Free speech is good and must be protected, that’s clear. But it should not be virtually limitless. The US played a major role sorting out the negative consequences of the Weimar republic, which did not contain fascist ideology, which then (edit: among other things ofc) lead to WW2.
It still baffles my mind how the US cannot see that tolerating the intolerant must inevitably lead to an intolerant and possibly facist society.
I agree, but Twitter has nothing to do with free speech. Period. It’s not like the government is going around throwing people in prison for being racist fucks on Twitter. Twitter can moderate content if they want to. If they don’t want to moderate content they don’t have to as long as the material isn’t illegal.
I don’t know why people keep thinking this has anything to do with the first amendment at all. Twitter is not public, not even close.
I agree, but Twitter has nothing to do with free speech.
Twitter positions itself as the Internet’s public square, and free speech certainly does apply in an old-fashioned offline public square, so yeah, Twitter kinda does have something to do with free speech. Don’t seek power if you don’t want the responsibility it comes with.
I think you’re mostly right but there’s a host of nuance and legalese that muddies this up. Social media is always in a conflicted relationship with speech, wanting to have no culpability over what’s posted while also making decisions over what to feature/restrict/etc. They’re actually really cautious to not position themselves as the “town square” for that reason since it does channel a sort of legal definition of such.
That’s not how it works, what you are talking about is often called freeze peach.
Until Twitter can fine you or lock you up for saying the wrong thing or exercise prior restraint over all your expression, it’s not a free speech issue.
By positioning itself as the Internet’s public square, Twitter seeks a monopoly over public discourse. If it is successful, then yes, it can exercise prior restraint over virtually all of your expression.
There’s no such thing as “the internet’s public square”. It is the “X-owned public square”. In an offline public square, the government owns the square, so free speech protections apply. But this “square” is privately owned. There’s an incredibly fundamental difference here.
AFAIU this is a result of the wording in the US constitution. The freedom of speech in the US has a stronger legal implication than in other countries, even stronger than western democracies like the UK.
And, then in the civilian level, as you say, US netizens tend to write "you are entitled to your opinion" to basically anybody with any horrible belief as if they were government officials.
The US has limits on free speech in the name of public health and safety. There’s no assumption of limitless free speech in the US. People who cry “free speech” typically have no understanding of its actual legal definition in the country and just want an excuse to be a bigoted asshole without consequences.
Twitter, not being part of the government, gets to decide what content they allow and doesn’t need to worry too much about the legal definition of free speech. But, despite Musk’s claims, Twitter is not actually a space of limitless free speech. They’ve taken plenty of actions since he took over that limit the speech of individuals he disagrees with. Twitter is just interesting in giving a platform to hate. There’s certainly money to be made in monetizing hate (see Trump), but hopefully it doesn’t work out well in the end for Twitter or Musk.
I think it depends on how you define free speech. There are plenty of people arguing against unrestricted free speech on this particular instance, and it’s a core value of the instance (intolerance of the intolerant).
On the contrary, people who argue for unrestricted free speech always seem to do so on legal grounds, constantly quoting the first amendment as though it applies to private platforms or to people outside the US.
I have thought about it for a while but the US is basically in a cold civil war, with a significant chance of it becoming hot. And it looks very similar to their previous one. Neither side seem to have a charismatic enough leader.
It’s easy to look over the pond and think it’s none of our problem. But if the US falls to chaos a lot of other countries will follow suit. We can already see this influence in the UK and I’d argue many other EU countries. Russia probably saw this weakness, bet on it worsening much quicker than it did, but lost that bet (so far).
With that said, addressing the US as a whole no longer makes sense. I’m sure plenty, plenty of Americans see what is happening.
It’s unfortunate that one of the wealthiest people on this planet has taken the anti-democratic side, but it’s not the first or the last time in history a powerful man, rich beyond measure has done so.
