Google suspending Parler from the Google Play store
play.google.com
play.google.com
There are some companies that I do not think should be allowed to ban people, like ISPs.. since many times people don't have choices between multiple high-speed ISPs. However, Twitter is not in that same category.
Note clearly - I am not condoning ISPs banning people. I am highlighting the hypocracy in a lot of contemporary conservative principles. It's not the Lincoln party we know of.
That word isn’t only applicable to state actions, and nor should it be.
Also, this isn't going to be effective Parler is a website, people can just browse to it in Chrome/Safari...
We should be promoting apps that encourage and promote healthy discourse between people not echo chambers, but that's what I think is morally correct.
Luckily you can still sideload apps on Android. The day they remove that feature is the day I take the time to figure out how to use an alternate OS.
> AT&T may immediately terminate all or a portion of your Service or reduce or suspend Service, without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes (a) is illegal, fraudulent, harassing, abusive, or intended to intimidate or threaten; (b) constitutes a violation of any law, regulation, or tariff (including, without applicable policies or guidelines (including the Acceptable Use Policy), and AT&T may refer such use to law enforcement authorities without notice to you.
Keep trying.
If it was just politics then Google would also pull New Republic magazine.
Apple has said that they need to step up their moderation game and they can get back into the App Store. I’m guessing that would be good enough for Google as well.
Free speech != guaranteed access to a company providing access to a big audience
It's going to happen. These platforms are so large they encompass a signification amount of the communication market .. and I don't say that lightly. Look at how Facebook has literally gobbled up all its competition and now is pushing policies that make WhatsApp and Oculus useless without handing over full control of all your accounts and devices?
These companies ARE STATES! They may not look like governments, but the communication power they wield is stronger than many nations.
You can no longer just say "They're private companies" when you literally cannot buy a well supported Mobile device unless it runs Android or iOS, unless you have the skill, ability and time to run something like a PinePhone or PostmarketOS.
Like, my life is proceeding just fine without either WhatsApp or Oculus products. Or a Facebook account that I use, for that matter.
(edit: For the record, the reason I am not happy with the precedent is that isolating communities like this seems to usually just serve to increase radicalism rather than remove it.)
Modern life absolutely depends on being able to connect to the Internet in some way. For a lot of people, that's a smartphone, which is cheaper and more mobile than a computer.
I got my first smartphone in 2019 because I watched the world around me gradually change to the point where an Apple or Android phone was expected and became inconvenient not to have.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25662215
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25669864
Apparently WhatsApp is so integrated into several countries' cultures, you cannot live without it. Like literally - some examples I remember are food deliveries (during lockdowns) are only available through WhatsApp, as are scheduling hospital visits, anything involving schooling, I think I remember lawyers sharing documents, and so on.
> ... noting that ownership "does not always mean absolute dominion." The court pointed out that the more an owner opens his property up to the public in general, the more his rights are circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who are invited in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama
Twitter is going to be forced to unban most if not all people if they want to be a general open to the public social network.
The section has two parts, the first of which protects the platform (Twitter, Google Play Store, FB, etc) from prosecution for user-generated content on the platform.
The second part, more relevant here, ensures the right of the platform to moderate it's users anyway it sees fit. If r/conservative can ban anyone for saying anything on the subreddit, or Parler can ban you for dropping leftist talking points, the Play Store can ban your app for enabling domestic terrorism.
I don’t have a huge problem deplatforming itself. I do have serious problems when it suddenly cuts you off from other unrelated websites or paid-for assets. These knock-on effects aren’t immediately obvious and can be quite severe at the individual level (eg FB locking you out and now you can’t access the local Oculus content you paid for).
Banned from "login with apple"? I should have a right to transfer my account to "login with google/facebook/my own server" and it should work. The same way I can call my friend when he transfers his phone number to another phone network.
Trump banned from Twitter? He should be able to transfer his account to Parler and I should still see his tweets in my Twitter feed, be able to retweet it to my followers, interact with it, etc. Twitter wouldn't be able to influence tweets from Parler so it would show in timeline. But they could decide to not display it in proprietary parts of their system (search, trending topics, whatever)
This way we would prevent echo chambers and deplatforming, while simultaneously allowing companies to maintain their freedom to moderate their own space.
“Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient." Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions, and other controlling bodies.”
“Real” censorship is just censorship, and that’s the definition.
So when I see what is called censorship in US, it seems a bit funny and strange to me. I immediately think how people in my country during communism would be happy if only that was called censorship and if they had a possibility to use alternative channels to exercise free speech. But of course, I accept that this might be my biased eurocentric view of things and that from a different cultural perspective "real" means something else. Perhaps it will be like that even in Europe in a few years, who knows. We don't have much problems for now because we all use US social media and they don't really react to foreign languages, except a few universal "trigger" words like antivax. At least for smaller languages and countries (central and eastern europe)
WeChat does not let you share Winnie the Pooh. Nominally, Tencent is a privately owned company freely choosing who they provide a platform to [2]. But in reality, they have no choice but to ban Winnie the Pooh, unless they want a state apparatus to make their lives increasingly difficult. Just because something is censored by a private platform doesn't mean that it's the "free market" of ideas and not a state or the government wielding its power.
Large US companies are also part of an industrial–congressional complex, with lobbying and political contributions on one side, political approval and threats of regulation on the other. Large tech companies are deeply and inseparably intertwined with the state and the political parties (both of them), based on the granting of reciprocated privileges. They know full well that if they ban the wrong speech (or refuse to ban the "right" speech), they face being regulated out of existence. Indeed, seeing this threat, we see them scramble to align with the incoming administration.
The kind of social engineering that led to the present bans was very popular in communist Eastern Europe as well. Did you recite an anti-government poem at your barbecue? You might find yourself banned from your favorite pub permanently! Why? Nominally, it was the bartender exercising his right not to serve you: after all, he shouldn't have to suffer potentially vocal ("verbally aggressive") imperialists in the establishment he runs. But behind the nominal reason was plain, state-mandated censorship. They'd have risked a bunch of misfortunes by not banning you. These could range from relevant, like the next few beer shipments "mysteriously" getting damaged during delivery, to completely random gaslighting-esque punishments, such as the bartender's daughter not getting admitted into the local high school. A plethora of plausibly deniable, no-outright-ban social mechanisms existed to make life difficult for people who disagreed with the official narrative, and to encourage people to ostracize the disagreeable. It required only a few well-placed entryists, made sure that ordinary citizens had skin in the game, and was a lot easier to handwave away than the black cars and heavy-handed approach that riled up the opposition in the previous years [3].
[1] https://meanwhileinbudapest.com/2020/09/11/klubradio-going-d... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-china-blog-40627855 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_German_uprising_of_1953 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Revolution_of_1956 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Spring
tl;dr: one can always switch their phone if they don't like Apple because the usefulness of a phone doesn't depend on its popularity; one can't practically switch their social media platform if they are banned because the usefulness of the social media depends on its popularity, and the most popular platform typically dominates due to the power law.
If that's what were happening you'd probably have a point, but it isn't. "Not deleting" something is not the same as providing the audience, nor amplifying.
And, by the way, yes free speech does imply some obligations on the rest of us. Speech is not free if you are not free to exercise it; "you're free to talk in a prison cell" type of thinking isn't productive because it avoids the entire conversation.
Free speech has absolutely nothing to do with the government, by the way. Just because one country wrote down something called "The 1st Amendment" doesn't mean that somehow free speech only exists in that country and only when the government gives it to you. Free speech is a natural right that we all have and nobody has the right to silence anyone else: The 1st is simply one aspect of that.
The fact that society at large has lost that value cannot be viewed as a good thing and all the people in this thread defending the silencing of millions because they disagree with them politically is beyond shameful.
I realize that there are some court cases that do guarantee free speech in extremely limited circumstances, but saying that society at large has “lost that value” doesn’t line up with any history that I’m aware of.
Wrong. You always do. They simply have free speech too.
More concretely, YouTube has actual knowledge that extremist right-wing political views damage their brand reputation - they've gone through several waves of pulled advertising that has harmed both themselves and their relationship with their creators. Advertisers have told them in no uncertain terms that they will not have their content on the same platform as, say, KKK rallies. So now we need to extend this positive duty to publish onto anyone who does business with these platforms, in order to prevent them from exercising the power of the purse to soft-censor views they don't like.
Furthermore, even this "duty to publish" standard for free speech does not always seem to meet the standards of some. I've heard people (not necessarily you, so the following is a strawman) argue that public rebuke is a form of censorship; if only because it may cause adverse publicity to have one's views opposed. This is absurd; the prescribed answer to offensive speech is counter-speech. If people decide not to do business with someone because they find their political views offensive, that shouldn't automatically be treated as censorship. Even at a "duty to publish" level (what you actually seem to be arguing for), you need to be careful to define common carriers narrowly to avoid forcing people into unwanted relationships, lest you run into this trap of "speech is consequence-free".
In this case, if a significant number of people are disenfranchised by this, it will naturally create the market pressure for a solution that they can use. It will spur adoption of tools like F-droid and open devices etc. It'll force these people to embrace open web technologies instead of proprietary ecosystems. Which are all very positive and healthy things.
It may be very inefficient, but to some extent its a healthy process that ultimately arbitrates where acceptable standards of speech sit.
So, one solution would be to foster an environment where Twitter et.al lose their power because they really CAN'T lock people in anymore and I would absolutely love to see such a future.
But unfortunately that isn't where we are right now and the incentives around us are all set up to ensure it never changes.
You’re exercising your free speech in one right now.
I don’t even have an account of any of the “monopoly” ones.
Whether a private company suppresses communication or the government does it, it’s still censorship.
In fact there have been many laws requiring companies to carry messages against their will, including the Fairness Doctrine, the Equal-Time Rule, and Common Carrier laws, as well as the failed, but generally regarded as Constitutional, Net Neutrality proposals.
Should government really keep pharma companies from selling you pills that are filled with snake oil?
Should a government really force you to allow black people to eat at the same tables in your restaurant as white people? It's your business after all and it's private. You should have a choice on which customers you get to serve.
The things you listed entail selling materially defective good, and discrimination on the basis of race and gender. These are not examples of compelled speech. Here are some more applicable questions:
* Can the government force Hacker News not to flag and hide certain posts?
* And the government make a bookseller to stock certain types of books?
* Could Trump pass a law or executive order to make Twitter revoke his ban?
* Can the government official compel a newspaper to print certain content?
The last one was actually addressed in a Supreme Court ruling [1].
Freedom of speech includes freedom from compelled speech. It's also against the law to tell a person or business to print or say something, or not ban certain content. Sure, if a business exclusively bans content based on the race of the poster they they could fall afoul of anti-discrimination laws. But note that it wasn't the content of the speech that matters here, it is the discriminatory nature on the basis of race.
These protections don't magically go away when a company grows to a certain size or number of users. Market share is relevant to things like anti-trust and anti-competitive behavior, but the people claiming that Facebook or Twitter have to run content because they're big are incorrect.
The exceptions to protection from compelled speech are very narrow, like showing your passport at the border and nutrition labels on food or health warnings on cigarettes. They almost always have a direct and tangible safety or administrative justification. Furthermore, political speech is the most protected form of speech in the US by far. I would be astounded if we ever pass legislation compelling platforms like Facebook or Twitter to host content against their will.
I agree that the principles of inclusion and freedom of speech should be upheld by Facebook and Twitter, but I strongly disagree that they should be enforced by the government. I could see wisdom in making ISPs, payment providers, and DNS providers act like utilities and extend services to all lawful customers, but not at the application layer.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_Herald_Publishing_Co._v....
Do remember, it's a democracy. The government by the people, for the people and all that. Not the people VS the government.
No one said that. We can criticize companies for censorship with or without wanting government intervention.
Even if the heavy hand of regulation were applied to private corps, it seems like they'd still draw the line somewhere.
This ship sailed 50 years ago, I'm afraid. Businesses can no longer discriminate (including refusal to serve) on the basis of race, gender, religion, disability, veteran status, and a variety of other factors. Now, this is almost certainly a good thing - there's been a few negative consequences of the change (destruction of black businesses, for one) but on net it's not really close.
