751–760 of 781 posts
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Fine, let the court of public opinion decide. Alex Jones is banned from Youtube. People, largely, do not give a shit. Now try banning gay people from a resturant. Good luck with that. And in many jurisdictions it is illegal to discriminate over sexual orientation. There is no such law protecting conspiracy theorists.
Your argument is juvenile and fails to address the point
I think we're done here.
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Count Dankula was a big case as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Meechan#Arrest
He was arrested and convicted for literally saying "gas the jews". That is inciting violence, and a very clear case of hate speech.
Hate speech involves intent. Here he used "gas the jews" as a means to project intent on a pug to make a cute pug Nazi. The joke is that a cute pug is a Nazi, and the joke would not work if that wasn't considered that a bad thing. The point of the video is "Nazi = bad".
Jesus, what a brain dead ruling.
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The challenge with giving an equal platform to bad-faith disinformation artists like Alex Jones is that it's simply not a fair fight. Respectable news reporting organizations are bound by an obligation to research and vet their stories. People like Alex Jones are not, and they can look 95% as slickly presented as a "real" news organization for 1% of the cost and 0% of the moral obligations. They can churn this stuff…
> Respectable news reporting organizations are bound by an obligation to research and vet their stories. Bound by whom ? Where is this obligation written? Who holds them to it? What are the consequences if they break it? Or more to the point: what consequences have they suffered for the fact that they have already broken this obligation over and over again over the past decades?
1. The mainstream news sources have messed up lots of times. (I would argue that their success rate is very high, though)
2. The mainstream news are largely ad-supported and therefore their entire line of work is a bit of a minefield of conflicts of interest.
That said...
They are not perfect, but comparing them to a disinformation merchant like Alex Jones is an absolute farce.
Stories at "real" news organizations are vetted by multiple members of the staff. They make corrections. This cannot be said of wack jobs like Alex Jones. They are not even in the same league in terms of good-faith effort to get things right.
Bound by whom? Where is this obligation written?
Who holds them to it? What are the consequences
if they break it?
Two -- and perhaps more tangibly -- traditionally in mainstream media, reporters caught fabricating stories or otherwise being unethical essentially forfeited their careers.
You can see both of those factors at work in the story of Jayson Blair, a reporter who was caught fabricating stories for the NYT.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair#Later_career
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/us/correcting-the-record-...
Yes, the NYT was duped. Embarrassingly. But the system worked. They conducted a pretty intense internal investigation to catch the guy. They caught him. They set the record straight. They admitted they screwed up. In that one instance they displayed more journalistic integrity than you'd see from Alex Jones in a lifetime.
And what happened to Jayson Blair? As I said above, his journalism career was over.
You can point out problems with "traditional" news organizations, and I'll agree with many of them, and they are still miles better than conspiracy hacks with zero journalistic scruples.
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I hate Alex Jones, but I have to agree. There's a difference between being kicked out of a restaurant for being an ass, vs being kicked out of EVERY restaurant on Earth for the rest of your life - without due process. These online services aren't small mom/pop shops that you can just replace and patronize another. They are global near-monopolies that you cannot function without. Google isn't just my search provider -…
> I hate Alex Jones, but I have to agree. There's a difference between being kicked out of a restaurant for being an ass, vs being kicked out of EVERY restaurant on Earth for the rest of your life - without due process. That's a bit of a straw man, no? Jones still has plenty of perfectly-functioning restaurants to visit, with quite extensive menus. If one of the biggest assholes on the internet still has a platform t…
> That's a choice you've made...
No, not really. Because my argument (perhaps wrongly) focused on Google, but it's still true that I have to choose a major near-monopoly corporation to do email, mobile, social media, telephone service, cloud, etc...
There are no alternatives. Have you ever tried to stand up your own email server? You can't. Google won't even relay the emails.
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I hate Alex Jones, but I have to agree. There's a difference between being kicked out of a restaurant for being an ass, vs being kicked out of EVERY restaurant on Earth for the rest of your life - without due process. These online services aren't small mom/pop shops that you can just replace and patronize another. They are global near-monopolies that you cannot function without. Google isn't just my search provider -…
A more apt comparison is being banned from every bar/pub in town for causing issues, without due process and without having set foot in some of them. Which is perfectly fine and acceptable
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I hate Alex Jones, but I have to agree. There's a difference between being kicked out of a restaurant for being an ass, vs being kicked out of EVERY restaurant on Earth for the rest of your life - without due process. These online services aren't small mom/pop shops that you can just replace and patronize another. They are global near-monopolies that you cannot function without. Google isn't just my search provider -…
I think you missed the parent's point. I read it as, "if you get kicked out of every restaurant on the planet, it might be your fault." Of course there are protections for certain classes of people based on their attributes or fundamentals, but society can call your bullshit out.
If I say someone is punished unfairly, it's probably because they deserved it?
Maybe you should tell that to a rape victim some time.
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I hate Alex Jones, but I have to agree. There's a difference between being kicked out of a restaurant for being an ass, vs being kicked out of EVERY restaurant on Earth for the rest of your life - without due process. These online services aren't small mom/pop shops that you can just replace and patronize another. They are global near-monopolies that you cannot function without. Google isn't just my search provider -…
So where were you when the Isis videos were taken off YouTube and ISIS twitter accounts were deleted? The thing is the outcry always only comes when companies don't want to be associated with some right-wing nutjobs hate speech, while I never hear the same people shouting that ISIS promo videos should not be taken down because of censorship. If all censorship is always bad, why not complain about those cases? Call me…
That's a pretty soft shell you have.
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Well actually yes, you very clearly could. Perhaps the restaurant is in a religiously conservative community and people won't eat there with their children if the restaurant has openly gay couples in attendance. So the gay couples being in the restaurant could negatively impact business. What law prevents this? I'm not sure there is one in most of the U.S. Twitter and Reddit's opinion aren't so far law. So the bottom…
> About 20 states, including New York and California, have enacted laws that prohibit discrimination in public accommodations based on sexual orientation https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/the-right-to-refuse-servi... You learned something today!
I also thought these laws were more prevalent then they actually are until I looked into it.
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Why do you think I’m talking about the US? There’s a whole world out there.
In that case "We" haven't decided anything at all what you suggest. But now you and I are in the weeds. I hope you see my point, that's all. Discrimination isn't good. Even if you don't agree with the other party.
Discrimination isn’t good and propping it up in the name of free speech is gross.