You would be hard pressed to find liberal / progressive content being censored online.
No, I wouldn't.
https://fair.org/home/that-facebook-will-turn-to-censoring-t...
I might have to work harder to find high-traffic social-media accounts peddling stories about the left being censored online than finding the same thing about the right.
But, if so, would that really be evidence that the right was being censored more, or just that its complaints are being amplified more by the very same platforms they claim to be selectively censoring them?
I think this is a false dichotomy. Whenever speech calls for violence that upsets the current social-political order in the US, it is censored regardless of being "left" or "right;" one example being the very-left chapo trap house crowd on reddit. My understanding that there is less violent content coming from voices identified as "progressives" that tend to value other more acceptable* methods for social change.
* Acceptable meaning something different per platform, but if we are being honest seems to usually mean "can sell mainstream ads space alongside them"
Clearly that's the wheelhouse of the right-leaning national groups, right? Oh, maybe not. Or maybe it's the rightwing nationalist governments cracking down on disadvantaged groups?
Really just seems like anyone that can get away with it is censoring people with differing opinions.
Seems like something that will surely end well /s
Hypocrisy on display
What I actually said is "anyone who can get away with it"
And obviously they would be doing it for partisan reasons.
A "liberal" on Facebook calling for the beheading of a conservative politican would be banned (possibly even arrested) immediately. The opposite can and does happen every day, with no penalty.
And all this still isn't relevant because we are talking about government censorship.
And I suppose that's probably a good thing.
> And all this still isn't relevant because we are talking about government censorship.
Agreed that the article is about government censorship, and I commented before I read the article.
However, given that the US government at least has shown very little backbone in its threats to regulate social media companies, their tendency toward more censorship also seems concerning.
[1] Obviously, black lives do matter and fascism is bad, but as slogans "Black Lives Matter" and "Anti-Fascism" represent very radical political programs. You should be as suspicious of these slogans as I assume you are of slogans like "All Lives Matter" and "Anti-Communism".
I see no evidence that that is the case.
And the question you have to ask is how do you see it when it happens to right-leaning people? Is it happening in your immediate neighborhood? Or is this supposed social "cancelling" happening to people who have pre-existing or readily-made-available access to strong, highly-visible, wealthy network that shares their story as outrage fuel and/or enables the socially "cancelled" a highly-visible platform to do so?
Information gathered as unstructured anecdotes, especially absent analysis of the systematic biases in how the information gets to you, is not a reliable basis for drawing conclusions about relative frequency, especially when the topic is specifically differential suppression of viewpoints and information.
Everyone has a personal Overton Window - the set of ideas that they think are reasonable and acceptable, even if they personally don't agree. When most of the personal Overton Windows approximately align on a particular topic, then we have society's Overton Window.
For example, think about gay marriage. 50 years ago, maybe even 20, 95% of society thought that gay marriage was clearly not acceptable. That meant that 95% of society agreed with 95% of society's personal Overton Windows on the topic, and so we had a clear society-wide Overton Window.
Now we have maybe 30% of people who still think that gay marriage is clearly not acceptable. We also have 40% who think that gay marriage is clearly in bounds. Of those, maybe half (so 20% of the population) think any doubts about gay marriage are clearly unacceptable. There is no position which a large majority of society finds acceptable. (All numbers made up, but I think they're in the approximate neighborhood.)
The society-wide Overton Window didn't move. It shattered.
"Socially acceptable" is, necessarily, relative to some defined group.
Especially in a political system with limited major parties and partisan primary elections (especially if they are closed, but even if they are open in theory but tend to attract a specific mostly-stable community in practice), and a substantial population that participates in neither parties primaries, considering the Overton Window within each party and/or ideological identity group as well as the "national" Overton Window can be useful. The GP comment could be rephrased without, I think, change of meaning as "the Overton Window of the community of the ideological Right and/or the Republican Party has moved relative to the rest of society such that it excludes much of the window as viewed by those not ideologically tied strongly to the Left or Right faction".
Again, goes to show the polarization of the US.
But either way, defund the police is not mainstream anywhere - that’s pretty universally understood to be a fringe (and ridiculous) proposition, and has already proven its devastating consequences.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/10/two-new-studies-show-again...
You're right, they technically don't. But they ban everything that can be even remotely interpreted as "offensive". To give you one example, I got banned for pointing out the appeal to nature fallacy. I've said that rape and murder is technically natural and yet it's not socially acceptable. Literally just that. Nothing less, nothing more. But someone either misinterpreted that simple sentence or found it offensive because of the context of the conversation, and thus I got banned.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-electio...
https://www.newsweek.com/bannon-calls-fauci-beheading-154528...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/05/steve-bannon-makes-beheading...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/steve-bannon-s-twitter-acc...
https://nypost.com/2020/11/06/twitter-bans-steve-bannon-for-...
This kind of political speech has no place in a democratic society. The fact that it comes down to social media and Internet providers to regulate it, however, is reflective of a policy failure. Keeping calls for extremist violence out of the public sphere ought to be the responsibility of the criminal legal system, not private business.
You must be joking? Twitter, Google, FB, the blatantly partisan censorship?
Conservatives and libertarians LOVE to bleat about property rights, but they can't handle it when private parties won't provide free advertising for right-wing conspiracies.
Enforcement of contracts is essential to a healthy society, but is it good to enforce a contract where one party either lied or coerced the other to sign? No, or at least not necessarily.
The nature of the contract between social media platforms and their users (both explicit and implicit) has changed dramatically since the days that Twitter was "the free speech wing of the free speech party". Users have sacrificed a increasing amount of privacy for less and less obvious benefit. In the meantime, many people have come to depend upon these services for connecting with others, for their livelihoods, and for news independent of corporate media.
Have the social media companies deceived their users? Or have they forced unconscionable terms upon their users? Have they violated consumer protection laws?
I am not a lawyer. I don't know the answers to those questions. But I do know that there are some lawyers and judges who do think that some of these social media companies have overstepped. We don't necessarily need a civil rights case, or a constitutional amendment, or even to repeal Section 230. All I think is necessary is for existing contract and consumer protection laws be litigated and enforced.
This kind of action would benefit both left and right, and I think is more constructive than opportunistically deciding that "businesses can do whatever they want" when you think it only hurts people on the right.
Be honest that you really want to use the force of government laws to mandate that Twitter spreads your version of free speech across the platform paid for and developed by Twitter.
Perhaps you should try reading my words instead and responding to them rather than the imaginary things you pretend I actually think? It might work out better.
Ergo, what you really want is government to enforce your version of free speech through "existing" contract law.
While I do believe in the necessity of freedom of speech (not just the first amendment, but a particular set of cultural values) those abstract values aren't my primary concern here. My concerns (across the various tech platforms out there) are:
* the disruption to peoples' businesses that result from the opaque and largely incontestable content moderation process. This is mainly a concern where the content in question does not violate either the law nor the TOS.
* The exploitation of consumers through the gradual degradation of privacy.
* The attempts to undermine consumer rights by removing users' options for legal remedy in the TOS
Basically, if users' are providing value to these platforms through advertising revenue, mine-able private information, transaction fees, etc. what expectations can the users' have with regard to the value they receive and how they are treated by the platforms? I do not think the answer of "nothing" is acceptable.