Mexico president slams social media censorship
reuters.com
reuters.com
So his opinion doesn't matter.
Looking back on the last few years, the most disappointing thing in society is the intolerance and tribalism. I bet if people were to state their own opinions, without any outside influence, we would all be at each other's throats given the current state of affairs. You don't agree with me on X so fuck you, where X >= petty. I have friends with varying political leanings but we seem to be the exception -- when did the slightest differences in political opinion become devastating deal breakers? You don't support BLM? You're an awful person. You want to ban guns? Burn in hell. These could otherwise be nice people that you could be friendly with. Has it always been this bad or has the internet underscored the black-and-white nature of politics?
If they are public forums, let them be run by the government.
Note that this is different from tv or radio, because then the broadcasting company has to do additional work to broadcast your speech, but with social media the company has to do additional work to block it.
Edit: can't -> should't (sorry english is not my first language)
A citizen is a citizen is a citizen. Everyone has the same rights and protections.
How the same people who complained about apartheid can then reinvent it in under 20 years is beyond me.
Might want to do research before arguing. This is incredibly inaccurate. Only discriminating against protected classes is illegal, shop owners can refuse to serve you for any other reason.
If you see a shop owner refuse service to a girl because of green hair, would you say "that's ok, not a protected class so she had it coming" or would you refuse to do business with that shop owner, and demand fair treatment?
No, they don't. You might think that they should have to, but as things are today, they don't.
I am not from US, and I think it's really sad that most people think, that by opinion on one issue it is possible to infer opinions on all the other issues. Social media makes it too easy to create echo chambers, and see only strawman versions of other sides arguments, freedom of speech and tolerance is the only way to heal the society.
The official broadcasting channels of the us gov remain fully open at Mr Trump’s disposal.
The left is pro-free market when big companies are anti-conservative.
You are also only saying this because your side is the one doing the censoring. If Republicans had control of all tech and media and you were almost completely censored, I think your opinion would change.
If we say let anyone say anything, we end up with someone encouraging discrimination or even genocide.
From the other side if we introduce restrictions on what's allowed to say and what's not, who decides black and white?
Even if we build a trustworthy system for decisions, what about gray areas? E.g. antivaxxers. Their efforts might make people die. Indirectly. But it can happen. If antivaxxers are banned, should we do the same for flatearthers?
Saying that Twitter should not be allowed to ban Trump is taking away Twitter's free speech rights to decide who they want to have in their community and on their private, non governmental platform. If you disagree with that, you are proposing to regulate Twitter as a public utility that will be able to censor Twitter's right to do that. But even without that, inciting riots and threatening people was never considered protected speech anyways, and that's exactly what he was doing with his account.
What's happened on Twitter instead, is that instead of banning him long ago for violating their policies multiple times over, they've in fact protected him unduly as he does things that would have gotten other people removed from the platform and probably sued or arrested a long time ago. He has in fact gotten more free speech rights than other people have.
This shouldn't surprise anyone that has studied American history. Free speech laws disproportionately empower people of means of using them, and much less people like their victims. The flavor of free speech in this country I'm told to unconditionally believe in was conceived by landholders and plantation owners. How much freedom of speech did Thomas Jefferson's slaves have? Unconditional "free speech", which thanks to Citizens United now includes money, still principally serves the Masters: the rich and powerful, the owners, far more than it will ever serve their victims. We don't do free speech or it's victims any favors by whitewashing the history of free speech, who disproportionately benefits from it, and who are the victims of it.
I'm not opposed to "free speech", but the tech crowd needs to get a lot better about understanding that there are nuances and complexities to it, and stop treating it like a religious edict that has to be worshiped unconditionally. They need to understand that applying it in a pure form can lead to outcomes that are dangerous to our safety and our society. If 2020 hasn't made this crystal clear, I really don't know what else I can do to convince people of this. I can't even eat at restaurants anymore.
I'm from Mexico, and the current president it's the definition of a demagogue. All word days, he spends 2 hours of his time in a press conference to his achievements and attacking opponents (not only other politicians, but the press that speaks about scandals of his party).
Despite presenting himself as a "leftist", AMLO it's closer to Trump or Bolsonaro, that to Trudeau or Jacinda Ardern. To them freedom of speech, it's "talking without facing the consequences of their words".
Relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1357/
- Donald Trump, during his presidential bid [1]
[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/06...
Funnily enough, China also promised Trump some magic beans if he would legitimize Kim Jong-un.
We’ll see how fond the left is when a new set of “counter terrorism” laws, corporate censorship, and the free market when it gets used on the next round of BLM protestors, to pick an example at random.
Not to mention how suddenly the far left is suddenly concerned about Twitter’s civil rights — something reaffirmed by their least favorite opinion: Citizen’s United.
