Really? A Brit from England, thought Pakistan was in Europe, and didn't know British Pakistani's are commonwealth British citizens?
That's astonishing that the only two people to think Pakistan is in Europe, met each other on a poker forum. It's a funny old world

The baseless smear is pathetic. I was defending Pakistani's and the British Police. I don't think I could be any more inclusive than pointing out to you that they are British.
How do you defend the Police from an accusation, apart from pointing out they are firmly on their side?
It's a weird modern phenomena, that some people try to spin everything to smear everyone. You win. I won't defend Pakistanis again.

You've yet to make a point on why 2+2 should allow racist speech on it's forum.

Facebook's essence, its primary purpose, is a data mining and targeted advertising platform. That people can gather and share thoughts in that space is the means, not the end, of Facebook.

The purpose of the town square is the opposite - to enable people to gather and share.

Do you borrow chewing gum?

I mean, Jesus at least try and tie it to something challenging like if Facebook doesn't have to allow Alex Jones access why do bakers have to make cakes for gay people. That at least sounds relevant.

Do you believe two people can privately own an item jointly? How about three people?

I'd love to see a truly public social media platform - GovNet or something like that.

In the meantime, Facebook is not the only social media platform around. There are plenty of web forums, message boards, etc., and there is also wide open potential for social media aggregation.

I'll clarify that while I do recognize the value of aggregated property rights (accomplishing economies of scale, reducing transaction costs, etc), I am less enamored with aggregated speech rights.

Individuals within an organization should be free to assemble and individually speak their minds no matter how their organization molds the individuals' messages, but providing the organization with a "voice" of its own actually obscures the individuality of the thereby propounded ideas, where the individuality is the basis of the value of the "marketplace of ideas" concept to begin with.


tbh I haven't really thought this part through a whole lot

Man, where were these freeze peach champions when Rose McGowan got suspended for calling out a rapist? Funny how this deeply-held “MySpace is the town hall” principle only gets trotted out when Alex ****ing Jones gets booted off Facebook.

Who cares. It is now the primary source of news to most people. It is where discussion takes place. If you value free expression, that is where the U.S. struggle is.

You make lots of jabs and cheap analogies, but are not connecting them to the underlying argument about whether open expression should be nurtured on social media. You clearly value property rights above expression. Fine. But stop hinting that applying the Bill of Rights to social media is logically impossible or somehow inconceivable. You simply value the collectivist property rights of the corporation over individual liberty.

So since it is hard to draw a line, therefore no argument or policy is valid. We can't decide on 50 or 55 red blood cells per unit, therefore anemia can never be diagnosed.

To protect free expression online, you pick a somewhat arbitrary number (12 owners, maybe revenue), and say above that, the Bill of Rights applies. That is how all decisions are made in medicine, science, government, parenting, trolling, etc.

What point are you even making? How does it undermine the claim that if a company retains ownership of sheets of paper, it could restrict expression? Or the broader argument, that we can't let property fetishism limit speech?

That's even a topic in this thread? Are our hosts a corporation or an LLC?

If, one day, open expression is required on FB, and Twitter, then it would apply to many entities. I certainly would not expend energy trying to include 2+2 in the cut.

Hmm, I wonder what Glenn Greenwald said at 3:52 AM on Oct. 12, 2017, while McGowan's 1/2 day suspension was still in effect:

Slow down your pitching Trolly, I'm catching a cold.

... and it was radio silence from you, FoldN, and the other freeze peach slappies who come in here. A rape victim getting silenced didn't seem to bother you guys much. Wasn't until Alex Jones got the boot that you got all riled up and workshopped this notion that nationalizing Instagram is essential to our democracy.

"You didn't write on 2+2 about Rose McGowan getting a half day ban on twitter so now you can't advocate for regulating Facebook or Twitter" is a piping hot take

You still didn't read up even after getting called out. Follow the link. McGowan was suspended a few hours for twitting a phone number, according to Twitter. (If so, Greenwald actually may have jumped the gun in defending her.) BTW, do you have your own McGowan post to link to?

