Twitter Suspends Prominent Alt-Right Accounts
npr.org
npr.org
But let's scope this out for a second, neutrally: if the subculture is sharing information that is against the political status quo to its own adherents, and it is organizing for its beliefs, should it be censored because its belief is fundamentally unpopular, especially when it is so far maligned from the political views of Silicon Valley? If Twitter aims to be a neutral platform, dissent takes more forms than just those that we agree with. It's being able to express, share, and debate those views that we can come to agreements on things.
The alt-right movement is in the crosshairs because a lot of people are still reeling from the election, myself included, and people are trying to find any and every excuse as to why Clinton didn't wrap this one up like it seemed to be happening in the exit polls and on the coastal cities. The alt right is popular, full of rage, and more than a little scary to some of us, but I don't think that means they should be instantly suppressed. Only hearing what politics are agreeable to you is how these types of movements rise in the first place.
"dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of African descent in the United States, and around the world."
Undoubtedly not. The only difference, of course, is s/African/European/g.
I'm a liberal, but I feel that if this election has taught us anything, it should be that suppression of "undesirable" views only makes them stronger. It's almost as if the Founders foresaw this somehow, and having done so, created some kind of First Alteration of the Constitution to protect this kind of speech, realizing that attempting to suppress it would cause more harm than good.
I do realize that Twitter is not the government, but the same principle applies.
Now, the left calls colorblindness and "all lives matter" racist. (Remember when Martin O'Malley was destroyed for saying that?) They create advantageous standards based on race, and even exclusive positions for non-white applicants. (For example, at the BBC.)
And I too doubt they would object to "dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of African descent in the United States, and around the world."
MLK's dream that one day people would not be judged by the color of their skin was abandoned by the left before the alt-right rose to power, and I believe that helped the alt-right rise to power.
As a liberal, I will say that liberals drastically overplayed their hand the last 8 years. Many of us have been saying for a while that the language, tenor, and actions of recent liberal movements was ultimately counter productive.
I understand and share the demand to be treated decently and equally, but admittedly things kind of got out of hand. Micro-aggression, safe spaces, trigger words - all things that have good intentions but the people who advocated for them were often, to put it kindly, un-diplomatic.
With "demographics" on our side, many of us constructed this alternate reality where America, ready or not, was going to bend to our will - our worldview. And so we poked the bear. Over and over and over again. Then it woke up, tore our heads off and left us wondering what the f*ck happened.
I didn't notice this until after I got back to the US after some time in an authoritarian country, and I noticed that liberals had this similar authoritarianness of being unwilling to consider the merits of the other side, a feeling of we are certainly right and we are going to enforce it on everyone else through legislation. California just banned single-use plastic bags; it could have simply charged a fee commensurate with the costs of cleanup. Or the hot-button issues. Abortion: women's rights, yes, but the conservatives have a point that it is also killing babies. Homosexual marriage: people's rights, yes, but there are some good arguments to the other side, too. Usually issues have two sides because there actually are two different ways of looking at the problem, and to say that the other way is ignorant, intolerant, wrong, etc. is really not respecting the other side.
(Full disclosure: I am a conservative. I am not saying conservatives (!= Republican) are any better, certainly we have our own failings.)
I like your analogy about the bear, btw. I think you are probably right on. And even as a conservative, I was just as shocked as everyone else. Hopefully this election will get a good dialog going and people actually trying to understand the other side. That would probably make it worth it.
IMO this is what distinguishes a traditional liberal from a a progressive. For me, a liberal is basically libertarian with a belief the state can be used to ensure the rights of citizens are administered evenly.
IMO, if someone's actions aren't depriving another of life or liberty, the state doesn't have much standing in regulating that activity. Progressives believe state power can/should be used to protects their rights and their feelings. But, depending on the issue, you'll find conservatives taking the same stance.
Gay people getting married deprives no one of anything. Conservatives that want they're feeling protected are no different than the "SJW" so many of them rail against.
Like all things there are some grey areas. For example, the trans bathroom thing. I legitimately see both sides on that. Abortion is another I see both sides on and believe compromise is the best way forward.
You'll find "authoritarians" on both sides of the political spectrum. In some cases (like abortion) conservatives have their heart in the right places. So do progressive/liberals (environmental issues, for example). In other cases, both sides can begin to see the state as a tool to unnecessarily curtail the liberty of their countrymen.
I am not American, but I must say on the level of politicians, Obama repeatedly tried to be bipartisan and was repeatedly rebuffed by the GOP who seemed intent on grinding the government to a halt. Frankly, and it made the Dems look like a pathetic 'hanger-on', IMO.
"Considering the merits of the other side" is a losing strategy in game theory when the other side always defects.
History has by and large been a march towards these ideals. Freedom, equal chances, some organized support isolating you from the raw&random powers of markets&nature.
That believe isn't new, by the way. The first progressive would have said: "We believe these truths to be self-evident".
Yes, but now people are going for an immediate overcorrection.
Tossing Brandon Eich out of Mozilla is the type of behavior that liberals probably should reconsider. I do think he was wrong, but is he really an evil man who deserved get kicked out of his company. I don't believe so.
Is the University of Toronto professor who is fighting to not use preferred gender pronouns a terrible person who liberals should hate? No, I don't think so. Especially when his argument is that it's compelled speech and violation of his charter rights.
Are the white supremacists and other racists who have come out of the woodwork to support trump bad people. Yes. They are. They need to be opposed.
> the conservatives have a point that it is also killing babies
It's not killing babies.
That being said, it's completely understandable that it is a moral issue for people. They believe it is wrong. That's not a viewpoint that makes you a bad person.
> there are some good arguments to the other side, too
Oh really? What are they? I've yet to hear a single one.
That's why the serious discussion happens on 4chan. Say WTF you think, or GTFO.
I also upvoted you. :-)
I've been saying this to my HRC-supporter friends, many are horrified that I could vote for Trump. A few are no longer friends (by their choice, screaming at me from the top of their lungs that I voted for Hitler).
The manner in which we discuss our differences matters.
For this election, for me (a moderate in a left-leaning city), the left was worse. I genuinely hope they can change.
Jobs. Jobs jobs.
You'll/us/we lost the election because the candidate didn't motivate people.
For the past 8years republicans stalled all your legislative attempts.
Before that they created wars and before that they created Fox News.
Along the way people created global warming deniers, creationism and vaccine denial.
America is at the forefront of figuring out ways to packages and deliver emotions to leverage policy and votes.
Communication had already failed for the past decades.
Memes/Facebook/fake news are red herrings - symptoms, not the diseases.
The American legislature has become more contentious and partisan - iirc voting across party lines is seen as a sign of disloyalty.
The issue is that the strategies applied and improved here are studied and applied elsewhere.
A massive wall of propaganda and emotions.
How can communication happen when even straight up Adoption of GOP programs (iirc mitt Romney launched the predecessor to Medicare.)is cause to Reject it.
