It's weird seeing Epik being referred to as the alt-right's favorite host. I use them as a registrar for completely benign personal domains. I did so because they offered Whois privacy by default. That was it. It's weird that it's being discussed like the site/service itself is some nefarious/controversial thing instead of just some of its customers.
The discussion reminds of this SlateStarCodex classic, in particular this quote:
The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
Lol, I love that quote ("your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches"). It's very true, and not the least bit surprising. The only reason for free-speech focused social media to be a thing is because it is a pushback against bans and restrictions from Facebook and Twitter. But look who these platforms ban: for all the (in my opinion, laughable) talk of how these platforms are "biased against conservatives", last time I checked Twitter wasn't banning anyone for saying the minimum wage reduces overall employment, or that we should return to the gold standard, or that marriage should be reserved for unions of 1 man and 1 woman. They ban people for inciting violence, for repeating provable falsehoods over and over which can lead to violence, for targeted harassment. So your "free speech social media" is primarily for people who want incite violence, or lie over and over to convince people of provable falsehoods, or to harass others.
These platforms absolutely do ban or demonetize people for these reasons. Dennis Prager's video on the Ten Commandments was demonetized and the reason given? "It contains the word 'kill'. Dangerous for children."
They have extremely rigid standards for conservatives and very loose standards for everybody else. That's a real thing and it's something you don't see until you are one of those whose views are being targeted.
Ultimately, I predict that conservative discourse will take a similar path to MP3s: first, it will be targeted by the big powers-that-be. Next, technologies will appear that make it impossible to police or shut down. Finally, corporate America will realize that it's better to work with people than fight them and the discourse will be brought back into the fold and corporations will once again make money off of it.
>”They have extremely rigid standards for people of one viewpoint and very loose standards for people of another.”
It only seems that way to you because you’re seeing only one side getting arbitrarily suspended.
My left-leaning Twitter feed has for years been regularly full of people complaining about how Twitter censors black women, activists, feminists and sex workers, while not doing enough against white supremacists, etc.
Probably the truth is that the standards are just unevenly rigid one day, loose the other, depending on who catches their attention. Policing hundreds of millions of active users is nearly impossible, and adding automated systems increases the risk of false positives.
No doubt that's true on the level of the average user like you and me. What we see for prominent conservatives, however, feels very unfair to me. Perhaps prominent members of other groups are targeted similarly--it wouldn't surprise me.
To be honest, every single time I dig in to a conservative complaining "they are singling me out for my views!!" I do more research and find that it is 99% bullshit. Not 100% bullshit mind you, because it's that 1% that is nominally true so they can leave out the rest of the context.
> "Respectfully, senator, that's not right," replied Bhatia, explaining that those videos contained mature topics—murder, rape, etc. He reiterated that they are still visible to the "98.5 percent" of YouTube users who do not opt for restricted mode.
Who would have thought that another conservative story about censorship would turn out to be bullshit.
It’s not like the people parroting them have the impetuous to check though, it’s much easier and more comfortable to drone on about “YouTube blocking a video about the 10 commandments” over and over until it becomes your reality, where you’re persecuted.
Multiple studies have shown that Facebook and twitter do not censor conservatives. This has been well established and anyone who argues otherwise is either ignorant or arguing from a position of bad faith.
All the "conservatives/libertarians" I've followed on youtube have been both demonetized and had videos suspended. It's a small sample size but all?!, what a coincidence. From the "left leaning" channels I follow I've not seen the same complain.
I don't follow anyone on facebook or twitter I can't vouch for those, maybe it's just youtube who does all the censoring.
"The findings demonstrate how a small number of conservative users routinely outpace their liberal rivals and traditional news outlets in driving the online conversation — amplifying their impact a little more than a week before Election Day. They contradict the prevailing political rhetoric from some Republican lawmakers that conservative voices are censored online — indicating that instead, right-leaning talking points continue to shape the worldviews of millions of U.S. voters."
"right-leaning pages consistently earned more average weekly interactions than either left-leaning or ideologically nonaligned pages"
This doesn't seem to me to support that "Facebook and twitter do not censor conservatives";
The assumption seems to be that if conservatives are ultimately more influential, they mustn't have been censored. I'm also not sure how fine-grained the distinction of right/left leaning is.
If all conservatives voices are censored except for a few far-right/extremist voices that are amplified, does this balance out? Add a few more dimensions and you might come up with a different conclusion.
In any case, I'll need to see more before I agree it's "well established".
It’s weird to claim that YouTube has a bias against right wing media and then shrug and say well I have no idea if left wing media suffers equally arbitrary censorship or not. That makes no sense as a stance.
What happens at the margins is probably random and depends on which moderator was having a bad day. But the Trump ban is quite different, especially since they gave a formal and thought-out justification [0].
The tweets that they quote are simply innocuous. The ban isn't justified based on the tweets, and was either a panicked response to the news with no investigation or a very thinly veiled political move. I think the right wing has reason to claim bias from that one. What is the closest parallel with that involving a left wing figure?
It is disingenuous to say those tweets are "simply innocuous" without the context of what was going on and what the President did that very day.
I've posted this before, and while I agree that those are far from his most egregious tweets, given the fact of the insurrection at the Capitol, the ban doesn't seem unjustified at all. Especially since there are now many videos coming out from the insurrection of the rioters believing they are acting in accordance with Trump's wishes.
For the sake of argument, Ok. I'll not argue with that. I shall assume that the context of the situation justified the ban.
But why then did Twitter quote two tweets? The tweets do not support the decision. They could just have said "based on context off Twitter, we are banning Trump".
The fact that they didn't makes me think they were scrambling and not thinking clearly. Their reading of the tweets is bizarre. Or maybe they being dishonest about their reasoning.
Because those two tweets, and the video, were both offering tacit support to people violently attacking the US Capitol and continuing to promote the egregious lie and conspiracy theory of a stolen election that was driving the attack in the first place.
What made those tweets untenable was the changed circumstances of the attack on the Capitol and the knowledge that those engaged in it were relying on Trump's support and encouragement.
I dunno, the further we get from the Capitol Hill riot, the harder I think it will be to sustain the argument that "I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th." can only be interpreted as "violently seize control of the American government". Those are going to be famous last words if ever there are any.
If you were going to put % chances that he was speaking literally, what would you put them at? Surely you'd agree there is at least a chance he was just stream-of-conciousness tweeting what he was thinking?
I don’t think you can wave away the impact of Trumps words, even if he didn’t intend violence. His audience interpreted approval. That’s what matters. To disagree is to be deliberately ignorant or to argue in bad faith.
That is a totally unreasonable standard that would speak very clearly of a bias (if that is what Twitter thought, which I doubt). It isn't being applied to politicians at all evenly, it is only being applied to Trump. If the speakers intentions and literal words don't matter, and they are to be judged by the most extreme fringes of their supporters then no politician is going to be allowed to speak.
The problem for conservative outlets is that we have to believe their word that they are being prosecuted.
But their word means absolutely nothing because they have zero credibility since they would be saying these exact same things no matter what.
If you always cry fire, you end up in a situation where people don't care if you are lying or that your house is on fire.
>. Finally, corporate America will realize that it's better to work with people than fight them
Conservative media isn't 'the people' and these tech companies aren't the corporates. The tech companies follow this policy because otherwise their employees walk out.
And the so called conservative media is a very tiny super elite spending a ton of money trying to pervert traditional values into a death cult for personal gain.
Indeed. "Conservatives" have for decades been complaining that Christians are being persecuted... meanwhile the vast majority of the house and senate identifies as Christian and no president has ever identified as any other religion.
To them, it seems, not getting everything they want qualifies as persecution.
While I do feel that conservatives pull out the persecution complex... using that as the entire basis for dismissing arguments seems disingenuous.
The problem for <i>feminist</i> outlets is that we have to believe their word that they are being prosecuted.
>tech companies aren't the corporates. The tech companies follow this policy because otherwise their employees walk out.
We at $bigname law firm aren't corporate, it's just if we hire poc our employees will walk out. -someone before the civil rights era.
I have the argument that the policy implemented are inherently biased against conservative groups. For example, a policy about misgendering would disproportionately affect conservatives because they feel that sex is an immutable characteristic.
>using that as the entire basis for dismissing arguments seems disingenuous.
You are right. The tech firms could be more transparent about the rules they apply and which ones are violated. The ambiguity is indeed solvable, but considering the state of the world, it seems like a low moral priority to me.
>We at $bigname law firm aren't corporate, it's just if we hire poc our employees will walk out. -someone before the civil rights era.
That's disingenuous. Your comparsions fails in five ways:
1. Its not about who gets hired, its about who is served as a customer
2. The violated rules of these firms are also defined as criminal behavior by law in all of the western world, so to 'serve the customer' you are talking about being an accessory in a crime. Even if public prosecutors don't make a habit of prosecuting companies when they are simply the platform, companies have an obligation to their shareholders to not take unnecessary risks.
3. None of this has anything to do with traditional or conservative values. Both the far-left and far-right have been creating a lot of propaganda suggesting that traditional values include racism, sexism, sedation, anti-semitism, etc.
4. The employees walking out is a realistic problem, because there is barely any supply of death cult members with the intellectual and educational background required to perform the job. I'm sure lots of people work at these tech companies that have traditional values, like a small government and low taxes, or a more family centric focus on life. But at this point those people are referred to as 'traitors' by the same so called conservative media
5. People's skin color isn't a choice. They are born with it. Your views on the other hand are a choice. There is accountability and liability. You can be an anti-semitic person and post a video about how to cook an egg without it being removed from youtube. You just can't express anti-semitic views on somebody else's platform. Not complicated nor an issue.
> These platforms absolutely do ban or demonetize people for these reasons. Dennis Prager's video on the Ten Commandments was demonetized and the reason given? "It contains the word 'kill'. Dangerous for children."
That's unlikely due to a anti-conservative bias though. YouTube is notorious for their aggressive demonetisation of content.
In any event, there is a definite difference between demonetisation and censorship. Nobody is obligated to pay you for telling them what you think .
Well that's what you say but that's not true, to be marked as domonetisatised also lowers your view counts since the video stops showing up, it also might not show for subscribers.
Youtube is also able to monetize your video, but since people have reported seeing adds on demonetized videos, you just don't get the money.
> That's unlikely due to a anti-conservative bias though.
Can you point me out to left leaning content that gets demonetized constantly so I could compare with the right leaning one. I've not seen this happen in people I've subscribed and would like to see if this claim has any merit.
> Well that's what you say but that's not true, to be marked as domonetisatised also lowers your view counts since the video stops showing up, it also might not show for subscribers.
I understand these to be separate issues that get lumped together because Google changed the way their recommendation engine worked to de-emphasise the importance of subscriptions around the same time as advertisers started to care about where their ads played. Happy to be proved wrong, but I had a quick look around on the internet and couldn't find a reasonable source to contradict me.
> Youtube is also able to monetize your video, but since people have reported seeing adds on demonetized videos, you just don't get the money.
This might be right, it might be wrong, but it isn't censorship.
> Can you point me out to left leaning content that gets demonetized constantly so I could compare with the right leaning one. I've not seen this happen in people I've subscribed and would like to see if this claim has any merit.
