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A narrative in which any punishment leveled at Facebook is construed as an assault on free speech and civil liberty is _very_ convenient for Facebook. Certainl

A narrative in which any punishment leveled at Facebook is construed as an assault on free speech and civil liberty is _very_ convenient for Facebook. Certainly it's convenient for Facebook. Does that prove it's not true? Fining an automotive company that makes unsafe cars is not attacking personal freedom of movement. Uh, you know publishers, even crappy publishers, have been protected historically in a different fashion than other sorts of industries. Historically, the concept of freedom of expression has generally been for the protection of what some people might consider "unsafe books". The production of an unsafe automobile isn't considered an example of "protected expression" but the production of an essay, book or other "container idea" is considered protected (with specific exceptions, of course). Facebook isn't a pillar of democracy. Free speech is seldom about protecting the expression ideas everyone likes - those usually don't need protection. Free speech is about prevent the state, in particular, from suppressing "bad", "wrong", "unpatriotic" etc ideas, because those are the targets of suppression. And the pillars of democracy are those lawyers and judges that defend free speech, not the completely random assortment of people, some terrible, who practice freedom speech. ...it's a for-profit business that inserts itself as a middle-man in human communication. Those publishers who've been sued and defend their right to publish various banned in the US (such as those of Henry Miller) were also for-profit businesses inserting themselves as middle-men in human communication. If we're living in a capitalist society, expression is going to require middle-men of one sort or another so suppressing these is going to be effectively suppressing free expression.

mindslight 7y ago
> If we're living in a capitalist society, expression is going to require middle-men of one sort or another so suppressing these is going to be effectively suppressing free expression. Only because of this naive bare-minimum protocol stack of HTTP/DNS, which discourages users from owning their own identities, pushing all traffic to centralizing servers. A decade old phone has enough computing power to serve the majority of users' personal communication needs. Ultimately centralized "social media" can only turn out to be yet another populist dumpster fire, ending up in the same state as the nightly newses, nytimes, etc - overwhelming sources of straight up government propaganda . The revolution will not be televised, and this still applies even when the TV has become a javascript browser. This entire issue is essentially just debating between supporting a rock or a hard place, wherein actually they both suck. We're in this position purely because we the people allowed the surveillance companies way too much trust, and the only way out is to move past them.

mindslight 7y ago

> If we're living in a capitalist society, expression is going to require middle-men of one sort or another so suppressing these is going to be effectively suppressing free expression. Only because of this naive bare-minimum protocol stack of HTTP/DNS, which discourages users from owning their own identities, pushing all traffic to centralizing servers. A decade old phone has enough computing power to serve the majority of users' personal communication needs. Ultimately centralized "social media" can only turn out to be yet another populist dumpster fire, ending up in the same state as the nightly newses, nytimes, etc - overwhelming sources of straight up government propaganda . The revolution will not be televised, and this still applies even when the TV has become a javascript browser. This entire issue is essentially just debating between supporting a rock or a hard place, wherein actually they both suck. We're in this position purely because we the people allowed the surveillance companies way too much trust, and the only way out is to move past them.