If you run a social network and can’t keep up with moderation for calls for violence you shouldn’t be allowed to be in business. This goes for the big tech companies as well.
in the case of illegal content, this usually isn't something that doesn't exist at all one day and then exists in volumes too big to moderate the next.
> If you run a social network and can’t keep up with moderation for calls for violence you shouldn’t be allowed to be in business. This goes for the big tech companies as well.
This is such a narrow minded view and doesn't hold up to historical precedent.
Was Facebook banned from app stores when shooters live streamed on their platform?
Was Twitter banned from app stores when calls for violence against Nick Sandmann were spreading?
Was Youtube banned from app stores when it was discovered that child predators were lurking in the comments and exploiting underage children?
Chrome allows access to calls to violence.. Google fiber allows access to calls to violence..
Do you really want Google to be the morality police of devices and services you pay for? Because that's sad. It's sad how people adopt authoritarian tendencies because they disagree with people they don't understand.
Hundreds of hours of video is uploaded to Youtube every minute, you can't have people to watch it through all. Twitter has thousands of tweets a second.
It's impossible to manually moderate social media platforms by your standard, it's the whole point of Section 230.
You remove disallowed content when it's discovered. Parler deletes illegal parleys when are notified, they deleted parleys from Lin Wood a few days ago.
Real creators could pay, what, a dollar or five to fund the moderation of their youtube videos. Same for facebook etc.
The idea that every social network deserves to exist on terms that are economically preferable to their owners is not some golden rule. These networks didn't even exist 20 years ago.
Exactly. it’s hard for McDonald’s to manage food safety with thousands of locations, but they don’t just go “oh well I can’t be watching everything”. They spend the money making sure everything is fine.
Do you think fast food startups aren’t required to comply with FDA, OSHA regs, etc to the same extent as McDonalds? It’s a higher barrier to entry, yes, but not impossible.
The brand new local pizza bar is held to the same standards as McDonald’s. If you can’t afford to do business safely and legally than you can’t afford to do business. Either scale down your plans or come up with a new idea.
It is always subjective, the entity in power get to decide the rule, in this case google is the entity in power. Its not enough to have rule that says 'illegal content not allowed', in the case of play store it has to be 'illegal content (according to google) not allowed'
My point is that there is an age-old institution to solve this problem, called a court. We all participate in a social contract where the court's decisions about subjective matters have the force of law.
Where it gets weird is that Twitter also has an explicit user contract with the underlying USA social contract/courts as a dependency! If you could physically live in Twitter apartments, and somehow remain safe from war, why not only depend on the Twitter contract and its moderation system? And that's how we get to the future world of Snow Crash.
I'm downvoting you because you know the answer to those questions. You know exactly what speech is protected by the 1st and what isn't. Parler is not removing illegal speech, therefore their apps are being taken down. It's pretty simple.
Reddit seems to have just as much illegal content. All of this just seems like empty virtue signaling by tech companies way too late to actually change anything.
I'm saying that if it's about illegal content, why make these moves now when there's been illegal content on Parler before today, as well as illegal content that existed on other apps in the past.
There is always a threshold. It isn’t one piece of illegal content that gets something banned outright. So we are just talking about where the line in the sand is drawn.
Most of the big tech companies have been taken over by activist employees anyways. Look at coinbase. They had to do a purge just to get rid of the employees that weren't working and focusing on non-company issues instead.
Palantir also had to completely leave because there was so much pressure being put on them in the valley.
I don't know much about parler, but Reddit just removed r/donaldtrump and banned the most egregious mod of r/conspiracy. It's also a much bigger site, so there are going to be more people talking on it, but they are at least taking steps to prevent this kind of content.
Yes and virtue signalling that will only drive a large segment of public opinion highly against them. I'm completely against Trump but doing a mass political purge of everything associated him will only prove a lot of the things his rabid followers say about social media platforms as true. I'm just hoping it won't be followed by employee retribution for holding political views that agreed with the president. We don't need more division in this country.
> We're sorry, the requested URL was not found on this server.
Is this link right? How about a link to an article instead? What is Parler? Why is it suspended? What is the story for those of us who are just tuning in now?
Parler is an app many of the American Conservatives go to now that their speech is restricted on Facebook and Twitter. But Apple (and Google) don't like how Parler was used to organize the protests/riots at The Capitol.
Parler is a twitter competitor. After Donald Trump and several other people were banned from Twitter and Facebook, people were thinking about moving over to Parler.
After about a day Google and Apple banned Parler from their appstores. Four big tech giants Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter - they are cooperating and coordinating in destroying people they don't like.
At this point this fourheaded beast is the most powerful force on this planet.
Trump is not the first one this happens to. Alex Jones faced a similar situation. The Gab app was also taken down in coordination.
And besides they were itching to ban Trump before this already. Twitter was very clearly hinting that Trump would be banned the day he was no longer president. This protest just made it happen two weeks early.
Making a competing smartphone ecosystem isn't exactly a weekend project. Apple and Android know perfectly well how ittle competition they have. That's why they know they can get away with being user hostile.
Parler is where people who were too openly racist for Reddit or Twitter go, because they won't get kicked off for planning coup attempts, or opining that Hitler did nothing wrong.
Apparently the modern state of both American "conservatism" and a chunk of newsy posters feel that Google and Apple should be forced to host them.
It was until liberals started to run big businesses, that wasn't supposed to happen, so now companies engaging in freedom of association is actually socialism. Those hippies and nerds weren't supposed to run the show
Partially, regulation is one thing but being able to kick someone out of your establishment is also part of the law that has been upheld by the Supreme Court and in the constitution. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of communication platforms on the Internet. If Twitter was the only communication platform, then I would be very upset about this decision.
There are some companies that I do not think should be allowed to ban people, like ISPs.. since many times people don't have choices between multiple high-speed ISPs. However, Twitter is not in that same category.
Ok, so ISP's shouldn't ban people but they're allowed to be monopolies in the first place!? Internet and critical infrastructure is not considered utilities, let private enterprise take care of the most important connection to the outside world - the internet. What could go wrong!?
Note clearly - I am not condoning ISPs banning people. I am highlighting the hypocracy in a lot of contemporary conservative principles. It's not the Lincoln party we know of.
Free market principles, at least. But regardless of the political orientation of the view, it always seems to last only as long as they happen to agree with the political implications of the company's decisions
None of these monstrous corporations would exist in anything resembling their current form without a tremendous amount of regulation that entangles government deeply in the affairs of these private companies. So that ship has sailed, you might say.
It's legal for entities outside the government to censor things. IANAL so if I'm wrong let me know. But my understanding is that censorship is perfectly fine for any company.
I find undesirable to buy a phone where a company can arbitrarily decide what I am and am not allowed to run on my device. Because economies of scale make things cheaper if many people want them and because I generally believe in fighting the power of arbitrary or harmful corporate decisions, I try to convince others of the importance of this "feature" (really it's more of a lack of an anti-feature).
Luckily you can still sideload apps on Android. The day they remove that feature is the day I take the time to figure out how to use an alternate OS.
Yes. NYT is making an editorial decision. Google publishing an app is much more akin to you making a phone call - they are the carrier, nothing else, because they control the end of line.
Phone companies also have terms of service. Here’s AT&T’s:
> AT&T may immediately terminate all or a portion of your Service or reduce or suspend Service, without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes (a) is illegal, fraudulent, harassing, abusive, or intended to intimidate or threaten; (b) constitutes a violation of any law, regulation, or tariff (including, without applicable policies or guidelines (including the Acceptable Use Policy), and AT&T may refer such use to law enforcement authorities without notice to you.
Parler wasn’t pulled from Google’s app store for discussion of Conservative policy. It was pull for hate speech, incitement, and for the illegal conspiracies being plotted. Plus Parler isn’t enforcing their own terms of service.
If it was just politics then Google would also pull New Republic magazine.
Apple has said that they need to step up their moderation game and they can get back into the App Store. I’m guessing that would be good enough for Google as well.
Real censorship means that the government prosecutes you for speech, no matter where or how or to whom are you saying it. That was happening in parts of Europe from 1945 to 1990. This what is happening in USA right now is nowhere near that. It's just free market. If you're banned from a certain platform you can reach your audience in another way. No one is censoring your speech. It's just a certain company not wanting to serve a particular user. If it was actual censorship then you wouldn't be able to even print it on paper and distribute in your neighborhood.
Free speech != guaranteed access to a company providing access to a big audience
> This what is happening in USA right now is nowhere near that
It's going to happen. These platforms are so large they encompass a signification amount of the communication market .. and I don't say that lightly. Look at how Facebook has literally gobbled up all its competition and now is pushing policies that make WhatsApp and Oculus useless without handing over full control of all your accounts and devices?
These companies ARE STATES! They may not look like governments, but the communication power they wield is stronger than many nations.
You can no longer just say "They're private companies" when you literally cannot buy a well supported Mobile device unless it runs Android or iOS, unless you have the skill, ability and time to run something like a PinePhone or PostmarketOS.
Why this assumption that you need a smartphone? That's patently silly. Your life and liberty do not depend on you owning a smartphone. This is an app on an app store. Do I think it's a great precedent to set? Not really, despite my political beliefs being heavily progressive. But this overblown reaction is bananas.
Like, my life is proceeding just fine without either WhatsApp or Oculus products. Or a Facebook account that I use, for that matter.
(edit: For the record, the reason I am not happy with the precedent is that isolating communities like this seems to usually just serve to increase radicalism rather than remove it.)
> Your life and liberty do not depend on you owning a smartphone
Modern life absolutely depends on being able to connect to the Internet in some way. For a lot of people, that's a smartphone, which is cheaper and more mobile than a computer.
I got my first smartphone in 2019 because I watched the world around me gradually change to the point where an Apple or Android phone was expected and became inconvenient not to have.
Apparently WhatsApp is so integrated into several countries' cultures, you cannot live without it. Like literally - some examples I remember are food deliveries (during lockdowns) are only available through WhatsApp, as are scheduling hospital visits, anything involving schooling, I think I remember lawyers sharing documents, and so on.
I think the solution is to simply break the network effect by mandating a right to transfer your account and a guarantee of interoperability. This would reinvigorate the competition
I made this comment in another thread but I think we are few year from it being forced by the Supreme Court as it has ruled very close to this in the past.
> ... noting that ownership "does not always mean absolute dominion." The court pointed out that the more an owner opens his property up to the public in general, the more his rights are circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who are invited in.
This actually isn't the case as long as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act exists [1].
The section has two parts, the first of which protects the platform (Twitter, Google Play Store, FB, etc) from prosecution for user-generated content on the platform.
The second part, more relevant here, ensures the right of the platform to moderate it's users anyway it sees fit. If r/conservative can ban anyone for saying anything on the subreddit, or Parler can ban you for dropping leftist talking points, the Play Store can ban your app for enabling domestic terrorism.
If the Supreme Court chooses to go down the route I have described the content of section 230 has no bearing on the discussion as ruling on this matter as a First Amendment issue would invalidate the needed parts of the Communications Decency Act.
For the sake of our freedoms let’s hope Twitters right to decide who gets to use their property and distribution remains. Otherwise it’s a tragedy of the commons as every platform devolves into the lowest common denominator.
Taking this to its logical conclusion, if you used the “login with X” feature (X being Apple, Google, Facebook), and you suddenly find yourself deplatformed, what are the knock-on consequences?
I don’t have a huge problem deplatforming itself. I do have serious problems when it suddenly cuts you off from other unrelated websites or paid-for assets. These knock-on effects aren’t immediately obvious and can be quite severe at the individual level (eg FB locking you out and now you can’t access the local Oculus content you paid for).
In my opinion, the solution needs to be a guarantee of transfering your account to another provider. We can do it with phone numbers, we can do it with banks (at least in Europe). I don't see a reason why we couldn't apply the same on social media and auth providers.
Banned from "login with apple"? I should have a right to transfer my account to "login with google/facebook/my own server" and it should work. The same way I can call my friend when he transfers his phone number to another phone network.
Trump banned from Twitter? He should be able to transfer his account to Parler and I should still see his tweets in my Twitter feed, be able to retweet it to my followers, interact with it, etc. Twitter wouldn't be able to influence tweets from Parler so it would show in timeline. But they could decide to not display it in proprietary parts of their system (search, trending topics, whatever)
This way we would prevent echo chambers and deplatforming, while simultaneously allowing companies to maintain their freedom to moderate their own space.
You might be interested in the "fediverse" then. One instance can ban you but you can make an account in others and still interact with people from your old instance.
Censorship has a very simple definition, and it can be conducted by private companies. From Wikipedia:
“Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient." Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions, and other controlling bodies.”
“Real” censorship is just censorship, and that’s the definition.
The reason I used the word "real" is probably because of my environment (ex-communist european country). I was born after the fall of communism, but of course the environment has a big influence on the lens through which you see things (family, friends, stories, history classes, etc.)
So when I see what is called censorship in US, it seems a bit funny and strange to me. I immediately think how people in my country during communism would be happy if only that was called censorship and if they had a possibility to use alternative channels to exercise free speech. But of course, I accept that this might be my biased eurocentric view of things and that from a different cultural perspective "real" means something else. Perhaps it will be like that even in Europe in a few years, who knows. We don't have much problems for now because we all use US social media and they don't really react to foreign languages, except a few universal "trigger" words like antivax. At least for smaller languages and countries (central and eastern europe)
Present-day social media censorship in the US is not "just free market", and is markedly similar to the kind I experienced growing up in a now-ex-communist eastern European country in the 1970s-1980s. Outright bans were not politically tenable by then, but forcing the opposition to express their views on fringe "alternative" channels was a popular strategy [1].
WeChat does not let you share Winnie the Pooh. Nominally, Tencent is a privately owned company freely choosing who they provide a platform to [2]. But in reality, they have no choice but to ban Winnie the Pooh, unless they want a state apparatus to make their lives increasingly difficult. Just because something is censored by a private platform doesn't mean that it's the "free market" of ideas and not a state or the government wielding its power.
Large US companies are also part of an industrial–congressional complex, with lobbying and political contributions on one side, political approval and threats of regulation on the other. Large tech companies are deeply and inseparably intertwined with the state and the political parties (both of them), based on the granting of reciprocated privileges. They know full well that if they ban the wrong speech (or refuse to ban the "right" speech), they face being regulated out of existence. Indeed, seeing this threat, we see them scramble to align with the incoming administration.
The kind of social engineering that led to the present bans was very popular in communist Eastern Europe as well. Did you recite an anti-government poem at your barbecue? You might find yourself banned from your favorite pub permanently! Why? Nominally, it was the bartender exercising his right not to serve you: after all, he shouldn't have to suffer potentially vocal ("verbally aggressive") imperialists in the establishment he runs. But behind the nominal reason was plain, state-mandated censorship. They'd have risked a bunch of misfortunes by not banning you. These could range from relevant, like the next few beer shipments "mysteriously" getting damaged during delivery, to completely random gaslighting-esque punishments, such as the bartender's daughter not getting admitted into the local high school. A plethora of plausibly deniable, no-outright-ban social mechanisms existed to make life difficult for people who disagreed with the official narrative, and to encourage people to ostracize the disagreeable. It required only a few well-placed entryists, made sure that ordinary citizens had skin in the game, and was a lot easier to handwave away than the black cars and heavy-handed approach that riled up the opposition in the previous years [3].
Sometimes I feel that the free market argument doesn't apply to media platforms. This is because the effectiveness of a media platform (or any mass media, for that matter) is largely determined by its market/usage share; in other words, smaller or alternative media platforms cannot be considered as a working substitution to the dominate platforms. And since the user distribution of social media tends to follow the power law (i.e. the "can't switch 'cause all my friends are using it and they won't switch due to the same reason" phenomenon), it is almost inevitable that a single platform will eventually monopolise the sector if left unregulated. banning a user from using the most popular media channel would mean he/she is no longer able to communicate his/her opinion effectively even he/her is able to choose a less popular alternative.
tl;dr: one can always switch their phone if they don't like Apple because the usefulness of a phone doesn't depend on its popularity; one can't practically switch their social media platform if they are banned because the usefulness of the social media depends on its popularity, and the most popular platform typically dominates due to the power law.
> Free speech != guaranteed access to a company providing access to a big audience
If that's what were happening you'd probably have a point, but it isn't. "Not deleting" something is not the same as providing the audience, nor amplifying.
And, by the way, yes free speech does imply some obligations on the rest of us. Speech is not free if you are not free to exercise it; "you're free to talk in a prison cell" type of thinking isn't productive because it avoids the entire conversation.
Free speech has absolutely nothing to do with the government, by the way. Just because one country wrote down something called "The 1st Amendment" doesn't mean that somehow free speech only exists in that country and only when the government gives it to you. Free speech is a natural right that we all have and nobody has the right to silence anyone else: The 1st is simply one aspect of that.
The fact that society at large has lost that value cannot be viewed as a good thing and all the people in this thread defending the silencing of millions because they disagree with them politically is beyond shameful.
You have never had the right of free speech on someone else’s property. This is not new in any way.
I realize that there are some court cases that do guarantee free speech in extremely limited circumstances, but saying that society at large has “lost that value” doesn’t line up with any history that I’m aware of.
This is a good point that isn't emphasized in this thread. A lot of people seem very upset about one mechanism of dissemination no longer being available, and treating it as though the content of the message boards are now illegal.
This line of argument is always going to end up accidentally side-loading authoritarianism into the American system. The logical conclusion is that the government should force Google to carry speech, and that is a bad idea.
Yes, but that also requires adopting a rather expansionist idea of corporate power and freedom of speech, even compared to post-Citizens-United America. Restricting a private actor from removing content they don't like creates a positive duty to publish content. For example, Net Neutrality regulation was legally opposed specifically on 1st Amendment grounds, and that was a far looser regulation than what would be necessary to prohibit social media companies from making political decisions about what to publish.
More concretely, YouTube has actual knowledge that extremist right-wing political views damage their brand reputation - they've gone through several waves of pulled advertising that has harmed both themselves and their relationship with their creators. Advertisers have told them in no uncertain terms that they will not have their content on the same platform as, say, KKK rallies. So now we need to extend this positive duty to publish onto anyone who does business with these platforms, in order to prevent them from exercising the power of the purse to soft-censor views they don't like.
Furthermore, even this "duty to publish" standard for free speech does not always seem to meet the standards of some. I've heard people (not necessarily you, so the following is a strawman) argue that public rebuke is a form of censorship; if only because it may cause adverse publicity to have one's views opposed. This is absurd; the prescribed answer to offensive speech is counter-speech. If people decide not to do business with someone because they find their political views offensive, that shouldn't automatically be treated as censorship. Even at a "duty to publish" level (what you actually seem to be arguing for), you need to be careful to define common carriers narrowly to avoid forcing people into unwanted relationships, lest you run into this trap of "speech is consequence-free".
Look at it this way: when private companies censor something the user has the option to go elsewhere to exercise their speech. When the government does it, they can't go anywhere.
In this case, if a significant number of people are disenfranchised by this, it will naturally create the market pressure for a solution that they can use. It will spur adoption of tools like F-droid and open devices etc. It'll force these people to embrace open web technologies instead of proprietary ecosystems. Which are all very positive and healthy things.
It may be very inefficient, but to some extent its a healthy process that ultimately arbitrates where acceptable standards of speech sit.
If there were a large, vibrant community of public squares, I'd very much agree with you; the problem is that the network effect means that there will only ever be 2-3 big ones. It's a form of natural monopoly if not monopoly-in-fact and that has to be accounted for if "the people" are to remain in control of their ability to exercise their rights.
So, one solution would be to foster an environment where Twitter et.al lose their power because they really CAN'T lock people in anymore and I would absolutely love to see such a future.
But unfortunately that isn't where we are right now and the incentives around us are all set up to ensure it never changes.
So the government should be able to force your business to do something against your will? That doesn't sound like free market of which USA, and particularly conservatives, are so proud of.
The government forces businesses to do things against their will all the time. So much so that most big businesses have compliance departments to ensure they're doing everything the government requires them to do.
In fact there have been many laws requiring companies to carry messages against their will, including the Fairness Doctrine, the Equal-Time Rule, and Common Carrier laws, as well as the failed, but generally regarded as Constitutional, Net Neutrality proposals.
The FDA forces food standards. Should the government really be able to prevent a farm from cutting your meat with sawdust?
Should government really keep pharma companies from selling you pills that are filled with snake oil?
Should a government really force you to allow black people to eat at the same tables in your restaurant as white people? It's your business after all and it's private. You should have a choice on which customers you get to serve.
The above poster does have an important point: Freedom from speech also includes freedom from compelled speech.
The things you listed entail selling materially defective good, and discrimination on the basis of race and gender. These are not examples of compelled speech. Here are some more applicable questions:
* Can the government force Hacker News not to flag and hide certain posts?
* And the government make a bookseller to stock certain types of books?
* Could Trump pass a law or executive order to make Twitter revoke his ban?
* Can the government official compel a newspaper to print certain content?
The last one was actually addressed in a Supreme Court ruling [1].
Freedom of speech includes freedom from compelled speech. It's also against the law to tell a person or business to print or say something, or not ban certain content. Sure, if a business exclusively bans content based on the race of the poster they they could fall afoul of anti-discrimination laws. But note that it wasn't the content of the speech that matters here, it is the discriminatory nature on the basis of race.
These protections don't magically go away when a company grows to a certain size or number of users. Market share is relevant to things like anti-trust and anti-competitive behavior, but the people claiming that Facebook or Twitter have to run content because they're big are incorrect.
The exceptions to protection from compelled speech are very narrow, like showing your passport at the border and nutrition labels on food or health warnings on cigarettes. They almost always have a direct and tangible safety or administrative justification. Furthermore, political speech is the most protected form of speech in the US by far. I would be astounded if we ever pass legislation compelling platforms like Facebook or Twitter to host content against their will.
I agree that the principles of inclusion and freedom of speech should be upheld by Facebook and Twitter, but I strongly disagree that they should be enforced by the government. I could see wisdom in making ISPs, payment providers, and DNS providers act like utilities and extend services to all lawful customers, but not at the application layer.
I think the answer here is that all the above is legal until the PEOPLE OF THE US choose it isn't, by voting. In all the above cases the people of the US elected officials who were saying they would take such actions. That means the people gave up their rights to sell sawdust as meat, sell fake medical products, and implement racist policies.
Do remember, it's a democracy. The government by the people, for the people and all that. Not the people VS the government.
It is also difficult for me to imagine that the government would compel private businesses to transmit speech inciting or coordinating riots at the capitol.
Even if the heavy hand of regulation were applied to private corps, it seems like they'd still draw the line somewhere.
> So the government should be able to force your business to do something against your will?
This ship sailed 50 years ago, I'm afraid. Businesses can no longer discriminate (including refusal to serve) on the basis of race, gender, religion, disability, veteran status, and a variety of other factors. Now, this is almost certainly a good thing - there's been a few negative consequences of the change (destruction of black businesses, for one) but on net it's not really close.
So really all people are asking for is "political affiliation" to be looked at like "religion". And honestly, there's a smaller and smaller set of differences between the two categories as the years go by.
the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.
That's what I saw daily under military dictatorship in South Korea in the 1970s and 80s. My Time magazine would arrive with gaping holes where pages had been cut out. These days the scissors in the US are virtual, but the goal is the same: suppression of political speech and news deemed heretical to one's ideological viewpoint. If you approve of censorship. try China, all the public rhetoric is very clean and faultlessly progressive.
I think companies should have the right to censor their products in very specific situations, but they should be grilled like they are when it happens so we can debate it with transparency. I am not condoning governments to censor, I think you are reading way too much into my comment.
The compliant Korean media companies under the military then and the Chinese ones like TenCent now craft their censorship to the ideological winds of the state. Silicon Valley under Biden will likely exactly mirror state ideology and indeed participate in its making. We're seeing before our eyes the creation of a one-party discourse system, where unapproved ideas will be extirpated from public forums as "hate speech".
Why does one mean it isn't the other? Clearly it's both. It's just not government censorship, for which there's a bit of text in the US bill of rights.
Agreed: Internet, like water, is a market failure and should be a public utility. c: That way, your DDoS protection & hosting is subject to First Amendment protections.
We spent the last four years waxing philosophical about how social media influenced the 2016 election, I think it's time to admit that these aren't _just_ private companies and there's a very real risk that this wave of censorship has far-ranging consequences.
Maybe there should be government regulation. That’s my personal opinion. Or laws to create and define new category for social media alongside publishers and news organizations.
It's not really a free market that's why these tech companies all have anti trust investigations. This is censorship. It's just censorship lots of us agree with.
Private companies in the same sense that Marx described democratic capitalism as the best outcome for corporations because it provides the illusion of separation while being unduly connected through monetary incentives?
It's corporate censorship and not government censorship. Corporate censorship is legal to a point. We see now Corporate and State are highly aligned in every possible way. The party Big Tech supports now has control over the House, the Senate and the Executive Branch.
In which fantasy world is the consolidation of power ever good for a democracy?
The free market approach requires antitrust. It's disingenuous to defer to free market rules when we have big government and big tech so deeply entrenched and largely unchecked.
Censorship opposes the free market of ideas. Maybe it's a private company, but it doesn't make sense to use that principle to justify a behavior that kills free markets, economic or not.
At best it's hypocritical, taking advantage of competition at the market level, but then preventing that competition within your company, then praising one and condemning the other. It's not consistent, platforms need to be platforms and let the information flow instead of control it.
Corporate sponsorship under pressure from “woke” customers is in fact a manifestation of free markets. These corporations are making editorial decisions based on what their customers want. Right now their customers want less overt coordination of political violence on their platforms. Therefore the platforms are complying.
Are you saying companies should comply with whatever market pressures they have regardless of the outcome (given a free market)? Because oil companies have an interesting history of abusing this. Surely there is a line, however blurry, that companies shouldn't be crossing if they want to keep the greater good in mind.
Given that many of these tech "platforms" are worldwide, and have slowly dominated the world's userbase BEFORE changing their policies, it's easy to see they might have already crossed that line, we're just not sure exactly how yet (at least imho).
Large companies are part of an industrial–congressional complex, with lobbying and political contributions on one side, political approval and threats of regulation on the other.
Just because something is done by a private company, it doesn't mean that it's not the state or the government wielding its power. In the current political climate, and given how intertwined corporations and state power are in the US, trying to maintain a crisp distinction between private companies and public authority is itself comical.
Thinking that Baidu banning photos of the Tiananmen Square protests is not the Chinese administration exercising its power, because the banning itself is done by a private company? Yeah, that would be comedy stuff.
In China as in the U.S., these are not local mom-and-pop stores exercising their rights to free association. These are large tech companies and business ventures that are deeply and inseparably intertwined with the state and the political parties (both of them), based on the granting of reciprocated privileges. They know full well that if they ban the wrong person (or refuse to ban the right person), they face being regulated out of existence the next day: indeed, seeing this threat, they're scrambling to align themselves with the incoming administration. Yes, they had deals with the previous administration too [1].
Exactly this. If I start a private enterprise, I'll be damned if somebody dictates that they have a private right to do or say some particular thing on services I pay hosting for.
Corporations are not beholden to pleasing every single individual.
I’m going to lend your neighbours a huge sound system so they can use their free speech to play the darkest industrial techno outside your door at 4am.
I’m obviously joking, but would it be okay for me to use my platform this way? If not, why not?
Until people whose brains have been melted by Parler influencers start calling you with death threats because they believe you’re a treasonous antifa instigator.
No, they're having trouble trying to say that they agree with the values held by the people who tried to stage a coup, without saying quiet part out loud.
- Twitter has suspended both General Michael Flynn, President Trump's first National Security Adviser, and attorney Sidney Powell. Also less know users.
- Twitch and Snapchat disabled Trump's accounts.
- Shopify took down two online stores affiliated with the president.
- YouTube says it's accelerating its enforcement of voter fraud claims against President Trump and others based on Wednesday's events.
- TheDonald.win lost a host (but has backups)
- Facebook has banned Brandon Straka and removed his #WalkAway campaign on the site, an initiative consisting of over half a million users.
Edit:
Not sure why a list of facts is being downvoted?
The ways to profit from Trump are shrinking and the chances his vindictive actions can affect companies have vanished. So there is no longer a good reasons to associate with his toxic brand. Companies can virtue signal with little to no repercussions now.
What is the alternative? Do you think that the government should nationalize private companies? Or perhaps they should dictate to them who should be their clients? If a company like Google doesn't want to do business with Parler, that is their right. That is free market. If the market didn't agree with it, the free market forces would make sure that Google dwindles and another company replaces them.
Google and Apple have a duopoly. In the wake of 2016 we collectively agreed that Big Tech has the ability to influence elections, now is the time to think about how to protect our democracy.
My take is simple: either treat social media conglomerates like we do telecom or break them up like we did AT&T.
I agree with breaking up companies which are monopolies/duopolies. But why do you think that those broken up companies wouldn't behave the same in this case (ban Trump, Parler, etc). If that's what the majority of users want, then such decisions increase their profit. If there was 5 mobile OS/store companies today, I'm pretty sure the same would happen on all 5.
I agree, it's probably wishful thinking. My hope would be that "we don't ban anything that's not explicitly illegal" would be a profitable stance for at least one of the competing app stores.
If that's what the majority of their users want, why shouldn't they ban those services? What better proxy is there for what they should do? Aren't they beholden to their users and shareholders? Is the suggestion that all platforms have to cater to the most vocal minority? That doesn't seem like a good strategy.
I think you're wrong. These companies are very aware of what their customers/users think (think of all the data!). It's asinine to think that these companies, with corporate boards and a legal mandate to produce profit, would just out some amount of users and reduce revenue. They clearly don't think the amount of users they are affecting with these actions are significant enough to damage them, especially compared to the costs of enabling these domestic terrorists.
These groups are not some good ol boys looking to have measured debate about monetary policy. They are literally trying to kill elected officials and undermine democracy.
More directly, the average voter very clearly seems to care, when you're looking at these actions in an economic light.
Never let a good crisis go to waste. I think we are seeing the beginning of a purge of a certain line of thought from the internet, using a few crazy people as the catalyst.
Primarily right-wing apps, websites, subreddits, communities. I'm afraid there will be attempts to cite some kind of complicity and ban them.
I'm troubled by it because right-wing != violent, and 74 million people voted for the republican candidate. Continuing to disenfranchise their speech options will not go well.
It’s not platforms fault that certain communities are much more likely to violate basic rules.
If reddit creates a rule stating “do not threaten or advocate for violence” and in the process of enforcing that rule they find out that certain groups are disproportionately affected, should they continue equally apply the rule or should they start tallying things up to make sure they ban equal amounts of each group?
How do you reconcile that Google News still caries New Republic and The New American and lots of other Conservative publications. They don’t seem anti-conservative, just anti-extremist.
Newspapers and magazines have always had a choice who or what to print in their papers. TV and radio stations have always had a choice who or what to air. Why shouldn't social media companies have the same liberties?
Social media companies are protected by Section 230 while newspapers and magazines aren't. If social media companies are going to act like newspapers and magazines then they shouldn't be shielded from liability for their content.
