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Elon Musk takes over Twitter

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Alma, Apr 25, 2022.

Page 269 of 274
  1. dixiehack

    dixiehack Well-Known Member

    Amazed this wasn’t the Moon Winx Lodge.
     
    dixiehack, Aug 28, 2024
    #3217
  2. The Big Ragu

    The Big Ragu Moderator Staff Member

    I was curious about this, so I tried to find the case and how it was resolved. Just because the police arrest someone, doesn't make it a good arrest or one that would hold up when it comes to a prosecution. Cops make arrests that are stretches all the time. In this case, a grand jury actually inditced him on a more serious charge than what that story said; a felony charge of promoting prostitution (i.e. running a brothel). They had evidence that he was actually involved and he was even sleeping with the hookers himself. What I have been saying actually makes someone criminally liable -- they are involved.

    I believe the cop quoted in the story was wrong about "a lack knowledge no longer being a defense." It may have been an arrest that would have been tossed in court if they hadn't been able to charge him with being directly involved in a crime.
     
    The Big Ragu, Aug 28, 2024
    #3218
  3. sgreenwell

    sgreenwell Well-Known Member

    re: The Telegram case, it strikes me as one with a whole slew of grey area. Historically, there has always been this kind of push and pull over time that the courts need to decide, whether we're talking about speakeasies, or Napster, or social media platforms like Facebook. What's your responsibility to monitor and to police your own platform?

    From what little that has come out about Durov's case, part of the issue seems to be that the company was not responding to subpoena requests. From how the AP story is worded, I'm not sure if that means they're just continually saying "no" to them, or if they're just not answering the request at all. In the U.S., the latter usually leads to a contempt citation or default judgement, depending on the venue. If it's the former, then it's seemingly the issue I mentioned up top. Can you just run a messaging app, provide practically zero oversight and be free from any liability for what happens? I don't really think it's a comparable situation to, say, buying and using a gun, because ultimately Telegram is involved in the transaction throughout (i.e. providing the mechanism to send the messages, hosting them on servers, etc.).
     
    sgreenwell, Aug 28, 2024
    #3219
    Inky_Wretch likes this.
  4. YMCA B-Baller

    YMCA B-Baller Well-Known Member

    Nonsense. Not every consumer product is created equally. You want to live in a world where apples are anvils. It doesn't work that way.

    Comparing a car, which only has impact in the space it occupies, versus a media company that can reach billions of people where they live is not in any way the same thing or logical to try to say they are. It's like saying a gun and a cantaloupe are the same thing because they're both a product you can buy at a store.

    For them to throw up their hands and say, "We're just providing the forum, we can't do anything about how our customers use it" is some high-on bullshit based on what the purpose of social media is. The very nature of the medium is partly to influence and to reach people.

    I believe online companies should have to abide by the same rules of liability that traditional publications have to honor. If a paper can be sued for libel or slander, so should a website if someone is using it slanderously. And people making comments on these sites should absolutely be legally responsible along with them.

    If a social media site is allowing itself to be used to disseminate inaccurate or harmful information, they should be legally responsible for it. Probably mostly in a civil court, but if it reaches the level of criminal responsibility, why on Earth should they be protected from that if they're doing nothing to stop it?
     
    YMCA B-Baller, Aug 28, 2024
    #3220
    Songbird and Gutter like this.
  5. justgladtobehere

    justgladtobehere Well-Known Member

    The comparison between a traditional media outlet and social media is absurd. They are entirely two different concepts.

    Would you want Verizon to be liable for texts a customer sent in a group chat? The city to be liable for flyers posted on light poles?
     
    justgladtobehere, Aug 28, 2024
    #3221
  6. YMCA B-Baller

    YMCA B-Baller Well-Known Member

    It isn't absurd at all. Not when both traditional and social media are used as sources of information.

    But especially, not when both can be publicly consumed by anyone without restriction.

    A group chat is not a general audience. It's a closed conversation one chooses to participate in. Not remotely the same thing as someone putting out bullshit on a social media forum that anyone can read.
     