Basically how can you talk when people are rarely going to hear you?
?? I suppose the question is how can signal be sent over lossy/noisy(hostile?) channel without degradation or subversion
I think you're missing some perspective on this; a small % of activists on the left (mostly on college campuses) do not represent the trends of liberals in the USA. I can't think of a mainstream Democrat who considers these serious causes (including liberal ones like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren).
The reality is the left has been making huge inroads on social causes in the last eight years - in fact, this may be the primary enduring legacy of the Obama years. The public perception of gay marriage, police violence against blacks, and marijuana use have all drastically shifted and led to very real changes that won't be undone. I wouldn't call this overplaying their hands.
Also, I wouldn't extrapolate much from this election. Obama is a fair bit more liberal than Hillary and is extremely popular compared to her.
A vocal minority + rapid societal change + social media echo chambers = reactionary backlash = Donald Trump presidency
>I wouldn't extrapolate much from this election
I would. 60+ million people voting for a man as odious and unprepared as Donald Trump says a whole lot to me. That and pretty much total Republican domination on the state level. The GOP is one state house away from being able to call a new constitutional convention[1].
1: http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a50672/st...
Although Obama was opposed to gay marriage when elected, I will say that this is an issue that the progressives have driven into the public consciousness.
But Trump will be the first elected President to support gay marriage when entering office.
> police violence against blacks
There are far more protests about police violence against blacks now.
As for "smug liberalism" where if only uneducated people were given the facts, they'd make the right conclusion and be liberal, is probably a real thing; i.e. there are educated people who are still ignorant and there isn't a lot you can about it. A major factor in getting along with each other is living among each other, and that really doesn't happen in rural areas of the country. There's no real effective way to impart city dormitory life, not just social tolerance but diversity appreciation, to people who don't live in cities.
The election is really not that big of a surprise. The country is this divided. It is very difficult for the same party to win three election cycles in a row. And, key Democratic party demographics didn't show up to vote in sufficient numbers that it affected the outcome of the election.
This is not "tore our heads off" territory, that's hyperbole.
You're over-estimating the appeal of the liberal movement on younger people. If some college kids can't openly talk about their inclination to right wing politics that doesn't make them 'liberals'.
Regardless of intent, they are ultimately part of the problem, not the solution. I understand that the latter are responses to the first, but they all serve to paint every member of society with an us-vs-them brush.
In the end, dialogue is a necessity to reform your broken society. Segregating off each subgroup into their own community, whether by choice or government policy, only increases distance and polarization and makes it harder for everyone to engage with other parts of society.
The All Lives Matter movement, as a reaction to BLM, is essentially saying that they don't, and that the racial struggles of American Blacks are irrelevant.
That is the reason why All Lives Matter is considered abusive.
Yes, of course, they do. But some houses need immediate attention because they're in danger.
I'm not really up-to-speed with US politics, but I know it's horrifying how easily and with impunity the police have been killing black people. Still, "Black lives matter" isn't a great slogan, and calling "all lives matter" racist definitely seems like an overreaction. I'm not familiar with ALM's positions, though, so maybe it's a racist organization in disguise, I don't know.
Well, the fire department does tell people that they need to pay attention to things that might cause fires. The response isn't "well, people should pay attention to all dangerous things! What about car accidents?"
I mean, this isn't a difficult concept to grasp. When someone is raising money for orphans, people don't usually say "but what about money for veterans?" When people are raising awareness about breast cancer, you don't usually tell them "hey, we should be raising awareness for all cancer." They don't get angry that Smokey Bear focuses on forest fires ("Oh, house fires don't matter to you?").
People understand single-issue campaigns for most things, but some suddenly have an issue with it when it comes to African Americans deaths. This naturally raises a few eyebrows.
The controversy isn't because it's a bad slogan. The controversy is evidence of it being the correct slogan.
"Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter."
Whatever may have happened after, there was little justification to destroy that candidate for saying this.
Make no mistake, Trump and the alt-right are incredibly hostile to anyone who doesn't see Black Lives Matter as an evil, racist attack on white people, who don't think that blacks complaining about police violence against them is the real racism.
[1] http://edition.cnn.com/2015/08/21/politics/martin-omalley-do...
EDIT: Perhaps I am wrong here, as I said, I know nothing about All Lives Matter, can you justify calling it an "abusive" movement?
The statement 'All Lives Matter' not as response to BLM would have been fine, but come on. No one here is blind to the current discussion to that extent.
That's not what "all" means. It's turning the name of the movement by implying it means "only" Black Lives Matter. So All Lives Matter is saying that not only Black Lives Matter.
O'Malley was eviscerated for that statement, even though he clearly agreed with the sentiment that black lives matter.
I can understand the concern that some have that turning "Black Lives Matter" into "All Lives Matter" could conceal the reality that people with darker skin have been disproportionately impacted by our Justice system, but I also agree with the contention that overreaching and overreacting to a statement that seems completely reasonable to people not deeply aware of the discussion can ultimately have the opposite effect and serve as fuel to movements like the alt right.
Agreed.
And that implies that Black Lives currently do not matter, which hopefully we can all agree is a big overstatement.
I understand that movements need simple powerful slogans to chant and make bumper stickers from. That's fine. But let's not treat these three words as some definitive analysis of race in America.
The problem is innocent people who happen onto the conversation, interpret it at first glance, not unreasonably, as some insane asshole saying "only black lives matter", engage in good faith on that basis, to uphold ideals that we can all agree are right... and subsequently are piled on by a mob who agree that the offender has just instantly and irredeemably proven themselves to be one of the worst things they've been taught it's possible to be. With a real, non-zero chance of their real lives being actually, materially ruined as part of this public shaming.
The problem is things like "Black Lives Matter" being used as a shibboleth[0] -- an excuse to form a gleeful lynch mob, giving everybody a pleasurable and community-affirming chance to engage in collective norm-enforcement against The Other.
The problem is an atmosphere where I'm so paranoid about even attempting to have a good-faith intellectual conversation about this that I have to create a throwaway account to remove a not-at-all implausible chance of having my life ruined for even engaging on this topic at all.
And this isn't even getting into the atmosphere that seems to really be setting in, where agreeing to listen to someone has become tantamount to agreeing with everything they say. That's the really frightening one.
----
It could also mean that black people are not especially target by the police and that outrage at law enforcement is misplaced. For example we know that the rates of police violence against black people vs white people roughly mirrors arrest and conviction rates.
Now you might consider this incorrect, but I think it's a debate that has to be had in the open and not shut down by calling people racist.
Those in the Black Lives Matter movement say black people are in immediate danger and need immediate attention, like the broken bone or house on fire.
Saying “All Lives Matter” in response would suggest to them that all people are in equal danger, invalidating the specific concerns of black people.
“You’re watering the house that’s not burning, but you’re choosing to leave the house that’s burning unattended,” said Allen Kwabena Frimpong, an organizer for the New York chapter of Black Lives Matter. “It’s irresponsible.”
