> What liability implications are there

EU [0], not US. There's a reason JD Vance was harping about "free speech" and "personal freedom" during MSC.

Hot take, but if we as Ds sacrifice Bruxelles to bring back Obama era tech donors who are overly impacted by the Digital Services Act, I'm fine with it.

[0] - https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...

Hot for HN maybe but not that hot in general. But we all know Dems have a lot of voters who demand ideological purity who will make a huge show of anger if they do something like this. The Dems have a cranky, fractious base and this contributed to their loss IMO.

Your party can't handle no dissent. Not internally and really go to emotional temperature tamptrum if the see outsiders.

We've forgotten what politics is. We think it's just about being right and having our rightness rewarded and memorialized by history.

Less than 40% of the adult population has a college degree. Less than 45% of voters have college degrees. Yet we took for granted the ascendence of ideas that few non-college-educated voters have been able to digest and see the evidence for. That it happened at all is pretty amazing, yet our only response has been to whine and moan that it hasn't happened faster or more completely. We could see that a lot of people weren't really getting it, and as long as we thought they were a minority, our response was who cares, they're losing. If they aren't educating themselves and keeping up to date, they're simply bad people and if they're confused and angry, fuck 'em, they deserve it.

It is not necessarily wrong as a moral stance, but it's not a strategy for succeeding in a democracy where those people can tip the balance of an election. As we felt more and more entitled to our triumph and got more and more angry and whiny about the bad people holding us back, surprise surprise, those people decided we weren't the best party to represent them anymore.

If there's any lesson we should take from this, it's that if we hold people in contempt, we can't count on their votes.

There's nothing coherent behind the shift to Trump except mutual contempt. I hope we are getting to a point where we can talk about our own political failings without reflexively changing the subject to the voters' moral failings.

Also, we should consider that when our definition of a good person includes the rapid assimilation of new information and ideas, the ability to be a good person is not evenly distributed. We're only a tiny way towards building a world where that ideal isn't elitist and exclusionary. A lot of people were not raised with that definition of moral goodness. Acting in good faith, they did not equip themselves with the necessary skills, because they thought they could be good people without them. What we're demanding from them now is that they either exercise intellectual skills and habits they don't have, or they speak and believe in obedience to those of us who have them. I don't see a good way around it, but we shouldn't be surprised if they're unhappy about it.

Yes I agree 100%. The Dem base has forgotten what democratic politics is. It's not the manifest destiny of moral progress into history. It's building coalitions. It's compromising with people who you deeply, fundamentally disagree with about some things but are willing to support you in others. It's about trying to get a large bloc of people to support something.

Seriously ???? Did you buy JD Vance on "free speech" in EU ? Actually, you should get better information (and a link to the EU Commission website is nothing if you dont read or understand it... it's only the old FUD)

Right now, the POTUS is so much reducing freedom in US that it's enough for him to say that it doesn't like something (like DEI) for a lot of companies to trash DEI in the hope to please him. And it's enough for the WaPo to change what will be the content of its "opinion" pages...

And EU is the one reducing freedom ?????? You should really wake up guys

One example is Germany will now arrest you for insulting someone in public or online, including insulting politicians. The UK has had some questionable laws passed as well. Pockets of Europe has much weaker free speech protections than the US does, that much is for certain.

60 Minutes did a recent segment on German speech laws.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bMzFDpfDwc

> Did you buy JD Vance on "free speech" in EU

I don't buy JD Vance's argument, but I am fine sacrificing the EU if it means Dem-turned-GOP donors (especially on the Tech side) return to our party.

Germany sent a woman to prison for calling her rapist a pig, for a longer sentence than the rapist received.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/german-woman-given-harsher-senten...

From the article you posted:

> Maja R was sentenced to a weekend in jail after her comments because she had a previous conviction for theft and had not attending the court hearing for the case.

I'm not supportive of defamation laws but clearly you (and this journalist) are sensationalizing what happened.

If this happened in America I don't think it would be an issue if a mob killed the judge and jury. Minimizing and justifying this at all should be a permanently disqualifying act. If you think that it's ok at any level, I don't want to share a country with you.

That comment could have been simply "Looks like I was misinformed. Thank you for the correction"

Everything I said was 100% correct, you (and gp) are trying to downplay Germany imprisoning a woman for speaking ill of a gang rapist who was given no jail time.

After reading a closer source (machine-translated), I apologize, especially since the issue is media literacy.

Your comment was near enough to the facts that I was wrong to be a scold.

* https://archive.ph/vml0k German newspaper

* https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/57108 random English discussion of source

Thanks for backing this up with more evidence. It's a graceful move to acknowledge a mistake.

