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As an adult I find little comfort in people telling me I'm not allowed to listen to someone for my own good.
>The line we’ve sort of drawn over the centuries just runs parallel with general decency and common sense in the form of laws/ social taboos.
I think if you delve into those lines you would find many of them to be quite horrifying today. Let's not forget those social taboos were things like interracial relationships and homosexuality.
>The guy who yells fire in a crowded theater as a joke and results in people dying?
And in particular that supreme court case was an analogy used to destroy the free speech rights of anti-war activists against WWI. Who by the way, turned out to be the ones correctly pointing out the real fire.
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You're totally right. If you consider Alex Jones some rightwing messiah, you need to do some soul searching. I don't know, is Alex Jones rightwing? Maybe I'm the one losing touch. Cause I always thought he was just insane. Further, he definitely wasn't banned for his political views, but for much worse. If a leftwinger was banned after doxxing people, harassing terrorist attack victims, veiled death threats, disinformation, incitement, etc- I wouldn't pretend it was because of their political views.
However, OP's point still stands. We cannot allow already near monopolies to get too trigger happy. Because we all know pulling ads off certain politically driven content is already an issue these companies are practicing- and it is a form of censorship.
We need to make it known to these multibillion dollar mega corporations that while we understand purging him was a necessary evil... we weren't necessarily happy about it. And we are deeply concerned about the practice becoming a new norm.
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Inciting violence is not protected speech. There is no useful reason for the term “hate speech”, if that is what is truly meant.
Re: your points about private companies can do what they want - when the shoe is on the other foot...
We are near a point where the courts will have to decide when and if a social media company is a medium of free speech.
I don’t know how that will play out, but it is time to find out.
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If that is the case why are the bans coming out now so many years afterwards? Why not ban him at the time of him doing all those atrocious things? Why wait and why make a collaborative effort to de-platform him?
I wouldn't hold this belief if he got banned after harassing and doxxing those people when it happened or soon after, but Sandy Hook was 6 years ago. Alex Jones has since tried to cover up that dark part of his past and now accepts the shooting is real. If this banning was really because of that, why the extremely delayed reaction? I just don't believe it, but it's a lot easier to see and believe that he's being hit because he's the easier target.
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If a small business owner got connections with the federal government for domestic spying cooperation in exchange for not getting regulated, and whatever other connections that aren't blatantly obvious, I probably wouldn't want that small business owner being able to infringe on someone's speech either.
To say these companies aren't monopolies is absurd, and to say "this isn't suppression of free speech because it's a private company" just because it's someone you don't like is a bad road to go down. These companies are multi billion dollar international conglomerates that have shown they're willing to deal behind closed doors with multiple governments. To give them the right to take away the best form of having a voice just because you don't like the person who is being suppressed is a terrible idea.
Also, nothing Alex Jones has done is nearly as bad as NBC, CNN, and Fox being propaganda arms to push false narratives to allow us to go commit war crimes in the middle east, and none of them are banned from contributing to the media.
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Wait, I've been told for years that America is superior to to the rest of the Western world because it's Constitution protects freedom of speech from **government** suppression. And that places like Germany and the UK are literally dystopian hellscapes straight out of the pages of 1984 because their governments occasional give people nominal fines for hate speech.
But now you are telling me that private corporations can be just as suppressive of freedom of speech, since they control the public spaces in which people actually communicate with each other in the modern world?
And perhaps that the massive concentration of media ownership in America means that it isn't the free-speechiest country in the world after all?
Nah, that would be going way too far.
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Depends on the government. But I know of words that I can't even mention, not use, mention, that are legal to mention, but will be punished on most platforms. There are concepts and questions that one may express that are fully legal to express, but will absolutely get punished on most platforms.
So yeah, you have less freedom on private platforms. I'm not even coming to the conclusion that this is a good or a bad thing. We're just lucky that this era of communication is done under secular companies and our morality roughly lines up with theirs. At most your mention of cock would get you banned from a Christian minecraft server, rather than having the site host sending the admins a demand to take down your comment.
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>He's free to start whatever kind of service he wants. So are you.
Right, but how do you think people will access your service? Maybe, just maybe through Google search which processes %90 of search requests each year. Because of Googles prevalence wouldn't you say that almost have become a quasi public utility? They could manipulate search results so my service couldn't be found until page 10 of results, safely hidden away from %90 of internet users. Big Tech could make it so I couldn't get the actual url to my followers that easily because I was banned from FB, Twitter, Youtube etc.
I know you can start a basic website. My point is that since Google/Twitter/FB has a virtual monopoly shouldn't they either act in good will on behalf of all legal content creators or be regulated by the government as a monopoly?
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I also know that in some of these cases what happens is that CNN already has advertisements ready to roll. So now instead of Youtube fetching ads, CNN runs their own on youtube for their own videos.
I also wouldn't be surprised if a lot of these companies just have like "get out of jail free cards" that makes them basically untouchable to youtube. I remember the Vegas shooting incident where Caisey Nicestat or whatever his name his got demonitized for saying the add rev would be donated to the vegas shooting while a CNN report got monetized. Their response to Caisey at the time was that shootings get demonetized no exceptions. Such a clownfest
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>1st amendment isn’t really doing what it was intended
The 1st amendment was never intended to apply to anything but government. No one has ever had 1st amendment rights working for a private business. This is why people get fired all the time for saying stupid shit on social media.
A perfect example of this was during the funeral of a NYPD officer, some guy blasted "Fuck the Police" from his apartment window overlooking where the funeral ceremony was. The police went to his apartment to **ask him** to turn it off but he didn't, and that was it. They didn't and couldn't do anything more because of the 1st amendment. However, the landlord evicted him afterwards because of his actions. 1st amendment doesn't protect him from his landlord who was simply disgusted by his bullshit.
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Yeah but when someone defrauds you you’re happy when the police arrest them. Rules aren’t perfect because humans make rules. Just because we’ve made some mistakes over the last 4 thousand years doesn’t mean anarchy is the answer.
In this case we’re talking about a privately owned and run business that is completely optional for people to use. They have the right to deny service just like any other business because Twitter isn’t a utility
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> It's a clear attempt by gigantic internet companies to take down a smaller news org.
I guess it's important we make a clear distinction between news and disinformation. There is a clear difference. Maybe we should ask them to make the distinction.
> Problem is that this certainly won't be the last time they do it.
I too am concerned about this. We all are. There are actual substantive debates to be had about who they should be able to ban/deny access to ad dollars. Particularly since they are effectively the front door to the modern Internet. But this current crop of extremists really aren't making that debate easy when it's nothing but spin/mudslinging/alternate reality nonsense whenever the issue is brought up. They force us to pick a side and this shouldn't be a "pick a side" issue. With the vocal minority of extremists like Alex Jones gone, hopefully we can begin to have that debate.
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We live in a world of smartphones and apps. Make no mistake, the internet will be borderline unrecognizable in two decades - it'll be nothing but a communications protocol for Snapchat v5 and Zuckbook v9. Your kids won't know what a webring is, assuming that even you do. Your grandkids will grow up barely understanding what a browser is. It's going to be apps and app stores and advertisement CDNs, and nothing else.
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They should catch more murderers and rapists, and YouTube should catch more people who violate their TOS, and ban them. But they won’t, because they selectively ban based on political ideologies. Though Alex Jones isn’t a classical Conservative, the particular people who like his conspiracies are Conservatives, so Twitter FB and YT made a lateral move to ban him on all 3 sites. They literally colluded and made a joint effort to take Jones off of their sites to show his followers they aren’t welcome. But I don’t see them do the same for conspiracy theorists who leftists enjoy, such as the people who think 9/11 was an inside job, or conspiracy theorists who harass political constituents about a baseless Russia accusation.
Face it; it was an ideological move and nothing more. And now that they show that they ban people in that fashion, these companies will never recover. Either they apply the rules fairly, or not at all.
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My brain actually hurt reading that. Please stop making these strawman arguments and analogies. You're being very intellectually dishonest with them and with your arguments.
Netflix is a streaming service that provides access to premium copyrighted content from other companies. It charges a fee to use their service, and if you don't want to use it you have plenty of other viable alternatives like the library, hulu, amazoninstantvideo, etc.
Your ISP also charges you for accessing the internet. Youtube only doesn't charge you because they stay afloat by charging advertisers to advertise on their website. Facebook and Twitter do the same.
The main difference between Netflix's content and Youtube's content is that the people who create the content for Netflix create it with the intent of making money by charging you in some way to see it which they do through netflix. In Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter's case Alex Jones creates the content with the intent of having it be seen by anyone free of charge. He wants to freely spread information, but his ability to do so is being throttled by these websites which is why I connect this to the way Netflix would want to give content to you but they are being throttled by an ISP.
