Reddit bans subreddit group “r/DonaldTrump”
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> In general, sedition is defined as trying to overthrow the government with intent and means to bring it about; the Supreme Court, however, has been divided over what constitutes intent and means.
> These acts made it a federal crime to speak, write, or print criticisms of the government that were false, scandalous, or malicious.
It is frightening to me that so many U.S. citizens get their perception of reality through social media channels; that is to say they get messages that are amplified by algorithm with insufficient regard to refutability (and a requirement of evidence to refute or confirm.)
As someone who cannot visit every single polling place in the country (I visited zero and voted by mail) I cannot with absolute certainty proclaim that there there was no widespread, coordinated and shockingly well-concealed election fraud. As a person of logic and reason and based on multiple sources of information that I consider reputable, I strongly believe this did not take place, and I would need multiple, reputable sources of information and likely trusted peer acceptance before I would change my mind to believe it did.
My way of trying to only accept what I believe to be accurate information will always be imperfect, and, at times, fail me. But I believe it is only shades different from what someone who believes in election fraud does. Their sources include the content of speeches made by the President of the United States, news anchors and journalists of conversatively-biased news, and perhaps most importantly, peers they trust liking and sharing those same speeches and articles with them as a stamp of acceptance.
That's a complex and very human problem that is not readily solved with gut reactions, broad strokes and absolutes.
From a believer's perspective, articles mentioned affidavits, eye-witness testimony, court cases being filed, and important, trusted people saying something along the lines of "there is evidence the courts are not even considering!" Presumably if that same believer dug deep enough into individual court cases and affidavits and statements by the judges dismissing cases, they may have changed their mind.
But I don't dig that deep, and obviously neither do the believers. We are wired to our inclination of confirmation bias. When we are already programmed and motivated to find evidence of what we already believe, we do not tend to exhaust every option possible to validate it. We stop when we cross the smallest of hurdles of validation.
We are in a tough place.
I disagree. There's no way they would have changed their minds. It's just an excuse. A thin veneer of plausible deniability while they willingly keep their heads in the sand. The simple explanation is no one is that stupid, that fascist, but, maybe they are. Maybe this is the effect of a decades long campaign by conservative politicians & pundits to constantly gaslight America & try to keep the electorate uneducated.
Either way, people clinging to these obvious falsehoods are seditious at worst or useful idiots at best.
People generally don’t like to change their minds on deeply held beliefs, and all the falsehoods Trump and Qanon are spreading have become deeply held beliefs for many of those people.
They end up supporting fascists but they won’t realise it until too late.
What I trust is that if Trump had serious allegations with evidence, that Republican election officials in Georgia would treat them seriously rather than debunking them in the midst of death threats. Or that some Republican judge, especially one of those nominated by Trump would have allowed a lawsuit to get traction.
Reading the transcript of the call to the SoS, and reading a couple of the legal opinions on one of the lawsuits, is worth more than a million news articles to me. Trump said there were thousands of dead people who voted; the SoS said there were two, in the face of people calling for his execution as a RINO. That's compelling.
I also trust peers with a similar threshold. If none of my intelligent friends and family members with a history of digging deeply into fantastic claims believe the current fantastic claim, I don't tend to feel the need to do such digging myself. If one of them was suddenly making a grandiose claim, I would sit up and notice and have to investigate further.
I choose things to read based on my perception of their average reliability, but I don't assume that something is true because it comes from a good source. If I did, how could I know the source was good in the first place? The causality goes from good articles -> good source, not the other way around.
I just don't think you can give anyone any benefit of the doubt. If you're not forming your opinions bottom-up, you risk getting drawn into a divergent reality like so many people these days.
I'm also reminded of how some people on HN like to mention the "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect". You can't expect that smart people automatically know about any random thing, if it doesn't impact their life whether they are right or wrong.
The democratic house members who argued against the objections easily tore down their arguments. Their largest point with respect to voter fraud was that there were was actually _no_ legal action mentioning voter fraud brought up in the many many court cases launched by Trump's team. The reasoning being because lawyers can have their licenses revoked for intentionally lying about serious accusations and no lawyer was willing to put their career on the line for something they had no evidence for.
I respect everyone's views and consider myself to be somewhat moderate, but damn overall republican house lost a ton of respect from me that night.
The RIGHT, people who supported/enabled Trump have said, nope - nothing to see, all's legit, got any better proof? Kemp for instance was a HUGE Trump supporter, Pence has no reason not to support Trump, yet now he's a "traitor" for doing his job. Seriously. I'd hate to play any board game with these people, you could never win, they'd throw a fit if they lost until you admit they won...
In an ideal world is there way to prove definitively that there was no fraud? Or is this something unprovable.
Poll workers for instance, get drafted from a lottery right near the election instead of a voluntary system so there's no way a team of confederates could scheme behind the scenes.
There's also multiple tabulating and verification steps. The ballots are both machine and hand counted. The people and machines are chosen at random and nobody could rig all the machines because nobody has access to all of them. Nobody can coordinate an effort for subordinates to rig them because again, the teams are formed via a random draft.
Test ballots get fed through the machines by teams of observers who get randomly assigned to polling stations for surprise inspections.
Furthermore the top 6 candidates independently verify the tally. They each get essentially an open book of the records. Statistical spot check surveys are done as a further confirmation etc. There's lots of international observers, etc
Every voter gets a copy of the ballot and a confirmation number that they can go and check the record of.
Maybe someone else can find a place where corruption in the tabulation could occur but it looks pretty airtight to me
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Venezuela#Polling...
* - It's worth noting I'm not saying anything about the outcome of the elections or the politics. Voter intimidation and disinformation could still happen, lots of objectionable things. But their tabulation of votes seems to be pretty clean. Dictators, if that's your opinion here, can stay in power without lying about the vote count by, say, deciding what makes it on the ballot in the first place. For an extreme example, this election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936_German_parliamentary_elec... could have been exemplary - as clean as mathematically possible, and had the same outcome.
> Dictators [...] can stay in power without lying about the vote count by, say, deciding what makes it on the ballot in the first place.
Reminds me of the situation in Hong Kong. Concerning the Chief Executive elections since 2017, there was a reform proposal in 2015 [1] to:
1. allow universal suffrage in Hong Kong, but
2. Beijing effectively could screen candidates.
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-32397179
Strongly opposed as “fake democracy”, the proposal eventually did not go through (due to a very silly technical error from pro-Beijing side).
The rest is history.
After lots of subsequent development, just this week there was a mass arrest of pro-democracy lawmakers and activists [2], for otherwise the pro-democracy camp may have enough say in the election of the next Chief Executive, after the landslide victory in the district council election of 2019.
Why though. What makes this an unique problem.
I have the same views. There are actually some "They stole my election!" people on HN, so maybe they'll read this and reconsider their "reality", but Biden won by several thousands in the 3 disputed states, to pull off voter fraud to swing that many votes require a lot of work, and probably a lot of people, and the problem with having many people is that it's hard to keep something like that secret. And if they were going to steal the presidency, why did some GOP candidates in those states still win seats, why not flip enough things Dem so that the "tyrants" have a comfortable majority?
I think Trump's "They stole it!" proclamations are a scheme to keep his base heated so they can donate to his retirement fund, although yesterdays "We’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue!" (only for him to take the limo back to the White House) probably goes beyond that, that was an incredible "Release the hounds!" moment.
It's infuriating that a significant percentage of the country doesn't listen to reason, haven't even looked at how flimsy the court arguments that Team Total Landscaping have made, but are just screaming everywhere "I know the truth, and the truth is, they stole it!". Then again, many probably would get lost in the first paragraph if they tried to read any court filing. (Not being insulting, but hey, someone must've thought years ago "why spend money to educate children if they're just going to vote you out.".)
This is turning to a rant, but it seems the seditionists in congress who are also still claiming voter fraud without evidence (like Cruz or Hawley) just want to keep the Trump base very very pissed off, and very very motivated.
Or they want to keep the crazies on their side, rather than being turned on suddenly the way the insufficiently strident (e.g.,.most visibly recently, Pence) have often been. Still had the effect of contributing to radicalization, but the intent may be more avoiding becoming a target.
The odds that Donny dies of natural causes before 2024 are not nothing. Trying to position yourself as the inheritor of his base is a savvy political move (despite my personal horror at such a callous idea).
Technically, that's not necessarily true: if he is convicted the punishment can consist of any combination of removal and bar from holding future office. In theory, he could be removed but not barred on conviction, though that seems improbable and, AFAIK, every actual conviction in an impeachment trial (most such trials have been of federal judges) has resulted in both removal and bar.
Name it. What sources? Every major news source has been complaining about "election theft" for 4 years and warning about election theft in 2020.
The issue with corrupt elections has been around at least since 2000 ( Bush v Gore ).
Here is an NYU professor giving a lecture about it in 2008 ( about the bush election theft ).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPhL53ol0DE
You'll notice the exact same issues voting machines, ballots, etc discussed.
Any person of logic and reason will conclude there was election fraud. Both the democrats and republicans have had 4 years to prepare for it. But also reason and logic says that if both cheated then so be it. The national election system is designed specifically to be gamed. It's not just local voting that has problems - gerrymandering, voting suppression, etc., but the national election as well.
There is no doubt in my mind that Trump and Hillary cheated in 2016. I think the DNC's hubris underestimated Trump and that's why he won. I think this time, Trump's hubris cost him. I mean "china, china, china" gets old after a while.
Rational people understand that both sides cheated and the better cheater won. Only democratic political activists think there was no cheating and only republican political activists think we should overturn the election because of cheating. Rational people understand there was cheating and are willing to live with it because both sides cheated and the system is designed to make it impossible to prove cheating.
The ballots are lost in time, like tears in rain.
As I said in 2016, I will say it in 2020, let the better cheater win. If Trump and the GOP really wanted to win, they should have worked harder.
See:
- Hanging chads (ballot got fixed)
- Gerrymandering (currently getting legislated away)
- Russian interference (more oversight currently)
- Electronic voting machines (no longer used...oh wait)
And yet the media, academics, politicians, etc all bring up over and over. I wonder why?
> However there are tons and tons of evidence that foreign powers like Russia and China troll and spread millions of fake stories to fool more gullible Americans
Tons? Where?
> I don't recall a single democrat saying "the dominion voting machines are fake data!"
Other than warren, klobucharm, wyden, etc?
https://www.warren.senate.gov/oversight/letters/warren-klobu...
Warren even wanted to get rid of voting machine to make our election secure.
https://time.com/5613673/warren-election-security/
Also, as I noted, issues with voting machines were mostly a democratic concern in the 2000s due to the Bush victories. Voting machine problem isn't a new issue. It's been around for decades.
> That's a complex and very human problem that is not readily solved with gut reactions, broad strokes and absolutes.
Sadly, though I feel the same as you, this kind of mindset is a vanishing minority in the US, or so it would seem based on most allowed speech these days. One can daily find entire reddit threads about how one side or another is absolutely unreasonable, and one shouldn't even consider that the other side may have reasons. And this goes for all sides. For those of us who try to remain objective and rational, the only option is increasingly to remain silent or find safe spaces (ironically, from the very crowd that popularized the concept of safe spaces). That's the main reason I started spending more time on HN. I've written before, this is one of the few popular places on the internet where being rational and impartial is common, though even here that seems to slowly be changing.
Nothing imo. Before it was probable that there could be careers and jobs outside of the presidency. With these moves it seems like Trump decided to make his bed with the worst of his base and a lot of people have finally decided that it's a bridge too far. Last-minute attempts to distance themselves after playing along the entire time.
They will be standing right there to fill key cabinet roles for the next Republican administration.
(365-14)/365 = 0.9616...In her case a bigger factor is probably that Trump has also fallen off the grace of a lot of Republicans. The guy is done. He's still massively popular and a threat given his popularity amongst pretty fanatical groups of people, but as far as raw, democratic power he lost his election by a pretty decent margin, and lost the House/Senate for Republicans.
A lot of people who sucked up to him and his rhetoric must be realizing it's time to suck up to someone/something else. He's always attracted an uncomfortable amount of media attention and now that he can't attract political power to remain in office he's a liability rather than an asset.
Going after Trump fans is just center-left back-slapping, and all the worse because ignoring the police partisanship is extremely reckless and irresponsible.
Our civil liberates will continue erode for no good reason, and our institutions will be no safer. Replace the police with something else they're not afraid to hold accountable. If there is to be a monopoly of violence, it must be held only in (small d) democratic authority.
Have you not seen the videos of officers swarmed and overwhelmed, being attacked and beaten?
Are you saying the police pulled a "false flag" on themselves? Seems like a Trumpist argument.
No, what happened was the Senators called Maryland Gov Larry Hogan who has command of the MD National Guard. He mobilized his troops but he needed permission from the Pentagon to move them into DC. He didn't receive authorization for over an hour while the Capitol was being overrun.
This is a separate issue from Mike Pence. This isn't about Pence vs. Senators; the question there is why wasn't Trump the one to make the call? Where was he in all of this in defending the Capitol. Reports are that he was reveling in the chaos, and making calls to Republican senators to lobby them to take more time and raise objections to the electoral certificates.
Police on the ground were overwhelmed. Congress was asking for help. Rioters that were screaming stuff like "Hang mike pence" got to within a hundred feet of the the vast majority of the leaders of our country. Local governors asked permission to intervene from the man that incited it all - whose political opponents rioters were bearing down upon. Permission that was denied.
The more I think about it the more fucked up it all is. January 6th could have been fucking devastating for the country. And lots of people don't seem to really give a shit. We're one step removed from a banana republic.
Lol
I suppose having positive ESG profile is still an interest. So your statement stands.
Him bringing EC faith into the open, actually hurts GOP for decades if the EC is removed, they'll never win again. It's been a very very long time since GOP has won popular vote. Their entire future rides or dies on the E.C. unless they can become a big tent party, and regain people who have left the party.
A first generation American is no less American than a 4th generation American and an overwhelming majority of us are the children of immigrants if you go back far enough.
I'm not sure what your point is in arguing that all Americans are equally American, whatever that means.
These accusations are belittling and removing agency from people on multiple levels by saying democrats import immigrants, that immigrants who become citizens shouldn't have a say in how this country is governed, and that immigrants vote for democrats for any reason beyond their political policies.
How does it remove agency from immigrants to point out that, as a group, they have tended to vote for one party over another, and to speculate that said tendency will continue in the future?
I'm not really understanding your point, I think.
The idea that democrats are somehow acting nefariously for adjusting their policy to meet the demands of the citizenry is sounds completely asinine? What do you think democracy is? Republicans lost because they have bad policy. Complaining that the winning side acted in bad faith for listening to their citizenry is anti-democratic. If you think citizens shouldn't be listened to, then why not just skip to authoritarianism?
I'm not sure who or what you are arguing against. I haven't seen anyone suggest immigrants were coerced in any way, or that they vote democrat for any reason other than preferring their policies.
>The idea that democrats are somehow acting nefariously for adjusting their policy to meet the demands of the citizenry is sounds completely asinine?
The "nefarious" behavior alleged in this comment thread is bringing in immigrants because they know they'll vote overwhelmingly democrat once they can vote (and same goes for their children, who would not have been born in the US if their parents had not been allowed in).
And some of the most rabid Trump supporters are recent immigrants (cf the Epoch Times' role in the last years, or the fact that one of the arrested Capitol rioters, Yevgenya Malimon, mother of an Oregon Republican party official, needed a Russian interpreter at her arraignment).
Think of other right wing voices in the US: Peter Thiel (first generation immigrant), Ron Unz (second generation), Roosh V (second generation).
Meanwhile, one of the key demographics for Biden's win in Arizona was high turnout among — Native Americans, the Final Boss of non-immigrants.
They seem pretty reasonable to me, having looked at the numbers.
