It must feel pretty surreal to be someone that is constantly moving to different communication apps and instantly finding them pulled by anyone and everyone.
We've seen an escalation of this from higher-level platforms (obviously Twitter can ban an account if they desire) to medium-level platforms (I suppose Apple gets to pick what I can do on my own phone even if it feels a bit wrong), but I'm curious if this will also escalate to low-level platforms (will hosting companies, registrars, or even ISPs start taking similar actions on a regular basis?).
At this point it appears to be in a bit of a feedback loop as well, since it's obvious that deplatforming groups will make them feel persecuted and even more upset, which then makes them more likely to be deplatformed by whichever platform they move to next.
Could this escalate even past low-level companies and result in decentralized, uncensorable, and end-to-end encrypted technologies having action taken against them (as more users, including some that are radicalized, seek them out)? I certainly hope not, but I have no faith in our government's various administrations here to begin with, especially given that we are likely only at the beginning of these types of conflicts.
(Obligatory note that I am not defending any given platform, group of people, or anything of that matter, as I find it much more interesting to talk about how systems like this may play out instead)
It seems to be that these platforms were quite outrageously accepting any content at all being published on their platforms, including direct personal threats and incitements to violence.
If these groups want to not be deplatformed every few years, they ought to moderate the content. That seems to be all Apple is asking for here - just moderate out the illegal content and you can come back.
That only seems hard to do for conservative groups - everyone else seems to at least try to moderate, even if they do it unevenly or not quickly enough, they try. These deplatformed companies and actors don't ever seem to even try to moderate.
I understand your sentiment, but the thing to realize is that the point you’re responding to is about decentralization and whether this will be an accelerant for the transition to a more distributed tech ecosystem. It’s not about how anyone feels about the parties involved in any particular case.
I don't agree that there is the feedback loop that exists in the OP's post. Deplatforming is not some inescapable negative feedback loop that these people can't get out of. It is the result of criminal behavior. If the criminal behavior stops, the deplatforming stops.
We already have processes in our society to reduce and hopefully eliminate criminal actors.
> Could this escalate even past low-level companies and result in decentralized, uncensorable, and end-to-end encrypted technologies having action taken against them?
Americans drop a loser like a brick. Taking Parler off the app stores seriously de-legitimizes their cause and their celebrity. If you read Apple's language [1] its very clear Apple believes Parler is operating in extremely bad faith, that they either lack the ability to moderate or are only doing so as a temporary token gesture. This means Parler's user demographic will become more and more full of fringe radical elements that scare off the silent majority less radical crowd.
[1]: "Your response also references a moderation plan “for the time being,” which does not meet the ongoing requirements in Guideline 1.2 – Safety – User Generated content"
> This means Parler's user demographic will become more and more full of fringe radical elements that scare off the silent majority less radical crowd.
The only way to contain fringe elements is to allow them to identify themselves and be prepared when they demonstrate intent to perform harmful acts (“terrorism”). The polite silent majority will go home, the extremist minority will go to prison if they overstep legal boundaries.
Nope, you’re spot on. Diversions are critical for folks who might be on the path to radicalization, who can be reasoned with, who can critically think, and who can be brought back from the edge. Not everyone is a lost cause, and the effort must be put forth collectively.
Or not even radicalized, just massively misinformed.
It seems like people denying a problem exists is creating massive inertia against solutions to even the most apparent and emotionally salient problems (mass shootings, COVID, etc).
I think the last 4 years of left wing propaganda from mainstream outlets was the main cause of radicalization on both sides.
It’s hard no to be radicalized when you and millions of other conservatives are being labeled ‘racist’ and ‘fascist’ for no reason other than having different political views.
Yes, and all this de-platforming is only going to deepen divisions, I fear. Is there any real reason for doing so, since there is always provisions to deal with people who break laws.
Are these companies acting preemptively from fear of being later assigned culpability?
There are systemic problems in society today which can be exploited to amplify the problems of fringe groups. This is how we got trump. So what do we do?
> that they either lack the ability to moderate or are only doing so as a temporary token gesture
Considering that Facebook and Twitter can't effectively moderate their platforms (algorithms don't work well and human moderation is too expensive) I doubt Parler could either, even if they wanted to.
That's because they make money from advertising that they then use to pay for moderators. I doubt most brands would even want to touch Parler with a 10 foot pole.
As much as a wish for there to be no money for them, I honestly doubt it is zero. Traditionally conservative groups (eg NRA, political campaigns, firearm related businesses, ...) would probably find significantly better ROI on marketing budgets spent at parler.
... according to a new investigation unveiled Friday by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.
Democrats have called everyone from sitting US presidents to Tulsi Gabbard a "Russian Asset". This is more than likely another false alarm.
What are all these Russian assets meant to be doing anyway? Promoting an excessively calm world peace with strong ties between Russians and Americans? Russia hasn't been a credible threat to the US for 30 years. Nobody is accusing all these assets of actually doing anything. There isn't a path for how Russia is going to take advantage of the US. Anything Russia can do, China can do 3 times over.
The time that they were an appropriate punching bag is long since past.
Didn't russia just commit the largest cyber espionage campaign ever via solarwinds? For unknown reasons Trump is a russia apologist who denies their wrongdoing (e.g bounties on us troops) at every opportunity.
The US was caught red handed spying on literally everyone with an internet connection. I don't accept that a country having a spy ring is a credible reason to have bad relations with them.
And if there are worries about division between US citizens, possibly Amazon, Apple and Google need to be probed for Russian connections. Suppressing the speech of the sitting president is going to be quite divisive and makes the democratic process look extremely unreliable.
There is no reason to be concerned if people have connections to Russia is the point here. The top examples of problems on your mind are kinda trivial compared to what the US does to itself.
> Considering that Facebook and Twitter can't effectively moderate their platforms
What an odd statement.
If that were true, Parler would have no reason to exist. After all, it's raison d'etre is specifically to allow people to get away from the perceived censorship on the major social media platforms.
Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc, etc, all struggle with the issues of content moderation. The perfect example is Facebook pulling down a journalist photo of, if memory serves, a naked girl in a warzone as CP when obviously it was not.
Yup, these systems are imperfect.
But I think it's pretty silly to claim they're completely worthless or ineffective and therefore moderation simply cannot be done, and Parler is therefore off the hook.
Heck, HN has commenting rules/guidelines. Are you suggesting those shouldn't exist and any system to enforce them is pointless?
It’s not a nirvana fallacy. I’m saying moderation on Facebook is so bad that it should not pretend it’s moderating in any kind of balanced way. It just does the bare minimum to keep regulators away.
It depends entirely on what you consider "effective moderation". Many consider "effective moderation" a purge of everyone who doesn't adhere completely to their cultural orthodoxy. Others think that if a platform so chooses it should be allowed to host any and all voices that don't spam or break any laws. Unfortunately the former are authoritarians who believe they have the right to deprive the latter from making that decision (and they currently hold the reigns of power in Silicon Valley and Washington DC).
> Many consider "effective moderation" a purge of everyone who doesn't adhere completely to their cultural orthodoxy.
This is clearly a strawman argument and frankly such an already polarized statement that I'm not sure there's any point replying.
But, I will say this: I'll bet if Parler simply took threats of violence and incitement on their site seriously and agreed to move to proactively remove that kind of content, they wouldn't be in this position.
Unfortunately, their entire pitch as a platform is to not moderate at all. To that end, their CEO has outright stated they will not moderate their site in any way, and as a result there's some truly scary content on that site from individuals who are literally advocating for the murder of those they view as political enemies.
And if not calling for murder and violence is "cultural orthodoxy", well, I guess I'm pretty orthodox and I'd hope you are, too.
As for Parler, their position on moderation always put them in direct violation of the Amazon/Google/Apple ToS for their various services.
The real mystery is why nothing was done to this point.
Actually their moderation stance it to not moderate LEGAL speech, illegal speech has to fail the "True Threat" legal standard which is FAR FAR FAR more limited than what Google, Apple, and Amazon desire, and more than the new standard deployed by twitter recently in the Trump ban, which relies on subjective analysis where by saying things like "American Patriot" are deemed to be "incitement"
Such a standard is on it face politically slanted towards banning conservative/right speech more than left speech
This is what one would call "cherry picking" a type of logical fallacy, but I will play for the movement.
Your first link is 404, so I can not comment on it
The second likely would not rise to the level of a "True Threat"
The third I think likely would / should be bannable as that is close enough for me to consider it a True Threat.
Apple's complaint was the Parler was not aggressive enough in removing posts, not that they were not removing posts at all
Apple, Google, and Amazon all have a very clear political bias in their enforcement of their own rules, I am not sure how this could even be debatable anymore.
I can easily cherry pick comments from Twitter, Facebook, etc that have the same or stronger lang around incitement to violence only towards groups like the Police, or other unpopular groups... This level of aggressive enforcement does not seem to be present if the target of the incitement is unpopular
Reddit seems to be having issues, first link is spitting our server errors right now.
My purpose wasn't to cherry pick, it was to understand what your line is re free/legal speech.
The fact the second one isn't a direct call to action but just an implication, and therefore you think it's fine, is useful information. It tells me that your bar and mine are definitely not the same.
I'll bet you also don't think Trump encouraged the rioting the other day because he didn't explicitly say "hey everyone, riot now!"
Which is of course what makes Trump so effective. Decades of litigation have taught him the artform if plausible deniability. Never say what you want. Imply it and let folks put two and two together
Of course, in the case if Parler, there's no shortage of folks who lack similar instincts and therefore say the quiet part loud...
> I can easily cherry pick comments from Twitter, Facebook, etc that have the same or stronger lang around incitement to violence
The difference is the CEO of Parler has ruled out moderating that kind of content, including the examples I've cited here, whereas every other site removes it.
So the situation simply isn't comparable.
> This level of aggressive enforcement does not seem to be present if the target of the incitement is unpopular
Okay, so where are your examples? I'd be happy to provide my opinion if you'd like.
>>the fact the second one isn't a direct call to action but
just an implication, and therefore you think it's fine, is useful information. It tells me that your bar and mine are definitely not the same.
I have outlined what my line is, True Threat [1], is a legal standard: "‘True threats’ encompass those statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals. . . . Intimidation in the constitutionally proscribable sense of the word is a type of true threat, where a speaker directs a threat to a person or group of persons with the intent of placing the victim in fear of bodily harm or death.” [1]
>>I'll bet you also don't think Trump encouraged the rioting the other day because he didn't explicitly say "hey everyone, riot now!"
I dont actively follow Trump's (or any other) twitter feed, I largely view Twitter as a cesspool just like I view Parler and all other Social Media including Facebook, Gab, even Reddit at this point. Mostly because each platform ends up becoming an ideological echo chamber for the most extreme views of their founding ideology, for the major platforms that ends up being left authoritarianism, for many of the alt-tech that ends up being right authoritarianism..
Since I am not authoritarian at all, left or right, those platforms hold little interest for me and I generally avoid those places. So I can not speak to all of Trump's tweets, though I do believe the partisan machine has generally applied the least favorable reading of all his public comments over the last several years and often time claim "dog whistles" far too often to the point where my general position is one of "Boy who cried wolf" when I see these types of comments.
My belief in this was reinforced by twitter's very very weak justification for their permaban [2]. The posts they highlighted in their justification were not something I would consider to be bannable speech
>>whereas every other site removes it.
Which I also explained due to Parler's very different position on what constitutes bannable speech, they take the same position that generally favor i.e all Legal Speech should be allowed, if a person could not be arrested and jailed for the speech then it should be permitted.
Now I have a feeling you also want the law to be changed to the point where people can be jailed more aggressively for their speech not simply be banned from a popular website. One of the reasons I generally oppose popular platforms banned unpopular speech is that fact that the law often follows popular opinion, thus it is popular to ban speech today it will not be long before the overton window shifts where maybe we need to water down the protections of legal speech, to the point where we are tossing people in cages for their unpopular speech.
As a individualist, libertarian advocating for Geo-Libertarian public policies my opinions are often viewed as unpopular, it concerns me that we are attempting to create safe spaces and echo chambers online where no dissenting opinions are welcome, and if you say an unpopular thing you are painted as a racist, bigot, sexist or some other immoral designation. For example I have been called a racist simply because I oppose income based taxation.
>>Okay, so where are your examples?
Just go back to the BLM protests/riots there we all kinds of calls for violence that went unchallenged. Then there is antifa, hell for a time there was popular subculture around "Punch a Nazi" and of-course all conservatives were "Nazi's"
>This is clearly a strawman argument and frankly such an already polarized statement that I'm not sure there's any point replying.
Unfortunately objective reality is extremely polarizing in 2021. Calling for murder and violence is illegal and should be prosecuted under the law.
>The real mystery is why nothing was done to this point.
Its no mystery why monopolistic tech giants have moved in unison to silence and censor anyone who opposes the narrative pushed by the ruling elite. Extremely low-information people take this to mean silencing Trump and his ignorant followers. Informed people understand that voices across the political spectrum, from advocates for Palestinian rights to journalists who push back against war propaganda, have been silenced by tech giants at the behest of powerful interests. Fortunately, low-information people who numerically dominate our society and mindlessly bleat the propaganda they have been programmed with have nothing to fear from the new totalitarianism. Until of course they get branded as a "Nazi" by having the wrong friend or the wrong relative, or being at the wrong place at the wrong time, or being flagged by a nameless, faceless algorithm that has been "flawlessly" programmed to seek out "Nazis" and ensure that they aren't able to participate in society. Of course when you are unpersoned by a tech giant, and your bank account is cancelled, and you are put on a no fly list and you are restricted from participating in society in every other way, you can always contact the powers-that-be and easily get the situation cleared up, just like all the people who are summarily banned from Google or Facebook without an explanation, right?
I think the critical component to this conversation that its important to stay focused on is not Apple's removal of Parler, but their continued insistence on maintaining exclusive control over what people install on their devices.
Apple should have the right to control what they distribute through their app store; this is undeniable in my mind. A reasonable, though not as obviously sound, argument could be made that at some level of scope and scale its alright to sell general purpose hardware limited to one operating system which delegates control over executable code to the manufacturer. I believe its also clear that Apple is far past any values of scope and scale where this is reasonable for them, specifically.
No one in these comments is talking about Google. Same thing happened with Fortnite; the conversation is all about Apple. This is a signal that the issue here really isn't their decision to allow or ban specific apps; its the core platform decision to allow or ban application distribution channels.
I think (but not sure) this thread was combined from multiple separate threads, some of which were only about Apple or Google or Amazon's actions. It seems like several threads with a few hundred comments each disappeared, and this one with 2k comments appeared out of nowhere.
That might explain why it looks like all of the comments are about one or the other.
Yes, I believe that's what happened here. Very poor decision by the mods; the Google/Apple ones make sense to merge, but the AWS one is a very different issue, and could have a far more interesting technical discussion about migration paths.
> I think the critical component to this conversation that its important to stay focused on is not Apple's removal of Parler, but their continued insistence on maintaining exclusive control over what people install on their devices.
This has been going on since the App store first launched. I remember speaking up about this years and years ago. There were two sides, and well, we know which side one: people just accepted that Apple gets to dictate what goes on the iPhone.
So at this point, I have no sympathy for anyone who suddenly realizes: "Hey, what are we doing? What are we allowing?"
Every cheered when Apple prevented Flash from running on the device. And then porn apps. And then cheap "flashlight" apps. Or apps that did nothing except cost $1000 for a JPEG of a red gem. Guess what? This is the end result.
So I always look for sincerity when people propose fighting back against this now. Because now that it affects them, they want a change, but do they really want change, or are they just being selfish. And it's always selfish. People are fighting for their piece of the pie.
The "fuck you, got mine" attitude.
> No one in these comments is talking about Google.
Google I can side load apps freely. Others can operate stores and do this. Google does not have this problem.
> their continued insistence on maintaining exclusive control over what people install on their devices
Think of iOS devices like gaming consoles with a GSM chip and you'll have a better analogy.
You can't install your own software on an Xbox, Playstation or Switch without going through some hoops. Neither can you get any random piece of software in their stores without complying with their rules.
> Imagine if MS could do this back in the 90s on Windows, would that have been acceptable?
It was not acceptable and they were forced to display a browser selection pop-up, on a OS that already freely allowed users to install whatever browser they wished.
Contrast this with Apple's iOS, where they somehow get away with not allowing any other browser engine than Safari's Webkit.
> It was not acceptable and they were forced to display a browser selection pop-up, on a OS that already freely allowed users to install whatever browser they wished.
In Europe. I once tried to uninstall IE in 2005, and it was a complete comedy of errors that lead to me re-installing Windows.
Game consoles are the exact reason why I included the line about "at some values of scope and scale".
I do feel they're an interesting analogue; they sell hundreds of millions of units, the scale is there, but why do I, if no one else, hold them to a different standard than phones? At the end of the day, I do hold them to a different standard, even if I don't have a fully logical argument for why.
I'm satisfied enough with three reasons, though none represent a fully logical argument.
First, they have very limited scope. Every game console does one thing: play games. Some game consoles do a second thing: watch movies and tv. There are platform features to support those goals (parties, voice chat, friends, etc), but that's effectively it.
In comparison, phones have undefined potential scope. They're used for everything anyone could need computing for, usually only limited by the screen size, input systems, processing power, and in the iPhone's case, Apple's 2010s attitude about what your phone is for.
Second, that limited scope described above is wholly "non-critical infrastructure". I love gaming; definitely more than most people. I have a Series X and a PS5 sitting next to my TV, while I'm typing this on a PC with a RTX 2070. Gaming can lead to some very powerful, life-changing moments for some people, and its been a godsend during this pandemic for many. But, its still Just Gaming.
I would define both Communication and News, among others, as computing scopes which are critical infrastructure; these are both things people use their phones for, and they're both scopes which Apple has a demonstrated history of assaulting on the iPhone.
Third, there's very little conversation from actual stakeholders concerning game consoles changing. I try to keep apprised with the games industry, and by extension how game developers feel about the major platforms; the discussion about Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo opening their platforms simply isn't happening. While they do have final control over what is allowed to be played on each console, even with the physical disc market, there's very few incidents of them abusing that control to restrict distribution of a game that desired distribution on each console. There certainly are games which haven't even attempted approval and would be shut down (steam has many anime porn games like this), but the problem certainly isn't as severe as on iOS (due to the limited scope, combined with specialized development skillset, combined with individual investment necessary to get a game working on each platform, I imagine).
There's a second argument, the Fortnite one, that secondary marketplaces aren't just necessary for freedom of speech, but also for revenue. All of these companies force games to use their IAP frameworks, which I'm sure takes something around 30%. Its definitely strange to me that Epic railed against Apple for the same policies they accept freely on Xbox, PS4, and Switch, and I have a less cogent explanation for this; either (1) they should be fine paying that tax to gain access to the platform, or (2) they shouldn't be, and thus should take issue with every platform exerting that control. Unfortunately, the reality is probably (3) Sony owns 2% of Epic, Epic cuts special deals with every platform, and those deals have kept them happy for now, despite not applying to the majority of game developers, and Apple is actually in the right on this specific issue in never giving special deals.
Its important to remember that the way Apple and Google treat game developers is, frankly, garbage. That previous statement I made about Apple never giving special deals actually isn't true: Amazon uses their own IAP framework for digital purchases on Kindle and Prime Video. Fortnite is definitely the same scale as these use cases, but they couldn't negotiate a special deal. Google allows applications to use whatever IAP framework they want (IIRC), but not Games; ...
I understand this logic but my worry is since smartphones have become the primary computing device for millions of people ("What's a computer?") treating them as closed systems like gaming consoles is a bad approach.
I think what's better for the consumer, and society in general I suppose, is to treat them as general computing devices. Especially as we see them converge with PCs (e.g. tablets with keyboards replacing laptops).
Consider the following: If you had to pick only one, would you replace your PC with a gaming console, or a smartphone? I worry the vast majority of people would choose the smartphone, and as such we would have replaced the open PC culture we have now with a closed, proprietary culture.
> Taking Parler off the app stores seriously de-legitimizes their cause and their celebrity
Does it though? 21% of voters approved of storming of the Capitol. That's not something that can be cancelled by banning a single app. I can see these bans biting the liberals in the back the next time Republicans take control of the federal government.
Echo chambers breed extremism, and ones with a low barrier to entry and a smokescreen of "saner" content are much easier to bring in new users.
If it's difficult to use the thing and the content skews more and more extreme, existing users may continue to get more radicalized, but new users don't offset attrition rates and eventually it dies off.
Like with the Pirate Bay, the demand for Parler is already there. Outside of being declared illegal, Parler soon come back online or another app/website will take its place.
"What I found is that approximately 18 percent of Americans are highly disposed to authoritarianism, according to their answers to four simple survey questions used by social scientists to estimate this disposition. A further 23 percent or so are just one step below them on the authoritarian scale. This roughly 40 percent of Americans tend to favor authority, obedience and uniformity over freedom, independence and diversity."
That also aligns with around 20% of voters supporting Nixon after Watergate. I think we should do our best to make sure that number stays at around 20% and does not grow; for if it does it imperils the whole democratic system of government that we take for granted.
If the general zetigeist does not make it obvious to you, please look to history for excellent examples of authoritarianism being orthogonal to left/right political bias.
Pretending that it's exclusive to the political right is not favorable to democracy.
I agree authoritarianism is dangerous. I also agree that authoritarian dystopias can be driven not just by governments, but also by powerful corporations. I don't really see too much of an important distinction between either. This banning is effectively authoritarianism - just not perpetrated by a government (directly - but possibly indirectly to appease the new administration/govt by a large corp). I think we should be just as concerned about this as if it were perpetrated by a govt.
From my understanding of the reasoning behind deplatforming I think there comes a point where it isn’t worth chasing any more.
The aim isn’t to remove the sites entirely, but to make it difficult enough to find that people won’t just stumble across them or seamlessly follow a link to them.
Last I heard Stormfront still exists on Tor and presumably still serves a dedicated audience. But I imagine it has a considerably larger problem attracting new readers than it used to.
That is the strategy, but the problem is that it produces an exhaust of increasingly angry people with fewer and fewer ties to society, with each distillation cycle.
Even though you're filtering out the less-radical and committed members of a population, you're also priming everyone left behind to be more sympathetic to the excesses of the people who stuck around.
These were tolerable outcomes for already fringe communities.
But as the technique is scaled up to impact increasingly broad segments of the population, I believe it creates something increasingly large, and increasingly dangerous dangerous.
> That is the strategy, but the problem is that it produces an exhaust of increasingly angry people with fewer and fewer ties to society, with each distillation cycle
That's not a problem, unless you feel society ought to "save" everyone from themselves (as opposed to protecting society at large from bad actors).
I share your sentiments, but the current US prison system tends towards isolating bad actors: no real effort is expended to reduce recedevism, with the goal being punishment rather than rehabilitation.
This is well-trod territory. See the war on drugs - society is very much ok with locking up a large (or even increasing) number of "bad" people. Being "tough on crime" increased electability
I agree that society is fine with it, but despite it disproportionately affecting minority groups, it doesn't explicitly target a population with a collective political identity by virtue of their convictions. This is, to my eyes more analogous to a less-harsh corporate McCarthyism (keep in mind, I'm not making a statement of more, but rather functional parity) with a much greater potential for ubiquity.
Drug offenders are more likely to become low-level criminals, check out of society, unemployed, or impoverished. They may also be more likely to latch onto fringe groups that offer them an identity or sense of empowerment, but that latching isn't deterministically going towards any particular group.
They're imprisoned for a crime that they likely know is bullshit, but the thing they're imprisoned for is amoral to them, and a personal matter. Smoking weed or doing opiates is not a coherent commentary on the social order. Becoming a drug user is a matter of weighing the risks vs the rewards that come with it in the moment you choose to start. They likely just want to live their lives.
When they are caught and punished, they are locked up, and afforded no freedom of movement whatsoever.
Their punisher is the government, a massive byzantine machine with power which society has collective assumed to be legitimate (anarchists excluded). The enforcers of those laws may be dicks, but they are as much an extension of that somewhat legitimate power as the sympathetic public defender you may be about to receive.
Systematically and repeatedly cutting the communications ties of a massive political block for the behavior of their worst actors has a very different effect.
The locus of their concerns is by its very nature external, they already have a collective conception of who their opposition is, and the people repeatedly cutting them from their social circles are not only unelected, but entirely lacking in political legitimacy despite their massive power. They perceive that what they do is much less an indicator of whether they'll be affected than who they might possibly be with.
I believe that this creates an ample breeding grounds for the next generation of domestic terrorists in a manner that gives them concrete grounds for their sense of isolation, while simultaneously creating an ambient corps of collaborators and sympathetic allies in society at an unprecedented scale.
Parler is by no means a niche application. One of my bosses, a milquetoast Republican who was entirely contemptuous of the Capitol incident, and was talking about regretting his vote for Trump afterwards has it on his phone, because he fancied a Twitter alternative for conservative ideas. He has no conception that he might be a potential domestic terrorist. All he'll perceive is that 'Democrats' in 'big tech' are trying to ban the opposition party now that they've secured all three branches of the government.
To him, violent extremists will increasingly look like freedom fighters, and a mild sense of annoyance at 'progressive tech' will increasingly become an awareness of a perceived institutional threat to his way of life.
The war on drugs was also a resounding failure and society slowly turned against it. Almost all the legalization movements are grass-roots and push their ideas through ballot initiatives. There is a strange disconnect here: voters generally vote for legalization, if they have a say, but elected politicians are afraid to do the same because they worry about their electability.
I think that need to communicate without external interference is at least as strong in people as the need to light up a joint. Even in China, where controls on communication are very strong, people manage to find a way to circumvent the limits. Much more so in other autocratic regimes, such as Iran.
It's a problem when it's millions upon millions of diseased, lonely, violent, impoverished, manipulated people who now have no way to communicate and are heavily armed.
This is actually demonstrably false - people have successfully been reintegrated into "normal" thinking by removing corrosive media influences.
The key distinction is between people who seek out certain content and people who stumble across it passively (in a morning car commute, say). The latter can actually be de-radicalized and de-programmed much more easily, and it's a worthwhile task to do so. Trumpism is a cult, and so the deprogramming methods have to be similar to recovery from a cult (and not the typical arguments that we see on facebook and such which are completely useless & worse)
Also, at least for Apple, I recall them giving Parler an ultimatum to moderate their platform. For example, if an app was full of child porn or ISIS videos, I would imagine Apple would take the app down. Similarly here, due to the lack of moderation, Parler was full of doxxing, call to violence and recruitment and planning for attacks on the Capitol (both the one that happened and future ones).
That's the reason for why it was removed, not simply because Apple doesn't like conservatives as they will claim.
My money is on urbit becoming a haven for these people. If you're constantly getting de-platformed, Urbit has a lot going for you. Decentralized, unregulated, unmoderated chat that’s hard to get into and fully anonymous, with a "burn it down" attitude throughout. I've been in there, they already welcome similar types. Symbolic imagery in the form of "sigils" already is a way to show support for certain concepts/places/people in a highly reproducible but obscure way. It really feels like it's only a matter of time.
Urbit looks gimicky. Maybe something you can buy an SD card for a Raspberry Pi for or something simple enough would be far more likely to become popular, especially if you sell a ready to run setup. Imagine more people running their own Fediverse instances.
The example on the page "Art Discussion" is so cringe.
They know exactly what kind of crowd free speech first platforms draws. And it most definitely isn't someone discussing the Q3 results of their art gallery or the merits of Hoffmann's art style.
I agree that this is the one thing I'm unsure about. But: a lot of people once said this same argument about cryptocurrency and were amazed at how technically literate drug dealers could actually be, given the right incentives.
Regardless, as of recently they are making everything a one-click process: https://tlon.io
Extremely obscure dark corners of the web have always existed. They're not novel, and in general they have not been particularly dangerous as their niche is extremely small.
When I was 10 I could already find The Anarchists' Cookbook on newsgroups trivially. Back then it was trivial to find thoroughly illegal porn, racist forums, and all sorts of things that never decanted into the current state of affairs.
Crypto only got popular when it became easy. Before Coinbase and some others nobody outside of the nerds or darkweb was talking about crypto. Even now most people don’t understand it even though they’ve heard of it.
One side effect is that these technologies very quickly only become used by the people who really need it. Crypto in general has a huge stigma of being used by drug dealers, money launderers, and the like.
'Deplatforming' isn't effective as a strategy if the platform/medium/resource isn't exclusive or scarce in some way. Twitter/Facebook are virtual social-media monopolies. Android/App Store platforms are distribution monopolies for mobile Apps.
Hosting companies? ISPs? Book publishers? Not so much, although things aren't moving in the right direction on those fronts. Cloud platforms come to mind.
Generally, to be interesting for anti-trust legislation, a company does not need to have absolute control of the market. It needs to have just enough not to worry about competition. Which is a position where Twitter/Facebook are. They tend to acquire all interesting startups that could threaten them.
Define “the market” though. Why is it that tik tok can not exist and suddenly become a huge phenomenon in just a few years and Facebook can do nothing about it?
That to me clearly says that FB doesn’t have a monopoly unless you define the market to be so tightly focused on what they control it becomes tautological
Apple: “Parler has not taken adequate measures to address the proliferation of these threats to people’s safety. We have suspended Parler from the App Store until they resolve these issues.”
Seems pretty reasonable in light of what we've witness Wednesday Jan 6th at the Capitol.
Why would we want to interpret this reaction as being an escalation or an all-out assault on the 1st Amendment?
As another illuminative poster above noted, it increases the “victimhood” and “specialness” that Parler participants feel. They want to interpret this in fully combative terms.
It’s quite scary how they see the world through such a lens. I feel Apple and Google performed the lesser of two evils here. Only time will tell though.
> At this point it appears to be in a bit of a feedback loop as well, since it's obvious that deplatforming groups will make them feel persecuted and even more upset, which then makes them more likely to be deplatformed by whichever platform they move to next.
No one can deplatform me. I use Gab on iOS from my phone and pad and Apple can kiss my ass. I don't even have to use iOS either. In fact the next phone isn't going to be iOS, just to make sure their get the message.
I had skipped Parler and their app just to make sure I don't have to deal with the censoring idiots from Apple again - that decision has already paid back.
Millions have moved to Gab whose service runs on Gab-owned physical servers. Gab doesn't depend on Silicon Valley Deep State Democrats, and their app is OSS (although you don't need the app, you can use Gab from the browser), thank you very much!
> It must feel pretty surreal to be someone that is constantly moving to different communication apps and instantly finding them pulled by anyone and everyone.
It will feel exhilarating. It will enhance their victimhood, increase emotional attachment to their cause and serves to prove, to them, that "the man" is trying to unjustly suppress them and that they must group together, somehow, and rise up.
And will make them, even more, vulnerable to manipulation by those who want a mob. And there are many.
I support the suspension, since it incites violence. And I'm worried where society now heads.
When a large number convince themselves they are unjustly oppressed they will justify all kinds of horrors in the name of defence from the whatever bete noire is chosen for them.
It’s really annoying as someone interested in hearing what fringe voices have to say even if I disagree with them. I’m constantly having to try to figure out where to go if I want to break out of the liberal echo chamber.
Twitter and 4Chan are generally for bareknuckle flamewars, and low-effort shitposts. In short, they're the least useful elements of the fringe, and their producers are easy to find because half their fun comes from ignoring bans, and pseudononymously transgressing social norms.
The content that is constantly forced to move is dialogue, and ideological exchange. The useful stuff. If you want to follow those discussions, you have to pay constant attention, and be prepared to run through social media accounts and platforms like tissue platform, or socially engineer yourself into multiple encrypted chats.
That core group of enraged users will move elsewhere. Parler is a tumor, and Apple has loped it off. What tumors will rise in its place? If hate is widespread and has metastasized, the US will not last much longer.
But optimistically, 80% of Republicans surveyed said they opposed the break in (88% overall). If promoters of hate have to go underground, fewer people will follow them. Not only because of the hurdles to get there and broadcast their message, but the hate will be more concentrated and vile.
The oppression may be seen as “just” or “unjust” but it definetely is there, the US Government itself usually classifies these sorts of acts (suppressing free speech) as oppression, that is when it happens in other countries.
You can always use a web site so long as DNS is working and even then there are options. It's more surreal that the internet has devolved into a medium for proprietary apps designed to capture as much of people's identity as possible. Access via web empowers the end user to control what data they send and receive. You'd think these wannabe revolutionaries would get on board with it.
> it appears to be in a bit of a feedback loop as well, since it's obvious that deplatforming groups will make them feel persecuted and even more upset
To me it seems obvious the feedback works in the opposite direction. Deplatforming disrupts the feedback bubbles that radicalize these people.
I personally think they should be allowed to have their space anyway, if they can refrain from inciting violence.
But I would certainly absolutely refuse to do business with them, and have no problem with others making the same decision. People have the right to their repugnant ideas. They don’t have the right to force others to help promote them.
> To me it seems obvious the feedback works in the opposite direction. Deplatforming disrupts the feedback bubbles that radicalize these people.
I'm not too sure about that. For people who are already radicalized and believe that there's a conspiracy of some kind working against them, wouldn't that just "prove" that there is such a conspiracy?
I agree that deplatforming will prevent future people from being radicalized, but what about the people who already are? The whole pizzagate incident shows that there are definitely people who believe all kinds of conspiracy theories, and are convinced enough to act on them.
radicalization is now part of mainstream culture, but I don’t understand the double standard, giving e.g. the “white supremacists” conspiracy by the left prime time on all the networks, but censoring conservatives (and they have no lack of dumb conspiracies of course), but why only one side is silenced and shut down?
Free speech apparently is only free if it agrees with the ‘party line’ these days.
The question here is where "doing business" ends and free speech begins. Arguably, paying for access to the Internet is also "doing business". Maybe paying for access to public utilities is "doing business" as well (if I don't pay my electric bill, I won't have electricity).
What option do I have then — go to the town square and voice my views? Even going to the town square is illegal in some cases these days, what with COVID restrictions.
I think this is an incredibly dangerous slippery slope, especially given how much our devices act as our "second brains" already.
I would be open to a discussion about some kind of “fairness doctrine” for these companies - but as is, if it’s a private company, they are under no obligation to host speech they disagree with.
Is it problematic that people take social rejection as a reason to further radicalize? Sure - but such is human existence - and where is their personal responsibility to observe their social environment and alter their behaviors/beliefs if they are unhappy with the results they are receiving?
I see the point you're making. If we deconstruct the whole matter and look at it from an existential point of view, humans are incredibly constrained in their freedoms by the nature of our existence. In a fundamental way, our language and culture predetermines what we can think and how we think, and our environment is probably a bigger impediment to freedom of speech and thought than anything else.
But from a policy perspective on the ground, I think the ideal of freedom of speech should eclipse the concerns of private platforms wherever possible. But this is not to say we should not police the boundaries of free speech. In fact, if we had a more strict enforcement policy about unprotected speech like direct threats (such as L. Lin Wood's declaration that people should execute Mike Pence by firing squad [0]), we might not need these platform interventions at all.
Agreed — I'm not trying to say I know the answers. However, I do believe there's a role that social media companies have played in this polarization that needs to be addressed. Tristan Harris (of The Social Dilemma fame) makes very good points in this regard. Many of the political problems we have are thanks to to a distorted landscape of information distribution centered around advertising and platform addictiveness.
Imagine a TV news network with audience of 1 billion people which will give free airtime to one political party only, especially during the election cycle. How big of an advantage this is and how much is this kind of reach worth? Aren't there campaign laws about this kind of thing?
Isn’t the general solution there to bust the monopoly?
The main exception is utilities which generally operate as natural monopolies. They should be (and generally are — this is isn’t a new idea) regulated to only be allowed to deny service for limited, specific reasons. There’s room for improvement here. ISPs are relatively new to being treated as utilities and many ordinary regulations that should be in-place are missing.
Free speech is about it being free from the government (congress shall pass no law), not about me or AWS or Twitter being forced to listen to you, or to repeat what you say.
Yes, that is true. Why do you people keep saying that? You're 100% legally correct. There's something else that people have and they're called morals and ethics. I, and many others, share that it is moral and ethical for someone to be able to say their repugnant mouth breathing garage however they choose. Then I get to decide if I want to interact with that person. Not some supposedly open to the PUBLIC service.
Explicit, credible calls for violence have never been protected speech. Parler’s own TOS forbid it. No moderation effort can be perfect, but we don’t need to argue in this case whether their moderation is sufficient. A violent insurrection was openly discussed and organized by thousands on Parler and then they went and did it. Lin wood called for the execution of the Vice President and many of his followers attempted to do just that.
In terms of the limits on a person or business to control with whom they will do business, utilities — ISPs in this case — should be regulated so they can only deny service for specific, limited reasons. They generally are, though I know this needs improvement.
Beyond that, businesses and individuals should have wide latitude to decide who to do business with.
What concerns me is the strange inversion freedom of speech has undergone in the Trump era. Instead of protecting the people from the government, it’s now invoked to protect the government — and supporters of the current administration — from the people. Now it means suppressing ordinary liberties like the right to not support people, content or speech you don’t want to.
> Lin wood called for the execution of the Vice President and many of his followers attempted to do just that.
I am in Europe so have not been paying too much attention. Your quote sound like hyperbole, can you show me some evidence that people actually tried to execute the vice president.
> To me it seems obvious the feedback works in the opposite direction. Deplatforming disrupts the feedback bubbles that radicalize these people.
I think it will push them off to even more obscure platforms, and the ones that do make it there will be much more extreme and dangerous. They'll be harder to monitor as well.
At some point, a show of force might be necessary.
ISIS had clear ideological roots in the region, recruitment of socially disgraced military leaders, and a complete power vacuum to fill as they ravished a vulnerable, impoverish and diffuse population. What an absurd, ahistorical example.
Yes, it’s absurd to argue that kicking some people
off a social media website is equivalent to: an existing domestic terror group that has committed organized violence at home and abroad (Al Qaida) is going to produce an even more radical offshoot organization (ISIS) after the government is destroyed by a foreign adversary (USA) leaving an entire geographic region without any projection of force (the Levant).
Many of those “domestic terrorists” have fought against “foreign” terrorists for the government of the United States, having as leaders of their chain of command people who now vilify them (both Bush Jr and Obama). This is Rambo I all over again, only that it doesn’t take place out somewhere in the obscure woods but in the open political field.
In 2011-2014 era, IS*S was huge on Twitter. Not many people seem to remember this happened. They were posting propaganda videos and actively recruiting people on the public timeline. Jack was letting that go on for years. A lot of the terror attacks in that era were tied back to people getting recruited online.
Now it's basically dead. Was it the deplatforming? Did the world just move on? Nobody knows.
Really do you want the government to do something similar to the "night of the long knives" like what happened in Germany? Think about what type of message that is sending and what type of society you want to live in.
I find it very hard to believe that people get the impression that Trump was the fascist when you are over here advocating for a fascist method of silencing opposition groups.
The Proud Boys might be an interesting case study. Creator Gavin McInnes along with the group was de-platformed a couple years ago. I remember them at the time seeming like a dangerous group of hipsters, nerds and meatheads.
Today they appear to be a bunch of navy seal white power dudes with guns. Scary. That culture kept growing outside of the spotlight in a creepy dark corner.
Right, dangerous hipster nerds, but they were on the fringes of the mainstream. If I remember correctly, Joe Rogan had Gavin McInnes on his show around that time. He was not by any means "center-right", but at least "acceptable" in the way that Ben Shapiro is today.
There's an adage that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that's obviously been missing in the long winter of the past few years.
There are good reasons to believe that adage is apocryphal. How do you square that with e.g. the mere exposure theory, in which the very act of seeing something makes you more accepting of it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect
I don't think these two concepts are in opposition. Of course, exposure to a toxic ideological viewpoint is poisonous for the recipient, and may in fact entice them to become more toxic themselves (if they are swayed by said reasoning). But a crucial part of the societal contract is to tolerate such toxic viewpoints so as to have the opportunity to redeem those who hold them. In other words, by eating a little bit of the poison ourselves, we are granted the opportunity to save that person from their own poison, by showing compassion and empathy towards them.
People who have hate in their hearts are not entirely bad people. Everyone was once a child, everyone has experienced the mystery of simply existing, almost everyone has experienced love (whether from their parents or someone else), most people enjoy art and music. Evoking our shared humanity and showing compassion for others allows us to break down their toxic ideologies and even reform them to be beacons of compassion themselves.
Perhaps the best and most compelling anecdote to promulgate this way of thinking is Daryl Davis, who, through his talents and love of music, has reformed many of the most hateful people in our country — members of the KKK. I would recommend this TED talk by him, titled "Why I, as a black man, attend KKK rallies": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORp3q1Oaezw. It really encapsulates the power of this viewpoint.
The crucial element here is ensuring that we have channels of communication that allow for this sort of compassionate understanding... I fear that the compression of thought foisted upon us by social media platforms and online communication tools obscures the basic reality of our shared suffering, joy, intrigue, and humanity. These important facets of communication can be lost to the aether of technology, and our true intentions are thereby belied by the incorrigibly weak substrate of written language.
As a note, I think we have discussed the topic of free speech in another thread before. It's good to "see" you again :)
I meant something else. When groups are not in their own respective bubbles, indeed, non-extremists might be exposed to extremists' propaganda and potentially can adopt such ideas, and as a result, increase the amount of overall extremism.
On the other hand, similarly, an extremist exposed to non-extremists' propaganda potentially may be affected by it as well, decreasing the amount of overall extremism.
Or perhaps the total amount of extremism stays the same and instead it is spread out over large number of people, removing "spikes".
I do not know if it is true. But just an idea to consider - the discussed process of de-platforming removes _two-way_ communication method.
Most people seem to be taking this like kids complaining to mommy that their sibling did the mean thing first. That will get nowhere.
The only path forward for the right is to accept that the tables are tilted and learn to operate in that context. It's not "fair", but it's also not game over.
The right threw a pre planned riot because they didn't like the outcome of an election. The left threw riots over unarmed black men being killed with impunity for generations. One of those groups has a moral right to riot.
Do people also have a moral right to not have their business burned to the ground, even when they had nothing to do with George Floyd's death? Asking for a friend.
I disagree heavily. The focus of this conversation seems misdirected, whether intentionally or not. It’s not about the fragility of morality as a system at all, which it of course is because it’s based on consensus. It’s about fundamental principles and upholding them, and how you prioritize those principles.
You seem to believe in upholding right to free speech, which, surely is crucial to the country. However, this other group you speak of is protesting their rights to life and liberty, which they are being actively deprived of by an oppressive regime. Isn’t it slightly unfair? What rights is the right being deprived of? Entitlement to a certain election result or a certain office? That opposes the very definition of this democracy. They have means for their voices to be heard and their issues to be heard, still, by the right’s representatives in Congress. Black people didn’t/don’t because law enforcement was/is being racist and oppressive in unfairly killing them.
To be clear, I don't think rioting is ever morally justified. Peaceful protesting is a different matter.
The issue people had with the protests this summer wasn't that they were out protesting. It was the fact that literally everything else about daily life had been upended and we were all supposed to be locked down away from friends and family, unless of course you wanted to go protest, in which case you had full government, medical, and corporate blessing to go do whatever you wanted. Then when you were at the protest, you could burn down buildings and cause untold damage to property and the media would look straight-faced into the camera and call it "mostly peaceful".
Great. To that same standard the protests last week were "mostly peaceful". Hardly any of the people who actually showed up in DC were part of the storming of the capital.
My point about morality is that it is a poor justification for why an action is justified in one case and not in another. It basically ends up with "it's right when I do it, and wrong when you do it."
I don't necessarily agree with the conclusions the protesters this summer came to, but I can follow their line of reasoning and see why it is something they felt strongly about. In the same manner, you might not agree that there is a evidence that vote counts were manipulated in the November election, but if you start from that assumption, I think you would agree that someone might want to protest that.
I've heard it phrased that the social contract is basically, "Your rights are my responsibility." I think that's something worth striving for no matter your political position. I hope we can find the will to de-escalate things on both sides to the point that we can actually work towards that goal.
Please stop using HN for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do this. I'm not going to ban you right now because you've been around for many years and have used HN in the intended way in the past. But please stick to the spirit of the site—intellectual curiosity—in the future. We're all responsible for protecting the commons here, no matter how others are behaving.
You know, dang, I am an old man. Born in Soviet Union, seen the scars of that brutal regime. Came here without English and money. Went to work. Went to college, then medical school in Chicago, residency in Harvard, and fellowship in NY. Started one of the first medical blogs, in 2004, that still going on. Lots of work in the hospital, big cases.
I would consider my bio full of intellectual pursuits.
Sometimes we make mistakes. Sometimes you make mistakes. Sometimes society makes mistakes, and these mistakes can live for hundreds of years...
Maybe I made a mistake. But maybe what you consider a failure of intellectual pursuit, is your own biases.
But point taken. I’ll limit comments.
PS Here’s an interesting idea for you (and that’s not to offend you, really): try to find and ban someone on a comment that lacks intellectual curiosity and scores political points, and has many upvotes. Surely there’s a comment like that today, somewhere?
Snide comments tend to get such a reception, regardless of which side they are promoting. I am sure "Many colleges would find it difficult to arrange for Ben Shapiro to speak on their campuses" would be received much better than what you wrote.
In my book, there's something fundamentally wrong when one person tells another how to speak. It's dictatorial, anti human rights, even.
And just because something is well received doesn't mean that it is right, or moral, or anything, really. Countless speeches were well received before some of the most atrocious events in human history.
That's a great story! There's a lot of rich experience for some great HN posts in that, too.
I didn't mean to imply that you were lacking in intellectual pursuits or depth or anything like that, and I'm sorry if it came across that way. It's just stock moderation language. All I have to go on are the things an account has posted, especially the recent things an account has posted.
Usually, when people are battling their political or ideological enemies in internet comments, they leave out all of the background and motivations and experiences that have led them to feel the way that they do. That's a shame, because if we included such things it would make it easier for us to relate to each other. It also means that our comments—especially flamewar comments—create a one-dimensional picture of us in the reader's mind. That of course is not an accurate picture of at all, but there's very little information transfer going on in these arguments.
I'm not sure I understood your last suggestion there but we don't consider upvotes when banning accounts. We also don't ban established accounts for just one thing they posted—we'd warn them instead. Bans are for when an account has built up a pattern of breaking the site guidelines. There are some exceptions to that, but they're probably not relevant here.
Thanks for writing such a humane response. I appreciate it.
Back around the debates when the Proud Boys were in the news, I watched a Vice segment about them.
Apparently their current leader is of Cuban descent as was most of the people in the segment. Out of the eight members in the video, six of them previously voted for Obama.
I don't know too much about them except from what I saw on Vice. Is it really a group of white supremacists?
They are definitely becoming more and more radicalized, but I don't know where you get this white power stuff. Their leader is a minority and many of their members are black, and other minorities.
However, I think deplatforming them has made them more radical. I think that we are going to see this more and more, by isolating people and forcing them to go into places where there are no public postings, nobody is going to see how radical they get. You are going to lose some people but the really dangerous people will wind up reinforced in their belief that they are being persecuted, and if they think they have nowhere to go and nothing to hope for, I think we are going to start seeing some real ugly violence.
Deplatforming like this will always lead to more radicalization. I'm not sure why people think that removing Parlar will somehow magically make all that group dissappear and find another hobby. Hold on to your butts!
> I personally think they should be allowed to have their space anyway, if they can refrain from inciting violence.
If.
The whole reason why they got banned in the first place was because of the incitement.
There have been all sorts of crazy things said since the US election (and before), and there weren't any bans, just "possible misleading statement" tags.
Parler is being held to an odd standard here. They need to remove content inciting violence like that on Capitol Tuesday, but the BLM related protests/riots killed more people and damaged more property and whatsapp, facebook, twitter etc kept the inciting comments. :/
There are some important distinctions between Black Lives Matter and Trump’s camp.
BLM’s mission is to strengthen democracy and justice with the unfortunate side effect of the fringe propagating violence. The core and leadership would rather the violence and property damage wasn’t taking place.
Trump is an authoritarian who is trying to subvert democracy, and his supporters consider violence to not only be acceptable but to be a necessary virtue.
If it were possible to remove disinformation, violence, and property destruction from each movement, BLM would still have an important message, while on the MAGA side I’m not sure what values would remain. What’s the coherent message beyond spite toward the left?
I agree and like Black Lives Matter because they have a valid point to make, and while it's unfortunate that there are fringe elements causing property damage and there have been instances of violence, that's not central to their mission and most people I know who support Black Lives Matter are against violence and property damage.
I dislike Trump because he's corrupt, incompetent, racist, sexist, a sociopath, and an authoritarian. I feel like it's a valid position to be against those things. However, any politician on any end of the political spectrum can be all those things, so setting those aside, let's look at his actual policies: the only one I can think of is isolationism.
I mean I'm mostly just repeating myself. Feel free to make a counterargument.
The BLM leaders were saying "we are marching/gathering to protest police brutality". However things got out of hand. Violence was not their intent. See also the false flag operations against BLM:
The folks on Parler are saying "we need to hang the traitor Pence". And this has been going on for months:
> “Will you and several hundred more go with me to DC and fight our way into the Congress and arrest every Democrat who has participated in the coup?” Holland posted on Friday. “We may have to shoot and kill many of the Communist BLM and ANTIFA Democrat foot soldiers to accomplish this!!!”
> One of Lang Holland’s posts reflected Donald Trump’s baseless allegations that the presidential election he lost to Joe Biden was stolen, and said: “Death to all Marxist Democrats.”
> Holland, who led the police department in Marshall, Arkansas, also wrote “take no prisoners” and “leave no survivors”.
> In a popular thread referencing a Trump tweet promoting the debunked conspiracy theory of election fraud, one user asked, "what if Congress ignores the evidence?"
> "Storm the Capitol," was a popular reply.
> Five days later, on January 6, as pro-Trump militia proceeded to do exactly that, the mood on thedonald.win switched to jubilation and outright defiance of police, with thousands joining "watching party" message threads.
> "This is what Trump told us to do!" a top post in one of these threads read.
"To me it seems obvious the feedback works in the opposite direction. Deplatforming disrupts the feedback bubbles that radicalize these people."
That does not seem obvious to me AT ALL. Most radical movements in history had no access to the Internet and relied on personal contact to radicalize, e.g. preachers in mosques. This also creates deeper bonds among the members.
If the result of deplatforming from Twitter is that the organization shifts to "meat world", you probably have a more dangerous opponent on your hands.
Edit: Signal is now #1 on the app store. Speech that was removed will obviously just migrate and be encrypted. Though not as public, the actual speech is still going to be communicated between people and groups. So why wouldn't Signal be next?
I wish people would stop making this claim without supporting it in any way. It's kind of a ludicrous claim. Signal bears no resemblance to Parler, and there are various other reasons why this analogy is poorly drawn, like the fact that Signal's traffic is entirely private and Apple would no way of knowing the contents of said traffic, and the fact that Signal could not possibly "moderate" said traffic for the same reason.
You make a good point. Though I have to agree with Snowden when he says this will be remembered as a turning point in the battle for control over digital speech.
A good argument could be made we don't need end to end encryption without a back door. And in this environment, there may be little political opposition.
A lot of the speech that's being labeled as "inciting violence" on Parler would feel different if it was spoken privately. The fact that it's being communicated publicly puts it in a different category, almost like you're saying it on TV or in the proverbial town square. I don't think this is setting any sort of precedent for attacking private communications.
I do recall various other chat apps being painted as being used by "terrorists" in the past. For some, the fact that bad people can communicate at all is something they would not like to have, at the expense of good people having access to those tools in some cases.
"There is no explicit limit to the number of people that can be added to a Signal group chat. However, if the group becomes very large, it can become difficult to manage and you may notice that messages take a bit longer to send."
Seems like it wouldn't bet too hard for it to become a social network.
I think the Signal surge is due to many people disagreeing with WhatsApp's new terms of use and privacy policy. I saw many people in my network advocating a move to Signal and Telegram after Facebook pushed the update.
It's due to extreme virtue signaling, basically cancel culture. These companies have to behave alongside the social pressure or else they're going to lose revenue.
They can ban individual accounts calling for violence (which happens on both the extreme left and extreme right). But it's only socially acceptable to ban one of those, the other gets a free ride.
And I frankly don't care much for your example. My grandfather was a Pole who had to fight Nazi invaders, and I have no reservations about him having to put a few bullets over them.
Nazis and fascists do not want a free and fair society. They delight in the violence of it and have no interest in a marketplace of ideas.
My grandmother survived the Bolshevik revolution, a real, actually violent left. That you would even dare compare the "radical left" of the US with actual violent revolutionaries makes me question how much of the matter you actually know.
There are degrees of radicalism. BLM founders already described themselves as "trained Marxists". That's sufficient for anyone paying attention to be concerned.
Do BLM protesters openly carry rifles and shotguns like the Black Panthers used to? Do they actually fire on police?
I doubt it, and unless you can provide footage from the Associated Press or Agence France-Presse I don't think there's any evidence you could provide that might convince me otherwise.
> If it’s dead cops you want google 2016 Dallas BLM ambush.
That's not how this works. If you want to persuade me, it's up to you to provide evidence. Telling me to google something doesn't count.
Now, fuck off back to 4chan. You haven't engaged with anybody but me since you created your account, and I don't find your singular focus especially flattering.
Please stop posting ideological battle comments to HN, regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are.
Fuelling hellflames is against the site guidelines, which ask you to flag egregious rather than replying to them (a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls).
We're trying for something else here than internet default and need users to know the intended purpose and stick to it.
I’m not the user you’re replying to here, but I apologize for making unconstructive comments earlier in the thread instead of flagging. Thanks for all the work you do to moderate this community.
And what, exactly, is a "trained Marxist"? Can they quote chapter and verse of Capital and The Communist Manifesto from memory?
Having spent a few years on the Fediverse, I've found that "the left" in the US consists mainly of book clubs and struggle sessions.
The book clubs just read and debate theory ad nauseum. They're a joke, and if you gave most of them an AR-15 they'd shoot themselves in the foot.
The struggle sessions look for people slightly less poorly off than themselves to bully. If they can't find a right-winger, they'll happily go after somebody who's only 99.999% on board with their program. Failing that, they'll pick one of their own at random, accuse them of insufficient ideological purity, and bully them. They're a joke, too, only not quite as funny as the book clubbers.
The radical left is a problem in Seattle as they are terrorizing the Capitol Hill neighborhood.
Don't take my word for it. Listen to community activist Victoria Beach explain how she is upset for them terrorizing the area and hijacking the Black Lives Matter movement.
Would you agree that it is Twitter and Facebook's responsibility to ban all BLM-affiliated groups? After all they have organized numerous events that involved mass rioting that resulted in billions of Dollars in damage, many deaths, and disruption to the lives of hundreds of thousands. In many cases, politicians like AOC or news pundits like Don Lemon have condoned this violence, and even encouraged more such action. At times they have gaslighted us by claiming those events were "mostly peaceful" even though there is evidence to the contrary showing criminality far larger in scale than the recent capitol riot (example: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/31/fires-light-...). Those individuals and groups who organized, incited, and participated in such events were not reprimanded and not banned.
So why are they all given a pass? It's because these tech companies are comprised mostly of left-leaning staff and are willing to now exercise their power against everyone else. Until Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon deplatform every single person and group involved in the hundreds of events in 2020 that involved criminal acts, these new acts of censorship will remain discriminatory and unacceptable.
Literally everyone clutching their pearls over this seems to ignore this. Were people under the impression it was reasonable to plot the assassination of the Vice President of the United States on social media sites?
Parler spends most of its moderation effort removing accounts of leftists who argue or make fun of right-wingers on that site. Someone who never even posted anything got their account banned over a screenshot. Yet they refuse to remove calls of violence against elected officials?
I don't even like Mike Pence. But I don't think he should die! He should just retire!
Shouldn’t those offenders face jailtime instead of censorship when inciting violence? To not see the darkness might be worse as you don’t then see the effects of things. Maybe get a psychologist involved, some happy pills and the offenders can make US better instead of being a tax burden?
> Shouldn’t those offenders face jailtime instead of censorship when inciting violence?
How can they face jail, if they are FBI operatives, acting on direct orders?
I means, are we supposed to believe, that FBI — the same FBI that surveils entirety of Internet and have backdoors in FAANG — fails to catch a whiff of ongoing revolts?! And police just yields Capitol to bunch of protesters?!? And they say, that Russian FSB is heavy on theatrics...
Yes, this is how companies are supposed to work. There are plenty of examples of conservatives trying to “cancel” companies for some perceived transgression as well.
The "virtue" of totally unmoderated speech is just another value you hold that you're misleadingly not categorizing as a "virtue": You're doing it right now.
The very idea of "virtue signaling" is delusional. There is no practical difference between twitter's intent and their action here.
Companies want to cover their asses and protect their own interests. Customers are essentially paying for usage of a company's services and don't actually own anything besides their own code and IP. If company decides it's worth it to them to remove customer, then they will do that. Companies have no reason to care what their customers do, as long as it doesn't adversely effect the company (see also: Apple clamping down on companies avoiding the 30% revenue cut).
I think what will be interesting to watch is how the government responds with legislation/mandates.
Will the government require they can ask for people be removed as customers from certain companies? Or require companies share data about customers with the government? Or give the government a backdoor API?
In the name of using it for good, in some ways it makes sense. Then, how does one trust the government to only use the tools for good - and who judges what "good" is?
If a 17 year old gets the keys to a Ferrari to only drive to school at 35mph, can they be trusted with that responsibility?
While so many comments are applauding this move to me this entire deal has been a massive wake up call. I always knew in the back of my head, but now it is right in front of me just how much power these tech platforms have. It's not about Parler (have never used it). Or any of the specific people banned. Just the fact that we have had a president addicted to social media shows how bad things have become.
For me, it's time to unsubscribe. It's not like they have brought me great benefit anyways, if anything the opposite. I wonder if any others will come to the same conclusion.
I guess there is something unique to social media. If someone is using its own website + bbs (hosted on its own sever) to communicate those messages, I am not sure what the tech companies can do.
In theory, Apple + Google + Microsoft can ban the website at the OS level, so nobody can really access those messages. Technically, they can do this to Parler now.
ISPs and telecoms can ban you. Banks can ban you from having a bank account. Visa can ban you from transacting on their network. These things are already happening.
You can build your own website, but you can't build your own internet. You can't build your own banking system.
I disagree with your last paragraph. Crypto is basically it's own banking system and while you can't build your own internet you'll always be able to run your own (often encrypted) protocol on top of it (IPSF etc) the existing one.
It's more about the web than the internet really. The web can be unfree quite easily. Unless we go full China and implement a Great Firewall other protocols can always exist on the net.
Crypto is its own banking system but going from fiat to crypto falls within the current banking system, unless you're willing to buy crypto with bundles of cash and risk getting mugged.
Advanced Cash
AliPay
Cash Deposit
Chase QuickPay
Face to face (in-person)
Faster Payments
HalCash
Interac e-Transfer
Japan Zengin Furikomi
MoneyBeam (N26)
MoneyGram
National bank transfer
Perfect Money
Popmoney
PromptPay
Revolut
SEPA
SEPA Instant
Swish
Transfer with same bank
Transfer with specific banks
Uphold
US Postal Money Order
WeChat Pay
Western Union
Zelle
And no, I don't think they asked permission.
It's so funny. Whenever people say you can't do X with crypto, there is always something they don't know about that proves them wrong.
> unless you're willing to buy crypto with bundles of cash and risk getting mugged
I'm trying not to fall into a "Survivorship bias" here but I made 10s if not 100s of trades on LocalBitcoin years ago without issue. I wasn't meeting at people's houses or in some dark alley, I was in the Kroger (grocery store) parking lot or even inside Kroger or the Mall. I don't disagree with your point that fiat->crypto is not as easy as some people pretend it is but I just wanted to push back a little bit on the second part of your statement.
They could build those things if they built their own society, which is what I fear the right will try to do one way or another. And I think our options are to split the country and manifest the divide early or wait for some sort of civil conflict.
What they need to do is accept that Donald Trump lossed, shut the fuck up, and get in line.
They're currently advocating for a revolution (civil war really). And if you're like: but were they really? Look at content on Parler, the answer is yes they were.
You can't expect any sort of appeasement when you're calling for violence.
You’re telling a group of people who lost their livelihoods and who watched their cities smolder for six months as far left militias committed crime after crime to “sit down and shut up”.
Has that strategy ever worked, in history?
Calling it an “insurrection” that a single demonstration at the capitol happened after six months of weekly to daily gang activity from far left militias promoted by politicians is just gaslighting.
The pearl clutching about “appeasement” when Kamala Harris advocated for rioting and multiple prominent Democrats created bail funds supporting far left violence is laughable.
The reason the DC event happened was because you already tried a media blackout of their concerns and telling them to shut up. They forcibly told you “no”.
The problem isn't that they have to build their own, to me it's clear they want to. The problem is that they feel they're being shut down or invaded or whatever, when they attempt to build their own services and communities. Their responses has been to double down and create even broader spaces going from small groups to alternative social media, and I think, eventually an alternate society and political system. At that point the legitimacy of the US government will be challenged, and that's already beginning to happen, and we may have a civil conflict.
They've been creating smaller more exclusive communities for years. They have their own youtube news and fan/media channels, they have their own internet personalities and figureheads even among the mainstream (like dr disrespect, who seemed to be popular with right-leaning gamers I know), they tend to congregate in various indie games (especially war and FPS games), they have their own forums and online spaces (e.g. private discords; thedonald reddit clone, alternate subreddits; parler; 4chan, which is older than any of this but decidedly more right wing nowadays than I remember 10 years ago), and so forth. The problem is that they feel these spaces and communities are under attack. Parler, while I don't disagree with the right of FAANG companies to decouple from parler, is just the latest space that's "under attack".
This isn't unique to Parler, I've seen the right complain about this in gaming, movies and comics (like Star Wars), tabletop games, etc. for years and I know people who were otherwise apolitical but shifted to the right because they felt their hobbies and fanbases were being (unfairly) criticized and changed by outsiders specifically from the left-wing who don't appreciate the original characteristics. And I even agree to some degree that it's hard to have your own space without being attacked. For example, recently I am somewhat aware that Hololive idols, basically asian/japanese game and lifestyle streamers using 3D avatars, have been under (what I think is) undue scrutiny from some feminists for being sexist, pandering to pedophiles, and fueling misogyny. I've seen similar attacks on anime and on some games. Personally I think there's more of a racial element, given western phobia towards asians, in a lot of these attacks and criticisms because extra criticism seem to be targeted at japanese or asian media, but in any case, people on the right think it's mostly political and the political divide has not only worsened it's caused people to take sides and move from a localized feuds (fighting over media like anime and Star Wars) to a broader battle (politics, values, belief systems). And as far as I've observed, this tracks with their attempts and successes at creating increasingly broader alternative platforms. From having their own spaces within larger communities to creating alternative platforms, like parler, or hijacking sites like 4chan, and actually making them viable, unlike earlier attempts (like voat). As of January 6 I think we've come to the point where enough people have aligned politically on the right that they're going to want their own real world society, and not just an online one. Shutting down parler is just going to accelerate the sentiment imo, because as far as I've seen people kind of quantize their world views when (they believe) they're under attack, and group up. They don't become more understanding and broader minded, they become more tribal.
So if the right wants their own society just let them have it before internet fights become real ones. Personally I think it's still a small amount of people, my experiences are just anecdotal based on what I've seen in communities I was part of and people I know, but I think the sentiment is growing rapidly and trying to shut things down isn't working, at best it's a roadblock that pushes problems down the road, at worst it makes people g...
I would say that Q Shaman photo-op is the right wing response to far left protests staging dramatic photos with the police all summer.
My summary:
Left: “Look, we can bully the police and people will cheer!”
Right: “We can touch you anytime, anywhere.”
Left: “Shut the FUCK UP!”
My fear is it’s not going to stop.
Star Wars, something so universal I saw xwing graffiti in Cancun, MX has been purposefully debased by people like Kathleen Kennedy — to astroturfed praise from corporate media. Their sales tell the true story. That Disney+ crashed when Luke Skywalker appeared tells the true story.
My fear is what we see at Harvard and Yale, where Asian applicants are discriminated against to “balance races” or whatever the racist euphemism of the day is just won’t stop. We’ll see a reconstruction of institutionalized racism.
I think you’re right that the criticism of Asian media has a racial element — but it’s also about control. As the far left burned down US institutions (eg, Disney and WM), many Americans adopted Japanese and Chinese media as surrogates. (Eg, I watch more anime than Hollywood content.) Understandably, Japan and China told left wing groups where to put their opinions on how they run their own culture. That turned into a full on power struggle. It’s very neo-colonial.
I think either we stand up to the racism and gaslighting now — or the censorship is here to stay.
I would personally hold the Asian community up as one that has integrated meaningfully into America at large, while not abandoning their own identity. Teriyaki, sushi, and American Chinese food are everywhere; anime and HK martial arts flicks are semi-popular; most Americans can name a few major events in Asia; etc. Personally, I consider “rooftop Koreans” to be an American archetype.
Is it so wrong I, as a Polish Jew, want to do the same? ...to celebrate my heritage and discuss the problems I face honestly?
It's probably impossible for the right-wing to create their own society, because they're geographically and economically mixed in with the rest of the country. The most salient political dividing line is ~800 people per square mile.
Social media platforms already long ago decided not to allow groups such as ISIS to propagandize and organize online. Why would they allow any other terrorist groups? Those calling for the usurpation of democracy through insurrection and violence are equivalent.
>So if the right wants their own society just let them have it before internet fights become real ones.
We've already seen many instances of right-wing terroristic violence in the form of bombings (attempted and successful), mass shootings, etc.; many of these have been organized online in extreme right-wing spaces. It's an easy case to be made that allowing such spaces to proliferate will lead to more violence.
But to equate all right-wing speech with terrorism seems to be succumbing to a self-fulfilling prophecy while at the same time justifying the very actions you're opposing.
If we truly want inclusive political discourse, we need to acknowledge the validity of traditional conservative viewpoints while drawing a clear distinction between those viewpoints and reactionary terroristic violence. With this understanding in mind, newspapers such as the NYTimes have long featured conservative columnists with critical viewpoints. Perhaps such mainstream publications should try harder to do this.
There is plenty of room for intelligent discourse, but hateful attacks (verbal and otherwise), simply have no place in a healthy society.
I don't think we necessarily disagree, I just want to address this.
But to equate all right-wing speech with terrorism seems to be succumbing to a self-fulfilling prophecy while at the same time justifying the very actions you're opposing.
I'm not equating it to terrorism, I'm saying that they have indicated they want separate systems and, really, a separate society. If you take right-wing talking points at face value, what we have now is a shaky middle ground, a society wherein the powers that be both reject them and also employ regulations that make it difficult for newcomers to make their own banks, lay internet cables, etc. which is why you see right wing memes about "make your own google, make your own banks, etc". And these aren't new talking points, one of Trump's promises going into his presidency was to get rid of as many regulations as he could in general: financial and economic, environmental, governance, etc. and democrats/the left are usually blamed for loving regulations. So if that's the case, split the country and let them do what they want with their government, from scratch. It's not like I'm saying we should go around and take all their belongings and march them down to Florida or something and leave them like cavemen. I make it sound trivial because I'm not an expert or anything, but for the purposes of this discussion I think it's a better alternative to civil conflict and I don't see how we're going to fix the divide.
If we truly want inclusive political discourse, we need to acknowledge the validity of traditional conservative viewpoints while drawing a clear distinction between those viewpoints and reactionary terroristic violence. With this understanding in mind, newspapers such as the NYTimes have long featured conservative columnists with critical viewpoints. Perhaps such mainstream publications should try harder to do this.
I'm not really disagreeing but I think we're past the point where publications matter. Social media has created this new world where you're able to discover people you didn't even know existed. In the past you might know your neighbors and accordingly, you'd move to a neighborhood that suited your tastes. For example, that's basically what white flight was (I'm trying to be brief, not insensitive), it's real, that's how people act. And they'd remain in their local bubble and only have a vague idea of the rest of the world, neatly summarized by the news. People would get mad at ideas and vague demographics, and occasionally figureheads like politicians and public businessmen.
Now, on "public" social media like twitter, you can find virtually anyone who has a certain belief or is a certain way and just yell at them for existing or thinking a certain way. You and your friends can pick them out for doing something and mob them on social media, dox them and get them fired, and attack every social aspect of their life. This isn't even unique to politics per se, this happened to a woman who made a terrible joke about AIDS and Africa, among many other people for non-political reasons like being accused of crimes or plagiarizing art. And this is in ADDITION to getting mad at ideas and demographics and figureheads. So the divide that used to be vague has been refined to an individual level, and to make things worse people categorize each other and place them into enemy tribes based on beliefs and people they follow on social media. You follow Biden on twitter? You're a "demoncrat" and you're the enemy. If you follow Trump you're a "nazi" and you're the enemy. You liked some youtuber personality that's this way or another and you're automatically a SJW or a white supremacist, etc. It's borderline impossible to escape and you don't even have to be a part of social media anymore, it's become somewhat normalized to pick individuals out for their wrong doi...
There’s no practical or ideological need to create a separate society—or really a separate anything—simply because of a difference in political opinion. The left and right are technically in agreement on a huge number of issues and could easily compromise on many others. There has always been room for these discussions within civil society.
A major issue seems to be literal lies and disinformation spreading over social media which makes that divide appear
to be much greater than it actually is. If these blatant lies can be prevented then the left and right will have a much easier time coming to political compromises when running the country. Having shared primary ballots would also help a lot to prevent the most radical wings of each party from dominating, because then each party’s candidate would have to appeal to all voters rather than their own.
I agree that the amount of "blatant lies" adhered to by large chunks of American citizens is causing/exacerbating our socio-political issues. But I also agree that changing social media is probably not enough. American politics has become an arms race of increasingly polarizing ideologies none of which are particularly appealing/helpful to normal people.
Shared primary ballots is a good start, but it seems like the most meaningful change to our political system would be implementing a system of ranked voting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting). Among other things, that would help break the two-party nightmare cased by first-past-the-post voting.
The practical reason is that people are extremely agitated and even if they're a fraction of the country that's still enough people for civil conflict. I think you're being a little dismissive of the fact that people are emotionally engaged and FAANG taking down parler is not only further agitating angry people but drawing more people, especially those of whom who hate and distrust "big tech", into the political divide. This isn't a knock against their decision to decouple themselves from parler, but just an observation that these actions are making people angrier than they already were. When you have two spouses who hate each others' guts and haven't been able to stand each other for years, with no improvement in sight, divorce is probably the right decision.
I think the lies and conspiracies are just a manifestation or side effect of the social and political divide. Its like imagining someone you already hate. "They're plotting against me", "they're going to get me", "they probably spilled that milk on purpose to piss me off", etc. And I think there is some substance to the hate, not to the conspiracy, but I see that our society has gotten to this point for real reasons and disagreements that can't be compromised on
Correct, Shopify has already banned a couple of Trump-related shops and I can see Visa and MasterCard going one step further and not accepting the transactions coming from Trump-related businesses at all.
>ISPs and telecoms can ban you. Banks can ban you from having a bank account. Visa can ban you from transacting on their network. These things are already happening.
It’s important to look at the context around those bans.
The most recent ban from the companies you’ve listed was Visa banning PornHub. They did so because of the amount of underage and non-consentual content on the website.
Yes, companies can ban you in theory, but everything indicates that they do so only in extreme circumstances, like hosting child porn or terrorist content (which is essentially what Parler is being banned for).
> Yes, companies can ban you in theory, but everything indicates that they do so only in extreme circumstances, like hosting child porn or terrorist content
This is very much untrue. Most of the conservatives (including the non-conservative called Donald Trump) banned from the main platforms are further from terrorist content than AOC is.
Not without a lot of effort. Having to go hunt down lists of conservatives and the exact things they got removed for is hours of work. Then it's another hour looking through AOC tweets. Then there's the write-up at the end.
Many people derive great benefit from being able to organize peaceful protests via social media. Disengagement might be right for you, but I would hazard to guess that a lot of people benefit greatly and tangibly from the existence of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Perhaps what we need is better social media, with interests that are more closely aligned with consumers, rather than no social media.
I concluded the same and finally closed out my accounts and ended any subscriptions. I just can’t help feeling repulsed while using these creations. I found them cool enough to work on back in the day, but what’s the point anymore. Why does the site people use to talk to their friends have to become a tool for social control. Anybody trying to use the internet this way, please back off.
I feel the same, and TBH this site really isn't much better. It's a groupthink incubator just like Twitter and Facebook, and though I've only been here less than 12 hours I regret signing up.
If you’ve been here 12 hours you probably haven’t gotten the chance to participate much in an actual tech discussion. This weekend has been all political in nature.
During the week when more people are working, more tech focused news/projects tend to be shared and discussed.
Give it another week and then decide if it’s all groupthink.
I've browsed here before but only just registered to participate in discussions on this topic. I've seen far more nuanced discussions and sincere consideration of both sides on HN than most other platforms.
I still find it alarming that so many people perceive these actions as sincere attempts at harm-reduction. Regardless, it is a pleasant to see both sides being represented in the discussion.
I have been here for a few years, there are definitely some areas of groupthink. HN knows it's tech, but it's politics aren't generally as well thought through.
Like any community, it grows and changes. You should give it a chance. Political discussions are not the norm, and if you’re interested in tech, this place can expose and involve you in really thought provoking discussions on myriad topics.
And that’s from someone who got fed up, left for a few years, then returned.
Edit: just don’t tell any jokes. Take that to Reddit :D
A large portion of tech audiences fall into major Dunning-Kreuger traps. Because they understand something to an expert level they feel they can apply that to other ares ignoring the experts already in that field and their current findings. Combine that with a certain segment being pre-disposed to ESR style feelings and it all eventually turns into ./, a cesspool of trolls and people too high on their own supply to even recognize they've gone off the rails.
> A large portion of tech audiences fall into major Dunning-Kreuger[sic] traps. Because they understand something to an expert level
Which is in itself the Dunning-Kruger effect. A tiny minority of people actually have expert level understanding and knowledge. The vast majority of people who think they have expert level understanding just fail to recognise how large their field actually is.
You can be considered a subject-matter expert for recruitment and employment purposes, and it still never be close to the truth. For most practical business purposes it will be true, but it still wont be the reality.
I didn't recognise that distinction until after I had 12 years experience in my field, and met someone who absolutely blew my mind with their level of knowledge and understanding (and declared themselves to be a subject-matter noob).
Couple this also with the Gell-Mann amnesia affect and it makes it that much more difficult to filter information as every source will need to be deeply investigated unto it's root.
The only option seems to be copious and wide reading of data yourself, and then applying that to your own life, while ensuring you provide a veneer that passes muster to those physically around you, unwilling to do the same, and at odds with your personal conclusion.
Easier said than done, when a large portion of your time is spent taking care of mundane work/family matters.
This breakage in trust of the 'common good' by 'experts' in their field - leaders, law enforcement, health, merchants, ensures that the path of least resistance is the "blind belief" in local leadership and their chosen 'expert' supporters.
You really think there’s no one here who has studied law, politics, philosophy or history? Not everyone here is a big tech engineer. Not everything is black and white.
You cannot judge a community after just half a day of participation, much less in times of turmoil.
From all the networks I participated in, HN is by far most quality-oriented and while the balance of political opinion is different from US average, there is neither mob rule nor cancel culture rampant.
I've been here for a bit, just reading but I registered just to suggest you give the site a chance. Personally I feel political topics are often quite slanted towards one side of the argument, however one of the first posts on p1 is exactly why I do read them; a guy convinced of something beginning to doubt those beliefs and then going in discussion with people. I've found quite a lot of thoughtful discussion here and in general I'd say HN is a good broad source of interesting topics. Give it a chance.
I also align with this general sentiment. A lot of the major tech platforms and media orgs (at least in the US) that are viewed as authorities in the dissemination of information on the internet, seem to be getting pulled into the downward inertia of a partisan culture war, and are abandoning notions of objectivity and policy standards that will help keep a pluralistic society like we live in from becoming more and more biased/fractured.
Perhaps this is all inevitable with the nature of the internet, but I have lost a bit of my faith in our institutions to maintain an environment that highlights our common humanity, even when we disagree.
They are not deplatformed for their political beliefs, but for their non-moderation of calls for violence. If this happens to be what somebodies politics is about, tough luck.
But it’s not the same as persecution.
Romney, McCain, Bush, Dole, Bush, Reagan, Ford all got it worse. The dirty secret of politics? This is battle on the Serengeti. There are no sides, no code of conduct.
A tweet can start a riot. What a joke. 0.25% interest rate increase, these hypocritical petty rich fools go on a bread line. Probably lead to 5 week social security checks, hurting the most vulnerable the most, but America is not going to be old forever. Perhaps they can cut back on the heroin.
Normal Americans held back from fighting thieves and arsonists unleashed on them by their leadership. As soon as election was over, they struck back, and mercifully compared to what they themselves went through, most of who are poor and out of the fight.
Soon you will be doing this to each other, if you haven't already. Americans just have to stay out of it. Take the free money, save it while everyone chases the spotlight maiming each other in the process. What's telling is how so many people bought the hype, thinking this time is any different than what everyone has been doing to each other always.
Family and friends I haven’t talked to in 10+ years are calling and texting me.
Giving me current addresses. Making sure everyone has paper maps in case things get worse.
These are people that don’t normally follow politics at all.
A lot of of people are freaking out.
Never seen anything like this here. Feels like Arab Springs.
That sounds like doomsday prepping. If a social media platform plastered with calls to violence gets deplatformed, and you start doomsday prepping because it really impacts you that much, then you are probably knee deep in the conspiracy theory BS that made parler popular in the first place.
People don't doomsday prep because they are currently being impacted, they prep because they are concerned that they might be impacted in the future. Now, you can paint these people as all being conspiracy theorists, but consider that they may be more like people that are concerned that the government is spying on them–which is less "I am a terrorist and this concerns me" and more of a "wait, they can do that? (Granted, they are currently only doing it to terrorists, but this still concerns me…)"
Your comment is prescient, I think. The race against the clock has begun. If we haven't seen the last of these extremist groups, then they're on the fast track to the crypto underbelly of the internet (whether they realize that or not). I hope the inevitable federal and international crackdown sees wide success before these groups go dark.
I am a conservative and right now in the community there is talks of using high-anonymity tools like TOR to go completely underground. We're trying to educate everyone on how to use these tools as quickly as possible.
There was a thread I saw on thedonald.win - a popular pro-Trump self-hosted Reddit fornicate - where a commenter stated that Twitter's action of banning Trump itself was an act of inciting violence. The problem is I'm not sure you can reason with illogic like that, especially people who're angry and have been manipulated for years to decades to more or less blindly hate, lacking critical thinking and/or integrity behind their thinking - and will more than likely be quickly ban if calmly pointing out the definition of inciting, and likewise pointing out that Twitter is a private platform - and the internet is reflexively neutral in America.
You're correct though the deplatforming will be inflammatory, but the self-made bubble filter these communities of like-minded people are already on a runaway train that's only going to stop when real world circumstances don't allow them to just ban the confrontation digitally, when reality will hit them.
As I posted elsewhere, there's a lot of healing necessary due to multi-generational dis-ease progression - healing to open people's hearts and minds, so they can develop their critical thinking and logic that's influenced by the heart to develop empathy; I discuss this further in a comment from yesterday - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25702673
Even though i agree with you and, in this particular case I have a hard time sympathising with Parler. After recent events and posts calling for more violence and the response of the enforcement agency last time despite having known that MAGA goons would try to disrupt the vote, I cannot think of another solution than what the tech companies are doing. Just to provide context, this is coming from a person who strongly believes these tech companies must be broken down. The events at the capitol have made me angry and the fact that 70 million people support this is just disappointing.
> What if we simply said that what tech companies are doing may be the right thing in this case, but it really shouldn't be up to them to decide.
I think the exact opposite: it may be wrong (I don't think it is, but I think there is legitimate debate), but it absolutely should be up to them to decide the rules for their platforms.
I don't think it's right that a few unelected old men have the right to tell me what I can and cannot say on the internet. I want to live in a democracy, not a corporate oligarchy.
When a platform is as ubiquitous as Facebook (for example), it's not just their platform that's effected by their decisions. We're all directly effected by how they act or fail to act.
Apple has been trying to get them to implement moderation for months, they just gave them the 24 hours as an ultimatum after not getting anywhere with them and the real world situation escalating.
Sure it was a fair expectation, because that expectation was known before Parler even started up coding any apps. That's always been the rule. No hate speech, no illegal content, no direct threats of violence. Hardly an unfair expecation for Parler to meet those guidelines - the 24h notice seems to just be a kind gesture that wasn't really even necessary from Apple's part.
Parler and its issues have existed for a lot longer than 24 hours. This isn't the first time they been told, this is just the first time its resulted in the lost of life.
An impossible deadline in other contexts can of course be designed to be impossible for petty reasons, but when the object in question is a runaway train, you can't really wait to pull the plug. You can only give them as long as possible, and must prioritize safety.
> It was never a fair expectation that Parler would be able to scale up moderation in 24 hours.
Apple asked for a plan, not for an implementation.
From Apple's letter:
> In addition [to removing the death threat examples in the letter], you must respond to this message with detailed information about how you intend to moderate and filter this content from your app, and what you will do to improve moderation and content filtering your service for this kind of objectionable content going forward.
They did. And Apple had a (likely pre-determined) response:
> We have determined that the measures you describe are inadequate to address the proliferation of dangerous and objectionable content on your app.
I'm not sure Apple is acting in good faith here. What is considered adequate? Facebook has had all sorts of crazy stuff on it like the Christchurch shooting (and regularly also abuses iOS API's) and has never been taken down.
Amazon's letter noted 2 things: They said they were going to use volunteer moderators to fix it, and their CEO said it wasn't really their problem anyway.
So it's possible Apple also took those things into account and was able to determine it just wasn't going to work out, and there was no need to go any further.
If you read Amazon's letter where they inform Parler they're kicked off, which you can find in the Buzzfeed News article, it sounds pretty cut and dry.
Using a lack of moderation as your selling point and then being surprised by such a deadline when you intentionally host content that doesn't tally with the platform you're on seems short-sighted.
The intent is likely to not moderate - it'd kill the platform. It remains accessible by web. Does it need a native app?
Parler is listed at 2.8 million total users back in July.[0] Assuming that's doubled and all lean towards Trump, that still represents a fair minority of voters.
The website remains there for those users that want to use the platform, but curated app stores that aim to promote certain values (and are fairly clear about those values) don't seem to be the right place for these platforms that devolve into highly controversial places.
> People should be able to run Parler on their phone if they want to, with full API access, not the half-measures that having a web app allow.
Under what justification?
These people agreed to the contract. Their BATNA is Android, which allows sideloading, or their web browser, where they can be as unmoderated as they want to be.
There is no problem here. If you want an Iphone supporting app store with more permissible side loading, go build one.
It's largely been the House side that has taken the lead so far, but a new Democratic Senate would also be interested in regulating Apple's "services" including the App Store.
They can easily get enough Republicans onboard to stop a fillibuster. After the Parler situation, Republicans would no longer feel the need to defend Apple's App Store margins (regardless of whether or not Parler can come back under the proposed laws, the political damage is done).
You're missing my point. It will be far easier to get laws changed than to develop a whole new phone.
The party that will control Congress in a couple of weeks does not like trillion-dollar companies like Apple. They believe that Apple and others should be considered monopolies, and if there is a court case they believe Apple should have the burden of proving that they aren't a monopoly (unlike current law).
Look for open source phones. There are several to start with, and they support Linux and even Firefox's attempt with an OS. Perhaps even a chromium type of Android. Have fun!
I didn’t sign up to anything other than buy an iPhone and while I’m not sad I can’t have a Nazi app on my phone if suddenly they say I can’t have Twitter I will be. It seems weird to have a computer and for the manufacture tell me what I can do with it.
Apple advertises that they review everything that goes on their store. It’s a feature that some people choose it for. It sounds like you chose the phone that had the wrong feature for you.
No, not really. That brings up a good point. Would people complain if all the car dealerships decided you could only buy American cars from now? Would they say "why are you complaining, you can just get a Ford instead of a BWM"?
People would complain at first, and then either ship their cars or build a new car company.
In fact, this is exactly what folks did to Tesla in the beginning. Of course the difference here was that Tesla owners were not seeking to overthrow democracy in the US.
> Of course the difference here was that Tesla owners were not seeking to overthrow democracy in the US.
I'm not sure how that is in any way relevant to the discussion of Android and Apple being substitutes or not. You keep bringing that up in your other comments too.
To be clear, I don't support people who want to rise up against the US, quite the contrary.
But they still bring to light an important point -- why does Apple get to say what apps I can install in my phone?
Because Apple is running the store. It's their store. And users have voluntarily and intentionally bought into an ecosystem that Apple moderates and curates, because that curation has substantial benefits.
I'm well aware that they curate. I can still complain about it try to fix it though, since I like all the other things Apple does. I don't want to switch, I just want my device to be better.
No, it doesn't bring up a good point, and your analogy is poorly drawn.
The situation with Parler and Apple is analogous to expecting a Ford dealership to sell, and promote, Tesla's products, or another car-maker's products.
Not if you're comparing a Prius and an f350. They both do the same task of 'people moving' but have very different appeal and featuresets. Most people could get away with either, regardless of their situation. But there are edge cases where their differences shine.
Prius and F350 are specific models. Android and/or iOS can be on small phones, big phones, tablets, Televisions, etc... So I think the analogy is broader - Ford and Toyota.
If build quality is my main factor, than Ford is not a substitute for Toyota. If having a Hybrid SUV as big as the Highlander, Ford is not a substitute.
There are lots of reasons people want a Toyota, and Ford doesn't have all those things.
It is either a substitute or a complement as they both are in the automotive industry. A complement is like peanut butter and jelly -- buying both makes life that much better. Clearly this isn't the case here. So let's drop the misapplied definition for "substitute" and move on. Your point is better made by identifying perhaps unjustified cost increases in purchasing (i.e. Toyota unionizes and causes a 0.002% increase in the car price, analogous to the increased difficulty in communication these insurrectionists now have in communicating with their proto-terrorist cells).
It is, if one of your highest use cases is “Parler we an app on my phone”
One of the main features of buying an iphone is “Apple guarantees my privacy and security”.
If you are choosing the former it strongly suggests you don’t care as much about the latter. Being on a system that allows sideloading is a serious step down in security especially for the non technical majority.
> It is, if one of your highest use cases is “Parler we an app on my phone”
That is not my highest use case at all. I have an Apple Watch. An Android phone works very poorly/not at all with it. I have an iPad. An Android phone does not easily sync between them. I have a Mac laptop. An Android phone does not sync well between them.
I think the UI on the iPhone is much more intuitive. I can't get that on Android. There are a bunch of apps that are only available on iPhone. The iPhone has better apps for my kids.
I could keep going on, but my point is, there is a lot my iPhone can do that an Android can't, for me.
> If you are choosing the former it strongly suggests you don’t care as much about the latter.
It doesn't in any way suggest that.
> Being on a system that allows sideloading is a serious step down in security especially for the non technical majority.
I agree. So make it hard to do. Put it behind a set of options. Make me have to install a text file on a BSD machine and then sync my phone to enable it. Just make it possible and let me assume the risk.
I like that your position offends both iPhone users and Android users equally. (I really do.)
Ultimately, is there anything that can be done? If you had to pick one specific world-changing action, what would it be, in detail? Your original premise was interesting, but perhaps difficult to codify.
If I could change anything, I would codify interoperability and access equality into law. If you have an API on your device and any app has access to it (1st party or not) than all parties should have access to it. It's fine if you want to have private system APIs, but if you're publishing apps for your platform than all apps should have access to the same APIs.
Maybe even specially call out that anyone can install any app they want on their mobile device, and this must be made accessible. You could even add in some weasel words like "after reasonable precautions have been taken" so that Apple can make you jump through some hoops to install an "unapproved" app. Let the courts sort out what is reasonable or not.
If a user is willing to go through the hoops to get exposed, I'm not sure anyone should stop them. Also, this is an old and tired argument. Computers have been this way forever. And yet you can build a platform that has a reasonable tradeoff between security and usability.
“And yet you can build a platform that has a reasonable tradeoff between security and usability.“
What examples do you have in mind and what has ‘usability’ got to do with this?
Also - as soon as one reputable App requires users to ‘go through the hoops to get exposed’, any app that can fool users into thinking it is reputable will be able to do so.
I didn’t mean you specifically. But for those super motivated to use a Parler app the ability to sideload probably trumps the factors you listed.
I agree they’re not fungible. I like being on iphone for all the ecosystem aspects you describe. But if android worked for some key feature I’d switch, and keep a secondary iphone for my apple watch, imessage etc.
> Being on a system that allows sideloading is a serious step down in security
How? The iOS system sandboxes the binary, so it can't do anything without permission. It can't read files, can't read data like contacts, can't connect to the internet, etc. I think it would be relatively easy for Apple to allow sideloading while maintaining great security. Plus, it would be off by default, so know-nothing users would not be doing it.
Iphone offers no common services that Android cannot provide. This is why they are saying it.
[X] Phone
[X] Text
[X] Compute Applications
[X] NFC or other near items
I guarantee the vast majority of consumers aren't using more than an extremely limited feature set that both phones happily share with their customers.
Are they produced by the same designer? Nah. But that really doesn't matter for functionality purposes.
So? There are still alternatives on good old laptops/desktops.
What application of computing (not specific compiled binary, but rather generic spreadsheet, ssh, chat, etc.) is not available on Android? You may have found your next business opportunity if you get moving. You'll simply be responding to capitalism as Parler did when they started, and as Google and Apple are doing now.
> So? There are still alternatives on good old laptops/desktops.
I can't carry a laptop in my pocket.
> What application of computing (not specific compiled binary, but rather generic spreadsheet, ssh, chat, etc.) is not available on Android?
I'm not sure how that is in any way relevant, but regardless you know very well that it is completely disingenuous to suggest that someone just "build a new app" for another platform.
Not every spreadsheet is the same. Not every chat app is the same. Someone isn't just going to go out and build another Fortnight because you can't get Fornight on the iPhone anymore.
It is not disingenuous, Iphone legitimately offers no major feature you can't get from Android.
You're arguing that feature parity is required for subsitutition, and that is an addled argument. It's not even temporally consistent, as you have prior versions of applications with features removed.
You can carry a laptop in your pocket. Sony VAIO had a mini edition around 2007. You can also use a bag, which has big pockets, and you can connect to networks and even cell networks.
Point is -- your argument here is very weak that the two platforms aren't substitutable, and there really is nothing left to say. Have a pleasant evening or morning, as the case may be.
The api should not be insecure and able to be abused (and it largely is very secure today). Sure they might be able to violate some ToS items like embedding their own payment processor but they won't compromise the security of the phone like they could on a desktop OS.
Ok, agree partially. I mostly meant privacy rather than security. What i wanted to say: iOS is nowadays famed for siding with the user (gateway process to weed out bad/malicious apps), restricting tracking and giving the user more control over what data is shared and so on. 3rd party stores would change that. Security could also be impaired by 3rd party stores neglecting to police malicious apps (eg. compare to some android 3rd party stores that often host pirated apps piggybacking malicious code). Likewise, apps on iOS 3rd party appstores might act maliciously (copying your credentials during auth in an embedded browser etc)
I also dont like what Apple did to Tumblr when they had to change their content policy and how BigTech generally projects US values onto the world (eg. nudity).
PS: I trust Android's F-Droid store more than the PlayStore due to its strong gateway process (anti tracking, pro privacy, FOSS only).
Not sure why this was dead, or why Apple seems to get a pass on this walled-garden behavior. If Microsoft were to require Windows apps to be installed from the store, people would be outraged. When it's done on mobile (how the majority of the world accesses computing these days), it's seen as a valid "security measure".
We used to have contempt for the concept of "forbidden software", and I hope some of us still do. Techno-libertarian culture used to be so defiant, but today, many of the same people have gone soft, and it's not clear why.
I remember having a DeCSS t-shirt and the PGP source code printed in a book. Are folks less interested in liberty now that wrong-think can get you fired?
Apple doesn't require apps be installed from the Mac App Store. If they did, people would be outraged.
People have different expectations from smartphones (tables, and Chromebooks as well). So long as you know what you are getting when you buy it, this isn't an issue.
Apple doesn't make phones to be hacked or tweaked or whatever, they make them to be simple to use and as secure as possible. For most people, this is far more interesting and appealing than being able to side load apps.
Isn't the Pine Phone fundamentally a device made for hackers?
Fundamentally, the market for hacker oriented products is far smaller and less interesting than the market for iPhones. So hacker oriented tech is by nature going to lag the market or be more expensive.
This is an important point that I haven't really seen addressed anywhere. Notifications are a crucial engagement tool, and the web doesn't seem to have any API on mobile to allow for them, even for consenting users.
Just wanted to point out that iOS Safari currently does not support web notifications, even for PWA. Works on Safari for macOS, but Apple hasn’t allowed it on iOS yet (along with a lot of PWA useful APIs).
Web push notifications work on most android phones. But not on apple. Apple hasn't figured out a way to get their cut on web apps yet so will make sure they are missing key features.
It exists, but Apple purposely drags their feet when it comes to implementing web standards in mobile Safari that include the web notifications API, and they make it impossible to use a different browser or JavaScript engine on iOS.
> hopefully this move pushes the government to force Apple to ...
While I strongly oppose Apple's decision, I even more strongly oppose government involvement as a solution. The government should not be able to compel association, it is essential to maintain freedom of association.
Could there possibly be anything more against the spirit of the Apple 1984 commercial than them kicking off a messaging system that lets people say whatever they want?
What's next, email? Are they going to ban text messages because people say no-no words on there?
I think browser could be a logical next. It’s not more rational for Apple to censor the content of the apps you run on your device than the content of the Website you browse on your device.
In a way this is a form of death of net neutrality. What your ISP couldn’t do, Apple and Google happily will.
Could you at least try to argue in good faith? Speculation that email and text messages will be banned by Apple isn't in good faith, or even minimally interesting.
There's no need to ban email. It's unencrypted plain text, with a small number of majority providers. Filtering extremist content at that level should be easy enough.
Alt-right apps, sites and people weren’t banned for associating with the wrong crowd, they were banned for their role in trying to overthrow the government.
You intentionally bought a phone with an operating system that intentionally controls what apps are allowed to be on it.
You don't have much of an argument here. No one is forcing you to buy that.
You don't even have the argument that Apple has a monopoly on the smartphone mart. There is a readily available alternative in Android. Android allows you to install whatever you want.
Apple's ecosystem may not be right for you. It's widely known to be curated, and it seems the majority of Apple users appreciate the curation. It's possible you didn't know the state of the ecosystem when you purchased the device and agreed to the terms, and it's unfortunate you only had 14 days to discover it before the return window closed, if you purchased directly from Apple. Perhaps they will make an exception for you. I've heard they occasionally allow returns outside of that window. Some people have luck selling their devices, and report they retain high resale value.
Non sequitur: My first VCR was a BetaMax. We got it on sale without knowing much about the technology. Once we had it a few days, I really wished it handled VHS tapes, as that's all the movie rental stores had. We returned it.
Any user that wants to could continue using Apple's curated store and apps, regardless of anyone else sideloading... just like the average Android user.
That has nothing to do with them going out of their way to make it impossible to sideload anything.
Apple preventing me from installing a social network by some group people don't like is akin to Ford not letting my car drive to a store owned by people they don't like. Do you think I should have to find a different car manufacturer to drive where I want?
The iPhone is more like a train than a car. Off-tracking, let alone off-roading, is technically prevented. It’s sort of a buyer-beware situation. I get that you’re unhappy with their chosen business model, design decisions and implementation. The natural remedy in a capitalist system is to choose an alternate product from a different manufacturer. You’re free to petition them of course, but the decision remains theirs. Or maybe you can petition the creation of laws to outlaw their business model. But of your three options, the first seems most expedient and reliable.
No they were banned for going against the democrat-left establishment. After a summer of rioting and endless attacks on federal property let's dispense with the clutching of pearls that this is something new.
There were no endless attacks on federal property, and there was no organized movement to disturb the peaceful transition of power, nor overthrowing a democratically elected government. Don't peddle lies.
> There were no endless attacks on federal property
It is still happening in 2021 and has been documented previously for months, even after the election. Typical examples here [0][1]. Many more found on Twitter.
So are you now going to stop gaslighting and peddling lies?
I'm not seeing these people trying to kidnap Senators. I'm not seeing an organized movement to stop a democratic transition of power, nor incitement by the President in favor of such actions, not people walking with guns threatening the lives of others. Vandalism, sure? Are you going to stupidly compare one thing with another?
Your hand waving is not very convincing. I mean Antifa setup it’s own autonomous zone in Seattle, effectively overthrowing the gov’ts authority (albeit on a small and temporary scale). People were killed there. Is this that not sedition or at least a direct attempt to usurp the gov’ts authority?
“Protestors” took over a Seattle City Hall and demanded the mayor resign. Is that not disrupting the legitimate legislative process? Isn’t that attempting to force a legitimately elected official out of office?
The mayor of Portland was being accosted at his home (so much so he moved) and while out in public having dinner (just this past week). Is that not intimidating and threatening our elected leaders?
The point is the left said nothing about about all this violence and rioting and in some cases encouraged it. Said “it was legitimate anger” and therefore authorities shouldn’t try and stop it.
Why the double standard? Why is arson and looting by Antifa given the benefit of the doubt and called “protesting”, while, when the right riots and causes disruption we go right to using words like “coup” and “sedition” and suddenly need to start creating new laws to stop it?
> Your hand waving is not very convincing. I mean Antifa setup it’s own autonomous zone in Seattle, effectively overthrowing the gov’ts authority (albeit on a small and temporary scale). People were killed there. Is this that not sedition or at least a direct attempt to usurp the gov’ts authority?
Were people actually concerned that this movement was going to blow out into a full-on anarchist revolt? Was this based on an idea of an all-out violent revolution? This is the only example where they may be a slight point and even so I'm not seeing an explicit call to join into this being amplified.
> “Protestors” took over a Seattle City Hall and demanded the mayor resign. Is that not disrupting the legitimate legislative process? Isn’t that attempting to force a legitimately elected official out of office?
Were they coming in with guns? Did they organize multiple days in advance with the idea of kidnapping legislators? This sounds like infrequent but very much run-on-the-mill instance of protesting.
> The point is the left said nothing about about all this violence and rioting and in some cases encouraged it. Said “it was legitimate anger” and therefore authorities shouldn’t try and stop it.
This is not true, and I'm the sort of person that consumes news from people who are not in favor of the current system. The critique was the violent overreaction of police forces and the fact that while they're getting rubber bullets in the head, actually seditious traitors that stormed the Capitol get coddled and kindly asked to leave.
_That_ is the double standard. The US has a history of allowing violence by white majorities, visible and obvious in the favorable treatment by police forces and legislators, while disproportionally repressing other forces. The deescalation is reserved for seditionists and white supremacists.
> ...After a summer of rioting and endless attacks on federal property let's dispense with the clutching of pearls that this is something new.
You (What I quoted):
> There were no endless attacks on federal property...
You have just lied in that first claim after the fact that the grandparent comment was referencing the summer violence of last year that still continues to this day and that is what I quoted in my comment which is still happening today. Never began to compare anything or started to.
So before you gaslight everyone again, are you now going to stop peddling lies?
There were millions of people in the streets, and the number of violent events was disproportionately small, and was an _excuse_ used by unaffiliated people to loot. To this date there is no association between BLM protesters at large and any willful intent to cause damage at scale or destabilize democracy.
We are living on different planets. This perspective being is being pushed solely by people who hate trump and his supporters. It’s clearly not true, and it blurs the lines around what happened. If it were true, there would be an actual civil war.
Claiming this only serves to increase the ever-widening divide in our country. There appear to have been thousand of people at the protest (I haven’t listened to any pundits yet, so unsure of the exact estimate), and a small handful participated in this disappointing display.
This is the equivalent of saying "if you don't like the laws, just move to a new country!".
Besides the logistical hurdles, one is not a substitute for the other. The pros still outweigh the cons, but that doesn't mean I can't push for better policies to fix the things I don't like.
Absolutely. I have no problem with them not wanting the app in the app store, but they should allow side loading or alternative app stores. We should have the same situation on ios that we have on macos.
I think the web is already the corporate-agnostic way to do apps in. If they lack some device features I think this is a technical limitation and a different topic. Things have got so much better in that regard already in just the last 5-10 years.
What will it take until the tech community realizes this comment couldn't be further from reality.
You are all going to wait until one of these deranged psychos does another Las Vegas?
You are all going to wait until your own kids are dead? Is that what it takes?
I'm not a huge fan of Reddit, but hopefully this pushes the government to force spez into hiring some expensive lawyers so he can get a slap in the face while half the country burns down and innocent people die.
so convenient for a techie to say they should be able to run parler.
Sounds like something a russian shill would say. What the fuck is wrong with you people. none of this bullshit is normal.
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. You can't do this here, regardless of how right you are or you feel you are.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules and never post like this again.
Or the web could be what the web was intended to be, platform less. We effectively killed the notion of “web” when we doubled down on “there’s an app for everything and stopped adding hardware access to mobile browsers.
Makes me said that there’s an app to order a burger from Shake Shack for example.
The only way they would've made this deadline would've been to delete all of their posts.
I'm not upset in the slightest about them being gone, but I can kind of see the argument about how the app store is deciding how someone uses their phones here.
I disagree. Apple's response quotes Parler's language and suggests they are operating in bad faith and any moderation effort in the last 24 hours was a token gesture at best.
Parler already banned non-right wing content (contrary to its "free speech" claims). If you wanted to de-escalate on parler, you couldn't. You'd get banned.
tl;dr a bunch of liberal and leftist people joined Parler back in June when it got popular. They did so intentionally to test how "free-speech" supporting it was and if it would allow people to post left-wing content. They got banned.
" And, yes, some people are claiming that Parler's quick trigger finger is mostly about shutting down "left" leaning accounts, but as with Twitter's content moderation, I won't say that for sure unless I see some actual evidence to support it."
And the second seems to be a rehash of the first. Most of the substance seems to be based on twitter claims with no verification?
What verification do you need beyond firsthand accounts of multiple journalists who tried to join and were banned? Like that seems about as good as it gets in terms of verification.
Do you think random reporters were conspiring and posting nudity to make Parler look ideologically driven when it banned them (there's irony there too, which we'll ignore for now).
In the first article one tweeting guy is primarily a comedian but also a writer, but looking at the clickbait he writes he doesn't seem too journalistish:
https://www.huffpost.com/author/tony-posnanski
The other isn't a journalist at all as far as I can tell?
If leftists are categorically banned (the claim was: "If you wanted to de-escalate on parler, you couldn't. You'd get banned"), then surely there is more than these articles, the second of which is a copy of the first which is a mention of two people tweeting about being banned?
I saw the first article back when it first came out and never saw any substantiation, but I didn't keep following it. Is there any significant evidence that leftists are all banned?
Among others, DevinNunesCow was banned. Lots of liberals and leftists joined. Lots of them got banned without any reason. Hell, a number of journalists were also banned for...unclear reasons.
That's a bad look for an app that claims to support free speech and claims that the solution to speech one doesn't like is simply to counter it. I have no problems with a platform moderating content. But I do find the hypocrisy amusing.
> Have you even used Parler?
Why would this be relevant to my ability to know who or what the platforms moderation policies were?
Glad I downloaded it yesterday since this was obviously an unrealistic deadline. It’s getting harder and harder to keep tabs on both sides now. Things have really fragmented in the past 24 hours: lots of posts on MeWe, Telegram, Gab, etc, looking for the “best” communication channel.
It's not terrifying at all. It's is breaking apart proto-terrorist cells, if the posts on /r/ParlerWatch can be believed. Which is something both the left and the right in the US support, at least until recently.
If you want to see all the calls for violence, they are streaming minute by minute on the donald site. Some even worse things today (I had to stop reading it because it's getting to the point of super illegal).
Is there someone closer to the decision making process who could explain this sequence of events? From afar it looks as if all the tech companies coordinated this action, Apple delaying it by a day for optic reasons. I am not as troubled by the decision as some people, but the timing merits examination.
The tech companies did not coordinate the attempted violent overthrow of the US government; that was the far-right extremists doing the coordinating, not the tech companies. The tech companies are simply responding to their platforms being used to incite violent riots, murder, and the direct overthrow of our democratic government.
No, it has absolutely nothing to do with Net Neutrality. Which you know by describing things that do somewhat resemble issues of NN, but which have nothing to do with the topic at hand.
Apple, and any other multinational corporation, is under no obligation to host inflammatory hate speech seeking to incite an insurrection against the US Govt.
Can you link me to a Chinese government official’s Twitter account calling for an insurrection in the United States while spewing derogatory hate speech against minorities?
Of course they should. Why shouldn’t they remove platforms that almost solely contain hate speech and insurrectionist content? Half the stuff said on Parler could constitute a hate crime, and frankly, they should have been removed from the App Store/Play Store ages ago.
I would agree. I don't think apple should be allowed to prevent side loading. And certainly not accessing things from email. But by all means, if you're running a curated store of apps, don't sell tickets to the white supremacist show
> Massive multinational corporations having this much power over our speech is not healthy.
Who has power over my speech? I have iPhone, Android, Ubuntu, Mac and other tech. My speech is not limited in any way.
I can write down notes on paper if I want. I can write down content freely today as I could yesterday.
What corporation out there has any power over my speech, much less "too much power"?
Edit: I seem blocked by HN temporarily (for opposing viewpoints? I don't know but I can't post any more!) so to respond to the post below me here is an edit:
Trump should hold a press conference if he wants to say something. It can easily be streamed on the internet.
No president before 2007 had access to Twitter and they could still get the word out online if they wanted to.
He calls a press conference, and Fox News, ONN, the New York Times and a host of other media sources listen to the press conference, then publish his remarks on the internet.
It is very hard for me to see the President of the United States as an unfairly persecuted, powerless individual without the ability to get his message out.
Free speech has limits, does it not? The US Supreme Court has ruled that one cannot, for example, falsely scream fire in a crowded theater.
I would assume that calls for the violent overthrow of the US government in order to overturn an election at the very least should be considered as equally dangerous as screaming fire in a crowded theater.
I agree that this should be decided in a courtroom. If Trump wishes to sue Twitter or the US Government, he is more than free to do so.
However, I think both his case and yours is undermined by the very, very strong circumstantial evidence that after his lawyer, Giuliani, called for "trial by combat" and he said that he would personally lead the crowd in a march on the Capitol on Jan 6th the violent insurrection actually took place is a very strong argument that he incited the uprising.
Furthermore, the fact that even as these Trump supporters were occupying the Capitol he said that he "loves them", that also undermines any argument that he did not incite sedition.
This is why social media platforms are anti competitive and in risk of anti trust lawsuits. You don’t get to twist trumps words and then ban the @POTUS account just because he threatens to create a competing platform.
No reasonable person could take that as incitement. So the only logical answer is anti competitive behaviour, or political manipulation/interference.
Trump wound them up with lies and conspiracies and urgency two hours before they went to the capital on his recommendation. This is certainly provoking unlawful behavior or urging someone to behave unlawfully which is the definition of incitement.
The defendants will unquestionably be using the "Trump told us to" defense.
Trump violated the terms more often and worse than regular people who were removed from the platform. Thousands of regular people kicked off for violating the terms and it's Donald Fucking Trump and Parler that gets folks in an uproar? Over things that happen all the time? By long standing service agreements? What?
Trump has been calling openly to overturn the election every day from Nov 3rd until Jan 6th, including when he was caught on tape attempting to convince the Secretary of State of Georgia to illegally overturn the election there.
> n 1969, the Supreme Court's decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio effectively overturned Schenck and any authority the case still carried. There, the Court held that inflammatory speech--and even speech advocating violence by members of the Ku Klux Klan--is protected under the First Amendment, unless the speech "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action".
I would argue that the elements of Trump's speech on Jan 6th satisfy all the elements in the lawless action test:
- Trump gave a speech on January 6th, the same date as the insurrection.
- In this speech he directed his supporters to march on the capitol with his support.
- His supporters did actually march on the Capitol, then proceeded to violently occupy it.
Regardless of Trump's inner mind, it is clear that his followers believed that his intent was for them to march on the Capitol while the election was being certified and forcefully disrupt those proceedings.
It seems to me this is a very strong case that Trump's speech did in fact incite the violence that occurred that day, and the very short amount of time separating those events make it easy to argue that one was the immediate cause of the other.
We are not talking about trump. We are talking about Apple, who is forcing other companies to censor their user’s speech and acting as judge and jury on what is acceptable.
> The US Supreme Court has ruled that one cannot, for example, falsely scream fire in a crowded theater.
Very few people seem to know the context of that ruling. That line of thought was used to justify criminal punishment of two socialists from Philadelphia for hindering the war effort in 1917. Their crime: they distributed anti-war leaflets. Elizabeth Baer spent 3 months in prison, Charles T. Schenck 10 years.
Goes to show the extent "yelling fire in a theater" can be stretched, and has been stretched from the very first case.
Inciting violence should not be defended as free speech. In fact it’s not considered free speech. Let alone the fact the usage being blocked violates the very clear terms of service.
Any limitation to speech implies that speech was never free, by definition. So, there is no reasonable limitation that preserves the "free" part of "free speech".
Let's consider some implications of what you're saying.
- Slander and libel are restrictions on free speech.
- Restrictions on any type of public insult, racial slur, hate speech or other derogatory speech are restrictions on free speech.
- Any restriction on the advertising of explicit pornography or illegal activities would also be a restriction on free speech.
If your argument is that absolute, then no, I don't support absolute free speech without qualification. I can't prove it, but I would assume that the majority of the population would rightfully take the same position that free speech should not utterly absolute with no restriction at all.
It doesn't matter if the majority thinks like me or not. That's the point of free speech, to let people think and speak freely. If you're against free speech, you have every right to be, but don't try to justify it by twisting words. Just say it: I do not support free speech.
Before pontificating so very much about what "free speech" is, would it be too much to ask if I requested that you learn the most basic concepts about free speech, and also figure out that actions by Twitter have no relevance whatsoever to the freedom of expression as defined in the First Amendment?
It's not so black and white is it though? What kind of violence? And against who? And who's committing it? For instance just a year ago it was totally acceptable (in the West at least) to incite violence in the form of a coup against the democratically elected leader of Bolivia on all major platforms. To the best of my knowledge no one was suspended and there weren't any calls to de-platform Twitter, Fox, CNN, etc. Probably for the best.
The real problem is not so much that they can do this, which is of course entirely legal, but that a few companies have such concentrated market power. People seem to regard Twitter as some kind of essential service, but it's just fucking Twitter. In the days when there were dozens of book publishers just in New York, if one turned you down, you could go somewhere else. Now there's four.
I mean, it's actually kind of nuts to consider that Twitter has somehow 'silenced' President [expletive deleted], when he still has a whole press corps at his disposal and could call a press conference at any moment.
Agreed, I just can't take Twitter seriously. I can see it's value for quick and cheap communication but it's always seemed like more of a quaint narcissistic toy...
I'm pretty darn cynical about social media in general though and I know my views are in the minority.
> The real problem is not so much that they can do this, which is of course entirely legal...
Not "entirely" legal. All these companies claim to be neutral, and while I think they genuinely try to be, for various reasons they aren't able to stick to that standard.
The point of contracts is that you give up certain rights. On Monday, I can't sleep in all day because I've got an agreement to work. I have to set aside some money for rent because I signed a lease.
What these companies are doing may be legal in practice, because of the difficulties in litigating, but it's never entirely legal to make promises and then break them, whether they're through contracts, terms, or even marketing claims and advertisements.
When they make those claims, they voluntarily give up their right to say anything they like. Being able to give a right up is part of having it in the first place.
Twitter could change their terms to say, "we will ban or block people we have political differences with, or when bad PR is making us feel uncomfortable." Then banning people for those reasons would be 100% legal, because they would have reserved that right.
It's hard to read any of these arguments in good-faith.
A single person has enough power to incite a mob that threatens the life of our government officials. That seems like "too much power" to me. A mob consisting of .001% of the US population threatening our cabinet seems like "too much power" to me.
Until we have a better way to figure out what causes that sort of conspiracy-theory mania, deplatforming is a million times better than insurrection.
By that logic, we need to immediately deplatform everyone though, right? Since any single person has that capability? Why wait until it happens, kick everyone off now!
On a more serious note, if a single person can raise a mob, that mob must have already been angry and out for blood in the first place which points to deeper underlying problems than just "this one person has too much power". The real solution is to address the underlying cause for the unrest and anger felt by the mob. Any other "solution" is at best a temporary bandaid.
Why do you say this as if that single person and his enablers haven’t been revving up this mob for years? The mob is angry about totally counterfactual nonsense that only exists because it was deliberately spread using the platform. That is the “underlying cause”.
Don’t confuse what this mob is angry about with all the actual legitimate reasons there are to be angry.
Everyone concern trolling over these things always brings up hypotheticals in an attempt to debate principals while fully ignoring everything that has actually happened in the real world.
Trump won in 2016 because the "mob" was already revved up and angry at a lot of the unfortunate legislation and narratives that already existed. He just capitalized and preyed on the existing outrage.
Yes, he and Fox and many other grifters added fuel to the fire, no question. But it's a mistake to just write off the millions upon millions of honest and good people who have been shafted by the system and are rightfully pissed while neoliberals and neocons crap all over them.
I didn’t write them off — quite the opposite! A crowd raiding the Capitol because they’re angry about nonexistent vote fraud and child pornography rings run by the Democrats has absolutely nothing to do with the legitimate concerns you’re talking about. It’s deliberate provocation spread using social media to distract from the actual issues.
If there were legitimate leadership that honestly wanted to address the issues you’re talking about, we’d be seeing debates in the Capitol, not a crowd trying to set it on fire. This is the result of years of party leadership that just wants to stir up emotion to get people locked into irrational loyalty, rather than actually doing anything to help people.
Trump deliberately amplified the nonsense and used it to build a cult of personality rather than doing real political work. He’s the one disrespecting the people who elected him in 2016, not me.
Why are you so scared of people being allowed to express their political power? Words and rhetoric is how it’s always been. Are you for censoring all political speech? Given the highly partisan nature of the censorship, difficult to not see it being politically motivated.
You've been using HN primarily for political battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of which politics they're battling for, because it destroys what this site is supposed to be for, i.e. curious, thoughtful conversation.
I hate to ban an 11-year-old account, but I had to scroll back two months in your comment history to find a post about ZFS. That's seriously uncool. Between that and the fact that we've warned you many times not to abuse the site like this, I think we have to ban your account and I've done so. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Have y’all considered suspensions (temporary bans) for people to cool off for a few months and reconsider? I’d be curious to see how many came back abusing right away.
Why is it hard to take it in good-faith? Regardless of one's political persuasion it should be chilling to anyone, especially the hacker types, to see how easily the tech companies can snuff voices out of existence. Who elected them? Whose interests do they serve? They should not have such power. We need real solutions to the speech problem and I fear that instead this knee jerk, performant stuff is going to backfire horribly.
Yeah but as hacker types people here should be looking at the fundamentals of the problem. I don't support free speech just for the sake of it. It serves a purpose to make society better off as a whole. The market place of ideas.
We well now know, and you can see it play out since the internet showed up - that content The ideas that win out are the ones best designed to encroach on the hind brain and avoiding the parts that analyze using reason.
Cat pics out perform everything.
Images beat long form arguments.
Machiavellian emotional constructs co-opt human brains, and a lawyer level eye for rhetoric, or blanket, unhelpful cynicism is needed to protect you.
If you actually want that market place to work, now we know that we have to act on speech that destroys reason.
The problem is who arbitrates which speech is good. If you look back at history there are many examples of speech that was suppressed because it was considered blasphemous or immoral only to later become orthodoxy. I think we are better off focusing our efforts on building back trust in journalism and teaching and empowering people to be skeptical and good critical thinkers. I do not think repression is going to work.
I too thought the same, but because I like empirics, I went out and tested it.
Repression works.
You make a few assumptions here, which are important to examine.
First, it was centralized power of the church, which was fighting facts that were not in congruences with their beliefs. However, today the positions are reversed, it is faith in unreal outcomes that is asking for credibility at the same level as facts.
The people who stormed America's highest houses were there because they believed that an election wasn't fair. Nothing will convince them otherwise, no matter what the evidence.
This is the essence of faith, and exactly why free speech exists. To allow human beings to be governed by reason over unreason or emotion.
Secondly - we know for a fact, that emotion is the fastest way to co-opt logic. You can take a look at politics at home or around the world for evidence - wedge issues win, logic doesn't.
If you aren't going to exert a force to counter emotional manipulation, then your people will be emotionally manipulated. They will be manipulated the hardest, by those who find that certain facts don't work for them.
Finally - Journalism is failing because of other reasons than trust. It was an unviable market a while back. Their last source of income was the classifieds, and craigslist alone put an end to that.
Journalism which is beholden to advertising will always have to compete with entertainment. Meaning that if its not more entertaining than a sports channel, advertising money will simply go elsewhere.
I can only see independent, government or public founded journalism as the solution.
I don't think any future generations would look back at conspiring to hang lawmakers out in public as some orthodoxy that we were wrong to see as immoral.
Someone in another comment pointed out that Trump can release press releases or call a press conference if he chooses, or give a speech from the Oval Office. Let’s explore that. If he uses the old media tools and goes on national TV to start directing insurrectionists to the next target, what then? Do we agree that they have a responsibility to cut him off?
The social networks and now Google and Apple are faced with an evolving volatile situation where the tools they supply are being used to foment an insurrection. They are taking steps to get ahead of what may happen in the event of Trump’s removal next week. Time is of the essence.
There will be time for more nuanced discussion when emotions have cooled. Now is emphatically not the time to try to have those discussions. We need to get through the next several weeks first.
As opposed to massive multinational corporations controlling traditional media?
I'd be willing to bet almost anything that the latter have been far more demonstrably toxic than all but the darkest corners of the Internet. Because they have a huge captive audience and have been operating as toxic bad faith actors lying and pandering to the prejudices of low information audiences for decades now.
We don't just need a conversation about Twitter, or even about Google. Or Apple.
We also need a conversation about Fox and the rest, and the fact that a tiny handful of corporations control TV content, movies, music, book publishing, print of other kinds, and so on.
In the bigger picture, Twitter is practically a small indie platform.
They are the massive multinational corporation controlling media, and a small number of Silicon Valley progressives should not be trusted with that degree of cultural and political influence and power over the world.
I'm sure Twitter loves to be seen as a small indie platform because then they can shift the blame elsewhere when in fact they have far more influence than is reasonable for a healthy democratic society.
Political affiliations don’t come in the picture when it comes to sedition and insurrection. We should have been unanimous in praising this move but unfortunately that is not the case
If you take the time to study why and how the Nazis became popular and came into power, you’ll realise why suppression of public sentiment is so dangerous.
Actually, you won't find anything of the kind. Only if you wilfully set out to misinterpret history will you find anything like that.
Hitler came into power because he was allowed to spread his message. Because he was given chance after chance to speak. Because he was given a platform.
the argument you're presenting, at its core, is "if you dont give an evil person a chance to be evil then they wont succeed," which is correct, except how are you to interpret who is evil and who will be successful at being evil? and how do you do that fairly?
it seems to be an impossible problem to solve from my POV and removing comms from various groups willy nilly because we're too scared that humanity is too stupid practice critical thinking and not give in to evil thought is a slippery slope. there has to be other ways?
It looks like you've been using HN primarily for political battle, or at least getting uncomfortably close to it. That's not allowed here—it destroys the curious conversation that this site is supposed to exist for. When accounts cross that line (see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for more explanation), that's when we start banning them, regardless of which politics or ideology they're banning for.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site for its intended purpose—especially now, as seemingly everything descends into the hell realms—we'd be grateful.
This is a bit hilarious because many of the things were seeing today from the left are exactly what the Nazis did. They thought they were correct and morally sound as they burned books and stomped out opposition voices. They turned on a part of the population labeling them as the issue with their country. They banned guns and eventually one thing led to the next.
You need to do a lot more reading on what the Nazis actually did. I'll start you off with a hint, though: No. What "the left" is doing now bears no resemblance to the actions of the Nazi Party.
Silencing a large chunk of the population because they felt they were on the moral high ground is exactly what the Nazis did. I dont need to brush up on that part of history thank you though.
I think when one side, and one side ONLY, sends armed militia with pipe bombs to storm the capitol, then yes, you can associate violence and death much more with one side than the other.
I strongly, strongly disagree. The "free and open internet" is a farce and only existed decades ago because nobody had any idea what they were doing yet.
We cannot allow people easy access to radicalization.
Right, but they just put a huge target on their back for something that was already an issue....being a monopoly/duopoly. Whatever you want to call it nobody can effectively compete in the app store territory.
The latest from Twitter, claiming that by Trump stating he will not attend the Biden inauguration, he is somehow insinuating that Biden is an illegitimate president and encouraging retaliation and therefore cause for a permanent ban is completely contrived to justify them doing what they wanted to do.
This is nothing more than pandering to those about to assume power. As we all know Twitter, Facebook, Google/YouTube have been summoned to the senate many times to testify over privacy and such issues. I am quite sure they are working hard to ensure the future administration is a bit more lenient.
We should be more worried over the thousands of other vocal conservatives and constitutionalists who have been deleted in the past 48 hours. This is silencing freedom of political choice.
EDIT: Downvotes shows that cancel culture is alive and well.
Not really, you can still choose to have whatever views, you can walk into the town square and shout your views, you can pass out flyers, you can do a lot. You can still vote for whom you want, without telling everyone, you can run for office, you can start a petition, etc.
The newspaper was never forced to print whether was sent in. A book publisher never had to publish a book they didn't want to, and a social media site isn't required to host your content. They're no political freedom being taken here.
> If they can do this to a sitting President of the US, they can do it to every single one of us.
I've seen this exact statement on various other platforms from conservative commentators. And it's basically horseshit. Now you're concerned? Seriously? Google accounts have been locked out with no recourse for years, apple bans apps left and right and facebook 'moderates' posts based on some interesting thresholds.
I find it disingenuous to suddenly care about this when Trump finally gets kicked off twitter and a horde of extremists are blocked from inciting violence against the government.
You wanted free markets? Here they are. If you have a problem with it, move to a different platform. Build your own platform. Host it yourself. Nobody owes you anything.
And guess what? Because of the republican led FCC, the ISPs can block your extreme right-wing website. Total freedom for the ISP to do whatever the fuck they want.
Parler was created in response to Twitter banning several far right personalities. People are more than capable of overcoming the big tech companies and finding ways to get their message out. Maybe the leader of a nation shouldn’t continually question an election and encourage his supporters to commit insurrection?
The only actual alternative is if people start investing in open cellular platforms.
I fully support the right of companies to sell locked down hardware, we shouldn't be trying to over-regulate here. The right response to this situation is to compete with it using open hardware, which respects its users. It's insane to me that we have all tolerated companies dictating what kind of software we run on the hardware we buy from them.
It's time to fight back. Open Mobile Hardware now!
Sorry man, I got burned when Verizon nuked all the EC25 devices. That's not a gamble I want to take with an $800 phone. I support their mission but without carrier authorization you're one whim away from having an expensive brick in your pocket. It sucks but that's the cell phone market.
Note how purism goes to extreme lengths to dodge the question of "which networks will your phone work on". They have these elaborate frequency tables but never name any networks, then at the bottom the fine print admitting that they have no carrier authorizations.
CloudFlare will be next, and they've already set the precedent that they will cease to serve websites that are "detrimental to society". Followed by Digital Ocean, Amazon, Verizon, Comcast, AT&T.
For those of you who championed XKCD #1357 at every opportunity, congratulations! You've won. For a short time. The consequences of censorship will be dire.
I'm no fan of Sagan, but he was right what he saw here:
> I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; [...]
Wow that Sagan quote is prescient. Where is that from?
And yes it is deeply concerning that an infrastructure service like Cloudflare is becoming increasingly political. This is what happens when companies stop acting neutrally and allow themselves to be influenced by activist employees or outside social/political pressure. The precedent they set will probably extend to all the other infrastructure players.
And this is why it is more crucial now than ever for us to enforce antitrust laws and split up and/or regulate powerful companies. They are acting government agencies simply shielded from the same responsibilities because they are technically private.
This is ridiculous. Who decides what is considered violence and what is not?
I personally feel black lives matter was a terrorist organization, they looted stores, destroyed people livelihood, murdered whites in the streets, and destroyed many cities across america. Yet posts calling for those protests are fully allowed, even encouraged on mainstream platforms like twitter etc. Yet a small group of crazies march on the rich politicians like pelosi profiting off all the dumb people who voted for them, eating 10000$ ice cream and going to hair salons while everyone is locked down and that is called violence!!
Why should apple be the one to decide what is violent and what isn't. This is crazy.
Since Trump announced to create his own social media platform after all the bans, does anyone think he will announce now his own smartphone and mobile OS?
There are already calls in congress for similar measures against OANN, Newsmax and Fox News and also calls for action by lower-level providers such as AWS.
It doesn't take much thought to see the US is going for the next few years.
It’s hilarious to see all these alt right folks clamor about free speech. Always thought they were big defenders of free markets and corporate friendly policy.
Not in my experience, no. I have a training YouTube video in my app and Apple rejected it because YouTube inserted their video recommendations after my training video was done, and one of those recommendations was a disturbing news footage.
You would have to reengineer your system along the lines of IRC where the app is divorced from the content.
Right so, when you open the app, you must choose a server to connect to, for the purposes of app verification, you provide a server with heavy moderation.
I could see apple having issue with providing pre-filled server selection, but if you had to manually enter a domain, I would be interested in how they would move the goal posts to deny an app like that.
Their goal so far has been avoiding casual exposure to anything less than family-friendly. If a user has to go out of their way to procure offensive content it seems Apple is not that concerned - browsers, mail clients, IRC clients, etc is fine.
I think a good example here is Telegram. Telegram did not used to surface NSFW chats on iOS to comply with the App Store. But you could still join the channels manually. However, on a whim Apple decided that wasn't enough and now you cannot access those at all on iOS, you get a message saying it's blocked.
Of course, it wouldn't be able if they were committed to equal treatment, so the counterexample here are the many Reddit apps on iOS. You can join NSFW subreddits and they are allowed so long as they aren't shown by default. The only explanation is here Reddit is used by Apple employees or they know there would be an outcry if the rules were evenly applied.
I heard they are about to get banned from AWS. Rumor is that Amazon has also demanded full moderation. I know they are getting pressure from Amazon employees and AWS customers.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 743 ms ] threadThe answers, respectively, would be: start your own hosting provider, start your own ISP, deploy your own Internet.
Just to be clear: I’ve never used Parler.
We've seen an escalation of this from higher-level platforms (obviously Twitter can ban an account if they desire) to medium-level platforms (I suppose Apple gets to pick what I can do on my own phone even if it feels a bit wrong), but I'm curious if this will also escalate to low-level platforms (will hosting companies, registrars, or even ISPs start taking similar actions on a regular basis?).
At this point it appears to be in a bit of a feedback loop as well, since it's obvious that deplatforming groups will make them feel persecuted and even more upset, which then makes them more likely to be deplatformed by whichever platform they move to next.
Could this escalate even past low-level companies and result in decentralized, uncensorable, and end-to-end encrypted technologies having action taken against them (as more users, including some that are radicalized, seek them out)? I certainly hope not, but I have no faith in our government's various administrations here to begin with, especially given that we are likely only at the beginning of these types of conflicts.
(Obligatory note that I am not defending any given platform, group of people, or anything of that matter, as I find it much more interesting to talk about how systems like this may play out instead)
If these groups want to not be deplatformed every few years, they ought to moderate the content. That seems to be all Apple is asking for here - just moderate out the illegal content and you can come back.
That only seems hard to do for conservative groups - everyone else seems to at least try to moderate, even if they do it unevenly or not quickly enough, they try. These deplatformed companies and actors don't ever seem to even try to moderate.
I don't feel bad for them, personally.
We already have processes in our society to reduce and hopefully eliminate criminal actors.
Americans drop a loser like a brick. Taking Parler off the app stores seriously de-legitimizes their cause and their celebrity. If you read Apple's language [1] its very clear Apple believes Parler is operating in extremely bad faith, that they either lack the ability to moderate or are only doing so as a temporary token gesture. This means Parler's user demographic will become more and more full of fringe radical elements that scare off the silent majority less radical crowd.
[1]: "Your response also references a moderation plan “for the time being,” which does not meet the ongoing requirements in Guideline 1.2 – Safety – User Generated content"
The only way to contain fringe elements is to allow them to identify themselves and be prepared when they demonstrate intent to perform harmful acts (“terrorism”). The polite silent majority will go home, the extremist minority will go to prison if they overstep legal boundaries.
I’m not sold on this action either way, just providing what I believe to be something worth considering.
It seems like people denying a problem exists is creating massive inertia against solutions to even the most apparent and emotionally salient problems (mass shootings, COVID, etc).
It’s hard no to be radicalized when you and millions of other conservatives are being labeled ‘racist’ and ‘fascist’ for no reason other than having different political views.
Are these companies acting preemptively from fear of being later assigned culpability?
The people really deeply devoted to these movements will remain, but many others will just lose interest if it becomes inconvenient.
The constant rejection isolates and estranges the proselytizer from normal society.
Considering that Facebook and Twitter can't effectively moderate their platforms (algorithms don't work well and human moderation is too expensive) I doubt Parler could either, even if they wanted to.
https://www.npr.org/2019/09/27/764879242/nra-was-foreign-ass...
Democrats have called everyone from sitting US presidents to Tulsi Gabbard a "Russian Asset". This is more than likely another false alarm.
What are all these Russian assets meant to be doing anyway? Promoting an excessively calm world peace with strong ties between Russians and Americans? Russia hasn't been a credible threat to the US for 30 years. Nobody is accusing all these assets of actually doing anything. There isn't a path for how Russia is going to take advantage of the US. Anything Russia can do, China can do 3 times over.
The time that they were an appropriate punching bag is long since past.
>There isn't a path for how Russia is going to take advantage of the US
Maybe the plan is to sow discord among NATO allies, cause division among US citizens, make democratic processes such as voting appear unreliable, etc.
And if there are worries about division between US citizens, possibly Amazon, Apple and Google need to be probed for Russian connections. Suppressing the speech of the sitting president is going to be quite divisive and makes the democratic process look extremely unreliable.
There is no reason to be concerned if people have connections to Russia is the point here. The top examples of problems on your mind are kinda trivial compared to what the US does to itself.
What an odd statement.
If that were true, Parler would have no reason to exist. After all, it's raison d'etre is specifically to allow people to get away from the perceived censorship on the major social media platforms.
Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc, etc, all struggle with the issues of content moderation. The perfect example is Facebook pulling down a journalist photo of, if memory serves, a naked girl in a warzone as CP when obviously it was not.
Yup, these systems are imperfect.
But I think it's pretty silly to claim they're completely worthless or ineffective and therefore moderation simply cannot be done, and Parler is therefore off the hook.
Heck, HN has commenting rules/guidelines. Are you suggesting those shouldn't exist and any system to enforce them is pointless?
This is clearly a strawman argument and frankly such an already polarized statement that I'm not sure there's any point replying.
But, I will say this: I'll bet if Parler simply took threats of violence and incitement on their site seriously and agreed to move to proactively remove that kind of content, they wouldn't be in this position.
Unfortunately, their entire pitch as a platform is to not moderate at all. To that end, their CEO has outright stated they will not moderate their site in any way, and as a result there's some truly scary content on that site from individuals who are literally advocating for the murder of those they view as political enemies.
And if not calling for murder and violence is "cultural orthodoxy", well, I guess I'm pretty orthodox and I'd hope you are, too.
As for Parler, their position on moderation always put them in direct violation of the Amazon/Google/Apple ToS for their various services.
The real mystery is why nothing was done to this point.
Such a standard is on it face politically slanted towards banning conservative/right speech more than left speech
So how would you classify these?
Advocating for killing "commie Democrat traitor politicians":
https://www.reddit.com/gallery/kua9fq
Advocating for bombing Amazon:
https://i.imgur.com/WcwH3F1.jpg
Advocating for attacking Apple stores:
https://i.redd.it/8bcbvebwz6a61.png
Oh, and by the way, that first guy (JuarezTX) has many more posts along those lines.
So, thoughts? Is it more "subjective analysis" to consider these posts to be incitement to violence? Should Parler be removing these?
Your first link is 404, so I can not comment on it
The second likely would not rise to the level of a "True Threat"
The third I think likely would / should be bannable as that is close enough for me to consider it a True Threat.
Apple's complaint was the Parler was not aggressive enough in removing posts, not that they were not removing posts at all
Apple, Google, and Amazon all have a very clear political bias in their enforcement of their own rules, I am not sure how this could even be debatable anymore.
I can easily cherry pick comments from Twitter, Facebook, etc that have the same or stronger lang around incitement to violence only towards groups like the Police, or other unpopular groups... This level of aggressive enforcement does not seem to be present if the target of the incitement is unpopular
My purpose wasn't to cherry pick, it was to understand what your line is re free/legal speech.
The fact the second one isn't a direct call to action but just an implication, and therefore you think it's fine, is useful information. It tells me that your bar and mine are definitely not the same.
I'll bet you also don't think Trump encouraged the rioting the other day because he didn't explicitly say "hey everyone, riot now!"
Which is of course what makes Trump so effective. Decades of litigation have taught him the artform if plausible deniability. Never say what you want. Imply it and let folks put two and two together
Of course, in the case if Parler, there's no shortage of folks who lack similar instincts and therefore say the quiet part loud...
> I can easily cherry pick comments from Twitter, Facebook, etc that have the same or stronger lang around incitement to violence
The difference is the CEO of Parler has ruled out moderating that kind of content, including the examples I've cited here, whereas every other site removes it.
So the situation simply isn't comparable.
> This level of aggressive enforcement does not seem to be present if the target of the incitement is unpopular
Okay, so where are your examples? I'd be happy to provide my opinion if you'd like.
I have outlined what my line is, True Threat [1], is a legal standard: "‘True threats’ encompass those statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals. . . . Intimidation in the constitutionally proscribable sense of the word is a type of true threat, where a speaker directs a threat to a person or group of persons with the intent of placing the victim in fear of bodily harm or death.” [1]
>>I'll bet you also don't think Trump encouraged the rioting the other day because he didn't explicitly say "hey everyone, riot now!"
I dont actively follow Trump's (or any other) twitter feed, I largely view Twitter as a cesspool just like I view Parler and all other Social Media including Facebook, Gab, even Reddit at this point. Mostly because each platform ends up becoming an ideological echo chamber for the most extreme views of their founding ideology, for the major platforms that ends up being left authoritarianism, for many of the alt-tech that ends up being right authoritarianism..
Since I am not authoritarian at all, left or right, those platforms hold little interest for me and I generally avoid those places. So I can not speak to all of Trump's tweets, though I do believe the partisan machine has generally applied the least favorable reading of all his public comments over the last several years and often time claim "dog whistles" far too often to the point where my general position is one of "Boy who cried wolf" when I see these types of comments.
My belief in this was reinforced by twitter's very very weak justification for their permaban [2]. The posts they highlighted in their justification were not something I would consider to be bannable speech
>>whereas every other site removes it.
Which I also explained due to Parler's very different position on what constitutes bannable speech, they take the same position that generally favor i.e all Legal Speech should be allowed, if a person could not be arrested and jailed for the speech then it should be permitted.
Now I have a feeling you also want the law to be changed to the point where people can be jailed more aggressively for their speech not simply be banned from a popular website. One of the reasons I generally oppose popular platforms banned unpopular speech is that fact that the law often follows popular opinion, thus it is popular to ban speech today it will not be long before the overton window shifts where maybe we need to water down the protections of legal speech, to the point where we are tossing people in cages for their unpopular speech.
As a individualist, libertarian advocating for Geo-Libertarian public policies my opinions are often viewed as unpopular, it concerns me that we are attempting to create safe spaces and echo chambers online where no dissenting opinions are welcome, and if you say an unpopular thing you are painted as a racist, bigot, sexist or some other immoral designation. For example I have been called a racist simply because I oppose income based taxation.
>>Okay, so where are your examples?
Just go back to the BLM protests/riots there we all kinds of calls for violence that went unchallenged. Then there is antifa, hell for a time there was popular subculture around "Punch a Nazi" and of-course all conservatives were "Nazi's"
[1] https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1025/true-threats
[2] StanislavPetrov ↗ >This is clearly a strawman argument and frankly such an already polarized statement that I'm not sure there's any point replying.
Unfortunately objective reality is extremely polarizing in 2021. Calling for murder and violence is illegal and should be prosecuted under the law.
>The real mystery is why nothing was done to this point.
Its no mystery why monopolistic tech giants have moved in unison to silence and censor anyone who opposes the narrative pushed by the ruling elite. Extremely low-information people take this to mean silencing Trump and his ignorant followers. Informed people understand that voices across the political spectrum, from advocates for Palestinian rights to journalists who push back against war propaganda, have been silenced by tech giants at the behest of powerful interests. Fortunately, low-information people who numerically dominate our society and mindlessly bleat the propaganda they have been programmed with have nothing to fear from the new totalitarianism. Until of course they get branded as a "Nazi" by having the wrong friend or the wrong relative, or being at the wrong place at the wrong time, or being flagged by a nameless, faceless algorithm that has been "flawlessly" programmed to seek out "Nazis" and ensure that they aren't able to participate in society. Of course when you are unpersoned by a tech giant, and your bank account is cancelled, and you are put on a no fly list and you are restricted from participating in society in every other way, you can always contact the powers-that-be and easily get the situation cleared up, just like all the people who are summarily banned from Google or Facebook without an explanation, right?
Apple should have the right to control what they distribute through their app store; this is undeniable in my mind. A reasonable, though not as obviously sound, argument could be made that at some level of scope and scale its alright to sell general purpose hardware limited to one operating system which delegates control over executable code to the manufacturer. I believe its also clear that Apple is far past any values of scope and scale where this is reasonable for them, specifically.
No one in these comments is talking about Google. Same thing happened with Fortnite; the conversation is all about Apple. This is a signal that the issue here really isn't their decision to allow or ban specific apps; its the core platform decision to allow or ban application distribution channels.
That might explain why it looks like all of the comments are about one or the other.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25708142
This has been going on since the App store first launched. I remember speaking up about this years and years ago. There were two sides, and well, we know which side one: people just accepted that Apple gets to dictate what goes on the iPhone.
So at this point, I have no sympathy for anyone who suddenly realizes: "Hey, what are we doing? What are we allowing?"
Every cheered when Apple prevented Flash from running on the device. And then porn apps. And then cheap "flashlight" apps. Or apps that did nothing except cost $1000 for a JPEG of a red gem. Guess what? This is the end result.
So I always look for sincerity when people propose fighting back against this now. Because now that it affects them, they want a change, but do they really want change, or are they just being selfish. And it's always selfish. People are fighting for their piece of the pie.
The "fuck you, got mine" attitude.
> No one in these comments is talking about Google.
Google I can side load apps freely. Others can operate stores and do this. Google does not have this problem.
Think of iOS devices like gaming consoles with a GSM chip and you'll have a better analogy.
You can't install your own software on an Xbox, Playstation or Switch without going through some hoops. Neither can you get any random piece of software in their stores without complying with their rules.
It's the exact same thing with iOS.
Firstly, the iPhone is used predominantly as a general purpose computing device, whereas a console is definitely not.
Secondly, pretty much every console has been locked down, whereas it's very new for a GP computing device to be this locked down.
Like, I understand the argument here, but the scale of people using only an iPhone makes it dangerous to give Apple this much power.
Imagine if MS could do this back in the 90s on Windows, would that have been acceptable?
It was not acceptable and they were forced to display a browser selection pop-up, on a OS that already freely allowed users to install whatever browser they wished.
Contrast this with Apple's iOS, where they somehow get away with not allowing any other browser engine than Safari's Webkit.
In Europe. I once tried to uninstall IE in 2005, and it was a complete comedy of errors that lead to me re-installing Windows.
I do feel they're an interesting analogue; they sell hundreds of millions of units, the scale is there, but why do I, if no one else, hold them to a different standard than phones? At the end of the day, I do hold them to a different standard, even if I don't have a fully logical argument for why.
I'm satisfied enough with three reasons, though none represent a fully logical argument.
First, they have very limited scope. Every game console does one thing: play games. Some game consoles do a second thing: watch movies and tv. There are platform features to support those goals (parties, voice chat, friends, etc), but that's effectively it.
In comparison, phones have undefined potential scope. They're used for everything anyone could need computing for, usually only limited by the screen size, input systems, processing power, and in the iPhone's case, Apple's 2010s attitude about what your phone is for.
Second, that limited scope described above is wholly "non-critical infrastructure". I love gaming; definitely more than most people. I have a Series X and a PS5 sitting next to my TV, while I'm typing this on a PC with a RTX 2070. Gaming can lead to some very powerful, life-changing moments for some people, and its been a godsend during this pandemic for many. But, its still Just Gaming.
I would define both Communication and News, among others, as computing scopes which are critical infrastructure; these are both things people use their phones for, and they're both scopes which Apple has a demonstrated history of assaulting on the iPhone.
Third, there's very little conversation from actual stakeholders concerning game consoles changing. I try to keep apprised with the games industry, and by extension how game developers feel about the major platforms; the discussion about Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo opening their platforms simply isn't happening. While they do have final control over what is allowed to be played on each console, even with the physical disc market, there's very few incidents of them abusing that control to restrict distribution of a game that desired distribution on each console. There certainly are games which haven't even attempted approval and would be shut down (steam has many anime porn games like this), but the problem certainly isn't as severe as on iOS (due to the limited scope, combined with specialized development skillset, combined with individual investment necessary to get a game working on each platform, I imagine).
There's a second argument, the Fortnite one, that secondary marketplaces aren't just necessary for freedom of speech, but also for revenue. All of these companies force games to use their IAP frameworks, which I'm sure takes something around 30%. Its definitely strange to me that Epic railed against Apple for the same policies they accept freely on Xbox, PS4, and Switch, and I have a less cogent explanation for this; either (1) they should be fine paying that tax to gain access to the platform, or (2) they shouldn't be, and thus should take issue with every platform exerting that control. Unfortunately, the reality is probably (3) Sony owns 2% of Epic, Epic cuts special deals with every platform, and those deals have kept them happy for now, despite not applying to the majority of game developers, and Apple is actually in the right on this specific issue in never giving special deals.
Its important to remember that the way Apple and Google treat game developers is, frankly, garbage. That previous statement I made about Apple never giving special deals actually isn't true: Amazon uses their own IAP framework for digital purchases on Kindle and Prime Video. Fortnite is definitely the same scale as these use cases, but they couldn't negotiate a special deal. Google allows applications to use whatever IAP framework they want (IIRC), but not Games; ...
I think what's better for the consumer, and society in general I suppose, is to treat them as general computing devices. Especially as we see them converge with PCs (e.g. tablets with keyboards replacing laptops).
Consider the following: If you had to pick only one, would you replace your PC with a gaming console, or a smartphone? I worry the vast majority of people would choose the smartphone, and as such we would have replaced the open PC culture we have now with a closed, proprietary culture.
Does it though? 21% of voters approved of storming of the Capitol. That's not something that can be cancelled by banning a single app. I can see these bans biting the liberals in the back the next time Republicans take control of the federal government.
https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
If it's difficult to use the thing and the content skews more and more extreme, existing users may continue to get more radicalized, but new users don't offset attrition rates and eventually it dies off.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/09/23/trump-amer...
That also aligns with around 20% of voters supporting Nixon after Watergate. I think we should do our best to make sure that number stays at around 20% and does not grow; for if it does it imperils the whole democratic system of government that we take for granted.
I wholeheartedly agree that authoritarianism is a threat to democracy, though.
Pretending that it's exclusive to the political right is not favorable to democracy.
The aim isn’t to remove the sites entirely, but to make it difficult enough to find that people won’t just stumble across them or seamlessly follow a link to them.
Last I heard Stormfront still exists on Tor and presumably still serves a dedicated audience. But I imagine it has a considerably larger problem attracting new readers than it used to.
Even though you're filtering out the less-radical and committed members of a population, you're also priming everyone left behind to be more sympathetic to the excesses of the people who stuck around.
These were tolerable outcomes for already fringe communities.
But as the technique is scaled up to impact increasingly broad segments of the population, I believe it creates something increasingly large, and increasingly dangerous dangerous.
That's not a problem, unless you feel society ought to "save" everyone from themselves (as opposed to protecting society at large from bad actors).
I share your sentiments, but the current US prison system tends towards isolating bad actors: no real effort is expended to reduce recedevism, with the goal being punishment rather than rehabilitation.
Drug offenders are more likely to become low-level criminals, check out of society, unemployed, or impoverished. They may also be more likely to latch onto fringe groups that offer them an identity or sense of empowerment, but that latching isn't deterministically going towards any particular group.
They're imprisoned for a crime that they likely know is bullshit, but the thing they're imprisoned for is amoral to them, and a personal matter. Smoking weed or doing opiates is not a coherent commentary on the social order. Becoming a drug user is a matter of weighing the risks vs the rewards that come with it in the moment you choose to start. They likely just want to live their lives.
When they are caught and punished, they are locked up, and afforded no freedom of movement whatsoever.
Their punisher is the government, a massive byzantine machine with power which society has collective assumed to be legitimate (anarchists excluded). The enforcers of those laws may be dicks, but they are as much an extension of that somewhat legitimate power as the sympathetic public defender you may be about to receive.
Systematically and repeatedly cutting the communications ties of a massive political block for the behavior of their worst actors has a very different effect.
The locus of their concerns is by its very nature external, they already have a collective conception of who their opposition is, and the people repeatedly cutting them from their social circles are not only unelected, but entirely lacking in political legitimacy despite their massive power. They perceive that what they do is much less an indicator of whether they'll be affected than who they might possibly be with.
I believe that this creates an ample breeding grounds for the next generation of domestic terrorists in a manner that gives them concrete grounds for their sense of isolation, while simultaneously creating an ambient corps of collaborators and sympathetic allies in society at an unprecedented scale.
Parler is by no means a niche application. One of my bosses, a milquetoast Republican who was entirely contemptuous of the Capitol incident, and was talking about regretting his vote for Trump afterwards has it on his phone, because he fancied a Twitter alternative for conservative ideas. He has no conception that he might be a potential domestic terrorist. All he'll perceive is that 'Democrats' in 'big tech' are trying to ban the opposition party now that they've secured all three branches of the government.
To him, violent extremists will increasingly look like freedom fighters, and a mild sense of annoyance at 'progressive tech' will increasingly become an awareness of a perceived institutional threat to his way of life.
I think that need to communicate without external interference is at least as strong in people as the need to light up a joint. Even in China, where controls on communication are very strong, people manage to find a way to circumvent the limits. Much more so in other autocratic regimes, such as Iran.
The key distinction is between people who seek out certain content and people who stumble across it passively (in a morning car commute, say). The latter can actually be de-radicalized and de-programmed much more easily, and it's a worthwhile task to do so. Trumpism is a cult, and so the deprogramming methods have to be similar to recovery from a cult (and not the typical arguments that we see on facebook and such which are completely useless & worse)
That's the reason for why it was removed, not simply because Apple doesn't like conservatives as they will claim.
You're already seeing it with tweets like this from within the community: https://twitter.com/default_friend/status/134769644628863386...
They know exactly what kind of crowd free speech first platforms draws. And it most definitely isn't someone discussing the Q3 results of their art gallery or the merits of Hoffmann's art style.
Regardless, as of recently they are making everything a one-click process: https://tlon.io
Hosting companies? ISPs? Book publishers? Not so much, although things aren't moving in the right direction on those fronts. Cloud platforms come to mind.
People repeat this a lot which is ironic because they’re doing it on HN. Or Reddit. Or Disqus. Or innumerable other special interest forums.
I don’t even have an FB/Twitter account but spend plenty of time interacting online.
That to me clearly says that FB doesn’t have a monopoly unless you define the market to be so tightly focused on what they control it becomes tautological
Seems pretty reasonable in light of what we've witness Wednesday Jan 6th at the Capitol.
Why would we want to interpret this reaction as being an escalation or an all-out assault on the 1st Amendment?
It’s quite scary how they see the world through such a lens. I feel Apple and Google performed the lesser of two evils here. Only time will tell though.
No one can deplatform me. I use Gab on iOS from my phone and pad and Apple can kiss my ass. I don't even have to use iOS either. In fact the next phone isn't going to be iOS, just to make sure their get the message.
I had skipped Parler and their app just to make sure I don't have to deal with the censoring idiots from Apple again - that decision has already paid back.
Millions have moved to Gab whose service runs on Gab-owned physical servers. Gab doesn't depend on Silicon Valley Deep State Democrats, and their app is OSS (although you don't need the app, you can use Gab from the browser), thank you very much!
It will feel exhilarating. It will enhance their victimhood, increase emotional attachment to their cause and serves to prove, to them, that "the man" is trying to unjustly suppress them and that they must group together, somehow, and rise up.
And will make them, even more, vulnerable to manipulation by those who want a mob. And there are many.
I support the suspension, since it incites violence. And I'm worried where society now heads.
When a large number convince themselves they are unjustly oppressed they will justify all kinds of horrors in the name of defence from the whatever bete noire is chosen for them.
Let's not pretend that this content is hard to find. It's not.
The content that is constantly forced to move is dialogue, and ideological exchange. The useful stuff. If you want to follow those discussions, you have to pay constant attention, and be prepared to run through social media accounts and platforms like tissue platform, or socially engineer yourself into multiple encrypted chats.
But optimistically, 80% of Republicans surveyed said they opposed the break in (88% overall). If promoters of hate have to go underground, fewer people will follow them. Not only because of the hurdles to get there and broadcast their message, but the hate will be more concentrated and vile.
I'm not the only one who now has the urge to participate in society as little as possible.
If Let's Encrypt bans a site, for example, as well as the other CAs, it is effectively dead.
But there are hundreds of CAs...
Of course, if Google says that of your CA accepts a particular site they will remove you from Chrome...
So this come back to overly centralized systems
To me it seems obvious the feedback works in the opposite direction. Deplatforming disrupts the feedback bubbles that radicalize these people.
I personally think they should be allowed to have their space anyway, if they can refrain from inciting violence.
But I would certainly absolutely refuse to do business with them, and have no problem with others making the same decision. People have the right to their repugnant ideas. They don’t have the right to force others to help promote them.
I'm not too sure about that. For people who are already radicalized and believe that there's a conspiracy of some kind working against them, wouldn't that just "prove" that there is such a conspiracy?
I agree that deplatforming will prevent future people from being radicalized, but what about the people who already are? The whole pizzagate incident shows that there are definitely people who believe all kinds of conspiracy theories, and are convinced enough to act on them.
I wonder what the solution for that is, though.
Ironically, maybe Trump showed us the right solution with his tirade against section 230. i.e. the end of the social media platforms.
Free speech apparently is only free if it agrees with the ‘party line’ these days.
What option do I have then — go to the town square and voice my views? Even going to the town square is illegal in some cases these days, what with COVID restrictions.
I think this is an incredibly dangerous slippery slope, especially given how much our devices act as our "second brains" already.
Is it problematic that people take social rejection as a reason to further radicalize? Sure - but such is human existence - and where is their personal responsibility to observe their social environment and alter their behaviors/beliefs if they are unhappy with the results they are receiving?
But from a policy perspective on the ground, I think the ideal of freedom of speech should eclipse the concerns of private platforms wherever possible. But this is not to say we should not police the boundaries of free speech. In fact, if we had a more strict enforcement policy about unprotected speech like direct threats (such as L. Lin Wood's declaration that people should execute Mike Pence by firing squad [0]), we might not need these platform interventions at all.
[0]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/secret-service-says-...
Maybe we need a "C-SPAN/NPR of social media".
First, election cycle is over; second, they are not banning one political party.
Let's say if these companies are monopolies. Should they still hold the same power?
The main exception is utilities which generally operate as natural monopolies. They should be (and generally are — this is isn’t a new idea) regulated to only be allowed to deny service for limited, specific reasons. There’s room for improvement here. ISPs are relatively new to being treated as utilities and many ordinary regulations that should be in-place are missing.
You don't need it because if you don't do anything wrong you don't really need it.
Your right to free speech does not oblige private corporations to provide you a platform to speak it.
A corporation refusing to repeat your words does not deprive you of the ability to speak freely.
So go shout your message in Town Square?
All the precedents here are well established.
Explicit, credible calls for violence have never been protected speech. Parler’s own TOS forbid it. No moderation effort can be perfect, but we don’t need to argue in this case whether their moderation is sufficient. A violent insurrection was openly discussed and organized by thousands on Parler and then they went and did it. Lin wood called for the execution of the Vice President and many of his followers attempted to do just that.
In terms of the limits on a person or business to control with whom they will do business, utilities — ISPs in this case — should be regulated so they can only deny service for specific, limited reasons. They generally are, though I know this needs improvement.
Beyond that, businesses and individuals should have wide latitude to decide who to do business with.
What concerns me is the strange inversion freedom of speech has undergone in the Trump era. Instead of protecting the people from the government, it’s now invoked to protect the government — and supporters of the current administration — from the people. Now it means suppressing ordinary liberties like the right to not support people, content or speech you don’t want to.
I am in Europe so have not been paying too much attention. Your quote sound like hyperbole, can you show me some evidence that people actually tried to execute the vice president.
I think it will push them off to even more obscure platforms, and the ones that do make it there will be much more extreme and dangerous. They'll be harder to monitor as well.
At some point, a show of force might be necessary.
Now it's basically dead. Was it the deplatforming? Did the world just move on? Nobody knows.
I find it very hard to believe that people get the impression that Trump was the fascist when you are over here advocating for a fascist method of silencing opposition groups.
Violence and persecution is never the answer.
Today they appear to be a bunch of navy seal white power dudes with guns. Scary. That culture kept growing outside of the spotlight in a creepy dark corner.
There's an adage that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that's obviously been missing in the long winter of the past few years.
Apocryphal means that the origin of the story is doubtful.
I think you might mean "the adage is incorrect" here.
I don't think these two concepts are in opposition. Of course, exposure to a toxic ideological viewpoint is poisonous for the recipient, and may in fact entice them to become more toxic themselves (if they are swayed by said reasoning). But a crucial part of the societal contract is to tolerate such toxic viewpoints so as to have the opportunity to redeem those who hold them. In other words, by eating a little bit of the poison ourselves, we are granted the opportunity to save that person from their own poison, by showing compassion and empathy towards them.
People who have hate in their hearts are not entirely bad people. Everyone was once a child, everyone has experienced the mystery of simply existing, almost everyone has experienced love (whether from their parents or someone else), most people enjoy art and music. Evoking our shared humanity and showing compassion for others allows us to break down their toxic ideologies and even reform them to be beacons of compassion themselves.
Perhaps the best and most compelling anecdote to promulgate this way of thinking is Daryl Davis, who, through his talents and love of music, has reformed many of the most hateful people in our country — members of the KKK. I would recommend this TED talk by him, titled "Why I, as a black man, attend KKK rallies": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORp3q1Oaezw. It really encapsulates the power of this viewpoint.
The crucial element here is ensuring that we have channels of communication that allow for this sort of compassionate understanding... I fear that the compression of thought foisted upon us by social media platforms and online communication tools obscures the basic reality of our shared suffering, joy, intrigue, and humanity. These important facets of communication can be lost to the aether of technology, and our true intentions are thereby belied by the incorrigibly weak substrate of written language.
As a note, I think we have discussed the topic of free speech in another thread before. It's good to "see" you again :)
On the other hand, similarly, an extremist exposed to non-extremists' propaganda potentially may be affected by it as well, decreasing the amount of overall extremism.
Or perhaps the total amount of extremism stays the same and instead it is spread out over large number of people, removing "spikes".
I do not know if it is true. But just an idea to consider - the discussed process of de-platforming removes _two-way_ communication method.
Most people seem to be taking this like kids complaining to mommy that their sibling did the mean thing first. That will get nowhere.
The only path forward for the right is to accept that the tables are tilted and learn to operate in that context. It's not "fair", but it's also not game over.
The trouble with morality is that if you ask someone if what they are doing is morally justified, they will pretty much always say yes.
It very quickly devolves into might makes right, which is more or less where we're headed.
You seem to believe in upholding right to free speech, which, surely is crucial to the country. However, this other group you speak of is protesting their rights to life and liberty, which they are being actively deprived of by an oppressive regime. Isn’t it slightly unfair? What rights is the right being deprived of? Entitlement to a certain election result or a certain office? That opposes the very definition of this democracy. They have means for their voices to be heard and their issues to be heard, still, by the right’s representatives in Congress. Black people didn’t/don’t because law enforcement was/is being racist and oppressive in unfairly killing them.
The issue people had with the protests this summer wasn't that they were out protesting. It was the fact that literally everything else about daily life had been upended and we were all supposed to be locked down away from friends and family, unless of course you wanted to go protest, in which case you had full government, medical, and corporate blessing to go do whatever you wanted. Then when you were at the protest, you could burn down buildings and cause untold damage to property and the media would look straight-faced into the camera and call it "mostly peaceful".
Great. To that same standard the protests last week were "mostly peaceful". Hardly any of the people who actually showed up in DC were part of the storming of the capital.
My point about morality is that it is a poor justification for why an action is justified in one case and not in another. It basically ends up with "it's right when I do it, and wrong when you do it."
I don't necessarily agree with the conclusions the protesters this summer came to, but I can follow their line of reasoning and see why it is something they felt strongly about. In the same manner, you might not agree that there is a evidence that vote counts were manipulated in the November election, but if you start from that assumption, I think you would agree that someone might want to protest that.
I've heard it phrased that the social contract is basically, "Your rights are my responsibility." I think that's something worth striving for no matter your political position. I hope we can find the will to de-escalate things on both sides to the point that we can actually work towards that goal.
My rights end where others rights starts or something to that effect.
The policeman in the car had a human right not to be executed.
People have a right not to get their homes burned to the ground.
etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You know, dang, I am an old man. Born in Soviet Union, seen the scars of that brutal regime. Came here without English and money. Went to work. Went to college, then medical school in Chicago, residency in Harvard, and fellowship in NY. Started one of the first medical blogs, in 2004, that still going on. Lots of work in the hospital, big cases.
I would consider my bio full of intellectual pursuits.
Sometimes we make mistakes. Sometimes you make mistakes. Sometimes society makes mistakes, and these mistakes can live for hundreds of years...
Maybe I made a mistake. But maybe what you consider a failure of intellectual pursuit, is your own biases.
But point taken. I’ll limit comments.
PS Here’s an interesting idea for you (and that’s not to offend you, really): try to find and ban someone on a comment that lacks intellectual curiosity and scores political points, and has many upvotes. Surely there’s a comment like that today, somewhere?
And just because something is well received doesn't mean that it is right, or moral, or anything, really. Countless speeches were well received before some of the most atrocious events in human history.
I didn't mean to imply that you were lacking in intellectual pursuits or depth or anything like that, and I'm sorry if it came across that way. It's just stock moderation language. All I have to go on are the things an account has posted, especially the recent things an account has posted.
Usually, when people are battling their political or ideological enemies in internet comments, they leave out all of the background and motivations and experiences that have led them to feel the way that they do. That's a shame, because if we included such things it would make it easier for us to relate to each other. It also means that our comments—especially flamewar comments—create a one-dimensional picture of us in the reader's mind. That of course is not an accurate picture of at all, but there's very little information transfer going on in these arguments.
I'm not sure I understood your last suggestion there but we don't consider upvotes when banning accounts. We also don't ban established accounts for just one thing they posted—we'd warn them instead. Bans are for when an account has built up a pattern of breaking the site guidelines. There are some exceptions to that, but they're probably not relevant here.
Thanks for writing such a humane response. I appreciate it.
Apparently their current leader is of Cuban descent as was most of the people in the segment. Out of the eight members in the video, six of them previously voted for Obama.
I don't know too much about them except from what I saw on Vice. Is it really a group of white supremacists?
edit: Reference: The Right-Wing Latinos of Miami: Proud Boys and Refugees https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Qa1f29diE
Sounds like a gay nightclub.
However, I think deplatforming them has made them more radical. I think that we are going to see this more and more, by isolating people and forcing them to go into places where there are no public postings, nobody is going to see how radical they get. You are going to lose some people but the really dangerous people will wind up reinforced in their belief that they are being persecuted, and if they think they have nowhere to go and nothing to hope for, I think we are going to start seeing some real ugly violence.
If.
The whole reason why they got banned in the first place was because of the incitement.
There have been all sorts of crazy things said since the US election (and before), and there weren't any bans, just "possible misleading statement" tags.
BLM’s mission is to strengthen democracy and justice with the unfortunate side effect of the fringe propagating violence. The core and leadership would rather the violence and property damage wasn’t taking place.
Trump is an authoritarian who is trying to subvert democracy, and his supporters consider violence to not only be acceptable but to be a necessary virtue.
If it were possible to remove disinformation, violence, and property destruction from each movement, BLM would still have an important message, while on the MAGA side I’m not sure what values would remain. What’s the coherent message beyond spite toward the left?
I agree and like Black Lives Matter because they have a valid point to make, and while it's unfortunate that there are fringe elements causing property damage and there have been instances of violence, that's not central to their mission and most people I know who support Black Lives Matter are against violence and property damage.
I dislike Trump because he's corrupt, incompetent, racist, sexist, a sociopath, and an authoritarian. I feel like it's a valid position to be against those things. However, any politician on any end of the political spectrum can be all those things, so setting those aside, let's look at his actual policies: the only one I can think of is isolationism.
I mean I'm mostly just repeating myself. Feel free to make a counterargument.
I take it "punch a Nazi" wasn't popular in your circle then?
Btw: I think Trump is an incomptent, a populist and a con man. But he's no more racist and sexist than the average american.
Jeez, I hope that's not true.
The protestors mission was to prevent the subversion of democracy.
I don't think using one side being mistaken about whether their actions help with their mission as a justification for surpression is fair.
As for the general MAGA message? I'm not red tribe and have no friends who are so take what I say with a grain of salt:
* The USA has gotten worse.
* Immigration is bad and one of the reasons for the USA decline.
* Our (Red tribe) economic interests are not being defended or advanced.
* Red tribe social norms and interests are not being advanced or defended by the centres of power. E.g. values related to family.
* Acceptance and promotion of alternative sexual expressions is bad for the world.
* Globalism is bad.
The BLM leaders were saying "we are marching/gathering to protest police brutality". However things got out of hand. Violence was not their intent. See also the false flag operations against BLM:
* https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-fake-antifa-acount-whit...
The folks on Parler are saying "we need to hang the traitor Pence". And this has been going on for months:
> “Will you and several hundred more go with me to DC and fight our way into the Congress and arrest every Democrat who has participated in the coup?” Holland posted on Friday. “We may have to shoot and kill many of the Communist BLM and ANTIFA Democrat foot soldiers to accomplish this!!!”
* https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/11/cops-n11.html
> One of Lang Holland’s posts reflected Donald Trump’s baseless allegations that the presidential election he lost to Joe Biden was stolen, and said: “Death to all Marxist Democrats.”
> Holland, who led the police department in Marshall, Arkansas, also wrote “take no prisoners” and “leave no survivors”.
* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/09/local-arkans...
> In a popular thread referencing a Trump tweet promoting the debunked conspiracy theory of election fraud, one user asked, "what if Congress ignores the evidence?"
> "Storm the Capitol," was a popular reply.
> Five days later, on January 6, as pro-Trump militia proceeded to do exactly that, the mood on thedonald.win switched to jubilation and outright defiance of police, with thousands joining "watching party" message threads.
> "This is what Trump told us to do!" a top post in one of these threads read.
* https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-01-08/us-capitol-st...
Do you see the difference?
If I could be satisfied that he was the leader then I can acknowledge that as an important difference.
That does not seem obvious to me AT ALL. Most radical movements in history had no access to the Internet and relied on personal contact to radicalize, e.g. preachers in mosques. This also creates deeper bonds among the members.
If the result of deplatforming from Twitter is that the organization shifts to "meat world", you probably have a more dangerous opponent on your hands.
Edit: Signal is now #1 on the app store. Speech that was removed will obviously just migrate and be encrypted. Though not as public, the actual speech is still going to be communicated between people and groups. So why wouldn't Signal be next?
A good argument could be made we don't need end to end encryption without a back door. And in this environment, there may be little political opposition.
Were those insurgents domestic terrorists?
What if it is to be found that they primarily used Signal for example to communicate their plans with each other?
No, but don’t think it can. But you can try.
Seems like it wouldn't bet too hard for it to become a social network.
And I frankly don't care much for your example. My grandfather was a Pole who had to fight Nazi invaders, and I have no reservations about him having to put a few bullets over them.
Nazis and fascists do not want a free and fair society. They delight in the violence of it and have no interest in a marketplace of ideas.
The same can be said for the radical left.
I doubt it, and unless you can provide footage from the Associated Press or Agence France-Presse I don't think there's any evidence you could provide that might convince me otherwise.
Enjoy the photos. Took all of one google search.
https://www.tampabay.com/news/nation-world/2020/07/25/breonn...
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/09/us/dallas-police-shooting...
That's not how this works. If you want to persuade me, it's up to you to provide evidence. Telling me to google something doesn't count.
Now, fuck off back to 4chan. You haven't engaged with anybody but me since you created your account, and I don't find your singular focus especially flattering.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
So then you agree that the Republican insurrectionists invading and looting the nations capitol this week were bad?
Fuelling hellflames is against the site guidelines, which ask you to flag egregious rather than replying to them (a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls).
We're trying for something else here than internet default and need users to know the intended purpose and stick to it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Having spent a few years on the Fediverse, I've found that "the left" in the US consists mainly of book clubs and struggle sessions.
The book clubs just read and debate theory ad nauseum. They're a joke, and if you gave most of them an AR-15 they'd shoot themselves in the foot.
The struggle sessions look for people slightly less poorly off than themselves to bully. If they can't find a right-winger, they'll happily go after somebody who's only 99.999% on board with their program. Failing that, they'll pick one of their own at random, accuse them of insufficient ideological purity, and bully them. They're a joke, too, only not quite as funny as the book clubbers.
Don't take my word for it. Listen to community activist Victoria Beach explain how she is upset for them terrorizing the area and hijacking the Black Lives Matter movement.
https://twitter.com/choeshow/status/1345184414016278528
https://twitter.com/choeshow/status/1345192831602679809
So why are they all given a pass? It's because these tech companies are comprised mostly of left-leaning staff and are willing to now exercise their power against everyone else. Until Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon deplatform every single person and group involved in the hundreds of events in 2020 that involved criminal acts, these new acts of censorship will remain discriminatory and unacceptable.
Parler spends most of its moderation effort removing accounts of leftists who argue or make fun of right-wingers on that site. Someone who never even posted anything got their account banned over a screenshot. Yet they refuse to remove calls of violence against elected officials?
I don't even like Mike Pence. But I don't think he should die! He should just retire!
How can they face jail, if they are FBI operatives, acting on direct orders?
I means, are we supposed to believe, that FBI — the same FBI that surveils entirety of Internet and have backdoors in FAANG — fails to catch a whiff of ongoing revolts?! And police just yields Capitol to bunch of protesters?!? And they say, that Russian FSB is heavy on theatrics...
I would say Amazon removing Parler due to a TOS violation is preferable to locking up thousands of people in federal prison.
The very idea of "virtue signaling" is delusional. There is no practical difference between twitter's intent and their action here.
I think what will be interesting to watch is how the government responds with legislation/mandates.
Will the government require they can ask for people be removed as customers from certain companies? Or require companies share data about customers with the government? Or give the government a backdoor API?
In the name of using it for good, in some ways it makes sense. Then, how does one trust the government to only use the tools for good - and who judges what "good" is?
If a 17 year old gets the keys to a Ferrari to only drive to school at 35mph, can they be trusted with that responsibility?
For me, it's time to unsubscribe. It's not like they have brought me great benefit anyways, if anything the opposite. I wonder if any others will come to the same conclusion.
In theory, Apple + Google + Microsoft can ban the website at the OS level, so nobody can really access those messages. Technically, they can do this to Parler now.
You can build your own website, but you can't build your own internet. You can't build your own banking system.
It's more about the web than the internet really. The web can be unfree quite easily. Unless we go full China and implement a Great Firewall other protocols can always exist on the net.
https://bisq.network/
Suppored payment methods:
And no, I don't think they asked permission.It's so funny. Whenever people say you can't do X with crypto, there is always something they don't know about that proves them wrong.
I'm trying not to fall into a "Survivorship bias" here but I made 10s if not 100s of trades on LocalBitcoin years ago without issue. I wasn't meeting at people's houses or in some dark alley, I was in the Kroger (grocery store) parking lot or even inside Kroger or the Mall. I don't disagree with your point that fiat->crypto is not as easy as some people pretend it is but I just wanted to push back a little bit on the second part of your statement.
You say you fear they’ll do so, but if they’re being forced out of society — what choice do they have but to build their own?
They're currently advocating for a revolution (civil war really). And if you're like: but were they really? Look at content on Parler, the answer is yes they were.
You can't expect any sort of appeasement when you're calling for violence.
Has that strategy ever worked, in history?
Calling it an “insurrection” that a single demonstration at the capitol happened after six months of weekly to daily gang activity from far left militias promoted by politicians is just gaslighting.
The pearl clutching about “appeasement” when Kamala Harris advocated for rioting and multiple prominent Democrats created bail funds supporting far left violence is laughable.
The reason the DC event happened was because you already tried a media blackout of their concerns and telling them to shut up. They forcibly told you “no”.
Now what?
They've been creating smaller more exclusive communities for years. They have their own youtube news and fan/media channels, they have their own internet personalities and figureheads even among the mainstream (like dr disrespect, who seemed to be popular with right-leaning gamers I know), they tend to congregate in various indie games (especially war and FPS games), they have their own forums and online spaces (e.g. private discords; thedonald reddit clone, alternate subreddits; parler; 4chan, which is older than any of this but decidedly more right wing nowadays than I remember 10 years ago), and so forth. The problem is that they feel these spaces and communities are under attack. Parler, while I don't disagree with the right of FAANG companies to decouple from parler, is just the latest space that's "under attack".
This isn't unique to Parler, I've seen the right complain about this in gaming, movies and comics (like Star Wars), tabletop games, etc. for years and I know people who were otherwise apolitical but shifted to the right because they felt their hobbies and fanbases were being (unfairly) criticized and changed by outsiders specifically from the left-wing who don't appreciate the original characteristics. And I even agree to some degree that it's hard to have your own space without being attacked. For example, recently I am somewhat aware that Hololive idols, basically asian/japanese game and lifestyle streamers using 3D avatars, have been under (what I think is) undue scrutiny from some feminists for being sexist, pandering to pedophiles, and fueling misogyny. I've seen similar attacks on anime and on some games. Personally I think there's more of a racial element, given western phobia towards asians, in a lot of these attacks and criticisms because extra criticism seem to be targeted at japanese or asian media, but in any case, people on the right think it's mostly political and the political divide has not only worsened it's caused people to take sides and move from a localized feuds (fighting over media like anime and Star Wars) to a broader battle (politics, values, belief systems). And as far as I've observed, this tracks with their attempts and successes at creating increasingly broader alternative platforms. From having their own spaces within larger communities to creating alternative platforms, like parler, or hijacking sites like 4chan, and actually making them viable, unlike earlier attempts (like voat). As of January 6 I think we've come to the point where enough people have aligned politically on the right that they're going to want their own real world society, and not just an online one. Shutting down parler is just going to accelerate the sentiment imo, because as far as I've seen people kind of quantize their world views when (they believe) they're under attack, and group up. They don't become more understanding and broader minded, they become more tribal.
So if the right wants their own society just let them have it before internet fights become real ones. Personally I think it's still a small amount of people, my experiences are just anecdotal based on what I've seen in communities I was part of and people I know, but I think the sentiment is growing rapidly and trying to shut things down isn't working, at best it's a roadblock that pushes problems down the road, at worst it makes people g...
I would say that Q Shaman photo-op is the right wing response to far left protests staging dramatic photos with the police all summer.
My summary:
Left: “Look, we can bully the police and people will cheer!”
Right: “We can touch you anytime, anywhere.”
Left: “Shut the FUCK UP!”
My fear is it’s not going to stop.
Star Wars, something so universal I saw xwing graffiti in Cancun, MX has been purposefully debased by people like Kathleen Kennedy — to astroturfed praise from corporate media. Their sales tell the true story. That Disney+ crashed when Luke Skywalker appeared tells the true story.
My fear is what we see at Harvard and Yale, where Asian applicants are discriminated against to “balance races” or whatever the racist euphemism of the day is just won’t stop. We’ll see a reconstruction of institutionalized racism.
I think you’re right that the criticism of Asian media has a racial element — but it’s also about control. As the far left burned down US institutions (eg, Disney and WM), many Americans adopted Japanese and Chinese media as surrogates. (Eg, I watch more anime than Hollywood content.) Understandably, Japan and China told left wing groups where to put their opinions on how they run their own culture. That turned into a full on power struggle. It’s very neo-colonial.
I think either we stand up to the racism and gaslighting now — or the censorship is here to stay.
I would personally hold the Asian community up as one that has integrated meaningfully into America at large, while not abandoning their own identity. Teriyaki, sushi, and American Chinese food are everywhere; anime and HK martial arts flicks are semi-popular; most Americans can name a few major events in Asia; etc. Personally, I consider “rooftop Koreans” to be an American archetype.
Is it so wrong I, as a Polish Jew, want to do the same? ...to celebrate my heritage and discuss the problems I face honestly?
Social media platforms already long ago decided not to allow groups such as ISIS to propagandize and organize online. Why would they allow any other terrorist groups? Those calling for the usurpation of democracy through insurrection and violence are equivalent.
>So if the right wants their own society just let them have it before internet fights become real ones.
We've already seen many instances of right-wing terroristic violence in the form of bombings (attempted and successful), mass shootings, etc.; many of these have been organized online in extreme right-wing spaces. It's an easy case to be made that allowing such spaces to proliferate will lead to more violence.
But to equate all right-wing speech with terrorism seems to be succumbing to a self-fulfilling prophecy while at the same time justifying the very actions you're opposing.
If we truly want inclusive political discourse, we need to acknowledge the validity of traditional conservative viewpoints while drawing a clear distinction between those viewpoints and reactionary terroristic violence. With this understanding in mind, newspapers such as the NYTimes have long featured conservative columnists with critical viewpoints. Perhaps such mainstream publications should try harder to do this.
There is plenty of room for intelligent discourse, but hateful attacks (verbal and otherwise), simply have no place in a healthy society.
But to equate all right-wing speech with terrorism seems to be succumbing to a self-fulfilling prophecy while at the same time justifying the very actions you're opposing.
I'm not equating it to terrorism, I'm saying that they have indicated they want separate systems and, really, a separate society. If you take right-wing talking points at face value, what we have now is a shaky middle ground, a society wherein the powers that be both reject them and also employ regulations that make it difficult for newcomers to make their own banks, lay internet cables, etc. which is why you see right wing memes about "make your own google, make your own banks, etc". And these aren't new talking points, one of Trump's promises going into his presidency was to get rid of as many regulations as he could in general: financial and economic, environmental, governance, etc. and democrats/the left are usually blamed for loving regulations. So if that's the case, split the country and let them do what they want with their government, from scratch. It's not like I'm saying we should go around and take all their belongings and march them down to Florida or something and leave them like cavemen. I make it sound trivial because I'm not an expert or anything, but for the purposes of this discussion I think it's a better alternative to civil conflict and I don't see how we're going to fix the divide.
If we truly want inclusive political discourse, we need to acknowledge the validity of traditional conservative viewpoints while drawing a clear distinction between those viewpoints and reactionary terroristic violence. With this understanding in mind, newspapers such as the NYTimes have long featured conservative columnists with critical viewpoints. Perhaps such mainstream publications should try harder to do this.
I'm not really disagreeing but I think we're past the point where publications matter. Social media has created this new world where you're able to discover people you didn't even know existed. In the past you might know your neighbors and accordingly, you'd move to a neighborhood that suited your tastes. For example, that's basically what white flight was (I'm trying to be brief, not insensitive), it's real, that's how people act. And they'd remain in their local bubble and only have a vague idea of the rest of the world, neatly summarized by the news. People would get mad at ideas and vague demographics, and occasionally figureheads like politicians and public businessmen.
Now, on "public" social media like twitter, you can find virtually anyone who has a certain belief or is a certain way and just yell at them for existing or thinking a certain way. You and your friends can pick them out for doing something and mob them on social media, dox them and get them fired, and attack every social aspect of their life. This isn't even unique to politics per se, this happened to a woman who made a terrible joke about AIDS and Africa, among many other people for non-political reasons like being accused of crimes or plagiarizing art. And this is in ADDITION to getting mad at ideas and demographics and figureheads. So the divide that used to be vague has been refined to an individual level, and to make things worse people categorize each other and place them into enemy tribes based on beliefs and people they follow on social media. You follow Biden on twitter? You're a "demoncrat" and you're the enemy. If you follow Trump you're a "nazi" and you're the enemy. You liked some youtuber personality that's this way or another and you're automatically a SJW or a white supremacist, etc. It's borderline impossible to escape and you don't even have to be a part of social media anymore, it's become somewhat normalized to pick individuals out for their wrong doi...
A major issue seems to be literal lies and disinformation spreading over social media which makes that divide appear to be much greater than it actually is. If these blatant lies can be prevented then the left and right will have a much easier time coming to political compromises when running the country. Having shared primary ballots would also help a lot to prevent the most radical wings of each party from dominating, because then each party’s candidate would have to appeal to all voters rather than their own.
Shared primary ballots is a good start, but it seems like the most meaningful change to our political system would be implementing a system of ranked voting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting). Among other things, that would help break the two-party nightmare cased by first-past-the-post voting.
http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/elections/approval_voting_lwv...
St. Louis in November passed approval voting. ( https://electionscience.org/press-releases/diverse-coalition... )
I think the lies and conspiracies are just a manifestation or side effect of the social and political divide. Its like imagining someone you already hate. "They're plotting against me", "they're going to get me", "they probably spilled that milk on purpose to piss me off", etc. And I think there is some substance to the hate, not to the conspiracy, but I see that our society has gotten to this point for real reasons and disagreements that can't be compromised on
edit: typos
Does anyone actually trust big tech at this stage? I thought it was just a case of how much you distrust them.
It’s important to look at the context around those bans.
The most recent ban from the companies you’ve listed was Visa banning PornHub. They did so because of the amount of underage and non-consentual content on the website.
Yes, companies can ban you in theory, but everything indicates that they do so only in extreme circumstances, like hosting child porn or terrorist content (which is essentially what Parler is being banned for).
This is very much untrue. Most of the conservatives (including the non-conservative called Donald Trump) banned from the main platforms are further from terrorist content than AOC is.
During the week when more people are working, more tech focused news/projects tend to be shared and discussed.
Give it another week and then decide if it’s all groupthink.
I still find it alarming that so many people perceive these actions as sincere attempts at harm-reduction. Regardless, it is a pleasant to see both sides being represented in the discussion.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25711525
And that’s from someone who got fed up, left for a few years, then returned.
Edit: just don’t tell any jokes. Take that to Reddit :D
Which is in itself the Dunning-Kruger effect. A tiny minority of people actually have expert level understanding and knowledge. The vast majority of people who think they have expert level understanding just fail to recognise how large their field actually is.
You can be considered a subject-matter expert for recruitment and employment purposes, and it still never be close to the truth. For most practical business purposes it will be true, but it still wont be the reality.
I didn't recognise that distinction until after I had 12 years experience in my field, and met someone who absolutely blew my mind with their level of knowledge and understanding (and declared themselves to be a subject-matter noob).
For all intents and purposes, he's still an expert to everyone else.
I think the line between expert and imposter syndrome is closer and more context based than people realise.
The only option seems to be copious and wide reading of data yourself, and then applying that to your own life, while ensuring you provide a veneer that passes muster to those physically around you, unwilling to do the same, and at odds with your personal conclusion.
Easier said than done, when a large portion of your time is spent taking care of mundane work/family matters.
This breakage in trust of the 'common good' by 'experts' in their field - leaders, law enforcement, health, merchants, ensures that the path of least resistance is the "blind belief" in local leadership and their chosen 'expert' supporters.
From all the networks I participated in, HN is by far most quality-oriented and while the balance of political opinion is different from US average, there is neither mob rule nor cancel culture rampant.
Perhaps this is all inevitable with the nature of the internet, but I have lost a bit of my faith in our institutions to maintain an environment that highlights our common humanity, even when we disagree.
It is persecution.
per·se·cu·tion - hostility and ill-treatment, especially because of race or political or religious beliefs.
A tweet can start a riot. What a joke. 0.25% interest rate increase, these hypocritical petty rich fools go on a bread line. Probably lead to 5 week social security checks, hurting the most vulnerable the most, but America is not going to be old forever. Perhaps they can cut back on the heroin.
Normal Americans held back from fighting thieves and arsonists unleashed on them by their leadership. As soon as election was over, they struck back, and mercifully compared to what they themselves went through, most of who are poor and out of the fight.
Soon you will be doing this to each other, if you haven't already. Americans just have to stay out of it. Take the free money, save it while everyone chases the spotlight maiming each other in the process. What's telling is how so many people bought the hype, thinking this time is any different than what everyone has been doing to each other always.
Empathy, the burden of knowledge.
A lot of of people are freaking out.
Never seen anything like this here. Feels like Arab Springs.
https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/28754/5982256...
Now that Silicon Valley corporations fall over themselves to appease the Democrats, perhaps he has a second chance.
You're correct though the deplatforming will be inflammatory, but the self-made bubble filter these communities of like-minded people are already on a runaway train that's only going to stop when real world circumstances don't allow them to just ban the confrontation digitally, when reality will hit them.
As I posted elsewhere, there's a lot of healing necessary due to multi-generational dis-ease progression - healing to open people's hearts and minds, so they can develop their critical thinking and logic that's influenced by the heart to develop empathy; I discuss this further in a comment from yesterday - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25702673
IMO these actions are coming too late, which shows that Google, Apple, Amazon, etc aren't responsible enough to have this kind of control.
I think the exact opposite: it may be wrong (I don't think it is, but I think there is legitimate debate), but it absolutely should be up to them to decide the rules for their platforms.
When a platform is as ubiquitous as Facebook (for example), it's not just their platform that's effected by their decisions. We're all directly effected by how they act or fail to act.
So this was in effect a rigged deadline, somewhat analogous to a "Performance Improvement Plan".
Apple asked for a plan, not for an implementation.
From Apple's letter:
> In addition [to removing the death threat examples in the letter], you must respond to this message with detailed information about how you intend to moderate and filter this content from your app, and what you will do to improve moderation and content filtering your service for this kind of objectionable content going forward.
> We have determined that the measures you describe are inadequate to address the proliferation of dangerous and objectionable content on your app.
I'm not sure Apple is acting in good faith here. What is considered adequate? Facebook has had all sorts of crazy stuff on it like the Christchurch shooting (and regularly also abuses iOS API's) and has never been taken down.
So it's possible Apple also took those things into account and was able to determine it just wasn't going to work out, and there was no need to go any further.
If you read Amazon's letter where they inform Parler they're kicked off, which you can find in the Buzzfeed News article, it sounds pretty cut and dry.
Using a lack of moderation as your selling point and then being surprised by such a deadline when you intentionally host content that doesn't tally with the platform you're on seems short-sighted.
The intent is likely to not moderate - it'd kill the platform. It remains accessible by web. Does it need a native app?
Ultimately the market will sort this out.
Parler is listed at 2.8 million total users back in July.[0] Assuming that's doubled and all lean towards Trump, that still represents a fair minority of voters.
The website remains there for those users that want to use the platform, but curated app stores that aim to promote certain values (and are fairly clear about those values) don't seem to be the right place for these platforms that devolve into highly controversial places.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parler#Usage
People should be able to run Parler on their phone if they want to, with full API access, not the half-measures that having a web app allow.
Under what justification?
These people agreed to the contract. Their BATNA is Android, which allows sideloading, or their web browser, where they can be as unmoderated as they want to be.
There is no problem here. If you want an Iphone supporting app store with more permissible side loading, go build one.
They can easily get enough Republicans onboard to stop a fillibuster. After the Parler situation, Republicans would no longer feel the need to defend Apple's App Store margins (regardless of whether or not Parler can come back under the proposed laws, the political damage is done).
The party that will control Congress in a couple of weeks does not like trillion-dollar companies like Apple. They believe that Apple and others should be considered monopolies, and if there is a court case they believe Apple should have the burden of proving that they aren't a monopoly (unlike current law).
Disagree, as substitutes presently exist in the form of Android models, which can be sideloaded.
I didn't know it would happen, never thought it could happen, and I would have reconsidered my purchase if I knew.
It'd have to support the apps, though, otherwise mine would have none.
Android is not an alternate for iPhone. They are not interchangeable. I don't know why people keep saying this.
Maybe for some people they are interchangeable, but they are sufficiently different that they are not true substitutes.
In fact, this is exactly what folks did to Tesla in the beginning. Of course the difference here was that Tesla owners were not seeking to overthrow democracy in the US.
I'm not sure how that is in any way relevant to the discussion of Android and Apple being substitutes or not. You keep bringing that up in your other comments too.
To be clear, I don't support people who want to rise up against the US, quite the contrary.
But they still bring to light an important point -- why does Apple get to say what apps I can install in my phone?
Could we stop feigning ignorance about this?
The situation with Parler and Apple is analogous to expecting a Ford dealership to sell, and promote, Tesla's products, or another car-maker's products.
If build quality is my main factor, than Ford is not a substitute for Toyota. If having a Hybrid SUV as big as the Highlander, Ford is not a substitute.
There are lots of reasons people want a Toyota, and Ford doesn't have all those things.
For HN's landscaper? Sure.
One of the main features of buying an iphone is “Apple guarantees my privacy and security”.
If you are choosing the former it strongly suggests you don’t care as much about the latter. Being on a system that allows sideloading is a serious step down in security especially for the non technical majority.
That is not my highest use case at all. I have an Apple Watch. An Android phone works very poorly/not at all with it. I have an iPad. An Android phone does not easily sync between them. I have a Mac laptop. An Android phone does not sync well between them.
I think the UI on the iPhone is much more intuitive. I can't get that on Android. There are a bunch of apps that are only available on iPhone. The iPhone has better apps for my kids.
I could keep going on, but my point is, there is a lot my iPhone can do that an Android can't, for me.
> If you are choosing the former it strongly suggests you don’t care as much about the latter.
It doesn't in any way suggest that.
> Being on a system that allows sideloading is a serious step down in security especially for the non technical majority.
I agree. So make it hard to do. Put it behind a set of options. Make me have to install a text file on a BSD machine and then sync my phone to enable it. Just make it possible and let me assume the risk.
Ultimately, is there anything that can be done? If you had to pick one specific world-changing action, what would it be, in detail? Your original premise was interesting, but perhaps difficult to codify.
Maybe even specially call out that anyone can install any app they want on their mobile device, and this must be made accessible. You could even add in some weasel words like "after reasonable precautions have been taken" so that Apple can make you jump through some hoops to install an "unapproved" app. Let the courts sort out what is reasonable or not.
What examples do you have in mind and what has ‘usability’ got to do with this?
Also - as soon as one reputable App requires users to ‘go through the hoops to get exposed’, any app that can fool users into thinking it is reputable will be able to do so.
I agree they’re not fungible. I like being on iphone for all the ecosystem aspects you describe. But if android worked for some key feature I’d switch, and keep a secondary iphone for my apple watch, imessage etc.
Citation needed.
How? The iOS system sandboxes the binary, so it can't do anything without permission. It can't read files, can't read data like contacts, can't connect to the internet, etc. I think it would be relatively easy for Apple to allow sideloading while maintaining great security. Plus, it would be off by default, so know-nothing users would not be doing it.
[X] Phone
[X] Text
[X] Compute Applications
[X] NFC or other near items
I guarantee the vast majority of consumers aren't using more than an extremely limited feature set that both phones happily share with their customers.
Are they produced by the same designer? Nah. But that really doesn't matter for functionality purposes.
What application of computing (not specific compiled binary, but rather generic spreadsheet, ssh, chat, etc.) is not available on Android? You may have found your next business opportunity if you get moving. You'll simply be responding to capitalism as Parler did when they started, and as Google and Apple are doing now.
I can't carry a laptop in my pocket.
> What application of computing (not specific compiled binary, but rather generic spreadsheet, ssh, chat, etc.) is not available on Android?
I'm not sure how that is in any way relevant, but regardless you know very well that it is completely disingenuous to suggest that someone just "build a new app" for another platform.
Not every spreadsheet is the same. Not every chat app is the same. Someone isn't just going to go out and build another Fortnight because you can't get Fornight on the iPhone anymore.
You're arguing that feature parity is required for subsitutition, and that is an addled argument. It's not even temporally consistent, as you have prior versions of applications with features removed.
You can carry a laptop in your pocket. Sony VAIO had a mini edition around 2007. You can also use a bag, which has big pockets, and you can connect to networks and even cell networks.
Point is -- your argument here is very weak that the two platforms aren't substitutable, and there really is nothing left to say. Have a pleasant evening or morning, as the case may be.
Neither Apple or Android are a commodity. They are a differentiated good, but they compete in the same market and are substitutes for each other.
Alternate app stores would jeopardize its famed security
I also dont like what Apple did to Tumblr when they had to change their content policy and how BigTech generally projects US values onto the world (eg. nudity).
PS: I trust Android's F-Droid store more than the PlayStore due to its strong gateway process (anti tracking, pro privacy, FOSS only).
This was the hacker ethos from the 90s. Where did that go?
Looking at their other posts, likely because the user was banned.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/switching-out-of...
I remember having a DeCSS t-shirt and the PGP source code printed in a book. Are folks less interested in liberty now that wrong-think can get you fired?
People have different expectations from smartphones (tables, and Chromebooks as well). So long as you know what you are getting when you buy it, this isn't an issue.
Apple doesn't make phones to be hacked or tweaked or whatever, they make them to be simple to use and as secure as possible. For most people, this is far more interesting and appealing than being able to side load apps.
Isn't the Pine Phone fundamentally a device made for hackers?
Fundamentally, the market for hacker oriented products is far smaller and less interesting than the market for iPhones. So hacker oriented tech is by nature going to lag the market or be more expensive.
There still are.
Nothing has fundamentally changed.
There is also an option for people who want a curated environment.
While I strongly oppose Apple's decision, I even more strongly oppose government involvement as a solution. The government should not be able to compel association, it is essential to maintain freedom of association.
Exactly. That's why the government should enforce my freedom to associate with who I want on my phone.
Could there possibly be anything more against the spirit of the Apple 1984 commercial than them kicking off a messaging system that lets people say whatever they want?
What's next, email? Are they going to ban text messages because people say no-no words on there?
It's not the same, but it's the same ballpark.
In a way this is a form of death of net neutrality. What your ISP couldn’t do, Apple and Google happily will.
Section 230 on the other hand...
You don't have much of an argument here. No one is forcing you to buy that.
You don't even have the argument that Apple has a monopoly on the smartphone mart. There is a readily available alternative in Android. Android allows you to install whatever you want.
Non sequitur: My first VCR was a BetaMax. We got it on sale without knowing much about the technology. Once we had it a few days, I really wished it handled VHS tapes, as that's all the movie rental stores had. We returned it.
That has nothing to do with them going out of their way to make it impossible to sideload anything.
Apple preventing me from installing a social network by some group people don't like is akin to Ford not letting my car drive to a store owned by people they don't like. Do you think I should have to find a different car manufacturer to drive where I want?
It is still happening in 2021 and has been documented previously for months, even after the election. Typical examples here [0][1]. Many more found on Twitter.
So are you now going to stop gaslighting and peddling lies?
[0] https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1347157489456975872
[1] https://www.portlandoregon.gov/police/news/read.cfm?id=28145...
“Protestors” took over a Seattle City Hall and demanded the mayor resign. Is that not disrupting the legitimate legislative process? Isn’t that attempting to force a legitimately elected official out of office?
The mayor of Portland was being accosted at his home (so much so he moved) and while out in public having dinner (just this past week). Is that not intimidating and threatening our elected leaders?
The point is the left said nothing about about all this violence and rioting and in some cases encouraged it. Said “it was legitimate anger” and therefore authorities shouldn’t try and stop it.
Why the double standard? Why is arson and looting by Antifa given the benefit of the doubt and called “protesting”, while, when the right riots and causes disruption we go right to using words like “coup” and “sedition” and suddenly need to start creating new laws to stop it?
Were people actually concerned that this movement was going to blow out into a full-on anarchist revolt? Was this based on an idea of an all-out violent revolution? This is the only example where they may be a slight point and even so I'm not seeing an explicit call to join into this being amplified.
> “Protestors” took over a Seattle City Hall and demanded the mayor resign. Is that not disrupting the legitimate legislative process? Isn’t that attempting to force a legitimately elected official out of office?
Were they coming in with guns? Did they organize multiple days in advance with the idea of kidnapping legislators? This sounds like infrequent but very much run-on-the-mill instance of protesting.
> The point is the left said nothing about about all this violence and rioting and in some cases encouraged it. Said “it was legitimate anger” and therefore authorities shouldn’t try and stop it.
This is not true, and I'm the sort of person that consumes news from people who are not in favor of the current system. The critique was the violent overreaction of police forces and the fact that while they're getting rubber bullets in the head, actually seditious traitors that stormed the Capitol get coddled and kindly asked to leave.
_That_ is the double standard. The US has a history of allowing violence by white majorities, visible and obvious in the favorable treatment by police forces and legislators, while disproportionally repressing other forces. The deescalation is reserved for seditionists and white supremacists.
> ...After a summer of rioting and endless attacks on federal property let's dispense with the clutching of pearls that this is something new.
You (What I quoted):
> There were no endless attacks on federal property...
You have just lied in that first claim after the fact that the grandparent comment was referencing the summer violence of last year that still continues to this day and that is what I quoted in my comment which is still happening today. Never began to compare anything or started to.
So before you gaslight everyone again, are you now going to stop peddling lies?
We are living on different planets. This perspective being is being pushed solely by people who hate trump and his supporters. It’s clearly not true, and it blurs the lines around what happened. If it were true, there would be an actual civil war.
Claiming this only serves to increase the ever-widening divide in our country. There appear to have been thousand of people at the protest (I haven’t listened to any pundits yet, so unsure of the exact estimate), and a small handful participated in this disappointing display.
Be part of the solution, not the problem.
Besides the logistical hurdles, one is not a substitute for the other. The pros still outweigh the cons, but that doesn't mean I can't push for better policies to fix the things I don't like.
I'm not trying to force anyone to make software for my phone. I want Apple to let other people make software for my phone.
That involves forcing Apple to design their software to do what they don’t want it to do.
Why not just buy the product that does?
I know the answer to that, since you have given it earlier.
It’s because you want Apple’s nice products, and have chosen that over the desire for an open ecosystem.
Nobody is stopping you from having the freedom you want. In fact many companies provide it.
This has nothing to do with rights at all.
It’s just that Apple makes nicer things and you want to force them to meet your needs because the products that do aren’t as nice.
Reddit is the whole reason why 5 people are dead.
What will it take until the tech community realizes this comment couldn't be further from reality.
You are all going to wait until one of these deranged psychos does another Las Vegas?
You are all going to wait until your own kids are dead? Is that what it takes?
I'm not a huge fan of Reddit, but hopefully this pushes the government to force spez into hiring some expensive lawyers so he can get a slap in the face while half the country burns down and innocent people die.
so convenient for a techie to say they should be able to run parler.
Sounds like something a russian shill would say. What the fuck is wrong with you people. none of this bullshit is normal.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules and never post like this again.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Makes me said that there’s an app to order a burger from Shake Shack for example.
I'm not upset in the slightest about them being gone, but I can kind of see the argument about how the app store is deciding how someone uses their phones here.
https://happymag.tv/parler-free-speech-social-media-banning-...
tl;dr a bunch of liberal and leftist people joined Parler back in June when it got popular. They did so intentionally to test how "free-speech" supporting it was and if it would allow people to post left-wing content. They got banned.
" And, yes, some people are claiming that Parler's quick trigger finger is mostly about shutting down "left" leaning accounts, but as with Twitter's content moderation, I won't say that for sure unless I see some actual evidence to support it."
And the second seems to be a rehash of the first. Most of the substance seems to be based on twitter claims with no verification?
Do you think random reporters were conspiring and posting nudity to make Parler look ideologically driven when it banned them (there's irony there too, which we'll ignore for now).
The other isn't a journalist at all as far as I can tell?
If leftists are categorically banned (the claim was: "If you wanted to de-escalate on parler, you couldn't. You'd get banned"), then surely there is more than these articles, the second of which is a copy of the first which is a mention of two people tweeting about being banned?
I saw the first article back when it first came out and never saw any substantiation, but I didn't keep following it. Is there any significant evidence that leftists are all banned?
Have you even used Parler?
Among others, DevinNunesCow was banned. Lots of liberals and leftists joined. Lots of them got banned without any reason. Hell, a number of journalists were also banned for...unclear reasons.
That's a bad look for an app that claims to support free speech and claims that the solution to speech one doesn't like is simply to counter it. I have no problems with a platform moderating content. But I do find the hypocrisy amusing.
> Have you even used Parler?
Why would this be relevant to my ability to know who or what the platforms moderation policies were?
Is it removed from their device?
If not will it still be able to receive updates?
It’s fascinating, if somewhat terrifying, watching communication channels breakdown for millions of people.
I believe it was created after the subreddit r/thedonald was banned from reddit.
Massive multinational corporations having this much power over our speech is not healthy.
If they can do this to a sitting President of the US, they can do it to every single one of us.
The issue isn’t whether they have the right to deplatform. The issue is whether they _should_.
https://twitter.com/adbusters/status/1288193793267625984
Who has power over my speech? I have iPhone, Android, Ubuntu, Mac and other tech. My speech is not limited in any way.
I can write down notes on paper if I want. I can write down content freely today as I could yesterday.
What corporation out there has any power over my speech, much less "too much power"?
Edit: I seem blocked by HN temporarily (for opposing viewpoints? I don't know but I can't post any more!) so to respond to the post below me here is an edit:
Trump should hold a press conference if he wants to say something. It can easily be streamed on the internet.
No president before 2007 had access to Twitter and they could still get the word out online if they wanted to.
How does he do it?
Think about it, and then tell me that these corporations don’t have power over our speech.
Possibly send some good ol' newsletters to people's mail.
Folks, this is "get on the back of the bus" behavior. People in a free society should be able to use modern, first-class services if other people can.
If it's important enough: https://www.fema.gov/emergency-managers/practitioners/integr...
If it's not, he can call a press conference which will be broadcasted over the internet.
I would assume that calls for the violent overthrow of the US government in order to overturn an election at the very least should be considered as equally dangerous as screaming fire in a crowded theater.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think what Trump said was incitement, or even close to it. Irresponsible? Yes. Incitement? No.
However, I think both his case and yours is undermined by the very, very strong circumstantial evidence that after his lawyer, Giuliani, called for "trial by combat" and he said that he would personally lead the crowd in a march on the Capitol on Jan 6th the violent insurrection actually took place is a very strong argument that he incited the uprising.
Furthermore, the fact that even as these Trump supporters were occupying the Capitol he said that he "loves them", that also undermines any argument that he did not incite sedition.
No reasonable person could take that as incitement. So the only logical answer is anti competitive behaviour, or political manipulation/interference.
There’s no way you believe he was doing anything else. You’re basically pushing for the denialability part by pretending to be innocently surprised.
No.
The defendants will unquestionably be using the "Trump told us to" defense.
Trump violated the terms more often and worse than regular people who were removed from the platform. Thousands of regular people kicked off for violating the terms and it's Donald Fucking Trump and Parler that gets folks in an uproar? Over things that happen all the time? By long standing service agreements? What?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boogaloo_movement
Does the crowd storming the Capitol chanting "hang Mike Pence" count? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW718KRYDtU
It has been three days.
Have you already forgotten?
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
> n 1969, the Supreme Court's decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio effectively overturned Schenck and any authority the case still carried. There, the Court held that inflammatory speech--and even speech advocating violence by members of the Ku Klux Klan--is protected under the First Amendment, unless the speech "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action".
I would argue that the elements of Trump's speech on Jan 6th satisfy all the elements in the lawless action test:
- Trump gave a speech on January 6th, the same date as the insurrection.
- In this speech he directed his supporters to march on the capitol with his support.
- His supporters did actually march on the Capitol, then proceeded to violently occupy it.
Regardless of Trump's inner mind, it is clear that his followers believed that his intent was for them to march on the Capitol while the election was being certified and forcefully disrupt those proceedings.
It seems to me this is a very strong case that Trump's speech did in fact incite the violence that occurred that day, and the very short amount of time separating those events make it easy to argue that one was the immediate cause of the other.
https://fortune.com/2021/01/08/parler-violence-trump-2020-el...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/05/parler-...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2021/01/06/trump-riot-tw...
Based on these articles, it sure sounds to me like Parler users are openly calling for immediate violence.
Now the government doesn’t even need to get their hands dirty to censor the internet, private companies enforce it themselves with with impunity.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocal...
Very few people seem to know the context of that ruling. That line of thought was used to justify criminal punishment of two socialists from Philadelphia for hindering the war effort in 1917. Their crime: they distributed anti-war leaflets. Elizabeth Baer spent 3 months in prison, Charles T. Schenck 10 years.
Goes to show the extent "yelling fire in a theater" can be stretched, and has been stretched from the very first case.
- Slander and libel are restrictions on free speech.
- Restrictions on any type of public insult, racial slur, hate speech or other derogatory speech are restrictions on free speech.
- Any restriction on the advertising of explicit pornography or illegal activities would also be a restriction on free speech.
If your argument is that absolute, then no, I don't support absolute free speech without qualification. I can't prove it, but I would assume that the majority of the population would rightfully take the same position that free speech should not utterly absolute with no restriction at all.
If you think I'm missing something, tell me.
> figure out that actions by Twitter have no relevance whatsoever to the freedom of expression as defined in the First Amendment?
So? What's the first amendment got to do in this situation?
I mean, it's actually kind of nuts to consider that Twitter has somehow 'silenced' President [expletive deleted], when he still has a whole press corps at his disposal and could call a press conference at any moment.
I'm pretty darn cynical about social media in general though and I know my views are in the minority.
Not "entirely" legal. All these companies claim to be neutral, and while I think they genuinely try to be, for various reasons they aren't able to stick to that standard.
The point of contracts is that you give up certain rights. On Monday, I can't sleep in all day because I've got an agreement to work. I have to set aside some money for rent because I signed a lease.
What these companies are doing may be legal in practice, because of the difficulties in litigating, but it's never entirely legal to make promises and then break them, whether they're through contracts, terms, or even marketing claims and advertisements.
When they make those claims, they voluntarily give up their right to say anything they like. Being able to give a right up is part of having it in the first place.
Twitter could change their terms to say, "we will ban or block people we have political differences with, or when bad PR is making us feel uncomfortable." Then banning people for those reasons would be 100% legal, because they would have reserved that right.
A single person has enough power to incite a mob that threatens the life of our government officials. That seems like "too much power" to me. A mob consisting of .001% of the US population threatening our cabinet seems like "too much power" to me.
Until we have a better way to figure out what causes that sort of conspiracy-theory mania, deplatforming is a million times better than insurrection.
On a more serious note, if a single person can raise a mob, that mob must have already been angry and out for blood in the first place which points to deeper underlying problems than just "this one person has too much power". The real solution is to address the underlying cause for the unrest and anger felt by the mob. Any other "solution" is at best a temporary bandaid.
Don’t confuse what this mob is angry about with all the actual legitimate reasons there are to be angry.
Yes, he and Fox and many other grifters added fuel to the fire, no question. But it's a mistake to just write off the millions upon millions of honest and good people who have been shafted by the system and are rightfully pissed while neoliberals and neocons crap all over them.
If there were legitimate leadership that honestly wanted to address the issues you’re talking about, we’d be seeing debates in the Capitol, not a crowd trying to set it on fire. This is the result of years of party leadership that just wants to stir up emotion to get people locked into irrational loyalty, rather than actually doing anything to help people.
Trump deliberately amplified the nonsense and used it to build a cult of personality rather than doing real political work. He’s the one disrespecting the people who elected him in 2016, not me.
I hate to ban an 11-year-old account, but I had to scroll back two months in your comment history to find a post about ZFS. That's seriously uncool. Between that and the fact that we've warned you many times not to abuse the site like this, I think we have to ban your account and I've done so. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
We well now know, and you can see it play out since the internet showed up - that content The ideas that win out are the ones best designed to encroach on the hind brain and avoiding the parts that analyze using reason.
Cat pics out perform everything.
Images beat long form arguments.
Machiavellian emotional constructs co-opt human brains, and a lawyer level eye for rhetoric, or blanket, unhelpful cynicism is needed to protect you.
If you actually want that market place to work, now we know that we have to act on speech that destroys reason.
Repression works.
You make a few assumptions here, which are important to examine.
First, it was centralized power of the church, which was fighting facts that were not in congruences with their beliefs. However, today the positions are reversed, it is faith in unreal outcomes that is asking for credibility at the same level as facts.
The people who stormed America's highest houses were there because they believed that an election wasn't fair. Nothing will convince them otherwise, no matter what the evidence.
This is the essence of faith, and exactly why free speech exists. To allow human beings to be governed by reason over unreason or emotion.
Secondly - we know for a fact, that emotion is the fastest way to co-opt logic. You can take a look at politics at home or around the world for evidence - wedge issues win, logic doesn't.
If you aren't going to exert a force to counter emotional manipulation, then your people will be emotionally manipulated. They will be manipulated the hardest, by those who find that certain facts don't work for them.
Finally - Journalism is failing because of other reasons than trust. It was an unviable market a while back. Their last source of income was the classifieds, and craigslist alone put an end to that.
Journalism which is beholden to advertising will always have to compete with entertainment. Meaning that if its not more entertaining than a sports channel, advertising money will simply go elsewhere.
I can only see independent, government or public founded journalism as the solution.
lol what? I can’t even name a single person who has no method of communicating due to “tech companies”. Even Stormfront is still online.
The social networks and now Google and Apple are faced with an evolving volatile situation where the tools they supply are being used to foment an insurrection. They are taking steps to get ahead of what may happen in the event of Trump’s removal next week. Time is of the essence.
There will be time for more nuanced discussion when emotions have cooled. Now is emphatically not the time to try to have those discussions. We need to get through the next several weeks first.
I'd be willing to bet almost anything that the latter have been far more demonstrably toxic than all but the darkest corners of the Internet. Because they have a huge captive audience and have been operating as toxic bad faith actors lying and pandering to the prejudices of low information audiences for decades now.
We don't just need a conversation about Twitter, or even about Google. Or Apple.
We also need a conversation about Fox and the rest, and the fact that a tiny handful of corporations control TV content, movies, music, book publishing, print of other kinds, and so on.
In the bigger picture, Twitter is practically a small indie platform.
Just to be clear, Twitter has over 320M users. That's more users than the population of all but 3 nations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
They are the massive multinational corporation controlling media, and a small number of Silicon Valley progressives should not be trusted with that degree of cultural and political influence and power over the world.
I agree with your point about Fox et al.
Last time we didn't take it seriously, 6 million perished in extermination camps.
I'd like for that to not happen again. I think that is a bit more important than what apps you can run on your phone.
Hitler came into power because he was allowed to spread his message. Because he was given chance after chance to speak. Because he was given a platform.
it seems to be an impossible problem to solve from my POV and removing comms from various groups willy nilly because we're too scared that humanity is too stupid practice critical thinking and not give in to evil thought is a slippery slope. there has to be other ways?
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site for its intended purpose—especially now, as seemingly everything descends into the hell realms—we'd be grateful.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_...
Do better.
They set up a GALLOWS outside.
They had PIPE BOMBS. They had HANDCUFFS.
What the FUCK are you on about?
We cannot allow people easy access to radicalization.
The latest from Twitter, claiming that by Trump stating he will not attend the Biden inauguration, he is somehow insinuating that Biden is an illegitimate president and encouraging retaliation and therefore cause for a permanent ban is completely contrived to justify them doing what they wanted to do.
This is nothing more than pandering to those about to assume power. As we all know Twitter, Facebook, Google/YouTube have been summoned to the senate many times to testify over privacy and such issues. I am quite sure they are working hard to ensure the future administration is a bit more lenient.
We should be more worried over the thousands of other vocal conservatives and constitutionalists who have been deleted in the past 48 hours. This is silencing freedom of political choice.
EDIT: Downvotes shows that cancel culture is alive and well.
The newspaper was never forced to print whether was sent in. A book publisher never had to publish a book they didn't want to, and a social media site isn't required to host your content. They're no political freedom being taken here.
I've seen this exact statement on various other platforms from conservative commentators. And it's basically horseshit. Now you're concerned? Seriously? Google accounts have been locked out with no recourse for years, apple bans apps left and right and facebook 'moderates' posts based on some interesting thresholds.
I find it disingenuous to suddenly care about this when Trump finally gets kicked off twitter and a horde of extremists are blocked from inciting violence against the government.
You wanted free markets? Here they are. If you have a problem with it, move to a different platform. Build your own platform. Host it yourself. Nobody owes you anything.
And guess what? Because of the republican led FCC, the ISPs can block your extreme right-wing website. Total freedom for the ISP to do whatever the fuck they want.
I fully support the right of companies to sell locked down hardware, we shouldn't be trying to over-regulate here. The right response to this situation is to compete with it using open hardware, which respects its users. It's insane to me that we have all tolerated companies dictating what kind of software we run on the hardware we buy from them.
It's time to fight back. Open Mobile Hardware now!
Sorry man, I got burned when Verizon nuked all the EC25 devices. That's not a gamble I want to take with an $800 phone. I support their mission but without carrier authorization you're one whim away from having an expensive brick in your pocket. It sucks but that's the cell phone market.
Note how purism goes to extreme lengths to dodge the question of "which networks will your phone work on". They have these elaborate frequency tables but never name any networks, then at the bottom the fine print admitting that they have no carrier authorizations.
I don't use Parler, but this newfound love of censorship is going to end badly. How long until we start book burning because they promoted wrongthink?
but I should add they later reversed the decision
This isn’t really different, only the medium/technology is.
CloudFlare will be next, and they've already set the precedent that they will cease to serve websites that are "detrimental to society". Followed by Digital Ocean, Amazon, Verizon, Comcast, AT&T.
For those of you who championed XKCD #1357 at every opportunity, congratulations! You've won. For a short time. The consequences of censorship will be dire.
I'm no fan of Sagan, but he was right what he saw here:
> I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; [...]
I wonder how has modern technology made censorship safer?
Finally, some big players kick off bad-faith actors from their platforms. People that call for violence and hate.
There is no need for a platform in this world where you can use racial slurs, call for hate and violence.
And yes it is deeply concerning that an infrastructure service like Cloudflare is becoming increasingly political. This is what happens when companies stop acting neutrally and allow themselves to be influenced by activist employees or outside social/political pressure. The precedent they set will probably extend to all the other infrastructure players.
And this is why it is more crucial now than ever for us to enforce antitrust laws and split up and/or regulate powerful companies. They are acting government agencies simply shielded from the same responsibilities because they are technically private.
I personally feel black lives matter was a terrorist organization, they looted stores, destroyed people livelihood, murdered whites in the streets, and destroyed many cities across america. Yet posts calling for those protests are fully allowed, even encouraged on mainstream platforms like twitter etc. Yet a small group of crazies march on the rich politicians like pelosi profiting off all the dumb people who voted for them, eating 10000$ ice cream and going to hair salons while everyone is locked down and that is called violence!!
Why should apple be the one to decide what is violent and what isn't. This is crazy.
Otherwise iOS won't run unsigned code without a jailbreak.
It doesn't take much thought to see the US is going for the next few years.
You would have to reengineer your system along the lines of IRC where the app is divorced from the content.
I could see apple having issue with providing pre-filled server selection, but if you had to manually enter a domain, I would be interested in how they would move the goal posts to deny an app like that.
Their goal so far has been avoiding casual exposure to anything less than family-friendly. If a user has to go out of their way to procure offensive content it seems Apple is not that concerned - browsers, mail clients, IRC clients, etc is fine.
Of course, it wouldn't be able if they were committed to equal treatment, so the counterexample here are the many Reddit apps on iOS. You can join NSFW subreddits and they are allowed so long as they aren't shown by default. The only explanation is here Reddit is used by Apple employees or they know there would be an outcry if the rules were evenly applied.
Edit it’s now official: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-p...