5 ms·

Kevin McCarthy leads charge against Silicon Valley

8 points by petethomas 8y ago

anoncoward111 8y ago
Why don't you try privately funding a platform where you can tolerate all the types of speech that you wish to tolerate? Innovation is hard innit?
- api 8y ago
  It's not even hard. Gab and Voat exist. No innovation is needed to set up a social site. You can run a sizable one for less than a few hundred a month given how cheap cloud hosting has become.
  - anoncoward111 8y ago
    Interesting. The main problem being Twitter's entrenched/sticky network effect? Just a couple hundred donators could support the whole project with a few bucks, a la Dwarf Fortress or many hundreds of Youtubers
    - spamizbad 8y ago
      I don't think there's any real problem here: conservatives in washington wants their base to think there's a conspiracy against them in tech. The technology industry employs large numbers of people who are college-educated, millennials/yougner Gen-Xers and/or Asian-Americans: people who demographically skew left. This alone makes our industry suspect to the conservatives. Isn't it odd that Steve Bannon starts publicly ranting about there being too many Asians in Silicon Valley and now all of a sudden we're far too liberal and censoring conservative voices... despite the fact that both Facebook and Twitter have been utilized deftly by conservatives to spread their message and communicate with their voters?
      - aaronbrethorst 8y ago
        It's called "working the refs": https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=%22working+the+refs%22&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=%22work...
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
        sremani 8y ago
        Are you kidding me? I do not know who refs, but if Social Media companies are your refs, god bless your children.. then need lot of luck! Here is an interesting exercise - name 5 silicon valley conservative stalwarts.
        spamizbad 8y ago
        > Here is an interesting exercise - name 5 silicon valley conservative stalwarts. Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Palmer Luckey, Tom Perkins, David Sacks.... and for extra credit: Jeremy Tunnel, Curtis Yarvin, Brendan Eich, Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina, Ted Dzuiba...
- bachbach 8y ago
  The federal government should actually open a public forum for people to just talk. It would be interesting and cheap as experiments go. There are no true public forums anywhere on the web that I'm aware of.
  - oddity 8y ago
    If you're not already aware, I'd recommend checking out deliberative democracy. Some of its advocates are pushing for something like this, but in a structured, moderated form. There's obviously debate over what the structure and moderation should look like and plenty of debate between deliberative democracy proponents and related schools of thought, but the general thrust (my words, I'm not speaking for anyone else, so I might not do them justice) is that the process of discussion and deliberation is as fundamental to democracy as the process of voting, and should be accommodated by the government just like voting is.
torgian 8y ago
So... this is just the start. You know the next step is the government taking control over what tech companies can do when it comes to dissemination of information. I'm gonna say it now: In 20 years, large tech companies in the States are going to be controlled by the US government, much like how China controls (or at least has direct oversight) large companies within their borders.
saagarjha 8y ago
> After sharing a screenshot of a tweet from Fox News host Laura Ingraham that was covered by language warning of “potentially sensitive content,” Twitter users were quick to point out that Ingraham’s tweet was covered up due to settings in McCarthy’s own Twitter account, not because of a company campaign to silence conservative voices. It's kind of sad that the people out to regulate technology companies aren't really all that familiar with technology themselves.
- awinder 8y ago
  Yeah, but Kevin McCarthy isn’t out to actually regulate anyone. He’s just paying tribute to His Orangeness, and maybe offering some red meat to republican voters, before he loses his position in a few months. This is a risk free move, given that there won’t be any ability to follow through. But it is pretty much garden variety poor leadership / waste of money.

8 points by petethomas 8y ago

Why don't you try privately funding a platform where you can tolerate all the types of speech that you wish to tolerate? Innovation is hard innit?

api 8y ago
It's not even hard. Gab and Voat exist. No innovation is needed to set up a social site. You can run a sizable one for less than a few hundred a month given how cheap cloud hosting has become.
- anoncoward111 8y ago
  Interesting. The main problem being Twitter's entrenched/sticky network effect? Just a couple hundred donators could support the whole project with a few bucks, a la Dwarf Fortress or many hundreds of Youtubers
  - spamizbad 8y ago
    I don't think there's any real problem here: conservatives in washington wants their base to think there's a conspiracy against them in tech. The technology industry employs large numbers of people who are college-educated, millennials/yougner Gen-Xers and/or Asian-Americans: people who demographically skew left. This alone makes our industry suspect to the conservatives. Isn't it odd that Steve Bannon starts publicly ranting about there being too many Asians in Silicon Valley and now all of a sudden we're far too liberal and censoring conservative voices... despite the fact that both Facebook and Twitter have been utilized deftly by conservatives to spread their message and communicate with their voters?
    - aaronbrethorst 8y ago
      It's called "working the refs": https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=%22working+the+refs%22&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=%22work...
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - sremani 8y ago
        Are you kidding me? I do not know who refs, but if Social Media companies are your refs, god bless your children.. then need lot of luck! Here is an interesting exercise - name 5 silicon valley conservative stalwarts.
        spamizbad 8y ago
        > Here is an interesting exercise - name 5 silicon valley conservative stalwarts. Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Palmer Luckey, Tom Perkins, David Sacks.... and for extra credit: Jeremy Tunnel, Curtis Yarvin, Brendan Eich, Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina, Ted Dzuiba...
bachbach 8y ago
The federal government should actually open a public forum for people to just talk. It would be interesting and cheap as experiments go. There are no true public forums anywhere on the web that I'm aware of.
- oddity 8y ago
  If you're not already aware, I'd recommend checking out deliberative democracy. Some of its advocates are pushing for something like this, but in a structured, moderated form. There's obviously debate over what the structure and moderation should look like and plenty of debate between deliberative democracy proponents and related schools of thought, but the general thrust (my words, I'm not speaking for anyone else, so I might not do them justice) is that the process of discussion and deliberation is as fundamental to democracy as the process of voting, and should be accommodated by the government just like voting is.

torgian 8y ago

So... this is just the start. You know the next step is the government taking control over what tech companies can do when it comes to dissemination of information. I'm gonna say it now: In 20 years, large tech companies in the States are going to be controlled by the US government, much like how China controls (or at least has direct oversight) large companies within their borders.

saagarjha 8y ago

> After sharing a screenshot of a tweet from Fox News host Laura Ingraham that was covered by language warning of “potentially sensitive content,” Twitter users were quick to point out that Ingraham’s tweet was covered up due to settings in McCarthy’s own Twitter account, not because of a company campaign to silence conservative voices. It's kind of sad that the people out to regulate technology companies aren't really all that familiar with technology themselves.

awinder 8y ago
Yeah, but Kevin McCarthy isn’t out to actually regulate anyone. He’s just paying tribute to His Orangeness, and maybe offering some red meat to republican voters, before he loses his position in a few months. This is a risk free move, given that there won’t be any ability to follow through. But it is pretty much garden variety poor leadership / waste of money.