Free Speech

First.Aspect

I'm tending towards not having ISPs held responsible for content, but for social media companies to be able to set their own t&c's just like this site's David. Or do you have an objection to that as well?

The solution to overly influential social media sites is not to allow everything and anything on them, and by extension precluding holding them to account. The solution is instead to reduce their influence, by breaking them up.

super_davo

The "left leaning" tech companies bit needs a bit of a reality check.

Twitter, Facebook are other tech companies are primarily driven by profit rather than anything else which is evidenced by them being heavily resistant to make editorial decisions up till now. If they were truly left leaning, they would never have ridden the Trump bandwagon for so long.

This differs hugely from traditional print media companies who would have owners setting the tone of what they can and can't publish. The net result of that is that the majority of the press is right leaning because that is the stance that will best suit the billionaire owner (Murdoch, Dacre etc.) . This then has an effect on their readership and it leads to behaviours that seem at first glance to be way out of step with a persons best interests e.g. people on benefits voting Conservative, the huge fear in the US of "socialism" etc.

The tradional press influence is bound to wane as fewer and fewer people buy papers but where does that leave us? The evidence so far is in lots of different echo chambers; Trumps supporters are a good example of that as was the movement behind Corbynism.

Unless we can find a decent way of managing this, the future will be a wild right government followed by a wild left, which won't serve anyones interests. Simply saying "your tech company is left leaning we'll spin up a right leaning one" would just fuel this. It would become fairly self fulfilling as said profit hunting tech companies follow the money i.e. they would need to go after the left as anyone who leans right would be elsewhere,

elbowloh

Jezyboy said:

Left wing companies that pay little tax.

Most left wingers I know generally want higher taxes...

Trying to paint Twitter, Facebook and amazon as socialist is weird.

FWIW mail online is still regularly one of the top visited news websites. You can still have opinions online.

Indeed. These tech companies seem to be all about making money and that's about it.

Even google, who i think may have started with some good intentions (Don't be Evil), finally seemed to put the final nail in coffin of their deceased moral conviction when they went into China and agreed to toe the Party* line.

*geddit?

DeVlaeminck

briantrumpet said:

It's weird how all these libertarians suddenly want to tell private companies how they should run their businesses. Why would that be, I wonder?

Yes, there is a discussion about how a few mega corporations effectively dictate the agenda, and how quickly single businesses can gain an effective monopoly, but in Parler's case, it made a decision to host the most hateful/dangerous of speech, and other businesses decided they wanted no part of it. Seems like the free market in action to me.

Not sure this is a debate that's just come up when a few right wing types have lost their platform. The concentration of our media in the hands of a few owners and the lack of balance has long been an issue - The Guardian actively markets itself as an important counter weight to right wing media ownership and it's one of their stated reasons for remaining free from subscription content.

kingstongraham

It did feel inevitable that the right would find some way to make themselves the real victims of what happened on Wednesday.

david37

rick_chasey said:

Were you on parlour, David?

nope and not on twitter either its just a place for people to get angry

kingstongraham

david37 said:

rick_chasey said:

Were you on parlour, David?

nope and not on twitter either its just a place for people to get angry

https://mobile.twitter.com/elmo/status/1345007258728599552

elbowloh

david37 said:

rick_chasey said:

Were you on parlour, David?

nope and not on twitter either its just a place for people to get angry

So is Bike Radar...

david37

kingstongraham said:

It did feel inevitable that the right would find some way to make themselves the real victims of what happened on Wednesday.

we're all the victims here. you just cant see it yet

david37

First.Aspect said:

I'm tending towards not having ISPs held responsible for content, but for social media companies to be able to set their own t&c's just like this site's David. Or do you have an objection to that as well?

The solution to overly influential social media sites is not to allow everything and anything on them, and by extension precluding holding them to account. The solution is instead to reduce their influence, by breaking them up.

i have no objection to tand c of an internet site providing they are legal. i do have concerns about a few massivley powerful global communications sites having this much influence. I agree they should be broken up not just the sites but the companies themselves.

kingstongraham

david37 said:

kingstongraham said:

It did feel inevitable that the right would find some way to make themselves the real victims of what happened on Wednesday.

we're all the victims here. you just cant see it yet

I haven't lost any of my 23 followers in the great twitter purge.