Which is a fair comment to make, but ultimately without the protection of Section 230, Twitter or Facebook would have never allowed Trump on the platform in the first place. The risk of being held accountable (ie. lawsuits, defamation suits, etc) for the content he posted would have been too great.
Removing Section 230 wouldn't have the effect people like to think it would.
Online newspapers and magazines frequently allow comments from readers, and they are absolutely protected by section 230 for the same reason that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are.
There was no "network effect" deterring me from dropping the NYT. These social media platforms, and the internet in general-- which are entirely "private"-- are the new public square.
Twitter, Facebook, et al just excluded leading conservative voices from the public square.
Then nationalize them or make them a public and/or Government agency (in a fair market fashion, by petitioning the Government to make them an offer to buy them out). But as long as they're a private company they get the same protections and liberties as all the rest.
They are not a public square. They are not the government.
They are a private company that needs to do business to stay alive. Other companies can choose not to do business with them based on the content that's on their site. If they fail to satisfy their customers, they die.
They cannot satisfy the whims of those who pay nothing and demand a megaphone. They owe you, and your beliefs, nothing.
Civilized (and sometimes boorish) people today go to the Internet to communicate. That's what we're doing right now.
Maybe if you (or I) were banned from HN, no big deal, find some other corner of the Internet to shout from. FB and Twitter are the modern public fora however, they have through moats or whatever business tactics, made other fora far less significant, and in terms of discussion space they are a very big deal. You might be correctly repeating legal principles as they appear in last year's hornbook, however, the books will eventually change.
If Cloudflare and Google together delisted and deplatformed anyone repeating any words of the President or major conservative leaders -- that would undermine a core tenet of our democratic society. That would be an obvious affront to first principles. I'm not sure FB and Twitter are greatly removed from that hypothetical.
What makes these companies the "new public square"? Some threshold for use? Is the "real" public square no longer the public square? If FB/Twitter/etc, are the public square, then the government should own them, right? Or does this mean private property can be a public square now and deserves protections because of it?
If I build the biggest coffee shop my small town has ever seen and it becomes ridiculously popular, is it the new public square and I'm no longer allowed to kick out people for being assholes?
This "big website is popular so now we must treat it as public space" is a take that I see kicked around but has lots of holes in it.
But it's different. There was a time when anyone could start a newspaper. There was a time when people had FM transmitters in their backyard. It became more expensive and the FCC started slicing up FM spectrum so everyone wouldn't trample over each other.
Media was once free and then collapse to be owned by ABC, NBC, CBS and a few dozen newspapers.
This was originally about network neutrality, but it applies to what we're seeing right now:
Anyone can start a social media network. Twitter has competition in the form of the relatively-new Parler, which has welcomed controversial voices - and has gained significant traction among them.
You can feel free to create your own too. Social media platforms existed before Twitter and Facebook, and eventually other platforms will succeed Twitter and Facebook.
Can it be expensive to start a company from scratch? Yes, it can. But that has always been the case.
I don't. Making something popular requires a tonne of work. Again, this has always been the case, even for traditional physical products. If you're going to make a competitor for something, expect an uphill battle.
As I said, there were social networks before Twitter, Facebook, and Parler, and there will be social networks afterwards.
>But it's different. There was a time when anyone could start a newspaper
starting a newspaper is significantly more costly and difficult than starting a social media app. You're confusing the fact that websites like Parler are so toxic that nobody wants to do business with them with the inability of actually starting it, which anyone with a laptop can do on a weekend.
The purge has been happening for years. I hate how people on HN is praising this. There are literally few alternatives for the average person apart from Google and eyeProducts. I have a PinePhone, but what percentage of America can truly put in the effort to use one? <1%.
If you cannot install an run your own software on a device, you do not own the device.
You cannot praise the removal of Gab or Parlor now and complain later when they take everything else from you. They can increase the Apple developer fees whenever they want. What happens when they start charging you $2,000 a year or $4,000 a year for the right to publish apps? What happens when the two big platforms decide no one can push an app unless their platform has full moderation.
What happens when Google and Apple, for your safety, say all user contributed content must go through their "spam" filter first for any apps?
This is horrific. You may not like Parlor, but it will not stop here. This is a dangerous place we are in and we should all be horrified by it. People are horrified right now, but they're focused on the wrong thing.
I think one potentially positive outcome is increased knowledge of side-loading apps. Granted, this really only exists as an option on Android but Fortnite demonstrated the feasibility of this approach. If side-loaded apps gain traction it might break the Google Play store monopoly.
I'm not sure if a fractured internet is more likely to lead to a fractured Union as compared to an internet were a substantial segment of the population feels suppressed. I highly doubt that these bans are going to be effective in terms of curbing undesirable communication. On the other hand, I am confident that they will reinforce perceptions of biased and uneven enforcement.
I am also particularly worried that politicians will use the threat of regulation to coerce companies into suppressing political opponents' messages. The government can't directly ban speech, but if they can intimidate platforms into censuring political opponents they will have achieved the same effect. Better, in fact, because the politicians' agency in this censorship is not visible.
Easy. Tech giants have means to control all public speech and information exchange. -> they ally with political party -> ensure they win elections, fairly or whatever, no one will be able to tell the story that votes are counted unfairly -> install an unremovable authoritarian dictatorship. Which might have imitation elections & stuff, just like USSR had.
And then, 'correction' camps for people that do not fully fit this new beautiful society.
How much insurrection is acceptable before the tradeoff of a 'new beautiful society' is the better deal? Both sound like bad outcomes. Neither sounds obviously superior.
the insurrection is the political classes fault! if they hadnt shown the right that they were ok with burning cities the right wouldnt have had enough and actually did something. Sure the political class is going to make examples because this wasnt approved like the other but now their own words are getting thrown at them. granted a civil war will make the soviet collapse look like a cakewalk so im not preaching for that but holy damn. and it doesnt help this censorship means 40% of the country will think there is indeed a conspiracy now and will cause more unrest which will cause more more tyranny which will cause more unrest which causes a giant feedback loop. the higher ups literally are meeting their destiny by trying to avoid it. this could very well not end well.
That’s just the start. We’ll start seeing tech giants introduce “Partner API” for allied political parties in other countries. And soon enough there will be a world centralized government.
Such APIs already exist. You can't install Signal on iOS in China. I've been preaching this to oblivious ears here for a long time, yet, most say 'i like apple appstore monopoly'.
This is going to sound incredibly cold and callous, but the comparison needs to be made.
One woman was shot. 4 others died for medical reasons. One was a heart attack. One was a police officer.
Tragic deaths, to be sure. And the photos really do feel horrific. But do single digit casualties justify all this? Gang violence and crime kills way more people and police officers on a daily basis. Are we really setting the value of our liberal values that low to justify all this censorship and deplatforming?
The events on the 6th, while horrific, have given a handful of big corporations control over national discourse and communication. That scares the daylights out of me. Was this all it took?
When it comes to communication channels, you choose how you get your information. Each person, individually, makes that choice. If you think that big tech is problematic for getting your information, it's not because they are making it more difficult to consume and participate on Parler. It's because it gives them too much control over information. The choice then is to your information elsewhere. People sharing disinformation on social media has been a grave issue long before the event on January 6, 2021.
When it comes to that event, the real horror is not "single digit casualties" and that is a naive lens to use here. Disrupting a core institution of our representative democracy - certifying the election results for the President of the United States - in an attempt to overthrow the votes and will of the citizens is horrific and chilling.
While i hear you - i don't see this as an isolated incident. I see this as the inevitable result of radicalization that this President has pushed for four years.
Shockingly when you flat out say that "They're only sending there criminals" (with regards to Mexico) it has affects on how some people view and thus tread Mexicans and/or brown skinned peoples. Repeatedly, examples similar to this have been expected by the left (myself included) to incite discrimination and violence to groups of people.
So this is, imo, the natural outcome of the President saying that the government is broken beyond belief and that it is a literal stolen election.
So, with all that said i don't entirely disagree with you - BUT, this is far from an isolated incident in my mind. This is repeated escalation.
I think the point is that the “radicalization,” as you are calling it, actually resulted in fewer deaths than say a typical day in Chicago. The point is this is all blown out of proportion simply because law makers themselves were involved. When there 20 death in a weekend the law makers don’t give a damn, it’s not radical, it’s just the norm, but when a couple deaths are close to a lawmaker then they care. It is hardly radical at all in my opinion it just has a microscope on it. It’s completely obvious as others have said the way this is being portrayed. It’s as others have said, the same journalist who would refuse to call a BLM protests with multiple deaths and burning buildings a riot calls this one a mob or riot and not a “mostly peaceful protest.” Hell it took some digging for me to even find what they were perpetrating about since the “why” is left out of every headline and article that a big corporation doesn’t agree with. They don’t want to humanize the people there, they want to exaggerate the actions, it’s a clear and obvious agenda on some of these organizations. I’ve never seen any response more clearly show the bias.
> The point is this is all blown out of proportion simply because law makers themselves were involved.
Not entirely true. Much of it is just plain old politics. This was a massive unforced-error by the President, many of his supporters in congress, and his fanatical base.
Do you recall how many years we heard about Benghazi? How many hearings, investigations, and committees there were? This incident was objectively worse than Benghazi. If the Left were as good at offense as the right, this Jan. 6th attack on our government will be investigated, examined, dissected, and discussed incessantly for at least the next 4 years.
Look up the Portland protests from earlier this year. Hundreds literally stormed a federal building attempting to light it on fire, throwing fireworks, Molotov a, and other objects all-night. The protesters dressed up in outfits with gas masks, helmets, lasers, and much more. That building was some how protected from people but the capitol building couldn’t be? Not only that but it was literally not on any of these major news sites anywhere. The mayor literally went out to protest with them yet nothing happened to him. No bans, nothing. But some how here the death was by the police shooting the protester and some how this is violent? I’m not kidding look up Portland courthouse protest, it is mayhem for months but no one cares because it wasn’t the right party.
A handful of big corporations already controlled national discourse and communication prior to the events of January 6th. That hasn't materially changed before or after the insurrection.
I would be humbled by data that proved or rejected the idea that disenfranchisement of actors who organize violence from mainstream platforms actually prevents or reduces its occurrence.
There's a fair point to be made that they'll move on elsewhere, but what if that slightly increased barrier friction is enough to stop them? No harm, no fowl, if that's the case. We traded a small bit of free speech for public safety, the ROI looks good, if it's so.
The comparison to be made is between a society that values and supports freedom of speech with one that doesn’t. Which will contain more violence and misery?
I can't imagine the world where you are less horrified by the literal neo Nazis storming the US capital then an app getting kicked off google play store. People are dead, get some perspective.
this is the world of techbro-ism with people making 200k per year living in sheltered neighbourhoods, more concerned about their online speech than having a boot on their neck. It's actually completely in line with the audience of this site
the literally most upvoted comment is some random rant about the 'great purge' let that sink in.
Did the “literal neo Nazis” prevail? How many of them were there?
“No” and “not many” are the answers so the comparison with widespread attacks on millions of people’s hard won freedoms are (or should be) definitely more of a concern to wider society.
You have lost a sense of perspective. People storming the capital was symbolic act ( with some violence ). Move by Google will likely have repercussions beyond that violence and that storm. Some of us horrified, because that song is always the same.
It was not a symbolic act, it literally happened. People literally died. By people who are literally neo Nazis who literally think I should be murdered, who literally had zip ties and the police are now finding literal pipe bombs. I assure you I am not the one who lost perspective.
I disagree. I may be wrong, but it would appear that you feel personally attacked. I am not sure how people storming capital AND fighting cops AND leaving pipe bombs in said building want to kill you specifically. I do not see the connection. Are you a staffer/lawmaker/cop there or something?
I recognize that tensions are high, but shouting "literally neo Nazis" is not a great argument in US for a variety of reasons ( not completely unlike antisemitism, it lost some of its punch ).
They don't want to kill me specifically, they want to kill me because they are Nazis and part of their ideology is that I should die. That's why they wore shirts saying 6 million was not enough or camp Auschwitz prison guard.
Other way round: anyone on the left is used to unfair treatment. The app reporting drone strike locations was banned years ago. Apple caused tumblr to self-destruct. Just this time the policy is actually in our favor.
Unlimited incitement to violence is not sustainable. Banning them for this is the start; America is going to have a long uncomfortable process of dealing with its media.
Exactly -- I love the pearl-clutching tone of these of slippery-slope complaints: "Just you wait, leftists! One day the power of the state shall be visited upon you, and then you'll see! How would you feel if the government censored you, infiltrated your gatherings, and sidelined you from mainstream society? Hmmmmm?"
Pearl clutching? Odd. I've heard people say that all summer long about those afraid of the "peaceful protests" turned violent riots that burned down cities and devastated business. This violence was encouraged by all types of politicians on the left and all the big media networks as well:
A small number of people at an almost entirely non-violent rally, a rally where the president encouraged people to "walk down to the capitol house" .. walk, not riot or loot or burn, a small number of people did something horrifically stupid. Most just walked around, a smaller percentage destroyed stuff. Everyone one of them should be charged if they did.
But you know what I also saw? "Pearl Clutching." Every senator and congressman afraid out of their mind because the villages had come into the castle. The peasants were in the kings court, and the village idiot with a racoon on his head was sitting at the seat of The King's Hand playing with her royal gavel.
You cannot possibly talk about the violence on the 6th, without addressing the fact that the media went on and on and on about praising all the violent "peaceful protestors" all summer long.
It did not matter at all when it was the business owners, the minimum wages workers who lost the jobs at stores now condemned, or those losing everything in lockdowns while Pelosi showed America her ice cream collection in her $14k kitchen setup.
But now that they were causing some minor damage, 1/1000 of the damage the democratic left supporters did on inauguration day 2014:
It's suddenly the worst thing on the planet! Unprecedented even!
America has a long history of its citizens taking federal buildings. The Black Panthers, with an armed militia, took the California Capitol in the 1970s and no one died.
If we're going to start enumerating domestic terrorist incidents, there's the Charleston church massacre, the Wal-Mart massacre in Texas, and the synagogue massacre in Pennsylvania. All of these incidents were linked to white supremacist ideas that the right has been flirting with for decades. Trump has just been dispensing with the dog whistles.
All four of these incidents had white perpetrators, btw. To extrapolate from mainstream Republican positions, we clearly need a complete and total shutdown of all white immigration until we figure out what is going on.
Back to the present day: the climate of lies about the election from Republican leadership up to and including Trump was obviously a factor in the violence in DC. On top of that Trump was there that day, speaking to that crowd immediately before they took action, directly inciting them to violence. There's no deniability to be had.
Appeasement has only emboldened these people to attack America, it's institutions, it's people, and it's values. We must have law and order, and that requires accountability for Trump and his enablers.
> that requires accountability for Trump and his enablers.
Absolutely not. It's words like that that truly frighten me. Have you lost your good sense?
What truly worries me is this part: "his enablers".... what exactly are you saying? That voting for Trump was a crime? That supporting Trump was a crime? That protesting for Trump (but not engaging in violence nor tresspass) was... what.. Terrorism (as the media is now trying to suggest)? No, no it was most definately not. It is very dangerous to use loose words like this which can be interpreted in too many ways, especially now. If you mean to say that Trump committed a specific crime and had co-conspirators, explain it that way and name the conspirators. Otherwise you are going to have a huge percentage of the population believe that you intend to "round them up into camps" or "line them up against the wall" or other things that other very dangerous people have tweeted. Trump supporters will defend themselves, potentially pre-emptively (just like how the war between the states started) and nobody wants that.
I don't associate with a political tribe, I didn't like Trump, and I left America long ago. But I've cautioned my mother who still lives there and who supported Trump all the way (she believes all the nutty theories, but isn't a bad person) that she needs to plan an escape route into Canada. Because I truly fear for her life at this point. Biden and the media keep wrongly using the word "Terrorism" in order to (I'm quite sure) invoke special governmental powers that allow them to suspend all civil and human rights from... who? ... all Trump supporters? And PATRIOT-ACT V2 has landed, all premeditated and prepared, ready for a huge draconian power grab.
Nobody has demonstrated that Trump has committed any crime (AFAIK). I'm sure there will be attempts. But nobody has even pointed to a credible suspected crime (AFAIK). Well respected constitutional lawyers like Alan Dershowitz have weighed in with clear opinion that Trump doesn't need to pardon himself because he has not committed any legally cognisable crime. And that his speeches were not incitement to violence... and Alan gives a long history of speeches that resulted in violence... and America has always punished the violence doers, not speakers, being extremely hesitant to invoke "incitement to violence." In this case it's laughably far from such.. he said walk, he urged peace, he only called for a protest.
But I'm positive many people will attempt to "require accountability for Trump." Go ahead, do so via the court system using the laws of the land. Both political tribes will support that.
> a rally where the president encouraged people to "walk down to the capitol house" .. walk, not riot or loot or burn
Consistently amazed that people seem to think that as long as you don’t literally say “I am inciting you to commit violence!” it can’t be considered incitement.
> "How would you feel if the government censored you, infiltrated your gatherings, and sidelined you from mainstream society?"
It already happened to the left before and it was called the Red Scare of the '50s. It is strange to see the modern left dig up those old repressive practices and adopt the for their own but "those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it" I suppose.
Um, it's happening to the left now (including infiltration, active attempts by government provocateurs to discredit, and even government agents collaborating with violent non-government actors engaging in violent retaliation, etc.; BLM has been a particular target), with government power involved much more than in anything targeting the Right.
That seems to be GPs point, actually. It's silly when those on the right are pretending that th comparatively minor private exclusion that the more extreme Right is subjected to might sometime be directed at the Left. The Left is used to much worse, at the hands of the State along with private exclusion, routinely.
If it's already happened to you, why are you happy about this?
All this is going to do is create a real market for more decentralisation and censorship resistance, we have a modicum of control now but that's going to evaporate with the next iteration of the web if this trajectory continues
Regarding the drone strike app thing. While most of the american left is against drone strikes they still don't mind voting for people who support them. (in comparison to the american right that I doubt would care about the drone strikes in the first place). Point is that both democrat and republican governments would support the drone strike app removal.
Interested to know you see the drone strike app as a left issue? I don’t think opinions on foreign intervention fall very neatly along the left-right spectrum
I think what falls more on the left is caring that the drone strikes kill 90% civilians.
The right is much more inclined to agree with the characterization that it's mostly terrorists we're killing or that why are civilians around them.
To what some on the right might object is why are we spending all this money on this, which they might even arrive at ultimately the same conclusion as the left but for a different reason.
This is the free market in action. No one is forcing Google or Twitter or FB to do anything; I think they've been very restrained. The libertarians should be happy that it's commercial companies shutting Parler down and not govt. It's only when the president incites violence in an attempt retain power that these commercial entities acted.
Once a company is so big that its refusal to support a small business is a major hit, that company cannot operate in a wild west style. That's why most countries have anti-monopoly laws; and it's long past the time when those laws should have been applied to google.
In case you didn't notice, there are already anti-trust lawsuits against Google; I'm happy that such inspection of big tech is happening. Even so, that's a separate issue
When a company (or two) gets a near-monopoly on a distribution channel, bans are no longer a business issue. We banned X becomes much more important than "because of Y" part, which can always be made up and is pretty weak in the case of parler.
They may be able to do it legally and it would still be wrong thing to do. Queue discussion about "Google or Twitter or FB" having it both ways as publisher and platform.
Parler is not going to be shut down now. Whoever made this decision, just literally gave them Trump base users on a silver platter.
This is a big point. I feel it’s acceptable for google to remove whatever they want because android allows you to install the apk directly. IMO apple should either be forced to allow side loading apps or to accept everything within reason to the App Store.
For me it would just be “complies with the laws of the country”
An acceptable compromise I think would be to have unlisted apps that can’t be found on the top charts or in search but can be installed via the App Store with a link.
Do you have a source? I can’t find any myself. I (and others in my family) have owned several Samsung phones and have always been able to install APKs, so this would be news to me.
You can already side load apps on iOS, you just need to go through some hoops (install Xcode, compile the app, create a developer account, futz about with certificates) but you don’t have to pay any money (you don’t have to pay the $99/year, that’s only necessary if you want to sell apps).
Well, at least you have to purchase another device from them to run xcode on. Those 99$/a aren't the biggest hurdle of you aren't a Mac user. (even assuming a skillset that includes "futzing about with certificates")
Applications installed like this have limited functionality--such as no push notifications--and some types of application are simply not supported (such as VPN clients: Apple seems to have structured everything in order to best support the China Communist Party's control regime here). You can only have three such self-signed applications installed at once, and you have to keep reinstalling them every 7 days (which is more annoying than you would expect if you haven't really had to do it constantly).
If government can control everything then why are we even discussing anything? Clearly this discussion is in the realm of citizens having _some_ free will.
Rather, we're talking about whether or not the government should forcibly allow/deny corporations from supporting extremists. This has nothing to do with government control, imo.
A {hosting, domain, ssl} company doesn’t have to accept another company as a customer.
What about the hosting company’s freedom of speech rights? If a hosting company doesn’t want to host your site, that’s their decision. If they don’t want to be associated with a site or app or spend their resources, that’s their decision.
These aren’t regulated monopolies that have to serve all customers.
Now, if you want to claim that they should be a regulated market — that’s a whole other discussion.
Except, the civil rights advocates in the 1960's would have agreed with me. Denying business to racist institutions, starting with the Montgomery bus system, is how they got started.
> So as we soon as we pass law making it a protected class, that argument will be null and void, correct?
For business discrimination in general, maybe.
For specifically constraining the expressive freedom of media (including social media) businesses, quite plausibly not, because a statute designating a protected class can't negate other people’s First Amendment rights, since the Constitution is superior to statute law.
Anything can be challenged in the courts. And I believe there are some (limited, mainly religious based) exceptions that are pretty recent. But there is nothing that protects the political beliefs of a person as this isn’t a protected class. Protected classes protect things people are, not what they think.
Trying to conflate 230 here is disingenuous and has no role in a strictly business decision about whether of not a business has to accept a customer.
The answer depends on what state and city the business is located in.
Political affiliation is a protected class in some states[0].
California[1], for example, also prohibits discrimination on gender identity, ancestry, sexual orientation, AIDS/HIV status, medical condition, political activities or affiliation, veteran status, or status as a stalking victim.
That's only for employers discriminating against employees. It doesn't apply to customers -- a business can almost always refuse to do business with you, for almost any reason. Example: you can get thrown out of a restaurant for not adhering to a dress code.
Ok, Can businesses refuse gays, lesbians and transgenders now ? Can one refuse to serve depending on whether customers are republicans or democrats, white or blacks ?
Surely, this should all be just OK by your logic ?
This isn’t possible without government control of the underlying components of the web, such as domain system. Otherwise private persons and companies can always create their own domain providers.
Yet you seem to advocate more government control. You see the dichotomy in your thoughts?
It's sufficient to push undesirables to services which are more expensive, more inconvenient, unreliable, and so on. Relegate them to their internet ghetto.
However, there clearly is a small number of players in mobile platforms, cloud, and payment, and they act in a unified way. It has been sufficient.
Sure, there are in fact only a small number of players in this space.
>cloud
There are vast amounts of hosting providers. A quick google suggests over 300k, but that sounds somewhat unlikely.
>payment
There are a thousands of banks in the world, most of Europe manages just fine using bank transfers for payments without involving external payment processors.
>It's sufficient to push undesirables to services which are more expensive, more inconvenient, unreliable, and so on. Relegate them to their internet ghetto.
Is this really a problem? That's just the inherent nature of being undesirable.
Payment processings are monopolies. More precisely, oligopolies. See how easily Mastercard and Visa drop PornHub payments after the news paper article. It's not a court order or even a trial. There is mainly zero way of doing business without fully government controlled banking entry-points.
Yes, there are cryptocurrencies available, so if we can fully legalize it and promise that we don't touch anyone's private transactions (as well as businesses officially accepting crypto) - that would be an argument.
For better understanding how bad it is: it's non trivial to even accept worldwide payments for small business/individual in the internet if you are, say, from Ukraine, Russia, China or lots of other countries not processed by stripe/paypal for some political or legal reasons. Apart from that, there is a "free" market of two payment processors in the internet and two card processors =)
This is bizarre. You offer cryptocurrencies as the alternative for Mastercard and Visa. How about bank transfers?
It's perfectly normal in Europe to pay for your ecommerce purchases with a bank transfer directly to the merchants account. There are thousands of banks out there, there's no monopoly or oligopoly at play.
Is this not “the market” deciding it doesn’t want to entertain this business? As a society it’s totally reasonable for us to draw the line at intolerable behaviour, we’re not obliged to put up with platforms that enable hate and vitriol, just as we don’t tolerate violence in the street.
If a business closes because nobody is interested in buying their products, or a club disbands because nobody is interested in joining, or a pub bars a patron who’s starting fights and nobody blinks an eye. The same thing happens on the internet and suddenly it’s the end of the world.
In those cases it's the business owner who decides. What happens when the decision comes after a mob puts pressure on the owner to drop that costumer or else?
If there is a market for it, presumably some business out of reach of the mob in question will take up the mantle for the money. If there's no money in it, then the market is deciding that the market doesn't want the opinions in question. The market still decides in the end.
Gratuitous provocation and name-calling are not dissent. You can express dissenting views without doing those things, and users here are required to.
There is a link, though: people with minority/contrarian opinions are sometimes so frustrated with the majority that they lash out in frustration in ways that break the site guidelines. People with majority opinions don't usually do it that way. They're more likely to be self-righteous. Either way, though, users here need to follow the guidelines regardless of what their opinions are.
You're skipping that you repeatedly broke the site guidelines and repeatedly ignored our requests to stop. What do you think we should do when people break the rules and flout polite requests by moderators?
For the vast majority, the BLM protests (which I assume you are referring to?) set out to be-and were-peaceful. Leadership made a big deal about remaining peaceful. Things escalated most of the time when the _police_ instigated attacks. Given the racial tensions, and generally charged atmosphere I am absolutely not surprised rioting broke out. Lets remember that low-impact/low-disruption protests had been done prior, and were not met with attention or change they were ignored and sidelined. Cripple peoples ability to be heard and they will use increasingly forceful methods to be heard. This is _not_ a case of protestors rocking up to a street and beating on random pedestrians - which didn't happen and is the kind of "violence in the streets" I'm talking about. In my opinion some broken windows and torched stores are less important than peoples human rights - if in the course of a legitimate protest some shopfronts are destroyed, I don't have an issue with this. I do have an issue with people using a protest (which went to lengths to remain peaceful) as a cover/excuse to destroy things "just because" or to loot - this I absolutely condemn, as it does nobody any favours and takes away from the issue at hand.
The fact that most of the largest headlines these days are all “Trump banned from X” shows you how important those websites are. If it these are “just apps” then it wouldn’t be headline news when someone gets banned. These are much more. They are monopolies in their own right but also they cooperate with eachother to simultaneous ban someone from all sites together. Now even if you allow the person they banned on their app on your app, or say you will such as Parler did, they will ban you from their payment processing system, their search, and basically everything they touch. It’s an attempt to blacklist someone from the internet and its only possible because they have monopoly like power. People will quickly catch on that “tech” is not one industry but many industries that no one player should dominate. There are only a few large players often control those industries and they collide with each other on things like moderation and bans.
> If you cannot install an run your own software on a device, you do not own the device.
I agree with this, and your analysis of the inaccessible cost of those devices people truly can own and control. However, I do not think this is an accurate parallel to the many horrifying political events of this week.
First, this is strawman bullshit. Don't bring up app prices in a culture war.
What you're witnessing is culture expressing itself, rooted in history, the law, the zeitgeist of the people. And right now the culture is drawing a line in the sand and saying, "don't do that (bigotry, racism, ignorance)". You are free to be on this side of the line or you can start a revolution. So far the good guys are winning. Not Dems or Republicans, but sane people.
Fuck you and everyone here. The fact that anyone could defend this decision is ridiculous. I'm tired of people defending censorship in the most brain dead of ways when it has never worked in the past and it most certainly will not work now. Censoring unpopular ideas only allows them to fester in the dark where they can't be brought to light or addressed in the open. This was never about "racism","bigotry" or "ignorance". We are in this boat because of a much deeper set of problems that are currently going to lead to the further regression of society.
Those in power, people here and the arrogance of many others have created an entire generation of people who've been banished, shunned or shouted down any time they had a differing opinion on anything. I personally am done dealing with this bullshit and the problems that have been inflicted on society. I'm done being quiet and, personally, I'd rather join the damned than continue this circus. I'm willing to put everything on the table to end this and ensure that this will never happen again. EVERYONE deserves a voice and a platform; you are more than free to not listen.
Take a deep breath and step away for a minute. You're not alone, and lots of other people right here in this thread are also opposed to censorship. Dying on a hill isn't what we need, and in fact given that you're here, you're probably uniquely qualified to help in the great effort of building the next generation of censorship-resistant technology. Haters gonna hate, but coders gonna code. It'll take time, but we've succeeded before and we'll succeed again.
That Wikipedia article is about the rise of Nazism you idiot. Please try to tell me again we're not talking about bigotry or racism in this thread, or that the "patriots" you stand by aren't some of the lowest pieces of shit fighting for one last gasp of relevance in this brave new world.
>
That Wikipedia article is about the rise of Nazism you idiot.
Are you really that dense?
>
"patriots" you stand by aren't some of the lowest pieces of shit fighting for one last gasp of relevance in this brave new world.
I am not defending the thugs or Trump. This came about because of a much deeper problem and what you are doing is a great example of why we are here. This is about the censorship and the arrogance that has lead us to where we are today. I and many others have been censored for having arbitrary opinions that don’t fit the narrative of the majority (mob). Instead of having civil (adult) conversions, it has become more popular to take out the ban hammer or label the speaker when, in reality, the label does not apply.
You can continue to water down important historical labels and assert what others believe without talking to them, but things are going to get much worse when we continue down this path.
Are you at all worried about the possibility that America could have another civil war because a sufficiently large proportion of Americans are radicalized in uncensored, insufficiently moderated communities? Facebook's own research found “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.” [0]
We just suffered a textbook seditious conspiracy against the United States, which was planned on Parler and thedonald dot win. Is there a chance that Google's decision to remove Parler from their app store will only throttle the spread of Parler? Have you heard of the slippery slope fallacy? [1] And if so, why doesn't the prohibition of apps for child pornography produce the harms you cite?
Why do you think there was a seditious conspiracy? Do you really honestly believe that a few hundred people marching onto the capitol have the ability to destabilize the country? Remember, we have layers upon layers of armed forces that would end any such attempt very very easily. I think this incident was more realistically just a bunch of amped up protesters who got caught up in the moment and crossed a physical barrier, but had no greater ambition of taking over the US government.
Not to mention, this is not the first time rioters have taken over capitol hill while Congress has gathered. It has happened over and over many times, even in the past few years. Which of the following events did you see broad front-page coverage of, along with censorship/deplatforming on social media, and calls for resignation/expulsion of politicians:
The reality is none of them resulted in any consequences for the activists, affiliated politicians, or organizations that either organized/led/incited those riots. After all, AOC is still here on Twitter/Instagram/whatever. The same thing happened throughout 2020. Rose City Antifa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_City_Antifa) organized numerous highly violent riots at federal buildings in Portland - guess what, their Twitter account (https://twitter.com/RoseCityAntifa) still stands. BLM-affiliated events have caused billions in damage, and resulted in a far greater number of deaths - shouldn't they be deplatformed as well?