The Cuban community is the only community of fairly recent immigrants of which I'm aware that doesn't reliably vote for democrats, on the whole. Outside of Florida, their votes do not make Hispanic votes in general swing toward republicans.
Hispanic votes for republicans may have increased this year, but they are still absolutely nowhere near 50/50.
My understanding of the Epoch Times is that it's run by anti-CCP Chinese, and not very representative of Asians in general.
Listing single individuals is not relevant when the topic is how a community votes.
Vietnamese Americans tend to vote Republican as well, and until the Trump era, so did Filipino Americans: https://asiamattersforamerica.org/articles/key-statistics-on...
> Hispanic votes for republicans may have increased this year, but they are still absolutely nowhere near 50/50.
Sure, but I find it remarkable that they increased vote share AT ALL while running on a fairly explicitly anti-Hispanic immigration platform.
> My understanding of the Epoch Times is that it's [...] not very representative of Asians in general.
But apparently quite influential in some language communities.
I'm not arguing that recent immigrants do not, overall, predominantly vote Democratic. But I think that behavior is not nearly as immutable as this discussion suggests. Many immigrants (a) come to the US in search of economic opportunities and (b) have somewhat more conservative personal values than their US-born peers. So they should be quite amenable to some flavors of Republicanism.
Now an interesting consideration, for both supporters and Donald Trump himself. What happens if he is effectively locked out of all the big social media sites? Does a site which lets him on suddenly catapult to the top or does it get shouted down by pressure originating from the users who are on the sites which locked him and his supporters out?
I mean we are in a unique situation where by a very public official is being locked out of his accounts because of his actions and his supporters are being similarly locked out. That has never happened before and its both awe inspiring and frightening all at once.
This whole censorship crusade that the Facebook, twitter & now reddit is on is a dangerous precedence we are setting for our society. Whatever they call it, this is censorship.
Already due to AI suggesting similar contents on services like Facebook & Youtube and the design of sub-reddits on reddit, we have living inside echo chambers. Atleast users have an option of searching for different contents on the platform. It's a bit easier to come out of the echo chamber. Now, by pushing people off the platform, echo chamber platforms are coming up like parler & rumble. The divide is widening.
I am not sure what other options are there, but censorship is the worst option.
-Don't like it? Make your own image host! X
-Don't like it? Make your own social media! X
-Don't like it? Make your own aggregator! X
-Don't like it? Make your own cloudfare/hosting provider (you are here)
-Don't like it? Make your own ISP!
-Don't like it? Make your own banking/payment infrastructure!
Edit: TIL HN doesn't support emoji
EDIT: One option I think you forgot is using one of the existing hosting providers but hide the web service under a TOR hidden service. That way people can't track it back to your hosting provider to complain about the hosted content (and you can use encryption of the content that is decrypted on the fly when being served by the web server) if you worry about the hosting provider doing some scans of customer content tho that seems very unlikely to me.
Make your own group: valid
Make your own site: valid
Make your own hosting provider: this one is tricky
Make your own ISP: shouldn't be needed
Make your own payment infrastructure: shouldn't be needed
The payment infrastructure doesn't really have a good solution. Visa/MasterCard are famously quite puritan, most sex workers (e.g. OnlyFans, porn actors) get paid in direct deposit (form the websites) and are paid (by clients) using bank details (not cards, nor in most cases paypal like processors, it's one reason Patreon toned down the sex work they allowed). So yes, one would have to do that, create your own bank and stuff. But banks, like Tier 1 networks, seem to generally "peer" with anyone, but I am not clear if that's a requirement of legislation or not.
Which is worse, censorship of people calling for the violent otherthrow of the democratically elected government. OR what we've seen this week - people literally overthrowing the democratically elected government of the US.
Oh and by the way- when the MAGA hat wearers have taken over, sure as hell they aren't going to be defending your right to equivocate between the people violently overthrowing democracy and the people not allowing a violent overhtrow of democracy.
The hysterics in this thread are pretty rich.
Not OP, but I will stop thinking people are hysterical if they can provide a single shred of evidence that the people who stormed congress were "under the instructions of [Trump]". A tweet, a video, anything that proves the storming of congress was a pre-meditated move by Trump to stop the electoral count.
Saying "oh, well Trump didn't come out and say it, but he chose dog-whistle terms that activated his sleeper agents" isn't going to cut it.
Also the part that is rich is the implication that a rag tag handful of protestors have the ability to overthrow the government just because they broke into a building for a few hours.
The man knows how to guide a crowd. He has responsibility here.
All things considered the events left me pretty unscathed.
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/01/08/capito...
And they left after a lockdown was already in-force and they were removed from the premises by force.
I think if their goal was to actually take control of the capitol things would have gone much differently. I find it hard to believe this was anything but a protest.
> Many scholars consider a coup d'état successful when the usurpers seize and hold power for at least seven days.
They didn't seize and hold power for any time whatsoever. They had no plan. They had no organization. They did not execute a plot in any way. They were rioters. There was nothing close to what could be constituted as overthrowing of the government.
What am I missing? Are you suggesting there was no reason for alarm?
Also there was bloodshed.
I don't care about what this president does because he's a repulsive child.
Is there reason for alarm? Sure. The Capitol Police were negligent in planning and performing their duties. There was not a sufficient lockdown and security protocol for the physical items. Probably all sorts of other things. These people committed felonies and should be punished.
But this was not a revolution. Our government was not overthrown.
Now, not that this magically justifies it, but it is censorship made by large companies on information that is viewed by a large number of U.S. citizens. The content being targeted is important and relevant.
The content is misinformation about the integrity of the federal government, the election process, the thousands of individuals involved in maintaining the integrity of the election, the merit of every individual's vote and every eligible voter having their right to vote, the election representing the will of the people rather than being overridden by courts and legislators and so on.
This information is coming from a propaganda machine, a disinformation machine. And that machine includes President Donald Trump, complicit members of the Senate and Congress, various state and local legislators... that is to say powers of government with a vested interest in maintaining and expanding their power over people through means of manipulation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_censorship
> Political censorship exists when a government attempts to conceal, fake, distort, or falsify information that its citizens receive by suppressing or crowding out political news that the public might receive through news outlets. In the absence of neutral and objective information, people will be unable to dissent with the government or political party in charge.
That being said, I think serious tech companies should not be an enabler of fascists.
By definition it is not. Only governments can censor. This is just a private entity making a decision.
You have the right to say what you want, but I don't have to let you into my living room to say it.
What if we live in a WALL-E type world where corporations are so large and powerful they effectively govern society?
1 - The community was repeatedly infringing the TOS.
2 - Reddit has liability to what's being posted on it
You are confusing censorship with a breach of the first amendment.
IOW, censorship has always specifically meant government restrictions speech. It is only recently that censorship has been broadened to include no-governmental actors, and that broadening is not universally accepted.
If by 1946 you mean "only recently", then sure (ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama).
The concept that no company be allowed to enclose the commons has existed ever since the concept of the commons existed; and the Supreme Court has ruled both this and other times that if a private citizen or company encloses the commons they're bound by the same First Amendment that the government is, for the same reasons.
The ruling only applies to restrictions on public rights of way (in this case, meaning the public easements over otherwise private property).
Supreme Court has ruled both this and other times that if a private citizen or company encloses the commons they're bound by the same First Amendment that the government is, for the same reasons.
No, they haven't. SCOTUS ruled that in limited circumstances, private property can be treated as a public commons if the property owner holds it out for general public use. Following the mall cases, many malls began restricting the acceptable uses on their properties, which is why you don't get harassed by political activists every time you go to the mall. (In a nutshell, open mall spaces are now designated as transit spaces rather than as general use spaces, and thus the entire lineage of SCOTUS cases no longer apply to privately held malls.)
Really. That's the "worst" option? You can't think of worse things than that?
The alternative platforms tend to die off, though. Like Voat.
Parler might outlast both if politicians keep moving to that platform. In that case, I might be wrong. TheDonald.win is way too focused, though.
The realities of staying in business sometimes override that. I don’t think we should consider it a default.
I don't think this is supported by the evidence.
The evidence: the current state of Twitter, Facebook, etc. None of them have the necessary level of moderation and until they do, they will continue to be cesspools.
If they could actually rein that shit in I would use it more. Just having the tools to filter that stuff out of my feed would honestly be enough. TikTok is pretty much where I go for discovery now because it learned really quickly to not show me any political content.
Many national brands have been steadily advertising on Fox News throughout the current administration, contradicting your thesis.
https://gnet-research.org/2020/05/11/weighing-the-value-and-...
Same will happen with the US. Sad.
Also, VK, OK, what's the third one?
YouTube is prevalent over all of them regardless.
I found data here: https://russiansearchmarketing.com/10-key-statistics-social-...
VK absolutely does remove anti-putin groups and events. [1]
[1]: https://newsland.com/user/4297807604/content/vkontakte-zablo...
Is that what the right calls opening the trapdoor on the gallows?
Why just the other day, I had friends blow up on me for daring to suggest that a particular type of bigoted speech should remain legal.
The free exchange of ideas is a prerequisite for a just world. You cannot build one without it. If you place limits on the free exchange of ideas, "just for this one really bad kind of thing", then you have forfeited your own future ability to resist WHEN - not if, but WHEN - a good and true idea is wrongfully labelled harmful and banned by the same mechanisms.
Every single authoritarian regime in history has made speaking ill of the leadership a crime. Every last one.
because that's ALSO censorship, no?
Also, who's stopping you from starting a reddit competitor and saying whatever you want? You have ZERO rights to THEIR customers, their users, etc.
I mean, can you go to the local news station and get on the air whenever you want? Because they aren't saying what you want to hear? No. They control who they put on the air. Social media is no different in this aspect.
I'm upset at the broader topics that are always brought up when articles like this are posted. I also have an opinion about what reddit should or shouldn't do, but the post you're responding to is not it.
Everyone has a right to their life, which is one of the most sacrosanct rights, but in self-defence you might still rightfully kill someone else. Those intersections of rights are always a fine line to walk on and you have to be careful so it is not abused. Just putting one right above the other can never be the solution.
Also freedom of speech has its limitations. Defamation is one case where I guess most people can get behind.
I think one could also make the case here, where there is a real danger that democracy can be lost.
No. If "real danger Democracy can be lost" is your measuring stick, then whatever "Democracy" you have in charge is free to defend itself against any speech that may fight it. It's free license for the government to shoot down dissent and not reasonable.
Think of it this way. There is a lot of harmful speech which, in a perfect world, we could prevent. But because power corrupts, we cannot afford to give out the power to prevent speech because it is too easily abused. The benefit of preventing [harmful speech x] is not worth the cost of granting the government the power to jail you for speaking counter to what it believes is right.
Would child porn, trademarks, advertising regulation, nutrition labels, and threatening letters be more interesting examples?
> But because power corrupts, we cannot afford to give out the power to prevent speech because it is too easily abused.
Why can the same argument not be made for, say, food regulation? Or in most countries, for some weapons regulation. All of these could be easily abused to some very powerful, political ends, yet they very rarely, if ever, are. Most abuse of such laws actually comes from companies skirting them.
>the power to jail you for speaking counter to what it believes is right.
Nobody is arguing for that - that the government should be an arbiter of truth. Instead, the argument is that the principle of an absolute right - which cannot ever be overridden - is insufficiently justified. I have some scholarly work from philosophers of law cited in this comment if you're interested in this point of view: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23136757
Ultimately, I do agree with you - but not on the basis that free speech should supercede all other rights, but because the (capitalist) state cannot be trusted, and has a worse track record with censorship over other kinds of regulation. This is because I do not have faith in the populace to decide such regulation.
In normal times, I would agree. Philosophies and ideals like this effectively discourage people from taking action. That makes a lot of sense during times of peace when our asses aren't actively on the line.
However, these are not normal times. We are facing a threat that might just overwhelm our society and rob us of our way of life. We must act now to neutralize the threat or risk going extinct. We can sort out the ethics of it all later.
You are not thinking it through. An imperfect analogy to help make the point: You can't put a backdoor in encryption "just for the good guys" because there's no way to prevent that backdoor being used by other actors. Similarly, you can't put restrictions on speech "just for the really bad things" because there's no way to prevent things being labeled as "really bad things"!
"Encryption" is not a place or a thing. It's a fact of nature. It's a mathematical truth. Anyone can take advantage of it once it's been discovered and disseminated. That cat cannot go back in the bag.
The US government is a unique thing that we risk losing control of if we don't act now to defend it. Social media platforms are single things or entities that can revert policies once a situation de-escalates.
I imagine that a lot of the people making these calls at these companies would like not to have to do it this way but feel they have no choice. I believe they would be happy to resume business as usual when they're not worried that a violent movement will overthrow their government. Until then, could you really see yourself sitting by, doing nothing, and hoping for the best while watching these maniacs use your platform to organize their movement?
This is rarely observed. See all of the legislation and policies that have remained, and even expanded, after 9/11. Politicians tend to make laws, not remove them. See the tax code for a good example of asinine infinite expansion.
Some people have made laws outlawing discrimination based on some of those characteristics. This is a kludge, with all kinds of annoying implications.
The classic argument in favor of unconditional freedom of association is, "If some companies are refusing to deal with some group of people for stupid reasons, then they will get outcompeted by other companies who don't have such prejudices and can therefore hire cheaper workers or charge higher prices."
This argument works less well when certain extremely valuable services (some would call them "essential") are provided by a small group of huge companies, and entry by new competitors is very difficult.
The solution I would favor is reducing those barriers to entry. Ideally by repealing laws that I think are unjustified in the first place.
In particular, for these social networks with their network effects, but also have something that sucks (be it "they use dark patterns", "they ban people for bad reasons", "their 'feed' algorithm is bad"), why can't someone create a "better network" that acts as a new interface to the old network, but also has better features or has additional members that aren't part of the old network?
My impression is that it would be "against the site's terms of service", and there may also be allegations of copyright violation, and that anyone who made such a thing would eventually get sued. Well, could we change the law so that the site would have no standing to get sued?
I think that, fundamentally, the principle would be, "If users can use a site through the site's interface, then they can also use it through someone else's interface. The site is free to try to detect the difference and block people who do this, but cannot get the law to punish anyone." So the site can either play cat-and-mouse with those developing better interfaces, or they can improve their own interface enough to keep their customers; in terms of banning people, they could either fix their banning practices, or just gamble that those who care enough to use the alternate interface are a sufficiently small group.
Being able to kick the idiots out and not compelling other people to amplify their nonsense is a basic mechanism of any society that wants to function.
Also the free exchange of ideas isn't a prerequisite for a just world, it's the consequence of a just system. You can "free exchange of ideas" yourself into a gulag if the population is dumb enough. Exchanging ideas is a process that can go as wrong as it can go right, it's a process, not a set of values.
What built the just institutions you like in the US were semi-aristocratic founding fathers, I went to school in a school system that was built in Prussia, colloquially called "a military with a country", and the civic code in France was written by Napoleon. People in Singapore are prosperous because Lee Kuan Yew had his wits together, not because they enjoy a lot of free exchange of ideas.
It's sane and capable elites building lasting institutions that afford you the luxury of free exchange of ideas, even if this offends the egalitarian myth that is popular in the US. Sorry to say it, but mom, pops and Donald Trump being able to post on Twitter doesn't built functioning states.
The mechanism of communication exchange have changed so rapidly, that compelling companies to abide by free speech is a tough legislative decision. Yes, they’re corporations and can decide who to have and who not.
But an emergent phenomenon are people using these services as their lens to the world. This was obvious in the last election, red or blue, it was obvious whose side big tech was on. They were not unbiased, as I think they should be.
I’d say just as AOC wanted to get a list created of trump political supporters/affiliates (not general public, but a stepping stone away) and essentially cancel them, the same rhetoric is used to ban forms of speech. “It’s for the better”.
