Just conveniently ignoring the content of these sites/services that gets them banned in the first place...
If it's legal, the service provides should have no say.
This is like christan toll-bridge operator not allowing people to pass the bridge, if they drove in from the direction of a brothel.
if it's abusive of the people patience and potentially dangerous, the government can and should shut it down.
it's not illegal to carry arms in most of the US, but in some places they can ban you if you carry one, because they don't want to deal with you or be responsible for what you could do with it.
it's not illegal to drink in many parts of the Globe, but some people could not want you to drink in the children's playground at 9 in the morning and if you don't leave on your own they might call the police.
society has rules other than legal/illegal.
it's the perk of living in what's called "a free country".
Some of us consider this a bad thing, even though it's still done in some societies (eg. USA).
If someone starts a harry potter microbloging platform, and the content there is legal, and the technology works in a way, where a want-to-be-offended pastor has to actively type in the url/name in the browser, to see the content and get offended, this should not be a reason to ban that platform. The same with eg. not being able to disallow customers of the shop that sells harry potter to use public roads.
Internet services and payment processors should be treated the same as other utilities... as long as it's legal, the services/processors should not be able to deny service due to political reasons, because they believe harry potter is against gods will.
it's not good or bad.
it's the price of freedom.
what's the alternative?
having the police to beat those people burning the books?
silence them?
kick them out the society/country?
> Internet services and payment processors should be treated the same as other utilities
I'm of the opinion that depending on the service they should have much more responsibilities than service providers.
For example social networks that algorithmically propose content should be considered editors/publishers and be treated as such, including being responsible for the content they publish.
Who’s the censor in this conversation again?
I’m having a hard time squaring the idea of free speech maximalism with “a certain group of people should have no say.”
We have laws set in place where we decide who can drive on roads using which kinds of vehicles, and road operators and owners (not sure how road system works in USA, in my country, some roads are country-owned, some are owned by the municipality, and some private ones can join the road system - eg. the long road from the main street to the IKEA entrance), and if the driver has a licence and a stret legal vehicle, s/he can drive on all those roads, even if he carries gay porn and anal dildos, and the municipality is full of christian/muslim radicalists.
So, as long as the content is legal (regarding the laws of the country), no service provider should be allowed to block you from using that service and/or connection to view that content.
that's not how it really works.
what you are describing is a totally nuclear society, where everyone is on their own and mind their own business.
if in the car you've mentioned in your example there's a kid sitting in the back, I would alert the authorities.
Not because it's illegal to dive kids in a car full of gay porn and dildos, not because the content is for gay people or because dildos are not toys for kids, it's not even because I believe in some weird story about magic eternal beings that have nothing better to do that dictate books to their disciples about what I should or should not do, but because it should ring a bell to everybody.
The first idea was EU blocking rt.com (and some other russian sites), even though their content is perfectly legal, but EU doesn't want the people to look at that content there.
I mean, even the taliban are allowed to keep their twitter accounts - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-twitter-allows-taliban-ma... - but not russia?
Globally speaking, in the same time, US (and nato and other "allies") attacked quite a few other countries, iraq, afghanistan, syria, libya, they're bombing somalia, bombed pakistan, etc., and none of the media was blocked back then.
Even the taliban are allowed to maintain their twitter accounts ( https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-twitter-allows-taliban-ma... ).
And now, we're blocking RT, for what?
Personally, this is no different than people setting up a rival newspaper or magazine that caters to a different POV. Eventually, the dominant platforms on both sides will regress to the content/banning mean.
There are well-known arguments for not tolerating intolerant people.
Do those who advocate for tolerating intolerant people act in good faith, or are they simply part of them?
Fighting disagreeable speech with more free speech is harder than just banning it, but generations that follow will be better off for it.
Just seeing the Russia v Ukraine conflict and seeing how one country can enforce a narrative by law and arrest people as being sympathizers of an “intolerant” regime should be enough to make people aware that regulating verbal “intolerance” is a bad idea.