More to the point: It is a given that all lives matter, said Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, an assistant professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University.
“That has always been an assumption,” she said. “The entire point of Black Lives Matter is to illustrate the extent to which black lives have not mattered in this country.”
“if we jump too quickly to the universal formulation, ‘all lives matter,’ then we miss the fact that black people have not yet been included in the idea of ‘all lives.’ ”
Also watch "The 13th" if you haven't.
Institutional racism is real and because of that it can't be undone by just pretending everyone is equal all of the sudden. It is much more nuanced than you make it out to be.
That being said, many of the people that twitter banned are just straight up racist and xenophoic/intolerant speech should not be protected.
Any evidence of this claim? Cause as an outsider to the US I see a black president and a lot of reversed-racism (affirmite action I think you ppl call it)
For example, http://money.cnn.com/2015/08/06/news/ferguson-arrest-warrant... shows that people in Ferguson are being arrested for things that wouldn't even be considered a crime where I live.
Compare that with https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethan_Couch or http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/27/us/oregon-standoff-ammon-bundy... and you will begin to see how crimes committed by white people are often punished by a slap on the wrist when the same crime committed by a person of color would land them in jail.
They still champion equality.
Unfortunately, it's now the equality of outcome, rather than equality of opportunity.
Yeah – or to put it another way, they champion social equality instead of equality under the law.
It's the difference between Classical Liberalism and the Social Liberalism which is currently in vogue.
The idea of equality is not some abstract mathematical notion. The left's treatment of social issues, including affirmative action, stems from decades of serious empirical study of society, rather than from an imagined "spherical-cow" sociology. That does not mean that the policy is the right one -- either ethically or the best means of achieving its goals -- but I think that the debate should be carried out based on all we know about our real society, though history, anthropology, sociology and psychology, rather than by deliberately ignoring them in favor of an idealized model that bears no resemblance to reality. You can disagree with leftist policies on many fronts, but you cannot say that the left has abandoned the idea of equality based on your observations unless you choose that imagined model.
"Equality
Twitter demonstrates the SJW commitment to one of the five fundamental pillars of their social justice ideology.
I fucking hate white people and their inconsiderate asses for voting for Trump. Fuck you! 1:57 AM 9 Nov 2016
Twitter, in response to a complaint about the above tweet:
Thank you for reporting this issue to us. Our goal is to create a safe environment for everyone on Twitter to express themselves freely. We reviewed your report carefully and found that there was no violation of Twitter's Rules regarding abusive behavior.
I fucking hate black people and their inconsiderate asses for voting for Clinton. Fuck you! 4:08 AM 16 Nov 2016
Twitter, in response to a complaint about the above tweet:
We've investigated and suspended the account you reported as it was found to be participating in abusive behavior."
Racism used to be something you did if you were white; now it's just "who you are".
Since the civil right movement 50 years ago, white Americans have agreed to a racial compact:
- whites are banned from doing anything overtly racist
- whites are banned from engaging in identity politics (that is, favoring white/Western culture and people over others)
- whites will accept a double-standard that allows other groups to engage in both of these behaviors (and not deem them "racist")
In exchange, blacks and others wouldn't call whites racist unless that compact was explicitly broken. When they did, whites agreed to make the charge stick—you'd lose your job, career, etc. A charge of "racism" was very, very difficult to undo.
IMO, this was all a good thing and worked pretty well.
Basically, that's all changed now—at least on the right, now that all whites are "racist" by definition. The alt-right in particular has agreed not to make charges of racism a deal killer, and in particular, is no longer enforcing that compact. Under the old compact, the alt-right is definitely racist.
Apparently, though, so is half the country now because by the old definition, absolutely, Trump is a racist with his comment about the judge's Mexican heritage, and whites should have made the charge "stick". As Speaker Paul Ryan said "textbook racism". Trump's comment should have—and would have—been disqualifying under the old compact.
IMO some whites have dropped the racial compact because of the development of privilege theory and systemic racism and the frankly "original sin"-like notion that all whites are racist. Who wants that?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privilege_(social_inequality)
What you call "systemic racism" has been known simply as "racism" in academic circles for the past few decades. Put succinctly, in research circles, racism is the property of a society that results in grossly unequal distribution of power among social groups viewed as different races; sexism is analogous. There is no assumption of ill intent or negative feelings, as those associated with xenophobia (or misogyny). There are very good reasons why this definition is much more useful to study this phenomenon.
The only thing that's changed in recent years is that the public at large has been exposed to those well accepted, well studied academic terms, while misinterpreting them to mean something else. Here's a recent article about this: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201...
It's not that all whites are racist by the academic definition, but that our society is racist, and so people in it who intentionally or not further the racist social dynamics can be said to carry out racism. Those people are both black and white, but as it's mostly whites who have more power in society, it is statistically correct to say that whites are more racist. It's just that "racist" doesn't necessarily mean what you think it does.
First, social scientists are overwhelmingly liberal. Normally, I don't have a problem with an appeal to "academic circles" as I'm in them. But this is a legitimate reason, I think, for conservatives to be skeptical of the motivations and reasoning here in such a politically-fraught topic.
Secondly, redefining words with existing meanings is a bad idea that only leads to confusion. A crude analogy: imagine I redefine the word "moron" to mean "an uninformed consumer of news". Then, I go around calling people "moron", and am surprised when they are offended, and are not placated when I tell them the word's new meaning. They might wonder: might I not have chosen that particular word to make uninformed consumers of news appear worse than they really are?
I think it is disingenuous to blame the public for "misinterpreting" what is meant by "racism" in this context, even though all you say about its academic meaning is true.
It is a legitimate reason to be skeptical, but not a very interesting starting point for a discussion if one side isn't even interested in rigorously studying the subject at all. There's a vast knowledge gap between the two sides.
> Secondly, redefining words with existing meanings is a bad idea that only leads to confusion.
In the case of racism it's not clear which definition came first. In the case of sexism, the situation is clearer: the academic, feminist definition came first, and has indeed been continually misinterpreted.
> I think it is disingenuous to blame the public for "misinterpreting" what is meant by "racism" in this context
I'm not blaming the public for the misunderstanding at all, but many people are actively hostile to even trying to understand the more well-researched point of view, so I'm not sure you can blame the academics, either.
After all, people who have not studied psychology, sociology, anthropology or history find it hard to accept how social dynamics and prejudice work through them without them being aware of it, just as it took 300 years for people to accept that some disease is caused by invisible microbes. Sadly, we do not yet have a simple, self-evident experiment like Pasteur's to demonstrate the existence of racism (and even after Pasteur's experiments, it took a couple of more decades for most people to become convinced). So you cannot deny the active resistance to the idea.
