goblekitepe

Her tweets were taken out of context? No. She tried to justify her racism by saying white people had done mean things to her on the internet in the past. That's an incredibly broken mindset and accepting her attempted justification just perpetuates racism. But it's against white people so I guess that's not a big deal.

Also I said prominent, the conservatives I mentioned each had around 1 million followers. That Antifa student group, orders of magnitude less.

Find the video of Jones saying that. He doesn't say what the BBC claims he does; BBC doesn't include video of him saying those things because such a video doesn't exist.

It's not his fault the victims received death threats. He did not advocate for deranged people to send death threats.

Just off the top of my head, Peter Fonda: "We should rip Barron Trump from his mother's arms and put him in a cage with pedophiles..."

https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/20/politics/peter-fonda-baron-tr...

He wasn't banned.

Sarah Jeong, despicable racist now working at NYT: "oh man it's kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men".

http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2018/08/02/new-york-tim...

Also not banned.

Please find me one example of a prominent Twitter Leftist being banned for saying something "hateful", whatever that means.

Yes it has dominance of the market, whether it uses monopolistic practices is irrelevant.

No, television spreads the product of companies, not the thought of individuals.

Jones never even said that, that's the problem. The media created a false narrative and spread it. He specifically said that people who were interviewed after the shooting were crisis actors.

Who cares the specifics of what he said though? It's distasteful, but if distasteful speech is grounds to ban someone then most of Twitter should be banned.

And the evidence is that James Woods, Alex Jones and others have been banned because of political speech while similarly high profile Leftist commentators who post inflammatory things have not been banned.

The profound issue here is that Alex Jones' supposed rule violations are far more tame than many things that liberal leaning individuals have shared on Twitter against Trump, Republicans, etc.

There is not equal application of the rules, they are applied in a biased manner.

Newsprint, Radio and Television are completely different for two reasons. First, they never had the monopoly control over information that Google has.

But a more important distinction is this: Google has control over what content produced by individuals is seen by other individuals. Television, radio and newspapers are much more limited in scope, in that they are private groups which produce content that I consume. Google, Twitter and Facebook instead provide platforms for individuals to share their own content, which is what makes them part of the "public square", and which is why - combined with their monopoly control of the internet - their politically biased attempts at controlling what we see is censorship and cannot be tolerated.

Google, Facebook, Twitter etc are profoundly different from any information medium that has existed in the past. As such, we must define new ways of thinking about their behavior, of considering the legality of their censorship.

What's especially insidious about censorship online that forces us to think differently about it is that when users do a Google search, they generally don't expect political bias to influence search results. People are aware of the biases of different media outlets and can tailor their consumption of such media accordingly, but the black box of social media and internet search means the bias is invisible and we can't monitor it the way we can when we read the New York Times or watch Fox News.

Yes these are private companies, but they monopolize what has become the public square and we must not allow the public square to be arbitrarily controlled by private entities.

Politifact is left biased as well and goes out of its way to discredit right leaning organizations.

Try actually watching and reading them, they're not as "terrifying" as you've been trained to think.

CNN is exclusively supportive of the Leftist and Liberal agenda. They are absolutely a fair game comparison to Fox.

CNN has spent over a year covering the Russia investigation, breathlessly accepting any shred of hearsay that could possibly maybe implicate Trump in collusion, however it seems now that there has been no collusion whatsoever and the entire issue is fake. CNN has been pushing nonsense this entire time!

In fact I've watched both Fox and CNN my entire life and Fox seems to me much less biased than CNN as of late.

"Prejudice" and "Hate Speech" are necessarily subject to interpretation. Whoever gets to decide what is and isn't prejudice will necessarily inject their personal biases, political or otherwise, into the decision. Recognition of this during the Enlightenment fueled the political philosophy behind the First Amendment in the American Constitution.

It is a dangerous day when a monopolistic corporation like Google can casually insert their own biases into search results, because they feel they know best.

Is Google a private company, and do private companies have the freedom to do what they want? Generally yes, but in the case of companies like Google that act as the gatekeepers of information to billions of people, the values of free speech AND free thought must supercede the the freedom of private Enterprise.

