Be careful what you wish for.

[ajax18]

Just because Facebook is popular doesn’t mean that it needs to surrender its property to you or anyone else so that you can use it for your benefit above anyone else’s.

So why should a private baker be forced to make a gay wedding cake if a private corporation has the right to refuse to provide services?

“The government can’t censor speech. The First Amendment makes that very clear,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said Friday on Fox News. “A private, for-profit corporation can make its own decisions, but when it’s doing that in collusion with government, that starts to look to me like a First Amendment violation.”

Government dictating what social-media bans is tyrannical

White House press secretary Jen Psaki casually confirmed on Thursday what skeptical conservatives and some civil libertarians have been suspecting for years: that the world’s biggest speech platforms take direction from the government in choosing what content to suppress, amplify, or remove.

“We are in regular touch with social media platforms” about COVID-19 related misinformation, including misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine,” Psaki said. “We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook.”

On Friday, she suggested social media companies should be working together to ban misinformation super spreaders from multiple platforms.

This is a startling admission. It was backed up by a 22-page “health misinformation” guidance issued by U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, in which he urged the social media platforms to “impose clear consequences for accounts that repeatedly violate platform policies.”

Joe Biden said Facebook was 'killing people' while walking to Marine One Friday.
Biden accuses Facebook of ‘killing people’ amid censorship row
The White House is motivated by a real problem: overtly wrong information about the COVID-19 vaccine. Some of the posts are factually inaccurate, and some of it misrepresents the fact that vaccines, in general, do work.

“They’re killing people,” President Biden said flatly yesterday when asked what his message was to platforms like Facebook.

But the administration’s solution — to control what can be said and who can use the world’s biggest speech platforms — is deeply unsettling and, frankly, undemocratic.

“This is the union of corporate and state power,” wrote reporter Glenn Greenwald on Twitter, one of the classic hallmarks of fascism.”

There is a dystopian element to telling social media platforms to control “misinformation” when the very definition of that keeps changing. In the early months of the pandemic, Facebook began banning anti-lockdown protest content. Not because it violated any laws, but because such gatherings might run afoul of local guidance and public health recommendations. YouTube began censoring any content that disagreed with the error-prone World Health Organization, removing videos from emergency room doctors and podcasts from Stanford University neuroradiologists alike.

Just this month, professor Satoshi Omura, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on a drug called ivermectin, was censored on YouTube for discussing how it might help treat COVID-19 patients.

Psaki added the government has flagged posts on Facebook that they deem “problematic.”

In their haste to bend to the controlling narrative, social media platforms have banned accounts for asking questions, and discussing errant data points or emerging hypotheses around new treatments. Famously, you weren’t allowed to discuss if the virus came from the Wuhan Lab. In other words, the platforms have banned debate and inquiry itself.

The media likes to scold people about what is and isn’t covered by the First Amendment. As private companies, social media platforms can decide what appears, they argue. But social-media platforms have become the de facto public square, through which Americans communicate with one another, petition their government, ask questions, and air dissent. The Biden administration’s moves veer close to the government “abridging the freedom of speech.”

“The government can’t censor speech. The First Amendment makes that very clear,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said Friday on Fox News. “A private, for-profit corporation can make its own decisions, but when it’s doing that in collusion with government, that starts to look to me like a First Amendment violation.”

There is a fine line between spreading outright lies in a public health crisis, and individuals thoughtfully pursuing information in a rapidly changing and evolving field of science. Increasingly, our major speech platforms and our government would prefer there is no difference.


https://nypost.com/2021/07/16/governmen ... yrannical/

[canpakes]

Just because Facebook is popular doesn’t mean that it needs to surrender its property to you or anyone else so that you can use it for your benefit above anyone else’s.

So why should a private baker be forced to make a gay wedding cake if a private corporation has the right to refuse to provide services?

Were they demanding a free cake?

What did the cake say, if they were purchasing it?

[canpakes]

(Now we’ll probably get Lee started up on another one of his ‘gay cake’ threads, lol)

[canpakes]

Ajax, does Facebook have the right to remove posts from its property that claim that the COVID vaccine will make you magnetic, allow Bill Gates to track your movements, or substitute lizard DNA into your cells?

