So much for "free speech absolutism" I guess. Does the first amendment have an exception for swastikas that I don't know about? Musk is quickly learning that he cannot pick fights with Apple and corporate advertisers while being tens of billions of dollars in debt.
No. Banning someone because they posted the symbol of a group that murdered millions of people based on their race is very different from banning them because they posted “men are not women”.
Right, so "so much for free speech absolutism" is exactly right. Turns out even Elon has a line that is well short of "law of the land." Because, fucking obviously.
Well to be clear, it's not "just because he says so." It's because Elon personally had an experience (the death of his child) that is salient enough for him to supersede free speech. This is very different from the personal experiences of other people regarding other contested topics/personalities primarily in that those are the experiences of people not named Elon.
In those cases, free speech wins open and close, very simple, and if you are upset about it it's because you're part of the cabal that's trying to take down Elon/Twitter/free speech.
It's not valid, that's how. He's using "free speech" as a way to hype up all the right winger fanboys and to unban people who will cause incredible drama (i.e. engagement) on Twitter. Hopefully all it causes is online drama, but the barrier between real world actions and online information sphere is way more permeable than the "it's just a website!" people would have you believe.
Nobody; Twitter's always been fairly tolerant of transphobia. Various unpleasant far-right figures were banned for attacking _specific trans people_, which is different (though Musk seems happy enough to bring them back).
That's not true at all. There are many, many cases of people being banned for what I would consider quite mild transphobia. There's was a high profile case this year[0] where a republican Senate candidate was banned for saying,
"Women's sports are for women, not men pretending to be women"
It is not hard to find many more cases and of course the vast majority of banned accounts belong to people with no public profile and you'll never hear about them.
> Hartzler’s tweet, posted in mid-February, said: “Women’s sports are for women, not men pretending to be women,” _and included her TV ad targeting transgender people in sports and particularly University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas._
Symbols associated with credible calls to violence. Pirates are more a joke, the CCP is trash but is known more as the government of mainland China than for their murders. Jewish people are beaten for existing to this day particularly by black Americans.
> Symbols associated with credible calls to violence.
This seems very squishy to me, I mean, fine, I don’t disagree, but it’s exactly the kind of thing old Twitter would be dragged for. Which symbols are “credible calls to violence” and who gets to decide that? Musk? I mean yes from a legal perspective he owns it, but his whole Schtick was greater transparency. If he wants to run Twitter “same as the old guard but his opinion, not theirs” ok, but then I want to stop hearing the moral grandstanding.
I assume you'd be okay with Twitter (and other forms of media) banning right-wing politicians and groups in the USA that associate with Nazis and fly Nazi flags at their rallies? Or those who call for Jewish people to be exterminated? Except no, everyone was up in arms about Twitter and liberals doing just that pre-Musk, because "free speech". Banning Kanye a month ago was the worst thing in the world, and today it's completely justified (despite the fact that he is posting much milder stuff). Funny how the conversation has turned now, and everything Musk does is justified using whatever mental gymnastics is necessary.
> fly Nazi flags at their rallies? Or those who call for Jewish people to be exterminated
Yes. I would support this ban for same reason I support Kanye being banned.
> associate with Nazis
I don’t support guilt by association. Punish people that do bad things not people that talk to people that do bad things.
> Except no, everyone was up in arms about Twitter and liberals doing just that pre-Musk
No they weren’t. They were pissed off about political bans not bans on racial violence. I mentioned an example earlier in this thread.
I don’t think you listen to people that you perceive to be your opponents.
Edit (can’t reply due to rate limit):
I don’t think Kanye should have been reinstated after “death con 3” - please, if you want to know my opinion on something, just ask rather than assuming.
> Yes. I would support this ban for same reason I support Kanye being banned.
Twitter banned Kanye for exactly this, were heavily criticized for it, and Musk reinstated him when he took over. So what is different now? If anything his recent tweets are milder (remember going "death con 3 on jewish people")?
And why is trans hate okay but Jewish hate grounds for an instant ban?
I am on your side generally, but are you labelling "men are not women" (or w/e) hate speech?
I think this is the sort of thing that poses a problem; that's basically a position on a controversial issue. It's not hate speech anymore than saying "There is no God" is hate speech against religious people.
Today's hate speech is yesterday's "position on a controversial issue."