So really all people are asking for is "political affiliation" to be looked at like "religion". And honestly, there's a smaller and smaller set of differences between the two categories as the years go by.
the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.
It is censorship. But not all censorship is bad.
pretty much all dictators agree with you on that.
If you think it should be illegal to yell "fire" in a crowded theater, you're a dictator.
If you think it should be illegal to create/sell/distribute child porn, you're a dictator.
Nice false equivalence. The US is divided right now because of bad faith arguments like this.
In which fantasy world is the consolidation of power ever good for a democracy?
Maybe Facebook can join and block in WhatsApp too.
Hey it's free market, private company product yay!
At best it's hypocritical, taking advantage of competition at the market level, but then preventing that competition within your company, then praising one and condemning the other. It's not consistent, platforms need to be platforms and let the information flow instead of control it.
Are you saying companies should comply with whatever market pressures they have regardless of the outcome (given a free market)? Because oil companies have an interesting history of abusing this. Surely there is a line, however blurry, that companies shouldn't be crossing if they want to keep the greater good in mind.
Given that many of these tech "platforms" are worldwide, and have slowly dominated the world's userbase BEFORE changing their policies, it's easy to see they might have already crossed that line, we're just not sure exactly how yet (at least imho).
So are Baidu and Tencent.
Large companies are part of an industrial–congressional complex, with lobbying and political contributions on one side, political approval and threats of regulation on the other.
Just because something is done by a private company, it doesn't mean that it's not the state or the government wielding its power. In the current political climate, and given how intertwined corporations and state power are in the US, trying to maintain a crisp distinction between private companies and public authority is itself comical.
In China as in the U.S., these are not local mom-and-pop stores exercising their rights to free association. These are large tech companies and business ventures that are deeply and inseparably intertwined with the state and the political parties (both of them), based on the granting of reciprocated privileges. They know full well that if they ban the wrong person (or refuse to ban the right person), they face being regulated out of existence the next day: indeed, seeing this threat, they're scrambling to align themselves with the incoming administration. Yes, they had deals with the previous administration too [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/business/media/facebook-d...
Corporations are not beholden to pleasing every single individual.
I’m obviously joking, but would it be okay for me to use my platform this way? If not, why not?
That may work for you, but I like to be educated and have insight.
This is why I browse (some threads on) HN
Keep your friends close, and...
- Twitter has suspended both General Michael Flynn, President Trump's first National Security Adviser, and attorney Sidney Powell. Also less know users.
- Twitch and Snapchat disabled Trump's accounts.
- Shopify took down two online stores affiliated with the president.
- YouTube says it's accelerating its enforcement of voter fraud claims against President Trump and others based on Wednesday's events.
- TheDonald.win lost a host (but has backups)
- Facebook has banned Brandon Straka and removed his #WalkAway campaign on the site, an initiative consisting of over half a million users.
Edit: Not sure why a list of facts is being downvoted?
My take is simple: either treat social media conglomerates like we do telecom or break them up like we did AT&T.
I think this is what they're doing right now. I'd imagine the average voter doesn't care whether Trump is on Twitter or Parler is on the App Store.
These groups are not some good ol boys looking to have measured debate about monetary policy. They are literally trying to kill elected officials and undermine democracy.
More directly, the average voter very clearly seems to care, when you're looking at these actions in an economic light.
Social media companies are indeed large communication platforms. There are a lot of similarities, even if they aren't exactly the same.
Or do you believe that our existing laws that apply to phone companies are somehow a tyrannical infringement on their rights?
I'm troubled by it because right-wing != violent, and 74 million people voted for the republican candidate. Continuing to disenfranchise their speech options will not go well.
If reddit creates a rule stating “do not threaten or advocate for violence” and in the process of enforcing that rule they find out that certain groups are disproportionately affected, should they continue equally apply the rule or should they start tallying things up to make sure they ban equal amounts of each group?
Your freedom to not listen or associate with someone is part of the First Amendment and applies to corporations as much as it applies to you.
People get to say or not say whatever they want, you get to listen or not listen to whoever you want.
A corporation you have chosen to rely on still gets to choose they want to associate with, arbitrarily even.
When the corporation messes up, we can try pressuring them into compliance with our ideals.
What the corporation did is in compliance with my ideals. Good luck with yours.
Removing Section 230 wouldn't have the effect people like to think it would.
Twitter, Facebook, et al just excluded leading conservative voices from the public square.
They are a private company that needs to do business to stay alive. Other companies can choose not to do business with them based on the content that's on their site. If they fail to satisfy their customers, they die.
They cannot satisfy the whims of those who pay nothing and demand a megaphone. They owe you, and your beliefs, nothing.
Maybe if you (or I) were banned from HN, no big deal, find some other corner of the Internet to shout from. FB and Twitter are the modern public fora however, they have through moats or whatever business tactics, made other fora far less significant, and in terms of discussion space they are a very big deal. You might be correctly repeating legal principles as they appear in last year's hornbook, however, the books will eventually change.
If Cloudflare and Google together delisted and deplatformed anyone repeating any words of the President or major conservative leaders -- that would undermine a core tenet of our democratic society. That would be an obvious affront to first principles. I'm not sure FB and Twitter are greatly removed from that hypothetical.
So is the premise of your argument that we should be protecting the less internet savvy from having to learn how to browse the web?
Give me a break. FB/TW shouldn't be required to uphold the public's ability to communicate.
If I build the biggest coffee shop my small town has ever seen and it becomes ridiculously popular, is it the new public square and I'm no longer allowed to kick out people for being assholes?
This "big website is popular so now we must treat it as public space" is a take that I see kicked around but has lots of holes in it.
Frankly, it makes smells like bullshit.
Media was once free and then collapse to be owned by ABC, NBC, CBS and a few dozen newspapers.
This was originally about network neutrality, but it applies to what we're seeing right now:
You can feel free to create your own too. Social media platforms existed before Twitter and Facebook, and eventually other platforms will succeed Twitter and Facebook.
Can it be expensive to start a company from scratch? Yes, it can. But that has always been the case.
But don't fool yourself into thinking my little instances have any sort of effect compared to the big mega-corps of Google/Facebook and Twitter.
As I said, there were social networks before Twitter, Facebook, and Parler, and there will be social networks afterwards.
starting a newspaper is significantly more costly and difficult than starting a social media app. You're confusing the fact that websites like Parler are so toxic that nobody wants to do business with them with the inability of actually starting it, which anyone with a laptop can do on a weekend.
If you cannot install an run your own software on a device, you do not own the device.
You cannot praise the removal of Gab or Parlor now and complain later when they take everything else from you. They can increase the Apple developer fees whenever they want. What happens when they start charging you $2,000 a year or $4,000 a year for the right to publish apps? What happens when the two big platforms decide no one can push an app unless their platform has full moderation.
What happens when Google and Apple, for your safety, say all user contributed content must go through their "spam" filter first for any apps?
This is horrific. You may not like Parlor, but it will not stop here. This is a dangerous place we are in and we should all be horrified by it. People are horrified right now, but they're focused on the wrong thing.
What if the same happens to the Union ...
I am also particularly worried that politicians will use the threat of regulation to coerce companies into suppressing political opponents' messages. The government can't directly ban speech, but if they can intimidate platforms into censuring political opponents they will have achieved the same effect. Better, in fact, because the politicians' agency in this censorship is not visible.
This is an act of great escalation in an already dicey situation.
I hope I'm wrong when I say this will likely beget more violence.
And then, 'correction' camps for people that do not fully fit this new beautiful society.
One woman was shot. 4 others died for medical reasons. One was a heart attack. One was a police officer.
Tragic deaths, to be sure. And the photos really do feel horrific. But do single digit casualties justify all this? Gang violence and crime kills way more people and police officers on a daily basis. Are we really setting the value of our liberal values that low to justify all this censorship and deplatforming?
The events on the 6th, while horrific, have given a handful of big corporations control over national discourse and communication. That scares the daylights out of me. Was this all it took?
When it comes to that event, the real horror is not "single digit casualties" and that is a naive lens to use here. Disrupting a core institution of our representative democracy - certifying the election results for the President of the United States - in an attempt to overthrow the votes and will of the citizens is horrific and chilling.
Shockingly when you flat out say that "They're only sending there criminals" (with regards to Mexico) it has affects on how some people view and thus tread Mexicans and/or brown skinned peoples. Repeatedly, examples similar to this have been expected by the left (myself included) to incite discrimination and violence to groups of people.
So this is, imo, the natural outcome of the President saying that the government is broken beyond belief and that it is a literal stolen election.
So, with all that said i don't entirely disagree with you - BUT, this is far from an isolated incident in my mind. This is repeated escalation.
Not entirely true. Much of it is just plain old politics. This was a massive unforced-error by the President, many of his supporters in congress, and his fanatical base.
Do you recall how many years we heard about Benghazi? How many hearings, investigations, and committees there were? This incident was objectively worse than Benghazi. If the Left were as good at offense as the right, this Jan. 6th attack on our government will be investigated, examined, dissected, and discussed incessantly for at least the next 4 years.
It could have, but the DoD and Trump by extension purposefully weakened security and delayed sending in reinforcements to help.
> The mayor literally went out to protest with them yet nothing happened to him.
Was he violent? Did he break any laws? You realize there were multiple former and current Republican elected officials among the seditionists in DC?
> But some how here the death was by the police shooting the protester and some how this is violent?
Well when you have multiple deaths by violence, yes. The below video I found uncomfortable and disturbing, but I link it to provide evidence this was not a nonviolent protest. https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2021/01/09/officer-crushed-in-...
Don't be so cavalier about what's being lost here. The right to think and to speak freely is a fundamental human right.
it's a pretty common occurrence, historically.
There's a fair point to be made that they'll move on elsewhere, but what if that slightly increased barrier friction is enough to stop them? No harm, no fowl, if that's the case. We traded a small bit of free speech for public safety, the ROI looks good, if it's so.
I would contend it is the latter.
this is the world of techbro-ism with people making 200k per year living in sheltered neighbourhoods, more concerned about their online speech than having a boot on their neck. It's actually completely in line with the audience of this site
the literally most upvoted comment is some random rant about the 'great purge' let that sink in.
“No” and “not many” are the answers so the comparison with widespread attacks on millions of people’s hard won freedoms are (or should be) definitely more of a concern to wider society.
I disagree. I may be wrong, but it would appear that you feel personally attacked. I am not sure how people storming capital AND fighting cops AND leaving pipe bombs in said building want to kill you specifically. I do not see the connection. Are you a staffer/lawmaker/cop there or something?
I recognize that tensions are high, but shouting "literally neo Nazis" is not a great argument in US for a variety of reasons ( not completely unlike antisemitism, it lost some of its punch ).
Unlimited incitement to violence is not sustainable. Banning them for this is the start; America is going to have a long uncomfortable process of dealing with its media.
Pearl clutching? Odd. I've heard people say that all summer long about those afraid of the "peaceful protests" turned violent riots that burned down cities and devastated business. This violence was encouraged by all types of politicians on the left and all the big media networks as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eQzLcO5qhY
A small number of people at an almost entirely non-violent rally, a rally where the president encouraged people to "walk down to the capitol house" .. walk, not riot or loot or burn, a small number of people did something horrifically stupid. Most just walked around, a smaller percentage destroyed stuff. Everyone one of them should be charged if they did.
But you know what I also saw? "Pearl Clutching." Every senator and congressman afraid out of their mind because the villages had come into the castle. The peasants were in the kings court, and the village idiot with a racoon on his head was sitting at the seat of The King's Hand playing with her royal gavel.
You cannot possibly talk about the violence on the 6th, without addressing the fact that the media went on and on and on about praising all the violent "peaceful protestors" all summer long.
It did not matter at all when it was the business owners, the minimum wages workers who lost the jobs at stores now condemned, or those losing everything in lockdowns while Pelosi showed America her ice cream collection in her $14k kitchen setup.
But now that they were causing some minor damage, 1/1000 of the damage the democratic left supporters did on inauguration day 2014:
It's suddenly the worst thing on the planet! Unprecedented even!
America has a long history of its citizens taking federal buildings. The Black Panthers, with an armed militia, took the California Capitol in the 1970s and no one died.