It's not going to be the sort of thing we "grok", at least in the traditional sense. Human minds can fully understand relatively simple discrete logical steps in a system but massively parallel interactions like the genome are fundamentally beyond our ability to "grok".

In order to make sense of and manipulate things like genetics we will need to develop machines that can do those things for us. While that's unsatisfying because we generally like the feeling of fully understanding things, such machines will still yield progress and results, which is all we can really hope for here.

Censorship is no longer anathema to the values of Google and other tech companies, indeed neither to the values of the ideological Left in general.

The Communist Party sets its censorship standard at anything that would denigrate the Party. Google, Twitter, etc. and ideological sympathizers set their censorship standard at "Hate Speech", which is an impossible term to rigorously define leading to political judgements in enforcement by necessity.

The modern political and ideological Left have far more in common with the Chinese Communist Party than I think even they themselves realize.

The arbitrary whims of the powerful can never define what political thought can and cannot be said in the public square if we wish to preserve freedom and justice.

The process of English becoming the global language has taken over 150 years. Massive cultural and economic forces have been at play to make English global.

It's not a simple thing, and what will likely happen is language balkanization for a significant period of time before any seismic shift from English to Chinese which is unlikely to happen for a number of reasons regardless.

Exactly. Unfortunately many fail at step 1.

Because the American philosophy is that people who make good decisions should not have to subsidize the poor decision making of others.

America has a significant social safety net, but should responsible citizens pay for the upkeep of someone who has multiple children out of wedlock before the age of 20 without any means to support those children? Absolutely not.

People must take responsibility for their own actions.

What's tragic is that millions of poor children are being raised in households considered poor because there is only a single earner. We have to address the cultural issues leading to the epidemic of single parent households.

That will do far more for the children of the future than anything else.

Well jobs absolutely are the solution for the 85% of Americans living above the poverty line. That said...

The article completely ignores the major cause of Vanessa's struggles: she is a single parent trying to raise three children. Where is the father of her children?

If you are not married, do not have children. Just going by the statistics, I suspect Vanessa's children were born out of wedlock.

Also, if you are very young (still in high school) and not on financially sound footing yet, do not have children.

Remedying these problems alone would massively reduce poverty.

Children are a massive financial and time sink, yet according to the Brookings Institute [1]:

"...more than 40 percent of American children, including more than 70 percent of black children and 50 percent of Hispanic children, are born outside marriage."

Many of these children are raised by single mothers and fathers. Sure, married people get divorced, but the number of children raised in single parent households is far less among those born to married adults than those who are not.

It's been clearly shown that the average child raised in a single parent household has worse outcomes than the average child raised in a two parent household.

Cultural issues must be addressed in this country, but everyone seems unwilling to do so because they worry about "blaming the victims".

Well in this case, poverty is clearly being perpetuated by poor decision making on the part of individuals and cultures which perpetuate this poor decision making. The "victims" are at fault.

Culture can be changed, but we must identify and talk about the problems before that change can occur.

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/three-simple-rules-poor-t...

I've recently been thinking of the internet in a way similar to the author...

In the past, what was most visible were a society's actions. The visibility of the thought that informed those actions was either ibscured or available to us only in very limited scope (newspapers, conversations with friends, etc).

Now, the internet makes it so that society's collective thought is more visible than anything else. Speech and conversation is what makes the internet go, but talk is cheap; when people talk on the internet they often let loose streams of consciousness fueled by idealism. Action is necessarily more sober.

Think of all the thoughts that shoot through your mind every single day. The fears, hopes, elations, frustrations... Imagine if everyone you knew had access to all of your thoughts, like when you imagine ramming your car into the asshole who just cut you off on the highway (knowing full well you would never do it), or when someone you're attracted to passes by and your mind wanders off...

This is the internet. It allows us to peer into the dark recesses of society's mind. Of course it seems unhinged. We would all seem a bit unhinged if our innermost thoughts were laid bare for all the world to see.