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> if the lie on Twitter is used to commit fraud

I'll apologize if I have the details of the case wrong, but where is this supposed fraud? The only way I could see this being fraudulent is if (1) the private investigator being PAID for his investigatory services created the account and faked the document himself to continue getting paid for additional investigation or (2) the journalist being PAID for her journalistic work created fake documents so that she could publish them and accrue the financial benefits of authoring a juicy story.

But if whysprtech is anyone else on the planet—a conspiratorial kook, a troll, or even a political operative trying to embarass people—no fraud has been committed and there is no basis for unmasking him. The people responsible for the defamation aren't random anonymous internet trolls, but publishing companies who make money purporting to report the rigorously validated truth, but are actually lazy, naive, and gullible.

Where do all your anti-free-speechers get your identically wrong talking points? Lying on Twitter or to a newspaper ISN'T FRAUD. And if you used your half-assed definitions to write laws, you could throw authors at The Onion in jail for creating fake documents and making up fake quotes from government officials.

Newspapers and Twitter users have no right to expect that anonymous statements made online or documents given to them for free are accurate or true. If they chose to publish defamatory articles based on their lack of due diligence, the civil liability rests with them.

Frustrating for sure, but you're comparing access to limitless knowledge and literally life transforming technologies that people even a few decades ago would have sold their soul for... to a home product that I think Google would refund you the price of. Keep things in perspective.

> You are an example of the problem.

So, I would be on your arrest and prosecution list. What a surprise.

And I guess highway designers who choose to make the speed limit 65 mph instead of 3 mph also need to go to jail, right? After all, they KNOW WITH CERTAINTY that a 65 mph speed limit will contribute to many more deaths than if they limited cars to going 3 mph on the highway, but they chose to do it anyway.

While we're at it, why don't we prosecute the mother who bought a $18k Honda instead of a $300k tank even though the $18k Honda exposes her children to more risk of serious harm in a car accident? The mother is knowingly risking her children's lives in order to save money!

Get real and cut the rhetorical hysteria. EVERYTHING in life and the real world is about tradeoffs. And acceptable vs unacceptable tradeoffs change with time as we gain in economic prosperity. If you want regulation, pass CLEAR laws. Don't use weasely rhetoric to pretend that regular businessmen are murdering children because they sell soda.

And this is fraud... how? Because a guy made up fake stories and gave them to a newspaper for free? Or because he posted untrue things on Twitter? I guess the folks at The Onion better expect police knocking at their door any day now. They make up documents and quotes from "government officials" all the time. Better arrest them!

I can't believe how unbelievably little people like you know about law and free speech. Are you the one seriously arguing that it's illegal to lie on Twitter? Or to lie a newspaper? Of course faking a document is perfectly legal as long as it's not used for fraud. Tricking people on Twitter or at a newspaper isn't fraud unless they're contractually paying you for authentic documents and you deceive them for monetary gain.

Is this really that hard? The Onion fakes documents all the time and claims to have quotes from police officers and government officials on a daily basis.

Free speech is the most essential of all freedoms, and you'd trade it away for a song and a dance out of sheer ignorance.

Do you not realize how unhinged what you're saying is? "Coke and Pepsi are poisoning whole generations"? So you want to put business people in prison because they supply customers with products that they genuinely enjoy? I enjoy soda, I enjoy being able to drive, I enjoy occasionally smoking, I enjoy air conditioning my home. Perhaps I should go to jail too?

If you tell me your job, I could also make up ridiculous reasons about how you're personally responsible for starving children, or destroying the environment, or putting the public's safety at risk.

If you want regulation, pass laws. Don't go starting corporate witch-hunts by politically motivated completely unaccountable prosectors.

You can't participate in civil society if your only solution to problems is "let's throw everyone in jail for doing things I don't like!" And the outrageous unhinged rhetoric: "poising children", "killing millions", and "destroying the planet"... it's obvious what type of leader you'd be if you ever got any power.

