News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:What went on inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid erupted by somenameforme on Monday June 12, 2023 @09:56AM (#36293489)
This is a weird topic to me, because I'm unsure if I live in a different bubble, or we're all just kind of playing the euphemism game (with a bit of self censorship on top) or what. Because what happened is hardly ambiguous. One thing, more than any, that the Twitter files provided evidence of was various governmental organizations, and individuals, pressuring at least one large tech company to censor for often arbitrary, and sometimes overtly fake, reasons. I think the chances of that behavior being limited to Twitter, or even tech companies in general, are zero.

The tech companies are obviously, at the minimum, complicit. Because "pressure" is just that - pressure. When the 'Russian trolls' narrative was being built up in Congress, Twitter knew it was entirely fabricated, and even referred to the requests as coming from "Congressional Trolls", and then they gave those said trolls nearly everything they wanted, and remained absolutely silent about what was happening. That strongly reflects upon the character, or lack thereof, of former Twitter leadership - but the source is the government.

The large scale centralization of speech has created an angle shoot of the 1st amendment. Pressure a handful of companies into censoring whatever you want censored and you likely achieve even more than a law would have, since you end up censoring it on a far larger scale than just domestically. Expecting politicians of a country to actually care about the intent of the constitution of that country is clearly no longer a reasonable expectation to have.

There are no comments on this comment yet.