I don't watch much 'left leaning' content, so I can't readily provide an example, but a lot of true crime and history channels are constantly having videos demonetised for touching on non-advertiser friendly themes. I know this because they constantly complain about it!
I don’t know this person’s political stance, but I can’t help but be reminded of this story. A woman shot YouTube staff when her channel was demonetized. I think people who view social media as targeting right wing views are seeing reality very narrowly. Politics don’t appear to be involved with this case.
>Can you point me out to left leaning content that gets demonetized constantly so I could compare with the right leaning one. I've not seen this happen in people I've subscribed and would like to see if this claim has any merit.
Is there a public notification of what videos are monetized? I'm unaware of one, and my quick check shows the poster gets one and some proprietary services that can supposedly check.
Without a public way to check, you would he unable to distinguish actual bias from which side complains more.
>Can you point me out to left leaning content that gets demonetized
This is a false equivalence. For all the flaws of Antifa and woke culture, they aren't the ones advocating violent insurrection against democratic government in the United States and the murder of Republican law makers for being traitors to the cause. Not as satire or comment, but literally.
I would contend that it is not surprising that one of these sides is encountering more problems with posting guidelines than the other.
> violent insurrection against democratic government
Is right leaning content for insurrection?
Sorry I've missed that train. The "right/libertarian" I see censored is much tamer than that, Joe Rogan, Sargon of Akkad, Viva Frey, Academic Agent, Thunderf00t, 1791.
Did they organise a militia, obtain weapons and ammunition, agree to meet at the Capitol and actually storm the Capitol, chant "kill him with his own gun" when they got hold of one police officer, and for real beat another police officer to death with a fire extinguisher?
Shit talking like that in private, in a bar in a heavily editorialised recording is one thing. I've been a student and Ive heard people brag about all kinds of stuff. Actually following through in the capitol with a violent, literally murderous insurrection is on a completely different level and it's frankly exasperating to me that you can't or won't see that.
You're relying on a highly edited video clip from Project Veritas, really? The constantly-cutting-clip is of some low level field organiser drunkenly mouthing off in a bar. Even the constant cutting of the video couldn't hide the fact that the guy was punctuating his musings with laughter.
The right have been pushing this narrative that they are being unfairly treated by platforms such as YouTube for some time now (long before the capitol riot). I strongly encourage you to look deeper into this because it is not an accurate picture of what is really going on.
Demonetization standards are universally fairly strict yet arbitrary, and they are based on the desires of the advertisers. Plus, "YouTube won't pay me for my right-wing propaganda" doesn't make someone a victim.
It does make them a victim if content on the other side is not demonetized at the same rate for the same arbitrary reasons. When that happens, you wind up with well-funded speech that continues on one side, and the other side fades away (which is what partisan individuals would like to see happen to their opposition, but is unhealthy for society).
But the very fact of YouTube's existence ensures that sincere and effective political commentators do not need their speech to be 'well-funded' for it to be easily accessed by millions of people. And the aspects of political speech that do involve significant donor funds like paid TV slots are overwhelmingly not dependent on or supported to any significant extent by YouTube channel revenues.
Sure, demonetization makes YouTube political commentary an unprofitable business model which is unfortunate for people who would like to earn a living from it, but free speech isn't about Google's advertisers owing anybody a living, and if people are only willing to express a particular view for click revenue then that political position has much bigger problems than Google,...
But it’s all about incentives. If they are financially incentivizing one side and not the other, it leads to a dramatic imbalance in the amount and quality of content on either side. If they wanted a healthy ecosystem, they would either even-handedly apply demonetization policies, or demonetize all political content across the board. They are, unsurprisingly, doing neither of these things.
>they wanted a healthy ecosystem, they would either even-handedly apply demonetization policies,
Videos are demonetized because advertisers don't want to be associated with them. You can't just force companies to compensate what they view as an unprofitable position.
>If they are financially incentivizing one side and not the other, it leads to a dramatic imbalance in the amount and quality of content on either side.
We've currently had well over a century of the far left, socialism, receiving almost no corporate or government financial support. Both groups have been openly hostile towards the position, yet it has somehow managed.
Videos are demonetized because advertisers don't want to be associated with them. You can't just force companies to compensate what they view as an unprofitable position.
That is absolutely not how demonetization works. Google doesn't take a poll of advertisers and ask if they think they should demonetize them. YouTube reviewers unevenly apply intentionally vague policies to demonetize videos, seemingly at random.
We've currently had well over a century of the far left, socialism, receiving almost no corporate or government financial support. Both groups have been openly hostile towards the position, yet it has somehow managed.
I'd argue that the current incarnation of the Democratic Party is incredibly far left, and it has plenty of financial support. By today's standards, Bill Clinton during his Presidential years would be considered a conservative. Even Barack Obama has been criticized by the woke left for saying that cancel culture is toxic [1]. You have to be pretty far left for Obama to say you're too far left.
> Google doesn't take a poll of advertisers and ask if they think they should demonetize them.
Advertisers don't have time to check every video, neither do YouTube reviewers. Advertisers set the guidelines, and they include many things common to the right wing narrative.
>I'd argue that the current incarnation of the Democratic Party is incredibly far left, and it has plenty of financial support.
Note that I called the far left "socialism," and that neither Biden nor the Democratic party strongly support socialized healthcare, something common worldwide. The Democratic party isn't remotely far left, it's center left at best.
The page is titled "Advertiser-friendly content guidelines," and they aren't overly vague. There's some uncertainty, and I'm sure the bots in charge make many mistakes that YouTube is terrible at correcting. It's still not some arbitrary attack on one side.
The demonetization policy is to serve their advertisers' priorities, not to promote the health of the ecosystem, and advertisers are unwilling to advertise against an enormous variety of content, including that put out by right wing, left wing and entirely mainstream commentators. It's also inconsistent precisely because it's reactive, defensive and not intended as debate moderation or any kind of evaluation of the actual merits of the argument.
And we're talking about an ecosystem for political opinion on a platform with low payouts here: the incentives are supposed to be convincing people of something you believe to be important, and thousands of politically active people are already prepared to donate time communicating with much smaller audiences than can be reached on YouTube. The health of political debate really doesn't depend on the representation of the sorts of opinions people are only willing to voice in return for a $5 CPM.
They didn't ban a former prime minister of Malaysia for stating "Muslims have the right to be angry and kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past". They wouldn't even remove the tweet. This was his response to a French school teacher being beheaded in Paris by a Muslim parent, angry that he was teaching freedom of expression includes freedom to offend.
They didn't ban Kathy Griffith for holding up Trump's decapitated head either. You wouldn't get away with doing that to Biden's head.
I think you are, deliberately or not, leaving out important context (e.g. Twitter did remove the tweet from the Malaysian ex-prime minister), but regardless, even if I fully accept your point that Twitter and FB don't apply their rules fairly, you're still left with the fact that the only people who really need a "free speech" social media platform are folks that are mad that they can't demand the killings of millions or that they can't display fake severed heads. And literally every one of these "free speech" platforms (Parler, Gab, Voat) was immediately turned into a cesspool of conspiratorial rantings, hatred and racism.
Voat was probably my "favorite" of all. Literally the only reason it got any traffic were people were mad they could no longer post to r/fatpeoplehate.
twitter didn't remove it initially and must have done so only after backlash pointing out their hypocrisy. Opponents of Trump have had free reign the last four years to incite violence against him and his supporters. Once you label your opponents nazis you can say what you like as far as the tech giants are concerned.
This is the specific sort of muddying via association that's often used. Suddenly, trump is a literal swastika flashing nazi, and that's why twitter banned him.
Associating people with the worst of whatever group you can lump them in, then following up with "they're that guy"
No, Trump is not a literal swastika-flashing Nazi.
BUT, there are literal groups of swastika-flashing Nazis that do support Trump. Targeting these people with harassment should be encouraged, NOT because they support Trump, but because they are Nazis.
Trump and non-nazi Trump supporters MUST NOT be harassed by simple association, EXCEPT to the extent that they are themselves protecting the nazis, or trying to muddy the waters.
Because a lot of people ARE muddying the waters from the "Trump" side as well: instead of recognizing that many attacks are against literal nazis who happen to support Trump, they act as if the attacks are against Trump supporters in general, or that people are calling a crowd nazis because they support Trump, not because they were chanting "jews will not replace us". Or claiming that Trump, who said about the crowd chanting "jews will not replace us" and the antifa counter-protest "there are fine people on both sides", was not literally defending nazis in this case.
He's not a Nazi although he's willing to ally with them, but I believe he is a Fascist, on the basis that he has nothing but contempt for democracy and the rule of law (among other things).
He pulled exactly the same 'stop the steal' crap in 2016, claiming massive voter fraud then as well, as a pre-emptive strike in case he lost. But hang on, if he actually believed there was massive voter fraud, how come he did nothing about it for four years eve when he controlled both houses? Where were his reforms of the voting system, increased supervision of voting and vote counting? why no improvements to ballot security and statistical analysis to identify the fraud (the current analyses show it's negligible). If he actually believed what he is saying about vote fraud, why didn't he act on it?
He did nothing about this for two reasons. First he knows there isn't any significant vote fraud, this is well established and was not a partisan issue before he started talking about it. Second, if he reformed voting security, he would become responsible for preventing any potential fraud and would be unable to blame failings in the system on anyone else, taking away his excuse.
> Trump and non-nazi Trump supporters MUST NOT be harassed by simple association, EXCEPT to the extent that they are themselves protecting the nazis, or trying to muddy the waters.
That's the thin end of the wedge though.
- Muslims must not be harassed by simple association, except where they muddy the waters to protect Islamists.
- Feminists must not be harassed by simple association, except where they muddy the waters to protect transphobes.
- Conservatives must not be harassed by simple association, except where they muddy the waters to protect an anti-gay rights agenda.
"Muddying the water" is dangerously vague. Who adjudicates between good-faith arguments and those intended to give cover for extremists?
Knew this was going to get downvotes. How very dare I apply the standards of the left to BLM. I've yet to see a good argument that this isn't s double standard though - your actions either aid bad actors, or they don't, whether through explicit support or indifference.
Ron Paul's page was never banned, blocked or censored in any way for people viewing his content. Admin rights on his page were mistakenly blocked, and reopened a few hours later. I in know way see that targeting the right, especially since I hear plenty of bitching from people on the left who also think it's some sort of conspiracy whenever they get blocked (e.g. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/04/24/facebook-whil... )
It's kind of a truism these days that whenever people are blocked or banned on social media, they blame it on some underlying conspiracy to ban their version of political thought. Another commenter put it best: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25818108
"It only seems that way to you because you’re seeing only one side getting arbitrarily suspended."
Good catch I should have looked into that a little deeper. It might be a case of confirmation bias.
There is one point that Tim Pool made that I think still stands. you have to moderate such that all content is within the Overton window. Only the left and right have different views on what does and does not fit inside this window. For example right wingers want to argue about the role of trans rights in womens sports. Much of the left and Twitter consider this to be outside of the Overton window.
I literally posted just a few comments up a story about people on the left complaining they were banned on Facebook from discussing racism. But anecdotes are relatively useless, another commenter posted an actual study showing there is no anti-conservative bias.
