Merged Musk buys Twitter!/ Elon Musk puts Twitter deal on hold....

Status
Not open for further replies.
The difference is that they're not coming to your country to operate there. You're the one going over the internet to do business with their company in California. It's like saying that a bookstore in the UK should be held responsible if they sold a copy of Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" to a tourist from South Africa in 2001. (When it was banned there.)

At any rate, if you honestly think that just being accessible over the Internet from some country means you are doing business there and should abide by the local laws, I urge you to take a long and deep thought about what it means for the site you're adminning. Because JREF is accessible in all sorts of countries. Some of which for example have criticizing the Islam as a capital offense.

Do you REALLY want a legal obligation to censor and filter everything so it's kosher for every single country, autonomous region, and even ethnic group in the world?
 
Last edited:
Ziggurat said:
Twitter is not competent to do those things. It did a piss poor job trying to, and censored stories that were true (such as Hunter Biden’s laptop).
Click to expand...
Regardless of Twitter's competencies or lack thereof, the fact that one of the most important social platforms is now owned by someone who echoes putrid CTs eminating from putrid sources is a bad sign of things to come.
 
Darat said:
Yes.

Companies operate in different countries to make money, they are beholden to the local laws in those countries, a company based in the USA can't sell something in the UK that is illegal in the UK but legal in their own country. I don't see why anything should be different for Facebook, Twitter and so on.

It you want to operate in my country then yes you do have to abide by my country's laws.

Yeah some countries are terrible places, some will restrict what a company can do in that country, if a company doesn't want to follow the laws of the country in which they operate then the solution is simple.

I don't think it is up to a USA company to decide they will ignore the laws of the UK, if they want to operate in the UK they need to obey UK laws.

In terms of global advertisers like Facebook and Twitter obviously the UK can't stop their illegal content, what the UK would have to do is to go after any company in the UK that uses them to advertise. Once it starts hitting them where it hurts i.e. revenues I bet these platforms "free speech" stances would crumble quicker than a sandcastle when the tide comes back in.

If a company wants to take a principled stance and it can convince its shareholders that the lack of revenue is worth it then all the best to them.
Click to expand...

This fight has already been had. The result was terms of service and enforcement of such. Elon Musk is simply a naive dunce who isn't aware of how anything works in the real world, and he apparently thinks the reason for terms of service agreements is because Twitter is being woke.

It always was a business decision for Twitter et. al. to have and enforce terms of service agreements. Musk tilts at those windmills at his economic peril.
 
HansMustermann said:
The difference is that they're not coming to your country to operate there. You're the one going over the internet to do business with their company in California. It's like saying that a bookstore in the UK should be held responsible if they sold a copy of Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" to a tourist from South Africa in 2001. (When it was banned there.)

At any rate, if you honestly think that just being accessible over the Internet from some country means you are doing business there and should abide by the local laws, I urge you to take a long and deep thought about what it means for the site you're adminning. Because JREF is accessible in all sorts of countries. Some of which for example have criticizing the Islam as a capital offense.

Do you REALLY want a legal obligation to censor and filter everything so it's kosher for every single country, autonomous region, and even ethnic group in the world?
Click to expand...

You missed the word "operate". If you aren't operating in a country then of course you don't need to abide by that country's laws.

In the case of advertisers like Twitter - they have a sales operation that sell's UK companies' advertising space, that is them operating in the UK. Therefore they should be subject to UK laws for what UK based people can access, if they can't technically stop UK folk from accessing material that is illegal in the UK then they need to stop operating in the UK or adopt policies that stop "illegal in the UK" material appearing on their platform worldwide.
 
Darat said:
You missed the word "operate". If you aren't operating in a country then of course you don't need to abide by that country's laws.

In the case of advertisers like Twitter - they have a sales operation that sell's UK companies' advertising space, that is them operating in the UK. Therefore they should be subject to UK laws for what UK based people can access, if they can't technically stop UK folk from accessing material that is illegal in the UK then they need to stop operating in the UK or adopt policies that stop "illegal in the UK" material appearing on their platform worldwide.
Click to expand...

Well, that's not what we were talking about then. I doubt that Facebook was getting much Myanmar corporate advertising money, and in any case that's not what either the lawsuit is about, nor how the argument for censorship goes. To the best of my knowledge, Facebook's revenue from advertising there isn't even mentioned in the lawsuit. It's literally that if radical posts were being posted and read in Myanmar -- and at that, in a language that nobody at Facebook was reading and their AI still has trouble with -- and Facebook's algorithms 'rewarded' those radical posts (with more visibility, etc) then Facebook should be responsible for the results*, because that's what Myanmar censorship laws say.

