Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

There are no possible alternatives to US based services unless you enjoy extreme restrictions on speech. Europe has become a big no-go zone for speech over the past decade, they're outright hostile and authoritarian about it (with only a few exceptions among European nations). And the direction re liberalism and human rights in Europe is overwhelmingly hostile toward speech. And for South America, Africa and Asia you can entirely forget about it, there are no reliable speech protected locations in any of those.

Mastodon, Bluesky, many other less-popular federated social networks.

Social media is trending towards regional balkanisation. Governments are clueing into the fact giving everyone including foreign states free reign to broadcast to, and manipulate, their constituants is a bad idea. Just look at what happened in the UK recently with the riots. Twitter's days are numbered there.

Because people lie about what the lies are, without fail. As soon as any "misinformation" rule becomes a thing, it is already being abused by liars.

The spread of lies or false information has always been the price the pay in order to have free speech.

It is the task of the individuals in free societies to discern the lies from the truth, or at least to choose their tools in doing so.

You’re lying to yourself if you believe you can have real human free speech with a system capable of censoring all lies.

The US learned a few lessons from alcohol prohibition, most of them tough and painful.

Banning a thing that allows “obvious lies” will have knock-on effects that haven’t been realized yet.

I guess we learned how to make faster cars to outrun cops…?

Liars do not need rule to abuse. They will first manipulate society and crate rules if needed afterwards. That is the nature of populism.

Yes but once people mess up and choose the wrong thing it’s very hard to go back. There are plenty of examples of countries where bad actors have taken over all institutions and what then? There are not takesies backsies

I have no idea why you’re being downvoted. We’ve seen this play out multiple times

> Social media is trending towards regional balkanisation.

By choosing to frame things like that, it almost sounds like multinational monopolies on social media controlled by murderous fascist regimes and used to push industrial loads of machine-generated propaganda is something that's somehow preferable.

Your new digital town square brought to you in part by the House of Saud, where there's free speech for everyone but some accounts are more equal than others and cisgender is a slur.

Saudi Arabia is of course Twitter's second largest shareholder.

But Twitter is also owned by Russian oligarchs linked to Putin himself.

https://www.dw.com/en/what-do-xs-alleged-ties-to-russian-oli...

We're talking about Elon Musk's Twitter, who around the time of Russia's invasion of Ukraine was found to have hardcoded censorship of pro-ukraine content as well as users who posted pro-Ukraine content on Twitter.

Yes. We are supposed to be able to rely on evidence from investigations and hungry reporters with integrity to expose the truth eventually.

this is called Popper's Tolerance Paradox, and you are quite right.

it's truly amazing how many people dont really get that having only 99% free speech is just fine

You believe the riots in UK are because of twitter?

People are living in parallel universes.

99% of speech is bland and unobjectionable. It’s the 1% that needs protection.

I learned that tweets by nobodies on topics such as Hunter Biden's laptop or Russiagate or Israel's behavior in Gaza have more credibility than the entire mainstream media. I fully understand the danger of lies (more than you ever will) and that is precisely why I support free speech for ordinary people.

And you think censorship will solve this? You’ll just get a different sort of monster. One that probably appeals to your worldview in the short term because you fit the typical person you think will be controlling it forever and you think the scope will somehow to be constrained to a small group of things you don’t like.

Well intentioned, but extremely naive. Something our society will sadly have to relearn every century or so.

It isn’t the problem of having only 99% free speech. It’s getting people to agree to which 99%.

i disagree, for example holocaust denial is not allowed in Germany and that seems reasonable and to work well

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/germanys-laws-ant...

They were to large extent provoked by misinformation about the attacker on kids party. The misinformation stayed on twitter for long time and was spread out by many people including Musk.

Exactly. It's specifically the objectionable speech that needs protection, not stuff like "cats are cute".

> And you think censorship will solve this?

A media company being punished isn't censorship , media companies aren't above the law.

If you believe that I have a colour revolution theory to sell you.

People choose the facts they want and it's incredibly dangerous to let them censor any dissent from their personal reality.

In Arizona a giant home builder complained about a home inspector called CyFy posting tiktoks showing their shoddy construction. What you consider bland and unobjectionable they get very upset about.

https://www.12news.com/article/news/local/valley/we-were-una...

A crazed 17yo son of African immigrants murdered 3 kids. Then, the far-right seized on it to make assumptions about the attacker, speculate he was a Muslim, and even provide a fake name. In fact, some of these Twitter accounts (Tristan Tate, etc.) shared the picture of a young Black preacher as the attacker. I saw it and I know when the post disappeared from EndWokeness' and Tristan Tate's page while I was reading through the comments. The young man in question had to make video clarifying he wasn't the attacker.

LMAo. I just gave you an objective breakdown of what happened and suddenly, I'm prone to conspiracy theories? I gave you the info of two people Elon Musk has platformed explicitly (EndWokeness, Tate brothers) and how they inflamed the riots across the UK, and somehow, what you deduced is that I'm a conspiracy theory type?

> I see no reason why someone should be allowed to spread obvious lies

The right to lie is fundamental to the principle of freedom of speech. Also the lies you think are “obvious” are almost certainly not obvious to everyone - they rarely are. And if someone cannot share a different view then you can’t arrive at the truth.

You are alleging some kind of conspiracy where a few twitter accounts are able to spread misinformation that somehow a hundred thousand people see and act upon in coordination.

The british protests/riot mass movement cannot be attributed to misinformation any more than the Arab spring can be attributed to the police mistreating the Tunisian merchant.

> right to lie is fundamental to the principle of freedom of speech

It's obviously not. We prosecute fraud. No freedom can be absolute unless it is singular.

It doesn't seem reasonable or work well to the holocaust deniers.

Did you read the article you posted? It doesn’t sound like it’s working well at all.

