Biden Administration Faces Preliminary Injunction Against Putting Pressure on Social Media

[Chaoticus]

Xzi your communist is showing

 

[tabzer]

Nor did I come up with the goofy "parenting" analogy, that was all you bud.

Lol, sorry if you don't like it because it is "goofy", but that's really all your complaint boils down to. Trying to strawman it away, though, that's telling. I think @Jayro's perceived role of the government is "goofy" too, so we'll just attribute it to consistency. Sorry if you feel targeted for agreeing with him.

 

[Xzi]

Xzi your communist is showing

Most of my positions lean more toward the anarchist side of things, but when it comes to ostracizing fascists, I'm sure we're on the same page. They don't deserve any "safe spaces," and they hold no respect for the constitution so the first amendment should not protect them.

 

[Foxi4]

Most of my positions lean more toward the anarchist side of things, but when it comes to ostracizing fascists, I'm sure we're on the same page. They don't deserve any "safe spaces," and they hold no respect for the constitution so the first amendment should not protect them.

Rights are not contingent on whether we like someone’s speech or not. Lest we forget, the ACLU defended speech rights for Nazis, KKK members, communists and anti-LGBT activists all the same (or at least used to - sadly things have shifted and the defense of people’s rights seems to have taken the back seat). If free speech rights only applied to people who espouse speech we like then it wouldn’t be free at all, would it?

 

[Xzi]

Rights are not contingent on whether we like someone’s speech or not. Lest we forget, the ACLU defended speech rights for Nazis, KKK members, communists and anti-LGBT activists all the same (or at least used to - sadly things have shifted and the defense of people’s rights seems to have taken the back seat). If free speech rights only applied to people who espouse speech we like then it wouldn’t be free at all, would it?

You're free to give them the benefit of the doubt, but from my perspective, if a person's goal is to overthrow the constitutional order, they lose the privilege of hiding behind its protections when things aren't going their way.

 

[KingVamp]

Well, there has to be some kind of system in place and I rather have that system help people in general, not just the ones already well off. Not to mention, be easier to hold people accountable that do so otherwise. That includes both the government and companies.

Most of my positions lean more toward the anarchist side of things, but when it comes to ostracizing fascists, I'm sure we're on the same page. They don't deserve any "safe spaces," and they hold no respect for the constitution so the first amendment should not protect them.

More specifically, they don't respect other people. In fact, they threaten those people instead.

 

[Foxi4]

You're free to give them the benefit of the doubt, but from my perspective, if a person's goal is to overthrow the constitutional order, they lose the privilege of hiding behind its protections when things aren't going their way.

It’s not about giving anyone the benefit of the doubt, it’s about having a fair civil society. Rights apply to everyone. If you want to prove that these people are wrong and that their views are abhorrent, you can do that with speech thanks to the First Amendment and society will follow whoever argues their case better. If they choose to forego speech and go straight to violence, you have the Second Amendment to put a stop to it, not to mention law enforcement. It seems to me that people, by and large, have rejected all of those hateful ideas and they only continue to exist in small pockets of society. Good job - that’s how this is supposed to work. The rights enshrined in the Constitution apply to every citizen up until the point when they, shall we say, “fuck around” to the extent that they “find out” and run afoul of the law - thought crimes are not a thing. Once you start picking and choosing who has rights without any due process of law based on what they say or think, and not on the basis of what they do as individuals, they cease being rights and become privileges granted conditionally to a select few.

 

[lolcatzuru]

No, actually. The government's been doing this since at least 2000. Republicans want to have the option removed for POTUS right now, but they never wanna play by their own rules. I'm consistent on when and how they should use the power.


Russians don't have first amendment rights. Take it up with Putin.


Oh I'm not talking just content "I don't like," I'm talking the fourth reich slowly rising up from the corners of the internet filled with piles of jizz-stained socks. Not only should we be repealing the protections of those sites, I'd be fine with all their members being doxxed too.

OH, this explains so much about you, you let your secret out

 

[Jayro]

You're free to give them the benefit of the doubt, but from my perspective, if a person's goal is to overthrow the constitutional order, they lose the privilege of hiding behind its protections when things aren't going their way.

Exactly. Freedom of speech does not equate freedom from consequences.

 

[Xzi]

If you want to prove that these people are wrong and that their views are abhorrent, you can do that with speech thanks to the First Amendment and society will follow whoever argues their case better.

Sounds a bit like the, "we should've debated nazis into submission" argument, though I know that probably wasn't your intent. These people are not eloquent, but nor are they interested in debating the merits of their ideology, rather only imposing it on everybody via violence and terrorism.

