Between Elon Musk, a free-for-all Facebook and Donald Trump, truth and decency are likely to have a hard time of it in 2025<\/p>\n
How did we get to a week in which the world\u2019s richest man could label our safeguarding minister and women\u2019s rights campaigner Jess Phillips a \u201crape genocide apologist\u201d<\/a>, and the boss of the world\u2019s biggest social platforms could abandon moderating even the most despicable content in the US?<\/p>\n Let\u2019s go back 30 years. It\u2019s 1995, cargo pants were slung low, Oasis were riding high. We were all going to Live Forever. And then the New York supreme court ruled against a long-forgotten company called Prodigy<\/a>, which hosted online message boards. An unknown user had posted a message that the brokerage firm Stratton Oakmont (which had inspired The Wolf of Wall Street<\/em>) had committed fraud. Stratton Oakmont sued for defamation and a crucial question was asked: was the site that hosted the comment responsible for it, in the way a traditional publisher would be for a comment on its letters page? The court decided that, because Prodigy had moderators and content guidelines, it was responsible. Another company that didn\u2019t moderate had previously gone unpunished.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Between Elon Musk, a free-for-all Facebook and Donald Trump, truth and decency are likely to have a hard time of it in 2025 How did we get to a week in which the world\u2019s richest man could label our safeguarding minister and women\u2019s rights campaigner Jess Phillips a \u201crape genocide apologist\u201d, and the boss of … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30247\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}