I never want to hear anyone preaching that the West has freedom of speech, freedom of the press, etc, ever again. Got it?
“but those are just the corporations who own every single media outlet and social media, that doesn’t count!”
Literally within five minutes of you saying this, someone replied with the same thing unironically. Nice.
You can also read my reply tearing that argument apart, maybe add your own thoughts on it.
“tearing”
Last I checked gab, gettr, parler, etc all existed. Maybe they suck and don’t get traction because no one wants to be on them. Why not start your own PayPal service and accept everyone?
Freedom of speech only concerns the government not silencing you- not private companies kicking you off their private platform. It’s no different than someone saying you can’t put signs up in their front yard.
Now I don’t know the specifics of why these two outlets had their funds frozen but they should definitely look into alternative methods of payment.
Maybe it’s regrettable but it has zero to do with freedom of speech.
Splitting hairs. It doesn’t matter how it happens, it just matters that it does, because the effect felt by the general public is the same in both cases. In a country where literally everything is privatised with no other alternatives, saying that some protection doesn’t apply to the private sector is a cop out, and if you say that, you’re effectively admitting that it’s a fake protection. If the government actually believed in freedom of speech, they’d have provisions against this even for the public sector (especially for companies powerful enough to be household names), or maybe provide a public-funded alternative to private businesses that would be subject to freedom of speech protections. A protection that not everyone is required to uphold is not a protection, it’s lip service.
If you claim to support some protection, and you even go as far as to accuse countries that don’t have it of a human rights abuse (China, Russia, etc), you better have a comprehensive way of ensuring that the protection is easily accessible and used by all in your own country. Otherwise, or if you start attaching astricks to it like “oh it doesn’t apply to the private sector, in the country which is basically one big private sector”, then even under your own definition which you presumably made to cast you in the best light, you’re a human rights abuser.
Or as another way of looking at it, if there’s a law saying that a building needs to have fire exits and smoke alarms, but actually, just government buildings need to and private buildings can be a tinderbox for all the government cares, in a country where 99% of the buildings are private, would you feel like that was an adequate effort by the government in terms of protecting citizens from fires? Or would you rather that the government mandate that all buildings, public and private, have those things? You know, like how it actually is.
This isn’t about freedom of speech. I personally don’t support it in the way that the West defines it. But this is about logical and legal consistency, where if you want to claim to support it, you better actually support it.
does that unironically make soviet media repression more free than modern media? Like protests and strikes were all the rage in soviet times, it was more coordinated with governments and they actually goddamn listened. The government free speech applied fully, so the rights the government protected could not be challenged by the media, but there were censors of fascist and useless neoliberalism.
In the “free” west, it doesn’t matter how free your speech is because they can do and censor whatever the fuck they want. They have the lawyers to back them up. if any thing gets really serious they have their army of bootlickers and lawyers to drag everything out until the price they pay is so low it barely scratches them. The only reason they seem free speech is that its good media. they can twist and propogandize whatever they want, justify it with their nonsense, and then barrage anyone and anything with what fits the corporate line. Social media is to control and to make ad revenue.
Exactly. The West’s free speech is merely virtue signalling.
Like protests and strikes were all the rage in soviet times, it was more coordinated with governments and they actually goddamn listened.
Or they just massacred everyone who disagreed. See also Cronstadt, the Communes of Ukraine, or the Prague massacre for the best known examples of that. Note that I’m not saying political repression is a specificity of bolshevik States (1), as it exists in pretty much any Nation State.
But as you said, free information is an illusion when most of the media is controlled by corporate cartels who decide what we should (or not) hear about and how to frame the story, what sources to employ…
(1) I would not call them soviets because bolsheviks have explicitly disempowered the soviets (who were leading the revolutionary effort in 1917) to empower a classic Nation State structure.
If you mean the anarchists I was not against that. I mean actual strikes and whatnot, and they didn’t need to most of the time, because they had government channels to bargain with, as in a socialist society (not a fully socialist one mind you).