(I don't think this is a simple question at all, but this particular tack is not as sound as it might appear. There was a time not so long ago that vitriolic antisemitism, even in the US and western Europe, was pretty much the consensus view.)
I get where you're coming from, but there are few issues with this.
Most importantly, I think as a practical matter, there is a big difference between "I do not think gender is subjective; instead, it is determined by observable biology" and "Jews are a treacherous race who control the levers of power and do not properly belong in our society".
Obviously, there is real hate speech against transgender people; but basic criticisms of that lifestyle choice (including the very labelling of it as a "lifestyle choice"), without more, cannot reasonably count as such.
I would be interested how many people who want to deplatform or censor criticisms of the phenomenon of transgenderism would agree with critcising Sam Harris in similar fashion. His criticisms of religion, in particular Islam, are very virulent and strident, and don't seem logically that distinct from "denying" that a man can become a woman. Doesn't he basically say that religion is a kind of mental disorder and that society should ban it? In fact, things like complaining about calling women "birthing people" seem quaint in comparison the stuff he says.
IMO there are so many differences between a religion and a gender decision/behavior/whatever you'd like to call it that they're really hard to compare in this way.
That said, I don't think there's much banning going on of people who are truly just stating their position "x is not y." In fact if that were the case, you'd see e.g. JK Rowling booted immediately. So why isn't she? In my view, platforms and individuals are making assessments of other people's intents and the likely impacts of their words in totality.
It's a deeply inconvenient fact that the words "a b c" uttered by one person to one audience can yield completely different results than the exact same words "a b c" uttered by a different person to a different audience. This is inconvenient because it makes consistent-appearing regulation basically impossible, but the reality is that everyone does this every day. We get it wrong a lot, but on net, it's obvious that a neo-Nazi with disgruntled, armed, lonely young men followers saying, "the Jews are overrepresented in media" is completely different from Pew Research saying "the Jews are overrepresented in media." These two phrases are different in basically every single way that matters!
So this is why IMO JK Rowling and Sam Harris kind of get passes. It's very obvious they're not calling people to arms. It's obvious their fans are not about to go raid a mosque or a gender-affirming care clinic. This is not so obvious for, as far as I can tell, many of the people who've gotten hit by Twitter's moderation.
Edit: And just to be crystal clear, I don't think Twitter or anyone else has gotten this exactly right. Idk what that'd even look like. It's a ridiculously hard problem. But that's why I never bought a website with 160MM DAU declaring that free speech is back.
JK Rowling gets a pass because she doesn't explicitly say "transwomen are men" or "$NAME is a man" even though that is clearly what she believes. She comes close, e.g. with tweets like https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1597611298728337408, but doesn't cross the line.
Whereas others who just go ahead and say it will eventually get their accounts suspended.
This reply might be too late for Hacker News, so I'll keep it concise since I think convo is dead anyways.
I would say that there are a couple ways in which religion and gender decision/identity are quite comparable in specific contexts like this; namely, they both involve people adopting assertions or beliefs that are empirically untrue (and I say this as someone who does believe in God and is somewhat religious), and asking for varying degrees of deference to such beliefs.
In the free speech context, we have the issue of when something is criticism of these subjective beliefs, versus when it is hate speech. I believe I can furnish at least one other, more clear example of a context in which, to me at least, they are pretty comparable.
I think your point about "who is saying it" is like...I agree with your example, but I don't see that can be a rule lol. That's just discriminating on the basis of who is saying it--and besides, how do you necessarily know whether someone is armed and lonely?
Does JK Rowling get a pass? She wasn't banned on Twitter, but she gets routinely dragged by a lot of people nowadays. IDK what most people think of Sam Harris. I am just glad he isn't more well-known and popular.
> there are so many differences between a religion and a gender decision/behavior/whatever you'd like to call it that they're really hard to compare in this way.
Since you seem to have forgotten or are having difficulty reading the thread.
Yes that’s a very accurate summary of my response. Sorry for that part where I insulted you, and for being the first one in the conversation that was rude to the other. Well done.
I disagree; I think saying God doesn't exist is much closer. Some people have a subjective belief God exists. Some of them admit it is subjective, others assert that God objectively exists. People who do not believe in God typically say no, it's not subjective, and, as a descriptive matter, we have no evidence God exists, etc.
