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Twitter and Facebook Controlling Speech
Is anyone besides me concerned by the power conferred on a dopehead like Dorsey ( CEO of Twitter ) and Zuckerberg ?
I've been watching them testify before the Senate and get clobbered by Hawley , Cruz and Lee among other Senators. Clearly they were both flagging posts and suspending accounts based on political ideas that they didn't like or agree with. Both companies have officers and employees that contributed almost exclusively to Democrats. They have only tried to control right wing messages and speakers that they do not like or agree with. Inter alia they use CHINESE algorithms and Chinese COMMUNISTS ( and their software ) to flag questionable postings. I am not making that up. That has been reported in the mainstream press. Both have admitted to hiring "technical " help from China to "fact check " and flag content.
They have immunity under Section 230 so long as they do NOT act like an editor or PUBLISHER. That means they are immune from defamation suits so long as they maintain content neutral , NON- Partisan positions. However both companies have clearly exercised editorial control over posts and tweets well within the political mainstream.
The only "mistakes" that Dorsey admitted to involved freezing the N.Y. Post's account after they published highlights from Hunter Biden's laptop. They CLAIMED they were suppressing "hacked" material but had their pants pulled down publicly as it was crystal clear there was no hacking. They also flagged any and all posts dealing with "voter fraud" opining that it was a very rare phenomenon. Corrections were made to the former just before the election AFTER they tried to blackmail the N.Y. Post. Twitter said they'd unfreeze the Post account in exchange for the Post pulling all tweets about Hunter and his shady business dealings. Eventually they dropped the condition and restored their account.
Among many troubling questions raised are : 1. Who voted for Dorsey and Zuckerberg to control speech on otherwise public platforms ? Or appointed them with or without congressional approval ? 2. Yes, they are private entities BUT they have a conditional public exemption under Section 230. 3. Leaving aside clear hate speech , White Power, Nazism , Holocaust Denial and clear Anti Semitism where do they come off regulating content ? 4. Where are the standards and guidelines ? What are they ? If it is factual accuracy vs. delinquency then they are way behind flagging left wing posts.5. Why have they had to retract and revise so many decisions ? 6. Why can't they point to a single instance where they imposed content controls on leftist groups ? Even leftist hate groups like BLM and Anti-Fa both of whom have prominent members openly advocating violence ?
One encouraging note ( maybe ) is that at least Dorsey wasn't as stoned out as he was last time he testified on this issue. And he dressed up. A little. I am not kidding . I was shocked by his appearance and affect the last time he testified. I asked all my pot smoking and LE friends what they thought. It was unanimous; Dorsey was stoned when he testified.
And for anyone claiming : " Not a problem , nothing to see here " please keep in mind that the day may come when Twitter is taken over by let's say the Koch Brothers and their friends and allies who then decide to regulate posts pushing socialism ; or race based quotas or "any abortion at any time for any reason" or countless other divisive ideas.
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Re: Twitter and Facebook Controlling Speech
There are several monopolies which should be broken up, but wont because they have too many politicians in their pockets.
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Re: Twitter and Facebook Controlling Speech
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Originally Posted by
slowpoke
There are several monopolies which should be broken up, but wont because they have too many politicians in their pockets.
Great Point ! Wasn't it Elizabeth Warren who advocated breaking up both Twitter and Facebook ?
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Re: Twitter and Facebook Controlling Speech
It depends, they are private businesses, so... I don't really fuck with Twitter, but I do use Facebook.
And Hawley is my Senator, and he PISSES me the fuck off. During his election run, he was like "My own kid has a pre-existing condition". Yeah Josh, you also have Government run healthcare, considering you're the Attorney fucking General, of course your kid's gonna be fine. And now he's a Senator! What about anybody else? What about THEIR kids?
If the Republicans want to get rid of Obamacare so badly, why can't they come up with something to replace it with?
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Re: Twitter and Facebook Controlling Speech
That's a valid point. Trump was supposed to do that. And never did.
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Re: Twitter and Facebook Controlling Speech
The essential facilities doctrine (sometimes also referred to as the essential facility doctrine) is a legal doctrine which describes a particular type of claim of monopolization made under competition laws. In general, it refers to a type of anti-competitive behavior in which a firm with market power uses a "bottleneck" in a market to deny competitors entry into the market. It is closely related to a claim for refusal to deal.
