If you start with the proposition "Anyone should be able to post anything on Twitter"...
... and want to get to "Everyone enjoys reading Twitter," then there's a lot of black box space in the middle.
You can have the most vile things on your platform, but your userbase self-censors. E.g. crowdsourced shadow-banning / down-voting. Or reputation with verified identities underneath.
Or just... more transparency.
Empowering the public to data-mine Twitter opens some interesting windows to a platform that has terrible things, but empowers interested parties to fruitfully research who they're coming from.
Incidentally, in the US at least, the idea of “free speech” is now firmly associated with the far right conservatives.
The latest impression is driven by conservatives' messaging that "big tech" is censoring them, coupled with their belief that tech mores used to calibrate that censorship are coastal (and therefore more liberal).
Ergo, free speech is their right to say conservative things.
In the 60s and 80s and 00s, it was liberal. Give it another few years to swing back.
It's not a "messaging", it's an observable fact. Look at political leanings and donations for Twitter or Facebook workers. Over 80% goes to the left. And that's before we consider that the power is not distributed equally there and if you look at the people in power it's more like 100% to the left.
> Ergo, free speech is conservatives' right to say conservative things.
That's a completely wrong conclusion. Free speech is everybody's right to say their things, but conservative's rights are infringed much more frequently, so they complain more.
You have that backwards.
White supremacist rallies have labeled themselves as "free speech" rallies in an attempt to normalize their cause.
However, exercising one's free speech rights by rallying for a cause does not automatically make that cause synonymous with supporting "free speech".
Free speech as in the first amendment is pretty universal.
Free speech as in Twitter bans and complaining about cancel culture is largely the far right.
It’s hardly the far right. People from all 3 political groups are scared of cancel culture. Painting this as far right serves only to label anybody that cares about such things as far right. You’re attempting to shut the conversation down. This is part of the problem and is literally misinformation that could cause violence against those labeled “far right” in the future.
> could cause violence against those labeled “far right” in the future.
That’s quite the scaremongering there, hyperbole does not move the dialog forward.
Oh but it is, why else would you label people that care about such things as extremists?
> That’s quite the scaremongering there, hyperbole does not move the dialog forward.
No it serves to make you aware of the danger of your speech.
> Many in the 1930s-40s enjoyed the hateful caricatures of Jews that the Nazis produced in their propaganda, and hateful people also buy refrigerators and sneakers today.
I may be sidetracking the conversation here, but I must admit I find it fascinating how “hatefulness” online is almost always assumed to be right-wing extremism.
Have everyone forgotten the BLM and Antifa riots going on for months where innocent people had their property, livelihood and in some cases even their lives taken?
That was fully encouraged and endorsed by the left, en masse, and especially so on Twitter.
Was that not “hate”? If not, what is?
I realize it's not HN-appropriate, but once in a while I break down and make fun of those who see no difference between oppression and fighting against the oppression.
Ofcourse the people burning the city down and looting think they are doing the right thing, or at least doing it for the right reasons. Ofcourse the black people "taking the streets back" feel entitled to it, after whatever backstory there was.
But during the Antifa and BLM riots, actual businesses, owned by innocents bystanders got ruined. Innocent people got murdered. There were real tragedies to real people, mostly white.
When that gets cheered on at social media-sites like twitter (or live on CNN!), it's hard to frame it as anything except hate against white people.
Maybe they thought they were fighting oppression. But at the same time they were oppressing. They became what they claimed to fight.
Who are to say they are better than the people they claimed to be fighting, which didn't burn down cities, didn't kill innocent civilians?
The ends does not justify the means. Not in a lawful society at least. These were hateful acts. EOT.
George Floyd’s killer was found guilty and sentenced. Does that mean nothing?
Breonna Taylor was with someone that shot at police. It’s unfortunate what happened but perhaps one shouldn’t associate with people doing such things if they want to avoid these situations.
Sure, which cities did they burn down? The person I replied to made a specific claim I was asking about. You don't seem to be able to list them, either, despite them being all over the news.