Similarly, some people believe gender is subjective, and that people can "be" another gender if they feel like it (if I am getting this wrong lmk; it's obviously a simplistic statement of that position). Others believe the question is purely objective and determined by observable biology--i.e. "it's not subjective, and as a descriptive matter, you are x gender".
In contrast, "marriage is between a man and a woman" is basically purely normative. It is not a statement about what "is". It is a statement about what should be.
Harassing transgender people and defaming them the way that Peterson did Eliot Page is not simply saying "men are not women." What he actually said was that the surgery that he had, to reduce his breast size in the same way a cis man who had gynecomastia would, was criminal.
Matt Walsh trolls transgender people and enjoys making their lives miserable because he believes their existence is a threat to his personal code of morality. He also wishes to ban transgender people, even adults, from receiving any sort of care beyond conversion therapy which is considered abusive and banned in many countries.
None of them are simply saying "men are not women."
It's like the difference between saying you think homosexuals are deviants who should burn in hell and saying "marriage is between a man and a woman." In both cases you're trying to be a jerk, but in the former you're being a lot more aggressive about it. There's a reason why even most homophobes don't like the Westboro Baptist Church. Only the biggest jerks support openly harassing and trolling people because of things that they can't control. Even if you think being gay or trans is a mental illness, a mental illness is still something you can't control. Trolling people is obviously not an attempt to help them. It's an attempt to make them suffer because you hate them.
> Harassing transgender people and defaming them the way that Peterson did Eliot Page
Did you read the tweet you posted? Peterson’s criticisms of Ellen Page’s physician (not even Page herself) are not harassment or defamation any more than your criticisms of Peterson are.
I see that you're not ideologically motivated here. ^_^
It's decidedly not "criminal" for an adult to get a surgery that is commonplace for men with gynecomastia just because they have an "F" on their birth certificate. Breast tissue is breast tissue and there is no regulation that says that anyone has to have a minimum amount of it based on their sex assigned at birth. Women have breast reductions, especially at advanced ages, to help with their mobility all the time after all.
Peterson's objective was to slur Eliot Page by casting him and the doctor who treated him in a negative light. It's slimy trolling and provocation. Not speaking truth or even a simple fact like that "men are not women." Just thinly veiled hate for his hungry audience to feed on.
Nobody is saying Page isn’t allowed to have cosmetic surgery to have her breasts removed. Rather that her doctor is being harmful in letting her do so. Again please read the actual tweet you’re referring to.
Separately: an adult “with F on their birth certificate” is called a woman. Ellen Page was Ellen Page when she had the surgery.
The past, much like the Tweet you keep talking about, does not change because you wish it to. It’s fascinating you labelled someone that disagrees with you as ideologically driven when you believe you can determine reality with your mind.
Nah, when someone changes their name like in the case of marriage but I don't approve of the marriage for some reason I don't go around calling them by their "real name" and refuse to acknowledge the change. When someone wants to go by another set of words to identify themselves, like pronouns, I'm also not a jerk about it.
You don't know anyone's medical history. You haven't given anyone a karyotype test. You'd use a new set of names for people in many circumstances and even pronouns likely in the case of an obvious intersex condition. Your decision to call Eliot Page she against his wishes is clearly ideologically driven and hateful. A petty snub more or less.
Doing it makes you a cruel person. I'm sure you don't see yourself that way, but, newsflash, humans generally want to be "good" so most cruel people think they are good and justified in their actions. They just have some toxic/anti-social ideas rooted into their sense of morality.
In this case it seems you've convinced yourself that by snubbing transgender people you're somehow protecting... truth? BiOloGiCal ReAlItY? Gendered terms predate any concept of sex chromosomes or even gametes. Jeez Ottomans worried about their concubines getting pregnant from EUNUCHS because they didn't fully realize that testes created sperm or that sperm was separate from semen. That's why they preferred dark skinned eunuchs, so they could tell if a baby was illegitimate.... Which is just to say that if you want to be "traditional" gendered terms are about surface level assessments of a person's physical appearance and social roles considered appropriate to such an appearance, not biology. If you transported Patti Harrison[1] (a very passable trans woman) back to King Arthur's court she'd be treated like a lady I assure you.
The even more fundamental thing though is respecting people's autonomy. It's a very aggressive act to call someone by labels that they dislike. Try continually getting someone's name wrong on purpose, maybe call a guy named Ted Bruce all the time, and see how your relationship with that person develops....