But even the conspiratorial mindset that "Oh look, this accident must be deliberate!!" is really annoying because it completely ignores the consequences of the mistake. Ron Paul (or anyone) not being able to post for a few hours is some big abuse of power, when none of his existing posts were unreadable? I've had power outages in urban settings that lasted longer.
For organizations that donate 95% towards one political party, some how they have managed to be extra-ordinarily neutral. If that is your thesis - I disagree.
Griffin may have apologized but has since rescinded that apology and subsequently published the image again. And as of this writing it’s been up for 2 months.
> Lol, I love that quote ("your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches"). It's very true, and not the least bit surprising.
It's not quite true though.
It's what happens when you're the new kid on the block and the incumbents are appointing Witchfinders General to burn the heretics, because then rather than languishing in obscurity as you would otherwise, you get a huge influx of refugees and thousands of them are witches. Then if you let the witches chase off all the other refugees, you reach the undesired end state.
The way around this is to get big enough that most of your users are not witches. So the incumbents can do it already. Just stop having witch hunts. The witches can't take over when all the witches in the whole world are 0.5% of your user base, and other people only leave once the witches take over. It's a stable equilibrium.
But you can also get there another way, which is when the incumbents are hunting witches so hard that 95% of their refugees are innocent people. Then you just sit there and let everybody in, and your percentage of actual witches isn't so high that you're in trouble.
Unless anybody who tries to do that gets canceled before they can get a large enough user base to outnumber the witches.
Let's follow that argument through to its logical conclusion. If the incumbents actually were hunting witches "so hard that 95% of their refugees were innocent people", the vast majority of the influx of refugees to new platforms would not be witches and they would not have to worry about getting a large user bases for witches to be vastly outnumbered.
Presumably this would be reflected in Gab, Voat and Parler being entirely normal discussion forums where people talking about storming capitols or Jewish problems would soon be shouted down by the majority userbase of perfectly normal people. Has this been the case?
The only one of the three that reached the point of having enough users to plausibly get there was Parler, and they were forced offline almost immediately after that happened. On the basis of a list of misbehavior which was unlikely to have been representative.
They had 10 million users. I have a hard time believing that there are 10 million "insurrectionists" in the country and if there were we have bigger problems. Meanwhile the cherry picked examples weren't anything you couldn't also find on Twitter or Facebook.
Is there any example of this ever happening? A major platform losing a non-trivial proportion of their users for not censoring them?
The network effect is strong. That's the problem to begin with. If people would quit so easily then there would be a lot more platforms and competition and we wouldn't be having this discussion.
They do, or at least they regularly suspend and remove tweets for that. I get a bunch of "the person you reported violated the Twitter rules" notifications for many of my reports. (Note that spam reports never generate report notifications; as far as I can tell they just go to the "quality tweets" algorithm or even shadowbanning in extreme cases)
I assumed OP meant that Twitter is "over-sensitive" and bans you for just misgendering nowadays. I clarified that it doesn't action your account for that specifically but the underlying context, if it's part of harassing someone.
There is something wrong with that quote - the point of calling things a witch hunt is that witches don't exist and that the people finding 'witches' are harming a community who haven't done anything. The language has drifted away from its meaning there to the point where it doesn't mean anything.
McCarthyism has a section on its wiki page called "Victims of McCartheyism" and mentions hundreds imprisoned and thousands of people losing jobs. It was hunting a soviet threat to America which didn't actually exist, and doing tremendous damage while doing so. The article you link on the actual spies is listing maybe tens of names.
And under that section are listed names like Dalton Trumbo, who was literally a member of the Communist Party USA, which was effectively a Soviet puppet organization. The Soviet threat absolutely existed, and has been validated by both US counterintelligence records that have been declassified since the Cold War and Soviet records that came to light as well.
None of this is meant to excuse or justify the excesses of McCarthyism, but rather to explain exactly what McCarthyism was. The Hollywood blacklist were, by and large, a group of people who were “deplatformed” for being enthusiastic supporters of Joseph Stalin. That’s not inherently far off from what a lot of people would favor today.
> The Hollywood blacklist were, by and large, a group of people who were “deplatformed” for being enthusiastic supporters of Joseph Stalin.
I think it’s more accurate to say that there were people enthusiastic about communism, rather than Stalin. Your statement is akin to stating that all republicans are enthusiastic about Trump. The Lincoln Project would suggest otherwise.
By that time, the international communist movement had been splintered between Stalinist and Trostskyite factions for a couple of decades. The CPUSA was not only Stalinist but actually funded and directed from Moscow.
... which begs the question: was Stalinism ever really a serious threat global capitalism? For me, part of the answer comes from looking into the reasons for the split between the Stalinists and Trotskyites, and how successful the US was in economically isolating the USSR and its allies.
As I stated, I'm not in favor of political repression, but Stalinism was an ideology that led directly to tens of millions of murders, so I'm inclined to take it seriously as a threat to basic human rights.
I would agree. That’s actually part of the point I’m making—unlike witches, communists actually exist.
I would further state that I’m, in general, opposed to political repression, even if the intent is to repress totalitarian ideologies that entail violence and mass murder such as communism.
> There is something wrong with that quote - the point of calling things a witch hunt is that witches don't exist and that the people finding 'witches' are harming a community who haven't done anything.
10 years ago I would've agreed with you. The problem is Trump called investigations "witch hunts" despite them proving the existence of dozens of witches.
The term in OP is used in this recent context, where witches do exist, despite the witches' protests.
I thought it banned for a lot more than call to violence (and mostlt calls to violence by right-wingers at that), including a number of right wing positions:
Doesn't Twitter ban people who define "man" and "women" in a way other than self identity and use the pronouns appropriate to that identification?
Doesn't it ban people who go on about how insert-minority is intellectually and morally inferior and should be removed from the country?
Try to find citations - original sources, not right-wing bloggers – for those claims. You’ll see that the first does not happen but the latter does when it crosses the line into racism (race is a legally protected category) and genocide, which is a call to violence.
The rules are not hard to stay within. The disturbing part is that many conservatives self-identify with these extremes.
Yes but this witch-hunt is extreme. You are a witch by association. The host of a social media platform should be no more lumped in with the users of that platform than a phone company that provides cell access to the KKK. At some point it's just going too far.
I have never understood why people get so angry at assumptions by association. It is a very natural process that people do. If you find out that someone is best friends with someone you despise, you will automatically assume the worst about them.
Best friends are not the ones being targeted here. You have examples such a Don Lemon trying to tar all Republican voters as being in league with the neo Nazis https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6223009033001 .
Loose associations don't mean you are in agreement with people on every possible issue. I agree with Hitler that public sanitation is important but consider him to be one of the most evil men to ever exist.
So would you vote for Hitler because of his public sanitation policies, while overlooking his other evil policies?
Because this is what Republican voters seem to be doing: they vote for Trump because they like some of his policies (e.g., lower taxes) while overlooking his other policies (open racism, open misogyny, anti-science, etc.).
Well I would agree that voting for someone with racist or misogynistic policies would be a problem, however I've not seen any policies or laws that were. You are welcome to prove me wrong.
As such I can excuse people for voting for Trump. Especially in a two party system. I suspect many simply always vote Republican and despite Trump's brash public persona they thought he was their best option.
> A federal court on Friday struck down North Carolina voting laws it said were enacted with “discriminatory intent”, targeting African Americans “with almost surgical precision”.
> Plaintiffs in the suit welcomed what one called “a stinging rebuke” to the Republican-controlled state government, representatives of which questioned the political affiliations of the judges involved and said they would appeal the decision to the US supreme court, because it “ignores legal precedent”.
> his other policies (open racism, open misogyny, anti-science, etc.).
The vast majority of people who vote for him do not think he has policies with these traits. Describing his policies as "open racism", "open sexism", etc requires definitions of those terms so broad that most of the American population (and the vast majority of the world population) would also be guilty of them.
Looking at his public statements about women I think it's clear he is a misogynist but mainly in his personal dealings. It's not really a feature of his politics.
As for racism I think the Muslim Ban was a case of explicitly racist policy. I know the Supreme Court disagreed, but frankly they are wrong on this.
It matters a lot, because words have meanings.
Can religion (ideas) be changed? Can you change your race? Did Trump discriminate against Muslims or against specific countries? Does a sovereign country have the right to refuse entry to whom it pleases within the laws?
Looking at his public statements about women I think it's clear he is a misogynist but mainly in his personal dealings. It's not really a feature of his politics.
As for racism I think the Muslim Ban was a clear case of explicitly racist policy.
Looking at his tendency to switch wives for a newer model is clear evidence that he has a lack of respect for the women in his life. But there is little evidence that his policy positions disadvantage women.
The travel ban was not something I see as racist. It was nationalistic and popularist. There was a terror threat and Trump actioned a broad travel ban to make his voters feel protected from that threat. Did it actually protect anyone, probably not. Did it unfairly disadvantage huge numbers of primarily Muslim people, yes it did. But the intent had nothing to do with them being Muslim, it had to do with their perceived link to terrorism. You could argue that it was racist to ignore the rights of all these foreign nationals but I think Trump's position was that he only cared about Americans. He was a strong nationalist but in my opinion not a racist.
But there is a correlation wrt race and religion, so how do you distinguish?
Most neo-Nazis and white supremist are white, isn't any action targeting those groups also racist? of course not; but what's the difference between that argument and the so-called "muslim ban"?
I don't really distinguish, there are technical differences but it's not as though one is ok and the other is not. Would a religion-ist ban really be any more acceptable? Either you accept that each person should be treated equally as individuals irrespective of such characteristics, or you don't.
Neo-Nazis are not targeted under the law for being Neo-Nazis. They are targeted for individual criminal acts they perform personally, or conspire to perform together. Some small groups have been outlawed in some countries, but only in the same way that criminal gangs such as the Mafia or other terrorist organisations are targeted. That is in no way comparable to targeting "Muslims".
The mistake you are making is to conflate the criminal act with the motivation for that act. Setting a bomb or shooting someone because you are a Neo-Nazi does not mean that if someone prosecutes you they are doing so because you are a Neo-Nazi. They are doing it because of the bomb or the shooting.
This is the mistake the MAGA crowd on the Capitol were making when they were surprised and shocked that the police didn't come over to their side. It's a characteristic of racism that it conflates group identity with individual identity, and it's also why I am vehemently opposed to far left identity politics which makes exactly the same mistake.
They may be on opposite sides of the political spectrum, but wing nuts generally are susceptible to the same cognitive failure modes.
> Would a religion-ist ban really be any more acceptable?
I don't really see religion as any more than personal/group belief; I understand America sees it differently, and privileges religious belief.
Is a religion-based ban more acceptable? yes, race is an immutable characteristic that does not determine or prescribe a persons actions or motivations - "religion" is a systems of belief that absolutely does.
> Neo-Nazis are not targeted under the law for being Neo-Nazis
If the metric for hate speech is guilt-by-association with acts of violence, any ideology that promotes violence is hate speech. Neo-Nazi ideology falls under this category, and I believe "refusing entry" has a lower bar then outright bans on freedom of expression.
