In its last report before Musk’s acquisition, in just the second half of 2021, Twitter suspended about 105,000 of the more than 5 million accounts reported for hateful conduct. In the first half of 2024, according to X, the social network received more than 66 million hateful-conduct reports, but suspended just 2,361 accounts. It’s not a perfect comparison, as the way X reports and analyzes data has changed under Musk, but the company is clearly taking action far less frequently.

Freedom of course always comes at a cost: what constitutes a victory for personal rights and freedom of speech also facilitates the spread of illegal messages, since decentralized networks make it harder to control what information is exchanged. Legality is of course a tricky matter, as some countries instate laws that prevent their citizens from voicing opinions that would be legal elsewhere.

Using rufus-scheduler with Passenger or Unicorn requires a bit more knowledge and tuning, gently provided by a bit of googling and reading

Samuel joined the party as soon as he was old enough, but left as part of the mass exodus prompted by Khrushchev’s secret speech and the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956.

It was enclosed in scare quotes, a sort of acknowledgment that the author knew it was non-standard, but was too apt for the purpose to resist. I remember reading it and trying to think of the “real” word that would be employed there, but could not find a satisfactory alternative. Since then, I’ve found myself unable to resist using the word when appropriate, due to its utility!

Poetry and children both have many interesting warpages and torsionings of language, all legal but serving to make the brain choke slightly, as the lungs do with a sudden whiff of ammonia or other unpleasant gas. 'Disprefer' is another good one!

On lackey, more or less following up on Mark Liberman's comment above: except in period references (where it refers to 'a footman, esp. a running footman; a valet' — OED2, citations from 1529), the word now comes with a sneer.

The initial focus is on the learner’s home language (it’s currently being piloted with grade 3 isiZulu-speaking learners at a school in Soweto, Johannesburg). English is introduced gradually as a target language. The language and speech technology has been developed to provide linguistic accuracy and is grounded in teaching principles.

There is an ʻŌlelo Noʻeau, a Hawaiian proverb, that states: I ka ʻolelo no ke ola, i ka ʻolelo no ka make. This translates to “in speech is life, in speech is death.”

this uh is taken from the website of a company called ibridge and this is 00:30:53 live transcription and translation at at the same time into text so it's it's almost interpreting there just isn't the voice synthesizer to speak the 00:31:06 translation

By its very nature, moderation is a form of censorship. You, as a community, space, or platform are deciding who and what is unacceptable. In Substack’s case, for example, they don’t allow pornography but they do allow Nazis. That’s not “free speech” but rather a business decision. If you’re making moderation based on financials, fine, but say so. Then platform users can make choices appropriately.

but not hate speech that meet the standards of ECHR Article 10; which is to say that the views espoused in by this person were also deemed “worthy of respect in a democratic society”

Morrison Robblee, 25, a middle school teacher in Massachusetts, resigned after facing antisemitic harassment by a 12-year-old student who allegedly made made hateful drawings, including a Hitler sketch, and gave him an insulting note.Courtesy of Morrison Robble

einwärts ge­wand­ter Spitze

Gänsefüßchen

“zeugma” is the use of the same word in two different senses in the same sentence: “he caught a fish, and a cold”.

How AI could become an extension of your mind

Abstract

Vulnerable users increasingly felt the effects of Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance, that if we include in a more tolerant discussion those who are less tolerant, they will prevent the discussion from being fully open. (Thus, in Popper's view, some level of "intolerance towards intolerance" must be exercised even by the tolerant.)

Alas, lawmakers are way behind the curve on this, demanding new "online safety" rules that require firms to break E2E and block third-party de-enshittification tools: https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/online-safety-made-dangerous/ The online free speech debate is stupid because it has all the wrong focuses: Focusing on improving algorithms, not whether you can even get a feed of things you asked to see; Focusing on whether unsolicited messages are delivered, not whether solicited messages reach their readers; Focusing on algorithmic transparency, not whether you can opt out of the behavioral tracking that produces training data for algorithms; Focusing on whether platforms are policing their users well enough, not whether we can leave a platform without losing our important social, professional and personal ties; Focusing on whether the limits on our speech violate the First Amendment, rather than whether they are unfair: https://doctorow.medium.com/yes-its-censorship-2026c9edc0fd

That same enshittification is on every platform, and "freedom of speech is not freedom of reach" is just a way of saying, "Now that you're stuck here, we're going to enshittify your experience."

