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.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @10:25PM (17 children)
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)
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)
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)
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
Beat me to it!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @09:08AM
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)
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)
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
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)
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: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday January 26 2018, @12:40PM
Not really. MLK did honest and reasonable pretty damned well regardless of external factors.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Spamalope on Friday January 26 2018, @01:08AM (4 children)
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)
"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)
"...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
Maybe a capitalist overlord is better than a non-capitalist overlord.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @09:49AM
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
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
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.