> That is in no way comparable to targeting "Muslims"
The Muslim ban was so-called by Trumps opponents. The ban targeted specific countries, and was not an exhaustive list of all Muslim nations.
> The mistake you are making is to conflate the criminal act with the motivation for that act
I'm not sure they are so different. Thought-policing ones own citizens is chilling, but I'm less certain about doing the same to refuse entry - we already filter based on a persons character.
>The Muslim ban was so-called by Trumps opponents.
Er, and Trump himself. Many times. It was really important to him that people understood that. He explicitly and frequently said it was his attempt to implement the explicit Muslim ban he promised in the campaign.
I agree religion is a choice, but 'Muslim' is simply a massively broad category. It includes many groups that are implacable ideological and religious opponents of each other, and says practically nothing about a person's actual likely behaviour or actions. As with all racism and other-ism the belief otherwise is nonsense on stilts.
Following your line of reasoning, all Muslims are evil because a few associated Muslims did bad things.
> If you find out that someone is best friends with someone you despise, you will automatically assume the worst about them.
Or maybe your friend has knows them better, or understands them better, or compartmentalises
I don't like that my dad likes Trump but he's still my dad and I still love him.
It reminds me a little of the West Wing episode "The Supremes" where everyone assumes the conservative supreme court judge they are considering giving a seat is the height of evil only to find that he's a reasonable person who can actually make valid arguments from the right's pov as is not just "guilty because he's on the right"
In this particular case there's pretty good evidence that Parler's moderation is/was anything but even handed. Parler may be a lot of things but a neutral platform provider doesn't seem to be one of them.
Can a neutral platform with algorithmic feeds exist? Self selection + optimization will result in feeds reflective of the community rather than some neutral standard.
The point of algorithmic feeds is to be the “everyplatform” and serve all biases. So in theory it’s neutral as a platform. But as we’ve seen has extremely negative results.
Well the problem at present is you have to moderate such that all content is within the Overton window. Only the left and right have different views on what does and does not fit inside this window. For example right wingers want to argue about the role of trans rights in womens sports. Much of the left and Twitter consider this to be outside of the Overton window.
You live in a society so there are always going to be cultural limits on the views you can express without social repercussions. Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence nor does it trump other people’s freedoms not to associate with you or exercise their freedom of speech to castigate you.
My point is you can't have a neutral platform when there is a split between large groups on what is the current cultural limit. Each platform has to pick a side in that case.
I mean you absolutely can, whether anyone would want to be on it is another question. That most/many platforms do moderate content doesn't mean that they must moderate content to fit into their cultural frame of reference.
Social media platforms are by their design not neutral at all. They are deciding which users get megaphones and which doesn't, and they like to amplify certain voices over other to increase engagement metrics.
> The host of a social media platform should be no more lumped in with the users of that platform than a phone company
Section 230 exists because even the legal system assumed guilt by association. Without it, sharing someone's false information would be illegal (such as the false dominican voting machine statements[0]). The phone company isn't liable because they're a public utility and don't moderate content - but congress didn't want the internet to be the internet to be filled with porn, so they created 230 which allowed them to remove some content without being liable for all content.
It's a great example of how the situation is portrayed, except witches don't exist. In reality, they're used to demonize anyone who isn't against witch hunts.
I would also argue that while not a Nazi, Trump is a Facist.
He pulled the same 'stop the steal' crap in 2016, but since then has done precisely nothing to prevent vote fraud. If he actually believed it was happening, don't you think he would try to do something to stop it? If it was me I'd make it the primary plank of my administration's policy, but no, nothing.
Firstly he knows it's a lie, but anyway if he did reform the electoral system he would no longer have an excuse when he lost because he would be responsible for ensuring the election was fair. The guy and his stop the steal supporters clearly have demonstrated that they have nothing but contempt for democracy or the institutions that protect it.
They don't even care enough to reform or improve the system. Where are their attempts to do so? Their only policy is to usurp power and suppress the democratic process, and that's a very familiar strategy to anyone who has lived under facism. Check out Arnold Schwarzenegger's articles and videos on this, the guy grew up in post-war Austria and knows what he's talking about.
And similarly there will be communists who think Stalin was a great guy at left wing rallies. We could just get rid of the labels and conclude that lots of people have authoritarian tendencies.
But the existence of some such people are being used at an excuse to dismantle democracy.
Damn, that article resonates a little bit too well with today. And your quote is spot on with regard to a yet unformed set of ideas that I'm struggling to reconcile.
> The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches.
Perhaps that's because the kind of digital utopian who would seek to build that community tends to apply UX ideas so out of date they have a fungus growing on them.
Moderate republicans? Have you been on Parler? Moderate is "I think universal healthcare is dumb, minimum wage is bad for business, we need more oil pipelines, etc." Positions that are reasonable and can be discussed using more reason. What's on Parler is not moderate, it's pretty much nothing but calls for a violent overthrow of democracy, to be replaced by a society where anyone they deem as a "liberal" can be put to death.
Do you have a reference for this? Parler has obviously been nuked off the internet for the last week, so I think asking for sources is a fairer request than normal. Most people had never heard of Parler before it got banned, and "I clearly remember that the site was made up of violent, bloodthirsty terrorists!" isn't a neutral opinion at the moment.
If you have the stomach for it you can just start going through some of the threads of well known left wing people and you'll soon find the extremists posts in between that you can follow further.
The first one I’m sure how it’s well known, considering it has 9 retweets. Yes, it should be taken town, but I can see how it might be a little low on Twitter’s priority list considering he’s just some random Scottish dude, not really an “influencer” or anything.
The second one was definitely bad taste, and I’m surprised it didn’t get taken down considering she’s at least famous, but I don’t think that’s actually calling for him to be beheaded, I think it’s a really shitty attempt at being an art piece.
But neither of these are really plotting armed insurrection against a democratically elected government, are they? Not really as vile as spreading word that liberals are baby rapers and calling for their death. It’s like gerrymandering: sure, technically both parties do it, but I only ever here calls to end it from one party, whereas the other does all it can to continue the process, and the scale at which republicans do it is much, much greater.
Dylann Roof, James Alex Fields, Cesar Sayoc, Patrick Crusius. Those are very few of the many, many right wing terrorists this country has produced recently - just the ones I could name off the top of my head. The only examples of left wing terrorist attacks I could find were the SDS and SLA from half a century ago. We don’t have a problem with left wing terrorism. Left wing groups aren’t infiltrating police departments. Sure, there are a few bad actors on the left. But it’s several orders of magnitude different than the right and to say “well both sides do it” is basically just willful ignorance at this point.
Most leftists I interact with want basic healthcare to be covered by tax dollars, living wages, a path to citizenship for immigrants, equal rights, etc. I’ve encountered very few outside of very small little cliques who were actually interested in taking rights away from people or in killing anyone. I was in the WTO protests in Seattle, I have lived in Portland for many years, and now I live in a really red area. The right wingers I encounter(ed, pre-covid) were happy to tell me how they think illegals should be shot, how liberals aren’t really people, how all democrats are pedophiles, how they don’t want (insert minority) living in this community because they’re dirty/criminals/whatever, how they carry a gun at all times in case a black person comes up on them. On and on. Waiting to have a chance to kill a fellow American. This is not something I see from both sides. These are just regular people, not extreme radicals part of some splinter group. This is the run-of-the-mill right wing.
Did you know that in 1983 far leftist group actually bombed the Capitol [1]? The goal of a FAR left has historically always been a revolution, a violent take over of power or as we call that today an insurrection. I have no problem calling a spade a spade when I see it and feel sorry for you that you can't.
Did you read my post? I said it’s been decades since there was any far left terrorist attacks, and then I named two far left groups who did commit terrorist acts back then. I’m saying right now, currently, this century, there isn’t a problem with it, and the right wing is much more dangerous and more radicalized.
I have read your post and i don't find compelling evidence that your anecdotes are anything more than anecdotes. I don't know what company you keep but in my experience most right or left wingers are decent people. The most extreme 5% on both sides are nuts.
American cities burned, people were killed and beaten, property destroyed for the last 7 months now. How is that decades ago. I can't even understand why would you even try to whitewash any kind of such primitive violence.
Some of the deaths caused at the protests last summer were actually caused by right wingers shooting protestors, such as Kyle Rittenhouse, a child with an illegally-purchased firearm, breaking curfew, but whose presence was condoned by the police even though he was breaking the law. Garrett Foster was killed at a protest by a right-wing guy who shot him as he (the right-wing guy) was trying to drive through the protest crowd. Heather Heyer in Charlottesville. Even when left-wing people are having a peaceful protest, they are murdered by right-wing terrorists.
The very few incidents of left-wing people attacking/killing others are not planned, premeditated, organized things like the attack on the U.S. capitol. No left-wing people are showing up to marches with zip ties planning to kidnap politicians. No left-wing people are planting pipe bombs at political offices. No left-wing groups are trying to infiltrate the police to...demand police reform or make them stop killing minorities? Shit maybe they should. Much better than right-wing groups infiltrating them to hopefully incite a race war.
If you can't tell the difference between people protesting police brutality and the police targeting of minority groups, and people storming U.S. state capitols and the federal capitol with guns, trucks full of bombs, zip ties, etc., as part of a planned action, then this discussion is pointless.
A source for a site that is supposed to be for content too extreme for Twitter has content too extreme for Twitter? Yes, sure, Wikipedia. Every news article posted about Parler from the beginning. The CEO. The court filing after Amazon warned them to implement some moderation policies and they didn’t[0].
Parler was also notorious for banning non-hardcore right-wing opinions, much like how r/conservative is somehow both a “free speech zone” but you aren’t allowed to post dissenting opinions.
Personally, I believe ISIS have a right to believe we all need to live under Sharia law. These wackjobs have a right to believe we all need to live in a fascist state where we can hang gays, Jews, liberals, and dissenters. But I have a right to believe views like that are abhorrent and dangerous and that Amazon and every other host is well within their rights to say, “we prefer social stability, thanks” and I would feel exactly the same about some violent left wing movement (if one existed that wasn’t some boogeyman created by OANN or NewsMax). Twitter removes violent left wing content just as much as it removes violent right wing content. The left just doesn’t bitch about nearly as much, or as loudly. And yes, I’m sure you can cherry-pick a few examples where lefties posted vile shit and it didn’t get removed, then I would cherry-pick some vile shit a right winger posted that didn’t get removed, and we would continue in this fashion indefinitely. It’s hard to moderate content when you have millions of users and millions of bots. No system is going to make everyone happy, but I think calling for the violent death of our democratically elected representatives is over the line, no matter who is making the call, and content like that should be removed. I feel like that’s a pretty sensible line to draw.
None of those is "stupid". They are anti democratic and violent assholes. But, there is no reason to think they are dumb or that they cant affect thing toward worst.
Oh in my home country (Russia) tanks once get "democracy" into the country.
I couldn't see much difference between anti democratic and anti socialistic (both are anti-"you") and both a violent. While no one will claim that was a bad thing.
In the case of capitol siege they followed the orders their leader. This is not always that bad: unlocking people to do violent things are half of the issue too. You can dream about killing someone, thinking about suicide or whatever - difference is if it will lead to action. Unlocking people to attack capitol or commit suicide are also a crime and in both cases target is not capable to think clearly. Why we treat two cases differently?