Another reason for controlled speech is a patronizing one, that “you’re head/emotions can’t handle X form of speech”.
Let people decide what they want to see. If I want a censored Twitter, or Wild West Twitter, let me choose. Though I understand the impracticality of forcing this on a corporation.
The only thing banned should be what is illegal. Let legislatures and judges determine it.
Nobody is stopping anyone from building a Twitter clone for anarchists. By all means, if you build it, they will come.
You wouldn't say I was being censored because MSNBC decided to air Morning Joe instead of my hour-long documentary about how the moon landing is fake. They simply aren't obligated to grant me the power of their massive communications network if they don't like my content. In what I can only call a massive failure of judgment, Twitter, Facebook etc. have outsourced their editorial decision-making to algorithms designed to maximize their profit.
This is not the same as making speech a crime. You still have the right to speak your mind, with your own voice, on any street corner you want. You can even print out fliers if you can convince anyone to take them from you. That was true before Facebook, and it will be true after they're gone. Now if the government tries to threaten this form of communication, I'll be right there with you protesting.
[1] The Simpsons - Bart's Megaphone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rf_jKzB3SLY
Rules for thee but not for me is the modus operandi and Wednesday was just an extension of that.
It's another thing for social media to do it. although they are all private companies, they remain a very global big force, that do not have reach only in the US, but are global and can do the same and affect many countries and politics across the globe.
Soon, if not already happening, politics will be pushed to one side or the other.
And it won't be for stopping hate speech, it will and it is so that they can make even more money.
On the bright side, I am an optimistic person, and since they dared block the president of the USA, maybe be they might not flinch anymore at blocking pedophiles, hitmen, terrorists, and all sorts of vile users on their platforms.
Why? Removing a subreddit isn't the same as banning a user.
A ban is a ban is a ban.
For the same reason that the government banning something is worse than when a private company does it.
Because one party has way more power and ability to actually ban someone.
Kicking someone out of my house is less powerful/effective at preventing speech than being banned by a subreddit, which is less effective than the website banning you, which is less effective than a bunch of websites banning you, which is less effective than the government banning it.
The more effective a ban is, the more careful we have to be about it. Because if the government bans you, that is going to have very significantly different consequences than me not letting a friend in my house.
Yes, they are more effectively able to censor it. Correct, thats my point.
> is the exact same thing
I described specifically what the difference is. The difference between them is that one is more effective than the other. Do you at all recognize how different methods of censorship can be more or less effective than others?
For example, would you seriously argue that every single grocery store in the world, banning all people who want to raise their taxes, is the same thing as a random person kicking a friend out of their house?
Obviously, the two things would be different. Even though the grocery stores are private businesses, there would obviously be a problem with them making it so people who want to raise their taxes are no longer able to buy food.
The difference is quite clearly about power.
I guess my point is more so where do you draw the line? Legislatively-speaking? By the size of the community?
Of course some censorship is more effective than others, but the idea that banning a subreddit is morally wrong because it's somehow "more effective" (by some metric) than banning a user (which apparently is OK?) makes absolutely no sense to me at all.
>For example, would you seriously argue that every single grocery store in the world, banning all people who want to raise their taxes, is the same thing as a random person kicking a friend out of their house?
Reddit doesn't have a global monopoly on internet forums though. Websites like the Daily Stormer still exist. Your analogy is not really applicable to this case. And even if Daily Stormer didn't exist, private individuals have never been legally obliged to signal boost and publish hate speech at any point since the US was founded that I am aware of. That would, ironically, violate the 1st amendment.
What? Users weren't banned, the subreddit was disabled. A mod banning a user is banning and censorship.
You are free to create any website you want, if you can find hosting to support your message. The internet still is mostly free and wide open.
An audience though is something you earn, these networks have EARNED their audience. What you're wanting is the equivalent of walking into the 7 o'clock news and demanding to be put on the air so you can tell everyone about your goat's birthday party on Saturday.
Seriously, nobody cares about your goat's birthday party. ABCD news has ZERO reason to put you on the air, you have zero rights to their audience, or to a platform at all.
Platforms like twitter/facebook/etc are NEW. It's an EARNED thing, as long as you're a good global citizen you can keep participating, when you go against social norms you get cast out, like pretty much every civic organization in the history of the world.
Town Drunk, sex offenders, felons, etc. all cast out for going against norms. Should they all get equal platform time to defend themselves 24/7 and everyone is required to let their content go across their feed on social media? How's that not also authoritarian, sounds a lot like communism to me...
The state seizing control of private business communication channels and forcing it open for everyone regardless of their message whether it's a birthday party, or terrorist organization recruiting message.
The .win ecosystem is trying to parallel reddit and its doing so much faster by pulling in high profile departures.
Stormfront is extreme and everyone knows about them. (Literally a white-nationalist website). But without a foothold on Reddit, they lack the ability to gain followers.
When LUE was banned from GameFAQs decades ago, they just formed up their own group (G00Ns, Something Awful, etc. etc.). They were no longer GameFAQ's problem, and GameFAQs no longer had to deal with its members slowly becoming indoctrinated by an group bent on posting pornography on video game forums where children were active. The rest of GameFAQs got better.
Ditto with 4Chan when they kicked the Gamergate people off to 8Chan. 4Chan got better, though the Gamergate dudes grew more extreme.
Having thedonald.win be a cesspool isn't all bad. If someone is on the fence and goes to check it out their first reaction is likely to be of disgust, especially if the userbase is hostile to "noobs" because they're paranoid about infiltration.
Is this really any better than religious idealogues burning books that aren't its Bibles, lest people get tempted to reject their faith or question their ideologies?
Or North Korea blocking any information about capitalist successes, lest that cause their citizens to question the communist / fascist ideologies they've been exposed to and cause more followers to switch?
Pretending that there aren't other opinions because you're worried that people can't properly evaluate and weigh the evidence / ideas is a weak excuse for censorship.
Of course, I should mention that I do not support many of the prevailing sentiments in r/DonaldTrump - but we should be better arming individuals with better critical thinking and believability weighting abilities, rather than resort to censorship.
"Censorship is telling a man he can't have steak just because a baby can't chew it." - Mark Twain.
When someone's opinion becomes violent or unhelpful, the mods around here will delete their post, curtailing discussion and making this area more reasonable for overall discourse to move forward.
There are unreasonable opinions and unreasonable people out there. The only possible weapon online groups have to combat unreasonable people in a discussion forum, is censorship.
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But sure, feel free to use the decades old arguments of "unmoderated speech" from the days of USENET. Some of us have been around long enough to see this argument style play out over-and-over again.
Again-and-again, the only USEFUL discussion forums are those who are run by good moderators. "Censoring" Spam, pornography, doxxing and yes, censoring calls to overt violence in the real world, is incredibly important to keep online discussions safe.
Cutting out hateful groups is _effective_. Its the weapon of last resort, but given what we've seen this past week, it is a well warranted move. It is no different than a moderator coming around here to delete spam.
China is a pretty strong economy right now - that doesn't make the CCP's aggressive forms of censorship any more just or ethical.
Censoring porn and spam from /r/HackerNews is not only effective, its ethical. Its the only way effective discourse can take place on this website.
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Lets turn this around. What's YOUR solution to porn and spam on discussion sites? Do you want that sort of stuff to just overrun this webiste?
You're talking in one of the most heavily moderated websites on the internet right now. Discussion is supposed to lean towards technical talk alone.
Yes, but it diminishes the level of intercourse significantly.
They got their notoriety by posting pornographic images all over the site, notably on Pokemon forums where children often came to discuss the game. It was a silly meme ("Mods are asleep, post Tub-girl" or whatever). But their memes were beginning to harm the site.
The LUEsers cried "free speech" and bemoaned the moderators for attacking their memes. Eventually, the admins shut down the LUE-subforum entirely (though with a "Grandfather clause", so that old LUEsers can still talk with each other, but newbies couldn't join their forum anymore).
Put your finger on the Median Republican line and it either moves left or stays put. The political divide has not been the republicans.
In the last year that changed for many reasons. The republicans have now moved. That political divide is now much larger. That 'more extreme' that you've noticed is because the political divide has shifted.
A great example I happen to have favorited on YouTube, check out the healthcare debate in 1971 [0]. It’s essentially Medicare for all (D) vs practically Obamacare (but from an R).
[0]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eBFJ7vv8vDU&feature=youtu.be
It shows the political swing over 25+ years capturing clinton, bush, and obama presidencies. We see that during bush and clinton the democrats were quite stable. Only at around 2011 did the graph start seeing a shift where 2017 has the democrats having moved far left on average.
This data is available from other sources. The other reality is that I can personally see it. The democrats used to have a strong moderate base, they are gone.
There are many many people writing on how the political divide is so bad that it feels like never before.
The reality is that Obama(first black president) was doomed to identity politics. Which has created this much division.
>A great example I happen to have favorited on YouTube, check out the healthcare debate in 1971 [0]. It’s essentially Medicare for all (D) vs practically Obamacare (but from an R).
Not available in my country. 1971 is much to old to properly compare to today's political climate.
They're behind Cloudflare and constantly DDoSd these days it seems like it.
Moreover, they've gotten threats from their ISP that they have to delete certain posts or be shut down. (which seems scary to me)
Also, please don't judge me, I just have a morbid curiosity to see what these people are talking about and how they think.
If Trump had been competent, he wouldn't have attacked net neutrality, he would have said net neutrality is a wonderful idea, and extended it to other layers of the protocol stack.
He would also have got on board when people like Elizabeth Warren talked about breaking up Facebook and Amazon.
(It’s easy for me to say ofc, I have no horse in this race)
The problem here is that the leader is going out of his way to specifically engage and this minority group by committing as many atrocities as possible.
No, they didn't.
And the assumption that people who choose to vote have an equal distribution of political views to those who choose not to vote is ludicrous; people who, if they voted, would only vote for someone who isn't a major party candidate are going to be vastly overrepresented among nonvoters simply because they are more likely to feel participation is futile; it would be less inaccurate than assuming equal distribution—but still inaccurate—to assume every eligible nonvoter is equivalent to a vote against at least all of the major party candidates.
According to Pew, the non-voter block is much less white, less educated, and poorer than the voting population. You can probably make several cases for which way that block breaks, but I would certainly not say they would vote proportionally the same as voters.
And it's a lot more complicated than who you voted for out of two choices.
And the real problem is first past the post, not the way you look at the votes.
Hacker News is a news site so I imagine little to no one on the Trump train is here.
[1] https://www.theroot.com/white-supremacists-killed-more-peopl...
Google trends: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
That is to say, the US attitude towards free speech is not somehow the result of some very wise collective, it simply hasn't had the history to affect its attitude towards it in the same way that European countries have.
Ask a Native American (or one of dozens of other groups whose vilification enabled their oppression and murder), or maybe read a history book? We Americans aren't less experienced than Europeans; we're just more committed.
I think you may be right that ethnic genocide alone may not be enough to change a whole population's opinions around free speech rights, that there may be additional factors required such as general awareness of how bad it was to engage in such acts and what contributed to those acts.
Free speech protections weren't obviously relevant to the genocide as it has occurred, although it wouldn't surprise me to learn e.g. that a native counterpart to Frederick Douglass had been silenced unfairly. As for speech in the other direction, the worst things were said (and done) by the "greatest statesmen" [0] so I doubt that corporate speech codes would have been much help. If it isn't too presumptuous of me to observe, it's unlikely that such things would have done much to slow down Hitler or Mussolini either.
[0] https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/nice-day-for-a-genoci...
Edit to add: Downvoting facts?
Their worst right now is much worse than expected, I would be ashamed to be associated.
This doesn't follow. Trump has been promoting violence since 2016. There have been multiple attacks carried out by Trump supporters. Most Republicans think the election was stolen thanks to Trump. Anyone who was surprised by this hasn't been paying attention to the blatantly obvious signs that have been on display nor to the repeated warnings by many, many people saying this is where things were headed. I'm in no way surprised this happened. Why were so many other people?
And to be fair their stance is not totally unreasonable. On both isles of the political spectrum most voters for some candidate ignore at least part of what the candidate says _and_ does. No candidate perfectly matches up with what you think should be done, that's normal and expected, democracy isn't perfect. A part of this process is trying to guess what the political candidate really thinks/believes vs what they say just to gain political capital. All people living in a democracy learn to do this early on. I guess for many Trump supporters they guessed that even with all the seemingly violence inducing rhetoric it wouldn't end up with a mob assaulting a federal government institution. Mistakes were made. :)
I think the vast, vast majority of people believe in non-violent protest and giving people room to express their views and hurt and frustration in non-violent ways.
I think politicians and the media is largely responsible for trying to paint groups they don’t like with an overly broad brush, and we should outright reject that as Americans.
The political flame war has to stop. The vast majority of Democrats and Republicans are in fact reasonable, kind, loving people who still believe in America even if it’s no longer popular to admit it.
The challenge is the fringe voices are amplified a million times more than the center-mass.
I read an interesting Twitter thread last week on how housing policy in SF is basically totally dominated by 6 people, private citizens, who scream down anyone who would dare to offer an opposing view, and are successful in setting policy with these tactics. I don’t know if that’s fully true, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least.
I dont have a horse in the race neither other than stock market.
It's not that strange. It's why elections are supposed to be confidential. Public opinion is always going to shift. During Clinton's reign we had the clinton crazies who hated him. George W bush? Did anyone like him? Obama derangement was readily labelled racism. Now Trump derangement is very strong. Biden will have his haters, that's coming.
However, the derangement is real and even the illusion you're for trump will gain you hate.
Because so much of it was tinged with racism
> Now Trump derangement is very strong
Yes some people are under the mistaken impression that there's anything good about Trump and therefore suprised when he doesn't seem to care for the future of our democracy and our country even a tiny bit
So even winning, it doesn’t really need to be that close to half of the U.S.
Not to say that isn’t a sizable chunk or anything.
23.5+% voted against Trump.
or did you count in people not eligible to vote? like kids and foreigners?
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
That said, reading what people are saying in an effort to understand and to de-radicalize is not something to be ashamed of.
Are you talking about donald trump or joe biden?
> People who voted for Donald Trump should be ashamed of their vote.
Using your logic, those who voted for corrupt biden should be ashamed as well.
> That said, reading what people are saying in an effort to understand and to de-radicalize is not something to be ashamed of.
Have you taken a look in the mirror. People like you are what's wrong with the country. Extremist and blind to their own faults.
We had two choices this year. Maybe I'll phrase it in a way you can understand. On the one hand, we had a "corrupt, evil rich privileged white male" and on the other hand, we had a "corrupt, evil rich privileged white male".
People like you whine about rich privileged corrupt white males all the time and yet are slaving over a rich privileged corrupt white male.
On the other hand, one candidate lost a son to drug overdose. One candidate had debunked conspiracy theories regarding their other son's interactions with Ukraine.
Do I think that Biden is perfect? Gosh, no. Do I think he is a good person? I don't know if it is possible to be a truly good person while holding any high office. Do I think that Biden is a better person and a better choice than Trump? Absolutely.
That's what Republicans and Trump supporters say too. You are tired of it because it's true.
> One candidate refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power.
Neither candidate committed to it. The DNC was going to do exactly what the RNC did.
"Hillary Clinton said in a new interview that Joe Biden should not concede the 2020 presidential election “under any circumstances," anticipating issues that could prolong knowing the final outcome."
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/hillary-clint...
> One candidate has a history of racial bias (Central Park 5, apartment zoning, Judge Curiel, etc.).
Yes and Biden help push a law that sent millions of minorities to prison.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-controversial-19...
> One candidate openly asked for and received aid from a foreign nation.
Are you for real? Biden and his son's ukraine, russia, china, etc endeavors are just as bad or worse.
