Comment by decimalenough

> Are the people with these views not also entitled to free speech and equal rights to express themselves the same as everybody else?

Free speech and equal rights in a legal sense, meaning staying out of jail? Sure, with caveats about threats and abuse.

Free to use a private platform? No, nobody's entitled to the support of someone else's private platform. Equal rights are about protection from the state, not from others' opinions.

Platforms themselves also have speech-based rights. Even if one portrays itself as a neutral 'town square,' it puts its own rights to work as soon as it implements an algorithmic feed, implicitly deciding what content to promote or hide.

You are entitled to your opinion: good, bad, or irrelevant. You are entitled to your words. You are not entitled to an audience.

This is the tricky line, isn't it?

Regardless of whether someone is entitled to free speech, is a private company bound to the constitutional protection?

My understanding has always been that its specifically the government that can't censor me, a private company or citizen can. The NY Times isn't required to write an article I submit to them for example, that's no different than Twitter deciding not to keep a post a write.

Sure they are, but you omitted half of that sentence.

Free speech doesn't allow you to say anything at all you know?

Calling for the eradication of people with certain sexual preferences or skin color for example.

No, this is paradox of Tolerance 101.

Even in his dissenting opinion in Abrams vs the United States, Holmes valued not free speech, but the market place of ideas - the competition of ideas that underlies the search for truth.

Slavishly sticking to free speech, and destroying the market of ideas - creating a monopilist propaganda force, with a symbiotic political party is NOT free speech.

Today we have far more information than any of the founders had anticipated. Monopolies of ideas, far more content than fact, the race to the bottom due to advertising - a source of stress in every pocket?

Yeah, your network is going to have a very specific signal to noise ratio. Your market place of ideas is going to be selling junk food, because its cheap and easy to make.

The idea of counter speech works, if counter speech is heard in the first place. If your message never gets to the other side, or the other party is completely enraged and unable to think past their fears - you have no market place of ideas.

Honestly,no.

> that a crusade against some social group is only interesting as long as it serves the primary interests.

This is clearly not true. X represents Elon’s politics. Best example: Elon has X officially blocked any usage of the term cis as part of his crusade against his trans daughter - and I don’t say that lightly, he was not anti trans until she came out.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91126082/elon-musk-x-cisgender-c...

>Aren't racists a minority who struggle to express themselves?

No, because people acting with hate as motivator don’t care if they are within a social minority. They will cease any opportunity to use every aggression tool they have at their disposal to express loudly their will to oppress whoever looks like unaligned with their mindset.

This is in sharp contrast with minorities whose only wish is to live in a way that is aligned with with their own aspirations that perfectly fit in a specter of harmonious social differences even if it doesn’t fall right in the middle of the median mainstream stereotype.

Everybody is part of some minorities. But not everyone think that because they are a member of this or that minority they should be given some hegemony over everything and the rest in the political matter of their society.

> My naive expectation was that Musk is mostly interested in enriching and aggrandizing himself, and that a crusade against some social group is only interesting as long as it serves the primary interests.

Difference without distinction in this case. The left actually polices its luminaries to some degree (not perfectly but still) which makes it incompatible with the grifter class Musk is chief president of. He’s never going to drift leftward because we’re not going to metaphorically suck his balls because he promotes basic human decency. Figures like him only go rightward.

As for if he bought twitter explicitly to make it a greater hotbed for racism, I think you’d have a hard time proving it in court, but at the same time, he’s unbanned a lot of prominent alt-right figure heads, and boosted tons of their tweets to the financial detriment of the platform. Can’t say he bought it to do that but the huge drops in value because of it hasn’t deterred him so…

That's true in good part. But when it comes to leftist activists specifically, it's war for Musk. His son transitioning didn't exactly endear him to the ideology.

How can being racist belong to a minority while literally being the force that elected a white supremacist like Donald Trump?

Moreover, it’s not that simple. Racists can express themselves. I was talking about racist discourse, not racists themselves. Racism is a hate speech, which has nothing to do with, for example, the right to enjoy one's body and have an abortion as a woman or the ability to express one's gender identity—something that, according to all scientific studies and meta-analyses on the subject, clearly improves the well-being of trans people.

I know very well that racists are experts at playing the victim and making it seem like they are the ones facing repression, but who runs the country? Who are the journalists on television? Are they women or men? White? Rich?

It’s outrageous to claim that the richest man in the world—Elon Musk, a racist, antisemitic, misogynistic white supremacist—is supposedly "censored" and unable to express himself freely! Remind me of a time in American history when a woman had as much power as Elon Musk over the country, or even over other countries (as we see with ALD in Germany)?

