PayPal and GoDaddy terminating business with them? I must be living under a rock because I don't think I've heard of gab.com before these tweets started appearing on HN.
What exactly did they do to piss everyone off?
What exactly did they do to piss everyone off?
This weekend a dude shot up a synagogue in Pittsburgh. Guess what social network he'd been hanging out on making lots of posts about killing Jews?
Many other social media sites also suffer from massive amounts of hate speech as well.
Does that actually work?
Well, guess what, it doesn't happen.
It doesn't help that simple imaginary solutions that probably blame some scape goat are easy to sell compared to complicated trade-offs that marginally reduce systemic issues our society has.
The US political system practically allowing only two parties doesn't help, since it makes it easy to disregard everyone not with your team instead of having to engage with a large set of different opinions.
But you quite often see people post something like "thanks for saving me from being an alt-righter" in the community of for example twitch-streamer Destiny. He did engage alt right youtubers in discussions, but recently scaled that back somewhat... apparently having a right wing mob hate you is a real thread to your livelihood as well. He says he has still no idea why he got his permanent twitter ban... so yeah, I'd love someone to look into that...
Anyway, we are talking about the marketplace of ideas. As with any marketplace, you need marketing to sell the good (idea). Guess what kind of ideas are worth paying for? Probably the kind that will benefit those with lots of capital. And for that reason do real lefties think capitalism will eventually always end in fascism once disillusioned people demand change and only a communist revolution can save us.
I always disregarded that as stupid, but the last few years make it more and more difficult...
It's hard to argue with people that are not even wrong. For example, some hold beliefs like "Women are subhuman and only exist to serve men and were created for that purpose."
How do you even argue against something like that?
They can go and get another registrar, and if they need another payment provider, they can always set up one themselves, or start taking bitcoin.
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/28/661532688/a-look-at-gab-the-f...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/28/us/gab-robert-bowers-pitt...
Surely it should be seen as a benefit for other websites that they have sequestered themselves off on their own domain?
These are people who think it’s okay so shout in the streets, “death to the Jews!” Because they of course are not actually killing anyone. They don’t accept responsibility for their vocal protest encouraging someone who was already harbouring murderous thoughts to actually commit murder. They don’t accept that actions spring from ideas and ideas spring from words. They don’t accept that in a world where people aren’t actively blaming Jews for the world’s problems, the nascent anti-Semite will take no action because they are insufficiently motivated to take any action.
So in the talking in theatres analogy, the worst harm is that someone else doesn’t get to enjoy the movie. In real life the worst harm is that someone is encouraged to commit genocide.
You can see this phenomenon in Indian right wing Twitter accounts, the talk is like: Don't I have freedom of speech? Why don't people listen to what I say? Why am I being deprived of audience?
And like you said many people have a hard time coming to terms when faced with fact that 'freedom of speech' only gives you the freedom to talk, as such no immunity is provided for the consequences of the speech. This leads to all sorts of crazy situations, for example: Many people give like hate inciting speech to create a riot, and almost act like they indulged in a great tradition of democracy.
On the very long term, things like 'freedom of speech', only make sense when they become a force for good. Another common abuse is comedians, cartoonists etc, in full conscious creating mischief and expect people to just happily put up with it.
To illustrate the issue, consider that one can be suspended or even banned from Twitter simply for stating (rightly or wrongly) that there are two genders. But Sarah Jeong-style tweets are considered perfectly fine, even though they are hateful and racist in many ways. I think these examples illustrate that what is at stake here is much more than just the ability of mass murderers to spew hatred.
To make your analogy stronger, you would have to imagine a world in which theaters had become the standard place to talk and engage in discourse amongst tens of millions of people simultaneously.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/28/us/gab-robert-bowers-pitt...
Note: I'm trying to be factual here, but know that Pittsburgh is my home town and I have a lot of feelings about this.