401–410 of 834 posts
Remember the Arab Spring and how Twitter was hailed as a tool for the masses to fight against their oppressors? And remember how Elon bought Twitter, loudly proclaiming he was doing so to defend free speech? I'm mildly curious to see how X tries to justify this, but I suspect they've reached the stage where they don't even need to pretend to pay lip service to their notional values.
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> allowing hate, racist, homophobic, and transphobic language to run rampant Are the people with these views not also entitled to free speech and equal rights to express themselves the same as everybody else?
This is the tricky line, isn't it? Regardless of whether someone is entitled to free speech, is a private company bound to the constitutional protection? My understanding has always been that its specifically the government that can't censor me, a private company or citizen can. The NY Times isn't required to write an article I submit to them for example, that's no different than Twitter deciding not to keep a post a…
Then you have no free speech. I can just refuse you internet access, or not sell ink and paper to you…
So my take is that no, it should not be allowed to private companies to censor arbitrarily. And of course an "algorithm" that sorts stuff in any other way than chronologically is censorship. The feed should just show chronological ordered stuff of followed accounts. No more and no less.
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Everything political gets downvoted, from either side, but you're going to need better evidence than Musk and rumors for this fraud. (There probably is some fraud! There is in any large money handling system! Japan had a problem with elderly people claiming pensions after they'd died, for example. It's just that you need a better standard of evidence before cutting off money that people are legally entitled to, becau…
Why is it unreasonable to demand that every recipient of money is alive and has a valid age in the system? This shouldn't be a political statement.
Edit: Also, it's not clear that the death field is the sole criteria for determining the eligibility for payments (i.e. determining the recipient is alive)
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> allowing hate, racist, homophobic, and transphobic language to run rampant Are the people with these views not also entitled to free speech and equal rights to express themselves the same as everybody else?
Free speech doesn't allow you to say anything at all you know? Calling for the eradication of people with certain sexual preferences or skin color for example.
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"Freedom of speech" on Twitter is nothing more than Newspeak for censorship. In reality, the goal has always been to silence minorities who already struggle to express themselves, while allowing hate, racist, homophobic, and transphobic language to run rampant. It is a form of indirect censorship, through the self-censorship of minorities who fear speaking out. Then comes direct censorship, where certain terms or lin…
> allowing hate, racist, homophobic, and transphobic language to run rampant Are the people with these views not also entitled to free speech and equal rights to express themselves the same as everybody else?
Free speech and equal rights in a legal sense, meaning staying out of jail? Sure, with caveats about threats and abuse.
Free to use a private platform? No, nobody's entitled to the support of someone else's private platform. Equal rights are about protection from the state, not from others' opinions.
Platforms themselves also have speech-based rights. Even if one portrays itself as a neutral 'town square,' it puts its own rights to work as soon as it implements an algorithmic feed, implicitly deciding what content to promote or hide.
You are entitled to your opinion: good, bad, or irrelevant. You are entitled to your words. You are not entitled to an audience.
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> allowing hate, racist, homophobic, and transphobic language to run rampant Are the people with these views not also entitled to free speech and equal rights to express themselves the same as everybody else?
> Are the people with these views not also entitled to free speech and equal rights to express themselves the same as everybody else? Free speech and equal rights in a legal sense, meaning staying out of jail? Sure, with caveats about threats and abuse. Free to use a private platform? No, nobody's entitled to the support of someone else's private platform. Equal rights are about protection from the state , not from o…
Brilliant statement, I fully agree.
The issue is who chooses to give them an audience. IMO it is up to the audience not to listen, but it seems to be the opinion of a lot of people here that gatekeepers (companies) should have the power to decide that and 'protect' their audience from it. That IMO is anti free speech, as the 'protect' part of the term is abiguous/subjective and depends on the beliefs/opinions of the gatekeepers.
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> Freedom of speech, at least in the US, is a concern specifically with the government censoring citizens' speech. Well, no -- you're conflating "freedom of speech" as a general concept with the first amendment as a legal principle. The first amendment is specifically the mechanism of law we use to ensure that freedom of speech is respected in our interactions with the political state. The first amendment doesn't app…
You're right, and that's were the double standards come in. Progressives: Elon doesn't care about freedom of speech because he doesn't allow (edge case) Also progressives: Freedom of speech has its limits Pick a lane.
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Apparently the 150 year old Social Security recipients were due to a COBOL quirk where the zero datetime is 1875. Interesting, but not fraud.
That doesn't hold up because there are 200 year old people as well, and apparently millions of 100-year olds. I'm not saying all of it is fraud but incompetence leading to waste would not be surprising.
https://xcancel.com/ThatsMauvelous/status/189135619250239902...
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Your comment is quite extraordinary as Orwell's work dealt with an unthinking bureaucracy resembling the Soviet Union. He also had the foresight to see the U.K. could be a totalitarian state. An honest assessment of the revelations of USAID spending and its funding of literally thousands of media companies via direct grants or voluntary purchases would suggest the information environment surrounding this is not entir…
If you take USAID « revelations » by Musk at face value, you are… rather misled. The very behavior of DOGE looks like kids unleashed in a factory they don’t understand, willing not to recognize their capacities are adequate to understand it in so little time. There were knowledgeable people, they’ve been fired. You wouldn’t accept it for a flying plane pilot or a surgeon in the surgery room, why would you accept it f…
I am fully aware of the widespread fraud they were encountering, as well as the technical difficulties of fixing it. I am also aware of the less-than-neutral culture that pervaded that organization at that time. I also have experience as a defense contractor and have personally met and interacted with many people in the administrative bureaucracy, including high ranking cabinet members.
My comments come from personal experience both with the precursor to DOGE (which is a division in USDS), as well as how the federal government operates.