Edit: actually, I don't know how many I had before, so maybe I have lost thousands.

rick_chasey

david37 said:

First.Aspect said:

I'm tending towards not having ISPs held responsible for content, but for social media companies to be able to set their own t&c's just like this site's David. Or do you have an objection to that as well?

The solution to overly influential social media sites is not to allow everything and anything on them, and by extension precluding holding them to account. The solution is instead to reduce their influence, by breaking them up.

i have no objection to tand c of an internet site providing they are legal. i do have concerns about a few massivley powerful global communications sites having this much influence. I agree they should be broken up not just the sites but the companies themselves.

In the specific instance of Trump - he didn't have to use twitter the way he did. In a sense, his way of governing put some of that power into Twitter's hands, by using twitter in the way he did.

Honestly, it wouldn't be as big a deal if they also banned Biden from twitter. He tweets the odd statement here and there but his tweets are rarely actually newsworthy and I suspect he won't be making up policy or signalling much policy via twitter.

elbowloh

rick_chasey said:

david37 said:

First.Aspect said:

I'm tending towards not having ISPs held responsible for content, but for social media companies to be able to set their own t&c's just like this site's David. Or do you have an objection to that as well?

The solution to overly influential social media sites is not to allow everything and anything on them, and by extension precluding holding them to account. The solution is instead to reduce their influence, by breaking them up.

i have no objection to tand c of an internet site providing they are legal. i do have concerns about a few massivley powerful global communications sites having this much influence. I agree they should be broken up not just the sites but the companies themselves.

In the specific instance of Trump - he didn't have to use twitter the way he did. In a sense, his way of governing put some of that power into Twitter's hands, by using twitter in the way he did.

Honestly, it wouldn't be as big a deal if they also banned Biden from twitter. He tweets the odd statement here and there but his tweets are rarely actually newsworthy and I suspect he won't be making up policy or signalling much policy via twitter.

Another difference with Biden though, is that Biden's twitter is probably dealt with by a media team rather then Biden sitting in bed throughout the night eating Big Macs, drinking coveffe and ranting at his enemies bigly.

kingstongraham

I don't think they should have kicked Trump off twitter. Their rationalisation of why they were not censoring his tweets for the last 4 years holds just as well or badly now as it did before. And it's not like cutting off his twitter feed should stop him communicating with the public if he wants to stir something up. Weirdly though, it does seem to have.

david37

kingstongraham said:

I don't think they should have kicked Trump off twitter. Their rationalisation of why they were not censoring his tweets for the last 4 years holds just as well or badly now as it did before. And it's not like cutting off his twitter feed should stop him communicating with the public if he wants to stir something up. Weirdly though, it does seem to have.

he might not want to spoil the water for the boy or vile girl to run for pres. and in a weird way cancelling trump (and those people he stands for) plays directly into his hands.

rick_chasey

david37 said:

kingstongraham said:

I don't think they should have kicked Trump off twitter. Their rationalisation of why they were not censoring his tweets for the last 4 years holds just as well or badly now as it did before. And it's not like cutting off his twitter feed should stop him communicating with the public if he wants to stir something up. Weirdly though, it does seem to have.

he might not want to spoil the water for the boy or vile girl to run for pres. and in a weird way cancelling trump (and those people he stands for) plays directly into his hands.

Mate, how is Trump cancelled? He is the president of the US.

What is your angle here? Are you a Trump supporter? Are you relaxed about having him invite a mob to invade the senate where they were in the process of ratifying a fair election?

The same election Trump was lying about, telling his supporters it was stolen? Perhaps you believe that?

kingstongraham

david37 said:

kingstongraham said:

I don't think they should have kicked Trump off twitter. Their rationalisation of why they were not censoring his tweets for the last 4 years holds just as well or badly now as it did before. And it's not like cutting off his twitter feed should stop him communicating with the public if he wants to stir something up. Weirdly though, it does seem to have.

he might not want to spoil the water for the boy or vile girl to run for pres. and in a weird way cancelling trump (and those people he stands for) plays directly into his hands.

