Is Big Tech being 1984'd?

You have a right to express your political views, but that does not mean that you can say whatever the fudge you want. And millions of people have been killed and arrested just for their thoughs, or simply not "obeing" to the state view, without ever expressing any opposing view.

 

I think you're possibly oversimplifying. This is not black or white. Firstly, you don't have a say in what I or anyone else writes and posts; with the expception of GutterBoy (hope he's doing ok). You are not a traditional 'publisher' then. Twitter provides a platform but has a code of conduct - or community guidelines. Should they sanction Trump if he breaches their code of conduct? If they are consistent, why not?

 

He's clearly above the law.

 

Seems like a rather wide brush. Could equally count for law enforcement cracking down on hate speech.

 

You have a right to say most of the things you'd want, not up to and including inciting violence.

You do not have the right to an audience or a platform. Me not getting a book or article published doesn't infringe on my freedom of speech.

You do not have a right to say what you want without consequences or people telling you you're wrong, a damned fool or worse.

Social media gets somewhat murky ethically, but personally I see this as a step in the right direction.

 

Yes and no on the gay wedding cake.

The way I understand it, sexual orientation is a protected class, political views are not. So a non right wing activist supreme court could have told the cakeshop to do one and twitter could still ban the soon to be twice impeached grifter.

 

I think as a private company they can do whatever they like but they need to apply things consistently, the thread linked in the opening post shows that there's thousands of death threats made each day and probably thousands of racist comments as well - shouldn't all those people be banned. I can see that someone with 80m followers is however quite different from someone with 100 followers posting similar things.

The other risk is that you drive all the nuttahs onto another platform which only posts and discusses more and more of the same and that's all they see - at least on mainstream platforms posts can be given warnings, you can easily access other information. If people leave and read QANON stufff 24/7 elsewhere then that could pose serious danger in the future.

 

I don't know how to use the like button.

 

Law is far from my strong point, but isn't there a difference here between social media (including this place) and traditional publishing?

If you delete something you're fine. Would a newspaper be similarly fine publishing something and then deleting or publishing a retraction? I thought with editorial responsibility they have a different responsibility to anything published?

Also you can ban anyone, delete anything. You could ban me for being annoying or having too many views you disagree with. Twitter can do the same. Though luckily none of you do. You could say that dogwhistles with nazi undertones aren't allowed, so could twitter.

I think where the big social media companies can be rightly criticised is with lacking consistency. They took down loads of ISIS stuff, rightly so, but dragged their heals on that at first and more domestic terrorism much longer (imo).

It's a difficult balance to find, perhaps an impossible one. I'm seeing progress with the recent developments at least.

 

Does it?

Assuming they're getting away with not being responsible for it in courts.

Would their choice to ban Trump have any impact on how the courts see their responsibility? Hey, you banned this guy (which you have the right to do), so now you must also ban all these other people because banning that one guy means you've taken responsibility for all of it.

Doesn't quite stack up in my mind.