For the record, the problem with silencing Jones is that that's how me and mine will get suppressed. Since 2003, probably a plurality of my posts have been against U.S. imperialism/militarism, followed by corporate domination, Israeli aggression, racism, police. Those are the expression topics I worry about. Of those, criticizing the Israeli occupation is probably the most vulnerable on social media. It's a real worry, what with actual laws proposed to harass Muslims or punish advocacy of boycott and divestment, and the defining of opposition to occupation as antisemitism. Hell, a very well-informed and articulate poster, Cyrus, was booted from 2+2 for apparatchik reasons.

As a reporter in 1978, I published a photo of a Klansman charging me in Tupelo, Mississippi. I challenge Trolley to a contest of our left wing street cred, to wit, who can piss the longest passage of The Communist Manifesto in the snow. I'm from Wisconsin, b****. Who volunteers to hold the bets?

Amazing.


You know, 2p2 has a search feature. You should really try looking these sorts of things up for yourself first before trying to drop these sick burns.

So you dispute that her account was paused for tweeting a private phone number?

Or you are doing an Alex Jones style smear, quoting just the phrase that can seem like defending rapists? You'll ban yourself, right?

Bill, should Facebook be prohibited from controlling the top posts on users' news feeds?

Seems like undue interference in the otherwise free exchange of ideas and opinions.

What I'm suggesting here, Bill, is that you think Alex Jones organizing a harassment campaign against school shooting victims is speech so vital to our discourse that we actually need to change the 1st Amendment to force private companies to host his content. That's what's got your dander up, that's what's spurred you to post here. Meanwhile, Rose McGowan tweeting Harvey ****ing Weinstein's number is where you draw the line and say Greenwald has gone a bridge too far in defending her. I mean, goddamn, if there's some forum award for picking the worst hills to die on, this deserves a nomination.

The primary source of news for most people is an unfiltered, say-anything format lacking in any standards of objectivity or verifiability?

Why was post-war America so much more concerned with journalistic integrity, if it was?

Wolf, you ask me to answer every scattershot whim while reciprocating very little. Most importantly, you have not addressed whether corporate control of information challenges democracy, and if so what to do about it. I've also argued that you avoid this because you value collectivist ownership rights over free discourse.

I'll take another crack at your questions, but do try to work through your conclusions rather than be the guy at the town meeting who only asks sniping questions but can't finish a sentence of his own.

This is an identical dilemma to government censorship. Who is to be trusted to be a responsible arbiter of truth? Yes, free speech invites acres of dreck. But censorship strengthens the most powerful and the least accountable. Did Alex Jones cause us to massacre three million people in Vietnam or burn down Iraq? Was he the source who persuaded the New York Times of the fake news that Saddam had chemical weapons? Did the John Birch Society fake the second Tonkin Gulf clash and get us into Vietnam? No and no. Our cowardly corporate media ran interference for our cataclysmic invasions. In 2003, do you know the intensity of the mobs demanding that anybody questioning Bush's invasion have "USA" branded on their foreheads? Will FB stand up to that, next war?

Few white people believed the volume of police violence when corporate media had the job. It was only with citizen cell phones and social media that the obvious could no longer be hidden. Do you want FB deciding that one more phone vid from Ferguson would be too incendiary? Do you want FB helping the NSA identify who's been distributing police violence vids?

Come on man address this. Why would you trust corporations to make news pure?

That is indeed a tricky question. Generic answer: insuring freer discourse will be a negotiated, messy affair. But none of the conundrums you come up with deny corporate dominance. You identify challenges in addressing it, but provide no reason to entrust the 1% with our democracy. Don't make that FB dweeb what's-his-ass your eyes and ears.

I don't deny that the social technology seems to have amplified the voices of Richard Spencers and 9/11 nutters and Alex Jones. People need to be more proactive in deciding what's reliable evidence. But you know, people were plenty stupid and awful before Twitter, forming lynch mobs, fighting for segregation, etc. The press of the 1790s was every bit as wretched as Bannon and Jones. But look at TwoPlusTwo as a hopeful little microcosm. In our little petri dish, the 9/11 conspiratards could not hold up. Actual Nazis get swarmed before a mod comes to and bans them. Sometimes I've felt cheated when the sport got shut down.

