They wouldn't do that, because there would be justified public outcry. Luckily, as moral agents, we humans are capable of differentiating "general political party" from "white nationalists", and can target the latter and not the former.
edit: Tim Pool for example was already accused. It will clearly be used to shut down unwelcome dissent.
That said, I absolutely agree that leftist positions do get censored. Even if I currently like to underline my dissociation with its authoritarian excesses and general dishonesty on certain subjects, the problem is a general one.
However not everyone thinks that it's so great.
I don't know, and it's probably not something we can just settle easily.
It's usually true, that a society cannot simply rely on "laws" to save it, and when the power imbalance get too extreme, then laws won't save anyone anyway. Though it seems having some kind of policy and publicly agreed way to stop serial inciters is not a bad idea. After all information censorship generally happens through claims of potential national security hazards and other gag orders, not by a too wide interpretation of hate speech laws. (But of course human creativity is pretty limitless when it comes to suppressing others.)
Which ones, specifically?
There are many, just some off the top of my head.
Who/what de-platformed Jimmy Dore (here's his YouTube channel; [1])? Or the rest?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3M7l8ved_rYQ45AVzS0RGA
His channel is not 'deleted', (as is the case with the majority of right-wing commentators as well btw), but it is very much 'shadowbanned'/blacklisted, (economic ruin).
I for example regularly notice the recommendation algorithm skews a lot more towards the centre & right actually even when I am specifically looking for Jimmy Dore videos.
People like Rania Khalek, Abby Martin... were even more explicitly interrogated by the likes of CNN, had their Facebook pages taken down etc.
On Twitter, a lot of them don't even come up in the search results, effectively shadowbanned.
Of course, none of them would be invited on mainstream TV because their viewpoint is not allowed in 'polite circles'.
This is why I have a huge issue with the right simplistically equating D.C. Democrats with 'the left'. I suppose the division is as to what do you care about, social leftism, (identity politics), which is easy & lazy and what many on the right focus on vs economic leftism, which is what many of those I named discuss and is not really allowed on mainstream media.
Contrast that to "Limbaugh", for which Rush Limbaugh is the (buried) #11 result, despite having 2x the followers anything else.
In Moments, there's a lot of other people talking about him, so that's what's shown, (also a lot more notable Limbaughs, as that's a pretty common surname), whereas Dore is pretty much just him, not that many other people are talking. That's how Moments always worked, nothing shady there. It's also true if you put i.e. 'Taylor Swift' in Moments, her actual Twitter account is fairly buried, because there's lots of other buzz that the algo deemed more relevant.
If anything, it speaks to his popularity.
And that's despite him not having a verified account, which are deranked for everyone over verified ones. Type in ie 'Sean Hannity' and you'd see his verified account right up.
Perhaps it's time to admit that the simplistic narrative of 'left censoring the right' is not really true and it's more complex than that. It's really the establishment silencing alternative voices.
The right is more than happy to censor the left on BDS, for example, (with the help of the Democrats even(!)) & cement that into law. I don't see any of the right-wing 'free speech worriers', like Ben Shapiro talk about how wrong that is. In fact they very much support it.
On the other hand, you have left-wing channels like Dore & Secular Talk constantly bring up how it's wrong to censor right-wing voices, even doing long rants on specific cases.
And, as we all know, nobody ever made money off of extremist political commentary before YouTube, right kids?
FFS he has his own website and show. Just because YouTube doesn't give him money doesn't mean he's persecuted. He can feel free to host his videos elsewhere.
> (economic ruin).
Hyperbole alert!
> People like Rania Khalek, Abby Martin... were even more explicitly interrogated by the likes of CNN, had their Facebook pages taken down etc.
Please cite some sources. I'm not really finding any info.
Feel free to do so whenever. Be sure to indicate when that has resulted in serious consequences for the "victim".
> Tim Pool for example was already accused.
TBF Tim Pool pulled the whole "I'm so neutral" act when dealing with a bunch of actual white supremacists. What "dissent" was unwelcome there? That he was pretending like these were totally fine people who just happened to think that genocide was okay?
All I could find was this: Peter Thiel once spoke at a libertarian conference. Libertarians, being libertarians, permit racism (read: not the same as "support racism"). THEREFORE, PETER THIEL IS A WHITE NATIONALIST.
Are you fucking serious? I pushed back on my leftist friends with what I found. "Duhhhhh, errrrrr, ummmmm, well... everyone just knows he is!" Oh, really.
Bullshit, repeated often enough as truth, becomes evidence for itself.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/internet-speech/facebo...
That's called freedom of association: the right for an organization or individual to not wish to associate with someone.