Those are right-wing economic positions, I think you'd find all right wing social positions abhorent. Even "we need to ban immigration from poor and disfunctional countries" is likely to be termed racist and not "moderate". Let alone things like "the word "woman" should not be used to refer to so-called "transwomen"" or "buggery is dangerous and should be made illegal".
You have no right force own morality on private enterprises and other people.
If something is illegal the government is supposed to deal with it.
Speaking of witch hunts: when Amazon uses their ethical standards to terminate a paying customer with minimal warnings, that's fine. When a hosting company accepts this deplatformed customer, you want to go after the provider although neither the customer nor provider haven't been convicted of any wrongdoing.
The quote doesn't really make sense if you use a traditional definition of "witch hunt", because the phrase comes from actual historic trials where the charge was something like "consorting with demons". The penalty was often death, even though people don't actually consort with demons in the real world.
There were no witches, of course, and the underlying causes of real witch hunts are a matter of speculation. Some people say it was a way to get rid of the elderly, some people say that ergot poisoning could have played a role, some people say that mobs are violent and irrational by nature. But everybody who was tried in a historical "witch hunt" was innocent.
Still, with the advent of the internet, it's taken on a new meaning. Today, "witch hunt" means something like "piling on". The target may or may not be guilty, but the phrase implies that their alleged guilt doesn't necessarily merit the amount of attention that they are getting.
It might be interesting to investigate when that change in meaning happened, and why.
> Today, "witch hunt" means something like "piling on".
And historically, it often meant moral panic and mass hysteria. Compared to another comment, that's _all_ it means to me when applied nowadays. The mainstream reception of the threat of witchcraft is what's changed. You might see parallels with (theoretical) homosexual conversion in parts of the US, I suppose.
Speculating on historical drivers: coercive confession existed then as it does now. Some law-enforcement officers' careers depended on confessions. After 35,000 to 100,000 executions I bet the technique was pretty smooth.
I don't think it's used in that context at all. There doesn't need to be more than one "witch hunter" for something to be called a witch hunt.
> The target may or may not be guilty, but the phrase implies that their alleged guilt doesn't necessarily merit the amount of attention that they are getting.
i think the point is that sometimes bad people need to be called out and not just tolerated.
it’s also called the paradox of tolerance, where if a society is tolerant of intolerance, eventually the intolerance will win by taking advantage of tolerance
The documentary "The Power Of Nightmares" by Adam Curtis highlights an excellent example of this.
During a 90s election in Algeria, a radical (and popular) Islamist party made it clear that if they won, their first action would be to cancel all future elections.
This basically put all the secular parties (both left and right) in a bind. Do you just proceed with the election as if everything's normal, even though it might be the end of democracy if the radical group wins? On the other hand, if you decide to boot out the radicals from the democratic process, haven't you now ended free and fair elections?
> This basically put all the secular parties (both left and right) in a bind.
Which is the solution. Bind themselves and everybody else.
Have a constitution that enshrines the right to things like fair elections and free speech. Have an amendment process that requires two thirds of the Senate, in a Senate that only has one third of the seats up for election in any given year. And three quarters of the states, which rarely agree on anything. Things like that.
Then even if the populists get in once, they don't have the power to end elections or free speech. And once the people see their true nature, they lose the next one.
Obviously you do have to be very careful not to allow any end runs around that process.
Because extra-judicial persecution of "bad people" [0] is something Popper never discussed or advocated for in _Open Societies and Its Enemies_. He very specifically advocates for this only when all else has failed, and only by the state itself -- being as such action doesn't bode well for any liberal democracy that undertakes such action.
I know you've not read the book, but perhaps read the Wikipedia article you're citing.
0. I've seen a whole range of people called "bad people" by antifa types these days, from centrists all the way to white supremacists.
There are literal, and I mean literal witch hunts going on in Western nations by the authorities, like Britain or the USA. Generally they use the word satanic.
They are far rarer than 40 or 100 years ago.
Obviously amongst the general population you also have things like Qanon and the Satanism within Pizzagate and in most developing countries they still exist at troubling numbers.
But I don't get your point, so no idea if that's OT
The owner reportedly is not far off his most notorious customers politically, and given that they’re popular for hosting sites others won’t it’s not surprising that this became their public image. It’s like how a bar doesn’t need to have 100% of its customers be bikers to be known as a biker bar.
Yeah it’s scary that “alt-right” is becoming doublespeak for freedom and privacy. Makes you wonder if it’s intentional, controlled opposition even, remove all freedom and privacy by vilifying a small group.
> Other way around. Alt-right is attempting to co-opt "freedom of speech" the same way they've co-opted "patriot".
This is it. Also, the main result of these efforts is mainly to stain the term try to co-opt. It only delivers a brief window of enhanced rhetorical effectiveness before everyone else gets wise, and starts treating those who use the term with a lot more skepticism.
I’m not sure I agree that if someone wants freedom of speech it means they are co-opting it. But it does seem like freedom of speech as a whole is being attacked because some people don’t like what a tiny fraction of people are saying.
What's your point? "Mocking" is literally mimicking to make fun of. So, yes, of course it's not right-wingers mocking themselves with that phrase; it's people mocking the cries right-wingers are making.
Not scared of that at all. I think what you're looking for is a synonym. The "alt-" part of alt-right might be the doublespeak -- paleoconservatism genuinely resists the mainstream attempt to remove white supremacy from conservative platforms.
The left's synonym is "deplorables", corresponding to approximately 25% of the American electorate -- not a small group at all.
An effort to "remove all freedom and privacy" is hyperbolic, with only a few examples notorious in 20th century history. Are you expecting Parlor to enact a real-name-only policy?
Sure, but the left leaning party that both exercises power and represents the left did use it. The left is responsible for that just as the right gets to own trump.
That’s a good point: neocons separated conservatism from the political right. That wasn’t the consequence of alt-right ideas reaching the seat of power. Perhaps the part of the political right that’s not conservative and generally opposes democracy is kind of the home of the alt-right.
If there is anyone far right on a platform, people will attempt to associate the entire platform with the far right to keep people away from it, thereby forcing the platform to kick those people off or lose business.
Then the scale shifts so that whoever is now furthest to the right is the new far right.
Often kicking anyone out who is not on the political left will be phrased not as censorship but as combating misinformation.
Didn't a similar thing happen with CloudFlare? I seem to remember people (even here) saying that they were siding with Nazis because they took a position of "we aren't the arbiters."
They released a post saying they don't think there is any point blocking legal but nasty sites because their service is easily replaced. Its a lot easier to switch cdn than server host or get back in to the app store
Politically polarized people tend to only have two brushes to paint people with: You’re either with them or against them. If you have any relationship whatsoever with their opposition, in their view, you’re against them. Ultimately, Epik is just a company that seems to have found a captive client base. That doesn’t make them bad...it makes them a company with a captive client base.
Did Google remove the link to the Parler site from its search results? I am sure I was able to just google it a week or so ago, when everyone became obsessed with it. If so, that's the level of censorship that doesn't get reported.
They do trim sites quickly when they go down. During the SOPA blackouts, they turned this feature off for 24 hours to prevent dinging any participating sites.
Not that quickly. The fact that a site has many external links pointing to it would mean it would be very unlikely to drop out of search results for a very long time indeed.
For an esoteric term that I tried, the results are about same for the top half of the page, but then were quite different for bottom half. Which leads me to believe they use Bing but do not completely rely on it (at least not to order the results).
The Bing API is actually open to anyone with a bank card but DDG has a specific deal to allow them to filter / sort results, to use ads not only from the Microsoft ads platform, and to skip the redirect link that records what the user click on.
Yes, other search engines can pay for access to Bing's results. DDG isn't just straight Bing results, though, it compiles results from a number of different sources (including their own), with Bing being the primary source.
"The results are aggregated from hundreds of sources, including DuckDuckGo's own web crawler, along with Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, specialty services like Wolfram Alpha, and others."
DDG's help website[2]:
"DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google)."
Clearly, they get their search results from a wide variety of sources including their own crawler. But it sounds like they do rely heavily on Bing.
That being said, the system is designed so as to not require trust in the front end. The JavaScript code is easy to read and ensures that queries are encrypted at the front end before passing thru a proxy to have its IP scrubbed. The engine then performs the query, encrypts the results and sends it back thru the proxy to the front end which decrypts and displays the results.
I watched a CNN segment pressuring AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Roku, etc. to remove Newsmax and OANN from their broadcasting.
Politically you have folks on one side of the spectrum saying "your speech is disagreeable/fake/dangerous but you can say it"
Other side says "your speech is disagreeable/fake/dangerous and you should not be allowed to say it"
When avenues for open dialogue and discourse are no longer available, more violence ensues. I am surprised that otherwise well intentioned people appear to be missing this insight.
> I am surprised that otherwise well intentioned people appear to be missing this insight.
Because it's plain false. One of the lessons learned from the Weimarer Republic is that a democracy has to defend itself, that's the reason why modern days Germany has - by request and design from the US - laws to limit freedom of speech.
It is false because certain types of calls for violence and hate speech have the uncanny ability to mobilize people who would otherwise never think of being violent. There are psychological reasons why otherwise normal people can be drawn fairly easily to violence and de-humanizing their opponents. With a few well-designed suggestions at the right time you can easily cause lynchings like in the Reichskristallnacht.
Generally speaking, people in democratic societies far overestimate the force of their society's civility and culture. It takes but a scratch on the surface of society, and a threshold is reached that leads to a reign of terror. A recent example is the war in former Yugoslavia. Seemingly harmless family fathers in an advanced society started to torture opponents to death by raping them with steel pipes until they died of inner bleeding. They were encouraged by politicians.
Things like that can occur in any country within just a few months of conflict and unhindered "free speech." There are large groups in the US who dream of a violent revolution, openly advocate "race wars", and so on. It's very reasonable to take away their megaphones and social network speech amplifiers.
This assumes that there is a good faith characterization applied fairly to all speech which calls for violence.
What you see in the United States is that this characterization is applied in bad faith based on one's political motives, and ignored in other situations.
There appear to be situations where "you need to fight" is taken literally when the speaker is an opponent, and taken metaphorically when the speaker is an ally.
This is all happening outside of a legal process, so there is no mechanism to ensure that this is happening according to any standards or principles. If you bring speech laws into the conversation, those are applied within a legal system, which would be designed in some way to prevent the arbitrary application of standards.
Charitable interpretations of the words of favoured public figures versus the worst possible interpretation of similar, perhaps even more benign statements, by public figures who are opposed. If there is an intention for laws to police speech, then they ought to be applied fairly, else they are the whims of whomever is in power to apply and enforce them. The media corporations (legacy and new) don't seem to be applying an equal standard to all speakers, which is their right, but it is important to discuss what happens when they exercise their rights in this manner.
Yes, but Germany rides a very fine line and tends to err on the side of not banning speech.
A few examples:
- HAIG was an association of former Waffen SS members who tried their best to whitewash their past before disbanding. Was not made illegal.[1]
- There is a long list of Nazi associated symbols that are illegal and not illegal in Germany. Much effort was made to not blanket ban anything remotely associated with Nazis.[2]
> that's the reason why modern days Germany has - by request and design from the US - laws to limit freedom of speech.