> One candidate built up a mob and pointed them at the Capitol in an attempted coup.
Right. And no rioting from biden's side.
The only people who think like you are brainwashed political zealots. You are part of the problem. The only difference between you and a tea party or trumpist is political party affiliation. That's it. And it doesn't really matter because DNC and RNC are ultimately on the same team. They serve the same master. And it isn't the american people.
But whatever, you do you and keep up the good fight.
I may be mistaken, but you sound like the type who cries about "privileged white males". But man, you sure do love Biden.
The false equivalency narrative you're spewing is tiresome. Trump's record is an unprecedented disaster. There is no equivalent.
That being said, identifying that the support for Trump is about 50/50 does not _really_ tell the right story here with thedonald.win -- this isn't a representative of the ~half of us in the US who voted for Trump (or would if we voted)...it's a representation of a small, extreme culture, part real and part just trolling.
I doubt OP would have apologized quite so hard for watching Fox News. Fox News's editorial content is somewhat to the right of the average Republican voter, but not by nearly as much as thedonald.win -- that's something that represents mainstream Trump voter (aka Republican voter) worldview.
This is one of the top threads on that site RIGHT NOW. Its easy to judge someone participating in that discussion.
Presumably violent threats?
Following the arguments put forth in the rest of this thread, it is possible to support free speech while still arguing for exceptions and being against free speech absolutism.
Such an argument against an entire whole does not logically follow from the given argument that specific exception should be made.
Would you support the silencing if leaders of the Augusta Civil Rights Riot were using forums, or Reddit, or FB, to organize themselves?
There is a reason why freedom of speech, without any limitations, is so valued in the free world. Those in power will always use "crime" and "think of the children" as tools to sway the public into weaponizing the government.
Do you believe it is OK to disrupt their planning? Do you believe it becomes not-OK if the target of the domestic terror is the seat of our government?
Do you believe it is OK to do this, in order to disrupt their planning? Do you believe it becomes not-OK if the target of domestic terror is a tyrannical government?
[1]: https://www.insidehook.com/article/history/kidnapped-why-an-...
Also I read there they are losing their SSL cert or something, so that might be how centralized, non-legal authority manages to shut them down. (Which, it probably goes without saying, should scare the shit out of anyone who cares about the principles of the free Internet.)
It doesn't really matter. If this starts being a problem, we'll use a decentralized web of trust for SSL. It doesn't have to be centralized.
It was quite clear that this was going to happen. No one on my timeline is shocked at all. In fact, I’ve been complaining about these deplorables since 2013 (even before the phrase was coined).
My timeline consists mainly of 80% American minorities and 20% graduates from elite US universities (with some overlap between the two groups obviously). What about yours? No one on my timeline was surprised. And if they were, they were privileged white people (no offense just being honest when talking about Harvard/MIT grads).
These insurrectionists complained all year about wearing masks. Some of them even shot retail workers because they were so upset. How could you not see this coming?
It’s sort of hard for me to tell based on your comments. Do you live in the U.S. and where about? I could see how one would be surprised if they lived abroad and only used mainstream social media to gauge what’s going on.
But if you’ve lived in the U.S. and read any of the think pieces in mainstream newspapers or even popular Medium articles over the last 4 years, you would have likely learned about the surge in domestic terrorism committed by white supremacists. There were so many articles, especially this past year in the summer. How could you not have read any of them?
Well, I do know that those sort of articles get downvoted on HN and don’t surface to the top. I’m not sure why articles with titles like “FBI confirms a surge in domestic terrorism” aren’t important to HN. (That was sarcasm.)
I literally had a conversation with dang@ the other day about this, and he didn’t believe me.
And my bubble was well aware that they were going to storm the Capitol because protestors often try to get past the police barricade and the police were going to go easy on them.
Note: I wasn’t downplaying that visiting sites like the one you mentioned was helpful. I do that from time to time as well to troll them but also to get the full perspective.
Nonsense, you've built a straw man. Maybe you've been hanging around 4chan too much and assuming that a subset of swamp creatures from the low parts of the internet represent the millions of Americans who support the President, but I assure you the overwhelming majority of conservatives are nice, hard-working people.
30+ people died as a direct result of the media-condoned protests over the past summer, led by blm/antifa and associated groups. Did your bubble predict that? Do you think those killings, burnings, lootings, violent behaviors were justified? If so, why is it ok for one group to protest in such a manner, but not the other?
Shouldn't we as a society, especially including the mainstream media, have a strict and principled standard that we apply?
No, your comment was just inappropriate. dang@ is the moderator.
And I don’t have discussions with delusional people. I wrote a super long reply to someone else as you clearly saw. But they weren’t talking like brainwashed people.
But if you did want to delete your comment instead of being passive aggressive, please do so.
This is a public discussion platform and not a one-sided filter bubble. Many people will have different perspectives and it is indeed healthy to listen to and consider them, even if you disagree.
Service-providers giving the boot to « problematic » users is as far as I know as old as the Internet.
Repeat customers that would get DDOS too many times (cybercafes would fall into that category often) would have to either pay more to cover for the cost of the network engineers dealing with the DDOS or get the boot.
From what I remember it's quite similar with many service providers, including hosting providers. Their TOS will allow them discretion to stop providing services to anyone that may negatively impact their business, it's not like there's any law that forces them to provide service to a customer.
You were always perfectly free to go find a new account elsewhere if anyone would have you. But there was always a point where if you passed far enough beyond socially acceptable behavior, your Internet provider might choose to stop doing business with you.
This was especially true in the case of harassment, attacks on network infrastructure, and criminal behavior.
Eventually they are going to find that there's a limit to how much violence you can incite before getting slapped down, legally or otherwise.
This doesn't mean 'planning a coup' is one of these contexts, but you are focusing on a very narrow example of the broad social system impact of anonymity in online communication.
Other than anonymity, talking to people who have no incentive to karma-farm is very refreshing.
In websites like Reddit/HackerNews, the karma system gamifies posting. You "lose" if you post any wrongthink, and you "win" when you reiterate whatever is socially acceptable.
This means there are consequences to posting. In *chan websites, there is no consequence to posting your thoughts (or just trolling, because that's fun sometimes).
If you go into a store or cafe and start shouting at the top of your lungs, the owner is free to refuse service, kick you out and/or even ban you from ever entering their store again.
What's the difference between that store owner and an ISP?
You're free to go to any other store that will have you, and is ok with your shouting. If it turns out there are no stores ok with it, whose problem is that? Should store owners be prohibited from refusing service to anyone, no matter what their behaviour?
You can start your own store, so long as you can pay rent, have suppliers that will sell you goods, etc - but again, no one is obligated to do any of that.
(I get there's protected classes that prevent discrimination based on things like age, gender, ethnicity, etc, but that's a separate issue, and tangential to their behaviour which is what we're discussing here.)
Damn near every channel on 2010 EFNet or DALNet would be deemed in violation of most of 2020's TOS. To say nothing of mid-90s EFNet. Whoo-boy, the eggdrop bots logging those channels could get probably a thousand well-known, well-respected developers and network engineers working at FAANGs today fired, if someone took the time.
Big tech companies are largely left-leaning internally (which isn't surprising since California is the most left leaning state), so there is nothing to fear as long as you lean left yourself, (i.e. I guarantee you won't be censored for left-leaning speech any time soon).
Also, I find the idea of classifying FB as left-leaning to be laughable.
Your list was pretty narrow in scope until this one. ToS could contain anything and be used to censor speech for any reason.
I’ve not heard any legitimate, evidence-backed claim that any of the major sites are enforcing their rules unfairly. Instead, the claims are usually along the lines of:
“I got banned for saying we should do violent stuff! And yet they allow this other ideologically opposite person to have an account!”
“Can you point to a specific post where the other person is saying we should be violent?”
“No, but everyone knows they support it!”
Well, “everyone knows” isn’t evidence.
Suppose it's a white family but they're wearing MAGA hats and the restaurant denies them service. That's nearly acceptable among a broad swath of the population today.
Now suppose it's your mom wearing a MAGA hat (you may not like that she wears one but it's her right, no?) and she gets denied service in a Starbucks. Maybe someone gets violent with her and knocks the hat off her head. Maybe the server spits in her coffee. All of which has happened. Are you still comfortable with "private property"?
Suppose you wander into a restaurant wearing a "Biden-Harris" T-shirt and they say "Get out!" Are you okay with that?
I could keep going, but you get the picture. We can't have a "freedom for me, not for thee" attitude. It has to be universal.
Also in practice, there is way bigger outcry over right wing reedits being banned then left wing reddits. Each time reddit banns a bunch of subs, there is discussion about right wings ones - including on HN. Nobody cares about left wing subs being banned, that discussion never appears.
For the record, I am fine with both left and right reddits being banned right now. But I have yet to see free speech advocates to fret about toxic leftist and feminist places being closed.
A private company choosing who to allow on their platform? Seems like the freedom to me. And in the absence of any government action against these domestic terrorists (they have been planning exactly this violence for weeks), it's great to see private companies step in and take action.
So yeah, there's some government action against this domestic terrorists and it's resulting in private companies banning their websites.
You can agree with the action or not, I think it's a good idea to have infrastructure in place that thwarts the spread of dangerous misinformation, but that shouldn't be censorship. It should be easy to access education and mental healthcare to help people be strong against misinformation on their own and without the long arm of the law having to babysit them.
I wonder when people stopped thinking. By the same argument, should they be allowed to block all black people?
It is a little more nuanced than that. Bakeries were not denying anybody based on sexual orientation.
If a gay man went to get a straight wedding cake, a non-wedding cake, or a wedding cake for a gay wedding that did not have anything to indicate it was for a gay wedding the bakers would not have denied them.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that you don't have a lot of exposure to terrorism. A bunch of idiots breaking into the Capitol and… mostly wandering around taking selfies? Not really very effective terrorists. It was a stupid, pointless move, and illegal — but a long, long way short of terrorism, except possibly on the very fringes of some three-letter organization's idiosyncratic definition.
And the ones not taking selfies were running around with zip ties and IEDs. Just because some of them were idiots, doesn't mean they all were.
Edit: how do you think these "idiots" got in? https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=20m04s&v=cJOgGsC0G9U
Edit: It sounds like the cops say they found IEDs. I'll be following that closely to update my view on the proper response to this.
Edit2: Actually the report is that the IEDs were not found at the Capitol or as part of that but near the RNC and DNC offices elsewhere, and a pipe bomb was found in a car. So there is no evidence that the people who entered the capitol were carrying bombs. The specifics in this case matter.
I worry more about Google et. al. killing the free and open internet by creating centralized walled gardens. I worry more about legislative attacks on encryption, about the overzealous use of copyright law and the sorry state of intellectual property generally.
If service providers want to deplatform centers of radicalization, I think that's ok.
In the limit what you would get is a world where speech is basically under the influence of people who, for all intents and purposes, are operating infrastructure services the whole world runs on.
Those downvoting me I guess feel they trust the arbitrary CEOs of a few large corporations to never deem their actions online of worthy of being censored. Just because you want to live in that world doesn't mean I ought to accept it.
The issue isn't that service providers are arbiters, the problem is that there are so few service providers that one can meaningfully choose from due in large part to the difficulty of taking one's social network along with you.
If service providers had federated communication then it would be a different story.
I've heard folks suggest making it criminal to share or sell user data, for instance, which would be the death of freemium services.
The fact that there is widespread support, let alone demand, for subjective, unaccountable censorship is frightening. You don't understand this, "war on domestic terror" will include legislative attacks on encryption? That bad actors always use, create and amplify perceived crisis to expand their power and permanently erode our rights? You can be certain that when the center of radicalization in Washington DC decides to whip up another war that will kill a million people, they won't be "deplatformed" (as opposed to those "radicals" who will oppose that war, who most certainly will).
* people who view democracy as a set of values, and if you do not share those values then you are against democracy.
* people who view democracy as the democratic principles (voting, representation, freedom of assembly, and so on)...
In my world (I belong to the second group) democracy is freedom of speech, the exchange of ideas, and coming face to face with values and opinions that you do not agree with (in fact you may find them abhorrent), and thinking that that's the whole point.
I found it an enlightening take on the situation, and thought that I'd share it here.
The thing is: left-wing radicalization is tolerated by the platforms, but right-wing radicalization isn't.
Look at the parent I responded to. This is a question of extremes, not mere left/right spheres. The far right / alt-right is fascist, racist and violent by definition: that's what makes them far-right. No one said being a conservative is violent.
You mean everyday?
EDIT: Original claim is left intact for posterity, but it is definitely wrong and I misremembered.
Here's a list of subs banned that day with active user counts:
https://www.redditstatic.com/banned-subreddits-june-2020.txt
Chapo was the largest by a large margin besides /r/darkhumorandmemes (edgy jokes).
And you are just straight up lying about /r/chapotraphouse2. It was banned the same day, as was /r/chapotraphouse3 through /r/chapotraphouse49.
"On February 26, 2020, Reddit administrators removed a number of r/The_Donald moderators "that were approving, stickying, and generally supporting content in this subreddit that breaks [Reddit's] content policy" and called the remaining moderators to choose new ones from a list of Reddit-approved individuals. About the same time, Reddit placed r/The_Donald in "Restricted mode", removing the ability to create new posts from most of its users. Since then, some users of the subreddit had moved to theDonald.win, a separate site based on Reddit's old user interface."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald
From Heavy:
https://heavy.com/news/2020/06/the-donald-subreddit-moved-to...
Reddit admins did the same to Chapo before it was banned too. They replaced a bunch of their mods, chapo just kept going though, with some new rules and stricter moderation to try and stay unbanned.
Just throw out anything that doesn't fit your narrative and keep your message on repeat and your audience will fall captive eventually since most are not open to doing their own fact-checking.
Nothing good comes out of these places, regardless of where in the political spectrum you position yourself (except maybe downright fascists). Look at what happened at the Capitol, did he further the right's agenda? Of course not, if anything it put them in a much more awkward situation.
Reddit admins are enablers and they share a part of the blame. Remember how subreddits like /r/jailbait and /r/creepshots were allowed on the website for months, if not years (among many others I can't be bother to remember, including some extremely explicitly racist ones)?
Then it's always the same thing, some news outlet or politician talks publicly about how Reddit hosts fascists/pedos/racists or something like that and within two days you have bans and a heartfelt post by the admins saying how they felt that it was their duty to do something and "think of the children" and all kinds of bullshit.
Reddit is 4chan wearing a tie to try to look more business friendly.
These subreddits and websites don't host free speech, they host hate speech. I have zero issue drawing a line in the sand here. "First they came for the fascists, and I said nothing because I'm not a fascist, and the world was a better place. The end."
Most people lurk. Lurking these sites has a lot of benefits despite the risk of being drawn into radicalization:
- It allows you to truly understand the motives of these kinds of people, and predict what they will do.
- Understanding these motives allows you to address root causes that lead to this extremism. For every radical who storms the capitol, there are a thousand people who have slightly watered down but directionally parallel beliefs. This is good to understand so you can contribute to finding solutions to any justifiable grievances motivating their higher order beliefs (some won't be justified, some will), to help pull them in the other direction.
- Seeing this stuff full-on and not heard about through second hand accounts demystifies it. There are people like yourself who look at this, get a sense of revulsion from it, and then that both hardens their mind away from it and also motivates them to counteract it when they see people in their own lives starting to echo similar sentiments. If you don't truly grok the mental models these people have, you lack the prerequisites needed to disarm any version of them in the minds of people you care about. This isn't a sure thing, but anyone who doesn't will have no effect.
