Matthew N. Bennett 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (377)

• On the post: Five Decisions Illustrate How Section 230 Is Fading Fast

  

  Matthew N. Bennett ( profile ), 18 Oct, 2024 @ 03:35pm

  I think a big part of why speech laws have been getting attacked so much is because the anti-censors have a complete inability to pool resources and money together to fight against the censors. The censors are incredibly well organized and constantly communicate with each other, sharing money, resources, and strategies. On the contrary, anti-censors take the ultimate "screw you, I got mine" attitude and refuse to band together in any meaningful way. I wish I could say I had a good explanation for why, but I just can't. Like what does the EFF even do besides flail about? The last big thing I remember them trying was Protect the Stack and they've essentially done nothing with that movement that matters. I think the last time they tried to make a statement was with defending KF and they immediately turned tail and fled because they got pushback for it. And that's not to mention that the anti-censors take the most legalistic approach possible to issues of censorship. They're perfectly fine throwing out their rights on technicalities. Like, I really hope everyone on Twitter who defended them censoring people with the "it's a private company they can do whatever they want with impunity" line enjoys it when corporations one day control all of their avenues of speech.

• On the post: Vote Yes On Locking Artist’s Voices In Contractual Seashells Like The Little Mermaid

  

  Matthew N. Bennett ( profile ), 18 Oct, 2024 @ 03:25pm

  Nah I think making you mad is really funny, Mr. Elder Millennial. Your every accusation is a mentally incompetent hallucination or something. Sorry if my comments pop your little bubble and make you rage. If you don't like me, just go make your own platform. Maybe you could call it GoatDirt.

• On the post: Vote Yes On Locking Artist’s Voices In Contractual Seashells Like The Little Mermaid

  

  Matthew N. Bennett ( profile ), 18 Oct, 2024 @ 10:39am

  It could be so much better if American liberals on social media did not always have the need to be so insufferably smug 24/7. Any space they overrun inevitably gets filled with incredibly smug people who think an insult works in place of a rebuttal. It's partly true, I guess, since they also bring along overly censorious mods that let the snarkers go free while anyone who tries to give meaningful responses gets banned. I have legitimately had a better time debating race relations with actual, self-admitted nazis than the people who purport to try and fight against them and be better than them. It is such a bizzaro world thing. For what it's worth, Anonymous Coward, your comment was good. Even if you get shut down and mocked for pointing out genuine flaws in an article, you should continue to do so because it's helpful to lurkers and making Techdirt users mad is always really funny.

• On the post: Vote Yes On Locking Artist’s Voices In Contractual Seashells Like The Little Mermaid

  

  Matthew N. Bennett ( profile ), 18 Oct, 2024 @ 09:40am

  I think you're making a hasty generalization, but I kind of get it. My personal realization of "this website is awful" is that one article that Karl did where he basically advocated taking away Fox News's freedom of speech on the grounds that it's not a blatant violation of everything the US stands for to openly silence a journalistic publication for pushing a viewpoint that doesn't line up with current consensus. The comments were filled with people making this argument, saying that because it's over cable, speech laws are somehow completely different. It was hypocrisy and it made me realize that both Techdirt and its writers don't actually care about free speech or the associated 1A laws--they only care about enforcing them when it personally benefits them. Otherwise, speech laws and principles are only suggestions/guidelines that can be subverted and destroyed on mere technicalities. It's anti-intellectual. There's no other word for it. And the sucky part is that literally every website that gets taken over by American liberals inevitably turns into this; a circlejerk of terminally depressed snarkers who will gladly give away their rights as long it's being done to hurt the "right people."

• On the post: Vote Yes On Locking Artist’s Voices In Contractual Seashells Like The Little Mermaid

  

  Matthew N. Bennett ( profile ), 17 Oct, 2024 @ 09:41pm

  This comment motivated me to actually go search his Ars Technica profile. It was hard to find at first since he'd changed his name and their forum software's search feature is pretty bad, but I eventually found it. I couldn't find what I was looking for (whatever period of time where he was banned) but I noticed that he'd posted a lot of messages since he joined in 2013--19,384, to be exact. As I scrolled through his posts I got a gist of the kind of man that Toom is. Almost every day for the past couple of years was him just arguing with other people--or, I guess, not arguing, but insulting with the same couple of insults, over and over. User X isn't literate, hallucinated nobody mentally competent ever, every accusation is le confession, etc. Even the other users of Ars Technica, who usually hold the exact same views that he does, don't seem to like him; I'm seeing a lot of posts calling him out for not actually engaging with arguments and just preferring to insult people instead. An average of 4-5 posts every day. For 11 years, doing the same thing over and over, forever. He's like a computer program that gets fed an opposing argument as an input and then spits out one of a couple lines as an output. I used to laugh at his gimmick but now I just feel sad. What a terrifically sad tale that his online activity tells. Who could have hallucinated this?

