Well you offer no solution other than some hand waving nonsense about vague TOS that at the most charitable is shockingly naive about social media and modern internet culture.
Where did I go astray? You said you wouldn’t be satisfied with a ToS drafted to clarify that the company had broad rights to autonomously decide who uses their (free) own service and equipment. This does imply that only government-approved ToS would apply. You further stated that you’d be interested in regulating how they applied whatever terms did end up in effect, putting the government in that position.
That’s why I posed the question as I did, to see if people are willing to stand by their proposal when it begins to look like concrete law that dictates how private property can be used. It’s easy to say “this situation needs to be fixed and I refuse to consider second-order effects or necessary legislation.”
I have a hard time believing you have read what I wrote. And my spending any energy repeating it has me questioning my judgement.
Here though-
If you have any comments that address what has actually been said let me know. Otherwise buh bye.
Okay, fine.
As I said, if we put the force of law behind what you wrote above, then you want Twitter only to have a government-approved ToS, and have a government-approved appeal process, and have the government regulate that process as well.
Would it stop at social media companies? Why would it? I want a transparent explanation from Fox why they won’t let me call into their morning show. I want a transparent process that accounts for why my newspaper doesn’t publish my letters to the editor (and why it always gets delivered late on Tuesdays). And I assume this would all be at the company’s expense?
I can see why you’d want to stick to your quoted text and run away from the implications of it. In practice this opens up a huge, expensive Pandora’s box of unintended consequences that nobody really wants to deal with.
The strength possible to that force of law is very limited, constrained as it is by to platforms’ 1A protections.
If you have concerns that other media companies might have government regulation consistent with 1A as well, well been the case for a very long time.
That is not related to what I said, I think that you entirely misunderstood what @Demontree said there. What was said was that you could go to the police and complain without evidence. I was pointing out that the words that you used would be evidence.
You seem to be talking about something entirely different, as you seem to have not understood the context that @DemonTree was talking about.
Except that they actually took quite a loss when they dropped him.
This wasn’t the first time that he led an insurrection on the Capitol? Please go on…
Twitter was very clear with their reasoning behind letting him post when he was breaking rules that they would have banned a regular user, and they were very clear as to how and when he crossed the line that his position wasn’t enough to protect him from.
You may not agree with their reasoning, but that just means that the remedy that you claim to seek would not satisfy you, as the remedy you claim to seek is exactly what has been done.
You are talking about a job that would go around and ask each police precinct if you had ever had a complaint about a non-criminal act.
And still what you are complaining about here is entirely outside the scope of this thread. We are talking about whether or not twitter banning people calling for an insurrection is a “freedom of expression” issue, not whether or not people should be allowed to take into account complaints about racist or violent speech that someone has complained about.
You are right, I did ask you what you were talking about when you brought that up out of the blue. I’m sorry to have assumed that you had any sort of relevant point you were trying to make there.
It’s a bit like when you use blueberries in a soufflé.
So, it is all about the audience then, not about the speech.
Good to hear you finally come to that conclusion.
I assume you mean social media outlets. And yeah, that is part of the function of the first amendment that you seem to care so much about, that private companies don’t have to carry violent or hateful speech if they don’t want to.
Once again, you keep coming back to the government for some reason. Do you understand the concept that the government is different than a private company? It really seems you don’t, since you keep trying to ask this same question in multiple different ways, and it will always have the same answer.
You know that there’s a whole world worth of excluded middle. Nazis marching in the street is neither a problem, nor is totally fine. Do you understand this?
What I meant is that there is no standard your words have to meet for the non-crime hate incident to be recorded as such. Just the accusation is enough.
And it would also mean that rather than complaining in ATMB about “unfair moderation”, they would instead go running to the government body in charge of ensuring fair moderation.
But the words would be there as well, right?
So when you go in for your job, and they go check up on you, and they call around to the police stations to see if anyone has complained about your social media activity, are you saying that the police just say, “Yes.” and they don’t actually say what it was that got you your complaint?