The tech companies making these changes at the eleventh hour is simply them pandering to the incoming administration (their new masters) and them finally caving in to their own political biases and putting their immense, unchecked power to use by attacking and suppressing their political enemies. It's a dark, dark day and like in all such catastrophes, it'll be welcomed with open arms.
> Do you really honestly believe that a few hundred people marching onto the capitol has the ability to destabilize the country?
How are we to know? Four years ago everybody was like "do you really believe a senile ex-talk-show host will withstand a round of debate^W^W^W^W^W become the Republican candidate^W^W^W^W become the president? Come on."
> Why do you think there was a seditious conspiracy? Do you really honestly believe that a few hundred people marching onto the capitol have the ability to destabilize the country? Remember, we have layers upon layers of armed forces that would end any such attempt very very easily.
You might want to review the facts. The Capitol Police were overwhelmed, our elected representatives, who were in the process of finalizing our election, had to run for their lives, and the layers upon layers of armed forces were not there to protect our representatives. This was a massive security failure and we should never come this close to having our elected representatives taken hostage and executed by insurrectionists. And if that had happened, yes, it would have destabilized the country. How could it not?
What crazy fantasy world are you living in? That's absolutely not what happened at all! Are you INSANE?
The police were literally taking selfies with protestors, the protestors stayed within the velvet ropes and the TRUMPers stopped anyone who tried to break things.
Huh, that's pretty crazy, especially with AOC herself writing up impeachment papers:
"Sunrise planned a sit-in in Pelosi's office and asked Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to help them publicize the event, which she instead decided to join herself...The sit-in took place on November 13. Over 250 protesters showed up to occupy Pelosi's office, with 51 being arrested by Capitol Police."
Haha. What the. You used an example of women with babies strapped to them in comparison with dudes that stormed the Capitol, killed a cop, looted, all while encouraged by the outgoing president?
> The reality is none of them resulted in any consequences for the activists
The article you linked to has the title: 'Nearly 600 protesters at Women's March arrested on Capitol Hill'
I mean, if you're gonna do false equivalencies, maybe make some effort, instead of going with the spewing hose approach.
Welcome to the streisand effect. Big tech has effectively silenced 80m Americans and Parker and other alternative wrongspeak will grow much faster now.
The 80M number is not “Americans silenced”, it’s the number of Twitter accounts that follow Trump’s Twitter account.
Evidence generally supports the notion that deplatforming works. If you remove people from your platform, they generally end up scattered across other platforms or new platforms in smaller numbers. “Alternative” platforms are more likely to collapse, which just makes things worse.
Think about this—when was the last time you heard about Alex Jones or Milo Yiannopoulos? What happened to r/fatpeoplehate or r/watchpeopledie? If you want to find these communities, where do you go? You have to search them out. Maybe you check out one of the chans. Maybe you go searching for Discord invites. But you still keep a Reddit and YouTube account, of course. You keep using Twitter and Instagram and Facebook even though the communities you want are deplatformed.
Most people don’t go through the effort. The communities end up fractured. The alternative platforms like Parler and Voat are often worse for exactly the same reasons that they exist in the first place. That’s why deplatforming succeeds.
Do you really think 80MM Americans have been "silenced"? What is wrong with you. As a member of a group that has been historically marginalized in the US, it's laughable to see tech bros act as if they've suffered some Red Summer of 1919 because they can't post on social media.
If you start conflating free speech with child pornography when that isn’t even relevant or necessary to the point at hand then it’ll be no wonder if you lack responses, and maybe you’ll consider that proof of a strong argument, who knows? Maybe that’s even the point of slinging that in there. I fail to see how that will lead to productive discussion though.
Neither I nor the person I replied to mentioned free speech. They asserted that Google or Apple removing an app will lead to Google or Apple "[taking] everything else from you".
I pointed out a class of apps that are banned and asked why we haven't slipped down the slope they described.
> in uncensored, insufficiently moderated communities
> if so, why doesn't the prohibition of apps for child pornography
Forgive me, I was obviously mistaken to bring up freedom of speech or to claim that you were conflating apps/sites that allow freedom of speech with those that allow child pornography.
There are good arguments against free speech absolutism, but this is not one of them, since child pornography IS protected speech in the US. You can write a book of poetry that has entire chapters featuring Achilles and the Tortoise raping babies in patently offensive detail. If Congress tried to pass a law that bans your book, it would easily pass the Miller test, and the Court would tell them to think again. Heck, you can find books featuring pornographic scenes involving children on Amazon today.
Of course you are not allowed to possess or distribute explicit photos of actual minors (the same way you are not allowed to possess or distribute human kidneys, or for that matter copies of Windows XP): fortunately, none of these acts are speech, even under extreme straw men versions of free speech absolutism. Easy test: you are still able to convey any of your thoughts/opinions and make absolutely _any_ point to any audience without inconvenience even if you don't resort to these activities.
So, you're saying that anyone can write an entire book on overthrowing the government and sell it on amazon, but Twitter has silenced however many million people? It sure sounds like there are easy avenues for people to share ideas.
Not sure what argument you're trying to make here.
If the state would use its influence to get one single bookstore in Bumsworth, Arizona to stop selling one specific book on repairing video cameras [2], that would certainly be a free speech issue, and it would certainly violate the First Amendment.
Yes, even if the book remained available in every other bookstore across the nation, and every book discussing other ways of repairing video cameras would remain available for sale in Bumsworth. Just imagine a state attorney trying to use that as a defense, to explain why the "No Video Camera Repairs in Bumsworth Act" does not violate the First Amendment. It would be ridiculous.
You're trying to use the same defense while the leaders of the largest soon-to-be-opposition party are banned en masse in an effort to align industry with the incoming new administration, while people with significant cred [1], who happen to be on bad terms with opposition party in question [3] denounce the whole thing as an "unacceptable act of censorship".
Here’s another easy test: say the government bans photos of something innocuous, like cars, but allows text to be written about them. Take a photo of a car, go to jail. You can write a book about racing, though. Free speech?
The proposition that free and open discussion creates civil war is frightening. If we are prepared to believe such a thing, then we have no democracy to protect.
Incitement isn't permitted by any interpretation of the 1st amendment.
The current state of affairs offers nothing more granular than shutting down all of Parler in response to their failure to moderate this speech effectively.
I suspect you believe that as an article of faith, but it makes me think you haven't been on the internet in decades. Go onto thedonald dot win and you'll see hundreds of thousands of people who have created an insulated bubble where assertions that support their preferred outcomes are articles of gospel.
If you can go on there and convince a single person that the election was legitimate, that ballot security measures make it impossible for their beliefs to be true, and that Biden was legitimately elected, it's possible for the proposition "free and open discussion can diffuse false ideas" to be valid, but if you can't, then you might want to reevaluate.
Discussion? I haven't seen discussion come out of the US on a number of topics for decades. Discussions might start, but someone comes along and starts incoherently screaming.
If the freeness encompassed saying "let's have a civil war", "these people are your enemy", "buy weapons for the incoming civil war", and selling t-shirts with a proposed civil war start date, then maybe?
How do you think civil wars start? And how many actual wars have been started by lies? Usually by the instigating government or yellow press, but in this case it's DIY yellow press letting people make up their own lies.
Actions like these where one side fully suppresses the other - one set of standards for themselves and another set of standards applied to people they oppose - are exactly the kind of actions that lead to civil war.
Have you forgotten about that? Does that look anything like the 6th? No, of course it doesn't. Had those people been let into the State House, it may have burned to the ground in 2017!
> insufficiently moderated community
Section 230 was put in place because it's difficult to moderate effectively when you're trying to launch a startup. Are you saying no one can launch a social network unless they have the money and staff to moderate each an every single post that comes in?
> You do realize, both sides of America think the other side is radicalized.
On Wednesday, while our elected Representatives and Senators were in the process of finalizing the count of the US election, armed Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol. Several of these people were carrying zip-tie handcuffs and were hunting for Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer. 5 people died in this insurrection attempt. Here's the video of the QAnon insurrectionist who was shot by the Capitol Police as she was breaking into the area where our elected Reps and Senators had retreated to.
This was an attempt to overthrow our government, and it's a matter of luck that our legislators weren't executed by this mob. Attempting to "Both Sides" this is intellectually dishonest, as a riot in the streets is a categorically different thing than a seditious conspiracy that involved the violent disruption of the finalization of results from our election.
> Are you saying no one can launch a social network unless they have the money and staff to moderate each an every single post that comes in?
I'm not intimately familiar with Section 230, but I don't want my country destroyed. If Google and Apple facilitate distribution of a toxic product that destroys my country, that's a problem for me.
> If you cannot install an run your own software on a device, you do not own the device.
ADB doesn't require individual clearance from Google, you can install any apk you like. In fact you don't even need ADB, you can just install an apk downloaded from the web if you uncheck "only verified sources" in settings. Google is merely removing Play Store convenience (and distribution channel safety). Providing that Play Store convenience costs them real dollars for computing resources and they chose to not do that anymore for the app in question.
I disagree. This is great, because it illustrates the problem you're citing.
Without this use case people won't realize why open source matters, or phones without control matters, etcetc. While i don't agree with Trump or his party actions, this definitely is waking thousands of people up to how easily even Americans are censored.
This realization is crucial to privacy focused applications, imo.
Agree with this. Everyone who was never dependent on FAANG in the first place because of tinfoil Stallmanism is now sitting back roasting their marshmellows as the rest of society burns.
Either you control your device, or your device will be used to control you.
In most countries in the world, you can go to jail for saying the wrong thing. This includes countries which are, for all practical purposes, freer than the USA -- like Germany, which hasn't renazified since WWII in part because of its hate speech laws.
So no, not everybody recognizes that unfettered expression is a universal good. There are places which have already experienced the danger of free-speech absolutism.
> Germany, which hasn't renazified since WWII in part because of its hate speech laws.
The US has a number of troops stationed in Germany comparable to the German army. The ideology of Germany has not been left to chance at any point after WWII.
That probably isn't the model that most people look for in their own country's governance.
Where were all of the free speech absolutists a decade ago when Twitter, Facebook and Google started removing Islamic content from their platforms under the guise of dealing with extremist content? I seem to recall them cheering those companies on.
I haven't seen the right screaming when there's Republican legislators passing anti-BDS legislation all over. That's the purest form of censorship targeting primarily people on the left and yet crickets.
Maybe the so called free speech absolutists are not as principled as they say.
A lot of pedants are telling you it's not censorship and they are technically correct, these private platforms are within their rights to decide how they are used. And many people have raised concerns before about what it means that we've given so much power to these platforms. I hope this goes down as the time the big platforms overplayed their hand and made people realise that even though we have turned over so much power to them, they do not have the same constraints or responsibilities as government, and as private businesses can act arbitrarily according to their prerogative.
While they may be pedants, I am anally right. On a personal level I think those who chime in to cry that it's not censorship are myopic fools.
It is absolutely censorship. It's textbook, dictionary, censorship. Take wikipedia's great opening paragraph:
>Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient." Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions, and other controlling bodies.
In my opinion it's especially egreoious, requiring remedy, if the censorious actor has a large amount of control over a medium of communication. In this case google dwarfs perhaps governments.
> telling you it's not censorship and they are technically correct
No, they are technically incorrect. As other posters have pointed out, it literally is censorship. Whether a private company or government is doing it is irrelevant to the definition of that term.
If wal-mart stops selling a brand of ice cream, is that censorship? Is it censorship that wal-mart doesn't sell playboy in their store?
If not, then why is the removal of an app from the app store censorship? The world wide web still exists. Parler is still on the internet.
Seems like there should be some acknowledgement that there's a difference between refusing to actively participate in distributing content and censorship.
You have Wal-Mart, Target, Wal-greens, CVS, BestBuy, MicroCenter, tons of mom-and-pop stores (until all the world leaders drove all of them to bankruptcy due to COVID)
Say you had two stores: Walmarket and Toget. That's it. That's all you got. Toget stops telling a brand of ice cream and you literally cannot sell it anywhere else other than Toget and Walmarket because someone would have to drive 2 hours out of their way each time to buy your Ice Cream.
How do you do notifications from a CRUD app on a mobile device if you can't have a native app on the device?
Let's not kid ourselves. People rarely use the browser for something they really like on mobile if there is a native app. The experience is very different.
> How do you do notifications from a CRUD app on a mobile device if you can't have a native app on the device?
Facebook and Twitter are older than push notifications. SMS and email are pretty obvious replacements with little functional difference.
> Let's not kid ourselves. People rarely use the browser for something they really like on mobile if there is a native app. The experience is very different.
Sure, but you are pretty clearly moving the goalposts. Is it any more difficult to enter "news.ycombinator.com" into a mobile web browser than it is to download a mobile client?
IMO it's worse than that, because there's a duopoly where both the stores coordinate to do this at the same time. And the intent of it is political, they're trying to end someone else's business because the owner is on the other political team. And that's not even where it ends, next they'll come after their web hosting and credit cards.
This is more akin to Walmart not selling certain magazines or books because they don't like their (political) content. You could also compare it to when the Catholic Church had a black list of "heretical" books and pressured their removal. Both are legal, but maybe not desirable?
Both are desirable. Walmart curates content for its customers, if it didn’t their sales experience would be far worse.
And as much as I dislike the Catholic Church, not allowing it to list books it finds heretical is outright restrictions of its freedom of speech. It’s only a problem when the church has the power to have governments also ban those lists, but that’s quite a different thing.
There are tens (hundrends?) of alternative ways of selling ice-cream other than walmart, there are 2 ways to to get access to Parler for most people, either through the browser or an app - you're cutting off the easiest way for most people to gain access to that content through a phone - do you see the difference between what's happening and your analogy?
This is assuming services like Cloudflare and hosting services won't cut Parler - they've done this before
I think a better analogy is saying, oh, you've banned newspapers, but who cares, you can still talk to people in person.
Which is to say, it's true, & that's a good thing, but that doesn't mean that the censorship itself isn't bad.
The most effective, most powerful communication medium that exists right now is native apps for social networks on smartphones. If 100% of that medium is controlled and censored by two companies, that means those two companies exert a massive influence on what kinds of communication society as a whole will have.
If you believe in the general principle of free speech (not just strict legal interpretations of say the 1A), that's not a good thing.
The better analogy is that the newspaper has banned certain people who have written articles inciting violence.
Or maybe an even better analogy: the movie theater has taken the microphone away from the person telling those in the crowded movie theater to start punching each other.
Do you think only Trump himself has been affected by this? Even just on topic for this forum they're talking about an app used by thousands (or more, I honestly have no idea since I don't use Parler) of people. Do you think all of those people have incited violence? What about Parler itself? All inciting violence?
I think you mean to say that if you aren’t allowed to walk into anyone else’s home or business, and yell your opinions into their face, your rights to free speech have somehow been infringed.
My analogy is far more accurate than your tortured newspaper analogy. Parlour still gets to publish unrestricted as a web site and as web apps, it just doesn’t get free distribution, marketing and hosting from Google or Apple.
That's a good point actually. I'm on iPhone; is distributing software via side-loading on Android actually practicle, or is it such a pain that it becomes non-workable in practice?
It is practical actually, it's like downloading an exe or dmg with maybe an extra security hurdle (settings -> enable installing apps from $X). Plus you could make your own play store clone like F-droid and I think amazon made their own, too.
Yeah, on Android it's much simpler. On iOS it's still doable using AltStore, it just requires you to be on the same Wi-Fi network as your computer at least once a week to keep sideloaded apps active.
If a newspaper is promoting killing and owning the libs and overthrowing the government it has gone from reporting the news to promoting death and violence which has never been acceptable for the free press.
Suppose Google releases an update to Chrome that prevents it from loading problematic websites. What really is the difference, in your mind, between removal from the app store and what I described? Or would you also find that scenario acceptable?
The difference would be that in the Play Store, Google hosts the app. They haven't blocked anything per se, just removed it from the server. It'd be more like them kicking problematic we sites off GCP and Firebase, which I don't like but can totally see happening.
We did this to ourselves by integrating Google/Apple products into our every day life. 20-15 years ago we didn’t have any of it and still led mighty fine lives. Yes, private companies are free to do this stuff to us, but we only have ourselves to blame.
When Hollywood voluntarily removed certain movies and ideas during the black list it was justified for the same reason these bans are justified: these ideas are harmful to society. And it was deemed censorship. In fact it’s an archetypal example of censorship. Government action isn’t required unless you’re talking about the 1A.
And this is yet another escalation on the road that started with “we’re just going to censor tweets that literally say the sky is green.” Google has banned an entire social network.
It’s exactly what social conservatives did back when they controlled the levers of government and industry in the mid-20th century. They prevented liberals from spreading their ideas, because that could cause social unrest, violence, etc. (And there was violence, such as anarchist leftist bombings.)
Hollywood isn’t a monolith, and it didn’t “remove movies or ideas”. Hollywood production companies and theatre chains agree to set standards for film ratings in order to access large audiences. Artists almost always have had the ability to release unrated films, at the costs of access to large funding sources and theatre chains.
That’s freedom in both directions.
At its worst Hollywood created a black list for alleged communist sympathizers. That was a very specific kind of rating system for the same benefits. Most Americans were justly terrified of the Soviet Union and its genocidal leadership at the time, and distributing a film written by or starring someone who publicly endorsed communism would have killed box office and likely had the studio boycotted by large anti-communist groups.
That said, the black list unfairly included lots of people who were at most interested in social justice.
Today the same thing has happened to Mel Gibson and us happening to Johnny Depp. Don’t expect your employers to invest their millions into help you promote repugnant behavior or beliefs to their customers.
> If wal-mart stops selling a brand of ice cream, is that censorship?
If WalMart sold ice cream to white people, but not to black people, that would be pretty awful both morally and it would be illegal.
The thing with speech is it is inherently attached to a person. There is no speech in a vacuum. Google has basically said that certain people shouldn't be able to speak. As politics is a personal belief like religion, it is sad it is not a protected civil right. But that's what this is--saying certain people can express their beliefs, but others can't.
Give me an ability to buy ice cream in a different store, and I would have no problem with that. However, on Apple devices you are locked to AppStore, and modern Android devices, while still giving you an ability to sideload apps, have severe limitations on their functionality without access to google play services (chiefly, push notifications are a must for any communication app)
This decision, in and of itself, doesn't seem particularly unprecedented or untoward to me. Every store, including the Google Play Store, has a right to choose what products it wants to carry, for pretty much any reason whatsoever, including for political reasons. It's probably pretty difficult to find copies of The Turner Diaries in your local Barnes and Noble, and I'd be even more surprised to find a copy of The Vagina Monologues in a Lifeway.
What makes this scary is not that stores are choosing what products to sell. What makes it scary is that, at least in this segment of the economy, there are exactly two stores, and picking at least one of them to shop at is very nearly a precondition for participating in modern society. This gives Google and Apple a degree of influence over peoples' lives that one could quite reasonably recognize as quasi-governmental, and that is worrisome.
Natural rights existed all governments all religions and all systems. Create a system that diminishes natural rights and by the Organic Law, it is our duty to alter or abolish such systems.
I own a kindle fire tablet. I wanted to use an app from a competing service, but alas it wasn’t in the Amazon App Store. No problem though, I installed the google store on my tablet, and downloaded it. Side loading would have also worked.
Isn’t this what android users have boasted of for so long to apple fans? There isn’t only one store. In the case of Parlor, you can probably just use a browser even.
I seriously can't identify with this viewpoint. There's no censorship here- parler still exists, people are still free to share their (abhorrent) viewpoints there, Google is just choosing not to amplify the voices of people that have proven themselves capable of and prone to violence. All the pearl-clutching over free speech is totally overblown.
Just because you have to go directly to the website doesn't mean it's censored. Google, Apple, FB, Twitter, etc are not in the business of supporting outlier extremism in our society. Claiming censorship because they don't want to platform that stuff is ridiculous.
Imagine a Jewish-owned store being forced to sell nazi paraphernalia because not selling it is censorship. The users of parler or gab are just mad these huge companies are taking a stand. Engaging with their tantrum only gives them a platform, even if it's just a small personal one, and is clearly bad. Do we argue with crazies on the street yelling "The end is nigh!" every day? No.
Or it dismantles the way they will organize with weapons to the next destination they seem unworthy of Trumpism. Could be a place like the U.S. Capitol.
Huh? Last time I checked, BLM app ( https://apps.apple.com/us/app/black-lives-matter/id955318790 ) is on Apple store and the group has, among other notable events, burning Kenosha done on their bucket list. Google, Apple, FB, Twitter et al have zero issues supporting violence as long it supports a given side.
I don't buy the analogy ( mostly because most analogies are crap ). Normal people try thought experiments and use the same situations and change one critical piece of information to see how it affects the model.
It is not a strawman. I introduced BLM specifically, because, just like not all Trump voters are violent, I am sure some are. BLM is just another side of the coin in my view. They are a group, who had instances of violent behaviors ( see 'fiery but mostly peaceful' CNN clip for reference ) during the past year(s?).
youre mischaracterizing BLM. Parler posts were actively calling for violence and government overthrow. The mob at the capitol set up a gallows and were carrying handcuffs. To the (limited) extent that BLM protests turned violent, it was the result of situations on the ground getting out of hand, not planned in advance or incited by leadership. (Also, much of it was the result of aggression by police). There's certainly room for valid criticism of aspects of BLM protests but they are not at all comparable to the insurrection at the capitol this week.
Eh. I honestly do not think I am, but let me do a quick DDG to not rely on memory alone:
Portland 01/02/21 - reports of molotov cocktails, fireworks, fires - I don't know about you, but use of explosive materials does tend to sound violent. You don't really come with a firebomb with no intent to use it.
Seatle 07/27/20 - reports of fires, 59 injured officers
Kenosha 08/25/20 - riots, destruction of property including fires including courthouse, incitement for more violence
I don't think I have to mention Chicago or NY..
And this is just a cursory check.
In BLM defense, they initially suffered from the same issues anonymous did. Literally anyone could be their spokesporson so right wing media got lovely quotes about purpose and goals of BLM such as ( some of those come from their official website ):
-Destruction comes before rebuilding, that’s what we talking about here
-“Yes, I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should also come down,” the activist posted via Twitter on Monday. “They are a form of white supremacy. Always have been.”“Tear them down.”
-We believe and understand that Black people will never achieve liberation under the current global racialized capitalist system.
-‘we will burn down this system’
-'MacCallum asked Newsome what Black Lives Matter hoped to achieve through violence." “Wow, it’s interesting that you would pose that question like that,” Newsome responded, “because this country is built upon violence. What was the American Revolution? What’s our diplomacy across the globe?”
Now you will note that their website is cleaned up and no longer contains notes about - forgot what terminology they used - abandoning existing familial structures and building new utopian world. It is a shame they took it down. It could open some eyes. I guess someone told them they need rebranding.
So maybe you are right. They are different after all. BLM is worse that Trump crazies. At least Capitol assholes will be picked up by various agencies and prosecuted. BLM members may have been arrested, but various Dem operatives ensured they are out as soon as possible. Hell, some were raising money for bails.
In other words, I do not think you have a clear picture of BLM, who they are, or even what they were doing.
It is censorship when those preventing freedom of speech are monopolies.
When a small number of companies make it difficult to communicate via our main communication device, and there are no viable alternatives, then a fundamental right is being suppressed.
There is no marketplace of ideas when there is no marketplace,
It's important to distinguish that "not deleting something" is NOT the same as amplifying it.
Amplifying it would be pasting images and links to Parler all over the Google Play splash page and all over the Google Play website, sending emails to all its gmail users to download Parler, or inserting Parler ads into some % of its ad impressions.
They aren't doing that. "Leave it alone" is not the same thing as amplification, that's literally the distinction that is made in Section 230.
The ONLY thing being asked for is that Parler polices itself (or the authorities get involved where appropriate), and that Google and Apple leave it be because all they do is serve as the conduit to get it onto the device they control.
That is the way the world SHOULD work. No it doesn't give you the adrenaline rush of enforcing your desires on the world, but that's not a good thing to be enabling in the first place.
If they had no control over the stores used to get apps on devices, the whole question would be moot. Their duopoly leads to this issue. Frankly, that control should be taken away.
not deleting something allows it to be shared, or at least show up in search results. it allows it to be seen by people who otherwise would not see it- this is amplification.
Absolutely but the platform isn't doing the amplification, people do. This is the same thing as someone copying your chant on a street in front of a courthouse. The street isn't doing the amplifying, the people are.
if that happens, then people on parler can share their opinions by self publishing books, or printing flyers and passing them out, or yelling on street corners. If your complaint about these media is that they don't have the same reach as online social media, then we can agree we're not talking about censorship and instead talking about amplification of ideas.
> choosing not to amplify the voices of people that have proven themselves capable of and prone to violence
Then why not ban Twitter as well? I could show you hundreds of tweets from little known left-wing activists inciting violence during the BLM protests. This double standard tells us that the rationale given for banning Parler is just an excuse. The real reason is that executives in these companies are doing what their most vocal employees and the liberal media are pressuring them to do.
You have to discern what people here are really outraged about - and sadly, it's not free speech or constitutional rights or any real high principle. Those are just intellectual cover.
After all, you don't see people clamoring in shock and about "unsettled" feelings regarding the moderation that happens here on HN.
Censorship: the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.
A private business not distributing a product because it doesn’t represent their or their customers values isn’t censorship, it’s a marketing decision.
If Walmart decides to stop carrying Coke because of its sugar content, is that “censorship”?
If a girl decides not to date you, is that censorship of your free speech rights to bore her?
The advocates for Parlours right of distribution don’t actually believe in individual rights, or they would argue it has to be imposed on the App Stores.
> Censorship: the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.
And this was indeed done because it was considered politically unacceptable and a threat to security.
> A private business not distributing a product because it doesn’t represent their or their customers values isn’t censorship, it’s a marketing decision.
The problem is your thinking that those two are some exclusionary.
The censorship that most company practice is of course for financial gain.
> The advocates for Parlours right of distribution don’t actually believe in individual rights, or they would argue it has to be imposed on the App Stores.
Nor does their believing in free speech or not have anything to do with whether this is censorship.
So then, can a restaurant refuse service, to filter what kind of customers would allow to let in, let's say on criterias like: only men, only white people, everybody but gay people? It's a private business after all. Especially if they are still available to deliver without any filter.
Be sure to pick up on of my official, Trump-endorsed anti-purge kits! Available for a limited time on Wetsy (etsy for the incontinent).
The kit contains zip ties, 9mm ammo, GI Joe halloween costume and an extra large tub of spray tan. Remember, social media can't censor us if we all look and dress and talk exactly the same. Stay vigilant heroes!
Have you bothered to look at the content on Parler? It's full of speech that is not protected by the US 1st, such as threats to kill political leaders and eminent calls for violence. There are also tons of neo-Nazis calling for the deaths of Jews and other minorities.
Parler need to remove this content. This isn't Google and Apple censoring political views. It's a demand for Parler to remove illegal content.
I think it's wonderful. Push them to the edges where they belong. Let them make their own platform to spread lies and hate, it will make them easier to find. They are going to commit acts of hate and ignorance with or without general platforms, why let it reach the mainstream. Make those who drift towards it work for it. Google is well within their rights as a company to do it.
I share your feeling “this is not going well”. Most of the comments here seem polarized and emotionally driven - yet these censorships are worrying even if they look like the right thing to do.
I can understand the viewpoint you have, though I don't agree with it.
Radical ideas have always looked for ways to spread around and influence people. As in with any idea, there are good ones (Why should a worker not have paid holidays, or days off, or have work life balance, education rights, voting rights, etc) and bad ones (the ones we see espoused by many radical right wingers like the claimed inferiority of the black race and the superiority of the white race)
Now, 74 million Americans voted for a vision of trump, that mixes a lot of good ideas with some very terrible ones. And out of the 74 million voters for him, I am sure many of them voted for the promise of jobs, stability, incomes, etc. Unfortunately, a significant & vocal minority of his supporters have shown hard right and often immoral ideas.
In the past, messaging and reach was a carefully cultivated art practiced by seasoned politicians and ideologists.
Today, the situation is different. It is very very easy to gather people into a group, isolate them and radicalize them. You see it happening everyday on the social media.
What, then, is the solution to this? It is a problem because a society must be coherent and move forward together, otherwise it fractures and implodes from within.
For a society, there are many aspects that affect it's prosperity. Jobs, distribution of wealth, prevalence of opportunities, justice, etc.
If you have allow one small section of ideologues hijack the conversation and demand for continuation of radicalization, that society will collapse. Just think about Nazism, Stalinism, etc. All those societies had one thing in common, the ability to radicalize and brainwash population.
So what about Parler? Banning is the right thing to do.
Out of those 74 million who voted, they have avenues like FB, Twitter, IG, etc to engage and communicate.
That small group who wants to radicalize the society, have their voices cut off, and that is how it should be.
This is pretty well put. I definitely agree with your points here.
I would like to point out that Nazism and Stalinism are localized versions of the same thing: fascism. trump is the current leader of American Fascism. He should have his voice on major platforms cut off.
What people don't seem to realize about democracy is that fascism is the weak point.
My opinion is that right wing ideas are more extreme than left wing ones. Sure, both of them have good ideas and radical ones, but radical ones of left seem to move the society as a whole in a good direction while right wing ones seem to move them in a direction that threatens the existence of the society itself.
The country went down this path as soon as the Senate refused to convict Trump.
We are now at the point where we have to block violent fascists from organizing the overthrow of our democracy, and that requires deplatforming. We had a peaceful resolution to this in February of 2020, but the GOP chose this path instead.
I don't know about Google, but Apple just told them they needed to moderate speech which incites violence (and maybe hate speech?). This isn't remotely like China where they are censoring people who post images of a stuffed bear with a vague resemblance to Trump.
"true threat" is where you have actual proof those threats arent empty rhetoric, like you know, people shouting about overthrowing the government and then storming Parliament while armed, with resulting causalities.
Neither do I but frankly it doesn't matter. People don't have what it takes to listen, to speak up, or to just stop bein idiots. They only see part of the painting, they don't see the big picture.
I don't support Trump, and I don't support his supporters or what happened at the capitol. I voted for Joe Biden this year, am a big supporter of my Democrat senators in Arizona (and hope to vote for Krysten Sinema as president one day specifically).
This is wrong, and this is a massive overreach. This is not the internet that we dreamed about and that many of us worked to build. Very sad day.
As the government is not involved at all, the overreach argument doesn't apply.
edit: okay. overreach/censorship in private sector doesn't bother me. thanks. make the antitrust case if it inconveniences you too much to make an alternative.
>As the government is not involved at all, the overreach argument doesn't apply.
Is it only the government which can overreach? I'm not sure I follow your argument.
If apple hooked into my banking app and decided to lock my phone because they saw me buying marijuana, that would also be an overreach, and also has nothing to do with the government.
