Am I the only one being very smug about all this? Not only am I glad the president is gone, but watching everyone who otherwise defends free markets tooth and nail get mad when the free market does what it's supposed to do is very gratifying also.
We’ll see how fond the left is when a new set of “counter terrorism” laws, corporate censorship, and the free market when it gets used on the next round of BLM protestors, to pick an example at random.
Not to mention how suddenly the far left is suddenly concerned about Twitter’s civil rights — something reaffirmed by their least favorite opinion: Citizen’s United.
Nobody should fool themselves: neither party has a consistent set of principles.
That has been happening? https://theintercept.com/2018/03/19/black-lives-matter-fbi-s...
Pretty much has been happening forever too. Many voices "on the left" have always been under surveillance since we started surveiling our citizens, and were often economically blackballed on the free market as well.
Also this seems like false equivalences between people saying we should change how policing works vs we should overturn the results of our election through force.
We have actual armed insurrectionists on one hand storming the capitol with zip cuffs and illegally carried firearms. You are asking how we would feel if we treated BLM, the people who want their tax dollars to go to alternatives to policing, like we treated those people inciting the capitol riot. Honestly it would probably be an improvement.
You’re coloring one ideology all good and another all bad. Not all MAGA people stormed the capital any more than all BLM supporters burned down a police precinct, took over city hall in Seattle and literally seceded from the union.
We have a lot of problems. The primary one is our inability to see that they are spread evenly across the ideological spectrum.
I’m not judging the entirety of a Maga movement, or the right, or even a “stop the steal” crowd. I am judging those who stormed the capitol and those who directly egged them on, who are being deplatformed in the article.
> We have a lot of problems. The primary one is our inability to see that they are spread evenly across the ideological spectrum.
Another contender for primary problem is the widespread use of false equivalencies and “both sides” to excuse whatever is inconvenient without nuance.
1) Storming the capital is far more concerning than some hippies setting up shop in Seattle. But I would contend that that these two extremes are pushing each other to more extremes and there is a distortion that whoever acts last is the current problem. Prior to the capitol incident, the fringe left had a monopoly on disgraceful behavior and unchecked violence in the streets. What would have happened had Trump actually won?
2) I think that rejecting the "both sides" argument _is_ the removal of the nuance.
The sheer number of people who can’t grasp this basic point is staggering.
My issue is with “moderation” where you just remove content you disagree with politically.
I've seen some real gems from ParlerWatch, people wanting to roast the wives and children of liberals on open spits to teach them the danger of liberalness.
Liberal means free, btw.
It's just a natural outcome of the different ideologies. One is bound by hate over decrease in privilege, the other is a broad coalition to make lives better for folks who then get frustrated and vent online (and sometimes in the streets).
Edit: I wonder why I got down-voted. My comment was not "off-topic or illegal", perhaps someone disagrees with me politically. =P
There is a massive agreement that he went over the line and he had to be banned.
Power is power and it needs to be held accountable.
HN censorship doesn't matter because it's a tiny fish in a very large pond. Reddit censorship does matter because they are basically a monopoly when it comes to online forums. Same for twitter/facebook when it comes to social media and google search results.
You'll be in for a wild ride.
Reddit? No central moderation beyond court orders. They were a lot better when they let each community decide their own standards pre-2017.
If you don't pay for the service, you are the product.
USA hasn't had free markets in a while. And monopoly platforms are not free markets. DoJ won't go after monopolies for violation of century-old anti-trust laws.
I give USA about ten years until it splits up.
I'm not sure I want to eliminate all freedom on the public internet, but I just have been thinking that people are really exaggerating the stakes here.
And it seems especially weird for the right to be so frightened, because surely when "America was great" was before this era of Facebook and Twitter? Weren't we free then?
In your view, how so?
Seems very unlikely to me. Trump draws massive traffic to Twitter.
It has nothing to do with any market.
Maybe we'll get lucky and find that they were wrong, and that this move causes enough public backlash to give other social networks a chance to thrive (if we're really lucky, maybe even decentralized ones!)
The only information we have is that it was internal pressure too be a "better company."
Get down to brass tacks so we can see if the argument holds up.
There's also something not mentioned very often, these apps are "free" and lose money at first, but they sell your information and now they control the conversation, something most people are not in a position to decide or even know about, of course until it's too late and you have your life in their servers. Imho, this is a conflict of interest similar to private healthcare insurance, where the profit and the wellbeing of the human involved (sometimes the customer, sometimes the product) is not the #1 priority, and as a result a large enough company has the scale to damage a large number of people.
It's shocking that hackernews has turned so far astray.
One can be against government control out of fear that government will use that to do something unintended, and at the same time condemn the destructive behaviour of these business owners.
The situation with freedom of speech is remarkably similar to the situation with religious freedom in England of 1600s. Like they have learned to not bring their sacral beliefs into everyday life, because that causes the society to fail, we need to learn that escalating the political fight too much is dangerous, and universal freedom of speech is game theoretically the right strategy.
There are plenty of left wing voices that have been kicked off twitter and reddit for making calls for violence, but mainstream democrats have not caused that liability for platforms they use.