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The "charge" of twitter is obeying the rules. He did not, he got shitcanned.
And besides that, they *gave* him a chance. They gave him multiple warnings, temporary suspensions, etc. After that it's on him to fucking obey the rules or get punished for it.
The only hypocrisy here is all these alt-righters who suddenly *really* think the market needs regulating. All the people crying "censorship" who gleefully attempt to silence those they agree with through harassment.
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Maybe you just need more friends, kiddo
How do you and your friends share funny content? How do you talk to your friends as a whole? How do you share your pictures with your friends? Where you do you keep everyone in your life updated? Is YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, Twitter, etc... not a major form of entertainment you enjoy?
As for profit businesses, they've forced their ways into our lives, your opinion doesn't matter, this is a fact. You think facebook is petitioning for less users? Come on man, you can't be that dull.
If social media wasn't a social necessity, people would opt out, but that doesn't happen.
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Oh stop with this technocratic fearmongering horse shit.
Alex Jones had a Twitter account for over 10 years. Over that time he said every crazy thing he could think of, harassed someone damn near everyday, and made a fake news platform which encouraged trolls to spread their misery among the internet. He was only ever banned once he livestreamed himself screaming and panting insults at another man's face for ten straight minutes.
These companies' policies are not that hard to follow. You're on reddit and you know tonight you're not going to get banned unless you pull some real outlandish crazy shit. To pretend like any service owes Alex Jones anything is hilarious and ridiculous.
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Oh shut the fuck up. If Alex Jones want to post rants and dox people, he can go to Gab.ai. He can go on Tumblr, he can come here and make his own fucking subreddit. Reddit supports both video, photo, and text posting. So tell me again how he has been left with 0 way of communicating because he got banned from twitter and youtube?
Being the biggest most popular sites doesn't make them the *only* sites. So what you're saying is tantamount to whining not that you have no platform, but that you don't have a platform that give you a wide enough audience to support your frail yet strangely inflated ego.
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> If the tech companies start banning people purely for stating political views then I'll agree with you.
Defense Distributed. Everything they did was legal, they've gone out of their way to defer to every unconstitutional ruling handed down to them. They abide by every site's TOS. And yet you can't link their products (CNC and 3D printer instructions for firearm parts) on facebook. And their fundraising videos were taken down by youtube, as well as a shitload of videos talking about them. No TOS violations - it was purely arbitrary. Every appeal ignored.
That's fucking censorship right there, because for some reason, the same silicon valley elites who were willing to "disrupt" every other aspect of modern life ended up in a mad panic about the thought of someone "disrupting" the balance of physical power, even if its nothing but a 3d printed plastic pistol that's in every way inferior to a slamfire shotgun you can make with $10 of materials from home depot and 20 minutes of effort. As opposed to a $500 3d printer, God only knows how much of X specific filament, a shitload of printing knowledge - just to print a single-shot .380 pistol that'll explode on the second shot like something you'd expect in a poorly-coded Borderlands clone.
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It's amazing how ridiculous what you're saying is about a word you clearly haven't bothered to even look up. Was the implementation of the 8 hour workday, abolition of child labor, and woman's suffrage tyrannical implementations of morality? Is Theodore Roosevelt's America right up there with Mao's China? The distortion of language is incredible - now everything from Nazis to European socialism to American progressivism to neoliberal centrists like Obama are all the same as Soviet communism.
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I have no idea what a storesecond is.
Also, why the fuck would a store let back in someone caught shoplifting, or someone who shoplifted in a store next to theirs? It's not discrimination to deny entry to CRIMINALS... Unless you're also fine with criminals teaching at schools or working with the elderly.
>Discrimination is literally just "treating someone differently"
No? You don't know what you're even talking about.
>the unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people, especially on the grounds of race, age, or sex.
This is discrimination. UNJUST or PREJUDICIAL. It's not prejudice if you judge someone based on his actions and crimes, it's just logic.
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In a way, we've been lucky our politicians were old and didn't understand how to manipulate the online media.
The new generation of politicians are keenly aware of how to get to the top of someone's Instagram feed and get their vote.
The only benefit is they know they are under constant surveillance. It might make them fear breaking the rules so much. Well the smart ones that rise to the top maybe.
Each generation, politicians become a little less corrupt on average but politics moves slowly. Usually the older guy doesn't mind closing the loop holes he exploited before leaving office as his final act to seem good to the people.
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This is basically my concern in a nutshell.
I do not weep for Alex Jones, but I weep for what *might* happen when this kind of behavior becomes normalized.
Some of the richest and most powerful people in the world (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, etc) could just buy Facebook, Reddit, and other major social media outlets and do exactly to the left as they're doing to the right.
Is this wise? Do we really want to open Pandora's Box in this way?
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Walmart is one retailer and not even the largest. Furthermore, I know of no incident in which Walmart and Amazon sat down together and decided that they'd both agree to stop selling Kenmore Vacuums (or whatever). In fact, I think that's illegal.
Most of Big Tech banned Jones *on the same day*. He hadn't even said anything particularly offensive on that day, to my knowledge. I think it was a Monday morning.
Edit: that explicit lyrics example is really bad. There was a third party rating service which determined explicit content and there were clear guidelines for what an artist could or couldn't say. To my knowledge, nobody ever argued "bias" in enforcement, because there was very little room for interpretation in the rules.
Big Tech is behaving nothing like the recording industry, music retailers and rating agencies were with the explicit content labels.
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That's an interesting issue and also deserves public discussion but a link to a production file for a functioning weapon is and should be treated as distinct from freedom of expression of ideas in the form of words and images.
I don't have any problem with censoring production methods for bombs or explosives, so I don't see why I should be that concerned about efforts to limit dissemination of an impractical and unreliable weapon that no reasonable person would want to entrust their personal defense to.
We do need to address the issues that come with increasing ease of fabricating weapons because the technology will only expand, but I don't see this as a fundamentally related to the first amendment, it's much more a question of how we chose to interpret the second.
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Uh huh.
And criminals aren't a "group, class or category to which the person belongs". You aren't being discriminated against if you broke the law and people distrust you based on your history.
If a teacher is caught molesting a kid and his license gets revoked, he isn't being discriminated against.
If a bankrupt person goes to a new bank to get a loan and is denied, he's not being discriminated against.
If your friend breaks your DVD and wants to borrow something again, you aren't discriminating against him if you know he's not trustworthy.
the unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people, especially on the grounds of race, age, or sex.
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> Though Alex Jones isn’t a classical Conservative, the particular people who like his conspiracies are Conservatives, so Twitter FB and YT made a lateral move to ban him on all 3 sites.
Ah yes! That's precisely the reason he was banned, and not because the guy was, I repeat: a moron that harasses numerous individuals in public (often implying threats of violence) and claims the government is turning frogs gay or that sandy hook was a hoax -- all so he can advertise his literal pills. Yes,
Sorry, but if AWS is hosting child porn or a website that incites violence, they should take that shit down. Same goes with youtube, fb, twitter, etc. This isn't really fucking complicated - it's totally fine to be a conservative and to have conservative views. It's really not okay to be inciting violence or manipulating viewers.
If I have "ItzWarty's wall of put any shitty drawing here" on my house and you put your profane bullshit, i'm ripping it down. The people who run large corporations can do the same, I don't give a shit about your ideology - I'm not going to enable your profane shit.
You're so hell bent on this being some anti-convervative conspiracy it's hilarious.
> They literally colluded and made a joint effort to take Jones off of their sites to show his followers they aren’t welcome.
Collusion! I love that word. Let's reappropriate it to take the focus away from Trump. This isn't really complicated, it's not really a conspiracy though I could see how a nutjob might see things that way. Jones starts going out of his way to become notorious nationwide for inciting violence and harassing people. It gives him boatloads of money after all. All of a sudden he's in the spotlight and the public knows YouTube/Twitter are hosting that and KKK bullshit, so the public wants that off because, you know, they're literally shooting up pizza restaurants or some shit and the huge voice behind crap like charlotesville (which our PResident also has a part in).
It's really not complicated: don't incite fucking murder and maybe you won't get banned from the site. If you start doing that everywhere, you shouldn't be surprised if that happens everywhere.
And dear god, private corporations aren't subject to your freeze peaches - if you want that, you can go to voat or child porn websites that probably (though maybe not) won't be in favor of your vitriol. Unfortunately it seems every community that accepts the far-right descends into batshit crazies and racism, and it seems the not-so-batshit crazy conservatives and right-leaning independents (of which I once considered myself idealistically) haven't been able to build a space that doesn't tolerate that hate.
> But I don’t see them do the same for conspiracy theorists who leftists enjoy, such as the people who think 9/11 was an inside job, or conspiracy theorists who harass political constituents about a baseless Russia accusation.