My country (Australia) has tied itself to you guys so if you go down we definitely go down with you. I’m 100% hoping the US doesn’t fall into chaos. We also birthed Rupert Murdoch and he’s played a huge part in heating up this civil war.
They are but things are definitely getting hot with China. There’s also been some issues with trade and diplomacy since our ex PM publicly called for an investigation into the origins of covid. China did not respond well to that and our previous government’s approach to diplomacy didn’t help. At one point China actually wasn’t answering calls from us.
We are walking a very fine line because we absolutely depend on trade with China but we’ve also entered in an alliance for the explicit purpose of preparing for a potential conflict with China. There’s absolutely no reality where we side with China over America. We would destroy our economy before we back out of our alliance with the US. We have followed them into every war since ww2.
Oh, yeah I know you wouldn’t. You’re in kind of a tricky situation but I think that spat over covid sort of tested boundaries for you.
I’m in Aotearoa, obviously we have a similar problem. Culturally we would go where you go, but on the other hand we didn’t follow the US into Iraq. China are by far our biggest trading partner, and also those of us with a long memory were disillusioned by how our allies treated us over the Rainbow Warrior terrorist attack so there’s probably not the same level of confidence.
Very much so, the Bavarian Conservative Party literally has gone to have talks with republicans to use their election strategies, the German-wide AgD has ramped up their Anti-LGBT campaigning and started to use similar messaging to far-right propaganda networks, e.g. “protect our children”, “pedophiles”, photoshopped images of CSAM at pride events, etc.
Wtf, csam photoshopped in? So gross and evil. How are people not arrested - idk about other places but i thought it is illegal in us to own it at all. So if someone photoshopped it - they should be in jail.
All the conservative parties in the west seem to be pushing the same thing. It seems pretty co-ordinated which is even scarier. Every country is hearing the same talking points.
Yep, it’s very clear. Far right parties are growing, conservatives are running after them trying to keep their voters by using more and more populist tactics, often crossing the line to keep up with far-right talking points, since they can’t keep their voters with their status-quo, corporations-first policies that they’ve been pushing for decades.
Yeah the Tories in the UK which were once the mainstream right are now sucking deeply on the crack pipe of Republican culture wars because after thirteen years in power it’s all they have left.
are now sucking deeply on the crack pipe of Republican culture wars
As are the conservative parties in Canada.
Until recently the federal conservative party had one of Trump’s co-conspirators listed as someone they had worked with. As so as he was indicted, thwy rapidly and quietly removed any mention of him.
Years ago I worked for a guy who came from old old money. He told me that he believed that something like the Illuminatti was real based on the notion that really wealthy people have similar goals everywhere and frequently interact. At the time I thought he was crazy but now Im less sure.
It’s safe to say Russia and China have actually helped contribute to a lot of the issues in the last decade by holding a lot of soft power online. The US government can’t stop an enemy that blends in with their sovereign users, advertisers, and content creators.
You're partly right. But it's the job of the citizenry to stand up to this stuff, not the state. We can't keep our heads down and hope it goes away on its own. We shouldn't allow the state, with its monopoly on violence, to fight our social battles for us.
I dislike the idea of the state getting to start making decisions on what is "hateful". And I'm disgusted we don't have more people standing up and loudly declaring how wrong the hateful viewpoints are. It is our responsibility and we are failing.
It is a tempting proposition to let the state handle hateful speech, but we don't have to look much further than Florida to see what happens when the shit side is in power and starts redefining what is "hateful".
Regulate an economy, maintain a border (meaning this is our stuff and everything outside the border is not it isn’t necessarily manning a border), and enforce laws. That’s the three basic tasks of any government.
If you take intro to poli sci literally anywhere in the world this is part of your first lesson. The three things listed are what makes a government a government. Kenya has no space program and is still a government.
It doesn’t matter what you think. Governments are expected and set up to do much more than that around the world and that’s because that’s what their intents are. It’s not just those three things. If what you said was true, we’d have had no meaningful progress on anything.
