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Facebook Bans Louis Farrakhan, Milo Yiannopoulos, InfoWars and Others

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Re: Facebook Bans Louis Farrakhan, Milo Yiannopoulos, InfoWars and Others

#751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to make sure we're on the same page, by "free-market-leaning" I mean opposing government regulations in markets. Advocating for some regulation is generally not considered supportive of a free market; on the contrary, that's just supportive of a market.

That’s what I thought you meant, and I think that’s a mischaracterisation of the group in question and of those more generally who say they’re advocates of free markets. Are any of them not against slavery on the basis it’s unfree? (based on your definition) Small or limited government is usually the given position, vague as that may be, not zero government.

It's not a mischaracterization. Free market proponents believe that markets will reach an equilibrium on their own if left alone, and they believe that monopolies are caused by regulation (regulatory capture). This line of thinking is often (but not always) rooted in the Austrian school of economics.

If someone is telling you that they support free markets and they also support government regulation, they don't understand what they're saying.

Re: Facebook Bans Louis Farrakhan, Milo Yiannopoulos, InfoWars and Others

#752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to find statistics for this claim by looking at homicide risk but was unable to find anything supporting it. Possibly this is true in non-western countries. For example here is a look at the data that claims tran people are less at risk in the UK. https://www.google.com/amp/s/fairplayforwomen.com/trans-murd... I suspect there are lots of confounders if you wanted to isolate the risk that trans brings. For exa…

I know this is late but from what I recall trans women are approximately 4.3x more likely to be murdered(Trans people of color coalition and human rights campaign), and 1 out of 2 trans people have experienced violence (I forget where I've seen this).

So what is that, like 10 people total? It seems like we're always blowing the importance of the trans community way out of proportion...there aren't that many of them and a lot of them end up committing suicide...they, as a group, aren't that important in terms of impact on society

Re: Facebook Bans Louis Farrakhan, Milo Yiannopoulos, InfoWars and Others

#753
post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are basically monopolies Monopolies of what, exactly? I admit to sometimes looking at entertaining videos on youtube. About an hour or maximum two hours a week worth. I'm not sure what you're suggesting that facebook and twitter are monopolizing. I haven't used the former in years and the latter just about ever -- aside from maybe five tweets over the course of twitter'…

> Monopolies of what, exactly? Monopoly on platform reach. The reach of facebook, or the reach of youtube, twitter etc, is so high, that if you want to disseminate a message, those _must_ be the platforms you use. It's as if they own the radio spectrum, and you have to acquiesce to what they demand to use said spectrum. Of course, i am free to use smoke signals to send my message, but who will receive it?

The claim is that Fb is most definitely not a monopoly on access to political speech. People are not stuck in an information vacuum the moment Facebook bans their favorite content. People who want to access Alex Jones can still do so easily.

What Facebook IS a monopoly of is getting your content to go viral. I argue this service is not speech. Which is why I oppose web hosts and cloudflare censoring content, but support social networks banning users. When web hosts do it, users who WANT that content can't get it anymore. When social networks ban people, they merely can't find new eyeballs that never specifically requested that content.

Re: Facebook Bans Louis Farrakhan, Milo Yiannopoulos, InfoWars and Others

#754
post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be confusing two different rights. The right to Internet access is not the right to say whatever you like on the Internet.

I suggest reading the first sentence from the link I posted.

But you seem to think "freedom of expression" == "freedom to say what you like", and that's clearly wrong because Europe has rights to freedom of expression (article 10) but you can't say what you like in Europe.

I'd suggest that you take the time to understand the links you post.

Re: Facebook Bans Louis Farrakhan, Milo Yiannopoulos, InfoWars and Others

#755

Attitudes towards free speech have changed a lot in recent times. This is related to the rise of social media. The advent of social media had made it too easy to spread hate online. It started off innocently enough, with cat videos uploaded to youtube, but soon extremists were taking advantage of social media for radicalization purposes, and others even live-streaming mass murders. This has caused an upheaval in atti…

I agree. People tend to forget that their "rights" end where another person's rights begin. Every right comes with responsibilities. While freedom of speech is important, the right to live peacefully free from hateful invective is probably even more fundamental.

> the right to live peacefully free from hateful invective is

Nobody can take that away from anybody else by posting on Facebook. Just log out.