“What We Mean When We Talk About Freedom of Speech” is based on the research of Sky Croeser, Professor of Internet Studies at Curtin University in Perth, Australia.

Activists within this movement, as well as academics writing about online harassment, have tended to ground their discussions of the problem with reference to free speech discourse. However, this language, with its grounding in the Western liberal tradition, comes with considerable limitations. I argue here that an intersectional approach requires us to explore a much more radical rethinking of the political traditions in which we ground responses to online harassment.

The real question isn’t whether platforms like Twitter and Facebook are public squares (because they aren’t), but whether they should be. Should everyone have a right to access these platforms and speak through them the way we all have a right to stand on a soap box downtown and speak through a megaphone? It’s a more complicated ask than we realize—certainly more complicated than those (including Elon Musk himself) who seem to think merely declaring Twitter a public square is sufficient.

This tweet, along with the reinstatement of Donald Trump’s Twitter account, has caused a whirlwind of discussion and debate on the platform—the same arguments about free speech and social media as the “digital public square” that seem to go nowhere, regardless of how often we try. And part of the reason they go nowhere is because the situation is both more simple and more complicated than many of us want to recognize.

🌟 Highlight words as they are spoken (karaoke anybody?). 🌟 Navigate video by clicking on words. 🌟 Share snippets of text (with video attached!). 🌟 Repurpose by remixing using the text as a base and reference.

No, thanks, Mom. I have lots of homework to clear by the end of the week,” he lied

Working backwards, Google isn’t legally compelled to give Mark a hearing about his digital life (Sixth Amendment); they are wrong not to. Google isn’t legally compelled to give Mark due process before permanently deleting his digital life (Fifth Amendment); they are wrong not to. Google isn’t legally compelled to not search all of the photographs uploaded to Google (by default, if you click through all of the EULA’s); they are…well, this is where it gets complicated.

In short, the questions about Google’s behavior are not about free speech; they do, though, touch on other Amendments in the Bill of Rights. For example: The Fourth Amendment bars “unreasonable searches and seizures”; while you can make the case that search warrants were justified once the photos in question were discovered, said photos were only discovered because Mark’s photo library was indiscriminately searched in the first place. The Fifth Amendment says no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; Mark lost all of his data, email account, phone number, and everything else Google touched forever with no due process at all. The Sixth Amendment is about the rights to a trial; Mark was not accused of any crime in the real world, but when it came to his digital life Google was, as I noted, “judge, jury, and executioner” (the Seventh Amendment is, relatedly, about the right to a jury trial for all controversies exceeding $20).

I found this paragraph in a New York Times article about Elon Musk’s attempts to buy Twitter striking: The plan jibes with Mr. Musk’s, Mr. Dorsey’s and Mr. Agrawal’s beliefs in unfettered free speech. Mr. Musk has criticized Twitter for moderating its platform too restrictively and has said more speech should be allowed. Mr. Dorsey, too, grappled with the decision to boot former President Donald J. Trump off the service last year, saying he did not “celebrate or feel pride” in the move. Mr. Agrawal has said that public conversation provides an inherent good for society. Their positions have increasingly become outliers in a global debate over free speech online, as more people have questioned whether too much free speech has enabled the spread of misinformation and divisive content. In other words, the culture has changed; the law persists, but it does not and, according to the New York Times, ought not apply to private companies.