I'll grant you one thing. In the Eighties, we thought USA Today (a newspaper, it still exists) was the end of the republic. But Fox and that ilk do make me miss the professionalism of legacy media. They hid a lot of the most important things, but when they did report a fact, you could usually depend on it.

Why? That'd take library shelves of explanation. A couple things that pop to mind. Part is simple replacement -- the media thriving today are not the ones of the postwar consensus. The postwar economic boom petered out by the 1970s. After there was no easy money to be made producing things, capital either went overseas or turned to financial raiding, attacks on wages, etc. Today's capitalists have lost the sense of having a social compact, that they owe anything at all to the nation. There only value is the bottom line. In the 1950s and '60s, corporate leaders were WWII vets and still believed in a beloved national community. That's all gone now, with predictable affect on everything that capital touches. So for example the fairness doctrine for broadcasters was rescinded. So now Fox only features GOP imperialists, while before they had to include Democratic imperialists. They debated things like whether Vietnam should be nuked or just napalmed. Now the most extreme print views are matched digitally. Surpassed.

Extremist views like John Birchers used to be confined to snarly little newsletters, but yes, the net is more efficient than the Post Office. But guess what -- it's easier for every other voice too. Yes the worst get amplified, but so do all the opposing views. That's only partial recompense for having to put up with Alex Jones, but the alternative is that dweeb Mark Zuckerburg controlling your synapses.

Carrying water for the John Birch Society is another amazing new twist.

Whereabouts would you draw the line? If you're saying 12 owners or something like that, then it doesn't have much to do with FB. You are just suggesting that businesses generally should not have the right to control speech. That should probably imply that Dodger Stadium and McDonalds can't throw you out for speech. That's different than saying FB is something really special, it's the town square, it's the main place for people to communicate.

And the ACLU are a bunch of Nazis?

Bill,

The difference between corporate "suppression" of speech and government suppression is that when the government does it they'll close you down, perhaps jail you, and if you resist they'll kill you. The first amendment is something that tells the government to not do stuff. When you tell the government that they now should apply the first amendment to private businesses you're asking them to do stuff. The government doing stuff is a threat to dissenting voices. And they'll be finding ways to punish Alternet for not publishing Exxon commercials if you give them this power instead of making FB carry revolutionary marxist pages.

I agree with you. The "12 owners" reference was only intended to address Wolfman's suggestion that policies cannot be created when there are shades of gray.

One possible approach would be to define the immense social media platforms as common carriers. This would exempt Alternet and Dodger stadium from tolerating Nazis and Exxon.

No doubt about it, this is a can of worms. But this is our world now. The point is to protect discourse, knowing fully well that it will be complex. As you know I'm just riffing off the top of my head, but steps need to be taken.

And I don't entirely agree that there's a fundamental difference between applying the 1st amendment to govt and FB. The courts tell the feds not to do something -- suppress speech -- and they could tell FB that too. Courts apply free speech widely, not just to the feds, but to tiny county governments as well. We need to find some way to keep FB open. They have immense bureaucracies doing nothing all day but policing speech. Plenty of mischief can come from that.

If anyone is paying attention to him, my actual reference to the Birchers was as "snarly little newsletters." I also said they were not the ones who faked Tonkin Gulf, which is about as controversial as saying the 4H Club did not destroy the Twin Towers.

What Trolly is doing is using a one sentence attack that can be read in a glance against a TLDR that only a few people read. Which is to say he is an Alex Jones smear artist who should ban himself in solidarity with his doppelganger.

Cliffs: he's a liar.

It may be trivial technically for FB to publish posts, but you're asking FB to publish. You're not just asking them not to censor.

I'm not 100% one way or the other on whether FB is sooo important to society that making it especially subject to this is necessary. Having essentially never used it myself it's certainly not essential to me. I'd much rather see users pressuring FB to do what they want or leave. And access to alternative perspectives is way higher on social media than conventional media as it is.

I'd also really want to find different kinds of solutions along antitrust lines.