> boy is Elon the wrong person to own a platform that should respect free speech and be neutral
Given twitter has not respected free speech, and Elon has no track record (AFAIK) of thwarting free speech, what makes him so wrong?
Given twitter has not respected free speech, and Elon has no track record (AFAIK) of thwarting free speech, what makes him so wrong?
"Pedo guy" is not defamation, just an insult barked back at someone who told him to stick a submarine where the sun doesn't shine.
Not the classiest response, but nothing to cry about.
Considering we're talking about someone who's footing the bill to make significant innovation in multiple sectors, I still view him favourably. I disagree with him politically on a few topics and agree on others.
I hope it's not going to be like DuckDuckGo, which started like a service against Google biased / curated results and ended up manually hiding what they deemed russian propaganda during the latest war, effectively doing what Google was doing.
That's despicable. He's an evil narcissist and a dangerous person.
This absolutist and judgmental attitude is what makes social networks hell. I wonder what your worst moment was and whether it happened offline or online, and how would you like to be judged for it by others.
Too many people cosplay the Old Testament God.
It was not just a "moment"; he could have said that he misspoke and that he was sorry. But he persisted, and put up a nonsensical defense where he said "pedo" was a kind of nice nickname in his home country in his youth (which nobody corroborated).
He showed that what he wants is eradicate opponents and will stop at nothing. That's probably what has brought him where he is. But we don't have to respect it.
Elon was mean on Twitter. It's not like he paid people in the Thai government to frame the guy or something - which would seem much more "stop at nothing" to me.
I think it's basically the same moral fault, though maybe a slight difference of degree, to accuse a person of being a pedophile on bad evidence as it is to accuse someone of being an evil narcissist out to eradicate on bad evidence.
Also the insult matters. "Pedophile" is currently, in the English speaking world, the worst label imaginable. This was not just any insult, the kind one says when they're annoyed at someone in traffic for example. This was intended to kill. It was extremely mean. I maintain it revealed his true character.
But you're free to think I reveal mine.
Regarding "evidence" Elon's reasoning, if I recall correctly, was that an adult man moving to Thailand was inherently suspicious for pedophilia. Thailand has some reputation for sex tourism, especially of the underage variety. This is, as I said, bad evidence. Likewise, your belief that Elon is an evil narcissist who will stop at nothing to eradicate opponents is based on bad evidence - the mean/bad tweets.
Finally, I don't think that you reveal your character. I don't judge people based on short comments - at least not comments such as these. Just like I don't think Elon's tweets were especially revealing or damaging to his character I don't think your comments are that meaningful for your character.
And the other guy was a guy that pushed himself into the media light and made headlines and also not deserving any.
Musk is also in a leadership position where his opinion is highly valued by many thousands, and he decided to abuse that authority and power.
TL;DR free speech is between you and the government, not between you and someone else or some other company.
That's up for debate. Modern communication is so monopolized by twitter/FB that the argument of "they are a private company" no longer holds.
We can bemoan Russian interference in the elections all we want. But the power Twitter/FB hold is far more impactful on domestic and international democracy than any russian agent every could be.
Yes, everyone knows that.
It's a bit different though when you have massive social media platforms that have monopolies over public discourse.
Well, one alternative would be that they have to decouple their front-end and back-end and provide open APIs to their backend (posts/tweets, friends lists, etc.).
Facebook/Twitter can moderate/censor whatever they want on their own front-ends, but they can't remove anything from the backend.
People/companies can build alternative front-end apps that access the fb/twitter graphs and censor in a different way - so that users have an alternative.
(Note that FOSTA/SESTA already imposes a proactive legal obligation to censor within the US, and overrides s230)
No, it's not. If you want corporations to be beholden to the first amendment then pass laws saying that private companies can no longer moderate their platforms, full stop.
(the term gets thrown around a lot, and has been devalued into meaninglessness by the Russian government, but it does have a legal meaning in Germany and France)
really now?
That and its excessive use on social media renders "Nazi" mostly useless as a descriptor, outside of those groups that explicitly and deliberately reference Nazi symbology and ideology.
Note: smaller than that of the same ideological but different geopolitical alignment that Russia has been sponsoring for years (Azov exists, but it's smaller than Sparta) in the same conflict.
>some far-right militia activity in some places
FYI, those guy with wolfsangel and black sun insignias and swastika tattoos are not a militia but a legitimate unit of Ukraine's national guard
https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/sonnen...
https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/wolfsa...
this is a clear violation of the First Amendment, which makes it legal to publish lies.
Yep — here we're getting into Prior Restraint. It's both against the law to restrain free speech such as lies, but as you rightly point out, this speech can have other legal consequences.
Then the government should pass laws stating that these private corporations are no longer able to moderate their own platforms as they see fit. There is no "second meaning" without concrete legal precedent.
Tell them to call it freedom of expression if you're so inclined, and keep supporting their fight for it.
Anything less is detracting from their point, seemingly intentionally.