Comment by DisjointedHunt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DisjointedHunt | Hacker News Reader

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This cognitive dissonance by people working in tech who should know better than supporting discriminatory censorship practices regardless of the political entity eschewing those policies is truly the most appalling thing i've noticed about the loud activists in the industry.

First, Parler gets kicked off because "They host violent, imminent threats". Never mind the sheer scale of terrorist groups organizing on Facebook, Twitter and enjoying free high quality encryption thanks to Whatsapp. Are we going to kick them all out of society unless they declare fealty to the ideas of their benevolent tech overlords?

Now, we have a forum of gun owners simply discussing things on a forum that they created to represent their connection through a shared love of a constitutional right.

Tomorrow, will it be okay to point a finger at any individual and have the equivalent of mass economic sanctions destroy their ability to be a part of society because they disagree with the broad interpretation of "values" these tech companies arbitrarily decide?

There is more power concentrated in Silicon Valley right now than all the governments of the world save for China and Authoritarian regimes. This is scary and intelligent people acting like political puppets is silly and dangerous.

Then use the power of the government to regulate and break up the tech monopolies. The answer is simple and obvious.

I don't want GoDaddy to have the authority to remove arbitrary folks from the Internet. I want GoDaddy to not exist at all. I want large datacenter owners to be regulated like utilities.

However, the same political stance which desires all of the violence and hate against our government is also the political stance which insists that our government is useless and bloated, too big and decadent to achieve victories for the people.

Who do you think gave responsibility to Silicon Valley? Who signed up millions of Americans for Facebook, retweeted millions of context-free quips, opened millions of Google email accounts, and bought millions of iPhones? It was the American public, including the 20% of Americans who voted for an open fascist for president.

If you want an end to censorship, then you should also want an end to corporatism and capitalism. That's the cognitive dissonance that is worth examining.

Breaking up monopolies sounds good in the abstract. (At least, it does to me. Presumably that doesn't go without saying around here.) But these particular monopolies have the potential to make a serious positive impression on the world, now that they've finally chosen to act. Given the state of things we shouldn't rush to abandon that opportunity.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/trump-is-b...

I haven't seen too much consideration of the potential (more the usual scaremongering) but here's something that popped up earlier along those lines. Social media is a lever for politicians. Why not take the chance to deny that to extremism around the world?

> First, Parler gets kicked off because "They host violent, imminent threats". Never mind the sheer scale of terrorist groups organizing on Facebook, Twitter and enjoying free high quality encryption thanks to Whatsapp

What's with all the whataboutism here? Can you honestly not see the difference? One is an echo chamber of hate with a lot of calls to violence and support thereof, and the platform does nothing about it. The others have shittons of shit ( cat videos, porn, ads, anti-vaxx bullshit, etc) and hate and calls for violence, which are moderated ( not nearly good enough). Apple explicitly asked Parler to come up with a moderation plan or get booted of their store, and they didn't. Twitter, Facebook, Google heavily moderate and ban all sorts of hate-related content.

> Tomorrow, will it be okay to point a finger at any individual and have the equivalent of mass economic sanctions destroy their ability to be a part of society because they disagree with the broad interpretation of "values" these tech companies arbitrarily decide?

I don't know why you've suddenly decided that if doing X to Y is okay today, doing X to Z will be as well tomorrow. That's not how regular people work in most cases, and if tomorrow "SV"( if you're so intent on throwing them all together, as if they aren't composed of many people at different levels ( employees, managers, CxOs, shareholders) in different countries, with varying political affiliations or views) decide to deplatform something people disagree being deplatformed, people will complain, same as what people are doing together to defend the hate speech spewing fascists on Parler.

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