Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the may-i-have-a-word dept

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment on our post about why moderating content does more to support free speech:

People want different content, gaming or tech forums host tech or gaming duscussions or comments,for example if you post weird extremist content or political content it will be removed or blocked.
The value of the open Internet is it allows people to make their own content or forums to communicate and form community’s that might be quiet niche or host for example lgbt or minority forums that might not exist before the web was invented
Moderation is essential to prevent forums being flooded with spam ads or trolls that harass other users
Some authoritarian country’s ban forums or certain apps that might be used to allow free speech by minoritys religious groups or critics of the government
We cannot take free speech for granted Fosta has taken away the right of sex workers to organise or communicate online and many platforms removed ordinary dating ads to avoid legal action

In second place, it’s Stephen T. Stone with a response to a comment from an unsurprising source claiming that “getting censored proves your opinion is the strongest”:

Hey, Koby: If a Twitter account connected to Al-Qaeda posts a political opinion⁠—one that doesn’t violate any laws or any of Twitter’s rules⁠—and Twitter bans that account anyway, does that mean Al-Qaeda’s opinion is the strongest?

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from Thad about the users of platforms like Parler admitting they are no fun when they can’t annoy and attack people who don’t agree with them:

Of course. It’s the same reason Techdirt’s resident trolls spend so much of their lives on a website they don’t even like: because they enjoy making other people’s experience with the site less pleasant.

Telling a Twitter troll to just go use Parler or whatever is like telling a subway flasher they can just go to a nude beach. It misses the point of why they’re doing what they’re doing. They don’t want a place where it’s socially acceptable to do it; the entire point is that they’re doing something socially unacceptable.

Next, it’s cpt kangarooski with a response to another complaint about social media moderation:

“What people want, on systems that aim to be neutral platforms for literally hundreds of millions of people to speak their minds, is for those platforms not to silence people on issues for which there are plentiful supporters on all sides.”

First, who says that they aim to be neutral platforms? If a site is moderating in a way that supports one position and does not support (or even impedes) another, then I’d say you’ve got your answer right there as to whether the site intends to be neutral or not. Since there is nothing obligating them to be neutral, and since they’re treated identically by the law whether they’re neutral or not, what’s the problem?

Second, what does it matter whether there are plentiful supporters on all sides? There are, sadly, plenty of neo-nazis. There are people who support the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There are plenty of people all around the world who support killing people for stupid reasons of religion, race, sexuality, etc. Popularity does not mean that their ideas have merit, or should even be tolerated. Often to refuse to put up with such things is both classy and indicative of good morals.

Indeed, it doesn’t matter at all whether everyone in the world but the operator of a site holds an opinion which the site operator finds unacceptable, or whether only one person in the world does; either way, there is nothing in the least bit wrong about the site banning that particular opinion.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Bobvious with a comment about forensic instructor Arpad Vass teaching cops to use witchcraft:

Oh! I thought it said Vapid Ass.

Never mind.

While we’re at it. If you detect bones by their piezoelectrickery, shouldn’t the diviners be using auto-ossuarial emissions isolation shields to prevent their own perturbations from interfering with the emissions of the deceased? The signal to noise ratio must be severely compromised.

Even worse is the metacarpal-carpal-phalangic triboelectric flex-field which fluctuates with each heart pulse and the quadricep correction loop. This subharmonic ring-modulation extends from the palmar region and into the 2nd and 3rd cosmic transmo-capitulators. These had better urgently be added to the other 17 scientific principles.

In second place, it’s James Burkhardt with another response to the idea that being censored proves you’re right:

Quite right! Man imagine how great the world would have been if those US SJWs hadn’t gone into Germany in the 40s and virtue signaled until Hitler canceled himself. Let us remind ourselves of the strongest opinion of them all, the superiority of the Aryan Race.

Poe’s Law Disclaimer: /sarcasm.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we’ve got a continuation of the riff that won first place. First wshuff had a question:

Could any of that be fixed with a reverse tachyon pulse from the main deflector dish?

And Bobvious returned with more information:

Only if you use a 7th-tuple orthopantomographic Tensor Hilbertian with the phase corrector in free-synchro and the capture-and-release hysteresis concentrator coupled to the Bose-Einstein Condensate distillation enhancer, which must be obverse to the evanescent Paulian offset in the ground plane.

That’s all for this week, folks!