If he'd been allowed to stay on, there is no way he'd see out his last two weeks.

rick_chasey

Here's a question for the 'keep him on twitter' argument.

So you decide he shouldn't be taken off Twitter in the name of free-speech. Fine.

What do you do about the problem that he is inciting people to commit crimes? Genuinely, what's the solution?

kingstongraham

If it opens people's eyes to how much power Apple have over your phone, or AWS have over everything, that good can come of it.

surrey_commuter

he could just as easily send his proposed tweets as letters to the editors of every newspaper.

Do we feel they should be obliged to publish them every single day?

david37

rick_chasey said:

Here's a question for the 'keep him on twitter' argument.

So you decide he shouldn't be taken off Twitter in the name of free-speech. Fine.

What do you do about the problem that he is inciting people to commit crimes? Genuinely, what's the solution?

i think youre being too simplistic. unless of course you think Californians should decide what you read and see and what you should say and think. Trumps message was wrong, you seem to have no issue identifying with that statement.

what happens when your opinion isnt aligned with Mark Zuckerbergs? should it be blocked out?

rick_chasey

surrey_commuter said:

he could just as easily send his proposed tweets as letters to the editors of every newspaper.

Do we feel they should be obliged to publish them every single day?

He could also just release a statement through the formal white house channel, like every president did prior to twitter.

Twitter is only important to Trump because he made it important to how he works.

If Johnson was kicked off twitter I'd be surprised if people noticed.

david37

surrey_commuter said:

he could just as easily send his proposed tweets as letters to the editors of every newspaper.

Do we feel they should be obliged to publish them every single day?

ah yes send your letter by post , its not how things are done these days and you know it.

rick_chasey

You get the point though, don't you David?

Or have you just decided and want to see everyone disagree with you to confirm that it's a big conspiracy and you need to find some kind of fight to beat these woke cancel ars*holes?

kingstongraham

He could do something like this, where he could express that his heart goes out to the woman shot while trying to storm the house speaker's lobby.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/first-lady-melania-trump-path-forward/

david37

it is expected that there will be over 800million iphones being used in the world by the end of the year

in order for a company to have a social network they need to have a platform on which its consumed. they produce an app for the phone. if apple decide what can and cant be made available in its closed ecosystem then it controls the experience of the user. thats a massive amount of global influence. hence parler cannot compete with twitter when apple decides it doesnt like the opinions and being voiced on parler and removes it from its store. when google decides to move parlour from its store (over 2,000,000,000) users then those two companies alone are managing the worlds content.

interestingly apple google amazon and co have argued long that they are not responsible for content. but it seems they now might have strayed into that area.

Start your own platform is a crass thing to say. because you simply cannot unless your platform is only accessed via pc which is not how social media is generally consumed, not least because whilst we might have pcs or laptops at home the world as a whole doesnt.

Apple Google Amazon facebook are too powerful and must be broken up .

kingstongraham

Apple is the main one you may have a point about.

pangolin

kingstongraham said:

He could do something like this, where he could express that his heart goes out to the woman shot while trying to storm the house speaker's lobby.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/first-lady-melania-trump-path-forward/

Ahahahahaha.

Melania reflects on the things over the last week that she finds shameful.

"I find it shameful that surrounding these tragic events there has been salacious gossip, unwarranted personal attacks, and false misleading accusations on me – from people who are looking to be relevant and have an agenda."

david37

rick_chasey said:

You get the point though, don't you David?

Or have you just decided and want to see everyone disagree with you to confirm that it's a big conspiracy and you need to find some kind of fight to beat these woke cancel ars*holes?

that you don't see the point indicates a lack of critical thinking, either wilfully or through absence of intellectual capacity.

pangolin

kingstongraham said:

Apple is the main one you may have a point about.

Again though, their app approval policy is myopic and plenty of developers have found themselves up against a brick wall trying to get an app on the appstore. Or found their previously working app removed by Apple. When does David start to care about this?

When an app which happens to host posts encouraging violence, calling for the killing of democrats, muslims, black lives matter leaders, journalists, posts containing racism, anti semitism, Nazi symbolism... when that app gets pulled. Oh it's right wing though.