I don't give Twitter any points for banning Trump. It's just part of the knee-jerk cancel-culture reaction that's happening right now regarding him.

Yes, he should be banned because he uses the platform to spread propaganda, untruths, and lies in a way that feels legitimatized since it's hosted by a private third party. As should any foreign leader be blocked who does the same. I would not allow lies to propagate through any platform I controlled if they had any sort of market reach. i.e., If nobody is there to listen, who cares. If you can broadcast a lie to millions of people with a push of the button, I don't want to be complicit in that.

But to do it now because he tweeted that he won't be going to the inauguration ceremony? Really, that is the final straw? How pathetic. He should have been banned years ago; the ban now is an act of cowardice for fear of being the only mainstream platform that doesn't.

I say the same to the fellow Republicans who are finally calling him out now. I dislike you even more. At least when you were with Trump, you stood for something. The taped calls to the Republican election officials should have been what evoked this game-ending uproar for those who were able to accept that he openly gloated about sexually harassing women.

For those of his fan base who finally see him for what he is, however, I'm glad they see the light. I hold no hostility toward his fanclub who have been duped into trusting him and the party the past four years. But the elected officials have no excuse.

What I mean is that Twitter lifted the ban and told him if he misbehaved they'd ban him forever. His only tweet that I'm aware of was him stating he wouldn't be at the ceremony. What did they think he was going to be tweeting? Videos of him handing out food at a local homeless shelter?

Again, I agree that he should be banned, but the manner in which they did it was pathetic. He can go to Parlor, etc, but any site or service that permits and endorses widespread lies and incites violence will be black listed by Google, Apple, Visa, advertisers, etc. It will be a very insular, self-funded community.

Ultimately there's nothing stopping him from low-tech solutions like email blasts, etc. But in today's rapid information age, anything that makes it a little harder to spread and legitimize the message will be effective in preventing the radicalization of more people.

It would be a weird, unique sequence of events as you describe. I hadn't thought about that negating the punishment of not being able to run for office, but it makes sense that it would. There actually have been official DOJ memos stating in the past that a president cannot pardon himself. So it's not actually widely agreed that he can do it. I'm sure that would go up to the Supreme Court who I'm guessing would side with the president since the Constitution doesn't expressly forbid it.

There was once a group of witches who gossiped about the nonsense that the devil was doing. END.

OANN's sources might be the same sources that Trump uses to claim the election was rigged.

Either the example of other leaders posting the same thing are REALLY subtle that we may not spot them, or like you said Twitter has deleted said tweets before you found them.

There are lot of interesting topics around this. It's impossible for me to perfectly articulate my viewpoints in part because they are always shifting since this is a very complex situation. My take is something like:

- USA laws against printing misleading information are lacking. I understand and agree with "Freedom of Press," but there should be consequences to breaking stories without knowing them to be true. The standard of being allowed to print anything as long as you don't know it's false is pathetically weak because that means stupid, ignorant people can publish anything they want without consequence.

- The standard for slander, libel, and threats is likewise too weak for individuals. Again, I understand and agree with "Freedom of Speech," but it is far too big of a shield.

- Companies that publish public content on the internet should be held liable for the content of their users. End of story.

- Anonymity on the internet is a bad thing.

The argument that Facebook, Twitter, Parler, etc like to use is that it's impossible to police that much content. My answer is then you don't deserve to exist. A traditional newspaper would never have published daily thousands of unvetted, unread, unedited content from their users only to ban somebody three months after publication.

I don't care about something that nobody reads. A person with no followers on Twitter can say anything he or she wants. Nobody is harmed. But I've come to believe that before there's any content that reaches a certain threshold of eyeballs, then the publishing platform's duty is to review it and take appropriate action if it violates terms of use.

This means that services like Facebook should be fundamentally redesigned. Limit people to only connecting with 50-100 actual friends. Limit content from spreading farther than friends of friends. Remove vanity metrics that both encourage distributing lies and give credibility to it. Require verified identification.

