I understand why Twitter might not want ISIS accounts on their service but from a national security standpoint, it seems better to have the communication happening on a U.S.-based service like Twitter than some darknet or crypto-centric app.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Culwell_Center_attack
when it was ongoing.
Minutes before the attack:
> #texasattack: "May Allah accept us as mujahideen."
Minutes after:
> Allahu Akbar!!!! 2 of our brothers just opened fire.
Also saw Salafists retweet an old cartoon by Charlie Hebdo of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi hours before the Charlie Hebdo shooting occurred.
I'm divided about this issue. One the one hand, I've seen accounts that glorify the Paris attacks and link to bomb making materials, on the other hand, I've seen lots of video's from Syria and Palestine which does indeed radicalize youth, but is also not directly terrorist propaganda (a lot of this is newsworthy, but does not end up in the news, so it is valuable to share on social media). Should linking to an Anwar al-Awlaki video be grounds for a ban? Remember, these videos are on Youtube.
I like to think back 10-15 years when people had to self-host their websites. Stuff that, back then, would surely get you a knock on the door, slips through daily on social networks. I say: If you can't host it yourself, you can't rely on a third party to host it for you and protect your anonymity.
So yes, chase them underground, and apply more serious tracking to those that are acting more seriously (someone on Telegram writing about terrorism is way more serious than someone on Twitter writing about terrorism). Try to keep social media free of war propaganda. And be careful to not overdo it. America is a country where writing a Facebook post about Apple interspersed with quotes from Fight Club can get you SWATted [1].
[1] http://nyconvergence.com/2011/06/ny-man-uses-fight-club-quot...
We built huge spy networks only to find out that the terrorists don't even use the internet for their plans. They use burner phones and other non-tech solutions (paper?! omgawdwtf.) because (surprise!) they're harder to track on a systematic level.
I typed my last comment going from memory. I looked it up and my memory served me well, his bunker didn't have Internet. Looks like his USB drives weren't encrypted though, rookie mistake.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/how-bin-laden-emailed-without-b...
""" I am careful in how I use the Internet.
I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see git://git.gnu.org/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror, which won't fetch from other sites in such a situation).
I occasionally also browse unrelated sites using IceCat via Tor. Except for rare cases, I do not identify myself to them. I think that is enough to prevent my browsing from being connected with me. IceCat blocks tracking tags and most fingerprinting methods.
I never pay for anything on the Web. Anything on the net that requires payment, I don't do. (I made an exception for the fees for the stallman.org domain, since that is connected with me anyway.) I also avoid paying with credit cards. """
Fortunately, nowadays half the planet's population are Stasi volunteers.
a cursory google search doesn't show anything substantive (only tor browser vulnerabilities).
are you saying that tor, the protocol, is compromised? what's the basis for your claim?
we do know that state actors can break it at great expense, but that isn't really a statement about tor weakness as much as it's a statement about the resources of state actors. and for a person like RMS who is likely not a state-level threat, his use of Tor probably does provide him with some degree of protection.
https://blog.torproject.org/tor-security-advisory-relay-earl...
https://blog.torproject.org/did-fbi-pay-university-attack-to...
two-factor solitude.
And by in solitude I mean, "in isolation from society at large".
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/6zg6w6/reddits_ban...
If you assume the people you disagree with are "insane" or disregard them as "full of hate" then you'll never understand why they think the way they do and the division in our world continues unabated.
It still blows my mind that people who support the currently elected president, are considered a hate group. If the other candidate had won, would we consider her subreddit a hate sub? Would we care what the losing party thought about her subreddit? We all know the answer to that: "No." I have never before seen an election where "only one candidate is considered a human being."
Strange times.
* "UN Globalists are on suicide watch after President Trump's speech"
* "One of the best quotes of the speech. Socialist cucks BTFO!"
* "This tweet from David Brock's cucks is less than 2 weeks old and has already aged terribly."
* "Can you imagine a world without Islam?"
* "HE TRULY IS A GOD AMONG MEN" (God-Emperor Trump)
* "Since 9/11 there have been ~35,000 deadly Islamic terror attacks; that's an average of 2,000 per year... So let's (A) NEVER FORGET, (B) PRESS F, and (C) DRIVE. THEM. OUT. FROM. THE. EARTH!"
Either Bill Maher (a liberal hero) is a racist islamaphobe, or, the_donald users who share the same views as him... aren't islamaphobes.
