Earlier quoted context omitted.
This makes the false assumption that authoritarians won't abuse the system simply because non-authoritarians didn't. Authoritarians gonna make up their own authority regardless.
> Authoritarians gonna make up their own authority regardless. I think they’ll try to, but not always succeed. They will definitely use and abuse any existing powers. So I think it’s logically unsound, and quite sad to me, to argue that it’s pointless to resist allowing powers that can be exploited because authoritarians will do it anyway.
Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship
381–390 of 600 posts
Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship
#382Take what you support and imagine it used against you in the worst possible ways. Do you still support it? If yes, then it is worth supporting. If it's not, then maybe you're only supporting it because of who it currently helps or harms. This exercise also works with things that you don't support.
This applies to policing in general of all kinds? Isn't this literally an "abolish the police" argument? After all, imagine the police used against you in the worst possible way ..
Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They will definitely use and abuse any existing powers. They'll also abuse new powers, particularly known-but-unused powers. My point is that it's better to make the best rules you can for now, rather than limit yourself simply because a bad guy will someday make it worse. They'll make it worse regardless.
> They'll also abuse new powers, particularly known-but-unused powers. Sounds recently familiar. I watched my state, city, ward, public health office and everyone in between or associated to “discover” new powers as a result of Covid. My state did not do comparatively well over 2020. All we had to do we what was logical and we could have made these decisions early.
The Spanish flu was a thing way back when
Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship
#384Take what you support and imagine it used against you in the worst possible ways. Do you still support it? If yes, then it is worth supporting. If it's not, then maybe you're only supporting it because of who it currently helps or harms. This exercise also works with things that you don't support.
This applies to policing in general of all kinds? Isn't this literally an "abolish the police" argument? After all, imagine the police used against you in the worst possible way ..
Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did they?
Yes. > We are in regular touch with these social media platforms, and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff > https://www.newsweek.com/biden-administrations-admission-the... Psaki also discussed how they're building blacklists of people so that if you get banned on one platform, you also get banned on all of the other platforms.
Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
He had a highly curable type of pancreatic cancer.
This is absolutely incorrect, he had islet cell neuroendocrine cancer, which is a much less common form of pancreatic cancer. "Highly curable pancreatic cancer" is a totally ludicrous statement. The prognosis of these type of tumor is highly variable and he lived a pretty long time with it regardless. He did not 'disregard "the medical elite" and went on an all-fruit diet', he had the tumor removed[0] nearly 20 years…
While Jobs did undergo surgery, he waited 9 months and didn't get surgery until after the cancer had spread. I don't see amy credible medical claims that this dis not have an impact on his survival.
> But Jobs refused surgery after diagnosis and for nine months after, favoring instead dietary treatments and other alternative methods...By the time Jobs finally opted for surgery, the cancer had spread. [0]
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2011/10/24/steve-j...
Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's the real issue in all of this discussion: there is simply no will. It's too hard, it's too impossible, we've decided big tech has already won, we've ceded decades of open progress in tech to moguls who don't give the fuck about us, or we're so ideological that any step to the "left" or "right" is perceived as abdicating principles of freedom. My gp was a former-Jew (thanks anti-semites) that flew over…
I'm sorry but I don't quite understand how Reddit--a bastion for young 20-somethings, among which leftism is a major demographic, could ever be construed as a Q-Anon stronghold. I feel as though this may more reflect your fears than the state of the site, and I feel as though so reflexively writing off a population that already largely agree with you illumines the opposite argument--that reaction to speech is largely…
I didn't call it a stronghold. There are certain subreddits that were aligned. The donald before it moved, conspiracy, conservative, etc. You ever see the greatawakening subreddit where they were acting like Trump was giving secret messages in speeches and calling for executions?
If that exists on a site with leftism as a major demographic, what does it look like elsewhere? You're making my point for me.
BTW, one of the longest-running mods of conspiracy that finally got banned has admitted that they are a Russian national. Not that this means anything, but it's interesting that a subreddit could be dominated by an individual with such strong beliefs about politics in another country.
