Political Crossfire Forums

Good” girls are not “soiled” by “bad” books; Censorship is not a remedy for mob violence.

I’ve heard and believe that no “good” girl was ever “soiled” due to having read a “bad” book. Similarly, I do not believe censoring internet’s social forums is the proper preventative for mob violence.
Democratic-republics’ voters choose their elected officials and their political associations. Republicans twice nominated Donald Trump as their presidential candidate. USA voters chose to elect him in 2016 and repudiated him in 2020. Both congressional chambers should censure President Donald Trump.
Respectfully, Supposn

Trump has not been censored. He has a button he can press in the White House that will take over every TV screen in the country. There is a White House press corps. there are good old fashioned press conferences. There is available to him every single tool that every president has had to communicate with the American people before the advent of social media.

eventually, people are just going to have to come to terms with what Free Speech actually is, and indeed, what it absolutely is not.

Twitter Facebook etc etc... These are private businesses. Nobody has any sort of right to them. people are perfectly capable of communicating their opinions without having access to someone else's platform. Again, these are not democratized. they are not government-owned. They are not public property. Twitter and Facebook and AWS are private enterprises under the private control of private individuals. Period.

It's amazing to me that the very same people who decry socialism and call everything they don't like communism are the ones who are now carrying is on as though they have some sort of public ownership stake in someone else's private business as if it's a part of the civil infrastructure or something. It's not.

People whine and cry and say that anything on the internet should be public property because of subsidies that have been paid over the years towards development of the internet. You'd think this would extend to something like, I don't know, Lockheed Martin for example. You'd think that American farms and farmers, being perhaps the most heavily subsidized thing there is, would therefore also be considered public property. Perhaps we all have a right to just hang around in someone's cornfield and carry on and do whatever we want? Maybe we've all got a right to stand around inside of someone's restaurant and start screeching out our hateful bullshit? Or maybe on someone's factory floor? Or maybe in your front yard?

By this logic, I suppose Parler has every right to hang around on Amazon servers and be a forum for literal insurrection and violence against the American people and our institutions.

I feel like there is a difference between Twitter kicking off the President, and AWS pulling Parler hosting.

To me, that difference is that while it is okay to kick somebody out of a particular house, it probably shouldn't be okay to prevent them from building one altogether.

If there is a need for regulation, I would start at the hosting level - develop legislation that protects access to hosting, with strict rules governing what kind and prevalence of illegal activity is needed to have access to that service removed. I think it is really important that people be able to publish online. The law should place a high value on maintaining access for all law-abiding people and organizations, even if those organizations or people are offensive, insane, etc.

As for the customers of that hosting, they should be able to develop rules as they see fit. Let users decide what they want to use or access, only interfering to increase competition by breaking up shit like Facebook and Amazon and Alphabet. AWS owns like a third of the global cloud market. Facebook buys up potential competitors before their product even hits the market. The fact that these companies are allowed to exist is insane. "Vertically integrated" has become a synonym for "monopoly."

As for Twitter banning the President, they are probably signing their own death warrant with shit like this. Trying to placate the f**k pussies who inhabit the modern internet is futile, and I'll tell you why: because as much as they love to talk about how Trump should be kicked off Twitter, they live for his shit. Remove Trump and people as outrageous as Trump from Twitter, and all that remains is a hivemind of smug, boring dickheads. The users are addicted to this drama, they'll be instantly bored when it ceases to occur, and they'll move to a platform that allows it.

they are doing this because they are worried that regulation is about to come down hard on them

AWS shouldn't be forced to host anything by the way.

AWS shouldn't exist as AWS, but more importantly, it isn't about AWS in particular. Hosting should be considered something like a common carrier.

Parler is back up - being hosted by Russia.

New regulations are likely coming with the Biden admin, but more towards censorship side of things. Democrats are a bit peeved at all of the misinformation that is so widely distributed via social media and they want to crack down on that. Hate speech and such is a secondary benefit.

The issue is everyone being given an equal voice and with that, validates their opinions, regardless of how damaging it is. These companies are going to have to start regulating to some degree, as we have seen the outcomes when we don't.

Hosting platforms want to make money, so they'll host those that comply with the agreements signed when creating an account. Parler was refusing to curb violent/hate speech which was against AWS's TOS. Parler had no issues shutting out all the liberals from their site, however, so one can't really make an argument of them being "for free speech", as they claim. AWS doesn't want to take the heat for that shit, nor should they.

I think the challenge that comes in is if only authoritarian states are willing to host your content, does that give it legitimacy? I would say no.

But then again, I don't believe in people being able to say whatever they want, however they want, whenever they want. Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom of consequence, despite many thinking otherwise. I'm 100% on board with outlawing hate groups in the US. We've been far too soft on this shit in the past and we're seeing the results now. Need to go hard on it or we're going to be The People's Republic of America under authoritarian regimes in the near future. People were already on board with this with Trump - ignore it and it isn't going to make things better. These issues HAVE to be addressed.