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X to be investigated for allegedly breaking EU laws on hate speech and fake news
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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You mean to tell me Elon's little neo-Nazi shithole might not be properly moderating content to stay on the right side of hate speech laws? ...Yeah that's not surprising.
What's surprising is that the US does nothing about it
What I think is surprising is how many still use the fucking platform. It's completely neutered. Companies shouldn't be posting news to it because unless you have an account you probably can't fucking view it.
Same. I'm surprised so many people still use for networking at all. I'll see people post links to the site and I'm just like "well I wish I could've seen that. Oh well."
I don't really see a difference in Twitter pre- and post-Musk. It is literally built for this, for broadcasting with minimal discussion afterwards. I left Twitter a bit before Musk got it because I realized Reddit was better for discussing and obtaining informed opinions. And now I left Reddit.
That's not what I mean. I mean literally not being able to access stuff when you're not logged in. How am I supposed to know what this company is posting?
I think this could have been the normal evolution of the social network under anyone else than Musk. I repeat, it has always been built this way, for broadcasting. And I am sorry to fire on the Red Cross, but Mastodon is just the same: the only reason it is somewhat better than what Twitter was is that it is novel and barely populated and therefore elicits what in Italy we call mountain path courtesy.
So just to be clear what old mate you are responding to here is trying to say is that until a few months ago, and for over a decade, me and him could click on a tweet and see what it was about, i used to do this all the time on the Guardian and I haven't had a twitter account in a very long time.
Doesn't matter what you think, what mastodon does and what you do with alpine wildlife. The fact that companies and outlets like the guardian still do this to this day, that they still post shit on twitter than most of us can't (or don't want, or both) access is weird they should reconsider their communication choices and move on.
As they say in Italy che cos'hanno al posto del cervello?
I mean we can all still look at (most) reddit posts if we don't have an account currently.
This whole "forcing us to have an account just to look at one post" is so blatantly and obviously a ploy to get your data. It's kinda disgusting. I would have a tiny bit more respect for Twitter if they just said outright "hey, you need to login to see any of this content so we can get your data. Thanks and fuck you."
The funny part is that I can live without shitter no problem. I wish major organisations would stop using it but if I cannot open a like I'm just meh. They lost the little traffic I was giving them.
While I stopped browsing reddit since moving to lemmy, I do still access old posts and that'ssomething I cannot replace that easily. Later today I'll do some research on some niche topics that I am sure will lead me to old reddit posts. Nice to be able to do it without an account (for now). And when they force me, I'll just open a new one for lunch lurking, not using my old one(s) anymore
How is this surprising to you?
Half of the US votes for christian nationalist theological fascists that have already successfully banned everything to do with lgtbq people existing in many parts of the country, and about 1/3 of the US population believes in all or significant parts of the insanely hateful and delusional QAnon conspiracy universe.
You must not be American, or follow American domestic politics closely?
The Republicans control Congress which means the Democrats cannot pass any legislation, and are in fact bogged down fighting off insane nonsense to basically either somehow give more money to the already wealthy, or fighting off insane shit to take away even more basic rights for minorities.
Its basically illegal to get an abortion now in half the country.
And Trump has now multiple times just said he will be a dictator if he wins in 2024, and is currently leading in the polls.
Like, if you are European, can I fake marry your daughter or something to get the hell out of this collapsing basket case of a society?
You guessed it, I am not American.
Nor I have time to spend following the domestic politics of a country that was decadent when it was founded by terrorists (according to its own Constitution).
I am surprised still because this is 2023 and you are behaving literally medieval de facto instituting a new kind of feudalism gibing power to these people.
The easiest way to explain this to a non American is that Americans are highly selfish, vain, anti intellectual, ignorant and superficial compared to much of the rest of the world.
Hence me asking about getting out.
Years ago now I was telling my friends that QAnon was such a serious problem that it would endanger the country and even the rest of the world very seriously. I have a degree in Econ and another in Poli Sci, so I was able to explain in detail a worst case scenario.
Then Jan 6th happened, far exceeding my worst fears.
A week or so before one friend told me nah man nobody believes in QAnon before, old meme bro.
Then after Jan 6th they spent a year calling me hyperbolic for describing what Trump and other MAGA Republicans were doing as fascist.
I no longer speak with them, as in addition to being infuriatingly politically illiterate, they are generally insufferable people who bicker about each other constantly.
Anyway... yeah. We live in a cyberpunk dystopia over here, half corporate exploitation of everything material, half cruel, absurd and hypocritical hyper christian fundamentalism over our minds.
I'll let you onto a little secret about Europeans: we don't don't give half a shit about the US and their "politics".
You may well argue that we have your bases in our territory, NATO and your social networks influencing our lives, but I see that as our internal problem of still having to grow a proper pair, rather than an interesting consequence of whatever medieval situation you're brewing in there.