A point that cannot be made too often.
Additionally, the US military governor banned newspapers and then gave out licenses for publishing newspapers only to people the Americans deemed "politically reliable".
In France nazi memboribilia and imagery are illegal, as is holocaust denial. That's not the case in the USA which protects free speech. What's interesting is that France has a much bigger problem with holocaust denial whereas in the USA its sort of laughed at. I still think the approach to permit free speech is better.
> What's interesting is that France has a much bigger problem with holocaust denial whereas in the USA its sort of laughed at.
Sure, you're laughing about the Proud Boys and the gazillion other armed neonazi groups, until they storm the Capitol. Obviously no problem whatsoever.
I'm talking about holocaust denial as a serious published phenomenon among intellectuals. Not trying to downplay the serious right wing problem the US has. Sometimes trying to oppress these viewpoints paradoxically doesn't work.
I always try to remember that my brain is essentially the same as the brains of the Auschwitz prison guard’s and that there is nothing special about me that would keep me from doing what they did. It is only civil society that prevents humans from being fully, horrifically, human. Civil society is a rare, most precious gift and it must be preserved.
Ignoring ideology and human rights and focusing solely on practical effects there's 2 sides:
1. people who are already radicalized should have some place to talk so we can know what they are talking about and so they are more likely to talk instead of acting
2. people who can be radicalized - are, because there's places where they can encounter such ideas
I've never seen any scientific study estimating which effect is more important. From ideological POV I'm in favor of more free speech when in doubt.
What I neglected to say in my original comment was that the political camps tend to exaggerate the "dangerous rhetoric" of their opponents and downplay their own. This is especially true when the statements require some specific interpretation in order to be treated that way, since their plan spoken version is not in itself dangerous.
This is nonsense. There are places everywhere to dialogue. Having an app removed is not an example of lack of dialogue, it's the same is removing a dangerous product from a shelf. it is a _recall_. You're also creating the false equivalency that one of those political sides would dialogue when they do not. Their actions have become extremist. So kindly quit creating a victim out of an app.
Cancel culture is predominantly a left-wing phenomenon. To say it bluntly: "the left" labels speech they disagree with as violent and clearly wants it banned.
"Extremism" is in the eyes of the beholder. We saw 6 months of violent insurrection by BLM and Antifa, which were organized on Twitter and Facebook. Apple, Google, and Amazon didn't ban either apps. People on the left called them "mostly peaceful protests."
The Jan 6 events were organized, shared, and streamed on Facebook and Twitter. None of the Jan 6th events were organized on Parler, yet Parler gets removed. See the problem?
"The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant."
Is needing servers with 96 vCPU's and 768 GB of RAM each...normal?
I'm a programmer, but I do mobile dev, and that amount of resources for a single machine sounds comically high to me. I thought modern websites usually had more 'normally' specced servers and just distributed the load across a ton of them?
Can anyone recommend a Coursera/EdX or other online resource that goes over the basics of designing and setting up such kinds of high-performance server systems ?
I honestly don't think you'll find a course that covers this. The SO devs (and others) have kept a blog going for years with the type of information you're after. The search term is "mechanical sympathy."
Language/framework also matters. You're not going to pull this off with a backend based on a framework that gives no damns about performance. Rust, C# (bleeding edge), Java and C come to mind as good candidates.
SO doesn't have the content requirements of a modern Social Network: images, video, and streaming are huge factors. Especially with modern smartphone capabilities.
I wrote a program that ran on that type of computer once. It was real-time log analysis. There was a lot of data coming in, and there was a need for a globally-consistent datastore for the results. Solution? Put it all in RAM. If the single replica crashes, you can just read all the inputs again.
Some extra capacity existed for that, and some other system already stored the raw logs to disk durably. The terabyte of in-memory data just made queries tolerable enough to run every few seconds and display in alert/chart form.
I didn't keep the system in this state for very long, but for version 1.0 it was just the thing -- idea to production in a short period of time. Eventually it did move to a more distributed system, as log volume (and usefulness) increased, and we had more time to deal with the details. It was mostly nice to not have to reprocess data after releases -- I could do them in the middle of the day without anyone caring.
My biggest worry when writing this was that 40Gbps of network bandwidth wouldn't be enough, but it was fine in the early stages. 40Gbps is a lot of data.
I'm not sure I'd say it's a great sign that you need a single beefy machine to run something, but it's a tradeoff worth considering. I found the distributed system version easier to operate, but it did constrain what sort of features you could add. I think we got it right, but it's easy to code yourself into a corner when you have encoded assumptions deep into the system. Best to avoid that until you're sure your assumptions are right.
To be clear (if the image is accurate), they weren't asking for one beefy DB instance with 96 vCPUs and 768GB RAM. They were asking for 70-100 instances with those requirements.
I remember reading a few days ago that their code was atrocious. Perhaps this is an extreme example of the costs of never refactoring? I can believe that the cost of spaghetti code compounds quickly.
I can believe that the company who named resources sequentially, enforced no security validation for viewing posts/media, and didn't strip metadata from media uploads also didn't have engineers especially skilled in optimization.
I agree that the other points indicate bad engineering. But not stripping metadata can be a intentional. E.g. some smaller image hosters do that to preserve files bit-identically. Some forums with heavy emphasis on minimal moderation take the position that opsec is the poster's responsibility.
I don't know what 96 vCPUs means in terms of real cores, and my server knowledge is a bit old at this point, but here goes.
There's a benefit to running on fewer servers. If you can make good use of many core machines and gobs of ram, it makes sense to go up to at least reasonably large machines. For Intel, dual socket Xeon is widely available and not obscenely priced; for AMD, I haven't seen a lot of dual socket Epyc, but 64 cores in a single socket is quite a lot. 768 GB seems big, but if you can put it into one machine instead of 12 machines with 64 GB, that helps reduce maintenance and communications overhead.
I ran systems with dual Intel Xeon 2690v4, a total of 28 cores/56 threads, and we put up to 768GB in some of them; that was several years ago, you can get a lot bigger now.
Databases love ram, and social sites make a lot of queries, so it makes sense a bit. I don't know what their usage numbers are, or what their site looks like; I'm just guessing based on general description. The traffic numbers didn't look too big, but types of request makes a big difference there; serving media is relatively easy, serving comments threads and highlighting your friends is trickier.
(Serving media with transcoding is a lot less easy though)
This seems extreme especially if they're going for bare-metal. Even a single one of these DB servers would handle a lot of traffic if they're bare-metal.
When it comes to running Postgres on 70-100 servers I'm also not sure, unless they're doing some sharding at the application level, I'd expect the overheads of replication and resulting network traffic to be insane if they're merely replicating across all of them.
Their whole website should be able to run on a handful of these machines; their main cost and resource usage would be hosting & converting uploaded media, not the DB of app servers.
Maybe they are trying to bring up multiple sites (ie. AWS regions) for redundancy. If you have 10 "regions" then maybe hardware requirements look a bit more reasonable (7-10 DB servers each, etc.)
It wouldn't matter for the anti-trust lawsuit, since they're alleging that Amazon conspired with Twitter to kick off Parler because Parler would steal Twitter's market share. (Well, trying to allege, because they don't even manage to allege that any further than "Amazon hosts Twitter" and implying there's no other reason Amazon would kick Parler off, despite spending half the brief complaining that they're being kicked off for being conservative.)
This is an absolutely bonkers amount of resources for the functionality and audience they have. We got our first 5 million users on 4 used PowerEdge nodes and our first 30 million with 2 bare-metal DB servers.
They're running Wordpress, which is famous for scaling badly to the extent that there are large companies like WPEngine.com devoted to doing nothing except working around that.
A lot of people like the back-end admin panel of WordPress and its WYSIWYG feature, so a bunch of other people have created a lot of themes/mods/plugins around WP because of that.
If you run a small website it's all fine, otherwise you have to deal with performance issues and WP limitations because you've decided to build a social network on top of a blogging engine.
The reason is that they're running their social media site using Wordpress (of all things, why?!?!?!), so it's probable that it will scale horrendously. The data breach happend with Parler was allegedly due to an exploit in one of the Wordpress plugins.
A static placeholder doesn’t really count as “back online.” Their domain name found a home—that’s old news at this point. The jury is still out on whether (or where) they will find hosting.
I’m calling this one misleading clickbait. No, they are not back online.
I've only heard of the fediverse and mastodon on HN. I can't help but think it's one of those things that ONLY has traction with HN types and that the mass of people and community that makes regular social media what it is today will never be seen over there.
Good. Currently the fediverse is a breath of fresh air compared to modern social media with all of its name calling, vapid trends and political polarization. Hopefully whatever that makes regular social media "what it is today" _will_ never be seen over there.
>Currently the fediverse is a breath of fresh air compared to modern social media with all of its name calling, vapid trends and political polarization.
My experience has been the exact opposite; in fact, the name calling and polarization (in particular polarized instances) is off the charts. This is compounded by the fact that some instances host certain porn others instances don't even want to cache, and many instances have block lists against the very permissive instances (not surprising, going by the Scott Alexander quote up thread as a testament to the kind of 'witches' in these instances).
There's some intelligent content on Fedi. Most of the content is just as vapid as regular social media, but written by a different group of people.
I've only checked out mastodon (which is supposedly part of fediverse) but it looks like a slower version of Twitter with a tiny fraction of Twitter's userbase - most of it already doubleposting on Twitter anyway. And most sites with it i've seen look like they want to sell me some service and feel faceless and soulless. I've considered at some point setting up my own instance for my own use since from what i can understand you can configure to 'fetch' messages from other instances, but (at least at the time) the system requirements for what is essentially passing around tiny snippets of text are so high that it is ridiculous. Then i thought perhaps a desktop client would provide the same functionality but the joinmastodon site has a bunch of them without any information about what they are, who makes them, if they're safe or whatever and the sites of a couple that i checked are again that "faceless, souless, perhaps trying to sell you something or sell your data to someone" variety.
I tried a GNUSocial site and got nothing but spammers and hackers uploading photos to my site. I ran out of disk space, and had to shut it down. Moderation of such a site with just one person is a nightmare.
I wonder who they're hosting with now? Interesting that it wasn't reported. I'd assume the hosting company would want to shout it out that they "support free speech" or something like that.
Epik. But I wouldn't necessarily count on them to stay there. Epik hosts thedonald.win, and recently told that site it needs to get its content under control or it will be kicked off [1], so there are limits to what Epik is willing to host.
It looks like Parler transferred their domain name to Epik (as a registrar), but are not currently using them for hosting.
As recently as a few days ago, Epik explicitly stated that they have no plans to host Parler (https://mynorthwest.com/2461882/sammamish-epik-parler/). That said, since the site is behind "ddos-guard.net," it's difficult to tell who their actual host is.
I saw a couple articles or so that said Epik was hosting it, but it is possible that those authors just saw that Epik was the registrar and confused that with being the host.
