Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted early Saturday morning that Starlink has been told by some governments to block Russian news sources, but Musk said, “We will not do so…”
In contrast, Apple on March 1st censored Russian state media, RT News and Sputnik News, pulling them from the Apple App Store outside Russia.
Spacex and Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted early Saturday morning that Starlink has been told by some governments to block Russian news sources. However, Musk said, “We will not do so unless at gunpoint. Sorry to be a free speech absolutist.”
Starlink is operated by Spacex. The service “provides high-speed, low-latency broadband internet across the globe,” its website describes.
Many people on Twitter commended Musk for not giving in to government requests.
Replying to this tweet, a Twitter user told Musk, “Russian ‘news’ resources are propaganda resources.” The Spacex boss replied, “All new sources are partially propaganda, some more than others.”
Starlink has been told by some governments (not Ukraine) to block Russian news sources. We will not do so unless at gunpoint.
Sorry to be a free speech absolutist.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 5, 2022
MacDailyNews Take: Don’t be a bit sorry.
Important warning: Starlink is the only non-Russian communications system still working in some parts of Ukraine, so probability of being targeted is high. Please use with caution.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 3, 2022
Obviously, this would negatively affect Tesla, but sustainable energy solutions simply cannot react instantaneously to make up for Russian oil & gas exports.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 5, 2022
Also nuclear is vastly better for global warming than burning hydrocarbons for energy
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 6, 2022
MacDailyNews Take: Musk is correct to stand against censorship, in stark contrast to Apple, which is wrong and, tellingly, rather quick and willing to censor – which is ironic, given the company’s famous “1984” ad (below).
We commend Musk’s stand against censorship. We do not support Apple’s move to censor Russian news outlets.
Musk is right. Cook is wrong.
Musk believes people can actually think for themselves, are not stupid, and do not need to be lead by the nose by Big Tech or anyone else.
Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties. ― John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644
Musk trusts people’s intelligence. As evidenced by his quick move to censor, Cook clearly does not trust people’s intelligence, which is simply antithetical to Apple’s founding ethos.
Musk’s refusal and Cook’s knee-jerk move to censor speak volumes about each each man views other people.
We believe people are smarter than Apple seems to think and that propaganda can and should be seen, not censored, as it tells us more about the perpetrators and their motives than does a vacuum created by censorship.
Apple should rethink their relatively newfound knee-jerk propensity to censor. Apple should not treat their customers as if they’re stupid, unable to handle ideas or discern truth. Apple, or any other Big Tech company, should not be playing Big Brother, arbiter of “truth.”
People who are confident in their ideas and values do not need to impose silence on anyone.
• RT News: https://www.rt.com
• Sputnik News: https://sputniknews.com
People who are confident in their ideas and values do not need to impose silence on anyone.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant.https://t.co/bRFpDInHC0
— MacDailyNews (@MacDailyNews) March 1, 2022
As we often write, the best way to consume “news” is to cast a wide net.
As always, readers of “news” need to consider the sources and interpret what they are are being told accordingly. The more disparate sources you can find, the better. And we don’t mean different newspaper, network, website brands that are all owned by the same conglomerate. Determining the actual ownership of your “news” sources is an investment that requires a bit of time, but it is very enlightening. — MacDailyNews Take, June 17, 2015
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Musk is 100% right. Give Russian “news” agencies the opportunity to report the truth or be in league with the liars. Censorship is not a solution whether the information is deemed religiously, politically, racially, or sexually offensive.
Is a race to the lowest tribal common denominator the answer?
The rule of law has been the most reasonable way for society to manage itself. All those laws essentially define the limits where your freedom ends & where your neighbors’ begins. If an uncivil person can’t restrain himself, society has established procedures to deal with the offender. Speech included.
The naive belief that infinite freedom of speech is a workable answer is fantasy. It’s as ridiculous as pretending mightiest or noble birth or richest person makes the best leader. Why should anyone be allowed to falsely scream Fire in a full theater? Why should it be acceptable for a rich company/executive to be able to kill a small business via a campaign of lies and slander? If humans were completely honest, then “sunlight” would be adequate. Since humans are not, then sunshine needs the force of law to ensure peace.