• On the post: Vote Yes On Locking Artist’s Voices In Contractual Seashells Like The Little Mermaid

  

  Matthew N. Bennett ( profile ), 17 Oct, 2024 @ 09:26pm

  You jest but the few times I've posted long-winded analyses they get stuck in moderation forever and then finally get approved long after any kind of discussion could happen. It's not just a my account thing, I've gotten hit with this queue even as AC on another IP. And if they do get approved quickly enough I get like five different Anonymous Coward commenters not engaging with anything I've said and just attacking a fantasy version of me in their head, even when commenting as signed out. Techdirt's comment section is easy to rile up because anything that resembles a concrete discussion or argument is attacked with non-sequiturs and reddit-tier gotchas. There's no actual discussion happening here, it's just people posting garbage. You can even see this with the comment Toom replied to earlier. Someone found a genuine issue with the premise of the article, but Toom just did his non-sequitur bit and that was that. No discussion, no real rebuttal, just "no, you stinky!!!" Nobody is ever going to intellectually engage with the premise of a Techdirt article because this is where intellectual discussion goes to die and the community reinforces that. Heck, even Techdirt itself reinforces it with its weekly comment roundup that has a whole section dedicated to the reddit-tier gotchas. It's a far better use of my time to just make fun of Toom and leave it at that.

• On the post: Vote Yes On Locking Artist’s Voices In Contractual Seashells Like The Little Mermaid

  

  Matthew N. Bennett ( profile ), 17 Oct, 2024 @ 02:45pm

  "Hey I noticed this discrepancy in the article that undermines one of its main points." "No, you!" Come on Toom, you're mentally competent. Can't you hallucinate something better???

• On the post: Vote Yes On Locking Artist’s Voices In Contractual Seashells Like The Little Mermaid

  

  Matthew N. Bennett ( profile ), 17 Oct, 2024 @ 01:57pm

  I can tell Holland is trying to bring light to a very real issue with the use of satire so I will make an incredibly rare seriouspost because I think this article is in serious need of a revision. First of all, I think Holland's metaphor is pretty decent; Ursula in the movie traps mermaids' voices in seashells, thereby owning a key part of their identity, and these recording companies are trying to do a similar thing. Unfortunately I think the writing of the article suffers from a thing we in academia call the curse of knowledge, where an author doesn't recognize their own unconscious expertise and it muddies the waters for the general audience they're trying to write for. Who is Big Content? What are the NO FAKES and AI FRAUD acts actually about? Who are the "teenagers, abuse survivors, and artists"? (The only victims brought up are Swift and Prince, who are suffering from existing law, not the new laws that are being argued against.) It's standard form in Techdirt writing to actually quote parts of the bills you're referencing in an article, but after reading this article over a couple of times you never actually get a sense of what the stakeholders involved actually want, just that, in the author's eyes, it's bad. I get that maybe you would expect the audience of a tech policy blog to be somewhat familiar with these things, but the article introduces a lot of new concepts that never get elaborated on. As others have mentioned, the article is also very meandering and can't seem to settle on a single argument. I used to TA for a summer class at a local community college that focused on writing scientific articles for a general audience. Essentially, it was about developing the skills needed to take complex topics and explain them to an audience who was unfamiliar with those topics without overloading or confusing them. If this was given me to me as a draft for revision, I would have asked them do it again on the premise that it easily would have overloaded a person who was not intimately familiar with the existing and new laws it was arguing against.

• On the post: Federal Court Tells Missouri Gov’t That Requiring Sex Offenders To Post ‘No Candy Here’ Signs Violates Their Rights

  

  Matthew N. Bennett ( profile ), 16 Oct, 2024 @ 01:15pm

  Matthew M Bennett has not been seen in almost two years. To this day, you are still hyperfixated on the fact that we share similar usernames. It's time to get a new bit, elder millennial.

• On the post: Federal Court Tells Missouri Gov’t That Requiring Sex Offenders To Post ‘No Candy Here’ Signs Violates Their Rights

  

  Matthew N. Bennett ( profile ), 16 Oct, 2024 @ 09:05am

  Hey Anonymous Coward, sorry to hear about your offender charge, it must really be sad for you that your entire neighborhood knows you're an untouchable. No need to take it out on the local churches, though.

• On the post: Robot Vacuums That Collect Photos, Videos And Audio Of Users To Train AI Models Start Yelling Obscenities And Chasing Dogs

  

  Matthew N. Bennett ( profile ), 15 Oct, 2024 @ 03:06pm

  I really wish people would stop buying devices with an internet connection that absolutely don't need to be connected to the internet. People are gonna realize way too late that internet-connected everything is a really bad idea when the government makes the sale of analog appliances illegal for "security" and now you can't use your internet connected dishwasher because your subscription to Dishwasher Plus lapsed.

