671–680 of 996 posts
The rationale they gave is that hate speech appears on these apps, because some of the microblogging sites that can be accessed via Fediverse have this kind of content. Based on this rationale, I look forward to Google Play removing Chrome, Firefox, and all other web browsers from the store as well.
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>If your site has been overrun by ultra-far-right types for basically its entire existence and you do nothing to mitigate this then you're very clearly complicit. How do you mitigate without running counter to the original idea of "free speeech"?
One thing is free speech, another thing is hate speech. You can't have anti-semitic, racist, homophobic speech without breaking some laws
>Hate speech in the United States is not regulated due to the robust right to free speech found in the American Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that hate speech is legally protected free speech under the First Amendment. The most recent Supreme Court case on the issue was in 2017, when the justices unanimously reaffirmed that there is effectively no "hate speech" exception to the free speech rights protected by the First Amendment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...
Hate speech in the United States is not regulated by any government. Google is considered by the courts to be non-governmental, so the courts will not prevent Google from regulating hate speech on the platforms it owns as Google sees fit.
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>If your site has been overrun by ultra-far-right types for basically its entire existence and you do nothing to mitigate this then you're very clearly complicit. How do you mitigate without running counter to the original idea of "free speeech"?
One thing is free speech, another thing is hate speech. You can't have anti-semitic, racist, homophobic speech without breaking some laws
In what jurisdiction? In the US, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action is a very high bar to clear, compared to other countries.
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> If the feds mandate the censoring on a private medium, I don't think it makes it legal FCC regulation of TV broadcast comes close, but apparently obscenity isn't protected under the First Amendment (perhaps you can tell I'm not a lawyer, or for that matter an American). https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/obscene-indecent-and-pr...
Yeah, there is this vague idea that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to certain categories of speech (yelling “Fire” in a crowded theater is the classic example) that get stretched to fit this sort of thing.
The is the first I (as well as others here, apparently) had ever heard of the "fediverse". Wikipedia [1] helps me out with what it is technically... but can anyone who knows describe what its content is actually like? In terms of hate speech or illegal content... does that make up the vast majority of fediverse content, in the way that pirated media makes up the vast majority of torrents? (Even though torrents can al…
However, anyone can create an instance in the Fediverse, like when Gab created their own Mastodon instance. Basically every other instance chose not to federate with them, though.
That's what is nice about the Fediverse, you can pick what community with what rules is best for you.
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>If your site has been overrun by ultra-far-right types for basically its entire existence and you do nothing to mitigate this then you're very clearly complicit. How do you mitigate without running counter to the original idea of "free speeech"?
It's not at all clear what "the original idea of 'free speech'" even was . In the US, the wording of the First Amendment is quite vague. I think people have a mental model that social media sites and apps are like a communication medium. They are a neutral carrier that transmits an idea X from person A to B. The site itself is not "tainted" by the content of X or get involved in the choices of A and B. But a more acc…
> Like hate speech is bad and it’s not censorship if it’s not mandated by the government. To be fully accurate, this is absolutely censorship , but it's not a violation of anyone's First Amendment rights. People often conflate the two. We can argue about whether or not Google should ban certain opinions on their platform, or where the line should be drawn, but it is arguable that hey have the legal right to do so. An…
I take your point about legality. But, I'd make the point that we don't have a clear moral or legal concept of free speech that relates to the current world.
"We can argue about whether or not Google should ban certain opinions on their platform, or where the line should be drawn, but it is arguable that hey have the legal right to do so."
At some point, the distinction between legal and moral breaks down.
In theory, google could legally do quite a lot. Say google decides to censor all mentions of the tiananmen square rising. They could remove it from search, youtube, android phones, chrome. Gmail could spam filter emails mentioning it. They could exert influence outside of companies/services that they own directly. None of that is illegal (at least not unconstitutional). In practice, this is very close to what China does with the great firewall.
It also wouldn't stand. Something like this would be too contradictory to the moral concept of free speech.
Constitutions are interpreted, and the supreme court is not the only interpreter. It's a cultural construct as well as a legal one.
We are effectively at this point now. Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc... These aren't platforms in the way newspapers were. They're not platforms at all. They're the level ground, in terms of speech, press, the right to petition the government or practice religion. The reasons that amendment was written runs through google.
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The thing is, any service that offers a "censorship-free" alternative will instantly attract mostly by those whose content is garbage for everyone else: usually it's pedophiles until the operators get a couple not-so-nice letters or a police raid and then at least introduce modest moderation, and then come Nazis, antisemites and conspiracy myth peddlers. And said hate peddlers then complain that they don't have the r…
> usually it's pedophiles until the operators get a couple not-so-nice letters or a police raid and then at least introduce modest moderation You're describing illegal content. Nobody is objecting to taking that down. Everyone else is talking about censoring legal content.
There was very little sign of intelligence. I had no urge to go back.
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That's a clever trick. Make the medium you want to censor a private property than it's legal.
Or another trick, just place it in another country and then you don't have to worry about the 1st amendment at all, and no I'm not talking about China. UK or Australia will do just fine.
The constitution doesn't apply to a location or a medium, it applies to an actor: the US government (and state/local subdivisions). The US government has to follow it everywhere, and nobody else has to follow it anywhere.