I also thought the GP was just throwing fire. But after reading more into the matter, I'm a little too disgusted to dig anymore.

This did happen, in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana when someone badmouthed the sheriff. No one killed anyone though.

> Did you buy JD Vance on "free speech" in EU ?

You can find TONS of examples of people in Europe being jailed or having cops come to their house for something they said on social media. In some cases for things as simple as criticizing a politician.

Here’s a high profile one, but I can find you plenty more examples.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Robinson

>On 25 May 2018, Robinson was arrested for a breach of the peace while live streaming outside Leeds Crown Court[170][174]

“Breach of peace” means he was saying something that they didn’t want him to say. This is a real curtailing of free speech.

>companies to trash DEI

DEI is often racist and many of its implementations in modern companies violate the civil rights act. Companies are correct to be ditching it because it poses a big risk for discrimination lawsuits.

I actually spoke with lawyers about this very recently and reverse discrimination lawsuits are a booming business right now because there are so many clear cut examples of violations of the civil rights act.

JD Vance harps about that to make it harder to see what he really is - fascist in the process of remove the freedom.

How does this contribute to the conversation any more than accusing him of having eyes for the furniture?

The initial claim was: "There's a reason JD Vance was harping about "free speech" and "personal freedom" during MSC."

And that reason has nothing to do with J.D.Vance having any concern at all about free speech and personal freedom. Not just zero of it, his goal is to remove both. He would love Europe to become fascist which is incompatible with both.

What does not contribute to the conversation is to pretend otherwise. To pretend that he has a point or any other meaning then to grab power and punish dissent.

> if we as Ds sacrifice Bruxelles

What does this mean? What does the US VP have to do with EU law?

A major reason why American social media companies flipped support from the Dems to GOP this cycle was because the EU is rolling out the DSA, and felt the Biden admin didn't do enough to push back on this.

Social Media organizations like FB/Meta and Google have historically been some of the largest donors to the Dems, and their flip was a massive reason why 2024 went the way it did.

Vance has been consistently lobbying against the DSA over the past few weeks, and that's where his "free speech" argument is coming from.

I don't really care one way or the other, but I care about ensuring that large donors who flipped from D to R return to the D fold.

I'm far from able to understand american politics but didn't Dems get far more money in the last election than Republicans? I've read about twice as much? What would big (social media oligarchs/moguls ?) donors flipping back bring about?

That was mostly because ActBlue (the DNC's fundraising platform) is well built while GOP's WinRed is a hot piece of garbage, and donors now sidestep the GOP to create SuperPACs for Trump and Trump-affiliates directly.

What you end up seeing is the GOP raises nearly as competitive as the DNC when you add Trump PACs plus WinRed.

And do what exactly? Sanctions against the EU for not allowing social media poison while at the same time banning Chinese social media?

Diplomatic pressure from the US against passing the DSA. Or, if it really comes down to it, offers of local amnesty for companies that violate the DSA in the EU. There's a lot to do. The US spends a lot of money on NATO and its influence in the region is a huge lever to do a lot with.

> spends a lot of money on NATO and its influence in the region is a huge lever to do a lot

Not any more, it's been made quite clear that's over and is now an extortion racket against Ukraine. Long term consequences of this are unclear.

Again: what's the argument for trying to ram US social media right wing propaganda into an unwilling Europe, while banning tiktok?

> what's the argument for trying to ram US social media right wing propaganda into an unwilling Europe, while banning tiktok?

To get the tech oligarchs back on the Dems side of course, just like alephnerd said above.

> while banning tiktok?

Is this ideological contradiction bothering you? Well, unfortunately the world is full of these. Norway is a huge oil and gas exporter and yet maintains very stringent standards on its domestic usage. Why do they profit off exporting O&G to countries with less state capacity to manage the externalities of O&G? Well them's the shakes. Pick your priorities. For me, I'm fine if tech companies stay unregulated if I don't get 4 more years of MAGA politics. I'd prefer neither 4 more years of MAGA politics nor unregulated tech companies but I also want to build affordable condos in Beverly Hills so ;)

The tech companies (mostly Facebook) are responsible for MAGA both times, but there's no amount of ass kissing that would have got them to do the necessary level of pro Dem moderation.

As an aside alephnerd, I really enjoy your comments because you actually think about politics as a game with objectives, strategies, and tactics. The way the game is actually played, not the way the kid who took the Political Compass Online Test and played Civ thinks politics should be. Not some sort of moral ideological sounding board. HN and a lot of online fora these days are filled with moralistic shouting and arguments.