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?