Comments by "Harry Stoddard" (@HarryS77) on "Ben Shapiro's Fake Confusion Over Why Steven Crowder Got In Trouble" video.

Ever read his pre-Iraq blogs? Seems like he's slipping back into his libertarian-reactionary skin.
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@nicholasrenstrom1421 "He believes that large social network sites should be held to the standards of the first amendment " And that much is fine. It's something we could argue about. But he lost me and I assume a lot of other people the moment he laid out this bogus line about Crowder being "marginalized." He's completely buying into the right-wing, disingenuous rhetoric about "free speech."
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I'm sorry, is your claim that a public utility must be a public utility before it becomes a public utility? Public utilities are often private companies that operate under government control and regulation. Reclassifying these sites are public utilities is one way to handle their obvious monopolistic influence. I don't know if it's the right way, but it's not impossible that it could happen. Telecommunications are already considered public utilities. Broadband is increasingly being pushed as a candidate for consideration as a public utility. We haven't really had something like Facebook or Youtube before—virtual public spaces controlled by private entities. There's not really a precedent for converting a company or industry like that into a utility, but it was like that for the other utilities too. What one would have to do is show that these companies provide a necessary public service, and maybe in a modern democratic society they are essential.
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Anytime one can dunk on Harris is a good time.
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@nicholasrenstrom1421 How is Glenn's position right now not a statement in favor of corporate power? If you are on the "real left," you know that class intersects with race, gender, sexuality, religion, and so on. For Glenn to state that Crowder—funded by the Koch brothers—is the marginalized person in this case shows his complete disagreement with what is now a fundamental understanding within the anti-capitalist left. Note that people like Michael and Jaime lay out exactly what one could say in Glenn's position—call for the breaking up and socialization of corporations like Youtube and Facebook. If one is really concerned with both LGBT issues and the consolidation of corporate power, that's the position to take. Glenn instead chose to regurgitate right-wing talking points about freeze peach and the "white minority." Yeah, that was dumb of him. Shame on him. He's done a lot of great things, but this is becoming a pattern.
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@nicholasrenstrom1421 "Vox and YouTube get together to make a decision about crowder and they made the right one." I'm not seeing anything like that. EDIT: Actually there is one person saying that Vox and Youtube colluded to punish Crowder: Crowder himself, in yet another display of infantile hysterics. Glenn should stop buying into alt-right talking points. And so should you.
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@nicholasrenstrom1421 Do you have some kind of evidence to support Vox using "its corporate power to influence Youtube"? I've looked at about a half dozen articles. None of them mention anything of the sort, except a few that show Crowder trying to gin up a conspiracy. "where Greenwald talks about "white minorities" I don't see that here." Yeah, it's the part where he says that Crowder is the marginalized one here. I don't think Glenn is a white supremacist. I do think that he ought to be smarter than to use language that mirrors white supremacist talking points on a white supremacist news network with a quasi-fasc anchor. You know? That's Fox's thing. That's the alt-right's appeal to white America. You are marginalized. The feminist, SJW, cuck, queer overlords of Apple (or whatever) are taking over America! Glenn just gave that talking point to them—Gay Goliath v. King Crowder. He needs to be smarter than that.
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@nicholasrenstrom1421 I explained exactly what I meant and you can hear Glenn speak in the video. Spare me the self-righteous indignation about my honesty. If being honest is such a big deal to you, correct your conspiracy theory statement about Vox colluding with Youtube to take down Crowder. Or provide evidence. Unlike you I actually did provide evidence and an argument that shows how Glenn is contributing to white minority rhetoric.
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@nicholasrenstrom1421 I was using the abstract "we." Like, that's a debate one could have.
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@tiioga8053 Yeah, I don't think anyone's arguing that the company should renege on its TOS or be unregulated. Again, I don't necessarily think these sites should become public utilities. If you want to argue the merits of that with someone, call into the show. But social media companies wouldn't be the first to start out as privately held and controlled companies and then be restructured as a public utility or nationalized. If anything, I think we're much more likely to see 1) the Internet become a public utility, since it's more akin to other sorts of PUs and is a telecommunications technology and 2) the classification of sites like Youtube (Google) and Facebook as monopolies and a strategy for breaking them up. The only way I could see social media classified as a PU is if it is considered an essential public good. Ten years ago that would've been absurd, and maybe it still is in some ways, but almost everyone relies on and uses social media for information, sharing, news, networking—it's a service that is quasi-infrastructural, or like an infrastructure within an infrastructure (broadband, cable, etc.). In other words, social media is closer to a modern analogue for telephony rather than a print medium like newspapers. Social media is different from newspapers and magazines in terms of accessibility and sheer volume of content. Also, we weren't really in a position before where newspapers were dominated by a few corporations (that's since changed, though not to the same degree as social media) and where a monopoly needed to exist to control prices and access. But that's not really my position. If you want to debate someone, debate Michael.
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