Re: <nettime> Sign the BAN X in EUROPE petition and join the campaign

[Keith Sanborn via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Musk is a fascist who promotes damaging lies and amplifies them. X is a vehicle for much damaging of the public sphere. I guess you must really love them nazis! Trying to defend them by standards they wd never adhere to. J D Vance made the same point about Trump’s damaging claims he won the 2020 election. All in the name of “free speech.” This is the moral equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded theater. And Musk is a repeat offender. That is not free speech but something akin to linguistic terrorism. 

> On Oct 11, 2024, at 9:12 AM, Cade Diehm via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi nettime,
> 
> In the years to come, the digital rights community will need to answer for the conflation of free speech of a democratic society with the formats and operations of the private platforms for which we interact on.
> 
> Indeed, the US-borne legal stance enshrined by Section 230 — that the platform is (within reason) not broadly responsible for the content of what its users post — is something that should be heeded by the wider democratic world. But what continues to be missed is the interface as it relates to speech: the editorialised algorithmic timeline, the scaffolds that dictate and shape platform speech (be it short form video, 200 characters, or pictures with filters), or what one must give up in order to participate.
> 
> Turns out, all of these properties are just as important in the context of speech, and how they shape what is said, who gets to say it, and how they say it. And yet, beyond meandering gestures towards interoperability by the EU, or the endless protest by NGOs against endless social-media accelerated genocides, we widely continue to equate the platform with the speech. The two could not be further from each other.
> 
> Put simply, the democratic enshrinement of free speech is the cloak that has successfully kept these controllers of discourse firmly in the seats of power. That has been the mantra, to attack the platform is to attack speech itself, what a convenient reality for these now-juggernaughts!
> 
> Forgive me, but in 2024 this kind of free speech discourse rings as hollow as Musks' facile speech absolutism. A digitalised democracy must evolve beyond the infantile technolibertariancore EFF understanding of free speech, where the platform and its designed constraints and rules are invisible to the demands of a free press. There is a very real accelerationist attack underway that leverages this very flaw in the 30+ years of digital discourse, driven by a flaw we have all perpetuated to varying degrees. Killing a platform for being run by a Epstein-adjacent hyper-criminal who once flashed a woman on an aeroplane and then offered to buy her a horse is not the same as kicking in the doors of citizens who post on the platform owned by Epstein-adjacent hyper-criminal who once flashed a woman on an aeroplane and then offered to buy her a horse. Frankly I'm tired of the claims that these are one and the same.
> 
> I am not an authoritarian, I don't give a fuck about the Nazis on X. What I care about is that, after 40 years of fighting for internet freedoms, the Nazis are now freely flowing into the timelines of everyone you care about. To continue to parrot this 20th century idea of free speech without considering the infrastructure actor is to be in denial as this information warfare submerges us. It is exactly the belief here, cloaking the corpo platform in the dream of the democratic voice, that has kept us from the nuance needed to navigate these pathetic implementations of mass media we are still just beginning to grapple with.
> 
> Thanks for reading.
> 
> Cade
> 
> ~
> 
> Founder, New Design Congress
> https://newdesigncongress.org/en/join
> 
>> On 11.10.24 18:55, Harv Stanic Staalman via nettime-l wrote:
>> Oh, how democratic and advanced. Asking for a censorship in a 21st century, after 40 years of fighting for internet freedoms certainly brings memories of the
>> //Reichsministerium//// für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda//.
>> I wonder which EU funding scheme sponsors this?
>> Geert should know better.
> --
> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
> # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> # more info: https://www.nettime.org
> # contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org
-- 
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: https://www.nettime.org
# contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org