181–190 of 1001 posts
I m sorry but all this concerted action feels (from afar) a lot like "if people don't vote the way we want, we re just gonna have to force them". It's not about overreach, but companies are not political entities, and reversing this relationship is a self-defeating travesty And if they are doing it for cheap popularity points -- well trump may be gone in a week, but his voters won't leave. this just reinforces mistru…
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If google, for example decided to stop surfacing trump stuff in results, that could be a real issue. Not because it’s google doing a bad thing, but because google has become so big. Maybe “what happens if this service started banning folks?” is a useful thought exercise for whether a platform has accrued too much market share/power/influence.
Welcome to the shiny new age of totalitarian tolerance.
There is a difference between bank accounts, Visa/MasterCard access and Internet service, on one hand, and App Stores, Twitter accounts and payment providers, on the other hand. The First Amendment promises both free speech and free assembly. Core to the latter is the freedom not to assemble. This freedom is regulated. You can’t refuse to do business with protected classes. But political affiliation is not a protecte…
FYI, political affiliation is protected from discrimination in CA, NY, and DC.
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/can-employers-discri...
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when did I say Stripe didn't have the legal right to do this? I used the Hollywood blacklist as a parallel precisely because it too was a legal enforcement of political speech by a big consolidated industry that had the power to end peoples' careers I only think it's morally wrong.
But it's not a parallel at all. All the Hollywood studios (a bunch of different entities) conspired with each other not to hire those people. Stripe is a single entity and isn't (AFAIK) working with others on the payment processing industry to block a specific set of people/groups. And it's protected (and IMHO, should be) because it's a political organization -- Stripe has the right (as do you or I) to choose whether…
I m sorry but all this concerted action feels (from afar) a lot like "if people don't vote the way we want, we re just gonna have to force them". It's not about overreach, but companies are not political entities, and reversing this relationship is a self-defeating travesty And if they are doing it for cheap popularity points -- well trump may be gone in a week, but his voters won't leave. this just reinforces mistru…
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spare us your outrage. A literal mob just overran the Capitol. Attempting to talk about “the mob” in opposition to the actual mobs that are continuing to take over Capitol buildings is frankly so tone deaf it’s almost insulting to our intelligence.
Spare us your hypocrisy. A literal mob took over parts of Seattle and several government buildings. Hundreds of buildings have been burned or looted in the past year during protests. People were killed in the process. Did anybody think to deplatform the Biden campaign? No, we did not - and rightly so. We accepted their condemnation of violence just as we should accept that of Trump and his campaign.
You don’t get to call me a hypocrite based on stuff you’ve made up.
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The mob has been coming for law enforcement and federal buildings in many major cities in America for nine months now. This mob actively organized on Twitter and other social media. Where was the outrage in June? Most of the organizations that organized this destruction still have their Twitter accounts.
> The mob has been coming for law enforcement and federal buildings in many major cities in America for nine months now They're "coming for" police reform and transparency. Please don't misrepresent or generalise very disparate groups of demonstrators.
Not to be reductionist but I don’t see this as a totalitarian issue. This is a free market decision. $Company decides to sever ties with another organization. That choice can be good, bad, reactive, overreactive, misguided, etc but it’s still a market participant choice. Market remains open for other market participants to make other choices.
You could look at countries as being part of a market. If one country decides to ban your speech, you just move to another one, right? But that's not how it works because switching countries is very difficult. We demand free speech from a government even if we theoretically have the option to move. If you have a colluding oligopoly in something crucial to do business such as payments or communication, where it's diff…
The people cheering this on will not be protected when the mob comes for you. We live in a digital age. If having the wrong opinion means you can get your bank accounts and all Internet presence removed from you, it's not any different than living under a fascist government.
gab got de-platformed and the mob didn't come for anybody else...the world moved on. not everything is a slippery slope. tons of people criticizing it on twitter/fb and they aren't being censored.
I do wonder if all these bans do is make people angrier.