Not comparable. We were close to a congressional decapitation on live TV.
In 2017 a lone left-wing activist caused more Congressional casualties than thousands of militia boys invading the Capitol.
All four of these incidents had white perpetrators, btw. To extrapolate from mainstream Republican positions, we clearly need a complete and total shutdown of all white immigration until we figure out what is going on.
Back to the present day: the climate of lies about the election from Republican leadership up to and including Trump was obviously a factor in the violence in DC. On top of that Trump was there that day, speaking to that crowd immediately before they took action, directly inciting them to violence. There's no deniability to be had.
Appeasement has only emboldened these people to attack America, it's institutions, it's people, and it's values. We must have law and order, and that requires accountability for Trump and his enablers.
Absolutely
> that requires accountability for Trump and his enablers.
Absolutely not. It's words like that that truly frighten me. Have you lost your good sense?
What truly worries me is this part: "his enablers".... what exactly are you saying? That voting for Trump was a crime? That supporting Trump was a crime? That protesting for Trump (but not engaging in violence nor tresspass) was... what.. Terrorism (as the media is now trying to suggest)? No, no it was most definately not. It is very dangerous to use loose words like this which can be interpreted in too many ways, especially now. If you mean to say that Trump committed a specific crime and had co-conspirators, explain it that way and name the conspirators. Otherwise you are going to have a huge percentage of the population believe that you intend to "round them up into camps" or "line them up against the wall" or other things that other very dangerous people have tweeted. Trump supporters will defend themselves, potentially pre-emptively (just like how the war between the states started) and nobody wants that.
I don't associate with a political tribe, I didn't like Trump, and I left America long ago. But I've cautioned my mother who still lives there and who supported Trump all the way (she believes all the nutty theories, but isn't a bad person) that she needs to plan an escape route into Canada. Because I truly fear for her life at this point. Biden and the media keep wrongly using the word "Terrorism" in order to (I'm quite sure) invoke special governmental powers that allow them to suspend all civil and human rights from... who? ... all Trump supporters? And PATRIOT-ACT V2 has landed, all premeditated and prepared, ready for a huge draconian power grab.
Nobody has demonstrated that Trump has committed any crime (AFAIK). I'm sure there will be attempts. But nobody has even pointed to a credible suspected crime (AFAIK). Well respected constitutional lawyers like Alan Dershowitz have weighed in with clear opinion that Trump doesn't need to pardon himself because he has not committed any legally cognisable crime. And that his speeches were not incitement to violence... and Alan gives a long history of speeches that resulted in violence... and America has always punished the violence doers, not speakers, being extremely hesitant to invoke "incitement to violence." In this case it's laughably far from such.. he said walk, he urged peace, he only called for a protest.
But I'm positive many people will attempt to "require accountability for Trump." Go ahead, do so via the court system using the laws of the land. Both political tribes will support that.
They made shields, set a police station on fire, etc, etc. Much worse than the current situation was.
Consistently amazed that people seem to think that as long as you don’t literally say “I am inciting you to commit violence!” it can’t be considered incitement.
It already happened to the left before and it was called the Red Scare of the '50s. It is strange to see the modern left dig up those old repressive practices and adopt the for their own but "those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it" I suppose.
That seems to be GPs point, actually. It's silly when those on the right are pretending that th comparatively minor private exclusion that the more extreme Right is subjected to might sometime be directed at the Left. The Left is used to much worse, at the hands of the State along with private exclusion, routinely.
All this is going to do is create a real market for more decentralisation and censorship resistance, we have a modicum of control now but that's going to evaporate with the next iteration of the web if this trajectory continues
The right is much more inclined to agree with the characterization that it's mostly terrorists we're killing or that why are civilians around them.
To what some on the right might object is why are we spending all this money on this, which they might even arrive at ultimately the same conclusion as the left but for a different reason.
Even copblock, something both of the more socially liberal wings of the political spectrum can appreciate, has been banned multiple times.
This is the free market in action. No one is forcing Google or Twitter or FB to do anything; I think they've been very restrained. The libertarians should be happy that it's commercial companies shutting Parler down and not govt. It's only when the president incites violence in an attempt retain power that these commercial entities acted.
Parler is not going to be shut down now. Whoever made this decision, just literally gave them Trump base users on a silver platter.
Businesses don’t have any right to force other businesses to carry their products.
An acceptable compromise I think would be to have unlisted apps that can’t be found on the top charts or in search but can be installed via the App Store with a link.
Hard not to be alarmed by the pattern here.
Edit: Maybe it was AT&T, not Samsung, but if so that's a broader scope anyway - and my current AT&T Android phone isn't locked down.
Okay.
Then hosting providers refuse to host.
Payment processors refuse to process your payments for web services.
Your domains are revoked.
Your SSL certs are revoked.
Where does this end? If they have the power to, and they've justified it this far, why wouldn't they keep going?
The answer is relying on corporate sponsored freedoms is not enough. Open source tools and communication technologies need to be available.
Rather, we're talking about whether or not the government should forcibly allow/deny corporations from supporting extremists. This has nothing to do with government control, imo.
What about the hosting company’s freedom of speech rights? If a hosting company doesn’t want to host your site, that’s their decision. If they don’t want to be associated with a site or app or spend their resources, that’s their decision.
These aren’t regulated monopolies that have to serve all customers.
Now, if you want to claim that they should be a regulated market — that’s a whole other discussion.
Do you feel the same way about a company refusing to serve Jews or Blacks? Is it their right?
Great, I cannot wait!
For business discrimination in general, maybe.
For specifically constraining the expressive freedom of media (including social media) businesses, quite plausibly not, because a statute designating a protected class can't negate other people’s First Amendment rights, since the Constitution is superior to statute law.
Of-course this can be challenged in the courts. Well, unless, it's protected by 230.
Trying to conflate 230 here is disingenuous and has no role in a strictly business decision about whether of not a business has to accept a customer.
Political affiliation is a protected class in some states[0].
California[1], for example, also prohibits discrimination on gender identity, ancestry, sexual orientation, AIDS/HIV status, medical condition, political activities or affiliation, veteran status, or status as a stalking victim.
[0] https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/discrimin...
[1] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/california-employmen...
[0] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/california-employmen...
I did some further searches; Madison, Wisconsin[0] and DC[1] forbid discrimination on political affiliation in public accommodations.
[0] https://library.municode.com/wi/madison/codes/code_of_ordina...
Surely, this should all be just OK by your logic ?
Yet you seem to advocate more government control. You see the dichotomy in your thoughts?
However, there clearly is a small number of players in mobile platforms, cloud, and payment, and they act in a unified way. It has been sufficient.
Sure, there are in fact only a small number of players in this space.
>cloud
There are vast amounts of hosting providers. A quick google suggests over 300k, but that sounds somewhat unlikely.
>payment
There are a thousands of banks in the world, most of Europe manages just fine using bank transfers for payments without involving external payment processors.
>It's sufficient to push undesirables to services which are more expensive, more inconvenient, unreliable, and so on. Relegate them to their internet ghetto.
Is this really a problem? That's just the inherent nature of being undesirable.
Yes, there are cryptocurrencies available, so if we can fully legalize it and promise that we don't touch anyone's private transactions (as well as businesses officially accepting crypto) - that would be an argument.
For better understanding how bad it is: it's non trivial to even accept worldwide payments for small business/individual in the internet if you are, say, from Ukraine, Russia, China or lots of other countries not processed by stripe/paypal for some political or legal reasons. Apart from that, there is a "free" market of two payment processors in the internet and two card processors =)
It's perfectly normal in Europe to pay for your ecommerce purchases with a bank transfer directly to the merchants account. There are thousands of banks out there, there's no monopoly or oligopoly at play.
If a business closes because nobody is interested in buying their products, or a club disbands because nobody is interested in joining, or a pub bars a patron who’s starting fights and nobody blinks an eye. The same thing happens on the internet and suddenly it’s the end of the world.
I agree with this, and your analysis of the inaccessible cost of those devices people truly can own and control. However, I do not think this is an accurate parallel to the many horrifying political events of this week.
What you're witnessing is culture expressing itself, rooted in history, the law, the zeitgeist of the people. And right now the culture is drawing a line in the sand and saying, "don't do that (bigotry, racism, ignorance)". You are free to be on this side of the line or you can start a revolution. So far the good guys are winning. Not Dems or Republicans, but sane people.
Those in power, people here and the arrogance of many others have created an entire generation of people who've been banished, shunned or shouted down any time they had a differing opinion on anything. I personally am done dealing with this bullshit and the problems that have been inflicted on society. I'm done being quiet and, personally, I'd rather join the damned than continue this circus. I'm willing to put everything on the table to end this and ensure that this will never happen again. EVERYONE deserves a voice and a platform; you are more than free to not listen.
We just suffered a textbook seditious conspiracy against the United States, which was planned on Parler and thedonald dot win. Is there a chance that Google's decision to remove Parler from their app store will only throttle the spread of Parler? Have you heard of the slippery slope fallacy? [1] And if so, why doesn't the prohibition of apps for child pornography produce the harms you cite?
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-di...
Evidence generally supports the notion that deplatforming works. If you remove people from your platform, they generally end up scattered across other platforms or new platforms in smaller numbers. “Alternative” platforms are more likely to collapse, which just makes things worse.
Think about this—when was the last time you heard about Alex Jones or Milo Yiannopoulos? What happened to r/fatpeoplehate or r/watchpeopledie? If you want to find these communities, where do you go? You have to search them out. Maybe you check out one of the chans. Maybe you go searching for Discord invites. But you still keep a Reddit and YouTube account, of course. You keep using Twitter and Instagram and Facebook even though the communities you want are deplatformed.
Most people don’t go through the effort. The communities end up fractured. The alternative platforms like Parler and Voat are often worse for exactly the same reasons that they exist in the first place. That’s why deplatforming succeeds.
I pointed out a class of apps that are banned and asked why we haven't slipped down the slope they described.
> if so, why doesn't the prohibition of apps for child pornography
Forgive me, I was obviously mistaken to bring up freedom of speech or to claim that you were conflating apps/sites that allow freedom of speech with those that allow child pornography.
/s
Edit: fixed my egregious typos.
Of course you are not allowed to possess or distribute explicit photos of actual minors (the same way you are not allowed to possess or distribute human kidneys, or for that matter copies of Windows XP): fortunately, none of these acts are speech, even under extreme straw men versions of free speech absolutism. Easy test: you are still able to convey any of your thoughts/opinions and make absolutely _any_ point to any audience without inconvenience even if you don't resort to these activities.
If the state would use its influence to get one single bookstore in Bumsworth, Arizona to stop selling one specific book on repairing video cameras [2], that would certainly be a free speech issue, and it would certainly violate the First Amendment.
Yes, even if the book remained available in every other bookstore across the nation, and every book discussing other ways of repairing video cameras would remain available for sale in Bumsworth. Just imagine a state attorney trying to use that as a defense, to explain why the "No Video Camera Repairs in Bumsworth Act" does not violate the First Amendment. It would be ridiculous.
You're trying to use the same defense while the leaders of the largest soon-to-be-opposition party are banned en masse in an effort to align industry with the incoming new administration, while people with significant cred [1], who happen to be on bad terms with opposition party in question [3] denounce the whole thing as an "unacceptable act of censorship".
[1] https://nypost.com/2021/01/09/russian-dissident-alexei-naval... https://twitter.com/navalny/status/1347969772177264644
[2] more pertinently, a book about the acts of the Catholic Church in Bumsworth, or the mafia connections of the mayor of Bumsworth
[3] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-05/donald-trump-us-has-n...
Of course not. The medium
The current state of affairs offers nothing more granular than shutting down all of Parler in response to their failure to moderate this speech effectively.
If you can go on there and convince a single person that the election was legitimate, that ballot security measures make it impossible for their beliefs to be true, and that Biden was legitimately elected, it's possible for the proposition "free and open discussion can diffuse false ideas" to be valid, but if you can't, then you might want to reevaluate.
How do you think civil wars start? And how many actual wars have been started by lies? Usually by the instigating government or yellow press, but in this case it's DIY yellow press letting people make up their own lies.
Comparing ~70 million Americans to paedophiles...
