Elon Musk decided to be explicitly partisan during one of the most politically divisive periods in American history. Nobody hates him because of his rockets, they hate him because he has taken many, many political and social stances that have nothing to do with his companies.
If you're going to blame anyone, blame Musk for derailing his own companies' missions by taking sides politically as loudly as he has. He's a very poor representative for the things that actually matter.
This lesson doesn't make sense in a two-party system where the two parties have wildly different levels of trustworthiness.
The left suppressing lies only opens the door to the right suppressing the truth, because the right was an enemy of truth and a spreader of lies from the beginning. The answer can't be "allow the lies so the truth has a chance to survive", that's just a compromise that brings us further from the truth.
Demanding neutrality on truthfulness in mass communication, especially during extreme political turbulence, is a terrible idea.
You're missing the point - if someone, broadly and irrevocably, is responsible for deciding what is true and repressing things that say otherwise, then that mechanism, even if used truthfully by one party and viciously by another, is itself a bad mechanism by virtue of being so easily abused. The very existence of a "bad others" in your government implies you do not want to give power to government.
That is the whole point. if you add power while you're in office, you better believe that power will be used against you while you're not. It's not about good vs bad, it's about giving power to an organization that itself can be flipped good or bad by one election.
Of course "ours==good, theirs==bad" is a different, dangerous cognitive problem, but institutional power creep is orthogonal and needs to be fought regardless to protect all of us from that power being used against all of us. That is a prerequisite to civil society wherein we're forced to live with people with completely different world views.
Because right now, platforms can and do cave to government pressure, so they're just thin proxy enforcement arms against dissent.
> The left suppressing lies only opens the door to the right suppressing the truth, because the right was an enemy of truth and a spreader of lies from the beginning.
It must be so nice to live in this imaginary world where the left does no wrong whatsoever but the right is the evil incarnate.
Furthermore, who decides what lies are and what truth is and who is responsible for enforcing this?
It’s honestly a very dangerous mentality. It’s what makes people do things like murder Charlie Kirk in cold blood for doing nothing other than speaking words, or attempt to shoot Trump at a campaign event.
It leads them to become the very bigots they think they are fighting against.
Wasn't the Trump shooter a registered republican? Not to mention, the Charlie Kirk shooter from a conservative family, and the attack had more to do with internet culture than leftism?
Anyone who is "fired up" about free speech but feels that their freedom of speech is being violated by someone other than the government has an explanation to give.
If the explanation is that they feel that other people have an obligation to listen to them, then I don't care.
My freedom of speech includes the freedom to reject other people's speech. If they can't tell the difference between a disagreement and suppression of speech, then that's their problem. The generous interpretation is that they don't fully understand the issue. The realistic explanation is that many people value their own freedom of speech over the freedom of others to the extent that they view disagreement with their views as an attack on their right to hold their views.
Essentially, "freedom for me but not for thee", and I don't rightly care about what enemies of freedom are "fired up" about.
But at the end of the day, much of what conservative "free speech" protests against big tech have been about has been that big tech drew a line on things like violence and hatred of protected classes, and conservatives don't like being told that their ideas, while legally allowed, are not welcome in polite company.
I'm not American. I chose to use American terms they have (from what I understand) the simplest definition in that it is considered absolute. Other countries have concessions for things like hate speech and other such matters (and yes, there is a lot of nuance to it). But my point was is that "free speech" is in regards to how the government treats you, not: "I can come to your business and treat you like shit and you have to sit there and take it."
EDIT: I just realized you were not responding to me... oops!
> conservatives don't like being told that their ideas, while legally allowed, are not welcome in polite company
As long as there are a litany of people like you who are totally comfortable with a double standard like this, the only option for conservatives is to exercise power and forcefully shove the shoe on the other foot until you change your mind.
I hate that, but I don't really see another way we'll ever get a culture of free speech, because people like you are completely comfortable exercising power towards a culture of, ironically, "free speech for me but not for thee"
I think there is still consistency between these two things.
