XKCD is great when it sticks to science and tech, not so much when it comes to the First Amendment.
19 thoughts on “12 Anti-Free-Speech Arguments”
Comments are closed.
XKCD is great when it sticks to science and tech, not so much when it comes to the First Amendment.
Comments are closed.
I;d love to hear how the XKCD cartoon was wrong.
It isn’t it is exactly true that anything stated in the cartoon is incorrect
This is why I paid to host my own blog when the deplatforming started during the Trum years. Free speech is one thing, but the private servers don’t need to host my words, free or not.
Nor is there a right to be free from private people choosing to shun you, or choose nto to employ you, or other consequences to your words or speech.
Please, explain.
The article you linked does a shitty job of it and is wrong. It assumes a socialistic intepretation of the “freedom of speech” wherein everyone has a right to be heard….Which is simply not true, anynore than everyone’s are is valuable and deserves patronage.
He explained that. Didn’t you read it? Or not for comprehension?
Here a good back and forth that tangential to the subject.
Does the freedom of the powerful to deplatform you need defending? Particularly, when they collude to suppress speech, attacking along multiple channels at once? I suggest looking at what happened to Wikileaks or Parler. In both cases, they got attacked on multiple fronts, including payment processing and marketing, to squelch speech.
If your speech gets unpopular enough, you have to replicate a considerable portion of the modern economic system just to talk.
And private servers that provide public forums should lose their freedom to discriminate on grounds of speech.
It really is that simple. What XKCD suggests may be ok, except when collusion between companies occurs to prevent entry into the market place. Besides the article Rand linked, anyone can go read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. The main plot of the story is how James Taggart was colluding with other rail lines and government to prevent competition in their industry and others associated.
When your local schools, government, and emergency agencies use social media and when federal offices and agencies do the same, these methods of communication become a common carrier much like a utility company. Denying water, power, or telephone services based on being on a Democrat hit list is illegal and the same is true for other services that are common carriers.
We all know that Democrats want to cut power, water, and telephone service to people and groups on their hit lists. They already act to prevent people from employment, banking, and transportation who are on their hit lists.
Depriving people from the right to pursue life, liberty, and happiness is a crime. There are no legitimate moral or legal claims that justify what the progressive fascists are doing.
The courts decided Trump’s Twitter feed is a public utility, and barred him from blocking anyone. If a man’s private Twitter account can be expropriated like that, the line between private and public no longer exists.
and yet Twitter permanently suspended the Donald…
Which, as they are a private company, they should be able to do.
You have a right to speak, you do not have a right to be hosted so others can hear your speech. You do not have the right to have others pay attention to you, nor validate your speech or opinions.
The article’s arguments are not valid….unless you are a socialist.
“Public Utility”. Did you get that? Would you be OK with the water and sewer service to your home being cut off because of something you said? Actually a better analogy would be if your utility company arbitrarily decided every other month you’d get billed for triple your usage, and every other month you’d be cut off.
Your attempts at portraying this as a claim of a “right to be heard” is infantile. And how you get “government ownership of the means of production” out of it is even more batty. You’re arguing it is proper that someone should loose their employment over something they said, or gain employment over something they said (Colin Kaepernick). I think you should take another look at that XKCD panel:
He (and you) are saying it’s insufficient for an individual to decide for themselves whether or not to listen, no one should be allowed to make that decision. Relax, it’s been made for you (cool, one less thing you know). For the record, that’s authoritarian. And you’re arguing we’re socialist??
And I really do love the “has to listen” part. Like anyone here is even remotely suggesting that. You totalitarian types really do love your Clockwork Orange shit huh?
Which, as they are a private company, they should be able to do.
Why? My take is that when you create a public forum and encourage people to speak on it, then you’ve relinquished most of those rights of censorship.
you do not have a right to be hosted so others can hear your speech.
Unless, of course, the business granted you that right.
Part of it is that Twitter doesn’t follow its own rules nor apply them consistently to all parties. They expect one party to follow all the rules, even ones they dont publish, but also think they don’t have to live up to their end of the contract.