You can deny it all you want, denial ain’t just a river in Egypt
There are a lot of things that collapse a government if not done that’s not one of those three things, though. Like educating its people. Especially that one for a democratic government, in actual fact.
I think you’re still confusing what you like in a government (e.g democracy) with what something has to do in order to qualify as a government.
Take a look at this report on education. If we look at a country like Mali the average child there has just two years of schooling and attendence even at primary/elementary school is very low.
It may not have a government that we like, but it still has a government.
Those three things define any government. Those are the absolute minimum. If you cannot determine your border you have no sovereignty. If you cannot enforce laws then your laws have no authority and you have no sovereignty. If you cannot maintain some dorm of economy you cannot control your government and will cede sovereignty.
Im not telling you what I think. Im telling you what is easily demonstrable.
Fir example you said you need a space program does that mean MOST countries do not have a government? Most countries do not have a space program because they are too expensive and provide little benefit for a country like Libya.
You mention education yet government provided education started in the late 1800s to 20th century for most nations. Was England never a nation state? That would be a moronic claim considering their monarchy is the longest one still running.
This is a case where you simply have no clue what you are talking about and it shows
This doesn’t define what a properly constituted government is though. Any government can prevent other worse governments from forming, all they need to do is massacre their citizens and there will be nobody left to form a government.
It is a tempting proposition to let the state handle hateful speech, but we don’t have to look much further than Florida to see what happens when the shit side is in power
You seem to be suggesting that separating hate speech prevention from legislation will protect you from a “tyranny of the majority” situation.
But if the populace has a bigoted plurality, won’t that also create a tyranny of the majority?
If the populace has a bigoted plurality, then they get to declare what is officially hateful. So yes, you're right.
I put the onus on the collective citizenry, but there is no perfect solution in reality. There is a role for the state to play in protecting people, I just don't think they should dip much into what speech is or isn't allowed. The majority should rule in my opinion, but we have the job of maintaining a majority that isn't regressive bigoted shitheads. It's an eternal struggle, unfortunately.
Defamation, intellectual property, stalking/threats, harmful digital communications, false advertising, accurate declarations of food contents, protected names, conspiracy to commit serious crimes: all these forms of speech are regulated by law and the judiciary where I live, so I have no problem with hate speech laws as long as they are clear and reasonable.
Personally I am in favour of proportionally representative democracy with a lot of checks and balances to enshrine human rights in law, so that if a populace wavers toward the hateful there are still protections for minorities and the non-hateful.
Fair, but the more people you have, with more diverse viewpoints, the harder it will be to get people to agree on what is hateful. And the more nuanced your laws, the harder it will be to agree on what is reasonable or even clear.
But we have got people to agree on everything from what is a fair defense against defamation, right through to the percentage of meat a product such as a meat pie has to contain in order for it to be able to be labelled “meat”.
Democratic consensus is something that gets built up and refined over time. We don’t try to invent it all in a single day.
X is really dumb, and I’m not a fan of Twitter personally… But twitters reputation shouldn’t be completely obliterated because of who now owns it. Not that it matters, I guess, because there’s no way people don’t know X was once Twitter.
So I don’t know, guess I don’t care either way. But X is dumb.
in that case Prince changed his name to the artist formally known as Prince because of some sort of trademark or copyright dispute. So again the media is just reporting the facts.
I mean, I’m sure there’s people’s jobs it is to monitor marketing at these companies? Unlikely they’d go thru the trouble of setting up an ad campaign just to cancel it and claim nazis if it wasn’t true?
I don’t know though, I stay off twitter - especially now.
Sure but then they’d also need to calculate the risk of Musk or X exposing the lie that X is allowing pro-nazi content. If it’s such an obvious lie for the exposure in the media then there’s a massive risk of being called out and exposed. The bottom line is X loses revenue and credibility due to this article and now has a huge incentive to blow the lid off this supposed conspiracy to paint X as a bastion of hate. I don’t think two big companies would roll the dice on that at the same time as losing their investment by ending this ad campaign early.
