Mass Shooting in Las Vegas
- Thread starter Daniel
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Danoff
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I'm sure it would be by some, but there are people who believe the earth is flat even though it is not. People will always misinterpret, it shouldn't stop anyone from behaving according to their own determination.
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Danoff
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It completely depends on what you think the purpose of the company is. Let me give you the mission statement of Medtronic, a very large publicly traded medical device company:
"To contribute to human welfare by application of biomedical engineering in the research, design, manufacture, and sale of instruments or appliances that alleviate pain, restore health, and extend life."
I know that the CEO couches this statement with the comment that the goal is to do that while making a "fair profit". The driving force behind a company, even a large publicly traded company, does not have to be pure profit. Granted the medical field lends itself less to outwardly spoken profit motives than what appears to be ostensibly an entertainment company. But the goal of MGM can be to make people happy, and that might just have been how MGM originally got started.
It is not impossible, rather, it's quite common, to find large publicly traded companies engaging in pure philanthropy and NOT advertising it. In fact, when they do advertise it, like Budweiser did during the last superbowl, they usually get pushback. People are so cynical that Budweiser can advertise that they delivered water to people who needed it and the immediate response is that it was a cheap way to make a feel good superbowl commercial. Many companies simply do not advertise any of the charity work they're doing. I know of companies that have their employees occasionally operating food drives and packing school backpacks simply for charity, no ads - if there's any team building it's a bonus but not the point.
If the goal of a company is always to maximize the profits to the shareholders, no companies ever engage in philanthropy without making sure that they can advertise or brand it in some way that leads to greater profits. But they do, and that's because there are few companies that, at just about any level in management, want to exist solely for making profit. That's generally not what already wealthy people want to do with their careers and lives... and make no mistake, the people who are running these companies are already wealthy people. I know that there are cynics on this board who will think that wealthy people care about nothing but money, but the opposite is true. People who are extremely wealthy often care less and less about making money (why would they?) and more about other more intangible things... like how they'll be remembered and what they accomplished.
- 2,647
Do the conspiracy clowns still say that this was a false flag operation?
Dan
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Does anyone actually care about their opinions? The less attention you give to these nutcases, the better. Everyone rants and raves about Alex Jones being crazy, but they’re giving him more publicity than he should’ve had in the first place.
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Dan
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Making him the top story of every news publication in the country (and some international ones as well) won’t help the families either. If they want to heal after a tragedy, seeing his name everywhere they look will only cause more pain. On top of that, you’re exposing him to more people that are likely to follow his message. As for conspiracy theorists in general, I don’t think they need a platform on social media, but there shouldn’t be a blanket ban either. The ones that *do* cause harm and violate the terms of service should be dealt with appropriately.
- 2,647
Actually, the families are being helped because Jones has had to backtrack on many of his statements and stop inciting. And huge avenues for reaching his audience have been cut off.
The families have been receiving death threats for years and have had to relocate several times over the years too. Jones was inciting his audience to go after them.
It was a huge mistake to ignore that and now that the families are fighting back in court, Jones has stopped inciting.
Dotini
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UKMikey
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It could also be Godwinism.
Jones still gets to speak. He has a website. Twitter etc simply don't want to provide a platform for him. If he were free to incite his followers to send death threats to the Sandy Hook families without any kind of comeback, isn't that sending the message that society doesn't care about the victims? If you're a liberal, you're supposed to be for social justice.
Bill Maher is at liberty to provide Jones with a segment on his own show, if he thinks that would somehow make the country more democratic. Forcing social media to air Jones's abhorrent views would appear to me to be infringing on their own rights and freedoms.
Obelisk
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Seriously? Social media platforms are allowed to regulate what kind of content is going through on their server. It's why you don't see a lot of real life gore on youtube or twitter (unless you look really, really hard). The companies all have a right to allow or disallow members' posts and content going through. It's actually specified in their Terms of Service.
To save my breath on this ridiculous argument about Alex Jones' access to social media,
From Twitter's TOS:
"We reserve the right to remove Content that violates the User Agreement, including for example, copyright or trademark violations, impersonation, unlawful conduct, or harassment."
Alex Jones agreed to these Terms of Service, not just on Twitter, but on other social media, and violated them. End of story. This has nothing to do with free speech and everything to do with an arsehole being an arsehole on social media and getting his due comeuppance.
To save my breath on this ridiculous argument about Alex Jones' access to social media,
This is correct.
From Twitter's TOS:
"We reserve the right to remove Content that violates the User Agreement, including for example, copyright or trademark violations, impersonation, unlawful conduct, or harassment."
Alex Jones agreed to these Terms of Service, not just on Twitter, but on other social media, and violated them. End of story. This has nothing to do with free speech and everything to do with an arsehole being an arsehole on social media and getting his due comeuppance.
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Free speech isn’t as cut and dry as you seem to believe it is, there are always consequences whether it be positive, negative, legal or illegal.
Threatening people, inciting, creating dangerous situations will probably have you facing legal consequences.
Threatening people, inciting, creating dangerous situations will probably have you facing legal consequences.
