Suck My Glock
Member
I think we all are discussing this matter lately. Almost all of us here have reverence for private property rights, and rightly so, because the western Judeo-Christian world jurisprudence (America's in particular) has property rights as a cornerstone of the foundation of society. While we are disappointed in the petty childish conduct of the enemy, neither do we want to see knee-jerk reactionary attempts made at using the force of government to force internet platform owners to accommodate us. We realize that any government tool used on them can also be turned on us.
However,...there have been some persuasive perspectives.
For instance, when the enemy tries to tell us that only flintlocks existed when the Bill of Rights was penned, claiming that because of this we do not have a RIGHT to an AK47, we laugh at that silliness because we know that while the tools may change, the principle does not.
So are we today at risk of not being consistent with such thinking regarding the evolution of media, and how central the internet has become to individual speech and expression? Well,...in that vein, I present the following article for consideration of one point of view.
I am, despite my libertarianism, beginning to bias heavily toward Poland's model of how they police bias among internet platforms.
https://www.piratewires.com/p/insurrection-as-a-service
In Pruneyard Shopping Center Vs. Robins, the Supreme Court ruled California could protect political protesters from being evicted from private property. This case built on a body of law that flourished throughout the 60s and 70s, and included such cases as Marsh v. Alabama (1946), Lloyd Corporation Ltd. v. Tanner (1972), and Amalgamated Food Employees Union Local 590 v. Logan Valley Plaza (1968). We haven’t even touched the Sherman Antitrust Act, or the much-discussed Section 230, and this is already complicated. In any case, the notion one should simply build a competitor platform if he isn’t happy with his Twitter ban has never really been serious, as everyone who works in tech is well aware it isn’t possible to build such a platform absent ideological submission to the shadow state. This was plainly evidenced by Parler’s fate last week.
The American Bill of Rights was written at the time of the printing press, a machine that anyone could buy, the street corner, on which anyone could sell a paper, a system of public roads and walks for distribution, and thousands of small businesses that comprised the “market,” any one of which, absolutely, could refuse to sell a paper, but no one or two (or five in obvious collusion) were capable of censoring a single voice out of public existence. Today, the internet is the gateway through which almost our entire democracy is conducted. It is where we go to learn about the world, almost without exception. It is our contemporary printing press, our street corner, our public roads and walks, and our market, all combined and dominated by a small handful of giants from the same class, of roughly the same politics, and from mostly the same region.
Should this tiny, unelected group of people so-empowered be allowed to vanish any voice from public, for any reason? Is this truly in keeping with the spirit of the Constitution? Separate from the legal questions: is this the kind of country you want to live in?
We are in danger, here — clearly, come on, you know that this is true — of something very dark.
However,...there have been some persuasive perspectives.
For instance, when the enemy tries to tell us that only flintlocks existed when the Bill of Rights was penned, claiming that because of this we do not have a RIGHT to an AK47, we laugh at that silliness because we know that while the tools may change, the principle does not.
So are we today at risk of not being consistent with such thinking regarding the evolution of media, and how central the internet has become to individual speech and expression? Well,...in that vein, I present the following article for consideration of one point of view.
I am, despite my libertarianism, beginning to bias heavily toward Poland's model of how they police bias among internet platforms.
https://www.piratewires.com/p/insurrection-as-a-service
In Pruneyard Shopping Center Vs. Robins, the Supreme Court ruled California could protect political protesters from being evicted from private property. This case built on a body of law that flourished throughout the 60s and 70s, and included such cases as Marsh v. Alabama (1946), Lloyd Corporation Ltd. v. Tanner (1972), and Amalgamated Food Employees Union Local 590 v. Logan Valley Plaza (1968). We haven’t even touched the Sherman Antitrust Act, or the much-discussed Section 230, and this is already complicated. In any case, the notion one should simply build a competitor platform if he isn’t happy with his Twitter ban has never really been serious, as everyone who works in tech is well aware it isn’t possible to build such a platform absent ideological submission to the shadow state. This was plainly evidenced by Parler’s fate last week.
The American Bill of Rights was written at the time of the printing press, a machine that anyone could buy, the street corner, on which anyone could sell a paper, a system of public roads and walks for distribution, and thousands of small businesses that comprised the “market,” any one of which, absolutely, could refuse to sell a paper, but no one or two (or five in obvious collusion) were capable of censoring a single voice out of public existence. Today, the internet is the gateway through which almost our entire democracy is conducted. It is where we go to learn about the world, almost without exception. It is our contemporary printing press, our street corner, our public roads and walks, and our market, all combined and dominated by a small handful of giants from the same class, of roughly the same politics, and from mostly the same region.
Should this tiny, unelected group of people so-empowered be allowed to vanish any voice from public, for any reason? Is this truly in keeping with the spirit of the Constitution? Separate from the legal questions: is this the kind of country you want to live in?
We are in danger, here — clearly, come on, you know that this is true — of something very dark.
