Fair point. I was really looking for ‘surprising’.

Also in the UK… it's fixed in part - works on my phone but not in my browser

Even the German Bundeswehr withdrew from Twitter because of Musk's endorsement of the far-right extremist AfD. The people who need to be made aware of this aren't the people who are remaining on there (which are people who either already are critical of Musk but are stubborn or can't leave for other reasons, and Musk fans).

Someone fat-fingered the "reach factor penalty for dem terms" and typed 01 instead of 0.1

Yeah the conservative stuff that gets censored is crap like pizza gate and Wayfair selling children. Or sandy hook lies. The two aren't even remotely the same.

In this case though, it's pretty clearly on topic. This is a major tech company and they are claiming that it is due to a software bug.

Ultimately, it is the same as censorship. That's why it's so tough to find the right balance between fostering a community and extinguishing it.

We call it differently because its purpose is different, not its actions.

Yeah, there's absolutely nothing tech or intellectually provoking about about this post! Wait...

Who decides what a fact is and by what manner is information determined to be factual? In 2020, many major social media sites censored the New York Post's story regarding the Hunter Biden laptop scandal citing the report as political mis- or disinformation. The same laptop that many denied the very existence of became a lynchpin in securing Hunter Biden's guilt during his subsequent tax fraud case.

German media is doing the same, posing it as a question or posing it as "looks like" and it's baffling. Then there's also the Anti-Defamation League coming forward protecting Musk and saying it wasn't a nazi salut. I don't even know how anyone, much less an organization meant to protect jewish interests, can come to that conclusion.

Which is why people will frequently repost things wrapped in a CW. Hence the request not to do that, so people see it.

Nearly half a trillion dollars of net worth must make him feel untouchable. The SEC can’t touch him when he says “funding secured” (it wasn’t). Nor can they do anything to him when he secretly bought Twitter shares.

Because he’s so engrained with the government he’s untouchable. SpaceX is doing stuff NASA only dreams of. Nobody built out starlink to the volume that he did and so now he can play king maker in war zones like Ukraine.

He’s got huge conflicts of interest with China.

The man is basically an asset of foreign governments and is here sweing the seeds of hate on his mega platform.

It used to be nobody was above the law but then billionaires became too powerful. How often do I think about Rome? A shit ton more now except I think more about the fall of Rome than the golden era.

The issue isn't necessarily that all censorship is "bad", it's that it is being applied asymmetrically to benefit a political party, blatantly.

> Private companies can't dump waste onto a river, can't build buildings not up to code, can't discriminate based on religion or sex, can't prevent their employees from joining a union, can't evade taxes

I think all of those are "fair game" now (if the price is right). I only wish I were kidding.

> why the hell wouldn't it be possible, in principle, to regulate them as public utilities and forbid them by law from censorship or other nefarious practices?

You're arguing with a strawman, I never said it's impossible in principle. I said it isn't currently categorized as a utility, hence they are free to censor as they see fit.

It's entirely possible for the courts of the USA to deem it a utility, and it'd be interested to see the long term effects of such ruling.

The ruling would only apply to citizens of the USA, so it'd be very interesting to see how the companies in question implemented the changes to stay compliant.

It'd be an interesting case study, but it's impossible to speculate on its fallout until a clear plan has been drafted. I.e. It could potentially make it impossible for newcomers to create platforms, depending on the angle for such a regulation. Or it could make changes to the algorithm borderline impossible etc.

basically countless pitfalls and without a clear draft, nothing of value can be discussed

Same in France, both #fucktrump and #democrats are censored, #republicans and #fuckbiden are allowed

It's a limited solution at best. You can't win a tech arms race with the very people who control the core infrastructure, write the laws and run the police. Just ask the pro-Democracy protestors in Hong Kong.

I see it as Nov 6 was when he crossed a border without return. He showed his cards. He lost that day, but he wins now, so prevailed in the end.

I completely agree that it's a very hard topic from the perspective of actually maintaining a healthy social media site.

Most of them have a vision for their platform, i.e. town hall for Twitter, family and friend conversations for Facebook etc.

To adhere to this image they filter out spam etc. now, filtering out obnoxious content just becomes one more rule and thus the slippery slope begins.

But to answer your question: for me, any kind of interference such as deleting/hiding content or algorithmically influence which content is shown is censorship on social media platforms, and the user should be responsible for applying such censorship.