Based on what I saw on Parler during an admittedly limited review of it, I don’t think they have to worry very much, if actual content is the issue that got them killed in the first place. I didn’t see much of the “scary” content that some people claim was on there. There were more links to positive news about Trump and conservatives in general than you would find on a site like Twitter, but I would certainly hope that isn’t the kind of thing that will get you destroyed overnight by the world’s largest companies, even in the current anti-conservative environment. I have seen far worse things on Reddit, from both sides of the aisle - and last time I checked, Reddit was still online.
It appears to me that these companies colluded to kill Parler not because of widespread horrible content (because it simply wasn’t there), but rather because they wanted to strangle any chance of Trump being able to communicate on any form of social media until after Biden takes office. As an added “bonus,” they probably also prevented millions of people from jumping ship from Twitter to Parler, because after this week far fewer people will even care about the situation.
I had a {troll} account on there - so I was there everyday. I disagree with your assessment and certainly saw posts calling for violence with essentially every comment on the post supporting it.
When you first signup you get connected for a few big names like Hannity, and the content is like what you'd see on Fox News (or really, News Max to be honest). Once you get past that layer it quickly spirals.
Regarding reddit...they did take down /r/The_Donald (and prob others, don't know off the top of my head)
If you go into the darkest corners of any of these platforms, including Facebook, you’ll see objectionable content from extremists. But when I went on there, I just poked around, as an average user would. As you point out, there was a fair amount of news and commentary from well-known conservative networks and personalities. While the general rule holds true - if you go looking for trouble, you’ll find it - most people wouldn’t go searching to connect with extremists and wouldn’t find the “quickly spiraling” content you describe. I’m sure it was there, as it is on Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook (in much larger numbers). But I would argue that they were no worse than the others.
...disagree. If you click on the comments on the well known conservative personalities that Parler sends you by default as an "average user', it's all right there. There's no need to search.
How much call for violence do you see in the comment section on reddit's default frontpage as an "average user"?
If you click on the comments on the well known conservative personalities that Parler sends you by default as an "average user', it's all right there.
I wouldn’t be able to test that, the website was taken down by the world’s largest companies. But I looked at the comments sections and saw nothing of the sort.
How much call for violence do you see in the comment section on reddit's default frontpage as an "average user"?
There were no threats of violence on Parler’s front page, in any section. But before he was banned, I used to see replies to Trump’s tweets that openly threatened violence against a sitting President of the United States all the time. If we apply the new Parler standard to that, I suppose Twitter needs to be shut down overnight.
There are plenty of calls to violence even on the front pages. But those calls to violence are always against "bad people", so it's like "good hatred".
FWIW you can get a feel for the content right now - I can only assume Parker’s content is on par with thedonald.win, which is still up. Right now there is few literal calls to violence, but racism, conspiracy theories, and extremist views are the majority of the content.
Prior to the deplatforming that content likely was.. more violent.
I can only assume Parker’s content is on par with thedonald.win
I have never frequented either of them, and don't really have any desire to. I basically checked out Parler because CNN told me not to. But relative to Twitter and Reddit, it seemed pretty tame to me.
Yes, Epik is just the registrar for Gab. They use Cloudflare as a DDoS/frontend, and have their own ASN, which is supposedly where everything is really hosted (https://bgp.he.net/AS42651).
The nameservers point to Epik, so at least the DNS is run by them. The actual host is behind ddos-guard, so they may/may not be hosting the data with them or another provider.
As Epik seems to focus on shared hosting, and LAMP stack style applications and parler was using a proprietary DB in the last offering, they might reasonably have the actual hosting somewhere else.
Scylla Enterprise [0] [1], which is a Cassandra-compatible NoSQL database, though I think that they were probably using the DynamoDB API shim to talk to it. The non-enterprise version is open source, but fewer features.
A DNS record lookup points to ddos-guard.net which provides both hosting and DDOS protection (like cloudflare) and is based in the Netherlands.
I don't think they care much about Parler or free speech for that matter. They might not care much beyond the likely big hosting bill they are being paid. Free market at work, nothing to see here.
Well, if hosting Snowden makes the Russkis righteous, then hosting Parler must be fine, too. It seems that Americans who speak against narratives find friends there? Ironic, to say the very least.
If Snowden is to be believed --and I personally think he is-- he was transiting through Russia to South America after fleeing Hong Kong and we all remember the forced landing of the official plane of the President of Bolivia. That seems very different than the coziness of certain Americans and what appear to be members of the Putin regime.
Just pointing out that snowden's passport was cancelled on 20130622 and that he flew out of hk on 20130623. It's not an unreasonable speculation that he planned to wind up in Russia, putting on a convincing show in the process.
A better hypothesis would be that Russia was one of the only countries that would accept an arrival with a cancelled passport (and could provide a reasonable degree of protection against rendition by US agents).
I don't believe it is possible to fly from HK to South America without passing through the US or New Zealand, whereas Snowden probably could have travelled from Russia to Cuba if Putin didn't find it politically advantageous to keep him as a trophy.
Yes, your hypothesis is a better fit, and makes fewer assumptions. Perhaps the arrangements with Russia were made hurriedly while Snowden was hiding in HK, days prior to departing, as some reports suggest.
However, Snowden had been stealing classified intel premeditatively for a long period of time, and had contact with actors who had the knowledge and contacts to plan such a ruse in advance. Given his high intelligence and exacting personality, haphazardly leaking to the press from HK prior to obtaining asylum seems to be out of character.
I do believe strongly that Snowden would have told elaborate, pre-fabricated lies, if it were to his benefit.
> haphazardly leaking to the press from HK prior to obtaining asylum seems to be out of character.
His original plan, supposedly[1], was to remain in HK and fight extradition to the US. It wouldn't have taken the US government long to notice he was missing from his job and had travelled to Hong Kong without approval, so it was not particularly haphazard for him to start sharing his story openly as soon as he was in HK.
> had contact with actors who had the knowledge and contacts to plan such a ruse in advance.
It's not clear how the deal with Russia was brokered, but it's possible that the Beijing government didn't want to sour relations with the US by letting him stay in HK, as reported by the New York Times[2]:
> “Behind the door there was definitely some coordination between Hong Kong and Beijing,” said Jin Canrong, professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing.
That also makes sense of the ridiculous story about HK rejecting the US arrest warrant request due to the US getting Snowden's name wrong.[3]
Having to arrange travel, on short notice, from HK to a country that could preserve Snowden's safety from US capture, and meet with approval from Beijing, would severely limit his options, even if there were no other concerns, and it is possible that assurances were given to Snowden about the possibility of onward travel, which were later broken. It would certainly have been unwise for Snowden to publicly call out that he had been tricked and betrayed by Putin. Instead, he claims that the US cancelled his passport to deliberately trap him in Moscow, so they could portray him as a Russian spy[4], which also seems to match what we know.
I use the mobile browser versions of Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit. I dropped the apps a long time ago. So yeah, one can easily survive without the app stores.
I doubt it. A small number of developers and enthusiasts might use the mobile versions, but most people won't. Google and Apple are currently gatekeepers and they're apparently cooperating.
I see a lot of people arguing about whether or not there is a bias to conservative accounts being banned. Is there a way to get the information about what accounts were banned (via their API maybe)? That would be the obvious way to decide if it is true or not. Though I guess they will delete a lot of the data associated with such accounts.
Facebook acknowledges that it is impossible to police their system because it is so large.
Ergo, the supposed intention is probably manifestly meaningless.
For example, you can point to the use of Facebook as a tool of genocide in Myanmar. Facebook will not, and probably cannot do anything about that beyond removing their service.
You clearly never read much about Parler before any of this happened. The founders are most certainly not rioters. They're libertarians who wanted to found a pro-free-speech Twitter.
Just because you disagree with someone doesn't mean they are bad, evil, or wrong.
But, Parler was not pro-free-speech. It was pro right wing speech of any kind, but if your posts were leftists, they would be deleted and accounts banned.
> Parler's entire point was being an alt-right platform
I don’t think this is a fair statement. From past interviews, it’s clear that the CEO of Parler and its founding team intended for it to be politically neutral and a destination for those of all ideologies. They may have attracted those on the political right, but that’s because Twitter is by default a bastion for the political left and naturally those seeking alternatives would have a different lean. But I don’t think that’s the same as the entire point being an alt-right platform.
The person who scraped the site pointed out that users started out shadow-banned, and were only unmuted after it was confirmed their posts fit a certain profile. That’s definitely not neutral.
All your reference shows is all politically-neutral anti-SPAM categories[1]. Compare this with Twitter’s internal moderation tool[2] and their granular suppression capabilities which appear deliberately prone to abuse.
I don’t think this particular conjecture is that sensational and backs up what Amazon has already claimed. This list of moderators overwhelmingly are Republicans/conservatives and some of them make concerning assertions in their bios.
I said it’s conjecture and you don’t disagree. I’ll leave it to you how sensational it is. I have biases but I would have no problem in moderating without them as above else I believe in free speech, so this argument is not very convincing, personally. You might be right, though, I’ve never used Parler, so IDK. But evidence is evidence and that Twitter statement was dishonest.
Every medium wants to reach as many people as possible. So they limit the visibility of what they don't like, but they don't completely get rid of people they don't like since they would no longer reach those groups.
Open basically any media and you'll see three categories:
(1) Opinion pieces.
(2) Attempts at appearing neutral by allowing opposing views, but always together with a commentary provided either by themselves or someone else to clearly provide objections.
(3) Safe easily sharable info. Like cute / funny pictures you can send to your friends which will get people into the site.
Fair enough. But is there any evidence to this? From my point of view, Twitter allows people like Steven Crowder, JK Rowling and Radical Feminists to use their platform to spread hate towards trans people, yet if I go there now and make a post with the word TERF in it I'll be suspended immediately.
Why is that a platform considered biased towards left thinking? Because it put warnings under probably false claims by far right presidents? The fact that it's only happened to Trump and Bolsonaro says more about right wing politics than about Twitter itself.
What Parler was, was bad for business. It's not a good look for AWS to be hosting websites with violent content linked to the Capitol insurrection, and apparently doing nothing about it. So they pulled the plug.
The elephant in the room is Facebook. There's lots of evidence they were the most directly responsible [1]. Parler wasn't bad for business but scapegoating it was good PR.
Facebook quite possibly was more responsible because they're more popular. But they also appear to be a actively fighting the misinformation that these groups spread and thrive on.
Whereas Parler is the opposite: they practically celebrate how little they care about undermining democracy with misinformation.
Actually FB let it fester and didn’t do anything about it until recently. Sure, Parler exists to provide this needed freedom of expression to extremists and does not represent what it is but in terms of impact, FB has had a lot more and did nothing about it
Only bad for business because of political dealings. The AWS name was not associated with Parler.
In my view, the more likely actual reason for the cancelling of Parler, as well as for their seemingly excessive hardware requirements, is that Parler wants a shot at competing with Twitter for real, and has convinced their investors that is possible. The latest chaos must be one of the best free marketing anybody in their line of business could hope for.
If realDonaldTrump moves to Parler, and some popular republicans already have, that would potentially bring in a floodwave of new users, and risking that kind of business opportunity by having underpowered servers would be professional malpractice.
Parler is also likely to face months-long DDOS attacks.
The AWS name wasn't associated with Parler and the Capitol insurrection, but it likely would have been. This is all about getting ahead of the story and limiting any potential brand damage.
