People rioting under the guise of "antifa" killed innocent people in Portland. They even bombed a court house. There's videos of "antifa" who tried to molotov police but accidentally self-immolated instead. It's a meme that the media will call these "peaceful protests".
As someone who has no dog in the race, and hates violence -- is this "fake news"?? Do these rabid maga idiots actually have a point?
If these protests were organized using FB or Twitter then why aren't they also removed from the app stores?
FB profited from radicalizing people using "engagement metrics" and machine learning at a massive scale just to sell ads. Now they want to wash their hands clean?
These billionaires weren't democratically elected and they shouldn't be shaping our democracy.
If there was a social network whose primary objective was to promote these actions, then sure.
As it happens, these actions are not coordinated en masse, are neither promoted nor supported by even the vast majority of people who are supposedly aligned ideologically with is perpetrators, and are not organized in spaces mostly devoted to that purpose.
Is this responsive to my comment? I am asking whether there are examples of posts of the kind that Amazon asked Parler to take down (clear incitement to violence / glorification of terrorism), which another service hosted on AWS has refused to take down when made aware of them? I don't know whether there are or aren't, which is why I'm asking. Your comment does not answer this question.
> You're continuing to demonstrate that if I answer your questions it has no bearing on your ideology.
Again, how am I demonstrating that? I honestly can't see anyway that you have any idea what I think, from my comments in this thread, without just completely making up a projection out of whole cloth.
> Now you want to know if Twitter has an active account with AWS. I could answer that. But does it matter?
It does seem to matter, when the question is "should AWS stop hosting Twitter because of the way in which they moderate their content?". AWS can't do that if Twitter is not hosted on AWS... So I fail to see how it doesn't matter.
To answer what I think your original question was, filling in assumptions for my (still unanswered...) questions: if Twitter is hosted on AWS, and if AWS notifies them of content they are hosting with AWS that violates the AWS terms, and Twitter refuses to remove that content, then yes, I believe AWS is within their rights to suspend Twitter's account.
I was actually in Seattle while similar protests occured, and seeing things myself, I can say that the media did mis-portray things greatly. 99% of the protestors were completely peaceful and tens of thousands of people rallied to protest day over day all peacefully. I was surprised the media coverage didn't really cover those much, it chose to focus on like the single instance of a car lit on fire at 3am and those very minor instances, sometimes the media photoshopped images too, where they'd like superimpose a person holding a weapon in front of the photo of the car on fire and things like that. And I mean all media, left-wing, right-wing, small media, big media, like they all did this, which I was very surprised about.
I felt pretty safe for the most part, when people weren't protesting I'd still go and have coffee and order croissant at my favourite places in the area that was "occupied".
Things got scary when "anti-protester" started showing up, and suddenly everyone felt like people would show up with guns so protesters felt they needed guns too, and then there was this weird tension of like why we all have guns?
I was really surprised personally at the intensity of the police response, especially in the beginning, and to me it felt like the police really escalated tensions early on which is what led to protesters starting to bring fireworks and umbrellas to protect themselves from police "croud control". Like if a single person in the croud threw a single bottle that was enough for the police to just start pepper spraying and tear gazing everyone. I always wondered why the police doesn't just go after that person that threw a bottle or broke a window, I'm not sure what justified all this collateral damage from them. There were kids and moms and even handicapped people at a lot of those protests.
Most striking is the way the police organises around protesters, even though the protests are peaceful, they flank the croud, and really position themselves like the police and protesters are about to have a Braveheart style face off. I don't understand why the police doesn't spread themselves through the croud and instead help keep the protest peaceful by deterring the few people who are there to cause raucous. They should focus on the people disrupting the protests, help protect others from them, and arrest those.
I was just really surprised by that, because if there was a parade, the police would do what I'm describing, but for a protest it seems they treat the protesters like a huge threat and that makes the whole thing really tense and makes people feel like the police is actually against them. It didn't help that the protesters were there to protest police brutality and they were welcomed by more police brutality and confrontation.
What I really want people to focus on here is this fact, I'm from Montreal, where we take Hockey seriously, and when the team Wins or Loses at the final, police cars are lit on fire, windows are smashed, while people celebrate the victory to the street or morn the loss of our hockey team!
