Trump misunderstands concept of free speech
- Thread starter Agema
- Start date
See, this makes the third example of the fallacy you keep committing. It's not either "political views are expressed" or "people are harassed to suicide". That's a huge leap to the extreme end of the spectrum.
- Apr 1, 2009
- 14,579
- 3,522
- 118
- Gender
- Whatever, just wash your hands.
Well, because people in a position of transitioning are in a pretty vulnerable position, there is a reason they tend to have pretty high suicide rates. Are you talking about someone on a forum like this engaging in a discussion about genders or are you talking about someone on twitter specifically messaging a trans or non-binary user and telling them they will never be the gender they want to be, or are an abomination or something like that?
Neither. I'm saying that, if someone wants to abuse their power while also making it look legitimate, they would justify the removal of an "incorrect political opinion" under the justification of "harassment". This could happen in the first scenario as well as the second, especially if the moderator believes that "misinformation is being spread that does damage to the world as a whole"
That's just a hypothetical scenario that stems from the question of "if we start censoring content based on 'fact-checking', who decides what 'truth' is, and can they be trusted?", and how such a power can be abused or spiral out of control.
Yes. But what do US conservatives keep saying about journalists? We could also consider scholars - historians, scientists, etc. - as a source of truth, but what do US conservatives keep saying about academics and universities? And when fact-checkers like Snopes, Politifact etc. rule against conservative memes, they get called biased too.
It turns out that any group that doesn't reliably turn out a conservative view of the world has "liberal bias". The minute I hear a conservative say anything along the lines of "liberal bias" without a very specific target and justification, I just tune it out as so much hot air.
I think from social media's perspective, outside criminality like incitement to violence, what bothers social media is activity we could call exclusionary: harassment and discrimination. Forms of harassment are pretty much endemic to all political persuastions. However, I can't help but note it's overwhelmingly the right and far right that tend to opine that Jews, Latinos, homosexuals, blacks etc. should either not be allowed in society or be kept in their place. This is likely to aggravate social media moderators. If an inclusionary view of society is liberal, then sure, in this sense social media has liberal bias. (I suspect what's significantly motivating social media is money - allowing trolls to drive people off their platform is bad for their business.)
The second issue is the win-win attitude towards social media disputes that an assumption of bias creates. A conservative provocateur can pick a fight with social media by breaking codes of conduct: either the site lets them get away with it, or it punishes them allowing the provocateur to don a victim's mantle on behalf of conservativism and whip up support and headlines. I am not sure the left has anything like the same number of (high profile) provocateurs.
I never thought I'd see the day but I'm actually extremely happy with that executive order Trump signed. If you want to be in the business of policing allowable opinions you shouldn't get to benefit from the status of a platform. If you want to endorse certain political ideology and have as a bannable offense the opposite opinions, such as for example twitter's policy about misgendering people, then you are defacto not a platform and should be liable.
And it is YOUR fault if you're bulliable into suicide from the internet. Normal people aren't. They just click off and go do something else when someone's an asshole if they even use twitter at all.
Yet, you STILL don't get to censor people and be a platform. The phone company doesn't cut your lines if you lie on your phonecalls. It doesn't play a prerecorded message after every lie you utter, explaining it's falsehood. It's not a platform's job to do these things. It's the people's responsibility to shift through it instead.
And it is YOUR fault if you're bulliable into suicide from the internet. Normal people aren't. They just click off and go do something else when someone's an asshole if they even use twitter at all.
Facts and truth have a liberal bias. It's why it's right to be a liberal.
Yet, you STILL don't get to censor people and be a platform. The phone company doesn't cut your lines if you lie on your phonecalls. It doesn't play a prerecorded message after every lie you utter, explaining it's falsehood. It's not a platform's job to do these things. It's the people's responsibility to shift through it instead.
Nope, I want to allow everyone to speak. Cancel culture is when people band together to prevent someone from speaking by making their speech untenable due to the damages that follow anyone who dares to allow someone who was canceled to speak.
Not sure if me being for canceling cancel culture makes me be pro cancel culture due to some sort of sophistry or what you are referring to.
So... You want all bulilies banned from the internet. Got it. Sounds very Freedom of Speechy
Not sure how you got that from what I said but it's the exact opposite actually. I just want them defanged, not censored lol.
The issue here is that bullies are being given unearned power to cancel things like they're the police of vice and virtue. In a vacuum I just find them pitiable and amusing, no need to censor them, let them be amusingly pitiable all they want.
Twitter having to follow the publisher guidelines, when it indeed is a publisher and not a platform, is just basic logic.
And I dunno what you think it takes to become president but it's a little bit more than just creating an account on a website lol.
Creating an account on a website doesn't give anyone unearned power to cancel things. lol.
Would not expect any less from a b@tch-in-a-box-stand. I never liked Twitter, and all I am seeing is two assholes going against each other. Never saw much value for Twitter, as it's just an open chatroom the whole public can see.
Which is why I despise them even more now, than I did when they first started.
I'd dispute this analogy partially on the grounds that a phone call is a private communication where a tweet is a public one.
But this is complicated. Firstly, let's start at the point that Twitter, FB etc. started off trying to almost completely stand completely back from moderation and content control. Clearly, that stopped being an option. You can say it's not the platform's job, but society overall very obviously disagrees, because it was social pressure - and effectively threats that these companies would face regulation - that drove them to start in the first place. I would argue for many of its own staff there's a significant problem working for a company that effectively allows itself to be used for abuse, discrimination, harassment, undermining the democratic governance of their own country, etc.
