Re: Twitter to ban political advertising
#543One thing about the first amendment is that it doesn't have conditions. This type of thing that Twitter is doing will be full of them, ie selectively defining what's political or not. The question is whether this is a lesser evil than allowing political ads but selectively blocking stuff with very broad and potentially inconsistent moderation rules. I personally think totally blocking is the easier of the two in term…
It does. You cannot shout "fire" to incite a panic for malicious purposes. We already determine that those lies are not protected by the First Amendment.
> the phrase "shouting fire in a crowded theater" has since come to be known as synonymous with an action that the speaker believes goes beyond the rights guaranteed by free speech, reckless or malicious speech, or an action whose outcomes are obvious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
Re: Twitter to ban political advertising
#544From what I recall Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez questioned Zuckerberg, she questioned along the anecdote of: If I purchase ads on Facebook saying Republicans support the Green New Deal (but they don't), will Facebook take the ads down? I often see these clean, easily provable anecdotes from those who support some kind of suppression of speech. I worry though: often the truthfulness of real world statements are difficu…
> I often see these clean, easily provable anecdotes from those who support some kind of suppression of speech. I had a bit of a different take. I actually think even this simple statement is incredibly difficult to verify. First, we have to define what the Green New Deal even is. I don't mean this to be snarky, but even that is difficult. Then we have to define what support means. Does it mean positive comments in t…
Re: Twitter to ban political advertising
#545From what I recall Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez questioned Zuckerberg, she questioned along the anecdote of: If I purchase ads on Facebook saying Republicans support the Green New Deal (but they don't), will Facebook take the ads down? I often see these clean, easily provable anecdotes from those who support some kind of suppression of speech. I worry though: often the truthfulness of real world statements are difficu…
Quit trying to micro manage everyone.
Accept payment to publish messages on a competitive platform - and let readers, being mostly competent adults, figure content out themselves.
Re: Twitter to ban political advertising
#546Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does it? What if the government decides the earth is the center of the universe and imprisons the scientist who has observable proof that it isn’t? What’s if the government decides “encryption with backdoor is unsafe” is a false statement and suppresses all speech that says otherwise?
Slippery slope arguments like this are stupid because a government determined to be a bad actor isn't going to let a constitution stop them. Russia has a constitution, heck, Soviet Russia did. The reality of having laws against broadcasting lies is that they will be applied sensibly if the rest of the system is sensible - and if it is not, you have worse problems.
The problem with law enforcement is you need people to pay them and tell them what laws to enforce.
The problem with lawmakers is you need some means to determine who gets to make the laws.
The answer is the guy with more guns and pointy sticks. The guy with more guns gets to tell you that while you’re in his land, whatever land it is, you’re going to give him money or goods.
Social contract theory mitigates this to a degree, by specifying the method by which you select who the guy with the most guns is. Sometimes it’s more than one guy. Sometimes it is a lot of them, and they all counterbalance each other, but it doesn’t take away from the fact that what keeps them in power is a piece of paper and all the guns they’ll ever need to back up what it says on the paper. Everything else is norms and traditions and processes. This is power.
The problem with social contract theory is that the contract can say anything. You just need enough people with enough guns to agree that this contract serves their interests enough.
Well the US Constitution wasn’t written in a vacuum. It was written by, largely, Englishmen and some other Northern Europeans subject largely to English rule. They already had values and cultural norms and traditions, they just needed the document. Well they had one already, several actually, the Articles of Confederation and the Constitutions of every State. The Articles were not doing the job of serving the interests of the people, in the view of the framers and Madison in particular, and they swapped it out.
Now go read Article I. Examine the structure. There’s a selection process, and there’s minutia about procedure, and there are limitations. The Article I branch is Congress, it is the supreme authority of the government, not coequal with the Presidency or SCOTUS, you were lied to about that, but above them. If Congress were one guy and could speak with one voice, it could do almost anything, impeach and remove the President, any sitting Judge, any Officer of the government, amend the Constitution, and declare war at will.
These are very good reasons why Congress isn’t one voice, and it is many.
Now to get back to what you were saying, the problem with with laws against things like “broadcasting lies” is you don’t know that they will be applied sensibly. The more laws you have to begin with, then more rope you have to hang the citizenry.
The First Amendment, and for that matter the Second and Third, the reason they are as ironclad as they are is specifically to prevent abuses by the Federal Government. It was to appease the faction at the time known as the Anti-Federalists who felt, rightly in my opinion, is that the more guns you give the Federal Government, the more potential abuses for power because there will be (have been and are) who will attempt to co-opt the Federal Government to wield those guns.
Congress doesn’t need the power to determine what is a lie and what isn’t. You don’t need laws to punish liars. If you have faith in sensible systems, then the system you want to have faith in is the people. If you don’t have that, then you can’t have faith in Congress.
Re: Twitter to ban political advertising
#547Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course it is workable. You approve ads as they come in. If the marginal value of the ads isn't high enough to justify human review, you kill those ads. It might be expensive, but it's not impossible. Using "scale" as an out doesn't fly. Sometimes you have to cut back on growth and/or scale to do the right thing. No human review clearly hasn't worked, so either automate or get humans in there. More likely, start wi…
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I think one thing a lot of people don't realize is just how incredibly long the "long tail" is in self-service ads. I would not be surprised if more than 99% of potential ad impressions fall below the cost-effective-to-manually-review threshold. So requiring manual review on all ads is going to mean a lot more sacrifice than cutting back a little. It could mean a lot of these compani…
Even if they lose money by manually reviewing a small ad that was flagged as possibly political, it doesn't mean it costs more to review 1/100 low-volume ads. They're also paying to classify useful data to train their model.
Re: Twitter to ban political advertising
#548Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trying to make a slippery slope argument about a private corporations private, for-profit website is hilarious. Twitter will do whatever the hell it wants on its own property and has no obligation to listen to anyone except the voice of 51% of its shareholders. If you don't want your communications to be under the total absolute control of a corporate entity you have no influence over, you might want to pack your bag…
Im scared of such arguments. And im telling you as a libertarian. No, private companies should be regulated and shareholders cant be the only voice to be heard. I mean, what if starbucks shareholders decide that, lets say, african americans are no longer allowed to buy coffe on their shops. Would it be ok to allow it?
If the shareholders are motivated by religious belief? Great question. I'm afraid to consider how the supreme court would decide
Re: Twitter to ban political advertising
#549Re: Twitter to ban political advertising
#550From what I recall Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez questioned Zuckerberg, she questioned along the anecdote of: If I purchase ads on Facebook saying Republicans support the Green New Deal (but they don't), will Facebook take the ads down? I often see these clean, easily provable anecdotes from those who support some kind of suppression of speech. I worry though: often the truthfulness of real world statements are difficu…