Big Tech Taking Advantage of a "Tragedy"

Post Reply New Topic

People who scream freedom of speech sure try to silence the left and those who fight for fair rights and silence those who disagree with them and criticize them. But what about our freedom of speech?

If one gets offended for not agreeing with them, I tell them "I am using my freedom of speech by disagreeing with you and telling you why this is wrong."

Freedom of speech does not mean express your bigotry and intolerance and then everyone sits back and not react to what you are saying.

Fair enough. Given how much this discussion has blown up though, life might be a bit too short for that. So, I guess I'll just wish you a good discussion with those who have put in the time.

It's Not Very Complicated; And Yes Read All the
Pages Easy As A Breeze, When You Get Bit By

A Snake You Don't Wait

For Four Years

To Find An

Antidote

As The Country Actually

Faced Failing on Wednesday

Simply For Not Finding A Proper Antidote

Four Years Ago; indeed That was the Slippery Slope

First The United

States

Has Been

Falling on

For More Than Four Years Now;

The Only Reason We Are Surviving

Now is the Folks Who Were Not So

Ignorant Who Wrote The Rules First...

Basically,

The Country

Has Cr8pped

On Them Sliding

All The Way Down CR8P Mountain...

It Comes Down to this: Change or Get Out of the Way...

So things

are

Changing

To the Dismay

Of Those Who Don't

Understand The Stakes at Play...

'The Corporations' Have Actually Been

A Few of the Real Heroes Through this

In Terms

of Walmart

At least Suggesting

Folks Wear Masks in

Trump Towns USA

It Doesn't Work

Still Where

Trump

Rules; This Ain't

No Snake to Play

With; 'Remove Its Head'

Through the Law at the Top....

Precisely What Big Tech Companies

Have Waited Far Too Long to Do; Yet Better Late than Dead...

NO, Big Tech Is NOT Taking Advantage of 'A Tragedy'; They
Are Finally Growing 'A Set' Bigger Than Share Holders Demand...

This Ain't
Ivory Tower
Talk Anymore...

The 'Fox Hole' is Now In Charge...

But, if there is regulation, that just means that multiple companies will control the content. And you are back to the same problem of regulated content. So you are back to "censorship." You also seem to forget you can open you own site on the internet. So no one is preventing you from sharing your content.

Well, I am a citizen of the US but have lived and work in Japan, UK, and Germany. What has that got to do with the topic?

Inciting violence is just freedom of speech.

Well, the first amendment is about government censorship. Private companies do have the right to control speech on their own platforms. As a user, you are bound by their terms and conditions. You also have the right not to use their platforms. So no one is controlling what you can say. You just can't force someone to enable your speech. No publisher has to publish a book, say by Josh Hawley. You cannot compel an organization, especially a private one, to publish your speech.

Also, free speech is not absolute. Inciting violence or fraud are not protected under the first amendment.

What amazes me by your position is that you think you have a right to say anything anywhere. Well, I don't need to publish your speech on my site or my books. That does not prevent you from speaking. You can stand on the street corner or start your own publishing platform. Google is not a public organization.

I agree the big tech companies have too much power, but there power has not been because they are preventing speech. All of these conspiracy theories have been propagated by them, and they were happy to do it. But now we have a problem where the responsibility of publishing speech has a downside. We just had an insurrection because we we made the mistake that free speech is benign and the best ideas will always win in an open forum (and thousands of years of proof that has not always been true). Well, that is not true on Facebook, 8Chan, or even WP. Ignorance and hate are are attractive for their simplistic lies and human psychology. The day before the insurrection, a Republican congresswoman quoted Hitler to justify authoritarianism. And this person is also a Q anon supporter. Fascism and democracy are a bad cocktail.

I support free speech, but it comes with responsibility. You can say whatever you believe, even bat$h1t crazy conspiracy theories. You just don't have the right to compel others to publish or tolerate that speech.

Well, you don't understand human psychology. Try to change the mind of a climate-change denier.

But you are not framing the topic correctly. No one is silencing anyone. You always have the right to publish. You just don't have the right to compel others to publish your speech.

“. I may not agree with what you have said , but I will defend to the death of your right to say it”
Oscar Wilde . .......apologies if the quote is not word for word but it carry’s the intend of Oscar Wilde
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ have to wonder if this still applies in this day and age ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Will you defend my right to say we should all go to Alex's house and yell at him because our favourite trolls were banned? Punishing me for saying we should all go to Alex's house and fight to restore freedom would infringe on my freedom of speech, right?

Somebody needs to do something.

Mr. Walrus, I don't fault you for not reading through the entire thread. But this was most certainly touched upon. I even said Android phones are de facto Google phones where Google makes it difficult/inconvenient to use non-Google or non-Google-sanctioned apps and all the more reason they're too powerful.

————

This sound like "corporate personhood," the idea that rights of an individual pertain to a company as a whole, as if the company itself were a person. I don't agree with corporate personhood.


Within the United States, Twitter and Facebook are American companies subject to American regulation. TikTok is a foreign company, whose ability to do business in any country outside of China is at the discretion of the outside country. Since TikTok couldn't be regulated the same way an American company could, it's a poor analogy.

You're partly correct. But it's not any PARTICULAR speech I want promoted or censored. I'm leery of any form of silencing some and promoting others, and skeptical of the agenda of the ones calling the shots. Yes, I really am concerned about free speech and who controls content (for anyone's opinionated speech).

Twitter is not privately-owned. It's very much traded publicly.

You seem to have this bad habit of being the know-it-all who actually doesn't know and states falsehoods as if they're undisputed fact. I think your should fact check while the Internet is still free and before you post.

Well said, techstepgenr8tion. These are things we should all be thinking about, instead of getting hung-up on one man or one app or whatever.

They're publicly traded, does this mean they're not entitled to have Terms of Service, like not promoting violence, not promoting criminal or terrorist organizations, etc that one must agree to in order to use the service? If one agrees to not promote terrorism and then uses their feed to promote a terrorist organization who's fault is it when they get banned?

Whether there's a monopoly or not companies are going to have Terms of Service which one must agree to in order to use the service. The fact that some companies have allowed certain portions of their user base to break these terms historically is another issue. What was unfair was treating far-right terrorist sympathizers with kid gloves for so long, not cracking down on them now.

I think the point was Twitter is a private-sector business, not a public-sector governmental organization. Being publicly traded still gives them the rights to set terms and conditions for using their product.

Google isn't private, per se. It's a publicly-traded mega corporation.

If you don't want to publish my book, fine, you're not obliged to and I'll start my own printing press. But when we both find out Google controls the physical buying and selling of said printing press devices, and pick and choose whom can have access to the printing presses in the first place, and Google decides where privately-pressed books can be sold and displayed, and which books library patrons can and can't check-out -- then we effectively have a monopoly over content.

EDIT: Or, more correctly, a monopoly controlling content.

There is a difference between being publicly traded and being a public entity that is government run. Publicly traded just means that anyone with the resources could go and buy stocks (ownership), how it is run should be still privately to those people. It does not become de facto public. I think that you are getting a bit mixed up with the differences of public and private in different contexts.

I otherwise think that with something like a social networking business you have more than shareholder you have stakeholders, which are all the people that rely on the service and may have tied themselves to it. And that is why as I said earlier that in the best case scenario you would have some aspect of the user base being able to decide if they want certain things allowed, and such users should not want things like calls for violence allowed, nor other aspects of harassment.