And here's a thoughtful piece about "censorship" on the internet at the "infrastructure level," making basically the same argument as the ACLU: Twitter banning someone is fine, but AWS deplatforming someone is bad.It’s hard to pick a favorite sentence, but I’ve got to go with the one that says, they don’t believe in censorship so they are blocking Facebook and Twitter. pic.twitter.com/L8d7mec594
— 😷John 😷 Jackson 😷 (Wear a damn mask) (@johnjac) January 11, 2021
The distinction is still lost on me. Yes, the internet needs to be "wide open;" but does that include child porn? Snuff porn? Advocacy of insurrection? Interestingly, I understand in Germany there are restrictions on publications of Nazi material/propaganda which would be allowed under our 1st Amendment. But:The Slope Gets More Slippery As You Expect Content Moderation To Happen At The Infrastructure Layer https://t.co/oLzD4gJInn
— techdirt (@techdirt) January 11, 2021
I'm not saying Chancellor Merkel should mind her own business (far from it!). But the old adage of whose ox is being gored comes to mind here. And the difference between Twitter self-regulation (or AWS) and government regulation is: the "people" get to decide? Which people would that be? The ACLU? Matt Gaetz? Bernie Sanders? AOC? Donald Trump's appointees? Mitch McConnell approved agency heads?German Chancellor Angela Merkel has blasted Twitter's decision to permanently suspend President Trump's account.
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) January 11, 2021
"The chancellor considers it problematic that the president’s accounts have been permanently suspended.”https://t.co/JhX4Dm6XBb
"Is it broke?' and "How do we fix it?" are going to be interesting questions going forward. Frankly, I'm a bit more concerned about the 11 weeks between election and inauguration, and unbridled pardon power, at the moment.
The wide open internet is going to prove to be incompatible with not only egalitarian democracy but any kind of decent, peaceful society. I think it's going to prove impossible to allow it to carry encrypted communications because that is such a boon to organized crime as well as innocuous entities. I always remember back when Glenn Greenwald had people all in a tizzy over the NSA and their reportedly modest intelligence gathering that I heard a woman who was an expert on really secure communications telling people who really wanted to communicate undetected on ways to do it. One of the easiest ways was to send something through the US mail. Another was to assume that anything you sent online would be gathered up somewhere by someone.
ReplyDeleteMerkel is of an age that buys into an unrealistic view of unlimited liberties and coming from where she does she should certainly know better. I think there was a backlash against government regulation in the wake of the Nazi period and Communism, some of which was good but some of which was extremely dangerous because it failed to believe that the best way to prevent an oppressive regime was through the promotion of democracy and that requires a. the truth and b. good will. Neither of which are greatly promoted on the wild-west-web.