That's not a fucking leftist conspiracy. Like, what prominent leftists believe 9/11 was an inside job? Holy fuck, I've literally just gotten brain cancer reading your shit. You came across as somewhat educated in your previous comments but holy fuck I was wrong.
Russia isn't a fucking conspiracy either, I don't know how you can ignore the many independent agencies who have uncovered the same trail from various angles, like dear god I don't know how you can have your head so far up your ass. On either side of the political spectrum, the narrative isn't even whether Russia as a conspiracy happened - it's about what happened and who was involved. I'm done talking with you, I can't convince a conspiracy theorist that their batshit views are insane.
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Criminal is definitely a class to which one may belong.
Cambridge:
the treatment of a person or particular group of people differently, in a way that is worse than the way people are usually treated:
Some immigrants were victims of discrimination.
The law made racial discrimination in employment a serious crime.
She claims she is a victim of age discrimination.
politics & government Discrimination is also prejudice against people and a refusal to give them their rights.
discrimination noun [ U ] (SEEING A DIFFERENCE)
the ability to judge the quality of something based on its difference from other, similar things:
He showed discrimination in his reading habits.
(Definition of “discrimination” from the Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary © Cambridge University Press)
English
Contents
“discrimination” in English
See all translations
discrimination
noun [ U ] UK /dɪˌskrɪm.ɪˈneɪ.ʃən/ US /dɪˌskrɪm.əˈneɪ.ʃən/
discrimination noun [ U ] (DIFFERENT TREATMENT)
C1 treating a person or particular group of people differently, especially in a worse way from the way in which you treat other people, because of their skin colour, sex, sexuality, etc.:
racial/sex/age discrimination
Until 1986 most companies would not even allow women to take the exams, but such blatant discrimination is now disappearing.
More examples
AIDS victims often experience social ostracism and discrimination.
There should be no discrimination on the grounds of colour.
She believes the research understates the amount of discrimination women suffer.
She will be remembered as an unrelenting opponent of racial discrimination.
The law has done little to prevent racial discrimination and inequality.
Thesaurus: synonyms and related words
discrimination noun [ U ] (SEEING A DIFFERENCE)
formal the ability to see the difference between two things or people
Thesaurus: synonyms and related words
(Definition of “discrimination” from the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus © Cambridge University Press)
Business
“discrimination” in Business English
See all translations
discrimination
noun [ U ] UK /dɪˌskrɪmɪˈneɪʃən/ US
the practice of treating particular people, companies, or products differently from others, especially in an unfair way:
He will work in partnership with a range of organizations to help eliminate discrimination against disabled people.
victims/targets of discrimination People sometimes have difficulty perceiving themselves as victims of discrimination.
discrimination on the basis of/grounds of sth Federal law bans discrimination on the basis of gender.
discrimination between sth (and sth) The new laws reduce the possibility of unfair discrimination between companies seeking to list on the Exchange.
racial/sex/age discrimination
fight/prohibit/tackle discrimination
The commission was created to address issues of discrimination in the workplace.
allegations/claims/complaints of discrimination
a discrimination case/lawsuit
See also
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>I'm not sure I agree that providing files for building your own guns comes under "political views". You can link to pro 2nd amendment websites all day long and no one will censor you.
You sure as fuck can't link to codeisfreespeech[dot]com, a pro-2A site that legally allows for the download of firearm component schematics and machine instruction sets. Not even here on reddit. Even Google censors it. Go try posting the full link here, enjoy that 3-day ban. You're objectively and provably wrong.
>Anyway there was several lawsuits about this
And the end result was that Defense Distributed cannot freely hand out blueprints. So they sell them. For $0.00, if you want. Anyone else can hand them out, though. So it remains until the remaining suits resolve, although it's pretty obvious how it'll turn out given that it's been cleared by the feds and it's states that are trying to block it. Although I'd love to see it go to the supreme court because the precedents THAT would set will be absolutely fucking glorious.
edit: Come on, you censorious, freedom-hating fucksticks. Downvote me more. Provide no arguments. Sound off, silently. Tell us how much you hate freedom of speech. I assure you - if Defense Distributed goes down, every decision that allows you to encrypt your traffic will suddenly die, and the CIA will be demanding that every major site remove HTTPS within a few years. The only risk I face is dying of laughter as I sniff your plaintext credentials at Starbucks.
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>I'm personally fine with leaving it there
Not sure if maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but thats not the line that these social media websites are using. Alex Jones is not illiciting any immediate danger. If somebody tried to arrest Alex Jones for dangerous speech, and took it to court, Alex Jones would win. So currently the social media websites are setting their own line. And yeah it's easy to say "just don't use facebook" but honestly, what alternative is there? As the comments were saying earlier, imagine if the shoe was on the other foot. Imagine if youtube started censoring opinions that you care about. Would you move to vimeo? Or just deal with it and continue watching youtube, letting their biases influence your content?
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I love how you start every reply with some form of "shut the fuck up". It makes having a conversation with such a pleasant person so nice.
He's already going to tumblr, I've never heard of gabai until now, and I doubt he'd come here. I know he's on one for now, but the other two I'm fairly certain he doesn't have a reddit or gab.ai. That really doesn't change the fact that he just got hit in a collaborative move by a group of the biggest platforms on the internet at this moment in order to deplatform him and reduce his influence on the internet.
And again I go back to my point on Net Neutrality. People didn't like it when their ability to access information could be throttled and hampered. Here we have the throttling and hampering of information put out by infowars and Alex Jones.
When your ability to access info is hampered, at some point you stop trying to seek it out like a youtube video that keeps stuttering from a slow internet connection. Eventually you would just close the window and do something else.
I'm going to make this my last comment to you because it's clear that you hold some vitrol in regard to this subject and that you have no intention of having your mind changed by our conversation.
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The fuck is this example? Who said anything about free of charge? ISPs charge for internet, that's how utilities work. Beyond that, Netflix isn't a social network. Netflix, like an ISP, charges for its content. Conversely, mainstream social networks don't have a use fee.
Furthermore, the house thing is a poor example. Comparing someone browsing the internet to a multi-million user website as similar 'houses' is absolutely disingenuous.
Consider instead, you are a car on the road and, for arguments sake, the social networks are the only supermarkets in town. If every supermarket refused to serve particular people, that would certainly be objectionable... If you don't like the supermarket example, it's analogous to just about any other business.
If your business is designed to facilitate communication (telecom, ISP, reddit), especially when it is as integral to the modern culture as Twitter, Facebook, etc. are, it is morally objectionable to a degree surpassing the right of a non-being to freely associate. For the same reason that a bakery has to provide basic service to all customers equally, so should a SMC be required to provide basic service to all of *theirs*.
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I read both of your replies. I didn't know I was commenting to the same person. And I'm not a Reddit stalker, so I don't look at people's old posts. That shit is lame and I bash Reddit stalking whenever it happens. It's sad, really, but those people just don't get it because they are sad. Anyway, aren't you suddenly really thinking the market *doesn't* need regulating? Aren't you normally crying "freedom of speech" while now being gleeful that one you disagree with is being silenced?
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> That's an interesting issue and also deserves public discussion but a link to a production file for a functioning weapon is and should be treated as distinct from freedom of expression of ideas in the form of words and images.
It's computer code. It's the same stuff that allows you to use HTTPS. You can thank the Crypto Wars of the 90s for that - encryption is no longer a munition under ITAR. And now, neither are semi-automatic firearms under .50 caliber.
Trust me here, this is crypto wars 2.0. Any justification used to ban firearm instruction sets will result in the collapse of the internet. Like, all of it. No encryption, at all. Have fun on your open wifi networks with no SSL!
>I don't have any problem with censoring production methods for bombs or explosives
I do. How about blueprints for bulldozers? They're incredibly dangerous and destructive. What about model rockets? Is stump remover now illegal? What about general petrochemical knowledge?
>We do need to address the issues that come with increasing ease of fabricating weapons because the technology will only expand
Happily, we have an entire constitutional amendment that basically says "no, you can't". Now fuck off and let me have my 80% lowers. If you disagree, I'll serialize one of them with your name and a picture of a dick.
>it's much more a question of how we chose to interpret the second.
There's only one way to "interpret" it. SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED.
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> Re: your points about private companies can do what they want - when the shoe is on the other foot...
You're framing this as a left/right thing, and that's the issue. Ignore politics here, all we have is media platforms refusing to host a violent man's ramblings.
It only just so happens that Alex Jones' supporters tend to be fringe right, but I wouldn't want to associate him with conservatives as a whole.
I wouldn't feel any different if Twitter banned some fringe leftist that was telling their supporters to attack NRA members or some shit.
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Twitter is a business that deal directly in communication. Anything that deals directly with mass communication is vital to society.
