Trump Launches Website to Report Social Media Censorship

[Hanafuda]

I lol’d when Facebook said Louis Farrakhan was right wing.


And then there’s this.

https://mobile.twitter.com/HJJoyceE...xpressing-clinical-opinion-on-transgenderism/

 

[burial]

This should be fun.....more than conservatives/christians get censored. A lot of leftists and anti-religious people are silenced too.

But trump and his ilk are too fucking ignorant to understand that.

 

[FAST6191]

Amusing to see. Not sure how useful it will be in the end (it is a government directed website after all) but no objections to them trying.

Re: first amendment vs private companies. Most of the argument I saw was less about that and more about figuring out whether such sites wanted to be treated as a publisher or a data carrier. If they are a publisher then they are bound by certain rules but they also get certain abilities, if they are a carrier then they get safe harbour provisions but are more limited to mess with data. There was a fairly interesting 9th circuit court case a little while back -- http://fortune.com/2017/04/10/dmca-ruling-livejournal/ https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/04/ninth-circuit-sends-message-platforms-use-moderator-go-trial https://blogs.findlaw.com/ninth_circuit/2017/04/court-ruling-makes-dmca-safe-harbor-less-safe.html
It was also noted Facebook is embroiled either currently or recently in a couple of different cases where they are trying to claim each way as it benefits them for that case.

That said from what we have seen from facebook, twitter et al this last however long they can go fuck themselves with the proverbial rusty spork, even more than usual. I am not a fan of their censorious ways, and don't think it does a tiny bit of good other than make people think they have done something when if anything they have made it worse -- "sunlight, wonderful disinfectant", cool and mysterious sees it fester and linger. At the same time "it is the new public town square" holds little water for me, at least until they get something passed into law saying people have to sort things and thus own the space -- no way this humble little forum can deploy some kind of machine learning setup to monitor the place and if that is all but required... yeah.

Hopefully people come to see them for what they are and they go the way of myspace.

 

[Xzi]

Hilariously pointless. Social media sites are not beholden to the government or the first amendment. What's Trump going to do? Bitch at them via Twitter? He already does that.

 

[zomborg]

His approval rating is going up with me. Last time I checked the zomborg poll he was at an historic 67%

 

[Xzi]

Also wouldn't any enforcement action in this regard be infringing upon the business owners' rights? "Management reserves the right to refuse service to anyone" and all that. I thought Republicans were the pro-business party?

 

[notimp]

Also wouldn't any enforcement action in this regard be infringing upon the business owners' rights? "Management reserves the right to refuse service to anyone" and all that. I thought Republicans were the pro-business party?

Please remember that facebook doesnt want to see themselves as a media company. They refuse to do so. They tell anyone that tells them that "your content is outrageous (russian propaganda, 'legal' opioid ads, ...)" -- WE ARE JUST A COMMON CARRIER, the news is made by our independent contributors, we just push out everything to peoples feeds, thats fun to them.

IF YOU STILL havent grasped that facebook is an ad network - fuck you at this point, I mean show some grasp of reality. And if you are now concerned for freedom of speech rights for ad networks, what the eff..

You can be concerned for the freedom of speech for the 'independent contributers', but not for facebook or twitter for effs sake. Yeah, the 120 algorithm junkeys to sell the most ads, really care about speech. And a corporation is a natural person, with free speech rights, just because the law says so?

OH, I'm so very concerned about their freedom rights. I mean, they are only a monopoly so far. Lets all be worried about if they would show that constrain - entirely voluntarily.

But then again, I'm so over that platform.. Trump apparently isnt.

 

[SomeKindOfUsername]

By "Trump" you mean the conniving members of the GOP.

This isn't about freedom of speech or censorship, God knows it's not about the first amendment (how about them press passes?) or any other such freedoms. It's about preying on hurt feelings and victimhood, fear of a non-existent threat of a wide-scale silencing of opposing views, but perhaps most importantly it's about marketing and campaigning. This is good PR even if they aren't sincere and it gets people signed onto email lists.

 

[notimp]

By "Trump" you mean the conniving members of the GOP.

And by conniving do you mean - you are some nut, that thinks of politics, like their personal soap opera? As idk 30% of americans do?

Do you want to read "conniving" in headlines? Is that what you are missing?

 

[Hanafuda]

Also wouldn't any enforcement action in this regard be infringing upon the business owners' rights? "Management reserves the right to refuse service to anyone" and all that. I thought Republicans were the pro-business party?

I pretty much agree with you. Not because I'm pro business, but hey it's a free country (or it's supposed to be) and this doesn't have much (anything) to do with government infringing on free speech.

This story did bring a couple things to mind though. Again, not the government's business necessarily, but a punishing action based on a defamatory labeling of someone's speech as racist or 'hate speech' could theoretically be actionable as libel. At least when the banned person is not a public figure (celeb, politician), and particularly where the action could have damaging effects on one's career, etc. See the link I posted above, for example, about Twitter banning Ray Blanchard. His comments were posted as professional, clinical expert opinions on a subject. What he wrote might be disagreeable to some, but it certainly wasn't hate speech. I would certainly consider Twitter's ban a damaging character smear in that instance.

