11 Comments

I lean toward absolute free speech mostly, since the slope the other way is extremely slippery. I think one has the right to shout "FIRE!" in a theater just as surely someone else has the right to shout, even louder "THAT'S BULLSHIT!".

Having said that, actions, including speech, have consequences. One has the right to say anything but can an should be held libel or lauded for any results of said speech. If a fool shouts fire and because of that folks are injured or harmed the fool should be reprimanded by the law and society.

Telegram evil? I think not, not any more than a monkey wrench or a .44 Mag. pistol is, although such can be utilized for good, evil or neutral purposes.

I grew up in an America where most folks truly felt it was far better for ten criminals to go free than one innocent to be falsely incarcerated. I admit such colors my feelings and beliefs today.

I also grew up in an America where most put a fair amount of trust in our government. Loss of that naivety of course also colors my feelings and beliefs .

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Yeah I don't disagree. You are absolutely right about the slippery slope argument

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I'm somewhat free speech. I also think that European elites are probably heavily pedophile, and may have a lot of criminal content on various smartphone services. As a result, I suspect that their primary concerns about such content on social media is their personal and political problems downstream of being blackmailed. Mostly, I think the current regimes in these countries fear the consequences of being misinformed by academics that they could just murder the uneducated, and all the bureaucrats and academics could live in happy utopia forever.

I certainly think that Durov is suspicious, that Telegram is suspicious, and the Russian regime is de facto at war with most world populations. I am potentially persuadable of military expedience grounds for over riding what would otherwise be necessary legal precautions.

Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus. (I may have that spelling wrong.) We can basically have an expansive view of the executive power under Lincoln, and a limited view of how the judiciary can override that executive power in those precise circumstances, or we potentially open the door to judicial suspension of the 13th, 14th, or 15th amendments.

The problem with any argument of that sort, is first the establishment in most Europeans countries is too chummy with the Russians, and more credible as Russian proxies than as opponents of Russian imperialism. The second element of that problem is that the pattern of attempts at speech restriction by the EU is quite broad, clearly aimed at including criticism of those regimes, and precisely opposite of narrowly tailored to counter Russian information warfare.

Third element is that academia has been pumping out clearly garbage ideas at behest of the politicians, has been 'training' those politicians, and has been trying to prescribe how ordinary citizens behave, and feel on the inside about how they are treated. These ideas are a conspiracy theory involving the ancient past, and also pretend that the ordinary 'uneducated' sorts cannot tell if the elites are behaving as if they are at de facto war with the uneducated.

The tertiary and secondary schools seem deliberately broken, deliberately intended to produce mental cripples, and deliberately intended to produce violent idiots.

The judges seemingly have their thumbs on the scales, when it comes to crimes by those violent idiots that happen to plausibly be terrorism directed against the poors. They are seemingly stupid enough that they fail to realize that a partial legal system undermines the foundation for peace that an impartial legal system provides.

The so called 'educated' self proclaimed 'betters' need to realize that they have trouble, and fix their behavior.

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The US apparently does not care that they share taxation of expats with just one other nation, the dictatorship of Eritrea, so I wonder how much the French gov really cares in whose company they find themselves in regarding censorship. Especially as all countries are moving to more and more censorship.

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Every country has some variation of the '230' rule, the idea that social-media are merely neutral channels, like telephone wires, and therefore have no responsibility for what is transmitted over them. In the U.S., this rule quickly became obsolete, as the Federal Government enforced censorship of anything the regime of the day doesn't like. As Facebook, Twitter, and Google tried to comply with Government takedown orders, they discovered their highly touted algorithms couldn't do the job, and they were forced to manually ban people like Alex Berenson for no other reason than that the Federal Government ordered it. (Berenson went against their 'vaxing is safe' narrative.) Now the censorship regime in the United States is an 'all-of-Government' colossus, together with the fact-check industry. At the same time, the absolutist free-speech model has also proven seriously flawed, as the criminal activity on Telegram demonstrates. Some sort of content moderation is clearly essential, and it's clearly better for the platform itself to take this responsibility seriously than to do nothing about it. As you suggest, that is what French officials were trying to tell Durov, and he wasn't listening or cooperating. So they arrested him to get his attention. That's the most benign interpretation of their action. The clever French may also have sought to diminish Russian trust in Durov, as suggested by one of the writers quoted, since no one knows what Durov may have been forced to disclose in the first three days of his captivity. What we can learn from all this is that neither the absolutist free-speech position, nor the total Government-control position, is viable. Content moderation will have to wise-up considerably, lest it go down the fact-check rat-hole. Algorithms, AI, etc. won't cut it. There is simply no substitute for human judgment.

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The problem is that content moderation requires lots of humans (because as you note AI and algorithms can't do it) which raises the cost of running the platform. Which, in turn, means platforms need lots of ads and/or lots of subscriptions to work.

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Cost of doing business. It’s either internal content moderation or Government censorship. The costs FB and others incurred responding to Govt ‘requests’ — which were actually commands — could exceed the costs of hiring humans who actually know something about the subject matter,

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I’m suspicious on Signals privacy. Katherine Maher’s background is a red flag.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Maher

I would be shocked if any communication software developed in the US does not have a back door. Either from bribing a developer or forced.

Elon Musks comment:

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1787589564917490059?

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Maher is the marketing chick. She has no development skills at all.

You can build your own Signal app from scratch - https://github.com/signalapp/libsignal

I'm 90+% sure there are no backdoors. Now it is possible that the signal app in the Apple/google app stores has some additions but there are enough suspicious hackery sorts that use them so I doubt it

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>National Ambitions of Ukraine

Being slaves to the United States and dying to the last Ukrainian because of your schizophrenic dictator of a president is nothing close of National Ambitions.

Lies and damned lies, it's all you've got

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Ignore this turbo faggot and listen to Mike Benz's words of truth:

https://youtu.be/vKBOrkk1FZE?si=jaz3ekOAcPunUIJx

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