• On the post: Vietnamese Duo Hit With Injunction After 117,000 Bogus DMCA Claims

  

  Matthew N. Bennett ( profile ), 11 Oct, 2024 @ 07:39pm

  The Anonymous Coward you're replying to wants Cloudflare to actively moderate and websites based on an ideological stance so that they can deplatform websites they disagree with. Either that or they don't understand the neutral web of trust that makes up the internet. I don't understand this generation's pro-censorship stances. It's like a terminal mind disease that has infected millenials and gen z.

• On the post: Vietnamese Duo Hit With Injunction After 117,000 Bogus DMCA Claims

  

  Matthew N. Bennett ( profile ), 11 Oct, 2024 @ 07:35pm

  Your bizarre screed against Cloudflare, a DDoS mitigation services company, for not personally policing and moderating every single website that uses their service is so far beyond stupidity I can barely quantify it with words. The companies that form the backbone of the internet deciding to take an ideological stance of any kind would be catastrophic and a massive blow to the free and open internet that allows you to post stupid ass comments like this freely. I don't want to see your Anonymous Coward face around here ever again.

• On the post: Elon Musk Is Now Seizing Other People’s Twitter Accounts To Promote Donald Trump

  

  Matthew N. Bennett ( profile ), 11 Oct, 2024 @ 10:44am

  Dude you just did the same bit Stephen did two days after him. I assume you're the same Anonymous Coward who was also copying the goat sex bit because you posted other comments under his on the same day in the same hour. You will never be Stephen. I don't want to see your Anonymous Coward face around here ever again.

• On the post: Elon Musk Is Now Seizing Other People’s Twitter Accounts To Promote Donald Trump

  

  Matthew N. Bennett ( profile ), 11 Oct, 2024 @ 10:40am

  Hey, buddy, Stephen already did the weird goat sex bit a year ago. It was ridiculous then and it's ridiculous now. The difference is that Stephen is sometimes funny. You, my Anonymous Coward friend, are not. Lurk more.

• On the post: Elon Musk Is Now Seizing Other People’s Twitter Accounts To Promote Donald Trump

  

  Matthew N. Bennett ( profile ), 11 Oct, 2024 @ 10:38am

  Your lack of a real rebuttal tells me what I need to know.

• On the post: Elon Musk Is Now Seizing Other People’s Twitter Accounts To Promote Donald Trump

  

  Matthew N. Bennett ( profile ), 08 Oct, 2024 @ 01:38pm

  You have zero understanding of how social media works. Social media is a zero-sum game. It is near impossible to profit from. Pre-Musk Twitter was never profitable except for two years, which is not even remotely enough to offset its existing losses. People were using adblockers on Twitter for years before Musk and it was still kicking. If you actually wanted to hurt Twitter, you would stop using it entirely, because that would drive down their metrics and make it appear to investors and stakeholders that the platform is unpopular enough to not bother with. Of course, you're a hypocrite with a Twitter addiction, like all Techdirtists, so you won't. But just saying.

• On the post: Elon Musk Is Now Seizing Other People’s Twitter Accounts To Promote Donald Trump

  

  Matthew N. Bennett ( profile ), 08 Oct, 2024 @ 01:31pm

  American Liberals are all about open borders and how no human being is illegal but are reflexively sympathetic to deportation when a successful immigrant isn't acting as a democratic party mouthpiece. What are the implications of this?

• On the post: Elon Musk Is Now Seizing Other People’s Twitter Accounts To Promote Donald Trump

  

  Matthew N. Bennett ( profile ), 08 Oct, 2024 @ 01:29pm

  I have failed to format the quote blocks. I must commit sudoku immediately.

• On the post: Elon Musk Is Now Seizing Other People’s Twitter Accounts To Promote Donald Trump

  

  Matthew N. Bennett ( profile ), 08 Oct, 2024 @ 01:29pm

  If you can’t see that, it’s Musk saying “For Twitter to deserve the public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally.”

  That’s not quite how things have played out. Elon has not only endorsed Donald Trump, appeared at his rallies, and turned ExTwitter into a non-stop propaganda-pushing campaign ad for Trump (while at the same time repeatedly pushing blatantly false and misleading claims via his own account), but he’s also become one of Trump’s biggest funders.

  Imagine how the GOP would react if a social media CEO had done that in support of Kamala Harris?

  Yeah man I can't imagine why Elon Musk fights against the people who have spent the last couple of years trying to destroy his site. It's a mystery.

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