The doctrine has its origins in United States law, but it has been adopted (often with some modification) into the legal systems of the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, and the European Union.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essent...ities_doctrine
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Re: Twitter and Facebook Controlling Speech
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Originally Posted by
Eric Stoner
That's a valid point. Trump was supposed to do that. And never did.
They just want to get rid of it and leave the rest of us out in the cold. We have to have some kind of Health care.
And now they refuse to give us any relief. What, how many homeless people do you want? Don't they realize that a Homeless person is not going to contribute to the economy, right? They become a DRAIN on the economy. We have to PAY to feed them. That shit from HOMELESS SHELTERS doesn't come free!
Next it'll be SOUP KITCHENS.
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Re: Twitter and Facebook Controlling Speech
You are free to use and direct others to use Parler. They won't miss any of you.
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Re: Twitter and Facebook Controlling Speech
They expect us to start eating ROOF RABBITS (Cats, a Depression era term).
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Re: Twitter and Facebook Controlling Speech
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Originally Posted by
dpacrkk
You are free to use and direct others to use Parler. They won't miss any of you.
That's fine but why should we have to ? If Twitter, Facebook and Google get a defined governmental benefit ( Immunity under Section 230 ) then they also have concurrent responsibilities to permit free and open debate and discussion within VERY limited parameters. They are NOT supposed to act like Thought Police.
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Re: Twitter and Facebook Controlling Speech
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Originally Posted by
Raziel
They just want to get rid of it and leave the rest of us out in the cold. We have to have some kind of Health care.
And now they refuse to give us any relief. What, how many homeless people do you want? Don't they realize that a Homeless person is not going to contribute to the economy, right? They become a DRAIN on the economy. We have to PAY to feed them. That shit from HOMELESS SHELTERS doesn't come free!
Next it'll be SOUP KITCHENS.
We already have soup kitchens and food banks. We had them throughout Obama's 8 years. We started seeing them during the Depression. Then they became more numerous under Carter and then Reagan , then Bush The Brighter , Clinton and Bush The Dim. Your point is what ? We've always had poor people and those struggling with food insecurity. I donate a bag of groceries to every food drive I know about. Afaic nobody should go hungry in this country. Ever !
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Re: Twitter and Facebook Controlling Speech
I don't know of any Soup Kitchens around here. In STL. Maybe in New York, but I don't think there's any here. Unless you call Salvation Army a Soup Kitchen.
It's good that you donate food. I do too.
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Re: Twitter and Facebook Controlling Speech
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Eric Stoner
That's fine but why should we have to ? If Twitter, Facebook and Google get a defined governmental benefit ( Immunity under Section 230 ) then they also have concurrent responsibilities to permit free and open debate and discussion within VERY limited parameters. They are NOT supposed to act like Thought Police.
You don't have to, but it seems like a good alternative for those that allege control. It's a value judgment, and to many people, it's better than rampant lies that can get debunked with seconds of googling. It's also far from being the Thought Police when the fact checking goes against the political thoughts of various government officials.
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Re: Twitter and Facebook Controlling Speech
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Originally Posted by
dpacrkk
You don't have to, but it seems like a good alternative for those that allege control. It's a value judgment, and to many people, it's better than rampant lies that can get debunked with seconds of googling. It's also far from being the Thought Police when the fact checking goes against the political thoughts of various government officials.
Fact checking is fine. So are warning labels on dodgy tweets. Too many of Trump's qualify. So did Obama's. I am talking about locking accounts when tweets that the Powers That Be do not like are posted.
Twitter by its very nature is an O P I N I O N site. It was DESIGNED to enable account holders to bypass mainstream media outlets to get their word out.
Technically fact checking is an EDITORIAL function and Section 230 is VERY clear : The exemption that Twitter and Facebook have is dependent on their NOT editing posts. There are LIMITED exceptions for things like racist hate speech ; Holocaust denial ; child abuse ; sex trafficking * and a very few other extreme things that 99.99 % of relatively sane people can agree are bad and ought to be suppressed.
* I do NOT have a problem with it but many escorts have Twitter and Instagram accounts. Would anyone want to see a content based crackdown on those ? I wouldn't.
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Re: Twitter and Facebook Controlling Speech
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Originally Posted by
Eric Stoner
Fact checking is fine. So are warning labels on dodgy tweets. Too many of Trump's qualify. So did Obama's. I am talking about locking accounts when tweets that the Powers That Be do not like are posted.