Re: Facebook Bans Louis Farrakhan, Milo Yiannopoulos, InfoWars and Others

#756

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s what I thought you meant, and I think that’s a mischaracterisation of the group in question and of those more generally who say they’re advocates of free markets. Are any of them not against slavery on the basis it’s unfree? (based on your definition) Small or limited government is usually the given position, vague as that may be, not zero government.

It's not a mischaracterization. Free market proponents believe that markets will reach an equilibrium on their own if left alone, and they believe that monopolies are caused by regulation (regulatory capture). This line of thinking is often (but not always) rooted in the Austrian school of economics. If someone is telling you that they support free markets and they also support government regulation, they don't under…

Then you're arguing against your original point because they don't support free markets, they just think they do.

For example, Paul Joseph Watson in this tweet[1] says he's for free markets, limited government, and against monopolies. I'm pretty sure a quick search will show similar results for the others.

[1] https://twitter.com/PrisonPlanet/status/1012108095286317058

Re: Facebook Bans Louis Farrakhan, Milo Yiannopoulos, InfoWars and Others

#757

Every time this subject comes up, someone inevitably says something like "Facebook is a private corporation, the first amendment only applies to the government, and if you want to use Facebook you have to play by their rules. No one is owed a platform." Platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are basically monopolies. They are the only services in their class to take seriously if you're looking to gain a follow…

In the recent case Packingham v. North Carolina the Supreme Court, in an unanimous decision, decided social media to be the new public square. See this article for why banning people from social media will be impossible in the near future.

https://humanevents.com/2019/05/03/platform-access-is-a-civi...

Re: Facebook Bans Louis Farrakhan, Milo Yiannopoulos, InfoWars and Others

#758

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Others have gotten into this with you about the specific damage, and my point was less "yay, censor them!" than the argument that not deplatforming them somehow protects me. It doesn't, even hypothetically.

Arguably censoring them does expose you to something worse: it establishes a bureaucracy and social norms that are perfectly fine with crushing unpopular and diverse opinions. It's a simple tyranny of the majority. Sure, you consider this speech abhorrent, but switch the scenario around and consider how enforcing these types of norms stalled real social progress in the past: gay rights, women's rights, rights for vis…

We already have the bureaucracy and social norms and the tyranny of the majority. We don't now, and never have, existed in a pure state of nature with respect to freedom of expression.

What this banning does is move the border between acceptable and unacceptable. You're arguing it's a slippery slope, that the moving border will eventually steamroll right over me and I'll regret not stopping it earlier.

"Slippery slope" is a fallacy. Legalizing gay marriage doesn't mean we'll legalize polygamy. Alcohol was made illegal and then legalized again. It's not a ratchet. We make collective decisions and live with them, and maybe change our minds later.

And among the factors stalling social progress on issues like gay rights and women's rights, I don't believe censorship was the biggest or even a significant factor, compared to all the others.

Re: Facebook Bans Louis Farrakhan, Milo Yiannopoulos, InfoWars and Others

#759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook is a corporation not a government agency and they have the right to control their own products. It's always fascinating how quick people are to jump on the free market bandwagon when it suits their ends. Free speech protections also sometimes apply to privately managed public spaces, like malls. > These individuals are free to shout their ideas in the public square. Facebook is arguably the new public squa…

It's always fascinating how quick people are to jump on the slippery slope bandwagon when it suits their ends. Your suggestion that privately held malls are subject to free speech protections is misleading. See Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner. There are counter examples of course, be these apply only in niche situations. Regardless, Facebook is not a public space. It's very much a private space. Suggesting that Facebook be tre…

> Regardless, Facebook is not a public space. It's very much a private space. Suggesting that Facebook be treated as a public space is a pretty radical idea.

Further precedent I recently came across suggests it's not so radical after all:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packingham_v._North_Carolina

Unanimous decision by the Supreme Court actually called social media the public square.

Re: Facebook Bans Louis Farrakhan, Milo Yiannopoulos, InfoWars and Others

#760
post #754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suggest reading the first sentence from the link I posted.

But you seem to think "freedom of expression" == "freedom to say what you like", and that's clearly wrong because Europe has rights to freedom of expression (article 10) but you can't say what you like in Europe. I'd suggest that you take the time to understand the links you post.

> But you seem to think "freedom of expression" == "freedom to say what you like"

Where did I say this?

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