I don’t mean to judge, but you obviously have never lived through a strike in a “socialist” State. They have the same interests and means as a “capitalist” State and negociating with your oppressors is obviously bound to fail. You can read about the three examples i listed before (or about the Telefonica siege in 1936, or about the PCF supporting war against algerian independentists in the 50s/60s) to learn some historical context of what it means to fight for social justice and have communist parties on the other side fighting tooth and nail for the status quo.
You could also do some reading on modern popular struggles in China. For example (unfortunately in french) this short documentary about Xiancun residents fighting against gentrification, corruption and police abuse in their neighborhood.
I don’t know you or where you’re from, but this sounds like an absolutist privileged take on free speech that i usually hear from US right-wingers. Would you say in the same way that Paypal/Facebook/Youtube needs to keep neonazi propaganda because of free speech?
I do appreciate that you make an explicit distinction that State censorship is less a problem in the US because everything is privatized, and therefore in that case private censorship is more of a problem (in relative terms). But coming from a country (France) which has a long history of State censorship which keeps on getting worse in the past decades, i personally couldn’t care less what this or that company does as long as i have legal protections (which i don’t under french law) to open my own platform and defy their ideas.
Also, please take the other side of the coin: if you apply “neutrality” regulations to private entities, what does that mean when you start a service? If i can’t ban nazis and other abusers on the chatrooms/forums i operate, i don’t want to operate public services. And if having leftists/anarchists censored from corporate platforms is the price to pay for us to have friendly communities like raddle.me or lemmy.ml on our side, i personally think it’s a very valid tradeoff.
PS: about Paypal specifically, you know it’s founded and operated by outright fascists, right? We’ve been boycotting Paypal for what 15 years now? There’s nothing new about this story, and i basically have no trust in “leftists” who depend on fascist megacorporations to do their propaganda. Write/distribute zines, placate posters everywhere, graph your whole neighborhood, sell a newspaper on the markets… But news websites like MintPress look like feel-good money-making machines pushing dubious narratives: or is it a workers cooperative or a non-profit? I’m always skeptical of blogs/sites trying to make money, and but i’m even more skeptical of pretend-leftist organizations who are just typical corporations. From MintPress about us page:
We are a for profit organization. Our goal is to be funded through advertising, syndication, and other traditional funding sources. Because we strongly believe in citizen driven journalism, we accept online donations. However, we are committed to rejecting any funding sources that attempt to influence what we report on and how we do so.
No, I’d really rather not the government tell me I have to support someone on my service if I didn’t want. Has fuck all to do with personal safety like fire exits.
Like someone else said, I wouldn’t want to be forced to allow neonazis on my service so…
If you’re so concerned, open your own payment platform and open source it or run it with no restrictions. No one is stopping you. Or tell them to accept checks through the mail, etc. Why is anyone entitled to a private company’s platform? There are still other ways to be paid. Why must this one company support everyone?
I am so shocked
just completely shook
like I can barely even function /s
Removed by mod
I like Taler, but it’s specifically designed to not give anonymity to sellers. In order to verify that you got a valid token (meaning it was issued by an accredited bank and was not already spent) you need to deposit it with the bank.
Now if you get money from a friend you trust has given you a valid token, then that’s not an issue. You can just use it to pay for stuff and nobody will know how you got that token. A seller however will want to verify the token immediately or they might end up giving stuff away for free.
I guess for donations it could work since you’re not giving anything in return and so can’t be scammed, but it’s obviously a bit of a problem since you could be sitting on worthless tokens. You don’t know what funds you have until you try to spend them, and people will probably get pretty annoyed with you if most of your tokens end up being fake. Not sure how one might protect themselves against this sort of spam.
There needs to be a payment method for the fediverse
Err please not. The fediverse is great BECAUSE It cannot be monetized. See also how the web turned to crap when advertisement/payment industry came in. I can understand the need for digital financial transactions in certain usecases, but if so we should support multiple payment protocols/providers, not “a payment method”.
Our iww branch had the PayPal account pulled like 8 years ago lol
“leftwing”.
While the principles here are important, calling these outlets leftwing is a stretch.