You do realize, both sides of America think the other side is radicalized. This was literally the reaction on Trump's first day of office:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXR3d22BhHs
Have you forgotten about that? Does that look anything like the 6th? No, of course it doesn't. Had those people been let into the State House, it may have burned to the ground in 2017!
> insufficiently moderated community
Section 230 was put in place because it's difficult to moderate effectively when you're trying to launch a startup. Are you saying no one can launch a social network unless they have the money and staff to moderate each an every single post that comes in?
On Wednesday, while our elected Representatives and Senators were in the process of finalizing the count of the US election, armed Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol. Several of these people were carrying zip-tie handcuffs and were hunting for Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer. 5 people died in this insurrection attempt. Here's the video of the QAnon insurrectionist who was shot by the Capitol Police as she was breaking into the area where our elected Reps and Senators had retreated to.
This was an attempt to overthrow our government, and it's a matter of luck that our legislators weren't executed by this mob. Attempting to "Both Sides" this is intellectually dishonest, as a riot in the streets is a categorically different thing than a seditious conspiracy that involved the violent disruption of the finalization of results from our election.
> Are you saying no one can launch a social network unless they have the money and staff to moderate each an every single post that comes in?
I'm not intimately familiar with Section 230, but I don't want my country destroyed. If Google and Apple facilitate distribution of a toxic product that destroys my country, that's a problem for me.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2021/01/08/ash...
ADB doesn't require individual clearance from Google, you can install any apk you like. In fact you don't even need ADB, you can just install an apk downloaded from the web if you uncheck "only verified sources" in settings. Google is merely removing Play Store convenience (and distribution channel safety). Providing that Play Store convenience costs them real dollars for computing resources and they chose to not do that anymore for the app in question.
Without this use case people won't realize why open source matters, or phones without control matters, etcetc. While i don't agree with Trump or his party actions, this definitely is waking thousands of people up to how easily even Americans are censored.
This realization is crucial to privacy focused applications, imo.
Either you control your device, or your device will be used to control you.
In most countries in the world, you can go to jail for saying the wrong thing. This includes countries which are, for all practical purposes, freer than the USA -- like Germany, which hasn't renazified since WWII in part because of its hate speech laws.
So no, not everybody recognizes that unfettered expression is a universal good. There are places which have already experienced the danger of free-speech absolutism.
The US has a number of troops stationed in Germany comparable to the German army. The ideology of Germany has not been left to chance at any point after WWII.
That probably isn't the model that most people look for in their own country's governance.
Maybe the so called free speech absolutists are not as principled as they say.
It is absolutely censorship. It's textbook, dictionary, censorship. Take wikipedia's great opening paragraph:
>Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient." Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions, and other controlling bodies.
In my opinion it's especially egreoious, requiring remedy, if the censorious actor has a large amount of control over a medium of communication. In this case google dwarfs perhaps governments.
No, they are technically incorrect. As other posters have pointed out, it literally is censorship. Whether a private company or government is doing it is irrelevant to the definition of that term.
If not, then why is the removal of an app from the app store censorship? The world wide web still exists. Parler is still on the internet.
Seems like there should be some acknowledgement that there's a difference between refusing to actively participate in distributing content and censorship.
Say you had two stores: Walmarket and Toget. That's it. That's all you got. Toget stops telling a brand of ice cream and you literally cannot sell it anywhere else other than Toget and Walmarket because someone would have to drive 2 hours out of their way each time to buy your Ice Cream.
You have Android, iOS and PinePhones.
Where I live there is indeed no importer of certain brands of products that I could easily get in the US. Not even an equivalent alternative.
But life goes on and aside from me complaining about it on the internet every now and then I don’t let it bother me.
Social media and communication are a different beast.
I mean, Parler is a CRUD app. You are posting a comment on another CRUD app that doesn't even have an official mobile app client!
Let's not kid ourselves. People rarely use the browser for something they really like on mobile if there is a native app. The experience is very different.
Facebook and Twitter are older than push notifications. SMS and email are pretty obvious replacements with little functional difference.
> Let's not kid ourselves. People rarely use the browser for something they really like on mobile if there is a native app. The experience is very different.
Sure, but you are pretty clearly moving the goalposts. Is it any more difficult to enter "news.ycombinator.com" into a mobile web browser than it is to download a mobile client?
There is also ongoing work to add Push API [0] support on the web as well. No Safari support though.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API
Can't service workers/PWAs handle this? While the UI may be subpar, they still have total access to it.
And as much as I dislike the Catholic Church, not allowing it to list books it finds heretical is outright restrictions of its freedom of speech. It’s only a problem when the church has the power to have governments also ban those lists, but that’s quite a different thing.
This is assuming services like Cloudflare and hosting services won't cut Parler - they've done this before
Which is to say, it's true, & that's a good thing, but that doesn't mean that the censorship itself isn't bad.
The most effective, most powerful communication medium that exists right now is native apps for social networks on smartphones. If 100% of that medium is controlled and censored by two companies, that means those two companies exert a massive influence on what kinds of communication society as a whole will have.
If you believe in the general principle of free speech (not just strict legal interpretations of say the 1A), that's not a good thing.
That's practically illegal now, too. What a time to be alive...
The better analogy is that the newspaper has banned certain people who have written articles inciting violence.
Or maybe an even better analogy: the movie theater has taken the microphone away from the person telling those in the crowded movie theater to start punching each other.
My analogy is far more accurate than your tortured newspaper analogy. Parlour still gets to publish unrestricted as a web site and as web apps, it just doesn’t get free distribution, marketing and hosting from Google or Apple.
Except you can sideload on Android.
And this is yet another escalation on the road that started with “we’re just going to censor tweets that literally say the sky is green.” Google has banned an entire social network.
It’s exactly what social conservatives did back when they controlled the levers of government and industry in the mid-20th century. They prevented liberals from spreading their ideas, because that could cause social unrest, violence, etc. (And there was violence, such as anarchist leftist bombings.)
That’s freedom in both directions.
At its worst Hollywood created a black list for alleged communist sympathizers. That was a very specific kind of rating system for the same benefits. Most Americans were justly terrified of the Soviet Union and its genocidal leadership at the time, and distributing a film written by or starring someone who publicly endorsed communism would have killed box office and likely had the studio boycotted by large anti-communist groups.
That said, the black list unfairly included lots of people who were at most interested in social justice.
Today the same thing has happened to Mel Gibson and us happening to Johnny Depp. Don’t expect your employers to invest their millions into help you promote repugnant behavior or beliefs to their customers.
"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
And actually, the more I think about it, this is a more apt analogue to what's happening with Paler then first engages the mind...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest#:~....
censorship of viewpoints you disagree with means you don’t understand the point of freedom of speech.
If WalMart sold ice cream to white people, but not to black people, that would be pretty awful both morally and it would be illegal.
The thing with speech is it is inherently attached to a person. There is no speech in a vacuum. Google has basically said that certain people shouldn't be able to speak. As politics is a personal belief like religion, it is sad it is not a protected civil right. But that's what this is--saying certain people can express their beliefs, but others can't.
What makes this scary is not that stores are choosing what products to sell. What makes it scary is that, at least in this segment of the economy, there are exactly two stores, and picking at least one of them to shop at is very nearly a precondition for participating in modern society. This gives Google and Apple a degree of influence over peoples' lives that one could quite reasonably recognize as quasi-governmental, and that is worrisome.
Isn’t this what android users have boasted of for so long to apple fans? There isn’t only one store. In the case of Parlor, you can probably just use a browser even.
Just because you have to go directly to the website doesn't mean it's censored. Google, Apple, FB, Twitter, etc are not in the business of supporting outlier extremism in our society. Claiming censorship because they don't want to platform that stuff is ridiculous.
Imagine a Jewish-owned store being forced to sell nazi paraphernalia because not selling it is censorship. The users of parler or gab are just mad these huge companies are taking a stand. Engaging with their tantrum only gives them a platform, even if it's just a small personal one, and is clearly bad. Do we argue with crazies on the street yelling "The end is nigh!" every day? No.
I don't buy the analogy ( mostly because most analogies are crap ). Normal people try thought experiments and use the same situations and change one critical piece of information to see how it affects the model.
Portland 01/02/21 - reports of molotov cocktails, fireworks, fires - I don't know about you, but use of explosive materials does tend to sound violent. You don't really come with a firebomb with no intent to use it.
Seatle 07/27/20 - reports of fires, 59 injured officers
Kenosha 08/25/20 - riots, destruction of property including fires including courthouse, incitement for more violence
I don't think I have to mention Chicago or NY..
And this is just a cursory check.
In BLM defense, they initially suffered from the same issues anonymous did. Literally anyone could be their spokesporson so right wing media got lovely quotes about purpose and goals of BLM such as ( some of those come from their official website ):
-Destruction comes before rebuilding, that’s what we talking about here -“Yes, I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should also come down,” the activist posted via Twitter on Monday. “They are a form of white supremacy. Always have been.”“Tear them down.” -We believe and understand that Black people will never achieve liberation under the current global racialized capitalist system. -‘we will burn down this system’ -'MacCallum asked Newsome what Black Lives Matter hoped to achieve through violence." “Wow, it’s interesting that you would pose that question like that,” Newsome responded, “because this country is built upon violence. What was the American Revolution? What’s our diplomacy across the globe?”
Now you will note that their website is cleaned up and no longer contains notes about - forgot what terminology they used - abandoning existing familial structures and building new utopian world. It is a shame they took it down. It could open some eyes. I guess someone told them they need rebranding.
So maybe you are right. They are different after all. BLM is worse that Trump crazies. At least Capitol assholes will be picked up by various agencies and prosecuted. BLM members may have been arrested, but various Dem operatives ensured they are out as soon as possible. Hell, some were raising money for bails.
In other words, I do not think you have a clear picture of BLM, who they are, or even what they were doing.
So I this my comparison is valid.
When a small number of companies make it difficult to communicate via our main communication device, and there are no viable alternatives, then a fundamental right is being suppressed.
There is no marketplace of ideas when there is no marketplace,
Amplifying it would be pasting images and links to Parler all over the Google Play splash page and all over the Google Play website, sending emails to all its gmail users to download Parler, or inserting Parler ads into some % of its ad impressions.
They aren't doing that. "Leave it alone" is not the same thing as amplification, that's literally the distinction that is made in Section 230.
The ONLY thing being asked for is that Parler polices itself (or the authorities get involved where appropriate), and that Google and Apple leave it be because all they do is serve as the conduit to get it onto the device they control.
That is the way the world SHOULD work. No it doesn't give you the adrenaline rush of enforcing your desires on the world, but that's not a good thing to be enabling in the first place.
If they had no control over the stores used to get apps on devices, the whole question would be moot. Their duopoly leads to this issue. Frankly, that control should be taken away.
People are calling for AWS to drop Parler, and Parler has already come out and said if this happens, then Parler itself is gone forever.
Then why not ban Twitter as well? I could show you hundreds of tweets from little known left-wing activists inciting violence during the BLM protests. This double standard tells us that the rationale given for banning Parler is just an excuse. The real reason is that executives in these companies are doing what their most vocal employees and the liberal media are pressuring them to do.
After all, you don't see people clamoring in shock and about "unsettled" feelings regarding the moderation that happens here on HN.
Who could have possibly predicted it?
Parlour can still distribute itself as a web app, no problem.
Censorship: the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.
A private business not distributing a product because it doesn’t represent their or their customers values isn’t censorship, it’s a marketing decision.
If Walmart decides to stop carrying Coke because of its sugar content, is that “censorship”?
If a girl decides not to date you, is that censorship of your free speech rights to bore her?
The advocates for Parlours right of distribution don’t actually believe in individual rights, or they would argue it has to be imposed on the App Stores.
And this was indeed done because it was considered politically unacceptable and a threat to security.
> A private business not distributing a product because it doesn’t represent their or their customers values isn’t censorship, it’s a marketing decision.
The problem is your thinking that those two are some exclusionary.
The censorship that most company practice is of course for financial gain.
> The advocates for Parlours right of distribution don’t actually believe in individual rights, or they would argue it has to be imposed on the App Stores.
Nor does their believing in free speech or not have anything to do with whether this is censorship.