Whoever is doing this background check can very well evaluate for themselves whether or not your words come from someone that they want to employ.
If your neighbor complains about you playing your music too loudly, there will be a record of that as well. Once again, you have failed to explain what this has to do with social media banning hatespeech and how that is an issue of freedom of expression, but you have doubled down on the fact that what “freedom of expression” means to you is expression that is free from any consequence.
You will never get that. And you shouldn’t.
I already told you it has nothing to do with social media, it was a reply to this comment:
I said we are freer in some ways and less free in others, and gave this as an example.
They don’t call around the police stations. Your post still shows no understanding of this issue. DBS checks are a formal process supposed to allow employers to find out if prospective employees have relevant criminal convictions. The enhanced check would mostly be used for people working with children or vulnerable adults.
And I don’t know, but I very much doubt the police are going to show employers details of your tweets. AIUI a DBS check would be more like ‘convicted of X crime on Y date’, ‘received a caution for doing W on Z date’. It would probably be against data protection laws to give details. And a music complaint wouldn’t be on there unless the police took some kind of formal action against you, which you would know about.
That is NOT what it means to me. I am talking here about a law that would be forbidden by your own 1st amendment, and how that makes us less free. Would you repeal that amendment if you could? If not then don’t attack me for supporting it.
The problem is that social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google act as a combination of utility (like the phone, water, or power company) and content provider (like traditional broadcasting companies). That is to say, they make their money off advertising linked to content. That content, however, is largely unregulated and unfiltered as it would be with traditional cable television or radio.
So the question becomes what responsibility do these companies have, if any, to curate the content that is transmitted via their platform?
Another question is to what extent should these companies be getting involved in politics? Most reasonable people seem to agree with these companies preventing the POTUS from fomenting sedition. But they were also praised for enabling BLM and Arab Spring protests. Should multi-billion dollar companies be in a position where they get to decide which protests to support and which ones to shut down? What prevents them from making those decisions based on their own self interests and then using their various algorithms to curate content for your news stream that provides a supporting narrative?
Well did they break the terms of use?
A point many analyses miss, is that Trump’s behavior would have got any normal person banned a long time ago, so those advocating for not banning Trump (which is not your position, I know) are really advocating for special treatment for him.
Meanwhile calls for peaceful protest probably don’t break their terms of use.
In terms of your point about FB et al being too powerful, I agree, but I think that’s an issue of anti Monopoly regulation / anti trust and is bigger than just concerns on freedom of speech.
A couple of days ago Twitter suspended four prominent Antifa accounts. Next up, BLM?
If they promoted violence, I have no problem with this. But that article is terrible and provides pretty much zero actual information (par for the course for the NY Post), referencing notorious bigot (and liar) Andy Ngo, so who knows what actually happened?
# Twitter suspends fake antifa account tied to white nationalists
Now you know not to trust the fucking NY post.
Another acct suspended was The Base, which is a revolutionary anarchist group, not Antifa.
These articles are both dated June 2020, so are clearly not referring to the same event.
If it’s an anti-fascist revolutionary anarchist group, then it’s as much antifa as anything else.
From Wikipedia:
Antifa (/ænˈtiːfə, ˈænti(ˈ)fɑː/) is a left-wing anti-fascist and anti-racist political movement in the United States. It is highly decentralized and comprises an array of autonomous groups that aim to achieve their objectives through the use of both nonviolent and violent direct action rather than through policy reform.
Perhaps if other media bothered to report on things like this, we’d have a better idea why Twitter banned them, and the NYP would have a few less readers.
As an aside, since I think you’re a Brit, we Americans think the New York Post is sort of like the Daily Mail. Don’t rely on it alone for political or scientific opinions, or we may think less of you.
~Max
I was getting that impression. And it wasn’t a very illuminating article. But I couldn’t find anywhere else that reported it at all - just those old articles from last June that DrDeth later posted.
Nm, not worth it.