I’m genuinely curious about how this title was misleading. I have not heard anything about this issue until this link on HN. I did indeed assume the crying was added by AI at the behest of White House staff.
Please don’t misread: I am genuinely curious how I one may have read this another way and how that could have been helped with rewording.
1. "Defends" suggests some level of explanation and justification; the White House did not present any here.
2. "AI image showing arrested woman" could mean a fully-generated image of a woman, rather than editing an image of an existing person under law enforcement control to disguise the actual facts. The first one would be bizarre, the second one is much more problematic.
There is no meaningful difference between a 100% percent fabricated image and a some slightly smaller percentage of a digitally manipulated image when presented from the government as fact. There's no need to split hairs.
It's the difference between drawing a cartoon and editing a photograph; the second one is a definite attempt to misrepresent matters of fact, the first could be argued to be illustrative only.
Oh in my head I just assumed they used AI to generate an image of a woman crying while being arrested from scratch. Given that the white house previously shared AI generated videos of Trump putting a flag on Greenland or dropping feces on protestors, I assumed it was a from-scratch generated image to show something 'aspirational', rather than using AI to edit an existing arrest image.
I mean agree to disagree I guess. If the government was modifying photos to make seemingly innocuous changes to the weather I would have a lot of questions as to why and would indeed hope that someone would report on it.
> … public good to be freely used, modified, and redistributed
That doesn’t mean “free as in beer,” but “free as in speech.” I do understand the potential for misinterpretation, but one could easily add “after paying for it” and those freedoms don’t change.
Free Software should rename to Liberty Software. Instead, advocates loaned Spanish "libre" in the ugly FLOSS acronym (Free/Libre Open Source Software). If only we used "liberty" then we could stop quibbling over the multiple meanings of "free" and just talk about software liberty.
"Free software" is a fine descriptor. It's needlessly confusing to repeat that "beer as in slurred speech" thing, though. Free software can be free "as in beer"[0], but the way it gets said makes it sound like it zero cost software is an anti-goal, rather than pointing out that it's not the true goal. Then the "free as in speech" thing is kind of pointless because you can just say "free as in freedom".
Free software is about fundamental computer freedom -- freedom to own your computer, inspect and modify, etc. -- we already have this word.
[0] where who why free beer ever? 0% relatable, 0/10 would still like a free beer though
Newcomers keep tripping on Free Software vs Freeware, therefore "Free Software" doesn't describe well. We could call it Freedom Software. (There now exist 15 competing jargon files.)
The current socio-political climate is actually making this analogy less US-centric by the day :(
edit: I'm specifically referring to people losing their jobs and similar retaliations due to being on the left, or making public statements that the current administration and supporters don't like.
"People losing their jobs on the right" can, in every case I'm aware of, be reworded as "people losing their jobs because they oppose basic human rights for certain categories of people."
Over the past few decades, and especially since about 2008, "the right" has become the refuge for every kind of bigotry (especially, though not solely, in the USA). Trying to defend that bigotry by crying about political neutrality is...well, to be polite I'll just say it's pretty ugly and leave it at that.
Not as wild of a claim as you might think, as opposition to gay marriage falls starkly along political lines in the US. If you are a republican and you support gay marriage, you are solidly in the minority (41%). 12% of democrats oppose it.
> In May 2025, a record-high 88% of Democrats supported same-sex marriage, support from independents stood at 76%, while Republican support dipped back down to 41%
Due to discrimination and bullying. There goes freedom of expression out of the door. Fortunately that crazy ship has long sailed and nowadays he'd have enough support to resist and publicly voice his opinions without personal attacks.
I think there is a very large difference between citizen activism (i.e. boycotts which can lead to resignations) and government authoritarianism. I have no problem with people exercising their right to free speech - including both Brandon Eich, and Firefox users.
No government official spoke up to have Brandon Eich fired, or bullied him or anything like that. His defenestration wasn't driven by government. Brandon Eich said some things, and the community around him judged those things and reacted to it. That's means that we're not talking about free speech any more. You have no right to speak and force other people to listen without social consequence, you do have a right to speak without the government retaliating. But other people are free to react to your speech as well, and to speak out in opposition to you.
