Funniest/Most Insightful . Of The Week At Techdirt

from the new-year,-new-comments dept

This week, both our winning comments on the insightful side come in response to worrisome ruling in California that denied Section 230 protections to Snapchat because it has disappearing messages. In first place, it’s radix with thoughts on the potential implications:

I can’t wait for every document shredding company to be swept up in every mail fraud case. 🙄

In second place, it’s an anonymous comment from an exchange about what exactly the ruling means:

But allowing an intentional design feature, transient messages, to be considered as possibly a defective design is also very worrying.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we’ve got two comments about the Utah governor who is absolutely positive that social media harms kids. First, it’s blakestacey expanding on a couple of specific points in our post:

“However, many of the studies also agree that for a small — but still important — group of teens, social media can exacerbate existing mental health problems, when they seek to use it alone as a kind of medication, allowing them to go deeper.“

And of course, adults never do this.

“That’s not to say there isn’t some sort of mental health crisis going on these days. Almost every expert believes there absolutely is.“

One thing’s for sure: This cannot have anything whatsoever to do with the fact that the world is shit and on fire.

Next, it’s an anonymous response to the Governor saying he’s seen the negative effects on his own kids:

Could it he is the cause of their problems by being over authoritarian, and control everything that they do?

Over on the funny side, for our first place winner we head back to last week’s round-up of the annual winning comments, where one commenter wondered what happens to comments that come in on that post. But I pull comments from Sunday through Saturday each week for these posts, making those comments eligible for this eek. So Pixelation‘s reply handily won in contradiction of itself:

They are lost in the void, never to be counted. An ignominious ending for great comments.

(However in case you are wondering, it did not rack up so many votes that it should have been a late addition to the annual winners.)

In second place, it’s a simple anonymous comment on our post about sending cops to search classrooms for controversial books:

Happy new year 1984!

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with an anonymous comment responding to the assertion that corn subsidies are mainly driving biofuel:

High Fructose Corn Syrup has entered the chat.

Finally, we head back to our post about the governor of Utah for one last anonymous suggestion:

Utah is going about this all wrong

The real way to keep kids off of social media is to make it required and establish minimum post quotas.

That’s all for this week, folks!