>>Aren't racists a minority who struggle to express themselves?

Maybe (if it's about black or white), but anti-Semites have a pretty loud and public voice in the "Western" world.

This is probably the only reasonable argument I've heard for this.

True, but thanks to certain groups using it as a dog whistle you now have to do extra work to find out whether you the person saying it actually cares about empowering people to speak or whether they just want a safe space where they can say the n word.

Which thankfully when it's a platform it doesn't take long to find out which it is.

As with all things in life, regulation makes it possible in the first place.

Unfortunately, in American culture any kind of regulation is seen as negative inherently, whereas in continental European cultures, regulation is seen as a vital and fundamental part of ensuring a place where everyone can thrive.

No it doesn't. It's like libertarianism—it's a concept I find interesting if it helps promote mutual aid, collectivism, etc. Abolishing the state as a vehicle of oppression? Why not.

But if we abolish the state the way libertarians currently define it—meaning abolishing the state but not private property (which paradoxically forces the state to persist in order to determine who owns what, such as businesses, housing, etc.)—then it's an entirely different project. We would be abolishing the so-called oppression of the state only to replace it with an even worse and unchecked oppression by corporations and the billionaires who own them, with no means of voting (since "voting with your wallet" is a myth).

And yet, when you listen to them, it sounds as if they are liberating us from something, when in reality, they are freeing themselves from all control so they can better enslave us.

> Twitter's content policy is more permissive now than it was pre-aquisition, with only narrow exceptions (e.g. doxxing is now banned).

Part of the problem is that the “content policy” keeps differing from practice. Does sharing Signal links violate the policy?

The difference is that freedom of speech is concerned with what the Government allows you to talk about.

X, through Musk, is now a quasi-governmental platform - as can demonstrated by actions like this.

I don’t have the freedom to say how I feel this. But I have been studying the great helmsman recently and soon we will all have an exchange of views.

This is a flat out falsehood - jk rowling was spewing anti trans hate from the position of “feminism” long before the purchase of twitter, she was never “censored” or anything close to it. This is revisionist bs, framed in a way to make your dear leader look like the hero, and not the incompetent anti free speech nitwit he actually is.

> Freedom of speech, at least in the US, is a concern specifically with the government censoring citizens' speech.

Well, no -- you're conflating "freedom of speech" as a general concept with the first amendment as a legal principle. The first amendment is specifically the mechanism of law we use to ensure that freedom of speech is respected in our interactions with the political state.

The first amendment doesn't apply to our interactions with each other outside of the political sphere, but that doesn't mean that we don't also have expectations of conduct and cultural norms that uphold freedom of speech via other means in non-government contexts.

Actually freedom of speech is a principle, which Musk and his ilk claim to care about, despite using their power to censor people through either direct control of information streams or threats. The first amendment to the US constitution specifically seeks to reify this principle in laws pertaining only to the government's actions, but freedom of speech as a principle can be supported or violated by anyone with power over other people. The people claiming to be "free speech absolutists" are hypocritical even if they didn't also work for the government and enact these vendettas against speech they don't like on a governmental level (which is also happening)

The owner is working for the government, can't play that card any more.

This is definitely true, however many of us remember Musk declaring himself a "free-speech absolutist", so in most cases people are referring to his hyprocisy rather than his legal rights.

[0] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1499976967105433600

I mean, congratulations you’ve explained why the Speechers criticising Twitter were always wrong on this point, but Twitter has now been taken over by people who’ve been pushing a very unamerican idea of free speech so it’s fair game to point out they’re trying to prevent people from using the very system that DOGE runs on.

When Mr. Musk describes X as "the last bastion of free speech" or similar what do you think he refers to?

It is very simple:

1. Inherited rich kids like Elon often have a strong feeling that they are better then the rest of humanity.

2. But it turns out if you are a leech on society like that sooner or later people stop accepting that (remember: he pays less in taxes and gains more in government subsides than most people)

3. So in order for people not to turn against you sooner or later you need to keep them split into subsections that are in conflict with each other. The more split they are, the more wealth you can extract.

That is the age old strategy of divide and conquer and if you ever wondered why your political system seemed to be split down the middle 50:50, that is your answer: people with money profit from it being so.

That's not a new problem though, platforms have been kicking people off with no clear reason for years.

> A couple of journalists broke Twitters rule on doxxing, and were briefly suspended.

That is a complete lie. Musk "updated" twitter rules to ban the tracking of private jets (namely his) despite that being public information, and immediately proceeded to suspend accounts having relayed that public information, and accounts which had mentioned or linked to such, or to aviation tracker websites.