> The even more fundamental thing though is respecting people's autonomy
Yes, and this includes people's linguistic autonomy; their freedom to say what they see.
We all know that Page is female. We also know that Page most likely wants everyone to refer to her as if she is a man.
Some people, who believe in the ideology of gender identity, will say that she really is a man, so this is no problem for them. Others will acquiesce out of a feeling of politeness, or social pressure. But many will say, no, she's female, so she's actually a woman.
Please respect the autonomy of the latter group to express a view that you disagree with, due to your differing beliefs. In particular, there's no need to start haranguing people with unfounded accusations of hate.
> Please respect the autonomy of the latter group to express a view that you disagree with, due to your differing beliefs. In particular, there's no need to start haranguing people with unfounded accusations of hate.
Does it make me a jerk to call you out for being a jerk? No....
Do I think you should be put in prison for being a jerk? No....
But I'll be honest, if you refuse to be kind to transgender people I'll find you distasteful and untrustworthy the same way I would a homophobe or a racist to be.
I realize from conversations with conservatives that many people consider supporting trans people as a form of virtue signaling, but from my experience it's the opposite. I live in a small town in a deep red county in a deep red state and the trans topic has become a shibboleth where not extending the basic respect of labeling trans people how they wish to be labeled is something that people do with prideful smiles and jolly laughter. It's a public display of cruelty that people bond over. There's nothing about it that smacks of protecting dignity or truth. It's just the same old human meanness that's popped up time and time again in history and always leads to nothing good.
I hope you'll grow as a person and treat people from outside of your experience with kindness and openness rather than callousness and suspicion. It's not the easy thing to do, but it's the right thing to do.
Not true - if you go on social media such as Twitter and Reddit, you'll often see trans people making the claim that they've actually changed sex. Along with other nonsense, like transwomen claiming that they have a menstrual cycle.
I can find you people of any ideological stripe who will say all sorts of outlandish and astonishingly wrong things; this does not mean that you should choose those worst examples as your exemplars. If I did that, I would have to assume that anyone right wing was a full-on nazi, which even with the nascent fascist jock itch we're all suffering, is ridiculous.
But the fact is that Sex and Gender are two different concepts - one, as you point out, is a biological matter having to do with reproduction, and is settled and done, usually, long before the body becomes conscious. Gender, on the other hand, manifests mostly as performance, but nonetheless arises from a deep-seated place in the mind. So if someone says their gender does not match their sex, this is not a difficult concept to hold in one's head.
I don't doubt you've seen people saying horrible things of all kinds on Twitter and Reddit, but understand, those places have nothing to do with the real world. You're here because on some level, you do understand that, and you want better. Welcome.
These are surprisingly common examples. The idea behind the first is to redefine sex as a collection of attributes, and then claim that because a significant number of these attributes have changed, then sex has too. So a transwoman who believes this may point to his estrogen levels, breast growth, etc. as an indicator that he is female. This is why many claim to have a menstrual cycle too, it's intended as further indication of being female.
When people say that their gender doesn't match their sex, they're expressing a rejection of their material existence. These are men who don't want to be men, and women who don't want to be women. I think it's no surprise that many then engage in self-deception, looking for ways to support a belief that they aren't the sex that they actually are.
Sure and if someone advocated for violence against those groups they should be banned. But “men are not women” does not advocate for violence as I’m sure you’re aware of.
And a swastika could just be something posted by some ignorant man with a mental illness and no interest in advicating for violence yet it gets censored anyway.
I don't have a problem with Twitter banning hate symbols but I have a massive problem with the intellectual bankruptcy over this "free speech absolutism" horse shit.
The he could just be ill is indeed the likely cause. But you have to treat the ill hate the same way you treat the sane hate.
The free speech absolutist stuff never included violence he was clear about that. People were being banned for simply not being left wing. That was a huge problem and it’s stopped.
Posting a swastika alone is not necessarilly a call to violence like posting a confederate flag or ACAB isn't always a call to violence.
It's been more than evident that the drivers Musk's policies on moderation are commercial and personal which is well within his right.
Others are pointing out the hypocrisy of him claiming that his motivations for setting policy have been a dedication to 'free speech absolutism' which is clearly not the case.
If yourself and others the moderation policy on Twitter was too oppressive to right wing views and are happy with this new direction all I can say is good for you. But you and those same other people should come out and expressly say that instead of getting on a high horse over "free speech absolutism" when thats clearly not what you're interested in.
The debt is put on Twitter, just like when you buy a house you can put the house itself as insurance for the debt. Elon Musk is still the richest man in the world, your own input to this forum however remains very poor.
And just like buying a house - despite the asset being collateral for the loan and generally having net positive equity, the individual is personally incentivized to keep making the interest payments "or else". Or else you lose the house and still need a place to live, or else Twitter gets foreclosed upon and the ego driven project turns into a failure.
I think it's a striking demonstration of the perils of living above your means. If we take the definition of "poor" as the inability to pay for one's monthly upkeep, it's possible for Musk to simultaneously be the richest and the poorest person in the world.
And sure, he could always increase his investment by using more personal funds to make the interest payments, taking the longer term view (whether business or idealistic based). But the fact is that he hasn't, and has been framing this situation exactly as Twitter needing to immediately service that debt.
Apple threatened to ban Twitter from the app store, Musk met with Tim Cook, deleted all his tweets critical of Apple, and then reversed his stance on moderation and banning. Sure, this has nothing to do with Apple at all...
"Hateful conduct: You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease."
> Good conversation. Among other things, we resolved the misunderstanding about Twitter potentially being removed from the App Store. Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so.
> Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter. You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from rest of Internet
Very funny to see people twist themselves into a pretzel to explain why this ban is justified despite all of Elon's phony preening about "free speech" over the past few months. Elon paid good money to live out his twitter admin power fantasy and it's as simple as that. Free speech is a brand not a real principle that Elon cares about. The most ironic part is that Swastikas are still allowed on twitter, but personal attacks against Musk are a big no-no.
There was an article here the other day about how it's not a swastika, it's a hooked cross.
The people who actually use swastikas would like to be disassociated from the murderous megalomaniac who appropriated their symbol and used it is his white supremacist propaganda.
The symbol is the first image on google when you search for swastika Star of David (or it was, now Ye images are showing up lol), and given the context of his por-hitler and pro-nazi rant, I think it's far more likely than not Ye had no idea the UFO connection.
Which makes it really weird in context, because the Raelians are using it in its original non-violent sense, but Kanye West is explicitly pushing anti-semitic messaging. Which leads me to assume Kanye either thought he was being clever or just doesn't understand the intended context of the symbol he posted.
Why? I’m definitely not pro Nazi and I am a minority. But why is posting hate speech a bridge too far for a “free speech” hard liner as Musk pretends to be?
Because Elon doesn't actually have an ounce of moral intelligence. Like virtually every other thing that has happened with this whole takeover, he appears not to have really thought about the problem for more than 30 seconds.
This was evident even before a "tricky" case came up. His opening salvo was "free speech reigns," then immediately "well, law of the land matters," then "wait I guess I didn't think about how to handle variations in laws..."
Yep, there's never before been a rich man with a loose grasp on morality, nor a poor man with a strong one. History shows that this just doesn't happen.
He's so rich because Tesla is incredibly overvalued. I don't think Musk is an idiot, but he's done nothing to demonstrate he's a genius, just smart in some areas.
The whole money=intelligence makes no sense, many field require high level intelligence but don't monetarily reward comparatively well (e.g. scientific research)
He could make spacex go public and make up for the fact that Tesla is arguably overvalued, and the market is wrong and you are right. Which you must be, since you are an internet genius!
Intelligence is not the same as knowledge of a particular domain, such as surgery. You seem very intelligent. Yes, I believe intelligence is something that is applied, just like wisdom.
I assume it's finally beginning to dawn on Elon that maybe everyone on twitter won't pay $8 to see a sea of swastikas, and he will need those advertisers after all.
Private comms between Musk and Kanye was Musk quoting the Bible (?) as giving him the authority to decide whether Kanye's Swastikarofdavid is "love" or not.
And claiming that an election was stolen that actually caused some idiots to storm a government building and putting the VP of the United States in danger is not associated with violence?
No, posting a flag of mass murderers is different from encouraging people to protest. I don’t care about the left/right politics, but since you may: bring consistent here also allows BLM to keep posting on Twitter despite people being shot by extremists.
Remember when ragequit forum drama was limited to the blast radius of the individual forum, and wasn't multiple weeks of coverage in the New York Times?