That Voat?
Somehow I'm skeptical this is a viable approach short of Torrifying the entire internet.
Take it up with New Zealand, which has very strong laws about hate speech and promoting extremist communities.
> whilst Facebook, which also hosted it, was left alone?
That content makes up a microscopic amount of the content on Facebook, and it was removed when reported. That content makes up the vast majority of the traffic on Voat, however.
It seems like you're moving the goalposts here, though. We're not talking about governments banning websites, we're talking about the government forcing websites to host content that they don't want to host. That's what's at play here.
And the fact is that you are free to start a public or Tor-based community of your own, unless you're in countries where Tor is blocked, in which case I think you're in far deeper shit than this discussion is focused on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Austral...
Are you going to suggest that people start their own ISP?
At some point, private actors can carry so much economic power that their private rules effectively become laws. Much of Jim Crow was implemented in this manner, in addition to actual legislation.
But even then, VPN or Tor? The internet is built to route around damage. Has Mastadon, IRC, or ICQ ever been blocked?
Again, just because white nationalists don't have the platforms they want doesn't mean they can't get their message out. But what they want is mainstream acceptance, and that is most certainly not going to happen.
Letting paranoid xenophobes roam, recruit and incite violence on Facebook is bad. And its ill effects are already felt, and it has significant potential for doing a lot more harm in the future.
Whereas allowing a quasi-public-forum to be controlled and basically censored by an unaccountable entity (FB) is problematic - especially if said control is co-opted by the very same ideology that in the first place that particular control mechanism was supposed to, well, control.
It feels like the problem is that hate speech and other kinds of populist nonsense is currently the tool that easily leads to more and more authoritarianism, more and more xenophobes and isolationists getting into power. But censorship itself is also a great tool for power consolidation.
Where would the outcry happen?
There aren't that many public platforms with any reach, and they're all adopting similar policies.
In [blocked] no one can hear you scream!
In practice, the distinction between banning a subject and banning a conversation about a subject ban, is easy to make. For example, Germany bans racist speech, but does not ban speech about whether racist speech ban should continue (and this particular debate is definitely alive and well in Germany). Even in the US we've banned certain words from broadcast TV for many years, but this never limited people from discussing whether the ban should continue!
Apparently not for Facebook’s moderators/censors workforce. Just they other day: https://mobile.twitter.com/OzraeliAvi/status/111040092879067... The day before that they banned a local satirical comics and this keeps popping up regularly.
And equally easy to abuse, something which has happened time and again:
Complain about the "ban of X"? Discussion shut down as supporting X.
At FB, Twitter, Snapchat etc, whoever happens to work in the subject banning division arbitrarily makes these decisions, unless overridden by top management.
Okay? Private organizations are under no obligation to provide you with a platform to spread your message.
If you want, you can start your own social network or host your own blog.
This is an argument for mob rule. I'm not sure that's as comforting as you intended.
Somehow saying "yes, these multinational corporation could exert undue influence over a political system, but they just wouldn't" does not seem sufficient. I feel that such an attitude is like saying "The US government would not spy on its on citizens -- they wouldn't do that, just imagine the public outcry!" Perhaps that is a bad analogy, but the issue here is that we are nearing the point where "oh, they wouldn't do such a thing" becomes untenable.
The CFO of Google said, in the leaked video[1] of the TGIF immediately following Trump's election, that they would use "the great strength and resources and reach we have to continue to advance really important values." Going by the reactions of everyone in that meeting, their efforts are certainly not impartial or apolitical.
If Facebook and Twitter suddenly decided to de-platform and ban any discussion praising, defending, or favoring a political party, where would the outcry happen? On Facebook? Sorry, it’s banned!
Journalists would be absolutely salivating at the thought of writing about Facebook's new policy, especially if it was that blatant.
FB and Twitter are not the entire world. It's good praxis to be involved with people in the real world.
For instance in the UK Facebook banned the pages of a political party and very little was said because the same kinds of people who control Facebook also control the mainstream media, so they're almost always in agreement, except that journalists would really love Facebook to ban even more stuff to achieve the 'right outcomes', as they see it.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/359847/facebook-bans-far-right-uk...
There's that conspiracy language again!
And then you go on to link a piece of "mainstream media" that writes extensively about it! Did you mean to prove yourself wrong?
It's hardly a conspiracy - the worldviews of these people are formed in the same crucibles and result in the same outcomes. They want to manipulate the narrative to ensure the right outcomes, in their view.
You're comparing apples to oranges. What's it's ranking among tech/PC websites?
How about the Guardian?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/14/facebook-bans-...
How about BBC?
