- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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It’s a private company and they can do what they want… And people who use the service can complain about it getting worse.
I mean, it is a private company and they can do what they want. It’s a shitty and childish thing that Musk is choosing to do but it’s his $44B dumpster fire to fuel as he pleases.
Advocating for free speech rights for a private American company to be beholden to is stupid because it misunderstands everything about free speech laws work and how companies and content moderation work.
The people who think Elon brought free speech to Twitter tend to also be the people who think free speech starts and ends at your right to use slurs without social consequences.
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Because it’s “their” platform.
Because they built the platform. It’s not a public good (or a town square) — the company foots the bill so they get to decide what they do and don’t want people to use it for.
Doesn’t that go against net neutrality?
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Is Twitter an ISP?
Yes.
It provides a service on the internet.
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I know.
I still think it’s unethical.
Twitter is website that contains “links to” the other 5 websites. Those “links to other sites” are really links to Twitter scripts that do database queries before finally linking to the other sites for real. It is easy for elmo to insert delays in the process.
They repealed that anyways.
Not in Canada.
Did we ever have it in the first place? :>
Yes, actually. In Québec, Videotron offered a mobile data plan that included unlimited data exclusively for the Google Music service. The CRTC told them that this was illegal and it broke net neutrality laws.
I think I recall reading now that they had implemented it here. The whole “what happens there, happens here” dynamic made me cancel it out when they cancelled it down there I guess.
This should surprise no one at this point.
Wait, I was told net neutrality wasn’t needed.
This has nothing to do with net neutrality. Either you didn’t read the article, you didn’t understand what you read, or you don’t understand what net neutrality means.
To your credit, the use of “throttles” in the headline is (likely intentionally) deceptive. It’s the wrong term entirely. What Xitter did was make their own servers wait ~5 seconds before serving an http redirect.
It definitely draws direct parallels to net neutrality. It also shows the consolidation of web services into the hands of a few large corporations and the impact it has on the internet.
Im sure Twitter would argue that it’s not throttling, they don’t limit the speed in any way. But it does make it appear to end users as if the web site is loading slower.
It would be interesting if these sites could see a noticeable drop in traffic during the period Twitter was imposing delays on the redirect. If so, thats potential lost revenue and a basis for a lawsuit.
Net Neutrality.
The principle that internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of source and without favoring, blocking, or throttling particular products or websites.
Sounds exactly like he is disregarding net neutrality to me.
Edit: To be clear, proponents of net neutrality believe that all corporations, not just ISPs should follow net neutrality. It’s because of this exact situation that people want shit like this put into law.
That’s because you don’t know what an “internet service provider” is. Twitter is not one.
I know what ISP means. Read my edit.
Twitter isn’t, and shouldn’t be under any obligation to respond to you proxying your requests through their url tracker with any service level.
Is it unethical? Yeah. Does it violate the letter of proposed NN laws? No. Does it violate the spirit of proposed NN laws? Also no. Those laws don’t cover what happens while a request is inside a parties network, only the traffic that travels in and out of it, of which Twitter was manipulating neither.
Well, I suppose they could deliver a few packets with a couple microseconds of latency when they delivered the HTTP response payload but they would have to literally modify their OS’s TCP stack to do so and the entirety of that actual throttling would be literally milliseconds of difference.
He’s like the asshole bakers who won’t make the cake for the gay wedding. Or he’ll do it eventually but whine about it the entire time and it’ll arrive late and burnt.
I’ve got no problem baking anyone a cake, but you’re right it’ll be late and burnt. I can’t bake for shit.
But your assumption that I wouldn’t force anyone to bake that cake, you’re absolutely right.
I was talking about Elon, but I’m sorry about your lack of baking skills in case you wanted to be good at it or something.
While still expecting to get paid.
internet service providers
This is the key here, though. Twitter isn’t an ISP, they’re just making it more annoying when navigating from their site to elsewhere.
Net neutrality is the concept of an open, equal internet for everyone, regardless of device, application or platform used and content consumed. You can argue semantics all day but twitter slowing traffic or redirects to certain other websites is a violation of net neutrality. If not the letter of the definition then for sure the spirit of it.
Just concede and learn from your mistake, because you’re missing the point. Cloudflare throttles connections to sites as part of their DDoS protection, but that isn’t even remotely related to net neutrality. On your site, you can do whatever you want, but ISPs preventing customers from accessing certain sites (or accessing them as they would “normal” sites) is what net neutrality is concerned with.
They’re violating the spirit of net neutrality, but not the law. Since they aren’t an ISP, they can’t actually slow down or block you from accessing certain websites. The most they can do is slow down (or block) their own URL redirection service when its used to access to those domains. That’s within their right of free speech, even if it’s really fucking petty.
Which is hilarious. This will only hurt them.
People will just think Twitter is slow. Obviously Threads or NY Times will work normally when people are on those sites.
On Tuesday afternoon, hours after this story was first published, X began reversing the throttling on some of the sites, dropping the delay times back to zero. It was unknown if all the throttled websites had normal service restored.
Who there didn’t see that coming? They thought nobody was gonna notice 5s delays on NYT links?
That new CEO must be locked in a cage somewhere at this point because she is definitely not calling the shots on this, or “X”, or any of the other nonsense that’s still been occurring because only one billionaire egomaniac is capable of this absolute fucking trainwreck.
These companies either need to rip the bandaid off and leave Twitter or, at least, start establishing themselves elsewhere and encourage their users to find the content wherever that place is.
This is definitely already happening. It’ll be slow, but both my wife and are work adjacent to marketing for larger companies and “well twitter is a shitshow, what else can we use” is such a constant refrain it’s basically canon now.
Thank you for saying twitter
Isn’t it called Ex-Twitter?
the website formerly known as twitter
Say the line Bart!
Free speech absolutist
How has no one just punched him in his stupid face yet?
Zuckerberg is trying to schedule face punches but he keeps making excuses.
He can get hit too. They’re the same.
I’ve had an idea for a song for a while that starts off: “have you ever noticed how no one has assassinated Elon Musk?”
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There are those of us who were on the Internet before the capital showed up, and all of us said that it was a bad idea to use these corporate silos, that there were implications that were not great to handing what we knew would one day be the public square over to private interests. We were not listened to, of course, and for the thirty years that the government kept the house of cards propped up with zero interest they created a real illusion that it might actually work.
But maybe I have to reassess Elon. I have heretofore considered him something of a bad man, a Senator Palpatine with his “saving the world through capitalism” schtick, but with an Emperor lurking in his twisted mind. And here we have that very Emperor, taking off the mask. But perhaps… perhaps… perhaps Musk is actually Vader. Perhaps in revealing, to all with eyes to see, the very problems we Libre’d zealots have been crying out in the wilderness about, perhaps he is the one who will restore balance to the Internet.
Nah he’s just an apartheid rich boy who talked a good line while he could keep pulling free money out of the bag, but now that he has to put money back in the bag he’s taking whatever work he can get.
People eat Elon Musk’s garbage PR like it’s dinner.
Every damn day they post about some inane shit just so Elon can stay in the 24 hour news cycle.
I am not sure being a petty anti-competitive cunt here is inane exactly,if anything it highlights the issues with rich cunts owning access control.
What is Twitter?
A Mastodon alternative apparently. Seems they haven’t implemented ActivityPub yet? I’ll stay away.
This is the most perfect response.
It’s an older platform that no longer exists. You’re thinking of X. Which is newer than Mastodon but still hasn’t implemented activitypub.
Birdy don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more
The most immature billionaire. Scary.
Companies need to abandon Xwitter already