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Twitter permanently bans Project Veritas account

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Re: Twitter permanently bans Project Veritas account

#41

Post by threatofrain »

slackfan wrote: post #6

The deafening silence in these comments is telling of how boned free speech proper actually is. Hope you all are enjoying the "free speech for me, but not for thee" attitude of this neo-feudalism that we live in.

Would you feel bothered if Wikipedia banned Project Veritas as a source, and also banned IP's related to Project Veritas? In many ways the stakes are much higher on Wikipedia.

How would Project Veritas's freedom of speech translate to Wikipedia's obligation to host and broadcast?

Re: Twitter permanently bans Project Veritas account

#42

Post by rektide »

slackfan wrote: post #6

The deafening silence in these comments is telling of how boned free speech proper actually is. Hope you all are enjoying the "free speech for me, but not for thee" attitude of this neo-feudalism that we live in.

Project Vertias has been at the forefront of free lying for a decade[1]. They have been manipulative, entrapping, dissembling corrupt foes of information & democracy seemingly their entire life.

Good riddance. Part of free speech is the public forming an opinion that some voices are wrong, and malicious. The public has a right to defend itself against it's foes, of which Vertias is one, one of a radical extremist & underhanded bent. It IS unfortunate that our public spaces are all operated by a couple communicative-capitalist super-entities, and I wish people would try more to use freer places, devise their own defenses. But here, the private companies made the right call, and protected democracy & the value of speech, by banning some particularly flagrant opponents of civic decency.

Beyond simply too much of the public being run by corporations, it is also deeply unsettling that getting kicked off a corporate network is determined based on single incidents. It is a wide array of behaviors that makes Vertias entirely unsuitable to have their voice supported & hosted by these communicative-capitalist giants, makes them an ill voice to carry. More honest assessments are due, their being kicked off should reflect a broadscale misbehavior, not a single incident.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Veritas

Re: Twitter permanently bans Project Veritas account

#43

Post by thu2111 »

TheIronYuppie wrote: post #29

I am in awe at people who say “market forces should rule everything “ and then in the same breath say “government has a responsibility to enforce that a private organization must allow everyone to use their platform in an arbitrary way”. No one was arrested. No one was silenced. Project Veritas could send an email out with the information to all their subscribers completely legally (assuming they weren’t breaking fed…

Sure, until Gmail decides to block emails from Project Veritas.

I don't think it makes sense for governments to pass laws saying tech firms must serve everyone. It would be too hard to word such laws properly, and there would inevitably be many bad side effects (e.g. making it harder to build new services). What we're seeing here is a slipping social consensus that ideas and debate are valuable and the fix is to re-establish that consensus.

It's hard to know if this is really some sort of creeping authoritarianism taking over the world, or if it's more like panicked and flailing scattergunning by social classes that are losing control of the global narrative, whose corruption, shallowness and stupidity are being increasingly exposed by people demanding higher standards than those classes feel they can meet. Their old approach of simply assuming that people in positions of authority are competent and correct is falling apart, as anything those authorities say or do is immediately dissected by an army of contrarians who are frequently better informed and sharper than they and their media defenders are.

The things I associate with Veritas are recordings with Googlers revealing things the firm would prefer to keep hidden, and the recordings where they revealed that some US news reports on COVID were faked (e.g. the news channel got staff at a COVID clinic to get in their cars and make fake queues to make it appear the clinics were busy). These are things that should have been brought to light, and bringing them to light was a valuable public service. I'm sure Twitter have some excuse for this, but I feel no surprise it's come to this. Tech firms are increasingly dominated by people who don't respect their own users, people who believe the world would be a better place if the clock could be rewound to a time when everyone believed everything said by the New York Times or the BBC. I'm doubtful they can pull that rewinding off.

Re: Twitter permanently bans Project Veritas account

#44

Post by cudgy »

dmwallin wrote: post #30
adamcstephens wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t let the democratically elected government ban speech but unaccountable private corporations are free to censor. These problems aren’t easy, and while I’ve lessened my free speech absolutism a tiny bit, I’m still quite concerned. We have to find a better way.

