Slippery slope is accelerating. Soon any wrongthink will get you banned by the tech cabal.
I'm confident if I show up to work on Monday and start asking people on our slack channel who wants to help me plan an assassination on an elected official I'll also be "de-platformed" for my "wrong think" by my company.
This is a simple problem to to solve: stop planning and committing acts of violence because you disagree with someone else's politics. Nobody is getting banned because they think abortion is wrong or that we should try to balance the national deficit...
See https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/why-did... for a balanced opinion on this.
While I'm sympathetic to some of the problems that BLM addresses--like the militarization of our Police Forces--I can't stick my neck out for them because of their hatred of Jews.
But they've expanded their agenda beyond that, and muddled their goals.
In the UK you will be banned from football stadiums for performing a 'white power' clenched fist in the crowd, but the BLM Marxist black power clenched fist is performed before each match by kneeling professional players in memory of the death of George Floyd several thousand miles away and many months ago last year.
This confusion about racism and efforts to signal support are IMO very clumsy, comingling Marxist politics with laudable efforts to support unfair and heavy handed policing of some black people.
Similarly the comingling of a minority of 'far right' wingnuts amongst moderate conservatives, greatly amplified and distorted by the corporate media, has gravely misrepresented mainstream common sense concerns.
The various sensationalist media companies have a lot to answer for, they are fanning the flames of division, encouraging bigots and ignoring the mainstream masses
I have been unable to find a current platform, so it is unclear if that is actually still in there.
Do you mean why wasn't twitter kicked off AWS for users making calls for violence? If so: because Twitter has a moderation strategy in place that clearly isn't perfect but has proven to AWS that they're taking it seriously.
If you actually meant why wasn't @blcklivesmatter kicked off twitter I guess I'm not sure what relevance that has to Parler being kicked off AWS. But my first guess would be: because they deleted the offending tweets and stopped making repeated posts calling for violence?
I don't use twitter, do you have some examples of recent @blcklivesmatter tweets that are actively calling for violence against elected officials that haven't been moderated or removed?
I know you created a throwaway to troll, but I'll humor you anyway. I could come up with endless reasons why a company would want to require moderation, but at the end of the day: because they say so. Amazon created the platform, Amazon creates the rules.
I find it mind numbing that the same people that want to live on Parler because "freedom" simultaneously think a private company shouldn't have the freedom to choose who they do or don't want as a customer. Meanwhile gay people can't buy a wedding cake and that's A-OK because freedom.
> I find it mind numbing that the same people that want to live on Parler because "freedom" simultaneously think a private company shouldn't have the freedom to choose who they do or don't want as a customer. Meanwhile gay people can't buy a wedding cake and that's A-OK because freedom.
There's plenty of hypocrisy here, I agree -- but the real issue is scale. Just a handful of companies in SV control the free flow of information, globally, and they're using that to suppress a group of people.
I'm not saying we should overturn their property rights, but that I disagree with them from a moral standpoint.
They absolutely, 100% do not. Nobody is forcing you to go to google or twitter for news, I don't and would encourage you not to either. Nobody is stopping you from going to and subscribing directly to news sources. I do and would encourage you to as well.
This idea that you need social media to get news is exactly what's wrong with the world today. Quite frankly the fact so many people are willing to tune into glorified talk show hosts pretending to be a source of news (Hannity, Carlson, Maddow) does a disservice to ACTUAL journalism.
If a user posts a call to violence - well to hell with them and who cares if they get booted off - but this more like if Google was shut down because it had a search-result for a call to violence. Unless there is some statement from the Parlor company itself that calls for violence that I've missed.
Taken one step further, what is the difference between Parlor and AWS in this case - technically speaking, the calls for violence were on AWS's platform after all...
What does Facebook have to do with the current discussion? Facebook isn't hosted on Amazon.
>Taken one step further, what is the difference between Parlor and AWS in this case - technically speaking, the calls for violence were on AWS's platform after all...
I guess I don't understand what you're getting at. It was indeed on AWS's platform. As part of hosting content on AWS you agree to not allow content calling for violence against others. They failed to moderate their users, so Amazon is moderating them.
