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Nope. There is no middle ground. It. Is. Not. Complicated.

Either you think of the internet as a utility where everyone is equal, like a telephone, or you think people should be "nudged" into harmonious behavior, where it takes on the worst aspects of a broadcast medium.

The problem with "nudging" people is there's an equal and opposite reaction through the cybernetic system. For instance, adding fact check labels to every sensitive topic, COVID vaccines for instance, will lead people to think that it's all part of a larger conspiracy and they'll get a hit of dopamine when they "follow the qlues."




Even utilities have limits on the behavior you can use with them. Granted you gotta really go out of your way to trigger those limits but there is no society wide system in existence that follows that level of openness


Doing actual actual crimes or committing a fraud using the phone, computer, fax, telex, or whatever other electronic means generally falls under wire fraud.

The phone company doesn't de-platform "literal nazis" simply for being "literal nazis."


You are correct, but now you are getting into shades of grey more nuanced than

> Either you believe in an open internet or you don't. Either you're with us, or you're against us.


The distinction is between perfectly legal speech, and specific acts fraud or things that are direct, actionable, and credible threats to physical safety (e.g., bomb threats). This isn't a complicated blah blah, where we need a technocratic meta-god to put his thumb on the scales. The existing legal pre-computer legal frameworks cover these cases.


And if the literal nazis we’re actually using a private person to person (can be through a service) communication medium like a phone the number of people who want them deplatformed would drop to basically zero.

Your argument has to account for the fact that Twitter is more like public radio than a phone and that WhatsApp is more like a phone than radio.


To be fair I do see articles written pointing to the fact that hate groups are using signal or discord, the implication being that such companies are "platforming" those groups.


What happens if the literally nazis robo called thousands of people with nazi propaganda?


They might get cut off for robocalling, but (if the telephone company is obeying the law) in a content-neutral way.





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