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Unfortunately, this isn't just a question of how much governments should interfere, but the manner in which they should. Some analogue to eviction rights is a

Unfortunately, this isn't just a question of how much governments should interfere, but the manner in which they should. Some analogue to eviction rights is a fantastic idea. But the political winds are trending sharply in the other direction, pushing more responsibility onto services for aggressive enforcement of what people say or do on their platforms. In an ideal world, the guilty would be rapidly and firmly dealt with while the innocent would be protected, but this is a million miles from the reality of how enforcement at scale works. It's a game of false positives vs false negatives, and we've recently been steering hard in the direction of diminishing user protections. If I hadn't paid attention for the last ten years, it'd be astonishing that begging for corporate overlords to be more heavy-handed was coming from the _left_, of all places.

edgyquant 5y ago
>If I hadn't paid attention for the last ten years, it'd be astonishing that begging for corporate overlords to be more heavy-handed was coming from the _left_, of all places. It is not coming from the left. Liberals, left and right leaning, are demanding corporations take responsibility but the _left_ are not liberals (in fact, go to any leftist message board and ask them what they think of liberals.)
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  You seem to be saying that the left, by definition, can't be in support of censorship et al. I don't see how this follows: in fact, I feel the exact same way about _liberals_. Individual negative rights are definitionally liberal values, while being on the left (or right) is obviously compatible with authoritarianism. More empirically (though anecdotally), I happen to have a decent amount of exposure to honest-to-god self-identified Communists and left-anarchists, the type of people who talk about praxis and casually mention revolution, including a good handful in my social circles (though none that i'm extra-close with). While they're dismissive of the prissier, more superficial forms of identity politics that many moderate leftists enjoy performing, they're often openly dismissive of liberal values. While their preference is for regulation, they're fully in support of forcing platforms to more heavily engage in banning and censorship of undesirables (or as you and they put it, "take responsibility" for making the platform "safe"), presumably as a strategic move.
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    I literally never claimed that. I said that it isn't the left pushing for censorship from corporations because the left almost entirely hates corporations more than liberals or the political right do.

edgyquant 5y ago

>If I hadn't paid attention for the last ten years, it'd be astonishing that begging for corporate overlords to be more heavy-handed was coming from the _left_, of all places. It is not coming from the left. Liberals, left and right leaning, are demanding corporations take responsibility but the _left_ are not liberals (in fact, go to any leftist message board and ask them what they think of liberals.)

wutbrodo 5y ago
You seem to be saying that the left, by definition, can't be in support of censorship et al. I don't see how this follows: in fact, I feel the exact same way about _liberals_. Individual negative rights are definitionally liberal values, while being on the left (or right) is obviously compatible with authoritarianism. More empirically (though anecdotally), I happen to have a decent amount of exposure to honest-to-god self-identified Communists and left-anarchists, the type of people who talk about praxis and casually mention revolution, including a good handful in my social circles (though none that i'm extra-close with). While they're dismissive of the prissier, more superficial forms of identity politics that many moderate leftists enjoy performing, they're often openly dismissive of liberal values. While their preference is for regulation, they're fully in support of forcing platforms to more heavily engage in banning and censorship of undesirables (or as you and they put it, "take responsibility" for making the platform "safe"), presumably as a strategic move.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  I literally never claimed that. I said that it isn't the left pushing for censorship from corporations because the left almost entirely hates corporations more than liberals or the political right do.