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Twitter permanently bans Project Veritas account
- mensetmanusman 6y agoThe Panama Papers have personnel information. I wonder if they will ban CNN next.
- mc32 6y agoI guess journalists will have to practice the art of [REDACTED] a little more going forward when they reveal details around corruption. The mayor of [REDACTED] was found to have sent mr. [REDACTED] wire transfers in an attempt to keep a lid on exposing her relationship with [REDACTED] while being married to [REDACTED].
- adamcstephens 6y agoThey already banned the New York Post for content they didn’t like.
- LocalH 6y agoI can't wait until social norms change again down the road, and the right uses this newfound power of consorship and control to dominate. I mean, it'll suck, no doubt. But it'll also be just desserts for the destroyers of freedom.
- acdha 6y agoYou mean it’s now a right-wing idea that private companies aren’t allowed to decide who they want to do business with? This isn’t really a right vs. left issue: it’s not like they lost their account for tweeting about lowering the capital gains tax rate or something. This is an organization which weaponized bad faith attacks. The only reason it seems politicized now is that there isn’t broad support for that kind of dishonesty outside of far-right circles.
- slackfan 6y agoThey're doing exactly the same type of yellow journalism that the NYT and CNN is doing, just with a bend you happen to not agree with. Nothing far-right about that.
- moistbar 6y agoAnd that makes it ok? Do you happen to know for sure that OP is accepting of the things that the New York Times and CNN do as well?
- slackfan 6y agoEither you have free press and open platforms, or you don't.
- moistbar 6y agoThat's not my point. My point is that you're assuming OP is on board with those things as well, which is something you can't prove. You've made a strawman argument about someone you've never met and know nothing about.
- acdha 6y agoThat’s a very big claim conspicuously made with no supporting evidence. In particular, misleading editing and entrapment is all Project Veritas does. You can find individual journalists who betrayed their audience’s trust, although rarely so badly, but you know about them because they get fired, not promoted. This is true across the political spectrum – CNN, Fox News, NPR, NYT, WSJ, etc. all have their biases but they’re all qualitatively better than someone whose business is based on deliberately editing video to mislead in service of a political narrative. The fact that some right wing people see ethics rules as an attack on their politics is disturbing but it’s only saying something about their values.
- anonRepub12345 6y ago
- cecja 6y agoIn the same vain as the right I hope you die you useless piece of shit.
- tootahe45 6y agoLooks like selective enforcement.
- slackfan 6y agoThe deafening silence in these comments is telling of how boned free speech proper actually is. Hope you all are enjoying the "free speech for me, but not for thee" attitude of this neo-feudalism that we live in.
- adamcstephens 6y agoWe don’t let the democratically elected government ban speech but unaccountable private corporations are free to censor. These problems aren’t easy, and while I’ve lessened my free speech absolutism a tiny bit, I’m still quite concerned. We have to find a better way.
- slackfan 6y agoConsidering the media propping up stories about how free speech is unnecessary and barbaric in our new and modern society, and making censorship a cultural norm - giving an inch is more than giving a mile.
- JuliusPullo 6y agoIn any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.
- dmwallin 6y agoYes, we don’t let our government, with the tools of state violence and the exclusive right to imprison us, ban speech. However, groups of private citizens, whose powers over the marketplace are/can be heavily limited through existing laws such as antitrust law, enforced by our democratically elected government have no requirement to carry speech they disagree with. It’s surprising to me how quickly the Big Business/Small Government Republican Party switched as soon as they realized that big businesses don’t always have their interests in mind. I suggest looking over to the far left, as they have been discussing ways to curb power of large businesses for decades and also have a healthy respect of the dangers of giving the government too much power as the frequent target of said powers.
- kderbyma 6y agoTwitter has become a joke. literally a twisted bastardized joke that only communists and fascists like.
- mc32 6y agoHow long before hard hitting independent journalists like Greenwald and others who publish regardless of who it exposes and inconveniences start seeing their voices silenced and only approved voices get to tiptoe and publish banalities along with special daggers for non conformers? Twitter needs to be renamed Pravda unironically.
- slackfan 6y agoGreenwald's already been booted out of his own media org that he founded. Private corporations & all that.
- g_sch 6y agoHe resigned after they refused to run one of his articles as written. I think this is an important distinction because other journalists have been fired for their speech, but he wasn't one of them.