I wasn’t calling it absolute. I used the word fundamental. My meaning was that giving people this freedom means giving them the freedom to lie as well. I agree that we can debate specific exceptions, which I feel SCOTUS precedence has explored in very nuanced ways. But that’s not where I was going. I was making the point that even if you think something is a ‘truth’, what you perceive as a ‘lie’ must be allowed since only through that debate can people find their way to the truth. A truth that is just unchallenged feels more like propaganda.

This is just speculation. I see videos from Ukraine sticking it to the Russians like every other day from Twitter, shared with the news. Also from Telegram channels. The most recent one was with a downed Su-25. Here:

https://x.com/igorsushko/status/1828661567094984774

The US is a ~250 year old continuous democracy. Almost no European states can say the same. After WW1 a lot of democratic European states popped up. Two decades later half of them were autocratic.

I think it's half that our governments don't want to give away control, lest the peasants become uppity. And the other half is that that's just how the dice landed when the laws were first created.

> giving people this freedom means giving them the freedom to lie as well. I agree that we can debate specific exceptions

We can. But we don't and never have. Anyone arguing for the freedom to lie without consequence is off the deep end. There has never been a society that doesn't punish lying and fraud. (What constitutes a lie is a deeper question.)

> even if you think something is a ‘truth’, what you perceive as a ‘lie’ must be allowed

Why? Also, where? Ever?

If I go and commit a bunch of fraud, I'd expect--at best--riotious laughter from anyone with more than two brain cells if I offered, as my defence, that I cannot be punished for defrauding everyone because I'm part of the truth-finding process.

> truth that is just unchallenged feels more like propaganda

Propaganda is regularly challenged. A truth that cannot be challenged is an article of faith. This entire debate reeks of arguments from faith on both sides.

A bad idea for who? The people in power of course.

Seems like this is a case of not letting the prisoners talk to each other too much lest they start to have some ideas of their own.

Do you consider anti-government Chinese people, such as Falun Gong members or general pro-democracy activists to be bad actors and that censoring their speech is important to protect institutions from them? I'm trying to point out that you can't simply decide who's good and who's bad. Censorship entrenches whoever happens to be in power regardless of their merits. Maybe you think democracy is the important part and autocratic governments are wrong to do censorship while democratic ones are wrong to allow free speech?

Fraud isn't just lying, it also has to be for some sort of personal gain, typically financial. You're taking their money too. If you tell people that if they invest in your pyramid scheme they'll get rich but you have no actual pyramid scheme and don't take anyone's money, then it's not fraud and shouldn't be banned in my opinion. But it is a lie.

> Fraud isn't just lying, it also has to be for some sort of personal gain

One, not true. If a real estate agent sells you a house based on a bunch of lies and somehow forgets to charge a commission, they're still punished.

Two, you're still drawing criteria per which speech is punished.

Well OK but he still sold the house. If you're not doing anything, just talking, it's not fraud. People often offer to sell a bridge to somebody as a way of saying they're gullible. That's not fraud because they're not actually selling the bridge.

> he still sold the house. If you're not doing anything, just talking, it's not fraud

Let's edit the premise. No sale occurs. The agent spins some yarn, but you catch on and report them to a regulator. Do you expect them to go unpunished simply because it was all talk? Should they?

That's a very black and white view of ways of restricting speech. Aside from the US most democracies have some sort of limits to free speech and not all of them have turned into autocracies. To counter your argument, absolute freedom of speech allows whoever controls the media to create narratives and manipulate public opinion without consequences

I totally agree with you.

Saying that lying is part of the truth finding process demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of how any science work.

> This is just speculation.

This is not speculation. When Elon Musk did that stunt on open-sourcing Twitter's source code right after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the source code explicitly included references to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in hardcoded rules to downrank discussions on the topic.

https://gizmodo.com/twitter-musk-ukraine-crisis-open-source-...

This is just the stuff he accidentally leaked.

The majority of pro-Ukraine content used by journalists are on Twitter. Has always been the case since the very beginning of the war. Take a look at any article on TWZ, like the most recent one:

https://www.twz.com/news-features/ukraine-pushing-slowly-wes...

> A media company

Text from the 1st amendment: "or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press"

You see that part that says "The press"? Thats what a media company is.

Yes, if the government punishes "The press" for its speech, and threatens it with legal action, that is by definition something that effects free speech and is censorship.

Definitionally, I cannot think of something that could be more accurately be described as censorship.

> Do you expect them to go unpunished simply because it was all talk? Should they?

If there was no house to be sold, and the agent wasn't even an agent, and they had no way of accepting that money, then of course they should not be punished.

As an example, lets say it was a youtuber who did this, and they recorded the video as a funny prank to post on the internet.

This would not be illegal and they would not be punished.

> Yes, if the government punishes "The press" for its speech

That wasn't the case, the case was "the press" covering criminals. Being the press don't give a company free pass to commit crimes and Xitter is paying for that.

PS: "1st amendment" is an American term that doesn't mean anything outside of american jurisdiction (and maybe not even inside, see Tiktok).

Real estate agents have stricter ethics requirements from their professional body than the general law for everyone else. They might be punished for doing that. I don't know if they should or not.

What's wrong with manipulating public opinion? People aren't complete idiots and are still responsible for their own beliefs and how they vote. They'll only believe lies that they want to believe. The Soviet Union used to control all the media and its people famously didn't believe what it told them.

> That wasn't the case, the case was "the press" covering criminals.

If the government makes it illegal to publish certain things, that would mean that it is both a crime and censorship. So yes, that would be the case and my previous statement applies.

The government making it illegal for the press to publish certain things is definitionally what censorship is. There is literally no more clear example of what censorship is than that.

Having lived in Germany and the US I disagree with your assessment of the situation