Munroe, though, assumes the opposite: liberty, in this case the freedom of speech, is an artifact of law, only stretching as far as government action, and no further. Pat Kerr, who wrote a critique of this comic on Medium in 2016, argued that this was the exact wrong way to think about free speech: Coherent definitions of free speech are actually rather hard to come by, but I would personally suggest that it’s something along the lines of “the ability to voluntarily express (and receive) opinions without suffering excessive penalties for doing so”. This is a liberal principle of tolerance towards others. It’s not an absolute, it isn’t comprehensive, it isn’t rigorously defined, and it isn’t a law. What it is is a culture.

This Article is a manifestation of Madison’s hope. Start with the reality that it seems quaint in retrospect to think that any of the Bill of Rights would be preserved absent the force of law. This is one of the great lessons of the Internet and the rise of Aggregators: when suppressing speech entailed physically disrupting printing presses or arresting pamphleteers, then restricting government, which retains a monopoly on real world violence, was sufficient to preserve speech. Along the same lines, there was no need to demand due process or a restriction on search and seizure on any entity but the government, because only the government could take your property or send you to jail.

Indeed, judging from the accounts of the many employees who have now gone on record about this issue, the “debates” that have been happening at Basecamp are precisely the kinds of conversations that happen when you have a diverse workforce. Different issues affect different people differently, and being able to speak freely about those differences is the hallmark of a healthy culture. But by framing these discussions as “acrimonious debates” rather than “challenging conversations,” Hansson has positioned himself not as a peacemaker, but as a tyrant hell-bent on taking his toys and going home; shutting down discussions rather than holding space for growth and discovery.

Correspondingly,the far-reaching studies of language that were carried out under the influence ofCartesian rationalism suffered from a failure to appreciate either the abstractnessof those structures that are “present to the mind” when an utterance is producedor understood, or the length and complexity of the chain of operations that relatethe mental structures expressing the semantic content of the utterance to thephysical realization.

Littlefeather, who had acted in a few films before her infamous moment, says that the federal government threatened to shut down any talk shows or productions that put her on the air.

In France, a wealthyvoter giving 7,500 euros (the current ceiling) to his preferred politicalparty has a right to a tax deduction of 5,000 euros, financed by the restof the taxpayers.

One conclusion follows from the opposition between the can-ons of good writing and those of good written speeches: unless youare threatened with jail and a heavy fine, do not allow a writtenlecture to be published without extensive rewriting on your part.

“It was 2017, I would say, when Twitter started really cracking down on bots in a way that they hadn’t before — taking down a lot of bad bots, but also taking down a lot of good bots too. There was an appeals process [but] it was very laborious, and it just became very difficult to maintain stuff. And then they also changed all their API’s, which are the programmatic interface for how a bot talks to Twitter. So they changed those without really any warning, and everything broke.

“As with many of the articles with which these proceedings are concerned, the respondent does not merely identify information, put the material before the public, and ask questions arising from it. He acts as arbiter, presenting the matter on the basis that his belief, opinions and interpretation of the information, assuming that is the right word to use, is “the full truth,”” the judges noted in their opinion [PDF] on March 25.

According to Kerr, Dorrian, who presided over both Salmond’s trial and Murray’s contempt of court proceedings, “has led the campaign to get rid of juries in the cases of sex offenses in Scotland.”

This is what free societies converging on an idea looks like.

We’re not a place—it’s very difficult to come to Xbox Live and say, ‘Okay, I want to go create a political party on the platform’. You could kind of twist the tools and try to get there, but it’s just not set up for general-purpose conversations or community.

we should not support the institutionalizing of the right to be intolerant. If Eich thinks that same-sex marriage is against his beliefs, that’s fine, even if you (as I) disagree with him. But, by making a commitment to impress that belief upon others, he created a situation where his freedom of expression trampled the freedoms and rights of others. If Eich disagrees with same-sex marriage on religious grounds, that’s also his First Amendment right. But unless there’s a law requiring religious institutions to officially support same-sex marriages, his right to practice a religion is not infringed upon by their legality. And, again, I stress the critical difference between disagreeing with something and campaigning to write that disagreement into law.