Nobody should fool themselves: neither party has a consistent set of principles.
That has been happening? https://theintercept.com/2018/03/19/black-lives-matter-fbi-s...
Pretty much has been happening forever too. Many voices "on the left" have always been under surveillance since we started surveiling our citizens, and were often economically blackballed on the free market as well.
Also this seems like false equivalences between people saying we should change how policing works vs we should overturn the results of our election through force.
We have actual armed insurrectionists on one hand storming the capitol with zip cuffs and illegally carried firearms. You are asking how we would feel if we treated BLM, the people who want their tax dollars to go to alternatives to policing, like we treated those people inciting the capitol riot. Honestly it would probably be an improvement.
You’re coloring one ideology all good and another all bad. Not all MAGA people stormed the capital any more than all BLM supporters burned down a police precinct, took over city hall in Seattle and literally seceded from the union.
We have a lot of problems. The primary one is our inability to see that they are spread evenly across the ideological spectrum.
I’m not judging the entirety of a Maga movement, or the right, or even a “stop the steal” crowd. I am judging those who stormed the capitol and those who directly egged them on, who are being deplatformed in the article.
> We have a lot of problems. The primary one is our inability to see that they are spread evenly across the ideological spectrum.
Another contender for primary problem is the widespread use of false equivalencies and “both sides” to excuse whatever is inconvenient without nuance.
1) Storming the capital is far more concerning than some hippies setting up shop in Seattle. But I would contend that that these two extremes are pushing each other to more extremes and there is a distortion that whoever acts last is the current problem. Prior to the capitol incident, the fringe left had a monopoly on disgraceful behavior and unchecked violence in the streets. What would have happened had Trump actually won?
2) I think that rejecting the "both sides" argument _is_ the removal of the nuance.
The sheer number of people who can’t grasp this basic point is staggering.
If you don't pay for the service, you are the product.
I'm not sure I want to eliminate all freedom on the public internet, but I just have been thinking that people are really exaggerating the stakes here.
And it seems especially weird for the right to be so frightened, because surely when "America was great" was before this era of Facebook and Twitter? Weren't we free then?
My issue is with “moderation” where you just remove content you disagree with politically.
There is a massive agreement that he went over the line and he had to be banned.
Edit: I wonder why I got down-voted. My comment was not "off-topic or illegal", perhaps someone disagrees with me politically. =P
I've seen some real gems from ParlerWatch, people wanting to roast the wives and children of liberals on open spits to teach them the danger of liberalness.
Liberal means free, btw.
It's just a natural outcome of the different ideologies. One is bound by hate over decrease in privilege, the other is a broad coalition to make lives better for folks who then get frustrated and vent online (and sometimes in the streets).
Power is power and it needs to be held accountable.
HN censorship doesn't matter because it's a tiny fish in a very large pond. Reddit censorship does matter because they are basically a monopoly when it comes to online forums. Same for twitter/facebook when it comes to social media and google search results.
You'll be in for a wild ride.
Reddit? No central moderation beyond court orders. They were a lot better when they let each community decide their own standards pre-2017.
USA hasn't had free markets in a while. And monopoly platforms are not free markets. DoJ won't go after monopolies for violation of century-old anti-trust laws.
I give USA about ten years until it splits up.
In your view, how so?
Get down to brass tacks so we can see if the argument holds up.
Seems very unlikely to me. Trump draws massive traffic to Twitter.
It has nothing to do with any market.
Maybe we'll get lucky and find that they were wrong, and that this move causes enough public backlash to give other social networks a chance to thrive (if we're really lucky, maybe even decentralized ones!)
The only information we have is that it was internal pressure too be a "better company."
There's also something not mentioned very often, these apps are "free" and lose money at first, but they sell your information and now they control the conversation, something most people are not in a position to decide or even know about, of course until it's too late and you have your life in their servers. Imho, this is a conflict of interest similar to private healthcare insurance, where the profit and the wellbeing of the human involved (sometimes the customer, sometimes the product) is not the #1 priority, and as a result a large enough company has the scale to damage a large number of people.
It's shocking that hackernews has turned so far astray.
One can be against government control out of fear that government will use that to do something unintended, and at the same time condemn the destructive behaviour of these business owners.
The situation with freedom of speech is remarkably similar to the situation with religious freedom in England of 1600s. Like they have learned to not bring their sacral beliefs into everyday life, because that causes the society to fail, we need to learn that escalating the political fight too much is dangerous, and universal freedom of speech is game theoretically the right strategy.
There are plenty of left wing voices that have been kicked off twitter and reddit for making calls for violence, but mainstream democrats have not caused that liability for platforms they use.
Probably going to be like Liberty vs Security after 9/11