Re: Q Anon is the tip of the iceberg

[spudb...@aol.com]

As long as people can move to another site to say their piece, then there is no issue. On the other hand, the practice has been to censor and de-platform the opponents of twitter, youtube, banks, that were involved in the original censorship. My fix would be to repeal fcc ruling 232 and permit lawsuits against carriers like apple, google, etc.

On Saturday, January 16, 2021 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On 1/16/2021 4:11 AM, John Clark wrote:

On Fri, Jan 15, 2021 at 10:00 PM spudboy100 via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

> For me, all I need to see is which companies are doing the censoring?
 
To censor someone you need the power to imprison or kill them if they say something you don't like, so no company is doing any censoring, some of them may want to but none of them are able to because only governments have enough power to do that. I'm not saying companies don't have any power at all because they do, and sometimes they use the power they do have unwisely, and that's a problem, but the solution is not to give even more power to the government because it already has quite enough power thank you. So what is the solution?  I don't know, there may not be one, there is not always a solution to every problem and that's why we live in an imperfect world and probably always will, but we should try to make the imperfections as small as possible. And if history has taught us anything it's that  giving even more power to the government, which is already the most powerful institution in our society, will not make the world perfect.

Except it's not clear that the government is the most powerful institution.  On paper, the legislature has the most power, but in practice division and polarization have left it ineffective, with a consequence that it just delegates power with no oversight or control. 

And there are problems, like global warming that require international solutions.  That implies that governments need the power to make the necessary agreements and to live up to them.

Brent

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[John Clark]

On Sun, Jan 17, 2021 at 12:26 AM spudboy100 via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

> As long as people can move to another site to say their piece, then there is no issue.

Then there is no issue, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube didn't even exist 10 or 15 years ago and we got along just fine and we didn't live in an Orwellian state. Even back then you could write a letter to the editor of a newspaper if you wanted to, but of course they were under no obligation to print it. If no Internet platform wants to publicize your harangue and no newspaper wants to print the thing then it must be because they all think what you're saying is evil or stupid or both. Of course maybe everybody else in the world is wrong and you're the only person that is correct, but then again maybe not. You might want to consider the possibility that there is another explanation.

> My fix would be to repeal fcc ruling 232 and permit lawsuits against carriers like apple, google, etc. 

Rule 232 allows the president to impose import restrictions  “in such quantities or under such circumstances as to threaten to impair the national security”. Trump used that As an excuse to limit Canadian aluminum imports because he claimed that Canada of all places posed a danger to national security! I think you mean rule 230, and in your approval of that you show a fundamental contradiction with everything you were saying before. Rule 230 exempts Internet platforms from liability lawsuits arising from things being said on their platforms, and the Internet could not exist without it. How in the world are Internet platforms supposed to stop people from making libelous statements if they're not allowed to kick them off for doing so? How about cell phone companies, if two people have a wireless conversation about you or send each other libelous text messages should you be allowed to sue the cell phone company for allowing it? Trump very much wanted to repeal rule 230, but when Twitter banned him for making thousands of personal insults, thousands of factual errors including quack medical advice that could kill people, and thousands of flat out lies, he whined and threw a tantrum like a three-year-old girl having her favorite doll taken away.  

If you are as interested in free speech as I am then it's obvious what the fix is.  Get rid of ALL liability laws not just those that involve the Internet, get rid of all of them! I say let the free market of ideas determine what's true and what is not, and Internet companies and their policies are part of the free market of ideas. Of course this will not eliminate all injustice in the world, the free market can be wrong but it's more reliable than most things and there would be far less chance of massive abuse. I'm perfectly OK with a judge determining what is legal and what is illegal but not in determining what is true and what is false, and I don't want government to make that decision either because history has shown us what happens when they do have that power, and it's not pretty. 

 

> it's not clear that the government is the most powerful institution. 

It's crystal clear to me that government is the most powerful institution because government is the only entity that has the legal power to kill you or to put you in prison for the rest of your life.  That's why I'm very reluctant to give the government even more power, like the power to tell Internet companies what they can and cannot put on their platforms.

> On paper, the legislature has the most power, but in practice [...]

 

In practice the legislature has given up most of its power to the executive branch, and that is to their shame. In practice the USA has been in many wars since 1945 but the Constitution says only the legislature can declare war and yet they haven't done that since 1941. So on paper the USA has been at peace for 76 years, but in practice not so much.

 John K Clark