I think the nuance you are missing is that people don’t care if you aren’t upset, but they absolutely are. And you should be skeptical of companies that do these things because this is how we end up with segregation, people refusing to bake cakes for gay weddings, etc.
If Google gives most of its donations to Democrats, how can you believe that they will not do what Democrats want them to do? Also, Democrats have been very vocal about the fact that Google and Twitter did not "censor enough" recently. This is a nice follow-up.
It could equally be said that the Democrats will do what Google wants them to do. That would be more in line with how other industry donations result in.
> how can you believe
I never said anything about what I believe.
If you believe the state is controlling some private organizations to conduct censorship, take it to a court.
I don't know if Mike Pence uses Parler, but if pro-Trump lawyer and right wing influencer Lin Wood is calling for his execution, don't you think that represents something of a risk to Pence whether or not he reads it?
I do not really see how this is new or a big deal. These stores have always been walled gardens and I have never perceived them as anything resembling a public square.
Moreover, the website is accessible and nothing stops people from using it. Apps are not the internet (thankfully). Pretending that the app store is the internet just gives these companies more power.
"Can" is probably the wrong question, Google has control of the Android project itself and many system level services found on nearly every Android phone so the "can" do a lot of things if they so decided to but unlike e.g. Apple they don't/haven't went past actions in the Play store ecosystem. This is only a suspension from Play though so the answer to "is it still possible to use the website or sideload the app" is "yes".
> But they can't ban the website and they can't stop sideloading, can they?
It's all about friction. The more you add friction, the more you slow down the uptake of competitive platforms. Right now you have to turn off play protect and let your phone install from unknown sources to install APKs. Most people probably don't even know how to do that, so it's an effective strategy.
Depends who provides hosting for the site, and whether they can be convinced to stop providing that service...
(And with locked-down mobile platforms, the platform owners could theoretically start enforcing a site blacklist of some kind at an OS level if they really wanted to)
I am guessing it refers to the number of people who are registered as Republican in the US [1].
I'd quibble about the 'vocal' part, however. People across the ideological spectrum are vocal, but it's probably more like 1% or less, not 30%. Our views are shaped by the few people who bother to say anything. I wonder if we'd be happier if everyone else could remember that.
It’s pretty coincidental that all of these tech companies are having epiphanies simultaneously now that Democrats will control the house/senate/and presidency.
The interesting question is whether they are doing it out fear of anti trust action from Democrats or weren’t doing it for the last four years out of fear of Republicans.
Why did they do it? There's video footage showing cops literally pulling back the barricades and waving people in. I don't understand why they did that, and surely their not doing that would have prevented the subsequent violence?
Okay, I took your advice and found the relevant video on her Youtube channel; it pretty much confirmed what I said.
> Speaker 1: There were a couple of groups that busted through, but other than that, I mean it was almost like they let everybody else through, like once a group kind of busted through just trying [inaudible] mad
> Speaker 2: They were just trying to run away [inaudible]
As they admit, the mob broke through part of the police lines, so the police retreated back to the Capitol building. Doing otherwise, would have allowed the remaining officers on the line to be encircled by the elements of the mob that had already broken through.
In any event, nobody is all that mad that the Trump supporters made their way to the steps of the Capitol building, the central issue is that they actually broke into the building and started marauding and threatening its occupants.
Your video does not allege that the Capitol Police let the protesters into the Capitol building. Rather, both your video and the ones I provided show they clearly did not. The mob made it in by climbing walls and scaffolding and smashing through windows and doors.
Your video tries to blames Antifa, but that is completely illogical. True, it shows several people within the crowd decrying the forced entry and blaming Antifa, but yet somehow scores of confirmed Trump supporters made it inside the Capitol building.
Did the Trump supporters just happen to be on a tour inside the building when Antifa broke down the doors? Did Antifa somehow force them to rampage through the place, beat police officers, steal, and vandalise property?
A big part of it is likely that they didn't know if the National Guard would be called out if things got out of hand. I believe the police let them in because they were outnumbered and thought letting them through once the premises were evacuated would prevent an even worse outbreak of violence if they (the police) were overwhelmed by the crowd.
Blocking parler does jack shit in stopping people’s ability to coordinate violence. Mass texts, email chains, WhatsApp, signal, 4chan boards, etc are all there.
How does it help? Parler's terms of service ban calls for violence.
The simple explanation is usually the correct one: Parler's growing so fast that it simply can't keep up with policing the content. They need to add a lot more moderators and things will calm down.
Maybe an unpopular opinion here but I think people should have a platform where they can safely coordinate activities that those in power don't agree with. Limiting peoples ability to organize is a decent into a police state IMO. Granted there has to be some tension where law enforcement is looking for terrorists, but overall, shutting down platforms to prevent people you disagree with from organizing is antithetical to being a free country.
"Two out of three Democrats also claim Russia tampered with vote tallies on Election Day to help the President – something for which there has been no credible evidence."
> 2/3rds of democrats believing Russia hacked and changed vote counts in 2016?
[Citation needed]
The chronology of Russian involvement with and around the Trump campaign, illegal or not, is pretty damn well established now thanks to the Mueller report, disclosures from other parallel cases, and the recent senate committee report. Changing vote counts isn't part of it.
Amazing! Then please explain where they got that idea put into their heads?
"Two out of three Democrats also claim Russia tampered with vote tallies on Election Day to help the President – something for which there has been no credible evidence."
Well where did they then? Find me a reference to something from a three letter agency, and I'll believe you. You're skirting around making the allegation via a rhetorical question.
If you're trying to pin something on me, keep in mind that I'm not even American, let alone a Democrat.
"Those on the political left who play fast and loose with the term “hacked,” as in “Russia hacked the 2016 presidential election,” are aiding the Kremlin in its mission of undermining Americans’ faith in the democratic process, two University of Kansas researchers write in a new scholarly paper.
...
The authors lay the blame for this problem at the feet of the liberal media, which they define as media that liberals consume, including the Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC.
They wrote, “We demonstrate that the insular nature of much of the liberal media ... enabled the spread of this misleading definition. Through a rhetorical analysis of texts defining Russia’s influence campaign as ‘hacking,’ we demonstrate that Twitter and the publications produced by the liberal media were highly influential in creating the widespread notion that Russia ‘hacked’ the election.”"
Sounds like a threat. Get on over to parler friend! You seem like the sort of patriot we love to keep very close tabs on. Be sure to have your SSN and photo ID out and ready
One day we’re going to find out that some inordinate amount of internet comments are paid astroturfing and the regular commenters will be equally upset between getting duped and not getting paid for their comments.
>The harsh truth is that our elections are extremely vulnerable to attack: Forty-two states use voter registration databases that are more than a decade old. Laughably, in 2019, some still use Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Twelve states still use paperless machines, meaning there’s no paper trail to verify vote counts. Some states don’t require post-election audits. And ten states don’t train election officials to deal with cybersecurity threats. This is a national security threat, and three years after a hostile foreign power literally attacked our democracy, we’ve done far too little to address it.
I mean, even this very place always had a history of distrusting voting machines, etc.
I'm curious why so many Democrats were allowed to encourage the BLM riots (more than 25 dead, $2 billion in property damage) without so much as a peep from Google, Twitter, Facebook or any other tech giant. Kamala Harris said "they should not stop" and helped with a bail fund for the people who were involved with them.
I think protest is a fundamental requirement of democracy, and as Chris Cuomo himself reminded us: protest aren't always peaceful [1]. It seems like a lot of Democrats are conveniently forgetting that all of a sudden.
Wednesday's riots were not a threat to anything either. They knew it was coming days in advance and allowed it to proceed so it could be used as a pretext for the ongoing crackdown and consolidation of political and cultural dominance (as well as splitting U.S. populist factions onto multiple platforms where they will no longer see each other).
Rejection of federal assistance, Capitol contractors told to stay home days in advance, numerous security barriers left wide open in the buildings, Pelosi is in charge of Capitol Police but left a laptop lying around so that could become a big HN headline ....
Sorry for the delay but I've been swamped since this conflagration.
Your recent posts have been using HN primarily for political battle. Please don't do that—it's against the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and it's the line across which we start banning accounts (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), regardless of which politics they're battling for. The reason is that it basically destroys what HN is supposed to exist for, which is curious conversation on a wide range of topics.
If creating an "autonomous zone" in the middle of the United States isn't sedition, then I don't know what is. If you want to forgive it because it was a bunch of deluded incompetents, then you should probably forgive the Capitol seditionists for the same reason.
> an "autonomous zone" in the middle of the United States
Well, in the middle of Seattle. It's not clear whether chaz intended to secede from the US or merely Seattle policing; their demands were certainly very local so I suspect they really had no intention of leaving the US itself.
Wherein 100 people spilling over a barrier into a government building (and one of them getting shot to death) is somehow worse than the aforementioned billions in property damage and assaults on cops, smashed police cars, passersby attacked, stores looted, fires set... in 12 different cities around the nation?
>100 people spilling over a barrier into a government building
This isn't a fair representation of what happened and it reveals your bias. For one example, it appears a police officer was murdered with a fire extinguisher. We don't even have to get to what might have happened if the politicians weren't able to get out in time.
You are correct; a police officer was reportedly struck over the head with a fire extinguisher, and he later died of the injury. I really, really want them to find who did that.
I also think the guy who shot that unarmed woman has no business wearing a uniform and carrying a weapon.
And if it wasn't 100 people spilling over a barrier (actually, the police pulled the barriers away and literally waved them in - explain that one to me) and entering a government building and disrupting an important session... then what was it?
>I also think the guy who shot that unarmed woman has no business wearing a uniform and carrying a weapon.
I don't know what you are basing this on. He was apparently the last line of defense between the mob and some of the politicians the mob was trying to attack. Who knows what would have happened if they got through that door and he didn't act. There could have easily been a serious hostage situation.
>And if it wasn't 100 people spilling over a barrier (actually, the police pulled the barriers away and literally waved them in - explain that one to me) and entering a government building and disrupting an important session... then what was it?
Cops aren't apolitical. I guarantee there were plenty of people involved in security that sided with the insurrectionists. And that is exactly what it was, insurrection. They were trying to and were temporarily able to disrupt the function of the government recognizing the rightful next president.
So, totally different from people in Portland barricading a Federal building, then trying to set it ablaze with people inside?
Did this crowd of "insurrectionists" actually threaten anyone? There are reports someone set a couple of pipe bombs, but not in the building, and the FBI is investigating it and has offered a $50K reward, but inside the building, it was kooks and protesters who were pretty quickly rounded up and arrested. I don't condone what they did at all, but comparing it to burning down buildings like in Portland and Atlanta... the mind boggles at this moral equivalency. True mob violence did not occur on January 6, and thank God for that.
The protestors in Portland saw the courthouse as a symbol. They were not trying to take control of the government or harm people.
Wednesday's insurrectionists were trying to stop the recognition of the next president and take control by force. You can look through this Twitter thread for examples[1]. People entered the House Chamber armed with some sort of weapon and carrying flex cuffs. These aren't "people spilling over a barrier". They are insurrectionists that attempted to literally take our government hostage. The intent here was drastically more serious than any of the BLM protests.
Yes, context is important. The building is The Capital of a government and their aim was overthrowing that government by disrupting the democratic transfer of power. You can pretend that computers weren't stolen from congressional offices and that bombs weren't planted in the building, but playing dumb is a weak defense.
Overthrowing the government by force, to infiltrate a congressional electoral process, planning to murder/hold-hostage dissendents and lawmakers, to help the sitting president seize power after a lawful and fair election.
Sure, that's the same as people angry when theyre throwing stones at cops after killing them in sleep. I don't support BLM violence, just that your view is showing some bias towards a particular narrative - I think you should see the storming of the US Capitol as massively symbolic thing that has shaken the world.
You can spin it your way, and I'll spin it my way. You won't persuade me or 75m other people by just asserting that you're right and we're wrong. It doesn't work that way.
Well, I take that back. It did work that way for 75 years in a place we used to call the USSR.
Still waiting on Trump's legal team and GOP supporters to show any strong evidence whatsoever to a court of law that would prove that there was sufficient electoral fraud to swing the election.
And no, before you copy/paste random twitter accounts, youtube conspiracy theorists, and "sworn" affidavits without corroborating material evidence: such "evidence" is not sufficient.
If it did then we'd have to believe that aliens are real, that lizard people are controlling the world, the earth is hollow, the moon is a space station, Nibiru is coming, and the pope worships satan.
That's the sort of theories your belief shares evidentiary quality with.
For some historical perspective, the last time the Capitol was stormed, British soldiers burned it to the ground. This was 200 years ago.
There have been multiple riots over multiple police-involved killings in multiple locations in the last decade.
So yes, what they did was far worse. They claimed to be defending the constitution while in fact they were using force to stop a constitutionally-mandated process: certifying the electoral vote. They were incited to do this by the President of the United States. None of this has ever happened before in America.
Over the summer, 8 men were arrested for plotting to kidnap the Governor of Michigan. There were multiple people with zip tie handcuffs in their possession in the Capitol. What do you think their aims were?
Open your eyes and see how truly insane Wednesday was, please.
Tone it back a bit. We have lost multiple presidents and other countless politicians to actual assassinations. Breaching the capitol is certainly new but that speaks to the incompetence of the police, not the gravity of the protesters’ intents.
> There were multiple people with zip tie handcuffs in their possession in the Capitol.
Maybe to tie some people up? Guess what the intent is of the people that have bombs and guns.
As Senator Graham pointed out in his speech, the security failure was so catastrophic that it could have been the death of the entire house, the senate, and the Vice President (lots of people with large backpacks inside that could have been loaded with explosives).
If there was any serious attempt at an actual overthrow it would have been a much worse day.
Hahah, "sedition." A big made-for-TV LARP that lasted a matter of hours where almost nobody was armed and nothing was at stake -- hardly any desks were even overturned. There wasn't even a millisecond where it looked like Wednesday's events would affect how power is wielded or who wields it in the U.S.
In 1954 Puerto Rican nationalists shot five Representatives on the floor of the House. It did not change U.S. policy one iota, and neither would those pipe bombs had they gone off, which they did not.
nothing was at stake, except the police officer who was beaten to death with a fire extinguisher, also the lives of the people targeted by the pipe bombs.
The riots[1] this past year were actual rebellion too. They certainly challenged government authority and burned down police stations.
Some of the Lafayette Square protestors would have breached the white house if they could have too. 60 secret service agents were injured. The only difference, really, is that the Capitol Police did a worse job.
[1]I don't like using the term BLM riots since I have have no idea to what extent they are responsible as a movement (if at all).
One difference is that nonviolent protestors were being gassed and arrested. I see nothing strange in an American politician saying that nonviolent civil rights protests should not stop.
More often than not the police was told to stand down.
Does no one wonder why Trump got 9 million votes more than 2016 and doubled his minority vote? The democrats encouraging and downplaying the riots is why.
I don't think any Democratic politicians literally told BLM to "go forth and riot". That's the difference. If someone is sympathetic to a movement, it's hard to say they had a hand in events. If someone literally says "hey everyone, let's do this thing!" then it's very obvious.
You could also argue that Trump's previous tweets, the wink wink nod nod tweets to white supremacists, also fall under a similar category as the BLM tweet. Sympathy and possibly support but not actual incitement.
This time was different. Trump was literally inciting sedition. "Go to the capitol and stop the steal" was the message.
It's amazing a person can make such a nonsensical comparison without thought, between a movement for non abusive policing and racial justice to an attempted coup
These people are a little crazy and this is now a declaration of war by big tech. I really hope they're ready because this is a stupid move in my opinion.
No coup. And quite a few employees from those companies were in those protests. And there are different arguments for merit between those protests. And the vast majority of the BLM protests we're peaceful. This one (sample size 1) was quite the opposite. Pipe bombs, small arms, etc.
They were absolutely more aggressive. Whether that's because they were more prepared in the BLM protests or less professional than in D.C., or whether because they were busy trying to evacuate the inside of the Capitol, or whether the BLM police were responding to the looting, or whether protesters frequently stayed out past curfew, or whether a core tenet of the protest was ACAB and a (justified, imo) loathing of the police, or maybe even because the cops didn't have the precedent of the BLM protests that they might not want to repeat is all conjecture.
It might be easier to make the comparison if you chose a single “BLM riot” to discuss rather than reduce a months long series of nationwide and international peaceful protests, and related riots, to a single catchphrase.
Seriously. I actually think making a comparison like that would be interesting and constructive.
Because it’s difficult to compare the events of this summer (a spontaneous response to the murder of George Floyd,choked to death under the neck of a police officer for over three minutes, on video, I’ll remind you) to the armed mob that invaded the Capital, threatening to kill or take hostage the entire Congress and the Vice-President, killed a Capital police officer, and planted pipe bombs in the Capital.
I think it would be easier to compare that event, since it’s a singular event, to another singular event, rather than a long series of events as I said.
What do you think?
[EDIT: Oh yeah the mob was also attempting to stop the process of certifying the results of the Presidential election. So much wrongness to have to remember.]
I don’t think Kamala Harris said “don’t stop rioting”, I think she meant “don’t stop protesting”. And the bail fund is ostensibly for people who were unfairly arrested, which happened quite a lot.
I don’t think Democrats should paint all Republicans with the same brush, and vice versa.
Forcing an evacuation of the VP, house and senate leadership and like 500 legislators while they are in session selecting the next president is a far, far cry from merely "not peaceful".
Literally the entire legislative branch of the federal government was attacked, along with the backup president!
And, but for a network of cold war escape facilities... they probably would have killed a few or taken hostages.
> ...93 percent of the protests associated with BLM were entirely peaceful...
Yet our government treats left-wing protests and right-wing protests quite differently.
> Between May 1 and November 28, 2020, authorities were more than twice as likely to attempt to break up and disperse a left-wing protest than a right-wing one. And in those situations when law enforcement chose to intervene, they were more likely to use force — 34 percent of the time with right-wing protests compared with 51 percent of the time for the left.
I think some of the questions posed in this thread are quite difficult and strike to the core of human psychology. This is a difficult moment for everybody. If we observe a somewhat tribal response, we should not be surprised.
It's all pretty complicated, but one obvious mitigating factor is the ends being pursued by each movement. Rioting aside, BLM is ultimately pushing for justice and equality. There's also a question of blame - many would argue that most of the BLM rioting was provoked by a disproportionate police response.
This movement, on the other hand, is quite transparently rooted in white supremacy, and had an explicit goal of trying to undermine democracy itself, and people showed up quite obviously looking for a fight. I mean, the news over the past few days have been plastered with images of a guy in a weird Davy Crockett the Viking hat, with enormous white supremacist symbols tattooed across his torso, brandishing a frickin' spear.
BLM was a badly organized movement. I support the cause, not the way they're sending the message.
Study Gandhi, MLK, John Lewis, Mandela - I understand BLM is a decentralized movement, but that's the problem. There is no leader and leadership. It has no coherency. It's dividing the society even more instead of pulling the entire populace behind it.
Social movement has a singular goal - to change the minds of people that oppose their views. BLM has managed to just bring out people who were already supporting them, it hasn't quite changed the hearts of people that were previously racists.
This is not how you make progress in the society. It is "pull", not "push".
For you to say this says that you haven’t studied MLK, John Lewis, or Mandela.
Mandela was arrested and detained on Robben Island, in part, because he was part of a group that violently opposed the white supremacists of apartheid South Africa.
MLK never said that there wasn’t a place for violent resistance to white supremacy. In fact, he called out that if the white supremacists of his time weren’t careful, violent resistance would be all that was left (MLK and Malcolm X were more aligned than most people believe; MLK believed that the time for violent resistance to white supremacist violence had not yet arrived).
BLM is, in fact, a very _well_ organized movement and their leadership is consistently calling for protest that is vocal and meaningful, but not violent. Almost every single BLM protest last year that turned violent did so either because of (a) police rioting against the idea of being held accountable for their violence against BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities and persons or (b) white supremacists who thought it would be a lark to start some violence and blame it on the victimized.
BLM isn’t out to change open racists minds—they are correctly considered beyond redemption (and sometimes even beyond shame, like DJT and his coupistas)—and they don’t really care about changing the moderate person’s mind, either. They simply want the indiscriminate state violence against their community to stop. They want to stop the freedom with which the police murder their children.
They want there to be no more Rodney Kings, no more Amadou Diallous, no more Philando Castiles, no more Tamir Rices, no more George Floyds, no more Brianna Taylors, no more Jacob Blakes, no more Mike Browns. I could go on, but these are the ones that I can remember right now. Even _if_ some of them were committing crimes, the police are NEVER supposed to be judge, jury, and executioner…and most of the crimes with which those were accused had no chance of a death penalty. That the police have been able to not only murder BIPOC, but to do so with impunity AS A MATTER OF POLICY, is truly disgusting.
We as a society are lucky beyond belief that we _aren’t_ facing the violent revolution we deserve for our treatment of BIPOC communities and persons. Instead, we’re facing continued white supremacist violence.
Your argument boils down to "I agree with one cause and reject a caricature of the other, so the first should be allowed". Not agreeing with something is not a reason to ban it.
You're allowing the BLM supporters to characterise their motivations, and the Trump opponents to characterise the motivations of this protest. That isn't fair.
Someone who turns up in a Viking hat, tattoos and a spear isn't looking for a fight. A person looking for a fight wears a mask, armour, carries a gun and probably camouflage.
When someone's prominently displaying white supremacist imagery on their torso, it's hardly putting words into their mouth to characterize them as a white supremacist.
When people wear imagery and slogans to any demonstration, I afford them the courtesy of understanding that what they're displaying on their bodies is part of the message they want to communicate.
Mr. Viking hat probably isn't an entire protest, even if his horns are intimidating. And even as a group the people storming the capitol probably don't represent most of the protestors, typically the bulk of protests are law abiding and peaceful and there are just a few bad eggs looking to cause trouble.
The core of the protest is electoral integrity and calls for the politically marginalised to have a voice, not racial supremacy.
The stated purpose of the protest was to "take our country back" from the democratic majority.
That's not a few bad eggs. That's an enormous crowd of people all deciding, tacitly or not, consciously or not, that democracy isn't for them anymore. And phrases like "take our country back" aren't even subtle; anyone who's been paying attention recognizes them as dog whistles. The obvious indication is that this crowd believes the votes of the democratic majority are not legitimate because they came from people who aren't entitled to run the country. And, while we can certainly spend an entertaining afternoon sealioning about particular examples, it would be easier to just take a look at some of the wide angle shots of the crowd. The crowd is clearly communicating exactly who they think isn't entitled to have a voice in how the country is run, either explicitly by holding flags and banners, or implicitly by consenting to be represented by the people holding the flags and banners.
Every movement claims it's advocating for justice and every class considers itself oppressed and they can all cherry pick the instances where they are.
I don’t think you need to put moral or political judgments on this. As I understand (and I have not really done my homework here), there are two reasonably objective distinctions here:
1. The BLM protests were planned, in public at least, as peaceful protests. Things went wrong and they didn’t all end up peaceful and law-abiding, but I did not see any reports of people using major internet platforms to plan to start riots or cause property damage. The reports of planning of the DC riots on Parler, in contrast, seem to have been quite explicit about the intent.
2. (In my mind rather less clear cut.) The BLM protests were not based on objective lies. The DC riots were. Ignore all the people saying there was no proof of widespread voter fraud — that’s like people saying that there is no strong evidence that MSG causes headaches. In fact, there isn’t even a reason to suspect widespread voter fraud. The proponents of the fraud theory have, when they’ve presented evidence at all, presented comically weak evidence. The theory is obvious BS.
The BLM protests were based on objective lies. Have you watched the whole bodycam video of George Floyd's death? Or is that main stream media told you it's true that the police knee on his neck because he is black?
Can you finish watching it and tell me which part of it is racist? It's unfortunately now people pick the lies they want to believe and claim it's the truth.
Please provide a source for your claim that Democrats encouraged riots. To the best of my recollection, no one encouraged riots, except for extremist groups like the “boogaloo boys.” Certainly no mainstream political party encouraged violence this summer.
I’d you want, I will provide a source that Republicans encouraged violence this year.
1. Given BLM was protesting mistreatment and institutionalised racism (especially in the police), do you not think it’s at all plausible that the police response would be racially-charged in how they respond to the protests?
2. The headline it’s literally says “one authors controversial view...”: it is entirely reasonable to entertain an idea for the purposes of analysing it without actually advocating it.
3. “In defence of destroying property”: this is inherently ideological I think, I for one place human lives above that of mere materials, and if people need to smash some windows in order to make their voices heard that is ok: we can repair windows, we can bring unjustly-murdered people back from the dead. Maybe a better way of framing this particular one is in reverse: “why is a window shop-front more valuable/important than someone’s life and human rights?”
Edit: Twitter thread: conflating “we wish to overthrow the government and kill our opposition” with “please stop killing us; we will make these protests more uncomfortable until we are heard” is disingenuous at best, and a flat-out mischaracterisation at worst. Nelson Mandela spent time in prison as well: does that mean nothing he said has any value?
The only one of these links which focuses on Democrats is the first one. Assuming the highly-edited video fairly represents the speakers’ contexts, they are calling for street demonstrations. If the events on the 6th had remained in the streets, we would be in a very different place. None of your links has anyone, much less a democrat, calling for the forcible occupation and disruption of a major part of the government.
I do think some of the rhetoric from some Democrats was unwisely heated over the summer. This week was different.
> Please provide a source for your claim that Democrats encouraged riots.
That was the question I answered. I've showed that the left, which is most of the media and the democrats, encouraged the riots and set the precedent of using violence to achieve political goals.
(Local) democrats demonized the police as enemy of the people. Kamala Harris encouraged her millions of Twitter followers to donate to a Minnesota crowd-funding effort that paid bail for accused rioters. Both local and national media rigidly only referred to the far-left rioters as “protesters.” The Associated Press, which sets guidelines for journalists, amended its stylebook to discourage use of the word “riot,” given protesters’ “underlying grievances.” It took months before Biden condemned the riots and he only did it when he started to drop in the polls. In Portland BLM/Antifa rioted for months and they even tried to storm into a federal courthouse downtown several nights in a row. The respons of the mayor wasn't to condemn the riots but to tell Trump to take his “troops” and leave.
Those showing righteous indignation now only months or weeks ago argued that the riots were “mostly peaceful” and that vandalism and looting don’t count as violence.
And it seems people have forgotten it's not the first time government building have been occupied to prevent a vote.
- BLM was not trying to replace our government with a new one. (aka a protest is not a sedition)
- Many BLM protesters were arrested. Some were charged with crimes. Similarly, any seditionists should be charged. This is probably true whether you agree with the final verdict or not
- Those at the capitol essentially held hundreds of lawmakers hostage, using guns and at least one pipe bomb, while Trump said nothing for approximately 2 hours
> why so many Democrats were allowed to encourage the BLM riots
With regard to prominent Democratic politicians, this is factually untrue. They (and me) are good with peaceful protest, whether BLM or MAGA. There is absolutely no problem with peaceful pro-Trump protestors.
Surely you can do a better job of cherry picking things out of context. In the former link, she was talking about how certain terminology ("defund") made people uncomfortable. In the latter, she denounces a sitting President who incited an insurrection that placed her life personally in grave danger.
The protests were to hold those bad police accountable.
Do not compare people asking for the rule of law to be applied fairly and justly, to a President directing his rally to violently attack Congress and overthrow a democratic election.
If you don't understand the difference between a people that have faced subjugation, systemic racism, and generational poverty for two hundred years protesting - and yes, at times, rioting - upon continued police brutality and a bunch of people promoting sedition and talking about being a part of a revolution as they invade the Capitol building because their favorite person lost a free and fair election, I don't really know what to tell you.
I wouldn't give much of a damn if these people had burned down a Target or Quick Stop, either. But they ran into the capitol while many of them were actively talking about it being a revolution. With people talking about grabbing Congresspeople and having military tribunals. People went in with zipcuffs and firearms. Multiple bombs were planted.
This was an attempted coup. A poorly thought out one, a poorly executed one, and sure, not everyone that ran in had such grand aspirations. But plenty did, and plenty were open about it.
Go check out ParlerWatch on Reddit. Look at what's actually being posted on there. People calling for the violent overthrow of the government. People talking about murdering lawmakers. People cheering on those that invaded the capitol and calling for more.
The parent comment is in every single thread in some form. It's almost like a narrative is being pushed. But yes, I distinctly remember a national tragedy like none other happening a few days ago.
"You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."
-Some guy from some political party
You’re right. Everyone is definitely capable of thinking for themselves. No one would ever, say, violently storm the nation’s capitol because they believed propaganda about election fraud.
Yes, we will wipe every Trump supporter from the internet because of that. Anytime anyone does or reads anything then acts on their own accord, the political belief they are part of will be /dev/nulled into oblivion.
So it shall be. Begin purge.
Retroactively scanning 2020...
10,000 results found spanning 1 political ideology, billions of dollars in property damage, threats made, multiple cities burned, autonomous zones created, dozens dead.
I don't have a right to be heard, that's not what free speech is. I also don't have the right to insist on other people publishing my views for me (corporations are people now, remember). And I certainly don't need to feel validated by apps.
That's whataboutism and conflation. It's possible to believe that BLM-related vandalism and anarchism is bad and that an attack on congress is bad.
But... sorry, a direct attack on a joint session of congress that forces the lawmakers and VP to be evacuated is WORSE than what happened in Portland.
This country can tolerate another bunch of fires and broken statues outside the Portland Federal Courthouse. I don't think anyone serious can imaging the idea of congress being sacked again.
It wasn't exactly an attack; it was a bunch of protesters, trespassing into the building during a very important session. Illegal and wrong, mind you, but hardly a terrorist attack that it's being painted as. A group of kooks and extremists who should have, and could have, been kept out by proper policing. The Capitol police really screwed up.
Actually in a way it's good that it happened; exposed some major security holes. Not good that they shot an unarmed woman, though.
Then why was congress evacuated? Why are multiple people on camera screaming "Where is Pence?!" and threatening to hang him? Why was that cop killed?
That's ridiculous, sorry. It was a chaotic attack, sure. And surely there were some people there who just wandered in with the crowd and didn't want to hurt anyone. But this is an attack on congress. Be real.
Alt right terrorists Steven Carrillo and Robert Justus murdered FPS Officer David Underwood in Oakland during the BLM protests. Steven Carrillo then murdered Sheriff Sergeant Damon Gutzwiller when officers showed up at his house to arrest him.
They also seriously injured another FPS Officer during the first attack.
> it was a bunch of protesters, trespassing into the building during a very important session.
No, it was a large armed mob targeting legislators; as well as many of them stating that legislators were their targets (some saying that they would be back for them), this is clearly shown in the video of the context around Ashli Babbitt getting shot, where the violence of mob at the barricades entrance to the Speakers office escalates with shouts of “They're leaving” as the legislators and staffers visible through the windows depart through another exit, shortly before the officers being threatened on the same side of the barricades as the mob withdraw toward the tactical team advancing up the nearby stairs and the crowd begins breaking through the barricades.
> Not good that they shot an unarmed woman, though.
