Kuwoobie wrote:
Speaking of the first amendment, I've been seeing a lot- and I mean A LOT of talk from Trump supporters lately about how their freedom of speech is being violated. It's "violated" whenever their video is deleted from Youtube. It's "violated" when Facebook or Instagram bans them for breaking their ToS. If they're ranting about how the Corona virus is fake and how wearing masks is the new **** holocaust, and you tell them to shut the **** up, you're violating their precious freedom. If you so much as disagree with what they're saying, they'll cry and tell you it's their freedom of speech and you can't criticize them for being a moron.
It's not you criticizing them. It's the site hosting their content deleting or removing it that they are upset at. If the rules that Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and other followed was consistent there would be no issues. But it seems suspiciously targeted at conservative speech, and that's what's got folks upset.
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Now I hear about how they're actually
trying to legislate "freedom of speech" on the internet. They want everyone to have the "freedom" to post whatever they want on social media for instance, but social media no longer has the freedom to decide what is and isn't allowed on their platform.
Ultimately what they're doing is removing the protection against third parties. What will end up happening is sites like YouTube and Twitter will cease to exist because they are no longer allowed to host user generated content whatsoever.
It's bewildering... They want everyone to be able to post what they want without being "censored" by the site administrators, yet what they're trying to do is undo part of a law that protects brands like Twitter from third parties posting whatever they want, like photos of themselves sodomizing a dead baby. They would have Twitter be liable for someone else's posts on their site.
That is a gross misrepresentation of what is going on. For those of us actually active online back in the late 80s and early 90s, and who knew people who worked in the content hosting world back then, the 1996 Communications Decency Act, and specifically section 230 (which is what your earlier link references to) was critically important to the growth of content hosting and eventually to modern social media that exists today. Before that point, content hosts were legally responsible for the content on their servers. Period. So if I build a bunch of web servers, and sell space on them to third parties (so each customer gets X amount of space and Y amount of bandwidth), I would be responsible to police the content on that web server. Same with hosting email content, online forums, etc. This is obviously extremely onerous and can get to be a ridiculous time and money sink (one of my cousins worked at a content hosting site in the early 90s and one of the accounts he managed was Tom Metzger. So fun!).
The Act basically removed that responsibility. It declared that if you merely hosted content services, but did not provide (ie: publish) the content yourself, you were not responsible. Only the actual publisher was. So the person who put the illegal content on the page, or on the post, or on a forum, was legally or civilly responsible. The point is that it declared such services to *not* be publishers. However, once you start editing that content you become a publisher again. You then take on responsibility for *all* the content you are hosting at that point.
That's the argument that conservatives are making. If Facebook and others want to enjoy the protection of that Act, they they need to be hands off in terms of third party content on their service. They can't edit, delete, ban, etc based solely on the content itself. They can obviously do this if there is some other abuse, but right now they're using that loophole to apply whatever rules they want. And those rules tend to magically censor conservative speech a whole heck of a lot of the time. If they want to censor that content, then they should lose their protect under that Act.
In other words, they have to pick one. Not just kinda arbitrarily do both.
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I mean, I thought conservatives were all about unfettered free market capitalism? You want to regulate private business now because they're deleting your meme about dragging a black person behind a truck? You think YouTube should be forced to keep your video about how you think viruses are just cell waste and everyone is getting sick because of 5G? How does that work? If I went on your private website and posted pictures of my last bowel movement all over the comment section, would you keep them in the name of "free speech?" How ******* stupid can you get?
No. We don't think that Youtube should be censoring anything at all. But right now, the conservative video expressing an opinion (whatever it is) gets deleted, while an equally fringe liberal video expressing an equally bizarre opinion, does not. It should not be about whether the (mostly liberal) folks running these services agree with the content. A video expressing the opinion that a fetus is just a collection of cells and should be treated no differently than a virus or a toenail (ie: can be removed with no ethical thought) is just as much unscientific and controversial as a video expressing the opinion that 5G will make you get cancer, right? Yet, which one do you think might be censored?
That should not be the case.
