Well sure the supreme court ignores standing, but we’re arguing in the Dope. I hold the members here to a higher standard. 
I think people quite often read an “or else” where there is none. It goes into the victim mentality that has been cultivated by the right.
These were not companies being told what their terms of service should be, or how to act on them. All that was being done was pointing out posts that violated their terms of service.
It’s like reporting a problematic post to the moderators here. I’m not forcing them to moderate it, just asking them to take a look at it.
Yeah, but what about the implicit “or else I’ll start a thread complaining about it?”
I would disagree that there is one. How often does someone start an ATMB thread because a moderator doesn’t take action on something reported?
Not saying it never happens, but it’s either someone trying to point out hypocrisy in moderation, usually getting shut down and looking like a fool, or someone petitioning to change moderation policies, which almost never goes anywhere. A “threat” of starting an ATMB thread is no threat at all.
Mods tell us all the time that they don’t read all the threads and that they rely on posters to point out problems. I’ve reported a number of posts that I wasn’t sure of, not telling the mods that they need to ban this poster or else, but rather, telling them that this is something I think they should look at.
Same with the social media companies. The govt doesn’t tell them their terms of service or how to enforce them, however, they know that the mods of the social media sites can’t catch everything, so they point out when they see something problematic.
So, I’m not sure that your “what about” is related to either the subject of the thread or to reality itself.
Perhaps that’s because it was a joke.
Apologies, I did not realize that. I assumed it was a serious response.
Replying to myself before seeing anyone else’s posts, because I misspoke. I posted that and had to leave, then realized what I had said and that it was wrong.
When I got home there was a already a big freak-out over it, and I just didn’t feel like wading in.
What I meant to say was that Biden was spreading misinformation about it being a ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’, because being vaccinated does not guarantee that you won’t get infected, and if you do you could still spread it.
In the early days, the effectiveness against infection was quite good, but not perfect. However, once Omicron came along (well before Biden’s speech), protection against infection had declined dramatically, especially for the first two shots. If you believed Biden and then behaved as if you couldn’t get infected because you had two shots, you could have been in trouble.
COVID-19 Vaccine Effectiveness Against Omicron or Delta Infection and Outcomes.
When Biden made his ‘epidemic of the unvaccinated’ remark we were well into the Omicron phase. If you had your two shots in the previous year more than 180 days earlier, it’s estimated that your protection against infection was 1%. If you recently had a booster, it might have been as high as 61% for a while.
So my statement was wrong for the original form of the virus, which the vaccine protected well against, but by the time Biden made his remarks Omicron was around and two shots previously did very little to prevent infection. It still had decent protection against severe outcomes and death. A third shot gave you better protection for while.
I am not a vax denier. My entire family, including myself, are fully vaccinated and we were some of the first ones to line up for the shot. None of us have gotten Covid, either. But the truth is, if you only got the first two shots you have essentially no protrction against infection now, but some protection against severe illness and death. If you’ve had three or four, it depends on the type of shot and how long since you got it. But no one is completely protected from infection, and it is not an ‘epidemic of the unvaccinated’.
Six months after Biden’s pandemic of the unvaccinated remarks…
It really was a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
Source: How to Compare COVID Deaths for Vaccinated and Unvaccinated People - Scientific American
Also…
Omicron (B.1.1.529) is a variant of first reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) by the Network for Genomics Surveillance in South Africa on 24 November 2021.
Source: SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant - Wikipedia
Biden’s, “Pandemic of the unvaccinated,” remarks were given on September 9th, 2021.
Source: Remarks by President Biden on Fighting the COVID-19 Pandemic | The White House
So this…
… is false.
As lance points out, you are incorrect as to the facts that you have used to support your conclusion. But, in a universe where the facts supported your case, are you also claiming that Biden was telling people not to get a third shot? That would be the only way that your criticisms would make any sense at all.
How soon we forget the Canadian “Freedom Convoy”. 
God knows I try to.
You’re going to have to be much clearer about what your point is, because I honestly have no idea.
First of all that article looks like libertarian claptrap. It seems to be arguing that there’s no such thing as human rights at all, only “property rights”, and therefore free speech isn’t a valid concept. I guess I should modify my comment that we all believe in free speech, because this lunatic doesn’t, but folks like that are obviously a very small fringe minority.