The people with slightly watered down but directionally parallel beliefs certainly exist in huge numbers, but they're the reason why such places are so harmful; they're much easier to radicalize than deradicalize, and they're the ones getting the content recommended to them or being swept along by the enthusiasm other people who share some of their views seem to have for it. And it'd actually be easier to understand their justifiable grievances if they weren't encouraged to connect them to pizza parlours or Jews.
Hate when that happens..
I'm not preaching tolerance here, but the more you understand your opponent the more you approach the inevitable conclusion: people are creatures of convenience, rarely going out of their own way for the sake of concepts like good or evil. If you want to change the way people act, the only way to really do it is to change what is convenient for them. Or to take certain conveniences away.
I don't go on 4chan anymore (or any social media outside HN [1]) and have mellowed out but it gave me the courage to call BS from either "side".
My theory is that 4chan hasn't become more extreme in the last 10 years. It's that "judgment-zones" like twitter and reddit have caused everyone else to become softer.
[1]: I'm serious, I didn't know about any stuff happening in the capitol until I saw it on HN.
You are right to worry - I remember reading an article about (FB?) moderators on anti-vaxxer pages finding themselves inadvertently internalizing that worldview, despite previously consciously not believing in it. The human mind appears to absorb information after repeated exposure, despite any conscious efforts not too - I assume it's similar to how the placebo effect works even when the person "knows" it's a placebo.
Of course, attempt to engage to improve the situation and help someone obtain ground truth on their own from legitimate information sources, but when it's obviously hopeless insulate yourself against those who could harm and move forward. You don't have to support the establishment, but you also don't have the right to violence because you feel slighted.
The second part of that is hard/expensive, but it is a path forwards to some level of discourse between the people using these subreddits and everyone else. Driving these communities to different sites means that people get in much stronger filter bubbles, that's probably not a good thing.
To take the example of /r/conservative on reddit right now, the subreddit currently bans anyone who says anything at all critical of Trump, and mostly only let's people who have a history of saying supportive things talk. That's not good for reddit, or the country as a whole. But if reddit just removed the current batch of moderators and those rules, and had someone enforce some reasonable standards of discourse but not enforce politics, I think it could turn into a force for good.
To put it in your own terms, my preferred solution is to try and make it possible to "have intellectual discourse with people who are fabricating reality or deeply believe in conspiracy theories", instead of just making it so those people go fabricate their reality elsewhere.
I'm not claiming this is a perfect solution, I'm sure you're right there would be complaints, and I'm also sure that no perfect solution exist. It's just not that easy to deradicalize people, and it's just not that easy to deal with people actively attempting to deceive and radicalize the public. I do think it would probably be a superior solution to what is being done right now, where there are even more complaints, and you get increasingly "strong" filter bubbles.
Note well: I am not at all saying that Trump supporters are right. I am saying that you are not omniscient enough to be qualified to decide what should be blocked. Nobody is.
Why do you want to go to great lengths and "educate" people on your point of view?
Or because their opinions leads them to construct bombs or shoot people.
Not even month ago. Ignoring yesterday, there was plan and attempt to execute Mitchigan governor last few months. There was Nashville boombing, likely due to whatever conspiracy theory that man believed.
Even Elliot Rodger had opinions largely from incels chans.
Do you believe it is OK to do this, in order to disrupt their planning? Do you believe it becomes not-OK if the target of domestic terror is a tyrannical government?
The very same situation has happened across all of South America throughout the 20th Century.
[1]: https://www.insidehook.com/article/history/kidnapped-why-an-...
The only strawman in this thread is the one made by you in the comment I am responding to now.
Trump praised China for paving the way to make Xi Jinping's presidency permanent
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trump-china/trump-praises...
> “He’s now president for life, president for life. And he’s great,” Trump said, according to audio of excerpts of Trump’s remarks at a closed-door fundraiser in Florida aired by CNN. “And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday,” Trump said to cheers and applause from supporters.
Which IMO implies support for a one-party state.
Who exactly is "they"? Anyone who disagrees with you? Anyone who votes for a Republican candidate? Trump supporters? Some subset of Trump supporters who say the election was fraudulent? What about Trump supporters who say the election MAY have been fraudulent -- do they also get silenced?
This is a slippery slope. You either have freedom of speech, or you don't. Muzzling people who have ideas you consider dangerous has a way of blowing back in your face; in fact it almost guarantees violence, when people feel they are not allowed to vent.
They are also proud boys starting fights. It is not like US would have shortage of organized political violence lately. It is pretty easy to find "they".
The Nashville bomber was one guy committing suicide and he even warned in advance.
The Michigan kidnapping plot was about 5-6 idiots who did not represent some kind of farflung organization.
The Proud Boys have not started fights, to my knowledge. They have marched peacefully down the street holding U.S. flags and the like, and been violently attacked by antifa elements. They show up at left wing/antifa demonstrations but don't attack; they fight back when provoked. They've been demonized by left wing news as "white supremacists" ironically even though their leader is a black guy.
So when you say "it is pretty easy to find 'they'", you need to support that statement. It's pretty easy to make stuff up, too, and I believe a lot of people are being censored on the basis of hearsay and madeup nonsense.
And is there proof that there wasn't fraud? Does the burden of proof fall upon them or the government?
I think you can, to a certain degree. For example: by making the mail-in system more trustworthy, or by eliminating it.
My country (Chile) only uses on-site voting and no one alleges fraud because we know that it would be incredibly hard to steal an election with this system. The system is transparent, votes are counted publicly the same day of the voting.
The electoral service is one of the few public institutions that I deem competent and actually trust in my country, and I think I'm not alone.
To be honest, now politicians are trying to impose mail-in ballot system, but that not the electoral service's fault. That's idiot politicians trying to ruin something that works.
This is a man who, in what any normal person, could admit was a mistake when tweeting about a hurricane having effects in Alabama. Instead he doubled down, tripled down, forced federal employees to make statements that he was right. He even drew sharpie on a map to extend the prediction cone because it didn't show what he said.
There is a clear pattern of behavior here.
Additionally, those who are alleging massive voter fraud in public did not make those statements in court, because it would have actual consequences. Every state certified their results, including those with republican leadership.
So you either have to buy in to extraordinary claims of all kinds of (in many cases provably false) of voter fraud and a massive apparatus (Deep State) working against Donald Trump or accept the much more obvious and plain result.
If you listen to the call with Georgia, when the Secretary of State pointed out that they had investigated several of the claims, Trump's response was that the investigators were either incompetent or actively working against him.
It goes beyond the pale.
I mean... why is it that if someone tells me that Sun rises in the west virtually everyone just ignores this as an obvious nonsense, but when someone says... a more nuanced but nonetheless proven-false controversy (I'd intentionally refrain from any examples - even the ones that were already provided - to avoid even a possibility debating any of those), some don't outright dismiss it.
Maybe I'm a weirdo, and maybe it's simply not possible with humans - but I still hope for a society where (argh, okay, let's invoke Godwin's Law) the next Hitler won't happen not because of some speech laws but because simply no one would listen to the lunacies seriously.
Yes, you are inherently fighting in support of the establishment if you are censoring ideas that the establishment doesn't support. You can't have it both ways.
Violence is one thing, but you're also lumping in violence with conspiracy theories, which in turn constructs its own form of orthodoxy. This is why I don't support censorship to such a degree that it invades the public space; all it does is promote a religion of some kind, whether it be Christianity or "the science is settled". By the way, violence only ever seems bad when it goes against your sensibilities. If violence supported your world view, statistically speaking, you are likely to justify it. America was founded on violence, and lots of people throughout the political spectrum believe that the violence was justified. If you build a system that is so technologically perfect that it extinguishes violence from the public space, then you have created a system of slavery.
Let's stop pretending that we're against violence and admit that we're against violence of certain agendas.
I intuitively get the point you are trying to make (sovereignty, "government has a monopoly on violence," yadda yadda), but I don't think it reflects the real, both contemporary and historical, systems of slavery.
Chattel slavery in the antebellum South's relied on extrajudicial violence. International sex trafficking is inherently violent. Modern slavery most often occurs in areas with widespread, violent conflict. Why should we be worried about "benevolent AI overlords" going rogue when historically civilizations with high percentages of unfree people were extremely violent?
I think you're making a false comparison. There's at least 2 different kinds of unfree regimes, the first being monarchies and dictatorships that use force in a top-down manner to control their subjects, and the second being the system of mind control which enslaves people by feeding them simulations that convince them that they are sufficiently free and safe. The latter version of an unfree regime still benefits from creating a form of slavery, but it's slavery of the mind. Imagine a civilization comprised of figurative Uncle Toms of the system. Sex trafficking is concerning, but it's a form of slavery that can only work in the 21st century by staying underground
Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding your point.
I'm a bit confused by the figurative language used here. Did you have a specific example of this, or is this a hypothetical? I think this type of thinking has its, but I think it's important to contextualize it. For example, you can say that a gambling addict gambles against their will, but I wouldn't say that they are enslaved to gambling institutions (unless I was purposely being hyperbolic). But I agree that many systems of slavery had a degree of self-regulation among the enslaved.
> Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding your point.
My framework is this: violence is a necessary part of slavery, because to a certain extent enslavement requires the enslaved to choose between continued slavery or extreme violence/death. If you remove state violence from the equation, slavery still usually exists, and often flourishes due to the lack of a countervailing force. In "top-down" situations, where a system of slavery has implicit or explicit state support, the state doesn't have to explicitly enact the violence itself, it can simply declare a certain segment of the population "extra-judicial.
I think authoritarian, low violence states like Singapore have numerous human rights issues, but I wouldn't go so far as saying that the entire body politic is enslaved.
This is completely wrong, China and India top the list with 8 million and 3.8 million slaves respectively.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century#St...
From the linked source:
North Korea has the world's highest rate of slavery, with about one in 10 people enslaved, followed by Eritrea (9.3%) Burundi (4%), Central African Republic (2.2%), Afghanistan (2.2%), Mauritania (2.1%), South Sudan (2%), Pakistan (1.7%), Cambodia (1.7%) and Iran (1.6%).
In retrospect, I should've said "violent conflict OR extreme poverty"
good luck on forbidding all religious speech and fiction on the internet!
Pretty often the new technology was the vector by which those came, simply because bad actors seem to be quicker to take advantage of new technology.
Also historically, censorship and gatekewping were overall succesfull strategies. I am not saying that it is good thing to do all that much, there is danger in overdoing it, but historically it was effective in suppressing viewpoints.
If we look and find that freenet and tor hidden services are only full of kiddie porn, drugs, and crazy we haven't swung to far towards censorship.
Right now the crazy is right in the open and hidden services are only for things that are actually already illegal like child porn so it is premature to suppose we are being too restrictive. Based on the fact that we almost lost our democracy we probably need to Crack down more on the hate, lies, and inducement to violence.
When you have to go somewhere secret to hear someone suggest we need to massacre some jews we may be approaching an actual balance.
I suspect we're not very far off. However, completely anonymous, decentralized, uncensorable network ideas like Freenet, TOR, I2P never really took off only because they needed a critical mass to support them: they're not technologically infeasible, they just didn't have enough support to get off the ground. If half the users of the "normal" internet are banned from it, they're going to start discovering peer-to-peer systems - that's what happened with the internet itself, after all.
It does mean that they cannot effectively find other people with the same opinion, cannot organize, and cannot spread their opinion effectively. Suppression of opinions _works_ (unfortunately, I must say).
Taking that option away from people scares me a lot more than the MAGA mob. People storming government buildings can also be a good thing (uprisings against oppressive governments). It wasn't in this case, obviously, but the damage this mob caused, including the lives lost, is nothing compared to the absolutely terrifying situation of a totalitarian government and all communication platforms being "curated".
Not to me, because free speech, even in the US, was never "absolutely free" speech - incitement to riot is punishable by law, for one.
They allowed the group to build and grow then once they moved off they killed the sub?
My point: Fine indeed, as long as they "stay there". But they won't. This goes for any online community: it has effects outside of that community.
It isn't an offence thing. It's just ... boringly dumb. It's just like I'm not going to start a conversation in this thread to review my basic backstitch.
Have you never heard of the DMCA?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25682785
Wikipedia was threatened for having B709D3A0CD2FEC08EAFCCF540D8A100BB38E5E091D646ADB7B14D021096FFCD on a web page.
ISPs are frequently threatening to disconnect customers who serve files, and sites that are large enough to have their own connectivity have had this for 20 years.
This one for example
https://slashdot.org/story/00/05/11/0153247/microsoft-asks-s...
"Under the provisions of the DMCA, we expect that having been duly notified of this case of blatant copyright violation, Andover will remove the above referenced comments from its servers and forward our complaint to the owner of the referenced comments. "
70 million people voted for Trump. Understanding them better is not a bad thing.
Does not mean agreeing with them.
And yes, same.
I personally am very liberal when it comes to speech.
And yes, all communities are good for understanding people better. Does not mean agreeing with them.
It does mean being able to know who one is dealing with. That matters to me.
Your average Trump voter is just a normal Republican. They voted for Trump because there was an R next to his name and defended him because he was on their team. The Democratic voters would be no different if the dems ran an equally ghastly candidate. (They obviously have not done so, and I am not making the claim that's random. I'm not saying 'both sides are the same' in this post.)
It might be useful to understand the thedonald.win crowd, but it ain't 70MM of your countrymen, Americans.
I'd say overall the majority on TDW are leaning more towards libertarian than conservative. Certain things like freedom of speech, 2nd amendment rights, limited government and spending are shared ideals. Other things like pro-marijuana, pro-life, Christianity are depicted and respected but differ between supporters and less popular then the ideals everyone agrees on.
Wow, that sucks. What ISP is that? Why can't they just take the money and host the service without censoring other people?
> constantly DDoSd
Hmm...
Agreed - though I find it's more of a headache than scary. On end, I don't like the fact that increasingly internet infrastructure is acting as a de facto judge in deciding what speech is and isn't allowed. I empathize with both parties. ISPs don't want to host speech they feel is abhorrent, and I'd probably do the same thing were I in their position.
I'm much more accepting of platforms like Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, et. al. taking down groups and banning members than I am of infrastructure providers doing the same. The former kicks people off of large communities, but people can still put together their own websites. When it gets the the point that I might not even be able to serve plain HTML that I wrote myself, because nobody will even let it go through the wires that's when I start thinking utility regulation in ISPs, DNS, etc. is necessary.
Cloudflare's CEO was very humble when taking down sites. When talking about taking down the Daily Stormer, "Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet... No one should have that power.” [1] I largely agree, though I'd offer the caveat that something needs to have this power but it should be an institution like the courts rather than individuals in corporations.
1. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/17/cloudflare-ceo-says-removing...
But where does this end? Does the phone company want to allow conversations they find morally reprehensible? Does apple want to send iMessages that denigrate their company?
After all, they are private companies! /s
I'm no lawyer, but I think the distinction is in utilities. The postal service, for instance, can't just refuse service to people they don't like. Same with power companies. I'm not sure how phone providers and ISPs fit into this. But I think it may be useful to have ISPs, payment providers, and maybe also DNS and DDOS protection providers be considered utilities. My basic measuring stick is that putting HMTL and CSS out on the internet should be protected akin to the ability to send letters through the mail.
Democracies usually protect the freedom of initiative too, but it's a different protection, with very different exceptions, and companies usually have it much more restricted than speech.
They're granted immunity from lawsuits from the government because they're a dumb pipe, but then they censor/promote as if they are a publisher.
A business can't sue facebook for allowing a BLM riot to organize on its platform that destroyed their storefront, and similarly they have no recourse when said business gets a facebook page deleted because they complained about it.
Freedom from compelled speech is the default. Requiring people or organizations to host speech is the exception, and is limited to things like utilities and cigarette health warnings.
Making Facebook or Twitter a utility is very coarse grained. They would have to allow all legal speech. They wouldn't be able to ban users for nudity or porn, or explicitly espousing Nazism (actual Nazism, not the much more expansive post 2016 definition of "Nazi"). Both of these things are legal in the US, and a utility would have to permit them. If social media is made a utility, then social media is going to become 8chan.