What does discretion in the products a restaurant sells have to do with the customers it sells to?
Whataboutisms galore.
Parler need to remove this content. This isn't Google and Apple censoring political views. It's a demand for Parler to remove illegal content.
1. Trump is a popular public figure that has been tweeting against Democrats for the past decade.
2. Trump runs for office, and immediately starts calling into question mainstream media and election integrity.
3. Trump wins the election, and his voters accept his premise that the media cannot be trusted. They turn to him as their sole voice of reason.
4. Given that they believe everything spoon fed to them by Trump, they cannot accept alternatives.
5. The voice of Trump is amplified by his followers across the internet (and this is aided by complicit Republican in and out of government.)
6. When Trump wins, they believe that he won the election. When he loses, they cannot accept it and instead choose to believe the word of Trump.
Should this voice of Trump be forced by the U.S. government to be supported by every public and private corporation to continue the Trump movement?
Would drowning out all other media and sources of information be the ideal way forward for the United States?
It is a clear and present danger.
Radical ideas have always looked for ways to spread around and influence people. As in with any idea, there are good ones (Why should a worker not have paid holidays, or days off, or have work life balance, education rights, voting rights, etc) and bad ones (the ones we see espoused by many radical right wingers like the claimed inferiority of the black race and the superiority of the white race)
Now, 74 million Americans voted for a vision of trump, that mixes a lot of good ideas with some very terrible ones. And out of the 74 million voters for him, I am sure many of them voted for the promise of jobs, stability, incomes, etc. Unfortunately, a significant & vocal minority of his supporters have shown hard right and often immoral ideas.
In the past, messaging and reach was a carefully cultivated art practiced by seasoned politicians and ideologists.
Today, the situation is different. It is very very easy to gather people into a group, isolate them and radicalize them. You see it happening everyday on the social media.
What, then, is the solution to this? It is a problem because a society must be coherent and move forward together, otherwise it fractures and implodes from within.
For a society, there are many aspects that affect it's prosperity. Jobs, distribution of wealth, prevalence of opportunities, justice, etc.
If you have allow one small section of ideologues hijack the conversation and demand for continuation of radicalization, that society will collapse. Just think about Nazism, Stalinism, etc. All those societies had one thing in common, the ability to radicalize and brainwash population.
So what about Parler? Banning is the right thing to do.
Out of those 74 million who voted, they have avenues like FB, Twitter, IG, etc to engage and communicate.
That small group who wants to radicalize the society, have their voices cut off, and that is how it should be.
I would like to point out that Nazism and Stalinism are localized versions of the same thing: fascism. trump is the current leader of American Fascism. He should have his voice on major platforms cut off.
What people don't seem to realize about democracy is that fascism is the weak point.
If you're only exposed to right-wing media, you only see left-wing radicalisation.
Both tribes are convinced that the other is dangerously radical.
We are now at the point where we have to block violent fascists from organizing the overthrow of our democracy, and that requires deplatforming. We had a peaceful resolution to this in February of 2020, but the GOP chose this path instead.
I think most of us didn't fully realize until this week the consequences of not conceding would be this bad.
"true threat" is where you have actual proof those threats arent empty rhetoric, like you know, people shouting about overthrowing the government and then storming Parliament while armed, with resulting causalities.
[1] https://twitter.com/YourAnonCentral/status/13473740754552299...
It seems like the basic political discourse you find on twitter, fb and every other social media system, both red and blue posters, at pretty much the same level of intelligence; I'm really not seeing anything there that doesn't equally merit the banning of, well, every other social media app.
[1] https://twitter.com/slpng_giants/status/1347190280492089344
I mean shit we just went through 4 years of liberals and conservatives fighting over this shit dramatically all over twitter -- I'm really struggling to find the new extremes you're finding in these; the only thing I can figure is you're giving it more weight because this topic translated into physical activity, where most such content just flames up digitally and dies out
Google doesn’t just randomly grow a set of morals and balls after a decade of silence about similar behavior by/on Twitter, fb, yikyak, tiktok, Snapchat, etc.
Hell, even encouragement if you count things like planning terrorist attacks and successfully killing/harming dozens on WhatsApp, and not immediately banning the application, as well as probably every communication system available on the phone.
Not being great at enforcing rules on social media is not on the same level as intending not to have those rules.
Equating private with public messaging is ridiculous. Not sure how laws are in the US, but when doing support here in germany we had to have private in-game messages reported by a participant before we were even allowed to look at them. The company obviously had a much easier time shaping the atmosphere in the public forum.
And if you only care about outcomes like never having a terrorist attack... well, I don't see how this could ever happen without in-depth control by government or the like. China-style is probably the closest example we have, and that's not a trade-off i would want to make.
https://twitter.com/EthanKrue/status/1347374487117946888
(Re-)Storming the whitehouse on Jan 20, planning on twitter.
Well that is one way to normalize Facist murderous wrecks and their abhorrent ideas.
https://twitter.com/CustomsFatman/status/1163877317208264705... https://twitter.com/kxxtcxcxxnx/status/1322190172872712192?s... https://twitter.com/AlmightyBoob/status/97830880193691649?s=...
Its almost as if you just searched for the phrase execute all conservatives but didn't actually read any of them.
> Just a cursory glance on Twitter
You chose one specific instance to be the molehill to stand on, lacking substantive argument to fight for anything more than pedantry.
Since content isn’t premoderated it’s obvious that it will always be some of that content.
The banning of this app isn’t because there are death threats but because Parler couldn’t present a moderation strategy to uphold their own ToS.
Maybe, or maybe they just don't like Parler. I'm skeptical whether a serious attempt to clean up violent speech would ever satisfy these platforms, especially when what constitutes violent speech is determined by people who are extremely ideologically hostile and uncharitable towards you (eg. see how Twitter construed Trump's last tweets.) But we'll never know because I don't expect such a reform effort to be made.
Liberal pundits are saying similar about conservatives ... elected officials call for disruption in the street, 4chan has crazy stuff, yaddha yaddha.
We have incitement and conspiracy laws. We have an FBI and Secret Service that really take this stuff seriously and are well financed. If anything these posts make it easier for them to keep an eye on the tiny percentage of loudmouths that might actually do something.
There’s a cost to all this ease of expression, to be sure. Maybe people can be radicalized more easily, and that sucks.
But we’ve built this whole society on erring in favor of more free expression, and by and large this value has been a tremendous success, where the downsides are absolutely crushed by the up side.
Nothing will be an unmitigated good but in this case it’s pretty clear where the balance lies, and what these companies are doing -as we speak- isn’t the winning choice, for anyone involved.
and how many times has that led to storming the US Capitol building with guns and bombs?
How do we know the capitol thing wouldn’t have happened anyway?
The content isn’t the issue. The question is: would Twitter moderate that content when it breaks their ToS? Apple and Google consider Twitters moderation efforts good enough.
"In order to protect user safety on Google Play, our longstanding policies require that apps displaying user-generated content have moderation policies and enforcement that removes egregious content like posts that incite violence. All developers agree to these terms and we have reminded Parler of this clear policy in recent months. We're aware of continued posting in the Parler app that seeks to incite ongoing violence in the U.S. We recognize that there can be reasonable debate about content policies and that it can be difficult for apps to immediately remove all violative content, but for us to distribute an app through Google Play we do require that apps implement robust moderation for egregious content. In light of this ongoing and urgent public safety threat, we are suspending the app's listings from the Play Store until it addresses these issues." Google Spokesperson
edit: axios attributes the statement** to José Castañeda
* https://twitter.com/viaCristiano/status/1347705178699558912
** https://www.axios.com/capitol-mob-parler-google-ban-826d808d...
So they don't allow browser apps? You can access parler/gab/tdw from Chrome.
The interesting question is whether they are doing it out fear of anti trust action from Democrats or weren’t doing it for the last four years out of fear of Republicans.
More like excuse :)
Or, maybe the CIA just manipulated the blue into doing this! Conspiracy inception!
The cops didn't just let them in. The protesters pushed past the main barricades.
After the cordon had been broken, the police retreated back towards the Capitol building.
The police repeatedly did this until they were completely overwhelmed by the protesters.
One police officer died in the melee and several others sustained injuries.
The failure on the day was one of leadership and intelligence, but the poor guys on the ground did their best.
https://twitter.com/elijahschaffer/status/134696651499014963...
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnewsvideo/comments/krvssn/trum...
https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/krvboi/clas...
> Speaker 1: There were a couple of groups that busted through, but other than that, I mean it was almost like they let everybody else through, like once a group kind of busted through just trying [inaudible] mad
> Speaker 2: They were just trying to run away [inaudible]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=52&v=BUE4TCLlv-c
As they admit, the mob broke through part of the police lines, so the police retreated back to the Capitol building. Doing otherwise, would have allowed the remaining officers on the line to be encircled by the elements of the mob that had already broken through.
In any event, nobody is all that mad that the Trump supporters made their way to the steps of the Capitol building, the central issue is that they actually broke into the building and started marauding and threatening its occupants.
Your video does not allege that the Capitol Police let the protesters into the Capitol building. Rather, both your video and the ones I provided show they clearly did not. The mob made it in by climbing walls and scaffolding and smashing through windows and doors.
Your video tries to blames Antifa, but that is completely illogical. True, it shows several people within the crowd decrying the forced entry and blaming Antifa, but yet somehow scores of confirmed Trump supporters made it inside the Capitol building.
Did the Trump supporters just happen to be on a tour inside the building when Antifa broke down the doors? Did Antifa somehow force them to rampage through the place, beat police officers, steal, and vandalise property?
Blocking parler does jack shit in stopping people’s ability to coordinate violence. Mass texts, email chains, WhatsApp, signal, 4chan boards, etc are all there.
It definitely helps. Just because people can coordinate using other mediums is not an argument against making it more difficult for them.
The simple explanation is usually the correct one: Parler's growing so fast that it simply can't keep up with policing the content. They need to add a lot more moderators and things will calm down.
Google and Apple are making a mistake.
The hypocrisy is unbelievable. This will not end well.
"Two out of three Democrats also claim Russia tampered with vote tallies on Election Day to help the President – something for which there has been no credible evidence."
The chronology of Russian involvement with and around the Trump campaign, illegal or not, is pretty damn well established now thanks to the Mueller report, disclosures from other parallel cases, and the recent senate committee report. Changing vote counts isn't part of it.
Meanwhile, as per YouGov [https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...] "One in five voters - including 45% of Republicans - approve of the storming of the Capitol building"
Amazing! Then please explain where they got that idea put into their heads?
"Two out of three Democrats also claim Russia tampered with vote tallies on Election Day to help the President – something for which there has been no credible evidence."
https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
If you're trying to pin something on me, keep in mind that I'm not even American, let alone a Democrat.
"Those on the political left who play fast and loose with the term “hacked,” as in “Russia hacked the 2016 presidential election,” are aiding the Kremlin in its mission of undermining Americans’ faith in the democratic process, two University of Kansas researchers write in a new scholarly paper.
...
The authors lay the blame for this problem at the feet of the liberal media, which they define as media that liberals consume, including the Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC.
They wrote, “We demonstrate that the insular nature of much of the liberal media ... enabled the spread of this misleading definition. Through a rhetorical analysis of texts defining Russia’s influence campaign as ‘hacking,’ we demonstrate that Twitter and the publications produced by the liberal media were highly influential in creating the widespread notion that Russia ‘hacked’ the election.”"
An example of a name: Biden Appointee Neera Tanden: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/biden-appointee-neera-tande...
> Neera Tanden So one person subject to an extremely obvious narrative-driven article by someone who clearly has an agenda on this issue? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Greenwald#Donald_Trump_a...
Her tweets are stupid, but quite frankly her response to Greenwald he shows in his own article is a fair response.
Amazing how lightly you brush off spreading a baseless conspiracy as long as it's your side doing it.
https://elizabethwarren.com/plans/strengthening-democracy
>The harsh truth is that our elections are extremely vulnerable to attack: Forty-two states use voter registration databases that are more than a decade old. Laughably, in 2019, some still use Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Twelve states still use paperless machines, meaning there’s no paper trail to verify vote counts. Some states don’t require post-election audits. And ten states don’t train election officials to deal with cybersecurity threats. This is a national security threat, and three years after a hostile foreign power literally attacked our democracy, we’ve done far too little to address it.