 

[Foxi4]

Sounds a bit like the, "we should've debated nazis into submission" argument, though I know that probably wasn't your intent. These people are not eloquent, but nor are they interested in debating the merits of their ideology, rather only imposing it on everybody via violence and terrorism.

It doesn’t matter how eloquent they are. If you dehumanise a group of people and strip them of their rights when they haven’t actually *done* anything against the law, you’re no better. Rights enshrined in the Constitution are unalienable, and if you’re religiously inclined, god-given, not granted by the government. It’s a set of rules that supersedes any other law, and the basis of all civil rights in the country. It is inherently tyrannical to punish people for thought crimes in spite of that universal blueprint. Nobody says you should be associating with bigots in your private life, but that’s your independent decision as an individual. If you run a website, you can ban whoever you want - it’s your website. That being said. once you start using the long arm of the government to punish people for the crime of “thinking the wrong things”, you become a tyrant. You’re effectively enforcing your way of thinking with force. If they were in charge doing it to you, that’s exactly what you’d claim - that they’re tyrants. Not only that, who knows what kind of speech becomes “wrong-think” in the future? Supporting that model of “thought enforcement” is short-sighted and inherently flawed. Hate begets hate. Never forget that part of the reason why the Third Reich even came to be at all was the fact that Germany was facing a level of reparations that it couldn’t possibly pay off, leading to widespread poverty. Not only that, they were also stripped of many privileges afforded to any sovereign state. Someone who didn’t care about any of that came along, and was more than happy to point a finger at a scapegoat, and there you have it - Nazis.

Exactly. Freedom of speech does not equate freedom from consequences.

As far as the government is concerned, that’s *exactly* what it equates to - it’s in the Constitution. The government is expressly prohibited from issuing any law that encroaches on freedom of speech. The “consequences” you speak of can be social - nobody can force you to associate with anyone else, that’s what freedom of association is. You can ostracise whoever you please in private life - that up to you. What you can’t do is sick government agents on your neighbour because they think “the wrong way”. The correct move is to ignore your neighbour if you don’t like their company.

 

[Xzi]

If you dehumanise a group of people and strip them of their rights when they haven’t actually *done* anything against the law, you’re no better.

See that's where our viewpoints again differ: anyone choosing to be a fascist is stripping themselves of rights, as they aren't rights they would grant to anyone else under any circumstances. Pretending the fascist movement within the US "hasn't done anything against the law" recently or in the past is either extremely naive or extremely delusional, it's not an ideology that plays within the bounds of any law. For that matter, fascism seeks to use the system's own laws against it until it has established a dictatorship, which is why fascists are so often attracted to the position of police officer.

I can't blame Sherman for not wanting to finish the job, there are some beautiful parts of Georgia, but the end result is that the confederacy still lives on in a different form; with an outsized online presence, too.

 

[Foxi4]

See that's where our viewpoints again differ: anyone choosing to be a fascist is stripping themselves of rights, as they aren't rights they would grant to anyone else under any circumstances. Pretending the fascist movement within the US "hasn't done anything against the law" recently or in the past is either extremely naive or extremely delusional, it's not an ideology that plays within the bounds of any law. For that matter, fascism seeks to use the system's own laws against it until it has established a dictatorship, which is why fascists are so often attracted to the position of police officer.

I can't blame Sherman for not wanting to finish the job, there are some beautiful parts of Georgia, but the end result is that the confederacy still lives on in a different form; with an outsized online presence, too.

If your idea of “free speech” is selective and only applies to things you yourself agree with then you’re not actually in support of free speech - I’m asking you to engage with this notion intellectually and logically, not through the prism of anecdotes. Having thoughts is not a crime, voicing those thoughts is also not a crime - in order to be guilty of a crime, one must necessarily act upon those thoughts or words.

I can just as easily claim that since communism has killed millions of people over the years, any sentiment in support of a more socialist arrangement of society is in fact an admission of kinship with communists. By the virtue of you sympathising with communists, I can then claim that you yourself are a communist, and that alone strips you of all of your rights since I find it to be a hateful ideology. You haven’t actually *done* anything, but you *thought* about it - in your world, that’s ample justification. It is, however, not fair.

A person is not guilty of theft until they steal something, they’re not guilty of murder until they actually murder someone, they’re not guilty of rape until they rape someone, but in your mind we should make an exception for speech you don’t like for *some reason*. There’s a logical disconnect here, and you should ponder on that a little bit. Now, we could have a nuanced discussion about conspiracy to commit a crime or premeditation, but in my opinion that crosses the threshold between “words” and “preparation to commit”, in which case an intervention is justifiable. You don’t wait for a bomb to explode before you react to a bomb threat, that’s asinine.