That's why I think it makes the most sense to apply utility status at the infrastructure layer not the application layer. Social media companies can still moderate, people on the fringes can spread their message on niche applications or on sites they build themselves.
I don't emapthize with the ISPs here. Internet access has become a utility which is required to participate in many parts of the economy and society. Utilities should not be allowed to refuse to service someone who is using the service legally.
If someone is hosting illegal content, that's a different story.
It's utterly fascinating.
Please forgive the language it is verbatim and I think threats of violence are more offensive than bad words.
> You had better be ready partriots! It is go time very soon. We must attack all central communications to big cities are democratic cities. Fiber optics telecom bridges supply routes we can starve those motherfuckers to death. The people are ready it is time.
>We got to give it until Monday but after that partriots we must take the fight to them, make that rally look small. Load your magazines gather your things it's time to go and take out the sorry bastards.
While we worry about the very legitimate question of what the limits of free speech are and how we ought not to create a situation where anyone serves as the gate keeper they are planning to kill us and install an autocracy.
I agree, that it's unfair to (a-priori) castigate free-speech-absolutist platforms; there are good-faith, civil-libertarian reasons for them to exist. Nonetheless, they inherently act as a moth-flame to specifically those people that are banned from more mainstream platforms; after all, what motivation would non-controversial communities have to migrate? I absolutely the right of such platforms to exist, but from Voat, to Gab, to now Parler, in practice they quickly skew towards conspiracies and "hate speech" and the like.
I consider SSC's heterodox "Culture War Thread" [0] to be the canonical case study in this pattern: "It's very easy to remove spam, bots, racial slurs, low-effort trolls, and abuse... But once you remove all those things, you're left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that's the scariest thing of all."
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread...
I will agree that "Voat" is a nasty place, but I'm not comfortable with shutting them down either, or cutting them off from pay processors and certificate authorities. This kind of game tends to come back and bite one in the ass. It's the old "First they came for xxx and I said nothing".
The line is very tricky, as to what constitutes colorful metaphor, vs. explicit calls to violence. (My favorite satire on this dilemma: https://youtu.be/eg3_kUaYFJA) Regardless, the emotional energy and goals of that community on Jan 6th was extremely clear: to alter the due process of law by threat of force.
All that said, I'm quasi-absolutist on free speech issues, for the slippery-slope reasons you describe. Free speech doesn't end at 1A: it's a cultural value as well. Yet, it's also a tall order to enforce that value proactively: if a newspaper is not obligated to print every letter, should Twitter be obligated to let everyone have an account? There's a good argument for a "digital commons", and regulating tech giants as utilities; but the balance between an individual's freedom to share offensive views, and the freedom of service providers to choose to whom they offer service, is extremely murky.
"de-platforming right wing voices" is such a bad faith interpretation of what's happening and I'm getting really frustrated that the right continues to pretend they're being censored.
You can have different opinions on plenty of political issues. Taxes, healthcare, abortion, gun rights, military spending, education spending, etc. Arguing in favor of low taxes, eliminating funding for public healthcare, banning abortion, etc. will not get you de-platformed.
What gets you removed is racism, bigotry, and inciting violence. Of course, nobody thinks they're racist. Even Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer denies being racist.
You mean, the things a tiny handful of people post there. Most posters are center-right and don't advocate violence.
I would also note that there's been plenty of talk of violence against conservatives on left-leaning platforms, Twitter especially but many others. These people are never called out even if they talk about "rounding them up and putting them in camps" and similar Nazi-like talk, even killing them seems to be permissible. I've reported lots of such tweets and sometimes they're taken down, other times, not.
Do they also condemn or apply moderation to violence being advocated? Or is it condoned? Honest question, I have not even remotely invested enough time (nor do I plan to do so) to understand this facet.
> I've reported lots of such tweets and sometimes they're taken down, other times, not.
I agree that such messages should be taken down and condemned just the same.
My personal "favorite" of such: "this country is not safe for you". Not a threat, just stating a fact.
Say 45% support their party
70% believes in the lie that the election was stolen
20% believes that violence is warranted
10% is willing to do violence.
Start with a population of over 330M and you get over 2 million insurgents.
Peace requires those funnel steps to be way smaller.
Let's shut them down, shut them out and generally rebuke them. History shows that higher order ideals generally need to be preserved with actions when words have failed, and make no mistake we are past words with these folks.
Shutting down anyone talking pro trump in the whole country will have downsides, and just make them more angry. Prohibition isn't an answer that will work.
Hopefully sending all of the insurrectionists to jail will help.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Hall_Putsch
"Maybe 2,000" was a precursor event to the rise of Nazi germany.
Speaking of gatekeepers, however, I wonder, how soon Google and Apple will boot Parler from their AppStores?
"BREAKING: Apple is currently threatening to ban Parler -- the free speech alternative to Twitter -- unless the service enacts draconian censorship policies demanded by left-wing Big Tech oligarchs, according to two sources familiar with Apple's threats."
[1]: https://twitter.com/seanmdav/status/1347660160806825984
Why not just tour your local Psychiatric Ward?
Please keep downvoting. I bathe in Maga-Moron tears. Poor Snowflakes.
I can be anti-Nazi and pro-free speech.
Companies like cloudfare are supposed to be dumb infrastructure, not your political cudgel.
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/thedonald.win
For reference, this is higher than infowars (#507 in the US) but far lower than Breitbart (#72 in the US), to name other, um, right-wing conspiracy-promoting sites.
This is also lower than amazon.ca in the US (#354), apparently. That probably says something.
There's something odd going on with their traffic. I've been on the front page of Reddit and thedonald.win at the same time, and either virtually nobody on that site reads the articles or the upvotes counts are being massively inflated: the upvote to pageview ratio is waaaay lower on thedonald.win then I've experienced on Reddit and HN.
I'll say it out loud: though I despise Trump and mourn the damage he and those enabling have caused, I spend more time online looking at pro-Trump, conservative and Republican focused material than anything else. I downvote none of it, even the legit crazy/scary stuff, and in the rare cases I comment, it's carefully worded to be neutral or even sometimes conciliatory, though always honest.
It scares me that many people feel the need to apologize for openly admitting that they looked at material from 'the other side'.
More often, people will refrain from posting their actual, perhaps nuanced views entirely, due to the fear of being judged/attacked/whatever. Didn't Paul Graham write an essay about that?
My wife was writing a research essay to present to our local Toastmasters group, which she is a relatively new member of. She was going over the talk with one of the senior members, one on one, on zoom, and she mentioned, in passing, that our family is going to delay getting the Covid19 vaccine a couple of months, because we've been exercising (essentially) phase 0 (extreme) lockdown consistently since last March. We can do that because we're blessed with the ability to work and (for our son) go to school from home.
The person my wife mentioned this to just lost her shit, and went into a verbal rampage about how to delay getting the vaccine is akin to being an anti-vaxer, how it was immoral to not get it as soon as humanly possible.
To be clear: If any of me, my wife or son came into contact with other human beings with any frequency, we'd get the vaccine as soon as possible. We're not afraid of it.
But others need it before we do.
However, that 'nuance' was entirely lost in an emotional, knee-jerk reaction which reminds me of so many other things we see today.
Was there voter fraud in the 2020 US presidential election? I'd bet my life on it; that there was at least a single single incident of fraud. Did that fraud in any way change the outcome of the election? Of course not.
Apologies for the tangent.
I want to encourage everyone to consider looking carefully, deeply and compassionately at what 'the other side' writes and says. It's not easy to do, but I believe it's a necessary, critical work that all of us need to honestly engage in.
However, the paradox of tolerance fully applies.
I fear that it happens a lot more frequently than most people are willing to admit.
Quality post. Thanks for it.
the difference is that r/the_donald is more violent. They cordinate gatherings, "attacks", a violent protests.
r/politics which is liberal bubble is more peaceful but both these communites censor opposing views and is dangerous to democracy
Will Cloudflare continue to protect thedonald[.]win? I think we should call Cloudflare out.
https://twitter.com/philipithomas/status/1347621982758719489
--
I bet they are violating multiple (inter)national laws since years.
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/thedonald.win
Over the last 90 days it has gone from a global Alexa Rank of 6000, to 2400. And is apparent about 400 in the US.
In my subjective opinion that is a large amount of growth.
They were openly writing about throwing liberals off helicopters etc...
To be afraid of being "judged" for your relatively tame and objective comments speaks volumes about the state of our increasingly polarized culture.
I read thedonald.win daily too. It feels like r/watchPeopleDie, some sort of morbid curiosity. Currently they're claiming Trump's concession video yesterday was deep faked. Very entertaining and scary at the same time.
Hacker news is 6500 globally, and 2600 in the US, if that is any kind of context.
Alexa is one of the oldest analytics companies to publicize top rankings for websites. Today was the first time I noticed they've been bought by Amazon.
You can look around their top 50, (which they are calling top 500 for the clicks) for global and country level web traffic here: https://www.alexa.com/topsites
It is clear, simple and harmonic.
Kudos for the design. I wished reddit would like that way.
Everyone IMHO should be peering into other bastions of thought
JFC. It's a circus of terrible thinking and baseless anger over there. If that site is getting a lot of traffic, you folks who consider yourselves above such things better start fighting for what is actually true and good, because what is not true and not good is exactly what is festering over there, and if they don't get their vote, they WILL get violent again, just see how they attacked Lindsey Graham at the airport just now for breaking rank on principle... and sweeping these folks under the rug will not eradicate the cancer
Doing this now makes me think their leadership are all cowards, at best. It reveals that leadership knew this step should have been done a long time ago, but failed to act due to fear. Had they left it alone, at least we could have all bought into this BS notion that it was due to fairness and a belief in free speech.
I say, cowards, at best, because what would be worse, is that this is entirely motivated by finances. That none of this is done for a concern of the well-being of our state, but because it is good advertising.
I'm sure next time will be different, right guys?
Reddit, Facebook, and most of all Twitter need to take a hard look at themselves and role they played in all of this.
Waiting until after an armed insurrection occurs is not good enough.
I don't understand why we have to blame the means of communication and method of discoverability rather than the, most likely mentally disturbed, people. Claiming that a very small group of unsane people bust into the capitol is some fundamental problem seems hyperbolic and reactionary to me.
If google searches, facebook groups, twitter recommendations, and subreddjts drove people towards content that radicalized them and continued to reinforce that radicalization then those companies should be held accountable.
I used to work in biomed, and if an algorithm I wrote resulted in people dying I would expect to face consequences. I don't see why the largest companies on the same planet aren't held to a similar standard while pushing for "engagement".
There are many examples you can pick if you want to point out bias in media, day before yesterday was not one.
For reference, conservative subreddits remain active, Donald Trump is the one that's banned.
By this logic pro-BLM democrats (including some high level pro-BLM politicians) incited numerous violent mobs over the course of 2020 to attack Seattle and Portland and usurp rule-of-law. But when it happened then the protests were "fiery but mostly peaceful" because "collateral damage is okay if it is done in the name of grappling with racism". Now that the other side has gathered to protest what they see as injustices, it's "a coup" and "terrorism" because of the bad actors who postponed congress for a few hours despite the fact that the vast majority of the people at the protest were peacefully protesting.
BLM was protesting the injustice of systematic oppression that results in black people bejng murdered by police. 93% of the protests were entirely peaceful. In the other 7%, it is not clear if the violence was instigated by citizens or police.
On the right, you have people who storm the US fucking Capitol building while they are confirming the next POTUS. They were trying to disrupt the federal government. Some of them had zip tie handcuffs and were reportedly looking for VP Pence.
If you cannot see the clear daylight between those two things, and insist on reducing it to “violence on both sides”, then I simply don’t know what to say to you except to please re-examine your humanity as well as your critical thinking skills.
This is largely attributed to systemic racism, but also to poverty.
Citation needed
For doing the SAME thing in the SAME location.
I know, it's hard to prove, here say, but you know it's true. Snipers would've been out in force. Cops were high fiving and letting these people in. National Guard was told to stand down. Police were taking selfies with confederates holding flags in the People's building.
This was a desecration of democracy and the rule of law in America. Everyone responsible needs at least 20 years in prison. No exceptions. Trying to disrupt our republic should have some consequences, no?
However, from my understanding, the research all seems to be pretty directionally consistent - minorities in the US receive worse treatment from the justice system. Here's a good overview of why the statistics might be under-reporting the size of the impact: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-statistics-dont-cap...
I’m willing to believe them, frankly, if there’s any data or responsible analysis to back it up.
This is a bit like saying "citation needed" for "the mitochondria is the workhorse of the cell". You just sort of gesture broadly at literally an entire field that studies this stuff.
It takes almost no effort to look up some faculty member at your alma mater who studies crime, race, and policing, look up one of their books, and check it out.
(Also, this article was not written by him. That kind of diminishes your point, unless you argue that all authors on 538 deserve your disdain by association?)
Could you directly address that time back in June when armed BLM protestors stormed Capitol Hill in Seattle and kicked out all the police for a month?[0] Why does that event get a pass in the context of this conversation?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Autonomous_Zone
My understanding was the police decided to withdraw from the area due to the intensity. It looks like the Seattle people rejected law enforcement, but weren't trying to overthrow the government.
Not all violence is equal. Overthrowing the US federal government because you didn't win is very different than CHAZ. Both can be disgusting while acknowledging that FEDERAL INSURRECTION AND ATTACKING DEMOCRACY IS WORSE THAN CHAZ.
This equivalence between BLM and the mobbing of the Capitol is confusing to be because it's so obviously a false one.
What's the difference? In both cases the stated goal of the protests was not to "break stuff" so if that ends up happening, is that the protest's fault?
> There's also a difference between a protestor throwing a firework at a courthouse and taking tactical gear and weapons with a couple hundred buddies into a legislature.
What about armed protestors forcibly ejecting police from a section of the city and setting up a police-free zone?
> This equivalence between BLM and the mobbing of the Capitol is confusing to be because it's so obviously a false one.
It's not equivalent, just similar. In both cases peaceful protesting of perceived injustice is the stated goal, and in both cases bad actors go renegade and break down rule-of-law.
This wasn't just a riot. It wasn't just a protest. Wasn't just an attack on a building. It wasn't just some vandalism. It was an attack on the last step of the presidential election process.
Or, you can recognize the right to assemble and protest while condemning non-peaceful protesting. I personally unequivocally condemn the violence that occurred in both BLM and Trump protests. I also support the right to gather and peacefully protest, for both BLM and Pro-Trump supporters.
Still, I see a difference that matters between a small minority trying to take over a police station or destroy a Pizza Hut (bad enough, and worthy of condemnation) and a small minority trying to interfere with the presidential succession (much worse).
There is also plain hypocrisy in both camps, when one camp riots, the other camp pretends not to understand that there is festering anger from injustice.
But every time, whenever one camps riots, they feel justified and righteous, and the opposing camp, feels enlightened as to and justified in retaliation.
WOKE is bad. EXTREME privilege is bad.
Finding common ground and coming back to our senses might save us all.
Both camps are just a bunch of babies...
If the terrorists are white, they're treated differently.
https://towardsdatascience.com/how-isis-uses-twitter-1006579...
Or were you talking more of an "official" twitter account for the organization itself (the same way Wendy's has a twitter account)?
There were many instances where protests got out of hand this summer and courthouses and police stations were destroyed; entire city blocks were taken over and those responsible enacted and enforced their own laws. The actions weren’t referred to as sedition and most media outlets avoided words like mob, treason, etc.
Of course, don’t take my statement to mean I condone ANY case of violence, rioting, property damage, etc. (And in all cases those responsible and those inciting violence should be held accountable) but being consistent and avoiding charged language when depicting civil unrest would go a long way to heal the country rather than to divide it.