This is the most intuitive explanation by far. I'd even say 1 million doors to really drive the point home.

You choose a door with only 1 in a million odds of it being the door with a prize. Monty Hall know where the prize is and will only open the remaining doors he KNOWS doesn't have the prize. If he then opens up 999,998 doors without a prize behind them and asks if you want to keep your original door or switch, you'd obviously know that Monty's last remaining door must be the one with the prize.

By what right do you have any standing to propose something so radically confiscatory and transgressive of property rights?

Can you list some ways Google has hurt you? You know, aside from all the harm they caused by giving you access to almost limitless knowledge, providing you tons of free storage, helping you navigate the world around you, providing an open source competitor to iOS, and providing countless hours of free entertainment and educational videos on YouTube?

In my entire life I've only ever felt screwed over by two--and only two--entities: Comcast and private universities.

Not Apple, not Google, not Facebook, not Amazon, not banks, not credit card companies, not even my cell carrier. On the whole—as a customer at least—I feel like all my dealings with these "big tech firms" have been fair and mutually beneficial. I love Apple products, I think Google basically deserves a Nobel Prize for their democratization of knowledge and their creation of useful tools, and I can sing the praises of how much Amazon has simplified my life with easy ordering and reliable product reviews. Frankly, I even sorta like getting targeted ads!

In contrast, Comcast keeps sneakily raising my bill, charging me BS fees they don't disclose ahead of time, locking me into punitive contracts, providing mediocre service—and I literally can't do a damn thing because they are the ONLY service provider in my area.

As for universities, they demanded that I take out hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to pay their insane tuition bills. They would in fact prevent me from registering for classes and would even withhold my diploma if I was even a little late paying their bills!. They employed these draconian tactics despite having endowments in the billions and receiving many hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants each year. And, these universities received all their money up front and pawned off any repayment risk to the Government or private lenders... And despite asking me to mortgage my future to pay their bills, they now have the outrageous gall to send me letters almost weekly asking for more even donations. And, very conveniently for somebody, educational debt is non-dischargeable in bankruptcy.

That's my longwinded way of asking: who the hell decided that regulating big tech is America's most pressing issue right now? I have nothing but goodwill toward big tech.

Meanwhile, I don't hear any politicians saying a anything about Comcast (in fact, I see many Comcast execs throwing fundraisers for Joe Biden), and all hear about universities from many Congresspeople is how we need to increase their funding and make sure more students can pay their insane tuition bills—not actually reigning in those bills.

Something seems... off.

Honestly, the premise seems exactly backward to me. I remember taking a selfie of myself on two different phones to compare their forward-facing cameras. The image quality on both was roughly the same, but one had subtle skin smoothing and lighting adjustments, the other one didn't. The one with "beauty filters" generally matched what I assumed I looked like to other people. The one without the "beauty filters" made me look much worse than my own mental picture of myself. I'm sure the one without beauty filters was more accurate, but it made me more self-conscious about my appearance and kinda made me realize "shoot, I'm actually uglier than I thought", and that bummed me out. It certainly didn't help my self-esteem or self-confidence! I rather suspect that subtle automatic retouching would actually be good for one's mental health.

Is this some sick joke? Do you really not see how arson and explosives are absolutely comparable crimes? The arson which accompanied looting in Philadelphia caused a massive fire in downtown Philly which could have easily killed people. Your apologism for serious crimes because I guess it suits your political biases is not OK.

Under normal circumstances, society gets pretty angry at arsonists irrespective of their political beliefs. Do you also feel bad for the guy who mailed CNN pipe bombs?

And if you don't get your way, what's next? Shutting off ICE employee's water, electricity, and telephone service? And why not kick them out of their apartments too since sheltering an ICE officer helps enable them.

I guess when they start administering ideological purity tests at the bagel shop, I'll know who to thank. After all, providing any type of sustenance or service to a person with the wrong political beliefs helps enable their wrong-ness, doesn't it?

