"complex enough" bah, this is just a white flag. sure wave it all you want, many folks think the "terms of surrender" are reasonable enough etc. Its sort of like the "enshittification" trend applied to philosophy lol its a nice gesture for dang to do the "both sides" thing but I just lump that in with memes like "<candidate> tells it like it is" when in reality what <candidate> says is just crazy talk.

not everything is so unverifiable that the only choice left is to view everything through <candidates> goggles.

Also coming to mind is some other recent Techdirt,

> Dear Senators Klobuchar & Lujan: Now Do You See Why Letting HHS Censor “Misinformation” Is A Terrible Idea?

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/11/20/dear-senators-klobuchar-...

Because facts are at best malleable and at worst disinformation, and what seems about to happen with HHS seems like some seriously dangerous alt-facts.

I'm making a leap in domain here, but also alas, Trump is already about facing on any pretense of things like journalistic shield laws. This government seems so intent on pursuing a very specific narrow interpretation of facts, and doing incredibly bad things to people who have ever said otherwise.

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/11/25/trump-orders-republicans...

We saw your observations on the phrase "free speech" in action when Mr Musk purchased Twitter. One of his stated goals as a "free speech absolutist" was to bring "free speech" back to Twitter. Now, Mr Musk boosts his own tweets, sells blue checks to bots, which boosts their tweets. All to virtually "shout down" any opposing opinions

I used to be a fan of the idea of places with absolute free speech. The problem is that repeatedly, in practice, these places suck. It is not an idea that scales. Once a place is larger a single friend-group that can ostracize any assholes, the assholes show up and start being assholes. You either moderate them, or everyone else leaves except assholes and people who are highly tolerant of assholes. This isn't something that's happened once, it happens repeatedly.

That doesn't mean that the horrifying sterile nature of youtube is great. There are acceptable in-betweens, it just won't happen while the internet mostly consists of corporate giants that don't want to spend the money for real moderation.

> it rubs me the wrong way that there's not really an equivalent of public spaces in the online world.

The internet is public by nature.

You can setup your website, blog, mastodon, irc, email newsletter, ftp, news, discord…

Endless possibilities to post whatever you want - why do you want to do it on my blog ?

I always thought this scotus case was interesting and relevant to the question of “can a private space count as a public square?”. Clearly in some way it can. Curious what a real lawyer or constitutional scholar has to say about this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...

>I find it weird how many people are happy to defend unchecked corporate power when it comes to this issue. The lack of any guardrails on moderation is why

It's not weird at all. We've already seen some places try to have little or no moderation, and the result isn't pretty: 4chan, and today's Xitter immediately come to mind. Shitty people and trolls take over, driving everyone else out, because who wants to read all that shit constantly?

Leaving the moderation to some corporation might not be ideal (look what happened with Reddit), but it's better than no moderation at all. At least with corporate-run moderation, if we don't like it, we can go somewhere else. What the "free speech absolutionists" are trying to do will just end up ruining ALL online spaces, so we have nowhere to go, except perhaps online spaces entirely operated in foreign countries where they don't subscribe to this idiocy.

Under Carr and his ilk, social media is not going to become a public square. They don't want fairness or equality: they want attention, regardless of whether people actually want to give it to them.

I like to think of it this way: we all have freedom of speech, but don’t we also have the freedom not to listen to it? People think their freedom of speech is diminished in cases where the reality is the audience doesn’t care for it and removes it from their view. There’s not a single opinion out there you can’t find somewhere online. Freedom of speech is as grand as it’s ever been. The complaint is isn’t some don’t get a say in their piece; it’s that people have signed up to media outlets in which they don’t have to put up with listening to i. It’s not some secret agenda Facebook blocks, say, racist content. They just don’t want it on their feeds and, yeah, honestly, they don’t think their user base being constantly offended and, frankly, bullied is what’s being asked of them to provide. 4Chan is there for those who want that sort of thing. Most people don’t want it.

I’ve never had to read a book I didn’t want to, or watch a movie I didn’t care for, so why is it suddenly every right-wing pundit’s right to have an audience with me? Im sick of being forced to listen to these people

  At what point will it be universally understood that "free speech" is only legally binding when a person is speaking with the government.

  Bluesky can implement any moderation policies they want, and it will never violate "free speech" laws.

Would that be legal for Bluesky, assuming no coercion from any government actors?

Given how little the US invests in public education, probably never

> private corporation like Twitter/X, Facebook, and now Bluesky can implement any moderation policies they want, and it will never violate "free speech" laws

Simply not true in the state of California where most of these companies are based.

According to the CA supreme Court, you have a right to free speech on private property that is regularly available for public use.

By that metric all of these companies are blatantly violating the constitution of their home state.

> At what point will it be universally understood that "free speech" is only legally binding when a person is speaking with the government

That is not what "free speech" means, that is what current US free speech laws does. Free speech itself include all censorship from big organizations, regardless if it is a government or not, the important part is if you have large organized censoring then its against free speech.

So it is totally valid to say you want to protect free speech by limiting the ability for large corporations to censor people.

And him saying NBC could lose it's license for giving airtime to Trump's opponents...? Where does that land?

Andersen says a lot of things. Who were the political opponents that were “debanked”? I’m looking for names here, along with actual citations.

Can we stop with the {ignore the current issue} + {point at something else} two-step?

I realize partisan news has normalized that method of discourse, but it's a boring and braindead way to argue.

In the real world, the existence of other bad things doesn't make a particular bad thing disappear.

This was my first thought. It's rich to see the media magically switch gears and be concerned about censorship when it's been happening for years under the Biden administration.

Insinuating that Biden had anything to do with Trumps FBI warning Facebook that Russia was spreading propaganda in 2020 is something..

> Everyone, and I mean everyone, regardless of their personal political views, wants to silence people they disagree with

Pure projection.

Filtering out trolls, passive aggressive jerkoffs, and outright verbal abuse is everyone's right. Musk (and Dorsey) believe those people have a "right" to do those things without being muted.

Right.