A major problem of the modern era is that propagandists, many directed by authoritarian regimes, have successfully convinced many idiots of democratic nations that the rule of law is bad. The internet, unrestricted by borders or decent law, has become the misinformation tool of those warmongers who want to take democracies down a notch. They could never defeat allied democratic nations but they never stop attempting to divide and confuse them. Big Tech leaders have been duped by their own greed into spreading lies and divisive toxic propaganda. We see it here on MDN by political operatives every day. If you post here every day that your political party is perfect and others are always wrong, then you are an idiot tool of enemies of democracy. If you tthink more unaccountable lies and propaganda from anonymous foreign cowards is going to make everything great, you’re an idiot.
There are pragmatic solutions to prevent lies, but sunlight is only the first step.
Corporate news outlets did not disclose the money they took to push dangerous drugs to their audiences
Nearly the entire corporate media took money from the Biden Administration to push the vaccines to their audiences without disclosing it…
The Biden Administration’s money did not just pay for pro-vaccine advertising at outlets like Fox and Newsmax: it paid for an outright ban on any negative coverage. There’s a word for that kind of thing, and the word is: propaganda. Corporate news executives with no medical training and no expertise began to make ludicrous announcements that were basically blanket endorsements of the deadly and untested vaccines.
We have just lived through the most extensive propaganda campaign in the history of the world and it was paid for with taxpayer dollars. You paid for it. I paid for it. We will probably never know how much money was spent because, according to a source familiar with the FOIAs, the Biden Administration won’t release the amounts under their “trade secrets” exemption.
— Emerald Robinson, March 5, 2022
Unfortunately, too many people can’t think on their own.
Exactly to have one side completely restricting others views while the other allows it to continue to spread lies unfettered will only make it certain that the former will cut out any opposite view expressed by those it disagrees with all the sooner knowing it’s own message will be left untouched. A lot of lies take an awful lot of work to untangle and experts like Russia know exactly how to manipulate minds far and wide. Totally naive not to see the dangers in that but intelligent comment from MDN has been increasingly rare in recent years.
People who are confident in their ideas and values do not need to impose silence on anyone.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant. – MacDailyNews
And you suggest that you are the bastion of truth and intelligence…hardly.
Leftist views are always about what you think is right and never about choice and freedom to decide on one’s own.
We get it, you’re a Democrat. You’re superior.
(That’s why everything is going so well with Democrats in “control.”)
This is Tim Cook and his ilk in a nutshell:
There is a smug style in American liberalism. It has been growing these past decades. It is a way of conducting politics, predicated on the belief that American life is not divided by moral difference or policy divergence — not really — but by the failure of half the country to know what’s good for them…
By the 1990s the better part of the working class wanted nothing to do with the word liberal. What remained of the American progressive elite was left to puzzle: What happened to our coalition?
Why did they abandon us?
The smug style arose to answer these questions. It provided an answer so simple and so emotionally satisfying that its success was perhaps inevitable: the theory that conservatism, and particularly the kind embraced by those out there in the country, was not a political ideology at all.
The trouble is that stupid hicks don’t know what’s good for them. They’re getting conned by right-wingers and tent revivalists until they believe all the lies that’ve made them so wrong. They don’t know any better…
As anybody who has gone through a particularly nasty breakup knows, disdain cultivated in the aftermath of a divide quickly exceeds the original grievance. You lose somebody. You blame them. Soon, the blame is reason enough to keep them at a distance, the excuse to drive them even further away.
Finding comfort in the notion that their former allies were disdainful, hapless rubes, smug liberals created a culture animated by that contempt. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Financial incentive compounded this tendency — there is money, after all, in reassuring the bitter. Over 20 years, an industry arose to cater to the smug style. It began in humor, and culminated for a time in The Daily Show, a program that more than any other thing advanced the idea that liberal orthodoxy was a kind of educated savvy and that its opponents were, before anything else, stupid. The smug liberal found relief in ridiculing them.
The internet only made it worse…
Nothing is more confounding to the smug style than the fact that the average Republican is better educated and has a higher IQ than the average Democrat…
– Emmett Rensin, Vox (most certainly not a conservative or a conservative outlet)
Can’t wait for the GOP Tsunami to roll across America, washing it clean, on November 8th!
