141–150 of 1001 posts
It's your right to have an opinion, it's my right not to have to listen to it.
As Frederick Douglass, a former slave and writer, wisely stated, “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the right of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. It is just as criminal to rob a man of his right to speak and hear as it would be to rob him of his money.”
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So as a free-speech absolutist, would you let anyone walk into a Starbucks and start shouting about anything they wanted? Would it be okay for them to write a manifesto on the chalkboard next to the barista? Starbucks is a privately owned location and has the right to enforce behavioral standards or kick people out. Social Media is the same. Privately owned and can set their own standards. The internet has plenty of…
> So as a free-speech absolutist, would you let anyone walk into a Starbucks and start shouting about anything they wanted? Starbucks is on private property. > Would it be okay for them to write a manifesto on the chalkboard next to the barista? The Starbucks chalkboard is privately owned. >Social Media is the same. Privately owned and can set their own standards. No it isn't. Anyone can log into Twitter and Facebook…
Fine. Nationalize them, remove all advertising, open up all the source code and infrastructure, and let open cyberwarfare commence.
Important to note that this 5th Circuit ruling conflicts with the 11th Circuit's ruling. And SCOTUS had previously reinstated an injunction against this very same law. And this 5th Circuit opinion has very idiosyncratic reasoning [0, just the first few pages will blow your hair back]. A sample: "In urging such sweeping relief, the platforms offer a rather odd inversion of the First Amendment. That Amendment, of cours…
In one case the corporation is speaking. In the other the corporation is facilitating me speaking to you (like a telephone wire). That strikes me as a pretty clear distinction. My hair is not blown back at all here.
The opinion fails at this very basic fact because they want it to be false. Not because there's any law suggesting it is false, nor has there been in a hundred years, but because they dont like it they just decided to make it up.
The states do not get to change this. If you want something else pass an amendment, don't try to get a bunch of crazy unqualified judges to make a mess.
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Does the LUG have 50M MAU?
This is really the critical factor. Anti-speech pro-corporate-authority advocates always try to put these monopolistic, unescapable megacorporations in the same category as some local mom-and-pop operation. It's a massive intentional category error; megacorps are not little companies you can just walk awawy from. There is a point where a corporation's influence becomes so unescapable and so capable of greatly degradi…
If Comcast owned practically the only ISP in my area then yes they should be considered a common carrier and shouldn't be able to discriminate traffic that isn't trying to break their stuff. In that case they would be the company that owns the roads or the water mains. Facebook isn't like that in the slightest.
Hacker News avoids political discussion, would this mean a site like hacker news(assuming it’s big enough) couldn’t moderate heated political discussion as off topic? Im curious how this would apply to Reddit, will there just be constant brigading of the political forums? Ironically as others have pointed out this will probably have a severe chilling effect on speech.
There are many offenses that are not strictly viewpoint. Unruly behavior could be one of those.
If this passes, basically what's going to happen is a lot of pre-filtering of people entering social networks akin to next doors strategy. I've worked at a civic tech social network that had no rules, and eventually the extremists pushed out all the normal folks - it's just stupid shouting matches. We tore it all down and made isolated communities. It's basically the only way to have real discourse.
It already passed, it's a law on the books in Texas. And now it's been upheld at by both trial and circuit courts. FWIW: there's one last chance at SCOTUS to undo this, but if that doesn't work out what we're almost certain to see instead of "pre-filtering" is just "No Tweeting from Texas".
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It's kinda interesting how a world like "no tweeting from Texas" might jive with EU laws which want to restrict IO and data storage to just inside the region or country. Are we about to get more decentralized just because the laws are accidentally forcing us to? Imagine connecting to EU or Texas Twitter to see what's going on there.
Oh, it’s not accidental.
If this passes, basically what's going to happen is a lot of pre-filtering of people entering social networks akin to next doors strategy. I've worked at a civic tech social network that had no rules, and eventually the extremists pushed out all the normal folks - it's just stupid shouting matches. We tore it all down and made isolated communities. It's basically the only way to have real discourse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does the LUG have 50M MAU?
This is really the critical factor. Anti-speech pro-corporate-authority advocates always try to put these monopolistic, unescapable megacorporations in the same category as some local mom-and-pop operation. It's a massive intentional category error; megacorps are not little companies you can just walk awawy from. There is a point where a corporation's influence becomes so unescapable and so capable of greatly degradi…
If I can’t use Facebook, I can use Reddit. If I can’t use YouTube, I can use Vimeo. If I can’t use Instagram, I can use TikTok or Snapchat. If conservatives get banned from Twitter, there’s a bevy of conservative-leaning Twitter clones. Plus Mastodon, which you can’t get banned from because you can just set up your own instance.
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It will result in way higher moderation, instead of less. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/section-230-good-actua...
I want smaller, tighter knit, and moderated communites. Why do we care about outcome anyway? The outcome of section 230 was arbitrary moderation, consolidation, and surveillance capitalism. It is unnatural for an entity to not be liable for what they publish.