soundsgrand
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Twitter lays off staff including whole ethics team, temporarily closes offices
And now the word is they’re calling some fired employees in critical engineering positions and asking them to come back…libertymatters said:A great move by Elon. Fire the woke. They've ruined the Internet.Honest question - do you really think Jack Dorsey of all people only hired a bunch of wokester engineers? My experience in STEM is that its pretty diverse and all of my libertarian crypto buddies LOVE Jack….
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Twitter lays off staff including whole ethics team, temporarily closes offices
What’s disingenuous is to bring up Masterpiece Cake v CCRC and not mention the outcome — the Supreme Court sided with the bakery, i.e. the private company. I think it’s gross they discriminated like that, but I always felt it was their right. Just as it’s now the right of people to boycott their business, So anyway, case law is on the side of the private company here.
designr said:
While it's true that from a strictly legal perspective it only the government is prohibited from infringing on speech, it's also a bit of a disingenuous argument for a couple of reasons.soundsgrand said:
Aren’t you tired of seeing people school you in basic civics and constitutional law? Free speech is a guarantee the government can’t put you in jail for the things you say, and even that has limits. There is no constitutional guarantee that any platform has to air, promote, broadcast, or amplify what you say without exception.libertymatters said:@Madbum censorship is the way all of authoritarians. 'Disinformation' is just the latest rhetorical trick to make it look like the censors are the 'good guys'. Glad to see you and others are not fooled. Free speech is a central American value, always has been, always will be.Feel free to go to your local town square and say whatever the fuck you want to. No one is going to stop you, unless of course you cross a line and say something about someone’s momma... Then you’re apt to get smacked for it.
Societal accountability doesn’t exist for anonymous trolls and thats a big reason we’re in this mess. People would never take their “Free speech” twitter screeds and say them to someone’s face.
First, this is a principle deeply ingrained in American culture. One which people expect to be broadly and generally respected not merely technically limited.
Second, it ignores the fact that some of these companies have been operating under the "guidance" or "influence" or "recommendations" of the US government. In that situation, these companies are defacto agents of the government. This is not something to be casually dismissed or hand-waved away.
Third, this censorship has tended to be quite one-sided—and not limited to the vaguely (conveniently vague mind you) defined "misinformation". And what we see is people falling back to this disingenuous technical legal argument because the people and views being silenced happen to be people and views they don't like or agree with so, you know, it's okay.
Finally, so few people have a time horizon that looks much beyond today. One day, the tides could turn and you might be on the side of "misinformation". History is instructive here. Better to champion free speech (good, bad, true, false, etc.) rather than risk this power to decide what is right/wrong or true/false is put into a different set of hands when it is too late to resist it.
P.S. To add to the disingenuousness of the general "well they are a private company, they can do what they want" argument is the fact that many of the people making this very argument took the exact opposite position when it came to a baker (among others) who refused to decorate a cake (provide a service) for a particular customer because that decoration (provision of the service in that instance) violated the baker's (et al) sincerely held views and beliefs. And, no, the "but that's different" excuse is plainly wrong. If people are honest (and I don't expect that) they'd see the situations are the same.
What’s also disingenuous is to argue historical precedent when none exists. The issue isn’t just speech but massive, algorithm-juiced amplification of speech, and there’s never been a tool like social media before in the history of mankind.Take the Pelosi kidnapping/possible assassination attempt. The alleged perpetrator has CONFESSED in detail his plans to the police and yet now an entire political wing thinks it’s a hoax and has conspiracy theories galore. Pre-social media maybe you have one guy who thinks up the conspiracy theory, phones his buddies, tells some people at a bar, and after 24 hours there are 100 people who have heard it. Then they publish a newsletter, it’s mailed out, and after a week 3,000 have heard it. They have free speech to do so and could still do that today.
But this week within hours a man with 114 million followers responded with that theory to a former US Senator and Presidential candidate and shit hit the fan… there’s no putting the toothpaste back in the tube. They don’t care he confessed or what the actual facts are. Space Man said it might’ve happened and that’s good enough for them.
I genuinely dont know what Twitter should’ve done about that, content moderation is impossibly hard as Elon is finding out, but the example of amplification vs speech still stands.
Lastly - clearly censorship is not one sided as governments of all political wings have done it. And right now it looks like Elon — one single human and not a government — is doing that to his critics according to your definition of censorship. AOC has stopped receiving ALL notifications and messages in Twitter. Other accounts (like his ex Amber Heard’s) are mysteriously vanishing and the head marketer for Unilever has been blocked by Elon for asking questions publicly — but the day before he asked them on a call at the invitation of Elon himself.
I also follow a hilarious trans comedian on Twitter who got permabanned 10 minutes after posting a poll asking “Should @elonmusk ban me for calling him a free speech fag?” Their account is now gone for good and they’re starting over on a backup, minus nearly a million followers. So yeah, I guess that’s Elon’s right, but what a disengous argument HE’S been making…. Pure hypocrisy really. Guess only some comedy is legal on Twitter now.
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Twitter lays off staff including whole ethics team, temporarily closes offices
Aren’t you tired of seeing people school you in basic civics and constitutional law? Free speech is a guarantee the government can’t put you in jail for the things you say, and even that has limits. There is no constitutional guarantee that any platform has to air, promote, broadcast, or amplify what you say without exception.libertymatters said:@Madbum censorship is the way all of authoritarians. 'Disinformation' is just the latest rhetorical trick to make it look like the censors are the 'good guys'. Glad to see you and others are not fooled. Free speech is a central American value, always has been, always will be.Feel free to go to your local town square and say whatever the fuck you want to. No one is going to stop you, unless of course you cross a line and say something about someone’s momma... Then you’re apt to get smacked for it.
Societal accountability doesn’t exist for anonymous trolls and thats a big reason we’re in this mess. People would never take their “Free speech” twitter screeds and say them to someone’s face.
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Twitter lays off staff including whole ethics team, temporarily closes offices
Sure, it’s always the other guy’s team and never the collective whole of humanity that bears the responsibility to maintain a civil society. I could go on and on about how ‘your team’ did this and mine doesn’t do that, citing examples of how “Libs getting owned” by toxic abuse is practically a Republican pastime, but what a waste of life to spend more than one second tossing good faith evidence into a bad faith, reductionist black holelibertymatters said:A great move by Elon. Fire the woke. They've ruined the Internet.
