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>social media sites should not be the business of censoring elected officials. That is the job of voters and Congress. What about Paul Nehlen, a political cand

• syrrim 6y ago
  The GP specified elected official, not candidate.
  • kohtatsu 6y ago
    How will candidates become elected officials without access to the platforms their electorate are on? I don't support Paul Nehlen, I just don't think it's that cut and dry.
    • syrrim 6y ago
      I'm not saying the decision of which political candidates to censor should be cut and dry. Just that the decision of which elected officials to censor should be.
  • JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > GP specified elected official, not candidate So incumbents get a material campaigning advantage?
    • syrrim 6y ago
      Yes. Oh wait, were you talking about social media censorship?
  • bigiain 6y ago
    So all that would have been OK if he were elected?
    • syrrim 6y ago
      He wasn't elected because he had disagreeable opinions. If someone you disagree with is elected, then clearly their opinions are mainstream, if not agreeable.
• kohtatsu 6y ago
  This fails to acknowledge how much power those sets of rules have. They really have unfathomable potential to be insidious thanks to algorithmic selection and presentation of information and entertainment.
• legostormtroopr 6y ago
  > Social media is a not a public square where people can plant their soapbox Except there isn't really an alternative to Twitter - they have monopolised that "short catchy text stream" market. Other services, like Gab, exist - but when services like Cloudflare readily pull support for less mainstream alternatives, its hard to say that if you don't like Twitter you can go somewhere else. For better or worse, Facebook and Twitter consumed blogs, and there are no real alternatives.
  • sooper 6y ago
    > "Except there isn't really an alternative to Twitter" I'm curious, what's the problem with that?
    • lukifer 6y ago
      Metcalfe's Law [0] dictates that the value of a network service scales exponentially with its number of nodes. This tilts the table in favor of winner-take-all ecosystems; moreover, in terms of both political soft power and cultural influence, this often creates a pressure for users to participate, not quite under duress, but let's say unenthusiastically, lest they be left out of the conversation. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law
      • disconcision 6y ago
        (proportional to the square of the number of nodes, not exponentially)
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  • StavrosK 6y ago
    > but when services like Cloudflare readily pull support for less mainstream alternatives What has Cloudflare pulled support for, except the one neonazi site that made them vow never to do it again?
• ars 6y ago
  They should not ban him. If for no other reason then that I prefer to know this info about a candidate.
• ponker 6y ago
  Well, there's a conversation about what "free speech" means that's very different from the conversation about what the First Amendment is. When the Constitution was ratified, they were somewhat synonymous, in that there was a public square that everyone walked past and you could stand there and you certainly could spout your "Jewish Question" logorrhea without government suppression. Now, the "commons" is controlled largely by private corporations, so while the government couldn't legally say "You cannot utter this speech in Times Square, go utter it in an abandoned piece of farmland in Kansas," private companies can boot you from their platform until you're basically required to set up the entire infrastructure of an ISP to have any access to the Internet, and zero access to the public conversation.
• JesusChrist2020 6y ago
  No matter what rules you make, there are going to be grey areas. The reason we defer to the democratic system and the rule of law to make those decisions, is because the alternative is violence. If you feel strongly that some speech is too dangerous to allow, it is your responsibility to convince enough of your fellow citizens to support you. If you, instead, take the easy way, of simply imposing your will on others, then you are choosing to be a tyrant.
• Alex3917 6y ago
  Better than the alternative. Consider the r/nyc subreddit, where criticism of anything Jewish-related, no matter how minor, is usually instantly deleted. Whereas posts referring to black people as thugs and animals are allowed to stand. E.g. Google "site:reddit.com/r/nyc thugs"
  • augustt 6y ago
    Huh, there were lots of posts/comments about how the Hasidic community has dealt with coronavirus, mostly condemning them.
    • Alex3917 6y ago
      Yeah criticism of Hasidic jews is usually allowed to stand, because (as a generalization) non-Hasidic jews don't like Hasidic jews and see everything they do as an embarrassment. Maybe Unorthodox will change the perception somewhat, since it humanizes them even though it portrays them negatively.
