OMG! New free speech social network won’t allow members to take the Lord’s name in vain A new social media network that promises its users untrammeled free speech won’t allow “The N-word, the C-word, the F-word or God’s name in vain.” The new network is called “Frank Speech” and is backed by Mike Lindell, who rose to fame as the CEO of My Pillow and has spent the last few years as a fervent supporter of former US …
What with my planned weekend to Scunthorpe... A weeks trip around Europe on a Fücker bus and visiting one of the local tapas restaurants "El Gato Negro".
On the flip side, you won't catch me discussing Post Malones song "God damn".
Morons, the lot of them. On the plus side, having a bunch of people openly discussing their hate in a known location makes it easier to track to worst of them.
Icon because everyone's going to get burned by this.
From yesterday's chip wrapper... sorry, Metro
"Bitche slapped with Facebook ban"
"Facebook has sparked fury in the French town of Bitche after taking down its official page for being offensive."
"...But the row is likely to lead to headaches for the French towns of Arse Stream, Anus, Condom, and Pussy, who risk being cancelled by the Facebook algorithms"
And "The American Embassy in Paris was once situated in Place de Bitche – Bitch Square – in honour of the town’s resistance during the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. But it was renamed United States Square after the Ambassador objected in 1881."
“Arse Stream”? There’s a French town with the word “Stream” in its name?
The tour d’Arse can be enjoyed in Chaumont, though.
Since Bitche is etymologically unrelated to “bitch”, Place de Bitche translates as “Bitche Square”, not “Bitch Square”. (Bitche is a francization of German Bitsch, which is also etymologically unrelated to “bitch”.)
Chip wrapper, indeed.
Let's see how leftpondian-centric they're gonna be with this.
Are they also gonna block vagina, fanny, pussy, minge, slit, gash, front bottom? How about copulate, shag, hump, pound, bang?
And don't get me started on cony, chjichja, kunda, pizda, píča, hajzl! And those are just three languages/regions for just one of the banned words.
I don't know. The whole exercise is so pointless and pathetic that few people might even bother to attack it.
Then again, it's probably built from misconfigured open-source components that are vulnerable to automated attacks by botnets, so it may just be killed by computer before any competent human attacker gets to it.
Does that mean that we have to demand that they also ban the FSM and the IPU?!?
Cos they lose either way. If they don't ban them then some people's Sky Faeries are being allowed. But if they do ban them then they are agreeing that they are Sky Faeries!
---------------> Kinda obvious!
this was reckless (though personally I'd prefer 'stupid'), because it dares many people to show it is not 'the most secure' and, possibly, quite the reverse. And, if they prove it, the results will be displayed and ridiculed all over social media. This happened recently in Poland, with a launch of right-wing social platform (abicla?), which boasted of this or that, and was quickly, and publicly, proven to be amateurish. Speak softly and carry a big stick - much more effective methinks.
The free speech problem is *only* a problem because Twitter is an incontestable monopoly and (since Google, Amazon and Apple shut down Parler ) a member of a cartel.
if Twitter wasn't a monopoly and a member of a cartel, free speech wouldn't be an issue because you could just use a competitor.
Monopoly is defined by barriers to entry. Such as your local phone company being the only one getting permission to run phone lines. Or extreme cost for another provider to run duplicate infrastructure, like gas and water. But even extreme cost doesn't make a monopoly by itself. Cell phone providers are regulated because they are an oligopoly. It costs billions to build a new nationwide network.
A competitor to Twitter has neither of those. Parler and Frank are both examples of how it is not a monopoly. You could launch a new platform on a hosted website, and then grow out of it. Register a domain, spend an afternoon coding, and a few $$ a month. The barrier to entry is getting users (customers) to switch platforms. Which means that the new sites have to be competitive. You know, the pure capitalism that they claim to want.
Everyone used MySpace before Facebook came out. AltaVista used to be THE search tool before Yahoo and Google. I haven't seen an AOL CD for a very long time. I'm sure there is a whole list of Internet companies that used to be the leader that no one could compete against. Until someone did.
That's not what a monopoly is. A monopoly is simply the only (major) supplier of something.
A really obvious example is that Microsoft were a monopoly with Windows despite it being relatively easy to make and sell an operating system.
A company that almost completely dominates a market is a monopoly. Twitter is a monopoly.
Twitter doesn't have a monopoly; there are a great many channels for expression, public and private.
And Twitter isn't abusing anything. Freedom of the press belongs to the press.
Honestly, there's nothing sadder than butthurt right-wingers bitching about "cancel culture" and people being kicked of Twitter. Leaving Twitter, voluntarily or otherwise, has never harmed anyone's ability to communicate with any audience that's actually interested. If part of your audience is too damn lazy to seek you out elsewhere, that's not Twitter's problem.
You might want to look up the definition of monopoly. No one has to, needs to, or is forced to use Twitter, nor is anyone prevented from using an alternative communication platform or starting their own. Twitter also has terms and conditions which they can remove users for not complying with. It's ok to criticize the way they do business, but stick to the facts.
You look it up. Internetz only work good for monopolies and cartels. You cannot really survive there without the backing of this little woke cartel of Apple/Google/AWS/Cloudflare. Just ask, say, one Brian Krebs. And I do mean "backing", not "services", as the cartel denies services to their paying clients at will - the "terms and conditions" you've mentioned is just a bunch of small font saying "we can drop you whenever we want".
Bollocks.
They're capitalist businesses that try their best to make money. When that helped fuel an insurrection they were untouchable because "free speech", now they've decided there's more money in democracy you're pretending they're doing it because they're "woke"?
Grow up.
Twitter is the only "Twitter style service". Therefore it's a monopoly. Of course Twitter would argue that it competes with Facebook, etc, but it doesn't. It's a different service.