She was part of an armed, violent mob breaking through the last physical barrier keeping them from a large group of high government officials with only small number of armed security forces who could not possibly protect the officials from the mob in the event of a general breakthrough; even so, the security forces waited as long as they could before shooting to prevent a breakthrough (and if they'd had only a few more seconds it's likely that the arriving tactical team would have turned back that particular arm of the mob.)
She was unarmed, in a group of people who all looked unarmed in the video. None of them was holding a weapon much less training it on the police. Don't make things up.
> She was unarmed, in a group of people who all looked unarmed in the video. None of them was holding a weapon
There are no firearms visible in the mob in the video; there are weapons in active use in the video (against the barricades, but if you are responsible for protection of life you can't assume that that will be abandoned once the barricade is down).
> much less training it on the police.
The police aren't the main people that the police were protecting. (That some of them were acting as literal human shields at the barricades makes that clear.)
What would you have had them do? Allow a breakthrough, reassess the intention of the mob, and if it was still an active threat start firing then, without the passive defense of th barrier? As well as endangering the lives they ought to be protecting most urgently (the ones not engaging in a violent crime), and their own lives, unless the crowd instantly became pacific after breaking through the barricade, that would have resulted in a whole lot more dead insurrectionists, because there would be no choice but to fire as fast as aim can be switched to a new target until the crowd stopped.
The threats haven’t been hypothetical all year. Dozens have died, 100s maimed, $2 billion in property damage.
Kamala Harris said,
> "They're not gonna stop, and everyone beware, because they're not gonna stop," she added. "They're not gonna stop before Election Day in November, and they're not gonna stop after Election Day."
> "Everyone should take note of that, on both levels, that they're not going to let up — and they should not. And we should not," she concluded.
I believe neither group are terrorists, but one side cannot be labeled a terrorist without implicating the other under the exact same label.
In Portland, in Seattle, in D.C.
The only difference is the scale of damage and death, which is orders of magnitude higher on one side.
Welcome to politics, DT's words are constantly taken out of context and used to enflame the masses.
That's why this censorship ordeal is scary. Both sides deserve to be heard so people can listen, hear both sides, sift through the bullshit and decide for themselves.
I don’t know if you realize you’re making exactly my point.
This “fact check” is the kind of laughable gaslighting that got us here. The YouTube videos speak for themselves. The death toll speaks for itself.
> Colbert: ”I know there are protests still happening in major cities across the United States, I'm just not seeing the reporting on it that I had for the first few weeks,"
The “protests” were violet mobs which destroyed property and killed people. The media made up a narrative of “fiery but mostly peaceful protest” while buildings (and people’s livelihoods) literally burned in the background.
$2 billion dollars of damage.
> This isn’t going to stop.
Police shot in the head, doused with gasoline, government buildings burned into the ground.
> This is a movement I’m telling you.
City capitol buildings invaded. Throngs calling for the removal of the elected leader of Seattle. City blocks occupied for days by an armed insurgent force.
> they're not going to let up — and they should not. And we should not," she concluded.
Ted Wheeler seems to be finally coming around to this, god knows how it took him so long;
> “My good-faith efforts at de-escalation have been met with ongoing violence and even scorn from radical Antifa and anarchists,” Wheeler said in a New Year’s Day press conference. “In response, it will be necessary to use additional tools and to push the limits of the tools we already have to bring the criminal destruction and violence to an end.”
Like I’ve been saying for the last two days, you can either say people like Kamala are inciting violent protest that was actively ongoing when they made these statements, and you can hold Trump to the same standard yesterday. Or you can let Kamala off the hook, but then you let Trump off at the same time.
You can’t hold Trump to one standard and Kamala to another. You can’t call yesterday an insurrection and last year a summer of love.
Harris was warning that those terrible riots would continue, not encouraging them. The meaning is quite clear, but I don't think I can convince you of that.
Quote from Harris: “It’s no wonder people are taking to the streets and I support them. We must always defend peaceful protest and peaceful protestors. We should not confuse them with those looting and committing acts of violence, including the shooter who was arrested for murder. And make no mistake, we will not let these vigilantes and extremists derail the path to justice.”
We agree the BLM riots were bad. The Seattle insurrection especially. But Kamala Harris did not encourage them. Trump did encourage an insurrection against our government. There is a massive difference.
I know that’s what you see. You see that because you believe that and spoken language is ambiguous.
Trump followed up with an almost identical statement. You understand what he said differently because you believe different things about Trump.
It’s OK. It’s politics.
In the end all I want is people to be consistent in how they describe violent mobs.
Personally I don’t think these violent mobs in the summer or yesterday are terrorists. I think they are simply violent mobs that were allowed to get out of control through lack of policing and bad politics. I blame both sides.
The meta problem I have is the rapid political capitalization by Democrats (including Harris) and the media following one violent mob after granting persistent cover and gaslighting readers for months over the significantly worse BLM/antifa mobs going off all summer.
Harris says verbatim that the protests are not going to let up, and should not. Even though they are violent, and people have died. You chose to interpret that as her saying that they would not stop (a warning) but not an endorsement. I see it clearly as a warning and an endorsement. Would not and should not.
But I recognize that Trump talks and suddenly maybe I’m in your shoes and you’re in mine.
Maybe I think the transcript irrefutably supports my position, but it’s Ok if you disagree. I don’t think either of us are fascists because of it.
The result isn’t words have no meaning, it’s whether you will respect people enough to let them answer you and clarify and believe them when they do.
So Trump says “there were fine people” and people say, wait did he just complement literal nazis, and you check the transcript and you realize, oh, “and I’m not talking about the nazis, they should be condemned totally”.
But the media doesn’t allow Trump to say “and I’m not talking about the nazis”. They cover their ears at that point and say, “la la la, Trump just said nazis are fine people!”
And that’s what’s wrong with this picture. They did it in Charlottesville, they did it to cover for horrible rioting by BLM/Antifa, and they are doing it today.
This is EXACTLY why this is bad. If you censor the narrative, then you get to control it and history tells us that the first thing you'll do with it is mislead the masses.
And all the members of the Trump administration bravely resigning in protest when they were going to be out of jobs in less than two weeks. Patriots, truly!
How _incredibly timely and coincidental_ that now that Trump will lose much of his relevance and the Dems are in control all these platforms suddenly found a backbone.
It's called got with in election fraud. And they surpressing people's voice cause sure shit the mass media outlets aka CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and the others ain't covering the fucking truth.
Not surprising, if other companies are doing it they now know its safe for their profits to do it too. They also know that hes leaving office soon so they dont have to worry about getting legislated into trouble.
Google and Apple control the means by which the vast majority of the world can access software. This is not like Twitter banning from a platform, this is preventing users from accessing a platform in the first place.
The point I’m making here is that a world where these companies have the power to go against the public opinion and the elected government officials would be a scarier one to live in.
If Google and Apple feel powerful enough to uphold the principles of free speech against what seems to be the will of the majority and the incoming administration (for better or worse), what is the source of that power? What else are they confident they can get away with?
This is a long way of saying your frustration is misdirected. If you want stronger free speech, start with the people and the government, not the corporations.
Sci-Hub also being suspended by Twitter for the farcical reason of 'counterfeiting.' I've never seen a fake paper on Sci-Hub ;-)
Remember, it's not about leftism winning per-say, it's corporatism. They are now emboldened to tighten their grasp on the narrative so they can make record profits while destroying the intellectual fabric of America.
I don’t agree. The President was just caught red handed asking Georgia to make up votes for him, and he caused an attack on the US Congress. People are actually dead because of the things he said — inciting an overthrow of the government.
Even our allied governments are saying he caused the riots. You can’t say the entire world is wrong, every single human being is deep state.
It is not possible to downvote this comment and also be a good human being. Any downvoter of this should be sick with themselves over such shameful behavior.
The best I could hope is that it’s some sick-minded person downvoting just to troll. The idea that a right-minded HN viewer seriously down votes this is absolutely unconscionable and completely beyond the pale.
It’s literally the same as downvoting a comment that says “racist murder is wrong.” Literally!
> The President was just caught red handed asking Georgia to make up votes for him
Did you listen to the entire phone conversation and not the 4 minute clip? That's quite not what happened. Trump laid out all his claims and was asking them to accept investigating anything that cloud make up his very narrow margin.
Another fun fact about that call, it was a Settlement Call. That was literally protected by attorney/client privileged. Barnes, a civil rights attorney who does federal cases, and who is currently contracted by the Trump team, talks about it here(starting at 54:49):
Second, as you've now been informed (and could have verified with a simple Google search), the call was not privileged, nor was it "confidential" in the sense we ordinarily mean. Disclosing it was perfectly lawful.
There was an attack on congress on Tuesday. Multiple accounts are talking up similar violence on Parler as we speak. People are calling it out all over the internet.
I mean... what do you want to happen here? The right wing got carte blanche to spread violent rhetoric for years on these platforms in ways that we would have called "terroristic" and "radicalizing" in other contexts. And it went too far. So... do we just ignore it?
I just can't understand how your mind goes to a routine election result and not a failed coup attempt as the reason behind this.
With the new War on Domestic Terror(TM) ramping up, I think the tech companies see a business opportunity for a private-public partnership to save the republic.
We can silence dangerous speech with no concerns about the 1st amendment (it's a private platform after all). All your Whatsapp chats can now be mined by Facebook (which the NSA will have access to as well). And the switch that controls social media communications is safely in the hands of Zuckerberg.
It's all coming together perfectly. Well... perfectly for big tech.
They were domestic terrorists and they will stand trial. And whoever organized the event will hopefully be tried for treason. With a punishment that is appropriate for that crime.
Exactly. Now is not the time to be quibbling about constitutional rights or the influence of big tech on political discourse. We'll deal with all that petty stuff when the crisis is over.
The United States is the only country where you are still required to take off your shoes before going through the TSA line. They can still put their hands all over you and molest you (they do to me every time I fly). No one complains anymore. No one finds the body scanners invasive anymore, even though the millimeter wave ones have massive false positive rates and are basically million dollar machines just for show.
The patriot act is still in place. We have FISA courts. We have unlimited domestic spying.
Exactly. Tech companies are realizing there will be blowback from having a mob of rioters in the Capitol building posting selfies and videos. The government will be wanting those images.
With this and Trump’s Twitter ban, it seems there’s a level of co-ordination at play here that should be worrying to people who care about freedom of speech.
And before someone tells me that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to private companies, I’m not making a legal point here, I’m making a moral one. This is not healthy.
You’re right, there absolutely is a level of coordination. Whenever people historically have stormed the capital building, everyone coordinates to ban them from their platforms.
But I agree, this is not the way forward to a healthy, united country
One of the group's leaders, Bill Ayers, lives unremorsefully in a tony neighborhood in Chicago where he went on to have an influential academic career, dedicating books to political assassins, and mentoring future presidents. This caused a minor kerfluffle when the details resurfaced to public light in 2008, but it was clearly, in the end, no obstacle to Obama's election.
One might raise a similar point about a figure like Oscar Lopez Rivera who, while he never bombed the Capitol, definitely did bomb about 100 other locations around the country and was rewarded for his efforts by an NYC ticker tape parade once he was released from prison. Lin Manuel Miranda's admiration for Rivera has hardly proved a stumbling block for his wildly successful career.
And that's just one end of the frequency-severity spectrum. Mobs break into the Capitol and interrupt proceedings with perhaps surprising regularity, as with the Kavanaugh hearings for example.
In any case, it seems that bombing the Capitol or doing widespread domestic terrorism is only selectively an impediment to a later life of comfort in the US.
I guess you didn't read my response, I said "Whenever people historically have stormed the capital building, everyone coordinates to ban them from their platforms." Your "rebuttal" lists no one who stormed The Capital Building (sorry should've put that in bigger letters)
Or take the 1954 attack on the Capitol, in which Puerto Rican separatists opened fire from a balcony, wounding five members of Congress. That seems to me at least as bad as what happened yesterday.
Did this discredit the cause of Puerto Rican nationalism and drive its supporters from public life? It would appear not: you can still be a celebrity with a successful career while voicing your support and admiration.
I'm not asking you to say that what happened yesterday was good, because of course it wasn't. I'm asking you why you think that such events are so rare and universally condemned. In fact they seem to happen on a timescale of decades at most, probably less, and the public judgment of the perpetrators seems to correlate less with the objective severity of the act as with elite consensus opinion of the cause it promotes.
It's unlikely to be coordination. More like is that all these companies wanted to do this, and then one went first. Or even more likely is that there was an event that caused them all to have policy meetings and that process took roughly the same amount of time at each one and they all came to the same conclusion.
Good for them for not bothering with the half-assed CYA nonsense Apple is doing. "Give us a moderation plan in 24 hours" is just such a ridiculously unmeetable demand (at least if they require that plan to be anything close to actually feasible) that it's just pointless. Just kick them off.
And to the people complaining about censorship, this is an app that was literally used to plan a violent attack on the capitol. Some things should be censored.
> And to the people complaining about censorship, this is an app that was literally used to plan a violent attack on the capitol. Some things should be censored.
Wait until you find out what the text messaging apps are used for.
“This was used in an attack” is a bullshit excuse to banish something. WhatsApp and signal have enabled countless terrorist actions and they are still up.
Twitter, Facebook, Whatsapp etc. are all used to plan violent attacks, murders, burglaries and so on - all communication tools are used to do harmful acts, should we ban them all?
Crazy that people are ok with what's been happening in the last few hours
people are actively cheering and celebrating the woman who got shot yesterday.
it's really insane how people who claim they are champions for human right and diversity rapidly descend into the inhumanity that they themselves blame the very country for.
If I was in America right now, I would get the hell out immediately. This is literally like watching the cultural revolution unfold step by step.
Twitter got all the spotlights, others try to rush onto stage before the audience stops applauding. Corporate decisionmaking structures at Google are clearly slower than a Zuckerberg whim, but their lag is surprisingly low.
Personally, I think it's a bit sad that Twitter with the hard tweet removal is effectively protecting Trump from being judged for his statements by the general public. The radicals got the messages anyways, but superficial observers are supported by the remove in any "bad but harmless" perception of Trump they might have.
But that wouldn't affect forks such as Brave, would it? Or maybe they would engineer in some way to force the forks to use a Google blacklist or else....
If a website isn't accessible on Chrome, Edge, or Firefox, it's effectively deplatformed. It's a tiny fraction of the population who even knows HOW to sideload an app.
Google one company but the different parts have different roles. With Google Play, they're the publisher. Google doesn't need to block websites because they have nothing to do with them.
Once one take more than a surface level look at what you have said one realize it doesn't actually add up. Google blocks websites for all kinds of reasons, a whole lot in fact. It's especially evident if one has been using google since the beginning.
They already do that for torrent websites. It's easy to imagine the jump to politically disliked opinions. It's McCarthyism and the red scare all over again except the party enforcing it has switched.
The link is broken, but I just read similar about Apple. Eventually I hope people will realise why computer platforms need to be free (and why this election was both fair, transparent, embarrassing and pathetic)
It's not peculiar at all. Different people have been asking them to do that for a long time, pointing out that social media platforms were being misused to spread propaganda, but their requests were refused.
Then there's a historically unprecedented incident stemming from Trump's dispute of the lection results, organized by him on social media, and initiated by his speech on Wednesday morning. I see nothing peculiar about multiple companies independently arriving at similar conclusions and following Twitter's lead.
I feels so conflicted about this kind of deplatforming. I find the people ignorant and topics discussed there of little value. It's mostly just actual lies, misunderstandings, blatant propaganda, stupidity, circlejerking, echo chambers. It's shit, to be blunt. I find it endlessly annoying.
But I sorta think they should be able to have their space? I don't like the way corporations and governments build these huge marketplaces, make them more and more restrictive such that no one can really get huge market-share without them and then they start curating (censoring). I understand why they do it: image, ethics (lol), they can, network effects, control over product quality, increased community cohesion, customer comfort, "safety" (lol), legal (i don't buy this one) and so on. But it wouldn't be a problem if the internet remained decentralized...these big companies should never be in the position to have this power.
At a certain point you get so locked out that you can't even pay the bills anymore because even payment processors won't take your money!
Is there any new way to circumvent the play and app stores so you can still download an app and use it? This throttling at OS level feels like checkmate versus free speech to me
You have always been able to do that on most Androids. And you can always use the mobile website. I do not understand what is the point of this app when it is identical to a website.
Thanks the obvious answer. Parler is very slow for me on android, presumably the incredible scaling issues Twitter dealt with back in the fail whale days. Maybe just using website is better
I'm basically seeing 4 posts about "kill <group/group-leader>" and otherwise standard speeches... and then someone later posts screenshots about Jan 20 re-org posted on twitter..
It seems like the basic political discourse you find on twitter, fb and every other social media system, both red and blue posters, at pretty much the same level of intelligence; I'm really not seeing anything there that doesn't equally merit the banning of, well, every other social media app.
...yes? What do you think gets posted during basically every political event? BLM, obama election, trump election, biden election, etc... Calls for riot and murder are like the standard go-to on social media, if only because extreme posts gather a lot more steam than anything diluted.
I mean shit we just went through 4 years of liberals and conservatives fighting over this shit dramatically all over twitter -- I'm really struggling to find the new extremes you're finding in these; the only thing I can figure is you're giving it more weight because this topic translated into physical activity, where most such content just flames up digitally and dies out
I’m only really concerned with consistency. This is just selective enforcement, with fairly obvious political motivation and timing.
Google doesn’t just randomly grow a set of morals and balls after a decade of silence about similar behavior by/on Twitter, fb, yikyak, tiktok, Snapchat, etc.
Hell, even encouragement if you count things like planning terrorist attacks and successfully killing/harming dozens on WhatsApp, and not immediately banning the application, as well as probably every communication system available on the phone.
If similar behavior would be fine on twitter, fb and the like, those people wouldn't have fled to parler in the first place.
Not being great at enforcing rules on social media is not on the same level as intending not to have those rules.
Equating private with public messaging is ridiculous. Not sure how laws are in the US, but when doing support here in germany we had to have private in-game messages reported by a participant before we were even allowed to look at them. The company obviously had a much easier time shaping the atmosphere in the public forum.
And if you only care about outcomes like never having a terrorist attack... well, I don't see how this could ever happen without in-depth control by government or the like. China-style is probably the closest example we have, and that's not a trade-off i would want to make.
Just a cursory glance on Twitter finds the same kind of unmoderated content but towards conservatives. Two wrongs don't make a right. But let's not act like these platforms are bastions of fair moderation. They are leftist corporatists, tried and true.
You dont think a trump supporter tweeting "Let's just execute all right wing conservatives and get it over with!" as a reply to someone else (another trump supporter) matters?
Its almost as if you just searched for the phrase execute all conservatives but didn't actually read any of them.
My argument is pretty basic, why would I report a conservative tweeting at another conservative "Let's just execute all right wing conservatives and get it over with!"? They're obviously not conspiring to commit violence against conservatives.
>Apple/Google think Twitter has good enough responses to reported violations.
Maybe, or maybe they just don't like Parler. I'm skeptical whether a serious attempt to clean up violent speech would ever satisfy these platforms, especially when what constitutes violent speech is determined by people who are extremely ideologically hostile and uncharitable towards you (eg. see how Twitter construed Trump's last tweets.) But we'll never know because I don't expect such a reform effort to be made.
Ah, we’ve had nonsense like that all over the internet for decades.
Liberal pundits are saying similar about conservatives ... elected officials call for disruption in the street, 4chan has crazy stuff, yaddha yaddha.
We have incitement and conspiracy laws. We have an FBI and Secret Service that really take this stuff seriously and are well financed. If anything these posts make it easier for them to keep an eye on the tiny percentage of loudmouths that might actually do something.
There’s a cost to all this ease of expression, to be sure. Maybe people can be radicalized more easily, and that sucks.
But we’ve built this whole society on erring in favor of more free expression, and by and large this value has been a tremendous success, where the downsides are absolutely crushed by the up side.
Nothing will be an unmitigated good but in this case it’s pretty clear where the balance lies, and what these companies are doing -as we speak- isn’t the winning choice, for anyone involved.
Are you reporting it? Is something happening when you do?
The content isn’t the issue. The question is: would Twitter moderate that content when it breaks their ToS? Apple and Google consider Twitters moderation efforts good enough.
I seem to remember another group calling for the killing of politicians and cops recently. Huge protests, rioting, burning down police precincts. Some three letter acronym I can't remember...
Its amazing you can take the message of "cops shouldn't kill people" and spin it to be about killing the cops. It's a view of the world detached from reality.
The message was really "COPS ARE KILLING BLACK PEOPLE," yet most people killed by police are white (somehow none of these ever seem to merit national, 24/7 news coverage), and while a disproportionate number killed are black, they also commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime and have more violent encounters with police.
I don't know about stats but lets see the big picture: they were brought over as slaves, abused for generations, and then put in shitty economic environments where there is no education, only poverty.
Crime goes hand in hand with poverty, and it builds stereotypes and biases that makes it easier for incarceration which in America is just privatized slave labor market who makes mundane everyday items.
That's typical of BLM supporters. Even intelligent, supposedly scientifically minded people no longer see fit to consult the raw data. They know it's out there, somewhere, but that they're not supposed to look at it.
> Crime goes hand in hand with poverty
Race is actually a better predictor of crime than poverty. But it should be obvious by now that a large part of the disparity is due to the media inciting hatred for whites amongst blacks. Look at the recent spate of "random attacks" (there's nothing random about them) in NYC in the last few months:
Do you seriously believe this would be happening if the media weren't constantly propagandizing black people with a narrative of "unprovoked violence against innocent PoC by white racists?"
I plan on leaving NYC sometime before 2024, since I assume the media will again create another "long, hot summer" to increase Democratic turnout, regardless of how many "random" attacks it incites.
I am... I am democrat, but I feel this is deeply disturbing.
I can see how apple doesn't like parler in its app store, and they have every right to remove it. It is a private company, and it shouldn't be forced to host apps that promote violence/whatever they feel is wrong.
But, the fact that you can't download an app, or side-load an app, on any iphone without it being on the app store, makes this decision very worrying.
Tim Cook and apple are being the arbiter of all speech/content, and this is very similar to autocratic countries where they ban entire sites (Like Erdogan did with youtube and twitter).
One rich corporate exec should not have this much power...
The solution is that all computing device makers, should have a away for their devices to be able to download/side-load apps, without having to go a centralized store.
This is better for those countries that are ruled by autocrats as well, where the government suppresses free speech.
You are not getting the point. I am fine with apple removing any app it doesn't like from their app store, as long as you can sideload an app to iphones (like you can do with Android). The fact that you can't sideload, it makes it worrying as one exec has all the power on what you do with your phone.
> I am fine with apple removing any app it doesn't like from their app store, as long as you can sideload an app to iphones (like you can do with Android).
Sure, I have the same preference, which is why in my household there are 7 actively used Android devices and zero iOS devices.
People with different preferences purchase Apple devices.
> The fact that you can't sideload, it makes it worrying as one exec has all the power on what you do with your phone.
If you choose to give them that power over your phone with your purchasing decisions.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 394 ms ] thread1. Illegal content is not allowed.
That’s it.
“It’s hard” is not an excuse.
I would like it applied to advertisers using tech platforms to evade all sorts of anti-discrimination regulations in housing and employment too!
This is such a narrow minded view and doesn't hold up to historical precedent.
Was Facebook banned from app stores when shooters live streamed on their platform?
Was Twitter banned from app stores when calls for violence against Nick Sandmann were spreading?
Was Youtube banned from app stores when it was discovered that child predators were lurking in the comments and exploiting underage children?
Do you really want Google to be the morality police of devices and services you pay for? Because that's sad. It's sad how people adopt authoritarian tendencies because they disagree with people they don't understand.
Hundreds of hours of video is uploaded to Youtube every minute, you can't have people to watch it through all. Twitter has thousands of tweets a second.
It's impossible to manually moderate social media platforms by your standard, it's the whole point of Section 230.
You remove disallowed content when it's discovered. Parler deletes illegal parleys when are notified, they deleted parleys from Lin Wood a few days ago.
The idea that every social network deserves to exist on terms that are economically preferable to their owners is not some golden rule. These networks didn't even exist 20 years ago.
A brand new startup from last year can hardly be held to the same standard.
(let's see how long this stays up)
Parler is not the "anything goes" website that people like to conflate with Gab.
When Trump says "we need to fight hard!", is that illegal? What if he says, "Go back to the Capitol and start shooting!"? Is that illegal?
FWIW that was our policy at reddit for a long time too. There is a whole lot of nuance to it that is really hard to deal with.
The fact is any moderation will be subjective and imperfect. How can making more complicated subjective rules help at all?
We sent fourteen people to walk around on the moon, twelve of them made it, and all of them made it back.
Its not technology problem. Its human problem.
Where it gets weird is that Twitter also has an explicit user contract with the underlying USA social contract/courts as a dependency! If you could physically live in Twitter apartments, and somehow remain safe from war, why not only depend on the Twitter contract and its moderation system? And that's how we get to the future world of Snow Crash.
Palantir also had to completely leave because there was so much pressure being put on them in the valley.
Don't forget that they banned ChapoTrapHouse along with The_Donald way back when
Is this link right? How about a link to an article instead? What is Parler? Why is it suspended? What is the story for those of us who are just tuning in now?
After about a day Google and Apple banned Parler from their appstores. Four big tech giants Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter - they are cooperating and coordinating in destroying people they don't like.
At this point this fourheaded beast is the most powerful force on this planet.
And besides they were itching to ban Trump before this already. Twitter was very clearly hinting that Trump would be banned the day he was no longer president. This protest just made it happen two weeks early.
Apparently the modern state of both American "conservatism" and a chunk of newsy posters feel that Google and Apple should be forced to host them.
There are some companies that I do not think should be allowed to ban people, like ISPs.. since many times people don't have choices between multiple high-speed ISPs. However, Twitter is not in that same category.
Note clearly - I am not condoning ISPs banning people. I am highlighting the hypocracy in a lot of contemporary conservative principles. It's not the Lincoln party we know of.
That word isn’t only applicable to state actions, and nor should it be.
Also, this isn't going to be effective Parler is a website, people can just browse to it in Chrome/Safari...
We should be promoting apps that encourage and promote healthy discourse between people not echo chambers, but that's what I think is morally correct.
Luckily you can still sideload apps on Android. The day they remove that feature is the day I take the time to figure out how to use an alternate OS.
> AT&T may immediately terminate all or a portion of your Service or reduce or suspend Service, without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes (a) is illegal, fraudulent, harassing, abusive, or intended to intimidate or threaten; (b) constitutes a violation of any law, regulation, or tariff (including, without applicable policies or guidelines (including the Acceptable Use Policy), and AT&T may refer such use to law enforcement authorities without notice to you.
Keep trying.
If it was just politics then Google would also pull New Republic magazine.
Apple has said that they need to step up their moderation game and they can get back into the App Store. I’m guessing that would be good enough for Google as well.
Free speech != guaranteed access to a company providing access to a big audience
It's going to happen. These platforms are so large they encompass a signification amount of the communication market .. and I don't say that lightly. Look at how Facebook has literally gobbled up all its competition and now is pushing policies that make WhatsApp and Oculus useless without handing over full control of all your accounts and devices?
These companies ARE STATES! They may not look like governments, but the communication power they wield is stronger than many nations.
You can no longer just say "They're private companies" when you literally cannot buy a well supported Mobile device unless it runs Android or iOS, unless you have the skill, ability and time to run something like a PinePhone or PostmarketOS.
Like, my life is proceeding just fine without either WhatsApp or Oculus products. Or a Facebook account that I use, for that matter.
(edit: For the record, the reason I am not happy with the precedent is that isolating communities like this seems to usually just serve to increase radicalism rather than remove it.)
Modern life absolutely depends on being able to connect to the Internet in some way. For a lot of people, that's a smartphone, which is cheaper and more mobile than a computer.
I got my first smartphone in 2019 because I watched the world around me gradually change to the point where an Apple or Android phone was expected and became inconvenient not to have.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25662215
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25669864
Apparently WhatsApp is so integrated into several countries' cultures, you cannot live without it. Like literally - some examples I remember are food deliveries (during lockdowns) are only available through WhatsApp, as are scheduling hospital visits, anything involving schooling, I think I remember lawyers sharing documents, and so on.
> ... noting that ownership "does not always mean absolute dominion." The court pointed out that the more an owner opens his property up to the public in general, the more his rights are circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who are invited in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama
Twitter is going to be forced to unban most if not all people if they want to be a general open to the public social network.
The section has two parts, the first of which protects the platform (Twitter, Google Play Store, FB, etc) from prosecution for user-generated content on the platform.
The second part, more relevant here, ensures the right of the platform to moderate it's users anyway it sees fit. If r/conservative can ban anyone for saying anything on the subreddit, or Parler can ban you for dropping leftist talking points, the Play Store can ban your app for enabling domestic terrorism.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
I don’t have a huge problem deplatforming itself. I do have serious problems when it suddenly cuts you off from other unrelated websites or paid-for assets. These knock-on effects aren’t immediately obvious and can be quite severe at the individual level (eg FB locking you out and now you can’t access the local Oculus content you paid for).
Banned from "login with apple"? I should have a right to transfer my account to "login with google/facebook/my own server" and it should work. The same way I can call my friend when he transfers his phone number to another phone network.
Trump banned from Twitter? He should be able to transfer his account to Parler and I should still see his tweets in my Twitter feed, be able to retweet it to my followers, interact with it, etc. Twitter wouldn't be able to influence tweets from Parler so it would show in timeline. But they could decide to not display it in proprietary parts of their system (search, trending topics, whatever)
This way we would prevent echo chambers and deplatforming, while simultaneously allowing companies to maintain their freedom to moderate their own space.
“Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient." Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions, and other controlling bodies.”
“Real” censorship is just censorship, and that’s the definition.
So when I see what is called censorship in US, it seems a bit funny and strange to me. I immediately think how people in my country during communism would be happy if only that was called censorship and if they had a possibility to use alternative channels to exercise free speech. But of course, I accept that this might be my biased eurocentric view of things and that from a different cultural perspective "real" means something else. Perhaps it will be like that even in Europe in a few years, who knows. We don't have much problems for now because we all use US social media and they don't really react to foreign languages, except a few universal "trigger" words like antivax. At least for smaller languages and countries (central and eastern europe)
WeChat does not let you share Winnie the Pooh. Nominally, Tencent is a privately owned company freely choosing who they provide a platform to [2]. But in reality, they have no choice but to ban Winnie the Pooh, unless they want a state apparatus to make their lives increasingly difficult. Just because something is censored by a private platform doesn't mean that it's the "free market" of ideas and not a state or the government wielding its power.
Large US companies are also part of an industrial–congressional complex, with lobbying and political contributions on one side, political approval and threats of regulation on the other. Large tech companies are deeply and inseparably intertwined with the state and the political parties (both of them), based on the granting of reciprocated privileges. They know full well that if they ban the wrong speech (or refuse to ban the "right" speech), they face being regulated out of existence. Indeed, seeing this threat, we see them scramble to align with the incoming administration.