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/r-conspiracy-axolotl-peyotl-b...
To give context, I'm very much what some people would mock as an "enlightened centrist" (I felt so sad when I realized this is bad?). I think much of the "hateful mistinformation" is actually more aligned torwards the left. I can't read a thread about pitbulls or my home state without people frothing at the mouth and acting like my dog should be put down today or that my state is an ISIS stronghold.
But consitutionally? If someone is being an asshole on your property, it's your right to kick them off.
Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship
#388A lot of the discussion around censorship devolves to "it's a private company, they can do whatever". While this has already been proven to be a false idea based on the comments from the White House actively telling private companies which posts/users to take down, I would also like to share how things happen in China: "People in the U.S. seem able to recognize that China’s censorship of the internet is bad. They say…
> While this has already been proven to be a false idea based on the comments from the White House actively telling private companies which posts/users to take down No, it hasn't. A government office telling private actors what it cobsiders to be misinformation and would like not relayed is not state censorship as long as there is no compulsory process. A private party can certainly use “I trust the government, and t…
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/biden-administration...
On top of this, they have already threatened the companies during the hearings that if they don't take it down, then they will get actioned. Plus Biden even called social media companies murderers.
"Congressional Democrats have repeatedly made explicit threats to social-media giants if they failed to censor speech those lawmakers disfavored. In April 2019, Louisiana Rep. Cedric Richmond warned Facebook and Google that they had “better” restrict what he and his colleagues saw as harmful content or face regulation: “We’re going to make it swift, we’re going to make it strong, and we’re going to hold them very accountable.” New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler added: “Let’s see what happens by just pressuring them.”"
This is literally what makes them state actors. I don't know what more they need to do for you to prove they are state actors. There's also precedent from Supreme Court.
"For more than half a century courts have held that governmental threats can turn private conduct into state action. In Bantam Books v. Sullivan (1963), the Supreme Court found a First Amendment violation when a private bookseller stopped selling works state officials deemed “objectionable” after they sent him a veiled threat of prosecution. In Carlin Communications v. Mountain States Telephone & Telegraph Co. (1987), the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found state action when an official induced a telephone company to stop carrying offensive content, again by threat of prosecution."
"As the Second Circuit held in Hammerhead Enterprises v. Brezenoff (1983), the test is whether “comments of a government official can reasonably be interpreted as intimating that some form of punishment or adverse regulatory action will follow the failure to accede to the official’s request.” Mr. Richmond’s comments, along with many others, easily meet that test. Notably, the Ninth Circuit held it didn’t matter whether the threats were the “real motivating force” behind the private party’s conduct; state action exists even if he “would have acted as he did independently.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/save-the-constitution-from-big-...
Bantam Books v. Sullivan (1963):
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/378/bantam-book...
Carlin Communications v. Mountain States Telephone & Telegraph Co. (1987):
https://openjurist.org/827/f2d/1291/carlin-communications-in...
Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship
#389I'm not concerned. If I ran a platform serving out qanon BS I'd ban and log their details. Terrorists don't get protections from a private company, nor should they. People don't understand just how insane these groups of people have become. Without FBI interference these terrorist groups would have murdered multiple state governors and carried out plenty of bombings. I'm not going to "be neutral" to such people. 1. G…
>Plenty more that I can't remember off the top of my head. You should familiarize yourself with the rest of post-War 20th century history in the United States, then. Far, far more deadly and dangerous "conspiracy theories" existed before the internet and caused actual deaths of sitting politicians. It's the Presentism of all of this that is making people forget how pernicious it is, letting these powerful organizatio…
Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Because uh, right now, we have Nazis. We do not, in fact, have Nazis. Allow me to re-phrase: Yes, censorship is bad, but which is worse: admitting a little bit of censorship, or Islamic Terrorists? Because uh, right now, we have Islamic Terrorists. At least one was real in the last couple decades.
It is an ironclad fact that more Americans have been killed by right-wing domestic terrorists than by Islamic terrorists since 9/11.