- idealism 6y agoA media corporation that doesn’t want the bad PR around firing their most recognized employee (and co-founder in this case) need only make the life so difficult for that person that they quit in protest. The ol’ “cold shoulder” routine. Some people would say “Yep! No foul play! He left totally of his own volition!” while others, not playing this corrupt PR game, will see it as the same thing as firing.
- chrononaut 6y ago> Twitter needs to be renamed Pravda unironically. Equating Twitter to Pravda is the same extreme hyperbole as people who equate GOP to Nazis. Last I checked Twitter is not a state-run operation that will arrest or kill people who report information that it doesn't agree with.
- autoditype 6y ago> Last I checked Twitter is not a state-run operation that will arrest or kill people who report information that it doesn't agree with. This isn't Pravda, that was KGB. Pravda is a better analogy as it was a newspaper. Your comment just flamed with additional hyperbole. There's no need for that here
- kasperni 6y agoI'm all for free speech. But do we really need to confront public figures in front of their own home and post it on the Internet? I think everyone would be concerned, especially if you have a family. I do think people have right to some privacy especially concerning their own home.
- MrRiddle 6y agoHow is this different from paparazzi and celebrities? Why should Facebook executives who work hard to remove privacy from their users, enjoy the same from comfort of their home?
- dbuder 6y agoYes, these people make decisions that effect a huge number of lives and they should be held to account, if they will not respond to electronic communication or talk on the phone then it is traditional journalism to track them down and put those questions to them.
- underseacables 6y agoThat depends on who you ask. The left thinks it’s perfectly OK to a cost someone at dinner, and harass them out of the restaurant. The right does not seem to believe in this tactic. Personally I think that we should all be able to sit and eat in a restaurant in peace, and should not have pitchfork mob standing outside of our homes, but that is a video absolutely rejected by the left and I think it’s very dangerous.
- TheIronYuppie 6y agoI am in awe at people who say “market forces should rule everything “ and then in the same breath say “government has a responsibility to enforce that a private organization must allow everyone to use their platform in an arbitrary way”. No one was arrested. No one was silenced. Project Veritas could send an email out with the information to all their subscribers completely legally (assuming they weren’t breaking federal law by doxxing people). If I was mod of a knitting forum and had a public policy of never allowing people to talk about Tom Brady, and someone did so, I could ban the person. That’s not censorship, that’s me kicking someone out of my (and only my) community. They can still talk all they want.
- tekproxy 6y agoI completely agree. When Twitter acts like this, it leaves money on the table for competition. You don't need to give the government more power. The rich will just hook into that power. Imo, the real story is Parler getting banned just as it was poised to become competition.
- thu2111 6y agoSure, until Gmail decides to block emails from Project Veritas. I don't think it makes sense for governments to pass laws saying tech firms must serve everyone. It would be too hard to word such laws properly, and there would inevitably be many bad side effects (e.g. making it harder to build new services). What we're seeing here is a slipping social consensus that ideas and debate are valuable and the fix is to re-establish that consensus. It's hard to know if this is really some sort of creeping authoritarianism taking over the world, or if it's more like panicked and flailing scattergunning by social classes that are losing control of the global narrative, whose corruption, shallowness and stupidity are being increasingly exposed by people demanding higher standards than those classes feel they can meet. Their old approach of simply assuming that people in positions of authority are competent and correct is falling apart, as anything those authorities say or do is immediately dissected by an army of contrarians who are frequently better informed and sharper than they and their media defenders are. The things I associate with Veritas are recordings with Googlers revealing things the firm would prefer to keep hidden, and the recordings where they revealed that some US news reports on COVID were faked (e.g. the news channel got staff at a COVID clinic to get in their cars and make fake queues to make it appear the clinics were busy). These are things that should have been brought to light, and bringing them to light was a valuable public service. I'm sure Twitter have some excuse for this, but I feel no surprise it's come to this. Tech firms are increasingly dominated by people who don't respect their own users, people who believe the world would be a better place if the clock could be rewound to a time when everyone believed everything said by the New York Times or the BBC. I'm doubtful they can pull that rewinding off.
- Shadonototro 6y agohow can they promote bitcoin and on other hand play the censorship card the amount of propaganda from the USA and the big tech companies is infuriating to be honest we are heading towards a very very bad and unhealthily long and dark road if you ask me
- underseacables 6y agoI’m sad to see this happen. I don’t know what the right answer is for undercover and hidden cameras, but exposing possible corruption should be a mainstay of all journalistic endeavors.