The kind of social engineering that led to the present bans was very popular in communist Eastern Europe as well. Did you recite an anti-government poem at your barbecue? You might find yourself banned from your favorite pub permanently! Why? Nominally, it was the bartender exercising his right not to serve you: after all, he shouldn't have to suffer potentially vocal ("verbally aggressive") imperialists in the establishment he runs. But behind the nominal reason was plain, state-mandated censorship. They'd have risked a bunch of misfortunes by not banning you. These could range from relevant, like the next few beer shipments "mysteriously" getting damaged during delivery, to completely random gaslighting-esque punishments, such as the bartender's daughter not getting admitted into the local high school. A plethora of plausibly deniable, no-outright-ban social mechanisms existed to make life difficult for people who disagreed with the official narrative, and to encourage people to ostracize the disagreeable. It required only a few well-placed entryists, made sure that ordinary citizens had skin in the game, and was a lot easier to handwave away than the black cars and heavy-handed approach that riled up the opposition in the previous years [3].
[1] https://meanwhileinbudapest.com/2020/09/11/klubradio-going-d... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-china-blog-40627855 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_German_uprising_of_1953 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Revolution_of_1956 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Spring
tl;dr: one can always switch their phone if they don't like Apple because the usefulness of a phone doesn't depend on its popularity; one can't practically switch their social media platform if they are banned because the usefulness of the social media depends on its popularity, and the most popular platform typically dominates due to the power law.
If that's what were happening you'd probably have a point, but it isn't. "Not deleting" something is not the same as providing the audience, nor amplifying.
And, by the way, yes free speech does imply some obligations on the rest of us. Speech is not free if you are not free to exercise it; "you're free to talk in a prison cell" type of thinking isn't productive because it avoids the entire conversation.
Free speech has absolutely nothing to do with the government, by the way. Just because one country wrote down something called "The 1st Amendment" doesn't mean that somehow free speech only exists in that country and only when the government gives it to you. Free speech is a natural right that we all have and nobody has the right to silence anyone else: The 1st is simply one aspect of that.
The fact that society at large has lost that value cannot be viewed as a good thing and all the people in this thread defending the silencing of millions because they disagree with them politically is beyond shameful.
I realize that there are some court cases that do guarantee free speech in extremely limited circumstances, but saying that society at large has “lost that value” doesn’t line up with any history that I’m aware of.
Wrong. You always do. They simply have free speech too.
Society is guided by law, not a Webster’s.
At the end of the day, as free people, the people at Google are free to decide who they want to associate with.
More concretely, YouTube has actual knowledge that extremist right-wing political views damage their brand reputation - they've gone through several waves of pulled advertising that has harmed both themselves and their relationship with their creators. Advertisers have told them in no uncertain terms that they will not have their content on the same platform as, say, KKK rallies. So now we need to extend this positive duty to publish onto anyone who does business with these platforms, in order to prevent them from exercising the power of the purse to soft-censor views they don't like.
Furthermore, even this "duty to publish" standard for free speech does not always seem to meet the standards of some. I've heard people (not necessarily you, so the following is a strawman) argue that public rebuke is a form of censorship; if only because it may cause adverse publicity to have one's views opposed. This is absurd; the prescribed answer to offensive speech is counter-speech. If people decide not to do business with someone because they find their political views offensive, that shouldn't automatically be treated as censorship. Even at a "duty to publish" level (what you actually seem to be arguing for), you need to be careful to define common carriers narrowly to avoid forcing people into unwanted relationships, lest you run into this trap of "speech is consequence-free".
In this case, if a significant number of people are disenfranchised by this, it will naturally create the market pressure for a solution that they can use. It will spur adoption of tools like F-droid and open devices etc. It'll force these people to embrace open web technologies instead of proprietary ecosystems. Which are all very positive and healthy things.
It may be very inefficient, but to some extent its a healthy process that ultimately arbitrates where acceptable standards of speech sit.
So, one solution would be to foster an environment where Twitter et.al lose their power because they really CAN'T lock people in anymore and I would absolutely love to see such a future.
But unfortunately that isn't where we are right now and the incentives around us are all set up to ensure it never changes.
You’re exercising your free speech in one right now.
I don’t even have an account of any of the “monopoly” ones.
Whether a private company suppresses communication or the government does it, it’s still censorship.
In fact there have been many laws requiring companies to carry messages against their will, including the Fairness Doctrine, the Equal-Time Rule, and Common Carrier laws, as well as the failed, but generally regarded as Constitutional, Net Neutrality proposals.
Should government really keep pharma companies from selling you pills that are filled with snake oil?
Should a government really force you to allow black people to eat at the same tables in your restaurant as white people? It's your business after all and it's private. You should have a choice on which customers you get to serve.
The things you listed entail selling materially defective good, and discrimination on the basis of race and gender. These are not examples of compelled speech. Here are some more applicable questions:
* Can the government force Hacker News not to flag and hide certain posts?
* And the government make a bookseller to stock certain types of books?
* Could Trump pass a law or executive order to make Twitter revoke his ban?
* Can the government official compel a newspaper to print certain content?
The last one was actually addressed in a Supreme Court ruling [1].
Freedom of speech includes freedom from compelled speech. It's also against the law to tell a person or business to print or say something, or not ban certain content. Sure, if a business exclusively bans content based on the race of the poster they they could fall afoul of anti-discrimination laws. But note that it wasn't the content of the speech that matters here, it is the discriminatory nature on the basis of race.
These protections don't magically go away when a company grows to a certain size or number of users. Market share is relevant to things like anti-trust and anti-competitive behavior, but the people claiming that Facebook or Twitter have to run content because they're big are incorrect.
The exceptions to protection from compelled speech are very narrow, like showing your passport at the border and nutrition labels on food or health warnings on cigarettes. They almost always have a direct and tangible safety or administrative justification. Furthermore, political speech is the most protected form of speech in the US by far. I would be astounded if we ever pass legislation compelling platforms like Facebook or Twitter to host content against their will.
I agree that the principles of inclusion and freedom of speech should be upheld by Facebook and Twitter, but I strongly disagree that they should be enforced by the government. I could see wisdom in making ISPs, payment providers, and DNS providers act like utilities and extend services to all lawful customers, but not at the application layer.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_Herald_Publishing_Co._v....
Do remember, it's a democracy. The government by the people, for the people and all that. Not the people VS the government.
No one said that. We can criticize companies for censorship with or without wanting government intervention.
Even if the heavy hand of regulation were applied to private corps, it seems like they'd still draw the line somewhere.
This ship sailed 50 years ago, I'm afraid. Businesses can no longer discriminate (including refusal to serve) on the basis of race, gender, religion, disability, veteran status, and a variety of other factors. Now, this is almost certainly a good thing - there's been a few negative consequences of the change (destruction of black businesses, for one) but on net it's not really close.
So really all people are asking for is "political affiliation" to be looked at like "religion". And honestly, there's a smaller and smaller set of differences between the two categories as the years go by.
the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.
It is censorship. But not all censorship is bad.
pretty much all dictators agree with you on that.
If you think it should be illegal to yell "fire" in a crowded theater, you're a dictator.
If you think it should be illegal to create/sell/distribute child porn, you're a dictator.
Nice false equivalence. The US is divided right now because of bad faith arguments like this.
"Make your own Twitter"
Ok... hard to get the network effect, but... done.
"Banned. Make your own Apple"
Uhm... we can't, they are a monopoly like you guys say everyday.
It's legal, but definitely not right.
In which fantasy world is the consolidation of power ever good for a democracy?
Maybe Facebook can join and block in WhatsApp too.
Hey it's free market, private company product yay!
At best it's hypocritical, taking advantage of competition at the market level, but then preventing that competition within your company, then praising one and condemning the other. It's not consistent, platforms need to be platforms and let the information flow instead of control it.
Are you saying companies should comply with whatever market pressures they have regardless of the outcome (given a free market)? Because oil companies have an interesting history of abusing this. Surely there is a line, however blurry, that companies shouldn't be crossing if they want to keep the greater good in mind.
Given that many of these tech "platforms" are worldwide, and have slowly dominated the world's userbase BEFORE changing their policies, it's easy to see they might have already crossed that line, we're just not sure exactly how yet (at least imho).
So are Baidu and Tencent.
Large companies are part of an industrial–congressional complex, with lobbying and political contributions on one side, political approval and threats of regulation on the other.
Just because something is done by a private company, it doesn't mean that it's not the state or the government wielding its power. In the current political climate, and given how intertwined corporations and state power are in the US, trying to maintain a crisp distinction between private companies and public authority is itself comical.
In China as in the U.S., these are not local mom-and-pop stores exercising their rights to free association. These are large tech companies and business ventures that are deeply and inseparably intertwined with the state and the political parties (both of them), based on the granting of reciprocated privileges. They know full well that if they ban the wrong person (or refuse to ban the right person), they face being regulated out of existence the next day: indeed, seeing this threat, they're scrambling to align themselves with the incoming administration. Yes, they had deals with the previous administration too [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/business/media/facebook-d...
Corporations are not beholden to pleasing every single individual.
I’m obviously joking, but would it be okay for me to use my platform this way? If not, why not?
That may work for you, but I like to be educated and have insight.
This is why I browse (some threads on) HN
Keep your friends close, and...
- Twitter has suspended both General Michael Flynn, President Trump's first National Security Adviser, and attorney Sidney Powell. Also less know users.
- Twitch and Snapchat disabled Trump's accounts.
- Shopify took down two online stores affiliated with the president.
- YouTube says it's accelerating its enforcement of voter fraud claims against President Trump and others based on Wednesday's events.
- TheDonald.win lost a host (but has backups)
- Facebook has banned Brandon Straka and removed his #WalkAway campaign on the site, an initiative consisting of over half a million users.
Edit: Not sure why a list of facts is being downvoted?
My take is simple: either treat social media conglomerates like we do telecom or break them up like we did AT&T.
I think this is what they're doing right now. I'd imagine the average voter doesn't care whether Trump is on Twitter or Parler is on the App Store.
These groups are not some good ol boys looking to have measured debate about monetary policy. They are literally trying to kill elected officials and undermine democracy.
More directly, the average voter very clearly seems to care, when you're looking at these actions in an economic light.
Social media companies are indeed large communication platforms. There are a lot of similarities, even if they aren't exactly the same.
Or do you believe that our existing laws that apply to phone companies are somehow a tyrannical infringement on their rights?
I'm troubled by it because right-wing != violent, and 74 million people voted for the republican candidate. Continuing to disenfranchise their speech options will not go well.
If reddit creates a rule stating “do not threaten or advocate for violence” and in the process of enforcing that rule they find out that certain groups are disproportionately affected, should they continue equally apply the rule or should they start tallying things up to make sure they ban equal amounts of each group?
Your freedom to not listen or associate with someone is part of the First Amendment and applies to corporations as much as it applies to you.
People get to say or not say whatever they want, you get to listen or not listen to whoever you want.
A corporation you have chosen to rely on still gets to choose they want to associate with, arbitrarily even.
When the corporation messes up, we can try pressuring them into compliance with our ideals.
What the corporation did is in compliance with my ideals. Good luck with yours.
Removing Section 230 wouldn't have the effect people like to think it would.
Twitter, Facebook, et al just excluded leading conservative voices from the public square.
They are a private company that needs to do business to stay alive. Other companies can choose not to do business with them based on the content that's on their site. If they fail to satisfy their customers, they die.
They cannot satisfy the whims of those who pay nothing and demand a megaphone. They owe you, and your beliefs, nothing.
Maybe if you (or I) were banned from HN, no big deal, find some other corner of the Internet to shout from. FB and Twitter are the modern public fora however, they have through moats or whatever business tactics, made other fora far less significant, and in terms of discussion space they are a very big deal. You might be correctly repeating legal principles as they appear in last year's hornbook, however, the books will eventually change.
If Cloudflare and Google together delisted and deplatformed anyone repeating any words of the President or major conservative leaders -- that would undermine a core tenet of our democratic society. That would be an obvious affront to first principles. I'm not sure FB and Twitter are greatly removed from that hypothetical.
So is the premise of your argument that we should be protecting the less internet savvy from having to learn how to browse the web?
Give me a break. FB/TW shouldn't be required to uphold the public's ability to communicate.
If I build the biggest coffee shop my small town has ever seen and it becomes ridiculously popular, is it the new public square and I'm no longer allowed to kick out people for being assholes?
This "big website is popular so now we must treat it as public space" is a take that I see kicked around but has lots of holes in it.
Frankly, it makes smells like bullshit.
Media was once free and then collapse to be owned by ABC, NBC, CBS and a few dozen newspapers.
This was originally about network neutrality, but it applies to what we're seeing right now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP_3WnJ42kw
You can feel free to create your own too. Social media platforms existed before Twitter and Facebook, and eventually other platforms will succeed Twitter and Facebook.
Can it be expensive to start a company from scratch? Yes, it can. But that has always been the case.
But don't fool yourself into thinking my little instances have any sort of effect compared to the big mega-corps of Google/Facebook and Twitter.
As I said, there were social networks before Twitter, Facebook, and Parler, and there will be social networks afterwards.
starting a newspaper is significantly more costly and difficult than starting a social media app. You're confusing the fact that websites like Parler are so toxic that nobody wants to do business with them with the inability of actually starting it, which anyone with a laptop can do on a weekend.
If you cannot install an run your own software on a device, you do not own the device.
You cannot praise the removal of Gab or Parlor now and complain later when they take everything else from you. They can increase the Apple developer fees whenever they want. What happens when they start charging you $2,000 a year or $4,000 a year for the right to publish apps? What happens when the two big platforms decide no one can push an app unless their platform has full moderation.
What happens when Google and Apple, for your safety, say all user contributed content must go through their "spam" filter first for any apps?
This is horrific. You may not like Parlor, but it will not stop here. This is a dangerous place we are in and we should all be horrified by it. People are horrified right now, but they're focused on the wrong thing.
What if the same happens to the Union ...
I am also particularly worried that politicians will use the threat of regulation to coerce companies into suppressing political opponents' messages. The government can't directly ban speech, but if they can intimidate platforms into censuring political opponents they will have achieved the same effect. Better, in fact, because the politicians' agency in this censorship is not visible.
This is an act of great escalation in an already dicey situation.
I hope I'm wrong when I say this will likely beget more violence.
And then, 'correction' camps for people that do not fully fit this new beautiful society.
One woman was shot. 4 others died for medical reasons. One was a heart attack. One was a police officer.
Tragic deaths, to be sure. And the photos really do feel horrific. But do single digit casualties justify all this? Gang violence and crime kills way more people and police officers on a daily basis. Are we really setting the value of our liberal values that low to justify all this censorship and deplatforming?
The events on the 6th, while horrific, have given a handful of big corporations control over national discourse and communication. That scares the daylights out of me. Was this all it took?
When it comes to that event, the real horror is not "single digit casualties" and that is a naive lens to use here. Disrupting a core institution of our representative democracy - certifying the election results for the President of the United States - in an attempt to overthrow the votes and will of the citizens is horrific and chilling.
Shockingly when you flat out say that "They're only sending there criminals" (with regards to Mexico) it has affects on how some people view and thus tread Mexicans and/or brown skinned peoples. Repeatedly, examples similar to this have been expected by the left (myself included) to incite discrimination and violence to groups of people.
So this is, imo, the natural outcome of the President saying that the government is broken beyond belief and that it is a literal stolen election.
So, with all that said i don't entirely disagree with you - BUT, this is far from an isolated incident in my mind. This is repeated escalation.
Not entirely true. Much of it is just plain old politics. This was a massive unforced-error by the President, many of his supporters in congress, and his fanatical base.
Do you recall how many years we heard about Benghazi? How many hearings, investigations, and committees there were? This incident was objectively worse than Benghazi. If the Left were as good at offense as the right, this Jan. 6th attack on our government will be investigated, examined, dissected, and discussed incessantly for at least the next 4 years.
It could have, but the DoD and Trump by extension purposefully weakened security and delayed sending in reinforcements to help.
> The mayor literally went out to protest with them yet nothing happened to him.
Was he violent? Did he break any laws? You realize there were multiple former and current Republican elected officials among the seditionists in DC?
> But some how here the death was by the police shooting the protester and some how this is violent?
Well when you have multiple deaths by violence, yes. The below video I found uncomfortable and disturbing, but I link it to provide evidence this was not a nonviolent protest. https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2021/01/09/officer-crushed-in-...
Don't be so cavalier about what's being lost here. The right to think and to speak freely is a fundamental human right.
it's a pretty common occurrence, historically.
There's a fair point to be made that they'll move on elsewhere, but what if that slightly increased barrier friction is enough to stop them? No harm, no fowl, if that's the case. We traded a small bit of free speech for public safety, the ROI looks good, if it's so.
I would contend it is the latter.
this is the world of techbro-ism with people making 200k per year living in sheltered neighbourhoods, more concerned about their online speech than having a boot on their neck. It's actually completely in line with the audience of this site
the literally most upvoted comment is some random rant about the 'great purge' let that sink in.
“No” and “not many” are the answers so the comparison with widespread attacks on millions of people’s hard won freedoms are (or should be) definitely more of a concern to wider society.
I disagree. I may be wrong, but it would appear that you feel personally attacked. I am not sure how people storming capital AND fighting cops AND leaving pipe bombs in said building want to kill you specifically. I do not see the connection. Are you a staffer/lawmaker/cop there or something?
I recognize that tensions are high, but shouting "literally neo Nazis" is not a great argument in US for a variety of reasons ( not completely unlike antisemitism, it lost some of its punch ).
Unlimited incitement to violence is not sustainable. Banning them for this is the start; America is going to have a long uncomfortable process of dealing with its media.
Pearl clutching? Odd. I've heard people say that all summer long about those afraid of the "peaceful protests" turned violent riots that burned down cities and devastated business. This violence was encouraged by all types of politicians on the left and all the big media networks as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eQzLcO5qhY
A small number of people at an almost entirely non-violent rally, a rally where the president encouraged people to "walk down to the capitol house" .. walk, not riot or loot or burn, a small number of people did something horrifically stupid. Most just walked around, a smaller percentage destroyed stuff. Everyone one of them should be charged if they did.
But you know what I also saw? "Pearl Clutching." Every senator and congressman afraid out of their mind because the villages had come into the castle. The peasants were in the kings court, and the village idiot with a racoon on his head was sitting at the seat of The King's Hand playing with her royal gavel.
You cannot possibly talk about the violence on the 6th, without addressing the fact that the media went on and on and on about praising all the violent "peaceful protestors" all summer long.
It did not matter at all when it was the business owners, the minimum wages workers who lost the jobs at stores now condemned, or those losing everything in lockdowns while Pelosi showed America her ice cream collection in her $14k kitchen setup.
But now that they were causing some minor damage, 1/1000 of the damage the democratic left supporters did on inauguration day 2014:
https://youtu.be/BXR3d22BhHs
It's suddenly the worst thing on the planet! Unprecedented even!
America has a long history of its citizens taking federal buildings. The Black Panthers, with an armed militia, took the California Capitol in the 1970s and no one died.
Not comparable. We were close to a congressional decapitation on live TV.
In 2017 a lone left-wing activist caused more Congressional casualties than thousands of militia boys invading the Capitol.
All four of these incidents had white perpetrators, btw. To extrapolate from mainstream Republican positions, we clearly need a complete and total shutdown of all white immigration until we figure out what is going on.
Back to the present day: the climate of lies about the election from Republican leadership up to and including Trump was obviously a factor in the violence in DC. On top of that Trump was there that day, speaking to that crowd immediately before they took action, directly inciting them to violence. There's no deniability to be had.
Appeasement has only emboldened these people to attack America, it's institutions, it's people, and it's values. We must have law and order, and that requires accountability for Trump and his enablers.
Absolutely
> that requires accountability for Trump and his enablers.
Absolutely not. It's words like that that truly frighten me. Have you lost your good sense?
What truly worries me is this part: "his enablers".... what exactly are you saying? That voting for Trump was a crime? That supporting Trump was a crime? That protesting for Trump (but not engaging in violence nor tresspass) was... what.. Terrorism (as the media is now trying to suggest)? No, no it was most definately not. It is very dangerous to use loose words like this which can be interpreted in too many ways, especially now. If you mean to say that Trump committed a specific crime and had co-conspirators, explain it that way and name the conspirators. Otherwise you are going to have a huge percentage of the population believe that you intend to "round them up into camps" or "line them up against the wall" or other things that other very dangerous people have tweeted. Trump supporters will defend themselves, potentially pre-emptively (just like how the war between the states started) and nobody wants that.
I don't associate with a political tribe, I didn't like Trump, and I left America long ago. But I've cautioned my mother who still lives there and who supported Trump all the way (she believes all the nutty theories, but isn't a bad person) that she needs to plan an escape route into Canada. Because I truly fear for her life at this point. Biden and the media keep wrongly using the word "Terrorism" in order to (I'm quite sure) invoke special governmental powers that allow them to suspend all civil and human rights from... who? ... all Trump supporters? And PATRIOT-ACT V2 has landed, all premeditated and prepared, ready for a huge draconian power grab.
Nobody has demonstrated that Trump has committed any crime (AFAIK). I'm sure there will be attempts. But nobody has even pointed to a credible suspected crime (AFAIK). Well respected constitutional lawyers like Alan Dershowitz have weighed in with clear opinion that Trump doesn't need to pardon himself because he has not committed any legally cognisable crime. And that his speeches were not incitement to violence... and Alan gives a long history of speeches that resulted in violence... and America has always punished the violence doers, not speakers, being extremely hesitant to invoke "incitement to violence." In this case it's laughably far from such.. he said walk, he urged peace, he only called for a protest.
But I'm positive many people will attempt to "require accountability for Trump." Go ahead, do so via the court system using the laws of the land. Both political tribes will support that.
They made shields, set a police station on fire, etc, etc. Much worse than the current situation was.
Consistently amazed that people seem to think that as long as you don’t literally say “I am inciting you to commit violence!” it can’t be considered incitement.
It already happened to the left before and it was called the Red Scare of the '50s. It is strange to see the modern left dig up those old repressive practices and adopt the for their own but "those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it" I suppose.
That seems to be GPs point, actually. It's silly when those on the right are pretending that th comparatively minor private exclusion that the more extreme Right is subjected to might sometime be directed at the Left. The Left is used to much worse, at the hands of the State along with private exclusion, routinely.
All this is going to do is create a real market for more decentralisation and censorship resistance, we have a modicum of control now but that's going to evaporate with the next iteration of the web if this trajectory continues
The right is much more inclined to agree with the characterization that it's mostly terrorists we're killing or that why are civilians around them.
To what some on the right might object is why are we spending all this money on this, which they might even arrive at ultimately the same conclusion as the left but for a different reason.
Even copblock, something both of the more socially liberal wings of the political spectrum can appreciate, has been banned multiple times.
This is the free market in action. No one is forcing Google or Twitter or FB to do anything; I think they've been very restrained. The libertarians should be happy that it's commercial companies shutting Parler down and not govt. It's only when the president incites violence in an attempt retain power that these commercial entities acted.
Parler is not going to be shut down now. Whoever made this decision, just literally gave them Trump base users on a silver platter.
Businesses don’t have any right to force other businesses to carry their products.
An acceptable compromise I think would be to have unlisted apps that can’t be found on the top charts or in search but can be installed via the App Store with a link.
Hard not to be alarmed by the pattern here.
Edit: Maybe it was AT&T, not Samsung, but if so that's a broader scope anyway - and my current AT&T Android phone isn't locked down.
Okay.
Then hosting providers refuse to host.
Payment processors refuse to process your payments for web services.
Your domains are revoked.
Your SSL certs are revoked.
Where does this end? If they have the power to, and they've justified it this far, why wouldn't they keep going?
The answer is relying on corporate sponsored freedoms is not enough. Open source tools and communication technologies need to be available.
Rather, we're talking about whether or not the government should forcibly allow/deny corporations from supporting extremists. This has nothing to do with government control, imo.
What about the hosting company’s freedom of speech rights? If a hosting company doesn’t want to host your site, that’s their decision. If they don’t want to be associated with a site or app or spend their resources, that’s their decision.
These aren’t regulated monopolies that have to serve all customers.
Now, if you want to claim that they should be a regulated market — that’s a whole other discussion.
Do you feel the same way about a company refusing to serve Jews or Blacks? Is it their right?
Great, I cannot wait!
For business discrimination in general, maybe.
For specifically constraining the expressive freedom of media (including social media) businesses, quite plausibly not, because a statute designating a protected class can't negate other people’s First Amendment rights, since the Constitution is superior to statute law.
Of-course this can be challenged in the courts. Well, unless, it's protected by 230.
Trying to conflate 230 here is disingenuous and has no role in a strictly business decision about whether of not a business has to accept a customer.
Political affiliation is a protected class in some states[0].
California[1], for example, also prohibits discrimination on gender identity, ancestry, sexual orientation, AIDS/HIV status, medical condition, political activities or affiliation, veteran status, or status as a stalking victim.
[0] https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/discrimin...
[1] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/california-employmen...
[0] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/california-employmen...
I did some further searches; Madison, Wisconsin[0] and DC[1] forbid discrimination on political affiliation in public accommodations.
[0] https://library.municode.com/wi/madison/codes/code_of_ordina...
[1] https://ohr.dc.gov/protectedtraits
Surely, this should all be just OK by your logic ?
Yet you seem to advocate more government control. You see the dichotomy in your thoughts?
However, there clearly is a small number of players in mobile platforms, cloud, and payment, and they act in a unified way. It has been sufficient.
Sure, there are in fact only a small number of players in this space.
>cloud
There are vast amounts of hosting providers. A quick google suggests over 300k, but that sounds somewhat unlikely.
>payment
There are a thousands of banks in the world, most of Europe manages just fine using bank transfers for payments without involving external payment processors.
>It's sufficient to push undesirables to services which are more expensive, more inconvenient, unreliable, and so on. Relegate them to their internet ghetto.
Is this really a problem? That's just the inherent nature of being undesirable.
Yes, there are cryptocurrencies available, so if we can fully legalize it and promise that we don't touch anyone's private transactions (as well as businesses officially accepting crypto) - that would be an argument.
For better understanding how bad it is: it's non trivial to even accept worldwide payments for small business/individual in the internet if you are, say, from Ukraine, Russia, China or lots of other countries not processed by stripe/paypal for some political or legal reasons. Apart from that, there is a "free" market of two payment processors in the internet and two card processors =)
It's perfectly normal in Europe to pay for your ecommerce purchases with a bank transfer directly to the merchants account. There are thousands of banks out there, there's no monopoly or oligopoly at play.
If a business closes because nobody is interested in buying their products, or a club disbands because nobody is interested in joining, or a pub bars a patron who’s starting fights and nobody blinks an eye. The same thing happens on the internet and suddenly it’s the end of the world.
https://nitter.net/AOC/status/1347679332014161920#m
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25695444
There is a link, though: people with minority/contrarian opinions are sometimes so frustrated with the majority that they lash out in frustration in ways that break the site guidelines. People with majority opinions don't usually do it that way. They're more likely to be self-righteous. Either way, though, users here need to follow the guidelines regardless of what their opinions are.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That's interesting: did you condemn the riots in the streets the past year?
I have a hunch that you defended them. Looking forward to being proven wrong.
I agree with this, and your analysis of the inaccessible cost of those devices people truly can own and control. However, I do not think this is an accurate parallel to the many horrifying political events of this week.
What you're witnessing is culture expressing itself, rooted in history, the law, the zeitgeist of the people. And right now the culture is drawing a line in the sand and saying, "don't do that (bigotry, racism, ignorance)". You are free to be on this side of the line or you can start a revolution. So far the good guys are winning. Not Dems or Republicans, but sane people.
Those in power, people here and the arrogance of many others have created an entire generation of people who've been banished, shunned or shouted down any time they had a differing opinion on anything. I personally am done dealing with this bullshit and the problems that have been inflicted on society. I'm done being quiet and, personally, I'd rather join the damned than continue this circus. I'm willing to put everything on the table to end this and ensure that this will never happen again. EVERYONE deserves a voice and a platform; you are more than free to not listen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
Are you really that dense?
> "patriots" you stand by aren't some of the lowest pieces of shit fighting for one last gasp of relevance in this brave new world.
I am not defending the thugs or Trump. This came about because of a much deeper problem and what you are doing is a great example of why we are here. This is about the censorship and the arrogance that has lead us to where we are today. I and many others have been censored for having arbitrary opinions that don’t fit the narrative of the majority (mob). Instead of having civil (adult) conversions, it has become more popular to take out the ban hammer or label the speaker when, in reality, the label does not apply.
You can continue to water down important historical labels and assert what others believe without talking to them, but things are going to get much worse when we continue down this path.
We just suffered a textbook seditious conspiracy against the United States, which was planned on Parler and thedonald dot win. Is there a chance that Google's decision to remove Parler from their app store will only throttle the spread of Parler? Have you heard of the slippery slope fallacy? [1] And if so, why doesn't the prohibition of apps for child pornography produce the harms you cite?
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-di...
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fallacies/
Not to mention, this is not the first time rioters have taken over capitol hill while Congress has gathered. It has happened over and over many times, even in the past few years. Which of the following events did you see broad front-page coverage of, along with censorship/deplatforming on social media, and calls for resignation/expulsion of politicians:
Was it the capitol riot that AOC directly participated in (https://theintercept.com/2018/11/13/alexandria-ocasio-cortez...)? Perhaps it was the repeated incidents after AOC and Rashida Tlaib both encouraged this group to continue illegal rioting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise_Movement)? Or the several past Capitol Hill riots staged by Democracy Spring (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Spring)? Or perhaps the Obamacare riots (https://www.cnn.com/2017/07/10/politics/health-care-protests...)? Or maybe when 600 people raided capitol hill to protest immigration law (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/womens-march-protesters-call...)?
The reality is none of them resulted in any consequences for the activists, affiliated politicians, or organizations that either organized/led/incited those riots. After all, AOC is still here on Twitter/Instagram/whatever. The same thing happened throughout 2020. Rose City Antifa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_City_Antifa) organized numerous highly violent riots at federal buildings in Portland - guess what, their Twitter account (https://twitter.com/RoseCityAntifa) still stands. BLM-affiliated events have caused billions in damage, and resulted in a far greater number of deaths - shouldn't they be deplatformed as well?
The tech companies making these changes at the eleventh hour is simply them pandering to the incoming administration (their new masters) and them finally caving in to their own political biases and putting their immense, unchecked power to use by attacking and suppressing their political enemies. It's a dark, dark day and like in all such catastrophes, it'll be welcomed with open arms.
How are we to know? Four years ago everybody was like "do you really believe a senile ex-talk-show host will withstand a round of debate^W^W^W^W^W become the Republican candidate^W^W^W^W become the president? Come on."
Yet here we are.
You might want to review the facts. The Capitol Police were overwhelmed, our elected representatives, who were in the process of finalizing our election, had to run for their lives, and the layers upon layers of armed forces were not there to protect our representatives. This was a massive security failure and we should never come this close to having our elected representatives taken hostage and executed by insurrectionists. And if that had happened, yes, it would have destabilized the country. How could it not?
What crazy fantasy world are you living in? That's absolutely not what happened at all! Are you INSANE?