Edit: Why do I even bother. That same blog has the following snippet in another post:
The white nations of Europe are, collectively and historically speaking, humanity's golden geese. It is to the long-term benefit of all Mankind to avoid killing them, or even adulterating them, through immigration, invasion, or assimilation.
Sigh.
And by biased source, I mean a racist idiot promoting his shitty ideas.
For example, if you substitute "Swedish" or "German" or something more specific than "European," you get something that doesn't set off alarm bells, just as with "African" (or "Eritrean" or "Egyptian" - although you might set off alarm bells with "Hutu" or "Tutsi.") Why?
I would wager at reasonable odds that a randomly selected American organization promoting the "heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent" will actually have an agenda dedicated to marginalizing or removing "undesirable" elements of the population (they will have an explicitly racist agenda, and support - if not directly participate in - hateful, illegal behavior).
I would take the opposite side of that bet for the corresponding group with "African" or "Irish" substituted in.
Words and symbols need to be understood against the cultural backdrop in which they appear. It means a very different thing to fly a giant national flag in the United States vs. in Germany (during anything other than a soccer match). The composition of a sentence is not sufficient to derive its significance, or its level of moral acceptability.
And of course, it's perfectly conceivable to have a non-racist group in America with the description you provided. It almost certainly has happened. It's just not what actually happens in the real world most of the time, for "lots of reasons."
It's uncomfortable to get down in the muck and deal with ambiguity and complexity. Evaluating whether or not a statement or group or personality is racist and worthy of approbation is generally really difficult. That doesn't mean it's impossible, especially at the extremes, and especially if you're willing to tolerate a false-positive rate.
The reason is that it places our government (or Twitter, in this case) in a situation of making impossible judgment calls. A person who is "proud of their European heritage" could be anything from a docile recent Polish immigrant to a rabid neo-Nazi. Yes, you can make probabilistic determinations as to which account or individual is truly racist and who is not, but to what end?
Speaking very broadly, we live in a democracy. And the underlying "faith" that is necessary to believe in a democracy is to believe that voters can distinguish between true and false, right and wrong. If we don't have that, we are completely lost.
So I choose to believe that voters are mature enough to see alt-right posts on the Internet and, on average, consider the reasoning and reject it. What's the harm of letting voters see the alt-right's arguments and decide for themselves? Either we believe the median voter can come to rational and ethical conclusion or we don't. If we don't, we have much bigger problems than deciding what Twitter's specific censorship policy should be.
100%. Throwing around "white supremacy" and "racist" is strengthening the actual KKK/Nazi types.
> It's almost as if the Founders foresaw this somehow,
I am amazed that the Founding Fathers seemed to have such foresight.
Its hard to see anyone who would be a "Founding Father"-type figure today.
In the long term, ~20 years, it probably doesn't matter what Twitter does today. It's a way for them to connect, now, with their primary demographics by making something of a political stance.
The context at the moment is that there are many rabid, racist, some violent, followers of these sites out there who have recently felt validated.
If your gentle website "dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of African descent in the United States, and around the world." had a similar atmosphere of whipped up feeling around it, potentially leading to abuse/violence, I'd expect exactly the same response, or at least the need for response.
Whether the response is correct or not, as you suggest, is another matter, but your comparison doesn't accept the context of current events.
In a literal sense, but the latter is a pretty good example of a white nationalist dog whistle.
> I feel that if this election has taught us anything, it should be that suppression of "undesirable" views only makes them stronger
That's your takeaway? Not that having a presidential candidate on TV giving his implicit approval to these ideas makes them stronger?
To quote Ray Davies: "Paranoia - brain destroyer."
To parody "The Sixth Sense": "I hear dog whistles."
I've watched some debates with Milo as well as Gavin Mcinnes. They are definitely not what most Americans would call "far-right" -- in that they aren't anti-gay, aren't anti-drugs, aren't socially conservative, and aren't particularly hawkish. They seem to dislike Republicans like Paul Ryan almost as much as Nancy Pelosi.
Milo recently did a profanity-laden pro-Trump rally dressed in drag. That's the "alt" -- it's quite different than what a person would typically call Republican.
When leftists think "Right wing" in the US think of the Christian theocracy. However, conservatism is only one sect of the right. The right is also reactionary, and the alt-right is definitely reactionary. I'd argue the alt-right fits nicely into Wikipedia's definition of far-right politics [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-right_politics
Edited because my sarcastic use of tone didn't really have a place in the discussion.
The alt-right are younger neo-reactionaries who are tired of political correctness, tired of the media narrative.
Because the republicans have been using that as a very loud base for a long time now.
SJWs are not liberal. They don't want free speech. CA is not a liberal state by looking at its taxes and firearms laws. These are authoritarian ideas.
Rectification of names... Labels and Knowledge are totally independent things.
People who claim it's a negative are usually upset that they can't attack, belittle, or harass other people for their own amusement, I've found.
We have laws on harassment and threats. You don't get to suppress people's speech even if they are idiots.
That's a real liberal position.
Believing that people that respect that idea are bullies is both unfounded and unfair.
You say, as you attack and belittle people you disagree with...
(...not only people who behave that way, but everyone who thinks censorship is a negative.)
yeah, War is Peace
or, as they taught is in Scientific Communism classes, "Freedom is a conscientious necessity"
I would argue that it can't. Freedom is the freedom to do things. "Freedom from x" is just another way of saying "you're not allowed to do x".
One man's freedom may be another man's prison.
Before the 2016 election, the term was "classical liberal". I don't know about Milo, but at least Alex Jones has described himself as a liberal.
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/11/16/translator-migran...
frontpage of breitbart today.
This article is racist af, and the comments are even worse.
This article basically has no source, and is a bunch of anecdotal race war bullshit. The only "facts" are so lacking in context that they are meaningless. Like number of total attacks for example....
To claim that it has "basically no source" is not true. The Breitbart piece links to the German-language article on which it is based. I'll link it here again for you:
The translator whose statements are featured in both the Brietbart piece and the original German article is allegedly a Christian Eritrean woman who has requested anonymity because she fears reprisals from the Islamic asylum claimants with whom her work requires that she interact.
Other people quoted in the German article are indeed identified by name.
Disclaimer: I am not vouching for the veracity of their statements, the integrity of the original German-language publication, or of Brietbart.
If we are truly building a society of tolerance, whether or not one has a visceral reaction to an idea should not stop whether or not one can discuss and debate it. I'm not a neo-Nazi, but I've talked at length with them about their views. I will give anyone a few minutes to explain what they are about, try to listen to it neutrally, and form my own opinion. My personal conclusion of neo-Nazism is that it is a way for white men that feel they have no economic opportunity to blame a convenient target, and they try to rationalize Nazi Germany's domestic infrastructural successes as a reason why the country was doing what was right. I think it is a prime example of scapegoating, and I find it violent and hateful.