The relevance of the “Freedom Convoy” was the way that it ended. The federal government invoked the Emergencies Act (1985) which allowed the government to act against the protesters despite the constitutional guarantee of freedom of expression in section 2(b) and freedom of peaceful assembly in 2(c). The government could do this because the very first sentence in the Constitution (emphasis mine) is this:
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
Thus my comment back in post #66 that “… reasonable regulation of speech is in fact the norm in most democracies, where the protection of free speech against government censorship is highly valued but is tempered with the imperatives of responsible stewardship of the tools of mass communication and other reasonable restrictions …”.
This thread is not about Canada, though, and nor is it a general debate about free speech. The point I was making is that Biden’s attempt to contain egregiously dangerous disinformation on social media was morally and philosophically the right thing to do. The idea that malevolent actors should be able to undermine public health and safety with impunity “because freeze peach” is naive idealism. But it’s a position that SCOTUS has upheld because it’s deeply entrenched in the American zeitgeist. In this particular case, the judge who ruled against Biden has a history as a COVID-denying anti-vax lunatic.
Really? I quote you and you have “no idea”?
Obviously, conversations about free speech and perceptions of ridiculous extremes are not confined to the U.S.
Comprende?
Nice to hear, for a change. 
No comprende. This is becoming a bit of a sidetrack, but that article shows no such thing as you claim. The debate about the “Freedom Convoy” and how it was shut down in Canada was specifically about whether the protests were so disruptive to the the public that it met the threshold for justifying the use of the Emergencies Act. I happen to think the answer is “yes”, but others legitimately disagree.
In the US, however, such a debate would never happen because no such legislation could exist, because instead of an explicit statement of “reasonable limits” on constitutional rights, those rights are considered to be nearly absolute. Cite: Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church, or the SCOTUS ruling that burning a cross on the front lawn of a Black family you wanted to terrorize was “protected speech”. The arguments that have occurred and are occurring today are over the question of whether even speech that is directly threatening to the health, safety, or well-being of Americans should enjoy the protection of the First Amendment. That kind of argument would be a non-starter anywhere else.
Thus, the two debates are not the same. Or if you want to claim that they’re the same because both are about “free speech”, the differentiating factor is that the thresholds for the kind of speech that may be prohibited are so vastly different that the two scenarios are fundamentally and qualitatively different.
Yeah, the idea that “every civilized country guarantees free speech” is a huge stretch. I would doubt it’s a even a plurality and let’s leave out the “civilized”stuff too.
What other countries specifically acknowledge free speech? I can’t think of any off hand, maybe there’s a few. Japan? Sweden? Peru?
Too bad the point escapes you.
Wrong.
The Supreme Court in 2003 upheld a main provision of a Virginia law against cross-burning, stating that using cross-burning to intimidate was not protected expression. So no, you can’t get away with burning a cross on a black family’s lawn to terrorize them. Though cross-burning in another setting (i.e. to demonstrate how vitriolically stupid you are) is apparently permissible.
There are numerous restrictions on the freedom of expression in the U.S., including those that limit unreasonable disruptions (e.g., limits on protesters’ proximity to abortion clinics).
Not wrong. First you ignore things like the Phelps travesty and the thousands of other examples like it, including neo-Nazis spreading their toxic hate speech under the protection of the 1st Amendment and the organized programs that endangered millions of Americans with COVID disinformation, and then you cite a Supreme Court case that has no relevance to what I said. For the record, what I said in that specific context concerned this:
… the SCOTUS ruling that burning a cross on the front lawn of a Black family you wanted to terrorize was “protected speech" …
And this is the relevant ruling – from R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul; emphasis mine:
R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, 505 U.S. 377 (1992), is a case of the United States Supreme Court that unanimously struck down St. Paul’s Bias-Motivated Crime Ordinance and reversed the conviction of a teenager, referred to in court documents only as R.A.V., for burning a cross on the lawn of an African-American family since the ordinance was held to violate the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of speech.
Moderating:
It has. To you and @Jackmannii and anyone else who wishes to carry on this limit-to-free-speech discussion hijack, please take it elsewhere. Thanks.