The police were literally taking selfies with protestors, the protestors stayed within the velvet ropes and the TRUMPers stopped anyone who tried to break things.
https://invidious.xyz/watch?v=LPxFGKVl5H (skip to 2:35)
"Sunrise planned a sit-in in Pelosi's office and asked Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to help them publicize the event, which she instead decided to join herself...The sit-in took place on November 13. Over 250 protesters showed up to occupy Pelosi's office, with 51 being arrested by Capitol Police."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise_Movement
Haha. What the. You used an example of women with babies strapped to them in comparison with dudes that stormed the Capitol, killed a cop, looted, all while encouraged by the outgoing president?
> The reality is none of them resulted in any consequences for the activists
The article you linked to has the title: 'Nearly 600 protesters at Women's March arrested on Capitol Hill'
I mean, if you're gonna do false equivalencies, maybe make some effort, instead of going with the spewing hose approach.
> Rose City Antifa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_City_Antifa) organized numerous highly violent riots at federal buildings in Portland - guess what, their Twitter account (https://twitter.com/RoseCityAntifa) still stands
Come back to me when Antifa, with the encouragement of Obama, storms the electoral proceedings of the next Republican president.
Evidence generally supports the notion that deplatforming works. If you remove people from your platform, they generally end up scattered across other platforms or new platforms in smaller numbers. “Alternative” platforms are more likely to collapse, which just makes things worse.
Think about this—when was the last time you heard about Alex Jones or Milo Yiannopoulos? What happened to r/fatpeoplehate or r/watchpeopledie? If you want to find these communities, where do you go? You have to search them out. Maybe you check out one of the chans. Maybe you go searching for Discord invites. But you still keep a Reddit and YouTube account, of course. You keep using Twitter and Instagram and Facebook even though the communities you want are deplatformed.
Most people don’t go through the effort. The communities end up fractured. The alternative platforms like Parler and Voat are often worse for exactly the same reasons that they exist in the first place. That’s why deplatforming succeeds.
I pointed out a class of apps that are banned and asked why we haven't slipped down the slope they described.
> if so, why doesn't the prohibition of apps for child pornography
Forgive me, I was obviously mistaken to bring up freedom of speech or to claim that you were conflating apps/sites that allow freedom of speech with those that allow child pornography.
/s
Edit: fixed my egregious typos.
Of course you are not allowed to possess or distribute explicit photos of actual minors (the same way you are not allowed to possess or distribute human kidneys, or for that matter copies of Windows XP): fortunately, none of these acts are speech, even under extreme straw men versions of free speech absolutism. Easy test: you are still able to convey any of your thoughts/opinions and make absolutely _any_ point to any audience without inconvenience even if you don't resort to these activities.
If the state would use its influence to get one single bookstore in Bumsworth, Arizona to stop selling one specific book on repairing video cameras [2], that would certainly be a free speech issue, and it would certainly violate the First Amendment.
Yes, even if the book remained available in every other bookstore across the nation, and every book discussing other ways of repairing video cameras would remain available for sale in Bumsworth. Just imagine a state attorney trying to use that as a defense, to explain why the "No Video Camera Repairs in Bumsworth Act" does not violate the First Amendment. It would be ridiculous.
You're trying to use the same defense while the leaders of the largest soon-to-be-opposition party are banned en masse in an effort to align industry with the incoming new administration, while people with significant cred [1], who happen to be on bad terms with opposition party in question [3] denounce the whole thing as an "unacceptable act of censorship".
[1] https://nypost.com/2021/01/09/russian-dissident-alexei-naval... https://twitter.com/navalny/status/1347969772177264644
[2] more pertinently, a book about the acts of the Catholic Church in Bumsworth, or the mafia connections of the mayor of Bumsworth
[3] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-05/donald-trump-us-has-n...
Of course not. The medium
The current state of affairs offers nothing more granular than shutting down all of Parler in response to their failure to moderate this speech effectively.
If you can go on there and convince a single person that the election was legitimate, that ballot security measures make it impossible for their beliefs to be true, and that Biden was legitimately elected, it's possible for the proposition "free and open discussion can diffuse false ideas" to be valid, but if you can't, then you might want to reevaluate.
How do you think civil wars start? And how many actual wars have been started by lies? Usually by the instigating government or yellow press, but in this case it's DIY yellow press letting people make up their own lies.
Comparing ~70 million Americans to paedophiles...
You do realize, both sides of America think the other side is radicalized. This was literally the reaction on Trump's first day of office:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXR3d22BhHs
Have you forgotten about that? Does that look anything like the 6th? No, of course it doesn't. Had those people been let into the State House, it may have burned to the ground in 2017!
> insufficiently moderated community
Section 230 was put in place because it's difficult to moderate effectively when you're trying to launch a startup. Are you saying no one can launch a social network unless they have the money and staff to moderate each an every single post that comes in?
On Wednesday, while our elected Representatives and Senators were in the process of finalizing the count of the US election, armed Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol. Several of these people were carrying zip-tie handcuffs and were hunting for Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer. 5 people died in this insurrection attempt. Here's the video of the QAnon insurrectionist who was shot by the Capitol Police as she was breaking into the area where our elected Reps and Senators had retreated to.
This was an attempt to overthrow our government, and it's a matter of luck that our legislators weren't executed by this mob. Attempting to "Both Sides" this is intellectually dishonest, as a riot in the streets is a categorically different thing than a seditious conspiracy that involved the violent disruption of the finalization of results from our election.
> Are you saying no one can launch a social network unless they have the money and staff to moderate each an every single post that comes in?
I'm not intimately familiar with Section 230, but I don't want my country destroyed. If Google and Apple facilitate distribution of a toxic product that destroys my country, that's a problem for me.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2021/01/08/ash...
ADB doesn't require individual clearance from Google, you can install any apk you like. In fact you don't even need ADB, you can just install an apk downloaded from the web if you uncheck "only verified sources" in settings. Google is merely removing Play Store convenience (and distribution channel safety). Providing that Play Store convenience costs them real dollars for computing resources and they chose to not do that anymore for the app in question.
Without this use case people won't realize why open source matters, or phones without control matters, etcetc. While i don't agree with Trump or his party actions, this definitely is waking thousands of people up to how easily even Americans are censored.
This realization is crucial to privacy focused applications, imo.
Either you control your device, or your device will be used to control you.
In most countries in the world, you can go to jail for saying the wrong thing. This includes countries which are, for all practical purposes, freer than the USA -- like Germany, which hasn't renazified since WWII in part because of its hate speech laws.
So no, not everybody recognizes that unfettered expression is a universal good. There are places which have already experienced the danger of free-speech absolutism.
The US has a number of troops stationed in Germany comparable to the German army. The ideology of Germany has not been left to chance at any point after WWII.
That probably isn't the model that most people look for in their own country's governance.
Maybe the so called free speech absolutists are not as principled as they say.
It is absolutely censorship. It's textbook, dictionary, censorship. Take wikipedia's great opening paragraph:
>Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient." Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions, and other controlling bodies.
In my opinion it's especially egreoious, requiring remedy, if the censorious actor has a large amount of control over a medium of communication. In this case google dwarfs perhaps governments.
No, they are technically incorrect. As other posters have pointed out, it literally is censorship. Whether a private company or government is doing it is irrelevant to the definition of that term.
If not, then why is the removal of an app from the app store censorship? The world wide web still exists. Parler is still on the internet.
Seems like there should be some acknowledgement that there's a difference between refusing to actively participate in distributing content and censorship.
Say you had two stores: Walmarket and Toget. That's it. That's all you got. Toget stops telling a brand of ice cream and you literally cannot sell it anywhere else other than Toget and Walmarket because someone would have to drive 2 hours out of their way each time to buy your Ice Cream.
You have Android, iOS and PinePhones.
Where I live there is indeed no importer of certain brands of products that I could easily get in the US. Not even an equivalent alternative.
But life goes on and aside from me complaining about it on the internet every now and then I don’t let it bother me.
Social media and communication are a different beast.
I mean, Parler is a CRUD app. You are posting a comment on another CRUD app that doesn't even have an official mobile app client!
Let's not kid ourselves. People rarely use the browser for something they really like on mobile if there is a native app. The experience is very different.
Facebook and Twitter are older than push notifications. SMS and email are pretty obvious replacements with little functional difference.
> Let's not kid ourselves. People rarely use the browser for something they really like on mobile if there is a native app. The experience is very different.
Sure, but you are pretty clearly moving the goalposts. Is it any more difficult to enter "news.ycombinator.com" into a mobile web browser than it is to download a mobile client?
There is also ongoing work to add Push API [0] support on the web as well. No Safari support though.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API
Can't service workers/PWAs handle this? While the UI may be subpar, they still have total access to it.
And as much as I dislike the Catholic Church, not allowing it to list books it finds heretical is outright restrictions of its freedom of speech. It’s only a problem when the church has the power to have governments also ban those lists, but that’s quite a different thing.
This is assuming services like Cloudflare and hosting services won't cut Parler - they've done this before
Which is to say, it's true, & that's a good thing, but that doesn't mean that the censorship itself isn't bad.
The most effective, most powerful communication medium that exists right now is native apps for social networks on smartphones. If 100% of that medium is controlled and censored by two companies, that means those two companies exert a massive influence on what kinds of communication society as a whole will have.
If you believe in the general principle of free speech (not just strict legal interpretations of say the 1A), that's not a good thing.
That's practically illegal now, too. What a time to be alive...
The better analogy is that the newspaper has banned certain people who have written articles inciting violence.
Or maybe an even better analogy: the movie theater has taken the microphone away from the person telling those in the crowded movie theater to start punching each other.
My analogy is far more accurate than your tortured newspaper analogy. Parlour still gets to publish unrestricted as a web site and as web apps, it just doesn’t get free distribution, marketing and hosting from Google or Apple.
Except you can sideload on Android.
And this is yet another escalation on the road that started with “we’re just going to censor tweets that literally say the sky is green.” Google has banned an entire social network.
It’s exactly what social conservatives did back when they controlled the levers of government and industry in the mid-20th century. They prevented liberals from spreading their ideas, because that could cause social unrest, violence, etc. (And there was violence, such as anarchist leftist bombings.)
That’s freedom in both directions.
At its worst Hollywood created a black list for alleged communist sympathizers. That was a very specific kind of rating system for the same benefits. Most Americans were justly terrified of the Soviet Union and its genocidal leadership at the time, and distributing a film written by or starring someone who publicly endorsed communism would have killed box office and likely had the studio boycotted by large anti-communist groups.
That said, the black list unfairly included lots of people who were at most interested in social justice.
Today the same thing has happened to Mel Gibson and us happening to Johnny Depp. Don’t expect your employers to invest their millions into help you promote repugnant behavior or beliefs to their customers.
"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
And actually, the more I think about it, this is a more apt analogue to what's happening with Paler then first engages the mind...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest#:~....
censorship of viewpoints you disagree with means you don’t understand the point of freedom of speech.
If WalMart sold ice cream to white people, but not to black people, that would be pretty awful both morally and it would be illegal.
The thing with speech is it is inherently attached to a person. There is no speech in a vacuum. Google has basically said that certain people shouldn't be able to speak. As politics is a personal belief like religion, it is sad it is not a protected civil right. But that's what this is--saying certain people can express their beliefs, but others can't.
What makes this scary is not that stores are choosing what products to sell. What makes it scary is that, at least in this segment of the economy, there are exactly two stores, and picking at least one of them to shop at is very nearly a precondition for participating in modern society. This gives Google and Apple a degree of influence over peoples' lives that one could quite reasonably recognize as quasi-governmental, and that is worrisome.
Isn’t this what android users have boasted of for so long to apple fans? There isn’t only one store. In the case of Parlor, you can probably just use a browser even.
Just because you have to go directly to the website doesn't mean it's censored. Google, Apple, FB, Twitter, etc are not in the business of supporting outlier extremism in our society. Claiming censorship because they don't want to platform that stuff is ridiculous.
Imagine a Jewish-owned store being forced to sell nazi paraphernalia because not selling it is censorship. The users of parler or gab are just mad these huge companies are taking a stand. Engaging with their tantrum only gives them a platform, even if it's just a small personal one, and is clearly bad. Do we argue with crazies on the street yelling "The end is nigh!" every day? No.
I don't buy the analogy ( mostly because most analogies are crap ). Normal people try thought experiments and use the same situations and change one critical piece of information to see how it affects the model.
Portland 01/02/21 - reports of molotov cocktails, fireworks, fires - I don't know about you, but use of explosive materials does tend to sound violent. You don't really come with a firebomb with no intent to use it.
Seatle 07/27/20 - reports of fires, 59 injured officers
Kenosha 08/25/20 - riots, destruction of property including fires including courthouse, incitement for more violence
I don't think I have to mention Chicago or NY..
And this is just a cursory check.
In BLM defense, they initially suffered from the same issues anonymous did. Literally anyone could be their spokesporson so right wing media got lovely quotes about purpose and goals of BLM such as ( some of those come from their official website ):
-Destruction comes before rebuilding, that’s what we talking about here -“Yes, I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should also come down,” the activist posted via Twitter on Monday. “They are a form of white supremacy. Always have been.”“Tear them down.” -We believe and understand that Black people will never achieve liberation under the current global racialized capitalist system. -‘we will burn down this system’ -'MacCallum asked Newsome what Black Lives Matter hoped to achieve through violence." “Wow, it’s interesting that you would pose that question like that,” Newsome responded, “because this country is built upon violence. What was the American Revolution? What’s our diplomacy across the globe?”
Now you will note that their website is cleaned up and no longer contains notes about - forgot what terminology they used - abandoning existing familial structures and building new utopian world. It is a shame they took it down. It could open some eyes. I guess someone told them they need rebranding.
So maybe you are right. They are different after all. BLM is worse that Trump crazies. At least Capitol assholes will be picked up by various agencies and prosecuted. BLM members may have been arrested, but various Dem operatives ensured they are out as soon as possible. Hell, some were raising money for bails.
In other words, I do not think you have a clear picture of BLM, who they are, or even what they were doing.
So I this my comparison is valid.
When a small number of companies make it difficult to communicate via our main communication device, and there are no viable alternatives, then a fundamental right is being suppressed.
There is no marketplace of ideas when there is no marketplace,
Amplifying it would be pasting images and links to Parler all over the Google Play splash page and all over the Google Play website, sending emails to all its gmail users to download Parler, or inserting Parler ads into some % of its ad impressions.
They aren't doing that. "Leave it alone" is not the same thing as amplification, that's literally the distinction that is made in Section 230.
The ONLY thing being asked for is that Parler polices itself (or the authorities get involved where appropriate), and that Google and Apple leave it be because all they do is serve as the conduit to get it onto the device they control.
That is the way the world SHOULD work. No it doesn't give you the adrenaline rush of enforcing your desires on the world, but that's not a good thing to be enabling in the first place.
If they had no control over the stores used to get apps on devices, the whole question would be moot. Their duopoly leads to this issue. Frankly, that control should be taken away.
People are calling for AWS to drop Parler, and Parler has already come out and said if this happens, then Parler itself is gone forever.
Then why not ban Twitter as well? I could show you hundreds of tweets from little known left-wing activists inciting violence during the BLM protests. This double standard tells us that the rationale given for banning Parler is just an excuse. The real reason is that executives in these companies are doing what their most vocal employees and the liberal media are pressuring them to do.
After all, you don't see people clamoring in shock and about "unsettled" feelings regarding the moderation that happens here on HN.
Who could have possibly predicted it?
Parlour can still distribute itself as a web app, no problem.
Censorship: the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.
A private business not distributing a product because it doesn’t represent their or their customers values isn’t censorship, it’s a marketing decision.
If Walmart decides to stop carrying Coke because of its sugar content, is that “censorship”?
If a girl decides not to date you, is that censorship of your free speech rights to bore her?
The advocates for Parlours right of distribution don’t actually believe in individual rights, or they would argue it has to be imposed on the App Stores.
And this was indeed done because it was considered politically unacceptable and a threat to security.
> A private business not distributing a product because it doesn’t represent their or their customers values isn’t censorship, it’s a marketing decision.
The problem is your thinking that those two are some exclusionary.
The censorship that most company practice is of course for financial gain.
> The advocates for Parlours right of distribution don’t actually believe in individual rights, or they would argue it has to be imposed on the App Stores.
Nor does their believing in free speech or not have anything to do with whether this is censorship.
What does discretion in the products a restaurant sells have to do with the customers it sells to?
Whataboutisms galore.
Be sure to pick up on of my official, Trump-endorsed anti-purge kits! Available for a limited time on Wetsy (etsy for the incontinent).
The kit contains zip ties, 9mm ammo, GI Joe halloween costume and an extra large tub of spray tan. Remember, social media can't censor us if we all look and dress and talk exactly the same. Stay vigilant heroes!
Parler need to remove this content. This isn't Google and Apple censoring political views. It's a demand for Parler to remove illegal content.
1. Trump is a popular public figure that has been tweeting against Democrats for the past decade.
2. Trump runs for office, and immediately starts calling into question mainstream media and election integrity.
3. Trump wins the election, and his voters accept his premise that the media cannot be trusted. They turn to him as their sole voice of reason.
4. Given that they believe everything spoon fed to them by Trump, they cannot accept alternatives.
5. The voice of Trump is amplified by his followers across the internet (and this is aided by complicit Republican in and out of government.)
6. When Trump wins, they believe that he won the election. When he loses, they cannot accept it and instead choose to believe the word of Trump.
Should this voice of Trump be forced by the U.S. government to be supported by every public and private corporation to continue the Trump movement?
Would drowning out all other media and sources of information be the ideal way forward for the United States?
It is a clear and present danger.
Radical ideas have always looked for ways to spread around and influence people. As in with any idea, there are good ones (Why should a worker not have paid holidays, or days off, or have work life balance, education rights, voting rights, etc) and bad ones (the ones we see espoused by many radical right wingers like the claimed inferiority of the black race and the superiority of the white race)
Now, 74 million Americans voted for a vision of trump, that mixes a lot of good ideas with some very terrible ones. And out of the 74 million voters for him, I am sure many of them voted for the promise of jobs, stability, incomes, etc. Unfortunately, a significant & vocal minority of his supporters have shown hard right and often immoral ideas.
In the past, messaging and reach was a carefully cultivated art practiced by seasoned politicians and ideologists.
Today, the situation is different. It is very very easy to gather people into a group, isolate them and radicalize them. You see it happening everyday on the social media.
What, then, is the solution to this? It is a problem because a society must be coherent and move forward together, otherwise it fractures and implodes from within.
For a society, there are many aspects that affect it's prosperity. Jobs, distribution of wealth, prevalence of opportunities, justice, etc.
If you have allow one small section of ideologues hijack the conversation and demand for continuation of radicalization, that society will collapse. Just think about Nazism, Stalinism, etc. All those societies had one thing in common, the ability to radicalize and brainwash population.
So what about Parler? Banning is the right thing to do.
Out of those 74 million who voted, they have avenues like FB, Twitter, IG, etc to engage and communicate.
That small group who wants to radicalize the society, have their voices cut off, and that is how it should be.
I would like to point out that Nazism and Stalinism are localized versions of the same thing: fascism. trump is the current leader of American Fascism. He should have his voice on major platforms cut off.
What people don't seem to realize about democracy is that fascism is the weak point.
If you're only exposed to right-wing media, you only see left-wing radicalisation.
Both tribes are convinced that the other is dangerously radical.
We are now at the point where we have to block violent fascists from organizing the overthrow of our democracy, and that requires deplatforming. We had a peaceful resolution to this in February of 2020, but the GOP chose this path instead.
I think most of us didn't fully realize until this week the consequences of not conceding would be this bad.
"true threat" is where you have actual proof those threats arent empty rhetoric, like you know, people shouting about overthrowing the government and then storming Parliament while armed, with resulting causalities.
This is wrong, and this is a massive overreach. This is not the internet that we dreamed about and that many of us worked to build. Very sad day.
As the government is not involved at all, the overreach argument doesn't apply.
edit: okay. overreach/censorship in private sector doesn't bother me. thanks. make the antitrust case if it inconveniences you too much to make an alternative.
Is it only the government which can overreach? I'm not sure I follow your argument.
If apple hooked into my banking app and decided to lock my phone because they saw me buying marijuana, that would also be an overreach, and also has nothing to do with the government.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/technology/90-perc...
If Google gives most of its donations to Democrats, how can you believe that they will not do what Democrats want them to do? Also, Democrats have been very vocal about the fact that Google and Twitter did not "censor enough" recently. This is a nice follow-up.
> how can you believe
I never said anything about what I believe.
If you believe the state is controlling some private organizations to conduct censorship, take it to a court.
This isn't about maintaining peace on their platforms or to protect users. Its about controling all conversations, everywhere
I don't know if Mike Pence uses Parler, but if pro-Trump lawyer and right wing influencer Lin Wood is calling for his execution, don't you think that represents something of a risk to Pence whether or not he reads it?
Moreover, the website is accessible and nothing stops people from using it. Apps are not the internet (thankfully). Pretending that the app store is the internet just gives these companies more power.
It's all about friction. The more you add friction, the more you slow down the uptake of competitive platforms. Right now you have to turn off play protect and let your phone install from unknown sources to install APKs. Most people probably don't even know how to do that, so it's an effective strategy.
(And with locked-down mobile platforms, the platform owners could theoretically start enforcing a site blacklist of some kind at an OS level if they really wanted to)
Edit: it's a question, not a statement or a judgement
I'd quibble about the 'vocal' part, however. People across the ideological spectrum are vocal, but it's probably more like 1% or less, not 30%. Our views are shaped by the few people who bother to say anything. I wonder if we'd be happier if everyone else could remember that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_party_strength_in_U....
The interesting question is whether they are doing it out fear of anti trust action from Democrats or weren’t doing it for the last four years out of fear of Republicans.
More like excuse :)
Or, maybe the CIA just manipulated the blue into doing this! Conspiracy inception!
The cops didn't just let them in. The protesters pushed past the main barricades.
After the cordon had been broken, the police retreated back towards the Capitol building.
The police repeatedly did this until they were completely overwhelmed by the protesters.
One police officer died in the melee and several others sustained injuries.
The failure on the day was one of leadership and intelligence, but the poor guys on the ground did their best.
https://twitter.com/elijahschaffer/status/134696651499014963...
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnewsvideo/comments/krvssn/trum...
https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/krvboi/clas...
> Speaker 1: There were a couple of groups that busted through, but other than that, I mean it was almost like they let everybody else through, like once a group kind of busted through just trying [inaudible] mad
> Speaker 2: They were just trying to run away [inaudible]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=52&v=BUE4TCLlv-c
As they admit, the mob broke through part of the police lines, so the police retreated back to the Capitol building. Doing otherwise, would have allowed the remaining officers on the line to be encircled by the elements of the mob that had already broken through.
In any event, nobody is all that mad that the Trump supporters made their way to the steps of the Capitol building, the central issue is that they actually broke into the building and started marauding and threatening its occupants.
Your video does not allege that the Capitol Police let the protesters into the Capitol building. Rather, both your video and the ones I provided show they clearly did not. The mob made it in by climbing walls and scaffolding and smashing through windows and doors.
Your video tries to blames Antifa, but that is completely illogical. True, it shows several people within the crowd decrying the forced entry and blaming Antifa, but yet somehow scores of confirmed Trump supporters made it inside the Capitol building.
Did the Trump supporters just happen to be on a tour inside the building when Antifa broke down the doors? Did Antifa somehow force them to rampage through the place, beat police officers, steal, and vandalise property?
Blocking parler does jack shit in stopping people’s ability to coordinate violence. Mass texts, email chains, WhatsApp, signal, 4chan boards, etc are all there.
It definitely helps. Just because people can coordinate using other mediums is not an argument against making it more difficult for them.
The simple explanation is usually the correct one: Parler's growing so fast that it simply can't keep up with policing the content. They need to add a lot more moderators and things will calm down.
Google and Apple are making a mistake.
The hypocrisy is unbelievable. This will not end well.
"Two out of three Democrats also claim Russia tampered with vote tallies on Election Day to help the President – something for which there has been no credible evidence."
The chronology of Russian involvement with and around the Trump campaign, illegal or not, is pretty damn well established now thanks to the Mueller report, disclosures from other parallel cases, and the recent senate committee report. Changing vote counts isn't part of it.
Meanwhile, as per YouGov [https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...] "One in five voters - including 45% of Republicans - approve of the storming of the Capitol building"
Amazing! Then please explain where they got that idea put into their heads?
"Two out of three Democrats also claim Russia tampered with vote tallies on Election Day to help the President – something for which there has been no credible evidence."
https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
If you're trying to pin something on me, keep in mind that I'm not even American, let alone a Democrat.
"Those on the political left who play fast and loose with the term “hacked,” as in “Russia hacked the 2016 presidential election,” are aiding the Kremlin in its mission of undermining Americans’ faith in the democratic process, two University of Kansas researchers write in a new scholarly paper.
...
The authors lay the blame for this problem at the feet of the liberal media, which they define as media that liberals consume, including the Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC.
They wrote, “We demonstrate that the insular nature of much of the liberal media ... enabled the spread of this misleading definition. Through a rhetorical analysis of texts defining Russia’s influence campaign as ‘hacking,’ we demonstrate that Twitter and the publications produced by the liberal media were highly influential in creating the widespread notion that Russia ‘hacked’ the election.”"
An example of a name: Biden Appointee Neera Tanden: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/biden-appointee-neera-tande...
> Neera Tanden So one person subject to an extremely obvious narrative-driven article by someone who clearly has an agenda on this issue? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Greenwald#Donald_Trump_a...
Her tweets are stupid, but quite frankly her response to Greenwald he shows in his own article is a fair response.
Amazing how lightly you brush off spreading a baseless conspiracy as long as it's your side doing it.
Sounds like a threat. Get on over to parler friend! You seem like the sort of patriot we love to keep very close tabs on. Be sure to have your SSN and photo ID out and ready
https://elizabethwarren.com/plans/strengthening-democracy
>The harsh truth is that our elections are extremely vulnerable to attack: Forty-two states use voter registration databases that are more than a decade old. Laughably, in 2019, some still use Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Twelve states still use paperless machines, meaning there’s no paper trail to verify vote counts. Some states don’t require post-election audits. And ten states don’t train election officials to deal with cybersecurity threats. This is a national security threat, and three years after a hostile foreign power literally attacked our democracy, we’ve done far too little to address it.
I mean, even this very place always had a history of distrusting voting machines, etc.
I think protest is a fundamental requirement of democracy, and as Chris Cuomo himself reminded us: protest aren't always peaceful [1]. It seems like a lot of Democrats are conveniently forgetting that all of a sudden.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/202...
Americans refuse to act collectively except to circle back to their job every morning, propping up “the establishment”.
Let’s stop pretending we’re above it all.
https://apnews.com/article/capitol-police-reject-federal-hel...
Your recent posts have been using HN primarily for political battle. Please don't do that—it's against the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and it's the line across which we start banning accounts (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), regardless of which politics they're battling for. The reason is that it basically destroys what HN is supposed to exist for, which is curious conversation on a wide range of topics.
Also worth noting that there was no property damage or injuries in more than 97 to 98% of protests[1]
[1]: https://today.uconn.edu/2020/10/study-2020-protests-shows-di...
Well, in the middle of Seattle. It's not clear whether chaz intended to secede from the US or merely Seattle policing; their demands were certainly very local so I suspect they really had no intention of leaving the US itself.
https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/protests/seattle-pr...
This isn't a fair representation of what happened and it reveals your bias. For one example, it appears a police officer was murdered with a fire extinguisher. We don't even have to get to what might have happened if the politicians weren't able to get out in time.
I also think the guy who shot that unarmed woman has no business wearing a uniform and carrying a weapon.
And if it wasn't 100 people spilling over a barrier (actually, the police pulled the barriers away and literally waved them in - explain that one to me) and entering a government building and disrupting an important session... then what was it?
I don't know what you are basing this on. He was apparently the last line of defense between the mob and some of the politicians the mob was trying to attack. Who knows what would have happened if they got through that door and he didn't act. There could have easily been a serious hostage situation.
>And if it wasn't 100 people spilling over a barrier (actually, the police pulled the barriers away and literally waved them in - explain that one to me) and entering a government building and disrupting an important session... then what was it?
Cops aren't apolitical. I guarantee there were plenty of people involved in security that sided with the insurrectionists. And that is exactly what it was, insurrection. They were trying to and were temporarily able to disrupt the function of the government recognizing the rightful next president.
Did this crowd of "insurrectionists" actually threaten anyone? There are reports someone set a couple of pipe bombs, but not in the building, and the FBI is investigating it and has offered a $50K reward, but inside the building, it was kooks and protesters who were pretty quickly rounded up and arrested. I don't condone what they did at all, but comparing it to burning down buildings like in Portland and Atlanta... the mind boggles at this moral equivalency. True mob violence did not occur on January 6, and thank God for that.
Wednesday's insurrectionists were trying to stop the recognition of the next president and take control by force. You can look through this Twitter thread for examples[1]. People entered the House Chamber armed with some sort of weapon and carrying flex cuffs. These aren't "people spilling over a barrier". They are insurrectionists that attempted to literally take our government hostage. The intent here was drastically more serious than any of the BLM protests.
[1] - https://twitter.com/jsrailton/status/1347011413101998080
Sure, that's the same as people angry when theyre throwing stones at cops after killing them in sleep. I don't support BLM violence, just that your view is showing some bias towards a particular narrative - I think you should see the storming of the US Capitol as massively symbolic thing that has shaken the world.
You can spin it your way, and I'll spin it my way. You won't persuade me or 75m other people by just asserting that you're right and we're wrong. It doesn't work that way.
Well, I take that back. It did work that way for 75 years in a place we used to call the USSR.
And no, before you copy/paste random twitter accounts, youtube conspiracy theorists, and "sworn" affidavits without corroborating material evidence: such "evidence" is not sufficient.
If it did then we'd have to believe that aliens are real, that lizard people are controlling the world, the earth is hollow, the moon is a space station, Nibiru is coming, and the pope worships satan.
That's the sort of theories your belief shares evidentiary quality with.
There have been multiple riots over multiple police-involved killings in multiple locations in the last decade.
So yes, what they did was far worse. They claimed to be defending the constitution while in fact they were using force to stop a constitutionally-mandated process: certifying the electoral vote. They were incited to do this by the President of the United States. None of this has ever happened before in America.
Over the summer, 8 men were arrested for plotting to kidnap the Governor of Michigan. There were multiple people with zip tie handcuffs in their possession in the Capitol. What do you think their aims were?
Open your eyes and see how truly insane Wednesday was, please.
> There were multiple people with zip tie handcuffs in their possession in the Capitol.
Maybe to tie some people up? Guess what the intent is of the people that have bombs and guns.
As Senator Graham pointed out in his speech, the security failure was so catastrophic that it could have been the death of the entire house, the senate, and the Vice President (lots of people with large backpacks inside that could have been loaded with explosives).
If there was any serious attempt at an actual overthrow it would have been a much worse day.
Also worth noting that there was no property damage or injuries in more than 97 to 98% of protests[1]
[1]: https://today.uconn.edu/2020/10/study-2020-protests-shows-di...
Some of the Lafayette Square protestors would have breached the white house if they could have too. 60 secret service agents were injured. The only difference, really, is that the Capitol Police did a worse job.
[1]I don't like using the term BLM riots since I have have no idea to what extent they are responsible as a movement (if at all).
Look things up before you throw fuel on the fire.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/09/03/kamala-ha...
Does no one wonder why Trump got 9 million votes more than 2016 and doubled his minority vote? The democrats encouraging and downplaying the riots is why.
You could also argue that Trump's previous tweets, the wink wink nod nod tweets to white supremacists, also fall under a similar category as the BLM tweet. Sympathy and possibly support but not actual incitement.
This time was different. Trump was literally inciting sedition. "Go to the capitol and stop the steal" was the message.
https://acleddata.com/2020/09/03/demonstrations-political-vi...
Seriously. I actually think making a comparison like that would be interesting and constructive.
Because it’s difficult to compare the events of this summer (a spontaneous response to the murder of George Floyd,choked to death under the neck of a police officer for over three minutes, on video, I’ll remind you) to the armed mob that invaded the Capital, threatening to kill or take hostage the entire Congress and the Vice-President, killed a Capital police officer, and planted pipe bombs in the Capital.
I think it would be easier to compare that event, since it’s a singular event, to another singular event, rather than a long series of events as I said.
What do you think?
[EDIT: Oh yeah the mob was also attempting to stop the process of certifying the results of the Presidential election. So much wrongness to have to remember.]
MAGA is fighting for a nihilist controlling government.
I’m curious why police let people storm the capital in violation of law.
Historical context matters.
I don’t think Democrats should paint all Republicans with the same brush, and vice versa.
Forcing an evacuation of the VP, house and senate leadership and like 500 legislators while they are in session selecting the next president is a far, far cry from merely "not peaceful".
Literally the entire legislative branch of the federal government was attacked, along with the backup president!
And, but for a network of cold war escape facilities... they probably would have killed a few or taken hostages.
> ...93 percent of the protests associated with BLM were entirely peaceful...
Yet our government treats left-wing protests and right-wing protests quite differently.
> Between May 1 and November 28, 2020, authorities were more than twice as likely to attempt to break up and disperse a left-wing protest than a right-wing one. And in those situations when law enforcement chose to intervene, they were more likely to use force — 34 percent of the time with right-wing protests compared with 51 percent of the time for the left.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polices-tepid-respo...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22206533
A corrective upvote would have sufficed. Notice that the comment you're talking about is no longer in a downvoted state.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This movement, on the other hand, is quite transparently rooted in white supremacy, and had an explicit goal of trying to undermine democracy itself, and people showed up quite obviously looking for a fight. I mean, the news over the past few days have been plastered with images of a guy in a weird Davy Crockett the Viking hat, with enormous white supremacist symbols tattooed across his torso, brandishing a frickin' spear.
> This movement, on the other hand, is quite transparently rooted in white supremacy
It's almost like people describe their side in the best possible terms, and the other side in the worst possible terms...
Aside? isn't that the whole point?
Study Gandhi, MLK, John Lewis, Mandela - I understand BLM is a decentralized movement, but that's the problem. There is no leader and leadership. It has no coherency. It's dividing the society even more instead of pulling the entire populace behind it.
Social movement has a singular goal - to change the minds of people that oppose their views. BLM has managed to just bring out people who were already supporting them, it hasn't quite changed the hearts of people that were previously racists.
This is not how you make progress in the society. It is "pull", not "push".
Mandela was arrested and detained on Robben Island, in part, because he was part of a group that violently opposed the white supremacists of apartheid South Africa.
MLK never said that there wasn’t a place for violent resistance to white supremacy. In fact, he called out that if the white supremacists of his time weren’t careful, violent resistance would be all that was left (MLK and Malcolm X were more aligned than most people believe; MLK believed that the time for violent resistance to white supremacist violence had not yet arrived).
BLM is, in fact, a very _well_ organized movement and their leadership is consistently calling for protest that is vocal and meaningful, but not violent. Almost every single BLM protest last year that turned violent did so either because of (a) police rioting against the idea of being held accountable for their violence against BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities and persons or (b) white supremacists who thought it would be a lark to start some violence and blame it on the victimized.
BLM isn’t out to change open racists minds—they are correctly considered beyond redemption (and sometimes even beyond shame, like DJT and his coupistas)—and they don’t really care about changing the moderate person’s mind, either. They simply want the indiscriminate state violence against their community to stop. They want to stop the freedom with which the police murder their children.
They want there to be no more Rodney Kings, no more Amadou Diallous, no more Philando Castiles, no more Tamir Rices, no more George Floyds, no more Brianna Taylors, no more Jacob Blakes, no more Mike Browns. I could go on, but these are the ones that I can remember right now. Even _if_ some of them were committing crimes, the police are NEVER supposed to be judge, jury, and executioner…and most of the crimes with which those were accused had no chance of a death penalty. That the police have been able to not only murder BIPOC, but to do so with impunity AS A MATTER OF POLICY, is truly disgusting.
We as a society are lucky beyond belief that we _aren’t_ facing the violent revolution we deserve for our treatment of BIPOC communities and persons. Instead, we’re facing continued white supremacist violence.
Someone who turns up in a Viking hat, tattoos and a spear isn't looking for a fight. A person looking for a fight wears a mask, armour, carries a gun and probably camouflage.
When people wear imagery and slogans to any demonstration, I afford them the courtesy of understanding that what they're displaying on their bodies is part of the message they want to communicate.
The core of the protest is electoral integrity and calls for the politically marginalised to have a voice, not racial supremacy.
That's not a few bad eggs. That's an enormous crowd of people all deciding, tacitly or not, consciously or not, that democracy isn't for them anymore. And phrases like "take our country back" aren't even subtle; anyone who's been paying attention recognizes them as dog whistles. The obvious indication is that this crowd believes the votes of the democratic majority are not legitimate because they came from people who aren't entitled to run the country. And, while we can certainly spend an entertaining afternoon sealioning about particular examples, it would be easier to just take a look at some of the wide angle shots of the crowd. The crowd is clearly communicating exactly who they think isn't entitled to have a voice in how the country is run, either explicitly by holding flags and banners, or implicitly by consenting to be represented by the people holding the flags and banners.
I'm not so convinced of a supposed difference.
1. The BLM protests were planned, in public at least, as peaceful protests. Things went wrong and they didn’t all end up peaceful and law-abiding, but I did not see any reports of people using major internet platforms to plan to start riots or cause property damage. The reports of planning of the DC riots on Parler, in contrast, seem to have been quite explicit about the intent.
2. (In my mind rather less clear cut.) The BLM protests were not based on objective lies. The DC riots were. Ignore all the people saying there was no proof of widespread voter fraud — that’s like people saying that there is no strong evidence that MSG causes headaches. In fact, there isn’t even a reason to suspect widespread voter fraud. The proponents of the fraud theory have, when they’ve presented evidence at all, presented comically weak evidence. The theory is obvious BS.
https://youtu.be/lJlQvOgEx58
Can you finish watching it and tell me which part of it is racist? It's unfortunately now people pick the lies they want to believe and claim it's the truth.
I’d you want, I will provide a source that Republicans encouraged violence this year.
This thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1346937852970483714.html
Insane articles like this:
- https://www.npr.org/2020/08/27/906729976/police-declare-port...
- https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178...
- https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/blm-looting-prote...
There's much more but I'm not going to collect links all night.
1. Given BLM was protesting mistreatment and institutionalised racism (especially in the police), do you not think it’s at all plausible that the police response would be racially-charged in how they respond to the protests?
2. The headline it’s literally says “one authors controversial view...”: it is entirely reasonable to entertain an idea for the purposes of analysing it without actually advocating it.
3. “In defence of destroying property”: this is inherently ideological I think, I for one place human lives above that of mere materials, and if people need to smash some windows in order to make their voices heard that is ok: we can repair windows, we can bring unjustly-murdered people back from the dead. Maybe a better way of framing this particular one is in reverse: “why is a window shop-front more valuable/important than someone’s life and human rights?”
Edit: Twitter thread: conflating “we wish to overthrow the government and kill our opposition” with “please stop killing us; we will make these protests more uncomfortable until we are heard” is disingenuous at best, and a flat-out mischaracterisation at worst. Nelson Mandela spent time in prison as well: does that mean nothing he said has any value?
I do think some of the rhetoric from some Democrats was unwisely heated over the summer. This week was different.
That was the question I answered. I've showed that the left, which is most of the media and the democrats, encouraged the riots and set the precedent of using violence to achieve political goals.
(Local) democrats demonized the police as enemy of the people. Kamala Harris encouraged her millions of Twitter followers to donate to a Minnesota crowd-funding effort that paid bail for accused rioters. Both local and national media rigidly only referred to the far-left rioters as “protesters.” The Associated Press, which sets guidelines for journalists, amended its stylebook to discourage use of the word “riot,” given protesters’ “underlying grievances.” It took months before Biden condemned the riots and he only did it when he started to drop in the polls. In Portland BLM/Antifa rioted for months and they even tried to storm into a federal courthouse downtown several nights in a row. The respons of the mayor wasn't to condemn the riots but to tell Trump to take his “troops” and leave. Those showing righteous indignation now only months or weeks ago argued that the riots were “mostly peaceful” and that vandalism and looting don’t count as violence.
And it seems people have forgotten it's not the first time government building have been occupied to prevent a vote.
https://twitter.com/wokal_distance/status/134710749813463040... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Wisconsin_protests
My point isn't to defend what happened but to point out the hypocrisy and double-speak.
- BLM was not trying to replace our government with a new one. (aka a protest is not a sedition)
- Many BLM protesters were arrested. Some were charged with crimes. Similarly, any seditionists should be charged. This is probably true whether you agree with the final verdict or not
- Those at the capitol essentially held hundreds of lawmakers hostage, using guns and at least one pipe bomb, while Trump said nothing for approximately 2 hours
With regard to prominent Democratic politicians, this is factually untrue. They (and me) are good with peaceful protest, whether BLM or MAGA. There is absolutely no problem with peaceful pro-Trump protestors.
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-kamala-harris-l...
The invasion of the Capitol was not a peaceful protest - it was an insurrection.
This is AOC during the Capitol riots: https://abc7ny.com/aoc-alexandira-ocasio-cortez-capitol-sieg...
The hypocrisy is astonishing.
Do you have any evidence to back up your claim where any Democratic official agitated for violence in those protests?
Bad police were maiming innocent civilians with no provocation: https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1266752393556918273
The protests were to hold those bad police accountable.
Do not compare people asking for the rule of law to be applied fairly and justly, to a President directing his rally to violently attack Congress and overthrow a democratic election.
I wouldn't give much of a damn if these people had burned down a Target or Quick Stop, either. But they ran into the capitol while many of them were actively talking about it being a revolution. With people talking about grabbing Congresspeople and having military tribunals. People went in with zipcuffs and firearms. Multiple bombs were planted.
This was an attempted coup. A poorly thought out one, a poorly executed one, and sure, not everyone that ran in had such grand aspirations. But plenty did, and plenty were open about it.
Go check out ParlerWatch on Reddit. Look at what's actually being posted on there. People calling for the violent overthrow of the government. People talking about murdering lawmakers. People cheering on those that invaded the capitol and calling for more.
If they make their own platform like we tell them to, we'll just ban that too, haha.
So it shall be. Begin purge.
Retroactively scanning 2020...
10,000 results found spanning 1 political ideology, billions of dollars in property damage, threats made, multiple cities burned, autonomous zones created, dozens dead.
It's about having a voice. It's about the main argument being "it's a private company" then going and banning the alternatives.
Like it or not social media platforms are the new town square. Yes the current censorship is legal, it doesn't make it right.
Especially when people make their own app then get banished on the only two app store monopolies.
I believe there's already some anti-trust issues there. Epic made a 1984 ad about Apple.
The sentiment here is generally Apple is a monopoly, today is different.
But... sorry, a direct attack on a joint session of congress that forces the lawmakers and VP to be evacuated is WORSE than what happened in Portland.
This country can tolerate another bunch of fires and broken statues outside the Portland Federal Courthouse. I don't think anyone serious can imaging the idea of congress being sacked again.
Actually in a way it's good that it happened; exposed some major security holes. Not good that they shot an unarmed woman, though.
Then why was congress evacuated? Why are multiple people on camera screaming "Where is Pence?!" and threatening to hang him? Why was that cop killed?
That's ridiculous, sorry. It was a chaotic attack, sure. And surely there were some people there who just wandered in with the crowd and didn't want to hurt anyone. But this is an attack on congress. Be real.
Certainly didn't last as long, it cost less in property damage, less people died, and less neighborhoods burnt down.
Maybe we can ban both sides from social media and have no Twitter.
They also seriously injured another FPS Officer during the first attack.
It was exactly an attack
> it was a bunch of protesters, trespassing into the building during a very important session.
No, it was a large armed mob targeting legislators; as well as many of them stating that legislators were their targets (some saying that they would be back for them), this is clearly shown in the video of the context around Ashli Babbitt getting shot, where the violence of mob at the barricades entrance to the Speakers office escalates with shouts of “They're leaving” as the legislators and staffers visible through the windows depart through another exit, shortly before the officers being threatened on the same side of the barricades as the mob withdraw toward the tactical team advancing up the nearby stairs and the crowd begins breaking through the barricades.
> Not good that they shot an unarmed woman, though.
She was part of an armed, violent mob breaking through the last physical barrier keeping them from a large group of high government officials with only small number of armed security forces who could not possibly protect the officials from the mob in the event of a general breakthrough; even so, the security forces waited as long as they could before shooting to prevent a breakthrough (and if they'd had only a few more seconds it's likely that the arriving tactical team would have turned back that particular arm of the mob.)
There are no firearms visible in the mob in the video; there are weapons in active use in the video (against the barricades, but if you are responsible for protection of life you can't assume that that will be abandoned once the barricade is down).
> much less training it on the police.
The police aren't the main people that the police were protecting. (That some of them were acting as literal human shields at the barricades makes that clear.)
What would you have had them do? Allow a breakthrough, reassess the intention of the mob, and if it was still an active threat start firing then, without the passive defense of th barrier? As well as endangering the lives they ought to be protecting most urgently (the ones not engaging in a violent crime), and their own lives, unless the crowd instantly became pacific after breaking through the barricade, that would have resulted in a whole lot more dead insurrectionists, because there would be no choice but to fire as fast as aim can be switched to a new target until the crowd stopped.
Kamala Harris said,
> "They're not gonna stop, and everyone beware, because they're not gonna stop," she added. "They're not gonna stop before Election Day in November, and they're not gonna stop after Election Day."
> "Everyone should take note of that, on both levels, that they're not going to let up — and they should not. And we should not," she concluded.
I believe neither group are terrorists, but one side cannot be labeled a terrorist without implicating the other under the exact same label.
In Portland, in Seattle, in D.C.
The only difference is the scale of damage and death, which is orders of magnitude higher on one side.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/08/13/fac...
That's why this censorship ordeal is scary. Both sides deserve to be heard so people can listen, hear both sides, sift through the bullshit and decide for themselves.
This “fact check” is the kind of laughable gaslighting that got us here. The YouTube videos speak for themselves. The death toll speaks for itself.
> Colbert: ”I know there are protests still happening in major cities across the United States, I'm just not seeing the reporting on it that I had for the first few weeks,"
The “protests” were violet mobs which destroyed property and killed people. The media made up a narrative of “fiery but mostly peaceful protest” while buildings (and people’s livelihoods) literally burned in the background.
$2 billion dollars of damage.
> This isn’t going to stop.
Police shot in the head, doused with gasoline, government buildings burned into the ground.
> This is a movement I’m telling you.
City capitol buildings invaded. Throngs calling for the removal of the elected leader of Seattle. City blocks occupied for days by an armed insurgent force.
> they're not going to let up — and they should not. And we should not," she concluded.
Ted Wheeler seems to be finally coming around to this, god knows how it took him so long;
> “My good-faith efforts at de-escalation have been met with ongoing violence and even scorn from radical Antifa and anarchists,” Wheeler said in a New Year’s Day press conference. “In response, it will be necessary to use additional tools and to push the limits of the tools we already have to bring the criminal destruction and violence to an end.”
Like I’ve been saying for the last two days, you can either say people like Kamala are inciting violent protest that was actively ongoing when they made these statements, and you can hold Trump to the same standard yesterday. Or you can let Kamala off the hook, but then you let Trump off at the same time.
You can’t hold Trump to one standard and Kamala to another. You can’t call yesterday an insurrection and last year a summer of love.
Quote from Harris: “It’s no wonder people are taking to the streets and I support them. We must always defend peaceful protest and peaceful protestors. We should not confuse them with those looting and committing acts of violence, including the shooter who was arrested for murder. And make no mistake, we will not let these vigilantes and extremists derail the path to justice.”
We agree the BLM riots were bad. The Seattle insurrection especially. But Kamala Harris did not encourage them. Trump did encourage an insurrection against our government. There is a massive difference.
Trump followed up with an almost identical statement. You understand what he said differently because you believe different things about Trump.
It’s OK. It’s politics.
In the end all I want is people to be consistent in how they describe violent mobs.
Personally I don’t think these violent mobs in the summer or yesterday are terrorists. I think they are simply violent mobs that were allowed to get out of control through lack of policing and bad politics. I blame both sides.
The meta problem I have is the rapid political capitalization by Democrats (including Harris) and the media following one violent mob after granting persistent cover and gaslighting readers for months over the significantly worse BLM/antifa mobs going off all summer.
By this reasoning there is no such thing as a meaningful statement in a human language.
Anyway. I think we'll agree to disagree. Pleasure chatting with you, and stay safe.
Harris says verbatim that the protests are not going to let up, and should not. Even though they are violent, and people have died. You chose to interpret that as her saying that they would not stop (a warning) but not an endorsement. I see it clearly as a warning and an endorsement. Would not and should not.
But I recognize that Trump talks and suddenly maybe I’m in your shoes and you’re in mine.
Maybe I think the transcript irrefutably supports my position, but it’s Ok if you disagree. I don’t think either of us are fascists because of it.
The result isn’t words have no meaning, it’s whether you will respect people enough to let them answer you and clarify and believe them when they do.
So Trump says “there were fine people” and people say, wait did he just complement literal nazis, and you check the transcript and you realize, oh, “and I’m not talking about the nazis, they should be condemned totally”.
But the media doesn’t allow Trump to say “and I’m not talking about the nazis”. They cover their ears at that point and say, “la la la, Trump just said nazis are fine people!”
And that’s what’s wrong with this picture. They did it in Charlottesville, they did it to cover for horrible rioting by BLM/Antifa, and they are doing it today.
How _incredibly timely and coincidental_ that now that Trump will lose much of his relevance and the Dems are in control all these platforms suddenly found a backbone.
Google and Apple control the means by which the vast majority of the world can access software. This is not like Twitter banning from a platform, this is preventing users from accessing a platform in the first place.
If Google and Apple feel powerful enough to uphold the principles of free speech against what seems to be the will of the majority and the incoming administration (for better or worse), what is the source of that power? What else are they confident they can get away with?
This is a long way of saying your frustration is misdirected. If you want stronger free speech, start with the people and the government, not the corporations.
Remember, it's not about leftism winning per-say, it's corporatism. They are now emboldened to tighten their grasp on the narrative so they can make record profits while destroying the intellectual fabric of America.
Even our allied governments are saying he caused the riots. You can’t say the entire world is wrong, every single human being is deep state.
The best I could hope is that it’s some sick-minded person downvoting just to troll. The idea that a right-minded HN viewer seriously down votes this is absolutely unconscionable and completely beyond the pale.
It’s literally the same as downvoting a comment that says “racist murder is wrong.” Literally!
Did you listen to the entire phone conversation and not the 4 minute clip? That's quite not what happened. Trump laid out all his claims and was asking them to accept investigating anything that cloud make up his very narrow margin.
Another fun fact about that call, it was a Settlement Call. That was literally protected by attorney/client privileged. Barnes, a civil rights attorney who does federal cases, and who is currently contracted by the Trump team, talks about it here(starting at 54:49):
https://youtu.be/bnevIjvohvQ?t=3276
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-raffensperger-...
Second, as you've now been informed (and could have verified with a simple Google search), the call was not privileged, nor was it "confidential" in the sense we ordinarily mean. Disclosing it was perfectly lawful.
I mean... what do you want to happen here? The right wing got carte blanche to spread violent rhetoric for years on these platforms in ways that we would have called "terroristic" and "radicalizing" in other contexts. And it went too far. So... do we just ignore it?
I just can't understand how your mind goes to a routine election result and not a failed coup attempt as the reason behind this.
We can silence dangerous speech with no concerns about the 1st amendment (it's a private platform after all). All your Whatsapp chats can now be mined by Facebook (which the NSA will have access to as well). And the switch that controls social media communications is safely in the hands of Zuckerberg.
It's all coming together perfectly. Well... perfectly for big tech.
They were obviously criminals and things like this need to be crushed or they happen again & get worse.
Freedoms are for non-criminals.
The patriot act is still in place. We have FISA courts. We have unlimited domestic spying.
What fantasy world are you living in?
That’s such a dumb meme because obviously tons of people disagree on what intolerance is.
So no surprise their actions are motivated by greed and future prospects of movement in share price.
In Hinduism, there is a saying - "Yatha Raja, Tatha Praja", meaning "As the King, So the subjects"
That is why the highest echelons of power need to be held by those with Honesty, Integrity & those who are compassionate.
And before someone tells me that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to private companies, I’m not making a legal point here, I’m making a moral one. This is not healthy.
But I agree, this is not the way forward to a healthy, united country
One of the group's leaders, Bill Ayers, lives unremorsefully in a tony neighborhood in Chicago where he went on to have an influential academic career, dedicating books to political assassins, and mentoring future presidents. This caused a minor kerfluffle when the details resurfaced to public light in 2008, but it was clearly, in the end, no obstacle to Obama's election.
One might raise a similar point about a figure like Oscar Lopez Rivera who, while he never bombed the Capitol, definitely did bomb about 100 other locations around the country and was rewarded for his efforts by an NYC ticker tape parade once he was released from prison. Lin Manuel Miranda's admiration for Rivera has hardly proved a stumbling block for his wildly successful career.
And that's just one end of the frequency-severity spectrum. Mobs break into the Capitol and interrupt proceedings with perhaps surprising regularity, as with the Kavanaugh hearings for example.
In any case, it seems that bombing the Capitol or doing widespread domestic terrorism is only selectively an impediment to a later life of comfort in the US.
Did this discredit the cause of Puerto Rican nationalism and drive its supporters from public life? It would appear not: you can still be a celebrity with a successful career while voicing your support and admiration.
I'm not asking you to say that what happened yesterday was good, because of course it wasn't. I'm asking you why you think that such events are so rare and universally condemned. In fact they seem to happen on a timescale of decades at most, probably less, and the public judgment of the perpetrators seems to correlate less with the objective severity of the act as with elite consensus opinion of the cause it promotes.
And to the people complaining about censorship, this is an app that was literally used to plan a violent attack on the capitol. Some things should be censored.
Wait until you find out what the text messaging apps are used for.
“This was used in an attack” is a bullshit excuse to banish something. WhatsApp and signal have enabled countless terrorist actions and they are still up.
Remember when the Christchurch shooter streamed his rampage on Facebook? Why hasn't Facebook been banned yet?
the double standard is really bizarre.
Crazy that people are ok with what's been happening in the last few hours
it's really insane how people who claim they are champions for human right and diversity rapidly descend into the inhumanity that they themselves blame the very country for.
If I was in America right now, I would get the hell out immediately. This is literally like watching the cultural revolution unfold step by step.
really scary that there are Americans who think like this.
Or was that a dream?
This is exactly the rhetoric used to ban Twitter in other countries. Funny how things are turning.
We have a whole criminal justice system, well staffed and well funded, that addresses this concern.
Unfortunately, Fdroid does have censorship policies (see Gab), but I believe you can add your own repos.
Personally, I think it's a bit sad that Twitter with the hard tweet removal is effectively protecting Trump from being judged for his statements by the general public. The radicals got the messages anyways, but superficial observers are supported by the remove in any "bad but harmless" perception of Trump they might have.
It seemed unthinkable a couple years ago, but at this point I would put even money on Chrome having a "radical" website blacklist within a year.
https://images.techhive.com/images/idge/imported/imageapi/20...
(where "participate in society" means being allowed on some/most social media)
Then there's a historically unprecedented incident stemming from Trump's dispute of the lection results, organized by him on social media, and initiated by his speech on Wednesday morning. I see nothing peculiar about multiple companies independently arriving at similar conclusions and following Twitter's lead.
But I sorta think they should be able to have their space? I don't like the way corporations and governments build these huge marketplaces, make them more and more restrictive such that no one can really get huge market-share without them and then they start curating (censoring). I understand why they do it: image, ethics (lol), they can, network effects, control over product quality, increased community cohesion, customer comfort, "safety" (lol), legal (i don't buy this one) and so on. But it wouldn't be a problem if the internet remained decentralized...these big companies should never be in the position to have this power.
At a certain point you get so locked out that you can't even pay the bills anymore because even payment processors won't take your money!
[1] https://twitter.com/YourAnonCentral/status/13473740754552299...
It seems like the basic political discourse you find on twitter, fb and every other social media system, both red and blue posters, at pretty much the same level of intelligence; I'm really not seeing anything there that doesn't equally merit the banning of, well, every other social media app.
[1] https://twitter.com/slpng_giants/status/1347190280492089344
I mean shit we just went through 4 years of liberals and conservatives fighting over this shit dramatically all over twitter -- I'm really struggling to find the new extremes you're finding in these; the only thing I can figure is you're giving it more weight because this topic translated into physical activity, where most such content just flames up digitally and dies out
Google doesn’t just randomly grow a set of morals and balls after a decade of silence about similar behavior by/on Twitter, fb, yikyak, tiktok, Snapchat, etc.
Hell, even encouragement if you count things like planning terrorist attacks and successfully killing/harming dozens on WhatsApp, and not immediately banning the application, as well as probably every communication system available on the phone.
Not being great at enforcing rules on social media is not on the same level as intending not to have those rules.
Equating private with public messaging is ridiculous. Not sure how laws are in the US, but when doing support here in germany we had to have private in-game messages reported by a participant before we were even allowed to look at them. The company obviously had a much easier time shaping the atmosphere in the public forum.
And if you only care about outcomes like never having a terrorist attack... well, I don't see how this could ever happen without in-depth control by government or the like. China-style is probably the closest example we have, and that's not a trade-off i would want to make.
https://twitter.com/EthanKrue/status/1347374487117946888
(Re-)Storming the whitehouse on Jan 20, planning on twitter.
Well that is one way to normalize Facist murderous wrecks and their abhorrent ideas.
https://twitter.com/CustomsFatman/status/1163877317208264705... https://twitter.com/kxxtcxcxxnx/status/1322190172872712192?s... https://twitter.com/AlmightyBoob/status/97830880193691649?s=...
https://twitter.com/CustomsFatman
Its almost as if you just searched for the phrase execute all conservatives but didn't actually read any of them.
> Just a cursory glance on Twitter
You chose one specific instance to be the molehill to stand on, lacking substantive argument to fight for anything more than pedantry.
Since content isn’t premoderated it’s obvious that it will always be some of that content.
The banning of this app isn’t because there are death threats but because Parler couldn’t present a moderation strategy to uphold their own ToS.
Maybe, or maybe they just don't like Parler. I'm skeptical whether a serious attempt to clean up violent speech would ever satisfy these platforms, especially when what constitutes violent speech is determined by people who are extremely ideologically hostile and uncharitable towards you (eg. see how Twitter construed Trump's last tweets.) But we'll never know because I don't expect such a reform effort to be made.
Liberal pundits are saying similar about conservatives ... elected officials call for disruption in the street, 4chan has crazy stuff, yaddha yaddha.
We have incitement and conspiracy laws. We have an FBI and Secret Service that really take this stuff seriously and are well financed. If anything these posts make it easier for them to keep an eye on the tiny percentage of loudmouths that might actually do something.
There’s a cost to all this ease of expression, to be sure. Maybe people can be radicalized more easily, and that sucks.
But we’ve built this whole society on erring in favor of more free expression, and by and large this value has been a tremendous success, where the downsides are absolutely crushed by the up side.
Nothing will be an unmitigated good but in this case it’s pretty clear where the balance lies, and what these companies are doing -as we speak- isn’t the winning choice, for anyone involved.
and how many times has that led to storming the US Capitol building with guns and bombs?
How do we know the capitol thing wouldn’t have happened anyway?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eQzLcO5qhY
The content isn’t the issue. The question is: would Twitter moderate that content when it breaks their ToS? Apple and Google consider Twitters moderation efforts good enough.
Crime goes hand in hand with poverty, and it builds stereotypes and biases that makes it easier for incarceration which in America is just privatized slave labor market who makes mundane everyday items.
That's typical of BLM supporters. Even intelligent, supposedly scientifically minded people no longer see fit to consult the raw data. They know it's out there, somewhere, but that they're not supposed to look at it.
> Crime goes hand in hand with poverty
Race is actually a better predictor of crime than poverty. But it should be obvious by now that a large part of the disparity is due to the media inciting hatred for whites amongst blacks. Look at the recent spate of "random attacks" (there's nothing random about them) in NYC in the last few months:
> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54396065
> https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/stranger-randomly-bash...
> https://nypost.com/2021/01/06/man-busted-for-series-of-attac...
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jfN1kXPiak
Do you seriously believe this would be happening if the media weren't constantly propagandizing black people with a narrative of "unprovoked violence against innocent PoC by white racists?"
I plan on leaving NYC sometime before 2024, since I assume the media will again create another "long, hot summer" to increase Democratic turnout, regardless of how many "random" attacks it incites.
I can see how apple doesn't like parler in its app store, and they have every right to remove it. It is a private company, and it shouldn't be forced to host apps that promote violence/whatever they feel is wrong.
But, the fact that you can't download an app, or side-load an app, on any iphone without it being on the app store, makes this decision very worrying.
Tim Cook and apple are being the arbiter of all speech/content, and this is very similar to autocratic countries where they ban entire sites (Like Erdogan did with youtube and twitter).
One rich corporate exec should not have this much power...
The solution is that all computing device makers, should have a away for their devices to be able to download/side-load apps, without having to go a centralized store. This is better for those countries that are ruled by autocrats as well, where the government suppresses free speech.
Well, yeah, Apple sells curated experiences. And people choose whether or not to buy those curated experiences.
> and this is very similar to autocratic countries
No, it's not.
No, I'm disagreeing with your point.
> I am fine with apple removing any app it doesn't like from their app store, as long as you can sideload an app to iphones (like you can do with Android).
Sure, I have the same preference, which is why in my household there are 7 actively used Android devices and zero iOS devices.
People with different preferences purchase Apple devices.
> The fact that you can't sideload, it makes it worrying as one exec has all the power on what you do with your phone.
If you choose to give them that power over your phone with your purchasing decisions.