“It’s just unfortunate that these are the circumstances that we’re talking about Mastodon again,” he tells me. “I would much prefer it was something specifically about Mastodon. Rather than, you know, Gab.”

Yet our investigation revealed that YouTube blocked advertisers’ ability to find social justice content, potentially restricting ad revenue for those YouTubers.

Τα δίκτυα του Fediverse και τα πλεονεκτήματά τους

even if you share a photo of someone who was like killed by an Israeli soldier you go to jail and you go to jail for the amount of like

«Νομίζω ότι είναι καιρός για τον λαό και τις ελίτ της Γερμανίας», δήλωσε προ ημερών σε συνέντευξή του στην Deutsche Welle o Παλαιστίνιος αναλυτής Αλί Αμπουνιμάχ, «να σταματήσουν να τιμωρούν τα παιδιά στη Λωρίδα της Γάζας για τα εγκλήματα που πραγματοποίησαν οι ίδιοι εναντίον των Εβραίων της Ευρώπης». Το αποτέλεσμα ήταν ότι ο σταθμός απολογήθηκε στους τηλεθεατές γιατί του έδωσε τον λόγο και διέγραψε τη συνέντευξη.

με την εξαίρεση του συναδέλφου του που δήλωσε ότι η προβολή και μόνο του φιλμ ειναι «πράξη ρατσιστική, ανεξάρτητα από τις προθέσεις του καθηγητή [Σενγκ]»

Facebook could shift the burden of proof toward people and communities to demonstrate that they’re good actors—and treat reach as a privilege, not a right.

Humans perform a version of this task when interpretinghard-to-understand speech, such as an accent which is particularlyfast or slurred, or a sentence in a language we do not know verywell—we do not necessarily hear every single word that is said,but we pick up on salient key words and contextualize the rest tounderstand the sentence.

Klarg received a messenger goblin from King Grol a few days ago. The messenger told him that someone named the Black Spider was paying the Cragmaws to watch out for the dwarf Gundren Rockseeker, capture him, and send him and anything he was carrying back to King Grol. Klarg followed his orders. Gundren was ambushed and taken along with his personal effects, including a map.

The dwarf and his map were delivered to King Grol, as instructed. The dwarf’s human companion is being held in the “eating cave” (area 6)

Their leader is a bugbear named Klarg. He answers to King Grol, chief of the Cragmaw tribe, who dwells in Cragmaw Castle. (The goblins can provide basic directions to Cragmaw Castle. It’s about twenty miles northeast of the Cragmaw hideout, in Neverwinter Wood.)

Fewer than twenty goblins currently dwell in the lair.

Personalized ASR models. For each of the 432 participants with disordered speech, we create a personalized ASR model (SI-2) from their own recordings. Our fine-tuning procedure was optimized for our adaptation process, where we only have between ¼ and 2 h of data per speaker. We found that updating only the first five encoder layers (versus the complete model) worked best and successfully prevented overfitting [10]

The researchers found that the model, when it is still confused by a given phoneme (that’s an individual speech sound like an “e” or “f”), has two kinds of errors. First, there’s the fact that it doesn’t recognize the phoneme for what was intended, and thus is not recognizing the word. And second, the model has to guess which phoneme the speaker did intend, and might choose the wrong one in cases where two or more words sound roughly similar.

founded on the principles of the free speech, independent thought and rejecting political censorship and “cancel culture”.

The First Amendment precludes lawmakers from forcing platforms to take down many kinds of dangerous user speech, including medical and political misinformation.

Francis Fukuyama has called "middleware": content-curation services that could give users more control over the material they see on internet platforms such as Facebook or Twitter.

"For example, human annotators rarely reached agreement when they were asked to label tweets that contained words from a lexicon of hate speech. Only 5% of the tweets were acknowledged by a majority as hate speech, while only 1.3% received unanimous verdicts."

The point of a pluralistic society, however, isn’t to find a single, absolute, dogmatic ideal. It is rather to discover ways of coexisting productively, despite and perhaps even in celebration of our differences.

