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Ken White ("Popehat") wrote a recent essay on what it typically means when a company promotes their support for "free speech". He wrote it about Substack, but I

Ken White ("Popehat") wrote a recent essay on what it typically means when a company promotes their support for "free speech". He wrote it about Substack, but I think it applies equally well to Rumble. https://popehat.substack.com/p/substack-has-a-nazi-opportunity https://popehat.substack.com/p/substack-has-a-nazi-opportuni...

yareal 3y ago
It's absolutely purely a monetary choice. Rumble isn't any more principled than any other free speech platform, they still moderate plenty of stuff that they find disagreeable. It's a very American sense of "free speech" that allows for Nazis and forbids video that contains any topless people. (Which, if you've been to many parts of the world, is not at all obscene.) They also ban this: > You may not post or transmit any messages pertaining to charity requests, petitions for signatures, requesting donations, relating to pyramid schemes, or pertaining to the manipulation of the Rumble Service. "Hey, can you sign my petition" sure seems like a cornerstone of free speech... surprised to see it considered against the rules by a supposed "principled" company.
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gorwell 3y ago
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- logicchains 3y ago
  >Clever how censors have convinced people that they are the good guys It's not that clever; they control all the information and ideas that a significant fraction of the population are exposed to, it'd be surprising if they didn't manage to paint themselves in a positive light.
- jevoten 3y ago
  Unless it's censorship [1] they don't like, in which case they call it book-burning. And we all know who burned books, don't we? [1] The bar to be called that can be as low or high as needed. Book publishers, online stores, credit cards, and social media platforms banning a person can be just "freedom of association", but not giving government support to a work by placing it in school libraries is censorship. You can take a guess at how many books that Amazon won't sell are on school library shelves. Yet that's not censorship.
  - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    > we all know who burned books, don't we? Everybody. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_book-burning_incidents#Cold_War_era_and_1990s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_book-burning_incidents... There are instances of books being burned for pragmatic, non-ideological reasons. But generally, reactionary ideology seems to top the charts.
    - a1369209993 3y ago
      > And it's not always a reactionary act. It's sometimes for pragmatic reasons - to prevent or curtail a non-ideological issue. Literally all of the examples in #Cold_War_era_and_1990s either were explicitly ideological, or seem plausibly likely to have been ideological, and the latter are all along the lines of "Well, they might have had a personal grudge against the author." or "We don't have any idea why they commited arson against a library.". Do you have any specific examples of attempted curtailment of a non-ideological issue? (No, "but our ideology is RIGHT!" doesn't count; denying people that shortcut is more or less the point of free speech.)
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canadiantim 3y ago
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yareal 3y ago

It's absolutely purely a monetary choice. Rumble isn't any more principled than any other free speech platform, they still moderate plenty of stuff that they find disagreeable. It's a very American sense of "free speech" that allows for Nazis and forbids video that contains any topless people. (Which, if you've been to many parts of the world, is not at all obscene.) They also ban this: > You may not post or transmit any messages pertaining to charity requests, petitions for signatures, requesting donations, relating to pyramid schemes, or pertaining to the manipulation of the Rumble Service. "Hey, can you sign my petition" sure seems like a cornerstone of free speech... surprised to see it considered against the rules by a supposed "principled" company.

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gorwell 3y ago

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logicchains 3y ago
>Clever how censors have convinced people that they are the good guys It's not that clever; they control all the information and ideas that a significant fraction of the population are exposed to, it'd be surprising if they didn't manage to paint themselves in a positive light.
jevoten 3y ago
Unless it's censorship [1] they don't like, in which case they call it book-burning. And we all know who burned books, don't we? [1] The bar to be called that can be as low or high as needed. Book publishers, online stores, credit cards, and social media platforms banning a person can be just "freedom of association", but not giving government support to a work by placing it in school libraries is censorship. You can take a guess at how many books that Amazon won't sell are on school library shelves. Yet that's not censorship.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  > we all know who burned books, don't we? Everybody. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_book-burning_incidents#Cold_War_era_and_1990s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_book-burning_incidents... There are instances of books being burned for pragmatic, non-ideological reasons. But generally, reactionary ideology seems to top the charts.
  - a1369209993 3y ago
    > And it's not always a reactionary act. It's sometimes for pragmatic reasons - to prevent or curtail a non-ideological issue. Literally all of the examples in #Cold_War_era_and_1990s either were explicitly ideological, or seem plausibly likely to have been ideological, and the latter are all along the lines of "Well, they might have had a personal grudge against the author." or "We don't have any idea why they commited arson against a library.". Do you have any specific examples of attempted curtailment of a non-ideological issue? (No, "but our ideology is RIGHT!" doesn't count; denying people that shortcut is more or less the point of free speech.)

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canadiantim 3y ago

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