• partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    they pressure advertisers who in turn pressure platforms to “ban free speech.”

    This argument of theirs is so strange. Don’t advertisers too have free speech? Is the right wing arguing that advertisers shouldn’t be allowed to choose to stop advertising with Twitter? What “pressure” can ADL put on them? Does the ADL have legal authority to force advertisers to exit Twitter? No. Is the ADL holding private information about the CEOs of advertisers and extorting the advertisers to leave? Not likely.

    Is the ADL communicating a position that the majority of the advertiser’s customers find the racist, fascist, and misogynistic content now omnipresent on Twitter distasteful, and therefore harmful to the advertisers’ brands and with negative impacts to future sales? Likely yes, but those statements are themselves free speech on the part of the ADL.

    What the right wing seems to be arguing is that the definition of free speech should be the right to say whatever racist, fascist, and misogynistic comments they like without anyone making choices of their own to dissociate with the right wing. That’s not free speech that’s…fascism!

    • neptune@dmv.social
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      1 year ago

      Honestly? Musk might be so used to big business wining in court that he thinks they might just reflexively take his side.

    • Hackerman_uwu@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Perhaps ironically it is the ADLs free speech that allows them to show advertisers what is posted on elons website. Further irony can be found in the fact that a screenshot of elsons website showing bigoted posts is an example of fact and not of feelings. Moreover: crying about your lost ad revenue is feelings and blaming the ADL for it is not facts.

    • abbotsbury@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Don’t advertisers too have free speech?

      I remember around 2020, a lot of freethinkers began spouting something about how Twitter is “a platform not a publisher” and therefore users are entitled to treat the website like a public meeting place and protected by first amendment rights, etc.

      It was basically a Soverign Citizen argument about how Section 230 means websites don’t have the authority to moderate content at all, and it died down after Trump stopped preaching it after he launched Truth

      Some articles about the notion:

      https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/no-section-230-does-not-require-platforms-be-neutral

      https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/publisher-or-platform-it-doesnt-matter

      • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I remember around 2020, a lot of freethinkers began spouting something about how Twitter is “a platform not a publisher” and therefore users are entitled to treat the website like a public meeting place and protected by first amendment rights, etc.

        I think you’re taking that quote of mine with an unintended meaning. I didn’t mean to suggest advertisers have right to post what they want, rather they have the choice to NOT post if they don’t want to. The right-wing argument appears to suggest that advertisers should be powerless to choose or not choose to advertise. Suggesting they are wheat to be harvested. A resource owned by the company they are purchasing advertising from; its a bizarre notion.

    • MrBusinessMan@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      It’s never ok to hurt somebody’s business just because you disagree with them giving free speech to everybody. The ADL should pay Elon for the damage they did to his business