A lawyer once described what you are calling Free Speech as merely "Protection of the First Speech." You believe that Brandon Eich should be able to speak (the first speech), but that the other people around him should not be able to say what they want in reaction to it (the second speech). Brandon Eich did say things without any government retaliation- and the people who worked at Mozilla didn't want to be associated with that, and so he chose to resign before the organization fell apart. Because those people around Mozilla have free speech rights as well, they are not forced to associate with Mozilla.
Similarly, a company choosing to fire an employee because of their speech is not really a free-speech issue. The company can fire you for pretty much any reason (at least in America- some countries have stronger worker protections), because they don't want to be associated with you any more. On the other hand, if a Government official suggests that you should be fired for something you said in your private life, then your free speech rights are being violated, even if the company does not fire you. It is only when the government gets involved that it becomes a Free Speech issue.
Obligatory XKCD to help you understand why you are wrong about what "Free Speech" means: https://xkcd.com/1357/
No need for "government official". There were plenty of non-government official branches such as media and social networks that were demonstrated to work as shadow tools for imposing heavy censorship around specific agendas. Up until the recent election so was the case for the large majority of mainstream social networks and legacy media.
The whole corona fabrication wasn't that long ago when governments directly mandated to silent dissident voices (even the scientific ones) and push a whole group of normal people into burning anyone who'd point out the obvious inconsistencies.
The First Amendment right exists in large part to enable and encourage non-governmental news reporting - to avoid a world in which government officials can dictate "reality" or "truth."
The Guardian is actually a British publication, which is a bit orthogonal from the original discussion of US free speech. It might be more accurate to say that this was part of an international political conversation. This is because Bradon Eich, the leader of an organization which provides products internationally, made public donations to political groups that seek to strip rights from others. He has a first amendment right to do so.
As OP states, the rest of the world has a right (in the US, legally; elsewhere, perhaps morally) to respond to Brandon Eich, and Mozilla. If they believe that his views may influence the organization negatively - either due to bad press or through his other behaviors within the organization - they are also granted free speech to call out this behavior.
What we are seeing now is actual government agencies and officials working hard to remove people from their jobs - both in the public and private sectors - in response to views that don't align with their own.
It's not clear to me what your argument is exactly.
My argument is that he contributed to a ballot initiative that passed (meaning the majority supported it), but he was still targeted and lost his job because media platforms targeted him.
To quote Andrew Sullivan
> "McCarthyism applied by civil actors".
When people with large platforms target you, you're just as screwed regardless of their status as elected officials. To be outraged by one and excuse the other is laughable.
Its not just left. Right had to face this too. As a moderate, it's hilarious sometimes that one side would do something and when the other side does something similar, they are all up in arms about it.
We should be allowed to discuss openly without being worried of losing job and humiliated.
Right now, I cannot discuss openly. Majority are silent. And loud ones are a minority.
Kevin hart losing Oscar hosting for a comment 12 some years ago. People who tried to cancel Eminem for his old songs and Rowan Atkinson's speech comes to mind on the top of my head.
Getting offended is a YOU problem. Not a me problem.
Until it's possible for us from both sides can talk openly, these will continue. Just like opposition political parties when one side is in more power, they will try and punish the other.
Ah, this is the first time I understand the analogy because my mother tongue has two different words for "free", so I did not realize there was a need to differentiate
Neither beer nor speech were the topics of discussion. "Free as in speech rather than free as in beer" is an analogy commonly used to specify that you're talking about freedom rather than money.
I mean, yes and no? In common speech we certainly lean more on Germanic vocabulary (and grammar!), but the dictionary overall has a lot more French/Latin-derived vocabulary than it does Germanic - many of them overly formal/technical for daily speech
(Entertainingly, modern German also adopted the Latin-rooted "gratis")
Today, we take the term "open source" for granted, but this wasn't always the case. There wasn't a single, universally accepted term to describe software that was freely shareable. "Free software" was one of the terms used, but it wasn't clear to non-programmers how this was different from proprietary software that was downloadable without having to pay for it. If you're not a programmer anyway, how should one type of "free software" be different from another?
Proponents of what we now call "open source" wanted to distinguish between two senses of the word "free". One sense is not having to pay for something, as in "Come over to my party, the beer is free." Anther sense is "I can criticize the government, because the country I live in is free." People in the free software and open source movement began to phrase the dichotomy in these terms to illustrate how one sense of the word "free" is much more important than the other. The fact that you don't have to pay for some piece of software is nice, but what's more important is that you aren't beholden to the company that developed it.
I get you - but making it absurd is where my brain went immediately. >.<
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