Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Thursday January 25 2018, @07:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the dangerous-precedent dept.

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

The social media giant may be guilty of violating of California law regarding discriminating against a political class, and being deceptive to their customer base. Twitter, by discriminating against people on the right, has exposed itself to a potential cascade of legal liability—including a potential class action suit.

Despite being from dangerous.com, this is not an attempted troll. The author gives a quite interesting analysis of Twitter's potential legal issues in censoring political speech in California.

Source: https://www.dangerous.com/40574/arroz-strong-case-twitter-censorship-violates-californias-civil-rights-laws/


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @08:31PM (25 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @08:31PM (#627840)

    Sounds like someone hasn't been paying ANY attention, instead blindly applying your own worldview on to the entire country. I wouldn't say there has been a rise in white supremacy, although that may indeed be the case, but I would say that those types certainly have felt more comfortable showing their true selves to the world. Trump's obvious racism has baited them out into the open. If you deny this very obvious fact then you need to seek professional help.

    Have you ever said "I'm not racist but..."? Do you tell racist jokes? Do you think people are too sensitive cause "it's just a joke bro calm down"?

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   +2  
       Troll=1, Insightful=3, Informative=1, Overrated=1, Disagree=2, Total=8
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 3, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @09:38PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @09:38PM (#627876)

    I'm not seeing "Trump's obvious racism" at all.

    "Muslim" is not a race. "Illegal alien" is not a race. Not even "Mexican" is a race, but Mexico has a racist constitution!

    Trump had a black girlfriend. I guess... he was racist for trying it? He should have ignored her due to her blackness?

    Picture of them together in the late 1990s:
    https://twitter.com/nytpolitics/status/898270757012160512/photo/1 [twitter.com]

    • (Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @11:00PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @11:00PM (#627920)

      I'm not seeing "Trump's obvious racism" at all.

      Found the racist!

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @12:06AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @12:06AM (#627980)

        Trump is racist for blocking illegal immigrants! Mexico apparently isn't though, they get to actually enforce their own immigration laws.

  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @10:25PM (17 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @10:25PM (#627905)

    Do you think people are too sensitive cause "it's just a joke bro calm down"?

    Absolutely! Taking offense at the smallest fart is becoming more popular than World Cup Soccer! Those people are very much responsible for the discrediting of the legitimate civil rights movement.

    You people need to understand that the right to verbally offend is absolutely sacrosanct. And any attempt at all to suppress it should be met with the most extreme violence possible to send an unmistakable message to the rest that their bullshit will not be tolerated. In other words, all censors shall Fuck Off And Die a most horrible death. It is essential that we fight back and hit hard. Our submissiveness only makes things worse.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by insanumingenium on Thursday January 25 2018, @10:46PM (16 children)

      by insanumingenium (4824) on Thursday January 25 2018, @10:46PM (#627911) Journal

      At the risk of feeding trolls, you had me until you mentioned violence. You don't fight censorship with violence, certainly not while there are other options like disobedience, and my all time favorite mockery. Trying to stop censorship with violence is like fucking for virginity, it doesn't work, and it makes you appear at best a foolish hypocrite.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @11:04PM (14 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @11:04PM (#627925)
        • If a "private" (non-governmental) institution such as Twitter refuses to publish your statements, then such censorship is not violence; it's just non-association.

        • If a "public" (governmental) institution refuses to publish your statements, then it's veering towards violence: by virtue of being "public", it is forcing you to pay for its activities, so it's ultimately an act of violence to force someone to pay for the publication of statements with which he disagrees (especially if there is no way to counter those disagreeable statements, due to censorship).

        • If any institution uses violence to censor someone (e.g., by throwing that person into a cage), then obviously such censorship is violence, and could justifiably be met with retaliatory violence.

          For instance, in Germany, they'll ultimately put you in a cage (or worse, depending on how much you try to defend yourself) for saying that the Holocaust didn't happen.

        • (Score: 5, Insightful) by frojack on Thursday January 25 2018, @11:25PM (2 children)

          by frojack (1554) on Thursday January 25 2018, @11:25PM (#627952) Journal

          Wait,
          Where did the government become responsible for publishing anyone's statements other than in a court transcript?

          --
          No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
          • (Score: 2) by insanumingenium on Thursday January 25 2018, @11:41PM

            by insanumingenium (4824) on Thursday January 25 2018, @11:41PM (#627967) Journal

            Beat me to it!

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @09:08AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @09:08AM (#628154)

            Congressional Records? (Thank you, again, Senator Gravel!). And Newspapers of Record? Official notices, stuff like that.

        • (Score: 2) by insanumingenium on Friday January 26 2018, @12:25AM (4 children)

          by insanumingenium (4824) on Friday January 26 2018, @12:25AM (#627991) Journal
          The clear context in this case was private institutions.