The seditious mob injured 50 officers and killed one of them.
You should quit defending them. Stop with the "both-sidesisms". We can clearly point out which group is evil here.
Like the way Clarence Thomas's wife made lists of people not loyal to Trump to be fired?
"Axios first reported that a "well-connected network of conservative activists" is drawing up lists of officials they perceive to be anti-Trump, who are then flagged to be fired and replaced with Trump loyalists."
https://www.axios.com/trump-memos-deep-state-white-house-ce5...
https://www.businessinsider.com/ginni-thomas-wife-supreme-co...
Seems to me a certain leader followed this same playbook circa 1939.
"Barr Told Prosecutors to Consider Sedition Charges for Protest Violence"
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/us/politics/william-barr-...
This is about the protests over the summer, not the recent insurrection. Yes, I'm calling it that. I think functionally it matters a bit more if the USAG is using words like "sedition" compared to media outlets or internet posters.
Words start out with power - until they're overused to the point of banality and lose it.
The white supremacist terrorists's goal yesterday was to prevent a formal certification process that's central to the transition of executive power. Many people were armed and prepared for violence: multiple IEDs were found, multiple people had body armor, multiple people had loaded firearms & extra ammunition, people brought a guillitine, people were shouting chants about killing senators & reps, multiple people had zip-ties or handcuffs. That is sedition.
Unlike BLM protestors, the terrorist's intent was a coup: they wanted to undermine a democracy's most important legal process. BLM wants to use legal means to revolutionize the country's public safety, primarily via re-allocating city and state police budgets to programs that have effective track records of increasing public safety and not ending in the murder of Black people.
- Nancy Pelosi
Definition of uprising : an act or instance of rising up especially : a usually localized act of popular violence in defiance usually of an established government
> Ownership of the house changes every couple of decades
If you can't control your house, what's the point of owning it? This undermines the whole concept of private ownership.
Perhaps the issue isn't that black and white.
I don't know how old you are but do you recall the mid to late 90s/early 2000's in the US? Back then we had to fight so shows like South Park could be shown on cable television (a private platform) due to the fact that the general consensus among the population was that content like that offended their personal and religious values and should be prohibited. Those exact people won't be in power again, but people similar to them almost certainly will. Moves like this hand them a weapon to use against you.
There's no way your idea makes any sense. It's impossible to implement -- unless of course we have no private ownership and the government runs and pays for everything but I feel like that would be even worse.
Cable TV didn't want to run "offensive" shows because their advertisers wouldn't pay to advertise with them if they did. So who's going to pay under your plan? Who's going to pay to host all this on the Internet?
Edit: every time I post a comment like this here I get downvoted. I’m not complaining, downvote away. But I have to wonder if the folks downvoting realize how much this site is moderated and how much they’re actively participating in it.
A major city would have approximately four local TV stations with any kind of news organization and two newspapers. Maybe you'd have CNN if you had cable, which a lot of people didn't have. I could guarantee you right here that none of them would platform extreme viewpoints, and the country was much better off for it. I guess if you lived in NYC you'd have a few more options, but they were still pretty limited. And none of these were interactive in any way we'd recognize: maybe, at the most, you'd get a letter to the editor published if you got lucky.
The idea where anyone could say anything and be given a massive platform on an international social network that most of the population uses is a very, very new development.
Algorithm-driven social media where anyone can post whatever is actively harmful to our country. Right now, if you view any YouTube videos about WW2, you'll start getting videos "explaining" that the Holocaust was a hoax in your recommendations. If you're thinking about getting into hunting, and you look up gun reviews on YouTube, your recommendations are going to fill up with "Stop the Steal" and QAnon and other boogaloo propaganda. This is the kind of behavior that, if allowed to continue, will absolutely and utterly burn down society.
So Parler should be mandated to host democrat/left views, too, right? After all, it'd be egregious to shut down the views of so many people.
Wait, no, Parler openly and happily deletes "non right wing posts, users and forums". My bad.
This site currently doesn't ban people just because the post is disagreeable. I've managed to respectfully discuss inflammatory topics here before, even though I'm usually the one with the unpopular opinion. On reddit people just get downvoted to oblivion or banned on sight if they post anything that offends the sensibilities of the group.
From the post itself. The subreddit was banned for breaking ToS. I'd expect the same on this site if I were to repeatedly call for violence.
Fixed it for ya ;)
Only because the cancel mob hasn't also figured a way to shut down those sites and prohibit you from building a platform of your own.
Yet.
There's plenty of hate and misinformation in those subreddits. None of them have been banned yet.
Here is a nice article on the whole situation:
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/russiagate-is-wmd-times-a-mill...
>Totally different than something like "the election was rigged", which was tested and failed in court, but still gets shouted from the rooftops, leading to dangerous outcomes like what we saw in DC.
Yes, that was untrue, ridiculous, and in the end became dangerous. I'm pointing out the usual hypocrisy on both the left and the right when it comes to their own pet causes.
That Russia helped Trump is generally agreed upon. Was it the only factor in his win? Of course not.
But your whataboutism here doesn't hold water. Sure, there are subreddits that commonly exaggerated the truth about the Russia thing. Should they should get banned, since r/donaldtrump got banned for supporting violence? The two issues are so very different. I do not see hypocrisy in this case.
It is only agreed upon when you don't talk to people outside of your own echo chamber. In 2016, people were just shocked that so many people could vote for a loathsome person like Trump. Dems were unhappy and looked for someone to blame, except themselves for running such a weak candidate. 2020 was just as fair an election, and Trump got even more votes than 2016.
>Sure, there are subreddits that commonly exaggerated the truth about the Russia thing. Should they should get banned, since r/donaldtrump got banned for supporting violence?
What is the standard? Misinformation is OK? Anyway, I don't think an argument here will change anyone's views. People will eventually realize that the Dems have been conning their supporters for quite a while now.
You're telling me this whole entire article is fake?
> What is the standard? https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy
Here is my money quote from the report:
> If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment.
This is what they were banned for. Find me evidence that /r/BLM and its moderators were doing the same and I'll gladly cede the point.
why are subreddits like “photos” or “pets” littered with “orange man bad” posts?
* The top moderator of /r/conspiracy (just gonna quote the SRD thread: "At times this mod would spam over 100 pro-Trump posts a day, deleting their posts and spamming them over and over until they got the response they wanted, all while banning dozens of people per post. Anyone that openly challenged them or Trump would be immediacy banned.") [0]
* /r/GenerationNazbol (Nazbol = "Nazi Bolshevik" = racist tankies) [1]
* /r/PinkPillFeminism (ban evasion sub for /r/GenderCritical, which was banned in June) [2]
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/ksk6ur/top_...
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/kskd...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/ksl3...
Yes. Absolutely yes.
The hands of those on the levers of power change over the years. Beware what you give them.
All these actions also seem to further fuel the beliefs that all the people who (partially or fully) supported Trump are being suppressed and beaten down by conspirators on the other side.
I don’t know the answers, but collectively humans of the last couple of decades have not figured out how to deal with misinformation in the Internet age. I wonder what the results of any trials have been. Shorter memory recall makes it seem like polarization has increased and gotten more violent.
Reddit isn't stupid. This is still sinking in for many, and for those ahead of the curve they're doing everything they can to disassociate themselves from any hint of support or enablement as quickly as possible.
1. Brought black and hispanic unemployment to record lows. 2. The DOW tied the record for the most consecutive all-time closing highs in a row. 3. Signed the biggest package of tax cuts and reforms in history. 4. United States is a net natural gas exporter for the first time since 1957. 5. Reduced illegal border crossings. 6. Improved relations with North Korea. 7. Promoted equitable and fair trade deals with a host of countries like South Korea, Japan, and other Middle East countries. 8. Signed the Right-To-Try legislation that allowed for patients to explore experimental treatments that have not necessarily been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
And many more...
However, children who are born this year won't be spending a lot of time in history class covering Trump's mundane policy victories in school. They'll be looking at the bullet points, and the first one will be about his incitement of a mob to sack the US capitol and shed blood in his name.
- Ban all /r/conservative
- Ban /r/libertarian
- Require pinned posts from /r/politics at all time to keep people properly informed (/r/all)
- Create an internal auditing team to start immediately banning users who may have voted for Trump or comment against progressive causes
- Work with other social media companies to create a shared "social credit" score worth for creating a minimum bar for who and what can get posted
It’s quite sad that even HN is turning more and more into the likes of /r/politics. Quality discussion is basically down the drain on any thread that has any hint of politics. What comes after banning these people with your “internal auditing team”, re-education camps for the half of the country you hate?
“The free Internet” has value, but it’s not the only thing that has value. When it conflicts with other values, then there has to be a nuanced resolution.
Speech is speech, when that speech begets action then we have a problem.
But, burning and looting is in a different category to the Capitol stuff, I think.
If it was done for some other cause, there would be no end of celebratory articles on the same outlets that now condemn it...
I think it would be condemned equally no matter who tried it. It’s the beginning of an end game scenario of democracy... so it makes sense it is viewed so harshly
The vast majority of participants in the protests following the Floyd murder did not take part in any violence. It is all but certain that the fraction who did is much smaller than the fraction of 1/6/21 protestors who illegally entered the Capitol.
Comparing the one to the other is not justified.
That's neither here nor there. I didn't say "burning for months" (e.g. the same fires keep burning for months), I said "burning and looting for months", that is incidents of burnings and lootings occuring for months. There have been dozens, if not hundreds, and have lasted (not each individual, the case of them popping has lasted) for months...
>The vast majority of participants in the protests following the Floyd murder did not take part in any violence. It is all but certain that the fraction who did is much smaller than the fraction of 1/6/21 protestors who illegally entered the Capitol.
That's not certain at all. The videos show a totally different story.
>Looting is not well-documented but my friends in Portland didn't seem very concerned.
Many of those in favor aren't, especially if they live outside of the affected radius.
Weasel words, then. The continuous presence of fire for months was of course not implied.
>Many of those in favor aren't, especially if they live outside of the affected radius.
In favor of what, precisely?
Use of violent tactics is not particlarly novel on either side
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/06/us/politics/homeland-secu...
Unfortunately that would probably put me in the "radical leftist" bracket according to current US discourse.
Come to think of it I can't think of any policies on which the (mainstream) Democrats are to the left of the Conservatives, but maybe I'm not thinking hard enough.
Tankie leftists that support violence have the political weight as furry enthusiasts afaik.
Chris Cuomo on CNN "And please, show me where it says that protests have to be polite, or peaceful"
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter "The whole point of protesting is to make ppl uncomfortable."
I would also say that there are leftist politicians who are encouraging and inciting criminal acts. See this recent tweet from AOC (https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1334184644707758080), where she excuses activists acting illegally because the "polite language policy game" (her words) didn't work for them. This is no less an act of incitement than Trump, since Trump never called for violence or encouraged acts of violence.
I also think there is a great deal of hypocrisy from the left on this point given the events of this last year. There have been numerous riots, arrests, deaths, and illegal occupation of public places recorded. All the politicians, activists, organizations involved in those criminal acts have been given a pass and have faced very little accountability and virtually no censorship from big tech.
Even before George Floyd, we have incidents from left-leaning activists where they literally invade federal buildings. Here's an example documented by the Associated Press (https://youtu.be/B_kxyacaAF4). What was the response from the far left elements? Rashida Tlaib and AOC actually joined some of their events and encouraged them (https://theintercept.com/2018/11/13/alexandria-ocasio-cortez...). And yet, these two continue to be allowed their platforms.
Let's be honest, the tech platforms are using this ridiculously inept protest at the Capitol as an enabling excuse to further censorship and erode free speech, aligning with the interests of their left-biased employee bases. The precedent it sets is dark, as it will be employed to discriminate against viewpoints that disagree with the progressive agenda.
Did they break into the offices and steal things?
Tell me I'm wrong.
edit: I should add here the thought exercise is that you are participating in speech that is legal and ethical but are overruled by SSL cert providers and are unable to get a root signed cert from anyone (or whatever other means of preventing SSL.) In that case, even if you are not hard blocked, having your speech be passed around the internet in cleartext also seems like it affects your ability to communicate in a negative way.
2) Is this practically any different than saying newsgroups, or even bbs(?), still exist, so those avenues for free speech are viable remedies for being otherwise suppressed.
*Although it's mostly been chrome. I did at least see it on Firefox while att tried to MitM errors during a recent outage.
I believe the recent att router bit-flipping issue resulted in the same.
The Paradox of Tolerance is a great game theory exercise, just like Mutually Assured Destruction, but I'd prefer to live in a society where we don't lean into these strategies with our foot on the gas.
You should also watch it for damaging lies, and have a judiciary system that makes them fix any damage those lies create.
What you don't create is a paraestatal censor authority empowered to cut any information it wants out of the internet. (You don't create an estatal one either, but that's not what we are talking about here.)
This year I have barely spoken more than 30 minutes to someone in real life, per day. If my interactions over the internet were to be as they say curated, I would effectively be silenced.
I was a frequent reader of r/dt a few years back, as the top poster was. There was nothing in particular there, no trend, that was any more terrible than what I could find in my bookshelf. Deal with it.
Your bookshelf doesn’t allow you to instantly connect with thousands of likeminded people to incubate terrorist plots.
This is what banning /r/the_donald and now /r/donaldtrump did. It doesn't stop the users from believing what they believe, it just further isolates them in an echo changer while simultaneously reinforcing the belief that the liberal media is "out to get them".
Given the heavy left leaning media bias it leads to free speech being free as long as it doesn't disagree with the 'party line'.
I.e. the same dynamics as in communist Soviet Union where 'enemies of the people' were ostracized and persecuted by totalitarian regime.
This is not a new or exciting phenomenon. Censorship and “cancel culture” have rich histories on all sides of the American political spectrum.
I think 1) is what's driving the "media is left" feeling. It is left compared to the median of society. To many people (not just on the far right), that feels like the media pushing leftist views/narratives/agendas.
Note that Fox News remains the most-watched cable news network - though online, it ranks after CNN and NYT (and possibly others, depending on the metric).
If, say, Newsmax rose to prominence and we'd see more fragmentation on the 'right', or CNN and MSNBC were to merge, and we'd see less fragmentation on the 'left', what would that change?
There is an enormous difference between an outlet like the New Yorker, which is definitely liberal but also fiercely committed to fact checking, and outlets like Newsmax or The American Conservative which are proudly movement conservatives first and journalists second, if at all.
This desire to present a false equivalence is understandable - it makes it easier to avoid acknowledging a major schism in the country - but the misrepresentations requires are a disservice to their readers. Just the fact that The Economist is listed as leftist to the same degree that The Post Millenial or NY Post are listed as right wing tells you how interested they are in accuracy!
Can you explain? On the site:
> The AllSides Media Bias Chart is more comprehensive in its methodology than any other media bias chart on the Web. While other media bias charts show you the subjective opinion of the one person who made it, our ratings are based based on multipartisan, scientific analysis.
> and by their own admission doesn’t even try to compare for honesty or credibility
I don't think this matters in the context of the point I was making.
> Most of the two R columns routinely run fake or highly selective coverage
Hmm, so this further reduces the number of quality right-leaning sources. Seems to further prove my point. Remember, the chart shows sites with the most traffic.
> There is an enormous difference between an outlet like the New Yorker, which is definitely liberal but also fiercely committed to fact checking, and outlets like Newsmax or The American Conservative which are proudly movement conservatives first and journalists second, if at all.
