281–286 of 286 posts
The EU would be the first to ban all discussion by its critics. I'm paying taxes so that they can daily serve me Youtube and Twitter ads of how wonderful the EU is. I can't imagine such propaganda in the USA.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why the US government also sets limits on what private companies and their customers can do to restrict each other's freedoms. Under these democratically deliberated laws, Parler has as much freedom to use Twitter & Facebook as you have freedom to do use my lawn. The principle still holds even if every neighbor in your neighborhood hates you and denies you access to their lawn; The scope & scale of their lawn…
The thing I wrote about freedom has nothing to do with US or Parler or Facebook. It's a general observation that restraint of locally strongest entity doesn't necessarily give you more freedom. It can (and often does) give you less. And when it comes to Parler my concern was Amazon, not Twitter and Facebook. Why should hosting provider be able to choose whom he provides basic infrastructure? Was Parler illegal conten…
The ability to host stuff yourself on the internet is, however, a freedom I consider to be basic and necessary, so I do support net neutrality and related legislation that classify ISPs as utilities.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd need quite a long list of companies to work together at the social network level for that to be true. If you go lower in the stack, like ISP's it becomes much easier.
What's the point of arguing if companies are able to limit free speech in theory when they just did so in practice?
Whether what they actually did is “limiting free speech” or not is, in fact, part of what is in dispute.
Obviously, if one grants the argument that that accurately describes the events that occurred, it becomes indefensible to argue that it is not within the power of corporations to do it. But that is very much not a point of consensus.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A functioning democratic government is accountable to its people, while a private corporation is only accountable to its shareholders. Depending what you believe politically either, none or both could be true. Ultimately free markets can work against societal good just as much as an overly stringent and unaccountable government. Maximally accountable government and a moderately and fairly regulated market seems to be…
The difference between a government and a corporation is that people can stop buying at any time and you can have plenty of choices. A democratic government is elected every X years and you have a very limited set of choices. It's plenty of time to forget about mistakes and that's too little choice to have accountable candidates.
I would say this - there's a good argument that our representatives are WAY WAY out of touch, simply because we don't have enough of them. In 1790 there was 1 congressperson per 33,000 people, and now it is per 800,000 people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_ap...
If you had a congressperson with 1/20th of the constituents, they'd probably pay a lot more attention to you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was a disingenuous quote, you merged parts of two different sentences as if they were one.
No it's not. The ellipses in the middle are sufficient to denote that there is a trimmed portion of the quote, especially as this is a threaded post and you only need to scroll slightly up to see the unmodified original. There's no misapplied meaning created from the cut either, as the final parenthetical unambiguously clarifies that the subjects of the former sentence were part of the group of subjects in the latter…