Freedom of speech doesn't mean that I have to tolerate a business platforming hate speech. Any platform that stands behind the "free speech" of neo-nazi groups, white supremacists, and violent nationalists deserves criticism for turning a blind eye to what they are enabling. The First Amendment wasn't built to protect citizens' speech from each other; it was built to protect us from government censorship. Facebook doesn't have a legal responsibility to protect that, and I as a consumer can expect them to take an ethical stand against things like ethnic cleansing.
And that is exactly the point the author here is making. Facebook, X (Twitter), even places like Fediverse instances and Bluesky/AtProto sites are privately run spaces with no obligation to respect your freedom of speech.
If you choose these spaces to organize your political cause, you put your movement into another person's hands. Stop doing that. Host your own infrastructure, make it easy to recover and migrate, and start organizing outside of corporate-controlled areas.
Turning to Facebook for political organizing "because everyone is there" is like doing your town-hall meetings at Walmart "because everyone shops there", and then wondering why small businesses don't feel represented in your town anymore.
It's easy to blame big tech, but you can also ask your local bar why they only advertise events through Mark Zuckerberg, and ask why their website is mostly just links to Mark Zuckerberg's websites. Ask them if they have considered that Mark Zuckerberg might not a good obligatory middleman between them and their customers. The core problem is that people have accepted the lie that these corporate-controlled spaces are "the public square", when they are the exact opposite.
Businesses operate in a world as it is now, not as we wish it to be. Facebook has a lot of people there, and also lot of businesses have it as their only webpage. If we want to change the world we start with this version that we currently have. You will have hard time convincing bar owner start renting server or paying web dev if current facebook-page is good enough already now. (Disclaimer: I do not use facebook and I’m quite frustrated when the only webpage for the business is on facebook :( )
In unrelated topic, each person decides how much to spend spend/borrow/save as it is private decision to make, but to control inflation government manipulates bond interest rates which force public to change their behaviour.
You might as well be hosting your own infrastructure by posting a sign in your living room for all the reach you will have. If you want to talk to yourself you don’t need infrastructure.
And barring people from "labeling things" is censorship, so I don't understand your point.
Speech that is hateful towards people because of their identities is hate speech. That is the widely accepted definition. It is not even a legal designation, nor does it need to be to concretely exist.
Denying the existence of hate speech isn't logical, because there are many unambiguous examples of it, and individuals and businesses have plenty of valid reasons not to tolerate it from the company they keep.
Any all-in-one solution is going to be considered illegal at face value if it is obviously designed to circumvent copyright.
But if you split all the pieces of the solution up into separate pieces of software that can't do much illegal by themselves, you can always claim plausible deniability as the maintainer.
After all, you aren't going to be downloading torrents with Sonarr, you aren't going to be looking up information about shows with Jackett, and you aren't going to be automating your downloads with qBittorrent. If you link them all together with APIs, though, they do everything automatically.
As for the issue demonstrated here, it's just a long-standing problem in Sonarr and Radarr that even when it detects that a torrent is bad, it just sits there holding onto a virus until you override it with a working torrent, instead of just dumping the bad data and trying again.
Best example of this is the IYKYK-io stack (not real name). 90% is a generic video watching system, then you just need one add-on from a different website to make it search torrents as the source for those videos.
This isn't a good answer for why a major cybersecurity story that largely throws the idea of doing business with any Israeli company ever into jeopardy (any company could be a state malware operation in disguise) to the 5th page when it was upvoted as much as it was.
I know HN's algorithm is weird, but this story deserves to stick to the front page for more than the couple of hours the last thread lasted. I don't agree with the algorithm automatically deplatforming controversial topics.
The story probably is being curated off the front page, but to be fair I understand the motivation. There aren’t many subjects that inspire as many high emotions as Israel. Everyone has strong options. The mods probably think it’s not worth the trouble to police the threads and they’re probably right. Nobody is going to change any minds in any of those threads anyway.
A company from countryX does something unkosher -- this means all companies from country X do everything unkosher :)
Good luck operating under these assumptions -- Show me a company that is a leader in tech or business that is not from a country where some companies did unkosher things
If you're going to blame anyone, blame Musk for derailing his own companies' missions by taking sides politically as loudly as he has. He's a very poor representative for the things that actually matter.
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