Rights are often times a double-edged sword - your free exercise and enjoyment of them also means that people whom you find detestable get to enjoy them too. That’s what makes them rights. In the absence of that, you have tyranny, and whoever happens to be in charge dictates what is and is not acceptable in society. Every civil rights movement in history was contingent on speech that went *directly* against the status quo and was *not* approved by the government. If your rules applied in the 1960’s, you’d still have separate water fountains for “coloured people”, since that was literally the law, and any opinion critical of segregation would be silenced. Surely you understand this.

 

[tabzer]

If your idea of “free speech” is selective and only applies to things you yourself agree with then you’re not actually in support of free speech - I’m asking you to engage with this notion intellectually and logically, not through the prism of anecdotes. Having thoughts is not a crime, voicing those thoughts is also not a crime - in order to be guilty of a crime, one must necessarily act upon those thoughts or words.

I can just as easily claim that since communism has killed millions of people over the years, any sentiment in support of a more socialist arrangement of society is in fact an admission of kinship with communists. By the virtue of you sympathising with communists, I can then claim that you yourself are a communist, and that alone strips you of all of your rights since I find it to be a hateful ideology. You haven’t actually *done* anything, but you *thought* about it - in your world, that’s ample justification. It is, however, not fair.

A person is not guilty of theft until they steal something, they’re not guilty of murder until they actually murder someone, they’re not guilty of rape until they rape someone, but in your mind we should make an exception for speech you don’t like for *some reason*. There’s a logical disconnect here, and you should ponder on that a little bit. Now, we could have a nuanced discussion about conspiracy to commit a crime or premeditation, but in my opinion that crosses the threshold between “words” and “preparation to commit”, in which case an intervention is justifiable. You don’t wait for a bomb to explode before you react to a bomb threat, that’s asinine.

Rights are often times a double-edged sword - your free exercise and enjoyment of them also means that people whom you find detestable get to enjoy them too. That’s what makes them rights. In the absence of that, you have tyranny, and whoever happens to be in charge dictates what is and is not acceptable in society. Every civil rights movement in history was contingent on speech that went *directly* against the status quo and was *not* approved by the government. If your rules applied in the 1960’s, you’d still have separate water fountains for “coloured people”, since that was literally the law, and any opinion critical of segregation would be silenced. Surely you understand this.

It's preemptive fascism, to prevent the bad fascists from getting power first. Don't start LARPing Wolfenstein.

 

[Xzi]

Having thoughts is not a crime, voicing those thoughts is also not a crime - in order to be guilty of a crime, one must necessarily act upon those thoughts or words.

Right, and we could dance around that notion all day, but the fact of the matter is that we know which sites host the most "manifestos" and hold the record for producing the most mass shooters. Perhaps the FBI uses those sites as "honeypots," but that being the case you'd expect them to prevent a lot more of the criminal activity that's planned out on them. This is all without even mentioning the dark web, but that's its own can of worms.

 

[tabzer]

Someone is gunning for 4chan. Think this through. If we lose 4chan, who is going to solve real crime? FBI? Reddit?

Also, the whole nature of honeypots is scummy. It's a recipe for capitalizing on and creating problems, not getting rid of them.

 

[Xzi]

Someone is gunning for 4chan. Think this through. If we lose 4chan, who is going to solve real crime? FBI? Reddit?

You can throw Stormfront, Truth Social, Parler, Voat, and a number of others in that bucket too.

Also, the whole nature of honeypots is scummy. It's a recipe for capitalizing on and creating problems, not getting rid of them.

For once that's something we agree on, you can't stop a fungus from growing in the dark once you've provided it all the nutrients it needs. Even if some of these places started out as honeypots, it's clear law enforcement has long since lost containment.

 

[Foxi4]

Right, and we could dance around that notion all day, but the fact of the matter is that we know which sites host the most "manifestos" and hold the record for producing the most mass shooters. Perhaps the FBI uses those sites as "honeypots," but that being the case you'd expect them to prevent a lot more of the criminal activity that's planned out on them. This is all without even mentioning the dark web, but that's its own can of worms.

Throwing the baby out with the bath water is never a sound or logical response, it’s a knee jerk reaction. You’ve now narrowed down from Facebook and Twitter to 4chan, which is not an SM - don’t think I haven’t noticed. That being said, if we pretend that I completely missed this manoeuvre on your part, even 4chan has a right to exist as a site *unless* you can demonstrate conclusively that *4chan itself* is guilty of criminal activity or incites it in a manner that produces an imminent threat of unlawful activity. You can’t do that because 4chan doesn’t do that - it’s just an image board with almost no moderation.

 

[tabzer]

The real fascists were the friends we made along the way.

 

[Xzi]

The real fascists were the people we scalped along the way.

FTFY