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posted by
martyb
on Monday October 29 2018, @08:15AM
from the social-commentary-on-social-media dept.
from the social-commentary-on-social-media dept.
The social network gab.com is apparently going down on Monday, October 29th at 09:00 ET. Their ISP has terminated their services, ostensibly because Robert Bowers, the Pittsburgh mass shooting suspect, had made offensive posts on Gab.
To get this out of the way: I have mixed feelings about Gab, more specifically, about the founders. However, the idea that some social network somewhere should refuse to censor anything that is not outright illegal? This is good. Social media has become the modern "market square", and free speech should be guaranteed, even if the platforms are technically private.
If you want free speech, you apparently don't want to be in the U.S.
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Social Media and the Pittsburgh Shooter: Gab.com Going Down
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TOO BAD YOU CAN'T BUY a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin
real fast and freak everybody out.
-- Jack Handey, The New Mexican, 1988.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by curunir_wolf on Monday October 29 2018, @08:32PM
Right, that's one of the benefits of true free speech. When people actually feel free to say whatever they want, others can look at some of their ideas and point them out as wrong. It's how humans actually make real progress. Like back when the law said you're allowed to literally own other people, it was still okay for the Abolitionists to spread their viewpoint, even if the law and majority of society disagreed. Now everyone realizes the abolitionists were right.
So the ACLU pointed out that the Nazis had a right to talk about their own views of racial superiority. And the more they try to spread those ideas, the more people rejected them.
What happens in Germany and other places where those views are actually illegal, and those kinds of speech can subject the speaker to arrest and jail, it just goes underground and festers. It isn't brought out into public forums where the problems with it are exposed, and people holding those views see themselves and persecuted and righteous. Eventually it bubbles up and turns into violence. "Oh, I'm oppressed by society and the government, it must be because my ideas are wrong," said no one ever.
I am a crackpot