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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35571 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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I guess it's kind of funny that after I have been complaining for years about Twitter's bullshit justification for banning Trump under the "incitement to violence" standard, the new management goes and suspends Kanye West because, according to Elon Musk's tweet, "he again violated our rule against incitement to violence." https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1598543670990495744

Maybe yishan (formerly of Reddit) was right that when you run a social media platform, there are certain bans that you just have to enact to keep your service alive, even though there are no objective rules you can apply to justify these bans.

[EDIT: Just noticed this was already discussed below. Sorry.]

[EDIT 2: I deleted in <10 minutes but there had already been some replies. No good options based on my past choices so I think least-bad is to undelete. Sorry for chaos.]

I'm a free speech absolutist, but I am willing to sacrifice Kanye West's free speech if it helps us win. I could tolerate a world where speech is free except for one unprincipled carve-out banning antisemitism. Twitter probably has to do that anyway to comply with German laws against Holocaust denial.

I guess the question is whether it helps. I think it does. The ban might reassure moderates. It's probably better to let this one go by and wait for a more favorable example to fight over.

Weak move by Musk, who said weeks ago he would only censor content/posts, not accounts. And also, posting a swastika , in and itself, is not inciting violence, even if it's interpreted as antisemitic. By that logic, the ADL and SPLC should be banned. No one is more obsessed with Nazi iconography than those groups. I guess he's starting to feel the pinch of advertisers leaving or bad media coverage. 50% of twitter employees laid off and they still kept the worst ones it seems.

OP deleted for some reason, so replying here, on musk, this was a twitter space that Musk joined and spoke in. Rough excerpts (paraphrased, transcripts didn't work)

He's giving taibbi and, "as of an hour ago", bari weiss full access to all twitter documents, uncurated, they can get what they want, he didn't see the tweets before we did. No clue how true all that is

Asked about freedom of expression vs kanye, he claimed, in order - "it was my decision" - "that was incitement to violence ... incitement to violence is illegal in the US ... what is incitement to violence, I think posting a swastika is incitement to violence ... I personally wanted to punch kanye, that is inciting me to violence". It's tough to interpret elon's statements here, what is poorly articulated vs actually true, but if taken literally, that's quite stupid - even saying "i wanna kill all the joos" is protected speech, and posting a funny swastika edit (that's also the logo of a weird cult, raelism) is not incitement to violence in any sense, let alone a legal sense!

He says "at some point it might make sense to make [the twitter files] publicly available". That'd be hilarious, doubt it'll happen.

Elon's hotmicing background noise while other people talk and constantly cutting out, based!

The phrase "coup-complete problem" comes up again and again in these scenarios, because keeping censors from having power over you goes way past "make your own international banking system," right up to "pull a Napoleon and conquer europe."

In the call Wednesday, Musk agreed to let the EU's Executive Commission carry out a "stress test" at Twitter's headquarters early next year to help the platform comply with the new rules ahead of schedule, the readout said.

That will also help the company prepare for an "extensive independent audit" as required by the new law, which is aimed at protecting internet users from illegal content and reducing the spread of harmful but legal material.

Violations could result in huge fines of up to 6% of a company's annual global revenue or even a ban on operating in the European Union's single market.

It's literally illegal to not censor things that are perfectly legal, governments can order you to ban anything they consider "harmful content", and we've gone way past the point where rearranging deck staff on the Titanic could fix anything.

I am once again reminded that despite my qualms with the United States government and what I think is obvious malfeasance on the part of American government officials in attempting to control Twitter narratives, that I prefer the American culture and norms around speech by an immeasurable amount to Europe. At least the American government officials still find the need to pretend that they're just informing Twitter of violations of platform policy, knowing that going beyond that point is a clear and obvious violation of First Amendment speech protections. The EU just flatly, openly says, "you ban anything that the regime doesn't approve of our we'll destroy you". They're not ashamed of that, they don't feel the need to hide it, they say it openly and proudly.

I still see people say, "how are Americans any more free than Europeans" and I'm just baffled that anyone thinks this is a difficult question.

Americans need to be periodically reminded that free speech is not a universal value in western countries.

Material vs. philosophical, I guess is one dimension. The Europeans have figured out good safety nets and regulations, we Americans still imbue an old document with enough faith to render it ironclad.

Good safety nets, but higher taxes and lower living standards. Nothing is free.

'right up to "pull a Napoleon and conquer europe."'

More accurately described as use independant first strike capability to eliminate all nuclear capability you don't control and then take on and best NATO, China, and any other powers simultaneously, occupying their cities and exterting uncontestable control over whatever of their remaining civiliian population is still around at this point.

Compliance and obedience or internal coup are the only non fantasy options.

He does have the rockets already, which puts him ahead of most...

I don't understand why an American company has to obey EU laws.

Because they do business in Europe, ie sell to advertisers here. They could of course withdraw from the EU market if they though that was in their best interest.

But they're not selling to advertisers in Europe. They're selling to them in the US, because that's where they are. How do they enforce a fine against a company that isn't physically located in the EU?

Twitter has an EU HQ in Dublin that runs the EU subsidiary. Post-Musk, they still have over 500 staff here. Most of those are salespeople, selling ads to EU customers.

I don't know the breakdown for Twitter specifically, but typically American MAGA/Faang/whatever firms make about 25 - 30% of their revenue in Europe. It's not nothing

Facebook's EMEA headquarters, which is Europe, Middle East and Africa, is located in Dublin. The EU has regulations for businesses doing business in Europe to EU citizens using their data.

You may not have seen the little pop-up banner on some American sites about "We see you are located in the EU and under GDPR we can't accept your details/you can't access this site", but it's because American companies do not have the level of data protection demanded by GDPR and if they aren't compliant, they can't do business with/handle data of EU citizens.

Whatever Facebook does in America is its own business, but it's a multinational corporation. If it's doing business in Europe and handling data of EU citizens, it has to be compliant with GDPR, or not handle that data.

Huh? Twitter has executives and employees in europe, and sells to advertisers in europe.

Presumably, they could work with the US government to hash it out.

The ole reverse DeBeers?

this could have been done by just blocking the picture for EU IPs.

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