Marsden is Here

For a tamer example, it would be entirely possible to make a bot that responds to everything a particular person posts on Twitter with pictures of human poop. If you use public-domain images, like Wikimedia's, it's even legal. But no one wants to use a website that's plagued by Poop-Bot and its ilk. A site that allowed Poop-Bot to run rampant would lose all its users in short order.

I somehow think, even though it's just gross and not actually dangerous, Poop-Bot would get kicked off the vast majority of "free speech" sites.
raininshadows

Everyone always says they want to use a website that doesn't "censor" content. ("Censor" in scarequotes there because people treat it like it's a magical word even when they're not treating it like the greatest possible offense... If you actually look at how people behave, though, the vast majority avoid unmoderated or undermoderated spaces, and the people who don't avoid them are the ones who've been kicked off every other service -- usually for cause -- and are shitty fucking neighbors. People do not actually want to hang out on a website that is nothing but spam and neo-Nazis! They just have no idea how much careful effort it takes to keep a website from becoming wall-to-wall spam and neo-Nazis, because good content moderation is invisible; they never see the amount of stuff that gets removed or the sheer volume of shit-tier spam and garbage that would cover 95% of every even mildly active site in 24 unmoderated hours.
denise

...banning content that actively harms human beings isn't censorship, it's basic safety and human rights.
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This isn't about free speech, it's about protecting users from actively harmful content like human trafficking and doxxing. As in, things that happen to real human beings and should not be happening to real human beings.
sarajayechan

"Free speech" is the wrong framing! "Free speech" is about the government suppressing or punishing you for what you say, and we aren't the government. Any online site that accepts user-generated content (which is the fancy term for "the stuff y'all post" as opposed to "the stuff the site itself posts") has to set forth content policies that govern what their users can post, because without those policies (and active enforcement of them) a site will be unusable in days, if not hours, because it will be overrun with spam, child sex abuse material, and a thousand other categories of things that make a service impossible to use and create legal liability. Like every other site out there, we have content policies that govern what people are and aren't allowed to post, and we will (and do) remove content that's reported to us that violates those policies.
denise

Actual free speech actively requires deplatforming those whose only "side of the story" is trying to harm and/or silence others.
onewhitecrow

There's an immense difference between fictional content and conduct that has concrete, tangible, offline harm. (Not trying to police your use of the term at all, but I personally try to avoid "real-world", because dammit, after 20+ years of us all living, working, and socializing online, and *especially* after the pandemic and associated virtual event shift, "online" *is* also the real world.) But there's also a huge difference between "someone posted a link to my Twitter account" and "someone posted a link to the GPS coordinates of my house", and the potential consequences of both are wildly different. Smart policy needs to recognize that!
denise

Freedom to quit distinguishes employment from slavery

The same principle also applies in the workplace. If you can’t quit your job because you are owned by or legally bound to your employer, or because economic necessity prevents you from quitting, then your employer can brutalize and exploit you and get away with it. If you can walk away, then your employer must treat you well if he or she wants to retain your services. The legal and economic capacity to quit is the force that tends to equalize the relationship between employer and employee. There is no mystery here.

I find it interesting that people so quickly respond to the situation where a perfectly rational person finds they can earn more by devoting their energy to begging than "working" by insisting that begging should be made more difficult not that finding better paying work should be made easier.

jomas_45

Sometimes it is only when you are among people who accept you for who you are that you are forced to figure out who that is, and which bits you want to keep.

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Having all of your retirement savings in cash is a time-proven formula for turning $1 saved today into 50c of future spending. Retirement savings should focus on the opposite - turning 50 cents of savings today into a $1 of future spending.
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Two days after the Budget the installer returned to put in some final brackets and I said I guessed his business must be booming on the subsidy just announced.

Like hell, he replied. It had completely ruined his cash flow. Of the 28 orders on his books before that Thursday, all but two had cancelled.

The rest were going to wait for the Government's grant next month and most of them, he reckoned, were waiting in vain; the job they wanted would not be nearly enough to qualify.
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"Eeca", as the authority is already known to my insulation man, prefers firms large enough to meet its Maori employment quota among other criteria he mentioned.

He described an industry thrown into disarray and said he would find someone to say so publicly, but hasn't. Half a dozen insulation firms contacted by the Weekend Herald last week all said they were busy. Two were planning to take on staff.

They were among the 33 approved providers of the government scheme. The authority is taking applications from others but a spokeswoman said it would be September before more may be approved.

If there's a government fee regime that's ripe for an electronic makeover, it's the collection of road user charges from the national diesel truck fleet, totalling about $800 million a year.

She draws a comparison with real time GIS location data, which telecom companies initially objected was too expensive to deliver and not really needed by consumers. When the killer app of turn-by-turn driving directions was invented, that debate was put to rest and the real time geolocation data infrastructure was born.
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What's the killer app for smart utility grids? Fehrenbacher says she doesn't know and that's the point - we can't even imagine what kinds of cool and useful applications will be developed on that platform once it's available. The lack of a killer app leads to less support for the building of the platform, though, a catch-22 we can relate to from discussions of our calls to open up aggregate activity data from social networks for analysis.