It would be a contestable monopoly, which would be better, except Apple, Google and Amazon conspired to shut down a competitor ( Amazon by pulling hosting, Google and Apply by pulling the app store listings ).
Whether or not Twitter is a monopoly depends on what Twitter is. If you define it as a generic social network then it isn't a monopoly. But it isn't a generic social network - it's a Twitter-style service. Twitter is the only Twitter-style service around.
> Twitter is the only Twitter-style service around.
And Jam sandwiches are the only jam-sandwich style sandwich around.
You can't really define a monopoly based on whether or not it's competitors are the same as it.
But then, you're repeating conspiracy claims that have already been thoroughly debunked, and that even Parler didn't actually push that hard on making arguments on whilst having their day in court.
If you want to talk people conspiring, maybe ask yourself who benefits from making you believe that right-wing views are being victimised by "them".
Of course you can, that's what a monopoly is.
> But then, you're repeating conspiracy claims that have already been thoroughly debunked
Would you care to be more specific?
I assume you're talking about AWS shutting down Parler's hosting and Google/Apple pulling Parler from the app store.
> If you want to talk people conspiring, maybe ask yourself who benefits from making you believe that right-wing views are being victimised by "them".
There are two problems here. The first is that there is an incontestable monopoly abusing its power. The second is that they are abusing that power to push one side of various political arguments.
Two isn't a problem without one.
I don't care in the slightest if a private company wants to have political views and ban anything different. I do care when that private company is as big as Twitter.
Sorry, but despite the fact you keep mentioning it, I don't think you _actually_ understand the Windows ruling.
Microsoft were found to have committed anti-trust abuses not just because Windows was dominant, but because they were using the dominance to gain an advantage in *other markets*
It wasn't "oh Windows is huge, we need to do something about this", it was "Microsoft are using the fact they've got Windows on every machine to bundle Internet Explorer and lock Netscape out of the browser market"
If you want to draw comparisons, you're going to have to show how Twitter is abusing it's position to gain an unfair advantage in other markets.
To use a flawed analogy, if Microsoft had said "you're not allowed to use Windows to create Nazi propaganda" that would have been absolutely fine in anti-trust terms.
Urgh. Microsoft were found to have abused their monopoly.
However nobody is complaining about Twitter banning Nazi's. People (well I am ) are complaining that Twitter is the sole arbiter of what is defined as beyond the pale. It's market reach is too large for it to have that power unchecked.
That became a problem on multiple occasions. The Hunter Biden laptop story - nonsense or not, was printed in a proper newspaper by actual journalists. Those journalists were then banned from sharing their article. Banning the (outgoing) US president was outrageous too, whether you think he's a tool or he isn't. Banning Katie Hopkins wasn't on either.
A smaller Twitter, with competitors, could have done all these things. But at the scale of Twitter it just isn't reasonable.
In 1975 no one had to, needed to, or was forced to buy IBM computers, nor was anyone prevented from using an alternative computing platform or starting their own.
In 2000 no one had to, needed to, or was forced to use Windows, nor was anyone prevented from using an alternative operating system or writing their own.
In 2021, if you managed to start a serious alternative to Twitter or Facebook, what's the chance they would buy your company? Why would they do that?
> In 2021, if you managed to start a serious alternative to Twitter or Facebook, what's the chance they would buy your company? Why would they do that?
In 2021 if you manage to start a vaguely serious alternative to Twitter, other members of the cartel ( Amazon, Apple, Google ) will conspire to put you out of business like they did with Parler.
Parler was set up to compete with Twitter.
Apple and Google kicked Parler out of their app stores and Amazon pulled the plug on their web hosting.
They acted in unison to protect Twitter from competition.
Either they coordinated this and therefore are a cartel, or it was a remarkable coincidence. Occams razor suggests that they coordinated their actions.
The lawsuits against IBM and Microsoft weren't about being a monopoly. If it was, they would have been broken up like AT&T. It was about anti-competitive behavior. Using their dominant positions to block competition. Example, tying software and service contracts to hardware purchases. One of the biggest reasons Microsoft exists is IBM was afraid that if they created and supplied the OS for the PC market they would get sued for tying them together.
Microsoft was using their dominant OS platform to block competitors by illegally tying non-OS products. Office had, and possibly still does, undocumented APIs to improve it's performance and integrate it with Windows. Internet Explorer, nuff said. MS kept modifying Win32S until it reached a point that OS/2 could not run large parts of the Windows software market.
As far as Twitter buying competitors, they would have to pass a Federal review to do so. And would likely fail. Consider the processes that derailed the AT&T purchase of T-Mobile and then approved T-Mobile and Sprint merger. Canadian Pacific merging with KC Southern railways is a current example. Although to be clear, none of them are monopolies in the legal definition.
I take offence at that. "Our founding fathers" is certainly not "My founding fathers" since it's almost impossible to argue exactly who was a founding father or fathers* (possibly William the Conquer would come closest) considering I live in a country where about a tenth of all buildings are older than the US of A.
We also lack a "Supreme Court". A High Court**, yes but certainly not a Supreme one.
" and stuff" - no qualms here on that one, it's in it's own special place of crazy all of it's own and I'm not going to contest international relations over crazy.
* Worth noting a total lack of founding mothers. Just saying...
** As in, there is no higher authority in the land, rather than court judging whilst under the influence of narcotics
It's just possible that the original AC was thinking of the High Court of the Justiciary, the highest court for criminal cases in Scotland apparently. But then having William the Conqueror as a Founding Father looks rather iffy. Robert the Bruce instead?
The Channel Islands and the Isle of Man have the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as their highest court.
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