The president for the last 4 years used the leniency of big tech to work up his supporters. Then told them to take over the capitol on his way out of the White House.
Now everyone is surprised to see when big tech says enough is enough.
Where else would these people draw the line if not here?
There is a difference between “can” and “should”. Twitter has every legal right to do what they did, but I feel that the decisions they (and other social media companies) are making are extremely dangerous and misguided.
But many of the legacy telecom laws remain on the books. It's tech that was exempted from these regulations, not legacy telecom. Sadly the privacy protections we had on phone calls were never applied to data. That would have resulted in a very different world than that in which we live today.
That was a scam. Follow the money. Lots of it was invested in 1990s/early 2000s, and every penny ended up in the pockets of ATT, VZN, and their executives and investment bankers. Only now, as sibling observes, common carriage and other requirements are gone.
You're blaming election fraud as the culprit then not trump.
Half the country is mad as hell, because there's 3k+ signed affidavits, 140 congressmen, at least two majority of state congresses, reports from data scientists, cctv footage, voting machine forensic reports in MI and AZ, and a lot of dismissal by courts based on standing not merits. It's unprecedented and it's straight up totalitarian to say "no mention of election fraud is allowed"
Nobody is saying you can’t mention the idea of election fraud. What’s getting rejected are attempts to lie about it and still be taken seriously. It’s true that a large number of people are mad but that’s because people are feeding them propaganda instead of truth.
I don’t know whether you are intentionally repeating claims you know to be untrue or haven’t looked at the details but you should ask yourself what it tells us when the President’s own lawyers keep dropping these cases. They wouldn’t do that if there was any merit to the case – and they’re certainly not out of money. The claims just aren’t true and they know it - once the fundraising dries up they’ll move on to something else.
The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly paradoxical idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.
People care more about tolerance than they do Facebook and Google creating a human attention farms. But as long as these megacorps have a rainbow logo once a year then they're the good guy, right?
absolutely. require age restrictions. anything. its causing mass brain damage and that's not a hyperbole. they should be treated like casinos, not handed to youth on iPads. Trump's real incompetence was not tackling big tech. If you control the minds of the people, you control the democracy.
I just don't see how that is tenable due to the way our society is structured. Also I thought there were already age restrictions in place for a lot of these services? Not that it is enforced.
Unless folks are willing to have some kind of real ID verification to access these services.
One interesting thing to consider is the Paradox of Tolerance[1]. In the case of our society, allowing the norms to be consistently pushed can lead to the rise of intolerance.
Not to mention that the decisions to ban Trump certainly wasn’t taken overnight and he was given a very long leash.
Regardless I’m sure the motives here are not philosophical but mostly profit motivated.
> And YT deletes content mentioning election fraud, and twitter permanent bans the president, all under the historically totalitarian guise of "safety"
Also, really puts a dent into the anti-free speech argument that "you can go to another platform" argument.
I do love watching all these "tech/social media is evil" crowd here suddenly praising tech/social media and wanting them to have even more control over our lives.
Social media is so evil that we need them to control our lives even more. Wonderful logic that.
That's a mistatement of what many of us are saying.
I certainly am not advocating that social media companies should have even more control over our lives. I would like them to have less, which presumably happens either because (a) we stop using social media (at least in the current sense) and/or (b) more options for "social media" platforms emerge.
Since (a) is unlikely in the near term, that probably means (b). I don't how Twitter banning anyone (including POTUS) from their platform does anything but encourage that.
I also don't see how "large corporations that have used psychological manipulation and network effects to become really popular must be consider public utilities, despite no law to that effect" really lines up with free speech. Do you believe that the NY Times should be required to print my op-ed's in their online version? How about my comments on their articles?
> That's a mistatement of what many of us are saying.
Actually I described you to the tee.
> I certainly am not advocating that social media companies should have even more control over our lives
So you are against censorship or for it?
> Since (a) is unlikely in the near term, that probably means (b). I don't how Twitter banning anyone (including POTUS) from their platform does anything but encourage that.
Except that if tech companies collude together to prevent that. Fine, you say go make your own twitter. They do and then it gets banned from google play/apple store/etc. And down the line it goes. That's my point.
> I also don't see how "large corporations that have used psychological manipulation and network effects to become really popular must be consider public utilities, despite no law to that effect" really lines up with free speech.
Who or what are you quoting? You just plucked a quote out of the ether. That's very dishonest and disingenuous. You almost write like a journalist.
> Do you believe that the NY Times should be required to print my op-ed's in their online version?
Of course not. But then again, they are not a platform, they are publishers. But you already knew that.
I'm against censorship but don't consider what private corporations do with platforms that are not legally subject to public utility style regulation to be censorship.
If you can show collusion, please do. Meanwhile, WTF is with the "app store" concept in the first place? You're complaining that it isn't fair that Apple and Google can block apps from their platforms, even though that's what they've actually done since the arrival of smartphones? Free software advocates (look me up) have been warning about this since day one of the app store. There's nothing new here, other than the dispute of the day involves people's ability to type whatever they want in messages to some platform rather than some other feature that Apple/Google think doesn't fit with their intended platform ecosystems.
I wasn't quoting anyone. The double-quotes were an alternative to using hyphens to create a run-on phrase that attempted to describe how I see some people talking about these corporations.
If I understand your last line correctly, you believe there is some category called "platform" which needs to be treated differently. Are you calling for new laws to define what a platform is? If I create my own "dwitter", will your new laws allow me to have to any say over what people can post to it?
Now everyone is surprised to see when big tech says enough is enough.
Where else would these people draw the line if not here?