Freedoom of expression

@thence said in #8:
> Exactly! If one is willing to replace the "public square" by medias which are owned by private companies whose main purpose is to make profit, then one shouldn't complain of the consequences on "freedom of speech", propaganda, and the political life.

No, you didnt got the point. There is no such thing as freedom of speech in social media. You just can be banned, even if you didnt said or did anything at all.

You might say unpopular stuff in (actual) public forums, the consequence is that you might defame yourself, or some one says something nasty to you, cancel you, whatever, BUT you CANNOT be silenced, you cannot even be touched nor assaulted, there are legal consequences to the ones taking action. Banning you from social media is the analogy of putting you in a gag and restraints, and repeating, even if you said nothing at all, its all subjective to the mod. Again, there is no freedom of speech in social media, and they have no legal liability for silencing you by "force".

Your picture is not a good analogy at all, its not even an analogy.

@potterchess said in #5:
> Actually, the comic is misleading. Constitutional Rights aren't simply things the government cannot restrict. One example is the debate about whether social media platforms are "public forums" or "publishers".

They're obviously publishers.

It's the people's own fault they decided to leave the public forums and instead flock to the publishers. And to top the stupidity off, to have everybody congregate on like 5 social media instead of using like 30.000 smaller ones like it was before roughly 2010.

When people left the forums for Social Media the choice was like

A) Hey we can use 30.000 forums so it doesn't matter if a forum owner goes nuts and bans people he doesn't like or whatever, because you can just switch the place.

B) We can just use 5 Social Meda so that the owners will have tremendous power over us and can treat us like shit and we'll just have to take it because there's no place else to go.

"Well B looks like it's by far the dumbest thing we can do here, so B it is!."

"Also after we picked B we're going to not remember what we decided because we're dumb and then pretend it was not US that killed the 30.000 forums and handed power to the 5 Social Media on a silver platter."

I still think it was SO stupid evertbody went to the SoMe pages and didn't stay on the forums. So many problems came because of that.

@thence said in #8:
> Exactly! If one is willing to replace the "public square" by medias which are owned by private companies whose main purpose is to make profit, then one shouldn't complain of the consequences on "freedom of speech", propaganda, and the political life.

Yeah.

It's like, you can either demonstrate in a public street or in Disneyland, and then people pick to do it in Disnelyand and then get all surprised to find out that Disneyland can kick you out if they don't like your demonstration.

What an unbelievably pretentious comic. Please bring this "holier than thou" mindset somewhere else. Funny how the same people who preach these messages are also the most intolerant people on the planet.

It's not that they are showing you the door - it's more like they are shoving you through it. Then, placing locks upon locks upon the door. Then calling the police to arrest you for having an opinion.

Unfortunate.

@Neco_Arc_Lurking said in #14:
> What an unbelievably pretentious comic. Please bring this "holier than thou" mindset somewhere else. Funny how the same people who preach these messages are also the most intolerant people on the planet.
>
> It's not that they are showing you the door - it's more like they are shoving you through it. Then, placing locks upon locks upon the door. Then calling the police to arrest you for having an opinion.
>
> Unfortunate.

You misunderstood the comic. It's about YouTube of Facebook, big webpages. Facebook cannot arrest people, they can just kick you off facebook.

@Raspberry_yoghurt said in #15:
> You misunderstood the comic. It's about YouTube of Facebook, big webpages. Facebook cannot arrest people, they can just kick you off facebook.

Perhaps.

But this comic is massively misleading. It's clear that the author ADORES echo chambers. Get rid of the opposing opinion, labeling them as "-ssholes," and then moving on with their day as if they did nothing wrong. The only way freedom of expression can truly work is if the receivers are willing to listen.

Unfortunately, not a lot of big web pages and businesses are willing to do that.

It is freedom of expression not freedom of deception. You don't have a constitutional right to claim forest fires are caused by jewish space lasers, spread misinformation about masks during a pandemic or fabricate lies about the election.

@Neco_Arc_Lurking said in #16:
> Perhaps.
>
> But this comic is massively misleading. It's clear that the author ADORES echo chambers. Get rid of the opposing opinion, labeling them as "-ssholes," and then moving on with their day as if they did nothing wrong. The only way freedom of expression can truly work is if the receivers are willing to listen.

It's style is like "in your FACE", for sure, but a part from the style is it 100 % accurate.

> Unfortunately, not a lot of big web pages and businesses are willing to do that.

That's how it has always worked. It's how it's meant to work actually.

Before the internet you could get shunned by TV Stations/Tv corporations and movie studios, before that by radio corporaions and before that by newspaper companies and book publishers.'

Then the "snunned" people would start their own radio station, newspaper or publishing house or whatever.

@Raspberry_yoghurt said in #12:
> They're obviously publishers.

Except that they enjoy the privileges of being a Public Forum.

When a whistle-blower passes leaked documents to a journalist, who then publish some of those documents on Social Media, these 'public forums' aren't responsible for navigating the legality. They aren't responsible for the content, therefore they are not "obviously publishers." If they want to enjoy the benefits of being a public forum, they should probably act like one. If not, they are legally responsible for every post.

Private companies can't violate protected rights in many cases. I don't think Disney World can exclude all Muslims from their theme parks, simply because of something that happened in the news between Gaza and Israel. There are many more examples of who protected rights interact with private entities. Look it up... really, do yourself the favor of learning.

Constitutional Rights are not simply things government isn't allowed to arrest you for doing. Obviously.

I sort of agree that the comic is missing the broader point. Around the time it was printed, and since then (I don't know exactly how much) the issue was that there was a cultural movement towards "cancelling" people who had engaged in even mildly controversial ideas or made offensive remarks 30+ years ago, rather than inviting them to speak, to hear out their differences of opinion, and to debate those differences.

I think it is slightly naive to view it only from the framework of your legal rights against the government. If society largely acts as a hypersensitive mob, then its just not a healthy society. And beyond that it was the incredibly harsh nature of the punishment. It wasn't just disinvitations; people would lose their careers, their friends, even being forced to move due to fear of being assaulted, if they dared to utter the wrong opinion on certain topics. There were a few articles from the Atlantic and the New York Times on the matter with dozens of examples but I can't recall the sources now.

We should have the ability to understand that people make mistakes, and we should also have the mental strength to debate ideas radically different from our own - that's what makes democracies work, our ability to be tolerant of others with differences of opinion, and to learn from them. But instead there was a movement in the opposite direction, led largely by progressive students and professors who were increasingly being offended by extremely minor things ("microaggressions", and then this kicked off several other movements like CRT around the same time which still does damage to this day). One of my favorite examples was, I think the University of Ottawa, where asking a student where they're from was considered a microaggression.

So apart from the discussion on whether twitter ought to serve as a public square or not because of its size (at least at the time), I think people were right to complain about whether there were unreasonable standards for cancelling people.

Then as a response to that, progressives ended up taking a hyperliteral take on what cancellation meant, and said, its not like the government is stopping you from speaking, and you ended up with comics like this XD.

Now we are full circle. But this all happened years ago. Its not worth getting worked up about. I just hope these movements have died or are dying out. But I will say, divorced from the content above, yes generally speaking the comic is correct. If you get banned for a forum for continuously sharing pro-Russian propaganda or something then no one should have an issue with it. But that was rarely the case imo.