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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34966 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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I guess it's kind of funny that after I have been complaining for years about Twitter's bullshit justification for banning Trump under the "incitement to violence" standard, the new management goes and suspends Kanye West because, according to Elon Musk's tweet, "he again violated our rule against incitement to violence." https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1598543670990495744

Maybe yishan (formerly of Reddit) was right that when you run a social media platform, there are certain bans that you just have to enact to keep your service alive, even though there are no objective rules you can apply to justify these bans.

[EDIT: Just noticed this was already discussed below. Sorry.]

[EDIT 2: I deleted in <10 minutes but there had already been some replies. No good options based on my past choices so I think least-bad is to undelete. Sorry for chaos.]

I'm a free speech absolutist, but I am willing to sacrifice Kanye West's free speech if it helps us win. I could tolerate a world where speech is free except for one unprincipled carve-out banning antisemitism. Twitter probably has to do that anyway to comply with German laws against Holocaust denial.

I guess the question is whether it helps. I think it does. The ban might reassure moderates. It's probably better to let this one go by and wait for a more favorable example to fight over.

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