Apple Approves Parler to Return to App Store
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
There are some parallels as Tumblr similarly could not control its content sufficiently to both allow most of it and also ensure the problematic content did not persist. Just explaining, not defending either social network or Apple.
There are very specific kinds of content that lead to these kinds of bans. Pornography and organizing violence are amongst them.
It isn’t about controversial content.
Parler wasn't "censored" because it contained "new stories" that were "remotely controversial". Parler was blocked because of rampant unmoderated violent content that correlated with real world political violence.
Look, when you have major thought leaders on your platform calling for the VP to be executed, you need to expect some repercussions when a mob takes the rotunda screaming "Hang Mike Pence!".
This doesn’t seem sufficient to me. Given that the US has the death penalty at all, how can we declare that it is not ok for people to call for it when they believe a crime has been committed?
Organizing an extrajudicial mob to carry it out, is another thing entirely, but just calling for it seems like it can’t be enough.
And there's also the fact that there's no basis in reality for the claims to be begin with.
In all of this confusion, it is true that Parler was essentially (Edit: not! obviously 'not' moderated)moderated - and - there was a lot of really terrible stuff happening there. Like 'kill these people'. The cover that Twitter can use is that they actual do moderate people and try to get rid of them. Mostly.
Parler must have had a huge leadership failure to play that game and think they were going to get away with it. There is zero chance that hosting people directly calling for violence, unmoderated, is going to last when associated with other people's brands.
I believe the CEO actually wanted to do something but his backers didn't.
Agreed, which is why “Hang Mike pence” is not sufficient. On it’s own, it doesn’t make the distinction between two.
If you want to make the case that assassination was being called for, you need to quote something else.
"Arrest Mike Pence" is not.
"Put Mike Pence to Trial and then Hang Him" isn't either.
You have to qualify 'Kill That Guy' with something more in order for it not to be calling for someone's murder.
This activity was out in the open, uncontrolled on Parler which is why it was a problem, even if technically it might be legal, Apple doesn't want to deal with that.
I think their response was on point, though Amazon's cancellation has more material effect their responsible response should have been 'you can't go live with that while on our servers you have 3 months to change policy or move out'. Granted, they may have been warned.
The fact that you have to use the phrase ‘kill that guy’ which is a straw man, shows that the logic doesn’t work.
Consider, ‘he should get the electric chair’. It’s pretty clear that this is not a call for assassination.
There is some ambiguity around hanging which is less present with the electric chair, but is not the clear call for assassination you assert it to be.
Speech that advocates support and action by terrorist groups is not protected by the first amendment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Providing_material_support_for...
> Organizing an extrajudicial mob to carry it out, is another thing entirely
Where did I insinuate this?
Does the crime they believe was committed have the death penalty? If not, then calling for the death of the "criminal" is certainly not ok. ( And generally I find calling for death and the death penalty to be morally wrong, but that's another story)
I don’t agree with your logic that this is necessary though. Someone can reasonably call for a higher penalty than is currently the statute, as long as it is not clearly extrajudicial.
> (And generally I find calling for death and the death penalty to be morally wrong, but that's another story)
Yes - I’m not making a claim about the morality of calling for death or the death penalty, but I am saying that if the death penalty is legal, it must be legal to call for it.
Or are some apps/publishers more equal than others? If Brave becomes more popular, will they also get removed for "unmoderated content"?
Look in the source code for both Firefox and Chromium, and you'll find a section that glad-handles high-value extension binaries... The binaries where if they aren't configured correctly when the browser is installed, the user will assume the browser is broken, not the extension binary.
Similarly, Microsoft decompiled some of its own APIs when developing Windows XP to account for circumstances where third-party developers (mostly Adobe) had squeezed clock cycles out of their API calls by assuming certain memory footprints in clear violation of the API spec. But if Photoshop didn't work on Windows XP, it was XP that was broken, not Photoshop.
There has never, to my knowledge, been a point in the history of the computer industry where "all software is created equal."
Do I need moderation for my Email now?
But you know Apple will hide behind their privacy policy when it is their apps.
Whether what Apple did here is actually a violation of one's right to free speech is a pretty tenuous argument. But that is the argument you should be responding to.
Don't make this about 'laws' - this was definitely not about 'laws' or the 'law' would have stepped in - and it's definitely not Amazon's job to enforce the law.
Amazon knowingly sells fake goods and suppresses unions so let's not give them the moral high ground.
Apple's concern I don't think was arbitrary: there was a lot of 'really bad discourse' on Parler, and it was not moderated at all (or community moderated which had no effect).
I don't like Apple's App Store 'monopoly' however they were within reason to not want Parler in the store.
If Apple allowed non-AppStore downloads, then I think it would have sat much better.
Amazon however, I think did something a few steps more inappropriate and more nakedly political.