Providing standard, regular service to anyone willing to pay for it is almost always the "default" non-political way of doing business. Do you want an ideological purity test to buy a bagel or a car? Refusing to provide a service when you have the capacity to provide it is a much stronger political act because it essentially implies "I hate you so much that I'm willing to harm myself (foregoing profit) in order to thereby harm you."

So you’re just trolling, is that right? You’re claiming that you’re deeply upset about a vague Trump tweet and need it to be banned to protect your innocent mind, but you’re openly advocating literal random violence. Ok, comrade.

Do you see how you're loading and manipulating your words to serve your biased purposes? If an "extremist" view is popular with the "mainstream", it's definitionally not an extremist view. And has it occurred to you that a Republican might consider AOC or Bernie Sanders or Ruth Bader Ginsberg a "dangerous extremist" while a Democrat might consider Trump or Bill Barr or Mitch McConnell an extremist? Is it really that hard to imagine how other people not aligned with you politically might think?

As I say elsewhere, I could just as easily use your empty standard to ban tweets saying “A riot is the language of the unheard.” This quote sympathetically explains rioting as a consequence of oppression—and it’s a quote I largely agree with. And yet people as easily triggered as you may seek to have MLK banned since the quote serves as justification/apologetics/glorification of rioting—-a definitionally violent and illegal act.

And if you want to play these games about particulars, replace war movie with war documentary. Are you satisfied now? Shall we ban war documentaries which may glorify violence?

> Which... can reasonably read as encouragement (or incitement, or glorification) of violence toward people.

Do you not see how I could just as easily use your empty standard to ban tweets saying “A riot is the language of the unheard.” -- a quote I largely agree with? This quote explains rioting as a consequence of oppression. But if I was as easily triggered as you, I'd have it banned since it "can reasonably [be] read as encouragement (or incitement, or glorification) of [rioting]" a definitionally illegal act.

And frankly, your interpretation of the Trump tweet is not reasonable. The most reasonable, common-sense interpretation is one linking severe consequences to severe actions. Does the phrase "When you play with fire, you're going to get burned" glorify burning people?

> Twitter is a part of the marketplace of ideas, is it not?

In the standard notion of a marketplace, you let decentralized end-users gravitate toward things they like and avoid things they don't like. If Trump's speech is so offensive, then let END-USERS decide to block his content or barrage his comments with condemnation or vote him out of office. Instead, you're advocating for a major centralized "authority" to make the decisions about tweets that should and shouldn't be seen, whether or not they're popular with the end-users. Yes, if they disagree that strongly with the censorship, those end-users can leave the platform, but that's analogous to "well, if you don't like it, then you can just leave". If people like something, they're rather fight to keep it good than let other people "ruin" it.

> ...whether the unoppressed is a straight man or a person who can threaten others with violence without consequence...

Mobs breaking windows, lighting things on fire, and stealing is violence. It exposes people to tremendous danger and tremendous injustice. Saying that violence begets violence should hardly be a controversial idea. I certainly don't think Trump's tweets are helpful in anyway. I think they're incredibly tone deaf and unhelpful. But I'm not going to cry to Twitter or Facebook and demand it be blocked.

> "Apply the same standards to all."

Do you honestly not realize that this is the exact issue being debated? Whether the "standards" are being applied fairly and consistently irrespective of political affiliations? And whether the "standard" itself is loaded to censor certain relatively mainstream but not Silicon Valley viewpoints?

What you're saying reminds me of an anti-gay marriage argument I heard: "Hey, I'm straight and I don't have the right to marry a man. A gay guy doesn't have the right to marry a man either. Look at that: the same standard applies to all. Everything is fair!"

I'm not particularly aligned to either democrats or republicans, but I've looked at "fact-checks" by supposedly neutral parties and they're often absolute garbage. Not only is the "research" superficial, what is chosen to be fact-checked vs. what isn't fact-checked is transparently biased. The "same standard" does not appear to be applied to all.

