"Oi bruv, you got a loiscience for dat news?"

It's like there's a contest to see who can become a third world authoritarian dystopia the quickest. Game on Brits, Cali comin in hard and fast...

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180SB1424

Oh no, anti-bullshit laws are destroying America!

Might not be necessary. While I was browsing inside the far right bubble I saw this.

http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/...-media-in-decline-following-algorithm-change/

I like that they don't consider Fox News to be conservative media.

Oh, what a surprise. One of our resident reality-impaired nitwits applauding state control of media.

They weren't duplicate content, just VERY similar titles.

The Internet is a threat to totalitarians everywhere.

I see people on the left using it, people on the right using it, people of all persuasions. Social media is a great big space where ideas can compete and people can interact without would-be totalitarians and hall monitor busybodies getting in the way, and I think that's a good--no--great thing. I don't want government to fuck it up.

Fuck, it's days like these I wish the Founders had remembered to guarantee freedom of the press.










Oh, wait.

That's the human condition: arguing over ideas. To use a modern phrase, that ain't a bug, it's a feature.

Not me. I never saw a totalitarian hellhole that was plagued by too much free exchange of ideas. On the contrary, a defining feature of many horrible states is state control over the media.

I'm for free speech because, even though I believe certain things intensely and passionately, I know that it's possible for me to be wrong. People who want to exert control over the media are interested only in power; such people never doubt that they're wrong because it doesn't matter to them.

Could people be misled or misinformed by others' use of free speech? Sure. But they will learn from it and move on. It's better to learn to face the world skeptically and questioning, than depending upon the state to insulate you from such worries.

And yet somehow there are laws against fraud and libel.

There are laws against those things.

Already.

No the fuck they don't. Flat Earth trutherism is making a comeback thanks to the internet.

Every social media post I've seen where someone advocates Flat Earthism has been subjected to fierce ridicule and repudiation. There will always be morons among us, but social media provides a mechanism for pushing back against moronic ideas.

The history of human ideas is that the good, true, and useful ones are promoted, and the odious and false ones are denigrated. Yes, there are some false views out there (some inarguably false, others debatable), but if they don't slug it out in the arena, they won't be killed off.

Pizza-gate, Anti-vaxxers, Charlottesville. Real problems are coming from and real people are dying due to social media and fake news.

Now, maybe the social media companies can fix it on their own, or maybe you feel the cure would be worse than the disease, but to say there is no problem is so out of touch with reality as to make discussion with you a waste of time.

Oh, gosh, I can find someone somewhere who was harmed because of the freedoms millions of other people enjoy! Time to put a stop to that!

Bing!

Then don't talk to me.

It's not exactly news that @Paladin has been disconnected from reality.

Demonstrating for us again that Anc is a statist.

What part of that, exactly?

I can't see how this bill, if passed, could survive a court challenge.

You know what I've always liked about your posts?

You have a great ability to simply things and bring hyperbole back down to reality.

Folks like Quest, 14th Douche, Ancalagon....what they want is simply to shut their intellectual and political opponents up. Labeling opposing viewpoints "fake news" or "Russian troll-bots" and then advocating for social media platforms to screen out "fake news" is just the newest front in this age-old battle.

They want a world where nobody is allowed to disagree with them. Simple as that. That's why they dismiss the concept of a "marketplace of ideas." They don't want to compete with others, they want to dominate others with their sociopolitical agendas. The marketplace of ideas implies that you actually have to go out and persuade and convince others that your point of view is best. You don't get to monopolize the debate, and you don't get to control what others say or how they say it.

Social media, if it's done anything, has leveled the playing field and allowed the average citizen to have a potentially global platform. Everybody on all point of the political spectrum uses social media.

Freedom of conscience and opiniom are paramount.

Freedom to spread factual falsehoods using the power of the Internet, when we know many people are dumb enough to believe them — I won’t be mourning this loss.

This has actually already been litigated.

In 2006, Congress passed a piece of pandering called the Stolen Valor Act, which made it a crime to claim to have won a military medal without having actually done so. In United States v. Alvarez, the Supreme Court found the law to be unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds.

Freedom of speech isn't contingent on that speech being true.

"Freedom" is one of those principles that Americans have warped beyond reason to justify all manner of human suffering and awfulness. It's like your system of values was written by a tobacco company.

I'd wager that a majority of Americans don't even know what the word truly means.

The biggest irony of all is that if you performed an academic study you'd find that a lot of first world nations are "freer" than the US in many ways. Freedom is a lot more wide ranging than just speech. I mean how free is a society if you can be shit scared to walk down a street based on your ethnicity, nationality or religion? Where if you try and pass through an airport you will be interrogated endlessly if you fit a profile? Where every movement you make online and on the telephone is tracked by your government? Where your electoral process is a two and a half century old system that ignores popular choice? Where your politics is dominated by only two choices? Where political discourse is almost impossible and people just default to partisan standpoints? Where kids are frightened to go to school through fear of being gunned down? Where you can still be sentenced to death for a crime? Where if you are an infant you have a much higher risk of death than in other first world countries? Where if you get ill you can be priced out of treatment and die if you haven't got cash to hand? Where freedom is defined not in respect of basic human rights, but whether or not you can own a weapon of aggression or spout as much foul shit from your mouth as humanly possible? Where you can be racially abused on the street and the law upholds that abuse?

"Freedom" is too loose a word to be claimed by any one nation or culture. Freedom means different things to different people, but one thing is for sure, this idea that America is somehow a much freer society than any other first world nations is absolute bollocks.

Don't sell yourself short, your system is a bit older than 250 years.

Sorry, but Parliamentary seats are selected based on popular vote per constituency ("first past the post"), which includes the MP ultimately nominated as Prime Minister, and is still a fairer and more direct method of election than the electoral college, which doesn't even return a popular vote per state, rendering huge amounts of votes utterly meaningless. Plus you're comparing the election of legislative body with that of a single head of the executive. Then you're trying to be clever by putting up some nonsense tweet bellyaching about the fact that Tories have 50% of the House of Commons, but have you looked at the spread of the other seats? It's not just Labour in opposition. Our election system means independents and smaller parties have a higher chance of being elected to Parliament than your congressional or presidential systems do. What's more have you looked at your own Congress? The Republicans dominate across the board with no third party/independent members of the House of Representatives and only two independent senators. Glass houses. The sort of coalition government we had during 2010-1015 is impossible in your Congress.

Anc, you never cease to amuse me when you throw your own principles out of the window when you get butthurt over a perceived attack on your wonderful country by a dirty foreigner.

First-past-the-post elections are a common bug of both the UK and US.

That more parties are represented in Parliament than Congress is a matter of happenstance and sectionalist geography, not the electoral system.

But at least the US upper house isn't un-elected aristocrats held over from medieval times.