Amazon has a zillion customers that do arguably more nefarious things, in the 'big picture' they look hypocritical, though they are surely within legal rights as well.
I do feel however, that Amazon shouldn't be allowed to drop customers without a 3 month notice unless said customers have done something actually illegal, and by that I mean 'illegal as designated by an actual Judge'.
It's about liability, and big corp's allergy to it.
> I do feel however, that Amazon shouldn't be allowed to drop customers without a 3 month notice unless said customers have done something actually illegal, and by that I mean 'illegal as designated by an actual Judge'.
That's not how liability works
> That's not how liability works
The post you're replying to is describing a better process (note the use of the word "shouldn't"), and your reply seems to be saying, "no, because that's not the current process."
The fact that the system we have now exists does not mean it's the best system possible. I could have misunderstood your comment though.
Amazon hosts all sorts of content that could make them otherwise liable, and they are selling billions in knock-off products every month.
They are able to insulate themselves from it quite well - much like 'Avis Car Rental' is not 'liable' for agency or person that does something bad while renting their car.
Amazon's response was at least about PR, and probably a little bit politics.
"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider"
Therefore the correlation does not work.
Part of the intent for section 230 was to allow free open discussion without the platform being liable. But once they begin to curate the content ( nice way to say censor ) they are no longer performing under section 230.
I don’t know man, seeing them beat an officer sure seems like it was an assault to me.
> As it is, theyre still trying to figure out who was even there
Except for the hundreds of people that video tapes themselves, I’m assuming?
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
And - this is the more important detail - they took no effort to moderate this.
This isn't a slippery slope situation, this is the full on iceberg.
Short of child pornography I can't imagine a more easier case to justify a ban from the perspective of a private enterprise.
Every. Single. Time.
Over and over, unabated.
But
What
About
Parler were banned for refusing to properly moderate ( while having no problem with moderating any content they disagreed with), not for having hateful content. When you report similar content on Twitter or Facebook, they usually do something.
So yes, this is classic and very useless whataboutism. Don't you have anything meaningful to add to the conversation?
> Don't you have anything meaningful to add to the conversation?
And in any event, there's no reason to resort to personal attacks.
Twitter moderates. Aggressively. They can't keep up with their massive scale, but they make an effort. Parler didn't.
> In court filings and elsewhere, Parler has said that it had been developing an artificial intelligence-based content moderation system when the larger platforms' crackdown took place.
I can't see this ending well...
...Also, did they finalize a deal for hosting? I recall seeing their absurd hosting spec [2] that would have cost >$250K/mo, and I don't see that working anywhere other than AWS/GCP/Azure or a dedicated datacenter.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/19/tech/apple-parler-app-sto...
[2] https://twitter.com/th3j35t3r/status/1350612426115452935
And how many users do they have to need that amount of hardware?
Seems like it's SkySilk. NPR has more info about them: https://www.npr.org/2021/03/19/978210584/why-skysilk-came-ou...
I don't see how a company with "less than 50 employees" could possibly host something with that spec, reliably and securely. Maybe it's just grifters all the way down.
Maybe somebody reeled in the specs to something more reasonable.
I hear a lot of voices in these threads that would occupy the overlap of that Venn Diagram. The cognitive dissonance is really something.
Nearly everyone sees the world through the lens of their Party, and come up with all sorts of justifications afterwards.
People can have complex positions that don't neatly fit into a binary view of the world.
Complexity makes hypocrisy inevitable in that system, but that doesn't make it desirable. You'd like to think that somebody confronted with objective, straightforward, simple hypocrisies would be willing to seek a compromise. Often, it's the opposite.
Maybe that's too optimistic, but there it is.
Maybe that's too pessimistic, but there it is. Paradoxically, I hope you're right.
Sounds very succinct and simple, but who draws the line? Can a bakery deny a customer who "acts gay"? That's an action, not a belief. Does voicing an opinion count as an action?
You still have to decide which actions are protected and which are ban-worthy.
judges, politicians, lawyers, cops and voters, just like everything else.
The baker could make rules against holding hands with someone of the same sex, or not speaking proper english. There could even be a strict "don't argue with the baker" rule, and the baker could sass and goad customers he didn't want into arguing with him so he can throw the customer out.
The entire controversy around what happened with Parler is the question of whether the rules the big tech platforms have are just, and evenly enforced. I have not seen anyone arguing against the concept of rules itself.
Now, the question of "even" enforcement is another matter, and I don't think I have enough knowledge or background to have an opinion on that.
It bothers me when people bring this up about SCOTUS appointments. “Mitch McConnell said Merrick Garland can’t be voted on because it is an election year then did the same with ACB weeks before an election. What a hypocrite!”
The right has cared about one thing above all else for the past decade: put conservative judges on the bench; as many as they can, as fast as possible. There’s no “dissonance”. They know exactly what they care about, what they’re doing, and why.