And I understand the "difference", I just don't see it being as big of a "difference". That's a difference of opinion, not a lack of understanding. Disagreeing with you does not mean I don't understand. That is something we all need to stop doing. Respect people's opinions instead of dismissing them as coming from a place of ignorance. You are essentially saying anyone who disagrees is ignorant and dumb. Come on, you can do better than that.
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As if Facebook, Google, and fucking Apple don’t have the cash...
And I don’t know about that. This seems very much in the realm of “not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good”. In case, it’d better than the half-assed algorithms we have now by a damn sight.
And I’ll reiterate, it’s *really* not that fuckin hard to tell fabricated bullshit from reality. Even from disputed, statistical-gray-area reality. The fact that goddamn Alex Jones is the straw that broke the camel’s back is evidence enough of that. We don’t need ethics experts and formal logicians here, we just need some fairly pedestrian critical thinking skills. The kinda shit you learn from a middle school science class is more than enough to debunk and pull some of the worst shit out there now.
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And there's the bakery argument.
Guess what, bakeries *don't* need to provide service to all customers. If I walked into a baker's and decided to take a shit on the floor, do they legally have the obligation to still serve me? Even if they were the only bakery in town, they'd stop me from shopping there.
I'd like to remind you that Alex Jones has only recently been banned, after years on the site, after years on the app store. *He was allowed to be there, but violated their rules, and as a result is no longer allowed there.*
If he'd tried to join up, and was told that he is not welcome there before he even had a chance to create an account or make a post, then yeah, your argument might hold water. But he wasn't prevented from posting.
Again, just because they're the only 'supermarket' in town, doesn't mean they can't ban someone for violating their rules. I can't just walk into the only walmart in town and set fire to the displays, *and* retain the right to return whenever I feel like it. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
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>If you're talking on a phone or over the internet, you've got to accept that privacy is no longer a guarantee (unless you're using an encrypted service, which Facebook is not),
I disagree. If I use the phone, I should be able to know that my conversation is private.and uncensored. This should be guaranteed by law. It puts no undue burden on the company but has a huge positive influence on society. This should be regulated and should be law. I don't see any reason for it not to be.
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And pray tell me, Sir Webdev, what should a humble sysadmin when his registrar seizes you domain a day after a transfer, redirecting it? ICANN says you can't transfer it again for 30 days. Your domain, something that's a fundamental cornerstone of the internet, is no longer in your control because a company changed their TOS specifically to make it ok for them to take it. What then, Mr. Webdev? How's your web framework and firewall going to stop that?
>If ISIS could keep websites up with reasonable amounts of uptime
It helps that Twitter doesn't ban their accounts, which get far more reach than the actual sites. Neither does Facebook, for that matter, unless they get tons of attention from the west.
>God knows his sycophants give him enough money to keep a server online already.
Which will do lots of good when he gets delisted by Google when they next change their TOS.
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The thing is, it’s not physically impossible to recreate these services. Tech is already there, information (on creating these services) is abundant, and creating a server and coding a search engine/social media, while not easy, is not an impossible task (not to mention existing smaller competition).
Now problem is the user base, but unless these tech companies (note plural) all conspire together to block all info on one subject simultaneously (to censor new service), government monoplay law will (or should...) come into play. Information about new service will get out, and one way or another, a specific censorship will fail. Market does have power to influence these services, like we are seeing with decline of Facebook now.
For crude analogy/real example, quite literally all of South Korea’s mainstream media were (are) conservative and pretty biased, think Fox News around Bush Jr. era level, in terms of politics sometimes. When shit started hitting the fan after President Lee MB stole m(b?)illions of tax through corruption and lying, some people started getting sick of MSM not covering all these wrongdoings. Some journalists left or got fired for trying to expose it, and they created podcast stations to spread their news.
However, Pres. Lee is pretty smart and was excellent at appearing like nothing wrong or bad was happening, so these podcasts didn’t take off really, only having listeners on far progressives.
But then came impeached-president Park GH. She managed to fuck things up to tremendous scales (300~ high schoolers were drowned, while nation waited and watched, there were last words of students sent to their prents via text...) and the podcasts took off, since MSM still refused to investigate for truth. Now the podcasts have their own share of media, pulling a non-trivial amount of viewership, enough to be recognized by MSM and force them to be more neutral (or risk losing viewership).
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> There's only a few tech companies that control a lot of what people see online. Google/YT, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook...so much internet traffic is directed there, they're the main platforms and they control so much information, and are known to manipulate it. Imagine if instead, they favored alt-right viewpoints, and banned progressives? In fact, some leftists are ALREADY being censored.
This is completely true, but the entire reason they are the most popular sites is because they, generally, cater to the most popular viewpoints (of a younger generation), which tend to be progressive. Were the entirety of society to shift authoritatively, perhaps this could be an issue, but it would be a sign of the issue and not the cause. If Trump took over Google by force tomorrow, people would just stop using Google.
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Anything that deals directly with mass communication is vital to society.
By that logic, if I wanted to rent a billboard with the sole intention of posting a big photo of a diseased dick across it, legally they aren't allowed to refuse me, because it's mass communication and therefore my right to do so.
If I wanted to purchase an ad block on Fox News to read out Sean Hannity slashfics, legally they aren't allowed to refuse, because they're mass communication and therefore vital to society, and so have a legal obligation to sell me that ad space.
If I were to break into a news studio, and tell the whole country to rise up in revolt, legally they wouldn't be allowed to stop the broadcast, prevent me from talking, or remove me from the premises, because that would be a violation of my free speech?
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My only issue with the fake news topic is on the issue of what gets classified as actual fake news and what gets classified as fake news because perhaps it's debatable and doesn't fit the narative or what have you. I'm never a fan of giving the government the ability to proctor what kind of speech is acceptable and what kind of speech isn't, but I do believe that actual fake news is something that shouldn't be on the internet. At this moment I believe the best way to counteract it is to let people decide for themselves through critical thinking. I've personally seen that method being fairly effective.
I don't think the conversation should be started after the purge, but before. Then again I am a bit of a free speech absolutist (minus yelling fire in a crowded theatre, violence, etc.). I think we shouldn't make it acceptable for extremists to be ousted for their speech because that's always where the death of free speech starts. I just hate that every time you argue it you not only argue on the side of speech but the opposition also tries to push you into a corner where you argue on the side of the person you try defending. Idc about Alex Jones, I obviously don't agree with a lot of what he says, and I don't even keep up with all his antics but people still try to push me into his corner on the issues then proudly say "he's had it coming" when that's not even what this is about.
I'm not saying Alex Jones shouldn't be banned. Perhaps he should and perhaps he should even face more consequences for his actions, but that's not what any of this is about. It's about the collaborative attack on an individual and a news org by a group of the most powerful internet websites on this planet. I don't think he should be banned like this and like I said before I very much oppose the direction this whole issue is going in.
As the wise Kanye once said, "No one man should have all that power."
It'll likely get ignored though since most conservatives are free market and most liberals support the banning of Alex Jones.
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I mean for me it all comes back to that it’s a business. If I go on sprite.com and write fuck sprite, I think it’s they’re prerogative to delete that and control the narrative since it’s their space. Especially so I think with social media companies because it’s their actual product. I think they’re totally in the right to decide what they do and and don’t want on their site because it’s an opt in service that is unessential. I don’t have to agree with their decisions but I also don’t have to use their product. When this gets complicated though is when we start talking about something a little more like an “entity” like google. Is an unbiased internet search a human right? Should it be if not? A case could certainly be made that many people need google just as much as they need utilities. Nuking net neutrality has ironically blown up in the faces of the very same conservatives that where paid off to get rid of it
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that's far from the first time somebody has started a harassment movement. One immediate example that comes to mind was [this "art" project](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattress_Performance_(Carry_That_Weight)), where a girl pretended to have been raped and carried a mattress around. The boy she accused was harassed by many. Maybe this girl should have been banned from social media? If I remember correctly, I believe the MeToo movement had a lot of witch hunts, false allegations, and harassment as well. There are definitely tons of other witch hunts I've heard of over the years, and I'm definitely not saying its a good thing, but never have I seen anybody get banned for it
Edit: [here's another example](http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/05/transracialism-article-controversy.html). This one is probably better because it actually started from social media
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Their ubiquity makes them borderline mandatory for the purposes of any meaningful degree of communication in the modern world. They are the medium just like air is for direct verbal communication. That is what I find concerning. The situation is not conducive to an individuals liberty. If someone could just get removed from effectively communicating, does that mean that terms of service become another layer of law, decided outside of public influence, that we are beholden to?
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Domain names are trickier and I don’t have a concrete answer for that particular question. I imagine there is a free speech registrar somewhere that will let you say literally whatever you want. If not, a sympathetic government will likely let you use their state owned registrar.
