241–250 of 763 posts
So what happens when Biden probably wins? Will any criticism of our sitting President be punishable by banning from social media?
No reason to suppose they will act differently for Biden.
Their action here seems to be more out of fear of a pre-election bombshell similar to the 2016 “emails” that turned out to a nothingburger.
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Twitter is not a utility. It is not common infrastructure. The Internet is, and I would not be okay with Internet access being terminated over political disagreements. But individual services? Sure, why not? For those who argue that Twitter is a de facto common platform, well these decisions are moving them away from that role. The more they exercise their own prerogatives in removing content, the more they're no lon…
Twitter is an infrastructure on top of which thousands of services are run. It's a notification service, it's a messaging server, it's an authentication/identify verification service, it's a news dissemination and discussion service, etc. But that actually doesn't even damage the argument: would it be okay if Google decided that they didn't like NyPost's politics, so they disabled the functionality of all of their ne…
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Those organizations all have a leftward slant. But thank you for informing me of your skew.
Interesting that @ap is considered a leftward slant. I’m not sure if you’d consider Reuters the same at that point?
Reuters and AP are rated similarly there.
Granted that you need to read the websites methodology to determine whether you think those ratings are credible.
Stoped reading after the author made an equivalent comparison between NYT and Brietbart...I mean, you're not fooling anyone with the "un-biased, unaffiliated voter just searching for the truth" shtick. It's 2020 buddy, we see what you're doing.
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Your ISP and phone provider are private/non-state-owned entities too. The corporation providing the service doesn't matter, it's the how the service itself is used by the public. And social media is now at the same level as phones and internet.
Not the case. 96% of americans have a cell phone: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/ 22% of americans have had a twitter account: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-tw...
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A very small handful of companies have a stranglehold over the lion's share of all global communications: Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter. So maybe Twitter isn't quite a monopoly on its own, but the consolidation of control over information and data distribution into the hands of a very small number of organizations has worrying implications for how we think about censorship and freedom of speech.
It's interesting to see how quickly Silicon Valley culture has changed over the past 10 years from one of free speech absolutism to "benevolent censorship". The people so vociferously clamoring about the nightmare-hellscape of a world without Net-Neutrality are now telling us that a handful of major corporations actively and blatantly censoring speech is no cause for concern.
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Your ISP and phone provider are private/non-state-owned entities too. The corporation providing the service doesn't matter, it's the how the service itself is used by the public. And social media is now at the same level as phones and internet.
How the "public" uses the service is irrelevant; the legal regulations are all based on what the service is. Social media is fundamentally different from ISPs and other utilities- there are some protections and restrictions under section 230 (for now) but number of customers does not a utility make.
Twitters censorship just serves to further polarize and divide people. As the right bails on twitter and goes to pure conservative echo chambers and the left stays in their leftist echo chambers... any shared interactions are lost. Even though it's their right as a private company...its truly a shame that Twitter is acting like this.
If a faction of society that breeds on lies decides to self-isolate and/or act in a way to get pushed out of the mainstream, that shouldn't be a controversial action. The faction does it to themselves.
This isn't a small fringe group.
The right is almost 50% of the country.
The fact that you're demonizing such a large group instead of attempting to understand them reveals a little of your fanaticism that you may not even be aware of.
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Wasn't this even MORE the case before things like Twitter and Facebook? Were people making arguments that Simon and Schuster were wrong and censoring if they decided not to publish a book? There are a LOT of books that have been written that no 'major' publisher would touch. Yeah, that means you have to go and publish the book yourself, and print your own copies. And it means that most bookstores probably won't carry…
You're suggesting that the message you just typed out has the same weight as printing a few thousand copies of a manifesto for someone and shipping that book across the country to be put in bookstores and eat the cost if it doesn't sell. In no reasonable way does the "book publisher model" resemble the "social media model". The "social media model" is far closer to discussions you would have in a coffee shop or at a…
Starbucks absolutely has the right (and would exercise it) to kick a group of people out if they were, say, conducting a KKK meeting and talking so everyone in the Starbucks could hear them.