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- cross-posted to:
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Labour MPs have begun quitting X in alarm over the platform, with one saying Elon Musk had turned it into “a megaphone for foreign adversaries and far-right fringe groups”.
Over the weekend, newly elected MPs took to WhatsApp groups to raise growing concerns about the role X played in the spread of misinformation amid the far-right-led riots in parts of England and Northern Ireland.
Two Labour MPs are known to have told colleagues they were leaving the platform. One of them, Noah Law, has disabled his account. Other MPs who still use X have begun examining alternatives, including Threads, which is owned by Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and the open-source platform Bluesky.
In an article for the Guardian on Monday, a former Twitter executive, Bruce Daisley, said Musk should face personal sanctions and even an arrest warrant if he continues to stir up public disorder online.
Oh, you mean after the official UK Xitter account was banned because the Police Commissioner displayed zero understanding of their laws boundaries and managed to completely embarrass themselves and their national government by threatening extra-judicial extradition?
I don’t like Elon but fuck that noise. We fought a whole fucking war to not be subject to the UKs laws and I have yet to find an expiration date on the Deceleration of Independence.
I think these MP’s are dining on a fresh bowl of sour grapes.
Yeah, I can’t really agree with the Brits on this one.
I think that what might happen in the long term is that different countries wind up with at least semi-separate social media platforms. Trying to create a least common denominator that everyone can live with just runs into too many problems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splinternet
I mean, I’m not going to have the British government censoring what I can see on political grounds. No way. And I’m sure that there are Brits who are appalled at seeing politically-extreme material that’s constitutionally-protected in the US showing up in front of their eyeballs.
And this is just the UK. Like, they’re maybe censorious by our standards, but it’s not even getting into stuff like Islamic countries and blasphemy law or Russia wanting state control over media because they don’t like criticism of the government.
Like, the best you might get is a common platform but with not everyone having the same view of the content on it, with some people having content censored in various ways, kind of like you get on the Threadiverse with defederations. Like, the government gets a kill switch over particular content on the view that their citizens have of information, but cannot disrupt communication between people outside of their jurisdiction.
It’s kind of unfortunate, because it decreases the gain potentially you get from leveraging network effect, where the value of the network rises with the square of the number of users.
I wish I could upvote your comment more than once. It’s just not possible to regulate a Social Media platform such that it complies with the cultural norms and speech laws of every country in the world while allowing the free flow of ideas and comments.
There was actually a really good RFC – if you’re not familiar with these, they’re normally the documents used to create most Internet standards, normally just address technical matter – put out a while back, “.sex considered dangerous”. At the time, Congress was considering passing laws to regulate obscenity on the entire Internet – a lot of the infrastructure of which we in the US ran – according to US social norms, because people were upset over access to pornography. While political speech is strongly-protected in the US, we do have an obscenity exception, and so pornographic content could be regulated in some forms, and had been, like on FCC-regulated broadcast radio and television. Parents were upset at this new Internet thing bringing lots of porn to their children, so the idea was “why don’t we just create an adult space on the Internet and make all that adult stuff go there”. And the answer here, which the RFC covers, along with some technical arguments, is that the Internet is global, and there are many different social norms around the world. You cannot just tell everyone to adopt your own. It doesn’t work.
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3675
The shoe was on the other foot there – it was us talking about our government limiting what other people in the world have access to, but the point, I think, remains the same.
I’d also add that, regarding the stuff on political speech in particular, we have a legal history of Congress refusing to budge specifically on First Amendment matters involving foreign restriction of speech of Americans.
British libel law is far more favorable to plaintiffs than American libel law, due in part to the First Amendment in the US. So what a number of plaintiffs who kept being unable to sue someone over libel in the US tried doing was “libel tourism” – taking their case to a foreign jurisdiction and finding an angle to try to claim that jurisdiction applied and then trying to get judgements there and then to get the US to enforce it in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding_Evil
That resulted in Congress passing this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPEECH_Act