Yes, we don’t let our government, with the tools of state violence and the exclusive right to imprison us, ban speech. However, groups of private citizens, whose powers over the marketplace are/can be heavily limited through existing laws such as antitrust law, enforced by our democratically elected government have no requirement to carry speech they disagree with. It’s surprising to me how quickly the Big Business/S…

Seems like the roles have switched...far left is now in bed with big corp and the right has drifted towards curbing restrictions on free speech by recent surge of big tech social platforms. Makes sense if you think about it. Secular shifts in society away from religion and traditional family structure are more acceptable to far left but less palatable to the right.

Re: Twitter permanently bans Project Veritas account

#45

Post by cudgy »

TheIronYuppie wrote: post #29

I am in awe at people who say “market forces should rule everything “ and then in the same breath say “government has a responsibility to enforce that a private organization must allow everyone to use their platform in an arbitrary way”. No one was arrested. No one was silenced. Project Veritas could send an email out with the information to all their subscribers completely legally (assuming they weren’t breaking fed…

Did you feel the same way about Greenpeace and their tactics?

Re: Twitter permanently bans Project Veritas account

#46

Post by cudgy »

acdha wrote: post #28
zthrowaway wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unorthodox journalist tactics or not, they catch the elite saying horrible things on camera when they think they are speaking amongst friends. Yes they do go against the left a lot in who they go after. But you can’t argue against the video footage. I consider myself on the left on many things but what they capture people saying is absolute appalling. Why focus on their tactics instead of what they uncover?

They like to present themselves as undercover journalists but their history shows that they don’t meet that standard: unlike journalists they actively manipulate the videos to mislead their audience – if you remember their rise to fame attacking ACORN, their videos were edited to be successful political propaganda but the subsequent legal investigations didn’t find any wrongdoing by ACORN and Project Veritas had to p…

“... unlike journalists they actively manipulate the videos to mislead their audience”

Are there any journalists left? This behavior is rampant in virtually all forms of news.

Re: Twitter permanently bans Project Veritas account

#47

Post by jjj1232 »

cudgy wrote: post #44
dmwallin wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we don’t let our government, with the tools of state violence and the exclusive right to imprison us, ban speech. However, groups of private citizens, whose powers over the marketplace are/can be heavily limited through existing laws such as antitrust law, enforced by our democratically elected government have no requirement to carry speech they disagree with. It’s surprising to me how quickly the Big Business/S…

Seems like the roles have switched...far left is now in bed with big corp and the right has drifted towards curbing restrictions on free speech by recent surge of big tech social platforms. Makes sense if you think about it. Secular shifts in society away from religion and traditional family structure are more acceptable to far left but less palatable to the right.

Far right is 100% in bed with corporations as well. Free speech arguments by those in power on the right are mostly symbolic, and will never get close to _actually_ threatening capital in any way.

Re: Twitter permanently bans Project Veritas account

#48

Post by cudgy »

jjj1232 wrote: post #47
cudgy wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like the roles have switched...far left is now in bed with big corp and the right has drifted towards curbing restrictions on free speech by recent surge of big tech social platforms. Makes sense if you think about it. Secular shifts in society away from religion and traditional family structure are more acceptable to far left but less palatable to the right.

Far right is 100% in bed with corporations as well. Free speech arguments by those in power on the right are mostly symbolic, and will never get close to _actually_ threatening capital in any way.

“100%” and “never” are quite unconvincing.

Re: Twitter permanently bans Project Veritas account

#49

Post by acdha »

cudgy wrote: post #46
acdha wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They like to present themselves as undercover journalists but their history shows that they don’t meet that standard: unlike journalists they actively manipulate the videos to mislead their audience – if you remember their rise to fame attacking ACORN, their videos were edited to be successful political propaganda but the subsequent legal investigations didn’t find any wrongdoing by ACORN and Project Veritas had to p…

“... unlike journalists they actively manipulate the videos to mislead their audience” Are there any journalists left? This behavior is rampant in virtually all forms of news.

No, it’s not. The people hawking that claim do so knowing that it’s a good strategy for getting low-information voters to tune out, but that makes it a useful political tactic rather than true.
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