If we are paying lip service to tolerance and acceptance of alternative worldviews to make ourselves feel like better progressives, we are doing our views a disservice and acting more hypocritical than those that blatantly wear radical views of censorship and discrimination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Twitter has to choose between upholding the ideal of tolerance (4Chan is a good example of this) and trying to create a community of tolerance by running off the intolerant crowd.
I don't think there's a happy medium in this case because the alt-right seem to really like disrupting conversations that are inconvenient to them (instead of just tuning them out) and Twitter's short-form messages make that extremely easy because the conversations are so disjointed and often misinterpreted to begin with.
> the alt-right seem to really like disrupting conversations that are inconvenient to them
That's aggressive behavior, then. I'm defending the alt-right's ability to use Twitter for expression and talk with themselves, and with people that have shown interest in their ideas. If they're off brigading every source they disagree with all the time with harassment and memes, that's a different issue, and Twitter should be wielding the banhammer in an egalitarian fashion on all groups behaving this way (per the views they hold themselves to.)
I don't think this was an outright purge of the alt-right, just those they saw as ringleaders of abusive brigading. Alex Jones and other big names from that group are still out there doing their thing.
>Twitter should be wielding the banhammer in an egalitarian fashion on all groups behaving this way (per the views they hold themselves to.)
Absolutely.
I can't speak to the particular accounts banned by Twitter, but the alt right have a carefully developed vocabulary designed explicitly to sneak across that boundary.
In this statement, you are unilaterally making a rule as to what ideals are OK to hold as part of "civilized society", and where the boundary is. Stating your society is more "civilized" than another is an opinion in and of itself, and arguably those who hold views opposite yours likely think your societal views also contain hints of barbarism or offend human nature.
There are multiple ethical views that humanity and even this culture have held throughout the past century alone that the predominant society has now decided are reprehensible, that other nations consider reprehensible, and then there are also views that have been considered reprehensible now widely accepted by this culture.
Personally, my beef is not with whether or not people agree or disagree with these views; the argument in this subthread is external to my original message:
I'm tired of the Valley's progressive ideology consistently espousing acceptance, free organization, and free speech when we as an industry keep taking steps that seem against it when we disagree with the information provided. It is the message of social media: people should be able to communicate and unite worldwide. If we aren't radically upholding this belief, then we need to change the mantra to be aligned to what it actually means: associate with us, our ideas, and our worldview, and we will give you a voice. If you don't, your voice on this platform will be stripped, even if you are not engaged in attacking those that disagree with you.
I don't agree. "Kill all the X" is a hate speech and, depending on context, a threat of violence -- we already have tools/laws to act against such, so there's no need for more censorship.
Why not? If we silence them on few webpages, you think they simply will disappear? Trump as a president should be the wakeup call for everyone that forced, artificial politeness and political correctness won't make problems disappear.
Does it make any sense to push the fringe away and offline when we can let them expose themselves and then monitor them?
You could say the exact same thing about literally any view and it would be equally true.
I don't agree with Neo Nazis. I hold Neo Nazis with the same contempt that I hold feminists. Why not apply the policy for all hate groups?
For example, in Australia we refuse to acknowledge the approximately 25% of violence and abuse by females within the household. The worst case statistic is NSW ("Twice as many female victims (19,488) as male victims (9,261) in New South Wales."). Not one of these victims is given a voice! http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/...
Also check http://www.oneinthree.com.au/
You will see that men who are victims of domestic violence are turned away from support groups. This doesn't surprise me as there is an aggressive campaign to ignore male victims from media, government and community support groups.
I conducted a Google search from 2015 to determine that 100% of references in the Australian media stated that domestic violence was a "male only" behaviour and the only victims represented were female. I checked over 2000 references! In other words, 2000 of 2000 references represented one gender with relation to violence.
If you listen to Cassie Jaye (the feminist who created the documentary The Red Pill), she says that feminists in media refuse to acknowledge male victims because it will take money away from female victims. In other words, if you are a boy or a man who is beaten or abused, feminists insist males get no representation or support. It's almost a complete media kibosh throughout the western world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itSTzV29bS0
So, why is Twitter not banning prominent feminists? or, why isn't Twitter banning all media outlets who support such hateful messages that insist that some victims of violence should be ignored? This is a fundamental breach of human rights! You can't get much worse!
Check media references for an absence of any of the following, 80% of suicide victims are male 25% of domestic violence is by a female 90% of incarceration is male
You will also notice that Cassie Jaye said she was suppressed by feminists. Cassie also said that she was advised by feminists not to represent any issues that impact men. This would explain the media suppression across all western countries.
If you're going to ban a hate group, why not include feminism. It's certainly one of the biggest and most active groups today and actively violates human rights. I've given plenty of pointers in this single post alone to build evidence.
There is almost universal silence from the overwhelming majority of feminists on this topic. It's a sad indictement of the overwhelming majority of the feminist movement. Check media, documentaries from 2016, support groups, even discussion forums. The message is consistent and it consistently breaches human rights.
So, should Twitter ban hate groups? If you really must silence hate groups, then ban them all. And like you, I dislike spending so much of my time fighting hate groups like feminism because there is no impartiality on the topic. How extreme do you need to get before people will speak up?
And sometimes the people the majority thinks are being intolerant will end up being right.
Bottom line though: look at all the intolerant societies with no real framework. They don't fare well. The Founders of the US Constitution believed in unalienable rights for a reason.
Her supporters act like she was squeaky clean. When I chatted with them they had hardly no knowledge of her or Bill's checkered past.
I've heard people say she lost because she's a woman. That's like the QB throwing 4 interceptions and saying they lost because the kicker missed a field goal.
You can say whatever you want about how terrible the people being banned supposedly were, but Twitter's priorities here are crystal clear. This was an ideological purge first and a (terribly subjective) ToS enforcement action second.
It's unfair and highly inaccurate to say that Twitter is turning a blind eye to terrorists on the platform. However, I'd be interested to know what radical leftist organizers are doing to use the Twitter platform and how many of them have ended up banned as well.
235k accounts is nothing. Absolutely nothing. Twitter accounts are like email addresses, cheap and disposable. It took proliferation of articles like that one (and probably more importantly, a lawsuit) for them to get off their rears and do something about it. And this is after multiple reports over months, against unambiguously hateful accounts, some of which I personally participated in.
For some reason, it takes no such media shaming or legal action to ban, limit, or otherwise mess with the speech of the political right. Milo can just mention someone, someone else will say it's brigading, and off we go to the races. A celebrity can talk about getting hate tweets, and the CEO will drop what he's doing and personally reach out to them, while ISIS propaganda goes completely unchecked.
Feelings are less important than terrorist propaganda, full stop, end of story. No matter what you think of the political right, this is a disgusting inversion of priorities.
[1]: http://www.jpost.com/Business-and-Innovation/Why-are-terrori...
Personally, I'm okay with kicking Nazis to the curb. Their ideas are regressive, harmful, and absolutely counterproductive to the future of the nation. And to those crying out "oh but civic discourse, let's build bridges"...have you ever talked to these people? They aren't trying to talk, they are trying to put a boot in your face if you're not white.