    YMCA B-Baller, Aug 29, 2024
    #3222
  7. Azrael

    Azrael Well-Known Member

    Azrael, Aug 29, 2024
    #3223
  8. Azrael

    Azrael Well-Known Member

    charges, free link

    Telegram Founder Charged With Wide Range of Crimes in France

    Pavel Durov, the Russian-born entrepreneur who founded the online communications tool Telegram, was charged on Wednesday in France with a wide range of crimes for failing to prevent illicit activity on the app, and barred from leaving the country.

    His indictment was a rare move by legal authorities to hold a top technology executive personally liable for the behavior of users on a major messaging platform, escalating the debate over the role of tech companies in online speech, privacy and security and the limits of their responsibility.

    Mr. Durov, 39, was detained by the French authorities on Saturday after a flight from Azerbaijan. He was charged on Wednesday with complicity in managing an online platform to enable illegal transactions by an organized group, which could lead to a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.

    He was also charged with complicity in crimes such as enabling the distribution of child sexual abuse material, drug trafficking and fraud, and refusing to cooperate with law enforcement.
     
    Azrael, Aug 29, 2024
    #3224
  9. Azrael

    Azrael Well-Known Member

    Azrael, Aug 29, 2024
    #3225
  10. The Big Ragu

    The Big Ragu Moderator Staff Member

    This is exactly how I see it, and what I agree with:

    But there is an answer, which is that this is the wrong question. We should not be asking whether anyone wants to help criminals (no!) but whether it’s worth sacrificing our own liberties to make it easier for the government to stop them. The Bill of Rights answered this with a resounding no, and that’s still the correct answer after more than 200 years.

    If you allow people to say anything, you’ll see a lot of hateful filth, but you will also see robust discussions that make our democracy stronger. If you allow bloggers to speculate about anything that crosses their minds, you will find they generate a lot of nonsense — and also provide a useful check on institutions that aren’t doing their jobs properly. If you maintain spaces where people can talk away from the prying eyes of the authorities, you will make it harder for democratic governments to catch criminals and also make it harder for despotic governments to crack down on political activists.

    It’s tempting to say that we’ll let only the good governments have those powers, for good purposes. That we aren’t really sacrificing an important freedom, only the kinds of freedom that no one should have. That we’re simply sanding off the wilder edges of the internet, while leaving plenty of spaces for all the right kinds of speech to flourish.

    But while it might not be one short step from a Telegram crackdown to a full-blown Chinese-style surveillance state, there is an inevitable trade-off: When such powers are used, they can be abused, as even democratic governments have done when they’ve decided that some emergency — communism, terrorism, the pandemic — required us to give up some of our liberties in the name of hunting the bad people.

    Inevitably, we regret those concessions. Coincidentally, shortly after Durov was arrested, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a letter to a U.S. House committee inquiry, regretfully admitting that the Biden White House had pressured Meta to censor disinformation during the pandemic, and that Meta had done so in some cases, though Zuckerberg takes full responsibility for those decisions. Undoubtedly, those officials thought they were helping people, but ultimately Facebook, owned by Meta, ended up also throttling reasonable speculation about the origins of the virus, along with an absolutely true story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, right ahead of an election.

    Small cost, I’m sure many of my readers will say, especially if they voted for Joe Biden. But then consider how Donald Trump might use such powers — and then consider what even worse governments might do with expansive powers over Telegram’s user base. Which is why we keep deciding anew to tie officials’ hands: not because we’re afraid of what they’ll do to the criminals but because we’re afraid of what might eventually be done to us.
     
    The Big Ragu, Aug 29, 2024
    #3226
  11. swingline

    swingline Well-Known Member

    Does fuck your feelings count as “robust discussions”?
     
    swingline, Aug 29, 2024
    #3227
    Mr. Sluggo likes this.
  12. Inky_Wretch

    Inky_Wretch Well-Known Member

    Did the guy who was busted running Silk Road, the dark web site that allowed peer-to-peer drug sales, use the 1A as a defense?

    (I've not reread any stories from a decade ago. But I don't think he actively was selling the drugs, just providing a platform for it to happen. Maybe he got a cut of the sale price, IDK.)
     
    Inky_Wretch, Aug 29, 2024
    #3228
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