It’s the same thing here. People don’t go by frameworks. They backfill justifications for their feelings. If those justifications overlap in weird ways, it’s just that they’re bad at consistently translating those justifications. The feelings are the same and not contradictory.
For anyone who thinks the above is too minor of a distinction, a potentially worthwhile question to explore would be whether, for example, an African-American baker (who customizes cakes) should be allowed to deny a customer's request to celebrate religiously motivated white supremacy.
Personally, under current law, I think Apple and Google should be able to determine whether an app like Parler is allowed on their platforms, although I think that concentration of power (whether in a corporation or in a government) is generally not good for society. I also think that there should be some base level of services (e.g. ISP) that should be treated as a utility (e.g. we don't deny someone water service because of his bigoted opinions).
Racists are not a protected class
Creating a cake is a work of art that a person must put creativity into. You cannot force this person to create art.
They wouldn't be able to deny selling a premade/cookie-cutter/premade item.
Essentially they get many of the benefits of being a common carrier, but without being a common carrier and having the associated obligations.
That's the difference between Big Tech and bakeries. Big Tech could literally object to all LGBT content on their platform and because of Section 230, your case would be dismissed.
Bakeries don't have anywhere near the amount of freedom as Big Tech enjoys from Section 230.
I don't see how Section 230 is relevant there at all. Section 230 is about content that appears on your site, not content that does not appear on your site.
Are companies actually liable somehow if they don't take proactive steps to mitigate illegal content, which nowadays also leads into heavy-handed censorship because of what they interpret as being borderline illegal (like "hateful speech")?
In other words, is this a purely risk assessment related action, or an ideological one as someone like Alex Jones would shout into a mic?
The point is that people are free to reject work they think is wrong, whether or not it is legal.
[1]: https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/11/hello-youve-been-referred...
[2]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
Of course there has been talk on both sides of the aisles (especially the past 6 months or so) to remove 230 totally or update it so that moderating speech makes you lose 230 protections - the argument that 'we don't write the words our users do so we aren't responsible" - the 'dumb pipe' defense, starts to erode when you censor some things you don't like - especially if you censor them before they are posted - from what I understand.
Of course some portals have already destroyed thier dumb pipe defense all on their own, aka cloudflare -
This leads to interesting situations where I believe most users do not know that their assumed private speech is being monitored, censored, judged, reported, deplatformed etc..
IANAL, dr., etc - anyhow I think it's a fluid situation currently.
Perhaps all that is necessary is the empirical observation that every completely unmoderated forum turns into a metaphorical sewage containment vessel once it gets beyond a certain size.
Email has sent countless child porn. BitTorrent as well. SMS? Check.
Everyone understands you don’t blame AT&T when someone texts CP, but to wrap a pretty UI around your protocol and suddenly the unwashed masses expect you to be the sole arbiter of truth and legality for everything that flows over said protocol.
A P2P facebook that broadcast your profile to another in a standard way would fool 99+% of users.
Unless you're suggesting that a centralized algorithmic feed is a critical part of the FB experience.
Remember Voat. They wanted to be "free speech Reddit" but predictably they turned into a cesspool of degenerate users, even for a time hosting the r/jailbait folks who had been kicked off Reddit a long time ago. And unsurprisingly Voat never got mainstream and now it is dead, while Reddit is still online and growing more and more all the time.
It isn't "censorship". It is optimization.
People have _tried_ unmoderated forums and other social media, again and again. It doesn't work. Being unappealing to advertisers is actually the _good_ case; the bad case is that people use it to orchestrate serious crimes.
I am getting calls weekly on how to deplatform off AWS services. These are normal businesses, not social media or news organizations. Decentralization is going to happen.
I agree. Decentralization is the future.
If your service suddenly becomes synonymous with an armed uprising, and your response is to talk about free speech and how it is not your fault... then ya, you are going to loose business partners left and right.
Did parler have particular features enabling these so called 'armed uprisings', beyond what e.g. Facebook also offers to its users for free?
These geniuses were posting videos on Parler showing themselves during the insurrection.
Regardless, it doesn't seem like Facebook put in these supposed emergency policies anywhere near quickly enough, right? Here is an entire article talking about the nuances of blame here... I just really get the feeling like a big part of what happened with Parler was "big tech" realizing their own culpability and then having to organize around a scapegoat, lest anyone decided to come after them instead.
https://www.salon.com/2021/01/16/despite-parler-backlash-fac...