I mean, even this very place always had a history of distrusting voting machines, etc.
I think protest is a fundamental requirement of democracy, and as Chris Cuomo himself reminded us: protest aren't always peaceful [1]. It seems like a lot of Democrats are conveniently forgetting that all of a sudden.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/202...
https://apnews.com/article/capitol-police-reject-federal-hel...
Your recent posts have been using HN primarily for political battle. Please don't do that—it's against the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and it's the line across which we start banning accounts (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), regardless of which politics they're battling for. The reason is that it basically destroys what HN is supposed to exist for, which is curious conversation on a wide range of topics.
Also worth noting that there was no property damage or injuries in more than 97 to 98% of protests[1]
[1]: https://today.uconn.edu/2020/10/study-2020-protests-shows-di...
Well, in the middle of Seattle. It's not clear whether chaz intended to secede from the US or merely Seattle policing; their demands were certainly very local so I suspect they really had no intention of leaving the US itself.
https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/protests/seattle-pr...
This isn't a fair representation of what happened and it reveals your bias. For one example, it appears a police officer was murdered with a fire extinguisher. We don't even have to get to what might have happened if the politicians weren't able to get out in time.
I also think the guy who shot that unarmed woman has no business wearing a uniform and carrying a weapon.
And if it wasn't 100 people spilling over a barrier (actually, the police pulled the barriers away and literally waved them in - explain that one to me) and entering a government building and disrupting an important session... then what was it?
I don't know what you are basing this on. He was apparently the last line of defense between the mob and some of the politicians the mob was trying to attack. Who knows what would have happened if they got through that door and he didn't act. There could have easily been a serious hostage situation.
>And if it wasn't 100 people spilling over a barrier (actually, the police pulled the barriers away and literally waved them in - explain that one to me) and entering a government building and disrupting an important session... then what was it?
Cops aren't apolitical. I guarantee there were plenty of people involved in security that sided with the insurrectionists. And that is exactly what it was, insurrection. They were trying to and were temporarily able to disrupt the function of the government recognizing the rightful next president.
Did this crowd of "insurrectionists" actually threaten anyone? There are reports someone set a couple of pipe bombs, but not in the building, and the FBI is investigating it and has offered a $50K reward, but inside the building, it was kooks and protesters who were pretty quickly rounded up and arrested. I don't condone what they did at all, but comparing it to burning down buildings like in Portland and Atlanta... the mind boggles at this moral equivalency. True mob violence did not occur on January 6, and thank God for that.
Wednesday's insurrectionists were trying to stop the recognition of the next president and take control by force. You can look through this Twitter thread for examples[1]. People entered the House Chamber armed with some sort of weapon and carrying flex cuffs. These aren't "people spilling over a barrier". They are insurrectionists that attempted to literally take our government hostage. The intent here was drastically more serious than any of the BLM protests.
[1] - https://twitter.com/jsrailton/status/1347011413101998080
Sure, that's the same as people angry when theyre throwing stones at cops after killing them in sleep. I don't support BLM violence, just that your view is showing some bias towards a particular narrative - I think you should see the storming of the US Capitol as massively symbolic thing that has shaken the world.
There have been multiple riots over multiple police-involved killings in multiple locations in the last decade.
So yes, what they did was far worse. They claimed to be defending the constitution while in fact they were using force to stop a constitutionally-mandated process: certifying the electoral vote. They were incited to do this by the President of the United States. None of this has ever happened before in America.
Over the summer, 8 men were arrested for plotting to kidnap the Governor of Michigan. There were multiple people with zip tie handcuffs in their possession in the Capitol. What do you think their aims were?
Open your eyes and see how truly insane Wednesday was, please.
> There were multiple people with zip tie handcuffs in their possession in the Capitol.
Maybe to tie some people up? Guess what the intent is of the people that have bombs and guns.
As Senator Graham pointed out in his speech, the security failure was so catastrophic that it could have been the death of the entire house, the senate, and the Vice President (lots of people with large backpacks inside that could have been loaded with explosives).
If there was any serious attempt at an actual overthrow it would have been a much worse day.
Also worth noting that there was no property damage or injuries in more than 97 to 98% of protests[1]
[1]: https://today.uconn.edu/2020/10/study-2020-protests-shows-di...
Some of the Lafayette Square protestors would have breached the white house if they could have too. 60 secret service agents were injured. The only difference, really, is that the Capitol Police did a worse job.
[1]I don't like using the term BLM riots since I have have no idea to what extent they are responsible as a movement (if at all).
Look things up before you throw fuel on the fire.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/09/03/kamala-ha...
Does no one wonder why Trump got 9 million votes more than 2016 and doubled his minority vote? The democrats encouraging and downplaying the riots is why.
You could also argue that Trump's previous tweets, the wink wink nod nod tweets to white supremacists, also fall under a similar category as the BLM tweet. Sympathy and possibly support but not actual incitement.
This time was different. Trump was literally inciting sedition. "Go to the capitol and stop the steal" was the message.
https://acleddata.com/2020/09/03/demonstrations-political-vi...
Seriously. I actually think making a comparison like that would be interesting and constructive.
Because it’s difficult to compare the events of this summer (a spontaneous response to the murder of George Floyd,choked to death under the neck of a police officer for over three minutes, on video, I’ll remind you) to the armed mob that invaded the Capital, threatening to kill or take hostage the entire Congress and the Vice-President, killed a Capital police officer, and planted pipe bombs in the Capital.
I think it would be easier to compare that event, since it’s a singular event, to another singular event, rather than a long series of events as I said.
What do you think?
[EDIT: Oh yeah the mob was also attempting to stop the process of certifying the results of the Presidential election. So much wrongness to have to remember.]
I don’t think Democrats should paint all Republicans with the same brush, and vice versa.
Forcing an evacuation of the VP, house and senate leadership and like 500 legislators while they are in session selecting the next president is a far, far cry from merely "not peaceful".
Literally the entire legislative branch of the federal government was attacked, along with the backup president!
And, but for a network of cold war escape facilities... they probably would have killed a few or taken hostages.
> ...93 percent of the protests associated with BLM were entirely peaceful...
Yet our government treats left-wing protests and right-wing protests quite differently.
> Between May 1 and November 28, 2020, authorities were more than twice as likely to attempt to break up and disperse a left-wing protest than a right-wing one. And in those situations when law enforcement chose to intervene, they were more likely to use force — 34 percent of the time with right-wing protests compared with 51 percent of the time for the left.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polices-tepid-respo...
This movement, on the other hand, is quite transparently rooted in white supremacy, and had an explicit goal of trying to undermine democracy itself, and people showed up quite obviously looking for a fight. I mean, the news over the past few days have been plastered with images of a guy in a weird Davy Crockett the Viking hat, with enormous white supremacist symbols tattooed across his torso, brandishing a frickin' spear.
Aside? isn't that the whole point?
Study Gandhi, MLK, John Lewis, Mandela - I understand BLM is a decentralized movement, but that's the problem. There is no leader and leadership. It has no coherency. It's dividing the society even more instead of pulling the entire populace behind it.
Social movement has a singular goal - to change the minds of people that oppose their views. BLM has managed to just bring out people who were already supporting them, it hasn't quite changed the hearts of people that were previously racists.
This is not how you make progress in the society. It is "pull", not "push".
Mandela was arrested and detained on Robben Island, in part, because he was part of a group that violently opposed the white supremacists of apartheid South Africa.
MLK never said that there wasn’t a place for violent resistance to white supremacy. In fact, he called out that if the white supremacists of his time weren’t careful, violent resistance would be all that was left (MLK and Malcolm X were more aligned than most people believe; MLK believed that the time for violent resistance to white supremacist violence had not yet arrived).
BLM is, in fact, a very _well_ organized movement and their leadership is consistently calling for protest that is vocal and meaningful, but not violent. Almost every single BLM protest last year that turned violent did so either because of (a) police rioting against the idea of being held accountable for their violence against BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities and persons or (b) white supremacists who thought it would be a lark to start some violence and blame it on the victimized.
BLM isn’t out to change open racists minds—they are correctly considered beyond redemption (and sometimes even beyond shame, like DJT and his coupistas)—and they don’t really care about changing the moderate person’s mind, either. They simply want the indiscriminate state violence against their community to stop. They want to stop the freedom with which the police murder their children.
They want there to be no more Rodney Kings, no more Amadou Diallous, no more Philando Castiles, no more Tamir Rices, no more George Floyds, no more Brianna Taylors, no more Jacob Blakes, no more Mike Browns. I could go on, but these are the ones that I can remember right now. Even _if_ some of them were committing crimes, the police are NEVER supposed to be judge, jury, and executioner…and most of the crimes with which those were accused had no chance of a death penalty. That the police have been able to not only murder BIPOC, but to do so with impunity AS A MATTER OF POLICY, is truly disgusting.
We as a society are lucky beyond belief that we _aren’t_ facing the violent revolution we deserve for our treatment of BIPOC communities and persons. Instead, we’re facing continued white supremacist violence.
Someone who turns up in a Viking hat, tattoos and a spear isn't looking for a fight. A person looking for a fight wears a mask, armour, carries a gun and probably camouflage.
When people wear imagery and slogans to any demonstration, I afford them the courtesy of understanding that what they're displaying on their bodies is part of the message they want to communicate.
The core of the protest is electoral integrity and calls for the politically marginalised to have a voice, not racial supremacy.
That's not a few bad eggs. That's an enormous crowd of people all deciding, tacitly or not, consciously or not, that democracy isn't for them anymore. And phrases like "take our country back" aren't even subtle; anyone who's been paying attention recognizes them as dog whistles. The obvious indication is that this crowd believes the votes of the democratic majority are not legitimate because they came from people who aren't entitled to run the country. And, while we can certainly spend an entertaining afternoon sealioning about particular examples, it would be easier to just take a look at some of the wide angle shots of the crowd. The crowd is clearly communicating exactly who they think isn't entitled to have a voice in how the country is run, either explicitly by holding flags and banners, or implicitly by consenting to be represented by the people holding the flags and banners.
I'm not so convinced of a supposed difference.
1. The BLM protests were planned, in public at least, as peaceful protests. Things went wrong and they didn’t all end up peaceful and law-abiding, but I did not see any reports of people using major internet platforms to plan to start riots or cause property damage. The reports of planning of the DC riots on Parler, in contrast, seem to have been quite explicit about the intent.
2. (In my mind rather less clear cut.) The BLM protests were not based on objective lies. The DC riots were. Ignore all the people saying there was no proof of widespread voter fraud — that’s like people saying that there is no strong evidence that MSG causes headaches. In fact, there isn’t even a reason to suspect widespread voter fraud. The proponents of the fraud theory have, when they’ve presented evidence at all, presented comically weak evidence. The theory is obvious BS.
Can you finish watching it and tell me which part of it is racist? It's unfortunately now people pick the lies they want to believe and claim it's the truth.
I’d you want, I will provide a source that Republicans encouraged violence this year.
This thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1346937852970483714.html
Insane articles like this:
- https://www.npr.org/2020/08/27/906729976/police-declare-port...
- https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178...
- https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/blm-looting-prote...
There's much more but I'm not going to collect links all night.
1. Given BLM was protesting mistreatment and institutionalised racism (especially in the police), do you not think it’s at all plausible that the police response would be racially-charged in how they respond to the protests?
2. The headline it’s literally says “one authors controversial view...”: it is entirely reasonable to entertain an idea for the purposes of analysing it without actually advocating it.
3. “In defence of destroying property”: this is inherently ideological I think, I for one place human lives above that of mere materials, and if people need to smash some windows in order to make their voices heard that is ok: we can repair windows, we can bring unjustly-murdered people back from the dead. Maybe a better way of framing this particular one is in reverse: “why is a window shop-front more valuable/important than someone’s life and human rights?”
Edit: Twitter thread: conflating “we wish to overthrow the government and kill our opposition” with “please stop killing us; we will make these protests more uncomfortable until we are heard” is disingenuous at best, and a flat-out mischaracterisation at worst. Nelson Mandela spent time in prison as well: does that mean nothing he said has any value?