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46746601
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43398417
How about Wired?
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/facebook-britain-first-far-r...
Is that mainstream enough for you?
> They want to manipulate the narrative to ensure the right outcomes, in their view.
Prove it.
Look, the original comment I was taking issue with said this:
"Journalists would be absolutely salivating at the thought of writing about Facebook's new policy [of de-platforming and banning any discussion praising, defending, or favoring a political party], especially if it was that blatant."
That clearly isn't the case because it's happened already and journalists didn't salivate over it - they reported the event once and then it was never brought up again.
Really? Because from the citations I've given, it looks like a lot was said.
> That clearly isn't the case because it's happened already and journalists didn't salivate over it - they reported the event once and then it was never brought up again.
Because it was uneventful. It was a universally reviled thing that got banned, and rightfully so. There doesn't have to be "another side" to a story when that "other side" is filled with nothing but hate.
They're the British equivalent of the NSDAP.
This is highly debatable. There are plenty of examples of benign movements and opinions that have been stifled violently by society and the state.
You can find with little effort plenty of people today calling for censoring or even being violent towards harmless liberal or conservative people because they are "communists" or "fascists". People are not good judgement and measured response.
Facebook and Twitter have become a digital public commons for discourse today. The check and balance is "what Facebook decides". That doesn't exactly seem like an adversarial check and balance system to me.
Absolutely correct, however, they aren’t the only places for public discourse. People have never been able to demand a newspaper print their article or that a magazine must include their story—people have always had the choice to start their own newspaper or their own magazine and build their own audience and this is still true today, in fact it’s much easier than it’s ever been.
People who’s business is access to human inputs, whether they are newspapers, music venues, theaters, magazines, etc.. have almost always had the freedom to set their own standards and it isn’t clear to me why business owners shouldn’t have this freedom anymore.
Small comfort if they are the main places for public discourse - so cutting people and ideas there essentially means relegating them to far less reach.
Strange how when some foreign state censors FB or Twitter it's an outrage, but when FB or Twitter sensor people directly "there are other places".
Not to mention the monetary deplatforming (e.g. Mastercard, PayPal, Patreon and co not allowing funding), in which case there are no "other places" (not many in any way, and not reputable for someone to go pay there).
>People have never been able to demand a newspaper print their article or that a magazine must include their story
Which is irrelevant, since newspapers and magazines where always top-down affairs, written and curated by a specific team. Social media and platforms were supposed to be open to society (hence "social"), not only for a select team of journalists to have an account there.
Because a government has a monopoly on violence, while a private company has freedom of association. You're conflating two different situations that are only superficially similar.
> Social media and platforms were supposed to be open to society (hence "social")
Yep, and that didn't work out so well. Hence, the bans.
A government choosing what information you have access to IS censorship.
There are many organizations, anyone can start one. There is only one government and you can't escape it.
The same sort power brokers that would drive censorship in a place like China are the ones who fund political campaigns, found think tanks, control media empires, and choose advertising spend, and use this leverage to drive censorship on social media.
In the end if the rich and powerful have effectively squelched dissent does it matter if it was through government mandate or some more complex mechanism though private means?
If a group of users explicitly want access to white nationalist content, they should be able to get it. So I would oppose blogs, webhosts, and cloudflare deplatforming anyone for any reason besides the outright illegal.
Facebook and Twitter are not just about serving content to those who have the intent to view it...infact the whole point of these social networks is that they expose content to NEW people who didn't initially have any intent to view. This is promotion, not access, and I have no problem with private entities choosing what they want to promote.
I would apply this same test to payments. Users who have explicit intent to financially contribute to objectionable content creators such as Alex Jones should still have a way of doing so. When Patreon, Matercard, etc etc deplatform him it closes the door to those who already have intent. Of course, I'm all for FB and Twitter shutting down the campaign so the word wouldn't spread nearly as far.
As a moderate liberal who finds sexual content over-censored, yet am disgusted by right-wing and anti-vax (anti-vax is often leftist!) conspiracy theorists, I think this test "honor their intent" test is a great way to keep the internet relatively sex positive, and extremist content relatively niche.
But at the end of the day, aren't the companies who are providing payment processing or website hosting profiting off of extremism and hate? If you'll recall, the reason why they started deplatforming individuals to begin with was that large swaths of people boycotted their services until they chose to no longer do business with said extremists.
Isn't that voting with our dollars? Isn't that the Free Market of Ideas in action?
From McCarthyism, to J.E. Hoover, to MLK, Gary Webb, to WMD, to the Patriot Act, to Snowden, to the "collusion" BS, to today's de-platforming, the establishment and the media easily stomps on whoever they don't like with impunity.