Now in Seattle, you had 60000!! Yes I said Sixty Thousand!!! PEOPLE marching an entire day completely peacefully without a single broken window or fire: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/thousands-march-in... when the population of the whole city is 600000. That means 1 in 10 people participated in this protest, and there were not even minor raucous! That's the most peaceful assembly of such a large number of people I've ever seen in my life.
In Montreal, you have 1k people in the street it doesn't matter why and there's more raucous then that.
And these protests, they didn't just happen once, day over day thousands of people over and over again, and everytime only a handful of incidents, mostly in the late evening or at night. Just do the math, 60k people, if 100 of them broke windows, threw rocks and lit some things on fire that would be 0.16% of the protestors. It be enough for the media to have footage ad-nauseam and publish 100 article about the "riots" and for police to bring out the tear gas. But it also means that 99.84% of the protestors were peaceful. Honestly, if it was for me, I think I'd call these the most peaceful protest I've ever seen, I think they should be given an award for how peaceful these were given the amount of people and the circumstances of how tense the topic was and how they were received by the authorities.
Disclosure: I'm just a bystander here, I didn't participate in the protests myself, I only observed and watched from the sidelines, and I knew people who did and heard from them. So take my info for what it is.
> What I really want people to focus on here is this fact, I'm from Montreal, where we take Hockey seriously, and when the team Wins or Loses at the final, police cars are lit on fire, windows are smashed, while people celebrate the victory to the street or morn the loss of our hockey team!
Happens in almost every city I've ever lived in. I've seen far more violence at a Los Angeles Lakers or San Francisco Giants riots after they win a championship than at my local BLM protests.
Google also runs an ISP. Do you want them to police which IP addresses "don't promote insurrection"? Seems like something a judge and jury should perform.. Democracy and all that..
Calling it now. The horseshoe theory is about to manifest in the most real way possible. Silicon Valley is going to clamp down on first amendment rights and vindicate the garbage insurrection we're seeing now. You'd think Americans would've learned something about blowback.
The social media platforms we use influence our democracy in a big way. The fact they can share ownership with hostile and non-democratic regimes is curious.
Personal behavior can have consequences. If I get in the habit of abusing my neighbors and the local service staff, I might get banned from buying lattes along with the other adults.
This isn’t a complex concept. The idea that a company can continually host people planning an insurrection and not get shown the door by the free market is actually a radical idea.
This isn’t burning books. This is getting banned by the local Starbucks for shouting slurs at the barista. It’s incredibly disingenuous to call this “burning books”.
And that’s before we cover the fact that you are arguing that the government should force private companies to associate with people based on their political affiliations. That sounds authoritarian to me.
Starbucks probably has a larger share of the coffee market than Apple does of the computing market.
Either way, Apple selling a bunch of stuff gives you no right to access their equipment. Nor does it make giving the government the right to reach in and compel Apple to do business with people and entities they don’t want to. That’s authoritarian, and if you think that won’t be abused by a later administration, I’m not sure what you’ve been paying attention to for four years.
If you think Apples so big that they have too much influence, then what you need is antitrust law, not the first amendment.
> If you think Apples so big that they have too much influence, then what you need is antitrust law, not the first amendment.
I agree. I was just taking issue with your analogy because your app getting banned from App Store isn't comparable to getting banned from the local Starbucks. On multiple levels. Acting like it is is misrepresenting the issue.
But here's the rub. You don't have an affirmative right to either Apple or Starbucks. If your behavior gets you kicked out of either, that's on you. Companies have the right of free association too, and while you can complain when you're on the short end of that stick, your rights have not been violated.
Pretending that anyone has a right to either is not only entitled nonsense, it's downright authoritarian. What is being advocated here is that the government should come in and force Apple to do business with fascists and terrorists against their will. Even if you imagine that this will encourage "free speech", and I promise you it will not, this is a power that will come to haunt us all if you give it to the government.
Compared to the power that the ability to arbitrarily deplatform people is giving to effective monopolies like Twitter, I'd definitely rather have the government be able to force companies to do business with anyone. There's clearly less potential for abuse in the latter.