Past that, IP addresses still work fine for direct access and since you’re convinced they’ll be kicked off Google entirely, might as well embrace the IP address.
I see your point but it’s easy to get around. You’re right, someone might lose a few domain names until they find a friendly registrar and that is unfortunate. My personal belief would be for a registrar to inform those accounts that they have 90 days to move the domain or they will release it back to the domain authority.
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This is ridiculous slippery slope argument.
There is a baseline that vast majority can agree on, which is human rights. As in, rights everyone have regardless of skin color, gender, sexual orientation, and other characteristics of which a person cannot control.
And these rights include, but not limited to, life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness (outlined by one of US’a founding documents), which includes things like not being murdered, assaulted, harassed, robbed, etc.
And yes, speech is a part of it, but here’s the kicker. Your right to free speech *ends* where it violates others’ rights.
Alex Jones clearly and numerously crossed these lines, and his ban is justified. If you can’t see that he hasn’t crossed the line, then you are legitimately brainwashed by a fucking cult.
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They shut down news reporting to their base to keep them manageable. They are 100 steps past obviously trackable evil and simply disabling critical thought. This has effectively helped the right and foreign governments sow chaos, disrupt checks and balances and delayed justice for treason. Bans must intensify to restore the value of facts to those who are less able to reason and who carry traditions of subjugation and hatred in their upbringing.
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However it does seem to be a cleansing of right leaning views. Dennis Prager was recently silenced on one of these platforms (Facebook?) and I can't imagine he ever used hate speech or doxed anyone. Also Ron Paul's co-host had his channel removed from YouTube. I don't know much about him except what I hear on Ron's podcast but he seems reasonable.
The point is if these platforms take the extreme measure of censoring viewpoints they need to be very clear on what specific policy violations led to the censorship, when it happened and why it is justified. It needs to be done publicly and transparently. That way we can all understand the rules and abide by them and also determine if they're fair.
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>There's some basic stuff that I see as a baseline.
>
>Nazi are not people we want around.
I do. I'd like to debate them. If you can't defeat someone's opinion with words then maybe they're right.
>Black people are not inferior to white people.
Is this a policy or a fact? They are clearly inferior at generating vitamin D compared to white people.
>Women are not inferior to men.
They are on average strength-wise and height-wise, they have 20 times fewer geniuses, are on average not as good at systemizing problems. Should I be censored for that?
>Human rights are inalienable.
Including the right to free speech?
>Peaceful, law-abiding dissenters are not criminals.
Yet we should shut the ones who say the wrong things!
>Anyone who is still arguing these things can fuck off.
I'd say the same about horrible ignorant authoritarians with a hard on for censorship, but I'm not that intolerant.
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> The whole point is these services are as critical for free speech as utilities are for health.
So Ceaușescu is still in power right? Because no one was able to communicate and coordinate as there was no twitter or facebook back then.
> These companies do not get to define what free speech is.
But they do get to ban people who contravene their terms of service.
You seem confused as to what freedom of speech actually is, have a read of this :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech
and pay particular attention to this paragraph:
> Legal systems sometimes recognize certain limits on the freedom of speech, particularly when freedom of speech conflicts with other rights and freedoms, such as in the cases of libel, slander, pornography, obscenity, fighting words, and intellectual property. Justifications for limitations to freedom of speech often reference the "harm principle" or the "offense principle". Limitations to freedom of speech may occur through legal sanction or social disapprobation, or both.
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> Domain names are trickier and I don’t have a concrete answer for that particular question. I imagine there is a free speech registrar somewhere that will let you say literally whatever you want.
There was. Their CEO decided that while ISIS was ok, neo-nazis were not. Again, virtue signaling. I spent a week going back and forth with him over email, he had no rational justification at the end. Just arguing that neo-nazis were bad. Somehow worse than ISIS, those guys that put people in cages and burn them to death, or wrap detcord around their necks to behead them, and enslave hundreds of women as sex slaves.
>Past that, IP addresses still work fine for direct access
If we're using direct IPs for websites it's a sign that the internet has utterly failed.
>I see your point but it’s easy to get around.
It's simply not.
>My personal belief would be for a registrar to inform those accounts that they have 90 days to move the domain or they will release it back to the domain authority.
It'd be nice if that was the case, but it's not. Even registrars keep TOS that allows them to take domains back.
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You are missing the point. Alex Jones didn't get banned because his content was deemed "unfit for the masses". He got banned because he unleashes mobs on grieving families while slandering them. THAT IS NOT PROTECTED SPEECH.
> In fact, some leftists are ALREADY being censored
What are you even talking about? Also, If the shoe was on the other foot and some liberals were being kicked off facebook for inciting a mob to harass and send death threats to a grieving family then good fucking riddence. They would have deserved to get banned.
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An STL or even gcode isn't directly comparable to a crypto algorithm such as PGP. That's like comparing a JPG to C++, they are distinct in that one is software- a set of instructions to perform operations to actually do something (like a machine) where the other is simply structured data. Yes, the Zimmerman thing was an interesting chapter and required some redefinition of what constitutes a weapon for export, but extending that to this discussion of printing physical weapons in an individuals home is quite a stretch.
And I don't share your concern about a slippery slope into banning bulldozer plans and chemistry. Censoring production methods isn't a wholesale ban on knowledge- it just raises the bar for skills required to individually fabricate certain items.
Interesting you mention model rockets. I did recently see a guy 3d print a gimbal for thrust vectoring. I think he's still good as long as he doesn't have any kind of active guidance but that's the kind of thing we have to decide on as a society- is it cool if that guy creates a functioning missile and pops all the code, schematics, and structural files on the github? I think the answer needs to be more deeply considered than just SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED. I can't incite a riot or yell fire in a theater because Congress shall make no law ABRIDGING THE FREEDOM OF SPEECH.
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I come from a country where we hold no constitution nor any democratic foundations so that can be the pretext to my statement for the sake of transparency.
I do genuinely believe that every individual has the right to speak their mind as we are all born as free beings with the right to individualistic thoughts and views; and moreover, are allowed to speak against any injustice we see taking place anywhere in the world, for it is the only way we will improve as human beings. Now even though that may be an oversimplification of the concept of “freedom of speech” I do believe that the points I stated are key pillars.
Now we fast forward to the modern day and age where you have a political spectrum under the concept of democracy that is so wide and also so very polarized at the same time, so much so that one of the spectrum may at times even accuse the other end of being “Un-democratic” as if to say so means that you are accusing the individual of sacrilege. Individuals in Europe and the US have been born in so called “liberal countries” with democratic values and believe it is a privilege so sacred that you must do everything in your power to preserve it. When in truth, and here’s the controversial part, there’s very little that individuals in democratic countries can change since so much power lies in the hands of the corporations and lobbyists, it’s almost like democracy has become a fallacy for Western counties that’s used as a tool to win over the hearts and minds of the masses in the elections.
The only part where things begin to get really messy is where people start becoming so defensive that they’re just downright aggressive and abrasive to other people when protecting their so-called democracy, and then you’ve got another concept where people have embraced the concept of freedom of speech so dearly that they are willing to go to radical lengths to stand up for what they believe is right. That is where the line should be drawn, when all sensibility and decorum is thrown out of the window to maintain a concept that turned into a facade over the years.
Now feel free to clarify my understanding of the concept and I’m more than happy to see a more well-articulated wording of my understanding of democracy.
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If you think the government should regulate speech on modern forms of communication then I'll be more than happy to discuss the intricacies of it.
So how do we force websites like this one to do away with their anti-doxxing policies which clearly stifle free speech. If you want all subs on here to be forced to follow government regulations, will the_donald be forced to reverse all their bans and censorship?
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> An STL or even gcode isn't directly comparable to a crypto algorithm such as PGP. That's like comparing a JPG to C++, they are distinct in that one is software
[Fuck off with that shit.](http://puu.sh/BrBHJ/ef3d08f79a.png) CAUTION, PREVIOUSLY ILLEGAL JPEG LINKED, REDDIT ADMINS MAY BAN FOR ITAR VIOLATION, BUT /u/spez CAN SUCK MY FAT BLACK COCK ANYWAY BECAUSE HE HATES FREEDOM IF IT DOESN'T BRING IN MONEY FOR HIM
>a set of instructions to perform operations to actually do something
Woah, so like, three lines of Perl code?
>Yes, the Zimmerman thing was an interesting chapter and required some redefinition of what constitutes a weapon for export, but extending that to this discussion of printing physical weapons in an individuals home is quite a stretch.
It's code. Either fuck off, or stop using every form of encryption known to man.
>And I don't share your concern about a slippery slope into banning bulldozer plans and chemistry.
You should.
