Comment by ironman1478 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ironman1478 | Hacker News Reader

A big reason this is happening IMO is due to the inaction of the government. I don't want companies to bring down sites, however the government seemingly actively refuses to take action. There is precedent for limiting free speech in the case of violence apparently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action And it seems like there is some correlation with communications being had on Parler and the insurrection on January 6th.

It is unclear how this could be enforced in the internet domain, but maybe the website could have huge fines levied against it or criminal charges levied against the founders (so not the posters) if its possible to prove violent intent. Its also not a very slippery slope. We have hate crime laws, but they are notoriously hard to prove. I imagine violent intent on the internet will be similarly hard to prove and only be applied to the extremely obvious cases.

Its also a bit weird. Nobody made a huge deal about PornHub (from what I can tell) being forced to take down tons of content due to Visa, because guess what. Its hard to disagree that the source of a lot of content on PornHub is troubling and very likely illegal. This isn't that much different from what Amazon and other companies are doing to Parler. The intent of a lot of posters (even if its a minority) seems to be to incite violence. Parler actively didn't try to monitor the content and boom, it got taken down. I imagine if PornHub didn't make a good faith attempt to remove a lot of content, we'd have seen Amazon (or whoever hosts PornHub).

Imminent lawless action as defined by the courts is a very high bar. It is going to be very hard for anything posted to a form of asynchronous communication to qualify short of a popular leader telling his followers to commit a specific unlawful act or specifically targeted threats made by people with the means to carry them out.

You're right that this will be damn near impossible to enforce except in the most stupidly obvious cases.

I think its good that it is a high bar. A lot of stuff online isn't serious or actionable, but with this Parler situation is on the cusp IMO of genuinely being designed to promote right wing extremism. That's how this seems to be playing out at least.

Imminent lawless action requires imminence.

Also, plenty of people complained about Pornhub being forced to take down content. You were either in a bubble, it's not paying attention. Specifically, that it appears that if you want to avoid getting bullied by online activists through your providers, you also seem to need to have your own bank.

A lot of things happen with the inaction or perhaps with the deliberate ignorance of government regulators.

Reading greenwald's take on it I come to feel that it seems likely that this cabal of corporate hegemons, utilized multiple private intelligence security firms to stoke and instigate the riot for the purposes of destroying their competitor as well as sending a message to people who dared utilize that app instead of one of the conventional apps that you're not safe if you do that. it was an extremely effective and coordinated campaign and I respect their ingenuity and will to dominance. fledgling startups should be aware of these sort of tactics and take steps to mitigate them for their own success, but I think aside from the purely political and free speech problems that poses I think and the important corporate monopolistic issues are companies should not be delivering these negative results for consumers who want to choose to use an alternate app, they shouldn't be using their monopoly power nor coordinating with other monopolies in order to shut out a competitor.

Perhaps this operation was a favor to the incoming administration who promised to go soft on the antitrust stuff if the techs would pull off this coup against these politically inconvenient free speech enabling technologies that go against the dominant ideology advocated by the group trying to maintain control. Win win.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia

Paranoid thinking typically includes persecutory beliefs, or beliefs of conspiracy concerning a perceived threat towards oneself (i.e. the American colloquial phrase, "Everyone is out to get me").

Paranoia is a useful blinker to keep people like you from going insane by considering ideas outside of your scope of comprehension so you should keep using it but people who can really think clearly have no need of that. But don't stop foreshortening the range of your thought by invoking such useful blinkers because it may be dangerous to your health and mental health.

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