201–210 of 335 posts
To see the tweets: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://twitter.com/Sci_Hub I should donate more to the Internet Archive. I hate how so much history can just disappear at a whim if it weren't for them.
(I'm surprised Twitter is archivable in the first place, the whole thing being a pile of JS crap.)
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It all boils down to this: a) Should twitter be allowed to cancel accounts who harm twitter? If yes: b) Who decides which accounts harm twitter? If the answer is "twitter", then they have effectively the right to terminate any account at their will. I don't know what other answer is possible for b) except maybe "the courts", and I'm not sure I like that one. If the answer to a) is no, for which companies does this ap…
> a) Should twitter be allowed to cancel accounts who harm twitter? Although some people agree that is the question, it is not the fundamental one here. Most of the respectable arguments are that Twitter's bans are senselessly harming Twitter. They're building a gaping hole in their offering that a competitor can cover.
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.
"Counterfeit goods"? Sci-Hub is giving us the real deal unlike these for-profit publishers.
Not a fan of "pirated" as the descriptive word for what Sci-Hub does. I'm sure some of it fits that description. On the other hand, a fair amount of these papers are funded with taxpayer dollars, and shouldn't be hidden behind paywalls in the first place.
The chairs at the DMV are also paid with taxpayer dollars. I’d be arrested if I tried to walk out the door with one.
E.g., if a user selects some text and chooses "Copy," the text gets deleted and a listener sends a message back to the server to signal that the text has been "pirated."
At that point the server not only deletes the associated data, but sends a message to all extant clients to remove the given text.
Kinda like a realtime borrow-checker, but not so much for memory safety as for the sheer stupidity of it.
Edit: clarification
I think the general discourse around high profile account banning raises some interesting questions. I've seen a lot of people in my (generally liberal) social bubble carry the line that Twitter, as a private corporation, has the right to ban accounts for whatever reason they see fit. While technically this is true, should it be? Is there a threshold where a service becomes more of a public good than a private enterp…
Splitting up a technology company like Amazon or Google would probably just make matters worse over the long haul. Instead of 1 obvious regulatory target you would wind up with several and this creates more shadowy areas for perverse incentives to grow like mold. Just look at how splitting up ATT has played out. It ultimately re-aggregated into more-or-less the same monster but with even more power and influence than in the 80s. If ATT would have been nationalized instead of split up, I'd have a hard time believing we wouldn't have better internet access on average today.
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> For that matter, should convicted murderers get their accounts suspended? I think not solely on the grounds that they’ve committed murder - but maybe if they are using their platform to cause further harm. On a related note, Facebook policy bans sex offenders from having accounts at all, regardless of what they do with them: https://www.facebook.com/help/210081519032737 : > Convicted sex offenders aren't allowed to…
That's pretty messed up. You as a 14 year old send a nude picture to your 15 year old boyfriend and suddenly you're banned from Facebook from life? Frankly the whole situation in the US is messed up, punishment should be limited to whatever the court decides.
It's worth noting that is far from the typical case of "being a sex offender."
100th reminder to stop using Twitter and to stop acting like it's an acceptable medium of communication.
What’s your alternative method to reach a mass audience?
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> a) Should twitter be allowed to cancel accounts who harm twitter? Although some people agree that is the question, it is not the fundamental one here. Most of the respectable arguments are that Twitter's bans are senselessly harming Twitter. They're building a gaping hole in their offering that a competitor can cover.
The thing is, few other companies will do business with anyone trying to compete with Twitter. Parler was nuked. Gab was almost nuked, but they've managed to survive. There's a huge demand for alternatives to Twitter, but other major tech companies, the corporate press, and many politicians are doing everything in their power to crush those alternatives and prevent them from springing up.
That's because companies don't want associated with the users on those platforms, many of whom left Twitter because twitter didn't want them either.
So businesses aren't simply in some evil cahoots with Twitter. They're associated with Twitter because that the users they do want to associate with.
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To be clear, there is no serious interpretation of the US Constitution required here: Twitter absolutely has the right to determine what shows up on their website. For the government to require Twitter to publish the opinions of the president would be a very clear violation of Twitter’s own first amendment rights. There could be more nuance involved if, for example, there were a credible claim of racial discriminatio…
The problem with this argument is that it completely sidesteps the issue of how much platforms like Twitter and FB possess quasi-monopolies in their respective niches. In fact, perhaps Twitter's biggest competitor just got shut down by Amazon. This effectively means that we are back to the old days of newspapers first, then radio, and finally TV, where a small number of media companies control what people read, hear,…