>Censoring production methods isn't a wholesale ban on knowledge- it just raises the bar for skills required to individually fabricate certain items.
Then why were manuals on constructing AR-15s banned as well? There's a lot more to a functioning firearm than just the lower receiver.
>Interesting you mention model rockets. I did recently see a guy 3d print a gimbal for thrust vectoring. I think he's still good as long as he doesn't have any kind of active guidance but that's the kind of thing we have to decide on as a society- is it cool if that guy creates a functioning missile and pops all the code, schematics, and structural files on the github?
Yes. It is. Shall not be infringed. Go back to "the facebook" if you don't like it, Zuckerbot will ensure that you have a nice, clean experience free of any dangerous information.
> I think the answer needs to be more deeply considered than just SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED.
Then change the constitution. If you don't want to, then fuck off and stop bothering the rest of us.
>I can't incite a riot or yell fire in a theater because Congress shall make no law ABRIDGING THE FREEDOM OF SPEECH.
Old case law, and invalid. You can, and it is constitutionally protected, you're just responsible for any damages that ensue as a result. Just like how you'd be tried for murder if you used a 3d printed gun to murder someone.
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> that’s far from the first time somebody has started a harassment movement.
Irrelevant. This is called moving the goalposts.
Alex Jones doxxed a family who had their child murdered at their elementary school. That harassment of those parents isn’t literally the first example of harassment doesn’t matter, you’re initial statement is inarguably false. And it’s also pretty telling that not only did you know you were lying, you’re trying to justify it with this absolute bullshit response.
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I still find this all so odd and the solution absurd. The burden of responsibility on what you consume is on you. What does it say of the current state of people? That we are unable to distinguish that Alex Jones is a fool and we need to be protected from the bad man? Rather than learn the lesson to not take things as is on the web, we get coddled because we need people both open to suggestion and consuming content at the end of the day.
Alex Jones is a troll, just like those silly magazines in the checkout line are. Problem is the media trolls too and is competing for the same thing, eyeballs and on the internet they are struggling at that. The primary goal is not to inform you, but the goal is to get your engagement then sell YOU to advertisers, you are the product not just by the news but any platform that sells ads.
On these platforms the most effective strategy is often trolling as it requires little content but large return which is the most efficient way to get viewership in many cases. The media has become very trolly in its delivery but they cant out troll, trolls on the web and maintain its legitimacy.
Rather than adapt models just change the platforms of delivery as a whole to fit the interest of established sources. Because advertisers do not like all of the ideas that can grow out of an open system then you can not have those ideas period. And they are here to save you from Alex Jones when in reality its about profits and investments.
-edit* did not mean to post so much
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> Harassment, threats, and doxxing might be the reasons given
Good, then we're done.
>but you'd be a fool to believe those are really the reasons Jones is being banned, especially when most of the harassment, threats, and doxxing in question happened at least a few months ago.
Yeah it's much more likely that THE GLOBALIST DEEP STATE GAY FROGS BANNED HIM.
Oh, wait, maybe it's because he threatened to "kill Mueller politically" while mimicking a handgun. Or maybe it was another lawsuit for Sandy Hook bullshit. Or maybe someone grew a spine and decided to make a stand. Or maybe a prominent ad company threatened to pull back if he's not banned for constantly breaking ToS. Or maybe it's his stalking of political figures and livestreaming himself harassing them.
Defense of "I've done it before, why punish me now" is just borderline idiotic. It assumes some kind of expiration date on being an asshole.
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> As an adult I find little comfort in people telling me I’m not allowed to listen to someone for my own good.
In what way has anyone stopped you from accessing Alex Jones’ content and literally not made it possible for you to listen to him? No one is telling you that you can’t listen to him, they’re just not going to host his content. It’s amazing you can’t make that distinction.
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Meh. It sucks if you’re an asshole of a human being who hates people for traits they can’t control. If those people don’t like it, they can go back to gathering in their basements screaming about black people and wearing silly hoods or praising Hitler.
At the end of the day, “the internet” will still work for those jerks, but it’s a connection of servers; servers owned by private entities. If some of those companies don’t like certain messages, they are free to not enable that content. It’s on the people signing up for these services to understand the terms before they sign up. If you don’t like the terms, go somewhere else. If nobody else wants you, then that should be a clue.
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> private companies
And yet you are arguing that private companies should not be able to ban hateful speech from their own platform - by using government / legal intervention to allow these users to continue their hateful speech, the very intervention which you seem to be against as well - this is why your points make no sense.
> word salad
I know English isn't your first language, but really, what I have written is not hard to comprehend.
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>The only problem I have is that if the shoe were ever on the other foot, it could be bad.
The shoe couldn't be on the other foot because the 'other foot' is the vast majority of the population.
>Imagine if instead, they favored alt-right viewpoints, and banned progressives? In fact, some leftists are ALREADY being censored.
Imagine if they banned all white skinned people, or banned everyone who's surname started with a letter A-Z, that would BE EVEN WORSE OHE NOE.
For anyone not aware of what's going on this is a reply to a comment saying businesses should be allowed to refuse service to anyone. I'll add 'within the bounds of the law' but that should go without saying.
This response is an attempt to change the groupings of people. At the moment the groups are as they've always been. People in the ball park of Alex Jones abusing other people in a manner he can only get away with because he has enough money for expensive lawyers. Then people who stay within the bounds of nice, to normal, all the up to just 'pretty disgusting'.
This isn't a political divide.
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I don't see much point in arguing with someone who evidently thinks SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED was intended to protect your right to bear IED's. I just think it's a bad idea and not remotely what the founders intended- maybe you should try and convince me why such a liberal interpretation of the 2nd is beneficial.
Or if you want to tell me to fuck off eight more times or rant at spez some more I'll probably watch.
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>Hell, I think when we live in an ever increasing “privatized” world the 1st amendment isn’t really doing what it was intended.
The intention was never to do with citizens and private companies. It was good, is good and will still be good. If we want something similar for citizens interacting with private companies it'll have to be bringing back the bill nicknamed net neutrality.
>That’s just America so says nothing about the rest of the world, but while people are generally supportive of this move now what about in 20 years? 100 or 200 years from now information will have been controlled by multinational companies (even more than now) and the continued rise of inverted totalitarianism will only worsen.
There isn't any worsening of having a ToS that prohibits the kind of behaviour Alex Jones displays. If you're envisioning a future where companies ToS are politically slanted to censor people then that is in an entirely different direction we aren't headed in.
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You are arguing about mechanics on an analogy. The issue here is *actions have consequences*, where Jones did shit deserving of “being put on no-fly no-sail list”, so he has proven to be potentially dangerous and should be restricted in setting where those potentials can be realized, which would be travelling in this analogy.
Whether or not those lists are perfect are not our concern. The assumption is that “it is good enough to be a common sense policy”.
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> it seem like one side has more of the fringe nuts
On the other hand, maybe one side does have more fringe nuts? (eg people directly calling for violence) In which case nothing the tech company does would satisfy the side with the "fringe nuts". They'll scream bias no matter what criteria is applied. I'm in favour of letting the market sort this out, there are plenty of outlets for all kinds of views. You don't have a right for any specific platform to carry your views. If you think social media platform XXXX is biased, then boycott them and use something else and urge everyone else to do the same.
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If all these tech companies target one company (infowars) at the same time, with coordination, not only they are defying Senate but they are sending a strong message: "yep , we're a service, we dictate the terms, you are not above us and this is our grandstanding for the future to come".
They could have easily, one by one, done it discreetly, the coordination is more than obvious. The tech companies are weaker alone so they are standing together, loudly.
2nd amendment and monopoly law play rolls here. This is a sticky mess.
I miss 2000's internet.
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>General decency/social taboos aren’t out of bounds, and probably shouldn’t be.
They are on some platforms, like Facebook. In particular: On Facebook you need to stay inside of American social standards when it comes to depictions of nudity. On this particular point the American standards are more restrictive than European ones, and this has let to some incidents were things have been, in my opinion, wrongly censored. One case was some historical photos of hippies.
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I agree, ISPs should be common carrier. And that would have literally 0 effect on these bans.
If you’re arguing that private services like Facebook or even Google shouldn’t be able to police their own server, protecting their own interests and profits, I’m just going to stop wasting my effort here, since they cannot meet criteria for common carriers due to replicable nature of their service.
If you want to go further deeper into the slope and worry about these media platforms censoring topics that actually can be contested in good faith, rest assured that market force can and will correct the issue.
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Now that all the tech companies and all the people on their platforms can slander him and he can’t respond his first amendment rights have been violated so good luck to the tech companies keeping that power for much longer. If the government won’t do it Google, Facebook, Twitter etc will meet the blunt end of 600 million legally owned firearms.