This isn't analogous to burning books, it's analogous to individual bookstore chains choosing not to stock your book. Or to individual publishers choosing not to publish your book.
No one is stopping you from self-publishing your manifestos and selling them out of the trunk of your car, metaphorically speaking.
Don't you see you're falling down the same rathole? Your language and imagery is... kinda violent. It's not an argument about principles, with nuance, you've got enemies. You're warning about "blowback". You're saying that the insurrection is "vindicated". You're implying that this action against Parler is a foreign conspiracy too.
Now... is that one post beyond what HN should allow? Probably not, and it's not my call, we'll see what dang says. But imagine a whole community of people like you warning constantly about imagined terrors and existential threats. And everyone gets to one-up each other.
That's what Parler is. Before long you get senior thought leaders like the President's former attorney (or whatever Lin Wood is) expressly calling for the Vice President to be executed to stop an imagined "steal" of the election. And then the mob attacks the VP and congress trying to do exactly that.
It has to be stopped somehow, right? We can't have online communities pushing real world violence. And it all starts with content moderation. The reason this seems so extreme is that it should have happened LONG ago.
I do worry about the consequences of Twitter, Reddit, et al banning the more marginal content, though.
When The_Donald was on reddit, it was more easily monitored in one place. People who used it at least were forced to confront evidence daily that they weren't holding the majority opinion. And grownups from the platform could remove (and report to LE) the worst stuff.
When you ban those people from mainstream platforms, you do deny them some of an audience. But you also encourage them to make their own echo chambers and congregate elsewhere, which may be on the balance worse.
Now we see the same things happening with Twitter / Parler and Gab.
It's definitely hard to know where to draw the line. Karl Popper and all that.
FWIW, I've almost never seen this argument made by people who aren't secretly or openly supporting those who are banned (you being the exception here).
I believe there's quite a bit of data now that shows that deplatforming tends to work. I have forgotten all the names, but someone named "Milo" seems relevant, and wasn't Alex Jones also banned from somewhere and lost a lot of influence since?
And those are the cases where bans would tend to fail, i. e. people that had years to grow a loyal fan base, collect names & emails, etc. If it works in those cases, it should be extremely powerful when being used a bit more proactive. Anybody watching /r/thed... would have known it's toxic two weeks in, before it had time to spiral entirely out of control.
I think that maybe, if you ban really early, you can interrupt some of the badness--- but this is also the time it's hardest to justify quelling speech.
But by the point they have a large community together, they'll go somewhere else and be worse. Better would be to constantly prune off the worst bits of the community that are most over the line rather than purging all at once (which guarantees a migration).
It's hard to disentangle what the exact causes are, but it sure seems like the discourse has gotten even worse over the past couple of years even as these types of deplatforming choices have been made.
e.g. thedonald.win is infinitely worse than /r/TheDonald was.
I do also worry a bit about a few powerful parties becoming intermediaries to communication (Twitter, Facebook) and imposing their own standards, too. Right now the choices being made are relatively benign, but will they always be?
Once you have an isolated pile of mostly violent extremists with no content control-- go ahead and censor away, though.
> It has to be stopped somehow, right? We can't have online communities pushing real world violence.
Seems like a function of a democratic government, not Jeff Bezos. Because Jeff Bezos isn't the government. Well, maybe, but not officially right?
What more could the FBI want than to have every extremist in the country communicating from one centralized server on AWS? Sad. Now they'll probably adopt a secure decentralized communication strategy and form into cells that can't easily be tracked.. wait, this happened before didn't it
Chrome allows access to calls to violence.. Google fiber allows access to calls to violence..
Do you really want Google to be the morality police of devices and services you pay for? Because that's sad. It's sad how people adopt authoritarian tendencies because they disagree with people they don't understand.
As someone who has no dog in the race, and hates violence -- is this "fake news"?? Do these rabid maga idiots actually have a point?
If these protests were organized using FB or Twitter then why aren't they also removed from the app stores?
FB profited from radicalizing people using "engagement metrics" and machine learning at a massive scale just to sell ads. Now they want to wash their hands clean?
These billionaires weren't democratically elected and they shouldn't be shaping our democracy.