          That said my response applies even against violence, disobedience and outright mockery beats the snot our of violence whenever possible. MLK was successful in a way the black panthers never were.
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @02:31AM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @02:31AM (#628040)

            I'm not sure what MLK did, other than provide a sound bite to play to schoolchildren annually.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @09:15AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @09:15AM (#628156)

              Sheeet! We done found us another racist! Hot dog! How many does that make for this thread? Member this spot, it's dadgum good for racist fishing!

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @04:53AM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @04:53AM (#628101)

            There is a pretty good argument that MLK was successful at least in part because of the black panthers. They moved the overton window far enough for MLK to seem honest and reasonable.

        • (Score: 2) by Spamalope on Friday January 26 2018, @01:08AM (4 children)

          by Spamalope (5233) on Friday January 26 2018, @01:08AM (#628011) Homepage

          The ideals the censorship and press freedom rules are intended to protect are important. Free public discourse in general, and specifically political and religious speech are to be protected as they're crucial to keeping a free society healthy.
          The international media platforms are the modern hybrid between the public commons and the printing press.
          They've played games to make the political opinions of your fellow citizens appear different than they are to exploit group preference propaganda effects.
          They've represented themselves as politically neutral while behaving as partisans.
          They've engaged in censorship (both people and messages), sometimes in an insidious dishonest fashion. (shadow banning for example)

          As a society we need to hash out how we're going to handle this, as what's going on is substantially weakening one of the protection/counter balances in a free society.

          • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @01:55AM (3 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @01:55AM (#628029)

            "Put up or shut up". The only problem here is that there is this one particular organization in society (the one that calls itself "government") which decides what to do with society's resources through "do-as-I-say" coercion rather than "do-as-we-previously-agreed" cooperation; democracy is the problem—censorship matters so much, because people vote, and those votes are used to instruct the men-with-guns to fuck someone over.

            The solution is capitalism: Your "vote" (e.g., your ability to decide what to do with society's resources) is tightly coupled to how productive you are for society, and interaction must occur according to explicit rules (e.g., contracts) to which each party agrees in advance of interaction.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @05:08AM (1 child)

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @05:08AM (#628108)

              "...how productive you are for society..."
              You mean "how productive your are for your wealthy capitalist overlords".
              TFTFY

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @07:42AM

                by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @07:42AM (#628142)

                Maybe a capitalist overlord is better than a non-capitalist overlord.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @09:49AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @09:49AM (#628173)

              That is some serious delusion you've got going on there. Just remember, while in the depths of your cult bake sale, eugenics is bad!

        • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday January 26 2018, @03:56AM

          by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 26 2018, @03:56AM (#628077) Journal

          Several problems with your post, but the one that caught my eye is disregarding network effects. Subsidized by the government.

          I don't have a good answer, but saying "Twitter is a private company, so they can do what they want" while ignoring federal subsidies to their means of communicating, is, at the most charitable, foolish. Also they are clearly engaged in interstate commerce. And even economic relations with foreign powers. So there are lots of arguments for regulating them, and a lot of arguments against doing so. Every simple answer I've looked at is clearly wrong, and most complex arguments seem at best dubious. I haven't seen a single one that looks like a net social positive. As for arguing what the current laws are, if the laws were actually enforced most employees of Twitter and all of management would be in jail. I think most of them are guilty of serious felonies (but I'm not exactly sure which crimes count as serious felonies, so I can't be certain).

          They won't be enforced. They certainly haven't been for multiple decades. And they were never intended to be enforces against "our people".

          --
          Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @03:58AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @03:58AM (#628078)

        It takes at least the threat of violence to enforce censorship. Sure we can let them draw first blood. But then, we must give them a war they won't believe. Remember what Goldwater said: *Extremism in the defense of liberty is not a vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!* Words to live by. We never acquired our rights through submission to authority. We must make authority serve to protect our rights.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday January 25 2018, @11:28PM (3 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 25 2018, @11:28PM (#627955) Journal

    Trump didn't bring them out. Antifa, among others, did more to bring out racism and latent racism than Trump could ever have done. Take your average white guy, who lives among White, Black, Latino, and Asian neighbors. Run multiple protests through his neighborhood, with the theme, "White men are evil!" What reaction do you expect from that white guy? The exact same reaction one would get from Jews in Europe, or Blacks in Asia, or any other group anywhere else. They band together for comfort and mutual support.

    Today's fascists wear progressive labels, instead of brown shirts, but they are the younger brothers to the people who put Hitler in power.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @12:01AM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @12:01AM (#627976)

      Your lunacy seems to have really topped off with the last few political articles. The worst part of Antifa is that they give you worms an excuse to wriggle out of your holes and proclaim the sky is green.

      I'm sure Trump's "Antiiiifffaaaaaa" proclamations had noooothing to do with your ignorance and anger. At least he made sure everyone knows that all Latino immigrants are murdering thieving rapists /s

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @12:37AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @12:37AM (#627997)

        Tell us what happened to the Jews in Europe when powerful people started hating on them.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @09:51AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @09:51AM (#628174)

          In this case it is backwards, so trying to play the victim is dumb. Muh oppreshun!