Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is TKnarr with a comment about Meta’s warning that it will remove news from Facebook and Instagram in California in response to the CJPA:

I liken these laws to ones requiring newspapers not only to carry advertising but to pay the advertisers for each customer that comes to their business because of the ads. That… isn’t how any of that works. The only way it might make sense is if the ad itself were a suitable substitute for whatever it was advertising, and if that’s the case the advertiser has bigger problems with their business.

In second place, it’s K Smith talking about another California law, this time the AADC:

What is wrong with California?

Gavin Newsom is approaching a Ron DeSantis-level of idiocy, lying and disregard for constitutional rights.

Anyway, if California can violate the first amendment in the name of “protecting children”, so can Alabama and Florida.

Not fighting Newsom and California will make it harder (than it already is) to fight Right Wing governors and states who enact laws against LGBT+, abortion, etc. material to “protect children”.

Not fighting is complicity.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with an anonymous comment about the fiasco around a certain hateful documentary on Twitter:

That he made a show of it being advertising-restricted and then turned around to promote it as the movie “they” don’t want you to see… quite thrilling, I’m sure, for advertisers to be thrown under the bus and placed right in the middle of the “culture war” like this by the site’s owner. On the one hand you can choose not to advertise against something to protect your brand, but on the other the owner (who sees all your brand’s advertising decisions) can choose at any time to publicly mock your brand for that decision to suit his personal or political agenda. And yet no doubt some people will praise him for his lack of “political correctness.” (How is the new CEO supposed to maintain relationships with advertisers, the supposed reason for her selection, with this threat constantly overhead?)

The whole “I choose to be polite” thing is incredibly cynical with the subsequent promotion of this propaganda. It shows that the claimed politeness is at best a façade that is at odds with his true convictions. What people are asking for here is for others to be respectful of their personal decisions, not just to say the right words to pretend to be polite. (Reminds me of what SBF said about how he thought society was about using the right words to create the appearance of having the “appropriate” views on things. How deeply cynical and unfeeling!)

Musk also apparently confirmed the suspicion that Irwin’s departure was related to the incident. But one wonders whether this was a principled stand or just the need to put people in their place when they do something to “embarrass” Musk in public (not that he didn’t use it to further his agenda anyway). What a mess.

Next, it’s Thad with a comment about the social media “think of the children” panic:

Every moral panic has some justification for how it’s different from all the other ones.

Video games were different from movies because they were interactive.

Movies were different from comic books because they had moving pictures.

Comic books were different from dime novels because they were made up entirely of pictures and you didn’t even have to be literate to “read” them.

And on and on, down through the ages.

This time is always different from all those other times. This time is always justified, unlike all those other times that were laughably misguided with the benefit of hindsight.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is freakanatcha with a comment about Musk’s Neuralink:

Dear Abby,
His rockets explode, his cars catch fire and now through his gross mismanagement, he has reduced the valuation of Twitter from $44B to $15B.

Should I let Elmo implant a microchip in my brain?

In second place, it’s Pixelation with a comment about Texas’s war on porn sites and the idea that porn leads to child porn:

Having sex creates children. If we outlawed sex, there would be no more children and child porn would be solved. Outlaw sex!

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with an anonymous reply to that comment:

But if we outlawed sex and there were no more children, then there would be no children to protect, and we must protect the children!

Such a dilemma!

Finally, it’s an anonymous comment about the general state of free speech discourse:

When Conservatives are rude to you, it’s free speech. When you’re rude back to them, it’s cancel culture.

That’s all for this week, folks!