I don't particularly agree with the messages of Parler or lean right at all, I am a staunch libertarian and believe that any and all opinions should be heard.
"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear." - not sure who to attribute it to since I don't know, but it is almost certain this censorship wave was started by a political party for political goals. The end result is the same.
Well it's a good thing the government had nothing to do with this decision then!
We are sliding down the slope at breakneck speed.
Slippery slope is not about a single thing happening. Instead, it is about one thing leading to another leading to another.
And I see a whole bunch of things leading to another and leading to another. Every 2 hours goes by, and another escalation happens.
The only question next is when will the escalation stop? Because clearly we have far far escalated past the point where we were a couple months ago, which was simply "Well, a couple nazis got banned on twitter".
We have zoomed ahead on the escalation to the point where a service with 10 million users is booted off of borderline critical internet infrastructure, with less than 12 hours of warning to do anything about it.
The slope, quite clearly, was pretty slippery it seems!
A bunch of companies deciding that unmoderated violence should not be given space on their platforms, or using their tools, is not a slippery slope.
One action is leading to another and leading to even more actions. That quite clearly falls under the principle of a slippery slope.
That is what people mean when they say "slippery slope". Imagine like an actual slope. That is slippery, because it has greese on it. And you slip down the slope.
Clearly, we are slipping down that slope very quickly.
First it was action X, which everyone agrees was done against someone who deserved it, then it was action Y which was an escalation, and then it was action Z that was another escalation.
Surely you should see how it is an escalation to go from "A couple nazis get banned on twitter", to where we are at now which it important computing infrastructure kicking major services off of the platform?
Do you actually think that "AWS terminates its relationship with a forum for violent extremists" is downslope of the President of the United States being barred from two of the largest social media platforms?
There's no slope here. There's multiple platforms drawing a line on acceptable speech, and taking actions to remove the worst offenders. Parler, in particular, thought that they could ignore Amazon's request for moderation and not even take action against specifically flagged posts that violated Amazon's AUP.
People have been talking about deplatforming for a long while. Quite clearly, all of this stuff started a while ago, and has escalated quickly since then.
Slippery slope is less about a direct cause, and more of a direction. IE, it is talking about how things are escalating.
"AWS terminates its relationship" I would consider major internet infrastructure kicking off a service with millions of users an escalation from where we were a couple years ago, which was more along the lines of "a couple nazis are kicked off of twitter", yes.
Quite clearly it is a more significant action to take down a service with millions of users, than it is to ban a couple people on twitter.
> There's multiple platforms drawing a line on acceptable speech
And those platforms has escalated things over the last couple years. In the past, there was less people being kicked off of various parts of the internet/critical infrastructure, and now there are more people/services being kicked off of critical network infrastructure.
That is an escalation.
Even yesterday, I did not even consider that AWS would get involved in this somehow, and now look where we are.
What is going to happen tomorrow, I wonder? Or the next day and the next? I could not guess at this point.
Will ISP's start kicking people off? Possibly. Maybe even phone companies and common carriers will start doing it (even though if a common carrier did it, this would literally be illegal).
TBH, It really does not feel like that much of an escalation to say to that ISPs or common carrier might start doing this eventually. They don't feel significantly different than other critical infrastructure.
Take your guesses now about what is going to happen next, and see if you were right.
When Armed idiots stop attacking the capitol building and calling for the assassination of duly elected public officials in an attempt to overthrow a democratic government.
Your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.
Thats what my question was. To rephrase, my question was effectively "how extreme will these measures get?".
And it seems like your answer to that question is "You don't care at all how extreme they get, as long as they fulfil your objective. There is literally no possible extreme to which you would not support, on this topic of censorship/deplatforming".
Government executing people in the streets, by the thousands for criticising it, justified? Soviet or china style re-education camps for citizens by the millions?
There is no possible extreme for which you would say "this censorship has gone too far!", And therefore you are completely unconcerned about any sort of escalation, no matter how extreme the crackdown gets?
Now these plans will go underground and will be harder to track.