Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

from the first-responders dept

This week, both our winners on the insightful side are anonymous responses to commenters trotting out the same old, boring, easily dismissed arguments about content moderation on our post about how very little content moderation has anything to do with politics. In first place, it’s a response to someone basically just saying “nuh-uh, of course it does”:

Ummm… This entire article points out how social media has zero fucks to give about your political affiliation, they just don’t want fucking assholes on their service.

That you consider the people getting banned from social media for being fucking assholes, ie racists, homophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic, bigoted assholes, is being biased towards conservatives, maybe you should take a long hard look at the company you want to keep and why you call yourself a conservative.

In second place, it’s a response to someone insisting that Techdirt’s own comment flagging system is abused for political reasons:

You are a fucking abusive troll.

It’s not that we don’t like your politics, its that we don’t like fucking assholes like you.

Hell, for all you know, we could be aligned politically, it’s just that I don’t act like a fucking asshole.

Why don’t you people ever learn, it’s not your politics we don’t like, its you, the fucking asshole.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we’ve got a pair of comments from Stephen T. Stone. First, a comment about why platforms don’t make their moderation rules more clear and explicit:

But that allows “I’m not touching you”–type rules-lawyering assholes to look for loopholes in the system and exploit them. That creates an infinite feedback loop where the mods try to fix the loopholes, only to open more loopholes, which the assholes will exploit, and repeat until the rules are so microdetailed that people can barely post anything without breaking the rules.

The whole point of having some vagueness behind moderation decisions is to allow for on-the-fly adaptation to situations admins didn’t expect when they wrote the rules. Take away that vagueness and you get the feedback loop of “rules lawyering ➡️ fix the rules ➡️ exploit the rules ➡️ rules lawyering…”, which does nobody any good.

Next, a comment about the lawsuit against Barnes & Noble in Virginia:

Republicans went from “don’t read that book in class” to “yank it from the library” to “fuck you, nobody should be able to buy this” in the span of a year. Welcome to the “openly fascist with no apologies” stage of American conservatism.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous response to the assertion that Twitter blocking stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop swung the election:

That’s it I’m not gonna vote for hunter now!

In second place, it’s Flakbait with a comment about Hertz refusing to drop prosecutions despite being sued for bogus theft reports:

Outdoing Avis

For many years, starting in the early 60s, Avis – smaller than Hertz – played on their #2 rental car company status with the slogan, “We Try Harder.” It seems that Hertz’s play on that catch phrase is, “We’ll Trial You Harder.”

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we’ve got a pair of comments about California’s blatantly unconstitutional bill allowing parents to sue websites because their kids are depressed. First, it’s That One Guy with an idea about turning the tables:

Easy way to turn this around if they had the guts

California: If social media does anything that might make kids worse off and/or they happen to serve as a great scapegoat for that they’ll be sued.

Social media: Okay, well we’ll be challenging this blatant unconstitutional Look At Us Doing Something/Think of The Children bill but until then we’ll be prohibiting any person under 18 and who lives in california from using our platforms, and you’d better believe we’re going to be telling them exactly who to blame for that.

California: But… that’s us, you can’t blame us when we’re trying to blame everything on you! Our kids are going to scream our ears off!

Last but not least, it’s Blake Stacey with another way of looking at it:

Now, now, let’s not be hasty. This whole “suing because the children are depressed” idea might have potential. For example, how about we sue politicians because the children are depressed over their planet being fucked.

That’s all for this week, folks!