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Notes -
Thierry Breton, Commissioner for Internal Market of the European Union, has written a 'friendly' letter to the leadership and ownership of
XTwitter:((The commission has called this letter "neither co-ordinated or agreed", for whatever that means.))
Bruce Daisely, the pre-Musk Twitter VP for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, writes in the UK's Guardian that:
The London Met Chief Commissioner had an interview last week, where he said:
I'd like to summarize the rest of the video -- allegedly he or the interviewer highlighted Musk specifically -- but for some reason the underlying video has disappeared. I'm sure Sky News pulled the video without any government action being involved, yepyepyep.
apropos of nothing
A Washington Post journalist asks the White House: [edited for readability]
Given the urgency here, I'm sure that they have published urgent fact-checking on things like... *checks transcript* Trump's hilariously false claims about the harms caused by the Fukushima Nuclear Accident, right?... Right?
No, that's not what they mean by misinformation or disinformation, just like the people calling GOP investigations into the "Global Alliance for Responsible Media" 'conspiracy theories' didn't mean that like its clear and prominent existence or self-admitted tooling or target matters. The line between 'allegedly' and 'stated in public' is less a distinction and more just overlap.
There's a fun story here, where despite all this, free speech still works, and to some extent that's likely to keep being the case. Even if you end up having to exfiltrate employees from certain countries, there's VPNs for now and StarLink in the future, and one not-quite-stated explicitly side effect of StarLink is that Musk will probably end up with a mini-Cloudflare, too. (though, uh, there's another possible solution to that).
But there's a more morbid one where it's come to this point. There aren't any detailed reports behind Musk's claims that "The European Commission offered 𝕏 an illegal secret deal: if we quietly censored speech without telling anyone, they would not fine us". Musk has implied at length that GARM used 'Brand Safety' as a proxy for political positions, but there aren't specific claims in his lawsuit. There's no explanation how major industry metrics whoopsididdled the official number there for months on end. Barring a million Congressional subpeonas that aren't going to happen and wouldn't be answered fully even if they did, it's impossible to tell the difference between GARM's membership all acting independently in a specific way, and someone in power in some regulating state made a few phone calls?
Is this the one place all these forces were necessary? Or is it unusual only in its visibility, as a result of people not playing along?
UK law doesn't require that speech isn't used to spread hatred. I am, for now, permitted to spread my hatred of onions as far and wide as I want. Their texture is disgusting and they make everything you put them in taste the same. But also, the UK does not have free speech regardless. The law is asymmetrical. Those to the right of the mainstream are prohibited from voicing their hatreds, while those to the left of the mainstream are allowed to rant about "zionists" and the like all they want.
Which is the inherent problem with the idea of criminalizing spreading hatred. Which hatreds? Hatred of Russia, for daring to invade Ukraine? Hatred of the unvaccinated and so-called granny killers? Hatred of the Far-Right? These are all forms of hatred that have been deliberately spread by the government over the last few years. Why are these forms of hatred not just allowed but endorsed? That's a rhetorical question, because the answer is too obvious.
The result is that restrictions on spreading hatred are always used to promote certain political views while suppressing others. That's not a slight tweak to make freedom of speech all nice and cuddly. Restrictions on hate speech instead directly attack free speech's common purposes: Democratic participation, truth-seeking, and checking power.
I don’t like onion. It’s coarse and rough and irritating, and it gets everywhere.
Not like leek... With leek, everything's soft... and smooth...
I know posting memes in the culture war thread probably isn't great, but I do really appreciate seeing memes from "my time". None of whatever the fuck kids these days are meming. It makes me feel strongly that this is my in-group.
Anyways, here are the lyrics to Ievan polkka so you can sing along: https://youtube.com/watch?v=d0FV3_i-6WU?si=pU4i_Oh-loSfzoPS
...and if you want to understand what the lyrics actually say, go here. (They're in heavy Savo dialect of Finnish, even I wasn't quite sure of all the words even though I come from an adjacent region.)
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