281–290 of 434 posts
So long as their speech remains legal, social media sites should not be the business of censoring elected officials. That is the job of voters and Congress. It’s too easy to walk down a slippery slope where suddenly these sites have to regulate in accordance with whatever is the popular opinion of the day.
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So people you know are thinking wrong, which shouldn't be allowed? You know this line of reasoning has a long and storied history.
So does not cracking down on hate speech and incitement to violence. Imagine tut-tutting if the Rwandan government had cracked down on radio broadcasts calling Tutsi people cockroaches and encouraging Hutus to chop them down.
If anything they would have cracked down on opposing broadcasts by claiming that, since Tutsis are the historically privileged beneficiaries of colonialism who were collectively responsible for the violent oppression of Hutus, any pro-Tutsi or anti-anti-Tutsi sentiment was unconscionable hate speech while any pro-Hutu or anti-Tutsi bigotry was not technically racism. The power to ban “hate speech” is the power to define “hate speech” and hateful people will use against you the very same weapons you propose to fight them with.
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>social media sites should not be the business of censoring elected officials. That is the job of voters and Congress. What about Paul Nehlen, a political candidate who (before he was permabanned) frequently railed on Twitter against the "Jewish media" and mused about the "JQ", which stands for Jewish Question? Who called Jewish critics "shekels-for-hire" and used the phrase "The goyim know!" as an imitation of their…
The GP specified elected official, not candidate.
So long as their speech remains legal, social media sites should not be the business of censoring elected officials. That is the job of voters and Congress. It’s too easy to walk down a slippery slope where suddenly these sites have to regulate in accordance with whatever is the popular opinion of the day.
Employees I spoke with did not seem particularly moved by these answers. "Everyone's grateful we have a chance to address these things directly with him," one told me. "At the same time, no one thinks he gave a single real answer."
Another said Zuckerberg appeared "really scared" on the call. "I think he fears his employees turning on him," the employee said. "At least that's what I got from facial expressions and tone."
At the same time, another employee told me that Zuckerberg's decision was supported by the majority of the company, but that people who agreed with it were afraid to speak out for fear of appearing insensitive. (An employee who spoke on the call echoed this point.)"
So much for "free speech" within Facebook, the company. In this case, "popular opinion" cannot be shared openly.
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> Social media is a not a public square where people can plant their soapbox Except there isn't really an alternative to Twitter - they have monopolised that "short catchy text stream" market. Other services, like Gab, exist - but when services like Cloudflare readily pull support for less mainstream alternatives, its hard to say that if you don't like Twitter you can go somewhere else. For better or worse, Facebook…
> but when services like Cloudflare readily pull support for less mainstream alternatives What has Cloudflare pulled support for, except the one neonazi site that made them vow never to do it again?
[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8chan/
If Facebook and Zuckerberg personally did not profit from such acidic and destructive kind of free speech they would fix that pronto, it's as simple as that and it appears fruitless to me to spend a lot of words to counterargue them without considering this. Karl Popper would be going nuts by now were he alive today, I'm afraid.
https://about.fb.com/news/2015/03/explaining-our-community-s...
"Free speech" is a very nuanced term. You can't shout "fire" in a crowd unless there's a fire; and you can't force me to distribute anything. Traditional media (TV, Newspapers, Radio, Publishers) always use discretion about what they print and broadcast. A TV station deciding not to broadcast something, or a publisher declining to publish something, is not censorship. IMO, Social Media is not like a generic web hosti…
I remember seeing that “yelling fire in a crowded theater” was technically untrue as it is usually presented. Anyone with more knowledge can elaborate?
- It was a non-binding side comment (dicta) not particularly grounded in existing law on the decision it was presented.
- It was presented in a decision that has since been overturned in effect which is notorious as one allowing government prosecution of core political speech “because socialism”.
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> provably false statements Herein lies the rub. It’s extremely rare that a politician is tweeting about something so black-and-white that the tweet can be provably true or false. There is almost always a gray area between fact and opinion. In fact, people tend to vote for politicians because they agree with their interpretation and prioritization of a set of facts. So I think you’ll find the vast majority of politic…
You're right. "No factual basis" might be a better standard. The claims Trump made had no factual basis. Twitter's addendum highlighted that fact. Nothing more. I can't believe that people are criticizing an organization for exercising it's right to free speech. Like this wasn't even a case of removal of content. It was literally taking a sign and sticking another sign below it. It's something that the government wou…
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This was the real eye opener for me over the past 5 or 10 years. I used to be firmly in the "no censorship" camp, but it seems an alarming number Americans (I'm American and can't speak for any other nation) are not capable of using critical thinking when it comes to political issue that they've already made up their minds about. Close friends and family included. I don't know the answer to this problem, but it seems…
So people you know are thinking wrong, which shouldn't be allowed? You know this line of reasoning has a long and storied history.
Also what that poster did say--and I agree--is that people lack critical thinking skills and have not developed immunity to flat-out bullshit. There's a huge education pipeline problem and our society is at risk because its normal resistance would be to have voters that can think for themselves. Things like flat earth and moon landing conspiracy theories don't need to be "not allowed", they just wouldn't take hold if people could think through basic logic.