The fun bit here is understanding that there's no way to tell which country you're talking about
What’s real? How do we know our perception of reality isn’t being distorted by algorithms and sampling bias?
They should be. But “overwhelming evidence” should be rephrased as “lots of allegations.”
Is Ukraine committing war crimes? I am not pro-Russia by any stretch, but the actions taken by both sides in that war aren’t so black and white.
Watching this war as a dispassionate observer, it’s a study in propaganda. Zelensky broadcasting using a green screen to make it look like he’s on the streets for instance. The famous “I don’t need a ride, I need ammo” quote. The so called Ghost pilot who supposedly shot down a bunch of Russian fighters (which didn’t happen by the way.)
There is also the stories of torture — stories being given to the media by the Ukraine government. At least some of which are unverifiable: https://www.reuters.com/world/pentagon-cant-independently-co...
Other media outlets have run stories of torture based on materials given to them by a government that has a vested interest in anti-Russian sentiment.
And still other confusion on the air strike on the materai it y hospital: https://thegrayzone.com/2022/04/03/testimony-mariupol-hospit...
https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/02/11/ukraine-attacks-military...
So we aren’t making excuses for Russia (why would I, an American in Texas, give any fucks about Russia?) — but we are used to the media lying and lying over the past several years.
Case in point: Hunter Biden’s laptop. Whether or not it matters, the point is that a bunch of media and intelligence types told us it was “Russian disinformation.” Yet two years later WaPo and The NY Times have confirmed the authenticity of the laptop contents. Two years after they made a big point of suppressing or discrediting it.
So we’re supposed to believe those same media outlets when they are getting hand-fed by one of the participants in the Ukraine War?
A lot of people have lost the ability to think critically. Read the North Korean News Agency sometime. The language isn’t much different than how the western media frames the Ukraine War. One sided, with a strong propaganda diction.
Was the Russian invasion wrong? Possibly. But what’s the other side of the story? What’s the background? What exactly was the situation in the Russian-speaking regions of the Ukraine? Are there actual neo-Nazis in Ukraine? What’s the real story of the Azov battalion?
War is messy. Propaganda can never be trusted. And calling the other side a war criminal serves a valuable purpose. To be clear, I am not saying war crimes haven’t happened. I am saying that such claims ought to be dispassionately evaluated. Using schools to base troops and them complaining when Russia bombs a school — that seems a bit ridiculous. That’s the same tactic Hamas uses. And it works. It generates sufficient international outrage because apparently a large portion of the world lacks the ability to think critically
So no, not making excuses for Russia — but also not blindly cheerleading Ukraine. I don’t know enough about the background of that conflict to have much of an opinion. My opinion is more in line with media criticism rather than any version of the facts.
May as well just go ahead and believe North Korean propaganda at this rate. Maybe the world is covering up the truth. We haven't been there so we really can't know though (honestly).
You can go and watch Putin's speeches directly. He goes from saying it's to simply protect Russians in Donbass, to saying it's actually to stop NATO's expansion (countries should be free to choose their alliances--people ally with NATO because they don't want Russia invading their country, and invading their country only makes NATO seem more necessary), to saying it's really that Ukraine is entirely controlled by Nazis and needs to be de-nazified... by sending in the nazi Wagner mercenary group to kill a country run by a Jewish president who pretended to be gay on TV, to outright denying the historical existence of the Ukrainian people or their country and that it's just supposed to be Russian territory. All these speeches were in the span of literal days and show he just gave up on trying to hide his actual reasons.
You can completely ignore all western media if you like. You can completely assume all of what Ukraine says is absolute lies. All you need to do is listen to the words directly out of Putin's mouth and it's immediately obvious that it's the most transparent bullshit to justify a land grab that there ever was.
Free speech is important and should be protected, even if k__ disagrees with what you said.
I might be out on a limb with this, but I don't think we should be giving far-right people a platform to spread their views.
Either way, I agree that there's a range of legitimate discourse and it shouldn't just be the current flavour of progressivism. I was more cutting out a negative exception for the far right than a positive exception for libsocs.