Almost all would probably decline. Not just because we wouldn't enjoy the work, but also because it is something that, by definition, would help them and support their goals (according to their judgement – otherwise they wouldn't hire you).
Should people working at twitter not be allowed to make similar decisions? It's not hyperbole – look at reddit, and how it has devolved to something like a lowest common denominator. I'd leave as fast as I could instead of lending support to the toxic community.
Do they have a right that overrides mine? No. Private entities are more or less free to decline any customers, exceptions only where they have monopoly power (telecom, water).
Is fighting them out in the open the more valiant thing to do? No – I don't argue about chemtrails, or religion, or flat earth or evolution. Because it doesn't work. The chance of them convincing me that evolution isn't real is 0. Unfortunately, even though I'm right, my chance to convince them is about the same. Because none of this has anything to do with facts – it's red tribe vs blue tribe, and the right's search for a sense of belonging that Reagan sold to the highest bidder.
Is it going to empower the extremists to ignore them? Considering the ideas aren't new, I can only conclude that the internet has given them increased visibility and therefore helped their rise. If reasonable people decide to curtail their options for propaganda – by hiding them from Facebook, Twitter, Google the way conspiracy theories were ignored by reasonable people in the past, they may just shrink back to their appropriate size of plus or minus 0.
Twitter has a history of banning right-wing accounts for petty tweets, and leaving alone left-wing accounts that spread hashtags like #KillAllMen, and post sexist tweets against men, or racist tweets against white people. Twitter also is notorious for banning anti-muslim tweets, or even accounts ran by activists fighting for women rights in islamic countries.
It’s in their right to do this, but don’t talk about this like Twitter’s doing something warranting a discussion.
Nazis didn't start deciding to post on Twitter because liberals were reading an insufficient amount of Nazi propaganda.
Influential people who think the government is intentionally making gay frogs, that media needs to be under strict control, that climate change is a Chinese hoax, and that everything is us vs (((Them))) just got a candidate that represents their views into the White House. There's nothing alt about it. It's just straight up mainstream now. Referring to it as such takes away from the rebel factor and reveals that this is, in fact, just the new system, as bad as the old one.
Also alt with the lower case a carries with it some techy payload as well which together with people like Thiel makes it look like its some expression of ideas about the future when it's mostly about nostalgia for the past.
I can't believe how easily this has been swallowed by everyone particularly the media.
I generally vote for the Labour party, but that doesn't mean I and my fellow Labour voters (Corbyn aside) support Mao/Chavez/PolPot-style murdering of our enemies.
The Alt Right ideology relies on the principle that White culture is the "true" culture of the nation, and that other contributions simply do not count. They cast an illegitimacy to the history of minorities in the US.
The debate about protecting the culture is irrelevant because they do not want to protect the nation's culture. They want to protect White culture.
Want to preserve Oakland or the Mission as is? That's fine.
Don't like seeing women forced to walk around in burkas and girls having their genitals cut (I live in London where these re both issues)? That's racist. Obviously Islam isn't a race, and this makes no sense, but it's something people still claim.
Either preserving existing cultures is OK or it isn't.
One of the reasons FGM goes on in the UK is precisely that people don't want to be seen as judging a culture, even for something which is statistically more likely to happen in a culture: ie, the problem could be addressed with medical inspections in schools but this won't happen for fear of being called Islamophobic (oddly enough I learnt most of this from reading Bridget Christie's book, and she's pretty damn left). A similar situation occurred in the systemic rape cases in Rotherham.
And yes, of course people can voluntarily submit to something, it doesn't change that others are forced.
I'm not even sure if Mao should be directly compared to Pol Pot. Probably not.
Second, the Labour party has been social democratic for at least 30 years. It cannot be compared to communist parties at all.
Edit: you edited your post to add:
> "Pol Pot is responsible for killing 1.6 million people. He ran labor camps, etc. Please name how many people were killed on purpose on orders of Chavez. Please name a labor camp."
...after I added multiple sources showing Chavez using torture and other forms violence. Nobody claims Chavez was as violent as the others - in fact, I specifically claimed the opposite in my reply before you edited your post. Merely that he used violence including torture.
edit: I did not edit my post after you provided any sources! From the start it contained "Pol Pot is responsible for killing 1.6 million people. He ran labor camps, etc. Please name how many people were killed on purpose on orders of Chavez. Please name a labor camp."
I have actually made an effort and checked, for example Amnesty International for the time that Chavez was in power. I don't find evidence that he tortured most of his opponents, sorry.
The Black Panthers are also racist, but I would not call them alt-right or neo-nazis.
You're a programmer, right?
NewNewClass ...
Is that really an alt-right position? I lost interest in politics a long time ago, but the last time I heard that sentiment was from the left - calling for the Fairness Doctrine to be brought back.
The alt-right probably wants free speech above all, to the point where hate speech is permitted in much the same way that safe spaces are today.
Great observation and you hint at a simple solution - call them by their conventional moniker: the far-right. There's nothing new about their ideologies and "the far-right" elicit a different response from people than the newer and unfamiliar "alt-right".
As an aside, there are likely plenty of people on the left that feel similarly.
The far-left/left/center-left etc and right side counterparts are defined by policy and ideology, so whether they feel the GOP was in touch doesn't really make a difference.
You wouldn't call the Republicans "right" if they started handing out generous welfare packages to the masses.
Like their pre-Obama universal healthcare proposals? The one dimensional political spectrum, with n-right vs n-left, doesn't work at all.
It's not a good way of accurately gauging the political spectrum but I'm not sure I'd say it doesn't work at all. A better method would be to add two more axes so you have x, y and z which would allow you to measure social policy (services, infrastructure), fiscal policy (an increase or decrease in state assets, taxation) and international relations (trade, alliances). The end result would be a kind of tetrahedron that represents the shape of a party's policy (that's not the point of it - it's just an interesting feature of having a three dimensional gauge).
As it fails in such a modest charge, I'm comfortable saying that it doesn't work. The only variable that it would come close to measuring is individual freedom vs collective comfort. A multidimensional representation would do a better job, but it would quickly become so complex that it would be useless - as most people hold contradictory ideas.
That is why far-right does not accurately describe alt-right, think of it as a second dimension on the traditional spectrum.
Maybe I'm missing something but in this thread I haven't seen anything that shows how the alt-right is fundamentally different to, despite the flawed labeling system, what is standard fare for the far-right. What sits in this second dimension, and does the rule apply to the left? Is it consistent?
It is good all these ideas are out there even if you don't agree with them. Shrouding them will only encourage it.
Strict absolutist and authoritative law/parenting almost always leads to acting out, while passive law/parenting let's knowledge decide individual choice.
Putting a stranglehold on knowledge that is bad will give people more desire to find confirmation biases in it. Let them naturally learn it is bad themselves.