Or have we already built the pinnacle of society at some past point, and everything we ever do in the future is doomed to be as bad or worse than what we already have?
I'd like to choose optimism here, personally.
Banning ads would also be another good start, but I don't see the idea getting very popular.
Why white? The CCP is running concentration camps for hundreds of thousands of Muslims right now, yet I see no ban on the only party that can be called National Socialist today, just because the nation they are supporting is yellow.
Not sure if CCP has a FB page, but that far is obvious.
> The CCP is running concentration camps for hundreds of thousands of Muslims right now, yet I see no ban on the only party that can be called National Socialist today, just because the nation they are supporting is yellow.
I don't see any way to infer this as saying that Facebook has banned the CCP–what am I missing here?
Also, if Facebook has indeed banned the CCP, well, turnabout is just fair play–after all, the CCP has banned Facebook from China.
I don't think they should, but I also know that if they didn't, Trump and others would get banned and the cries from the fake free speech worriers, (who are quiet as heck on ie BDS), would be a lot louder.
Really? How about plain nationalists? How about communists? How about separatists? How about traditionalists? How about "Occupy Wall Street"? How about "nationalists" in e.g Iceland, a country where nationalists would be predominantly if not exclusively white in the first place?
If your idea of "general political party" is Democrats and Republicans and the occasional third candidate, ie. the bland two-party consensus that agrees on almost everything (foreign policy, more money to big money, etc), but disagrees on token issues (and that increasingly less), then sure.
But the movements and parties that change things up historically were never welcomed as "general political parties" by the establishment and the "good people" of the 10%.
I'm from a generally center-left-leaning country, where e.g. Reagan would be considered the epitome of nationalist and/or imperialist. Would it be OK for Facebook to censor Reagan (or some modern politician with the same ideas) on those grounds?
Are they talking about racial genocide? No? Then they're a-okay.
I don't know why this is such a difficult concept for people to understand: If you're advocating genocide or violence against a people, you're gonna get banned. Pure and simple.
We’re also good at being boiled slowly, like frogs.
Doesn't matter what they believe or say: Sam Harris? Alt-right. Tim Poole? Alt-right. Jordan Peterson? Alt-right. David Rubin? Alt-right. And that's just the leftists!
Nazis in Greece like their country or what they perceive as “their country”.
Note how you will never hear the term "ethnic supremacists" used by conventional media. It's too accurate and does not push the borderless agenda.
That’s different from saying things like “get that Spanish off the menu, this is America”, “go home foreigners”, and “immigrants are criminals”.
I’m sure you can see the difference.
I don't really care what FB does, I prefer it to have all the rope it needs, but this normalization of taking and modifying the meaning of terms to fit the anti-borders narrative is dishonest and manipulative. Again, it's not even remotely a new thing, the anti-borders crowd has been gunning against nationalism time eternal.
Your comment suggests you have internalized the idea that nationalist and racist are the same thing. Or were you really thinking I wanted to use "white nationalist" (or any color) in some other context?
What do you think "it's an inherently dishonest frame" means?
Frames are important, it's why I asked why you thought I was bemoaning the loss of a phrase when I was really describing how the phrase itself is dishonest.
Lets take your question as true for the sake of discussion. Do you take your language cues from these people? I don't. I don't see why you would let people you strongly disagree with decide what language to use. Are you concerned you might offend them by not using their preferred terms?
Might you be opening yourself up to some rather trivial social engineering opportunities?
Anyway... def don't talk about frames.
But even setting aside your specific example, I don't believe that ambiguity should paralyze us into inaction. I think it's fair to say "OK, we'll ban anyone who advocates distributing political power based on race, with the white 'race' getting the most power... when people cross that line won't always be clear, but we'll do our best." For private action especially, we should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Is it?
Or is this a deliberately conflated term promoted as an 'official' label in public discourse in order to dissuade association with those favoring the more benign meaning?
Agreed that ambiguity shouldn't create inaction - but it just as well shouldn't promote incorrect action either
Why would you use the term white and nationalist together? Being white has very little to do with being a nationalist unless you believe it has everything to do with it, in which case you would be racist.
Oh her? don't listen to her, shes a 'white nationalist'.
Also, if, assuming this confusion to be true, having the term 'white nationalist' existing in the discourse as a negative, those who are not aware of the nuances between 'whites who happen to be nationalist' and 'those promoting a white nation' are pre-biased via faulty discourse to discount the words of 'whites who happen to be nationalist'.
Any popular terminology which deliberately overlooks subtlety and dismisses it when it is pointed out in the discourse is problematic. It's effectively a subtle smear campaign against the non-problematic nuances.
See also the strangely similar situation with the term 'skinhead' -
Initially this was a mostly apolitical working class subculture, most listened to soul music and smoked pot and listened to reggae, and many were apolitical or left/socialist leaning. Genearlly mildly populist, mostly white, but yes somewhat 'dangerous' in that it was a popular social movement of unconventional rowdy people of all stripes. (much like the 'disenfranchised trumpians' that the media is happy to highlight as contributing to the rise of the so-called 'white nationalism' we're talking about here)
Cue one politically motivated overtly racist subgroup acting up and stealing all the headlines, and now the entire term/culture is essentially taboo..
One can argue that this group just got the press and 'messed up the term', but at some point editorial bias is a factor.
For god sakes this is 'hacker news' I shouldn't need to explain this.
Many right-wing people claim that in practice, there's not: they're accused of being "white nationalists" for being "white and a nationalist".
Edit:
If people downvoting me think I'm wrong, explain why people like Jordan Peterson, who merely espouse non-leftist positions and happen to be white, routinely get accused of supporting the alt-right and neo-Nazis.
For the people who doubt what I'm saying -- here's a video of Jordan Peterson. This is who the leftists routinely call "neo-Nazis" or "alt-right": moderates who refute their positions and calmly assert values like personal responsibility over collectivist victimhood culture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2bFzK2EdIo
Edit 2:
I'd originally written "conservative"; I'm not sure Mr Peterson would describe himself in such terms. I've made it more neutral.
I've just assumed it was a vague insult aimed at non-nominal conservatives.
To quote Merriam Webster:
"one of a group of militant whites who espouse white supremacy and advocate enforced racial segregation"
I am not of the opinion that white nationalism has no real meaning.
And this applies to both ends of the political spectrum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYlZiWK2Iy8
I’d say it’s even closer to “people I disagree with”.
Stephen Colbert would disagree: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nk0dUjYUNI
"You know why you're not supposed to use that word [nationalist]? Because it's the second half of 'white nationalist'. Chopping off the first word doesn't change what it means in our minds."
But this isn't what will happen. Expressing skepticism about immigration - a fairly normal and mainstream opinion in the 1990s and early 2000s - can easily be construed today as "white nationalism" by many on the political left. It's not you who gets to define what your views are on these platforms, it's the "moderators".
Welcome to not having a safe space anymore.
We’ve done this kind of thing before, and we’ll do it again. Facebook responding like this IS the marketplace of ideas reacting.
They'll crow and gloat about how the scene isn't a safe space, that it's founded in hate and intolerance. But as soon as well-known nazi/NSBM-related bands or members of the scene are deplatformed and antagonized for their views, the tone goes straight to "get these leftists out, this is a right wing scene! This is censorship!" and so on.
Apparently only right wing radicals should be allowed to have safe spaces... /s
This will be an ongoing project and will require constant tweaking and adjustment, but I’m all for their removal from the public sphere.
There are underlying economic and social issues leading to the reemergence of this worldview that need to be dealt with urgently and with peacemaking intention. Still, in the meantime this kind of thought if unchecked leads to genocide and must be stopped.
i dont consider myself republican, but the slippery slope seems all too real in this case.
Facebook banning outside ads for the Ireland abortion referendum comes to mind, as well as the case where a Christian satire site was threatened with a ban for spreading false information because Snopes had fact-checked one of their articles as false. Susan B. Anthony List had a bunch of pro-life ads banned; I think most of them were restored.
https://stream.org/328684-2/ this is a more recent case that follows a familiar pattern: Flagged, rejected appeal, then mysteriously overturned appeal some days later.
Hopefully, you also don't doubt that there are also many examples of Facebook censoring liberal/left/non-Republican whatever stuff, and then overturning on appeal, many times mysteriously so, after initially rejecting the appeal. (This post presents like a dozen examples in the genre of black activists being banned for discussion of racism, such as uploading screenshots of racist and sexist harassment they received. You might also want a warning that these examples are interspersed with the author's strongly opinionated and bellicose comments. https://medium.com/@thedididelgado/mark-zuckerberg-hates-bla... )
Due to their scale and the shittiness of their algorithms and processes at this kind of thing, surely you're not surprised there are tons of examples on every side. (This article documents more examples on all sides, including exemptions for a prominent Republican: https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-hate-speech-cens... )
What reason do you have to believe these mistakes always seems to hurt conservative causes or that you tend to see conservative stuff get caught, disproportionately more than non-conservative stuff?
If you want to convince me that it's more of a "establishment/fringe" divide than "left/right", that ProPublica piece goes a long way towards making that case.