Maybe, but it doesn't matter in the context of my point. Also, if they are clear about their biases it shouldn't matter, unless presenting outright lies. Many left-leaning sources try to come off like they are objective. Also:
> A leading New Yorker writer omits crucial facts to run interference for Joe Biden against serious allegations of corruption in Ukraine, writes Joe Lauria. [0]
Many left-leaning sources were also guilty of this (twitter going so far as take down the tweet from the NY Post as "hacked information" even though there was zero evidence this was the case, and Facebook de-prioritizing shared link of the same).
This is my opinion and based around some examples I've seen, but I believe that conservative sources have a tougher time making money, because people will attack their ad-partners for supporting those companies. I'd like to see where this happens to left-leaning sources.
[0] https://consortiumnews.com/2019/10/08/the-new-yorkers-partis...
But traffic is decided by the market. There's nothing wrong with left-leaning media being more popular.
The obvious question in this analogy is if there's anything akin to a vaccine. Well, when it comes to bigotry, I think having people you care about in your life that are in tribes or groups being demonized by bigots is just that. And a society of liberal norms of the free exchange of ideas and democracies acts similar to a culture of hand washing and cleanliness in a society where people are free to interact with the sick.
As they have every right not to do.
These people are brainwashed. No concrete action normies take can convince them. They have to decide to get better and ask for help. And we must help them, without judgment or scolding, when that happens. But at some point, you have to stop a policy of appeasement because it doesn't work. They'll just keep pushing and taking more and more.
In principal, are they different technologies? Or is all information, regardless of medium equal?
The terrorists who stormed the capital on Wednesday have a history of violence and connections to various far right extremist and terrorist groups. They came carrying weapons, zip ties and bombs. Don’t pretend there’s no difference between the two groups.
The terrorist attack yesterday exceeded a quarter of that death toll in a matter of hours.
I don't know how to explain that invading our nation's capitol with the intent of capturing and murdering politicians is different than breaking into a Target.
[1] https://time.com/5886348/report-peaceful-protests/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_and_controversies_dur...
Let me know when I can't get my wife's medication again because right wing ""terrorists"" smashed up my pharmacy, or when parts of my city are completely off limits for violence, or when one the teachers in my school district gets arrested for assaulting somebody filming them burning a car. I'm not losing sleep over congress getting delayed for a couple of hours. I'll keep my perspective that all political violence is bad, and that I want little to do with politics in general, but one side of extremists in particular has caused more problems for me than another.
It’s founded on the presumption of bad faith, which is bad faith in itself.
The fact is that the only people who died during the 1/6/21 event were part of the protestors.
Just because two groups have opposing political aims doesn't mean they're equivalent. One attempted to take our nation's capital by force, the other attempted a sit in.
Show me literally one single source that indicates the Women's March people were out for blood. Were there any casualties? Injuries? Was there even any fighting?
Your fact is false, by the way. The terrorists murdered a Capitol Police officer. https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/08/politics/capitol-police-offic...
The point of the protest was not to “take the capital by force.” That’s cartoonish and unrealistic. The point was to express disapproval of the election results. Where do you get your information from?
Sicknick died as a result of a blood clot in his brain. His death was not the direct result of any protestors actions.
Not literally everyone was there to take the capitol, obviously. But that was the point for many people. This was entirely predictable. See [1] [2] or especially [3], wherein someone back in December describes exactly what ended up happening.
Why bring guns and zip ties if you're not there for violence?
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-01-08/us-capitol-st...
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/extremists-made-little...
[3] https://twitter.com/ariehkovler/status/1341016471795843080?s...
Got it, so you have no evidence they were out for blood. It’s just a bad faith assumption on your part, ignoring that people often carry weapons for good faith reasons. Ignoring that no one was attacked with said guns except for the protestors.
It has not been proven that Sicknick was murdered. He died due to a blood clot that happened while he was on duty.
What is a good faith explanation for forcing your way into the capitol with guns and zip ties?
What is the good faith explanation for e.g. this video? https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2021/01/08/ash...
Again, show me literally one single source indicating that the Women’s March sit in was remotely like this.
Ashli Babbitt was killed by law enforcement. If law enforcement was not deployed it’s not clear there would have been any deaths. If law enforcement were deployed on the women’s March Storming of the capital, maybe they would have injured or killed protestors as well.
But regardless, the actions of the maga protestors did not directly cause the death of anyone. Doesn’t matter what you want to assume about their guns, you can’t deny that.
We haven’t even mentioned that many of the invaders came bearing Nazi symbols and/or were members of known violent groups like the Proud Boys. I suppose that it’s unfair to presume that someone wearing a 6MWE shirt isn’t coming to be peaceful?
Obviously it’s impossible to prove conclusively whether or not there would have been deaths without law enforcement. But there are multiple accounts of them assaulting journalists. What do you think they would have done had they made it to the floor of the Senate without police there?
What, exactly, do you think the zip ties were for?
I will concede that a medical examiner has not confirmed the officer’s cause of death. But signs point to him being killed by one of the terrorists, so I’ll continue to describe it as murder until evidence arises to the contrary.
Yes the point of the question was to tease out what concrete differences there were between the two to justify fear of murder in the second case. It seems like his fear is more based on narrative and assumption of bad faith than any direct evidence of intent to “take the capital” violently. The violence was perpetrated against the protestors, not by them.
> But signs point to him being killed by one of the terrorists, so I’ll continue to describe it as murder until evidence arises to the contrary.
You should assume innocence until proof of wrongdoing. Anything else is illiberal.
No I was not.
There is a fundamental difference between storming the house with the intent of stopping a democratic process (the confirming of the next president) and marching to it to deliver a message.
You and I both know that if all the folks did yesterday was go into the Capitol and march and chant in the halls, they'd be framed as deranged lunatics who might've gone a bit too far - not domestic terrorists. Show me the video evidence from the women's march where they coordinated a group to push into the police while yelling for "fresh patriots" to come to the front line and push back.
The left was basically allowed to freely enter the Senate building, in an attempt to sway the ongoing confirmation vote of a scotus justice, and met little to no police resistance, and it was celebrated by the media.
Replace "confirmation" with "certification", and "scotus justice" with "president," and what's the difference, politically?
I think it's a mistake to argue the specifics. The parent comment here is arguing in bad faith.
To anyone not invested emotionally in this conversation, it's clear that your point isn't making a valid point. They are not equivalent actions.
You're pretending they are to try to lend cover to the truly harmful action that just took place.
We can call a spade a spade without pretending that everything else is also a spade.
To be clear, I am directly saying that you are arguing in bad faith.
I hope it is clear that this is not an attack on you as a person. I am attacking your idea directly, not you.
The only difference that in can see is that during the 1/6/21 event, the police were called in. They attacked and killed 4 protestors.
Maybe you don't know that of the 4 rioters that died, one had a heart attack (unconfirmed), one was shot and the others were trampled (by the mob).
Maybe you didn't know that congresspeople from both sides of the isle hid in closets and under desks, terrified and afraid for their lives.
Maybe you just didn't know these things, and got them wrong. But when confronted with them, you aren't going to say "oh sorry I was mistaken." You will respond with whataboutism and other deflection, to preserve your worldview that this wasn't a mob and Trump didn't do anything wrong, etc.
Which was OP's point. This isn't a good faith discussion. You are either ignorant of the truth (and will respond poorly when confronted with it), or you know the truth and are cynically lying about reality to win a rhetorical game.
This is the nature of all bad faith political discussion, which is why I (try to) avoid it all together.
Maybe you don’t know that the police officer who died, died as a result of a blood clot. Not as a direct result of any action by the protestors.
Those police were doing crowd control. If they were not deployed there would have been no on-duty injuries. Was law enforcement deployed on the women’s March protestors?
"The Bank security guard would have never been hurt if they just let people steal the money and take hostages."
> Maybe you don’t know that the police officer who died, died as a result of a blood clot.
This is beyond bad faith, this is insulting. And i'm not going to participate anymore. I just hope people like you die out before this country is irrevocably harmed, and your children don't carry your sickness to a new generation.
can you explain this analogy? What are you assuming the protestors would have done if the police weren’t deployed?
> I just hope people like you die out before this country is irrevocably harmed, and your children don't carry your sickness to a new generation.
This is a pretty radical statement. I’m actually a center left liberal and you’re wishing that I die simply because of a fact I brought up that refutes your narrative. Can you substantiate your claims that I’m causing harm to this country by citing facts? How did you get this radicalized?
You're pretending that your "rational" arguments are anything other than bad faith.
It's difficult to take anything you say seriously when you can't admit that the actions this week are not the same as the women's march.
This is game that the rest of us are tired of being subjected to. The results of this style of thinking has just borne fruit thanks to the continued lying and obfuscating of the President and his gaggle of sycophants. The world is not confused about the dangerous actions that just transpired.
You are purposefully and willingly beyond reach.
So when you say that the protestors caused a truly harmful action to take place, what exactly are you referring to?
I don’t think breaking into Congress is always bad. I support people’s right to peaceful protest. The Trump supporters by and large did not initiate violence, the violence was initiated on them by the police. If there was evidence that the trump supporters actually were initiating mass violence against people in the capitol that would be a different story, but with 4 unarmed protestors dead, they were the only ones who suffered casualties. That’s simply a fact.
You’re drawing a line that any protest which occupies the capitol is immoral. I disagree with that but if you really believe that, was it immoral when the women’s March protesters took the capitol? https://twitter.com/EgSophie/status/1048634940169048064?s=20
I’m not arguing that at all, I’m just telling you what the rest of the society is doing; that pressure you feel to change your opinion is coming entirely from within yourself.
> was it immoral when the women’s March protesters took the capitol?
I’m not sure, let me check: did they break windows and doors to gain entry into the capitol building? Did they break into representatives’ offices? Were there weapons and detaining tools found on their persons?
So now your position is that it’s okay to occupy a capitol building as long as you don’t break windows, break into representatives offices, and/or some small percentage of them have weapons on them? Even if they directly cause no one harm. Okay. Was it immoral when BLM occupied and damaged the Ohio capitol? https://www.cleveland.com/open/2020/05/state-officials-asses...
> Damage included 28 broken windows along the west and south sides of the building, as well as damage to the wooden window frames, five pole lamps and two doors, including the West Rotunda entrance, according to the Capitol Square Review and Advisory Board, the agency responsible for keeping the Statehouse grounds. Flags planted in flower beds were burned.
No, but it’s the bare essentials to stick to if you don’t want to be taken for an insurrectionist.
> Was it immoral when BLM occupied and damaged the Ohio capitol?
Yes! Whoever thought that was a good idea is a goddamn punk. Although, they weren’t trying to change the outcome of an election; that’s a pretty significant difference. There’s few things in a democracy worse than interfering with its election, I’m sure you agree, except maybe literally blowing it up.
You’re not a child, I think, so I can’t scare you with made up stories about what happens when you lie. But seriously, it’s not good for you, or those around you.
But this is the point I tried to make at the top of this thread.
These people are playing a game. They aren't interested in talking about this honestly.
Seriously, where is the legitimate debate about the events of this week?
Is anyone compelled by the idea that this seditious event was comparable to the women's march?
I don't know what tools we have to bring these people back. I wish I could point to something and say "here", this is how we can find common ground. But they are proving every day that they are more interested in this dishonest babble than engaging in serious discussion.
Again, for anyone whose made it this far. The fact that they are pretending that there is no difference between the women's march and the events this week are all you need to see to dismiss the rest of the justifications they put forth.
Don't fall for the trap. They wont argue "the point". They will deflect, lie and twist every issue to fit their narrative.
Of course, if you’re fair and reasonable in your judgments you’d see that both were legitimate protests, and the only innocent victims of violence in the maga protest were the unarmed protestors themselves.
What the heck are you talking about?
It's the natural last step in any fascist movement. The question remains, how many Americans remain this radicalized. If the number is low enough , the country survives.
Capitol Police said this...
Or are we only allowed to provide partial facts?
Maybe all of those gun shot victims I keep reading about are simply dying from loss of blood? My mistake...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/us/brian-sicknick-police-...
https://googlethatforyou.com?q=stroke%20after%20blunt%20forc...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/benjamin-philips-kevin-greeson...
Just in case we need more...
More footage: https://twitter.com/mickeydelo/status/1348312979129905155
"While authorities haven’t provided details on the medical emergencies, Greeson’s son said his father died from a heart attack mid-protest. Boyland died after being crushed by the crowd, according to one report, while Philips had a stroke, fellow protesters said."
https://www.thedailybeast.com/benjamin-philips-kevin-greeson...
This is why I don't talk politics, ever. You simply cannot attack a person's idea in politics, because their ideas are their identity. They will respond with the ferocity in which they would if someone were to physically attack them. While noble of you to try, it will fail. Every time.
The nuanced resolution is our laws and court system.
If something is illegal, then our justice system can handled it. Otherwise, it should be allowed to exist on the free internet.
Censoring(or moderating if that's what you're going to argue it's called) will only make things worse, it will polarize things even further.
The way to address Trump supporters is to listen to them.
Suppress whatever biased lower-level consciousness that's going to hijack your thought process and demonize them.
Observe what is driving their anger and actually help them.
You cannot stomp out this many people who have very real concerns that need to be addressed. And the effective solution will not be the thing that confirms all your priors.
How is this relevant? We don't have a Trump-led dictatorship in the US. And since when is "Well it's not as bad as a <insert really bad scenario>" a well thought out argument?
Precisely what would we have gotten if those insurrectionists had succeeded in neutralizing the legislative branch?
> And since when is "Well it's not as bad as a <insert really bad scenario>" a well thought out argument?
It's an argument that is sufficiently well thought out when we are literally faced with a choice between A and B. We can do whatever we can now to prevent this movement from continuing to gain momentum or we can allow ourselves to be overrun by the movement.
Oh please. This is pure delusion. There was 0 path for a group of a few hundred to “neutralizing the legislative branch”. What happened at the capitol was bad, but pretending there was any chance in it ending in a Trump dictatorship is simply hyperbole.
The end goal is total censorship.
Much as you like to spin it, if there weren't notable, repeated documented cases of idiots on Parler coordinating protests and outright violence, then no-one would really give a shit.
Making this out to be "the left wants to remove our ability to speak whatsoever" is not a "narrative shift", it's your conjecture.
So are we just pretending that March-September 2020 didn't happen in dozens of major cities across the US.
> The end goal is cessation of real and specific incitements to violence against people and property
You:
> So are we just pretending that March-September 2020 didn't happen in dozens of major cities across the US.
Apparently you are confused between "empathy" and "incitement".
That "supercut" didn't have anyone inciting violent behavior. No-one saying "Go out, damage and destroy property. Hurt people". It didn't have anyone saying "this is a good thing".
You have people saying "I can understand why this is happening", "I get why people are driven to it".
That's empathy. Not encouragement.
I was also raised by a convert narcissist and have experienced (and fortunately, overcome) the exact behavior being used to manipulate the population. It was used to manipulate me in the exact same way.
Deny reality all you want but none of what's happening right now is good.
Once that precedent is set, people who once felt they were "on the right side of history" will equally be silenced for whatever reason the mob wants and then wonder "what happened?" This has played out before in history. The only difference is now we have smartphones.
A quote I just saw that encapsulates this well:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.” - C.S. Lewis
I have too much to lose for that to happen. I hope you realize the implications of your line of thought, not to just yourself, but to society around you.
Applying your logic to your own politics would lead me to believe that "all left leaning americans" are communists who want to take my property by force, just because I saw one hammer and sickle on a flag.
Vitriol doesn't sow peace my friend.
Seeing the Twitter mob, composed not only of the usual subjects, but also major media members, celebrities, and politicians outright push for restrictions and "punishments" for anyone who has ever shown support for Trump is terrifying. The left has become the true fascists they've always pretended they were fighting. It's a small step from here to the Bolshevik purges and Chinese Cultural Revolution. Exact same playbook being enacted.
* Congress has been "stormed" many times in US history, as recent as Kavanaugh hearings.