cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/56719476
Italy fined Cloudflare 14.2 million euros for refusing to block access to pirate sites on its 1.1.1.1 DNS service, the country’s communications regulatory agency, AGCOM, announced yesterday. Cloudflare said it will fight the penalty and threatened to remove all of its servers from Italian cities.
Based. Censorship no bueno
What about censoring neo Nazis? What about banning Trump from Twitter?
You need to read and understand about the Paradox of Intolerance, it’s really important.
What government entity does Twitter represent?
To the people that don’t get it. Censorship is when the government oppresses or modifies speech.
What the user above is talking about is when social media companies like Twitter banned Donald Trump and neo-nazi accounts.
Social media companies are private entities that you have a contract with where they provide you with service and you agree to abide by specific terms of that service. Hate speech and promotion of violence are things that you have agreed to not do on their services. If you do those things, then you agreed that your account could be terminated. That is what happened to Trump and the neo-nazi accounts (but I repeat myself).
I can agree that social media companies have too much power over public interaction and media consumption but I also agree that a person or organization should not be forced to host and broadcast messages that they disagree with.
Ironically, this standing legal interpretation is due to a right-wing lawsuit widely celebrated on the religious right about a cake baker who didn’t want to make wedding cakes for a gay wedding. The ruling is what affirmed the ability of private entities to regulate speech on their platforms.
Complaining about being banned from a public platform and also celebrating the victory of the cake baker is a situation where their side wants to have their cake and eat it too.
People seems to be fine with corporate censorship, but government censorship is somehow a no-no. I don’t get it. Corporate censorship is still censorship, but it’s now worse. Because you have now given up democratic control of what to censor, and let the tech billionaires have free reign over it. Twitter could ban Trump today, and promote fascism tomorrow and you’d have no say. (oh waiiit, that actually happened?!?!). If you think twitter banning Trump in 2021 is a good thing, why won’t you want the power to vote to ban Trump?
I could be wrong, I am open to change my mind, but please give me a good counter-argument.
Corporate censorship is not illegal. If you come to my house spouting Nazi rhetoric I have ever right to call you out on it and kick you out of my house.
There are laws deliberately protecting the people’s right to free speech that is not infringed by the government.
Now if you want to talk about how we should remove companies/corps rights as entities, we can have the conversation.
Trump was banned from Twitter and it was a good thing because it was them enforcing their TOS/EULA rules in a reasonable manner that doesn’t play favorites. Because the average person like you or me couldn’t say a lot of what Trump said on the platform and not get banned.
That doesn’t mean Twitter is a good company. There are no good companies. Corporations are not your friend. But they also aren’t government entities and they shouldn’t be. So if the state wants to sponsor the internet as a utility it can create its own cloudflare-like service for the purpose of DNS blocking and block whatever it wants. But cloudflare isn’t a state sponsored utility. It’s a corp. It has every right (whether you agree it should have rights or not) to not operate in countries it doesn’t want to operate in.
Your thinking is so calcified by the specific laws of the united states of America it is frustrating. Laws are written by mere mortals like you and me. When those bunch of dudes wrote the Constitution more than two hundred years ago, they couldn’t have imagined the internet in theirs wildest dreams. And that’s without pointing out that the reason they valued absolute freedom of speech so much can be largely attributed to the historical backdrop at the time.
A long time has passed, something better is possible. It’s time to think again from first principles.
ineffective, disastrous, & still no bueno. better to educate & discredit their weak reasoning.
Censorship is, at best, a band-aid. And they can always find ways around it. The best solution isn’t to block them from view temporarily, but to teach people to evaluate what they say with empathy and critical thinking.
That is, of course, difficult to accomplish. But then again, there’s no easy solutions, only easy excuses.
The “you don’t need to censor fascists, bigots, racists, etc., you just have to be louder than them” idea hadn’t worked. The world had decades to make it work but didn’t succeed. It is ideologically pure, I’ll give you that. Really nice if you can drive those bad people out without dirtying your own hands with censorship. But I have lost confidence that that approach can ever work.
A lot of people don’t seem to remember Alex Jones getting banned from YouTube in 2018. While rightwing, ultra-MAGA’s were already a thing, they were relatively small compared today. Alex Jones was the first high profile ban from social media and it was like tossing gasoline onto a small bush fire.
You have to remember that Trump did not win the first time because he had an army of fanatics. A lot of other factors were at play; from people still upset about the DNC’s snubbing of Bernie, to people who weren’t fully paying attention (remember, politics used to be boring), to people who voted for Trump simply “for the lols” (don’t discount this last group, any historical account that doesn’t factor in how important internet memes were to getting that man elected is being willfully ignorant) . Die-hard MAGA’s were relatively rare, and usually a source of ridicule.
Until their spokespeople started getting banned from places. It seems so small by today’s standards. People get banned and deplatformed all the time. But Alex Jones was the first real incident, and people saw it as a massive attack on free speech. To his relatively small number of followers, the man had his free speech rights violated by the left-wing news cabal for daring to speak the TRUTH™. Suddenly, all their bullshit was justified.
I’ve always been pretty far-left but I got a deep chill when that happened. I remember remarking to my friends that banning political speech, no matter how full of shit, would only cause problems in the long run, and so it has. Precedent was broken, and the right took it as a declaration of war. I truly believe things would not have gotten nearly as insane as they are had Google not decided to ban him. He deserved it, but they opened a door that couldn’t be shut again; and following this was a couple years of high-profile bans of rightwing figureheads and safe-spaces, all cumulating to the shut down of /r/theDonald in 2020. And the infection, which had been contained to a few small corners of the internet, suddenly exploded.
Popular culture became complacent by over-relying on censorship instead of openly educating, criticizing, and discrediting idiots as was effectively done before with deference to free speech values.
I really cannot follow the argument. In Germany, we have a law making it illegal to deny the holocaust. People will say that seven million jews never died, and the police will investigate them, they are taken to court and put into prison if necessary.
Nothing bad ever came from this. We simply get to put one specific kind of asshole into prison if they spread lies to sow hatred.
Except everything bad that came from it? That’s some serious selective attention.