U.S. billionaire Elon Musk has agreed to sell a portion of Starlink assets to the U.S. Department of Defense, removing himself from decision-making regarding geofencing Ukraine’s access to the satellite internet service

  • ThuglasAtoms@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    All of the bad faith arguments about free speech and the first amendment become real arguments about free speech and the first amendment if the government is operating the social media site. You couldn’t ban someone for offensive speech or delete their post.

    • mateomaui@reddthat.com
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      1 year ago

      They could probably get around that by outsourcing the moderation to some public group overseen by some other public ethics group, etc, and otherwise the gov’t just provides the funding to keep it all employed, running and maintained.

      Not that I’m recommending it. It would have to be better than X though.

    • MataVatnik@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      True, the thought has crossed my mind cause I thought of it before. Honestly I’m not sure how it would be handled. On the one hand, calls to violence would definitely be stamped out more thoroughly. On the other hand, I could see certain problematic speech run rampant because of the first amendment. But I think you can still have a certain idea of decorum, like they do in congress, where certain behavior is frowned upon if not completely banned. I think you can also get away with pseudobanning people kind of how it’s done with fact checking where certain posts are hidden behind a warning banner. Maybe also leave it up to the community like in lemmy where certain things are downvoted. It would still get spicy tho. My guess is that ultimately government run social media would be super stale and attract only the most boring conversations, like cspan.

    • j4k3@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Go running up and down the street outside of wherever you are waving a gun and reading all of your social media posts as loud as possible so all your neighbors can here. I bet you won’t last an hour until the government shows up, shoots you, hauls you off, or tells you where to shove all of your rights and amendments.