> Are you saying the entirety of the DOJ apparatus could be politically steered to look for non-existent evidence or make frivolous referrals?
Yes, absolutely and unquestionably. This fact is blatantly, blindingly obvious to anyone who hasn't had their head buried in the sand for the past year.
There is no comparison between what this administration is doing and any that have come before it. Attempting to draw that false equivalence is just pure foolishness.
> Which was exactly my point. It happens more than it should, and it’s wielded by both parties.
It doesn't happen how it's happened the past year though, this is a false equivalence. The DOJ being weaponised as an intimidation tool against dissidents/opponents is not that common, it's become normalised during 2025.
I really cannot comprehend how you cannot see that, I'm not even American nor living in the USA but have followed American politics for a long time (since it impacts my life in some shape or form for as long as I remember).
I remember being more astonished that it took so long for it to finally happen. If he hadn't been the president, he would have been banned ages earlier. Same exact thing with this settlement - if he wasn't the president it wouldn't be happening. Based on merit alone, he'd stay banned for life.
I see where you are coming from, but I completely disagree - his content is mild, he's just being banned because he's in the enemy's party, among the people running the platforms.
(politically I dislike both right wing authoritarianism and left wing authoritarianism - and I live in EU)
The point of blocking is to prevent harassment, no? Hiding the blocker's posts from the blockee puts up an additional barrier to interaction. Even if it can be circumvented, it still requires some effort and may dissuade the person from continuing the harassment. There is a reason why this is the standard implementation for almost every social media site, and petulance has nothing to do with it.
> To stop harassment, reach out to the platform, assuming it cares about harassment, and if it doesn't, contact law enforcement, or file a lawsuit
Your wording suggests that you seem to be aware that none of these avenues actually work in the real world, which is precisely why platforms have the ability to block.
> Your wording suggests that you seem to be aware that none of these avenues actually work in the real world, which is precisely why platforms have the ability to block.
You may personally infer that, but the precise reason platforms have the ability to block someone is, "I don't like this person for whatever reason so I don't want to see their posts or replies". Maybe you don't want to see their posts or replies because you feel they are harassing. Blocking/ignoring them stops you from seeing them. It shouldn't affect anyone else's ability to see their posts or replies to you.
Honestly, in what other public, online discussion forum can anybody without admin powers, arbitrarily and unilaterally ban others from publicly replying to public posts?
Having worked at a fairly prominent social media company, that is not why social media platforms have block functionality. Mute, functionality, yes, absolutely.
Blocking is typically a much stronger remedy, aimed at curtailing targeted harassment.
Having worked with multiple online public discussion forums / media over the decades, that is precisely what blocking / muting / ignoring is for: the digital equivalent of plugging your ears. Don't want to hear an account you feel is harassing you? Good news: you don't need to! The functionality you're describing, on the other hand, opens the door to trollish abuse like reply-and-ban-responses.
In what other public, online discussion forum format can anybody without admin powers, arbitrarily and unilaterally ban others from publicly replying to public posts? That idea sounds insane to me.
It would be like if IRC's /ignore function prevented someone from sending messages containing your name – weird. You should be able to block yourself off from anybody you wish, and live in whatever bubble you wish, but not to control others' public speech. The platform has admins who can theoretically deal with law-breaking behavior like harassment or threats or CSAM, and if they choose not to, the platform sucks and I recommend you ditch it. coughtwittercough.
> In what other public, online discussion forum format can anybody without admin powers, arbitrarily and unilaterally ban others from publicly replying to public posts? That idea sounds insane to me.
Regardless of all your other arguments here, the change being made to twitter here does nothing to prevent that. Blocking a user still prevents them from interacting with your posts in any way. Now they can just see the post without being able to reply to it. So I'm not exactly sure what your point is.
> In what other public, online discussion forum format can anybody without admin powers, arbitrarily and unilaterally ban others from publicly replying to public posts? That idea sounds insane to me.
I mean, Facebook and Twitter have both worked this way for years. Arguably that constitutes most of social media for the last decade.
> can be done by making an account private, or not posting the posts publicly
but not the criteria where you _want_ other people to see your posts publicly.
aka, the ask is to allow individuals to "excommunicate" a particular user, not just blocking.
I'm glad, tho, that twitter does not allow this. I think having this feature allows for echo chambers...(tho, this is currently already true so may be it's moot...?)
The point is that contacting you isn’t always needed to harass you if the opponent have enough influence (or bots under his control) to harass you with its minions.
Of course it could be bypassed but it requires effort and most harassers are in fact pretty stupid people who just happen to have an influence over a group of people as stupid as them.
> Super-niche use-case: our game studio prototyped a multiplayer horror game where we played with cloning player voices to be able to secretly relay messages to certain players as if it came from one of their team-mates (e.g. "go check out below deck" to split a pair of players up, or "I think Bob is trying to sabotage us" to sew inter-player distrust, etc).
That's an insanely cool idea, and one I hadn't really considered before. Out of curiosity, how well did it work? Was it believable enough to fool players?
Most political prisoners in Russia get out after 15 days. There is even a colloquial term for it.
Even the woman mentioned in this article was taken to the police station, yelled at, intimidated, and released. Not saying that's great, but there was no jail time.
Exactly. Dudes here are getting high on their own propaganda and imagining that the same multi year pre-trial detentions that are the norm in the US are also the norm elsewhere. But they just aren’t, unless you take money from the CIA like Navalny foolishly did
I think people with near zero empathy regard their interpretation as primary, but most humans can understand that people have different senses of humor.
> but most humans can understand that people have different senses of humor
I agree completely. And I would think that someone with greater than zero empathy would have a hard time arguing that there is one and only one correct way to interpret a piece of writing. An author with a non-zero amount of empathy should be well aware that their work will be interpreted in a variety of ways by a varied audience, and won't seek to hide behind the flimsy shield of "satire" when they publish something intentionally provocative and incendiary.
> When Hillary called 1/2 of Trump supporters "deplorables" isn't that hate speech?
No, it is unequivocally, objectively not hate speech. Nowhere in there is there a threat of violence. I don't really care if it hurts your feelings. Make better choices in life.
Assuming that most of what was in the article is true, then I guarantee that the government now knows exactly who the leaker is and has no need to contact the person who was the source for this article. Message logs, ip addresses, user account info, and whatever else needed to identify this person all exists on Discord's servers, and I doubt law enforcement will have any trouble getting access to it (assuming they didn't already have it through other channels).
Yes, absolutely and unquestionably. This fact is blatantly, blindingly obvious to anyone who hasn't had their head buried in the sand for the past year.
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