- seigneur
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Offline - Registered: 6/26/2015
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Re: Liberty and regulation
Jeremy Taylor wrote:
It is simply the case that these companies market themselves as open platforms for expression.
And it is simply the case that you have your own view of how "open platforms of expression" are supposed to operate. They have their view. Your view does not conform with their view. Everybody is free to have their own view, right?
Facebook or Twitter don't claim to be media outlets, like the NYT or CNN. Also, in the US at least, carriage services are regulated differently to media outlets.
It does not follow that there is no point of similarity. I never claimed they were the same. There are differences and there are similarities.
You said Facebook and Twitter were "platforms for letting people interact with each other." Well, IRC (you know what that is, right?) is definitely a platform for letting people interact with each other, but it is nothing like Facebook and Twitter, because it does not throw ads at you and the content is not public the way it is at Facebook and Twitter.
So, saying that Facebook and Twitter are platforms for letting people interact with each other is saying too little. All in all, you are saying too little in too many words. You are surprisingly reductive when it comes to social realities.
1) It is probably true that commercial outlets like these have business interests that can often conflict with their stated loyalty to free expression. But one can still point out conflicts and note where they aren't living up to their claims about free expression and their legal position.
Yes, everybody is a 100% free to claim that the said companies are in conflict with this or that. But when the claim comes from self-proclaimed conservatives who are really just anti-liberal activists (where "liberal" means whoever they don't like), then this is a conflict in itself and everybody is, again, a 100% free to simply ignore such claims. And it is easy to ignore such self-proclaimed conservatives when their market trend is waning and when they stupidly put themselves out of mainstream.
2) There's nothing, really, in business or corporate interests that demands limited expression...
Never heard of the term "business secret", for instance? Business interests tend to be easily devious and, as devious, not so open.
3) There's certainly no reason that a pro-corporate position should align with left-liberalism, especially social and cultural liberalism...
There is very much reason for a pro-corporate position to align with the mainstream. If the mainstream for the time being or the current market swing happens to be in favour of left-liberalism, especially social and cultural liberalism, then it is smart business to put your money on that. Sorry.
4) The rules, which tend to biased against conservatives (or non-left-liberals) to begin with, aren't even enforced even even-handedly.
Hence Loius Farrakhan can obviously violate the rules of Twitter
You keep mentioning that name so I had to look it up now. By your reasoning, Farrakhan should be some arch-leftist liberal who gets a pass for breaking the rules. But he is not a liberal by any stretch of the imagination. So what is your point?
And when was the bias conservative?
A hundred years ago. Even fifty. Do not remember that far? I mentioned it a page ago or so.
But I agree that conservatives should leave these platforms (I don't see why anyone would use Twitter anyway), but you seem to contradict yourself by now , towards the end of your post, admitting a liberal bias at these companies.
I do not find "conservative" and "liberal" to be useful terms in this debate. I only use the words to keep myself in the debate, and in part my debate is to demonstrate the futility of those words. On both sides, they are blanket curse words for bashing the other side. They have no concrete content at all.
Sure enough I admit a bias at businesses. Businesses make money by having a bias, by creating a surplus value even when the "creating" part is just marketing-speech. There is always that bias, but I refuse to admit that there is inherently something either conservative or liberal in this. It's just business.
- Jeremy Taylor
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Re: Liberty and regulation
You literally don't make anything even pretending to be a response to my points, not that you did much better previously, but there was some attempt at least. Apparently you just can't take being wrong, especially when it involves conservatives being right about being targeted. This fits in with your previously stated position of trying to win at all costs, though how you think this trolling nonsense can accomplish that I'm not sure. Your intention was silly and snarky to begin with - conservatives just can't be right about their being discriminated again, no matter the evidence - and has remained so. This is supposed to be a philosophy forum, so it would be good if you could avoid the most blatant sophistry. Tellingly, you ignore the legal/regulatory position. So, for a start, these companies are legally supposed to be carriage services, and therefore have no narrow editorial policy. And your point about me and Facebook et al. having different views about what an open platform means is just silly. Words have meanings. An open platform doesn't suggest one that blatantly discriminates against conservatives and other relatively mainstream non-left-liberal viewpoints, nor one that then doesn't even enforce these stacked rules fairly. This is not what open platform suggests in English, not by a long way. It's an Orwellian use of such a phrase. It would be like a university promising free and open discussion and then sanctioning students for even relatively innocuous deviation from left-liberalism (which is, in fact, how many universities and colleges in the US and Britain now act) - indeed, it is just like this, except we're talking about social media platforms.
I noted Farrakhan and his relationship to liberalism. Being black, he is high on intersectional hierarchy that now dominates left-liberal thought, so his racialism is overlooked. And there are important connections between him and prominent left-liberal figures, especially African-Americans. It doesn't matter he isn't a mainstream left-liberal, that was never a part of my point. It is enough he is looked on indulgently by left-liberals so not treated as conservatives are treated. This all was obvious from what I said and from my argument in general.