- Local time
- Today, 01:58
- Joined
- Sep 28, 1999
- Messages
- 7,821
To be honest moke, I don't know enough about it or if it even applies to me because I am small fry. I think it is a difficult topic. The US and the UK are slightly different in that the UK has edged towards "polite society" a little bit, and things seem a lot rougher in the US with complete freedom of speech. You only have to compare our news channels to yours to get a flavour of the difference.@Jon, I've been curious about your opinion on repealing section 230 and haven't noticed you weigh in on it.
Where everyone always point to the protections of the big tech sites like twitter and facebook, it also protects you.
I sympathise with big tech on the one hand because the technical implementation of managing hundreds of millions of users input must be very difficult. For example, I only ever read a fraction of the posts here. So, I see that point of view. But if you start censoring based on what you perceive as good intentions, you do so looking at the world through the prism of your own political bias. I see that as a big problem. You end up having an unfair society because the levers that control speech are disproportionately skewed towards the left.
In Trumps case, I do not think we have ever had a leader of a country having their voice box removed. It just seems wrong to me. You can say how dangerous he is, that is views are wrong, racist and so on, but that is only your opinion. There will be tens of millions of others who think the other side is racist and wrong and so on.
Take my stance on BLM, which I claim is a racist political group. The left will find this position utterly irrational, a view of your typical white supremacist who is operating from white privilege and has no perspective on the world. Yet I can assure you I have seen all sides of the argument for an eternity, I have no intention of having any superiority over someone who is black, I have nothing against anyone who is black, I have best friends who were black, dated black girls, love watching movies where the black underdog gets his vengeance, read books on black slavery and so on. Instead, I try to keep a clear head without getting micro-focused on the short-termism when a movement comes along, such as the BLM protests. I said from the outset that there was no evidence of racial bias in what happened to George Flloyd. I also pointed out the lack of protests for the black police officer who shot the white woman who called for their help. This happened 3 years earlier in the same city.
In essence, I believe it is a citizens right to have their voice heard. This is largely done via social media nowadays. Big tech is now preventing Trump speaking to his base with the frequency he desires. That is wrong, in my view.