from the ourselves-alone dept

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

This week, MrWilson takes both top spots on the insightful side. In first place, it’s a comment about opportunistic ICE arrests:

ICE keeps trying to find more victims to prove the false narrative of how many undocumented immigrants there are in the country, so individual agents probably want to make their own abductions to show dear leader that their jackboots are loyal rather than hand it off to someone else.

In second place, it’s a response to our post about the MAGA GOP warning about communism while taking ownership stakes in private companies:

Another angle is seeing it as just more fascism. The Nazi government in Germany was deep in it with corporations and seized assets and controlled factories and controlled how they did business

Trump isn’t seizing or nationalizing the means of production for the benefit of the people or the workers. He’s getting more power and money for his corruption machine. We’re not seeing all of what’s happening in the background, but you know he’s personally benefiting from these moves.

And when a Democrat gets into the White House, watch for Fox News and GOP politicians to decry the “communism” that Democrats are perpetuating and they’ll ignore Trump’s moves entirely or our local propaganda repeater will stop by to tell us it was legal under Trump and completely different but any Democrats doing 5% of the same thing are dirty commies.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we’ve got a pair of comments about the federal court ruling that said recommendation algorithms aren’t protected speech. First, it’s Stephen T. Stone with a reply to a commenter who asserted that “the government needs the power to control what companies recommend”:

No. No, it does not. As the article asks, do you really want the Trump administration in control of what content social media services can/will recommend? Because that seems like a surefire way to privilege TRASH speech over all other kinds. But feel free to point out how that wouldn’t be the case!

Next, it’s an anonymous comment about the line in the ruling saying the social media companies had not shown that their feeds constitute fully protected speech:

Uh… Protected speech is assumed. The court needs to fully explain how something is not protected. They have utterly failed to do this so far.

Not that i don’t think plenty of these companies, and plenty of algorithms, pretty much suck to one degree or another. However, one is free to search or refresh or better train how the algorithm serves them, at least to a point. And one is free to leave. One is also free to educate one’s children in media literacy.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is MrWilson yet again, this time with another reply to that same commenter:

No. No, it does not. As the article asks, do you really want the Trump administration in control of what content social media services can/will recommend? Because that seems like a surefire way to privilege TRASH speech over all other kinds. But feel free to point out how that wouldn’t be the case!

In second place, it’s an anonymous comment from last week’s comments post, in which I lamented that there were no more Star Trek jokes for me to highlight:

Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far, no further!

(Though several commenters associated “this far and no further” even more strongly with the iconic final episode of the initial run of Columbo, another greatest-show-of-all-time. Techdirt readers have great taste!)

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from PB&J about MAGA’s fearmongering about communism:

obligatory meme: “If Those Kids Could Read They’d Be Very Upset”

We all know that 50% of Americans don’t know what communism is — like, they literally cannot define it — and another 49% think it means “The Democrats”.

Finally, it’s one more anonymous reaction to the ruling that algorithms aren’t protected speech because they just reflect what people want back to them:

Today I learned that portrait photography is not protected under the Constitution because it is merely a mirror held up to that person.

That’s all for this week, folks!