Given the debatable nature of these questions, I think common sense would say it's better to let voters and the marketplace of idea arbitrate rather than social media companies. And, as a general matter, I'm shocked people are still so into censoring in 2020. Isn't censoring books/ideas/speech something we laugh at given how consistently wrong it tends to be? I'd say censoring is silly at best and evil at worst.

I share the exact same sentiment as you, but I don't know if I'm being fair to how ugly a unmoderated forum can be.

For example, spamming advertisements in comment sections is completely legal speech. So would be typing in gibberish and hitting enter a thousand times. But both of these things would ruin the point of the forum.

Even if I compare Hacker News to Reddit, the former is consistently high quality while the later is 95% garbage in my opinion. Why? Probably because Hacker News is far more highly curated.

At the same time, I feel like YouTube has crossed the line with idea suppression. YouTube gives the impression that it's an open non-biased platform that links you to content you're interested in. But there are several egregious examples where popular videos with near-mainstream "conservative" viewpoints are suppressed into oblivion (e.g. appears on the 12th page of results even when you search for the video title verbatim and it has millions of more views than every other "relevant" result).

But, just because I can give examples of things which cross the line (suppressing popular conservative videos) vs things that don't (suppressing random gibberish, suppressed bot-created videos)... I don't think I could clearly articulate any rules to say exactly where that line is in a way that is scalable. YouTube created YouTube... I might just have to defer to their moderation policies while hoping another competitor comes along to challenge them.

Well, it was a building Povey ordinarily had a right to be in until protestors illegally chained all external doors shut. So, calling it "breaking in" is a sorta backward way to think about it, in my opinion. His right to be in the building was curtailed by people who did not have a right to be in the building (or at least did not have a right to exclude access).

As for the university explicitly telling him not to try to enter the building, that may be the case, but keep in mind that his personal work and career were being compromised by an illegal act that had dragged on FAR beyond reasonable accommodation (the sit-in had been ongoing a month and the chaining of doors went on over a week). Just because he was curently a Hopkins employee doesn't mean that his research was owned by Hopkins. Universities aren't like regular companies. Hopkins had a duty to him to provide safe and reasonable accommodations for his work. The grant money he obtained probably had a large payment to the university for these accommodations. Hopkins failed to uphold their end of the bargain with him by pussyfooting around blatantly dangerous and illegal activity by protestors.

What he did was imprudent, maybe even fireable. But unless the students who incited this all are also expelled (I'm pretty sure they weren't), then this would be a significant injustice against the professor due to selective enforcement of policy against some but not all Hopkins members.

Also, seeing Hopkins' sleezy firing letter makes it obvious that there is no good faith on the part of the university. You can tell by how it is written in "you admitted that we had to fire you!" style, that they grossly and intentionally mischaracterized statements he made to appease university lawyers. Dr. Povey doesn't look great, but Hopkins looks like a place where no decent person should ever hope to work.

Yes, it must be the subtlety and witty nuance that throws me off. https://www.chappatte.com/en/images/trump-overdose/

I think this piece is a great example of smug, establishment romanticism which grossly overvalues form over function. A political cartoon hasn't made me laugh, think deeply, or--most importantly--change my worldview in years. It's the most self-satisfied, pretentious, and outdated medium I know of. The author's notion that the loss of political cartoons is a serious loss of visual political culture is a self-absorbed joke. Visual political memes have become a massive and persistent grassroots social phenomenon with far more influence and engagement than too-clever-by-half political cartoons... not to mention certain animated shows with extremely sharp political and social satire. I don't think the author really regrets loss of political discourse. I think he regrets no longer being considered part of the political chattering-class establishment, even as that establishment loses its influence in a world of democratized information flow and opinion-sharing.