Το ότι αποτελούν αντικείμενο ρύθμισης δεν είναι κάποια ριζοσπαστική θέση, είναι η θέση που έχει εκφράσει στο κογκρέσο των ΗΠΑ ο ιδρυτής  και ιδιοκτήτης του Fb Mark Zuckerberg: «Η θέση μου δεν είναι ότι δεν πρέπει να υπάρχει ρύθμιση. Πιστεύω ότι το πραγματικό ερώτημα, καθώς το διαδίκτυο γίνεται ολοένα και πιο σημαντικό για τις ζωές των ανθρώπων, είναι ποιος είναι ο σωστός τρόπος ρύθμισης, και όχι αν είναι απαραίτητο να υπάρχει ρύθμιση»

οι «ψηφιακοί καθαριστές» που δουλεύουν στα ελληνικά γραφεία της Teleperformance, η οποία έχει σύμβαση συνεργασίας με τη Facebook από τον Σεπτέμβριο του 2018, εστιάζουν μόνο στις διαφημίσεις και όχι στις προσωπικές αναρτήσεις κάθε χρήστη.

Ασκείται όμως από τις 11 (μέχρι πρότινος) ομάδες σε όλο τον κόσμο που συμμετέχουν στο Product Policy Forum, το οποίο διεξάγεται κάθε δύο εβδομάδες online προκειμένου να επιθεωρήσει την εφαρμογή των κανόνων κοινότητας,

At the very least I would have expected the Court to have held back from making sweeping conclusions about his intentions and desires without first hearing from him under examination and on oath on the witness stand during his trial.

In saying this it is essential to stress that the protection of witnesses and complainants in sexual assault cases is a paramount priority, and that the need to take steps to provide them with protection by securing their anonymity is not at issue.  However, to use this obligation to prevent balanced reporting of a case, especially one like Salmond’s, which had important public and political implications, seems to me to go too far and looks oppressive.  It appears to extinguish the right to a fair and open trial, which can only be secured by fair and balanced reporting. 

Offense, insult, and hurt feelings are not particularly important

Το 2017 πάρθηκε μια στρατηγική απόφαση και είναι δηλωμένη επιλογή του Ζούκερμπεργκ να μειώσει στην πλατφόρμα τον χώρο όπου διενεργείται πολιτική συζήτηση γιατί μια τέτοια δραστηριότητα δεν είναι ιδιαίτερα επικερδής αλλά δημιουργεί προβλήματα στην εταιρεία.

Η Facebook φορολογείται στην Ιρλανδία, αλλά κάνει μπίζνες με τις διαφημίσεις χωριστά σε κάθε χώρα.

Μια σειρά δημοσιευμάτων έδειχναν πως οι λογοκριτές δεν ήταν άλλοι από τους υπαλλήλους της Teleperformance, της εταιρείας που, όπως είχε αποκαλύψει η «Εφ.Συν.» σε συνεργασία με το Investigate Europe και το Reporters United (30/4/2020), ανέλαβε εν κρυπτώ τη διαχείριση της γραμμής του ΕΟΔΥ για τον κορονοϊό («Η μυστική συνεργασία ΕΟΔΥ - Teleperformance και τα 6 σκοτεινά σημεία της»).

“child-directed” or “caretaker” speech.

Βλέποντας τις μεγάλες ιδιωτικές πλατφόρμες (φατσοβιβλία κ.λπ.) στις μέρες μας, αντιλαμβανόμαστε ότι δεν διαμορφώθηκε απολύτως καμία αθηναϊκή αγορά (το ιδανικό), αλλά ενισχύθηκε απεριόριστα το «Ολα για την κυκλοφορία» (η πραγματικότητα).

One person writing a tweet would still qualify for free-speech protections—but a million bot accounts pretending to be real people and distorting debate in the public square would not.

External electrodes simply cannot provide precise enough data from small brain regions, experts agree.