I understand wanting to know what evidence someone has for an argument, but when the source is attributed in the posted article then demands for proof come across as sealioning which is very much discouraged on Beehaw.
For those that don’t feel like reading that Media Matters report, the account in question was openly and explicitly neo-nazi, and Media Matters has screenshots of a number of posts with memes praising Hitler, Holocaust denial, and “great replacement” memes. There’s also a meme that just says “It’s okay to be a national socialist” which seems about as pro-Nazi as something could possibly get.
Do you realize there’s a difference between one or few “events” and a platform promoting it? There’s a fishy attempt to bind Musk to any right-wing/nazi shit.
Really? I just spent 5 minutes searching for the fourteen words, and found a bunch of openly white supremacist/nazi content, with plenty of likes and retweets. Remember, Musk fired/let go most of his content and safety teams after he took the company over. You can report stuff but it won’t get taken down any more.
(Note, I won’t link the content here in case that’s against rules, but it’s really not hard to find. Look at the “ChiefBarony” and “SindriThule” accounts for example)
I imagine cnn doesn’t want to encourage people to visit the hate account in question by posting a link or screenshot. It doesn’t mean they don’t have proof, it just means they don’t want to drive traffic to hate content. Printing that would be kind of irresponsible. But CNN is known as a pretty reputable news source. I can’t see why they’d lie about it.
If you aren’t seeing any white supremacy on your own timeline, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, it just means the algorithm isn’t showing it to you, which is a good thing. It might seem surprising, but people do actually search for and deliberately seek out that shit. Hate groups use social media to network, I imagine that’s why CNN didn’t post a screenshot of the account name, or its content.
But that policy creates a window for literally any accusation to be made. “Proof would encourage or glorify the behavior” basically means you get to accuse anyone of anything at any time .
I’m sorry, but i’m going to have to see this reply as bad faith. There’s no good reason to think the news outlet in question skipped the entire journalistic process and ‘has no proof’, so I can only assume you have another reason for sowing doubt about the legitimacy of the story.
The proof is NCTA and Gilead pausing ad spending. This isn’t some crazy conspiracy theory, hate groups have always been on Twitter and musk’s gutting of the moderation and safety teams certainly didn’t make that better. There’s literally no logical reason to think cnn would lie about this, I’m honestly confused why y’all are being weirdly defensive and contrarian over this.
Whether it was fascist or not matter because the word has lost its meaning. Could be something fairly innocuous really.
CNN sources a Media Matters report which goes into detail as to the content of the twitter account. Tl;dr, it’s an explicitly neo-nazi account which regularly posted memes and content praising Hitler and the Nazi party and pushing neo-nazi talking points.
I’m not sure what it accomplishes playing semantic games about whether something fits the technical definition of fascism (Nazi Germany absolutely does, btw) when the commonly understood definition of far-right, ultra-nationalist, authoritarianism is abundantly clear.
lol yeah sounds totally righteous to dictate which opinions others should have
I don’t think anyone is proposing that we dictate others’ opinions. But companies, advertisers, and platforms are under no obligation to be associated with the expression of those opinions, and I have no issue stating that Nazis, Fascists, and their ideological descendants are very unwelcome on Beehaw.
A day ago I was talking to a friend about Microsoft and they equated Microsoft to Nazis, I said let’s be realistic, they aren’t Nazis, they said fine the KKK. Watering down these terms to mean someone you don’t like is super dangerous and let’s actual Nazis and KKK just play off the accusations as someone not liking them.
So I agree, it’s been watered down and it’s really a bad thing.
I always say if you don’t like the idea of corporations having too much power over you, you’ll hate a government that has too much power over you.
Corporations deplatform people and shut off their electricity. Governments drag people into the street and shoot them, and firebomb cities. There’s no comparison.