• philwelch 6y ago
  > What about Paul Nehlen, a political candidate... If that despicable moron somehow got elected, I think there would be a public interest in keeping his statements available to the public. If for no other reason than to maintain the public record of him making those statements as an elected official. If President Trump told a journalist “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” and the journalist reported it, should social media censor that journalist? Of course not. Well in this case we don’t need the journalist because we can just see it ourselves. Social media can be, among many other things, a window into thoughts that public figures would not otherwise share without a significant filter in place. If elected officials actually want to live their private mental lives in that particular fishbowl, I sure as hell want to be able to keep an eye on them. > Social media is a not a public square where people can plant their soapbox Under California law there is an affirmative right to free speech even inside private shopping malls. So if your social media company is subject to California civil rights laws, the “private property” argument doesn’t hold up.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • michaelmrose 6y ago
    Pruneyard Shopping Ctr. v. Robin https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/447/74/#tab-opinion-1953647s https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/447/74/#tab-opin... held that parties could collect signatures for their political activity on mall property due to a provision in the CA state constitution or more generally that a state constitution could offer more protections than federal law or the US constitution provides. It found that it didn't represent a taking because passing out leaflets didn't substantially harm the mall. It found that the political speech was unlikely to be confused with the malls and that they could publicly disclaim such association thus it wasn't compelled speech. We can logically assume both of the above points are congruent with twitter so we can conclude that if CA or any other state provides a similar protection it ought to be applicable. What it notably did NOT say is that such speech on someone else's property was generally federally protected nor if I understand did it disclaim it. The next question is does CA law make banning people from your social platform an illegal infringement of citizens rights. So lets follow the same case back to CA. https://law.justia.com/cases/california/supreme-court/3d/23/899.html https://law.justia.com/cases/california/supreme-court/3d/23/... "The Agricultural Labor Relations Board opinion further observes that the power to regulate property is not static; rather it is capable of expansion to meet new conditions of modern life. Property rights must be "'redefined in response to a swelling demand that ownership be [23 Cal. 3d 907] responsible and responsive to the needs of the social whole. Property rights cannot be used as a shibboleth to cloak conduct which adversely affects the health, the safety, the morals, or the welfare of others.'" In context it is talking about the worthiness of restricting the property rights of owners by forcing them to allow speech on their property. In fact it calls out the fact that the increase in importance of places like malls makes the cause of allowing free speech there more worthy which is in line with the rise of importance of social media. Seems pretty clear that there isn't much daylight between allowing people to petition people for an offensive cause in a mall vs on twitter at least in California but while I reluctantly agree with you I have a few concerns. I'm concerned that in the short term our Orange dictator will end democracy as we know it and would prefer the matter of free speech to be litigated after we have averted the immediate threat and had the opportunity to decrease the power of the executive to decrease the chance of a similar situation. Given the time required for any court decision this seems inevitable. The court it seems would have found it an infringement on the property owners rights if the activity made say commercial activity at the property impossible. What kind of activity on a platform would be regarded as a taking? Electronic properties are a lot different from physical ones in this regard. - Is speech from a bot protected? Is it still protected if it pretends to be a bunch of fake people? - Is using someone else's platform to distribute ads protected? Does it matter if they are political ads? - Is Slander protected speech? Do we get to remove obvious to us slander or does it require a court to decide? - Is direct incitement to illegal activity allowed? - What about indirect incitement? Can I run ads for the purple haters club which aren't themselves directly offensive themselves but promote a group that everyone knows is all about promoting the murder of purple people? It seems like disclaimers on posts are the safest legal choice as they represent the owners own free speech rights. From the Supreme Court opinion "appellants are free to publicly dissociate themselves from the views of the speakers" It seems logical that other limits to your free speech on others property will logically be established to protect the integrity of the platform in the future. It would be better if the limits in question could meet one standard under law.
• gjs278 6y ago
  he should be fine. he broke no law.
• nine_k 6y ago
  Ideally all the speech, including every kind of speech you find disgusing, should be left as is, without censorship. As long as it's not anonymous, you can see who is who (even under screen names), and value other speech and actions of these people accordingly. For instance, it would be easy to let anyone know that Paul Nehlen is a racist, by pointing at these posts As a service owner, you could collapse and mark certain posts so that content offensive for most people won't jump in their eyes. Twitter does this. Unfortunately, this is not always possible. First, there are legal limitations (hate speech, libel, etc). Second, the public outrage: people actively want to destroy things they find offensive and wrong, and put pressure on the service's owners. This includes its employees and shareholders. Most people only tolerate free speech as long as it fits the confines of the Overton window. You have to have balls of steel and really good sources of money to explicitly and publicly tolerate anything beyond. Common carrier protections help here, too.
  • nine_k 6y ago
    (BTW I love how the downvotes confirm my point.)
• 1ark 6y ago
  > Social media is a not a public square Except, @jack has said publicly that is what Twitter wants to be.
• giardini 6y ago
  Why not let a fool be a fool? Why hide what someone is? All that does is create mystique about him. "Social media is a not a public square where people can plant their soapbox, it is a set of privately owned servers where people can persist small amounts of data that comply with a set of rules. " Certainly that is how it started. But the de facto power of social media's censorship and dominance in discourse will eventually bring government to regulate social media so as to preserve free speech.
  • michaelmrose 6y ago
    During the rise of Hitler somebody should have done something. I think putting a disclaimer on someones speech is a pretty tame and justifiable answer to doing something.