I have no issue with private, encrypted peer-to-peer chat platforms, but I still would hold the companies liable if their end-to-end software platform is used to coordinate terrorist attacks (etc). This is a hard distinction to make, but I differentiate between, say, the inventor of encryption and the makers of software that enable a click-and-run version that directly supports illegal activities.

Yes, encrypted chat is needed, but if you cannot tell the police upon receiving a court order who is using your software, and who they are communicating with, then you deserve to be held partially accountable. There are reasonable trade-offs where speech can still be kept private, but metadata around it to assist in investigations remains accessible.

Sure, yes, the evil guys will ultimately resort to low-level encryption, etc. Good. Then it will be easier to spot them vs the average user of Signal.

Again, there are a lot of cases that are hard to define. For example, I wouldn't hold the makers of Wordpress liable for everybody that uses their software. However, if you are hosting Wordpress on behalf of others, and are actively providing services that enable them to publish, then I would hold you more accountable.

Ultimately this means that publishing content would cost a little bit of money because somebody would need to be paid to vet it. But IMO I'd sacrifice 90% of the terrible content of the internet if it meant we were left with higher quality stuff.

And to bring this back home - back in the day when this site was much more active, I took the responsibility of making it a non-abusive place very seriously. Other then some not-nice name calling from time to time, thankfully it remains a relatively tame place... But ultimately I should be responsible for this place as I'm the closest to the implementation of it.

Just commenting on this since it seemed to evoke the strongest response from you. It's interesting though to see you apply logic differently in different places. Here you want to solve human nature instead of taking precautions...

I don't necessarily mean that all anonymity on the internet is bad; I'm mostly thinking of it in the context of public social networks. Anonymously publishing a coherent piece of writing can be a powerful thing because it causes people to focus on the message and not the author. (Okay, so then people spend all day speculating on who the author is...)

The freedom of an open Internet is far greater than the risks. Nefarious people have always found a way to get around the law, and if we make the Internet difficult for them to use for their purposes they'll just figure out another way to do it. In other words, we won't stop the bad things from happening.

We need to remain focused on what's great about the Internet and not cripple it just because some bad people do bad things with it. If there is such a thing as human nature I'm not sure it should be solved. How do you tell an intelligent animal that it can't do what is natural for it to do? Who made you God to even decide such a thing?

My insistence on an anonymous Internet is in spite of the inevitable abuses. I think that the good far outweighs the bad. Or the bad would find a way to happen anyway so nerfing the Internet won't fix the world.

The problem isn't anonymity on the Internet. The problem is social networks. Keep the anonymity. Dispose of the social networks. Problem solved.

The problem with social networks isn't anonymity either... Anonymity would improve social networks. The Internet is meant to be a place where you can talk to anyone, but in doing so you need to be able to evaluate how much you trust what that person says. That necessarily means that you need maturity and intelligence to evaluate the credibility of information on the Internet. Who is the alleged author? How do you know them? How much should you trust what they say? Is it enough to risk your child's life? Is it enough to go to war over it? Or is it just some guy's opinion and it can be ignored?

There are plenty of stupid people on the planet that appear incapable of doing this (points at Trump supporters). I don't think that we should nerf the Internet for their benefit either. I'd much rather allow stupid people to believe stupid things than to make it difficult or impossible to express controversial ideas without anonymity. Free speech is very important. We need the ability to question whether the world is flat without getting ganged up on by social media mobs that know it to be flat and don't like you questioning it.

Whatever problems arise from the anonymity should be addressed individually without compromising the ability for people to be anonymous on the Internet. If people want some other platform that is locked down, and trusted, and everybody is identified, then go ahead and create a separate virtual network over the Internet to do that with. That should be technically possible, and offers the people that might want that the option without sacrificing the entire Internet to them.

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merci. salut. ca va? Allez bien, avec moi.

Well, a Flash site could very well be a serverless app... Too bad Good thing Flash is dead.

...

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https://twitter.com/ItsyRealm/status/1351592913139081220?s=20

(It's a video.)

The cinematic camera is one of my favorite 5 minute changes.

It's probably walked farther than you've driven sitting on the couch watching Fox News...

Is that full time? I'd guess more than that... Average American drives around 13k/year or thereabouts.