Those who claim that terms like “Nazi” or “fascist” are being watered down are usually Nazis/fascists themselves, and they’re trying to cover it up by convincing everyone that Nazis/fascists don’t exist.
I know a lot of pretty normal people that dont have terminally online views and I think almost all of them would agree with the statement that “nazi” and “fascist” have been watered down. Obviously nazi’s and fascists will say they’re watered down but to lump random people in with them is not doing you any favors.
I know a lot of pretty normal people that dont have terminally online views and I think almost all of them would agree with the statement that “nazi” and “fascist” have been watered down.
Then I question their normalcy.
Well, that or it’s now considered normal to be a fascist. I certainly hope that’s not the case, although sometimes I have to wonder.
Obviously nazi’s and fascists will say they’re watered down but to lump random people in with them is not doing you any favors.
Obviously. I’m not denying that. I’m denying that that’s actually happening to any significant extent.
Don’t you see how this comment proves the point. I mentioned that I’ve heard regular people comment that they think people online overuse the term nazi and fascist and your response is “they’re probably nazis or fascists”
I do not think it proves fascism is popular these days. The people you just assumed to be fascists are left wing voters and not fascist in any way yet you instantly assumed them to be fascist so you can dismiss their opinion.
Ah, you mean the “All” feed? Hm, might have to take a look, but normally I only use the Local and Subscribed ones. Not a big fan of scrolling through random trash.
Instances could likely add some ads to their Local feeds and communities, at least they’re supposed to know what goes in there.
Good point, they’re from lemm.ee. I just happen to have an account there (to follow some lemmit bot) since it’s a “federation friendly” instance, and they recently seem to have had a Hexbear problem: lemm.ee/post/4543536
Oh well, guess anyone running ads on a Lemmy instance, would have to run them only on local, or just on a per-post level.
Spokespeople for NCTA and pharmaceutical company Gilead said that they immediately paused their ad spending on X after CNN flagged their ads on the pro-Nazi account.
Alt-speak: we only care if the media report that our ad placements were next to questionable contents.
Why do people assume that brands explicitly endorse everything their ads run next to? Do they think companies are purposely seeking out these bad people to run their ads next to? I never got the whole not wanting your ads next to questionable content thing.
Tiki torch companies must be making bank off of Twitter ads now, though. They don’t even have to use keyword matches to show up in all the right places.
It’s not just that they don’t want their ads next nazi crap, it’s that they don’t want to put ads on a platform that has nazi crap. You make a platform friendly to nazis, you lose advertising.
I’m no expert but I think it’s the same reason ads are full of hot people: association. If you see an ad for a Baconator enough times next to a neo-Nazi spewing hate speech you’re going to start to link the two in your mind.
It’s gotta be this one. Marketing works partially with the subconscious and association. They want you to get a fuzzy feeling when you see their logo or a product of theirs in a (web) store. If you don’t get a fuzzy feeling, but you are reminded of the vile fascist shit you read while you saw their ad, you will avoid buying their product, even if you can’t quite put the finger on it.
But also a factor (for those that know) is that companies will pay for their ads to run to specific demographics of people based on the data that a advertising platform (Twitter, YouTube, Tinder, Facebook, etc) has gathered to determine specific things about you as a person.
It’s the whole concept behind targeted ads. You pay for eyes that will see it and are more likely to purchase your products due to that demographic data. Or at the very least, view your website for traffic that can be used to harvest more data about you so that it can be sold to other companies.
People will presure companies not to allow it. "I will not purchase your product because it is helping fund hate speech"
It doesn't matter that the company did not choose to place the ad there. The ad being there gives money to platform that they are recieving because of hate speech.
I believe it’s a matter of being in the same platform as controversial content.
In the end they’re paying Twitter to display their ads, and if Twitter allows questionable content to be in their platform, the companies are indirectly supporting it.
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