[xwkd]

Comedy cannot be offensive to trans people on Twitch, specifically!

Here's the part where I rhetorically taunt with my weaponization of the virtue of free enterprise:

"You have a right to free speech, but I have a right to decide what I allow on my platform!"

Yeah, I don't entirely believe that either. I see the weasel here and so do you.

So I have a right to disregard the value of free speech. But is that really what we want?

[klyrs]

Platforms aren't there for your free speech, nor should they be. They're there for their own free speech, and freedom of association. Every platform bans content that is perfectly legal: spam, porn, gore, etc. Platforms like gab and parler ban "woke" content. Hell, even libraries pick and choose which books to buy, which books to put in the shelves, which books to put on display. Yes, this is really what we want, if we want a useable internet. Without the freedom to curate, platforms would inundated with so much spam, you'd never see the content you want.

Don't like it? Feel free to make your own platform that allows absolutely everything up to the line of legality! Just remember, nobody owes you financial success or a large user-base.

[xwkd]

I agree with you completely. This is the way that it should be. I will also say, then, that I feel like we’re all a bunch of huge pussies. Sounding more like my dad every day. Great.

Curation and censorship are strange cousins, don’t you think?

It seems like it’s only censorship if it’s done with big furnaces and a gun barrel by a man with tiny glasses and creased pants. Governments censor. Corporations curate. Right?

I’m not sure if I even want to dignify the following state of affairs by calling it an open secret, but the US is governed by corporations. I won’t insult you by expounding on this line of reasoning. You see what I’m getting at.

[klyrs]

I mean, my dad would call you a pussy for playing video games, much less watching somebody else play them on twitch, and my mom would keep her mouth shut lest the verbal abuse be turned on her. I think we should strive to be better than our parents, and think for ourselves.

And, yeah, we've let corporations take control again. But let's be clear, I'm much more concerned about the likes of Halliburton than twitch. Some in government have expressed some interest in breaking up big tech and undermine big oil, so it's not a perfect equivalence, thankfully.

I'm with Ken White[1] on "cancel culture." Sometimes, it goes too far. But by and large, "cancel culture" is better framed as "speech that is critical of other speech." And, yeah, the people at the helm of big platforms have bigger thumbs than the rest of us. But nobody stopped anti-woke Musk from taking over Twitter, did they?

[1] https://popehat.substack.com/p/our-fundamental-right-to-sham...

[InitialLastName]

> I'm much more concerned about the likes of Halliburton than twitch

Amazon's capacity to affect the world, through both its enormous market share in retail and its control of large portions of the internet's infrastructure has the potential to extend their influence far further than Halliburton's ever did.

There's real potential that the diplomacy that Amazon encourages to avoid any serious roadblocks in the China->US disposable crap pipeline will make the Iraq War look like a game of Capture the Flag.