Gab Vanishes, and the Internet Shrugs | Hacker News Reader

Gab Vanishes, and the Internet Shrugs

lawfareblog.com

20 pointssmacktoward7 comments

There are psychos on all platforms. The double standard is horrible.

Basically, if you leave the reservation / aren’t in the old boys club, you’re toast. (Provided you become popular enough to get noticed)

I disagree, there is a real and significant difference between places with a few outliers that spew hateful awful rhetoric and places that primarily serve allow people to do that. And what does "leave the reservation" actually mean? Pick twitter or reddit - they have lots of people who just want to express ideas, share their views with similar people, but there are also some on there who want to threaten and express a desire to kill those they don't like. On reddit and twitter that will (eventually) get you banned.

I'm free to disagree with the govt, with the political views of any politician, to wish embarrassment for a celebrity, or financial ruin of a business person I don't like. But saying I was xyz to die, or someone to be attacked, or all people like whatever to perish, that's a different thing.

What I meant by “leave the reservation” was that Gab as a company was not in line or subservient to the big companies (Google, Facebook, Apple). Apple banned their app a long time ago even. I believe this sets a precedent for other smaller companies that also do not fall in line. We’ve seen this many times now. Getting deplatformed is a scary thing and it only happens to those that don’t fall into line. You never see extremists on the left that call for violence against conservatives get deplatformed. What we're seeing is one platform being taken down because they were vocally in support of free speech, which the others are not.

Gab had a lot of bad apples, yes. Their moderation could have been a lot better. I’m not even sure what their moderation was. I thought they didn’t allow for calls of violence on their platform actually. But I guarantee if we count the amount of calls for violence on Twitter, it will be vastly higher than Gab. But I digress.

How long until Mastodon apps are taken out of app stores just because some bad people have Mastodon servers?

This does seem like the kind of news that recently would have generated quite a bit of discussion.

Right but in fact not so much. Despite government and tech becoming ever more important to one another it's often hard to discuss politics without revealing a position of some sort and political positions are generally downvote magnets. To me this is both good and bad...

This probably isn't the place to comment on it, but has anyone noticed how odd it is that people act shocked and/or complain that "anti-censorship" websites/services aren't actively removing content/users?

IMO, discourse would get a lot more reasonable if people thought of sites separately from the content on them. (e.g. like how people don't commonly complain about the US navy enabling darkweb lawbreaking)

I can't wait for the day that a website that is anti-tech-giants gets no-platformed. I guess the internet will shrug then as well.

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