Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Twitter has launched a new way to punish users for bad behavior, temporarily "limiting" their account.
Some users are receiving notices their accounts are limited for 12 hours, meaning only people who follow them can see their tweets or receive notifications. When they are retweeted, people outside their network can't see those retweets.
Some speculate these limitations are automatic based on keywords, but there is no hard evidence.
This would be fine if this was used uniformly to clamp down on harassment, but it appears to be used on people, simply for using politically incorrect language.
Source: http://heatst.com/tech/twitters-new-tool-to-crack-down-on-politically-incorrect-language/
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Wednesday February 22 2017, @07:58AM
Seems Americans forget their history or, more likely, have so much propaganda shoved down their throats from birth that even a decent person such as Louis Brandeis makes fundamental mistakes.
The American Revolution depended heavily on silencing opposition. Popular means of silencing included tar and feathering, something likely to kill, letters of attainment from various colonial/State governments targeting those whose viewpoints were unpopular due to being anti-revolution to the extreme of some guy named Lynch hanging those that voiced opposition.
Once opposition has been silenced, it is easy to push free speech though in truth, all the Founding Fathers did was ban the Federal Legislature from banning speech. States were allowed. The Judiciary, in a time when the common law was much more important, were, and as Lincoln showed, the President wasn't denied the freedom to silence people, especially during insurrections such as the American revolution.
There has always been common law restrictions on the common law freedom of speech. Slander, libel, incitement are the obvious examples.
Your thought process seems rather mangled, so I'll try to make some sense of it. The discussion at hand is about a *private* entity limiting speech. This is neither illegal nor uncommon in the United States. I used the Brandeis quote, as it makes clear why censorship is bad, and discussed how we might appropriately address speech that is hateful or nasty.
You're correct to say that the First Amendment restricts the Federal Government from restricting free expression. Making that work has been a centuries long odyssey, and we're still working on it. What's more, the Fourteenth Amendment [wikipedia.org] and the Incorporation Doctrine [wikipedia.org] ensure that it does, in fact, apply to the several states.
While there are slander, libel and incitement laws in the US, proving such claims is quite difficult here. As I mentioned, wartime restrictions on civil liberties have been common everywhere, throughout history, and the US (to our shame) is no exception.
Throughout history (both in the United States and pretty much everywhere else) a variety of civil liberties have been curtailed, often quite significantly, usually with violence and often deadly force.
We do remember the vitriol, anger and violence against loyalists during and after the Revolutionary War. In British occupied areas, there were similar occurrences. What's more, the war broke families and turned father against son and brother against brother. Even after the war, those that were on the side of revolution were at each other's throats even before the war ended.
I'm not sure where you come from, but some of us do know our history. And it's filled with genocide (how many native americans are left?), mass enslavement and other atrocities. Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus [wikipedia.org] during the Civil War. The Espionage Act of 1917 is still on the books.
It didn't stop there either, but you get the idea. As time has gone by, we strengthened civil liberties for everyone, although there have been disturbing signs of backsliding of late.
Brandeis was quite clear in his reasoning (and in my view, quite wrong) when it came to wartime censorship (cf.
Schenck v. United States [wikipedia.org]).
Brandeis' thinking matured as he did and famously expressed that in Whitney v. California [wikipedia.org] (where the quote in my initial post came from. Here's more, putting it in context):
Later courts have further strengthened the right to free expression.
All that said, the US Constitution does not apply to private entities. However, the ideals (however poorly implemented historically) ensconced in that document have created a tradton of free expression that's one of the nice things about this country. Don't like it? Just get 2/3 of congress and 3/4 of states to modify the constitution to be more to your liking.
As for your claim that Americans don't know their history, you're talking out of your ass and it smells that way too. I'm sure there are many (if not most) in whatever shithole^W country you hail from that are staggeringly ignorant of *your* history. Oh, and fuck you!
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr