However, forcing people or organizations (which are groups of people) to host or support speech/activities they do not wish to support restricts the rights of those people/organizations.
If you can force them to give up their rights, others can force you to give up your rights.
I can't support that at all.
What's more, the idea that there's some sort of conspiracy/cabal that spans every corporation, industry and profession to murder free speech is a pretty far-fetched one.
There's an old saw that says, "if everyone around you appears to be an asshole, perhaps it's you and not everyone else."
My objection to that argument is that the companies claim that the content on the website isn't their speech when invoking Section 230, then claim that it is their speech in order to invoke the First Amendment.
Section 230 says:
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
So how can a company have free speech rights regarding content if they aren't the speaker?
Section 230 is irrelevant to the discussion in this case[1].
Section 230 refers to the ability of one party to sue over the speech of a third party. That's not in play here at all.
Rather, this is about freedom of association.
Stripe can associate (do business, in this case) with whom it chooses (with some restrictions[2], but this isn't one of them), and that freedom of association is protected by the constitution[0].
Sorry, I thought this discussion was on a different post. You're right, the argument above doesn't apply to Stripe.
Instead, I would respond that freedom of association is considerably more limited than other rights. Soldiers, students, jurors, prisoners, etc are often forced into association with people they would rather not associate with, and businesses are legally forced into association to protect the rights of other people. When there is a conflict between freedom of association and other rights or government interests, freedom of association rarely prevails.
So forcing businesses to associate with someone in order to protect fair elections or free speech rights wouldn't be incongruous.
I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know the details of this case, so I won't speculate about how this case might be resolved under current law.
But the general principle I would apply here is that people who own important infrastructure shouldn't be allowed to interfere in elections (Trump 2024 in this case, I assume) by refusing to allow candidates to use that infrastructure.
I don't think that's controversial in the case of, say, electricity or phone service, and it seems reasonable to apply it to payment processing as well.
1. When it comes to political actors, forcing a person or organization to support a specific candidate (who isn't even on any ballot at the moment) amounts to political coercion and is antithetical to a free society;
2. Which candidate do you hate the most? If what you were saying was reasonable, then you could be forced to provide material support for that candidate. How would you feel about that?
3. Stripe is not a utility like electricity or the phone company. Nor are they anywhere close to a monopoly. In fact, Stripe is just one of many players in that market[0];
4. Not only does the Donald Trump Campaign (a specific "candidate") have other options for online payment processing, online payment processing is not the only way to collect donations. As such, in addition to the dozens of other payment processors on the market, Bank transfers, Western Union, Zelle, CashApp, old fashioned checks and money orders, cash etc., etc., etc. are also available.
You've got this all backwards. Political activity/speech is strongly protected in the US -- no just positive activity/speech, but negative activity/speech as well.
And if the government can force Stripe (or you or me) to provide support to a political actor, then all of our rights are being impinged.
I'm not comfortable with the idea of "reverse boycotts", in which businesses can hinder candidates by denying them services. That gives business owners far too much power over elections (and Citizens United already gives them too much, IMO). I want democracy, not plutocracy.
> Which candidate do you hate the most? If what you were saying was reasonable, then you could be forced to provide material support for that candidate. How would you feel about that?
Absolutely fine, if that "material support" was merely providing the same business I provide everyone else, at the usual cost. To me, paid services are not "material support", a phrase I would only use to describe in-kind contributions (that is, services provided for free).
And 99% of businesses already act that way. The local office supply store doesn't discriminate based on politics. What's backwards about expecting big tech to act like other businesses?
> Stripe is not a utility like electricity or the phone company. Nor are they anywhere close to a monopoly... [candidates] have other options for online payment processing
That's an important point, and here's the rule I would propose to account for it: treat refusing to do business with a candidate while doing business with their opponent as an in-kind contribution to their opponent. If the cost of finding an alternative is small, denying services will be allowed as a small in-kind contribution.
I'm not a lawyer and I'm talking about how I think things should work, not what the current law is, but I believe that's the legal principle behind the Equal-Time Rule, so it's not entirely legally unprecedented.
>And 99% of businesses already act that way. The local office supply store doesn't discriminate based on politics.
That's as may be. However, US Federal law doesn't require them to service anyone except in specific circumstances[0].
There are some state laws that extend to political affiliation, but that's almost always just in employment decisions and not B2B transactions.
If you think the law is wrong (I do not), you can advocate for changing the laws. I won't support your efforts, but I will and do support your right to do so.
Which is what you seem to want taken away from others.
> I will and do support your right to do so. Which is what you seem to want taken away from others.
I certainly don't want anyone's right to political activity to be taken away. I just don't want the weight of their opinion to be related to how much they own.
Are campaign finance limits taking away people's political rights? I suppose they are, relative to unlimited rights, but I still think they are necessary because they they tilt the balance toward democracy instead of plutocracy. For the same reason, I'm opposed to unlimited in-kind contributions, and also to censorship and "reverse boycotts".
>Are campaign finance limits taking away people's political rights? I suppose they are, relative to unlimited rights, but I still think they are necessary because they they tilt the balance toward democracy instead of plutocracy.
Actually, I think campaign finance limits expand political rights as it gives more people a more equal say. In fact, I support banning campaign contributions altogether and moving to publicly financed campaigns.
Because that not only gives more people a more equal voice, it also gives more people the opportunity to run competitive campaigns without deep-pocketed supporters and/or deep-pocketed political parties.
>For the same reason, I'm opposed to unlimited in-kind contributions, and also to censorship and "reverse boycotts".
I'm also opposed to the first two. Quite strongly, in fact.
As to the first, I have no problem with volunteering (time is a resource and, as such, could be considered an "in-kind" contribution but I'm okay with that) or using one's own resources (cars, phone minutes, electricity, etc.) while volunteering, but not much beyond that.
As to the second, censorship (that is, government censorship) is always wrong. However, private persons or groups have every right to control their freedom of association and the speech they allow on their property.
However, I'm not really clear on what you mean by a "reverse boycott."
I'll hazard a guess that you mean multiple product/service providers refusing to do business with a specific customer. If that's what you mean, I'm not sure I can fully agree.
Not because I don't believe in freedom, but just the opposite. Because forcing anyone to associate with someone they don't want to associate with (within the limits set out for protected classes[0]) reduces the freedom of those being forced.
And I believe that to be especially true when it comes to political actors and issues. Primarily because forcing someone to support political speech/beliefs/actions with which they disagree is an affront to our free society and the ideals of free association and political choice.
My apologies If I misunderstand how you define "reverse boycott," and I'd appreciate being corrected.
I think our history books do a disservice when they teach McCarthyism by focusing only on the falsely accused-- many Americans really did support the USSR and some even swore an oath to Stallin. The lesson should be that it was still a mistake to take civil liberties away from these people who passionately supported a horrible cause, not that McCarthyists were just bad prosecutors who arrested the wrong people.
I believe Trump supporters, especially the QAnon weirdos, are wrong to believe the things that they do, but they are less wrong than the people who supported the Soviet Union during its genocidal reign. Unless people are charged and convicted of a crime, their livelihoods should not be taken away by the whims of these powerful companies selectively enforcing their rules. McCarthyism was wrong then and it's wrong now, even though its targets are wrong too.
The QAnon folks are no less irrational than any other (pseudo-)religious devotees and should be afforded the same protections under the first amendment.
This is like the millionth time this has been posted on this website in the past few days, but the first amendment applies to the government, not private companies.
the poster you are replying to seems to be arguing that Qanon people should be a protected class under the civil rights act because it's a hokey pseudo religion with prophecies, shamans, and everything. That absolutely does apply to private companies. I don't really know what to make of that as I am not a lawyer, but I'm not making a legal argument but a moral one.
Internet businesses are natural monopolies and being banned from one can ruin your life without trial in a way that was unprecedented for private companies to be able to do in the past. In the near future somebody who is banned from both Paypal and Stripe will be close to being perpetually unbanked in some lines of work. The way progressives have cheered on giving tech companies this much power over our lives has been dispiriting
the civil rights act effectively does protect speech with regards to religion and sexual orientation, since the idea that we won't discriminate against those things as long as nobody finds out is not what it means
>Internet businesses are natural monopolies and being banned from one can ruin your life without trial in a way that was unprecedented for private companies to be able to do in the past.
What solution do you propose? Take away the right of association from one group of people to enable another group?
That seems strange to me. If you allow the government to create a precedent where you can restrict the rights of anyone, then you can restrict the rights of everyone.
What you are saying is word for word the libertarian argument against the civil rights act ("if we have to bake a cake for gay weddings, what if wants a cake for their child bride!"). I happen to disagree with it as it applies in the real world
>What you are saying is word for word the libertarian argument against the civil rights act ("if we have to bake a cake for gay weddings, what if wants a cake for their child bride!"). I happen to disagree with it as it applies in the real world
No. I'm not. Please don't put words in my mouth.
I'll try to boil it down to as few words as possible:
If the government can take away your rights, then they can take away mine too. I don't support that and will defend your rights as vigorously as my own, whether I agree with you or not.
As for the example you give, bakers don't have to bake a cake for gay weddings.
again I'm not making a legal argument but a moral one.
>If the government can take away your rights, then they can take away mine too. I don't support that and will defend your rights as vigorously as my own, whether I agree with you or not.
This applies to Stipe and Paypal too. They can arbitrarily prevent anyone from operating an online business. The libertarian view that you should care more about their right to do that than individuals who will lose their livelihoods with no recourse, is something I'll never understand and we'll never come to agreement on.
>The libertarian view that you should care more about their right to do that than individuals who will lose their livelihoods with no recourse, is something I'll never understand and we'll never come to agreement on.
I'm not sure why you bring that up, since that's not a position that I've advocated, nor is it one that I support.
I find your repeated strawman[0] arguments quite tiresome.
This argument seems to intentionally ignore that the conservative-led decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission ruled in favor of the bakery.
The first amendment applies to corporations when they use the state to enforce their speech over someone else's. The actual case history surrounding first amendment rights is way more complicated than you're implying. There are situations where the government can restrict your first amendment rights; there are situations where you can have your first amendment rights violated by a company — and seek restitution.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Can you give me an example of something that has happened recently in regards to QAnon where their first amendment rights may have been violated?
Hollywood is a private business as well. They were within their rights to make a blacklist. And people cheered on big business for protecting them and snitched on their friends to their employers, just like they're doing now
>Hollywood is a private business as well. They were within their rights to make a blacklist. And people cheered on big business for protecting them and snitched on their friends to their employers, just like they're doing now
I'm not seeing the parallel to Stripe choosing who they want (or don't want) to do business with.
Especially since there is no "blacklist" circulated and used by everyone in that industry.
Stripe doesn't owe anyone the right to use their services. Just as an airline can bar anyone for most any reason (unless that reason is membership in a protected class[0]), Stripe can do the same.
when did I say Stripe didn't have the legal right to do this? I used the Hollywood blacklist as a parallel precisely because it too was a legal enforcement of political speech by a big consolidated industry that had the power to end peoples' careers
All the Hollywood studios (a bunch of different entities) conspired with each other not to hire those people.
Stripe is a single entity and isn't (AFAIK) working with others on the payment processing industry to block a specific set of people/groups.
And it's protected (and IMHO, should be) because it's a political organization -- Stripe has the right (as do you or I) to choose whether or not they wish to support (verbally, financially or through other material methods) any particular political party, policy position or candidate.
Let's say that you own a business that makes t-shirts. And you strongly support candidate X. Should you be required to make t-shirts for candidate Y (candidate X's opponent)?
And if you chose not to make t-shirts for candidate Y, is that morally wrong?
you are being intentionally obtuse. there is obviously a difference between a t shirt vendor and 1/2 of a duopoly on online payments. the other of which also (coincidentally in your view) took the same measures to restrict people from using their services at the exact same time with no realistic alternative
good luck starting an eccommerce business where everyone has to write you a money order. oh and you can't use amazon, ebay, or shopify either
you don't really believe what you're saying do you? that's like telling blacklisted hollywood writers and actors that they can make their own plays in their backyards
But we're not talking about an e-commerce business are we?
We're talking about a candidate's campaign fundraising operation. Which is odd in and of itself, because as far as I know that candidate isn't actually running for any office.
You've moved the goalposts far enough, haven't you?
> are you under the impression that the hollywood studios published an actual blacklist and openly admitted to collusion?
Neither publication not open admission are necessary for a combination in restraint of trade to be illegal, and you'd usually want to avoid them since they make it much easier to prove.
yes but practically big businesses can get away with these types of things without much fuss. even in the case where Apple and Google were caught wage-fixing, and there were emails from the CEOs blatantly colluding to prove it, all they got was a slap on the wrist. So it's effectively legal in my view
The people cheering this on will not be protected when the mob comes for you.
We live in a digital age. If having the wrong opinion means you can get your bank accounts and all Internet presence removed from you, it's not any different than living under a fascist government.
gab got de-platformed and the mob didn't come for anybody else...the world moved on. not everything is a slippery slope. tons of people criticizing it on twitter/fb and they aren't being censored.
I'm not so sure - I've watched reddit progress from banning suggestive pictures of children to racism to hating on fat people to political views they don't like and conspiracy theorists... it certainly seems to me like we're sliding down a slippery slope rather quickly.
I do wonder if all these bans do is make people angrier.
Yes, first Alex Jones, first Gab, then Trump himself, then Parler, then the Trump’s campaign. Among the other examples of conservatives being censored by bit tech peppered in.
Are sure this is a good example to use against it being a slippery slope?
FFS, I’m not even a conservative but I have backbone and know I would be furious if this was the other way. Why is ideological consistency so rare?
It's not a slippery slope because they're all saying the same things. The examples you listed are not a spectrum where it's leading to milder and milder forms of extremism.
Parler bans people that post poop pics. It just so happens that mainstream services have a higher standard.
But seriously, how is mounting an insurection a slippery slope? At this point I get the feeling that a lot of people posting here are apologists for domestic terrorism and it worries me.
There are violent people and they think like Timothy McVeigh. That should worry you. It should worry you even more if they can find like-minded friends like Terry Nichols on cesspools like Parler.
> At this point I get the feeling that a lot of people posting here are apologists for domestic terrorism and it worries me.
What a great way to shut down any discussion. Anyone who doesn’t agree must be terrorist apologists?
If you read these comments and all you can see in anyone not posting full throated praises of this purge are people defending terrorists, consider taking a break from the discussion and come back when you’re ready.
Oh, I see. Are we talking about the 75 million people who supported the person who incited a mob? Members of the mob themselves? What's the difference?
I get it - to you it's just a political flame war. Easier to just brand everyone who voted for Trump a terrorist sympathizer, than to consider the myriad reasons they may have had for voting how they did. It's only 74.2 million people after all.
Maybe easier for you to dismiss concerns your fellow technologists might have, when Big Tech's largest companies unite to completely destroy a competitor with millions of users in a single day, based on the actions of a tiny sliver of its users.
"What's the difference?" you ask, I assume non-ironically.
I wonder, let's say if a politician started a fund to bail out the arrested protesters, would you consider them complicit in the violence?
> Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/) is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society and of the economy which came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe. [0]
This is what Trump wants. This is why he's tried to overturn a democratically held election. This is why he's incited his followers to riot.
You seem to be assuming I'm a Democrat. I am not.
BTW, I love how you've disingenuously implied Harris funded bail for the DC protesters. She did not. It was for the BLM protestors, who, are clearly not fascist, if you look at the definition.
Again, I’m not interested in the political flame war.
You want to make it solely about the right, and the term fascist is thrown around against many on the right regardless of how non-fascist they may be, often times immediately followed by violently attacking them on the street.
I didn’t say Harris funded bail for the DC protestors on the 6th.
In fact, Harris funded bail for rioters who were much more violent than what we saw on the 6th. The BLM riots caused over $2 billion in property damage, killed dozen of people, and maimed hundreds. Police officers, and Federal courthouses were a notable target. Also the Whitehouse on at least one occasion.
It's not a "political flame war." For the past 4 years, we have had an ultra-right wing, authoritarian, nationalist president in the White House. That's literally the definition of "fascist."
> In fact, Harris funded bail for rioters who were much more violent than what we saw on the 6th. The BLM riots caused over $2 billion in property damage, killed dozen of people, and maimed hundreds. Police officers, and Federal courthouses were a notable target. Also the Whitehouse on at least one occasion.
And, for that, I give her credit.
While the casualties are regrettable, I'm not sure why you even mention them here.
Property damage? Pffft. Who cares? That's what insurance is for.
They are not "conservative", they are fascist loons. There's a big difference. Reasonable conservatives can get along quite well in society, even today.
This quote is deeply misleading. It's not completely clear but I think Rudy is talking about Biden, Trump and himself staking their reputations on the outcome of a fraud investigation.
Over the next 10 days, we get to see the machines that are crooked, the ballots that are fraudulent, and if we’re wrong, we will be made fools of. But if we’re right, a lot of them will go to jail. Let’s have trial by combat. I’m willing to stake my reputation, the President is willing to stake his reputation, on the fact that we’re going to find criminality there.Is Joe Biden willing to stake his reputation that there’s no crime there? No.
There is also a pause around the trial by combat comment that is not evident in the transcript so its probably worth listening to the speech to get the full context.
Has Trump? Did I miss something here? I find it difficult to say he's done anything of the sort directly. I read the comments Twitter used to justify his ban the other day and none of it seemed to directly be calling for any sort of violence, let alone overthrow.
EDIT: Is HN so far left-leaning that I get flagged in under 5 minutes for asking this? Sorry, I'm not American, it's possible I missed something here.
The RNC declared Trump to be the leader of their party after he told a crowd of armed terrorists that they should go to the Capitol and "save" the country from the politicians who were busy certifying the results of an election. They did so after that same crowd stormed the Capitol building, replaced the American flag with a Trump flag, and proudly declared to the cameras that they were there for a "revolution."
Kind of hard to know where the line is drawn between "declaring as your leader the man who advocates for a violent overthrow" and "advocating for a violent overthow."
Stripe hasn't been around that long. I'm sure they can find another payment processor.
And if they can't, well, we all know Republicans don't trust filling out documents (i.e. ballots) when it isn't done in person. So perhaps the best solution is for supporters to drive to their local GOP office and hand deliver the cash.
First they came for the violent insurrectionists attempting a coup in the nation's capital to prevent the peaceful transition of power, and I was glad that they did.
During Stalin’s purges engineers and scientists often claimed their rivals were anti communist to get ahead. This is how Sergei Korolev ended up in the gulag for a decade.
Poor guy believed even in the gulag that Stalin was still good and in no way responsible.
Absolutely, you should be worried. No court has ruled that Trump has done anything illegal. It is not even a proven fact that he is advocating for the violent overthrow of democracy in America. Properly run law courts make these decisions. It is not for you or me to decide. That is the definition of mob rule.
Based on pressure from the public, a few powerful Tech Moguls have acted as judges within their private jurisdictions, which just so happen to encompass some of the most important infrastructure in the modern world.
What if these Tech Moguls get it wrong, and start denying your tribe the services of the modern world?
Anyone who thinks this issue is simple is confused. These are new problems of the modern world. Solving them probably requires new laws.
You've been posting tons of political flamewar comments to HN, some of which have been egregious. I'm replying here because it's your most recent comment, not because it's the worst of what you've been doing on this site.
We ban accounts that use HN primarily for political battle, regardless of which politics they're battling for. We have to, because otherwise this site won't survive for its intended purpose, which is intellectual curiosity.
We just had an attempted coup in our democracy dummy.
If those fighting against a coup fail, then we're fucked anyways.
Can you point me to any part of the history of the United States in which the POTUS hasn't spoked to the VPOTUS in days? Especially days after murders happened in our capital.
I don’t know if you were paying attention last week, but the mob literally came for the members of Congress.
There are wrong opinions, and then there is “six million Jews were not enough” and “hang the Vice President”, and a violent mob attacking the Capitol. No one is under any obligation to tolerate such actions in a civil society.
If I advocate for your murder, am I just expressing an opinion that should be consequence free if someone kills you? Does that change if enough people agree with me that you should be killed?
A teacher in my local school district literally beat down a state congressman for video taping them burning our city down a few months ago, yet every corporate entity and left wing politician I can think of encouraged that violent mob. #KillAllCops, or whatever, isn't a wrong opinion I guess.
Much the same way Trump didn't say "form a violent mob and attack Congress" yet he's being held accountable for what was comparatively nothing.
"Both sides" doesn't mean all things are equal, just that they're comparable. The BLM riots this Summer were far more deadly and destructive, and the response to them was very different. Violent protests should be denounced by everyone. Period. I cannot figure out when we collectively decided it was fine, so long as it was the "right" side.
There’s always this gem from Maxine Waters instructing the country to:
> "If you see anybody from that (Trump) Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere."
The mob has been coming for law enforcement and federal buildings in many major cities in America for nine months now. This mob actively organized on Twitter and other social media. Where was the outrage in June? Most of the organizations that organized this destruction still have their Twitter accounts.
Just like the handful of crazies the other day, you don't get to wash your hands of your bad elements. Imagine if this was the scene at the capital: https://youtu.be/c8j3h7fuYsY
Misrepresent? If anything, I underrepresented what is happening. These mobs have been literally launching explosive mortars at the police, throwing Molotov cocktails at them, along with urine, feces, and God knows what else. Antifa isn’t out for reform, they are out for mayhem, which they continue to organize on social media with the tacit cooperation of the same companies that ban conservatives on extremely flimsy grounds.
The videos of massive numbers of bricks being thrown at the Chicago cops, the expose on Rose City Antifa, and the murder of antifa opponents complete with film crews and diversions say otherwise.
Do self-identified Antifa just spontaneously and simultaneously decide to engage in identical acts violence? Is there some remarkably prominent commie Schelling point us outsiders aren’t privy to?
It's more like how "Anonymous" was in the 2008 Scientology demonstrations. Just buy a _V-for-Vendetta_ Guy Fawkes mask and you're in. Wanna be in Antifa? Just go to a demonstration and hang-out with other people who simply look like they're in Antifa - though that doesn't give anyone permission to fight or act aggressively: there is a degree of mutual-acknowledgement amongst "members": if someone acts aggressively or fights on the offensive (as opposed to fighting defensively against other people who were aggressors[1]) then you wont' find many future allies to witness in your defence in court.
While there may be no central leadership, there are definitely organized chapters. That's exactly what they would like people to believe. And yet, they seem to act in an incredibly organized fashion...
I love it when people try to gaslight us like we haven't seen the shit that happened last year. The capitol building "coup" was like watching a kids bop version of BLM/antifa.
So they did not fire bomb various police stations? Torch Businesses that refused to put up signs in support of their movements? Attack people in the street pulling them out of their cars and beating them? Literally stalk a man in the streets to execute him?
None of those things happened? That is your position?
Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, and many other US cities saw mobs attempting (and in some cases, succeeding) in burning down police precincts and courthouses this summer.
You've subtly avoided answering the question I asked. As far as I know, there was one (abandoned) police precinct burned. Was the burning of an abandoned building avocation for violence against police officers?
You've gotten a distorted version of the story. The Minneapolis Third Precinct was abandoned at the time of burning only because police could no longer defend it against the rioters who were trying to break in and hurt them.
> against the rioters who were trying to break in and hurt them.
This is, we'll go with dubious. Probably true at this point, but the protests had been going, relatively peacefully for close a day, and then less peacefully, with police having repeatedly tear gassed and fired rubber bullets at protestors who weren't doing anything violent, and didn't appear to have any violent intentions. Reports obviously differ, but many concluded that the actions of the police, in attacking the protestors, are what escalated the situation to violence. Compare from [1], and I think this "who is escalating" question becomes clear and relevant.
Which is to say that while the protest ended violently, I think you'll be hard pressed to find widespread intent that it be violent from the start.[2]
So again I'll ask: do you believe that the protesting in Minneapolis was formed with the intention of committing violence against police officers?
On the other hand, do you believe the insurrection at the capitol, which had participants openly advocating for violence for days, was formed, with the intention of committing violence against elected officials?
I find the attempt to draw a parallel between a situation where it took 3 days of getting teargassed for protestors to become violent and one where it took...a speech from the President.
[3]: https://www.apmreports.org/story/2020/06/30/what-happened-at... is my source for the timeline, which appears to be a fairly evenhanded account, noting that some city council members had already proposed abandoning the precinct for more than a day before it ultimately was.
I believe both of those things. I'm confused by the contrast you're drawing here, because the reason I believe them is the same in both cases: many participants made angry, public declarations that violence was needed and they'd like to see it happen. Questions of how many nonviolent people were involved, how long the violence took to kick off, or who made the first escalation don't strike me as very relevant.
Can you source these in the case of BLM? That's what I'm missing. Preferably equivalently specific plans, which amount to "our intent is to physically harm police officers and destroy a police precinct" at a minimum.
> how long the violence took to kick off, or who made the first escalation don't strike me as very relevant.
I think they're highly relevant to discussing the goal of the protests. If a group of protestors shows up and demonstrates peacefully, but is eventually goaded into violence by the group they're protesting[0], that's very different from a group that essentially immediately attacks the people they're protesting.
And, of course, all of this entirely assumes that both groups have equally valid concerns, which is just plainly not true and important to realize. If you're going to take a stance that violence is absolutely never valid, that's an interesting opinion that I don't believe I share. But if you're of the opinion that violence may be an acceptable response to injustice, well, there's a whole lot more reason to believe that BLM protestors have justification for their claim of injustice than stop-the-steal protestors.
[0]: I'll reiterate the importance of this, in general, especially with police tactics that escalate and force violence, such as kettling. While I don't think that specific tactic was present at the 3rd precinct events, tactics that escalate violence are often used against BLM protestors, to predictable results. The fact that violence was reached quickly and without any of those tactics at the capitol speaks to, I think, a different mindset.
> Preferably equivalently specific plans, which amount to "our intent is to physically harm police officers and destroy a police precinct" at a minimum.
I'll take a crack at this. I could just site your own post where you say the following:
" If you're going to take a stance that violence is absolutely never valid, that's an interesting opinion that I don't believe I share".
It kinda seems like you are at least implying that you support the violence that happened during those riots. So your post right here would be one example of people endorsing violence.
The context we're in is advocation for violence prior to the events. Are you looking for cheap rhetorical points, or are you actually trying to engage thoughtfully (as the person I'm responding to is)?
> people endorsing violence.
Note how you've shifted from "advocating for" to "endorsing" and what I asked for was 'specific plans, which amount to "our intent is to physically harm police officers and destroy a police precinct"'.
So can you explain how my statement that, hypothetically, violence may be acceptable in some situations, is a specific plan to harm police officers? With the added assumption that such people should then, you know, show up and do a violence. All of those things were present with Parler. Unless you're claiming that
1. I made statements specifically advocating for violence against in advance of the 3rd precinct protests
2. I then showed up to those protests and committed acts of violence (or, alternatively, I have a large enough following that my followers did the same)
If even you yourself are at the very least implying that you might support the violence, then really it should not be surprising or an out there claim that other people at the riots also supported the violence, is the point.
Feels like a weird thing to push back on. You kinda admit that you personally might support the violence. If even you admit this, then really you should not be pushing back hard on this assumption that other people also supported it.
It should not be an out there claim, that other people supported the violence, when you are kinda implying that you support it yourself.
I just don't think that you should act flabergasted, or surprised, or indignant, or demand large amounts of specific evidence, at someone making a claim that other people supported or wanted violence to happen, given that you kinda are saying that you support it yourself.
> The context we're in is advocation for violence prior to the events
"Nobody advocated for violence before it happened, but now that it did happen I definitely think that the violence is justified!" feels like a pretty poor argument to me.
If you are going to imply that the violence was justified, then really you should not push back on this idea that other people thought it was justified to, and endorsed it prior to the event.
I'm not asking for examples of people saying what the protestors did was okay. I agree that there's lots of that. I'm asking for examples of the violence being planned or premeditated. Those are two different things. The "line" appears to be in between those two things, and people (like you!) appear to be equivocating between them when they aren't the same.
> support it yourself.
My (hypothetical!) lack of objection to generic violence is not the same as active planning and encouragement of specific violence. And I find your repeated attempts to equivocate between the two rather confused.
I'm asking for examples of the second, the active specific planning and incitement of violence. You're avoiding engaging with that request, likely because, as I believe, you can't find examples of that kind of behavior.
> My (hypothetical!) lack of objection to generic violence is not the same as active planning and encouragement of specific violence.
Yes there are varying levels of support. But frankly if you are going to take a position that is kinda moderately in favor of violence, then you really should not be pushing back so hard at the possibility that there are other people who were a bit more supportive of the violence than you are.
That is what I am pointing out. I'd put you at a 5/10, on the "is this person trying to justify the violence that happen". So if an average/random person such as yourself are going to moderately support the violence, then you really should not be so flabergasted at the suggestion that there were other people that were closer to an 8/10 on the "do they support violence" scale.
If such a thing would be so unsurprising, you should have no problem finding and citing those examples. Your only justification so far seems to be a combination of "both sides are the same" and "well some people don't object to all violence".
My argument is that, well no, both sides aren't the same, as shown by the fact that only one set of protestors was openly advocating for and planning to attack people. The burden of proof is on you to show that they both sides are in fact the same. I obviously can't prove a negative, and so far you haven't provided anything concrete.
> "well some people don't object to all violence".
Actually, after rereading the original comment, I'd have to say not some people. Instead Id say you specifically. You specifically pretty much tried to said that the violence was justified.
Ex: you said this, which is a not so subtle attempt to justify the violence:
"of the opinion that violence may be an acceptable response to injustice, well, there's a whole lot more reason to believe that BLM protestors have justification for their claim of injustice ".
> well no, both sides aren't the same
Specifically you, kinda do seem at least to be pretty similar to the "other side" actually, after rereading your comment, in that you attempted to imply that the violence actually was justified, and that it therefore "may be acceptable".
Your comment was a pretty clear attempt to say that this violence could have a "justification" that would make it "acceptable".
No, not "understand". Instead you implied that it would be justified and also acceptable.
In this situation I really would not consider you much different than the other side if you are attempting to say that the violence was justified and acceptable.
If you are saying that it was justified and acceptable, which your comment pretty clearly
seemed to imply, then I would consider the difference between you and "the other side" to be very small to the point where the difference doesn't matter that much.
That's pretty close to advocacy for violence to say that it was justified and acceptable.
I'm going to disengage because you've chosen to repeatedly ignore my comments, and instead respond to imagined things that I haven't said. I can only assume this is because you can't actually do what I've asked you to do seven times now, and find someone actually openly advocating for and requesting that people engage in violence against the police.
I want to be absolutely crystal clear about one thing: I have never, not in this comment thread, nor anywhere else, advocated for people to engage in violence against the police. It is frankly insulting for you to insinuate that I would do so, or to state that there is essentially no difference between me and people who planned and executed an attack on congress.
> I have never, not in this comment thread, nor anywhere else, advocated for people to engage in violence
What I pointed out is that you basically said the violence was "justified and acceptable".
Those were your words, when you used the words "justified" and "acceptable" in your original comment to generally describe that violence in general. I didn't make you say that.
If you need me to explain to you how mobs attempting to burn down police and court buildings is indicative of advocating violence towards police officers, then you've got bigger problems then your misreading of my response.
Would you consider throwing IEDs at cops while hundreds of people chant "pigs in a blanket fry em' like bacon" and try to set fire to the building the police are in violent?
Or howabout permanently blinding some of the cops with lasers? Is that violent, or is that just asking for a funding change in the police department?
Those statements, one from William Barr and one from trump, turned out to be false.
The pigs in blankets quote is from a peaceful 2015 protest. Trump lied about it in a Presidential debate.
The officers sight returned.
Edit: in response to this, you provided a video that doesn't include
> throwing IEDs at cops while hundreds of people chant "pigs in a blanket fry em' like bacon" and try to set fire to the building the police are in violent?
As far as I can tell, it's someone throwing a firework at the side of a stone building, which while not a great idea isn't endangering anyone. And "fry em like bacon" no where to be found.
As for that chants: go to any of the videos of the various occupations from the summer. If that really does come from a 2015 march instead of 2020, fine, but go to any video and find the same activity (arson, assault, IEDs, lasers) and chants like "no justice no peace".
Like with all the mainstream media that 'reported' in front of the federal buildings and businesses that got looted and burned down, the shootings in the CHAZ/CHOP areas and the continuous riots and chaos all over the summer last year as seen on Twitter, they told me that there was 'nothing to see here' and it was a 'mostly peaceful protest' which everyone knows is absolute BS.
Both the GOP and Democrats instantly condemned the Capitol riots, but as for the summer riots, but not a single condemnation from the media of those events or even the Democrats disavowing the summer riots in June that are still continuing to this day.
The outrage did not fit their narrative. Neither did it fit their definition of what they think a 'mob' is, since the main culprits behind it were BLM and Antifa, as usual.
Setting aside for a moment the multiple orders of magnitude difference in lethality per participant, the key distinction for me is this: what happened in the Capitol is about usurping the monopoly on violence possessed by the government. BLM is not about overthrowing the government, and has never posed a credible threat to it. Even if BLM overthrew the government, no one has been talking about mass executions. By contrast, 6MWNE was on full display at the Capitol attack, as were calls to execute legally appointed representatives. I have been half expecting Trump to declare on Twitter that anyone who kills a democrat gets a pardon.
With the current state of the right wing in the US, there is a clear and present danger of us losing our democracy. When you look at the statements about the election from last _June_, or the purges at the Defense Department last fall, it is clear that this nonsense (and it is nonsense, 59 court cases and counting) about election fraud was premeditated, and so was this coup attempt. This is the Beer Hall Putsch, and it’s a mistake to see how lucky we got and say there is an equivalence to protests against police violence.
Assuming you’re arguing in good faith, what you’re missing is that the outrage from this event isn’t about the five dead people, tragic though that is. It’s about the fact that armed protesters just walked into the Capitol Building while Congress was in session. We are very, very lucky we don’t have dead congresspeople. What do you think the mob that beat a police officer to death with a fire extinguisher in the Capitol building would have done to AOC if they’d gotten to her?
We cannot afford to make the mistake Weimar Germany did. We cannot assume that because this failed the problem is gone. We cannot appease these people, we cannot treat them as benign. They must all be identified and prosecuted, and their enablers in Congress must be expelled from our governing bodies.
That is very much in dispute, the reports [1] have been revised [2] and it appears that the officer may have had a medical issue and was not attached by anyone
> Setting aside for a moment the multiple orders of magnitude difference in lethality per participant
Is this really true? I’m tempted to charge the entirety of the post-summer urban bloodbath to the BLM movement. This represents an increase of 3-4000 deaths over the prior year.
> BLM is not about overthrowing the government, and has never posed a credible threat to it. Even if BLM overthrew the government, no one has been talking about mass executions.
This is sidestepping your point somewhat, but Antifa (who figured prominently in the protests) do explicitly avow both these things.
Millions (the estimate I saw was 15-26 million) of people were involved in the BLM protests, which lasted many months. 25 people are known to have been killed. I don’t think it’s reasonable to assign 3-4k deaths to it. By contrast, this was a single event with a few thousand people in which 5 people died. That’s what I mean by orders of magnitude.
I agree that there is a destroy-the-government black bloc present in some of the BLM protests. It’s a fair thing to point out, but I’ll say this: they’ve never had a chance or a credible threat. It’s really a false equivalence to compare a terrorist attack on the Capitol incited by the ruling party in an attempt to overturn a democratic election with seven months of mass protests against police violence.
The BLM protests themselves killed 20-30 people. The murder spree that immediately followed killed thousands more. The Gun Violence Archive has the whole story, but this chart for Philadelphia is indicative[1]. Note the structural break in the series in May 2020. I contend this was ex-ante predictable and should therefore be laid at BLM’s feet.
This is new information for me - thank you for providing it. What I’d like to understand next is - is there a causal link? This is a pretty unusual year in a lot of ways, including a record number of unemployed people and many people experiencing serious financial pressure. I did a little preliminary googling and it suggested that this is related to a large increase in gun sales in March and April, prior to the George Floyd incident. The other factor that I would think could be relevant is the increase in domestic violence during coronavirus restrictions, as people are trapped with their abusers.
I don’t agree the folks involved in the terrorist attack last week were not a credible threat. If they had succeeding in kidnapping and executing congresspeople, which was both possible and clearly the intent of at least some people who made it into the Capitol, things could have turned out very differently. Something like a third of Congress still thinks we shouldn’t do anything about this - the conditions are ripe for a coup; just because it failed doesn’t mean it didn’t have a chance.
Where was the "we love you, we know how you feel, please go home peacefully" rhetoric in June? Imagine the inroads that could have been made if Trump actually cared about injustice against Americans! Instead he stoked the fire, and saved his adoration for his cronies to throw them under the bus when they failed to secure him his position as unelected president.
I think you would find that the majority of people do not support the riots that were happening (and still are) prior, either. So if we say, those accounts should be banned also, will that make everything ok, as both sides would/could be seen as equal?
At the end of the day, we must also recognize that corporations are still run by humans. Those humans make decisions within the context of their own biases and interests. Those interests are also legal requirements in some cases.
It's a tough situation, but even companies which do not have a legal requirement to do so, should be able to express their own views, and be accountable for them. I believe that actions (or threats) by Trump towards twitter earlier on expresses how the Government at the time thought that social platforms should have some accountability.
> "We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016. We can't let a more sophisticated version of that.... happen again." ..... Trump
We've even got a New York State Senator claiming: "Seeing the Twin Towers crumble is no longer the most frightening moment of my life,” tweeted state Sen. John Liu (D-Queens).
The recent wave of deplatforming has affected a very large number of people based on the actions of a small group of rioters. Imagine if far left rioters stormed Congress and all of Reddit got nuked as a result. Personally, I'm a lot less worried about right-wing insurrectionists than I am about politically motivated censorship on social media. Why? Because opponents of the insurrectionists are vastly stronger than the insurrectionists. Opponents of the insurrectionists dominate the military, intelligence agencies, tech, academia, and media. The insurrectionists pose virtually no threat to me. The difference between social media controllers' reactions to last summer's riots and last week's riot shows that a concern for keeping people from getting killed is not the controllers' dominant motive. The ones doing the censoring this week don't care if you get killed in a riot that people encouraged on their platforms as long as the riot was politically correct and they won't get into trouble for having allowed people to incite it.
Shouldn't people be held accountable for their own actions at some point? Everyone should know that murder is illegal, even if <insert popular figure> says to kills someone, you should know not to.
"I don’t know if you were paying attention last week, but the mob literally came for the members of Congress."
A couple of hundred people attacked the capitol in a crowd of 500,000+. Do you remember the phrase 'mostly peaceful protesters'? We've been hearing it for 8+ months after violent riots in major cities which resulted in 30+deaths, hundreds of innocent people attacked, and 1 billion+ in property damage.
"There are wrong opinions, and then there is “six million Jews were not enough” and “hang the Vice President”, and a violent mob attacking the Capitol. No one is under any obligation to tolerate such actions in a civil society."
Antifa and BLM have taken over multiple state and federal buildings over the past 8 months. In June, for instance, multiple fires were set all over DC. A church was nearly burnt to the ground and the President had to go to an underground bunker as a result of the threats outside the white house.
Unlike the protests in January 6th (which was an unorganized mess of random people), BLM and Antifa are professional rioters/criminals. They wear masks to protect themselves and have corporate backing from large left-leaning organizations.
Instead of concern, local leaders painted BLM and named a major street after them.
I'm not sure why you only seem to care when it's Trump supporters. Political violence is wrong on both sides, but only one political not only supported it, but paid the bail of rioters and continue to deny that it even exists. The real criminals are about to get into office.
"If I advocate for your murder, am I just expressing an opinion that should be consequence free if someone kills you? Does that change if enough people agree with me that you should be killed?"
You do realize Trump never said any of this, right? Him and his entire campaign have denounced the violence repeatedly. If you listened to the speech before the capitol was attacked, it was not full of any sort of energy. He basically said that it was all in Pence's hands. Supporters were actually angry because he sounded so defeated. This doesn't sound like the actions of someone trying to storm the Capitol.
The media+tech companies+incoming administration are censoring and destroying their political opponents for things they themselves have been supporting and instigating for 4 years.
If it wasn't so scary, I would call it pathetic actions from limp-dick journalists.
There is a difference between eight months of protests in which 15-26 million people participated across the entire country resulting in significant property damage and some loss of life (~25 people), and what happened last week.
Let’s call what happened last week what it was: a terrorist attack against the seat of government perpetrated by the ruling party in an attempt to overturn a democratic election.
You need to take a serious look in the mirror and ask if you’re the bad guy. As arch-conservative a figure as Mitch McConnell describes this as a failed insurrection and you make excuses for it.
Banks accounts? All internet presence? Neither of those things is happening. They still have websites, not to mention a press secretary with the world’s press at their feet.
Minimizing it to just wrong opinions? NAMBLA, look it up, is still around so stating this is about wrong opinions is ignorant.
I’m fairly certain that attempting to overthrow the government to get your desired election result is fascism. Saying we will have a trial by combat just before telling protestors to head to the Capitol sounds a lot like a call for violence.
> I’m fairly certain that attempting to overthrow the government to get your desired election result is fascism.
I can't believe I'm actually going to go to this topic, but your argument has been made before with the Reichstag Fire [1]. Using threats of violence as a pretext for assuming more government control is a tactic as old as governments.
> The Nazi Party used the fire as a pretext to claim that communists were plotting against the German government, which made the fire pivotal in the establishment of Nazi Germany.
Fine, this particular action is not government control.
But the argument that taking away power from people because they're "fascists" isn't like fascism is not a strong one. These people are supposedly an existential threat to the fabric of America, and there absolutely is not a single group that hasn't simultaneously deplatformed them.
It suggests a question around who really holds the power here.
> I can't believe I'm actually going to go to this topic, but your argument has been made before with the Reichstag Fire [1]. Using threats of violence as a pretext for assuming more government control is a tactic as old as governments.
There's a bit of false equivalence here. The fire was, on one hand, a false flag (from the very link you posted), and on the other hand, a stroke of luck.
Whereas here, it was an attempt at taking human hostages (reference: the many more recent videos of insurrectionists with human zip ties and small arms) and disrupting election certification with human shields in the form of a mob of conservative protesters. Which by every definition would be an attempted coup.
And don't get me wrong, I'm saying quite explicitly that there were legitimate, Trump-believing protesters in the crowd who either got swept up into the moment or genuinely fear for the state of the country but who were not in it to overthrow a legitimately elected government. However, within the crowd were people who came equipped to overthrow leadership followed by blending right back into the crowd, and they coordinated on platforms such as Parler with impunity, which is precisely why deplatforming the platforms is the appropriate next step.
It's not because of everyday conservatives who feel duped. It's because of the conservatives who came together to enact violence and disrupt the democratic process.
> It's not because of everyday conservatives who feel duped. It's because of the conservatives who came together to enact violence and disrupt the democratic process.
And those 75M voters are not able to receive communication from a person they voted for and want to hear speak. They can't buy things from stores that are selling ordinary, run of the mill political apparel. The servers and apps providing social media--protected under section 230 just like AWS, Apple, and Google--have been banned.
It is not the extremists who are receiving the brunt of this purge.
>It is not the extremists who are receiving the brunt of this purge.
And if the extremists hadn't stormed the capitol and been supported (Trump literally said "we love you.") by certain folks, those who are being inconvenienced (and yes, it's just an inconvenience) wouldn't be.
"Rudy Giuliani, made a reference to the HBO drama “Game of Thrones” when he called for a “trial by combat” while talking about conspiracy theories alleging massive scale voter fraud."
> The people cheering this on will not be protected when the mob comes for you.
> We live in a digital age. If having the wrong opinion means you can get your bank accounts and all Internet presence removed from you, it's not any different than living under a fascist government.
Just to rebaseline, in this case a mob infiltrated the dais in the Capitol, and this mob's opinions included speech not just disagreeable to public corporations but unprotected by the United States government.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
The people cheering this on will not be protected when the mob comes for you.
The facile sophistry of comments like yours is becoming obnoxious. An actual fascist mob already came for us last week and we were not protected, get it?
There can be interesting intellectual arguments about whether this was the right move but breathlessly calling ToS enforcement by private companies a “mob” while ignoring an actual mob with lead pipes, guns, and bombs ain’t it.
Perhaps you missed the repeated actual attempts by leftist mobs to burn down the Federal Courthouse in Portland and the East Precinct in Seattle this summer?
Get back to me when they do it to someone who did not just tell a crowd of terrorists to go over to the Capitol and "save" the country from its own democratic process.
Replying to Chrissnell comment which seems to be flagged.
I agree with your sentiment, and I was there on slashdot in those times. Even though I have nothing for or against the political events happening in the USA. I fear that all these companies are using what happened as a pretext to stop giving service to people with different ideas.
Twitter censoring trump is OK. Reddit censoring some channels is OK. But blocking a chat app from apple/google store? AWS? Stripe? This is exactly what a lot of us fought for ed2k, BitTorrent DeCSS and other technologies: the technology is not bad. And even if we dont like the content, we should allow people with different ideas to talk a out it.
Sure, some of the people at the capitol committed a crime. But it's the same as if companies have banned cryptography because of DeCSS.
AWS laid out the timeline in their letter to Parler:
> "Because Parler cannot comply with our terms of service and poses a very real risk to public safety, we plan to suspend Parler’s account effective Sunday, January 10th, at 11:59PM PST."
Spare us your outrage. A literal mob just overran the Capitol. Attempting to talk about “the mob” in opposition to the actual mobs that are continuing to take over Capitol buildings is frankly so tone deaf it’s almost insulting to our intelligence.
A literal mob took over parts of Seattle and several government buildings. Hundreds of buildings have been burned or looted in the past year during protests. People were killed in the process.
Did anybody think to deplatform the Biden campaign? No, we did not - and rightly so. We accepted their condemnation of violence just as we should accept that of Trump and his campaign.
Biden decried the violence in Seattle. Trump encouraged this riot, and may have even purposefully slowed down the authorization to send in the National Guard.
You don’t get to call me a hypocrite based on stuff you’ve made up.
A literal mob tore apart my city's downtown and looted many of the independently owned businesses and yet it was somehow considered bigoted back then to not continue talking with the mob.
I'm tired of people who have only read one book in their entire lives (1984) trying to explain to me how banning Trump is going to lead to an angry leftist mob throwing me in jail (because leftists have power right?) for speaking.
It might just as well lead to an angry right wing mob throwing you in jail, because you have given up fundamental principles for short term political expedience.
Twitter is currently suspending lots of left wingers, in order to maintain a semblance of neutrality.
Once you allow deplatforming as an acceptable tool, do not be surprised when it gets used against you.
Poor Orwell must be rolling in his grave. Maybe we should wrap him in copper for free power?
For the record, Orwell was a leftist. Yes, 1984 was a warning about the USSR, which he hated, but the idea that he was warning about creeping leftism in general turning into authoritarianism is to really misunderstand him.
For the record, he hated the authoritarian right just as hard as he hated the authoritarian left, possibly more so. He participated in the Spanish civil war, following his own advice that everyone pick up a rifle and shoot a fascist. He was wounded in action by a sniper bullet to the throat.
By the terms of his place and time, he considered himself a libertarian (that word later came to be a right wing phenomenon in America, self consciously co-opted from the left). We’d typically call him a democratic socialist; someone who wanted the government to help solve the “social problem” (where the term “socialism” partially comes from) of poverty and what not, but he was also wary about giving too much power of the government to control people.
He was a complex guy with even more complex political opinions. Sadly our Cold War fueled reading of 1984 has flattened out a lot of his nuance from him.
There was a time when the tech community fought ferociously against corporations and government attempts to censor and silence ideas. In its early years, Slashdot was ardently libertarian, as were most of the engineers I worked with. Can you imagine 1997 Slashdot’s reaction to something like Apple removing Parler from the App Store? There would be protests, DDoSes, editorials from thought leaders, and more.
I feel very out of place with many of the younger folks working in tech today. The majority of them seem to support (or even demand) de-platforming of people and ideas that they disagree with.
This is not a good trend. As you said, the mob will eventually come for you, too.
Other people have pointed out that Trump and much of the GOP just launched a coup, so I'll leave that aside.
Of course it's different from living under a fascist government. A totalitarian government would send you to a prison camp or kill you for saying the wrong thing. The Stasi would systematically and invisibly ruin all your relationships and your career. People who are banned from Twitter can go to another website or start their own. If they're banned from Stripe, they can use Visa or pay in cash. If they are banned from social media, they can hop on any of the numerous right-wing TV stations or write for any of the numerous right-wing newspapers.
Even if this were the government, it would be an exaggeration to say that these actions are totalitarian. There are countries today where you could get locked up for having the wrong opinion that are miles from being fascist. Germany springs to mind, since many people have been arrested for Holocaust denial. Many European countries tick along just fine despite the fact that they would instantly throw the likes of the Westboro Baptist Church in prison.
The American dedication to freedom of speech is admirable. However, it is also an aberration. Since the American approach to freedom of speech is not the norm, we should treat it as rare and precious but also recognize that things would be mostly fine with some restrictions. Cool it with the hyperbole.
The American dedication to free speech only functions when people -- especially those in power -- are acting in good faith.
Trump took the pseudonymous troll culture of the internet to the highest office of government, and this is the result. Trolls and Trump play by different rules, truth and facts are inconsequential -- all that matters is the reaction of their victims.
I have sympathy with Trump supporters that are not in on the "joke". It's not stupid to believe the president of the United States will be honest with them (at least on issues of national importance like "massive" election fraud), but he won't. If you were attracted by his other views (however distasteful), it is a bitter pill to swallow to admit he is a lier.
Americans are lucky their constitution was strong enough to ensure (at least) Trumps tactics to overturn a democratic vote failed.
There's a big difference in wrong opinion and inciting violence. This isn't the government doing this. This is private companies taking action against the spread hate and lies. These are companies I want to do business with.
Where do you draw a line? These days in a snowflake culture any opinion can cause outrage and violence. It's just a matter of interpretation and who reads the message. Should companies be allowed to restrict your freedom to information? It's quite patronising.
This sounds like a slippery slope argument[1], which can be genuine but also controversial when generalized.
Can we talk about individual instance, like those specific to the current situation with Trump or other situations, like "Operation Choke Point," separately or should something like this be only considered with generic rules that do not consider the nuisance and details of any specific circumstance?
Read what you just wrote 3 or 4 times over. Who is the mob? Stripe? A billion dollar company who has one small board of directors who made this decision?
What am I underestimating? The power of a company to deprive people of their income? Oh, you mean every single company on earth?
History is riddled with stories that start just like this? Yes, history has one example of a story that starts with a fascist mob invading the government, and then the liberal mob banned them and then... wait a second that's not how the story went.
...and after winning they promptly put down another attempted revolution, then passed laws against further violent revolution and working with foreign governments against the US:
That is true but from the perspective of the British it was illegal. I'm not sure that British companies would've provided services to revolutionaries while they literally try to overthrow the constitutional order of their country. Sure, they succeeded, got their independence, but when someone decides to literally fight against the country from the inside they shouldn't expect any company to be friendly to them or to offer them any services. As a matter of fact not even the government will be friendly, because they will do everything in their power to maintain order from their legal and constitutional perspective.
What happened on the Capitol had elements that lead to a conclusion that the goal was to stop legal procedures in the country, perhaps even taking elected representatives as hostages. This is different from any other type of "ordinary" riot. Luckily the people there didn't seem to be particularly skillful so they didn't manage to achieve anything. But they shouldn't expect that everyone will forget what they tried just because it failed. There needs to be a serious investigation first to determine how was it organized and what were the goals. Until this is known for sure, everyone should be really careful and that includes the right of companies to ensure their tools are not used for a potential violent government overthrow. What would happen to the revolutionaries if the American Revolution had failed? I'm pretty sure that the British wouldn't just forget it and pretend it didn't happen, even if they managed to stop it quickly before it got serious.
I have seen this exact phrase like 500 times in the past week. Do you guys all read the same books or something?
It's such a huge exaggeration to say that stripe's decision was motivated by a 'mob'... Wait, it was motivated by a mob, the mob of right wingers. And they DID come for me. That's why we ban them from our websites.
It's just pure fear mongering and outrage news to say that liberals are mobbing together to force companies (as if its not ultimately the choice of the company) to ban people, and that somehow this will lead to them turning on each other... and then i'll be sorry i banned Trump? I don't get it.
You are free to create your own far-right payment bank and payment system. The fact that sites like 4chan and Stormfront continue to exist is a sign that no one's speech has been stifled, only inconvenienced.
please quit equating terrorism with “differing opinion”
trump caused his followers to believe the election was a lie, and when they came to protest he egged them on to the capital building where they beat a police officer to death with an american flag while singing the anthem.
they beat him to death with an american flag and trump called them patriots after.
beat him to death sir, these patriots, our president said. wearing nazi tshirts, sir.
differing opinions? maybe you can find a better way to communicate your idea here
Please provide the well sourced news article, or video with the beating of the police officer to death with a flag.
I'm asking because it was claimed it was a fire extinguisher, but other sources said it was a heart attack or stroke that happened many hours after the fact, and the cop had already had well-known health issues prior.
What mob? The one what wants to hang Mike Pence? I'm not a Trump supporter but as a Christian I admire Mike Pence as a person, even before he supported Trump.
If you can't ban a fascist for instigating violence and a coup attempt then your ToS are worthless and all moderation on every website must be made illegal.
>If having the wrong opinion means you can get your bank accounts and all Internet presence removed from you, it's not any different than living under a fascist government.
Calling for the overthrow of the government through violent insurrection isn't an opinion.
I see where you are coming from, but I do not agree that they are being punished just for “having the wrong opinion”.
The Trump campaign just attempted a coup. As in they attempted to seize control of the government by stopping the lawful transition of power. That it failed does not make it any less serious. Should we let them continue to try until the are successful? Let’s not repeat the mistakes of 1920s Germany.[0]
I do not think it is hyperbole to say that Trump and his ilk are fascists, not unlike the Nazis.[1] They are the mob that is coming for you.[2] Do not make the mistake of failing to believe these people when they tell you who they are and what they are about.
Please make your points more substantively than this. Your comment is the fulcrum tipping this thread into flamewar, and that's because the ratio of grandiosity-plus-inflammation to information in it is super high (high is bad).
(I'd make the same reply if you were arguing this way for the opposite position, in case anyone is still worried about that.)
Correct. While silencing him may be satisfying, this road will lead us down a dark path. It is better to suffer a little evil than to loose everything good.
"I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity."
The full thread seems way too coherent and well-punctuated to be not written by a policy-maker/advisor, especially on a matter like US Fiat (put bluntly this is not a man who is either intelligent or interested in things like that)
I think you are missing the point of my question. I’m pointing out that not all opinions should be protected equally. Opinions of hate or violence are bad for society. I don’t understand why the suppression of those things is considered totalitarian? Especially when it comes from private enterprise.
Because if you block 'bad' opinions, you'll need to arbiter them to distinguish bad ones from good. This process is corruptible and eventually you'll find that opposing a current government is 'bad' (this happened in my country in a short span of 15 years). So it turns out that allowing all speech, even 'bad' is less harmful for society in the long run than trying to suppress some speech.
This is a third time today I see this hypocritical nonsense. The definition of tolerance is willingness to accept behaviour and beliefs that are different from your own, although you might not agree with or approve of them.
If you carve yourself an exemption to not accept some behaviour or beliefs, you are no longer tolerant. And you still think that you are, it's just a hypocrisy.
Being tolerant of those who believe differently absolutely does not preclude pushing back against those who are not tolerant of those who believe differently from them.
There's no hypocrisy there.
Acting against intolerance is supporting tolerance.
Some provinces there literally have curfews and police patrolling the street to arrest anyone breaching curfew. Just because it's justified as an attempt to slow the spread ot covid, doesn't make it any less totalitarian.
Temporary emergency measures don't make a totalitarian government. For that matter, similar measures were temporarily taken and then rescinded in the past; proof of non-totalitarianism. Further proof is minority governments and recent changes in governing parties. Totalitarian governments don't have these.
I think further burden of proof on wether Canada is a totalitarian state reasonably falls on those who believe it is. It seems reasonable to accept that Canada isn't totalitarian as a premise, when I say that some restrictions on freedom of speech don't inevitably lead to totalitarianism.
>… you'll need to arbiter them to distinguish bad ones from good. This process is corruptible…
By the time this may matter the most, it is already too late… rubicon has already been crossed. Thus, the one who recognizes this must position themselves to expect any of the downsides that will most assuredly come and to expect society to be of no help at all to achieve such ends.
The problem here, and I am not disagreeing with you or blaming you for this, is the Republican Party spent four decades telling us ceding control of things to the marketplace and private industry was going to make the world better. That they are now hoist by their own petard is something for a better person than me to not laugh at.
And on the flip side, the Democrats have been clutching pearls about the monopoly of big tech, but once big tech starts silencing their political opponents they come rushing to big tech's defense and talk about how much they believe in free markets.
If that does happen, if they were to abandon oversight of Big Tech over this, that would be soulless and wrong. I just don’t see how you know this will happen.
Yes, they were. In the UK, there was fairly consistent opposition to fighting the Nazis. Even after France was overrun, there was a fairly large minority in the UK saying that the UK should surrender and ally with Germany (some of these were right-wing, some of them were not). In the US, unsurprisingly given the huge number of German migrants to the US, there was fairly unanimous opposition which is why the US joined so late. The connection with Britain and France was only really present in the elites of US society, isolationism was the default.
Also, it is worth remembering that what we know about the Nazis today is not necessarily what people knew about the Nazis then.
I think myths about WW2 are quite damaging. Everyone today appears to think that they are in a good vs evil battle. Not only is this quite clearly not justified by the facts today (for example, comparing the Capitol with Kristallnacht, as Schwarznegger did, is a chilling inaccuracy...particularly from someone who hails from Austria), it wasn't the situation then...no-one in WW2 in the US regarded it as a good vs evil battle (only Churchill did, and he was lambasted for it).
It's also worth pointing out that a lot of Nazi ideas about race and social organization came from America. Not all, but enough to make most modern Americans uncomfortable. America had a sizable Nazi party, and eugenics was a hugely popular movement before the Nazis really highlighted the severe downsides of that ideology.
America also turned away a lot of Jewish refugees for similar reasons. Most of the ended up victims of the Holocaust. It's only after the war that the "we had to fight this great, singular evil" emerged.
I really don't think this is it (Yet), but (although the Chinese may take priority sadly) the Orwell's of the future will probably be writing about these companies.
Spare me all of this. All the pearl clutching in here is based on the idea this is for a single wrong thought or one mistake. We had four years of this clogged up toilet of a human trying to set us back two centuries and when someone finally plunged the thing (and I feel weird about Mark Zuckerberg being able to put POTUS in timeout too), all of a sudden Hacker News turns into Killer Mike and is telling me the second after they’re done with Trump they will come for me.
To the HN users arguing in bad faith that Parler was just another Twitter or Facebook, it wasn't. The top posts of the site were overwhelmingly calls for violence, racism, and the spread of conspiracy theories. Parler volunteer moderators curated all dissenting voices on the platform to produce the exact content they wanted (accounts are shadowbanned by default until they are 'approved' for crying out loud).
This is the paradox of tolerance reaching its tipping point. Any sufficiently tolerant society can only be so tolerant until a bad actor becomes so detrimental to the continued function of that society, that they must choose between allowing some intolerance toward the destructive actor or risk losing everything by allowing the bad actor to continue their work.
This is not the patriot act. This isn't Prism. This is a group of people grooming others to shout fire in a crowded assembly hall. Good riddance.
I disagree. Earlier would mean Republicans have more time to enforce consequences. With looming antitrust cases with many big tech companies, this could be construed as a pledge of loyalty.
Interesting point I hadn't considered, but in the face of it, Occam's razor makes me more inclined to believe this isn't a cross-Big Tech conspiracy and more in reaction to the bad press following the Capitol events.
I never said that. I said if you support fascists, you should be afraid. Mitt Romney didn't support fascism. He's a Republican, last I checked. Got any more words you'd like to stuff in my mouth?
I've said this before and naturally downvoted by the suddenly zuckerburg loving anti-free speech crowd, but we really need to investigate the "cartel-like" collusion amongst in the tech industry. Expand that to tech + news collusion for a broader scope.
The behavior of the tech industry is far more of a threat to democracy/unity/etc than trump in my humble opinion. I can't believe anyone even supports it at this stage, but that's political partisanship and propaganda for you. Heck you could even call this a soft tech coup...
Stripe doesn't owe anyone the right to use their services. Just as an airline can bar anyone for most any reason (unless that reason is membership in a protected class[0]), Stripe can do the same.
Interesting to see how the US political establishment is so intertwined with corporate interests that the private sector now openly acts to shutdown a hostile political movement.
No need for things like the Communist act, it feels like these shutdowns were too fast and strong not to be coordinated. Nothing good will come from this sort of thing.
Not to be reductionist but I don’t see this as a totalitarian issue. This is a free market decision. $Company decides to sever ties with another organization. That choice can be good, bad, reactive, overreactive, misguided, etc but it’s still a market participant choice.
Market remains open for other market participants to make other choices.
...which could be viewed as the overall market is deciding not to cater to these views... which is also absolutely legal (and creates a market opportunity for someone else if the group not supported supports it)
It's so interesting when people cheer on censorship because, don't worry, they've been convinced that it's good censorship. Still doesn't change what it is though.
I'm sure anybody that's been censored, dehumanized, and removed from society by an evil regime has been comforted by the fact that the people doing it think it's fine to do it, or because the people doing it are doing it legally. Those facts don't make it right ...
I have a feeling that at least half of people here are using the free market argument ironically. Because until last week it was usually republicans who advocated for the free market, no government regulation, and believing that markets sort themselves out magically. And now they are angry when the free market is going in the direction they don't like.
There are cartel and monopoly arguments to be made that are based on maintaining an efficient free market. This is generally a bipartisan issue, but the sides are taking turns on it.
Of course Stripe does not have a monopoly, but the broader discussion involves major players that can function as a cartel.
I think that Apple and Google should definitely be broken up or somehow regulated because they act as gatekeepers and there are no viable alternatives. Especially Apple where there is no way to even sideload an application. And I say this as an Apple user. But there's no guarantee what would happen even if there were five mobile platforms. In such parallel universe all five would maybe take the same action. However I don't think that other platforms which took some drastic actions last week are gatekeepers and I don't see a point in regulating them (Stripe, Twitter, AWS)
Regarding collecting money there should definitely be some government sponsored alternative solution for quick inter-bank transfers. In my country political parties collect donations by bank transfers. They provide an IBAN account number and anyone can send money to that account from any other bank in the EU. Same with private initiatives. Recently there was an earthquake in my home country which did some damage to a smaller city and most donation initiatives were collecting through bank accounts. The central bank runs the infrastructure for inter-bank communication (basically a clearing house). Right now they are working on a system where you will be able to associate your phone number and/or an email address to an IBAN (basically a DNS-like service) so you won't even need to know someone's IBAN to send them money.
I agree except for the case of Twitter. There may be alternative services similar to Twitter but they are not functionally the same because the broader public does not use it. I consider Twitter as a medium like phone or email that happens to be run by one company.
On one hand it feels completely appropriate and even deserved. On the other, yes, this is unfortunately a path to a very serious totalitarian issue. Situations like this one underscore the future importance of cryptocurrencies.
Without an uncensorable currency, any political adversary -- especially an incumbent -- can just coerce payment processors into blocking payments to their opponents through threats of imprisonment or violence against a handful of executives.
It's easy to donate cryptocurrency to other people. From there getting it into cash can be a problem, but I can think of a million ways of doing it. Privacy technology helps a lot.
These things don't work anymore. They recently passed a law that says all exchanges must report everything that flows through them, and that's just the beginning. If you think those cute stories like selling virtual cats to an anon will work in the future, you're being naive. The government has made it clear what their intent is. They will be regulating crypto circulation through on/off ramps, and every user of those exchanges must do KYC and report where they spent their money. If they do things like what you said, it will now legally be classified as money laundering.
if there's a will there's a way. Just look at projects like bisq and fiatdex. Not to mention the pretty obvious solution of just using crypto as money.
Also, things like I mentioned definitely still work.
You said these things were easy. My point is that it will be increasingly difficult to do so. Your comment about "If there's a will there may be a way" is not the answer because having a "way" doesn't mean it's easy, and that was exactly my point. Tor exists, but that doesn't mean it's easy to do Tor, nor do regular people use Tor.
> Without an uncensorable currency, any political adversary -- especially an incumbent -- can just coerce payment processors into blocking payments to their opponents through threats of imprisonment or violence against a handful of executives.
That has always happened, Visa/Mastercard have been used that way since forever. The Swift system is designed to exercise financial control. Paypal bans anyone for merely looking suspicious to them.
> Without an uncensorable currency, any political adversary -- especially an incumbent -- can just coerce payment processors into blocking payments to their opponents through threats of imprisonment or violence against a handful of executives.
How is this a good faith argument. You’ve jumped a situation where somewhere is being deplatformed and banned from various services for encouraging violence. To someone will use violence to kick someone off platforms. Coercing payment processors in that manor would be illegal. So, how exactly are we on the path to fascism? This is absolutely wild to me, that a textbook fascist being banned from things is being spun as... fascism.
I'd define fascism as a method of government which enforces some specific morality/actions/market through force. By this definition it's entirely possible for two different brands of fascism to have two opposing goals, and for one to use fascist methods on another fascist.
If your definition of fascism is specifically centered around nationalism or racism then this doesn't really work, but I don't think the word fascism implies this, only that fascism is usually associated with regimes using fascist authoritarianism to enforce racist and nationalist ideologies.
Although fascist parties and movements differed significantly from one another, they had many characteristics in common, including extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy and the rule of elites, and the desire to create a Volksgemeinschaft (German: “people’s community”), in which individual interests would be subordinated to the good of the nation
There has been considerable disagreement among historians and political scientists about the nature of fascism. [...] For these and other reasons, there is no universally accepted definition of fascism.
I recognize the definition I gave is different from how most people define "fascism", hence the disclaimer. I will however reject the idea there is actually a single precise meaning to "fascist". It has become heavily overloaded and is primarily used as a derogatory expression, something that dates well back into the 20th century. [0]
By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.
Coming from a very leftist man who fought against Franco's very classically fascist government in Spain for the anarchists and communists, I don't think he said this to protest the far-right from being called mean nasty words.
I agree, there are different flavors and interpretations, which my article did mention. It gave what I'd label to common or core features of most fascist states. I'm sure there's infinite possibility for variation and different implementation details, including the means of controlling the economy and exercising power over others through economic means.
Russian opposition is tamest of the tame, yet, it is routinely deplatformed and prosecuted, guess for what, calls for extremism and violence! And a large portion of population believes that to be true, because government controls most sources of information.
I think US might look exactly same in a few years. The mighty benevolent Party will care for thankful citizens, with the exception of a few outcasts who can't even create a simple website and are laughed at all over the media and social networks. And of course the Party will win all the subsequent elections for the next 70 years.
And it's no coincidence that Russian dissident Alexei Navalny spoke out against big tech conspiring together to censor Trump. He sees exactly what they're doing and knows where it leads.
All big tech has to do now is tighten the screws further, and they can use their new standard to wipe out any challenger from the right half of the political spectrum before they ever gain traction (whether in media, with payment processing, social media, news, tech platforms & hosting; it's all controlled by the same political group now).
This approach by big tech would have prevented Trump from ever having a shot at getting elected in the first place, they would have turned down the volume so nobody could hear what he had to say. Which tells you all you need to know about what's coming next.
The US is a unified structural dictatorship of the left now. Tech. Academia. Hollywood & media. Social media. News. Payment processing. Thought police. Speech censorship. Tyranny will obviously follow. I'm non-partisan, I've never voted for a Republican, but it's obvious the left has acquired a dangerous amount of system power over the country.
Here's a prediction for you: in the next few years big tech will use this same conspired approach to begin behavior 'encouragement' for the wider population. Fat shame someone? No more Gmail account for you. Say something hateful? No more PayPal account for you. Already you'd have 1/4+ of the left wing nodding their heads in agreement that this is exactly the kind of social engineering that should happen (a US form of what China does to its population). It's inevitably what big tech is going to do, because it's very hard to legislate behavior control to pursue the politically correct dream they have in mind (safe spaces for all, so long as it's their type of safe space, by their rules, and their ideas), but it can be achieved through aggressive coercive action using the platforms, and now with these moves they're officially on the political playing field. It'll arrive in the guise of wrapping society in bubble wrap meant to keep everyone safe, and it ends in societal death by suffocation, narrowing and revocation of practicable rights as ever increasing numbers of things become wrong-think (and come with punishment).
Yes, the "left" represented by the Democratic party /s.
Every single thing you've listed is controlled by capital, not by the left. Tech, Hollywood/Media, Social Media, News, and payment processing. Academia is a very partial exception (google "Koch brothers university funding").
Do you think that any of the organizations that constitute these groups are run by social activists? These are overwhelmingly multinational corporations. They care about nothing but profit and the preservation of the status quo. They will appropriate rhetoric about identity politics insofar as it is a good marketing strategy, but they never make a move which is not motivated by their bottom line, which is why none of the tech giants acted against Trump until he threatened the orderly continuation of the system in which they're all invested.
"Left" media is a tiny, powerless fraction of the media. MSNBC and CNN toe the line of the DNC, a right-wing clique that represents only the interests of finance capital, and which, because it has comprehensively rejected any project of improving people's lives in any material way, has been forced into a politics of performative culture war posturing. Any leftist challenge to the status quo can be quelled by capital's complete capture of the media apparatus and government.
When you say "the left", it's very clear you mean social progressives, and nothing else. You're conflating co-opted woke capitalism with leftism, the same way countless liberals do.
You are however, absolutely correct about the coming repression that will be directed against the populace. It will be mostly directed against the left, as has always been the case, but we will definitely begin to see greater brutality in general as the overall immiseration and precarity of the average person continue to ratchet upwards.
In tandem with this, we'll see ever-increasing social policing of culture-war nonsense, as the social unrest continues to play out in a make-believe symbolic realm completely detached from material reality. People will of course continue to believe that it's "the authoritarian left" or "the bigoted right" that is ultimately to blame, depending of which flavour of news media they consume, missing the symbiotic relationship between two parties that both represent nothing but the short-term financial interests of capital.
>>Do you think that any of the organizations that constitute these groups are run by social activists?
it is clear that they are, while they may not be owned by social activists the day to day operations are certainly controlled by social activists
Take the recent effort of google employees to form a union, one not to negotiate pay or working conditions but rather to demand a litany of things around social activism including the power to control the policys and projects of the company
Then there are publishers, tech companies, and universities that continually have their employees protest if their employer engages with anyone that they deem to have "wrong think" see the Reaction at spotify when they brought on Joe Rogan, or reactions to Ben Shapiro speaking at any Campus, or the reaction at Penguin to the publishing of certian books...
To deny these companies are run by social activists is to deny reality itself
>"Left" media is a tiny, powerless fraction of the media.
100% incorrect, the Left enjoys a majorty position in Fiction Media (movies, TV Shows etc), and you can see a clear political shift in narrative of TV Shows.
i like to binge watch shows, even long running shows. So over the course of a month or more I may a long running series back to back, several of them that ran in the early 00's till after Trumps election you can see a clear political messaging shift in them, from an attempt to being "neutral" in their politics to a clear hard left turn.
Further Print News media is clearly Left bias as well probably 70% / 30% left to right positioning
Your lone example of Cable TV news is a weak argument, and if you talk to many conservatives you will find there is a large contingent of people that believe that since Roger Ailes passed Fox News has also taken a left turn...
I think alot of your position is based on the fact that many of these places are "not as far left" as you, or other organizations, but this does not make them "right" either.
CNN is not as far left as MSNBC, but CNN is not right either.
Barrack Obama is not as far left as AOC but that does not make Obama a Republican
> while they may not be owned by social activists the day to day operations are certainly controlled by social activists
Complete fantasy. You're not citing any evidence whatsoever here so I really shouldn't be bothering, but just think this through. When you witness for example Kuerig pull their advertising from Fox News, that is not evidence of some leftist agenda in their management. It is some combination of (a) a response to customer complaints/bad press, (b) an absolute storm of free publicity resulting from the controversy and (c) customer goodwill from the majority of the population. It's exactly the kind of action of the free market conservatives are supposed to be so enamored of. If you honestly think that companies are running socially progressive ads etc. because they are run by social activists, you are (a) just as gullible as all the liberals who eat up that style of marketing and (b) not living anywhere in the vicinity of reality.
You've also cited the example of a union, an organization explicitly in conflict with management, to bolster your argument about the management of organizations being captured by social activists. Absurd.
> if you talk to many conservatives you will find there is a large contingent of people that believe that since Roger Ailes passed Fox News has also taken a left turn...
Someone who would complain about some "left turn" by Fox News is not someone with whom it's worth discussing politics.
> Further Print News media is clearly Left bias as well probably 70% / 30% left to right positioning
Nope. Almost all media is either liberal (read: neoliberal) or conservative. Left wing print media is negligible.
> I think alot of your position is based on the fact that many of these places are "not as far left" as you
My position is not based on the fact that these places are "not as far left" as me. I am not further along on some sliding scale. Yeah, I probably agree with liberals on most social issues. However, I have a qualitatively different outlook to liberals, one rooted in a fundamentally incompatible worldview.
At the end of the day, you've made it clear that the left-right divide is about culture-war issues for you. Some of the repressive apparatus of the state is going to start being directed against the fraction of reactionaries who can no longer be assimilated by the system, but it's not going to approach the level of brutality reserved for e.g. BLM in the foreseeable future. You can continue to enjoy media catering to people totally fixated on the lost cause of relegitimating retrograde social attitudes, because it doesn't pose a threat to people in power.
No one said the left's agenda is the popular agenda. The fact a single news station can be the most popular by being a slight political outlier is just indication of how controlling the left needs to be to enforce their view of reality.
One could also construct an argument about some groups like ISIS recruiting and calling for violence in social media, claiming to fight for freedom and against evil, and create a false slippery slope that America might be equivalent to the caliphate in the next 70 years.
I could argue that with all the defects in the Russian political climate, I would prefer to live that kind of regime than something equivalent to an ISIS caliphate, but I consider both arguments fallacious and more akin to scare tactics.
Reminder that this was the year where right wing militia groups felt confident enough to plot to kidnap lawmakers in Michigan. Anything is possible, and this country is changing.
It pretty easy to see how a law or norm implemented for just reasons can be co-opted for nefarious ones. The US has been doing this for as long as I've been alive. Patriot Act?
I don't think it is a totalitarian issue. One problem is that the SEC and FTC have sat on their hands in the 21st century. There is no competition anymore. At worst this leads to party supporting companies in each market who will still allow it.
Going from bans due to ToS violations all of the way to government coercion of executives through imprisonment is an enormous leap in logic. There's quite a few steps along that path in between.
And if course given that bitcoin has to be sent and received, if we ever arrived at your dystopia, bitcoin would not help: the political rival would simply jail the executive for receiving bitcoin payments instead of USD currency. Bitcoin isn't preventing your dystopia.
government coercion of executives through imprisonment
I think you read this slightly wrong -- drop the government (political adversary != government adversary) and relax imprisonment for threats of violence:
"coercion of executives through threats of violence"
...and we've got something a lot closer to what we already see today.
The very idea that cryptocurrency is an "uncensorable currency" is just fundamentally false, yet is a common refrain of crypto supporters who somehow think crypto can exist outside the realm of government control.
Governments can choose to make anything they want illegal, and they have the guns to back up that decision. Sure, it may be easy to make crypto transactions more surreptitiously, but at the end of the day someone is going to want to spend that crypto on something that has real value, and governments can, and do, control what method of payments are acceptable.
If alternative chat, payment, etc. are prevented from being created, that is not a "free market" decision. This smells like a politically aligned cartel, with key companies enjoying de facto monopoly positions in effect legislating what is and what is not acceptable.
Right now, we haven't heard from ISPs. The entire suite of services that are controlled by the monopoly FANGs can be recreated, including clouds and cloud-fronts.
If that line is crossed as well then we'll have a modern society entirely dependent on information infrastructure that is controlled by a handful of companies with pedigree rooted firmly in the defense and intelligence sectors. You can call that whatever you please, but it will not be pleasant.
It will likely be pleasant for the vast majority of people, who have no objectionable views one way or the other. It might even be better, not having to deal with the constant disruption.
I don't have specific studies to point to ATM but am certain there have been [a few] that have looked at isolating specific aspects of social networks that seem to engender the imo legitimate "constant disruption" that you mention. Point being that keep in mind that simply changing interaction patterns may affect the desired goal of (say) "a civil virtual society".
"Objectionable views" is an objectionable notion for many. And "unified messaging" from monopoly information and communication corporations (owned by an astonishingly small subset of humanity) is not a legitimate source of authority for determining what is or is not "objectionable".
This is the entire point of political systems: resolving conflicts of views and providing a mechanism for harmonious, fair, and productive societies. Unless the plan is to medicate people, in which case sure, a perfectly homogenous body politic may be in your future.
I'm inclined to agree with you. I realize that the term has been abused to the point of meaninglessness, but Fascist economics is defined by corporate monopolies in symbiosis with the state.
To me this just smells like a bunch of companies finally booting people off for violating ToS. Especially given a reasonable argument that President Trump committed a crime, failing to enforce their ToS could open them to their own legal liability for facilitating activity that went against their ToS and is later found to be criminal. Shareholders would sue for securities fraud at the very least.
You could look at countries as being part of a market. If one country decides to ban your speech, you just move to another one, right? But that's not how it works because switching countries is very difficult. We demand free speech from a government even if we theoretically have the option to move.
If you have a colluding oligopoly in something crucial to do business such as payments or communication, where it's difficult to switch due to network effects, being banned by them is like being banned by government.
Payment networks are where the network effects and scale are. Visa and Mastercard have been known to ban people for political reasons.
Payment providers are just a front end for their networks, so it's easy to switch providers like Stripe, but you can still be banned by underlying network like Mastercard and your business will suffer.
To be honest, after all I'm seeing, maybe all of this is a good idea. Maybe what you need is a taste of authoritarianism to really understand why what's happening now is dangerous.
And don't fool yourself. This is cancel culture at another level. All these companies have been wishing to do this for years but they needed an excuse.
First they banned those they deemed to have wrong think from Social Media, crying Build your own Social media, it is a private company...
So they did, but the totalitarians were not satisfied, so then they banned them from app stores users used to connect and find the new service... crying Build your own service it is a private company
So they did, but the totalitarian were not satisfied so they banned them from the network infrastructure used to connect them to the service... crying build your own network infrastructure it is private company
So they did, but the totalitarians were not satisfied so they banned from the payment services used to generate revenue for the service... crying build your own payment service it is private company
So they did, but totalitarians were still not satisfied, still hiding behind the "but its a private company" the totalitarians continue to demand anyone that disagrees with them be banned from all services everywhere all the while screaming that they are not in fact totalitarian, no they are upholding freedom for all...
see in 1984 war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength
As a counterexample: The Pirate Bay have successfully dealt with this sort of thing for many years, and they were subject to much harsher and more sustained censorship. Including legal attacks by various nation states.
Is it really totalitarianism in this case? Or, just some private companies inconveniencing people by choosing not to do business with them?
Trump to this day has an approval rate of around 40%. That is a pretty large “periphery”. You can not just seperate him from the Republican party. They tried and failed.
It'll certainly be interesting to see what happens to the Republican party over the next few years, given that they've ended up tying themselves so strongly to Trump's cult of personality.
> There was always a contingent of "Never Trumpers". Politicians are fickle.
Trump isn't really a Republican, it's just that on some key issues, his position aligns better with the Republican party. The majority of the Republican party was openly anti-Trump in the beginning, then later turned around due to his massive public support.
That hasn't really changed, his approval is as stable as ever. The only people buying into the "failed coup" narrative are the ones that never supported him to begin with. Dropping Trump, as much as the party might want to, is not a recipe for success. Strategically, dividing the Republican party will be the prime objective of Democrats.
Personally I think or rather hope this is a defining moment for both Democrat and Republicans,
It will really come down to what the Democrats do with their current turn in power, The republican party is clearly fractured, if the Democrats attempt to ram through sweeping social and economic changes that appeal to their most authoritarian left base then it will fracture the Democrat party as well
This could be, for the first time since the Wig Party collapsed, that we see an opening for an actual 3rd party to emerge
Except Twitter is for Republicans too. And many of them like Bill Kristol turned against Trump because of his behavior. Many that still support Trump have managed to stay on Twitter because they act responsibly.
The problem with Parker and Gab is that they are only for the problem users. In fact, in an interview with Kara Swisher the CEO said that they have panels of volunteers that judge whether a post should be removed. The blind leading the blind.
Bill Kristol is an Authoritarian, Pro-War, corporatist Republican that does not share much in way of ideology with many social conservatives in the Political party.
Bill Kristol is the type of Republican that turned me away from the Republican party
Bill Kristol is closer in political alignment with the Authoritarian Left, than he is with the Libertarian right which is why he is allowed to stay on Twitter.
While I applaud Pirate Bay for the technological ingenuity that is not an counter example in anyway
The Pirate Bay is more or less a link register today after having been pushed to the point where they can not even sustain hosting torrent files, they can only host mag links.
This is far cry from running an actual platform or business on the internet.
How is it not a counterexample? TPB has user registration, submissions and comments, and a search function. Conceptually, this isn't too different to the function of Parler.
Also, the introduction of magnet links (or more generally, the DHT which those rely on) was a broadly positive move for the BitTorrent community, reducing reliance on centralized tracker servers.
My reading of the situation is that Twitter etc. we're fine turning a (not very) blind eye until President Trump did something that is arguably illegal. At that point self-interest kicked in as they realized "oh crap since he did this with the help of our platform and we've been letting him violate our own rules we may have legal liability OMG ban!"
Heck, AWS hosts the National Enquirer, the publication that tried to blackmail AWS's owner with genital pics. It's difficult to claim anti-conservative bias when so much borderline and over the line extreme right content is allowed to remain.
If there's an appearance of conservative bias then I believe it is because between President Trump peddling conspiracy theories and general hatred of those who oppose him, it simply caused more extremist content to be posted, and therefore more to be banned. It's not bias is there really is a lot more extreme right content.
Interesting, but no, it doesn't change my mind. What I agree with is that the ban decision making process should be open and transparent, which this was not.
The author implies it’s worse to be censored by a company because with government you in theory can influence it with voting... but in practice you have about as much direct influence as reversing tides in the ocean by splashing against them.
All of these silicon valley companies need to realize they live in a bubble. You can't continue doing this and expect it to be recieved well.
Yes the extreme right is ridiculous. But the extreme left is too.
Spend some time outside silicon valley and other liberal hubs. Understand the perspective of others.
I am not in favor of violence. I am not in favor of Trump's behavior. However Trumps stance on policy typically aligns more closely with what I believe than Biden. Behavior like this alienates me.
Again, I do not love Trump. Far from it. But these moves come across not as anti-extreme-right, but anti-conservative.
> But these moves come across not as anti-extreme-right, but anti-conservative.
No, they're anti-"storm the nation's seat of government with an angry mob intent on killing members of Congress and / or the Vice President, as a last ditch effort to overturn a democratic election"
Yes some were violent. Yes those who were violent should be arrested, investigated, etc. But I'd argue half the country doesn't agree that the mobs intent was on killing members of congress. And that's the issue. You view it from that perspective, and from that perspective it makes sense to ban everything. But half the country (likely) doesn't agree with that perspective.
I remember seeing bloody heads of Trump on twitter. That certainly seems a lot more like inciting violence than Trump saying to head down the street. As violence started to break out Trump tweeted that they should remain peaceful. Followed up by a video saying go home in peace.
Huh? You're really trying to compare what some randos do on Twitter to what the President of the United States did on Wednesday?
Really think about it: the President of the United States incited a mob to attack the Capitol to prevent the certification of the vote of his political opponent.
He did this by pushing constant lies and propaganda for months, and urging his followers to "fight" for him. Go watch his speech and then try to tell me he didn't know exactly what he was doing.
> Trump saying to head down the street
I'm honestly flabbergasted that you can see the culmination of Trump's actions from the past year (or however long he's claimed the election would be rigged) as just saying "head down the street".
Do you honestly believe Trump was trying to overthrow the government? Had that been his real intent I'm fairly certain it would have had a more significant outcome beyond people stealing random envelops and podiums.
It was a protest that went too far. We've seen plenty of this occur from both sides in the past year.
He was trying to overthrow the election, yes. The same thing he's been trying to do since November 4th. The fact that it was an incompetent attempt (like all of his attempts) makes no difference.
Rudy and Trump were busy calling members of congress DURING the lock down to get them to object to the count in order to delay the process.. For reasons. I'm not sure what they were hoping to do by just delaying everything.
> Do you honestly believe Trump was trying to overthrow the government?
Yes, just like I think that was the US’s goal in Cuba with the Bay of Pigs. And just as with the Bay of Pigs, the active agents that were sent off were expendable and abandoned once it didn't work.
> Had that been his real intent I'm fairly certain it would have had a more significant outcome beyond people stealing random envelops and podiums.
Murder of a law enforcement officer is a more significant thing than stealing random envelopes and podiums, as is a mob being stopped from harming Congressional staffers and members at several points by only seconds (and in one case by application of deadly force.)
> It was a protest that went too far.
The people involved said online they were going to seize and kill security officers and members of Congress to achieve their goals, they did the first and were forcibly prevented from being able to do the second. It was a violent insurrection that went less far than planned.
The officer was killed with a fire extinguisher. I don't mean to downplay the tragedy of his death. But using a fire extinguisher certainly sounds a lot more like a protest gone too far than a president trying to over throw the government.
Do I need to remind you that Trump encouraged the protest to be peaceful? Then released a video telling everyone to go home, peacefully? Those involved in the violence are being arrested.
"People" online have held up bloody Trump heads, wished for Trump to die. The extreme left isn't this super peaceful always tolerant group. The extreme right isn't either.
The Bay of Pigs is a good example of an actual coup attempt with military training and small arms. Can you see the difference between that and what happened at the Capitol Building?
> The Bay of Pigs is a good example of an actual coup attempt with military training and small arms.
The Bay of Pigs wasn’t a coup attempt, though it was an attempt to replace the government. It was an invasion, support for which was cancelled when the expendable, superficially deniable spearhead force did less well than planned.
And, yes, there are lots of differences between it and coup attempt at the Capitol, which is why I didn’t say they were similar generally, only specific, identified points.
>"In their article “Global Instances of Coups from 1950 to 2010: A New Dataset,” authors Jonathan M. Powell and Clayton L. Thyne provide a definition:
A coup attempt includes illegal and overt attempts by the military or other elites within the state apparatus to unseat the sitting executive.
There are two key components of this definition. The first is that it is illegal. Powell and Thyne note that this “illegal” qualifier is important to include "because it differentiates coups from political pressure, which is common whenever people have freedom to organize."
In other words, protests, or threats of protest don’t count as coups. Neither do legal efforts such as a vote of no confidence or an impeachment.
But an even more critical aspect of Powell and Thyne’s definition is that it requires the involvement of elites."
>"Nonetheless, we should not be surprised that the media has rushed to apply the term to the riot. This phenomenon was examined in a November 2019 article titled “Coup with Adjectives: Conceptual Stretching or Innovation in Comparative Research?,” by Leiv Marsteintredet and Andres Malamud. The authors note that as the incidence of real coups has declined, the word has become more common but with modifiers attached."
> A coup attempt includes illegal and overt attempts by the military or other elites within the state apparatus to unseat the sitting executive.
That’s a rather incomplete definition:
—quote—
Threats to democracy involve officeholders’ abuse of the official powers given to—
them within a democracy through the unconstitutional extension of those powers
either temporally or substantively. This abuse is most dramatic in a coup d’état. The
traditional coup occurs when one part of the state attempts to take over other organs
of the state using force or the threat of force. Because the military represents that
part of the state meant to control a monopoly of force,3 the military is the most
frequent – but not the only – culprit. Other kinds of coups could occur if a head of
government uses unconstitutional means to dismiss judges who deliver unwelcome
judgments (what Dr. Mort Halperin calls an “auto-coup”), or to get rid of an
“uncontrollable” legislature in order to rule by decree instead (another form of autocoup). A distinct but functionally similar threat is of the erosion of democracy, where
officials abuse their constitutional powers to take over gradually the powers of other
institutions, as in Zimbabwe.
> There are two key components of this definition. The first is that it is illegal. […] But an even more critical aspect of Powell and Thyne’s definition is that it requires the involvement of elites
And the attack on the Capitol was both illegal violence and with the involvement of elites, who egged it on because they sought to benefit from it, so what’s your point?
I don't think there were grandmas with thermoses on the beaches in the Bay of Pigs.
Riots are generally illegal by definition. If Trump asking people to go home and respect police officers is your idea of elite involvement, we've reached an impasse.
> If Trump asking people to go home and respect police officers is your idea of elite involvement
No, that's my idea of elite abandonment after the attack had failed, similar to the American abandonment of the pawns in the Bay of Pigs. The incitement by Trump, Giuliani, et al., immediately prior to the attack is my idea of elite involvement.
You failed to mention that Clinton lost 5 electoral votes as a result of those shenanigans, while Trump lost 2. None of the faithless electors voted for the other major candidate. How does that constitute "Democrats" trying to overturn the election?
What's more, Clinton herself was not the one trying to supposedly "disrupt the electoral college vote." If you're going to make up a story, at least make it consistent.
I would like to add too that it's no coincidence that all these extremist groups were at Trump's rally. He has been talking to these people using coded language and rhetorical devices for years. Lots of gross rhetoric at every rally, for years and it's all recorded for people to go back and pour over now.
Then there was the great idea to hold a rally down the road from the capital building on that very day, actively invite a bunch of extremist groups you've been courting for years, whip those people up using inflammatory rhetoric and your greatest hits about the the election being stolen, tell them "Because you'll never take back our country with weakness, because you have to show strength and you have to be strong", and then invite them to walk down to the capital building with you..
And let's tweet this during the assault on congress for good measure: Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution
I'm not sure it mattered if Trump meant for this to happen. He's toxic, and he's dangerous.
I think the poster's point was that you can cherry pick extreme examples from either side to support a desired narrative. If you believe that most of the Capitol Building protesters were peaceful this makes sense. Even if you disagree, take that as a hypothetical and work backwards from there to understand this view.
Several media outlets are highlighting the worst behavior and generalizing from there. Of course the media has every incentive to be sensationalist. There's also a question of bias outside of the motive of sensationalism.
I’m sure they took it into account that certain people would feel “alienated” by this, but weighed it against what has happened over the last 4 years and what happened last week in the Capitol and decided “yep, worth it”.
Personally, I don’t understand how you can acknowledge that you ‘far from love Trump’ (paraphrase) but then consider a banning of his campaign (which is separate from the R party and from conservatism) as against you, a conservative.
Conservatives argued it was totalitarian overreach to force a cake baker to make a gay cake, maybe rightly so even if totalitarian was hyperbolic. Now we’re going to force companies to allow people to coordinate or encourage the overthrow of the entire government and that’s not totalitarian?
There is a difference between bank accounts, Visa/MasterCard access and Internet service, on one hand, and App Stores, Twitter accounts and payment providers, on the other hand.
The First Amendment promises both free speech and free assembly. Core to the latter is the freedom not to assemble. This freedom is regulated. You can’t refuse to do business with protected classes. But political affiliation is not a protected class.
There are utilities, which have limited freedom not to assemble. Then there are private persons and private businesses. Stripe and Twitter are clearly the latter. AWS and Visa feel like the former, though they are legally the latter.
The cost of switching private activity to a utility model is a loss of innovation and an increase in political involvement. We are re-evaluating, as a society, the balance between the freedoms of speech and assembly. Let’s not forget these are freedoms in balance, not a spectrum of tyranny and anarchy.
Stripe isn't preventing the Trump campaign from fundraising. You can feel free to withdraw cash from your bank account and mail it to the Trump campaign. Stripe also isn't prohibiting all Republicans from using Stripe. It seems that the people claiming that this the end of free speech are unaware that demonstrating that freedom of speech can have consequences. In this case, that free speech was arguably inciting an insurrection.
> Stripe and Twitter are pretty clearly the latter.
They might be the latter, but I wouldn't consider it obvious. Regarding social media, we've gotten to the point where even US Visa applications ask for social media handles (and I understand they consider it as a negative datum if you don't provide one). And we're also at the point where some companies won't provide you with respectable service unless you @ them on social media. Regarding payment platforms, generally people expect them to be quite neutral, since getting locked out of the financial system is not exactly going to lead to a great life in the modern digital economy.
I don't know at what point these cross into "utility" territory, and I'm willing to entertain the idea that they might never do so, but I find it quite debatable and very much not clear.
(Note: None of this is to opine on the reactions to this particular incident. Just commenting on the more general idea.)
> And we're also at the point where some companies won't provide you with respectable service unless you @ them on social media.
Real-world example: T-Mobile. Their Twitter and Facebook representatives (called T-Force) have better customer service (they are more empowered to help you without supervisor escalation and fix things faster) than calling 611.
I think that's essentially saying that "Customers who stand in the town square screaming 'T-Mobile sucks!'" get attention faster than ones that send private letters to T-Mobile.
It's sad, but at least we have a digital public square?
You can direct message @tmobilehelp on Twitter and you get access to the same representatives that respond to public complaints, without actually having to publicly complain.
I'm not sure if this is intended behavior (or if it works with other companies), but it solves my problems quickly.
If you want to do this more discreetly and in the old-fashioned manner, probably the fastest thing would be to contact your state's attorney general or equivalent.
I'm confused, payment processors often stop working with criminals, or even non-criminals that are just in "unseemly" industries. PayPal arbitrarily freezes people's accounts for even possibly being scams, why not obvious billion dollar ones?
I have never thought they were neutral when it came to actual crimes. That's so much liability, why would anyone expect them to take it on given how risk averse they are?
PayPal kept doing that so much that regulators (FTC? I forget) finally made them stop holding pseudo-cash accounts for people until/unless people specifically requested it. Laws take time to catch up.
> why not obvious billion dollar ones? why would anyone expect them to take it on given how risk averse they are?
Again: I'm not opining on what they should or shouldn't be doing. All I'm saying is, if you think the fact that it's not a utility is a good supporting argument for this, I'm saying their classification is far from obvious to me. But if you have other arguments to make, I'm not expressing any opinions on them; I'm solely replying to the "it's clearly not a utility" bit.
I would think that because of “know your customer” and other regulations banks and payment processors have to be able to decline business. They can’t possibly be utilities unless we overturn all the anti money laundering regulations. Am I missing something here?
Yes. In general, a utility provider may refuse to initiate service if the requesting customer cannot comply with the requirements outlined in the utility’s tariffs or rules. Utility tariffs and rules are authorized by the CPUC.
Utilities must provide service to any member of the public living within the utility’s service area who has applied for service and is willing to pay for the service and comply with the utility’s rules and regulations. The utility’s duty to serve is not absolute, however. A utility may deny service for good cause (e.g., nonpayment).
To my knowledge, Paypal continues to randomly and often very opaquely freeze people's funds for months at a time or longer, so if you have a link to this FTC ruling, im honestly curious to see it.
Wasn't there a sort-of reverse issue a year or two ago, when the President was blocking people on twitter and a court ruled that he was violating their 1st amendment rights?
Is it exclusively because of his office? Could it be construed the other direction?
They only ruled that way because of the way Trump use(ed) his Twitter account - he used it to conduct government business, the white house themselves said his tweets are ‘official statements.’
Yes, it's exclusively because of his using his Twitter account as an official outlet for government statements.
Trump has appealed the decision to SCOTUS, which is still considering whether or not hear it [1]. Given that Trump's Twitter account is now banned, I suspect SCOTUS will dismiss the motion as mooted.
I don't have a twitter account and login to Facebook once a month. If both went away tomorrow, my life would continue, very much as now. And I think this is true for most people.
If my water, power, or internet was cut off, I would immediately suffer real, life changing inconvenience and hardship.
To me, the difference between these things is incredibly stark.
That is a non-sequitur right? Twitter , Google and Apple via their app stores, and now stripe are refusing to doing business not with a political party. They are refusing to doing business with people who have committed alleged(?) crimes.
The _actions_ by a group of people are resulting in these bans. Not the group's affiliation. Am I missing something here?
The private entities are not the justice department. They are not the judiciary. They are not lawyers and they are not juries. They do not require criminal conviction before taking action. Your question is irellevant.
But to give you a partial answer anyway: Many criminals are never convicted. Many _known_ criminals are never convicted, due to lack of undeniable proof. Some criminals are convicted on lesser crimes, just to get them off the streets. There's plenty of evidence to support the position that Trump is a criminal. He may never be convicted but not because he's innocent.
The question is not “what legal power does Twitter have”. I’m not saying they legally can’t kick him off their platform.
The discussion is whether they should be able to kick someone off their platform who has been convicted of no crime, because of how integral they have become to the political process.
Yes, because you don't have to be convicted of a crime to have done something wrong and regardless it doesn't matter. Twitter can kick someone off for whatever reason they want. That's something currently protected in our law.
On the other hand, there is a legal concept called Common Carriage - private companies that have monopoly are not allowed to refuse service to anyone unless mandated by courts.
If it was a power company shutting off electricity to Facebok, Twitter and AWS, because they disagree with their business practices, we would have an outrage right now about how undemocratic it is.
(And I say this with all my distaste for Trumpism)
Kind of unrelated to the point of your post -- what does it mean when any discussion about current events/politics requires every poster to affirm they do not support a particular political candidate. I don't have an answer myself, I'm just wondering if it's considered somethinf like self-censorship or if there's something else to it. Either way, it kinda feels weird to me.
If someone believes in the principle of "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" they will naturally find themselves defending some pretty odious speech - and gaining the support of people who believe pretty odious things.
After all, a free speech advocate and a neo-nazi would both support the publication of Mein Kampf - but the former might well want to be clear they're not the latter. (and of course, to complicate the situation further, the latter may want to disguise themselves as the former)
As to why you see so many posters affirming they don't support Trump - that's because HN readers aren't Trump's target demographics: Trump only got 12% of the vote in San Francisco in 2020. IMHO it's believable that on HN, free speech advocates simply outnumber Trump supporters.
Maybe these are monopolies, and if they are we shouldn't be granting them special status to entrench them further. We should be looking to open them up and break them apart.
In the case of Stripe cutting off the Trump campaign, I guess you could make the argument that Trump (and therefore his campaign) are indeed alleged to have committed crimes. Then again, Trump is still the sitting president and therefore the effective head of his party (even tho, thankfully, at least some of his party are now abandoning him). I wonder what would happen if the Trump campaign switched to RNC-operated stripe accounts, with the RNC's blessing...
As for Google + Apple + Amazon (+ probably every other cloud provider and virtually every other hosting company) cutting off Parler or refusing their business in the first place: Parler was accused of not moderating "enough". This in itself is not yet criminal, given section 230 (which in this context ironically Trump wanted gone so bad he tried to hold the military budget hostage over it), and the definition of "enough moderation" was kept vague enough by Apple and Google and Amazon that Parler couldn't possibly ever comply if they wanted to.
The same argument about under-moderation can be made against facebook, e.g. when they aided - or even enabled - the Rohingya genocide, which saw thousands of people killed and hundreds of thousands of people displaced. Even the UN directly pointed fingers at facebook. Facebook admitted to their role[1], but came up with a bunch of lame excuses like that they do not really have any content moderators that understand the language.
People dug up quite a number of screenshots (anecdotal evidence) of abhorrent things written on Parler to justify them getting punished. But I found that not really convincing to single out Parler like that. If I went digging on Twitter or Facebook, or could see what people tell each other in Whatapp of Telegram groups, I would find the exact same things. I have reported things on twitter in the past, like people making extremely thinly-veiled death threats or inciting violence, and twitter's response has been sluggish and often in favor of the people talking about "nooses" and "you'll get what's coming to you" in the same sentence.
One of the many issues I have with the arguments equating the Black Lives Matter protests to the Trump protests last week is that people tend to want to compare this one single Trump event to all protests nationwide over a period of months. If we’re doing an apples-to-apples comparison, here’s the Black Lives Matter DC protest: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelsandler/2020/06/06/large-...
...or, conversely, we should compare damage and lives lost during Black Lives Matter protests to all damage and lives lost by Trump-supporting white supremacists.
I didn't mean to imply that anything that isn't a utility is unimportant, but only that (unlike the parent) I think there is a clear difference between social media and actual utilities.
As for your question, probably not. And there is an interesting debate as to whether political candidates should be some sort of protected class. Though I don't think the issue is particularly urgent given that political candidates across the political spectrum (including Donald Trump) still have access to all of those things.
For the most part, payment process, web hosts, and mail providers are interchangeable, so I don't think it is a big deal that Trump can't use Stripe specifically.
Social Media is more complicated. I guess we will see how things develop, but my intuition is that Trump will open a parler account, interested parties will follow him there, uninterested parties won't, and his most noteworthy statements will be widely reported in the media. So, the same situation as when Trump was on Twitter.
If society has decided that your political campaign is so toxic that no one wants to do business with you, should private entities be forced to deal with you if you are not a protected class?
Parler being booted is society's reaction to a movement that has been getting more extreme for the last 5 years.
I'll note the irony that many of the people complaining about companies refusing to deal with Parler are the same people that support bakeries being able to deny the business of people in a protected class.
Doesn't seem like any other groups are interested in supporting them either or else they wouldn't have any issue paying to self host/finding a willing provider.
So the same dynamics that has happened through history when one group is qualified as "untouchable" and any association with them, even if purely commercial, will bring retaliation.
We have to distinguish between those who are untouchable because of circumstances beyond their control (lineage, birthplace, disabilities) and those who are pariahs because of their behavior (criminals, militant anarchists, that mean old guy who sits on his porch with a shotgun).
I have sympathy for the former, but not the latter. While it would be kind to reach out to the latter group and help them mesh with society, there's no requirement anyone has to nor a guarantee the pariahs would want to mesh.
No, we dont have to distinguish that. Your weak premise would justify the discrimination of atheists, anarchists, monarchists, pentecostals,marxists, epicureans... among thousands of other groups.
I dont really understand why it is so complicated.
At individual and private level I can decide who will I spend my time with, who I will invite to my place, go to the beach etc, with no coercion and I expect everybody else to have that right too.
At public level I have the expectation to serve all the people the same (ceteris paribus) unless I am forced by current legislation to not do so (like selling alcohol to a minor).
I would not extend that prohibition to a person who can request my services legally , if the person is going to pay and if he is going to behave like any other customer.
If I manage a 7/11 I would not create an ideological purity test to figure out if I will sell you gas or a soda and I think society will be way better if everybody does that too.
Yes, of course, that's how humans work. But these bubbles are often considered as a singular group moving as one, when in reality they are separate organizations and individuals who agree with each other.
Sure. But my point is that it's not correct to go from "multiple independent organizations think this way" to "basically everyone must think this way", as if those multiple organizations represent a random sample of the population.
In the case of Facebook and Google, their founders have voting majority shares and literally control the companies. It’s not a secret cabal of left-leaning owners, it is a publicly known set of left-leaning tech owners.
I’m not saying they act evilly, but Facebook is literally controlled by one person who cannot be outvoted by every other owner. And Google is controlled by two as well [0].
That's not what the parent poster suggested nor the one you initially replied to. What's being discussed is big tech acting as one given their homogenous political inclinations, and user Jochim thinking this is representative of "society" at large as a way to normalize and whitewash this chain of political censorship.
I agree, that’s why I said “ It’s not a secret cabal of left-leaning owners, it is a publicly known set of left-leaning tech owners.”
Of course the key characteristic of secret cabals is that they are secret.
While I know of no evidence for secret cabals of big tech people, having individual capable of making unaccountable decisions is a different bad thing than secret cabals.
And I responding to someone saying these were big organizations with lots of decision makers. And that’s false for Facebook and google, since they have power concentrated.
Society hasn't decided anything unless you think a self selected group of people now represents the whole society. The Democratic party and its business lackeys decided to remove political in business opposition/competition with impunity and the Republican party being mostly indifferent about it.
You are lumping together two different organizations that are nothing alike as somehow part of the same cabal.
Many different people from many different groups and organizations are reaching the same conclusion about Trump and the rise of violent right wing extremism.
Different parts of society are agreeing, and then in each of these parts there are individuals making decisions.
I'm not the one lumping them together, they lumped themselves together the same way unions and the Democratic party did a long time ago. Revolving doors, clientelism, business opportunities, power struggle,...
There is a clear difference between people clearly going to the same bakery over and over to harass and old guy, and being unable to actually do politics because of the technocrats and their cronies don’t be dishonest and don’t assume things for which you do not have proof.
Not only that but if society decides that the Earth is flat would you agree with any decisions stemming from that, assuming there is a thing such as “society deciding” of course.
I will note the irony about people saying that we should respect society “decisions” when they didn’t respect Trump becoming president since day one . Come on pal drop the dishonesty.
> There is a clear difference between people clearly going to the same bakery over and over to harass and old guy,There is a clear difference between people clearly going to the same bakery over and over to harass and old guy.
Look back a few decades and this is exactly the same argument that segregationists were using. You've basically just said: "That shopowner has a right not to deal with blacks, why do they keep harassing that poor man by trying to buy his goods?".
> I will note the irony about people saying that we should respect society “decisions” when they didn’t respect Trump becoming president since day one . Come on pal drop the dishonesty.
Those people didn't leave pipe-bombs at both party headquarters, call for their own Vice President to be hanged, or storm the Capitol building though. It's both transparent and dishonest to try to equate the two. Especially when you consider that Trump was one of the people peddling the birther nonsense about Obama and that pretty much everyone involved with the trump campaign was actually found guilty of some form of corruption. Trump himself has only escaped charges by virtue of being the President.
Except he was not denying them service just not engaging artistically lol stop being dishonest and trying to compare him to racists that denied service when he only denied artistic expression.
From your comments it is quite obvious that you actually know a lot about the case. However you keep conveniently just leaving things out to fit your framing, please just drop the charade and the dishonesty.
The man offered a service where he would produce a cake for your wedding. The man refused to provide that service exclusively to LGBT couples. There's no charade or dishonesty to that at all and it's just as abhorrent as the people that made the same weak argument about potential black customers during segregation. You can try to pretend it's about "artistic expression" but in the end it's about wanting the ability to discriminate against a protected class that you don't like.
They're enforcing Civil right violations via lawsuit. It's no different then trying to rent from a racist landlord
Speaking of landlords who discriminate, Trump has never done anything to deserve a shred of respect. Long before day one. If anything they're saving gullible people from sending money to a conman
> If society has decided that your political campaign is so toxic that no one wants to do business with you, should private entities be forced to deal with you if you are not a protected class?
I think this is the issue though, right. Elections represent what society wants. If 5 corporations get to decide you’re toxic and that prevents you from campaigning, what regulation will help insure this authority isn’t abused or misused?
I think it’s also worth noting the irony that many of the people complaining that bakers should be forced to bake a cake are supporting stripe being able to refuse service.
> I think it’s also worth noting the irony that many of the people complaining that bakers should be forced to bake a cake are supporting stripe being able to refuse service.
It's only ironic if you choose to ignore the fact that one of those cases involves discrimination against a protected class and the other does not. If you don't ignore that fact then the irony is only applicable from those who were espousing the "free market, free speech" position in the previous case.
Actually neither involves protected classes. At the time of the case, sexual orientation wasn’t protected. Fortunately, it was added as a protected class.
But even if it was a protected class at the time of the suite, I think the opinion was that religious rights (another protected class) come into play.
For me, this seems to expose that some people aren’t arguing from first principles but kind of change their position based on a pre-conceived notion.
So just like people now bringing up that looting isn’t so bad after the capital riot/insurrection were against rioting in situations over the summer.
It seems odd to me, or at least irrational, that someone could be against rioting for BLM purposes but for rioting for conspiracy theories. Or that someone could be against a baker’s ability to not serve a gay couple, but for a hosting company not serving an asshole megaphone company.
So just as people, rightly I think, were arguing that discrimination against sexual orientation should be a protected class and thus illegal; people now are arguing that net neutrality/free speech should have regulation, change in rights.
If you can't get access to a payment provider, you can't launch a business effectively.
Sex workers face this problem. Even in countries where sex work is legal, the payments industry refuses to deal with them (in part because the chargeback rates are high for these kinds of transactions). They're forced to deal in cash and have all sorts of problems because of it (not least the fact that depositing large amounts of cash triggers money laundering regulations, and doing that too much can cause a bank to close the account).
> I don't know at what point these cross into "utility" territory
I think there's an obvious midpoint missing in the discussion between private and utility, which is monopoly, which do have additional set of laws and checks in place precisely for their strength against the free market.
preemptive "there are plenty alternatives so they are not monopolies" - if turns out these alternatives are acting in concert, it configures a cartel, which can get regulated in all the same ways.
the economical concepts behind these events aren't so alien as the folk around made them to be, their novelty is in their application to intangible assets (views and online services) but most of the issues are the same as they were decades ago and the same concepts apply, to the same conclusions.
I feel that right now, there's a lot of people conflating the status quo with the way they think things ought to be.
I've seen a lot of comments that act authoritative about the legal consequences, but heavily editorialized to say "the government shouldn't".
I'm not going to state my personal stance, because it's complicated and frankly, I haven't put enough thought into it to be comfortable presenting it. But, you (the reader) should be willing to forgo your kneejerk reaction (if you have one) and think about the consequences of what you're proposing when discussing changing the status quo and desired legislature to "solve" these issues.
> But political affiliation is not a protected class.
Classes that are protected now, were not protected at some point.
I think the discussion revolves not around whether political affiliation is a protected class, but whether it should be, in a sense- whether what is going on is good or bad for society, not whether or not it is illegal.
You are entitled to believe that it is good, of course.
Quite. This is not a political debate. This is about enforcing TOS which explicitly ban use for criminal acts.
The fact that the criminal is the President of the United States and his enablers is incidental to the principle.
No one wants to ban any reasonable political views. But when a political party organises public mass violence, subversion, insurrection, murder, intimidation of public officers, the attempted overthrow of a legitimate election, among other crimes, that party - and especially its leaders - loses all claims on the patience of the public and on the tolerance of private sector service providers.
Attempts to turn this into a debate about political censorship are not being made in good faith. The reality is that criminal acts took place on a scale that was truly shocking.
Anyone who provides goods and services of any kind to the individuals and organisations responsible has a moral and legal duty to stop doing so - immediately.
> Attempts to turn this into a debate about political censorship are not being made in good faith
But it is political. This summer saw widespread political violence, including attacks on government institutions, not to mention billions in property damage, but the mainstream reaction to that was "Show me where it says protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful"[1] with massive support for the riots from Silicon Valley companies. Kaepernick praised the violence and Dorsey gave him $3m.[2] The double standard is just sickening.
None of these companies severing ties with Parler or other far-right presences are making political decisions. These are all business decisions, because they are businesses. I've explained this elsewhere, but what if a boycott were to start because the company refused to cut ties with Parler? They should just eat the loss? No, in any market, people vote with their dollars, and the vast majority of tech customers just happen to also be politically liberal. This is what we signed up for when we decided to operate in a free market system.
It is funny that you quoted that the arguments are not being made in good faith and then proceeded to make a bad faith argument.
Lets go through some quick fire bullet points, 93% of the summer protests where peaceful, most of the damage was on insured property with no loss of life, the cause of the riots was the unashamed and unlawful treatment of minorities in America. It was a grassroots movement.
Now lets compare that to, a mob that straight away turned to violence, caused loss of life (and bashed the head of a police man with a fire extinguisher), mob had gallows and chanted to kill the vice president, pipe bombs, molotov cocktails and hostage situation zip ties where found on the scene, and it all started from a conspiracy theory that 51 different judges have considered meritless, our congress has considered meritless and the vice president of his own administration considered debunked.
I wonder who is the one with a double standard here?
I'm not sure how to confirm/disprove that statement. I'd posit that most protestors at the capitol were peaceful, but I'm not sure how to confirm/deny that either.
>mob had gallows and chanted to kill the vice president
Where I live "ACAB" is a trendy chant used to devil-ify police
> molotov cocktails and hostage situation zip ties where found on the scene,
I have seen molotovs used at BLM protest
All this to say - it's not black and white; I also feel there clearly is some double standard going on here. I disagree with (what i think is) the premise of the capitol protests, but it does not strike me as that much worse than what people were supporting a few months ago.
> No one wants to ban any reasonable political views.
No one (including the US Supreme Court) has a definition for "reasonable."
That's what has some of us alarmed.
For Trump and his cronies? Sure, there are more than enough actual laws they've broken. But let's justify action against them on actual laws, as opposed to because-SV-doesn't-like-them and has public support at the moment. Or even use the moment to pass new laws, covering the type of behavior we want to make illegal.
Instead, this feels a lot like 9/12, in that people are post-hoc justifying popular actions on a moral basis, to the detriment of legal foundations.
And as we found then, as soon as you decide "terrorists can't be reasoned with and don't deserve rights," then being able to label someone a terrorist becomes a powerful tool...
> Classes that are protected now, were not protected at some point
Creating protected classes significantly curtails neighbouring freedoms while increasing the government’s role in day to day interactions.
One hallmark of existing protected classes is they are somewhat objective (counterfactual: race). Political affiliation is totally subjective. If someone believes in violent death for Blacks, Jews and gays, should a Holocaust memorial group be forced to accept them? If no, then you need someone deciding which groups do and don’t merit protection. And who is and isn’t actually a member of that group.
It’s not impossible. But it has unintended consequences. More than re-delineating the private company / utility boundary. More than expanding antitrust enforcement.
> One hallmark of the existing protected classes is they are somewhat objective
Another hallmark is they tend to be mostly immutable, or unchangeable voluntarily. Society generally doesn’t accept that it’s reasonable for a person to change their gender, sexual orientation, race, age etc in order to participate in all facets of society.
I don’t think political affiliation meets that standard. Although I imagine that some might consider their political affiliation to be as core their identity as religion.
Protected class should. be reserved to things you cannot change. People don't choose to be black, gay, trans etc. They choose their political affiliation and even their religion.
Yet another Hacker News comment saying along the lines of “they are private companies, they can do what they want”
Nobody is arguing what they can do, it’s what they should or shouldn’t be doing.
At this rate, anyone with a differing opinion is required to:
* Build their own social media
* Build their own server hosting
* Build their own bank accounts
Just to get their voice heard without censorship, because “private companies can do what they want”
People here are ok with it, because in their own echo chamber and on the news articles they consume, it seems justified.
Have you ever considered the reason it feels justified is because you aren’t getting the full picture, because anyone who speaks against the status quo is deplatformed and there is no balance in points of view anymore unless you stray away from the mainstream platforms.
> political affiliation is protected from discrimination in CA, NY, and DC
Lawful political activity is protected from workplace discrimination. That’s a far stretch from making it a general protected class, and wouldn’t prevent Stripe from refusing to work with the Trump campaign.
> That’s a far stretch from making it a general protected class,
There's no such thing as a “general protected class”; there are different lists (and different effects of the status) of protected classes in various categories of law (public accommodations, employment, housing, etc.)
The assumption that a government model would cause a loss of innovation seems dismissive of what the government model has brought us in the past (DARPA, Space Program, nuclear energy, etc., etc.)
> The assumption that a government model would cause a loss of innovation seems dismissive of what the government model has brought us in the past
Government program != utility designation. DARPA, NASA and the Manhattan Project were not utilities. PG&E is a utility. It requires political consent to make significant changes.
I’m not saying utilities can’t be innovative. Amtrak and the Post Office are utilities, and they experiment. But they have obligations private businesses don’t, and that slows things down.
Freedom of speech was created when there were many distributed newspapers. If one newspaper decided not to publish your piece, you could go to another. There was not a cabal of newspapers that controlled 99% of information distribution, like do Twitter, Facebook, and Google. This is not something the founders ever could have foreseen.
For all intents and purposes, freedom of speech has flatlined in America. What will bring it back?
Freedom of speech has nothing to do with newspapers or news, and never has done.
It only protects you from government, nothing else.
There are legitimate concerns regarding monopolistic behaviour of large digital gatekeepers. But we don’t solve that by deciding to restrict their speech (which is what forced speech would be). You solve it by either making them utilities or breaking them up to create more competition.
Freedom of speech as laid out in the 1st amendment protects individuals from being arrested or censored by the government for speech. It does not protect individuals who violate the TOS of a private company, nor does it provide blanket protection in all cases of speech. Inciting violence and making false statements of fact are not protected forms of speech under US law[0]
False statements aren’t protected? Then why was “Russia Collusion” speech not banned? Why didn’t Twitter label all of the Russian Collusion nonsense as false? The Steele Dossier was a complete fabrication, but Twitter did absolutely nothing.
Are false statements not false if they come from Democrats? Because that’s certainly how it appears. Sheila Jackson-Lee in 2016 led opposition to the electoral count — even said the election was faulty and unfair. Seditious statements using the current standard of sedition being tossed around.
The hypocrisy is astounding. Can ANTIFA use Stripe? Because they burned down police stations and even assaulted elected officials. The US has become fascist in a hurry — and it isn’t because of any Trump policy.
You don't have an inherent right to a megaphone. Freedom of speech means you don't get in trouble from the government for saying things, not that you have the right to broadcast your message.
If you can you will have the means?
Lmao sounds like you believe popular support is an indicator of correctness and that is very very wrong you should read about Galileo pal
Lmao, pal to you too. Galileo succeeded, we heard his theory and eventually found it more correct than the previous one. And he managed that without Twitter, Youtube or Parler.
Yeah but the suffering that had to take place in order for that to happen was erroneous we should strive to avoid that and not licking Bezzos and ZUckerberg boots is part of a society where Galileos have to avoid trials
So you go on about Lmao pals and licking boots. What it is that you actually propose? That someone who has a publishing platform, they're forced to propagate your message, no matter what it is? And if they refuse? Fines? Jailtime? Pitchforks, torches, white hoods, noose?
>And if they refuse? Fines? Jailtime? Pitchforks, torches, white hoods, noose?
SOrry what the fuck is wrong with you, no, idea why you try to thinly veil your dog whistling, are you trying to imply that not liking to bend over for silicon valley is a sign of liking the ku kux klan. Are you actually comparing or trying to make a cokmparison between lynching and not liking the coordinated power of a few companies?
What is like wrong with you?
I am latino no idea why you even suggest that, but we have legal means to stop powerful corporations from destroying political activists and smaller companies in a day. We should expand those protections to avoid seeing what we have seen. A coordinated attack on political activists and free speech alternatives. If that makes you think about nooses, then perhaps you should read things properly, and maybe get some help.
You can speak all you want in public spaces, on your own property (whether that be your home, your blog or your mastodon instance) mostly without limit.
But Facebook, Twitter, Google, HN or any other private organization is under no obligation to host or amplify your speech.
The government can't censor you and you may speak your mind in public spaces. You may also do so in private spaces, with the permission of the owners of those spaces.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that certain private actors are required to allow your speech. That's not true. They are responsible only to their shareholders and to a lesser extent, their customers -- and in this case their customers are advertisers and not you. You are the product being sold.
If you don't think that's right or fair, then don't interact with those private actors. If enough people chose not to deal with them, they would lose their power and influence.
I voted with my feet years ago. If you haven't, then you're part of the problem and not the solution.
Claiming they are not public squares is correct and says very little.
When capitalism revealed its ability to create abusive monopolies, we created new laws to mitigate those harms.
When the whole worlds discourse flows through a few centralized social media companies, as a society we are free to imagine new legal concepts and regulations to deal with the unforeseeable consequences of these new phenomena.
>When the whole worlds discourse flows through a few centralized social media companies, as a society we are free to imagine new legal concepts and regulations to deal with the unforeseeable consequences of these new phenomena.
Where did I say that wasn't appropriate?
I strongly believe that those big social media companies not only have too much power and influence, but that their business models are exploitative and morally repugnant.
Which is why I don't use them. At all.
In fact, I detailed[0] how I thought this issue should be dealt with the other day.
> Facebook, Twitter, et al are not public squares.
You can speak all you want in public spaces, on your own property (whether that be your home, your blog or your mastodon instance) mostly without limit.
I can't find it at the moment but there was recently a court case where a judge ruled that the constitutional right to Assembly was not infringed by pandemic restrictions (It is illegal in several US jurisdictions to assemble with more than N people in a private space) because people could freely assemble on online platforms like Facebook and Twitter. If the digital public square does not allow for free assembly, and the government forbids you from assembling in a physical public space, then it seems plausible to me that we have constructively eliminated certain constitutional rights.
According to an article posted on hn yesterday, even this is not quite correct (the first amendment can be interpreted to affect state laws, not just federal, and even civil litigation, apparently)
I don’t think there’s much difference. If you argue that companies like Stripe and Twitter should “uphold freedom of speech”, then you’re restricting their freedom of speech.
My right to speak doesn’t override you’re right to ignore me, or refuse to transmit my message.
Now there’s a knotty issue with entities like Facebook and Twitter becoming the primary ways people communicate with large audiences, but people managed before Facebook and Twitter, so they can manage again.
Or the alternative is that we say Facebook and Twitter don’t deserve to have their own speech protected. At which point someone is picking a choosing who deserves free speech.
> It only protects you from government, nothing else.
As I had mentioned in another comment a few days ago, it stands to reason that were the government to outsource the censorship to private entities (like Orban is now doing in Hungary, where almost all the media is in his pockets) than everything would be technically legal, even though it would definitely be against the spirit of the law.
As a matter of the fact the US right does seem to say that the same thing is happening right now, i.e. that the US mainstream media is "in the pockets of the left" hence the censorship.
"For all intents and purposes, freedom of speech has flatlined in America."
No - 'Freedom of Speech' is at an all time high.
The internet gives every single person a giant soap box to stand on.
You can communicate, in public, with anyone in the world.
25 years ago, you had no voice.
Now, everyone can be a 'journalist' or 'agitator' or whatever.
The level of open communication possible today was unthinkable 25 years ago.
25 years ago most people didn't have access to 'most news'. The NYT maybe was accessible by the elite in most towns, but the LA times was not. Now it's all available to everyone.
That is very much the case and the policies of facebook and twitter have changed a lot, evne google removed the "dont be evil" from their ethics. People did much worse int he early days of facebook and twitter and facebook and twitter couldnt do anything because their guidelines werent made to censor things like that, let alone to particularly target a party as they do now.
> If Visa is a "utility," why are we clutching pearls when Trump is banned by them, but not Pornhub?
Visa is not a utility.
I would be open to debating whether they should be one.
The flip side of such a designation is it would likely require the government indemnify Visa against fraud losses. The line between deplatforming for fraud risk (the ostensible reason for Visa’s aversion to porn) and for objectionable content is difficult to draw.
That's what I'm saying. Where was the outrage when Pornhub was banned? If they're not a utility when they kick off Pornhub, how can they possibly be a utility when they kick off Trump? You don't get to have it both ways.
There are plenty of comments on HN in opposition to Visa and MasterCard stopping to work with Pornhub. Volume might not be the same, but that's hardly surprising.
That's exactly my point. People are up in arms over Trump being booted off the platform, but not Pornhub. This is not consistent with arguing that Visa is a "utility."
I buy this argument as the law currently stands, but this is also such a moral double standard (Colorado bakery for instance).
Also, how far do we go with this reasoning? Stripe and PayPal refuse service so they're supposed to "Go build their own" (it costs billions to create a new service like stripe or PayPal that can compare). AWS shut you down? Build your own data center... (Again, costs millions or billions). What if next Intel or AMD decides to not sell you processors? Go build your own fab and develop your own hardware? What if the silicon miners won't sell you silicon, are you now supposed to go build your own mine?
The issue isn't that companies have a right to do it, it's that there are no viables alternatives to these large duopolies, and that "creating your own" is not an alternative.
What happens if the party in power next decides to attack religious organizations who congregate during that pandemic with the same type of concerted de-platforming? What if it's people who advocate against raising taxes who are next as deemed "morally corrupt"?
It's not hard to imagine this type of anti competitive, semi-concerted effort to de platform a new company being targeted at other things in the future. We need laws to catch up to our modern society and either break up the monopolies or put a lot more protections around the types of discrimination that are illegal, which should include political affiliation (this is law in California for employment discrimination so it's not that far fetched of an idea).
For the article in question, they are banning someone who blatantly committed criminal acts against the state. Literally an attempt by the president to overthrow the government. Treason is a crime that's enforceable with a death penalty.
For someone with such deep knowledge of the law you surely must know that a person can be considered a criminal only after being convicted by a court. So in this case the punishment was carried out based on allegations only.
They weren't criminal punishments. They were enforcements of ToS agreements. There's no need for an arrest, a conviction, or even a crime for them to ban users who violate ToS agreements. And, it being their own ToS, they don't need a court or any 3rd party to render judgment: they are the arbiter and interpreter of their own ToS and the enforcement actions taken.
Yeah yeah those ToS, the new founding document of the United States of America.
One little warning from someone living in a real fascist state (Russia). It wasn't always a fascist state, but when it began to morph into one, censorship what what they started with. Of course, it was legal, because it was all private companies, rightfully executing their liberty to not show anyone they don't like...
The rich irony, of course, is that regular fascist masses that support government are brainwashed to think, they it is the marginalized opposition who are fascists.
So the government should instead step in and decide what companies can and can't do with their own services & infrastructure? That sounds a lot more fascist to me than a company saying, up front, "Here's the rules for using our service. Violate them and you can take your business elsewhere."
And considering the ToS citations were I service of a potentially criminal act, fascism doesn't enter the picture: This is as much about these companies' own legal liability if they allow their platform to facilitate potential criminal activity even though it's against their own rules.
As has been said elsewhere, this is not about disagreeing with someone’s political views. This is about not amplifying a voice that incites a mob to attack congress and overturn an election.
And they aren’t even banning people for solely the latter! Representatives who continue to support the president have had no issues.
But when mainstream media published lies to support the Iraq War nobody was banned because to served the interests of the government. Or when Facebook was used as a platform for inciting etjinc violence in Burma. No, this is all about selective enforcement against people we do not like.
For the record I hate Trump and am a European Social Democrat.
Did Twitter and FB's newsfeed exist when the NY Times was spreading their misinformation? (For context - were they promoting what they were told by the gov't, or were they caught lying on their own?)
Mainstream media didn't lie about the Iraq war, they were lied to about it.
Facebook is a US company with a lot more eyes on US activity than in Burma. They're going to see, understand, and react to events in the US much more easily than anywhere else in the world.
That isn't me condoning Facebook's activity here: they need to do a better job elsewhere in the world. What I'm saying is that their failure may be just that: a failure, not selective enforcement.
If political views or personal bias were the deciding factor, Bezos wouldn't have let the National Enquirer continue using AWS after it tried to blackmail him with genital selfies.
The issue here is that the platforms were used in service of activity that was arguably illegal. These platforms' failure to enforce their rules consistently doesn't mean they shouldn't have enforced them in this case, it means they should have been doing a better job all along. If you want to pass laws regarding platforms like this and free speech, it should be regulations that encourage more consistency, not less moderation of content.
I believe common carrier laws don't apply to these platforms. If they did, common carrier laws would still not prevent these platforms from removing users that were inciting illegal acts.
In particular though, common carrier laws tend to apply to services that have been given a special privilege to have for their own use some type of public resource or special privilege. Like broadcasting frequencies or the right-of-way granted to power companies and other utilities. That isn't the case for these platforms.
I think your making my point. Your freedom of speech doesn't entitle you to use it on the stage built by someone else.
Free markets aren't either
Again, that doesn't contradict me. It would take a fundamental adjustment to the legal framework surrounding either user licensing agreements or the definition of public utilities in order to say these companies aren't allowed to enforce their current ToS.
If you want to argue that laws should change, that's fine, but then we're talking about a slider between the definition & right to own private property on the one hand, and freedom of speech using 3rd party's property on the other hand. If you want to slide it more towards the later, you are taking away from the former, and vice versa. I don't know any formula for where that line should be drawn, only that in this particular example I believe the line drawn was acceptable.
Of course we're talking about what should happen; that's even the word you used in your first post.
Public utilities and antitrust are not new concepts, nor is this really a private property issue. It's about power and control over our private lives (which should come first before corporations). The internet has changed everything in less than 2 decades and laws from a century ago are no longer sufficient.
When governments start asking for social media accounts at border crossings, and Twitter claims to be a public square, and even it's CEO says that social media is a human right; we need to address the new digital equivalence of our existing protections.
That is true. But if your buddy is packing heat, wearing a Nixon mask and asks you for a ride to and from the bank, then you don't get a free pass just because your buddy wasn't deemed a criminal at the time.
>For someone with such deep knowledge of the law you surely must know that a person can be considered a criminal only after being convicted by a court. So in this case the punishment was carried out based on allegations only.
You're absolutely correct that in the US no one may be punished by the state without due process. But Stripe isn't a government and refusing to do business with someone doesn't require a criminal trial.
Or are you claiming that Stripe cannot choose its customers unless a court has convicted that customer of a crime?
Actually I think you might have the Colorado case misrepresented here. The baker was ruled in favor due to objecting based on his religious beliefs. Part of this was that he was okay with baking a cake for the gay couple but NOT one that had certain messaging that would violate his faith. [1]
If the baker had altogether refused to bake a cake for the gay couple, it would have been discrimination on a protected class.
> The baker was ruled in favor due to objecting based on his religious beliefs.
No, he was ruled in favor of because the US Supreme Court found anti-religious animus in the enforcement process leading to the State ruling against him.
> Part of this was that he was okay with baking a cake for the gay couple but NOT one that had certain messaging that would violate his faith.
No, it wasn't. The decision specifically notes that he objected to being required to make cakes for same sex weddings entirely, on both free speech and free exercise of religion grounds [0], not that he was willing to do so dependent on messaging, so any such willingness he might have had was not a basis of the decision.
Instead, the Court found animus toward Phillips’ religious views by the state commission that found against him, both expressed in the process and evidenced through difference in how Phillips was treated vs. other bakers in similar cases before the same Commission, which mean that whether or not the law could otherwise have been enforced against him, the specific government act had an impermissible purpose, requiring it to be struck down. [1]
Note: All quotes from Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, 584 U.S. ___ (2018)
[0] “Phillips raised two constitutional claims before the ALJ. He first asserted that applying CADA in a way that would require him to create a cake for a same-sex wedding would violate his First Amendment right to free speech by compelling him to exercise his artistic talents to express a message with which he disagreed. [...] Phillips also contended that requiring him to create cakes for same-sex weddings would violate his right to the free exercise of religion, also protected by the First Amendment.”
[1] “The official expressions of hostility to religion in some of the commissioners’ comments—comments that were not disavowed at the Commission or by the State at any point in the proceedings that led to affirmance of the order—were inconsistent with what the Free Exercise Clause requires. The Commission’s disparate consideration of Phillips’ case compared to the cases of the other bakers suggests the same. For these reasons, the order must be set aside.”
Not to mention they are intentionally sending more LGBTQ customers his way to have him politely say no and refer them to another business, just so they can sue him again, and again, and again...
Indeed he offered the couple any other cake than a custom wedding cake with two men figures on top.
His custom cakes are small works of art. If he'd be forced to create one against his beliefs, why not force a far left painter to paint a favorable portrait of Trump?
And indeed this situation has little to do with Silicon Valley corporations offering generic services to millions of people. They are like supermarkets, who should not be allowed to refuse service to anyone.
AWS isn't like a supermarket. Depending on the context it's better analogised to something like a car rental chain or a large shopping centre. They're providing ongoing, rented, commodity infrastructure that is subject to acceptable use policies.
I think that’s the issue people mix up. He isn’t refusing to do business with anyone because of who they are. He’s refusing to create certain expressions which I should think he has every right to do.
I would expect a Christian cake maker would not agree to accept my money to design a cake that worships satan for example. Likewise I wouldn’t expect a satanic cake maker to make a cake celebrating Jesus.
Would it be right to force an Islamic cake maker to make a cake featuring Muhammad’s likeness?
And literally the Supreme Court decisions stated that he objected to making cakes for gay couples on two separate grounds. To the extent that he may have offered them to make other items, it wasn't part of the basis for the decision, which was entirely about religious animus shown by the Colorado State commission that enforced the law in his case, and not at all about him not actually discriminating because he was willing to do business with gay couples, just not to make the specific cake they wanted.
The fact that something is mentioned in a news article about a court case doesn't mean that (even if it is true) it is part of the basis for the decision. If you want to understand the basis for a court decision, it's best to read the decision itself.
The baker discriminated against the couple but the supreme court punted on ruling on the laws and just said the goverment hadn't acted correctly in that case so threw it out. The law is still on record and baker has to abide by it and stop discriminating against gay couples unless the court someday rules otherwise
I don't see how it's anti competetive. The free market advocates on HN would say that other people will create other companies and gain the market share current companies have turned down. Or that existing niche companies will find an expanded market serving them.
It's also important to note that companies aren't cutting ties with Trump because of his political ideology, they're cutting ties with him because there's a strong argument he broke the law, and they don't want to be in the awkward position of facilitating that, especially as it could open them to their own legal liability.
We could say there is a strong argument Joe Biden and his family broke the law, and indeed there's a criminal investigation into Hunter and associates.
However not only did all the big tech companies not withdraw support for Biden or prevent his campaign from using their apps, they doubled down and censored the story so most voters would not hear of it before the elections.
Again, big double standards at play here from a moral sense.
The larger issue here is that the internet really isn't so decentralized as it used to be.
There's like 10-20 major companies that control the majority of services people use, or the underlying infrastructure that powers the whole internet. This goes against the original design of the internet which meant it to be fully decentralized so no single entity or small set of entities could prevent the flow of information.
We should try to go back in that direction, either through competition and free markets or by enforcing it via existing or new regulations to prevent situations like this from ever happening again.
The Hunter Biden conspiracy has been debunked dozens of times over. That’s why the companies haven’t withdrawn support for his family. Trump, OTOH, has pushed the boundaries of acceptable his entire presidency, and has almost certainly broken the law in the process many time.
I can do a quick google and find so many journalists in twitter saying the story is debunked! What do you want twitter to do in the face of such overwhelming evidence coming from twitter?
For what is Hunter being investigated for? According to several articles, its for tax and money laundering which is not at all what everyone was making a fuss about a few months ago (the laptop/emails, which reminds me of Hillary and "Her Emails!").
Given that there's uncertainty around it, can we really conclude that "they broke the law" and that it's unfair that big tech did not withdraw their support?
>What happens if the party in power next decides to attack religious organizations who congregate during that pandemic with the same type of concerted de-platforming?
I didn't realize that Stripe's actions were due to a government order. Probably because they weren't.
You're conflating a private organization's decisions with government action. If the government were to attempt do as you suggest, the courts would slap them down hard.
It has happened before and recently too, so it wouldn't be exactly be shocking. Sneaked in with other stuff, they told the banks to fuck with sellers of Tobacco, Porn and Drug paraphernalia.
> Operation Choke Point was a 2013 initiative of the United States Department of Justice[1] which investigated banks in the United States and the business they did with firearm dealers, payday lenders, and other companies believed to be at a high risk for fraud and money laundering.
> This operation, disclosed in an August 2013 Wall Street Journal story,[2] was officially ended in August 2017,[3] and the FDIC settled multiple lawsuits by promising to Congress additional training for its examiners and to cease issuing "informal" and "unwritten suggestions" to banks.
>If the government were to attempt do as you suggest, the courts would slap them down hard.
The issues around Operation Choke Point[0] that you linked to were investigated by Congress and the Department of Justice and, as I said, smacked down hard.
The above isn't analogous to the current situation, but the result was exactly as I said it would be.
Some elements of Operation Choke point were shut down hard, others never even got enough due process to see their day in court. We recently made the prime actors of one of these initiatives the vice president.
But when the limited collection of players in the system all act in concert to prevent access to opponents of their preferred political party, isn’t the effect nearly the same? Arguably worse, because there’s no legal recourse. I think that’s the point being made here.
Imagine all the airlines were run by Republicans, and they universally prevented anyone who works for Democratic leaning organizations (Eg ActBlue) from flying because some small number of bad actors on their side did some bad things.
We would do well to imagine what it would be like to be prevented access with no legal recourse to an an oligopoly of services that cannot practically be bypassed, and ask ourselves what potential for abuse exists when such impactful decisions can be taken without standard legal due process.
>But when the limited collection of players in the system all act in concert to prevent access to opponents of their preferred political party, isn’t the effect nearly the same? Arguably worse, because there’s no legal recourse. I think that’s the point being made here.
What evidence can you provide to support your claim that various corporations are colluding to block folks?
What evidence can you provide that said corporations have a "preferred political party?"
You have no such evidence. What's more, whether or not the nebulous set of entities to which you refer (let's have specific names and specific actions).
I'd further say that "cloud" (read: someone else's servers) services, a few large social networking sites and a small subset of payment processors (I'm guessing that this is the set of corporations to which you were referring since you don't bother to be specific) do not constitute an "oligopoly."
I'd further add that there are hundreds of hosting and co-location providers, dozens of payment processors and a variety of mechanisms to share data, information and messaging.
I find your diatribe to be sorely lacking in evidence, reasoned argument and factual information.
Finally, your analogy concerning airlines is deeply flawed, as that isn't even close to what's going on.
Please provide some evidence for your claims.
Otherwise, I can only conclude that you are arguing in bad faith.
some previous names for cloud compute entities were "grid compute" and "utility computing". some veneer of old-school small fries still exist thank the stars but absolutely, more & more of the internet is powered by the hyperscalers. absolutely terrifying seeing the scales keep tilting heavier & heavier towards fewer & fewer options.
Very well said. The critical point is that society is constantly balancing different factors. Sometimes, the balance has been good enough for long enough that we don't even see it. We were in that situation until Trump arrived. During that time, we grew accustomed to talking about our liberties in a way that lacks any depth or nuance.
> But political affiliation is not a protected class.
Perhaps these bans are happening not because of political affiliation but due to the messages these particular people (e.g., Trump) are espousing.
Parler go banned because it's full of message calling for (e.g.) Mike Pence to be hanged and other such things, and Parler isn't / can't do much about it, and its infrastructure providers (AWS, app stores) do not want any part of it per their ToS.
No one has cut off Mitch McConnell because he hasn't been calling forth angry mobs to storm Congress (or the White House).
Twitter is flooded with calls for violence 24/7. Exclusively left wing celebrities openly call for violence all the time on there, nobody does anything about it. That has been going on for the past four years non-stop.
Actor Peter Fonda called for violently assaulting Trump's underage child on Twitter in 2018 (his account was not permanently banned), and that's very typical posting from leftist celebrities on Twitter these past four years.
Thousands of violent posts were in the "Hang Mike Pence" Twitter trend that was going on the other day. People have been openly calling for executions for treason and similar on Twitter in relation to the Capitol riots. There was widespread cheering and celebrating when that woman got shot in the neck by Capitol Police, I read thousands of Tweets that were literally cheering for her death, all on Twitter, and nobody gives a fuck.
The double standard by Twitter is beyond disgusting. It's psychopath behavior.
Maxine Waters called for her supporters to harass government officials. She’s still on Twitter. A Bernie Sanders supporter ambushed and shot a US Congressman and yet no penalties to various Sanders organizations. Supporters of convicted spy Jonathan Pollard are on Twitter. Mumia Abu-Jamal, a convicted murderer of cops is even on Twitter! AOC stormed and occupied Pelosi’s office in a climate protest in the Capitol and she’s on Twitter.
Notice a pattern? Left wing heroes can say anything they want and Twitter doesn’t ban them.
Your rather terse language is doing a lot of heavy lifting for those false equivalences. Applying the rationale behind Twitter's recent decision to these other cases is an exercise I shall leave to others.
> Then there are private persons and private businesses. Stripe and Twitter are clearly the latter. AWS and Visa feel like the former, though they are legally the latter.
Twitter and Stripe are acting in coordination - literally conspiring - with every other big tech company to take a specific action. When they do that they're acting as an illegal cartel and must be prosecuted accordingly. This is the kind of coordinated cartel behavior that banana republics and third world countries have that behave exactly like these companies are and do so out in the open (and always with the political support of the group with the most power, to target their foes). We're supposed to have anti-trust laws to deal with conspiring mega corporations.
> AWS and Visa feel like the former, though they are legally the latter.
Back in the day, you had to rack your own servers in your own data centers and manage them yourself. Had any of these 'free speech' services spent any time considering how reliant they were on 3rd party services, they should never have engaged those companies in the first place.
There was a day when you had to build your own servers to host your own websites. Not that long ago, imo.
Gab does this- they run their own servers and payment processing. For better or for worse, they have remained online and seen a huge uptick in traffic [0] while Parler has been kicked off every cloud vendor. I suspect Gab will displace Parler as the QAnon crowd's platform of choice.
> But political affiliation is not a protected class.
The ongoing purge -- would it not be seen as treason, as an act to in fact subvert/weaken a position of POTUS and therefore directly destabilize the US government?
It is incredible that people on HN can be against Visa/Mastercard banning payments to Wikileaks or Pornhub, against PayPal making arbitrary decisions about their customers, but somehow in support of Stripe banning Trump. All of these companies are providing utility services, and they should all be regulated as if they were public agencies. They should have to uphold the freedom of speech and other principles enshrined in our system of laws, because these organizations are so powerful and influential that they might as well be government agencies. The services they provide are completely fundamental and necessary today, and the fact that they are operated by private entities does not mean that we cannot require them to do what is right by implementing our nation's founding principles. If we can regulate power utilities or force all businesses to shutdown during a pandemic, we can absolutely update our laws to regulate these companies, require them to uphold the first amendment, and provide due process. We should also definitely revamp our anti-trust laws and break them up where possible, so that there is real competition and choice.
it's not incredible. It's pretty much an open double standard at this point, because political leftism is seen as the only true ideology a rational person can have. The rhetoric about conservatism is increasingly casting conservatives as vulnerable to irrational forces like fake news or algorithims that can override their will and make them believe patently absurd things.
If you are conservative or lean to it, its incredibly disheartening. You have to consistently justify to these people you aren't brainwashed, because their default idea is that you are. Sort of the same way about serious religious belief if you have one; people default assume you are nuts and at best you can work your way up to "he's nuts but he is our nut."
It's scary to me, and to be honest my political views are starting to move towards "limit the power other people can affect you as much as possible" because its now evident how people will happily deplatform any unpopular person beyond the real justification. I can buy removing Trump's speech due to incitement, but it keeps going and going-like we literally see fox news next, and what then?
Pretty much agreed and I am probably more to the left than almost everyone here. I have seen way too often people who normally want to regulate corprotions (just like I want) suddenly become corporate fanboys in support for unregulated capitalism as soon as some big corporation shut down a voice they did not like. Personally I hate the hypocrisy and also think that the cure might end up to be worse than the disease.
The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.
I'm so sad today. I came from a very left-wing background, becoming conservative gradually over decades. I've learned to self-censor and keep my ideas to myself along the way to keep the peace, hoping the many left-wing people in my life would eventually see how intolerant they were becoming.
Looks like my choices are to stuff everything I believe down deep inside and hope I can participate in society, keep a job, support my family, etc. OR to speak up and risk losing everything. This is the true mob to fear. Everything is being torn down to get the "bad guys". Everything.
> But political affiliation is not a protected class.
This is a distraction. Political speech enjoys the highest level of protection in the US, political speech is one of the primary motivators behind the existence of constitutionally protected speech in the US.
To be honest, I firmly evaluate this behavior as negative irrespectable of the legal issues. It might look clear in the case of Trump. Freedom of speech is something civil society defines and the refusal to let people speak is something I regard very negatively. Never would have thought to say something like this in 2015, but the opposition to Trump looks inept as does this behavior from Stripe. They just didn't have an answer, so they just needed to ban him.
It’s not a legal issue. People and companies have the freedom to put what they want on their websites or not.
Trump just stood up and asked for his people to go to the capitol - one of his former campaign managers called for beheading members of government.
Calling out his lies - a la politifact and many others - hasn’t worked to deradicalize. Fact check verifications next to the content haven’t. So - just shutting off the calls for violence and lies are the next step.
“Opposition to Trump looks inept”(?) The opposition just swept congress and the presidency, crushed the popular vote, and even members of his party are strongly against his actions. Ineptitude is the Trump’s legal challenges against the election and the “4 Seasons Total Landscaping” fiasco.
Trump can raise funds in many ways. He can get checks. No one is required to allow someone to raise funds on their site - let freedom ring!
I didn't work because you didn't understand the nature of the opposition. It is true that it the freedom of companies to ban people like they want to, as it is for any other side.
I don't think even the last election was a success for democrats to be honest, it was a pretty close call. But that is another metric. Trump became president and had his full term. I don't think past you would call even the current situation a success, you just reduced your expectations.
The supposed fact checkers had a clear bias and couldn't establish trust. That will take some time to get back and I doubt democrats will have success with programs that require any form of solidarity because you still define yourself as opposition to Trump. There is still a huge and solidified division. Hard to govern, but we will see.
"We are re-evaluating" - I imagine for many people it's not re-evaluation but learning for the first time, people who haven't critically thought through any of this - of what freedom of speech means and its boundaries or how the relative sovereignty of private businesses is a feature, and it's not you being persecuted if they remove unwanted users; the private companies aren't preventing free speech, these people can still speak freely in America and on the internet - just not on the platforms that don't want the incitement of violence, etc. on their platform.
When we're talking tech giants, like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and so forth, it strains credulity to think that there isn't some connection between what they do and currying political favor. Politicians are holding a big hammer over the heads of these giants, in terms of laws, regulations, and even tax and trade policy. On paper, they are private enterprises making decisions that are within their right, as opposed to governments censoring speech and prohibiting association. The reality is almost certainly more complicated, and involves nuanced levels of political pull, "understandings," and backroom deals.
These tech giants have made themselves into a lattice on which modern society attaches itself, and their pervasiveness will only continue to grow in 21st century America. We risk them being in bed with government. And when nominally private, major industry is aligned with government to effect political ends, there's a word for that, and we've seen that before.
Non-US-citizen here: Isn't the first amendment protecting private people and entities (e.g. newspapers) from government influence into free speech?
Private companies deciding not to service the head of the executive seems to be nearly the opposite of that, unless I understood this wrongly (which is entirely possible). Think of a newspaper (=private entity) decides to boycott a president and not write anything about him. Wouldn't it be the polar opposite of free speech if the president then had the power to force them to write about him?
I get that a payment service is not the same as a newspaper, but it is still a private entity.
1,052 comments
[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 571 ms ] threadJust create your own online shop bro
Just host your own platform bro
Just host your own videos bro
Just make your own DDoS protection bro
Just make your own ISP bro
Just create your own law firm bro
Just create our own payment processing bro
Welcome to the free market at work! Sometimes market forces work against you but you don’t get to complain about it.
(I agree with you. The logical conclusions are sad.)
Maybe they could have used some of that money to do just that?
There's plenty of money to at least try.
However, forcing people or organizations (which are groups of people) to host or support speech/activities they do not wish to support restricts the rights of those people/organizations.
If you can force them to give up their rights, others can force you to give up your rights.
I can't support that at all.
What's more, the idea that there's some sort of conspiracy/cabal that spans every corporation, industry and profession to murder free speech is a pretty far-fetched one.
There's an old saw that says, "if everyone around you appears to be an asshole, perhaps it's you and not everyone else."
Not obligatory but apropos:
https://xkcd.com/1357
Section 230 says:
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
So how can a company have free speech rights regarding content if they aren't the speaker?
Section 230 refers to the ability of one party to sue over the speech of a third party. That's not in play here at all.
Rather, this is about freedom of association.
Stripe can associate (do business, in this case) with whom it chooses (with some restrictions[2], but this isn't one of them), and that freedom of association is protected by the constitution[0].
[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt1_2_13_1/
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group
Instead, I would respond that freedom of association is considerably more limited than other rights. Soldiers, students, jurors, prisoners, etc are often forced into association with people they would rather not associate with, and businesses are legally forced into association to protect the rights of other people. When there is a conflict between freedom of association and other rights or government interests, freedom of association rarely prevails.
So forcing businesses to associate with someone in order to protect fair elections or free speech rights wouldn't be incongruous.
A fair point. How would you apply that in this case?
I'm not being snarky, I just don't see the relevance of applying your (correct in certain circumstances) reasoning in this particular case.
But the general principle I would apply here is that people who own important infrastructure shouldn't be allowed to interfere in elections (Trump 2024 in this case, I assume) by refusing to allow candidates to use that infrastructure.
I don't think that's controversial in the case of, say, electricity or phone service, and it seems reasonable to apply it to payment processing as well.
1. When it comes to political actors, forcing a person or organization to support a specific candidate (who isn't even on any ballot at the moment) amounts to political coercion and is antithetical to a free society;
2. Which candidate do you hate the most? If what you were saying was reasonable, then you could be forced to provide material support for that candidate. How would you feel about that?
3. Stripe is not a utility like electricity or the phone company. Nor are they anywhere close to a monopoly. In fact, Stripe is just one of many players in that market[0];
4. Not only does the Donald Trump Campaign (a specific "candidate") have other options for online payment processing, online payment processing is not the only way to collect donations. As such, in addition to the dozens of other payment processors on the market, Bank transfers, Western Union, Zelle, CashApp, old fashioned checks and money orders, cash etc., etc., etc. are also available.
You've got this all backwards. Political activity/speech is strongly protected in the US -- no just positive activity/speech, but negative activity/speech as well.
And if the government can force Stripe (or you or me) to provide support to a political actor, then all of our rights are being impinged.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_online_payment_service...
> Which candidate do you hate the most? If what you were saying was reasonable, then you could be forced to provide material support for that candidate. How would you feel about that?
Absolutely fine, if that "material support" was merely providing the same business I provide everyone else, at the usual cost. To me, paid services are not "material support", a phrase I would only use to describe in-kind contributions (that is, services provided for free).
And 99% of businesses already act that way. The local office supply store doesn't discriminate based on politics. What's backwards about expecting big tech to act like other businesses?
> Stripe is not a utility like electricity or the phone company. Nor are they anywhere close to a monopoly... [candidates] have other options for online payment processing
That's an important point, and here's the rule I would propose to account for it: treat refusing to do business with a candidate while doing business with their opponent as an in-kind contribution to their opponent. If the cost of finding an alternative is small, denying services will be allowed as a small in-kind contribution.
I'm not a lawyer and I'm talking about how I think things should work, not what the current law is, but I believe that's the legal principle behind the Equal-Time Rule, so it's not entirely legally unprecedented.
That's as may be. However, US Federal law doesn't require them to service anyone except in specific circumstances[0].
There are some state laws that extend to political affiliation, but that's almost always just in employment decisions and not B2B transactions.
If you think the law is wrong (I do not), you can advocate for changing the laws. I won't support your efforts, but I will and do support your right to do so.
Which is what you seem to want taken away from others.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group
I certainly don't want anyone's right to political activity to be taken away. I just don't want the weight of their opinion to be related to how much they own.
How else can forcing people to provide support (whether that support is compensated or not) for a political entity be interpreted?
Doing so would reduce the political rights of those affected.
And reducing those rights for to one group means they can do that to you or to me. You can't eat your cake and have it too.
Actually, I think campaign finance limits expand political rights as it gives more people a more equal say. In fact, I support banning campaign contributions altogether and moving to publicly financed campaigns.
Because that not only gives more people a more equal voice, it also gives more people the opportunity to run competitive campaigns without deep-pocketed supporters and/or deep-pocketed political parties.
>For the same reason, I'm opposed to unlimited in-kind contributions, and also to censorship and "reverse boycotts".
I'm also opposed to the first two. Quite strongly, in fact.
As to the first, I have no problem with volunteering (time is a resource and, as such, could be considered an "in-kind" contribution but I'm okay with that) or using one's own resources (cars, phone minutes, electricity, etc.) while volunteering, but not much beyond that.
As to the second, censorship (that is, government censorship) is always wrong. However, private persons or groups have every right to control their freedom of association and the speech they allow on their property.
However, I'm not really clear on what you mean by a "reverse boycott."
I'll hazard a guess that you mean multiple product/service providers refusing to do business with a specific customer. If that's what you mean, I'm not sure I can fully agree.
Not because I don't believe in freedom, but just the opposite. Because forcing anyone to associate with someone they don't want to associate with (within the limits set out for protected classes[0]) reduces the freedom of those being forced.
And I believe that to be especially true when it comes to political actors and issues. Primarily because forcing someone to support political speech/beliefs/actions with which they disagree is an affront to our free society and the ideals of free association and political choice.
My apologies If I misunderstand how you define "reverse boycott," and I'd appreciate being corrected.
Thanks.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group
Edit: Added the missing link.
I believe Trump supporters, especially the QAnon weirdos, are wrong to believe the things that they do, but they are less wrong than the people who supported the Soviet Union during its genocidal reign. Unless people are charged and convicted of a crime, their livelihoods should not be taken away by the whims of these powerful companies selectively enforcing their rules. McCarthyism was wrong then and it's wrong now, even though its targets are wrong too.
Internet businesses are natural monopolies and being banned from one can ruin your life without trial in a way that was unprecedented for private companies to be able to do in the past. In the near future somebody who is banned from both Paypal and Stripe will be close to being perpetually unbanked in some lines of work. The way progressives have cheered on giving tech companies this much power over our lives has been dispiriting
What solution do you propose? Take away the right of association from one group of people to enable another group?
That seems strange to me. If you allow the government to create a precedent where you can restrict the rights of anyone, then you can restrict the rights of everyone.
That idea makes me very uncomfortable.
No. I'm not. Please don't put words in my mouth.
I'll try to boil it down to as few words as possible:
If the government can take away your rights, then they can take away mine too. I don't support that and will defend your rights as vigorously as my own, whether I agree with you or not.
As for the example you give, bakers don't have to bake a cake for gay weddings.
>If the government can take away your rights, then they can take away mine too. I don't support that and will defend your rights as vigorously as my own, whether I agree with you or not.
This applies to Stipe and Paypal too. They can arbitrarily prevent anyone from operating an online business. The libertarian view that you should care more about their right to do that than individuals who will lose their livelihoods with no recourse, is something I'll never understand and we'll never come to agreement on.
I'm not sure why you bring that up, since that's not a position that I've advocated, nor is it one that I support.
I find your repeated strawman[0] arguments quite tiresome.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
Can you give me an example of something that has happened recently in regards to QAnon where their first amendment rights may have been violated?
I agree. No one should take Stripe's civil liberties away from them.
I'm not seeing the parallel to Stripe choosing who they want (or don't want) to do business with.
Especially since there is no "blacklist" circulated and used by everyone in that industry.
Stripe doesn't owe anyone the right to use their services. Just as an airline can bar anyone for most any reason (unless that reason is membership in a protected class[0]), Stripe can do the same.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group
I only think it's morally wrong.
All the Hollywood studios (a bunch of different entities) conspired with each other not to hire those people.
Stripe is a single entity and isn't (AFAIK) working with others on the payment processing industry to block a specific set of people/groups.
And it's protected (and IMHO, should be) because it's a political organization -- Stripe has the right (as do you or I) to choose whether or not they wish to support (verbally, financially or through other material methods) any particular political party, policy position or candidate.
Let's say that you own a business that makes t-shirts. And you strongly support candidate X. Should you be required to make t-shirts for candidate Y (candidate X's opponent)?
And if you chose not to make t-shirts for candidate Y, is that morally wrong?
Why must it be through an online payment processor?
My bank will send payments for me. And I can write a check and mail it to whoever I want.
you don't really believe what you're saying do you? that's like telling blacklisted hollywood writers and actors that they can make their own plays in their backyards
We're talking about a candidate's campaign fundraising operation. Which is odd in and of itself, because as far as I know that candidate isn't actually running for any office.
You've moved the goalposts far enough, haven't you?
Except there isn't a duopoly in online payments. In fact, Stripe is just one of many (and not anywhere near the largest) payment processors[0].
[0] https://www.business.org/finance/payment-processing/largest-...
No, it's not a private business.
> They were within their rights to make a blacklist
No, making an agreement in restraint of trade is a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
They didn't do that, just like the tech giants are not doing that now, as they take the same action at the same time against the same target.
Neither publication not open admission are necessary for a combination in restraint of trade to be illegal, and you'd usually want to avoid them since they make it much easier to prove.
We live in a digital age. If having the wrong opinion means you can get your bank accounts and all Internet presence removed from you, it's not any different than living under a fascist government.
What are you, nine years old?
Be sure to always agree with your new ruling party, and vote as they say, or you might find yourself to be a nazi lover, too.
I do wonder if all these bans do is make people angrier.
Are sure this is a good example to use against it being a slippery slope?
FFS, I’m not even a conservative but I have backbone and know I would be furious if this was the other way. Why is ideological consistency so rare?
But seriously, how is mounting an insurection a slippery slope? At this point I get the feeling that a lot of people posting here are apologists for domestic terrorism and it worries me.
There are violent people and they think like Timothy McVeigh. That should worry you. It should worry you even more if they can find like-minded friends like Terry Nichols on cesspools like Parler.
What a great way to shut down any discussion. Anyone who doesn’t agree must be terrorist apologists?
If you read these comments and all you can see in anyone not posting full throated praises of this purge are people defending terrorists, consider taking a break from the discussion and come back when you’re ready.
Maybe easier for you to dismiss concerns your fellow technologists might have, when Big Tech's largest companies unite to completely destroy a competitor with millions of users in a single day, based on the actions of a tiny sliver of its users.
"What's the difference?" you ask, I assume non-ironically.
I wonder, let's say if a politician started a fund to bail out the arrested protesters, would you consider them complicit in the violence?
And, yes, if a politician started a fund to bail out these fascist protestors, they would be complicit.
It’s about violence. And that bail fund? That was Kamala Harris.
> Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/) is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society and of the economy which came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe. [0]
This is what Trump wants. This is why he's tried to overturn a democratically held election. This is why he's incited his followers to riot.
You seem to be assuming I'm a Democrat. I am not.
BTW, I love how you've disingenuously implied Harris funded bail for the DC protesters. She did not. It was for the BLM protestors, who, are clearly not fascist, if you look at the definition.
---
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism#Definitions
You want to make it solely about the right, and the term fascist is thrown around against many on the right regardless of how non-fascist they may be, often times immediately followed by violently attacking them on the street.
I didn’t say Harris funded bail for the DC protestors on the 6th.
In fact, Harris funded bail for rioters who were much more violent than what we saw on the 6th. The BLM riots caused over $2 billion in property damage, killed dozen of people, and maimed hundreds. Police officers, and Federal courthouses were a notable target. Also the Whitehouse on at least one occasion.
> In fact, Harris funded bail for rioters who were much more violent than what we saw on the 6th. The BLM riots caused over $2 billion in property damage, killed dozen of people, and maimed hundreds. Police officers, and Federal courthouses were a notable target. Also the Whitehouse on at least one occasion.
And, for that, I give her credit.
While the casualties are regrettable, I'm not sure why you even mention them here.
Property damage? Pffft. Who cares? That's what insurance is for.
Would you be ok with Stripe stopping payment to the GOP?
Has the GOP, specifically the GOP, advocated for the violent overthrow of the United States Government?
> My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub. ~ Grover Norquest
-Rudy Giuliani, 1/6/2021
The transcript and the speech is available here: https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/rudy-giuliani-speech-tr...
Over the next 10 days, we get to see the machines that are crooked, the ballots that are fraudulent, and if we’re wrong, we will be made fools of. But if we’re right, a lot of them will go to jail. Let’s have trial by combat. I’m willing to stake my reputation, the President is willing to stake his reputation, on the fact that we’re going to find criminality there. Is Joe Biden willing to stake his reputation that there’s no crime there? No.
There is also a pause around the trial by combat comment that is not evident in the transcript so its probably worth listening to the speech to get the full context.
EDIT: Is HN so far left-leaning that I get flagged in under 5 minutes for asking this? Sorry, I'm not American, it's possible I missed something here.
Kind of hard to know where the line is drawn between "declaring as your leader the man who advocates for a violent overthrow" and "advocating for a violent overthow."
And if they can't, well, we all know Republicans don't trust filling out documents (i.e. ballots) when it isn't done in person. So perhaps the best solution is for supporters to drive to their local GOP office and hand deliver the cash.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
- Martin Niemöller
The end.
Poor guy believed even in the gulag that Stalin was still good and in no way responsible.
Based on pressure from the public, a few powerful Tech Moguls have acted as judges within their private jurisdictions, which just so happen to encompass some of the most important infrastructure in the modern world.
What if these Tech Moguls get it wrong, and start denying your tribe the services of the modern world?
Anyone who thinks this issue is simple is confused. These are new problems of the modern world. Solving them probably requires new laws.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
We ban accounts that use HN primarily for political battle, regardless of which politics they're battling for. We have to, because otherwise this site won't survive for its intended purpose, which is intellectual curiosity.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stop doing this, we'd appreciate it.
If those fighting against a coup fail, then we're fucked anyways.
Can you point me to any part of the history of the United States in which the POTUS hasn't spoked to the VPOTUS in days? Especially days after murders happened in our capital.
All of the deplatforming is completely warranted.
The wrong opinion being the fascist attempted coup of a democratic government
There are wrong opinions, and then there is “six million Jews were not enough” and “hang the Vice President”, and a violent mob attacking the Capitol. No one is under any obligation to tolerate such actions in a civil society.
If I advocate for your murder, am I just expressing an opinion that should be consequence free if someone kills you? Does that change if enough people agree with me that you should be killed?
Point to the leader of a political party that instigated the attack you speak of.
"Both sides" doesn't mean all things are equal, just that they're comparable. The BLM riots this Summer were far more deadly and destructive, and the response to them was very different. Violent protests should be denounced by everyone. Period. I cannot figure out when we collectively decided it was fine, so long as it was the "right" side.
No, but he did whip a crowd into a frenzy and then direct them to March to the capital.
> "If you see anybody from that (Trump) Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere."
https://www.npr.org/2018/06/25/623206039/congressional-leade...
It’s pretty hard to argue she doesn’t mean to remove them by force.
They're "coming for" police reform and transparency.
Please don't misrepresent or generalise very disparate groups of demonstrators.
Please don't misrepresent or generalise very disparate groups of demonstrators.
Do self-identified Antifa just spontaneously and simultaneously decide to engage in identical acts violence? Is there some remarkably prominent commie Schelling point us outsiders aren’t privy to?
[1] Yes, I'm aware of how murky that sounds.
While there may be no central leadership, there are definitely organized chapters. That's exactly what they would like people to believe. And yet, they seem to act in an incredibly organized fashion...
None of those things happened? That is your position?
This is, we'll go with dubious. Probably true at this point, but the protests had been going, relatively peacefully for close a day, and then less peacefully, with police having repeatedly tear gassed and fired rubber bullets at protestors who weren't doing anything violent, and didn't appear to have any violent intentions. Reports obviously differ, but many concluded that the actions of the police, in attacking the protestors, are what escalated the situation to violence. Compare from [1], and I think this "who is escalating" question becomes clear and relevant.
Which is to say that while the protest ended violently, I think you'll be hard pressed to find widespread intent that it be violent from the start.[2]
So again I'll ask: do you believe that the protesting in Minneapolis was formed with the intention of committing violence against police officers?
On the other hand, do you believe the insurrection at the capitol, which had participants openly advocating for violence for days, was formed, with the intention of committing violence against elected officials?
I find the attempt to draw a parallel between a situation where it took 3 days of getting teargassed for protestors to become violent and one where it took...a speech from the President.
[1]: https://twitter.com/LiteraryMouse/status/1347873482550468609
[2]: https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/07/us/police-response-black-live...
[3]: https://www.apmreports.org/story/2020/06/30/what-happened-at... is my source for the timeline, which appears to be a fairly evenhanded account, noting that some city council members had already proposed abandoning the precinct for more than a day before it ultimately was.
Can you source these in the case of BLM? That's what I'm missing. Preferably equivalently specific plans, which amount to "our intent is to physically harm police officers and destroy a police precinct" at a minimum.
> how long the violence took to kick off, or who made the first escalation don't strike me as very relevant.
I think they're highly relevant to discussing the goal of the protests. If a group of protestors shows up and demonstrates peacefully, but is eventually goaded into violence by the group they're protesting[0], that's very different from a group that essentially immediately attacks the people they're protesting.
And, of course, all of this entirely assumes that both groups have equally valid concerns, which is just plainly not true and important to realize. If you're going to take a stance that violence is absolutely never valid, that's an interesting opinion that I don't believe I share. But if you're of the opinion that violence may be an acceptable response to injustice, well, there's a whole lot more reason to believe that BLM protestors have justification for their claim of injustice than stop-the-steal protestors.
[0]: I'll reiterate the importance of this, in general, especially with police tactics that escalate and force violence, such as kettling. While I don't think that specific tactic was present at the 3rd precinct events, tactics that escalate violence are often used against BLM protestors, to predictable results. The fact that violence was reached quickly and without any of those tactics at the capitol speaks to, I think, a different mindset.
I'll take a crack at this. I could just site your own post where you say the following:
" If you're going to take a stance that violence is absolutely never valid, that's an interesting opinion that I don't believe I share".
It kinda seems like you are at least implying that you support the violence that happened during those riots. So your post right here would be one example of people endorsing violence.
> people endorsing violence.
Note how you've shifted from "advocating for" to "endorsing" and what I asked for was 'specific plans, which amount to "our intent is to physically harm police officers and destroy a police precinct"'.
So can you explain how my statement that, hypothetically, violence may be acceptable in some situations, is a specific plan to harm police officers? With the added assumption that such people should then, you know, show up and do a violence. All of those things were present with Parler. Unless you're claiming that
1. I made statements specifically advocating for violence against in advance of the 3rd precinct protests
2. I then showed up to those protests and committed acts of violence (or, alternatively, I have a large enough following that my followers did the same)
You haven't done what I asked.
Feels like a weird thing to push back on. You kinda admit that you personally might support the violence. If even you admit this, then really you should not be pushing back hard on this assumption that other people also supported it.
It should not be an out there claim, that other people supported the violence, when you are kinda implying that you support it yourself.
I just don't think that you should act flabergasted, or surprised, or indignant, or demand large amounts of specific evidence, at someone making a claim that other people supported or wanted violence to happen, given that you kinda are saying that you support it yourself.
> The context we're in is advocation for violence prior to the events
"Nobody advocated for violence before it happened, but now that it did happen I definitely think that the violence is justified!" feels like a pretty poor argument to me.
If you are going to imply that the violence was justified, then really you should not push back on this idea that other people thought it was justified to, and endorsed it prior to the event.
> support it yourself.
My (hypothetical!) lack of objection to generic violence is not the same as active planning and encouragement of specific violence. And I find your repeated attempts to equivocate between the two rather confused.
I'm asking for examples of the second, the active specific planning and incitement of violence. You're avoiding engaging with that request, likely because, as I believe, you can't find examples of that kind of behavior.
Yes there are varying levels of support. But frankly if you are going to take a position that is kinda moderately in favor of violence, then you really should not be pushing back so hard at the possibility that there are other people who were a bit more supportive of the violence than you are.
That is what I am pointing out. I'd put you at a 5/10, on the "is this person trying to justify the violence that happen". So if an average/random person such as yourself are going to moderately support the violence, then you really should not be so flabergasted at the suggestion that there were other people that were closer to an 8/10 on the "do they support violence" scale.
My argument is that, well no, both sides aren't the same, as shown by the fact that only one set of protestors was openly advocating for and planning to attack people. The burden of proof is on you to show that they both sides are in fact the same. I obviously can't prove a negative, and so far you haven't provided anything concrete.
Actually, after rereading the original comment, I'd have to say not some people. Instead Id say you specifically. You specifically pretty much tried to said that the violence was justified.
Ex: you said this, which is a not so subtle attempt to justify the violence:
"of the opinion that violence may be an acceptable response to injustice, well, there's a whole lot more reason to believe that BLM protestors have justification for their claim of injustice ".
> well no, both sides aren't the same
Specifically you, kinda do seem at least to be pretty similar to the "other side" actually, after rereading your comment, in that you attempted to imply that the violence actually was justified, and that it therefore "may be acceptable".
Your comment was a pretty clear attempt to say that this violence could have a "justification" that would make it "acceptable".
1. Someone says "lets go attack the police" and then proceeds to go attack them.
2. Someone says "yes I can understand why someone got in a fight with the police after being attacked by the police"
Because I'm asking you to give examples of (1), and you're going on about (2).
No, not "understand". Instead you implied that it would be justified and also acceptable.
In this situation I really would not consider you much different than the other side if you are attempting to say that the violence was justified and acceptable.
If you are saying that it was justified and acceptable, which your comment pretty clearly seemed to imply, then I would consider the difference between you and "the other side" to be very small to the point where the difference doesn't matter that much.
That's pretty close to advocacy for violence to say that it was justified and acceptable.
I want to be absolutely crystal clear about one thing: I have never, not in this comment thread, nor anywhere else, advocated for people to engage in violence against the police. It is frankly insulting for you to insinuate that I would do so, or to state that there is essentially no difference between me and people who planned and executed an attack on congress.
What I pointed out is that you basically said the violence was "justified and acceptable".
Those were your words, when you used the words "justified" and "acceptable" in your original comment to generally describe that violence in general. I didn't make you say that.
Or howabout permanently blinding some of the cops with lasers? Is that violent, or is that just asking for a funding change in the police department?
The pigs in blankets quote is from a peaceful 2015 protest. Trump lied about it in a Presidential debate.
The officers sight returned.
Edit: in response to this, you provided a video that doesn't include
> throwing IEDs at cops while hundreds of people chant "pigs in a blanket fry em' like bacon" and try to set fire to the building the police are in violent?
As far as I can tell, it's someone throwing a firework at the side of a stone building, which while not a great idea isn't endangering anyone. And "fry em like bacon" no where to be found.
Please don't spread lies.
IED: https://youtu.be/dm_lZxmPxUU
As for that chants: go to any of the videos of the various occupations from the summer. If that really does come from a 2015 march instead of 2020, fine, but go to any video and find the same activity (arson, assault, IEDs, lasers) and chants like "no justice no peace".
Good question.
Like with all the mainstream media that 'reported' in front of the federal buildings and businesses that got looted and burned down, the shootings in the CHAZ/CHOP areas and the continuous riots and chaos all over the summer last year as seen on Twitter, they told me that there was 'nothing to see here' and it was a 'mostly peaceful protest' which everyone knows is absolute BS.
Both the GOP and Democrats instantly condemned the Capitol riots, but as for the summer riots, but not a single condemnation from the media of those events or even the Democrats disavowing the summer riots in June that are still continuing to this day.
The outrage did not fit their narrative. Neither did it fit their definition of what they think a 'mob' is, since the main culprits behind it were BLM and Antifa, as usual.
With the current state of the right wing in the US, there is a clear and present danger of us losing our democracy. When you look at the statements about the election from last _June_, or the purges at the Defense Department last fall, it is clear that this nonsense (and it is nonsense, 59 court cases and counting) about election fraud was premeditated, and so was this coup attempt. This is the Beer Hall Putsch, and it’s a mistake to see how lucky we got and say there is an equivalence to protests against police violence.
Assuming you’re arguing in good faith, what you’re missing is that the outrage from this event isn’t about the five dead people, tragic though that is. It’s about the fact that armed protesters just walked into the Capitol Building while Congress was in session. We are very, very lucky we don’t have dead congresspeople. What do you think the mob that beat a police officer to death with a fire extinguisher in the Capitol building would have done to AOC if they’d gotten to her?
We cannot afford to make the mistake Weimar Germany did. We cannot assume that because this failed the problem is gone. We cannot appease these people, we cannot treat them as benign. They must all be identified and prosecuted, and their enablers in Congress must be expelled from our governing bodies.
[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-nw-capitol-po...
[2] https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/us-capitol-police-a...
Is this really true? I’m tempted to charge the entirety of the post-summer urban bloodbath to the BLM movement. This represents an increase of 3-4000 deaths over the prior year.
> BLM is not about overthrowing the government, and has never posed a credible threat to it. Even if BLM overthrew the government, no one has been talking about mass executions.
This is sidestepping your point somewhat, but Antifa (who figured prominently in the protests) do explicitly avow both these things.
I agree that there is a destroy-the-government black bloc present in some of the BLM protests. It’s a fair thing to point out, but I’ll say this: they’ve never had a chance or a credible threat. It’s really a false equivalence to compare a terrorist attack on the Capitol incited by the ruling party in an attempt to overturn a democratic election with seven months of mass protests against police violence.
> they’ve never had a chance or a credible threat
Agreed. But neither did the Trump rioters.
[1] http://ibgvr.org/philadelphia-shooting-victims-dashboard/
I don’t agree the folks involved in the terrorist attack last week were not a credible threat. If they had succeeding in kidnapping and executing congresspeople, which was both possible and clearly the intent of at least some people who made it into the Capitol, things could have turned out very differently. Something like a third of Congress still thinks we shouldn’t do anything about this - the conditions are ripe for a coup; just because it failed doesn’t mean it didn’t have a chance.
Same accusations were made against peaceful many time in history.
There is also evidence of police instigating violence: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/26/opinion/blm-p...
At the end of the day, we must also recognize that corporations are still run by humans. Those humans make decisions within the context of their own biases and interests. Those interests are also legal requirements in some cases.
It's a tough situation, but even companies which do not have a legal requirement to do so, should be able to express their own views, and be accountable for them. I believe that actions (or threats) by Trump towards twitter earlier on expresses how the Government at the time thought that social platforms should have some accountability.
> "We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016. We can't let a more sophisticated version of that.... happen again." ..... Trump
Also when 5 members of Congress were shot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_United_States_Capitol_sho...
We've even got a New York State Senator claiming: "Seeing the Twin Towers crumble is no longer the most frightening moment of my life,” tweeted state Sen. John Liu (D-Queens).
https://nypost.com/2021/01/09/ny-state-sen-john-liu-explains...
Schumer also compared the event to Pearl Harbor: https://twitter.com/dailycaller/status/1346991088301715456?s...
Like really? https://i.imgur.com/ysWxd8f.jpg
A couple of hundred people attacked the capitol in a crowd of 500,000+. Do you remember the phrase 'mostly peaceful protesters'? We've been hearing it for 8+ months after violent riots in major cities which resulted in 30+deaths, hundreds of innocent people attacked, and 1 billion+ in property damage.
"There are wrong opinions, and then there is “six million Jews were not enough” and “hang the Vice President”, and a violent mob attacking the Capitol. No one is under any obligation to tolerate such actions in a civil society."
Antifa and BLM have taken over multiple state and federal buildings over the past 8 months. In June, for instance, multiple fires were set all over DC. A church was nearly burnt to the ground and the President had to go to an underground bunker as a result of the threats outside the white house.
Unlike the protests in January 6th (which was an unorganized mess of random people), BLM and Antifa are professional rioters/criminals. They wear masks to protect themselves and have corporate backing from large left-leaning organizations.
Instead of concern, local leaders painted BLM and named a major street after them.
I'm not sure why you only seem to care when it's Trump supporters. Political violence is wrong on both sides, but only one political not only supported it, but paid the bail of rioters and continue to deny that it even exists. The real criminals are about to get into office.
"If I advocate for your murder, am I just expressing an opinion that should be consequence free if someone kills you? Does that change if enough people agree with me that you should be killed?"
You do realize Trump never said any of this, right? Him and his entire campaign have denounced the violence repeatedly. If you listened to the speech before the capitol was attacked, it was not full of any sort of energy. He basically said that it was all in Pence's hands. Supporters were actually angry because he sounded so defeated. This doesn't sound like the actions of someone trying to storm the Capitol.
The media+tech companies+incoming administration are censoring and destroying their political opponents for things they themselves have been supporting and instigating for 4 years.
If it wasn't so scary, I would call it pathetic actions from limp-dick journalists.
Let’s call what happened last week what it was: a terrorist attack against the seat of government perpetrated by the ruling party in an attempt to overturn a democratic election.
You need to take a serious look in the mirror and ask if you’re the bad guy. As arch-conservative a figure as Mitch McConnell describes this as a failed insurrection and you make excuses for it.
Minimizing it to just wrong opinions? NAMBLA, look it up, is still around so stating this is about wrong opinions is ignorant.
I’m fairly certain that attempting to overthrow the government to get your desired election result is fascism. Saying we will have a trial by combat just before telling protestors to head to the Capitol sounds a lot like a call for violence.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/giuliani-rally-speech/
I can't believe I'm actually going to go to this topic, but your argument has been made before with the Reichstag Fire [1]. Using threats of violence as a pretext for assuming more government control is a tactic as old as governments.
> The Nazi Party used the fire as a pretext to claim that communists were plotting against the German government, which made the fire pivotal in the establishment of Nazi Germany.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fire
Private companies using their liberty to deny service to the leader of the United States government seems like freedom to me.
But the argument that taking away power from people because they're "fascists" isn't like fascism is not a strong one. These people are supposedly an existential threat to the fabric of America, and there absolutely is not a single group that hasn't simultaneously deplatformed them.
It suggests a question around who really holds the power here.
There's a bit of false equivalence here. The fire was, on one hand, a false flag (from the very link you posted), and on the other hand, a stroke of luck.
Whereas here, it was an attempt at taking human hostages (reference: the many more recent videos of insurrectionists with human zip ties and small arms) and disrupting election certification with human shields in the form of a mob of conservative protesters. Which by every definition would be an attempted coup.
And don't get me wrong, I'm saying quite explicitly that there were legitimate, Trump-believing protesters in the crowd who either got swept up into the moment or genuinely fear for the state of the country but who were not in it to overthrow a legitimately elected government. However, within the crowd were people who came equipped to overthrow leadership followed by blending right back into the crowd, and they coordinated on platforms such as Parler with impunity, which is precisely why deplatforming the platforms is the appropriate next step.
It's not because of everyday conservatives who feel duped. It's because of the conservatives who came together to enact violence and disrupt the democratic process.
And those 75M voters are not able to receive communication from a person they voted for and want to hear speak. They can't buy things from stores that are selling ordinary, run of the mill political apparel. The servers and apps providing social media--protected under section 230 just like AWS, Apple, and Google--have been banned.
It is not the extremists who are receiving the brunt of this purge.
And if the extremists hadn't stormed the capitol and been supported (Trump literally said "we love you.") by certain folks, those who are being inconvenienced (and yes, it's just an inconvenience) wouldn't be.
If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.
Edit: Fixed wording of old saw.
Spare me the "poor me" act.
Game of Thrones???
> We live in a digital age. If having the wrong opinion means you can get your bank accounts and all Internet presence removed from you, it's not any different than living under a fascist government.
Just to rebaseline, in this case a mob infiltrated the dais in the Capitol, and this mob's opinions included speech not just disagreeable to public corporations but unprotected by the United States government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
The facile sophistry of comments like yours is becoming obnoxious. An actual fascist mob already came for us last week and we were not protected, get it?
There can be interesting intellectual arguments about whether this was the right move but breathlessly calling ToS enforcement by private companies a “mob” while ignoring an actual mob with lead pipes, guns, and bombs ain’t it.
I agree with your sentiment, and I was there on slashdot in those times. Even though I have nothing for or against the political events happening in the USA. I fear that all these companies are using what happened as a pretext to stop giving service to people with different ideas.
Twitter censoring trump is OK. Reddit censoring some channels is OK. But blocking a chat app from apple/google store? AWS? Stripe? This is exactly what a lot of us fought for ed2k, BitTorrent DeCSS and other technologies: the technology is not bad. And even if we dont like the content, we should allow people with different ideas to talk a out it.
Sure, some of the people at the capitol committed a crime. But it's the same as if companies have banned cryptography because of DeCSS.
> "Because Parler cannot comply with our terms of service and poses a very real risk to public safety, we plan to suspend Parler’s account effective Sunday, January 10th, at 11:59PM PST."
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-p...
According to my watch, it's a few minutes past 17:30 PST.
"Give me liberty or give me death"
A literal mob took over parts of Seattle and several government buildings. Hundreds of buildings have been burned or looted in the past year during protests. People were killed in the process.
Did anybody think to deplatform the Biden campaign? No, we did not - and rightly so. We accepted their condemnation of violence just as we should accept that of Trump and his campaign.
You don’t get to call me a hypocrite based on stuff you’ve made up.
He Tweeted everyone saying to be peaceful and go home.
Twitter censored those Tweets. Presumably to fit the narrative you have swallowed.
Twitter is currently suspending lots of left wingers, in order to maintain a semblance of neutrality.
Once you allow deplatforming as an acceptable tool, do not be surprised when it gets used against you.
For the record, Orwell was a leftist. Yes, 1984 was a warning about the USSR, which he hated, but the idea that he was warning about creeping leftism in general turning into authoritarianism is to really misunderstand him.
For the record, he hated the authoritarian right just as hard as he hated the authoritarian left, possibly more so. He participated in the Spanish civil war, following his own advice that everyone pick up a rifle and shoot a fascist. He was wounded in action by a sniper bullet to the throat.
By the terms of his place and time, he considered himself a libertarian (that word later came to be a right wing phenomenon in America, self consciously co-opted from the left). We’d typically call him a democratic socialist; someone who wanted the government to help solve the “social problem” (where the term “socialism” partially comes from) of poverty and what not, but he was also wary about giving too much power of the government to control people.
He was a complex guy with even more complex political opinions. Sadly our Cold War fueled reading of 1984 has flattened out a lot of his nuance from him.
I feel very out of place with many of the younger folks working in tech today. The majority of them seem to support (or even demand) de-platforming of people and ideas that they disagree with.
This is not a good trend. As you said, the mob will eventually come for you, too.
The early denizens of the 'net were very homogeneous relative to today.
Of course it's different from living under a fascist government. A totalitarian government would send you to a prison camp or kill you for saying the wrong thing. The Stasi would systematically and invisibly ruin all your relationships and your career. People who are banned from Twitter can go to another website or start their own. If they're banned from Stripe, they can use Visa or pay in cash. If they are banned from social media, they can hop on any of the numerous right-wing TV stations or write for any of the numerous right-wing newspapers.
Even if this were the government, it would be an exaggeration to say that these actions are totalitarian. There are countries today where you could get locked up for having the wrong opinion that are miles from being fascist. Germany springs to mind, since many people have been arrested for Holocaust denial. Many European countries tick along just fine despite the fact that they would instantly throw the likes of the Westboro Baptist Church in prison.
The American dedication to freedom of speech is admirable. However, it is also an aberration. Since the American approach to freedom of speech is not the norm, we should treat it as rare and precious but also recognize that things would be mostly fine with some restrictions. Cool it with the hyperbole.
Trump took the pseudonymous troll culture of the internet to the highest office of government, and this is the result. Trolls and Trump play by different rules, truth and facts are inconsequential -- all that matters is the reaction of their victims.
I have sympathy with Trump supporters that are not in on the "joke". It's not stupid to believe the president of the United States will be honest with them (at least on issues of national importance like "massive" election fraud), but he won't. If you were attracted by his other views (however distasteful), it is a bitter pill to swallow to admit he is a lier.
Americans are lucky their constitution was strong enough to ensure (at least) Trumps tactics to overturn a democratic vote failed.
I think it's pretty stupid. The entire Iraq war was based on lies. Trump in particular is a terrible liar but has lied consistently for forty years.
Somewhere on the right side of "storming Congress with a mob".
Who gets to decide to the line? Do we get to vote for them?
It’s politically motivated and one sided censorship
Can we talk about individual instance, like those specific to the current situation with Trump or other situations, like "Operation Choke Point," separately or should something like this be only considered with generic rules that do not consider the nuisance and details of any specific circumstance?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
What am I underestimating? The power of a company to deprive people of their income? Oh, you mean every single company on earth?
History is riddled with stories that start just like this? Yes, history has one example of a story that starts with a fascist mob invading the government, and then the liberal mob banned them and then... wait a second that's not how the story went.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_rebellion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_sedition_act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan_Act
What happened on the Capitol had elements that lead to a conclusion that the goal was to stop legal procedures in the country, perhaps even taking elected representatives as hostages. This is different from any other type of "ordinary" riot. Luckily the people there didn't seem to be particularly skillful so they didn't manage to achieve anything. But they shouldn't expect that everyone will forget what they tried just because it failed. There needs to be a serious investigation first to determine how was it organized and what were the goals. Until this is known for sure, everyone should be really careful and that includes the right of companies to ensure their tools are not used for a potential violent government overthrow. What would happen to the revolutionaries if the American Revolution had failed? I'm pretty sure that the British wouldn't just forget it and pretend it didn't happen, even if they managed to stop it quickly before it got serious.
It's such a huge exaggeration to say that stripe's decision was motivated by a 'mob'... Wait, it was motivated by a mob, the mob of right wingers. And they DID come for me. That's why we ban them from our websites.
It's just pure fear mongering and outrage news to say that liberals are mobbing together to force companies (as if its not ultimately the choice of the company) to ban people, and that somehow this will lead to them turning on each other... and then i'll be sorry i banned Trump? I don't get it.
Or just write a check to the Trump Campaign.
trump caused his followers to believe the election was a lie, and when they came to protest he egged them on to the capital building where they beat a police officer to death with an american flag while singing the anthem.
they beat him to death with an american flag and trump called them patriots after.
beat him to death sir, these patriots, our president said. wearing nazi tshirts, sir.
differing opinions? maybe you can find a better way to communicate your idea here
I'm asking because it was claimed it was a fire extinguisher, but other sources said it was a heart attack or stroke that happened many hours after the fact, and the cop had already had well-known health issues prior.
We should be celebrating Stripe's ability to do this. Do you think a Chinese company could "deplatform" Winnie The Pooh?
It's fantastic that we can still disassociate ourselves and our businesses from someone like Trump!
Calling for the overthrow of the government through violent insurrection isn't an opinion.
The Trump campaign just attempted a coup. As in they attempted to seize control of the government by stopping the lawful transition of power. That it failed does not make it any less serious. Should we let them continue to try until the are successful? Let’s not repeat the mistakes of 1920s Germany.[0]
I do not think it is hyperbole to say that Trump and his ilk are fascists, not unlike the Nazis.[1] They are the mob that is coming for you.[2] Do not make the mistake of failing to believe these people when they tell you who they are and what they are about.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Hall_Putsch [1] https://images.app.goo.gl/BxMXjGz7Zjsa1G6Q8 [2] https://twitter.com/59dallas/status/1346963199778828290?s=21
And the funny thing when there are two mobs fighting each other is that neither will exercise restraint if the other backs down.
So the smart thing to do is to be either so powerful the mob can't touch you or to be so invisible the mobs can't see you.
There is always the Kolmogorov option.
(I'd make the same reply if you were arguing this way for the opposite position, in case anyone is still worried about that.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
If you carve yourself an exemption to not accept some behaviour or beliefs, you are no longer tolerant. And you still think that you are, it's just a hypocrisy.
There's no hypocrisy there.
Acting against intolerance is supporting tolerance.
Have a read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_expression_in_Can...
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/why-im-withdra...
I think further burden of proof on wether Canada is a totalitarian state reasonably falls on those who believe it is. It seems reasonable to accept that Canada isn't totalitarian as a premise, when I say that some restrictions on freedom of speech don't inevitably lead to totalitarianism.
>… you'll need to arbiter them to distinguish bad ones from good. This process is corruptible…
By the time this may matter the most, it is already too late… rubicon has already been crossed. Thus, the one who recognizes this must position themselves to expect any of the downsides that will most assuredly come and to expect society to be of no help at all to achieve such ends.
The issue is making this distinction. You’re out of your mind if you want corporations to make that for you.
It's entertaining as hell.
Also, it is worth remembering that what we know about the Nazis today is not necessarily what people knew about the Nazis then.
I think myths about WW2 are quite damaging. Everyone today appears to think that they are in a good vs evil battle. Not only is this quite clearly not justified by the facts today (for example, comparing the Capitol with Kristallnacht, as Schwarznegger did, is a chilling inaccuracy...particularly from someone who hails from Austria), it wasn't the situation then...no-one in WW2 in the US regarded it as a good vs evil battle (only Churchill did, and he was lambasted for it).
America also turned away a lot of Jewish refugees for similar reasons. Most of the ended up victims of the Holocaust. It's only after the war that the "we had to fight this great, singular evil" emerged.
I’m a going to risk it.
This is the paradox of tolerance reaching its tipping point. Any sufficiently tolerant society can only be so tolerant until a bad actor becomes so detrimental to the continued function of that society, that they must choose between allowing some intolerance toward the destructive actor or risk losing everything by allowing the bad actor to continue their work.
This is not the patriot act. This isn't Prism. This is a group of people grooming others to shout fire in a crowded assembly hall. Good riddance.
I haven't seen any "proper" news channels touching founding/funding subject.
Financial organisation making conditions on which political party you can support.
Implying Republican == fascist is the exact type of thinking this world doesn't need, and prevents any kind of nuanced discussion.
https://californiaemploymentlaw.foxrothschild.com/2018/10/ar....
They have been doing it on other less prominent people and businesses, and haven't suffered any major consequences.
But, this is major escalation in political activism, and likely will not end up the way things have worked out in the past.
I've said this before and naturally downvoted by the suddenly zuckerburg loving anti-free speech crowd, but we really need to investigate the "cartel-like" collusion amongst in the tech industry. Expand that to tech + news collusion for a broader scope.
The behavior of the tech industry is far more of a threat to democracy/unity/etc than trump in my humble opinion. I can't believe anyone even supports it at this stage, but that's political partisanship and propaganda for you. Heck you could even call this a soft tech coup...
Edit: Hilarious, a downvote within a second.
The government could do nothing. But businesses who are answerable to nobody can do whatever they feel is best.
Hopefully they always make the right choice.......
No need for things like the Communist act, it feels like these shutdowns were too fast and strong not to be coordinated. Nothing good will come from this sort of thing.
Private enterprises should always retain the right to refuse to do business with violent and dangerous entities.
The day the government FORCES me to have to do business with someone intending harm on others..
Market remains open for other market participants to make other choices.
I'm sure anybody that's been censored, dehumanized, and removed from society by an evil regime has been comforted by the fact that the people doing it think it's fine to do it, or because the people doing it are doing it legally. Those facts don't make it right ...
Of course Stripe does not have a monopoly, but the broader discussion involves major players that can function as a cartel.
Regarding collecting money there should definitely be some government sponsored alternative solution for quick inter-bank transfers. In my country political parties collect donations by bank transfers. They provide an IBAN account number and anyone can send money to that account from any other bank in the EU. Same with private initiatives. Recently there was an earthquake in my home country which did some damage to a smaller city and most donation initiatives were collecting through bank accounts. The central bank runs the infrastructure for inter-bank communication (basically a clearing house). Right now they are working on a system where you will be able to associate your phone number and/or an email address to an IBAN (basically a DNS-like service) so you won't even need to know someone's IBAN to send them money.
Without an uncensorable currency, any political adversary -- especially an incumbent -- can just coerce payment processors into blocking payments to their opponents through threats of imprisonment or violence against a handful of executives.
https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/09/05/most-expensive-cr...
Also, things like I mentioned definitely still work.
That has always happened, Visa/Mastercard have been used that way since forever. The Swift system is designed to exercise financial control. Paypal bans anyone for merely looking suspicious to them.
How is this a good faith argument. You’ve jumped a situation where somewhere is being deplatformed and banned from various services for encouraging violence. To someone will use violence to kick someone off platforms. Coercing payment processors in that manor would be illegal. So, how exactly are we on the path to fascism? This is absolutely wild to me, that a textbook fascist being banned from things is being spun as... fascism.
If your definition of fascism is specifically centered around nationalism or racism then this doesn't really work, but I don't think the word fascism implies this, only that fascism is usually associated with regimes using fascist authoritarianism to enforce racist and nationalist ideologies.
Although fascist parties and movements differed significantly from one another, they had many characteristics in common, including extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy and the rule of elites, and the desire to create a Volksgemeinschaft (German: “people’s community”), in which individual interests would be subordinated to the good of the nation
[0] https://www.britannica.com/topic/fascism
[0] https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/e...
I think US might look exactly same in a few years. The mighty benevolent Party will care for thankful citizens, with the exception of a few outcasts who can't even create a simple website and are laughed at all over the media and social networks. And of course the Party will win all the subsequent elections for the next 70 years.
All big tech has to do now is tighten the screws further, and they can use their new standard to wipe out any challenger from the right half of the political spectrum before they ever gain traction (whether in media, with payment processing, social media, news, tech platforms & hosting; it's all controlled by the same political group now).
This approach by big tech would have prevented Trump from ever having a shot at getting elected in the first place, they would have turned down the volume so nobody could hear what he had to say. Which tells you all you need to know about what's coming next.
The US is a unified structural dictatorship of the left now. Tech. Academia. Hollywood & media. Social media. News. Payment processing. Thought police. Speech censorship. Tyranny will obviously follow. I'm non-partisan, I've never voted for a Republican, but it's obvious the left has acquired a dangerous amount of system power over the country.
Here's a prediction for you: in the next few years big tech will use this same conspired approach to begin behavior 'encouragement' for the wider population. Fat shame someone? No more Gmail account for you. Say something hateful? No more PayPal account for you. Already you'd have 1/4+ of the left wing nodding their heads in agreement that this is exactly the kind of social engineering that should happen (a US form of what China does to its population). It's inevitably what big tech is going to do, because it's very hard to legislate behavior control to pursue the politically correct dream they have in mind (safe spaces for all, so long as it's their type of safe space, by their rules, and their ideas), but it can be achieved through aggressive coercive action using the platforms, and now with these moves they're officially on the political playing field. It'll arrive in the guise of wrapping society in bubble wrap meant to keep everyone safe, and it ends in societal death by suffocation, narrowing and revocation of practicable rights as ever increasing numbers of things become wrong-think (and come with punishment).
I'll go with Noam's take on this. There is no liberal media in the US.
Every single thing you've listed is controlled by capital, not by the left. Tech, Hollywood/Media, Social Media, News, and payment processing. Academia is a very partial exception (google "Koch brothers university funding").
Do you think that any of the organizations that constitute these groups are run by social activists? These are overwhelmingly multinational corporations. They care about nothing but profit and the preservation of the status quo. They will appropriate rhetoric about identity politics insofar as it is a good marketing strategy, but they never make a move which is not motivated by their bottom line, which is why none of the tech giants acted against Trump until he threatened the orderly continuation of the system in which they're all invested.
"Left" media is a tiny, powerless fraction of the media. MSNBC and CNN toe the line of the DNC, a right-wing clique that represents only the interests of finance capital, and which, because it has comprehensively rejected any project of improving people's lives in any material way, has been forced into a politics of performative culture war posturing. Any leftist challenge to the status quo can be quelled by capital's complete capture of the media apparatus and government.
When you say "the left", it's very clear you mean social progressives, and nothing else. You're conflating co-opted woke capitalism with leftism, the same way countless liberals do.
You are however, absolutely correct about the coming repression that will be directed against the populace. It will be mostly directed against the left, as has always been the case, but we will definitely begin to see greater brutality in general as the overall immiseration and precarity of the average person continue to ratchet upwards.
In tandem with this, we'll see ever-increasing social policing of culture-war nonsense, as the social unrest continues to play out in a make-believe symbolic realm completely detached from material reality. People will of course continue to believe that it's "the authoritarian left" or "the bigoted right" that is ultimately to blame, depending of which flavour of news media they consume, missing the symbiotic relationship between two parties that both represent nothing but the short-term financial interests of capital.
it is clear that they are, while they may not be owned by social activists the day to day operations are certainly controlled by social activists
Take the recent effort of google employees to form a union, one not to negotiate pay or working conditions but rather to demand a litany of things around social activism including the power to control the policys and projects of the company
Then there are publishers, tech companies, and universities that continually have their employees protest if their employer engages with anyone that they deem to have "wrong think" see the Reaction at spotify when they brought on Joe Rogan, or reactions to Ben Shapiro speaking at any Campus, or the reaction at Penguin to the publishing of certian books...
To deny these companies are run by social activists is to deny reality itself
>"Left" media is a tiny, powerless fraction of the media.
100% incorrect, the Left enjoys a majorty position in Fiction Media (movies, TV Shows etc), and you can see a clear political shift in narrative of TV Shows.
i like to binge watch shows, even long running shows. So over the course of a month or more I may a long running series back to back, several of them that ran in the early 00's till after Trumps election you can see a clear political messaging shift in them, from an attempt to being "neutral" in their politics to a clear hard left turn.
Further Print News media is clearly Left bias as well probably 70% / 30% left to right positioning
Your lone example of Cable TV news is a weak argument, and if you talk to many conservatives you will find there is a large contingent of people that believe that since Roger Ailes passed Fox News has also taken a left turn...
I think alot of your position is based on the fact that many of these places are "not as far left" as you, or other organizations, but this does not make them "right" either.
CNN is not as far left as MSNBC, but CNN is not right either.
Barrack Obama is not as far left as AOC but that does not make Obama a Republican
Complete fantasy. You're not citing any evidence whatsoever here so I really shouldn't be bothering, but just think this through. When you witness for example Kuerig pull their advertising from Fox News, that is not evidence of some leftist agenda in their management. It is some combination of (a) a response to customer complaints/bad press, (b) an absolute storm of free publicity resulting from the controversy and (c) customer goodwill from the majority of the population. It's exactly the kind of action of the free market conservatives are supposed to be so enamored of. If you honestly think that companies are running socially progressive ads etc. because they are run by social activists, you are (a) just as gullible as all the liberals who eat up that style of marketing and (b) not living anywhere in the vicinity of reality.
You've also cited the example of a union, an organization explicitly in conflict with management, to bolster your argument about the management of organizations being captured by social activists. Absurd.
> if you talk to many conservatives you will find there is a large contingent of people that believe that since Roger Ailes passed Fox News has also taken a left turn...
Someone who would complain about some "left turn" by Fox News is not someone with whom it's worth discussing politics.
> Further Print News media is clearly Left bias as well probably 70% / 30% left to right positioning
Nope. Almost all media is either liberal (read: neoliberal) or conservative. Left wing print media is negligible.
> I think alot of your position is based on the fact that many of these places are "not as far left" as you
My position is not based on the fact that these places are "not as far left" as me. I am not further along on some sliding scale. Yeah, I probably agree with liberals on most social issues. However, I have a qualitatively different outlook to liberals, one rooted in a fundamentally incompatible worldview.
At the end of the day, you've made it clear that the left-right divide is about culture-war issues for you. Some of the repressive apparatus of the state is going to start being directed against the fraction of reactionaries who can no longer be assimilated by the system, but it's not going to approach the level of brutality reserved for e.g. BLM in the foreseeable future. You can continue to enjoy media catering to people totally fixated on the lost cause of relegitimating retrograde social attitudes, because it doesn't pose a threat to people in power.
The most liked and tweeted content on Twitter and Facebook skews heavily towards the right.
Fox news is the most watched news show in this country.
Your spin on the whole situation is a gross distortion of what is happening.
As a single source yes. But if you consider the total share of voice of the other side across all media Fox News is a distinct minority.
I could argue that with all the defects in the Russian political climate, I would prefer to live that kind of regime than something equivalent to an ISIS caliphate, but I consider both arguments fallacious and more akin to scare tactics.
And if course given that bitcoin has to be sent and received, if we ever arrived at your dystopia, bitcoin would not help: the political rival would simply jail the executive for receiving bitcoin payments instead of USD currency. Bitcoin isn't preventing your dystopia.
I think you read this slightly wrong -- drop the government (political adversary != government adversary) and relax imprisonment for threats of violence:
"coercion of executives through threats of violence"
...and we've got something a lot closer to what we already see today.
Governments can choose to make anything they want illegal, and they have the guns to back up that decision. Sure, it may be easy to make crypto transactions more surreptitiously, but at the end of the day someone is going to want to spend that crypto on something that has real value, and governments can, and do, control what method of payments are acceptable.
Right now, we haven't heard from ISPs. The entire suite of services that are controlled by the monopoly FANGs can be recreated, including clouds and cloud-fronts.
If that line is crossed as well then we'll have a modern society entirely dependent on information infrastructure that is controlled by a handful of companies with pedigree rooted firmly in the defense and intelligence sectors. You can call that whatever you please, but it will not be pleasant.
[p.s. I vote Green.]
"Objectionable views" is an objectionable notion for many. And "unified messaging" from monopoly information and communication corporations (owned by an astonishingly small subset of humanity) is not a legitimate source of authority for determining what is or is not "objectionable".
This is the entire point of political systems: resolving conflicts of views and providing a mechanism for harmonious, fair, and productive societies. Unless the plan is to medicate people, in which case sure, a perfectly homogenous body politic may be in your future.
If you have a colluding oligopoly in something crucial to do business such as payments or communication, where it's difficult to switch due to network effects, being banned by them is like being banned by government.
Payment providers are just a front end for their networks, so it's easy to switch providers like Stripe, but you can still be banned by underlying network like Mastercard and your business will suffer.
To be honest, after all I'm seeing, maybe all of this is a good idea. Maybe what you need is a taste of authoritarianism to really understand why what's happening now is dangerous.
And don't fool yourself. This is cancel culture at another level. All these companies have been wishing to do this for years but they needed an excuse.
So they did, but the totalitarians were not satisfied, so then they banned them from app stores users used to connect and find the new service... crying Build your own service it is a private company
So they did, but the totalitarian were not satisfied so they banned them from the network infrastructure used to connect them to the service... crying build your own network infrastructure it is private company
So they did, but the totalitarians were not satisfied so they banned from the payment services used to generate revenue for the service... crying build your own payment service it is private company
So they did, but totalitarians were still not satisfied, still hiding behind the "but its a private company" the totalitarians continue to demand anyone that disagrees with them be banned from all services everywhere all the while screaming that they are not in fact totalitarian, no they are upholding freedom for all...
see in 1984 war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength
Is it really totalitarianism in this case? Or, just some private companies inconveniencing people by choosing not to do business with them?
Chances are that Trump is going to own a big part of it. That is why Trump is not on Gab or Parler, because he will compete with them.
So people end up conflating the ostracism of Trump and those in his periphery with an attack on the Republican party.
It will be interesting to see what happens, more so because I expect widespread disillusionment from Trump republicans.
Trump isn't really a Republican, it's just that on some key issues, his position aligns better with the Republican party. The majority of the Republican party was openly anti-Trump in the beginning, then later turned around due to his massive public support.
That hasn't really changed, his approval is as stable as ever. The only people buying into the "failed coup" narrative are the ones that never supported him to begin with. Dropping Trump, as much as the party might want to, is not a recipe for success. Strategically, dividing the Republican party will be the prime objective of Democrats.
It will really come down to what the Democrats do with their current turn in power, The republican party is clearly fractured, if the Democrats attempt to ram through sweeping social and economic changes that appeal to their most authoritarian left base then it will fracture the Democrat party as well
This could be, for the first time since the Wig Party collapsed, that we see an opening for an actual 3rd party to emerge
The problem with Parker and Gab is that they are only for the problem users. In fact, in an interview with Kara Swisher the CEO said that they have panels of volunteers that judge whether a post should be removed. The blind leading the blind.
Bill Kristol is an Authoritarian, Pro-War, corporatist Republican that does not share much in way of ideology with many social conservatives in the Political party.
Bill Kristol is the type of Republican that turned me away from the Republican party
Bill Kristol is closer in political alignment with the Authoritarian Left, than he is with the Libertarian right which is why he is allowed to stay on Twitter.
Twitter is for Authoritarians / Totalitarians
The Pirate Bay is more or less a link register today after having been pushed to the point where they can not even sustain hosting torrent files, they can only host mag links.
This is far cry from running an actual platform or business on the internet.
Also, the introduction of magnet links (or more generally, the DHT which those rely on) was a broadly positive move for the BitTorrent community, reducing reliance on centralized tracker servers.
Heck, AWS hosts the National Enquirer, the publication that tried to blackmail AWS's owner with genital pics. It's difficult to claim anti-conservative bias when so much borderline and over the line extreme right content is allowed to remain.
If there's an appearance of conservative bias then I believe it is because between President Trump peddling conspiracy theories and general hatred of those who oppose him, it simply caused more extremist content to be posted, and therefore more to be banned. It's not bias is there really is a lot more extreme right content.
does this make you reconsider at all?
[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/0cd2285d-5e39-4d54-81e7-f4c657364...
Yes the extreme right is ridiculous. But the extreme left is too.
Spend some time outside silicon valley and other liberal hubs. Understand the perspective of others.
I am not in favor of violence. I am not in favor of Trump's behavior. However Trumps stance on policy typically aligns more closely with what I believe than Biden. Behavior like this alienates me.
Again, I do not love Trump. Far from it. But these moves come across not as anti-extreme-right, but anti-conservative.
No, they're anti-"storm the nation's seat of government with an angry mob intent on killing members of Congress and / or the Vice President, as a last ditch effort to overturn a democratic election"
I remember seeing bloody heads of Trump on twitter. That certainly seems a lot more like inciting violence than Trump saying to head down the street. As violence started to break out Trump tweeted that they should remain peaceful. Followed up by a video saying go home in peace.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/amp/6568305002
Really think about it: the President of the United States incited a mob to attack the Capitol to prevent the certification of the vote of his political opponent.
He did this by pushing constant lies and propaganda for months, and urging his followers to "fight" for him. Go watch his speech and then try to tell me he didn't know exactly what he was doing.
> Trump saying to head down the street
I'm honestly flabbergasted that you can see the culmination of Trump's actions from the past year (or however long he's claimed the election would be rigged) as just saying "head down the street".
It was a protest that went too far. We've seen plenty of this occur from both sides in the past year.
Yes, just like I think that was the US’s goal in Cuba with the Bay of Pigs. And just as with the Bay of Pigs, the active agents that were sent off were expendable and abandoned once it didn't work.
> Had that been his real intent I'm fairly certain it would have had a more significant outcome beyond people stealing random envelops and podiums.
Murder of a law enforcement officer is a more significant thing than stealing random envelopes and podiums, as is a mob being stopped from harming Congressional staffers and members at several points by only seconds (and in one case by application of deadly force.)
> It was a protest that went too far.
The people involved said online they were going to seize and kill security officers and members of Congress to achieve their goals, they did the first and were forcibly prevented from being able to do the second. It was a violent insurrection that went less far than planned.
Do I need to remind you that Trump encouraged the protest to be peaceful? Then released a video telling everyone to go home, peacefully? Those involved in the violence are being arrested.
"People" online have held up bloody Trump heads, wished for Trump to die. The extreme left isn't this super peaceful always tolerant group. The extreme right isn't either.
The Bay of Pigs wasn’t a coup attempt, though it was an attempt to replace the government. It was an invasion, support for which was cancelled when the expendable, superficially deniable spearhead force did less well than planned.
And, yes, there are lots of differences between it and coup attempt at the Capitol, which is why I didn’t say they were similar generally, only specific, identified points.
https://mises.org/wire/capitol-riot-wasnt-coup-it-wasnt-even...
>"In their article “Global Instances of Coups from 1950 to 2010: A New Dataset,” authors Jonathan M. Powell and Clayton L. Thyne provide a definition:
A coup attempt includes illegal and overt attempts by the military or other elites within the state apparatus to unseat the sitting executive.
There are two key components of this definition. The first is that it is illegal. Powell and Thyne note that this “illegal” qualifier is important to include "because it differentiates coups from political pressure, which is common whenever people have freedom to organize."
In other words, protests, or threats of protest don’t count as coups. Neither do legal efforts such as a vote of no confidence or an impeachment.
But an even more critical aspect of Powell and Thyne’s definition is that it requires the involvement of elites."
http://www.uky.edu/~clthyn2/powell-thyne-JPR-2011.pdf
>"Nonetheless, we should not be surprised that the media has rushed to apply the term to the riot. This phenomenon was examined in a November 2019 article titled “Coup with Adjectives: Conceptual Stretching or Innovation in Comparative Research?,” by Leiv Marsteintredet and Andres Malamud. The authors note that as the incidence of real coups has declined, the word has become more common but with modifiers attached."
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0032321719888857
That’s a rather incomplete definition:
—quote—
Threats to democracy involve officeholders’ abuse of the official powers given to— them within a democracy through the unconstitutional extension of those powers either temporally or substantively. This abuse is most dramatic in a coup d’état. The traditional coup occurs when one part of the state attempts to take over other organs of the state using force or the threat of force. Because the military represents that part of the state meant to control a monopoly of force,3 the military is the most frequent – but not the only – culprit. Other kinds of coups could occur if a head of government uses unconstitutional means to dismiss judges who deliver unwelcome judgments (what Dr. Mort Halperin calls an “auto-coup”), or to get rid of an “uncontrollable” legislature in order to rule by decree instead (another form of autocoup). A distinct but functionally similar threat is of the erosion of democracy, where officials abuse their constitutional powers to take over gradually the powers of other institutions, as in Zimbabwe.
—end-quote—
https://eprints.qut.edu.au/42605/1/World_Politics_Review.pdf
> There are two key components of this definition. The first is that it is illegal. […] But an even more critical aspect of Powell and Thyne’s definition is that it requires the involvement of elites
And the attack on the Capitol was both illegal violence and with the involvement of elites, who egged it on because they sought to benefit from it, so what’s your point?
Riots are generally illegal by definition. If Trump asking people to go home and respect police officers is your idea of elite involvement, we've reached an impasse.
Take care.
No, that's my idea of elite abandonment after the attack had failed, similar to the American abandonment of the pawns in the Bay of Pigs. The incitement by Trump, Giuliani, et al., immediately prior to the attack is my idea of elite involvement.
They failed, but they tried.
Not to mention four years of telling their base the election was stolen or hacked, followed by a pointless impeachment.
This is the new norm. And both sides are indeed complicit and escalating.
What's more, Clinton herself was not the one trying to supposedly "disrupt the electoral college vote." If you're going to make up a story, at least make it consistent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_electors_in_the_2016...
Edit: Also:
> “What the Committee did find however is very troubling. We found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling.
https://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2020/8/rubio-s...
Then there was the great idea to hold a rally down the road from the capital building on that very day, actively invite a bunch of extremist groups you've been courting for years, whip those people up using inflammatory rhetoric and your greatest hits about the the election being stolen, tell them "Because you'll never take back our country with weakness, because you have to show strength and you have to be strong", and then invite them to walk down to the capital building with you..
And let's tweet this during the assault on congress for good measure: Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution
I'm not sure it mattered if Trump meant for this to happen. He's toxic, and he's dangerous.
Several media outlets are highlighting the worst behavior and generalizing from there. Of course the media has every incentive to be sensationalist. There's also a question of bias outside of the motive of sensationalism.
Personally, I don’t understand how you can acknowledge that you ‘far from love Trump’ (paraphrase) but then consider a banning of his campaign (which is separate from the R party and from conservatism) as against you, a conservative.
The First Amendment promises both free speech and free assembly. Core to the latter is the freedom not to assemble. This freedom is regulated. You can’t refuse to do business with protected classes. But political affiliation is not a protected class.
There are utilities, which have limited freedom not to assemble. Then there are private persons and private businesses. Stripe and Twitter are clearly the latter. AWS and Visa feel like the former, though they are legally the latter.
The cost of switching private activity to a utility model is a loss of innovation and an increase in political involvement. We are re-evaluating, as a society, the balance between the freedoms of speech and assembly. Let’s not forget these are freedoms in balance, not a spectrum of tyranny and anarchy.
They might be the latter, but I wouldn't consider it obvious. Regarding social media, we've gotten to the point where even US Visa applications ask for social media handles (and I understand they consider it as a negative datum if you don't provide one). And we're also at the point where some companies won't provide you with respectable service unless you @ them on social media. Regarding payment platforms, generally people expect them to be quite neutral, since getting locked out of the financial system is not exactly going to lead to a great life in the modern digital economy.
I don't know at what point these cross into "utility" territory, and I'm willing to entertain the idea that they might never do so, but I find it quite debatable and very much not clear.
(Note: None of this is to opine on the reactions to this particular incident. Just commenting on the more general idea.)
Real-world example: T-Mobile. Their Twitter and Facebook representatives (called T-Force) have better customer service (they are more empowered to help you without supervisor escalation and fix things faster) than calling 611.
It's sad, but at least we have a digital public square?
I'm not sure if this is intended behavior (or if it works with other companies), but it solves my problems quickly.
Does hacker news count as social media? This might be one of the only social media accounts I have.
I have never thought they were neutral when it came to actual crimes. That's so much liability, why would anyone expect them to take it on given how risk averse they are?
PayPal kept doing that so much that regulators (FTC? I forget) finally made them stop holding pseudo-cash accounts for people until/unless people specifically requested it. Laws take time to catch up.
> why not obvious billion dollar ones? why would anyone expect them to take it on given how risk averse they are?
Again: I'm not opining on what they should or shouldn't be doing. All I'm saying is, if you think the fact that it's not a utility is a good supporting argument for this, I'm saying their classification is far from obvious to me. But if you have other arguments to make, I'm not expressing any opinions on them; I'm solely replying to the "it's clearly not a utility" bit.
Yes. In general, a utility provider may refuse to initiate service if the requesting customer cannot comply with the requirements outlined in the utility’s tariffs or rules. Utility tariffs and rules are authorized by the CPUC.
https://consumers.cpuc.ca.gov/cab_faq/
Utilities must provide service to any member of the public living within the utility’s service area who has applied for service and is willing to pay for the service and comply with the utility’s rules and regulations. The utility’s duty to serve is not absolute, however. A utility may deny service for good cause (e.g., nonpayment).
https://www.nclc.org/images/pdf/older_consumers/consumer_fac...
Is it exclusively because of his office? Could it be construed the other direction?
Twitter is not an elected official.
This is not hard.
https://www.cnn.com/2017/06/06/politics/trump-tweets-officia...
>Could it be construed the other direction?
No.
Because of his office and the manner of use, yes, explicitly, under the limited public forum doctrine.
Trump has appealed the decision to SCOTUS, which is still considering whether or not hear it [1]. Given that Trump's Twitter account is now banned, I suspect SCOTUS will dismiss the motion as mooted.
[1] See https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/trump-v-knight-f... for the docket information.
The POTUS is part of the US Government. Twitter is not.
So... no.
Stripe and Twitter are not utilities. Some may want them to be. But I don’t think anyone says they currently have utility obligations under the law.
If my water, power, or internet was cut off, I would immediately suffer real, life changing inconvenience and hardship.
To me, the difference between these things is incredibly stark.
The _actions_ by a group of people are resulting in these bans. Not the group's affiliation. Am I missing something here?
But to more directly address your point, I ask you - what crime has Trump been convicted of?
But to give you a partial answer anyway: Many criminals are never convicted. Many _known_ criminals are never convicted, due to lack of undeniable proof. Some criminals are convicted on lesser crimes, just to get them off the streets. There's plenty of evidence to support the position that Trump is a criminal. He may never be convicted but not because he's innocent.
The discussion is whether they should be able to kick someone off their platform who has been convicted of no crime, because of how integral they have become to the political process.
If it was a power company shutting off electricity to Facebok, Twitter and AWS, because they disagree with their business practices, we would have an outrage right now about how undemocratic it is.
(And I say this with all my distaste for Trumpism)
After all, a free speech advocate and a neo-nazi would both support the publication of Mein Kampf - but the former might well want to be clear they're not the latter. (and of course, to complicate the situation further, the latter may want to disguise themselves as the former)
As to why you see so many posters affirming they don't support Trump - that's because HN readers aren't Trump's target demographics: Trump only got 12% of the vote in San Francisco in 2020. IMHO it's believable that on HN, free speech advocates simply outnumber Trump supporters.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/23/just-6-of-u-s-adults-on-tw...
As for Google + Apple + Amazon (+ probably every other cloud provider and virtually every other hosting company) cutting off Parler or refusing their business in the first place: Parler was accused of not moderating "enough". This in itself is not yet criminal, given section 230 (which in this context ironically Trump wanted gone so bad he tried to hold the military budget hostage over it), and the definition of "enough moderation" was kept vague enough by Apple and Google and Amazon that Parler couldn't possibly ever comply if they wanted to.
The same argument about under-moderation can be made against facebook, e.g. when they aided - or even enabled - the Rohingya genocide, which saw thousands of people killed and hundreds of thousands of people displaced. Even the UN directly pointed fingers at facebook. Facebook admitted to their role[1], but came up with a bunch of lame excuses like that they do not really have any content moderators that understand the language.
People dug up quite a number of screenshots (anecdotal evidence) of abhorrent things written on Parler to justify them getting punished. But I found that not really convincing to single out Parler like that. If I went digging on Twitter or Facebook, or could see what people tell each other in Whatapp of Telegram groups, I would find the exact same things. I have reported things on twitter in the past, like people making extremely thinly-veiled death threats or inciting violence, and twitter's response has been sluggish and often in favor of the people talking about "nooses" and "you'll get what's coming to you" in the same sentence.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...
BLM may claim not to be responsible for the horrendous roiots and crime that has been committed in its name across America.
Trump may claim that he is not responsible for the tiny (in proportion) riots that happened in DC.
(IMO, they are both responsible, thus making BLM the one with more blood on its hands. But nobody asked me.)
BLM may claim that it is in their rights to fight law and order if it causes harm to individuals.
Trump may claim it is in his right to complain about law and order when (in his opinion) it was not lawful.
(IMO, this is a finer line. He certainly can legally complain. Riots are over the line for either right or left)
Stripe processes payments for BLM, and Twitter allows their posts, etc. So IMO the line they walk is fine and biased.
...or, conversely, we should compare damage and lives lost during Black Lives Matter protests to all damage and lives lost by Trump-supporting white supremacists.
As for your question, probably not. And there is an interesting debate as to whether political candidates should be some sort of protected class. Though I don't think the issue is particularly urgent given that political candidates across the political spectrum (including Donald Trump) still have access to all of those things.
For the most part, payment process, web hosts, and mail providers are interchangeable, so I don't think it is a big deal that Trump can't use Stripe specifically.
Social Media is more complicated. I guess we will see how things develop, but my intuition is that Trump will open a parler account, interested parties will follow him there, uninterested parties won't, and his most noteworthy statements will be widely reported in the media. So, the same situation as when Trump was on Twitter.
Parler being booted is society's reaction to a movement that has been getting more extreme for the last 5 years.
I'll note the irony that many of the people complaining about companies refusing to deal with Parler are the same people that support bakeries being able to deny the business of people in a protected class.
I have sympathy for the former, but not the latter. While it would be kind to reach out to the latter group and help them mesh with society, there's no requirement anyone has to nor a guarantee the pariahs would want to mesh.
No, we dont have to distinguish that. Your weak premise would justify the discrimination of atheists, anarchists, monarchists, pentecostals,marxists, epicureans... among thousands of other groups.
I dont really understand why it is so complicated.
At individual and private level I can decide who will I spend my time with, who I will invite to my place, go to the beach etc, with no coercion and I expect everybody else to have that right too.
At public level I have the expectation to serve all the people the same (ceteris paribus) unless I am forced by current legislation to not do so (like selling alcohol to a minor).
I would not extend that prohibition to a person who can request my services legally , if the person is going to pay and if he is going to behave like any other customer.
If I manage a 7/11 I would not create an ideological purity test to figure out if I will sell you gas or a soda and I think society will be way better if everybody does that too.
I’m not saying they act evilly, but Facebook is literally controlled by one person who cannot be outvoted by every other owner. And Google is controlled by two as well [0].
[0] https://fortune.com/2019/12/05/page-and-brin-google-control/
Nobody is thinking society is just big tech people. There are a lot of people who agree with tech's decision to cut off coup enablers.
Of course the key characteristic of secret cabals is that they are secret.
While I know of no evidence for secret cabals of big tech people, having individual capable of making unaccountable decisions is a different bad thing than secret cabals.
And I responding to someone saying these were big organizations with lots of decision makers. And that’s false for Facebook and google, since they have power concentrated.
Well it's hard to argue against it when the people being cut out are trying to pipe-bomb your headquarters as well as the Democrats :/.
See this is part of the problem.
You are lumping together two different organizations that are nothing alike as somehow part of the same cabal.
Many different people from many different groups and organizations are reaching the same conclusion about Trump and the rise of violent right wing extremism.
Different parts of society are agreeing, and then in each of these parts there are individuals making decisions.
> Revolving doors, clientelism, business opportunities, power struggle,...
Add activism, donations, candidate support and cooperating with them on a local and global level.
Seems like a text book definition of a political party.
Look back a few decades and this is exactly the same argument that segregationists were using. You've basically just said: "That shopowner has a right not to deal with blacks, why do they keep harassing that poor man by trying to buy his goods?".
> I will note the irony about people saying that we should respect society “decisions” when they didn’t respect Trump becoming president since day one . Come on pal drop the dishonesty.
Those people didn't leave pipe-bombs at both party headquarters, call for their own Vice President to be hanged, or storm the Capitol building though. It's both transparent and dishonest to try to equate the two. Especially when you consider that Trump was one of the people peddling the birther nonsense about Obama and that pretty much everyone involved with the trump campaign was actually found guilty of some form of corruption. Trump himself has only escaped charges by virtue of being the President.
Speaking of landlords who discriminate, Trump has never done anything to deserve a shred of respect. Long before day one. If anything they're saving gullible people from sending money to a conman
I think this is the issue though, right. Elections represent what society wants. If 5 corporations get to decide you’re toxic and that prevents you from campaigning, what regulation will help insure this authority isn’t abused or misused?
I think it’s also worth noting the irony that many of the people complaining that bakers should be forced to bake a cake are supporting stripe being able to refuse service.
It's only ironic if you choose to ignore the fact that one of those cases involves discrimination against a protected class and the other does not. If you don't ignore that fact then the irony is only applicable from those who were espousing the "free market, free speech" position in the previous case.
But even if it was a protected class at the time of the suite, I think the opinion was that religious rights (another protected class) come into play.
For me, this seems to expose that some people aren’t arguing from first principles but kind of change their position based on a pre-conceived notion.
So just like people now bringing up that looting isn’t so bad after the capital riot/insurrection were against rioting in situations over the summer.
It seems odd to me, or at least irrational, that someone could be against rioting for BLM purposes but for rioting for conspiracy theories. Or that someone could be against a baker’s ability to not serve a gay couple, but for a hosting company not serving an asshole megaphone company.
So just as people, rightly I think, were arguing that discrimination against sexual orientation should be a protected class and thus illegal; people now are arguing that net neutrality/free speech should have regulation, change in rights.
It’s not “ironic” in either sense.
Sex workers face this problem. Even in countries where sex work is legal, the payments industry refuses to deal with them (in part because the chargeback rates are high for these kinds of transactions). They're forced to deal in cash and have all sorts of problems because of it (not least the fact that depositing large amounts of cash triggers money laundering regulations, and doing that too much can cause a bank to close the account).
I think there's an obvious midpoint missing in the discussion between private and utility, which is monopoly, which do have additional set of laws and checks in place precisely for their strength against the free market.
preemptive "there are plenty alternatives so they are not monopolies" - if turns out these alternatives are acting in concert, it configures a cartel, which can get regulated in all the same ways.
the economical concepts behind these events aren't so alien as the folk around made them to be, their novelty is in their application to intangible assets (views and online services) but most of the issues are the same as they were decades ago and the same concepts apply, to the same conclusions.
Could you give an example of this? Sounds fascinating.
I've seen a lot of comments that act authoritative about the legal consequences, but heavily editorialized to say "the government shouldn't".
I'm not going to state my personal stance, because it's complicated and frankly, I haven't put enough thought into it to be comfortable presenting it. But, you (the reader) should be willing to forgo your kneejerk reaction (if you have one) and think about the consequences of what you're proposing when discussing changing the status quo and desired legislature to "solve" these issues.
Classes that are protected now, were not protected at some point.
I think the discussion revolves not around whether political affiliation is a protected class, but whether it should be, in a sense- whether what is going on is good or bad for society, not whether or not it is illegal.
You are entitled to believe that it is good, of course.
The fact that the criminal is the President of the United States and his enablers is incidental to the principle.
No one wants to ban any reasonable political views. But when a political party organises public mass violence, subversion, insurrection, murder, intimidation of public officers, the attempted overthrow of a legitimate election, among other crimes, that party - and especially its leaders - loses all claims on the patience of the public and on the tolerance of private sector service providers.
Attempts to turn this into a debate about political censorship are not being made in good faith. The reality is that criminal acts took place on a scale that was truly shocking.
Anyone who provides goods and services of any kind to the individuals and organisations responsible has a moral and legal duty to stop doing so - immediately.
But it is political. This summer saw widespread political violence, including attacks on government institutions, not to mention billions in property damage, but the mainstream reaction to that was "Show me where it says protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful"[1] with massive support for the riots from Silicon Valley companies. Kaepernick praised the violence and Dorsey gave him $3m.[2] The double standard is just sickening.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-zb58uiFjU [2] https://i.imgur.com/uM1iQ5R.jpg
Lets go through some quick fire bullet points, 93% of the summer protests where peaceful, most of the damage was on insured property with no loss of life, the cause of the riots was the unashamed and unlawful treatment of minorities in America. It was a grassroots movement.
Now lets compare that to, a mob that straight away turned to violence, caused loss of life (and bashed the head of a police man with a fire extinguisher), mob had gallows and chanted to kill the vice president, pipe bombs, molotov cocktails and hostage situation zip ties where found on the scene, and it all started from a conspiracy theory that 51 different judges have considered meritless, our congress has considered meritless and the vice president of his own administration considered debunked.
I wonder who is the one with a double standard here?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_and_controversies_dur...
>most of the damage was on insured property
Government property is insured by taxpayers
>93% of the summer protests where peaceful
I'm not sure how to confirm/disprove that statement. I'd posit that most protestors at the capitol were peaceful, but I'm not sure how to confirm/deny that either.
>mob had gallows and chanted to kill the vice president
Where I live "ACAB" is a trendy chant used to devil-ify police
EDIT: Also, is this not the same thing? https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3217754/Black-Lives... - not sure how trustworthy this is
> molotov cocktails and hostage situation zip ties where found on the scene,
I have seen molotovs used at BLM protest
All this to say - it's not black and white; I also feel there clearly is some double standard going on here. I disagree with (what i think is) the premise of the capitol protests, but it does not strike me as that much worse than what people were supporting a few months ago.
No one (including the US Supreme Court) has a definition for "reasonable."
That's what has some of us alarmed.
For Trump and his cronies? Sure, there are more than enough actual laws they've broken. But let's justify action against them on actual laws, as opposed to because-SV-doesn't-like-them and has public support at the moment. Or even use the moment to pass new laws, covering the type of behavior we want to make illegal.
Instead, this feels a lot like 9/12, in that people are post-hoc justifying popular actions on a moral basis, to the detriment of legal foundations.
And as we found then, as soon as you decide "terrorists can't be reasoned with and don't deserve rights," then being able to label someone a terrorist becomes a powerful tool...
Creating protected classes significantly curtails neighbouring freedoms while increasing the government’s role in day to day interactions.
One hallmark of existing protected classes is they are somewhat objective (counterfactual: race). Political affiliation is totally subjective. If someone believes in violent death for Blacks, Jews and gays, should a Holocaust memorial group be forced to accept them? If no, then you need someone deciding which groups do and don’t merit protection. And who is and isn’t actually a member of that group.
It’s not impossible. But it has unintended consequences. More than re-delineating the private company / utility boundary. More than expanding antitrust enforcement.
Another hallmark is they tend to be mostly immutable, or unchangeable voluntarily. Society generally doesn’t accept that it’s reasonable for a person to change their gender, sexual orientation, race, age etc in order to participate in all facets of society.
I don’t think political affiliation meets that standard. Although I imagine that some might consider their political affiliation to be as core their identity as religion.
Nobody is arguing what they can do, it’s what they should or shouldn’t be doing.
At this rate, anyone with a differing opinion is required to:
* Build their own social media
* Build their own server hosting
* Build their own bank accounts
Just to get their voice heard without censorship, because “private companies can do what they want”
People here are ok with it, because in their own echo chamber and on the news articles they consume, it seems justified.
Have you ever considered the reason it feels justified is because you aren’t getting the full picture, because anyone who speaks against the status quo is deplatformed and there is no balance in points of view anymore unless you stray away from the mainstream platforms.
FYI, political affiliation is protected from discrimination in CA, NY, and DC.
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/can-employers-discri...
Lawful political activity is protected from workplace discrimination. That’s a far stretch from making it a general protected class, and wouldn’t prevent Stripe from refusing to work with the Trump campaign.
There's no such thing as a “general protected class”; there are different lists (and different effects of the status) of protected classes in various categories of law (public accommodations, employment, housing, etc.)
Government program != utility designation. DARPA, NASA and the Manhattan Project were not utilities. PG&E is a utility. It requires political consent to make significant changes.
I’m not saying utilities can’t be innovative. Amtrak and the Post Office are utilities, and they experiment. But they have obligations private businesses don’t, and that slows things down.
For all intents and purposes, freedom of speech has flatlined in America. What will bring it back?
It only protects you from government, nothing else.
There are legitimate concerns regarding monopolistic behaviour of large digital gatekeepers. But we don’t solve that by deciding to restrict their speech (which is what forced speech would be). You solve it by either making them utilities or breaking them up to create more competition.
If somebody speaks in the woods, and there's nobody there to hear it, do they make a sound?
Yes, they technically have free speech, but in reality not really.
The purpose of speech is that you might persuade somebody else. If there's nobody to talk to, you might as well not speak at all.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...
Are false statements not false if they come from Democrats? Because that’s certainly how it appears. Sheila Jackson-Lee in 2016 led opposition to the electoral count — even said the election was faulty and unfair. Seditious statements using the current standard of sedition being tossed around.
The hypocrisy is astounding. Can ANTIFA use Stripe? Because they burned down police stations and even assaulted elected officials. The US has become fascist in a hurry — and it isn’t because of any Trump policy.
If you can't convince enough people that your message is worth propagating, maybe it isn't. If you can, you will have the means.
You can speak all you want in public spaces, on your own property (whether that be your home, your blog or your mastodon instance) mostly without limit.
But Facebook, Twitter, Google, HN or any other private organization is under no obligation to host or amplify your speech.
The government can't censor you and you may speak your mind in public spaces. You may also do so in private spaces, with the permission of the owners of those spaces.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that certain private actors are required to allow your speech. That's not true. They are responsible only to their shareholders and to a lesser extent, their customers -- and in this case their customers are advertisers and not you. You are the product being sold.
If you don't think that's right or fair, then don't interact with those private actors. If enough people chose not to deal with them, they would lose their power and influence.
I voted with my feet years ago. If you haven't, then you're part of the problem and not the solution.
When capitalism revealed its ability to create abusive monopolies, we created new laws to mitigate those harms.
When the whole worlds discourse flows through a few centralized social media companies, as a society we are free to imagine new legal concepts and regulations to deal with the unforeseeable consequences of these new phenomena.
Where did I say that wasn't appropriate?
I strongly believe that those big social media companies not only have too much power and influence, but that their business models are exploitative and morally repugnant.
Which is why I don't use them. At all.
In fact, I detailed[0] how I thought this issue should be dealt with the other day.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25688032
I can't find it at the moment but there was recently a court case where a judge ruled that the constitutional right to Assembly was not infringed by pandemic restrictions (It is illegal in several US jurisdictions to assemble with more than N people in a private space) because people could freely assemble on online platforms like Facebook and Twitter. If the digital public square does not allow for free assembly, and the government forbids you from assembling in a physical public space, then it seems plausible to me that we have constructively eliminated certain constitutional rights.
https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/11/hello-youve-been-referred...
My right to speak doesn’t override you’re right to ignore me, or refuse to transmit my message.
Now there’s a knotty issue with entities like Facebook and Twitter becoming the primary ways people communicate with large audiences, but people managed before Facebook and Twitter, so they can manage again.
Or the alternative is that we say Facebook and Twitter don’t deserve to have their own speech protected. At which point someone is picking a choosing who deserves free speech.
You can’t have it both ways.
As I had mentioned in another comment a few days ago, it stands to reason that were the government to outsource the censorship to private entities (like Orban is now doing in Hungary, where almost all the media is in his pockets) than everything would be technically legal, even though it would definitely be against the spirit of the law.
As a matter of the fact the US right does seem to say that the same thing is happening right now, i.e. that the US mainstream media is "in the pockets of the left" hence the censorship.
No - 'Freedom of Speech' is at an all time high.
The internet gives every single person a giant soap box to stand on.
You can communicate, in public, with anyone in the world.
25 years ago, you had no voice.
Now, everyone can be a 'journalist' or 'agitator' or whatever.
The level of open communication possible today was unthinkable 25 years ago.
25 years ago most people didn't have access to 'most news'. The NYT maybe was accessible by the elite in most towns, but the LA times was not. Now it's all available to everyone.
These platforms haven't changed that much in terms of their policies.
If you called someone the n-word or tried to coordinate murder of some public official you would be banned.
Bannon was calling for Dr. Fauci to be beheaded a few days ago. That's what got him banned from Twitter.
Gen. Flynn was calling for public officials to be executed. He was banned.
Get it?
Twitter has not really changed that much - the public, and their expectations of 'freedom of expression' in the face of politics has changed.
Visa is not a utility. I would be open to debating whether they should be one.
The flip side of such a designation is it would likely require the government indemnify Visa against fraud losses. The line between deplatforming for fraud risk (the ostensible reason for Visa’s aversion to porn) and for objectionable content is difficult to draw.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25381920
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25379213
Pretty sure it is in California.
Also, how far do we go with this reasoning? Stripe and PayPal refuse service so they're supposed to "Go build their own" (it costs billions to create a new service like stripe or PayPal that can compare). AWS shut you down? Build your own data center... (Again, costs millions or billions). What if next Intel or AMD decides to not sell you processors? Go build your own fab and develop your own hardware? What if the silicon miners won't sell you silicon, are you now supposed to go build your own mine?
The issue isn't that companies have a right to do it, it's that there are no viables alternatives to these large duopolies, and that "creating your own" is not an alternative.
What happens if the party in power next decides to attack religious organizations who congregate during that pandemic with the same type of concerted de-platforming? What if it's people who advocate against raising taxes who are next as deemed "morally corrupt"?
It's not hard to imagine this type of anti competitive, semi-concerted effort to de platform a new company being targeted at other things in the future. We need laws to catch up to our modern society and either break up the monopolies or put a lot more protections around the types of discrimination that are illegal, which should include political affiliation (this is law in California for employment discrimination so it's not that far fetched of an idea).
One little warning from someone living in a real fascist state (Russia). It wasn't always a fascist state, but when it began to morph into one, censorship what what they started with. Of course, it was legal, because it was all private companies, rightfully executing their liberty to not show anyone they don't like...
The rich irony, of course, is that regular fascist masses that support government are brainwashed to think, they it is the marginalized opposition who are fascists.
And considering the ToS citations were I service of a potentially criminal act, fascism doesn't enter the picture: This is as much about these companies' own legal liability if they allow their platform to facilitate potential criminal activity even though it's against their own rules.
Here, I fixed it for you:
Violate them, and if you are not someone whose political views we support, you can take your business elsewhere.
And they aren’t even banning people for solely the latter! Representatives who continue to support the president have had no issues.
For the record I hate Trump and am a European Social Democrat.
Facebook is a US company with a lot more eyes on US activity than in Burma. They're going to see, understand, and react to events in the US much more easily than anywhere else in the world.
That isn't me condoning Facebook's activity here: they need to do a better job elsewhere in the world. What I'm saying is that their failure may be just that: a failure, not selective enforcement.
The issue here is that the platforms were used in service of activity that was arguably illegal. These platforms' failure to enforce their rules consistently doesn't mean they shouldn't have enforced them in this case, it means they should have been doing a better job all along. If you want to pass laws regarding platforms like this and free speech, it should be regulations that encourage more consistency, not less moderation of content.
They already do this in many places.
The most common example would be common carrier laws. Those aren't particularly controversial.
Do you believe that common carrier laws are some huge infringement on company rights or something?
Do you believe that common carrier laws are "fascist"?
If not, then you must admit that your previous argument is pretty silly.
In particular though, common carrier laws tend to apply to services that have been given a special privilege to have for their own use some type of public resource or special privilege. Like broadcasting frequencies or the right-of-way granted to power companies and other utilities. That isn't the case for these platforms.
That's called regulation. We have a lot of it. Free speech isn't absolute and free markets aren't either.
I think your making my point. Your freedom of speech doesn't entitle you to use it on the stage built by someone else.
Free markets aren't either
Again, that doesn't contradict me. It would take a fundamental adjustment to the legal framework surrounding either user licensing agreements or the definition of public utilities in order to say these companies aren't allowed to enforce their current ToS.
If you want to argue that laws should change, that's fine, but then we're talking about a slider between the definition & right to own private property on the one hand, and freedom of speech using 3rd party's property on the other hand. If you want to slide it more towards the later, you are taking away from the former, and vice versa. I don't know any formula for where that line should be drawn, only that in this particular example I believe the line drawn was acceptable.
Public utilities and antitrust are not new concepts, nor is this really a private property issue. It's about power and control over our private lives (which should come first before corporations). The internet has changed everything in less than 2 decades and laws from a century ago are no longer sufficient.
When governments start asking for social media accounts at border crossings, and Twitter claims to be a public square, and even it's CEO says that social media is a human right; we need to address the new digital equivalence of our existing protections.
You're absolutely correct that in the US no one may be punished by the state without due process. But Stripe isn't a government and refusing to do business with someone doesn't require a criminal trial.
Or are you claiming that Stripe cannot choose its customers unless a court has convicted that customer of a crime?
If the baker had altogether refused to bake a cake for the gay couple, it would have been discrimination on a protected class.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/04/politics/masterpiece-colorado...
No, he was ruled in favor of because the US Supreme Court found anti-religious animus in the enforcement process leading to the State ruling against him.
> Part of this was that he was okay with baking a cake for the gay couple but NOT one that had certain messaging that would violate his faith.
No, it wasn't. The decision specifically notes that he objected to being required to make cakes for same sex weddings entirely, on both free speech and free exercise of religion grounds [0], not that he was willing to do so dependent on messaging, so any such willingness he might have had was not a basis of the decision.
Instead, the Court found animus toward Phillips’ religious views by the state commission that found against him, both expressed in the process and evidenced through difference in how Phillips was treated vs. other bakers in similar cases before the same Commission, which mean that whether or not the law could otherwise have been enforced against him, the specific government act had an impermissible purpose, requiring it to be struck down. [1]
Note: All quotes from Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, 584 U.S. ___ (2018)
[0] “Phillips raised two constitutional claims before the ALJ. He first asserted that applying CADA in a way that would require him to create a cake for a same-sex wedding would violate his First Amendment right to free speech by compelling him to exercise his artistic talents to express a message with which he disagreed. [...] Phillips also contended that requiring him to create cakes for same-sex weddings would violate his right to the free exercise of religion, also protected by the First Amendment.”
[1] “The official expressions of hostility to religion in some of the commissioners’ comments—comments that were not disavowed at the Commission or by the State at any point in the proceedings that led to affirmance of the order—were inconsistent with what the Free Exercise Clause requires. The Commission’s disparate consideration of Phillips’ case compared to the cases of the other bakers suggests the same. For these reasons, the order must be set aside.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/masterpiece-cakeshop...
Who are they and why do you think they send people?
That's how you enforce civil rights laws
It's no different then trying to rent an apartment from a racist to make a case
His custom cakes are small works of art. If he'd be forced to create one against his beliefs, why not force a far left painter to paint a favorable portrait of Trump?
And indeed this situation has little to do with Silicon Valley corporations offering generic services to millions of people. They are like supermarkets, who should not be allowed to refuse service to anyone.
I would expect a Christian cake maker would not agree to accept my money to design a cake that worships satan for example. Likewise I wouldn’t expect a satanic cake maker to make a cake celebrating Jesus.
Would it be right to force an Islamic cake maker to make a cake featuring Muhammad’s likeness?
If he refused to provide groom&groom wedding toppers I'd fully support him but this is food not speech
Likewise I wouldn't expect him to write messages or make decorations he disagreed with
But in this case it's a simple case of discrimination
The fact that something is mentioned in a news article about a court case doesn't mean that (even if it is true) it is part of the basis for the decision. If you want to understand the basis for a court decision, it's best to read the decision itself.
This seems like a giant loophole to negate anti-discrimination laws.
Are subway "sandwich artists" able to discriminate in their art?
The baker discriminated against the couple but the supreme court punted on ruling on the laws and just said the goverment hadn't acted correctly in that case so threw it out. The law is still on record and baker has to abide by it and stop discriminating against gay couples unless the court someday rules otherwise
It's also important to note that companies aren't cutting ties with Trump because of his political ideology, they're cutting ties with him because there's a strong argument he broke the law, and they don't want to be in the awkward position of facilitating that, especially as it could open them to their own legal liability.
However not only did all the big tech companies not withdraw support for Biden or prevent his campaign from using their apps, they doubled down and censored the story so most voters would not hear of it before the elections.
Again, big double standards at play here from a moral sense.
The larger issue here is that the internet really isn't so decentralized as it used to be.
There's like 10-20 major companies that control the majority of services people use, or the underlying infrastructure that powers the whole internet. This goes against the original design of the internet which meant it to be fully decentralized so no single entity or small set of entities could prevent the flow of information.
We should try to go back in that direction, either through competition and free markets or by enforcing it via existing or new regulations to prevent situations like this from ever happening again.
Given that there's uncertainty around it, can we really conclude that "they broke the law" and that it's unfair that big tech did not withdraw their support?
I didn't realize that Stripe's actions were due to a government order. Probably because they weren't.
You're conflating a private organization's decisions with government action. If the government were to attempt do as you suggest, the courts would slap them down hard.
> Operation Choke Point was a 2013 initiative of the United States Department of Justice[1] which investigated banks in the United States and the business they did with firearm dealers, payday lenders, and other companies believed to be at a high risk for fraud and money laundering.
> This operation, disclosed in an August 2013 Wall Street Journal story,[2] was officially ended in August 2017,[3] and the FDIC settled multiple lawsuits by promising to Congress additional training for its examiners and to cease issuing "informal" and "unwritten suggestions" to banks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
>If the government were to attempt do as you suggest, the courts would slap them down hard.
The issues around Operation Choke Point[0] that you linked to were investigated by Congress and the Department of Justice and, as I said, smacked down hard.
The above isn't analogous to the current situation, but the result was exactly as I said it would be.
Thanks for making my point for me.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
( https://reason.com/2019/08/26/secret-memos-show-the-governme... )
How is that relevant to Stripe? They aren't the government. They're not even one of the top ten biggest payment processors.
I can only conclude that you're not arguing in good faith. More's the pity.
Imagine all the airlines were run by Republicans, and they universally prevented anyone who works for Democratic leaning organizations (Eg ActBlue) from flying because some small number of bad actors on their side did some bad things.
We would do well to imagine what it would be like to be prevented access with no legal recourse to an an oligopoly of services that cannot practically be bypassed, and ask ourselves what potential for abuse exists when such impactful decisions can be taken without standard legal due process.
What evidence can you provide to support your claim that various corporations are colluding to block folks?
What evidence can you provide that said corporations have a "preferred political party?"
You have no such evidence. What's more, whether or not the nebulous set of entities to which you refer (let's have specific names and specific actions).
I'd further say that "cloud" (read: someone else's servers) services, a few large social networking sites and a small subset of payment processors (I'm guessing that this is the set of corporations to which you were referring since you don't bother to be specific) do not constitute an "oligopoly."
I'd further add that there are hundreds of hosting and co-location providers, dozens of payment processors and a variety of mechanisms to share data, information and messaging.
I find your diatribe to be sorely lacking in evidence, reasoned argument and factual information.
Finally, your analogy concerning airlines is deeply flawed, as that isn't even close to what's going on.
Please provide some evidence for your claims.
Otherwise, I can only conclude that you are arguing in bad faith.
This is just not happening. Except apparently in the minds of many HNers who live in some bizarre alternate reality.
Perhaps these bans are happening not because of political affiliation but due to the messages these particular people (e.g., Trump) are espousing.
Parler go banned because it's full of message calling for (e.g.) Mike Pence to be hanged and other such things, and Parler isn't / can't do much about it, and its infrastructure providers (AWS, app stores) do not want any part of it per their ToS.
No one has cut off Mitch McConnell because he hasn't been calling forth angry mobs to storm Congress (or the White House).
Actor Peter Fonda called for violently assaulting Trump's underage child on Twitter in 2018 (his account was not permanently banned), and that's very typical posting from leftist celebrities on Twitter these past four years.
Thousands of violent posts were in the "Hang Mike Pence" Twitter trend that was going on the other day. People have been openly calling for executions for treason and similar on Twitter in relation to the Capitol riots. There was widespread cheering and celebrating when that woman got shot in the neck by Capitol Police, I read thousands of Tweets that were literally cheering for her death, all on Twitter, and nobody gives a fuck.
The double standard by Twitter is beyond disgusting. It's psychopath behavior.
That trended because Trump supporters built a gallows and chanted “Hang Mike Pence” at the Capitol on Wednesday.
* https://www.newsweek.com/twitter-stops-hang-mike-pence-trend...
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25704588
Notice a pattern? Left wing heroes can say anything they want and Twitter doesn’t ban them.
Twitter and Stripe are acting in coordination - literally conspiring - with every other big tech company to take a specific action. When they do that they're acting as an illegal cartel and must be prosecuted accordingly. This is the kind of coordinated cartel behavior that banana republics and third world countries have that behave exactly like these companies are and do so out in the open (and always with the political support of the group with the most power, to target their foes). We're supposed to have anti-trust laws to deal with conspiring mega corporations.
Back in the day, you had to rack your own servers in your own data centers and manage them yourself. Had any of these 'free speech' services spent any time considering how reliant they were on 3rd party services, they should never have engaged those companies in the first place.
There was a day when you had to build your own servers to host your own websites. Not that long ago, imo.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/gab-reports-growth-in-the-mi...
Just FYI, some countries have made it a protected class, e.g.: https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1993/0082/latest/... (see 21(1)(j))
The ongoing purge -- would it not be seen as treason, as an act to in fact subvert/weaken a position of POTUS and therefore directly destabilize the US government?
If you are conservative or lean to it, its incredibly disheartening. You have to consistently justify to these people you aren't brainwashed, because their default idea is that you are. Sort of the same way about serious religious belief if you have one; people default assume you are nuts and at best you can work your way up to "he's nuts but he is our nut."
It's scary to me, and to be honest my political views are starting to move towards "limit the power other people can affect you as much as possible" because its now evident how people will happily deplatform any unpopular person beyond the real justification. I can buy removing Trump's speech due to incitement, but it keeps going and going-like we literally see fox news next, and what then?
The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.
Looks like my choices are to stuff everything I believe down deep inside and hope I can participate in society, keep a job, support my family, etc. OR to speak up and risk losing everything. This is the true mob to fear. Everything is being torn down to get the "bad guys". Everything.
This is a distraction. Political speech enjoys the highest level of protection in the US, political speech is one of the primary motivators behind the existence of constitutionally protected speech in the US.
Trump just stood up and asked for his people to go to the capitol - one of his former campaign managers called for beheading members of government.
Calling out his lies - a la politifact and many others - hasn’t worked to deradicalize. Fact check verifications next to the content haven’t. So - just shutting off the calls for violence and lies are the next step.
“Opposition to Trump looks inept”(?) The opposition just swept congress and the presidency, crushed the popular vote, and even members of his party are strongly against his actions. Ineptitude is the Trump’s legal challenges against the election and the “4 Seasons Total Landscaping” fiasco.
Trump can raise funds in many ways. He can get checks. No one is required to allow someone to raise funds on their site - let freedom ring!
I don't think even the last election was a success for democrats to be honest, it was a pretty close call. But that is another metric. Trump became president and had his full term. I don't think past you would call even the current situation a success, you just reduced your expectations.
The supposed fact checkers had a clear bias and couldn't establish trust. That will take some time to get back and I doubt democrats will have success with programs that require any form of solidarity because you still define yourself as opposition to Trump. There is still a huge and solidified division. Hard to govern, but we will see.
These tech giants have made themselves into a lattice on which modern society attaches itself, and their pervasiveness will only continue to grow in 21st century America. We risk them being in bed with government. And when nominally private, major industry is aligned with government to effect political ends, there's a word for that, and we've seen that before.
Private companies deciding not to service the head of the executive seems to be nearly the opposite of that, unless I understood this wrongly (which is entirely possible). Think of a newspaper (=private entity) decides to boycott a president and not write anything about him. Wouldn't it be the polar opposite of free speech if the president then had the power to force them to write about him?
I get that a payment service is not the same as a newspaper, but it is still a private entity.