The half hour of the "Breaking the News: Censorship, Suppression, and the 2020 Election" hearing I watched focused on the fact-checking only and the disclaimers that claims posted by users were misleading or have been disputed. I'll watch the rest later.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Eric Stoner
Twitter by its very nature is an O P I N I O N site. It was DESIGNED to enable account holders to bypass mainstream media outlets to get their word out.
From one of the founders in a 2013 interview:
"There are certain businesses that you know what they are when they're born. You don't necessarily know how big they are or what's going to make them successful, but Google, for example, was always a search engine.
With Twitter, it wasn't clear what it was. They called it a social network, they called it microblogging, but it was hard to define, because it didn't replace anything. There was this path of discovery with something like that, where over time you figure out what it is. Twitter actually changed from what we thought it was in the beginning, which we described as status updates and a social utility. It is that, in part, but the insight we eventually came to was Twitter was really more of an information network than it is a social network. That led to all kinds of design decisions, such as the inclusion of search and hashtags and the way retweets work. All this came because we were thinking deeply about the question: what is the essence of this product? It didn't reveal itself immediately and would have been a lot harder to get to had we not been focused on that."
There's no mention about being an opinion site nor bypassing mainstream media outlets.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Eric Stoner
Technically fact checking is an EDITORIAL function
There is post hoc fact-checking, which is not editorial.
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Re: Twitter and Facebook Controlling Speech
Quote:
Originally Posted by
dpacrkk
The half hour of the "Brewking the News: Censorship, Suppression, and the 2020 Election" hearing I watched focused on the fact-checking only and the disclaimers that claims posted by users were misleading or have been disputed.
From one of the founders in a
2013 interview:
"There are certain businesses that you know what they are when they're born. You don't necessarily know how big they are or what's going to make them successful, but Google, for example, was always a search engine.
With Twitter, it wasn't clear what it was. They called it a social network, they called it microblogging, but it was hard to define, because it didn't replace anything. There was this path of discovery with something like that, where over time you figure out what it is. Twitter actually changed from what
we thought it was in the beginning, which we described as status updates and a social utility. It is that, in part, but
the insight we eventually came to was Twitter was really more of an information network than it is a social network. That led to all kinds of design decisions, such as the inclusion of search and hashtags and the way retweets work. All this came because we were thinking deeply about the question: what is the essence of this product? It didn't reveal itself immediately and would have been a lot harder to get to had we not been focused on that."
There's no mention about being an opinion site nor bypassing mainstream media outlets.
There is post hoc fact-checking, which is not editorial.
That is really just sophistry. At Present , Twitter is an Opinion site. It is also informational and a social platform. And ever since Obama it has been a POLITICAL PLATFORM for almost everybody. It has become a semi-public bulletin board. In exchange for that status it has been granted the immunity we previously discussed.
Rotfl . Fact checking is not editorial ? Are you serious ? That is an essential part of editing. Most media outlets do it because truth is an absolute defense to defamation suits. The more "checked facts " the greater the protection provided by the defense.
As I posted , fact checking is fine so long as it is not used to suppress tweets and posts that the owners and staff of Twitter and Facebook do not like or agree with. Which it has been. Twitter especially has admitted it. Dorsey always says it was a "mistake" to do so but he admits that they did it. Zuckerberg was even more slippery and evasive claiming not to know and promising to get back to his Congressional questioners.
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Re: Twitter and Facebook Controlling Speech
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Originally Posted by
Eric Stoner
That is really just sophistry. At Present , Twitter is an Opinion site. It is also informational and a social platform. And ever since Obama it has been a POLITICAL PLATFORM for almost everybody. It has become a semi-public bulletin board. In exchange for that status it has been granted the immunity we previously discussed.
Yes, your evaluation should be considered more heavily than one of the founders of Twitter. It's also not a site, though it includes a site among its services.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Eric Stoner
Rotfl . Fact checking is not editorial ? Are you serious ? That is an essential part of editing. Most media outlets do it because truth is an absolute defense to defamation suits. The more "checked facts " the greater the protection provided by the defense.
Did I ever type "fact-checking is never editorial" or anything to that effect? READ!
Quote:
Originally Posted by
dpacrkk
There is post hoc fact-checking, which is not editorial.
