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Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

Your comment is unhelpful, abstracct, and too hyperbolic for the purposes of this discussion.

Stick with reality. I dare you to defend Parlor. Or, if you don't like Parlor, we have a myriad of other deplatformings (Gamergate/4Chan, Church of Scientology/Wikipedia, and Daily Stormer / Cloudflare) you can discuss instead.

IMO, you want to run away to an imaginary world where the events of last Wednesday do not matter. Some pretend argument where people are taking away all cell phones (or something similarly unrealistic...). I'm not going to let you. At a bare minimum, you need to choose a realistic example from reality before I can take you seriously.

Lets be real, lets stay real. Lets use actual, reality-based arguments and discussions.

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How do you delineate between Parlor planning this and ISIS using telegram for recruiting and planning? In both cases, the platforms did nothing to prevent, but in the telegram case the consequences were much more severe—evidence of mass casualty events due to telegram planning.

To me, this is why it feels political: these tech companies are responding more strongly to this than well-organized terror organizations that were active for years.

Your history of events seems... strange.

https://www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/europol-and-tele...

It seems like to me, that Telegram is cooperating with police services to delist propaganda.

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If anything, you seem to be proving my point? Telegram is closely working with European officials to remove ISIS propaganda today.

> Over the past year and a half, Europol has been collaborating with Telegram in tackling terrorism online. Building upon a previous Referral Action Days with Telegram in October 2018, the event this year was an opportunity for both parties to review the kind of content that terrorist groups attempt to disseminate online and further improve the referral process with the common aim of ensuring that material glorifying terrorism would be removed from internet as soon as possible.

...

> Telegram is no place for violence, criminal activity and abusers. The company has put forth considerable effort to root out the abusers of the platform by both bolstering its technical capacity in countering malicious content and establishing close partnerships with international organisations such as Europol.

The above post is dated 2019, which means they were in close collaboration from 2017. In 2015, Telegram immediately purged ISIS content in response to the attacks on France.

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I'm very confused by your post. Could you elaborate on your version of history? Or maybe what you're trying to say? As far as I can tell, your Telegram example only supports the Parlor deplatforming. When extremist attacks occur, our only option is to silence the attackers.

In 2015, telegram started removing posts after the attack in Paris—but they’d linked attacks as early as 2014 back to telegram communications and recruiting. Even in 2015, attempts were half-hearted until a high profile expose (Vox) and Others like it ran.

There were never any calls for deplatforming telegram in this manner as far as I know; it would be like giving Parlor another 3-5 years to clean itself up.

I agree that the attackers need to be silenced, but this move by apple and google is unprecedented and unnecessary; if they are inciting violence, it should be dealt with legally, not via corporate ethics panels. Platforms should be responsible for content like what parlor presents, but apple shouldn’t be the who holds them accountable. This isn’t the cake shop declining to serve a gay customer, but rather the phone company pulling the plug.

After the Paris attack in 2015, it seems like Telegram immediately started working with authorities.

In contrast, Parlor double-downed on its behavior. It immediately became clear that Parlor admins were NOT working on clamping down the violent extremism that's occurring currently on its site.

You're commenting is very uncivil and doesn't belong here.

I completely disagree. It's a well-formed argument, and he's calling out someone for making a lazy argument.

What's lazy about my argument?

I purposefully stayed away from the "Lazy" word, since I do think that starts to lean towards unhelpful (and if I'm claiming you're unhelpful, then the very least I should do is be helpful myself).

I purposefully used three words to describe your argument: unhelpful, abstract, and too hyperbolic. Which hopefully provides you enough room to move forward with the discussion.

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I wouldn't sweat it. I don't think your argument is "lazy". If anything, you're posting in too many threads simultaneously.

If I were in your boat, I'd start cutting out the threads which are least helpful, and start focusing on the discussion threads which are most promising.

Not all discussions are fruitful. If you have fewer discussions, you'll find that you'll naturally result in higher-quality discussions. You shouldn't feel the need to respond to everyone.

I strongly disagree. The parent comment is making a well-reasoned rebuttal against an overly vague/hyperbolic argument ("they'll ban all cell phones next").

IMO it was perfectly reasonable. He was attacking the argument, not the user.

Attacking the user: "IMO, you want to run away to an imaginary world where the events of last Wednesday do not matter"

Agressive tone towards OP: "I'm not going to let you"

They also edited the comment slightly from what you see now.

Does anyone else see the irony in this or is it just me?

I am defending Parlor. With a very concrete and relevant analogy.

Why don't you deplatform me from HN if you disagree.

EDIT: So according to you, for my argument to be relevant it has to have an actual precedent in reality? Did Nazi germany have one?

EDIT2: I'm not using nazi germany as an example, I'm pointing out that nazi germany did not have an actual precedent in reality, yet one could have warned about escalating events at the time and, faced with your argument, one would not have been able to provide precedent rooted in history to make one's case that things were going down a slippery slope. Yet, we all know what happened.

> I am defending Parlor. With a very concrete and contextual analogy.

No one is trying to get rid of cell phones anywhere in the USA. It is neither concrete nor contextual.

This Parlor de-platforming is extremely similar to the Daily Stormer de-platforming from Cloudflare. That's an actual, reality-based example I feel acceptable about discussing. There are probably many other examples.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

This happened 4 years ago. There's a huge amount of historical discussion and arguments you can look up about this event 4 years ago if you like.

> EDIT: So according to you, for my argument to be relevant it has to have an actual precedent in reality? Did Nazi germany have one?

Yes. Nazi Germany counts as a historical example if you wish to use them. But since they had no internet back then, I think you'll find it difficult to find similarities to today. But give it a shot, what about the Nazis do you want to discuss?

If I'm thinking about the 1930s or 1940s, I'm thinking...

* The US Office of Censorship (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Censorship), which literally opened mail and censored them, as a historical example if you'd like. There's plenty of real-life examples of censorship from which you can base your argument and discussion off of.

* There's also Hay's Code (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code), which is probably a good 1930s example of Free-Market American Censorship being applied to Hollywood (and now that I think of it, bears some level of resemblance to the Parlor vs AWS situation).

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