Dotini
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I suspect some members of neoliberal authoritarian (i.e. fascist) tendencies when they grandly announce social media should practice censorship in catering to the neoliberal tastes of ownership like Zuckerberg and a loud neoliberal fanbase. This only contributes to our problems of extreme polarization. What is needed is open dialogue leading to eventual reconciliation and convergence somewhere near the center. Remember, if it comes to civil war, it is the conservatives who have the guns.
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Anybody that owns or operates their own website. Twitter isn't an open forum — the people in charge can (and do) decide what flies and what doesn't. They're providing a service, one with agreed-upon terms for becoming a member.
I think the ubiquity of social media, specifically Facebook and Twitter, has skewed peoples' perceptions of what is and isn't free speech. To be fair, technology has changed how we communicate in huge ways since the late 1700s, and I'd argue that — so long as they're not violating any laws — conspiracy theorists can and should be able to host their own websites to megaphone their craziness out onto the intertubes.
The internet itself is a wonderful platform for people to share their thoughts, however out there they may be. But like so many other things, people crave "easy" with their internet experience, and a site like Facebook increasingly acts as some sort of one-stop shop. That's made all the more dangerous with algorithms that encourage echo chambers, or moves to keep people on-site through any means necessary instead of letting them browse the rest of the web.
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- TenEightyOne
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Anybody whose asked to repeat a message on anybody else's behalf. Take the "I Won't Make a Gay Cake" baker as an example. I found his reasoning horrible (refusal to provide services for weddings) but I could never agree that he should be forced to do so.
Those "lefties" (seems a pretty poor generalisation but I see your point) have views that are abhorrent to "righties", or to "liberals" (who sit between the two). Unless you've found a way to make everybody agree it will always be like that.
Dotini
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I don't know how much it costs to buy webspace south of the border, but last I checked up here, Squarespace and such averages less than $20/month. Not exactly an Elon-exclusive bar, there.
People can say whatever they want out in public, but when they come into my home (my website, if I were to have one), they are under my rules. Using Alex Jones as an example, since he was mentioned up-page: he's still free to spew his bile on his own website, but he can't demand the social media outlets let him do it on theirs.
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- Dennisch
True. But the current trend does show us that racism against white people is perfectly fine on Facebook etc. and the exact same text but white is replaced with any other skin colour is against their terms.
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- TexRex72
From late last month:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech...es-youtube-removes-infowars-videos/840544002/
So...he's probably going to be okay thanks to having an existing outlet for his content.
There's also the narrative that action taken against him has actually helped his cause rather than hinder it. I mean...it sounds kinda like a "didn't hurt" to me, but if there's anything meaningful to it, one has to imagine the platforms that took action did so for the justifiable reasons they've stated rather than to silence him, which they were clearly incapable of doing.
As an aside, I had to laugh at an ad that appeared not once but twice in the body of the article:
I have to wonder how taking a survey is going to combat anything, but with such a message promoting it, I have to imagine respondents are going to yield biased results that are then going to be plastered all over you-know-who's Twitter.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech...es-youtube-removes-infowars-videos/840544002/
So...he's probably going to be okay thanks to having an existing outlet for his content.
There's also the narrative that action taken against him has actually helped his cause rather than hinder it. I mean...it sounds kinda like a "didn't hurt" to me, but if there's anything meaningful to it, one has to imagine the platforms that took action did so for the justifiable reasons they've stated rather than to silence him, which they were clearly incapable of doing.
As an aside, I had to laugh at an ad that appeared not once but twice in the body of the article:
I have to wonder how taking a survey is going to combat anything, but with such a message promoting it, I have to imagine respondents are going to yield biased results that are then going to be plastered all over you-know-who's Twitter.
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- TexRex72
That dirst paragraph gets me:
One, I saw [some of] the tweets and they struck me more as wildly inappropriate than as cruel.
Two, the "jokes" (I use quotes because I don't find them even the least bit humorous, even if I take the claim that they were jokes entirely at face value) weren't so much hateful or inciteful as they were graphic in alluding to heinous acts of a sexual nature with children. Disney, a company that caters largely to children, was not only probably wise in its decision to give him the ol' heave-ho, but probably ought to have looked into the guy before hiring him. Don't prospective employers do a social media sweep as part of the hiring process these days?
Three, Mike Cernovich, the guy largely responsible for dredging up Gunn's inappropriate tweets because of Gunn being outspoken against the Trump administration, is a right-wing conspiracy theorist in the same vein as Alex Jones--he was the driving force behind "Pizzagate", which resulted in an individual armed with an assault-style rifle busting into a pizza parlor to break up the Clinton/Podesta-run child pornography and sex ring in the basement when the business didn't even have a basement, and he is fervent in the claim that date rape isn't a thing--and yet he's still active (as of the last hour) on Twitter and still has a YouTube account.
It seems to me that the whole issue is a bit more nuanced than left vs. right.
UKMikey
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I find it hard to accept that making or encouraging death threats against the bereaved victims of a mass shooting isn't objectively bad, regardless of which side of the political spectrum you inhabit. Under which circumstances wouldn't it be?
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Here's a slightly different take on the Sarah Jeong "controversy".
Come to think of it, isn't her apology worthy of a standing ovation?
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