And yes, I’m saying if big tech takes our speech rights through monopoly people will die and if you’re too stupid and cowardly to get that, you’ll probably be one of them if you push this childish bullshit too much further.
The first and second amendment shall not be infringed and we don’t mind killing a generation of “everyone gets a trophy” to get it back.
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It has nothing to do with any political veiwpoints either way. Alex Jones has used their platform in a manner that has brought him to court several times over defamation and disparagement. In fact, it was probably hard call, considering that it's a net loss for them. But when something becomes a liability, it's not worth keeping around, which is why it was removed. If you can show me a single instance from either side that could be viewed as censorship and not at all a violation of their terms of service, I'll certainly stand corrected.
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> I don't see Twitter or any of these platforms banning random conservatives who simply espouse their conservative views.
Thats because you refuse to look. Loads got under the hammer for completly random reasons. Not super High profile folks like Jones, because banning someone that known creates waves.
But smallers ones? Medium sized ones? Twitter, FB, YT etc are banning people left right and center. Not nessesarily because the Companys intend the ban, but because they created the tools that the Radical Left, and some Radical right, groups use to mass flag.
Youtube has an issue where random gun channels got nuked in wake of the last few shootings. None of these channels even touched those topics, the mere fact that they were gun channels was enough to get a radical left mass flag event going.
Twitter got an issue with random people getting suspended for completly tame tweets, even retweets. Remember That racist Sarah Jeong that got hired by the NYT? People quoted her, changed whatever racist shit she said by replacing "white" with anything, like black, jew, asian or whatever. Those folks got banned from twitter.
Its the same on most of the big Social Media platforms. Reddit is gladly still okay on the admin level, but holy fuck look at the mods of some places. The mere fact that I post on KIA got me banned from a bunch of other subs, even tho that actually breaks sidewide rules (banning users from other subs because they post on said sub).
This shit is going on for a while, we keep pointing out that this shit is insane, and every time we do we have idiots like you show up going "Well I dont see XYZ".
Yes, you dont see, because you are blind. AJ is just the latest target of this insanity. He is not the first, and not the last. Once all the super crazies on the right have been dealt with, they go for everyone else.
Oh, wait. shit. I forgot that everyone and their mom gets labeled a nazi racist or whatever these days, so if you allow Twitter and co to "Take out the trash", then you literally give them a free pass for fucking everything up, while also supporting the people who label everybody and their mom a nazi.
TL;DR: Doesnt matter if AJ busts your party to shit on your floor, because this is not a party. This is a global discussion, and you keep kicking out people who say shit you dont like, completly ignoring your ability to just ignore them. YOU try to tell US what we can read, listen or watch. With You I mean Twitter, YT, FB etc and everyone supporting this shitshow of cencorship, with US i mean US; means US, so everyone, everywhere.
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That is a lie. You know full well hosts, payment processors and entire registrars are banning people for what they perceive as unacceptable speech. The Daily Stormer, regardless of what you think of the content, has a right to run a website and they were for a time pushed completely into the dark web and still can only process bitcoin because hosts and payment processors merely adjust their terms of service to justify banning them.
Millennials are so weak-minded they need nannies to protect them from all the “baddies” and they never grew up and grew out of the need for their precious Net-Nanny program protecting them from all the things their damaged brains can’t process.
As soon as an entire generation seems ok with limiting free speech because of their feelings that’s when they need to learn what it feels like to bleed.
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Jesus, for your analogy to work, select few restaurants have monopolies on entire food industry, you literally require internet attention to survive, and harassing people is same as being born black. Fuck, you’re dense.
If, for this argument’s sake, race wasn’t a protected status, then yes, segregated restaurants still can exist. People can and will still choose not to go to those fucking restaurants, because most people now realize racism is bad. Those restaurants fail, and new ones accomodating market’s will will take place. Or if there is no restaurant that is not segregated, someone will sooner or later make one that isn’t segregated, *because you can open your own restaurants*. And it will do better, because of market pressure.
I’m sure your (very hard to find) point is somewhere along the lines of society not changing (still being racist and wanting segregation), which is fucking asinine because you’re comparing acceptance of a protected status with being an asshole and harassing others.
I’m done with trying to converse with a brick. Go fucking sea lion somewhere else.
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And how about mail companies? Should UPS, Fed-Ex, and USPS be able to ban people whose views they disagree with? How about banks? Should he just be banned from being able to have a credit or debit card? How long until he's unpersoned in so many ways that he can't operate in society and is out on the street just because you disagree with what he says? And what happens when one day he stumbles across a real conspiracy, like the time the US government [secretly infected](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment) 400 poverty-stricken black guys with syphilis as a deranged experiment? Does everyone else who repeats what he says get the same treatment?
This problem has been solved since the middle-ages. The solution is called [Common Carriage](http://wpressutexas.net/cs378h/index.php?title=History_of_the_term_%E2%80%9Ccommon_carrier%E2%80%9D). It originally said that companies which offer mail service can't refuse service to people just because they don't like the other person. They must serve everyone equally. The same should apply to the tech companies which now provide the modern public square.
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You
>If you want to go further deeper into the slope and worry about these media platforms censoring topics that actually can be contested in good faith, rest assured that market force can and will correct the issue.
Also you:
>Restaurants can't be trusted to not segregate blacks without federal intervention.
So is the invisible hand of the market too busy holding a big mac to punish restaurants for being racist?
Can we deal away with having people+ (or protected groups as you like to call them)?
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> When is Sarah Jeong getting banned from twitter? Or even fired? She tweets about her support for literal white genocide and she doesn't even lose her job with the NYT.
Like, we both know that you're lying and that isn't a real thing, but even if that were true, you don't see the difference between some 24 year old who writes reviews about iPhone headphones privately tweeting mean things back at people calling her racial slurs and *Alex Jones?*
>A couple had to go into hiding because Spike Lee tweeted out their address because he thought it belonged to George Zimmerman. Tech companies weren't tripping over themselves to remove him.
Ooh, deep cuts -- that happened closer to Twitter's founding than to today... And Lee publicly apologized, was sued and didn't contest the trial, and paid restitution. Even if he hadn't, that was one tweet -- by all accounts an honest mistake, by the way -- and not a pattern of... doxxing elderly couples?
>What Alex Jones did was wrong and you can believe he deserves to be banned. But you are kidding yourself if you think he wasn't a target because of his politics.
He deserves to be banned from a lot more than Twitter, but he wasn't banned because of his politics, he was banned because Twitter thought it was a good financial move. The ridiculous "but what if they do it to the left, huh?" is an oxymoron: Capital protects capital.
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No you're right, its not the same as censorship. I'm more referring to the gleeful way people are celebrating their inability to hear alex jones on twitter and on you-tube. People are linking to his twitter account, joking, haha I can't read his tweets anymore, isn't that great?
They're happy they can't hear what he has to say on twitter. On a platform where they could literally just not follow him. That's literally so foreign to me I have a hard time understanding it.
My guess is this is either a result of hatred of trump blinding people to right vs wrong. Or a generational change in the education system that doesn't emphasis how terrible systems like this (yes even consensual ones) have ended up in the past.
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> Can AT&T refuse to complete his phone calls?
Yes.
> Or, to make the question even more similar, can AT&T sit down with Verizon and both agree not to complete his phone calls?
No, because collusion actually *is* a crime, just not the one people seem to think.
>Can First Energy refuse to provide electricity to the servers hosting his podcast?
Depends on where the servers are located. If they're in Ohio, they can't refuse or even effectively delay. If they're outside of the country they can certainly refuse.
The problem here though is that whether you love or hate Alex Jones, those are some pretty shitty (accurate, but shitty) answers I just gave, and if you want better ones you basically end up at "nationalize pretty much everything." That's not an option, so we're stuck in the shit zone.
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Strongly disagree with this notion that information is so centralized right now that people should be able to say whatever they want on all of them
Imo there’s MUCH more variety now than there was 20 or more years ago.
Back a couple generations ago you literally got news from like 2 or 3 sources
Now there’s like 500,000 sources you can access. You can literally make your own website today talking about almost anything you want.
This idea that YouTube or any site needs to allow whoever to say whatever on their platform is completely ridiculous. You might as well say that because Ellen Degeneres show is so popular and widespread that she should be forced to have any random idiot on there.
No, sorry this is one of the dumbest reddit circle jerks I’ve ever seen. Good for YouTube / Twitter / FB they can do whatever the fuck they want. Don’t use them if you don’t like them, they aren’t necessities for life. Not by a long shot.
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You know that quote...
First they punched the Neo-Nazis, and I didn't speak out because fuck those assholes...
...Then they banned the dude who organized harassment campaigns on grieving parents whose young children had been murdered, and I didn't speak out because I don't make a living terrorizing people in order to sell dick pills to impotent obese MAGA hat wearing conspiracy theorists...
