With email, if you don't want to receive someone's emails anymore, you unsubscribe. Or put it in spam (equivalent to social media block) and you won't see those emails anymore.
"Platforms" claim that because they're platforms, they have a duty to "remove toxic elements from the platform". That doesn't work when they're practically monopolies for online speech, i.e. when if you get banned by one and you're famous enough, you get banned by all of them.
Gmail regularly does both of these things to me despite explicit filter rules to the contrary.
If you are a US citizen, even if you’ve never lived in the US (born to a US citizen parent), get on over to https://fvap.gov to get yourself registered and request your absentee ballot. Hurry up, because the deadline for most states is rather soon, and a lot of them still require the registration to happen via paper mail - plus, you need time for the ballot to get to you and for you to mail it back.
As long as the US is going to insist I report all my German income and accounts that I’ve already paid Germany’s well-collected taxes on, you’re darn right I should have the right to vote!
Just don’t have one centralised overlord.
How is this different from the current internet?
> Tying (informally, product tying) is the practice of selling one product or service as a mandatory addition to the purchase of a different product or service. In legal terms, a tying sale makes the sale of one good (the tying good) to the de facto customer (or de jure customer) conditional on the purchase of a second distinctive good (the tied good). Tying is often illegal when the products are not naturally related.
I'm not interested in hashing out a complete argument and coming to a vacuous conclusion with some other random on an internet forum, I'm just saying that there seems to be a reasonable argument to be had in this direction.
It could be effectively a crowdsource / peer recommended model where you opt in to aspects of the bubbles. So my elderly parents could get some of the safety guidance mirroring mine (eg weeding out conspiracy thought or spam) but then also picking up aspects that mirror older peers (eg reflecting their more traditional tastes)
Right now there's a remarkable amount of undesirable content that gets through that ought to be easy to filter. On Twitter you see it a load with searches for regular terms that show up inappropriate content for the term, yet you don't want to set content filtering or it cuts things that are genuinely interesting but edgy!
- Google (including GMail)
- Meta (Facebook, Instagram)
If someone thinks far right content is reasonable and good it would be refreshing to hear that take.
Instead people bend themselves into logical pretzels to oppose the idea of moderation for supposedly “content neutral” reasons. It’s tiresome.
That straw man incinerated and replaced with "mainstream conservative content", you still are not going to get any examples because the one providing that will be voted/flagged into invisibility, or if not that, the resulting discussion will be derailed into quibbling about the specific example rather than the much more important general principle.
It would be not at all honest to imply that this forum is anything but generally hostile to the American right, regardless of how extreme or not the take is. With that in mind, it is no surprise that specific positions are only ever mentioned indirectly, or negatively.
[1]: https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/Details.aspx?id=8759
Should a million or two people be allowed to enter the country with no rules or oversight. Again, far right.
Should parents have a say in child’s education. Far right question.
Those three actual opinions are completely uncontroversial. But people pretend other issues are those issues so they can be the common-sense instant victor.
What mostly gets banned at big social media sites is spam and bots. The political speech that does get banned is overwhelmingly violent.
The right gets banned more because there is no liberal equivalent of the Christchurch shooter, the Buffalo shooter, the El Paso shooter, the Charleston shooter, the Tree of Life shooter.
The last president got kicked from Twitter because he tried to violently overthrow our government.
Kiwifarms was finally taken down by cloudflare only because of immediate threats of violence.
The right wing in the US has a violence problem. Culture war junk and social media moderation policies pale in comparison to this problem.
>Kiwifarms was finally taken down by cloudflare only because of immediate threats of violence.
A single threat of violence originating from a long dormant account which had posted once, in 2018. It was reported multiple times and removed by Kiwi Farms moderators within 30 minutes. It wouldn't be unreasonable to conclude that there might've been shenanigans at play. Possibly by the same actors behind the DDoS campaign.
Imagine if Bell was touchy about letting "undesirables" use their service.
It’s not. It’s about individual private publishers, of which there are potentially infinite. That is the beauty of the internet.
EMail is one such example: there is no meaningful way to filter spam, so the peering relationships between mail providers break down unless they each implement some sybil-proofing on their own side. The end product is that everyone is forced to use a provider like Google, and play a corporate-political game to stay in good favor with their peers. This is because there is no spam-resistance on Email application level
We've seen a similar situation this week with a controversial forum called KiwiFarm taken down by DDoS. They need to maintain a political relationship with their DDoS-protection provider, CloudFlare, who also controls a massive chunk of the internet infrastructure. This is all so that there can be a central entity that discriminates on the traffic, as there's no spam resistance features on IP level.
uBlock Filters, but for Twitter.
uBlock Filters, but for ...
Just let us choose which ones we can activate, and if we want to see the unfiltered list we'll turn it off and refresh.
Sign up for Twitter. Immediately you're greeted with a list of "suggested filters" that will pop up again and again, using dark patterns eventually, until you either give in or are tricked into adding Twitter's highly recommended "safe filter plus package" that uses the exact same shadow bans and biased algorithms used by default today.
Actually, I suspect that such a law would be on even shakier First Amendment grounds, but here's a test that might bring this regulation into the realms of competition law rather than regulating speech:
Whenever a (sufficiently large) platform makes a UI change about which the FTC receive multiple negative comments, that platform is required to run a poll of (some random subset of) its users, with a wording specified by the FTC, asking the users if they like the change or they find it manipulative.
