'US military develops software to manipulate social media'

[Maerj]

I'm not trying to convince you, since we obviously have different opinions on this and that's fine, but I just don't understand why some things are deemed acceptable under the 'free speech'. Rush Limbaugh has said we should kill all liberals on all college campusses, except for two, to remind everybody of the exterminated ideology. Glenn Beck joked on his show about poisining then-Speaker of the House Pelosi. Sarah Palin drew the crosshairs of a rifle over the name of Congresswomen Gabrielle Giffords --who got shot in the head a week or two later! I don't think any of that is free speech, but incitement to hatred and incitement to violence.

I'm not sure why anyone gets away with those kinds of "speech." In my opinion, that kind of language crosses over from "speech" to generalized "death threats"--which are against the law.

That's what I thought of too, when I read that. I don't listen to those types of radio shows and never even heard of that Michael Savage guy, so I didn't realise that they were saying things like that. Death threats should be a no-no for sure.

[Goliath]

No one has to make the case that what you believe in is hateful. People in power only have to declare it so. Power-hungry people can also be arbitrary.

You're right about that. But, like you said, that would be the fault of the people in power, not of the things I would be saying. So I don't really understand why you made your initial post. Because it doesn't negate the fact that a lot of what I was referring to was hate speech. Not according to me and my personal tastes only, but factually hateful. The intention of the examples used by me was clearly to insult people and to incite hatred against them --or to even threaten them.

I'm not sure why anyone gets away with those kinds of "speech." In my opinion, that kind of language crosses over from "speech" to generalized "death threats"--which are against the law.

They are death threats. But they all get away with it. What if you or I were to say we think the 'New York Times' building should be blown up? If the FBI read anything like that, they had good reasons to at least question us. Yet Ann Coulter said the exact same thing and she's selling millions of books. I guess that's why I always get angry when people (like even Jon Stewart) equate the left-wing pundits to the right-wingers. First of all, there's only a tiny handful of them on the left, so the right far outweighs them. But more importantly, even if you agree that some of them are tools (like Ed Schultz), I've never heard them make those kind of remarks. Never. They have never called for the extermination of anybody. Yet, in the media, it seems to be perfectly okay to compare Rachel Maddow to Bill O'Reilly, just because they work for competing networks on the opposite spectrums of the political divide --which is *insane*!

[David S.]

Movie studios already do this to fake positive reviews and increase hype.

Yes, and I wouldn't be surprised if there have been "shills" for BVHE (or WDHE, or WDSHE, or whatever the heck they are calling themselves these days) on this very board!

[Super Aurora]

slightly off topic but can't help but lol'd at this:

[ajmrowland]

^All I got out of that is the US...............oh.