Comment by busymom0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by busymom0 | Hacker News Reader

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This is where I simply don't understand how people can justify a billionaire company which has basically become the modern means of communications similar to telephones of the past to censor whoever they want.

"Loose laws" allow censorship of Palestinians under the guise of "anti-semitism" and Christians/Israel under the guise of "islamaphobia" depending upon where the pendulum is. Similarly censorship of women who speak out against men in their sports, spas and bathrooms.

Or in this woman's case, censorship of her for standing up for woman's rights in Somalia.

Meanwhile Twitter is letting Taliban's page to stay online...

Similar examples:

The blackout Palestinians are facing on social media:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27645282

The reasoning provided was "Criticism of Israel is Anti-Semitism. Really.":

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/criticism-of-israel-is-anti-...

Speaking out against the Patriot Act and forever wars would be (and was) labelled "unpatriotic" and "terrorist sympathizer" and censored. Speaking out against healthy living would be labelled "fat phobic". Or the opposite could also happen. All the groups which speak out against fat shaming could also get censored because it's dangerous to public health. The government and big tech would start censoring you for advertising soft drinks/chips and other junk food. Since all religions oppose gay marriage, when super religious are in power, they would censor LGBT content. Pro-choice would get censored for religious reasons and Pro-life would be censored for racism/dangerous or other reasons.

Add to this, the absolute contradiction of their terms of service where it aims to stop discrimination against religion while also stopping discrimination against LGBT. Every religion from Hinduism to Islam to Christianity is against LGBT, abortion etc. How they plan on maintaining any neutrality is beyond me. And lord forbid when the pendulum swings in other direction and you get some super religious person in power.

The only way to stop all this is to have absolute freedom of speech on tech platforms which should be classified as common carriers. We already have plenty of laws to take care of any immediate actions taken as a result of your speech.

And since this is regarding UK, what needs to be done is for free speech on the Internet to be recognized as a human right by the UN.

People are being silenced on all these platforms for all kinds of reasons. I think we are pretty much lost. People don't understand the impotence of not being censored and they applaude censorship when it agrees with their views.

It comes down to one thing. Does the speech advocate violence or is intentionally designed to cause it against anyone for any reason? If yes,ban it if no, then don't. The other reason is; if someone without proven medical training in a related field is peddling snake oil, ban it. And the twitter taliban thing is actually more complicated than you make it out to be. They are horrible but the government of a country. Its the same reason a certain orange individual was allowed to continue even after calling for violence many times and breaking TOS many times, he wasn't banned until he was voted out of power. Think of it this way, do you want every program to be goven unconstrained access to your hardware without your OS?

And yet almost everyone around here was standing clapping hands when the silenced where on the opposite political side.

I was happy when political figures who for years spouted things on plattforms that would have gotten me banned in a single day, finally got judged under the same guidelines as me. Because why have guidelines if you don't enforce them evenly?

Is it really politcal if you ban a politician from your establishment for shitting into the pool if both common sense, manners and decency demand people not shitting into pools. After all normal people also get banned for shitting into pools.

Unless we make twitter a true public plattform which is paid by taxes and where rules are enforced by the police I don't really see why they shouldn't enforce their (not unreasonable) rules.

I don't particularily care whether the person seriously inciting violence is from the left or on the right, it is reasonable to go after both on your own plattform.

first off, not all of them where inciting violence. you bunching them all up is part of the issue, the other being selective tos enforcement.

idk what else to say, keep standing and clapping.

first off, I didn't claim all of them where. What I did say is that:

A) there are common sense rules of communication that are enforced everywhere for the most part. If you are screaming, yelling or generally trashtalking you will be usually not tolerated in any kind of private etablishment. This is not different online.

B) these rules should be applied evenly and transparently. If they are not (which is sometimes the case) this is a problem. This means removing posts that adhered to the rules because some mod didn't like them politically is bad. This also means leaving posts up that broke the rules because the person who posted it had some sort of power is also bad.

So if they didn't break the rules and their posts got deleted, this would be clearly something I'd criticize. If they did break the rules and it is just a case of "the rules are too extreme for my flavour of politics" then your flavour of politics could either be incompatible with common rules of human decency and behaviour, or the platform is needlessly strict with their rules or the enforcement of said rules.

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