So, again, it's more like if, say, somewhere in East Elbonia there was some violence against some Christian minority (a la Darfur back then) and someone decided to start a lawsuit and list JREF among the many sites which allowed and even 'rewarded' (with attention, popularity, whatever) posts belittling Christianity and Christians and promoting views such as those of Hitchens which call it a vile religion and whatnot. And now because East Elbonia censorship rules say you're directly legally responsible for what you publish, you should be held responsible under those laws. And a court in your country should be enforcing the East Elbonian laws upon you.

In fact, it's not even 'like', it's a direct equivalent. That is literally what the lawsuit is about.

So, again: are you SURE you want that kind of a precedent set?


* Well, I say "the results", but that relies on believing that an action initiated by the government of Myanmar, which was doing that kind of thing before Zuckerberg was even BORN, and which already had all the media control to push their side of the story, and which justified it in said media as cracking down on some terrorists attacking the police... is somehow not the result of just that, but of Facebook's algorithms. 'Cause apparently unlike the previous DECADES of murdering, raping and pillaging (again, quite literally) their minorities and only needing their own media to justify it, just THIS time they totally wouldn't have done it without seeing that such posts are popular on Facebook :p
 
Last edited:
varwoche said:
Regardless of Twitter's competencies or lack thereof
Click to expand...

Regardless? Yeah, no. You can't brush that under the rug. Their incompetence in fact checking and their decision to do it anyways is a pretty god damn ******* important thing.

the fact that one of the most important social platforms is now owned by someone who echoes putrid CTs eminating from putrid sources is a bad sign of things to come.
Click to expand...

You want your CT's to emenate from only the most prestigious of sources.

You don't have to trust Musk. Having Twitter stay out of the fact checking business altogether is EXACTLY the approach you SHOULD want if you don't trust him. But it does raise the question: why on earth did you ever trust Twitter's executives to begin with?
 
Ziggurat said:
Regardless? Yeah, no. You can't brush that under the rug. Their incompetence in fact checking and their decision to do it anyways is a pretty god damn ******* important thing.



You want your CT's to emenate from only the most prestigious of sources.

You don't have to trust Musk. Having Twitter stay out of the fact checking business altogether is EXACTLY the approach you SHOULD want if you don't trust him. But it does raise the question: why on earth did you ever trust Twitter's executives to begin with?
Click to expand...

I'm not going to get into your portrayal of some of the claims about one of the 6(?) different laptops that was supposed to have belonged to Hunter Biden, as that's off topic for this thread.

I will note that those who follow or promote conspiracy theories (such as those who promoted the Benford's Law proves 2020 was fraudulent CT) do have a vested interest in hampering or completely ending fact-checking.
 
wareyin said:
I'm not going to get into your portrayal of some of the claims about one of the 6(?) different laptops that was supposed to have belonged to Hunter Biden, as that's off topic for this thread.
Click to expand...

That was far from the only time Twitter ****** up their "fact checking". Other examples abound. They aren't competent to do fact checking. The people they outsource fact checking to aren't competent to do it either.

I don't have any problem with fact checking, if it's actually done well, which Twitter didn't. But fact checking and censorship aren't the same thing at all. Nor should fact checkers be above accountability, which is what they were on Twitter, and how you still want it to be.
 
Ziggurat said:
That was far from the only time Twitter ****** up their "fact checking". Other examples abound. They aren't competent to do fact checking. The people they outsource fact checking to aren't competent to do it either.

I don't have any problem with fact checking, if it's actually done well, which Twitter didn't. But fact checking and censorship aren't the same thing at all. Nor should fact checkers be above accountability, which is what they were on Twitter, and how you still want it to be.
Click to expand...

They can "fact check" whatever they want, however they want. If people don't like it, don't go to the platform. It's that simple. It really is that simple.
 
Elon Musk has dissolved the Twitter Board of Directors.

He is now sole Director.
 
Worm said:
Elon Musk has dissolved the Twitter Board of Directors.

He is now sole Director.
Click to expand...

He's now Tweeting that he's going to appoint his horse as consul! I'm certain making the puffy-faced money clown king of the internet's third-biggest dumpster fire can only lead to excellent outcomes.
 
If anyone can finish the work of shoveling Twitter into a dumpster and lighting it on fire, it's Elon Musk. With any luck, this task will keep him distracted from Ukraine until at least mid-2023.
 
