21 Comments

It has bothered me a great deal that he is being erased from online spaces. He has not even been found guilty. There is no justice for regular Americans.

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Same here. His Goodreads account was taken down the same day he was arrested too. Seems like innocent until proven guilty has gone out the window.

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Thanks for the note about his Goodread. I’ve updated the article to include that too. Good point.

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If they kept the content , that smells like theft.

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The wealthy really are a protected class, and it’s becoming such a problem that it’s almost as if they’re trying to start a class war at this point - just so they have an excuse to point guns at us and kill us all.

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The wealthy started the class war decades ago, most working class people are just now waking up to it now though, because the wealthy are losing control over the avenues of information (read indoctrination) so, there’s anger and pushback at the injustices by the working class which they’ll deal with using information suppression but, as it escalates, they’ll employ an increasingly militarized police force as they did on peaceful protesters for Palestinian liberation on college campuses.

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They missed a trick, just imagine the traffic those accounts would have generated for their sites

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Incredible post. I am completely miffed at the internet scrubbing of Luigi Mangione. It’s unprecedented especially by someone who hasn’t been convicted of anything. There are murders every day and this is a first. That in itself is very telling. What makes THIS young man different?

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WELL DONE SIR! 👏🏅🧐

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The two licenses theory is really something.

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I like your poignant response to the Moderators letter!

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You’d think he was the first man to (allegedly) commit a crime. Do all arrested persons receive the same actions by these sites?

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Not at all. One such example is mentioned in the article. ;) The case of the Silk Road dude.

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Agree. My question was rhetorical 😊

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Great post and writing! I didn't know about Ulbricht. After reading about him online, it really is astonishing how his name is still associated with his accounts, but Luigi's is not. It's also suspiciously interesting that Meta decided to eliminate fact-checking, but Threads and FB are still hiding posts that show support for Luigi.

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It is so dehumanising. It’s bleak. And what happened to you seems to be a continuation of the rights violations that have happened over the past year regarding another vital issue where people’s privileges and livelihoods are threatened if they speak up for justice.

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It's really awful how online companies can get so large that no one is able to compete, and then after that they engage in abusive moderation and ban practices.

Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange are engaging in abusive practices.

It's really time we pressure lawmakers to enact legislation to prevent larger online companies from acting like this when they are pretty much the only game in town.

It would be easy to enact a policy that says any platform that has over 1,000,000 users is not allowed to ban or restrict accounts unless the policy is very clear, they are allowed to speak with someone about the situation prior to the ban or restriction taking place, and there must be a meaningful way to appeal prior to the ban except in cases of specific threats of violence. Violations of this policy would result in escalating fees, which would be used to increase the budget of local schools.

I just don't see why, we, as a population, let companies get away with egregious behavior like this when we can simply pass regulation to stop them from being so terrible, regulation that could also benefit children learning things. Republicans hate how they have been banned for sharing misinformation, Democrats seem to love regulating things (although are slow to implement meaningful change). This shouldn't be hard to get politicians to do. Why do we live in a world of such feckless politicians?

Stack Exchange is engaging is user abuse based on monopoly power, and although it's natural for monopolies to occur in certain online spheres, we need to regulate this much more and recognize that large online companies with lots of users have different duties to society than a regular company.

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Above all this shows the inadequacy of first amendment protections. Restricting those protections to government actions only, simply makes corporations more powerful than governments in their ability to infringe free speech.

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When a centralized platform reaches a sufficient size and is a corporation, it should have legal duties to not abuse users in an unfair way. It's true that the 1st Ammendment doesn't give users a right to not be arbitrarily deplatformed. The answer is de-enshitification legislation. The problem is Democrats are too weak to demand meaningful reform, since these companies are often big cash cows for blue states, and Red States are so afraid of regulation that they will let the enshitification continue. The solution is a populist pushback urging our leaders to do something to Stop the Shit.

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"user4616250 not found"

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It’s right here, I linked to it in the article: https://stackoverflow.com/users/4616250/user4616250

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