Another thing this made me think of is the so-called 'fairness doctrine' that keeps getting revived by Democrats every few years, i.e. legislation to force a balance of left/right voices on the radio. Yes, the airwaves are regulated by the FCC so there's government involvement. But is the internet really any different nowadays, functionally? I'd say social media sounding boards like Twitter and Facebook might even have a more significant role than 'the airwaves' now. If the fairness doctrine is sound policy from the Democrat perspective, why can't this be?

Just thinking out loud. My personal opinion is that if your kind of thinking isn't welcome by the owners of a privately-owned discussion board, small scale or large, then you don't belong there.

 

[SomeKindOfUsername]

And by conniving do you mean - you are some nut, that thinks of politics, like their personal soap opera? As idk 30% of americans do?

Do you want to read "conniving" in headlines? Is that what you are missing?

The only thing I'm thinking is how you need to work on your non sequiturs.

 

[slaphappygamer]

This is a great resource that will be forgotten in 3 months.

 

[piratesephiroth]

Hilariously pointless. Social media sites are not beholden to the government or the first amendment. What's Trump going to do? Bitch at them via Twitter? He already does that.

Yeah, remember when black people were forced to sit at the back of the bus. Private businesses so nothing wrong with that, right?

 

[SomeKindOfUsername]

Yeah, remember when black people were forced to sit at the back of the bus. Private businesses so nothing wrong with that, right?

Aren't most buses municipal?

Anyway, who's with me that GBATemp needs to stop deleting posts that openly link to piracy? Free speech and all that.

 

[Xzi]

Yeah, remember when black people were forced to sit at the back of the bus. Private businesses so nothing wrong with that, right?

That's more of a human rights issue than a free speech one. Banning someone from a site/forum (regardless of the reasoning) isn't quite on par with treating a whole race of people as second-class citizens, now is it?

 

[piratesephiroth]

Anyway, who's with me that GBATemp needs to stop deleting posts that openly link to piracy? Free speech and all that.

You should first ask the content owners not to come after gbatemp when they catch those links

That's more of a human rights issue than a free speech one. Banning someone from a site/forum (regardless of the reasoning) isn't quite on par with treating a whole race of people as second-class citizens, now is it?

it is similar when it's based on ideology or political alignnment.

 

[Xzi]

it is similar when it's based on ideology or political alignnment.

It's based on users breaking rules that were clearly defined for them when they created an account. It's not the business's fault if the user decides not to read those rules, they still have the right to enforce said rules.

To compare low-level internet drama to the civil rights movement is absolutely absurd.

 

[piratesephiroth]

It's based on users breaking rules that were clearly defined for them when they created an account. It's not the business's fault if the user decides not to read those rules, they still have the right to enforce said rules.

To compare low-level internet drama to the civil rights movement is absolutely absurd.

Nope, they're openly silencing conservative voices worldwide.
They learned their lesson after Trump and other anti-establishment politicians rose to power thanks to social media.

Now they're making sure this won't ever happen again, directly engaging in election meddling.

https://www.rt.com/news/457660-twitter-bans-tommy-sargon/

 

[supersonicwaffle]

millions of eyes rolling unconrollably.

because that's the type of problem that -TRULY- requires the president to launch a website to take action...
i hope people use it to report actual problems, like that suicide plan for the economy...

Everyone: social media is extremely important to our democratic process. It's so powerful that foreign governments use it to interfere with elections

The Left: let's do a two year witch hunt to see if the current president conspired with foreign governments to manipulate people on social media.

The Right: let's collect data. People have been banned from social media, we need to figure out whether we need to protect access because it's become so important to the democratic process.

The Left: millions of eyes rolling uncontrollably. "Don't we have real problems?"


I guess you described TDS symptoms quite well.

 

[notimp]

Just out of interest who of you knows the difference between a media outlet, and a common carrier?

Just because I'm amazed how many people think of facebook as literally anything - but what they actually are. But isnt that the platform where I get all my free news, family pictures, coupons and personalized ads? No - moron, thats the platform that doesnt care about anything anyone does, unless it scares off advertisers, or makes you share less of the data they sell. Thats literally it. They dont employ any journalists. And if they employ censors, they are sitting in banglasch and the philippines, apart from a token office with graffiti somewhere in Palo Alto.

You are worried about their freedom of speech? The companies that literally are "the internet" and free short messages - to large parts of the world.

I mean - f*ck.

And by the way, you love them, because of emotional attribution. Grandma sees her grandchildren there. Grandma can boast with her grandchildren there. Grand ma can become important in a useless facebook group. And her grandson checks out girls there, then uses whatsapp to call them over. We all love facebook. Does it have to do anything with what they are producing? If it isnt the newsfeed (algorithmically created, so you spend as much time on the platform as possible) - no. Free speech for facebook...