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I 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

I 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 ago
I 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 ago
Sure, 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.
cudgy 6y ago
Did you feel the same way about Greenpeace and their tactics?
- TheIronYuppie 6y ago
  Such as?

tekproxy 6y ago

I 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 ago

Sure, 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.

cudgy 6y ago

Did you feel the same way about Greenpeace and their tactics?

TheIronYuppie 6y ago
Such as?