“you do not have a right to be hosted so others can hear your speech. You do not have the right to have others pay attention to you, nor validate your speech or opinions.”
The funny thing about this statement is that the Democrats do claim it is their right for their views to be hosted, that others must pay attention to it, and that their views must be validated.
All the big social media companies run content on top of other people’s content that promote the latest Democrat narratives that either in support or to denigrate opposing views. They force their views on others through controlling institutions like the media, education, and the corporate class of business and failure to validate those views leads to lost jobs through people being fired or prevented from getting hired, getting bad grades, being banned from the internet, and denied access to the financial industry.
The Democrats achieve this through street violence, subverting institutions and bullying people professionally, and using government agencies to extort businesses to do what Democrats can’t do legally with government power.
Munroe is a goose-stepping totalitarian nutjob who believes you shouldn’t have a job if you disagree with his politics. Screw him and his retarded little webcomic.
who believes you shouldn’t have a job if you disagree with his politics.
I suspect Mr. Monroe is credentialed in one of the Sciences based on the topical subject matter of many of his cartoons. And since Science has been owned by the Federal Government by and large since WWII your description of his viewpoint has been more or less standard practice in them since the 1940s. In fact it has usually been the case between the philosopher and their benefactor(s) going all the way back to Socrates and probably before.
The whole system is exploitative by design. It exists to draw your attention to those who pay the bills with the one exception for those services which are subscription based. In that case I agree it is more like a utility than a private platform if it guarantees to make what you write public as part of what you pay for as a subscriber.
BTW it is possible for utilities to cut you off if you quit paying your bills for a long enough time. There are prohibitions only under specific conditions when termination of service occurs not outright bans. The courts can and do decide.
Going back to private entities. Being banned from the Frobitz service because you were banned on Facebook without clear evidence of why you were violating the Frobitz service terms of service seems like unfair restraint and collusion. A clear anti-trust issue. Same happened to Parler when it was de-platformed.
Moving on, I won’t subscribe to any service that employs ‘fact-checkers’.
I’d rather see a system like Facebook go peer-to-peer and get rid of any central servers. You cannot monetize that? Well that’s tough on you! I pay my cable subscription regularly in order to post this unmolested.
I deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts on Jan 6 2021 and I will never go back. The date was not a coincidence.
I had stopped using FB a year and a half earlier and had never been much of a Twitter user outside of my one tweet: “Testing”.
Not sure what field(s) Randall Monroe is credentialed in. Doesn’t appear to be in anti-trust law. But that won’t stop me from liking most of his cartoons. After all as I like to say: It used to be a free country.
“BTW it is possible for utilities to cut you off if you quit paying your bills for a long enough time.”
Sure but there are laws about what time of year they can do it too. It is slightly different than the censorship issue because you lose access for saying something they don’t like, something phone, power, and water companies can’t do.
Banks are another area of concern since they can turn away customers unlike other common carriers but like with utilities cutting off your power, it used to be because of bouncing checks, fraud, insufficient funds to start an account, and other economic concerns. Now, they are banning businesses who break no laws but are on Democrat’s hit list. They also engage in viewpoint discrimination and ban and blacklist individuals who say things Democrats don’t like.
Essentially what you are saying is that anti-trust needs updating for the digital as opposed to the guild-ed age. I don’t disagree.
I stopped following XKCD when “Black Lives Matter” appeared on the banner.
The Left systematically blocks and punishes speech by its political opponents, gets them fired from their jobs and makes it difficult or impossible for them to be employed in big companies and government, indoctrinates their children in the public schools, limits their financial transactions, and uses physical violence as needed. The Right is worried that responding to such leftist assaults in kind or by political means may be morally or legally unjustifiable. One side is pursuing a campaign to gain power by any means necessary. The other side acts as though rules and customs defining fair play that once constrained both sides are still in effect. Which side is most likely to prevail? The libertarian Right will prevail only if becomes more effective politically. Discussions about Facebook and the 1st Amendment are a sideshow.