Because unless we're not talking about Islamaphobia, what else did you actually see that could be considered "hateful"? Because on that same sub you'll find people of all colors, and most religions discussing things. You'll find legal immigrants. You'll find ex-Muslims and atheists. You'll find gays. You'll find women. You'll find Brits. You'll find lifelong Democrats and Libertarians. You'll find ex-"Bernie Bros" who were furious at the DNC's betrayal of Bernie Sanders. You'll find people who grew up under Communist rule. I know, because I've seen every single one of those on that sub and almost every one of those demographics has posted a picture of themselves with a MAGA hat at one point or another.
If you want an actual white supremacist sub, you're thinking of /r/uncensorednews which actually lists Jews with (((triple parenthesis))). That's a pretty sharp contrast to the_donald. But it wouldn't be, if the_donald was as hateful as been claimed.
There's islamophobia, there's cherry picking of news about rape claims, infowars crap about illegal immigrants which is just hate mongering, posts like "let's trigger illegals and show some love for our ICE agents".
I'm not going to link to that dump specifically because they don't deserve the publicity. If you don't see this as hate mongering, we disagree on a very fundamental level.
He isn't a liberal hero these days and he definitely is a racist islamaphobe.
SALENA ZITO wrote (about Trump)
the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.
You can map the same thing onto his subreddit. If we take them seriously but not literally, they're not wrong.
People with a globalist view really disliked Trump's speech.
There's a matter of opinion about a line in the same speech that his supporters apparently liked.
I'm not going to weigh in on David Brock.
Some God Emperor silliness. FWIW, the God Emperor of 40k led humanity very well up until the point of the Horus Heresy and every God Emperor depiction of Trump is one prior to the Emperor's wounding so it's well intentioned (at least).
And Islamic terror is the most deadly religious ideology in the world right now. Perhaps it's not the wisest thing to be concerned about but it's avowed enemy of America , democracy, and limited government so it's an almost perfect outgroup for self-styled American patriots.
Yes, it is extremely important not to dehumanize our political opponents and to understand all the terrible things that made people be disillusioned with the establishment and vote for Trump.
But the_donald community is definitely extreme in their fundamentalism, way beyond just being supportive of Trump's political agenda. Looking at their front page does actually show islamophobic and sexists posts and frequent calls/cheers to violence, contrary to your claims.
Go read the comments. You will find plenty of that stuff.
"If the other candidate had won, would we consider her subreddit a hate sub?"
False equivalence. I don't recall Clinton ever saying she wanted to jail her political opponent. I don't recall her campaign ever retweeting literal white supremacists.
This part isn't really fair. If I want to jail my political opponent because she's my political opponent, this is a big problem, but if I want to jail her because she's committed crimes, that's perfectly fine.
Except, as many, many investigations have proven over many, many years, she hasn't. Hence it largely being a dogwhistle for...
> [wanting] to jail my political opponent because she's my political opponent
It flabergasts me that otherwise reasonable people can say what you're saying. Is it confirmation bias? Is it a media that while rarely outright lying, just avoids mentioning anti-Clinton facts? How?
In the same way that many people did before her and in the same way that people continue to do now. Are you proposing to prosecute everyone the same way?
Why is it suddenly an issue when HRC is doing it but not when Gowdy and Chaffetz do it? Or when almost the entire Trump administration is doing it? Or when the Bush administration "lost" 50M emails they were supposed to have kept?
Hint: If you only have a problem with it when HRC does it, you probably want to check your sexism and misogyny settings.
I'm unfamiliar with your accusations against Gowdy and Chaffetz, but if they did something similar, I'd support their prosecution, too.
I had to remind myself of Bush's email scandal. It looks like, in the end, since the emails were found, there was no law broken? I'm unclear on this point. But the point is, that if they broke the law, somebody should have been prosecuted, then, too.
Your arguments seem to be going in the direction of "the other side is doing it, too." That's not a defense! It especially doesn't do anything to convince me, since I'm not on anybody's side.
And I would feel the same way if it were a male republican we were talking about. Do you really think you can retreat to accusations of misogyny every time somebody says something negative about a woman you support?
The cases aren't comparable. One was a wilful mishandling of classified documents; the other was a widely accepted way of dealing with email.
> since the emails were found, there was no law broken?
A Senate committee said "[T]his subversion of the justice system has included lying, misleading, stonewalling and ignoring the Congress in our attempts to find out precisely what happened." That sounds like they broke the law.
> "the other side is doing it, too."
Not really - it's more that "Oh, look, the female candidate is getting slammed for things that everyone in USGOV has done, is doing, and will do whilst the male candidates and aides ... do not."
> And I would feel the same way if it were a male republican we were talking about.
Then presumably you are now calling for Kushner's indictment?
The study is interesting, but this is decidedly not what it says, and you should be wary of overinterpreting its arguments. If you look at the definition of hate speech they used, it was defined as "the vocabulary of the subreddits in question". This isn't a general complaint about hate speech being slippery and hard to pin down, it's a criticism of the fact that defining it as the specific vocabulary of the subreddits in question is a huge confounder. What the study's conclusion boils down to is:
"If you ban a subreddit, the exact vocabulary (in-jokes, etc) of that subreddit declines."
Well, duh. This is an especially tautological result for communities that have such a rich vocabulary of in-jokes (and slurs) :(
There's not much in the paper to suggest that the emigrants from coontown and FPH aren't expressing the exact same ideas elsewhere, without using the exact same lexicon that they developed in their original communities. I would be surprised if this result didn't replicate for pretty miuch any community that has its own internal vocabulary and in-jokes, such as nominally pro-social-justice subreddits or even narrow political subreddits like /r/anarchism or something.
It's pretty much a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
ISIS doesn't use twitter to debate you. They use it strictly for outbound propaganda.
Even if you could somehow convince those running ISIS accounts of the folly of their endeavours, these are likely to be a tiny fraction of ISIS' people. There are a few dozen social media people in their ranks, but the idea that the bulk of them even have access to Twitter is somewhat laughable.
Denying ISIS such propaganda outlets is useful in fighting them. Proof by the free market theorem: they wouldn't use Twitter if they did not consider it better than the alternatives. They are also better informed about their situation, so they're more likely to be right than anyone else. Denying them this possibility must therefore be damaging to their cause.
This idea that extreme ideologies are somehow damaged by access to mass media is among the most ridiculous infatuations HN has embarked on, informed almost exclusively by wishful thinking. An ideology that is pushed underground is, and this is almost a truism, strictly worse off than one that has access to these tools.
See the recent reddit paper for some numbers, or consider something like r/the_donald: does anybody really believe that community would have been more powerful if it had been relegated to their own platform early on?
this implies they actually want to have a discussion and not just spew bile everywhere, dox innocent people, and vote brigade racist bullshit.
Absolute rubbish; bad ideas spread through people, thus you need to be able to reach people when you counter bad ideas, but people generally aren't controlled by their rationality, they are attached to ideas and stick with them. The idea that if only for example Jewish interest groups had debated the Nazis more, then the Nazis would have been shown to have bad ideas is ridiculous.
Some ideas, as Marcuse put it, block the democratic process and this blockage may require apparently undemocratic means to remove.
It inherently assumes that A) people vulnerable to being recruited into a suicidal death cult are thinking logically, and B) such people can be logically talked out of their ideology.
If instead one assumes that emotional connection is the primary driver of the recruiting success in question, it follows that disrupting this pipeline would yield more success than attempting to reason with talented recruiters who aren't trying to have a fair and logical debate.
There is no free speech issue here, Twitter isn't operated by the government, neither is Facebook or Reddit. My point is, people are still free to set up their own servers at home, running their own app, their liberty to do that is not harmed by Twitter rejecting content. On the contrary, it's an opportunity for free speech advocates to remember that.
One has never been able to compel a publisher to publish them.
You may have a different concept, but to my way way of thinking that has always been the connection between the First Amendment and Free Speech.
But, since you asked, businesses that offer services to the public can refuse service to anyone UNLESS they're refusing a member of a protected class, for being a member of a protected class.
White restaurant owner kicking out a black lady because she's belligerent/drunk/whatever -- fine.
White restaurant owner kicking out a black lady because she's black -- not fine.
Religious bakery owner refusing service because it's Monday -- fine.
Religious bakery owner refusing service because the customer is gay -- not fine.
But again, please no more whataboutism.
In all contexts, freedom of speech is considered a 'right', but in some contexts it's a positive right, and in others it's a negative right.
In the US constitution, it's a negative right. The First Amendment states that 'Congress shall write no law ... abridging the freedom of speech.' In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it's a positive right:
"everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice". [1]
To dissallow Twitter to shape its own content/user base strategy would be unethical.
Ideologies are routinely stopped by denying them a platform. It's the standard way of stopping an ideology.