Censorship is bad, but Facebook and X’s entire business models revolve around spreading content that is at once false and inflammatory, either just to create engagement or for more malicious purposes, and they reach a huge portion of the population directly, including children, teenagers, the mentally ill and other vulnerable populations. This requires a new understanding of accountability for spreading information.

I wouldn’t agree that it makes sense to hold a Mastodon instance responsible for what its users post, because they don’t have a financial incentive or the ability to promote misinformation at a massive scale. Twitter does. As Aristotle said, we must treat equals equally, and treat the unequal unequally according to the form and extent of their inequality.

I think that the point is “Rowling claims to want to protect cis women but even cis women would be harmed if she got her way, so nobody actually benefits”. Maybe it’s too charitable an interpretation but then again maybe not.

I squarely disagree. People who dedicate as much time and energy to making life worse for others as her are clearly living with intense negative emotions that they don’t know how to deal with in a healthy manner. Happy people don’t campaign against rights for others. Rowling is clearly a miserable and pathetic person. In the game of life, she’s losing to the average favela musician who has no money but loves their community.

You talk as though closed-source developers reviewed all the upstream code. The exact same problem exists with closed-source, except there isn’t even the possibility of reviewing all the code if you want to. At worst, the lack of review in FOSS projects is on par with closed-source projects. At best, it’s a much smaller problem .

Wouldn’t a narcissist fret a lot about their public image, even what’s left of it after their death? I mean, the way this man brags about winning at golf, having every other country “kissing [his] ass” asking for deals after the tariffs, scoring high marks on his intelligence dementia tests, etc, it’s quite clear he cares a lot about being seen as a powerful and talented person.

I don’t know much about narcissism other than the popular definition so of course I could be completely wrong.

They can’t unless the parties agree that they can. The sneaky part is the “by continuing to use our services, you agree to the new terms” part, which is standard practice. You’d have to terminate your account before the new terms come into effect, then take them to court to make sure they didn’t keep your data around and use it to train their AI anyway because they “didn’t notice” that that particular content belonged to someone who didn’t accept the new terms.

Nothing suspicious at all about being contacted by the subject of a news story just to say it’s not newsworthy. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Then the few people who don’t are very prolific commenters because it’s a mistake I see often.

Just because this is a common enough mistake, I’m going to publicly correct you for the benefit of other people who might see this comment. I apologize.

It’s Martial Law. Not Marshall Law.

So they only share when you click on an ad. I use an adblocker anyway, so effectively they’re not sharing anything. Or do I misunderstand?

No, that was John McAffee.

It’s not ok to insult anyone. Why do you feel the need to do so, and why are you asking for permission?

In the same vein, my friend frequently tells his fiancé to quit being a f*ggot when he doesn’t want to eat something unusual or complains about mild annoyances. Which always draws hilariously confused looks from nearby straights who don’t know them very well.

To be fair, we absolutely should outlaw at least 99% of all currently practiced forms of advertising and make it so that new forms of advertising have to be whitelisted by a panel of psychiatrists, sociologists, environmentalists and urban planners before they’re allowed.

Removed by mod

… with blackjack and hookers.

In other words, the consent of a corporation is more important than the consent of a human being… for the public distribution of that human being’s likeness in an intimate context. Holy dystopia, conservatives are fucked in the head.

EULAs don’t have to say “you own this forever” because it’s implicit. Just like when you buy bananas at the grocer you aren’t forced to sign a EULA that says you can eat the banana or make a smoothie with it but can’t use it to make nuclear weapons or commit war crimes.

Let’s break this down: a product is an object that is delivered to a buyer. A service is an action or group of actions that is performed for the buyer. If I have to keep running my servers for your game client to connect to, push updates or offer tech support, I am providing a service because it requires me to keep doing something for the thing to work. If, on the other hand, all I do is give you some code you can run entirely on your machine - and it doesn’t matter if I give it to you on a CD, a floppy, via digital download or if I print it out as a big book for you to type yourself into a hex editor - then our transaction is finished when I deliver it to you and you pay me. There isn’t anything to license because now you own that copy of the code. My participation in what you do with it is finished, just like the grocer’s is finished when you leave his store with the bananas.

Do you understand now?

[Citation needed.]

Rotated 180 degrees.