Comment by adventured
9 years ago
I find it incredible that so many people here do not realize what inventing and enforcing a new, arbitrary hate speech category will enable politically over time. While simultaneously they're terrified of Trump, they're extremely eager to intentionally give him extraordinary new powers of speech control.
Or is the plan to only give those speech control powers to politicians & authorities one agrees with? It's like all sanity and reasoning has left the building.
In fact private corporations already have the right to censor or refuse service to any of their customers.
That is not the primary issue being debated here.
The issue is: once all the big platforms are aggressively enforcing speech controls, supported by a wider shift in the culture that backs that, how likely is it that the government will take the opportunity to become a speech regulator as it pertains to the Internet just as they are with broadcast & radio today.
I say: it's guaranteed as an inevitable outcome, if the platforms & wider culture keep moving the direction things are going now.
The consequence: the next Trump will do horrific things with those new speech control powers. It's extremely obvious this is where we're heading. The fear people are using as an excuse to argue in favor of controlled speech today, is identical to the fear that was taken advantage of by the government to implement dozens of new abusive post 9/11 powers on the basis of a constantly terrified (eg the Bush terror color codes) citizenship.
The platforms are putting the levers into place, that a future government will use at their pleasure to silence opposition. We have a very, very aggressive, power hungry government; we have a very consolidated power base politically, with only two major parties. You can't see what's going to come out of that?
Every country in the world has more stringent free speech laws as the US, and the democracies among them have not devolved into dictatorships. So I'd be careful with any certainty approaching a "guarantee of an inevitable outcome:.
Unless you bake cakes.
No. Cake maker must make cakes for gay wedding. duh.
Excepting protected classes, which "neo-Nazi" is not.
Trump is going to run Cloudflare? What?
> Trump is going to run Cloudflare? What?
The debate is a wider cultural one, which ends in political action. That's how powerful changes to government are put into place. See: 1970s, or see: post 9/11.
The issue isn't whether Cloudflare should be able to control the content on its network, that's a small, narrow, mostly settled debate.
The very large issue is: is the culture shifting toward ending freedom of speech as we know it, in favor of controlled speech. That is the only debate that matters here, and it is occurring throughout this thread.
The consequence of any further limitations put onto speech eg in regards to the Internet medium, is that the next version of Trump will use his FCC in horrific ways to silence counter speech.
How do all the people here not understand this is the core issue? We just lived through a terrifying expansion of power post 9/11 because the culture became unduly scared, in which all the reasoning was fraudulent and solely used as a means to expand power. Now we have dozens of new power levers, increasingly abused by each administration.
The single most important bastion of freedom to protect, is speech + press.
People don't "understand" because you're wrong (or at least, have no evidence of being right). Infact, what you argue for is a worse outcome than your conclusion, an outcome where individuals and businesses are forced to support speech they don't agree with, thus robbing them of their freedoms.
Nothing is stopping you from self hosting what ever content you want. If you come to my machines, you play by my rules; simple as that.