But back to the main issue. We might envisage three basic models:
1) Snailmail and phone calls are obviously media where the communication company is just a passive conduit linking the people communicating, who have responsibility for what they say. 2) Then you have private media like traditional publishers, who are making individual communications available to the public but take responsibility for them. 3) Then you have open public spaces, where someone can just shout out their stuff to anyone where the communicator has responsibility.
Social media operates in the area between these these models. Twitter is essentially shouting out your stuff to everyone, except from a privately owned publisher space, so a sort of hybrid of (2) & (3). FB's messenger service is effectively just an internet version of (1). After that the main FB page, depending on user preferences, is again a sort of (2) and (3) hybrid.
So the obvious question is, do we force Twitter into model (2) or (3)?
Model (3) has some very interesting implications for private property rights: it's essentially telling Twitter that in certain ways it doesn't own its platform any more - the platform it designed, created and pays to maintain - the public do. What precedent does that set for ownership generally? Also, Twitter doesn't even have to moderate at all. It can just leave everything to the courts to decide. You can imagine the tidal wave of police reports and litigation that will cause as individuals and organisations seek to shut each other up, gumming up the legal system.
Model (2) presents Twitter with incredibly onerous and difficult responsibilities. A newspaper, for instance, would set a legal team to check many articles for fear of libel. Twitter can't do that for the volume of content on its site. Due to the fact that a tidal wave of expensive litigation (this time against Twitter itself) will also emerge for it hosting problematic content, Twitter will necessarily have to clamp down extremely hard on anything that looks remotely dodgy with a safety-first approach. It's a far greater restriction of free speech than the current system (Trump of course would have a ton of his Tweets removed).
Trump's executive order (at least, the early draft) is highly problematic because it's governmental overreach. It made statements about the government assessing "ideological balance". I'm sorry, but that's insane. The government - particularly given the nature of political appointments - has no business assessing this. It's speech control at the most fundamental and dangerous level.
They do, they just call them celebrities and journalists. Freaking Madonna after Trump's election goes to a rally and says she thinks often about blowing up the White House. Or work for the stupid platforms. Headline from yesterday: "Twitter's Head of Site Integrity Compares Kellyanne Conway to Joseph Goebbels in Resurfaced Tweets: 'Actual Nazis in the White House'."
That's not true. Most social media started with limited access to your friends, sites didn't want to be like 4chan,and Facebook required a school email to sign up. The features that made Facebook what it is now came much, much later. The weren't policing, but the content was controlled by its limited range of influence, not unlike phones or mail.
I'm sorry, but there's no meaningful comparison between the loose, off-hand 200-character opinions and exaggerations of people like Madonna to the concerted political action and alleged "news" output of someone like Alex Jones. It's like arguing that a newspaper columnist is a scientist because they've written a few articles on climate change.
A lot of journalists and media outlets, including the NYT, have misinterpreted Section 230. But this level of wrong is embarrassing for ANY journalist, especially one that claims to be steeped in First Amendment issues and loves wrapping himself in the Bill of Rights.
If there's been one benefit to the whole drama and the (at times intentional) spread of misinformation about what 230 actually means, it's seeing some of the self-professed free speech defenders like this clown expose themselves as the grifting, ill-informed posers they've always been.
If there's been one benefit to the whole drama and the (at times intentional) spread of misinformation about what 230 actually means, it's seeing some of the self-professed free speech defenders like this clown expose themselves as the grifting, ill-informed posers they've always been.
What if it's a group call? What if you have it on speakerphone? What if you use a megaphone to blast your phonecall over a full stadium, does the phone company then get to cut your line?The public/private thing is a distinction without a difference.
Twitter is kinda like a mall, it's a privately-owned public space. Like how people are freely to come and go during open hours and say anything they want to their friends and whoever around them may overhear so should they be able to function on twitter. They never stop owning the platform, they just have less than absolute control over it.
I definitely don't see them even being able of functioning if they shift to a publisher model to be honest. The moderation load would be too huge.
As for the ideological balance, it's definitely an over-reaction which I guess is to be expected when you have ideology built in to the rulesets of these sites. Take twitter's misgendering rules for example, to even have that as a rule is to take a left wind intersectional stance politically, because newsflash, people of other views (not even necessarily right wing) don't even think it's a "thing" because to call someone the sex they are is just being accurate or not playing along with their mental illness in the same way you don't treat otherkin like they're really wolves or dragons or whatever the hell they think they are. When you take a legitimate opinion and say it's against the rules then you invite this regulation and yes regulation is a blunt instrument which is why we were against these biased conditions from the beginning.
Its not a violation of free speech when a company chooses to ban people off their platform. This on the other hand, a government dictating what can be on a privately owned platform? This is literally a violation of twitters free speech.
This is deeply ironic considering every time a conservative trump follower gets banned for slurs they incorrectly cry free speech and thought Trump was their champion of fighting for their right to their misunderstood version of free speech....
If a newspaper were forced to put up an article against their wishes, or were left without the right to add a note to the bottom of an article, that's just as much a violation of their free speech as forcing them NOT to run a story. If Twitter is not allowed to put their own comments on their own website then Twitter is kind of like the fictional newspaper I mentioned.
This is deeply ironic considering every time a conservative trump follower gets banned for slurs they incorrectly cry free speech and thought Trump was their champion of fighting for their right to their misunderstood version of free speech....
If a newspaper were forced to put up an article against their wishes, or were left without the right to add a note to the bottom of an article, that's just as much a violation of their free speech as forcing them NOT to run a story. If Twitter is not allowed to put their own comments on their own website then Twitter is kind of like the fictional newspaper I mentioned.
Last edited: