His verification check was taken awaaaaaaaaay
In hilarity news, Milo Yiannopoulos – who is a tweeter, not a journalist – crashed the White House press briefing on Friday to tell Obama that Twitter took his blue tick away.
Yiannopolous began by quoting Reddit founderAaron Schwartz, who argued that the importance of free speech also extended to social media sites, and brought up Obama’s previous statements denouncing university safe spacesand the coddling of college students.
“It’s becoming very clear that Twitter and Facebook in particular are censoring and punishing conservative and libertarian points of view…” he argued. “Is there anything the president can do to encourage Silicon Valley to remind them of the critical importance of open free speech in our society?”
Can Obama please please do something to make Twitter more welcoming to misogynist bullies?
“You obviously can’t enforce the First Amendment on private corporations,” Yiannopolous allowed. “But there seems to be a very clear trend. My verification check was taken away for making fun of the wrong group of people. Conservative commentators and journalists are being punished, being suspended, having their tweets deleted by Twitter. Facebook is removing criticism of immigration in Europe.”
“Are there any mechanisms the government can use to remind these companies that they have this responsibility, or do we just have to trust the market will punish them if they don’t?” he asked.
His verification check was taken away! That’s literally the worst thing that has happened to free speech since ever. How can the world have an intelligent conversation about whether or not women are stupid sluts if Milo Yiannopolous doesn’t have his blue tick?
Libertarian aggrieved by actions of private company; demands government take action.
I sense a disturbance in the Force, as if a million irony meters cried out in agony.
A friend of mine was suspended from Facebook for three days for calling a Trump supporter a racist.
It’s not vulgar. Its not a threat.
I have trouble believing in this liberal bias.
He’s complaining about social media sites punishing libertarians while at the same time asking if the government should punish them or if he should wait for the free market to do its thing…
Something doesn’t compute here…
And I’m just repeating Screechy Monkey… Sorry!
Also, private corporations censoring speech is not functionally equivalent to Obama’s (correct) complaints about rampant censorship/campus-wide safe spaces in public universities.
Strangely enough the Internet is not a forum for unfettered free speech…
I would nitpick that a little: I think the internet as whole is “a forum for unfettered free speech,” more or less. In the sense that you can pretty much always find somewhere on the internet where you can say any given thing. That is not the same as saying that you can say any given thing anywhere on the internet.
Of course, it’s the latter that people like Milo think they’re entitled to, because it’s no fun for them to express their opinions where only a handful of fellow sociopaths can see it.
Well it’s more in the sense that the internet is not a single open public space for free speech but rather many individual communities in which certain kinds of speech are considered acceptable. It’s the nature of the beast; the ‘net’s more compartmentalized and isolated than the physical world while at the same time far more connected.
There is, of course, the question of whether large multi-national corporations such as Twitter or Facebook should have the sort of power they have.
@8 Exactly. Why should Zuckerberg’s minions have the power to decide what is acceptable and unacceptable speech. Ophelia’s posting below about Hollande giving The Legion of Honor to a Saudi Prince is just the type of ‘racist’ posting that gets someone shut down. There are no shortage of nitwits who’d view the blog postings here criticial of the Saudis and Saudi Arabia as bigoted.
Bernard Hurley and John,
So to whom do you want to give that power? And if your answer is “no one,” meaning that they have to abide by the First Amendment, then what you’re really proposing is to turn Facebook, Twitter, etc. into 4chan. Essentially no ability to delete postings or accounts based on content, a very high bar for what is a threat or harassment… I don’t think you’re going to like that alternative better than the status quo.
I much prefer to have every site or network have to decide for itself what kind of community it wants to be, and the users vote with their feet. Arguments that any particular site is so indispensable that it must be regulated like a public utility have not impressed me: the list of “indispensable” sites seems to change and shift pretty rapidly. Facebook still has a huge user base in terms of accounts, but today’s teenagers and college students aren’t using it nearly as much, other than to communicate with their elders. Twitter is the current flavor of the month, but how long will that last?
Maybe he should ask Calgon about it.