It's similar to when Cloudflare booted 8chan, after the latter was linked to the white nationalist terrorist attacks in Christchurch and El Paso.
I don't understand the rationale for your view. Why would slapping down a potential Twitter competitor be any concern of AWS?
Their stated aim was to forcibly overturn the results of a free and fair election, so that their leader, who lost, could remain in power.
In what universe is that not an insurrection?
It's not like they just protested outside and maybe broke a few windows with rocks or something. They actually broke through the police defense, broke into the building, and went looking for legislators, who had to be evacuated.
I'm sure one or two idiots out of thousands of people had (or at least expressed) bad intentions. What we're talking about here is the goals of the group.
What other intention did they have in pushing up the steps of the capitol and then inside? It’s not like two idiots did that. They were all attending a “Stop the Steal” rally and were told that their country was being stolen from them. They were told Pence must comply.
Their goal was to stop the counting of the electoral college votes and cause havoc. They were trying to literally subvert the federal government and our collective voting system.
> What other intention did they have in pushing up the steps of the capitol and then inside?
They very obviously didn't have a plan and were just seeing how far they could get. You are imputing too much direction and intelligence to these people.
> They were trying to literally subvert the federal government and our collective voting system.
The capitol doesn't work like a round of Capture the Flag in Halo; just standing there for a few minutes doesn't give you political power. Even the protestors were smart enough to comprehend this.
So you're supposing they were just trying to see how far they could get into the Capitol for what purpose? Fun? Lore? A game?
Nobody else is contending that the Capital is a "round" of capture the flag. You just brought that up for some bizarre reason. The timing of this directly lines up with when they were working to count the electoral college votes. More than a few people were violent toward the cops, and nobody has any reason to believe that they wouldn't have killed some Democratic congresspeople or Pence if they had been able to find them. At least one person did kill a cop and a dozen other cops were injured.
> There's zero evidence that they intended to do anything to legislators.
You mean other than:
(1) Many of them stating their imminent or thwarted intent to do so, either by chants, in interviews, in electronic messages, or otherwise;
(2) Them bringing weapons and restraints with which to do things to legislators;
(3) Them becoming increasingly agitated and violent at the prospects of targets of violence escaping, as occurred when people were evacuated from the Speakers Lobby shortly before the breakthrough where Ashli Babbitt was shot.
> This is the only actual violence that happened and it was an overreaction by the police.
Not true. The mob physically attacked the Capitol police, repeatedly, with a variety of weapons. One of the policemen, who was struck in the head by a rioter wielding a fire extinguisher, later died from his injuries.
> The mob physically attacked the Capitol police, repeatedly, with a variety of weapons.
Can you be more specific than "a variety of weapons"? Almost all interactions with the police seemed peaceful, bordering on friendly, barring the one who was hit on the head.
What is the free speech alternative to Cloudflare for DDOS protection? Activist hackers are everywhere today and have no qualms attacking Parler or others they disagree with. Culturally, many in the younger generation of hackers are anti free speech, or at least against it for their political adversaries. Twitter still hasn’t banned the one archiving locations of Parler users from EXIF data in photos. And with utilities like AWS deplatforming paying customers now, I imagine Cloudflare can’t be relied on either.
I’m not an expert but my understanding is that defending against DDOS requires immense infrastructure. Can a single site in its own achieve that with a load balancer or the rate limiting you mention?
Depends on the scope and scale of the attack. If you put a proxy server in front of the actual application server (or a series of proxy servers that were lightweight/cheap to run), technically speaking you could control it. Not an expert either but have relied on mechanisms like that in the past to help with traffic control.
We already use terms like "denial of service attack", so it's not stretching the English language too much to say that a hosting company shutting down a website is the "digital (equivalent of) violence".
Whether silencing millions of people or ruining a company counts as digital violence against someone is more subjective.
Admittedly it may be more accurate in this case to say "temporarily inconveniencing millions of people", but it must feel quite oppressive to find that the only sub-reddit you use has been blocked, then the only YouTube channel you comment on gets banned, then the only social media app you use gets shut down.
Eventually some of the people affected would just give up on trying to communicate with like-minded people online altogether, which I suppose is the point. Remember, though, we are talking about First Amendment protected speech for most of these people.
You may say that no one needs to be able to communicate online, and as long as someone can use the postal service then they haven't been silenced, but by that logic you could say that a regime which locks up its political opponents hasn't really "silenced" them as long as they are still allowed to write letters.
I was listening to a talk by a former head of the ACLU yesterday (on the JRE podcast). His central point was that all speech (including hate speech) should be free because someone else is going to be deciding what speech shouldn't be free, and therefore nobody should get to decide that.
This fellow seemed to not realise he was living in a democracy and had been doing so his whole life.
He provided some examples to prove his points, and they were all from ages ago. He didn't seem to realise that the trouble we're going through now is a direct result of allowing hate-filled people to form bubbles within which their hate festered until it boiled over.
Without Parler (or any other safe space for these bigots and racists), they benefit from a broader range of views, and that's a better thing for society as a whole.
Conservatives seem to just not get democracy, and as a result see the Government as something distinct from themselves. In my country, the government is folk I (or my neighbours elected), and they enact policy I (or my neighbours) want. We can just as well change that policy in a few years time if we didn't want to. That's democracy 101.
If you live in a democracy, you don't fear your government, and you can trust them to regulate speech, because they'll do what you (or the majority of your peers) want... if not immediately, then in four years time at most.
> This fellow seemed to not realise he was living in a democracy and had been doing so his whole life.
Just because a law is passed in a democracy, doesn't mean it is moral. A law that requires all members of an ethnic or political minority to be arrested should be resisted no matter how "democratic" it is. (I'm not saying a voluntary boycott of Parler is equivalent to that, just that "living in a democracy" isn't, by itself, a complete justification).
> the trouble we're going through now is a direct result of allowing hate-filled people to form bubbles
If the problem is online bubbles forming, then maybe you should be objecting to Parler blocking criticism of right-wing views on its platform (in other words, suppression of speech is the cause of the problem, not the solution). However, to be against Parler banning left-wing hate-filled accounts but not Twitter banning right-wing hate-filled accounts raises the original concern that the person deciding which speech to ban might have political biases.
> Conservatives seem to just not get democracy, and as a result see the Government as something distinct from themselves.
To be fair, in many countries (particularly the US) the electoral system (not to mention lobbying) causes quite deliberate divergence between what the majority of the people want and what the majority of politicians want. Also, to steelman the view which you assign to "Conservatives", it's worth considering that societies should care not just about democracy but about liberty as well, since "we can pass this law" doesn't always mean "we should pass this law".
> If you live in a democracy, you don't fear your government
What a wonderful world that would be. As explained, not every democracy is as representative as you might hope, and not every person even in a perfectly representative democracy can feel safe from their government.
> if not immediately, then in four years time at most.
The Nazi party actually lost seats in the November 1932 German federal election, which was considered free and fair, but just two months later the party had seized power. Also, if we're making international comparisons, UK general elections only occur every five years.
Finally, to give a recent example of how "silence" is used in political discourse, let me give this example:
> High-profile barrister says 10th arrest warrant for Duterte critic showed the Philippines was trying to silence Ressa
Facebook is problematic, but Parler solves the wrong problems IMHO. Facebook is toxic because it creates big echo chambers for political (including religious) opinion which makes for a toxic society. Facebook was successful long before it became the cesspit it is today, so it’s possible for a social network to solve these problems and flourish. It wouldn’t be as successful as Facebook due to the inability of users to shout opinions at each other, but I think there’s a big enough niche to be exploited.
I would not look at fb alone, meaning no WhatsApp and no instagram, as successful in North America. IMHO they blew it, fb groups are good for local happenings, I do not see any other value
This is a baseless accusation, made to build a strawman argument that can be torn down, given Google's crawler will remove results from down sites AND DOES NOT IMMEDIATELY BRING THINGS BACK WHEN IT A RANDOM HUMAN NOTICES IT'S BACK UP.
A search for "gab", "gab.com" and "gab.ai" all return normally, which just means your comment is designed to be divisive. This is, of course, the issue with proper discourse enforcement!
Can you please stop using HN primarily for ideological battle? it's not what this site is for, and it destroys the curious conversation that it's supposed to be for. Because of that, we have to ban accounts that do it—regardless of which ideology they're for or against. More explanation here: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
I never violated any of your rules. The real issue is that you are so blinded by your own personal political ideology, you see any other views as somehow offensive. It's actually part of the problem we have in our society today.
You did violate the rules, by using ideological flamewar rhetoric ("The masks are now off for the Liberals", etc.).
It's common for users who get moderated for this reason to feel like it has nothing to do with anything they said or did, and therefore that the mods must be against them. But if you look closer and more objectively at your comment, I don't think it's so hard to see that it's not in the intended spirit of this site. There's no question that it was a battle comment as opposed to a curiosity comment.
Freedom of speech is not freedom from social consequence. It doesn't apply to private institutions. Ever. End of discussion.
What should be discussed is whether or not Twitter and Facebook have crossed into the "public utility" domain. I mean, twitter literally facilitate and handover a POTUS account that reaches hundreds of millions of you Americans.
It feels like Americans won't do that though because the idea of talking to the other side is unimaginable.
But twitter and facebook have incredible power over the public, and I don't think it's crazy to suggest a regulator
I think what people don’t really get is that Facebook, Twitter, etc are basically broadcast mediums. They’re not really individual communication tools, nor are they just public utilities like phone lines or internet services.
Instead in many ways they’ve replaced TV for how many people receive news and information about the world. One or few people are able to broadcast information to millions and even billions.
If we look back to the role of the FCC for example, we see the concept of Broadcast licenses. These licenses have also come with content restrictions notwithstanding the First Amendment which have held up in court. On top of that you’ve also had the FCC established rules that limited national shares of broadcast ownership in order to ensure diversification in media.
All of this has suddenly been sidestepped online, and it seriously needs a rethink ASAP.
the difference between a government and a private institution is just the amount of power they have. There are places in the world run by unrecognized militia, who of course do censor free speech when they can. It's still censorship, although they are not "true governments".
So, if we have a monopoly (oligopoly) on the control over flow of information by big tech, this is effectively censorship. And if the laws don't apply to them formally, then maybe there should be new laws for that.
Bryan has talked about how he supported it when Joyent dropped 8chan and, if my memory serves me right, that he wished they'd done it sooner. In the same conference talk he muses on the responsibility of platform owners/providers.
Yes, it was actually Gab -- and I talked about it in a talk on ethics on software engineering.[1] As you indicate, that talk captures my feelings on the matter, so I'll let it speak for itself...
Ah, yes. I must've skimmed an article a little too quickly. Thanks for the great talk, that certainly made me reconsider some things when I first watched it.
It's a bit of a weird comment but I've had similar thoughts about what the Oxide Computer Company is doing could be a good use-case for Parler.
They're doing some awesome stuff around providing software to help manage on-prem infrastructure. They also have a fantastic podcast [0].
I don't claim to know what Brain Cantrill (one of the founders of Oxide) thinks about Parler's situation or their content but from some of his talks you can tell he's an incredibly ethically conscious person, so the commenter above is likely assuming he's not a fan of Parler.