This is just the Streisand effect and way too similar to what they do in China, like the censoring of Kim Jong Un fat memes[1]. Twitter just got political and that is not wise in business.
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/11/16/502312268/...
I'm with you. Its very difficult to find people like you who think practically and consider side-effects, etc.
I'm curious as to whether this has changed over time. And how could the founding fathers have such foresight.
Where have all the thinkers gone?
everyone's shouting past each other.
Isn't it obvious? They've been censored. Matt Lauer can't even ask legitimate questions about Clinton's private email server without being publicly censured for being a "bad" journalist.
What a joke.
Twitter is under no obligation to partake in this too.
For those readers of such material who are rational critical thinkers, then yes they will see it as bad for themselves and it will leave a bad taste in their mouths, and it will also waste their time
For those with irrational hateful right-wing ideology, it will reinforce their existing miserable attitudes
I agree that censorship is bad. But all publications select their messages. For example, scientific publications don't publish articles on homeopathy or communication with the dead. Are they censoring such material ? Shouldn't they be committed to fair and balanced presentation of ideas ? Aren't they _biased_ towards genuine evidence-based science ?
The reason scientific publications select real science rather than crank bullshit, is that their readers are trying to get real work done, and they rely on peer-review to filter the shit
You have to filter-out the noise in any communication channel. The problem we have with FB & Twitter is that the low signal-to-noise ratio is impeding our decision-making processes
Af first the media gave them no air time, they weren't invited to political debates, they filtered them out like they didn't exist. The political parties created a cordon sanitaire, somekind of agreement to never create a government with that party involved.
The result? The biggest win ever for a far right party. To this day that particular moment in history is called black sunday. They were the underdog, the ideal party to give a protest vote and their idea's for a lot didn't seem that ridiculous as they got no confrontations.
Later they tried to outlaw the party but it just resurfaced as a new party called the Flemish importance (Vlaams Belang). Then something changed and they got more airtime, they were invited to political debates or debates too court.
The result ? People saw how ridiculous some of their arguments were or how they lost debates when confronted with just sane arguments.... Today they are a marginally sized party at best and nobody is scared from them anymore.
The only way you can defeat those ideas is not by taking away their voice, but to let them speak.
>We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
-Dr. King, Letter From a Birmingham Jail
Our values of free speech and free expression are far more important than the cringeworthy and extremely stupid things some people choose to say.
Twitter should not ban these accounts, or should it ban ISIS accounts or anything else. Twitter is a platform, not a curation service or thoughtcrime police force.
Can you give me a definition of this that can be consistently applied to all tweets?
The issue is that you can say something is "neo-Nazi propaganda" and it will shut down the discussion and publicly shame the person because the phrase is so powerful.
Less day by day, thanks to the liberals
It's hard to see how 140 character snipes, provocations and occasional calls to hostility fall into that category. But maybe.
Is it censorship to remove random stickers from telephone poles? To erase graffiti?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12966699 (343 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12971779 (21 comments)
That first link with 343 comments and over 100 points in an hour was on the third page before it was two hours old.
Sometimes it's a function of user flags (which affect the ranking even if [flagged] isn't visible) which is a more democratic process, and sometimes it's a function of what whether the mods determine that the discussion is constructive and valuable to the overall health and purpose of the HN community. I don't know if the mods always comment when this is the case, but they have in the past done so.
“We need a conservative Facebook, a conservative Google, a conservative Twitter” - Steve Malzberg
Ideally we have a free market of ideas fostered by tolerance and respect for different points views. Not being willing to expose yourself to different points of view creates ignorance.
Corporate censorship like this sends a signal that Twitter is not willing to be that communication platform for free speech.
All other political and bulling noise aside, this to me is the core of what Twitter is doing. As soon as the market understands that Twitter is betting against freedom of speech I believe the market will adjust accordingly and it will have a stock sell off and loss of users.
Would you say the same if Twitter were owned by the right-wing and was banning left wing users?
You might be inclined to grant someone permission to stand on your lawn, but chances are if they stood on your lawn and then held up a sign that said "Send Jews to the gas chambers!" you'd likely ask them to leave. And if they refused, you'd eventually force them to leave.
And calling that expulsion "enforcing your world view" would be a very extreme way of explaining what you did.
Are Stephen Colbert / daily show etc. included in the list?
This, to me, seems the result of a Western tech company meeting the world. It's a result of growing and enlarging the people using it. It's an indication of different cultures, societies and ways of looking at the world.
To get more people, Twitter has been forced to appeal to a wider range of people. When it started it was just people like us, techies, using it. It was good, remember?
So we are seeing what happens when cultures and people clash. If anything, Twitter needs to make the bubble better, not reduce the bubble. Facebook does this really well - things can be shared from outside the circle but its not usually some internal comment thread. Twitter makes it too easy for different people to talk to each other.
As humans, the best way is to have more empathy for others, to understand that other people you encounter may have different world views. Most online conflict occurs not due to ideas but to lack of empathy of others. Twitter as it is does not encourage empathy between people.
I don't think this will ever happen, but it's an interesting hypothetical.
I wonder if any uncloseted conservatives or republicans are in the room, or even the building, when these things are decided?
I truly believe that by playing host to hateful views over the last 6+ years, sites like Reddit and Twitter have helped to mainstream them and make the "alt right" (Neo-Nazi) movement what it is.
This is consistent with the ban on ISIS propaganda accounts, which was also a positive step towards combatting online extremism.
Practically, one of those three groups were widely successful among many millions of people. So you'll find a great sensitivity to that one.
Just because you call a group you don't like a Nazi, doesn't make it true.
Rejecting a culture seems a little different than wanting to kill people from a culture, but maybe in the social media age speaking out against something is as bad as physical violence, because of the hurt feelings.
So, it's basically a whitewashing act to ensure they look like they're solving a problem of abuse but in practice they ignore the 99% of abuse that actually goes on. They think if they hit that 1% the 99% will get in line. But I think the Twitter devs don't understand that they don't care. It's not as if their lives depend on Twitter. They'll just laugh and make alt accounts to continue the cycle over and over. Twitter needs a complete redesign for the abuse to be minimized or otherwise eliminated. And it wouldn't even need banning involved at least in my opinion. In some ways, I think Google had it right with G+ because it was easier to filter out people on circles than anything else. Too bad Twitter is so popular.
Freedom of speech runs headlong into freedom of association.
There are a lot of things businesses can do to increase profits: They can get more users, they can cut employees, they can move their offices to cheaper areas, they can pursue important business deals, and more.
If a plane is off-course, you wouldn't go to the cockpit and start flipping levers and pressing buttons at random. But you could make the same arguments you've made against a person opposing that idea.
If they don't curb the hate speech and racism they are even closer to being cut entirely out of my life - I would think this is what they as a company has to balance vs people that are into those things and appreciate having a platform for such behavior. As of right now - I personally - would never work for a Twitter/Facebook, due to the online presences that they actively support, albeit I'm sure that talent pool is not #1 priority.