HansMustermann said:
No, I'm going to say that:

1. it actually makes my case. The posts cited in the lawsuit are actual calls to violence, which as I was saying is already illegal, and thus not what Elon Musk promised. I.e., we ARE dealing with a delusional SF scenario in which somehow that's what Twitter would end up promoting.

2. censorship is usually the problem, not the solution. And has always been. From the 1915 Armenian Genocide, to the 1930's Germany, to the Khmer Rouge atrocities starting in the '70s, to, yes, Myanmar (and a few more in between) the biggest enabling factor was being able to control what the media says. E.g., in the first example above, the Ottomans just banned all Armenian newspapers, so only the Turkish version of the story would be heard.

And that was already the case with the press in Myanmar. The regime ALREADY controlled the narrative in the press, yes, including about its abusing the ethnic minorities. (Including such 'charming' details as that they used rape to terrorize minorities. Those didn't quite make the local news.) And made a political prisoner out of anyone saying otherwise. It had done so since at least the EIGHTIES. Even at the time of the incident, it retained even the right to monitor and censor any information, including the Internet, and including selective denying access to it. (They just sucked at it, but they had the right to.) It already had all the vehicle it needed for its hate narrative, and the means to block any other narrative in its own media... except for that part where they sucked at actually controlling what comes over the Internet.

If anything, Facebook was (also) a way to get information that's not filtered by the government censorship.

3. This is the dumbest lawsuit ever, because what it tries to establish is that Myanmar laws should prevail over US laws in that case. Which, yes, on one hand is the only way to give Facebook any legal responsibility, but see above what laws we're talking about. The kind of laws where Facebook should have even blocked all reports that the incident is happening. Or where the same Muslims should have only been reported as illegal immigrants and terrorists. Or where those in targeted groups shouldn't have even had access to Facebook or the Internet in general. THOSE were the kind of laws that were active in Myanmar at the time. THAT is the context and purpose of establishing responsibility for the kind of speech you carry: so you can get it in the ass (quite literally sometimes; as I was saying, they used rape as an oppression tool) if you publish anything else than what the government allows you to.

And the consequences of establishing that kind of precedent aren't relevant just for Myanmar. E.g., look at what's happening in Iran right now. Do you REALLY want a legal precedent where foreign companies should respect the local laws when it comes to what information can reach the public?
Click to expand...

What are you talking about. Of course it doesn't prove your point. You were the one insisting that legality being the only valid metric of what to limit is a good idea. The problem is that things that are 'awful but lawful' was shown to cause real problems. No, not all of it was illegal. Not even most of it. There isn't a good mechanism to combat the problem of leveraging large fast platforms like Twitter besides moderation.

The lawsuit doesn't have to have legal merit to illustrate this problem. That's a red herring.

'Awful but lawful' is a ****** standard to use in running a dive bar, let alone one of the most powerful communication platforms on the planet. The idea that 'well Myanmar was already doing these vile things so Twitter doesn't have reason to avoid helping them' isn't just wrong on most any morality one could hold (and thus people running Twitter might have call to act on), it's utterly moronic business sense. Do you really think a business doesn't have an interest in avoiding helping genocide if it doesn't get them in trouble with criminal or civil law?

Driving out the talent and environment that made Twitter powerful in the first place will just leave another 4chan or Parlor. It isn't chance that the places who don't at least try moderate moderation suck to be and fail to gain market. It isn't like Twitter didn't already favor conservative content. (BBC link) But that's never enough for those trying to 'play the ref' pretending to be persecuted by 'the woke'.

So yeah, I'm still under the impression that it's butthurt snowflakes who don't know what they're asking for.
Click to expand...

Of course you do. Probably going to tell the 'Japanese teens who think they're special' story again next.
 
theprestige said:
If anyone can finish the work of shoveling Twitter into a dumpster and lighting it on fire, it's Elon Musk. With any luck, this task will keep him distracted from Ukraine until at least mid-2023.
Click to expand...

It would be great if he could improve it, but because his ideas are stupid and he's too up his own butt to realize that, I'll gladly take him hastening it's demise right along with you.

Darat said:
https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/30...ification-elon-musk-blue-monthly-subscription
Click to expand...

That deadline? The 7th of November.

I want to know how the staff of SpaceX keep him from ruining everything there.
 
plague311 said:
They can "fact check" whatever they want, however they want. If people don't like it, don't go to the platform. It's that simple. It really is that simple.
Click to expand...

If what Twitter does isn't important because you can go to another platform, then nothing Musk does with it matters either. You can't have it both ways.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Back
Top Bottom