And you wish you were in a cyberpunk dystopia. You're in a boring one.
It's perfectly fine not to care about another country's politics, but WTF do you mean putting "politics" in scare quotes? You're just being condescending for the sake of being condescending, and you're doing it to someone who is pretty clearly trying to explain things in good faith. If you're not interested, just don't read it. It's not that hard.
My "politics" is because I don't think that any politically relevant (especially for the rest of the world) decision in the US is taken in or by the appointed institutions. And recent events, including the news we are commenting on here, are confirmation of this.
There’s nothing to be done about it. Legally there’s no such thing as “hate speech” in the US, and there won’t be unless we get around to changing the first amendment.
Time for that amendment to be ... amended.
But they're holy texts, you can't just change them!
Yeah I’m shocked.
Fortunately, the US has free speech protections. It's not up to some bureaucrats to decide what opinions are illegal.
If it were up to the US Congress to decide what is considered hate speech I don't think it would work out. The GOP would want to make calling someone "racist" hate speech.
Calling someone racist is reverse-racism! /s
No but seriously, I’ve heard this plop out of a few peoples mouth holes.
Exactly! You never know who is going to be in charge next, so be very careful what kind of powers you give to the government.
OTOH, maybe the GOP wouldn't be like that, or wouldn't be nearly so powerful, if their voters hadn't been fed a steady diet of hateful lies for the last 40 years.
We're so afraid of the wrong people having the power to limit speech that we've instead given them unlimited power to lie. Everything is a trade-off, and the goal shouldn't be to absolutely prevent a certain kind of abuse of power, but to prevent the worst abuses of all kinds of power, even if it means certain specific abuses are easier. What we have now is like barricading the front door while leaving the back door standing open.
I totally agree. We wouldn't be in this mess if Reagan hadn't tossed the Fairness Doctrine out the window. Gee I wonder why he did such a thing. /s
But here we are. And so getting back on track I think, yes, we need to slightly curtail free speech when it relates to very carefully specified things like public officials inciting violence and specific forms of hate speech because of their significant danger to the public and our institutions of government.
But I think we aren't going to get far with that until, as I think you are implying, we bring back the Fairness Doctrine so Fox "News" and OANN and Breitbart and, frankly, some of the similarly bullshit left wing "news" (looking at the media bias chart) like Occupy Democrats or Palmer Report, say.
Once we can get news bias in check, then, after maybe a generation, we won't have as many gullible lunatics voting and it will be less likely for right wing extremists to gain seats in congress and wreck everything.
Ok but what if someone figured out where you lived, doxed you and got a mob of angry racists to threaten your family? Maybe it was a joke, but given the amount of extremist angry conservatives these days maybe that threat of violence is real.
Do you think that is ok? What if so many people were hate messaging you that it utterly overwhelmed your ability to even go on your favorite social network? What if you woke up one day and one of those internet users drove by your house and left a note threatening your life on your door?
These aren’t hypothetical questions, this is what awful people do when you don’t curtail hate speech (and actively support it like musk does). There are REAL WORLD violent consequences for it and if you have never felt the fear from being targeted by a mob of irrationally angry strangers that want to hurt you than you just don’t really have any meaningful perspective to talk about “free speech” like you are.
Sure some of the hypotheticals I brought up are also illegal, but there is always a throbbing tumor of bigots spewing hate speech at each other at the heart of this kind of thing that these actions grow out of. These people need to be isolated, shamed and alienated from normal social circles for their behavior or things become dangerous for real human beings. You don’t negotiate with these people, you show them the door when they start spewing hate speech.
No, that's where I draw the line. I don't believe inciting violence should be covered under free speech.
Neither do I, which is why I support not allowing hate speech because the end goal is always violence or the threat of violence whether the people spewing it are conscious of it or not. The lame hateful racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic jokes that punch down at stereotypes are an advertisement for an ideology of hate (like a lightbulb for moths) and a test to see if that hate will be allowed to flourish in a community.
I disagree that the end goal is always violence. And I think what constitutes "hate speech" is subjective and cannot be fairly enforced.
Power is the end goal. Violence will be used when no more power can be obtained by legal and nonviolent means.
Fortunately, not all the world is the US and some countries have sensible laws.
And good luck trying to ignore the EU: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect
Not even Apple dares...
No, it's Musk who decides what gets boosted or banned, that's oh so much better.
Dont worry, even if Elon tanked the whole company by publicly telling its main customers, advertisers, to all go fuck themselves, its gonna be the new paypal with 100 trillion dollars in transactions!
Yes thats right, the company that can barely ever turn a profit, that just corporate public image suicided, and also fired nearly all its staff and now has an insanely toxic work environment that everyone competent is avoiding like the plague...
Fuck i cant even keep up the gimmick.
Elon and everything connected to him is so fucking fucked.
He's on the right side of the hate speech laws. The alt-right side.