301–310 of 335 posts
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.
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Just because you have the legal right to do something doesn't mean you should do it or that you should be immune to criticism for doing it. For example, in an at-will employment state, an employer can legally fire you for looking at them funny. No one would argue that an employer shouldn't have the right to terminate an employee if they were bad for the company, nor would anyone object to the employer being able to d…
Seems like a bad analogy. I would absolutely argue an employer shouldn't be allowed to fire you for any reason of their choosing
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It's crazy isn't it? This community thinks Apple and Google are monopolies despite being competitors, ditto Twitter and Facebook. Microsoft isn't though. Not because they don't completely own the Desktop PC market just as they ever did, but because that market is less relevant than it used to be for web devs. I live in a strange time.
You live in a town with no fresh water, and the only drinks available are sold by the local store. This store does not sell bottled water, wine, orange juice, milk, or tea. The only drinks it sells are Coca-Cola and Pepsi. But if you don't like Coca-Cola, just buy Pepsi - how silly it would be to complain of monopoly when you still have a choice!
Sounds like the plot of Idiocracy.
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Moral and legal are different. I think Sci-Hub is ethical. I'm under no illusions that this somehow makes it legal. Sci-Hub explicitly bills itself as a "pirate website." Twitter's rules explicitly ban both copyright violation and illegal activities. Therefore Sci-Hub is violation of Twitter's rules. Twitter may well be very selective in their enforcement, but the fact that Sci-Hub is violating Twitter's rules is not…
What about The Pirate Bay account? Should it be banned as well?
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What do you think about not nuking 230, but making its protections reliant on specific conduct? We can sidestep the 1A issue altogether since these companies would do anything to avoid being held responsible for the libelous, harassing, defamatory, threatening and sometimes terroristic content that their users post every day. That is nothing short of a gift given by the government, and it can be modified or restricte…
230 isn’t a gift to Twitter, it’s a gift to us. A world where 230 was restricted in the way you describe wouldn’t see Twitter agree to one of your two modes. They’d opt to instead take a heavy hammer to anything even remotely objectionable, so-as to avoid having to deal with any of the controls on your list. It’s also not clear to me why we’d expect a private company to have to answer to you or me or anybody else abo…
Put plainly, I do not believe it is possible for a social network to moderate hard or fast enough at Facebook/Twitter scale to reject section 230 immunity. Even if they took the step of pre-moderating all content before it appears on the site, there is simply too much content coming in for that to be a realistic option (and not lose a ton of users due to the delay putting people off).
To give you an idea of the scale we're talking about, Twitter does about 500,000,000 tweets per day.
>It’s also not clear to me why we’d expect a private company to have to answer to you or me or anybody else about decisions they make.
They answer to society at the end of the day, which can express its desires via the legal system. If society tires of social networks acting as unaccountable gatekeepers to the national conversation, society can act.
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.
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What about The Pirate Bay account? Should it be banned as well?
For that matter, what about the Pirate Party?
Which countries' laws? It's kind of illegal in civilized countries to decapitate homosexuals. Will twitter ban this account now: https://twitter.com/ksamofaen?lang=en They're kind of for it.
Anyway as Matt Levine points out everything is securities fraud nowadays so when any of these decisions burn the share price even a bit, they'll get a class action to deal with. Not sure that's the right way to deal with this sort of thing at all but here we are.
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you are mixing up net neutrality and a platform. Net Neutrality ensures that ISP do what the name says, providing Internet service without interfering with it, like restricting which sites you can visit. A platform like twitter, facebook, parler. Is something that was created from scratch and is owned by these companies. As of now it's not their duty to allow everyone in. And enforcing it is stepping on their freedom…
If U.S. government provided a platform, then these "free speech" claims might have a basis in law. IMO, the issues would be easier to grapple with. Instead these enourmous websites are filling what is now an obvious void in public services for communication. Perhaps I should not have used the term "common carrier" as that term has very specific meaning, and only in certain jurisdictions. What I mean is common carrier…
Having the government provide the platform would create a huge burden on one entity to moderate content. Any mistake would be magnified 1000x what they are now. It would end free speech as we know it and would be very expensive.
Instead we encourage businesses to moderate their own content and compete for a userbase. That allows platforms to evolve on their own dime with incremental changes that satisfy their respective userbases.
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What’s your alternative method to reach a mass audience?
Is our collective imagination really so stunted that we cannot conceive of what the world was like before Twitter existed?
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For most academic researchers, publishing is a net cost: they aren't getting royalties when people pay to read their work. "Piracy" of these documents does not deprive the creators of anything. The only entities it hurts are the organizations of questionable social value who exist by gatekeeping this information.
No one is putting the proverbial gun to academic researchers heads to use these publishers.
You have metrics. You pulish with the parasites, they're bigger than with some open-source journal nobody has heard of. Your career progression relies on getting published by the "most prestigious" journal.
You want your work read. Everybody in your field read parasite journal A, there isn't a good substitute. You're stuffed.
You don't get to decide. You're one author. the head of school had decided for you.
I can go on. The parasitic publishers are /hated/ by everybody. They provide nothing at all of value. They have been a very successful example of rent-seeking through the puchase of prestige titles then jacking up the subscription prices.
You underestimate the level of hatred accross the political spectrum from socialist to libertarian of these parasitic (insert metaphor here).
The gun they have to the head isn't perfect. They will go but they continue to extract a vast amount of rent on the way down.