191–200 of 335 posts
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In what world is Twitter a monopoly? Its market cap is $36B. That's 2X less than Snap and 20X less than Facebook.
It is a communication monopoly.
It's funny. If a direct popular vote was held on making publicly-funded research freely available, it would pass by a staggering margin. Yet here we are, many easily-solvable issues ignored by government officials later, pretending representative democracy is a valid form of democracy.
With politicans it is easy to hide behind partisan idealogy to justify that everything is fine.
The more regular, relatively apolitical accounts are getting banned, the more people realize that something is wrong with the way Twitter acts.
Twitter has no business inserting itself into a dispute between Elbakyan and Elsevier et al. Few people would have issues if Twitter shut down the Sci-Hub account after they received a valid court order, but a private monopolist cannot be trusted to be the arbiter of what is permitted speech.
@dick said recently in an interview that these are geo-political decisions. That they might've did the calculus of losing advertising money but it's not the predominate reason [1].
[1] - I can't find this source. I find it weird that I can't search my history to find it. It was in an interview with either Bloomberg or WSJ.
P.S. The interview was in relation to Trump being banned but I think his response applies to Sci_Hub because these are intentional decisions, not from an AI/automated system.
I don't support piracy. So I don't support Sci-hub. But I believe that publishers are bilking the public and that publicly funded research should be made freely available. The real way to fix this is to disrupt the reputational incentives academics (and deans supporting this) have to keep publishing in these journals. For some reason, I think this is an unpopular opinion on HN.
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> This isn't about speech, it's copyright infringement. Are they committing copyright infringement on Twitter?
They're an organization who's purpose is to commit copyright infringement. They don't have to be doing the infringement on twitter itself for twitter to reasonably suspend them. Again, they suspend them to prevent the platform being inevitably used for direct infringement or to be used as a guide on where/how to participate in the infringement. Twitter may not be responsible for user content as per section 230 but it…
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Thundering voice from the heavens above: THOU SHALT NOT LIE! edit: just cited THE supralegal authority here, regarding fake nyuz...
It is a common misconception that "Thou shalt not lie" is a divine commandment from God. You're probably thinking of "Thou shalt not bear false witness against your neighbor" (Exodus 20:16), which is more specific.
Twitter has no business inserting itself into a dispute between Elbakyan and Elsevier et al. Few people would have issues if Twitter shut down the Sci-Hub account after they received a valid court order, but a private monopolist cannot be trusted to be the arbiter of what is permitted speech.
It all boils down to this: a) Should twitter be allowed to cancel accounts who harm twitter? If yes: b) Who decides which accounts harm twitter? If the answer is "twitter", then they have effectively the right to terminate any account at their will. I don't know what other answer is possible for b) except maybe "the courts", and I'm not sure I like that one. If the answer to a) is no, for which companies does this ap…
I think perhaps a legislative approach to monopoly should be nationalizing rather than breaking up. Monopolies can be valuable for consumers if their claws are trimmed.
100th reminder to stop using Twitter and to stop acting like it's an acceptable medium of communication.