My net wealth is massively negative and will remain so for decades... and yet any fair assessment of my quality of life is that it's great. I can't afford a car, but I can still be chauffeured around like a celebrity at the push of a button on my phone. I can summon almost anything I want from across the planet and have it show up in my doorstep in 2 days as if I was a king. I have access to probably 99+% of the knowledge, information, art, entertainment, and telecommunication tools of the richest guy in the world. I could hardly care less that some people are preposterously wealthy while I'm "poor", because I really think my life is probably at least 80% as good as theirs is. I also hope for greater equality in the hope that it would further spur creation and make people feel more comfortable with risk taking and self-fulfillment or self-expression. But, thinking that millennials/post-millenials/future generations have been somehow "screwed over" or have been given a world on fire is an ungrateful and borderline laughable delusion.

The "previous generations failed us" mentality implies that we are somehow due all of the good things previous generations have given us (even though the only thing most of us have done to "deserve" them is exist) without having to deal with any of the bad. I think if some people had their way, we'd be shivering out in the cold and bartering mounds of dirt for big circular rocks because they'd have villified the people that first cut down a tree for shelter or crucified the people who thought that steam engines were an innovation.

What are you asking for? The world has changed drastically, culture and preferences have changed drastically, and new technological tools make the job and economic landscape entirely different than earlier. That's not Baby Boomers' fault. Are you really going to blame them for not predicting the future well enough? Baby boomers aren't forcing young folks to like living in cities more than suburbs. They're not maliciously causing robots and computers to be more reliable than humans at menial repetitive tasks. They're not forcing young folks to want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on mediocre private universities when reasonably priced state universities exist (and a world of knowledge for self-teaching is available through the internet). And even the global warming thing, our current prosperity--and don't kid yourself, America is pretty freaking prosperous--strongly depended on us exploiting cheap and reliable energy for decades. And it's that prosperity which gives us the bandwidth and resources to think "hey, let's do something about this, either find a way to avoid or prepare or cope".

Yes, it would have been nice if everyone in the previous generation had a crystal ball and selfless motives. But that is not something we are due as a right, nor is it something anyone should reasonably hold against them. They didn't blow up the world, and made it better in better in a bunch of ways, and maybe a bit worse in some ways. On net, that's still like a B+ or higher in my book.

I guess I'm considered a millennial, but messages like this sound like misconceived pandering. Firstly, I don't think any generation necessarily "owes" anything to future generations. But, even if we accept the premise, I am the beneficiary of absolutely mind-boggling amounts of technological advancement, culture, progress, infrastructure, science, and on and on and on even just over the course of my own lifetime (approaching 30 years). "Boo hoo, things aren't absolutely perfect in every way." That doesn't mean that any generation has "failed" another. Sure, there might be some setbacks and difficult problems to solve or adjust to in the future, but come on. As Steven Pinker has I think convincingly pointed out, things have been reliably getting better for a long time, and even when we think "the world is going to hell", it simply doesn't.

Not to mention, there is something extraordinarily presumptuous about the CEO of one tech company thinking he has the standing to either criticize or speak on behalf of literally billions of people.

> Also, I have my doubts about the importance of carrying it around with you. It's the knowledge and the access that counts (if you're into knowledge), not the "and I can do it while standing outside anywhere in the city".

I would have to disagree strongly with that. There's a fundamental difference between the knowledge being extraordinarily democratized vs. available only through gatekeepers. Imagine having to go to a library to get directions for a short daytrip or book an Uber a day in advance. The frustration that would cause and time it would waste is enormous.

And importantly, you can't separate the "productive" and "non productive" aspects. The fact that you can FaceTime your friends or waste time on the devices is what makes them universally available. How many people in a poor neighborhood would shell out for a knowledge-only device or spend hours after a hard day shlepping down to a library? The fact that you can do fun stuff and mindless stuff with a phone is why the phone is in your pocket when you suddenly want to learn to do something difficult or find out the solution to an obscure problem.