[quote[It never ends. This is every single day. People have stopped crying about "fake news" and moved on to crying about how oppressed they are by the government when a private business stops them from voicing their idiotic opinions using their platform. So now they want to take their ball (which is not actually their ball) and go home.[/quote]
Uh. Again, that's not remotely what people are saying. That's the gross misinterpretation you are receiving from your own biased sources. Maybe actually talk to conservatives and see what they have to say rather than talking to liberals talking about what they think conservatives are saying? It might be more informative. No one's saying that the government is oppressing them in this, but that these services are abusing a protection that the government gave them 25 years ago, and it's now becoming unbalanced (has been for some time actually).
Again. It's not anyone's job to censor "idiotic opinions". But it does become dangerous to a society that believes in free speech when pretty much every one of the major internet media providers is censoring. Because what defines "idiotic opinion" is subjective, and can easily be translated to "opinions I disagree with". Given the sheer volume of communication that is now done via these services, that's a big deal.
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Meanwhile it's perfectly ok to gun down someone's child for (possibly) stealing a bag of skittles. It's ok to drive by and shotgun a dude in the face, why, "he shouldn't have been running" they'll actually tell you. We'd have fewer cases of Covid 19 if nobody went and got tested...! I mean, you're technically not wrong! I am only touching the surface of iceburg of stupid that represents America's collective thought process.
Look. If you want to talk about other people's stupidity, maybe you can start by *not* massively misrepresenting those things in the first place. Every one of those is completely wrong in terms of describing the events or actions in question. I might not even disagree with you on some of these things, but when you seem to go out of your way to exaggerate, misrepresent, or completely reverse the cause/effect argument someone else made, it just makes *you* look like either an idiot, or a tool that just parrots the idiocy of others.
One example from your list. No one (well, no one worth listening to) is arguing that we'd have fewer covid cases if we tested fewer people. The number of people you test has nothing at all to do with the actual number of people infected. However, what we do say (I've said this many times) is that slavishly listing the number of "confirmed cases" and trying to do stats on that is silly. Doubly so when the folks doing so most of the time are journalists and they don't understand anything at all about statistics. The number of "confirmed cases" also has nothing to do with the number of actual infected people. It has to do with how many people you test. Obviously, if you double the number of tests, and the "real rate of infection" in your population stays the same, you will double the number of "confirmed cases". And you might erroneously conclude that "OMG! The number of cases of covid is spiking! We must run around like scared chickens now!". But in actuality the "real rate of infection" hasn't changed at all. There is no spike. There's nothing to be alarmed about (well, more so than the previous numbers anyway).
The only numbers anyone should *ever* be looking at is hospitalizations for covid per capita and deaths from covid per capita. Track those numbers over time (not "totals", but "new this week" or whatever time period you're looking at). This gives you something you can graph that is actually useful. But you'll be hard pressed to find that stat on any graphic on your evening news, or your 24 hour cable news, or on your online news. You have to dig a few levels down on the cdc pages to find this information. And most people wont bother.
My point is that the way you wrote it makes it seem like people are arguing that we shouldn't test people, because testing just makes more people sick or something ridiculous. No. We're saying that the way people are reporting the data is incorrect and provides false information to the public. And, yet again, it's remarkable how often the mostly left leaning media tends to selectively choose when and which data to do the misinformation about. So GOP run states get this false "OMG covid rates are spiking" treatment, while there are crickets chirping about Dem run states. This despite the *actual* fact that death rates in Dem controlled states (ie: deaths from covid per capita) are like 2.5 times higher than the rates in GOP run states.
Pretty sure your source never informed you about that right? They just told you all the stupid things that conservatives are saying. Maybe be more diverse in your sources. Just a thought.
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I'm reading all of this back to myself and I feel stupid for even writing it. It feels unreal. It feels like I'm beating on strawmen because quite a few times someone on here recently has said as much. I mean, do you think they're strawmen, really? Have you been to the comments sections or forums outside of the Aslyum recently? A lot of commenters are quick to dismiss them, calling them "paid Russian trolls." I'm not really sure about the validity of that- that they're all just bots or a sweatshop filled with poor folks in Russia getting paid to say dumb things where Americans can see it. -not when every day I read news about actual, real life stupid Americans throwing tantrums about wearing a mask or running over protesters with their cars. Could it just be that all of this madness is real, after all?
Not sure what you're saying here. Are commenters dismissing the posts/articles as russian trolls? Or other commenters? Actually, scratch that. I don't really care.
Edited, Jul 21st 2020 2:08pm by gbaji 
