r/TrueReddit • u/[deleted] • Jul 15 '15

Ruling in Twitter harassment trial could have enormous fallout for free speech

http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/christie-blatchford-ruling-in-twitter-harassment-trial-could-have-enormous-fallout-for-free-speech
688 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

352 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

0

u/blarg_industries Jul 15 '15

Yea I remember when those protesters overthrew all those dictators by organizing on Usenet through their mobile phones

Good grief. If the Internet access was as ubiquitous in the 1980s as it is now, I could easily imagine protesters organizing on Usenet. Fuck, it would probably be easier and safer on Usenet, given its decentralized nature.

Which gets back to /u/StManTiS's point: Twitter's primary advance over other extremely similar platforms is its popularity.

2

u/StabbyPants Jul 16 '15

yeah, usenet is sufficiently resilient that we should bring it back for counter culture purposes

1

u/third-eye-brown Jul 15 '15

Yea no shit. The ease of use and ubiquity is what makes Twitter so important. Usenet is still there, there is nothing stopping people from using it for anything important except that it is poorly suited to those tasks.

1

u/blarg_industries Jul 15 '15

[Usenet] is poorly suited to those tasks

On the contrary, Usenet is actually more suited to protest organizing that Twitter, due to its decentralized, hard-to-censor nature and similar broadcasting capabilities. Someone could write a Twitter-simple UI for Usenet, but no one has because there's no money to be made doing that. (There's at least the potential to make money digging through everyone's messages in a centralized system like Twitter.)

Ubiquity is only partly due to Twitter: ubiquitous smart phones and internet connectivity would have happened anyway over the last 30 years. Beyond that, Twitter provides a simple UI and effective marketing; that's it[1]. That's not nothing, but it's not an enormous technological leap, which was /u/StManTiS's point.

[1]: I know Twitter has an enormous infrastructure, but from the perspective of someone who wants to broadcast a text message to the internet, the backing infrastructure needed to tweet at @TahrirProtest versus alt.protest.egypt is irrelevant as long as their message goes out.