Spot the threat to free speech
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@Jolly Twitter is all about hot takes and fast information.
If a trade happens in sports, a breaking news event, a fire in your city, an ongoing police situation, or just discussing the news.
It happens first on Twitter. That’s the special sauce.
E.g. in SF during fires - I smelled smoke outside. I twittered “SF fire” and multiple people were talking about it. You can’t get news articles that fast.
Horrible medium for discourse. It’s just a shouting / popularity contest.
The President’s particular brand of communication could work just as well on Facebook.
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Loki:
"I wish him a lot of luck with that. The silver lining may be a real discussion of what social media is doing to society. It’s a cesspool."And that would be typical Trump. Cause an explosion, everyone freaks out, and the subject becomes the center of conversation, everyone focuses upon it.
Intentional, or not. Or, as Bret Weinstein's wife Heather put it, Trump is in her estimation, "a political savant" in that he has an instinct for how he wants to get things done, like winning a presidential election, does everything wrong according to everybody, and then smirks like the Cheshire cat.
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@taiwan_girl said in Spot the threat to free speech:
In this case, how did Twitter limit the free speech of President Trump?
He put out a tweet. Nothing was censored. It was allowed in real time. Etc etc
Do you know what free speech is, and what it means to protect It? Free speech is not about the right to say things someone else agrees with. Free speech is about protecting the right for someone to say something you DONT agree with. The Left used to love saying "I may not like what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". Not any more. Now if you say anything the Left doesn't like they call you names and try to remove it.
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@jon-nyc said in Spot the threat to free speech:
Is it:
A). A private company making editorial decisions on its own platform.
B). The President of the United States vaguely threatening a private company for making editorial decisions on its own platform
Well we now know that the exec order says if you do that you lose liability protections and fed funding. Will have to survive court challenges but is probably a good issue for base politics.
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He should have demanded to speak to the manager.
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@Loki said in Spot the threat to free speech:
Well we now know that the exec order says if you do that you lose liability protections and fed funding. Will have to survive court challenges but is probably a good issue for base politics.
Seems like the greater liability threat will make them more likely to censor.
Kinda makes you wonder if Trump thought this through....
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@jon-nyc said in Spot the threat to free speech:
@Loki said in Spot the threat to free speech:
Well we now know that the exec order says if you do that you lose liability protections and fed funding. Will have to survive court challenges but is probably a good issue for base politics.
Seems like the greater liability threat will make them more likely to censor.
Kinda makes you wonder if Trump thought this through....
I read quickly and thought the take was if you don’t censor (I.e. conservatives) you’ll be fine.
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@jon-nyc said in Spot the threat to free speech:
@Loki said in Spot the threat to free speech:
Kinda makes you wonder if Trump thought this through....
You're a funny guy
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Trump signs executive order targeting Twitter after fact-checking row
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52843986The executive order:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-preventing-online-censorship/ -
I read the executive order.
While I do think that Trump's tweets are often unbearable and embarrassing, I do think that Twitter went too far. I'm actually glad that they flagged Trump's posts and provoked this escalation. Twitter has been doing this for years to other less visible Twitter users. Now it gets drawn into the spotlight. The companies shouldn't have both immunity from any responsibility for the content on their platform and freedom to censor as they like. They should have to decide for one of those things and then not have the other.
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I agree this was really stupid for twitter to do but the law was designed to do just that.
All this executive order will do is set in motion a bunch of litigation until congress rewrites the law, if they ever do.
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@jon-nyc said in Spot the threat to free speech:
All this executive order will do is set in motion a bunch of litigation
But litigation can be expensive and behavior-changing, no?
(I have no idea what that EO actually entails in the real world)
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The idea of the legislation was specifically to allow online platforms to not have to choose between publisher (editorial control and responsibility) or platform (neither), but rather to generally not be liable for people’s posts even while they do enforce some rules about them.
Already in the days of Compuserve and Prodigy this was an issue - with no control they would quickly become cesspools but neither company could police and be responsible for everything posted by everyone. This law said they didn’t have to choose.
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Standby by for the principled conservatives to be against this as an aggressive overreach of the administrative state.... there still are a few out there....right?
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Spend much time at Gab?
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No, I've never used Gab. I hear it's used a lot by extremists. If Gab has a quasi-monopoly on not censoring, then of course they are a honeypot for those kinds of people. But if every social platform would be like that, then those people would not be more visible than they are visible in non-online communication. I can handle that.
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@jon-nyc said in Spot the threat to free speech:
Standby by for the principled conservatives to be against this as an aggressive overreach of the administrative state.... there still are a few out there....right?
As you say, make them choose: Publisher or Platform. If they choose publisher, then their editorial choices, for them to be seen as fair, must be carried out throughout the medium. You'll note that death threats against Nick Sandmann are still up on Twitter. They can't begin to be considered fair until their standards are applied to everyone. I'm surprised that no high-profile person who was
censoredadmonished on Twitter hasn't sued yet. -
Also, there would be an obvious way how social media companies could provide editorial control without censorship. They could just offer an option for every user whether they want to see all content, including potentially offensive or extremist content, or only a subset of the content selected by that company. More sophisticated variants of that scheme are easily conceivable, too.
YT goes in that direction a little. Sometimes they pop up something along the lines of "are you sure you want to see this".
It gets more complicated when it comes to ads and ad revenue, but I believe it's completely possible to design it in such a way that it assumes citizens are adults who can make their own decisions.