I do think some of the rhetoric from some Democrats was unwisely heated over the summer. This week was different.
That was the question I answered. I've showed that the left, which is most of the media and the democrats, encouraged the riots and set the precedent of using violence to achieve political goals.
(Local) democrats demonized the police as enemy of the people. Kamala Harris encouraged her millions of Twitter followers to donate to a Minnesota crowd-funding effort that paid bail for accused rioters. Both local and national media rigidly only referred to the far-left rioters as “protesters.” The Associated Press, which sets guidelines for journalists, amended its stylebook to discourage use of the word “riot,” given protesters’ “underlying grievances.” It took months before Biden condemned the riots and he only did it when he started to drop in the polls. In Portland BLM/Antifa rioted for months and they even tried to storm into a federal courthouse downtown several nights in a row. The respons of the mayor wasn't to condemn the riots but to tell Trump to take his “troops” and leave. Those showing righteous indignation now only months or weeks ago argued that the riots were “mostly peaceful” and that vandalism and looting don’t count as violence.
And it seems people have forgotten it's not the first time government building have been occupied to prevent a vote.
https://twitter.com/wokal_distance/status/134710749813463040... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Wisconsin_protests
My point isn't to defend what happened but to point out the hypocrisy and double-speak.
- BLM was not trying to replace our government with a new one. (aka a protest is not a sedition)
- Many BLM protesters were arrested. Some were charged with crimes. Similarly, any seditionists should be charged. This is probably true whether you agree with the final verdict or not
- Those at the capitol essentially held hundreds of lawmakers hostage, using guns and at least one pipe bomb, while Trump said nothing for approximately 2 hours
With regard to prominent Democratic politicians, this is factually untrue. They (and me) are good with peaceful protest, whether BLM or MAGA. There is absolutely no problem with peaceful pro-Trump protestors.
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-kamala-harris-l...
The invasion of the Capitol was not a peaceful protest - it was an insurrection.
This is AOC during the Capitol riots: https://abc7ny.com/aoc-alexandira-ocasio-cortez-capitol-sieg...
The hypocrisy is astonishing.
Do you have any evidence to back up your claim where any Democratic official agitated for violence in those protests?
Bad police were maiming innocent civilians with no provocation: https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1266752393556918273
The protests were to hold those bad police accountable.
Do not compare people asking for the rule of law to be applied fairly and justly, to a President directing his rally to violently attack Congress and overthrow a democratic election.
I wouldn't give much of a damn if these people had burned down a Target or Quick Stop, either. But they ran into the capitol while many of them were actively talking about it being a revolution. With people talking about grabbing Congresspeople and having military tribunals. People went in with zipcuffs and firearms. Multiple bombs were planted.
This was an attempted coup. A poorly thought out one, a poorly executed one, and sure, not everyone that ran in had such grand aspirations. But plenty did, and plenty were open about it.
Go check out ParlerWatch on Reddit. Look at what's actually being posted on there. People calling for the violent overthrow of the government. People talking about murdering lawmakers. People cheering on those that invaded the capitol and calling for more.
If they make their own platform like we tell them to, we'll just ban that too, haha.
It's about having a voice. It's about the main argument being "it's a private company" then going and banning the alternatives.
But... sorry, a direct attack on a joint session of congress that forces the lawmakers and VP to be evacuated is WORSE than what happened in Portland.
This country can tolerate another bunch of fires and broken statues outside the Portland Federal Courthouse. I don't think anyone serious can imaging the idea of congress being sacked again.
Actually in a way it's good that it happened; exposed some major security holes. Not good that they shot an unarmed woman, though.
Then why was congress evacuated? Why are multiple people on camera screaming "Where is Pence?!" and threatening to hang him? Why was that cop killed?
That's ridiculous, sorry. It was a chaotic attack, sure. And surely there were some people there who just wandered in with the crowd and didn't want to hurt anyone. But this is an attack on congress. Be real.
Certainly didn't last as long, it cost less in property damage, less people died, and less neighborhoods burnt down.
Maybe we can ban both sides from social media and have no Twitter.
They also seriously injured another FPS Officer during the first attack.
It was exactly an attack
> it was a bunch of protesters, trespassing into the building during a very important session.
No, it was a large armed mob targeting legislators; as well as many of them stating that legislators were their targets (some saying that they would be back for them), this is clearly shown in the video of the context around Ashli Babbitt getting shot, where the violence of mob at the barricades entrance to the Speakers office escalates with shouts of “They're leaving” as the legislators and staffers visible through the windows depart through another exit, shortly before the officers being threatened on the same side of the barricades as the mob withdraw toward the tactical team advancing up the nearby stairs and the crowd begins breaking through the barricades.
> Not good that they shot an unarmed woman, though.
She was part of an armed, violent mob breaking through the last physical barrier keeping them from a large group of high government officials with only small number of armed security forces who could not possibly protect the officials from the mob in the event of a general breakthrough; even so, the security forces waited as long as they could before shooting to prevent a breakthrough (and if they'd had only a few more seconds it's likely that the arriving tactical team would have turned back that particular arm of the mob.)
There are no firearms visible in the mob in the video; there are weapons in active use in the video (against the barricades, but if you are responsible for protection of life you can't assume that that will be abandoned once the barricade is down).
> much less training it on the police.
The police aren't the main people that the police were protecting. (That some of them were acting as literal human shields at the barricades makes that clear.)
What would you have had them do? Allow a breakthrough, reassess the intention of the mob, and if it was still an active threat start firing then, without the passive defense of th barrier? As well as endangering the lives they ought to be protecting most urgently (the ones not engaging in a violent crime), and their own lives, unless the crowd instantly became pacific after breaking through the barricade, that would have resulted in a whole lot more dead insurrectionists, because there would be no choice but to fire as fast as aim can be switched to a new target until the crowd stopped.
Kamala Harris said,
> "They're not gonna stop, and everyone beware, because they're not gonna stop," she added. "They're not gonna stop before Election Day in November, and they're not gonna stop after Election Day."
> "Everyone should take note of that, on both levels, that they're not going to let up — and they should not. And we should not," she concluded.
I believe neither group are terrorists, but one side cannot be labeled a terrorist without implicating the other under the exact same label.
In Portland, in Seattle, in D.C.
The only difference is the scale of damage and death, which is orders of magnitude higher on one side.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/08/13/fac...
That's why this censorship ordeal is scary. Both sides deserve to be heard so people can listen, hear both sides, sift through the bullshit and decide for themselves.
This “fact check” is the kind of laughable gaslighting that got us here. The YouTube videos speak for themselves. The death toll speaks for itself.
> Colbert: ”I know there are protests still happening in major cities across the United States, I'm just not seeing the reporting on it that I had for the first few weeks,"
The “protests” were violet mobs which destroyed property and killed people. The media made up a narrative of “fiery but mostly peaceful protest” while buildings (and people’s livelihoods) literally burned in the background.
$2 billion dollars of damage.
> This isn’t going to stop.
Police shot in the head, doused with gasoline, government buildings burned into the ground.
> This is a movement I’m telling you.
City capitol buildings invaded. Throngs calling for the removal of the elected leader of Seattle. City blocks occupied for days by an armed insurgent force.
> they're not going to let up — and they should not. And we should not," she concluded.
Ted Wheeler seems to be finally coming around to this, god knows how it took him so long;
> “My good-faith efforts at de-escalation have been met with ongoing violence and even scorn from radical Antifa and anarchists,” Wheeler said in a New Year’s Day press conference. “In response, it will be necessary to use additional tools and to push the limits of the tools we already have to bring the criminal destruction and violence to an end.”
Like I’ve been saying for the last two days, you can either say people like Kamala are inciting violent protest that was actively ongoing when they made these statements, and you can hold Trump to the same standard yesterday. Or you can let Kamala off the hook, but then you let Trump off at the same time.
You can’t hold Trump to one standard and Kamala to another. You can’t call yesterday an insurrection and last year a summer of love.
Quote from Harris: “It’s no wonder people are taking to the streets and I support them. We must always defend peaceful protest and peaceful protestors. We should not confuse them with those looting and committing acts of violence, including the shooter who was arrested for murder. And make no mistake, we will not let these vigilantes and extremists derail the path to justice.”
We agree the BLM riots were bad. The Seattle insurrection especially. But Kamala Harris did not encourage them. Trump did encourage an insurrection against our government. There is a massive difference.
Trump followed up with an almost identical statement. You understand what he said differently because you believe different things about Trump.
It’s OK. It’s politics.
In the end all I want is people to be consistent in how they describe violent mobs.
Personally I don’t think these violent mobs in the summer or yesterday are terrorists. I think they are simply violent mobs that were allowed to get out of control through lack of policing and bad politics. I blame both sides.
The meta problem I have is the rapid political capitalization by Democrats (including Harris) and the media following one violent mob after granting persistent cover and gaslighting readers for months over the significantly worse BLM/antifa mobs going off all summer.
By this reasoning there is no such thing as a meaningful statement in a human language.
Anyway. I think we'll agree to disagree. Pleasure chatting with you, and stay safe.
Harris says verbatim that the protests are not going to let up, and should not. Even though they are violent, and people have died. You chose to interpret that as her saying that they would not stop (a warning) but not an endorsement. I see it clearly as a warning and an endorsement. Would not and should not.
But I recognize that Trump talks and suddenly maybe I’m in your shoes and you’re in mine.
Maybe I think the transcript irrefutably supports my position, but it’s Ok if you disagree. I don’t think either of us are fascists because of it.
The result isn’t words have no meaning, it’s whether you will respect people enough to let them answer you and clarify and believe them when they do.
So Trump says “there were fine people” and people say, wait did he just complement literal nazis, and you check the transcript and you realize, oh, “and I’m not talking about the nazis, they should be condemned totally”.
But the media doesn’t allow Trump to say “and I’m not talking about the nazis”. They cover their ears at that point and say, “la la la, Trump just said nazis are fine people!”
And that’s what’s wrong with this picture. They did it in Charlottesville, they did it to cover for horrible rioting by BLM/Antifa, and they are doing it today.
How _incredibly timely and coincidental_ that now that Trump will lose much of his relevance and the Dems are in control all these platforms suddenly found a backbone.
Google and Apple control the means by which the vast majority of the world can access software. This is not like Twitter banning from a platform, this is preventing users from accessing a platform in the first place.
If Google and Apple feel powerful enough to uphold the principles of free speech against what seems to be the will of the majority and the incoming administration (for better or worse), what is the source of that power? What else are they confident they can get away with?
This is a long way of saying your frustration is misdirected. If you want stronger free speech, start with the people and the government, not the corporations.
Remember, it's not about leftism winning per-say, it's corporatism. They are now emboldened to tighten their grasp on the narrative so they can make record profits while destroying the intellectual fabric of America.
Even our allied governments are saying he caused the riots. You can’t say the entire world is wrong, every single human being is deep state.
The best I could hope is that it’s some sick-minded person downvoting just to troll. The idea that a right-minded HN viewer seriously down votes this is absolutely unconscionable and completely beyond the pale.
It’s literally the same as downvoting a comment that says “racist murder is wrong.” Literally!
Did you listen to the entire phone conversation and not the 4 minute clip? That's quite not what happened. Trump laid out all his claims and was asking them to accept investigating anything that cloud make up his very narrow margin.
Another fun fact about that call, it was a Settlement Call. That was literally protected by attorney/client privileged. Barnes, a civil rights attorney who does federal cases, and who is currently contracted by the Trump team, talks about it here(starting at 54:49):
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-raffensperger-...
Second, as you've now been informed (and could have verified with a simple Google search), the call was not privileged, nor was it "confidential" in the sense we ordinarily mean. Disclosing it was perfectly lawful.
I mean... what do you want to happen here? The right wing got carte blanche to spread violent rhetoric for years on these platforms in ways that we would have called "terroristic" and "radicalizing" in other contexts. And it went too far. So... do we just ignore it?
I just can't understand how your mind goes to a routine election result and not a failed coup attempt as the reason behind this.