We get it. You’re a Trumper, thus deplorable.
Right on the mark! Exhibit A: First Then
So, you-Mel, or some other “appointed wise,” is here to assist? Or, perhaps they should call you for the honest scoop? Can I assume, you were pleased when TWTR, FB, GOOG stood in the gap as the “appointed wise” to limit info for the betterment of the so called feeble?
Maybe we need to create the Bureau of Proper Thinking.
That would be the App Store and the Applesphere in general
…and I’ve got just the answer for that:
I’ll think for them… and since I’m already engaged in this “thinking” business, I’ll think for you too! In fact, please don’t bother yourself with thinking about anything – just feel. You do the “feeling” and I’ll bother with the whole messy “thinking” thing…
Speaking of imposing silence etc. how’s that free flow of information working out domestically in Putin land?
Musk: “All news sources are partially propaganda, some more than others.”
That’s weak.
If by “weak,” you mean true, you’re correct.
Musk is objectively wrong. His is simplistic thinking, as usual.
Would you characterize the US Constitution is “partially propaganda”?
Are SCOTUS rulings propaganda?
Are scientific peer-reviewed test findings propaganda?
No, no, and no. Propaganda is the anonymous garbage on this website that has nothing to do with the subject or the website mission statement, but repeat shrill claims that your side bad, my side always good with lots of tweety quotes ad nauseum.
Moderation – or censorship, as you characterize everything – is the wise choice to weed the garden.
Nothing weak about it, it is true. OTOH someone who thinks the other side is all propaganda, my side if all the truth, that is the very definition of weak.
Good on Elon Musk for taking this stance. However, if you haven’t noticed there is a nasty war going on in Ukraine and sanctions against Russia are coming in hard and fast from countries, companies and organizations.
If you Tim Cook as wrong you might as well take a swipe at all the other censorship going on. Russian athletes are banned from the current Olympics. Oh yes that’s censorship all right, but circumstances are not normal.
This is what will make this particular war so interesting. Thanks to all the mobile devices, and the networks that Elon Musk will sustain, information will be flowing like crazy. There is a sense to that. There is also a sense to cut off business with countries who take potshots at nuclear facilities.
Have fun making out what’s fact from fiction.
Alright! Good virtue signaling. Wouldn’t be surprised if you say, ‘KEEV’, and couldn’t pick out Ukraine on a map 4 weeks ago. Keep that Twitter going. I do not follow you, nor will I ever.
@James – it’s a bot
I don’t respect Elon Musk, and I don’t think he’s brilliant. I think he was right place, right time, just like Bill Gates, and he exploited everything in spite of creating virtually nothing. He has money. That’s it. Lots and lots of it of it. His rockets keep exploding, after years. That does not make him ‘visionary’, just very, very rich. Like Christina Aguilera.
Self-driving cars will never be a thing on a planet of 7 billion people. Not going to happen, ever. For a useless, very much not bright, tool like him to be saying the things he’s saying – that should wake everyone up – the rest of us non-elites should know better. He is an idiot, and even he can see that because people were so very illogically, and at this point clinically afraid of Trump – sigh. Ad infinitum, sigh.
Modern liberals are clinically insane, and they run Apple. They do not believe in equity or equality, only personal profit – the great irony of their anti-capitalism stance, which is easy, because the most vocal of the millennial class have very generous trust funds. That is a fact. They want to make money; they just don’t want YOU to make money or have any influence, unless it in turn makes them money. Timmy included. As a gay activist, he is something the gay community should be rightly embarrassed by, Has nothing to do with shared humanity or compassion (see: cancel Russia, bit still be in lockstep with China, whose government still kills people on the regular for dissent). Ad nauseam, sigh, and this is the mentality of modern, 21st century, Apple too. There is currently no alternative.
Vote your little behinds off in the midterms, please. Make the West Coast irrelevant.
To Cook defence , he doesn’t have the same power at Apple than Musk at SpaceX. Musk own SpaceX. Cook is fundamentally an administrator and shareholders can become very nervous with cases like this. Only S. Jobs could have said to the shareholders : « I don’t care what you think ». Cook can’t.
But sadly, I pretty sure he is very fine with censure : (