I find it an equally problematic off-sourcing of state functions to corporations, to have as an excuse "but it's not state censorship".
-- and this is something that has been commented on, and spread increasingly more, for half a century...
"Trump conspiracy theories": Bad.
"WMDs, video with prostitutes in Russia, and the Steele Dossieur": Good.
(plus, we'll self-critique ourselves, several years down the line, when it doesn't matter anymore, e.g. after the war was declared, the elections over, etc., so that makes us legit).
Nobody was saying anything like that.
But go ahead. Have fun with your strawman arguments.
That people don't care about being lied to is their problem. Russia is a political adversary, but don't try to convince people you think critically. That would be absolutely ridiculous for anyone part of that discussion. If people dislike impolite statements more than war too, well, just don't argue about morality please or the same ridiculousness continues.
I don't think Trump is a good candidate to be president. But his opposition was a laughing stock.
Twitter decided they want to join the conspiracies about Russian interference. They are free to do that. But don't complain about other conspiracies either.
In times where there's more fear about dissidents, you get McCarthyism, blacklists, and people fired from their jobs, Hoover's FBI blackmailing politicians and journalists, and so on. And even in more benign times, from MLK to SDS members, and from human rights activists to Kent State students, had taps on them, police records in the tens of thousands of pages, intimidation, and attempts to frame them with drugs, snitches and other BS. Heck, even John Lennon, a harmless famous pop culture figure if I ever saw one, had FBI records the size of a small library.
And this goes all the way to modern OWS members, environmental and political activists, black rights activists, character-assasinated journalists (from Garry Webb to Greenwald), and so on.
And if we extend it to the "but they deserve it, no?", war on terror, I don't see much of a difference between a state with black sites, extra-judicial drone killings, and off-shore off-due-process camps, with people exposing state crimes like Manning in prison and Snowden in exile...
Western phones are no different, the only difference is in which government actually manages the data...
> Western phones are no different, the only difference is in which government actually manages the data...
In some ways first world oppression is comparable to third world oppression, but they are different in scale and magnitude.
I'd rather have the oppressive government, which ostensibly creates rules to benefit the country as a whole, than be ruled by the whims of a network of billionaires.
Oh, you sweet summer child.
One can hope. But counter-examples abound.
To note: I think this is abhorrent, and really my point is I wish Twitter didn't censor or editorialize either.
To make it easy. I believe you don't allow anyone to come into your home and give you lectures about politics, but you would be pretty outraged if your homebuilder would have placed a microphone camera into your home and if you say the wrong words, e.g. the toilet stops working.
No. Of course not.
How can you honestly believe, that a smartphone producer controlling what you can access _on the internet_, is the same thing, as an online platform having a say in what happens on _their_ platform?
That's completely absurd.
If you don't like it don't buy my phones. Again, I'm largely playing devil's advocate here. I'd much rather live in a world where we stop saying "but it's a private company" as a catch-all.
If you sell me a phone, and then deny me the right to use it as phone, then you are breaking the law. At least where I live. I would be able to demand a refund, and the Company could be penalized for lying about what they sell.
You are being absurd.
Also, private businesses should always be able to enforce their rules on their platform/property, as long as they don't discriminate against protected classes like ethnicities, genders, sexualities, etc.
Otherwise you could just shit on the floor of a restaurant, and they could do nothing about it.
Again, you are being absurd.
> Otherwise you could just shit on the floor of a restaurant, and they could do nothing about it.
While they both fall under the broad umbrella of 'ownership', I find it deeply misleading to equate Twitter, Inc.'s ownership of the URL twitter.com/XxxBloodNinjaXxx to your fellow citizen John Q. Smalltownrestauranteur's ownership of a floor that he personally cleans with a mop every evening.
They are two form of ownership that have very little in common, and naïvely treating the owners as if they were equals and had the same power leads to poor policy.
But the broad societal effect of companies censoring things is more or less the same whether they did that on their own or were instructed by the government. What prevents this a little right now is that we do not have a truly monopolistic landscape in that matter, at least when it comes to online services. You basically need facebook and google and twitter (and tiktok) to all decide on a certain topic to become non-grata to effectively censor a topic enough to vanish it from most public discussion (small services will populate only by people interested in the topic, but the way to "get the message out" will be gone). The governments are more effective by forcing all the big players into compliance. Regardless, the threat of big companies looks very real to me. and the trend goes to big companies consolidating their power more and more.
It's also good to remember there are companies more powerful than FAANG from the perspective of (specific groups of) regular citizens: banks, credit card companies, ISPs, utility companies, health insurers and other insurers, the company that sells you "copyrighted and patented" seed or DRM-enabled tractors, home owners associations, potentially your own employer, to name a few.
This whole discussion reminds me of the "our blessed homeland" cartoon: https://twitter.com/vrk100/status/1231211141218500608
FB/GOOG absolutely do. You may trust the USG or the companies it pressures into this domain of behavior more than the CCP/Xiaomi (or may not - it is not relevant to this point) but the comparison is there.
There's no day in the US where remembering a day equivalent to violently pancaking protestors beneath tank treads (take your pick of our atrocities) was censored everywhere as was the case recently on the day of the Tiananmen Square massacre in China.
The point shouldn't be "your bad behavior justifies my bad behavior", it should be this: folks in the valley ceded the moral high ground in the pursuit of short term political interests. There is a cost associated with that, which can be paid in many different ways. The right way would be acknowledging the mistake and a rededication to first principles... but obviously that isn't going to happen. Instead, hypocrites will be forced to perform mental gymnastics in order to preserve their working model of the world without admitting fault - it is exhausting, ineffective, and soul crushing... but they'll do it.
not sure if you're intentionally comparing things like child porn to democracy as equally deserving of censorship but that's how i read it.
Yeah, on US tech platforms you can promote Taiwan's independence and criticize China's national interests, I'll give you that!
It's like the old joke, where the American says that he's free-er as he can go to Times Square with a bullhorn megaphone and openly criticize the US Predident.
To which the USSR guy counters that he's equally free, as he is also perfectly allowed to go to the Red Square and openly criticize the US Predident.
>not sure if you're intentionally comparing things like child porn to democracy as equally deserving of censorship but that's how i read it.
I wrote censoring based on "national interests" (not to mention petty political partisan censorship), but you took it that I was complaining about them censoring "child pornography". "Think of the children", much?
I don't think that censoring people from Snowden and wiki-leaks (banned on several instances, which corporations even disabling their way to accept donations), to people writing on the wrong side of the political and being banned for "fake news" (while the "legit" sources touted BS like the Steele Dossier, that now, years after it doesn't matter anymore, do a 180-turn on), amounts to "child porn".
Like, out of the millions of things one could somewhat legitimately censor, it's always CP..
... In the old definition of "proves" as in "tests," because any process that greenlights CP is wanting. So it's the one you go to as a litmus test for whether or not the question of censorship vs. open speech on the table is worth spending energy discoursing on.
kind of hilarious given the present context that where I come from, CP means Communist Party
Facebook does not block anything like “Winnie the Pooh” and you don’t risk disappearing by posting on Facebook.
Could end badly for you.
"It's ok when we do it" - and when you point it out, ofcourse "that's whatabboutism" (plus, "our targets deserve it").