We can silence dangerous speech with no concerns about the 1st amendment (it's a private platform after all). All your Whatsapp chats can now be mined by Facebook (which the NSA will have access to as well). And the switch that controls social media communications is safely in the hands of Zuckerberg.
It's all coming together perfectly. Well... perfectly for big tech.
They were obviously criminals and things like this need to be crushed or they happen again & get worse.
Freedoms are for non-criminals.
The patriot act is still in place. We have FISA courts. We have unlimited domestic spying.
What fantasy world are you living in?
That’s such a dumb meme because obviously tons of people disagree on what intolerance is.
So no surprise their actions are motivated by greed and future prospects of movement in share price.
In Hinduism, there is a saying - "Yatha Raja, Tatha Praja", meaning "As the King, So the subjects"
That is why the highest echelons of power need to be held by those with Honesty, Integrity & those who are compassionate.
1. Illegal content is not allowed.
That’s it.
“It’s hard” is not an excuse.
I would like it applied to advertisers using tech platforms to evade all sorts of anti-discrimination regulations in housing and employment too!
This is such a narrow minded view and doesn't hold up to historical precedent.
Was Facebook banned from app stores when shooters live streamed on their platform?
Was Twitter banned from app stores when calls for violence against Nick Sandmann were spreading?
Was Youtube banned from app stores when it was discovered that child predators were lurking in the comments and exploiting underage children?
Do you really want Google to be the morality police of devices and services you pay for? Because that's sad. It's sad how people adopt authoritarian tendencies because they disagree with people they don't understand.
Hundreds of hours of video is uploaded to Youtube every minute, you can't have people to watch it through all. Twitter has thousands of tweets a second.
It's impossible to manually moderate social media platforms by your standard, it's the whole point of Section 230.
You remove disallowed content when it's discovered. Parler deletes illegal parleys when are notified, they deleted parleys from Lin Wood a few days ago.
The idea that every social network deserves to exist on terms that are economically preferable to their owners is not some golden rule. These networks didn't even exist 20 years ago.
A brand new startup from last year can hardly be held to the same standard.
Parler is not the "anything goes" website that people like to conflate with Gab.
When Trump says "we need to fight hard!", is that illegal? What if he says, "Go back to the Capitol and start shooting!"? Is that illegal?
FWIW that was our policy at reddit for a long time too. There is a whole lot of nuance to it that is really hard to deal with.
The fact is any moderation will be subjective and imperfect. How can making more complicated subjective rules help at all?
We sent fourteen people to walk around on the moon, twelve of them made it, and all of them made it back.
Its not technology problem. Its human problem.
Where it gets weird is that Twitter also has an explicit user contract with the underlying USA social contract/courts as a dependency! If you could physically live in Twitter apartments, and somehow remain safe from war, why not only depend on the Twitter contract and its moderation system? And that's how we get to the future world of Snow Crash.
Palantir also had to completely leave because there was so much pressure being put on them in the valley.
Don't forget that they banned ChapoTrapHouse along with The_Donald way back when
Is this link right? How about a link to an article instead? What is Parler? Why is it suspended? What is the story for those of us who are just tuning in now?
After about a day Google and Apple banned Parler from their appstores. Four big tech giants Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter - they are cooperating and coordinating in destroying people they don't like.
At this point this fourheaded beast is the most powerful force on this planet.
And besides they were itching to ban Trump before this already. Twitter was very clearly hinting that Trump would be banned the day he was no longer president. This protest just made it happen two weeks early.
Apparently the modern state of both American "conservatism" and a chunk of newsy posters feel that Google and Apple should be forced to host them.
And to the people complaining about censorship, this is an app that was literally used to plan a violent attack on the capitol. Some things should be censored.
Wait until you find out what the text messaging apps are used for.
“This was used in an attack” is a bullshit excuse to banish something. WhatsApp and signal have enabled countless terrorist actions and they are still up.
Remember when the Christchurch shooter streamed his rampage on Facebook? Why hasn't Facebook been banned yet?
the double standard is really bizarre.
Crazy that people are ok with what's been happening in the last few hours
it's really insane how people who claim they are champions for human right and diversity rapidly descend into the inhumanity that they themselves blame the very country for.
If I was in America right now, I would get the hell out immediately. This is literally like watching the cultural revolution unfold step by step.
really scary that there are Americans who think like this.
Or was that a dream?
This is exactly the rhetoric used to ban Twitter in other countries. Funny how things are turning.
We have a whole criminal justice system, well staffed and well funded, that addresses this concern.
Personally, I think it's a bit sad that Twitter with the hard tweet removal is effectively protecting Trump from being judged for his statements by the general public. The radicals got the messages anyways, but superficial observers are supported by the remove in any "bad but harmless" perception of Trump they might have.
But I sorta think they should be able to have their space? I don't like the way corporations and governments build these huge marketplaces, make them more and more restrictive such that no one can really get huge market-share without them and then they start curating (censoring). I understand why they do it: image, ethics (lol), they can, network effects, control over product quality, increased community cohesion, customer comfort, "safety" (lol), legal (i don't buy this one) and so on. But it wouldn't be a problem if the internet remained decentralized...these big companies should never be in the position to have this power.
At a certain point you get so locked out that you can't even pay the bills anymore because even payment processors won't take your money!
that is the problem with policy defacto being set by corporate convenience. The real blowback of this decision is not experienced by google.
Can you please provide some sources for this claim?
Additionally, this may help clarify some things. [1]
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-antifa-twitter-...
Then there's a historically unprecedented incident stemming from Trump's dispute of the lection results, organized by him on social media, and initiated by his speech on Wednesday morning. I see nothing peculiar about multiple companies independently arriving at similar conclusions and following Twitter's lead.
I can see how apple doesn't like parler in its app store, and they have every right to remove it. It is a private company, and it shouldn't be forced to host apps that promote violence/whatever they feel is wrong.
But, the fact that you can't download an app, or side-load an app, on any iphone without it being on the app store, makes this decision very worrying.
Tim Cook and apple are being the arbiter of all speech/content, and this is very similar to autocratic countries where they ban entire sites (Like Erdogan did with youtube and twitter).
One rich corporate exec should not have this much power...
The solution is that all computing device makers, should have a away for their devices to be able to download/side-load apps, without having to go a centralized store. This is better for those countries that are ruled by autocrats as well, where the government suppresses free speech.
Well, yeah, Apple sells curated experiences. And people choose whether or not to buy those curated experiences.
> and this is very similar to autocratic countries
No, it's not.
No, I'm disagreeing with your point.
> I am fine with apple removing any app it doesn't like from their app store, as long as you can sideload an app to iphones (like you can do with Android).
Sure, I have the same preference, which is why in my household there are 7 actively used Android devices and zero iOS devices.
People with different preferences purchase Apple devices.
> The fact that you can't sideload, it makes it worrying as one exec has all the power on what you do with your phone.
If you choose to give them that power over your phone with your purchasing decisions.
In order to protect and preserve their monopolies and undue influence over others, it seems reasonable that they would suffocate and kill any competitors that would threaten their survival. This includes silencing their political rivals in addition to other corporate structures and platforms.
[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20210107225836/https://twitter.c...
If you're going to be tough on people like that, don't cherry pick.
Threatening with violence if Trump appointed a new SCOTUS. He has almost 300k followers. The tweet is not deleted and his account is untouched.
There are several more like him, with hundreds of thousands of followers. Some deleted the tweet but their accounts are still there.
But we could go even further. The VP-elect, Kamala Harris, asked for money to bail BLM/Antifa rioters. https://twitter.com/kamalaharris/status/1267555018128965643
It's all about friction. The more you add friction, the more you slow down the uptake of competitive platforms. Right now you have to turn off play protect and let your phone install from unknown sources to install APKs. Most people probably don't even know how to do that, so it's an effective strategy.
(And with locked-down mobile platforms, the platform owners could theoretically start enforcing a site blacklist of some kind at an OS level if they really wanted to)
In the future, this will be how all websites work: ban certain keywords or risk being blocked, regardless of your TOS and good intentions.
It seemed unthinkable a couple years ago, but at this point I would put even money on Chrome having a "radical" website blacklist within a year.
https://images.techhive.com/images/idge/imported/imageapi/20...
(where "participate in society" means being allowed on some/most social media)
Unfortunately, Fdroid does have censorship policies (see Gab), but I believe you can add your own repos.
Calm down and stop typing.
This is wrong, and this is a massive overreach. This is not the internet that we dreamed about and that many of us worked to build. Very sad day.
As the government is not involved at all, the overreach argument doesn't apply.
edit: okay. overreach/censorship in private sector doesn't bother me. thanks. make the antitrust case if it inconveniences you too much to make an alternative.
Is it only the government which can overreach? I'm not sure I follow your argument.
If apple hooked into my banking app and decided to lock my phone because they saw me buying marijuana, that would also be an overreach, and also has nothing to do with the government.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/technology/90-perc...
If Google gives most of its donations to Democrats, how can you believe that they will not do what Democrats want them to do? Also, Democrats have been very vocal about the fact that Google and Twitter did not "censor enough" recently. This is a nice follow-up.
> how can you believe
I never said anything about what I believe.
If you believe the state is controlling some private organizations to conduct censorship, take it to a court.
This isn't about maintaining peace on their platforms or to protect users. Its about controling all conversations, everywhere
I don't know if Mike Pence uses Parler, but if pro-Trump lawyer and right wing influencer Lin Wood is calling for his execution, don't you think that represents something of a risk to Pence whether or not he reads it?
Moreover, the website is accessible and nothing stops people from using it. Apps are not the internet (thankfully). Pretending that the app store is the internet just gives these companies more power.
I'd quibble about the 'vocal' part, however. People across the ideological spectrum are vocal, but it's probably more like 1% or less, not 30%. Our views are shaped by the few people who bother to say anything. I wonder if we'd be happier if everyone else could remember that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_party_strength_in_U....
Edit: it's a question, not a statement or a judgement
And before someone tells me that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to private companies, I’m not making a legal point here, I’m making a moral one. This is not healthy.
But I agree, this is not the way forward to a healthy, united country
One of the group's leaders, Bill Ayers, lives unremorsefully in a tony neighborhood in Chicago where he went on to have an influential academic career, dedicating books to political assassins, and mentoring future presidents. This caused a minor kerfluffle when the details resurfaced to public light in 2008, but it was clearly, in the end, no obstacle to Obama's election.
One might raise a similar point about a figure like Oscar Lopez Rivera who, while he never bombed the Capitol, definitely did bomb about 100 other locations around the country and was rewarded for his efforts by an NYC ticker tape parade once he was released from prison. Lin Manuel Miranda's admiration for Rivera has hardly proved a stumbling block for his wildly successful career.
And that's just one end of the frequency-severity spectrum. Mobs break into the Capitol and interrupt proceedings with perhaps surprising regularity, as with the Kavanaugh hearings for example.
In any case, it seems that bombing the Capitol or doing widespread domestic terrorism is only selectively an impediment to a later life of comfort in the US.
Did this discredit the cause of Puerto Rican nationalism and drive its supporters from public life? It would appear not: you can still be a celebrity with a successful career while voicing your support and admiration.
I'm not asking you to say that what happened yesterday was good, because of course it wasn't. I'm asking you why you think that such events are so rare and universally condemned. In fact they seem to happen on a timescale of decades at most, probably less, and the public judgment of the perpetrators seems to correlate less with the objective severity of the act as with elite consensus opinion of the cause it promotes.
Shameful. Just truly shameful. Sick and disgusting.
It's time for change. Hate speech is not free speech. If you foment hate, spread antigovernment lies like the vote fraud narrative, or are complicit as a platform in doing the same, you should be punished.
I was blocked from sharing comments or posts in Facebook Groups for almost 2 months for sharing an article about Presidential clemency for Ross Ulbricht in the 2600 group.
From my perspective, the Organic Law of the United States has constitutional force. And any system including government agencies and public platforms, are beholden to the natural rights that preexisted all governments and all religions.
If you believe in John Locke, then defend principles. If you don’t, perhaps you should consider a country which wasn’t founded on natural rights as the lowest layer precept to our civilization. You can’t challenge first principles and replace them with relativism and a world full of neoliberal militaristic rackets.
But this corporate censorship is intolerable. And the timing it's making it particularity odious.