Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the topics-of-conversation dept

This week, our first place winner is an anonymous comment about Texas’s content moderation law, responding to the claim on Twitter that Wikipedia could easily comply with it by being more open and transparent:

Tell me you don’t understand how Wikipedia works without telling me you don’t understand how Wikipedia works.

I mean, Wikipedia is so open it airs its own dirty laundry in the talk pages. How much more open does it need to be?

In second place, it’s another anonymous comment on the same subject, this time responding to the claim that social media platforms just need to post their rules and admit their bias:

They do post their rules, its just that people like you cannot distinguish harassment from political discourse.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with yet another anonymous comment, this time responding to someone describing the EU’s big tech tax proposal as a “sender pays” system:

I’m sorry, but the proposal isn’t “sender pays”.

It’s “sender pays”, “receiver pays”, and “third party middlemen pay” all at once.

And to keep it all anonymous on the insightful side, we wrap up with a comment about the notion that Twitter is a carrier that “transmits communications between parties”:

Utterly wrong, Twitter allows people to post to its site for other people to read. ISP’s transmit packets between users and Twitter, but Twitter no more transmits or offers public carriage that any user of the mail, phone or other common carriage services.

Over on the funny side, we head back to the post about Texas’s law and the discussion around Wikipedia, where first place goes to Toom1275 for responding to the idea that it would “allow truth to flourish over propaganda there”:

Must have gotten Wikipedia confused for Conservapedia.

In second place, it’s That One Guy commenting on the subreddit that enacted a new rule in defiance of the law:

Be careful what you wish/throw a tantrum demanding…

Greg Abbot is a little piss baby.

With the mandatory text out of the way this seems reasonable enough, I mean there’s been so much whining about how platforms just need to be more exact and clear in their rules by people who are definitely not bad actors looking for loopholes to exploit that having clear rules about what your commentary must include can only be an improvement.

On top of that with all the furor about ‘viewpoints discrimination’ since there are people who don’t think that Greg Abbot is a little piss baby the platform’s hands are tied on this rule as it legally cannot tell the mod of that subreddit that they aren’t allowed to do that since that would be viewpoint discrimination against them, and I’m sure the law’s supporters would never be so grossly hypocritical as to demand viewpoint discrimination in their favor.

And last but most certainly not least since it’s a rule that all comments must include the ‘Greg Abbott is a little piss baby’ line there’s no possible concern about confusion over whether the text represents the position of the poster, and since it’s not forced speech so long as that confusion isn’t there there’s really no grounds at all for the first-amendment hating supporters of the bill to object to this new rule.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we’ll start by throwing in one more comment from That One Guy on that post, this time about the Wikipedia angle again:

You can tell a lot about a person/group by who/what they consider their enemies and when [Citation Needed] is on that list it’s probably not a good sign.

Finally, it’s glenn with another comment about the EU tech tax:

I’m waiting for grocery stores to pay me to take food off their hands, you know… because.

That’s all for this week, folks!