Musk also routinely singles out individuals of companies or administrations he dislikes e.g. https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-bullying-federal-wor...

What exactly is it about that article that leads you to label it as politically biased? I see nothing but apparently factual information without any commentary.

The rules on doxing are applied haphazardly.

Musk is fine with censorship with his Chinese CCP friends, anyway, so the hypocrisy is as big as his Melon.

> link to Watergate Scandal article

> Wikipedia’s political bias confirmed

When you say "Wikipedia" do you mean the site operators, or the volunteer editors? If there is a factually incorrect statement in the article, instead of complaining about bias you can always edit it or start a section in the Talk page on the article. Be a part of the group and reduce its perceived bias.

The simple existence of a page that documents an event is not evidence of political bias, and that accusation says more about your own biases than it does Wikipedia editors.

[flagged]

The Egyptian case was so sad: the first elections run elected Islamists, who failed to make a pluralist democracy stick (which was what the Twitter protestors largely wanted!) and instead ended up running similar levels of repression but with a Muslim flavour.

I'd argue it's a tool for extremism and populism everywhere; the weakest Arab governments simply crumpled first, however the same pressures are applied to all governments.

Isn't there a common theme though whether authoritarian or democracy? That's the tension between those in charge who think they know better ( and may well do ) and the populace.

In my mind, the failure on the democracy side has been the rise and rise of managing the message, and the fall of free speaking politicians - modern political comms is positively Orwellian - in part in response to the overwearning power for certain media groups to run a negative campaign to get what they want. Politicians were cowed.

If you look back at historic TV footage of politicians from 50 years ago - the level, subtlety and honesty of debate is much better.

Not sure how you fix it - the money+internet allows anybody to try and control the democratic process - but part of it has to be politicians being braver in speech and deed.

In speech, for example, Bernie Sanders didn't shy away from owning the word socialist - when he first came to prominence it was used as an unthinking label that the media thought should instantly disqualify him - but instead he took the opportunity to re-define it.

In deed - rather than clamp down on the voices of the many, the government should be looking to curtail the power of the few - Elon Musk is currently dismantling government and while I'm sure there is lots to fix, the reason democratic governments and laws exist is to challenge and constrain the power of the few ( every one is equal before the law ).

>Given that overthrowing The Taliban (lol) and Saddam is hailed as a positive of the trillions of dollars and millions of lives spent on the GWOT, at least give the people of the Middle East the courtesy of acknowledging the overthrow of Ben Ali, Assad, Mubarak and Gaddafi.

I don't believe either of those ended up positive either. The Taliban waited out the US; they may have been overthrown, but given that he Taliban are back in power it seems like the entire effort was waste. In Iraq, Saddam was the only force holding back the Shia majority. Iraq has largely devolved into another proxy for Iran, and I don't believe it can be argued that Iraq is any better off with Saddam gone. I'm not supportive of Saddam, either; he was truly evil in ways that people don't always understand. My point would just be that populism and revolution do not necessitate positive outcomes.

> So your assertion that "Twitter was _never_ a net positive for anyone" is not only false but an absurdly biased and frankly wrong view on how the world accesses information.

I presume the grandparent was being rhetorical and trying to say Twitter was always a net negative for society as a whole.

Even today, its a net positive for plenty of people (myself included).

I don’t think it’s quite right to say they assume it. News outlets and online platforms intentionally cultivate that idea, because in the modern era they directly optimize for engagement, and I’m substantially more likely to click on people saying or complaining about outrageous things than measured criticisms from a perspective I don’t share.

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer.

I can't speak to the evidence or lack thereof, but this is what they were referring to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files

IIRC, Twitter(and several other social media platforms) was asked to limit/block accounts that were spreading Covid misinformation at the height of the pandemic. You know, the kind of stuff a functioning government interested in protecting ALL of it's citizens would do. That's "heart" of this "government meddling" excuse.

I would say there is all sorts of "government meddling" going on right now, with all the uncertanty and mess with all the services + departments we all rely on over the last month....

> The Twitter Files also conveniently omitted that Twitter also got requests from the Trump campaign and accepted some of them.

It got requests from both the Trump administration and the Biden campaign. Joe Biden was not President in 2020. Donald Trump was still running the government that was "censoring" social media.

I don't know why this never comes up when people talk about the Twitter Files. .

They're unlocked now with a spam warning added. Occam's razor wins again.

https://x.com/JeremiahDJohns/status/1891554583756845526