201–210 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People say this, but not long ago Twitter/Reddit/Youtube were basically a free for all for anything except porn. And their user numbers were skyrocketing at the time.
Exactly. The court isn't saying you can't moderate out the cesspool posts. They are saying that you can't choose political sides.
Copied from a comment thread below. Because I feel this is the root of the issue/problem. > I don't see how the heck my website is a public square but my home or café isn't, this argument sounds self-contradictory. Yup. This is the exact problem that we’re (as a society/world) wrestling with. The reason it is (not just seems) different is because of the scope. A message on a chalkboard cannot reach millions of people…
If it's a website with over 50 million users, and it's designed explicitly as a place for these users to express themselves, then calling it "a public square" seems entirely warranted.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can we stop miscategorizing reactionary regressivism as "conservatism" ? There is nothing conservative about it. They're essentially trying to drag us back at least a few decades and destroy longstanding institutions, including things like separation of church and state and the right to access medical care.
No. Because as much as your absolute moral certitude might feel good to express you aren’t changing anyone’s mind with it. On the contrary. There’s tens if not hundreds of millions of them and same for you guys. We are all stuck together in one polity. If we are ever going to achieve a synthesis and get back to a healthier place it’s not going to involve the kind of rhetoric you are indulging in here.
As far as synthesis and reconciliation, for a long time I viewed the answer as that of respecting individual liberty. Each party seems to get its constituents excited about a desire for individual freedoms on topics that matter to them, and then transmutes that energy into enacting authoritarian regulations that benefit their commercial sponsors. I had hoped that over time the liberty would be an attractor that gained ever more ground. But the flare up of grassroots authoritarianism, specifically in the Republican party where it has gone mainstream, has shown this was too optimistic. So I'm left hoping that there are enough actual conservatives horrified by these developments that will end up voting for the actually conservative options (which now seems to be mostly in the Democratic party) to keep the off the rails reactionary populism from causing too much damage.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Zuckerberg was free not to listen to anything the FBI had to say. No one forced him to do anything.
This is either dishonest or naive. Federal law enforcement "advice" always comes with a hidden message of "Nice company you've got there. It would be a shame if something were to happen to it."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Citizens United determined that corporations have some of the same natural rights that people do. In particular, First Amendment right, which in turn means that corporations can do the same politicking (and political funding) that natural persons do. This ruling countermands that: the (implicit) right to not be compelled to speak would seemingly no longer apply to corporations or, more accurately, the people within t…
Citizens United determined that corporations have some of the same natural rights that people do. In particular, First Amendment right, which in turn means that corporations can do the same politicking (and political funding) that natural persons do. A more charitable way to put this: you don't lose your First Amendment rights just because you joined with other people for commercial or other purposes.
Too many people think CU was some sort of this-changes-everything moment when it was actually a fairly narrow, technical decision based on prior rulings.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Section 230 is a federal law, it cannot make a state law that would otherwise violate the First Amendment as incorporated into the Fourteenth Amendment somehow okay. That’s not how the relationship between state, federal, and constitutional law works.
If this court case is over a state law, is Citizens United even precedential? That was a ruling about a federal law, and this appears to be a matter of Texas law, adjudicated with Texas court precedent. I assume it's only in federal court due to diversity jurisdiction.
Citizens United isn’t directly on point. That was a question of positive corporate speech while this law, if it’s struck down will be struck down under the corporate compelled speech doctrine. But they are both part of the same body of Constitutional law that the federal courts very much have jurisdiction to enforce.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I seriously do not.
“Othering” has moved from race to political viewpoint, but the human tendency to exclude others from discourse/commerce/society is still alive and well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>The same reason that the phone company or a company that owns all the local roads or water mains can't decide to "stop serving" you because they don't like your religion Because it's hard to impossible to get alternate services for roads, water and electricity, i.e common carriers. But there are plenty of neo nazi forums, Gab, Truth Social, Parler, 4chan for racists to express and spread their views.
As a free-speech absolutist, I got no problem with this. Unless the speech is threatening the direct physical harm of someone, or violating a law, it should be allowed. At the same time, everyone else should have the tools to filter, block, and mute speech they do not like. If a tweet or a social media post has a certain word or phrase in it that I don’t like, I should be able to mute that and never see it. Social me…
I've been wondering about a technical solution to this problem for a while now. It seems like a properly distributed social media network would still need moderation... but who is to say everyone has to use the same moderators? What if we distributed the task of content moderation and allowed users to subscribe to a moderation team the same way they subscribe to a friend's updates? In this way, users could tune their…