It's definitely not an easy position, and I guess it kinda shows that touting yourself as a tech company when you are really a platform for good/bad/medium ideas comes with its own set of challenges.
The more the establishement tries to fight the alt-right, the more free (and valid?) publicity it recieves.
I didn't really believe in the so called "anti-white" agenda, but the more I see these guys getting censored for simply expressing their (somewhat legitimate) concerns and their views while ISIS supporters are free to express their hate towards the general western population, the more I am beginning to accept the fact that there is a clear anti-european sentiment deeply rooted in international politics. In other words: It really does seem like there is an "anti-white" agenda, especially considering how islamist extremists are free to share their decapitation pictures on facebook and twitter while raising concerns for some official stats gets you banned and labelled as racist.
BLM acitivists are free to call for the killing of all "white cis males" on twitter, that is apparently not hate speech at all - Sometimes I just get the feeling that the entire world is FUBAR.
First, Hillary campaign and pro-Hillary journalists keep lumping GG with altright and Trump, ignoringt surveys that show that most GG people are more in the Bernie camp instead.
This basically forced GG into politics, and then you got outright anti-white racism on the mix... for example one of the biggest opponents of GG is Bioware, they even made a tweet comparing trump to Reapers (mass effect antagonists, they are a species of racist robots that use mass brainwashing as basic weapon), but the same people in Bioware made blatant racist tweets, for example tweeting photo of a cup with words about white tears, making a feminist conference and writing in one of the slides that white women are against the cause and should be ignored, defending hiring decisions based on race (ie: hire everyone that ins't white) and so on.
GG also had spats with a guy that literally wrote that he wanted white people dead, twitter banned his critics instead.
Or the infamous Leslie Jones vs Milo incident, GG people dug up lots of racist tweets from Leslie, and then tried to defend Milo, and were banned instead. someone then copied Leslie tweets, made a new account, and tweeted the same tweets but changing whites for other races, and got insta banned.
GG also has lots of devs, that of course noticed GitHub controversies, including that GitHub refused to fix their official code of conduct that explicitly writes that anti-racism protections don't apply to whites.
GitHub also hired people that were already infamous on Tweeter for making explicitly anti-white racist tweets.
People have enough of anti-white propaganda and leeching of them while at the same time spitting in their face.
Which countries treat their minorities better than white ones? Which countries push the most for equality of gays, women, etc.? Which countries spearheaded abolishing slavery? Most of the leftist should go on a tour to Arab, Asian or Black countries and see how they treat the white minority, they're in for a shock (but probably will try to explain everything by something that happened 300-500 years ago)
If you ask the average person on the street about the improprieties of the media leading up to the election, they're not going to go into the details of the DNC emails and explain the cozy relationship between them and the media. They never read them. They're going to say the media is 'rigged' because that's what they were told over and over until the notion stuck with them.
Clearly a lot of people were faking their world views on the social media in order to appear "politically correct" and avoid being shunned and attacked from people that see themselves as politically correct and informed.
And then, on the ballot without anyone looking, they, of course, voted against that and we got Trump, Brexit, etc...
And now, people are expecting that the answer to on how to actually get these people back, inform them, make them more open and try to show them a better view of the world, is to censor their thoughts even more?
That's just simply untrue. Hyperbole and lies don't help in these conversations. (And I say this as someone who thinks that Facebook and Twitter have no place being arbiters of "truth").
Downvoted to -4 on HN for saying that Twitter doesn't allow liberals special privileges to threaten violence on Twitter. Gotta just love this place sometimes, and by love, I mean that it's full of shit.
https://twitter.com/_g3orgia/status/796263284282454017
https://twitter.com/cervines/status/795679114673852416
https://twitter.com/_mr_parker25/status/796521044492349440
"If you voted third party in a swing state you should kill yourself."
"Kill yourself"
"Kill yourself. Honestly kill yourself. You wouldn't be missed"
"To everyone who voted for trump as a joke kys. To everyone who voted for Harambe kys. To everyone who voted for Hennessy kys."
10 seconds with this search: https://twitter.com/search?q=kill%20yourself& or variations.
Untrue, huh?
But first: Yes, such posts are abhorrent and unacceptable and come from people who're very childish, emotional and lack self control.
That said, it helps to understand where this comes from. Many of these people (particularly the one responding to 2) feel that thanks to the policies of Trump and the people he surrounds himself with, they or their friends are being indirectly already being told to die. (LGBTQ, Obamacare recipients, others)
I am not making excuses for these reprehensible tweets, but i feel it is valuable to understand where the causes for them lie.
..I'm not sure what distinction you're trying to make, or how it is useful for discussion. Irrationality that ends in violence is irrationality that ends in violence.
Besides, the first three pages of that search have zero tweets that involve someone telling someone else to kill themselves. They're all mock conversations, or memes, or literally a discussion of the fact that the punishment for attempted suicide is death. Or people encouraging others to call suicide hotlines, or a joke about killing yourself to get insurance money. I'm literally looking for a threatening tweet in that search and can't find one.
Why haven't the posters of every single one of the above tweets I linked been banned? Yet we're only hearing about the "alt right" boogeyman.
I have no idea how you would've come to that conclusion, I certainly don't think it and didn't imply it.
Is this really the game we're playing? Really? I have to go find three tweets of Trump supporters telling HRC supporters to kill themselves? Do you really think that can't be trivially found?
https://twitter.com/h0elooks/status/796337658549202945
"Please kill yourself racist piece of shit" (seconds ago as of time of writing)
https://twitter.com/braaaaiiinnns/status/799113146602573825
5-6, actually.
Go ahead, I'll wait. Yes, I really think you can't find that, unless we're getting different search results for some reason. I'm not doing some cherry picking of the results here, these are literally the first tweets I can find where "kill yourself" is directed at a person or group and not obviously humorous.
That last one came up in the search while I had the search open, even.
I stand by my original statement and believe I've proven it.
https://twitter.com/LK4Csjsharks20/status/795128062941675520
https://twitter.com/Sundance_44/status/794595588822155264
https://twitter.com/gr1zzly/status/794184499491782657
https://twitter.com/WYLTK13/status/798922065399070720
https://twitter.com/Wolf_Gang_Tears/status/79871237999133081...
https://twitter.com/TonyTehTowel/status/797860571882389504
I won't replying in this thread again. Whatever point you're trying to make, you're doing a poor job of it.
You're not better than the people you're suspending. In fact, you're a lot like them.
It so strange as an American expat living under a military dictatorship where any improper speech is harshly dealt with to see American slowly but steadily moving in the same direction. What's weird is it's starting with restrictions on speech in the private sector and education. I'm wondering how long before laws and the courts get behind the restrictions.
I've become convinced that the American left is now totally post liberal, in the sense that they consider classical liberalism -- à la John Stuart Mill -- highly offensive.