Russia Blocks FaceTime, Snapchat, and Roblox

Mark my words, this is coming to the US. And it doesn't matter which administration is in power. The right will say it's for the children, the left will say it's because of hate speech, but the important thing is the censorship.

I already said on another post they would start coming for the VPNs once enough states had age verification laws, and that has already begun.

"The right will say it's for the children, the left will say it's because of hate speech"

I don't think the Democrats have enacted or attempted to enact any federal hate-speech legislation in at least the past ten years. Left legislative action has focused on preventing hate crimes (i.e., actual violence), not hate speech.

My impression is that people confuse protected speech against hate speech with legislation against hate speech. When someone says something racist on Twitter, and people "cancel" that person, that's not an attack on free speech; it is itself an exercise of free speech.

Claiming that it doesn't matter who we vote for because they're all equally shitty is itself a tool used to suppress people's ability to fight back against this kind of free speech suppression.

I agree that this sort of thing is coming to the United States, or at least that the US federal government is going to attempt to enact these sorts of controls. Hopefully they'll fail. The internet has long been a thorn in the side of both the government's and corporate world's attempt to propagandize and control the dissemination of information, especially now that their older method -- using mainstream media, especially mainstream news media -- is rapidly losing its influence.

And I also agree it doesn't matter which political party holds power, because a) the deeply vested powers that want to do this aren't aligned with one specific political party (call it corporations, security agencies, the deep state, or whatever you like), and b) both political parties have recently demonstrated that they are willing and eager to try and suppress information they don't like.

I'm not going to claim that it doesn't matter who we vote for, but I will say that for any solution to have legs it will have to recognize and acknowledge the long-term complicity of both political parties in the mess that we're in now.

I look forward to the Democrats taking a strong stance against this, voting it down, preserving actual freedom of speech on the internet and proving me wrong.

I don't think anyone wants this to happen in the United States, but my point is that both political parties are trending in the wrong direction. The one thing they can seem to agree on is national security bills.

I vote for candidates who support the right stances, but very few of those have the backing of the national political parties.

"I look forward to the Democrats taking a strong stance against this"

What is "this"? Democrats can't vote down a Russian law, and they have recently consistently taken strong stances for free speech. Chris Murphy is introducing the No Political Enemies Act right now, which protects political speech.

@Plume Senator Klobuchar has said that she wants tech companies to be liable for amplifying hate speech. I’m not sure whether this ever reached the legislation phase, though she has had several other proposals over the last few years for removing or limiting Section 230 for other reasons (misinformation, child safety). Overall, I think both parties are eager to protect speech they like and limit speech they don’t like.

I think @bart was responding to @Bri’s hypothetical, that if the US government attempted to do this sort of thing, hopefully the Democrats would take a strong stance against it.

"both political parties have recently demonstrated that they are willing and eager to try and suppress information they don't like"

How have the Democrats demonstrated this?

"I’m not sure whether this ever reached the legislation phase,"

It hasn't. People say dumb shit sometimes, what matters is what they actually do.

Having said that, I think Klobuchar is probably right in this case. She's presumably talking about repealing this:

"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider"

This seems reasonable in principle until you realize that the algorithms of these services decide what information you actually see. Algorithmic social media services *are* the publishers of the information they provide to their users. They *are* responsible for the behavior of their algorithms.

They shouldn't be exempt from rules that apply to everyone else.

I think a better example would be TikTok. This is an actual example where both parties strongly supported a ban. But even here, the difference is visible: 50 Democrats opposed it, and only 15 Republicans. So maybe a better approach than just complaining that everybody sucks would be to point out the people who don't suck.

I'll take this as an opportunity to point out that I'm not happy that Marjorie Taylor Greene is stepping down. She's one of the Republicans who genuinely believe in their stated principles. She voted "No" on the TikTok ban, and she's also strongly in favor of releasing the Epstein information, despite knowing that it will hurt her party's leadership.

> How have the Democrats demonstrated this?

The most straightforward recent example that comes to mind is suppressing the story about Hunter Biden's laptop. More broadly there's numerous examples of the Biden administration colluding with tech companies to censor information they didn't like. I think the Obama administration's record prosecution of whistleblowers ought to count too.

(I wish I didn't have to include a disclaimer like this, but please note that any criticisms I make towards the Democratic party is *not* a tacit endorsement of the Republican party.)

"The most straightforward recent example that comes to mind is suppressing the story about Hunter Biden's laptop"

What exactly did they do, though? People often claim that the Biden administration "suppressed" the laptop story. But when I try to find actual things they did, there are no official actions that aren't themselves just free speech (e.g. them claiming that the Biden story "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation").

All recent administrations have requested content removals from Twitter, which they can do, and is different from actually suppressing information.

I just think this is a false equivalence. Am I 100% happy with the Democrats? Of course not. But when you say things like "it doesn't matter which political party holds power", then I think that isn't consistent with the facts.

@Plume They got government officials to tell people it was fake when they already knew it was genuine, with the goal being to suppress the information. I don't think it makes sense to look at that as free speech. If an intelligence official says they've seen the reports and it's certain that country X has WMD, when that's not what the reports say, that's not "just free speech."

I agree that both sides have requested content removals. Directing and paying millions for content removals, and threatening if they didn’t comply, is the very definition of suppressing information.

"They got government officials to tell people it was fake when they already knew it was genuine"

Even if I were to agree that lying is suppressing information, it's clearly not the kind of suppression that limits free speech.

"Directing and paying millions for content removals, and threatening if they didn’t comply, is the very definition of suppressing information."

I'm not sure what you're referring to.

@Plume Government officials under the direction of the Biden administration were directly coordinating with tech companies to blanket remove social media posts about certain topics, including the aforementioned Hunter Biden laptop story, as well as several other topics. I believe that's what Michael was referring to. It was very clearly government suppression of information.

This is not what happened.

This was a time when employees of companies like Twitter still believed they were doing something good and valuable, unlike the nihilistic way these companies operate today. When they saw how foreign governments used social media to spread misinformation, they created teams like Twitter's Trust & Safety team. These teams held regular meetings with the FBI, DHS, and other agencies, but those meetings were voluntary. They *wanted* to hold these meetings to better understand what these agencies knew about how misinformation was distributed on Twitter.

For the Biden laptop story, Twitter's Trust & Safety team decided to suppress the Post story on its own, based on its experience with earlier cases in which misinformation was distributed on Twitter. There was no Biden coercion or anything like that that led to Twitter suppressing the Post story.

Musk flat-out lied about this when he claimed Twitter acted "under orders from the government" to suppress the Post story. There was no government involvement; Twitter suppressed it on its own.

The Trump administration is backing punitive lawsuits and regulatory threats against networks, late-night hosts, and public broadcasters, expelling reporters from the White House who don't write what they want, threatening media and nonprofits with revoking federal funding access, using "catch and revoke" programs against international students based on what they write on social media, using executive actions and proposed compacts to tie support for universities to their handling of protests and teaching programs, and so on.

I'm not saying the Democrats are perfect. They're far from it, and fuck them for that.

But it's incorrect to say that "it doesn't matter which political party holds power." Worse, it's providing cover for those who cause harm, creating the impression that nothing can be done anyway.