>George Floyd’s killer was found guilty and sentenced... Breonna Taylor was with someone that shot at police.
And? The comment I was replying to said that the people BLM claimed to be fighting hadn't killed any innocent people. What was George Floyd's killer convicted for then? What did Breonna Taylor do that left her guilty?
I understand that situations are more complicated than what they end up reduced down to. But op made specific, false claims.
Is it conceivable that perhaps the statement employed hyperbole to make a point and was not literal?
Your hairsplitting between "burning cities down" and arson misses the point completely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_arson_damage_during_th...
https://www.yahoo.com/video/rioters-set-fire-federal-courtho...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_and_controversies_dur...
What I was originally responding to was the fear of twitter allowing hateful speech, which ofcourse had to be right-wing "hateful" speech.
My comment was more directed towards how I found that (default) assumption weird, since I see tons and tons of clearly hateful content and attitudes from all sides of the political spectrum online and in social media.
When I see people complaining about all that "hateful" speech online from one end of the political spectrum, I have a hard time seeing that as something else but denial about the hateful speech their side of the political spectrum themselves are promoting, or worse deliberately ignoring.
The fact that you find someone else's opinion disagreeable, distasteful or "hateful" is not a blanket-license for you yourself to act disagreeable, distasteful or "hateful" in response. It's a chance for you to be a better person.
If you want to fix our divided world, you need to show people there's a middle way, and you do that by calling out bullshit on both sides.
And they are upset that they are called uh, names.
I get what you're saying: name-calling is mean. It can deepen divides. I've been called names before. It felt bad.
Yes they’re names, does this mean the position of the left that speech can be hateful is invalid?
NO! This is extremely dangerous misinformation. Nobody on the right is trying to end democracy. This is a lie started by the left media in order to convince the left to get out and vote. If you keep spreading this misinformation, you will likely push people on the left to violence.
Maybe they thought they were fighting
oppression. But at the same time they
were oppressing. They became what they
claimed to fight.
Oppression involves systemic power. Control of the courts, the justice system, the police, the government, of business. Some or all of the above.
Some protestors acted badly! They were wrong! I agree with you! But that is not the same as oppression.
Why is what BLM and antifa always excused? Why can’t you condemn it so we can fix the country? Some of us are over the left v right politics and want the left to realize their problems so we can all move on.
So how come BLM and Antifas actions are not condemned by the left?
I actually completely agree with this.
> Why is it you’re acting like there’s only one “left voice”? There will always be communists and SJW’s free speech doesn’t work if you act like the extreme voices are the mainstream or only voices of value.
Because increasingly they look more and more aligned. And regardless if personal beliefs, the non-extremist still vote on the same lines as the extremists. That’s why we’re coming up on a recession now.
Why imagine? Twitter is full of malevolent, hateful, and violence-inducing speech on any day of the week. That has long been the case. True, some instances of such speech which went contrary to political ideology of Twitter employees and management was deleted, but other instances, that aligned with their ideology, were flourishing. And consumers of Twitter and advertisers don't seem to mind too much.
I think this is failing to imagine how bad things could get societally. Imagine if more consumers and advertisers start enjoying consuming and being associated with malevolent, hateful, and violence-inducing speech.
Many in the 1930s-40s enjoyed the hateful caricatures of Jews that the Nazis produced in their propaganda, and hateful people also buy refrigerators and sneakers today.
Yes, that would mean a majority of people would have to adopt those perspectives - to the detriment of society at large - but it's happened before in many parts of the world, and could happen again. That is a long-term goal of fascists anyways - to re-normalize that kind of thing, and to re-combine industry and media with a religious ethnostate.
At the very least, the previously quiet pre-existing enjoyment of malevolent speech has been exposed for all to see over the last several years. The question is whether it has a growing audience.
I'm not saying that's Elon's goal, but accelerationism seems to be something he is aligned with as long as it doesn't come at a cost to him.