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

So why should a private baker be forced to make a gay wedding cake if a private corporation has the right to refuse to provide services?

for what it's worth, I don’t agree with the government forcing a private entity to labor for someone else if the former doesn’t like the latter. I get that it’s tricky, but I think a man’s or a woman’s labor is something they should own, period, and to have a government force that person to labor either by edict or gun point is intolerable to me. If Facebook or Reddit or Parler or Fox News can enforce an ideological TOS, then a damned cake maker can, too.

Now. That being said I don’t have a problem with a Hispanic barber refusing to cut a White person’s hair, or a Gay wedding planner refusing to service an Evangelical. Bigotry ain’t great, but I’d rather people be free to be selective service providers as long as they’re not government employees or providing something like a utility en lieu of the government providing it.

- Doc

[Moksha]

History Question

So why should a private baker be forced to make a gay wedding cake in Utah?

Originally in Utah, there was some consternation in placing a groom figurine with a single bride figurine on a wedding cake, but people got used to it. After all, they were being paid for the cake and not the extra bride figurines. Eventually, they even discontinued the Wedding Patriarch who would whoop, holler, and make astounding predictions which he would later scribe onto a scroll as a patriarchal memento and to collect his fee. If there was bluegrass music following the service he would even throw in some foot-stompin' jigs and do-si-do dancing free of charge, provided the groom handed him a pint of moonshine (or Saspirilla if the bishop was looking).

[Jersey Girl]

I'm just about ready to put a call out for moderators in the Terrestrial Forum, but before I can do so, I need to know something:

If you're willing to accept that our two new participants' personal attacks and off-topic derailments be sent to the Spirit Prison forum when they're directed at you, are you willing to accept that your own personal attacks and off-topic derailments be sent to the Spirit Prison forum when they're directed at Ajax18?

If you are, then I can put out a call for moderators. If you're not, then the status quo should remain intact.

Honestly, how long does it take one man to get ready. Come on, Shades.

Let's do it.

[canpakes]

So why should a private baker be forced to make a gay wedding cake if a private corporation has the right to refuse to provide services?

for what it's worth, I don’t agree with the government forcing a private entity to labor for someone else if the former doesn’t like the latter. I get that it’s tricky, but I think a man’s or a woman’s labor is something they should own, period, and to have a government force that person to labor either by edict or gun point is intolerable to me. If Facebook or Reddit or Parler or Fox News can enforce an ideological TOS, then a damned cake maker can, too.

Now. That being said I don’t have a problem with a Hispanic barber refusing to cut a White person’s hair, or a Gay wedding planner refusing to service an Evangelical. Bigotry ain’t great, but I’d rather people be free to be selective service providers as long as they’re not government employees or providing something like a utility en lieu of the government providing it.

- Doc

I’m on board with this, basically.

Another thing that I’d ask is why anyone would want to do business with someone so opposed to taking their money. I understand the buyer wanting to make a point, but that point is largely made already without the sale going through, and an alternate point can be made by electing to not support that business with your dollars.

I can’t imagine anyway wanting to eat a cake made for me by someone virulently opposed to some aspect of creating that cake.

I’d see the difference between this and ajax’s Facebook example as rooted more in how the law is set up for commerce, with a significant influence on those laws from the days of separate but equal - wherein a person could be denied services simply for what they were (black, latino, Irish, whatever, or in the modern day, LGBTQ, etc.) rather than for whatever they wanted to say or publish. But smarter folks with legal experience like RI will need to add those details.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

I think the gay cake thing was 100% activism - like you said, who wants to eat food from someone who hates you? I guarantee there’d be enough spit in that cake to, uh, hrm, I don’t have a good metaphor here.

Anyway.

Cake boss cake:



- Doc

[ajax18]

for what it's worth, I don’t agree with the government forcing a private entity to labor for someone else if the former doesn’t like the latter.

I appreciate you saying this. But I think free speech advocates and actual libertarians on the left need to help put a stop to what's happening in the public square if they want to see the constitution upheld. We're headed for a world with separate paypal service providers depending on your political leanings. I liked the idea as well at first glance but I'm not sure this is going to be the best outcome for the country or even the world.