Post hoc fact-checking is performed by people who aren't publishing the original claims (e.g. Politifact, FactCheck, Pinocchios, etc). It requires said materials to be published by others first, therefore it's not editorial. You are referring to ante hoc fact-checking which serves to catch errors before publication, which is editorial.
Great job. "Rotfl ." (why is there a space there anyway?)
To reiterate, you're free to go on Parler. Or build your own Twitter to disseminate whatever [dis]information you want. But being that you'll need STEM people that tend to lean to the left heavily: good luck with that!
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Re: Twitter and Facebook Controlling Speech
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Eric Stoner
That's fine but why should we have to ? If Twitter, Facebook and Google get a defined governmental benefit ( Immunity under Section 230 ) then they also have concurrent responsibilities to permit free and open debate and discussion within VERY limited parameters. They are NOT supposed to act like Thought Police.
All other businesses have the same immunity from third parties. Why should businesses on the internet be any different? Television stations aren't responsible for the content of advertisers. Bookstores aren't responsible for the content of books and magazines they sell. You can't sue NBC if a third party makes a false claim in a commercial. You can't sue Barnes and Nobles if a book they're selling has false information.
You probably couldn't have an internet, if every internet-related business was responsible for 3rd party content. Amazon Web Services probably host hundreds of thousands of third party websites. It would be impossible for them to monitor every single one of them.
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Re: Twitter and Facebook Controlling Speech
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Originally Posted by
eagle2
All other businesses have the same immunity from third parties.
Do they?
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-...245-story.html
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Re: Twitter and Facebook Controlling Speech
I'm not on FB anymore because I don't trust any of them!!
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Re: Twitter and Facebook Controlling Speech
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Originally Posted by
slowpoke
It says here that there were more than a half-dozen cases of contract murder linked to Soldier of Fortune magazine over 10 years.
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/08/19/u...ller-s-ad.html
Perhaps judges and jurors thought that the magazine should have done more to prevent it from happening, since this had happened multiple times before, and they were aware of the possibility that this could lead to someone getting murdered.
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Re: Twitter and Facebook Controlling Speech
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Originally Posted by
slowpoke
That's an old case and an extreme example.
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Re: Twitter and Facebook Controlling Speech
Quote:
Originally Posted by
eagle2
All other businesses have the same immunity from third parties. Why should businesses on the internet be any different? Television stations aren't responsible for the content of advertisers. Bookstores aren't responsible for the content of books and magazines they sell. You can't sue NBC if a third party makes a false claim in a commercial. You can't sue Barnes and Nobles if a book they're selling has false information.
You probably couldn't have an internet, if every internet-related business was responsible for 3rd party content. Amazon Web Services probably host hundreds of thousands of third party websites. It would be impossible for them to monitor every single one of them.
None of those businesses edit content although T.V. , radio stations and newspapers all refuse ads on various grounds. They also often provide a forum for response to what they air or publish.
If a book contains false and defamatory statements you can sue the publisher. Newspapers can be sued. Radio and T.V. stations have FCC licenses and their renewals can be challenged if they are not "acting in the public interest".
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Re: Twitter and Facebook Controlling Speech
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Originally Posted by
Eric Stoner
If a book contains false and defamatory statements you can sue the publisher.
That depends, is it Fiction, or like, something Bob Woodward would write? If it's Fiction, it's SUPPOSED to be something else. I don't think you'd get very far suing somebody over a Fiction book. I personally write Fiction, but none of my stuff is political, nor does it feature real people, so I don't really think I have to worry about it. I've only written one Novel set in the present day, even, (at least in part). Although I don't say when, most of it is set ten years ago.
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Re: Twitter and Facebook Controlling Speech
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Raziel
That depends, is it Fiction, or like, something Bob Woodward would write? If it's Fiction, it's SUPPOSED to be something else. I don't think you'd get very far suing somebody over a Fiction book. I personally write Fiction, but none of my stuff is political, nor does it feature real people, so I don't really think I have to worry about it. I've only written one Novel set in the present day, even, (at least in part). Although I don't say when, most of it is set ten years ago.
Generally that is true BUT if your "fiction" has a character that can easily be identified as or connected to a real person and you write about that person in a defamatory way it is possible you could be sued. There was a famous case brought by Gerry Spence representing a former Miss Wyoming against Penthouse Magazine for a supposed fictional short story ( Pring v. Penthouse International ). They won at trial but it was reversed by Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit and the SCOTUS let the dismissal stand .