...Actually I forget how the rest of it goes.
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I agree with most of what you said, but I find posting someone’s home address to be so far over the line that “it was an honest mistake” doesn’t quite cover it. And that’s without it turning out to be the wrong person.
I do agree that there is a key difference in the pattern of behavior. Jones has repeatedly violated the TOS for multiple platforms. He had been suspended for it. Lee had not, and but he answered for what he did in court.
Jones likely assumed what most people here seem to have— that the companies had more to gain by keeping him than cutting him off.
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Yeah but it is. The gov't isn't stopping anyone from saying anything or punishing them for doing so. That's the 1st amendment. By using their platform you're abiding by their rules. Is it wrong to censor some stuff and let others by? Sure. The problem we'll be facing is the fact that the ones that make the rules on this stuff were born long before the intention of the internet. Their lives aren't as technologically driven as most everyone under 35 today. That's why the FB Zuck hearing was such a shit show because it seemed like half of them didn't know what a MyFace even was.
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I did a quick search and the sandy hook incident is the only one I can find where Alex Jones doxxed anybody. Maybe it's because it's dominating search results. Do you have any other examples?
And the way the legal system works, people should be punished for every offense. Otherwise people start wondering how many times they can get away with it. I want to know what are the exact rules these social platforms are using to ban people, or are they just banning people willy nilly based on their own political opinions.
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might want to save this slippery slope stuff for when it’s somebody other than Alex fucking Jones being banned lmao. this isn’t a sincere conservative being banned for loving The Troops or some shit, the guy is a sociopath per his own lawyers - he’s knowingly pretending to be a lunatic to convince other lunatics to threaten innocent people’s lives because it helps pay his bills. him and any hypothetical liberal equivalent can eat shit and enjoy their Internet forum ban
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So he was permabanned for harassing people on video? Like that hasn't happened before, by tons of other people? I just want to know exactly what rule Alex Jones broke that nobody else before him didn't break. Because otherwise, it just seems like the business is just banning him to save face, like you said. Which goes back to the original comment that Kamaria made. Which is, if you had a minority opinion on some political issue, how would you feel if a huge social media platform started censoring and banning people with that same minority opinion, just to save face to their shareholders? And this is not just an Alex Jones issue. Recently twitter [banned people who took offensive tweets against white people and made them about black/jewish people](https://www.zerohedge.com/comment/12132410). This is clearly turning political
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I feel like we’re emphasizing too much of his political perspective in this debate. He didn’t get banned because of his perspective, he got banned because he is using the platform in bad faith with language that borderlines sedition and inciting violence. If we’re having this conversation as if he’s the victim for violating ToS as a bad faith actor, he’s already winning his argument. That being said, thousands of political viewpoints are said every single day on Twitter. None of them are actively being suppressed that don’t contain language that violates the ToS. In whatever scenario we might think voicing political opinions *need* to incite any sort of violence or potential illegal acts, becomes an opinion that crosses a line away from protected speech. This is what Twitter is avoiding.
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You are referring to American progressivism. I was referring to modern **progressives** , which has co-opted the term and morphed into something different.
The usage stems from the word progress—>move forward. And the usage connotes using a government/power structure to enforce the change for societies supposed benefit. A modern progressive policy would be affirmative action.
Liberal, at least stemming from the root of someone believing in liberalism In general, is the belief that it is the aim of politics to preserve individual rights and to maximize freedom of choice.
So, perhaps you should go read your newspapers more, pay attention to the last 60 years, and at least understand I was being facetious and exaggeratory in order to wedge the inherent difference between liberal being of the individual, and progressive being of the state. (Granted i probably did a shitty job of making that clear)(Communist nations always claim to be progressing humanity and social good. And they do so through the state. I have the most familiarity with communist regimes and implementations so I use those as an example).
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And this is why net neutrality is important. These companies have every right to ban content they don't like and censor people. With net neutrality if the censorship moved from fringe things like Alex Jones to more popular media a new company would move into the market that wasn't censoring that stuff and they would dominate due to the free market. But without net neutrality these big companies can pay to have all the bandwidth. ISPs that want to censor could charge absorbent rates to new companies trying to move into the space essentially forcing us to get all our media from a handful of established companies with no practical hope of a new company offering something different.
And as with most really bad things in our country we have Republicans bending over backwards for corporations to thank for the repeal of net neutrality.
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Then we shouldn't be talking about whether behavior's acceptable because of its commonality, we should be discussing how to disperse some of the power and authority of these enormous tech companies and promote competition so public discourse isn't controlled by the whims of a few. People will always be biased one way or another and be willing to ignore their own company's policies based on their beliefs (as we've seen Twitter do again and again regarding Jones, Trump, etc)
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Can you please point me to the constitutional right to hearing? I can't seem to find it. I'm pretty sure it does not exist, but its possible that I missed something, so please direct me to where this thing exists.
Free speech is the right to speak freely from constraints by the government. The word hearing isn't even in the constitution.
Trump cannot block people because right now, he is the government and has to abide by the constitution. The big C Is why, for right now, his twitter feed is called a town square and he is not allowed to block anyone. It's an official government feed right now. Had he used the POTUS account like Obama did, he could still block people on his personal twitter freely, but since he's using his personal for government, that's why he can't.
The constitution does not allow Trump to silence people due to freedom of speech.
Once Trump is no longer president, that will no longer apply as he will no longer be speaking on behalf of the government, and as such can block anyone he wants.
Twitter is a private company. They can ban whoever they want. The constitution does not apply because they aren't the government. They aren't stopping anyone from interacting with the president or going to listen to his speeches on other platforms, or seeing news.
It's just like if you got kicked out of a business and the president was giving a speech there, you would not magically be allowed to go back in citing the right to hear.
Have you perchance talked to an attorney about your theory? What did they tell you when you said this?
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You're acting like Jones has been unfairly painted as a bad guy, or that the only reason people are okay with this is because they disagree with him. That's not the case. What I see is the bar for human decency online getting bumped up ever so slightly. The man caused the victims of a tragedy where their child was murdered to go into hiding because he'd convinced his followers that it was all fake. That's the kind of person that we should all be able to agree doesn't deserve a free megaphone by way of social media. Any hand wringing about a slippery slope is just ignorant, corporations have always had this power and we need to react to how they use it, but sometimes it will be appropriate to exercise this power, and that doesn't mean that it's always okay. It should be a case by case basis, and when corporations cross a real line then that's when we give them a real backlash.
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>yes they should be more transparent
Totally agree. How many rule violations? I want to know what that threshold is, so I can compare it to other people who make similar harassment campaigns. Otherwise they are just free to censor whatever they want. These are social platforms, they aren't the same as newspapers or publishers. There was a post elsewhere on Reddit concerning this exact issue. A publisher should be responsible for their posts (aka get sued for libel, etc). A platform stays neutral but claims no responsibility. Right now people view these websites as platforms. But if these websites want to become like publishers, and have influence over their content, then they should say so. Otherwise the users have a false perception of the website. If these "platforms" are becoming political mouthpieces of their owner companies, then people need to be aware of that. And even if they are just appeasing shareholders, if they are giving into the political bias of shareholders, then people need to be aware of that too. And just a related note, here's [some context on what I'm talking about when I say these platforms are becoming politically biased](https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-08-05/twitter-suspends-black-conservative-changing-nyt-bigots-tweets-white-jewish-and).
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When the telecommunications act was created, starting a new phone company required massive outlays of capital and created providers with natural monopoly statuses. It is predominantly these reasons why it was deemed important to regulate them as common carriers and have them be neutral in carrying phone calls.
These days, those companies are most similar to ISPs. It can take hundreds of millions of dollars and years of work and your ISP may still not have much of a deployment (see Google Fiber). Most Americans only have the choice of one or two ISPs.
There are literally free (as in freedom, open source) competitors to Facebook, so the barrier to creating a chat platform to challenge Facebook chat is incredibly tiny. If you don't like the rules Facebook chat wants to enforce, don't use Facebook chat. It costs almost nothing to switch chat platforms. I've switched most of my messaging to Signal and convinced most of my friends and family to join.
If Facebook is banning people, people can just go to a different website. If ISPs restrict your access on the internet, you have no place else to go except to sell your house and move to a different part of the country served by an ISP not blocking things.
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>What would the regulation look like?
Simple: You cannot ban the official account of a person or organization if you are a new public forum. A new public forum would be defined as a forum with a set amount of public members, public members being people like Alex Jones not PenisDestroyer9000.
>You can't ban harassment until it's illegal?
Harassment is already regulated by law.
>Can't ban spam until you've proven it's a spammer?
People can often be ignored on those platforms if the spammer is a public account. If it is an anonymous account then ban freely.
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