Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to Jeff Bezos shutting down the Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris for president. In first place, it’s a simple anonymous summary:

Yep.

The message he sent is that he will control what is or is not published.

In second place, it’s another anonymous comment about his mention of the fact that newspaper endorsements don’t have much impact on voter choices:

This. Exactly this. And when the owner of the newspaper blocks something so weak and uninjuring to Trump, there is no longer any question of whether he will block the next Deep Throat exposé if it would actually hurt Trump. None whatsoever.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with an anonymous response to the argument that it should be perfectly possible to reform Section 230 in an unproblematic way:

This kind of admission indicates you probably shouldn’t have posted such a lengthy response with unearned confidence. Many of the attempts to repeal 230 involve have involved not putting anything substantial in place to protect websites from death by lawsuit flood. It’s a very real danger if anyone actually gains traction with an appeal effort.

Next, it’s an anonymous election registrar with some thoughts on election disinformation on ExTwitter:

This is going to get election workers hurt/killed

(volunteer registrar here again)

Ignorant lunatics like this Philadelphia Q dipshit are increasingly doxing, stalking and assaulting election workers, a great many of whom are volunteers, a lot of whom have been doing it for years or decades.

The result of this has been to drive out older — and more experienced — people who simply don’t want to put up with this crap, and shouldn’t have to. This makes it harder to run elections efficiently, because the people who’ve seen problem X 39 times and know how to fix it are being replaced by people who’ve never seen it before, and then everyone has to wait, and then the lines get longer and longer, and nobody has a good day.

I don’t volunteer on election day. I did, but I don’t any more. Why? Because someone exactly like this Philadelphia Q dipshit might recognize me from all the hours I spent registering people, conclude that I must have turned in a lot of fake registrations and that now I’m at the polling place to make sure that the people behind those can vote.

This is, by the way, nearly impossible to pull off even if you’re intimately acquainted with how elections are run, and I am. And even if you could pull it off, you’d have to do it for a large number of fake voters in order to impact almost any election. And even if you could do that, there’s a very high probability you’d be caught by focused and/or spot audits.

So, to go back to the start: what Musk is doing is going to result in physical violence against volunteers who are just trying to help. He won’t admit responsibility (of course not: he doesn’t know how) but there will be blood on his hands.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Boba Fatt with a response to a mention of the term “cracker”:

We prefer the term “Saltine Americans”.

In second place, it’s Pixelation with a comment about Threads banning any mention of Hitler in any context:

Sounds like Godwins moderation.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from Thad about WaPo’s growing subscriber losses, which gets a nod for precise use of the word “decimated”:

Up to 250,000 now, I hear. Their subscriptions have literally been decimated.

Finally, it’s an anonymous comment about the lack of a DMCA exemption for video game preservation, and the Register of Copyrights’ argument that emulation has been “historically associated with piracy”:

Go deeper

HTTP, while not infringing in its own right, has been “historically associated with piracy,” thus “rais[ing] a potential concern”… (cough)

That’s all for this week, folks!