Step 2: Pressure those platforms to ban legal speech.
(Unintended but predictable consequence: People move to less censored platforms.)
Step 3: Pressure the mobile OS duopoly to ban the less censored platforms.
^-- You are here.
Step 4: Ban mobile providers from supporting internet connections on unapproved mobile devices.
Step 5: Ban general purpose computing devices.
The insurrection we saw in DC was planned, in the open, on Parler. That is hardly legal speech and no company is obligated to host it if they don’t want to.
Until you can provide me with some actual proof Apple or Google were pressured by anything but the written law to remove this crap from their stores, say, a threatening phone call from a certain ranking Congressperson or judge or member of the executive branch, I’ll call this hysterics.
Today I read the mayor of Portland was attacked whilst he was dining. The "mostly peaceful protesters" have burned his apartment building, attempted to take over police stations and court houses, and decapitated models of the mayor. He supports them anyway - it's so crazy it's impossible to believe, really. What is going on in the USA?
If FB/Twitter had cracked down on the BLM organisers putting together nightly attacks on the police, at least nobody could say they were being inconsistent now. Instead they put banners up on random developer docs sites saying they support BLM. Blatant double standards.
How about a tweet from a member of Congress?
Wait, direct threats of violence and child porn are legal speech now?
Because that's what you'll find on Parler.
Edit: for the sake of accuracy, Parler is unquestionably rife with threats of violence that they refuse to remove. Go visit /R/parlerwatch and despair.
They do, however, remove CP from the site if it's reported by users, but as of 2020-12-02 they admit they lack any automated systems for detecting and removing it at scale.
Well, in case it wasn't clear, I'll try more words and hope this helps:
Parler has knowingly allowed content to exist on their site that violates both the Google ToS and the law.
This content isn't "naughty". It is very much illegal, and includes direct threats and incitement to violence among many other things. This includes, for example, calls to murder politicians, the police, etc.
Parler has further affirmatively stated they will not remove that material despite having the ability to do so. In this way Parler distinguishes itself from Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and so forth.
That is, of course, their choice. However, a failure to moderate this kind of material violates Google's ToS.
It is therefore also Google's and Apple's choice to enforce their ToS and remove the Parler app from their store.
In no way does this represent censorship (neither Google nor Apple are in any way obligated to distribute third party software), nor does the offending content represent legal speech.
> Because that's what you'll find on Parler.
No article I've read substantiates the presence of child pornography.
Source?
> Wernick elaborated after this story published, confirming that Parler has no system for detecting child pornography before it is viewed and potentially reported by users.
However I absolutely admit your point: rather than affirmative statement of the presence of CP on the site, the issue is they've not built systems for finding and removing it.
They have a manual human moderation pool for removing illegal content. But they are very slow, it took over 12 hours for them to remove a spambot.
Article about the porn stuff: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/dec/7/parler-rebut...
I keep wading into these threads defending Parler because they are nothing like 4chan, 8kun, or Gab. They do have moderation, they do remove illegal content, they just suck at it.
What's your point? By equivalence, you should be calling for hackernews to be shut down, right? By equivalence, you shouldn't be posting here.
If your husband's friend really did see illegal material just scrolling the discover page, there will be mainstream media confirmation of an arrest soon.
But I worry that you are right. Visa and MasterCard have already been non politically neutral.
And where will the left stop? Even if we talk about actual nazis, should they have internet connections? Electricity? The right to property? It’s not like the left seem to be satisfied with anything they achieve, they always want more.
And first it’s actual nazis, then it’s qanon, then it’s lockdown sceptics, then it’s??
If you're going to group millions of people together and judge them by their extremes, you might want to try applying the same logic to "the right" and see if you are happy with the slippery slope you construct.
However on the left the people pushing for this are as mainstream as Nancy pelosi, so I’m not sure what term to use. “Pro censorship left”?