161–170 of 783 posts
This thread baffles me. There are a lot of replies that either didn’t read the article (or even the headline) that seem to be government apologists, or arguing that a particular email isn’t coercive enough, etc. A court found that the government abused its power and infringes on people’s first amendment rights by using its intimidation power to coerce social media to censor free speech of citizens. Freedom of speech…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'd look at it the same as a police officer demanding things. The Government cannot demand that political speech be censored without running afoul of the First Amendment. If you recall, the courts didn't allow Trump to block critical accounts on Twitter.
Facebook is employing former CIA agents to moderate content/determine misinformation policies. https://thehill.com/hilltv/3566225-reporter-facebook-using-e...
For example:
> We released a list of 354 names Maine Senate Angus King wanted taken down for reasons like “Rand Paul visit excitement,” “followed by [former Republican opponent Eric] Brakey,” and my personal favorite, “mentions immigration.” For balance we also released a letter from a Republican official at the State Department, Mark Lenzi, who tells Twitter about 14 real Americans “you may want to look into and delete.”
https://www.racket.news/p/capsule-summaries-of-all-twitter
This behavior clearly violates the First Amendment.
>But Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump nominee at US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, granted the plaintiffs' request for a preliminary injunction imposing limits... 1. Him being a trump nominee makes me suspicious, but also sad that that is the effect and that papers need to list who nominated a judge. 2. Granting a preliminary injunction is a long way from winning a case. 3. There is pressure and th…
The courts have historically taken a dim view of the government's "chilling of free speech."
Maybe it's true for individual speech in the limited sense of them just speaking (not broadcasting)?
The Hunter Biden laptop story was actively suppressed on Twitter and Facebook specifically because the FBI told them it was Russian information, despite the fact that the FBI had verified it was legit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files
What do you think the FBI's goal was with that behavior?
This thread baffles me. There are a lot of replies that either didn’t read the article (or even the headline) that seem to be government apologists, or arguing that a particular email isn’t coercive enough, etc. A court found that the government abused its power and infringes on people’s first amendment rights by using its intimidation power to coerce social media to censor free speech of citizens. Freedom of speech…
> A court found that the government abused its power and infringes on people’s first amendment rights by using its intimidation power to coerce social media to censor free speech of citizens. This is not how a preliminary injunction works. The court has ordered that the governmment stop doing the in-dispute things until the dispute is resolved - in either direction - in court. The standard for such an injunction is n…
Judge Doughty could have dismissed the case without an opportunity for discovery, as another judge did in another NCLA case, Changizi v. HHS, involving the same sort of censorship. Judge Doughty understood, however, that a largely secret censorship system can’t be evaluated under the First Amendment until after discovery.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a really fun, and deeply relevant, historical tidbit on the history of 'yelling fire in a crowded theater.' That statement didn't actually come from any court case along those lines. Instead it was first used by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the case Schenck vs the United States, as a metaphor. [1] So, what was the egregious offense, endangering all of society by words alone, uttered by by Sc…
The meta-lesson I've learned from these types of examples is that language is a slippery construct: the more you wander away from concrete words and specific meanings, in the direction of metaphors and abstractions, the easier it is to convince of yourself of stupid things. It's on the back of my mind a lot when worrying about LLM's. The power to convince, and the power to reason, are very different things.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
This thread baffles me. There are a lot of replies that either didn’t read the article (or even the headline) that seem to be government apologists, or arguing that a particular email isn’t coercive enough, etc. A court found that the government abused its power and infringes on people’s first amendment rights by using its intimidation power to coerce social media to censor free speech of citizens. Freedom of speech…
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.18...
It amounts to “no one from these 8 government agencies may communicate with anyone working at these three non profits, 20 social media companies or any similar organization”
I’m not defending the behavior alleged here but this judge is not the sort of person you want adjudicating serious issues. You don’t fight censorship with blanket bans on speech.
A supporter of free speech should be horrified by this ruling. If you’re not, imagine an injunction of similar scope where the political sides were reversed.
This thread baffles me. There are a lot of replies that either didn’t read the article (or even the headline) that seem to be government apologists, or arguing that a particular email isn’t coercive enough, etc. A court found that the government abused its power and infringes on people’s first amendment rights by using its intimidation power to coerce social media to censor free speech of citizens. Freedom of speech…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So if they did it to me, it's bad, but to Facebook it's OK? In some court cases the actual harm matters, and sometimes it's the principle that matters.
if the random government bureaucrat "demanded" something of you you didn't want to do, and you laughed him or her out of the room, both actions are okay it seems Facebook was more polite than that, instead just ignoring the random government bureaucrat when it suited them also, in American courts, it is the actual harm that matters. No harm, no standing, no court case.
To this specific topic, could you clarify your position? Do you think the same is applicable to a police officer or an IRS agent?
The specific thing that made me think your statement was contradictory was police. The left was demanding police to be accountable seemingly five minutes ago. For most police departments, I think they went too far in saying the whole system was corrupt. I think there's at least an argument to be made about the extent of the Biden administration's involvement, but certainly you think the person doing the coercion should be punished, right?
It seems to me that any case of a "random bureaucrat" attempting to coerce a citizen or company outside of their civil mandate should be punished to the maximum extent of the law. If there isn't a criminal punishment already for this, one should be created and applied retroactively because it should be common sense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We now live in the most peaceful time in human history. And just to be clear, we're contrasting this time of unprecedented peace with entities that have killed in spasms of violence with no apparent public casus belli than "my book is better than your book and it told me to do so?" Spasms that, in one set of instances, led to the deaths of a significant fraction of the global population? “Estimates of the number of p…
> We now live in the most peaceful time in human history. I would say we live in the most widespread Uneasy Peace in human history. And unlike religious peace which had occasional conflicts, a break in the peace now would mean annihilation. Is general peace, risk of annihilation better than occasional petty wars without annihilation? > And just to be clear, we're contrasting this time of unprecedented peace with enti…
This is the rule, not the exception. Throughout history, instances where religious war was waged or religious atrocities occurred, there was often an underlying political logic to them. Religion has less to do with the underlying morality of the scripture and more to do with what religious leaders of the time say it is, and their interpretation can be...flexible.
> So said the French Revolution.
What followed the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars was one of the most peaceful 99 years on the European continent since Pax Romana.