I.e. provide a UI which let the user configure their own preferences. But actually nailing such a feature with a good UX ain't easy, and how to actually implement it isn't either, so that's just a pipedream, realistically speaking.

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. Jean-Paul Sartre

He might not be pro gas chamber but he knows exactly what he’s doing. Continuing to give him the benefit-of-the-doubt is willful ignorance.

For starters, the Sieg Heil salute that Elon did was exactly the same as Hitler did it [1] and modern-day white nationalists do it [2].

Secondly, anyone who refers to Nazism as the "the National-Socialist party of the German working class" is clearly attempting to make an utterly specious claim that Nazism is really about Socialism and not about Fascism.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/1i6par1/elon_musk_vs_...

2. https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/1i6v521/for_those_not...

Between this and people convicted for sedition being pardoned I'm curious. How much copium do you use to remain in denial?

> You believe Elon Musk is somehow showing support for the National-Socialist party of the German working class?

That's a bizarre comparison. Are you deliberately trying to build a straw-man and associate a known extreme right-wing, Nazi salute with socialism? You do realise that the Nazi party were not at all socialist - they called themselves that to trick and lie to the Germans.

Yes.

> You believe Elon Musk is somehow showing support for the National-Socialist party of the German working class?

No, which is why nobody but people who want to downplay say this stuff. This is the second comment of this kind I saw.

He's doing the Hitler salute, with a snarl, once to the crowd and once to Trump. He has no clue who Hitler is or what he did, just like he has no clue what RPC are, or what item level requirements in Path of Exile 2 mean, but that doesn't change what we see with our own eyes.

Even a repost can't edit/add a CW (which is why adding a CW to your post, counter-intuitively, will often net your post more visibility, since many feel uncomfortable reposting un-CW'd posts)

I suppose we did when signing up to accounts on a US-based site. It's long been a problem that the US has de facto global jurisdiction of the internet.

> The rest of the world didn't sign up for this.

He didn't say they did, he said America did, and everyone is along for the ride.

But in a way we did, by letting US (or China) control all our social medias.

In a way they did. Europe outsourced their defense to the US, energy to Russia and manufacturing to China, now getting <censored> by all three, rather predictably.

We share the blame as we spent 80 years relying on the crutch of US military support and now we struggle to see how we can stand up on our own without the crutch. The next decade will test the resolve of other liberal democracies to survive this challenge.

Republics fall, progress isn't linear. Even c. 2000 years ago people were writing about how democracy falls to tyranny. The world is a lot more global now, but the Roman Republic would also have seemed rather "global" too, yet was replaced by the Roman Empire not long after Cicero was writing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory

Hoping ROTW can make US a little bit less relevant. More non-US startup unicorns. Fund the WHO, UN etc. Surely 8 within billion people we can so it?

Apparently ROW = America's colonies (in the eyes of Meta), so maybe kind of yeah.

While youre touching on a real issue, your phrasing doesn't really convey you've understood the issue you're touching on, honestly.

What you're actually putting forth is wherever large social media platforms should be treated as utilities. (Which ISPs are).

If the legislative decided to categorize it as a utility, then any censorship the company decided to do could potentially infringe on your free speech, yes.

However, this is not the case as of today. If it's deemed as such, it'd definitely have a global effect. Wherever that'd be positive would be an interesting case study.

And I might add: lots of ISPs host DNS servers which do in fact censor / block certain domains from resolving

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre

I agree. As well as the technical merits, it seems to me to be a better match for natural human interaction. Your point about citizen-owned media is well made - in the US we seem to be seeing the near-total collapse of integrity in commercial media - on the one hand it is dismaying to watch, on the other it is as clear a call to arms as we could wish for.

It's been good to see Bluesky up its video game in response to the TikTok nonsense. I'd like to think that the Fediverse could evolve to meet the expectations of people fleeing Facebook, Twitter & co, but it's not there yet. Those of us who are highly motivated (and I am, after recent events!) will make do, but I think it needs to be easier in order to get the critical mass required.

> France as one country which correctly identified the threat of US going batshit crazy soon after WW2

This was equal part pragmatic foreign policy and a desire by the French elite to hold onto their colonies, an institution strongly opposed by the United States since around WWI.