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Well our laws and legal traditions are a bit different than Germany’s Basic Law and Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch. In our case Twitter’s private property rights trum
by SllX 6y ago
Well our laws and legal traditions are a bit different than Germany’s Basic Law and Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch.
In our case Twitter’s private property rights trump the President’s rights. The President is the President and the President can always get a message out if he wants; Twitter on the other hand is not obligated to serve as a medium of Government communications and if they had IP banned the White House and Capitol at any point in their history, and maybe IP banned the equivalents in other countries, who would be able to say they couldn’t?
- fastball 6y agoYes, but I think the problem is more that we have a massively connected society but are relying on the good will of corporations to provide that connectivity.
- AniseAbyss 6y agoRepubs always hated public broadcasting, championing the free market to take care of journalism. Companies think Trump is toxic for their brand- surprised pikachu.
- fastball 6y agoI'm not really championing public broadcasting here either. But in an internet-enabled world, in a country that values the right to free speech, there should be wholly unbiased platform that allows anyone to promote their speech to anyone else who wants to listen, as long as it is not speech that is already considered illegal (as decided by the courts, not unnamed corporate arbiters of truth). People keep making the argument that "free speech isn't the same as right to have a platform / be signal boosted" or whatever, and I think that was true in the past. When the most you could do to broadcast was stand on the street corner and yell out your speech, that idea applied. But in this day and age, information flow is so strong that someone who has their broadcasting ability cut off effectively has their speech cut off. Imagine trying to exercise your free speech in a world where, whenever you tried to say something, there was someone there to just yell 1000x louder than you so that you were totally drowned out. In a world where so much of our communication is happening over internet channels, this is essentially what we're talking about when we "deplatform" someone.
- shuntress 6y agoIt is still possible to register a domain name, run a web host, and present your speech to the unbiased, (nearly) global, public internet. If you will indulge a bit of doomsaying, three recent trends should be more worrying to you: - The current administration's actions against net neutrality - ISP terms of use clauses against running any kind of server on "residential" connections - "unlimited [insert streaming service] included!" data plans Debate over where twitter should ban any users is wasteful bike-shedding in the conversation around modern communication.
- edmundsauto 6y agoAre you familiar with the comedy of horrors that late night public access broadcast was? Not saying it shouldn't be done, but let's set realistic expectations: nobody is going to want to use a government website to exercise their speech, especially because of the types of speech it will be used by. (Unappealing, basically.)
- SllX 6y agoPart of life is that unless you live miles from others and hunt, forage and fish, you are pretty much always relying on the goodwill of others. I don’t want to start designating some corporations as special just because we happen to like their service a lot, and part of just how unspecial they are is they remain mere private entities carrying out their own activities including enforcing their own property rights.