If most users think that the change is negative, then that's a de facto / prima facie case of the platform abusing its monopoly power to the detriment of its users, since if there were a free market then those users would simply move to a competing platform.
You don't receive the OP's messages unless you are friends him them, or change your default settings to allow strangers to message you.
As for phishing attacks: Education is helpful. It would help if organizations with legitimate flows that are indistinguishable from phishing attacks were made liable. (Mortgage industry: I'm looking at you.)
Blocking unpopular content doesn't become a political act just because one side produces more of it than the other.
No, it's users trying to censor what they don't want other people to be permitted to say or see.
Twitter users have a "block" button; they're free to use it, and thus limit what they themselves will see.
>Perdí varias cosas en Buenos Aires... No me quejo. Con tantas personas perdidas, llorar por las cosas sería como faltarle el respeto al dolor.
Translates roughly as:
>I lost various things in Buenos Aires... I don't complain. With so many people lost, to cry over things seemed to lack respect for suffering.
In a kind of similar vein, you're complaint about Twitter users being silenced lacks some respect for people who are actually being silenced. Although I agree with your underlying sentiment.
The original statement I replied to — which was also the first time "silenced" was used in this thread — was:
> Being kicked off Twitter isn't the same as being silenced.
In reply, I asked "What would you call it?".
In any case, do we really want the government to start dictating to private sector publishing companies what content they must publish?
Yes, I think we do, if it’s in exchange for their currently privileged position.
Currently, they operate with the privileges of a common carrier, and none of the responsibilities.
They shouldn’t have the privilege of being shielded from responsibility for what they publish on behalf of others, while also claiming that doing so represents their own protected speech.
If they want to editorialize, they can be treated like any other publisher, and be held responsible for what they publish — including disinformation, libel, harassment, et al.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier
> A common carrier in common law countries (corresponding to a public carrier in some civil law systems,[1] usually called simply a carrier)[2] is a person or company that transports goods or people for any person or company and is responsible for any possible loss of the goods during transport.[3] A common carrier offers its services to the general public under license or authority provided by a regulatory body, which has usually been granted "ministerial authority" by the legislation that created it.
They were granted the traditional privileges of common carrier status under section 230 of the CDA, but none of the responsibilities.
Refer to the “telecommunications” section of the Wikipedia page you’ve cited, where this specific topic is covered, along with additional references for further details.
Being a "Interactive computer service" != being a "common carrier". Pointing to Section 230 as an example of "common carrier" statues is massively misunderstanding the "ISPs as common carriers" debate.
Social media can definitely be used to silence people, but I don't think that's mostly what's happening (for the most part) wrt big tech banning certain controversial content on their platforms.
Why is a “social media” company headed by the most popular “conservative” in America failing?
Why can’t FoxNews create its own social media company?
"If they don't like it, why can't they just create their own internet that we will not be able to access?"
https://time.com/6209392/truth-social-financial-problems-tru...
Trump is supposedly a billionaire. He couldn’t fund the equivalent of Cloudflare if he desires? He couldn’t find enough like minded investors?
In any case they are simply mastodon forks, are they not? I can't see why it would require massive funding. I don't think the failure of truth social speaks to the failure of "splinter" forums at large.
What word should we use to describe the viewpoint-based prohibition of someone’s speech?
Alternatively, conservatives are all about the free market. Let them create a platform where their views can be heard.
Common carriers are private companies required to guarantee non-discriminatory access to the public.
They do this in exchange for a shield from liability for what the public says/does/transfers via their service.
The legal framework for this dates back to English common law, and applies to telephone companies, airlines, freight carriers, taxi companies, and just about any other company that provides public services under the privilege of a government-granted shield from liability.
The only companies of this type that this doesn’t apply to are ”interactive computer service” providers, because they were granted a special privilege cut out in the Communication Decency Act of 1996, while we asked for nothing in return [1].
That’s the issue, here.
If the NRA wants to launch an “interactive computer service” that publishes user content, then yes, I think they should be forced to either accept liability for what they publish, or accept they they must serve the public without viewpoint discrimination.
If RedState wants to host a comment section, then I think the same rule should apply to them, too.
ISPs, too. This is the fundamental concept on which all arguments for net neutrality rest.
[1] Not entirely true; the liability shield of the Communications Decency Act was intended to counterbalance the criminalization of user transmission of “obscene or indecent” material on the internet.
The indecency clauses were struck down by the courts, leaving the privileges and none of the responsibilities.
The whole law was a broken, idiotic idea and should have been scrapped entirely.
(1) That the invented classification was a mistake, and should be rectified, and
(2) How that invented classification — and the privileges it granted — was made in trade for something we never received (and never should have asked for): criminalization of “obscene or indecent” material on the internet.
I'm not sure whose arguments you believe you're rebutting, but they're not mine.
Giving people option to filter out what they don't want to see is fine; but the moment when (aside from reporting illegal stuff) you block content for user B because user A asked, it quickly becomes picking a side and censoring the other side.
Instead, let people pick their moderators / editorialization.
The are de facto acting as publishers because of that.
Go make a service. Like a photo-sharing service. A service like that should obviously feature user comments, right?
And, then users start posting millions of blatant racist, misogynistic, pedophilic and false shock propaganda comments. But, if you decide you don’t want to personally spend your own money propagating this repulsive material using your own servers, large men with guns and dogs will drag you into a cage.
That’s what these laws mean. Don’t sugar-coat them.