I wonder about that. If you think about it, Parler isn't particularly "decentralized", either. It isn't Twitter, but it is controlled and curated by a fairly arbitrary authority. In theory, if you didn't like Twitter's rules, and you didn't like Parler's rules, you could just move off to another competing service - if you or somebody else started one up (easy) and did the legwork of advertising it far enough that enough people used it to make it useful (hard). True decentralization would be something like Tor, I2P or Freenet, where all the users cooperate to share bandwidth and there's no plug to pull and no central dictator to ban content. However, truly decentralized services have been around for a long time now (I seem to recall installing Freenet once in the late 90's), and they have yet to catch on. As much as some of us fear the power of central planning, it seems as though the majority of people like knowing that there's nuclear kill switch that can be pulled if the communication platform gets to be too contentious.
Things on the cleanweb will be average, safe, and predictable. Various deviations from user expectation will be punished (up to and including having your service provider yank a piece of your service Jenga tower out from under you if they're irritated enough about the offense).
The trashweb will spawn some serious beauty and truly novel things and an awful, awful lot of scams, hatred, illegal transactions, and garbage.
And most people will constrain themselves to the cleanweb but the trashweb will see a robust userbase.
And now that Parler has proven it has a system in place, Apple has allowed them back on to their storefront.
There are a lot of potential issues with the Parler ban -- namely the revelation of how monopolized online distribution is. But the ban had legitimate reasons behind it.
It missed it's shot at becoming a social media platform and I don't see why people wold come back to it now that it is on the App Store again. The free speech crowd has moved onto other platforms and the Trump people are awaiting Mike Lindell's new platform and/or the Donald Trump social media site that's rumored to be in the works.
Parler was created so people would be free of Twitter "Censorship". About the only thing Twitter censored was threats of violence or rape, election misinformation, or extremely blatant racism.
Their only appeal was to people who found that kind of speech acceptable. If you market primarily to violent and racist people, you are absolutely going to be associated with negative connotations.
Twitter blocked the NYPost because they didn't approve of their entirely factual journalism.
Regardless of the laptop though, there's clearly a double standard in what Twitter will block with or without proof. The Russian bounty program that was widely reported by the Washington Post and others during the election cycle was unsubstantiated, but no effort was made to block it.
The laptop story seems like the most probable explanation of this leak, given the documents and FBI correspondence provided. Most attempts I've seen to debunk it seem dishonest or misleading, like "the PDFs' metadata showed they had been created in the fall of 2019, though the emails were supposedly from 2014 and 2015" as if anyone expected the PDF compilation of incriminating emails to be pre-made by Hunter.
While the email is real and the laptop story seems the most probable explanation, the email doesn't necessarily imply corruption on Joe Biden's part or even that he discussed anything business-related with Pozharskyi.
So I would not say "entirely unsubstantiated" -
In fact I would read between the lines and be real - he's certainly seen the articles quoting emails and pics and such - if this was a setup / fake plant - he could of said 'hey that could be my laptop, but I never emailed X and never had a pic of Y - so the thing is false flag - He did say deny the content and owned up to the possibility that it was his hardware - so..
If I'm wrong and don't know the whole context I am open to consider whole truth, admittedly have not watched the whole interview (yet, and don't want to, but will if people say this or that)
At this point it certainly seems that twitter censored something as voting disinfomation or election manipulation - and that by censoring it twitter actually created disinformation / election manipulation.
With this, being such an important thing - I am okay if corrected and find out my current understanding is wrong.
should be more clear.
"He did not say, "I deny the content" - and owned up to the possibility that it was his hardware - so.
and the issues about the story that were brought up, were indeed 'the content' of the emails and such.. which did not get much public discourse.
The fig leaf they used to justify it was that it exposed an email from a public official (a Ukrainian gas executive) and was "hacked/unauthorized" material. Of course, journalists use unauthorized information all the time (Snowden, Trump's tax returns, etc.) without getting banned from Twitter.
This is the danger with censoring "fake news". Obviously there's a huge grey area, since I don't think many people would object to censoring falsehoods that are agreed upon to be harmful to the public, like claiming that 5G spreads COVID-19.
But with something like the Hunter Biden story, who exactly are these companies like Twitter to almost immediately censor such stories, whether they seem specious or not? Do they hire people specifically for their background in journalistic ethics?
Yes, they are private companies. We are also treating them as arbiters of truth and have handed a massive amount of power to them. They can absolutely censor what they want to censor, but that doesn't mean people are wrong for pointing out the bias and the danger present in exercising such strong armed control over what information people want access to.
By the way, telling people they can't see something only makes them want to see it more. Can we hardly blame people for distrusting Twitter because, for some reason, Twitter had an interest in hiding a story of political interest counted to their own?
If Twitter is only to sanction stories that they believe are true, then they are completely falling flat when it comes to the sheer amount of specious tripe that comes out of the mainstream media. I can't count on both hands the number of times I've read articles making claims based on a study, only to use Sci-hub to look up the actual study and find that it completely contradicts the claim some journalist was making.
Twitter can certainly kick whoever they want off their platform for whatever reason. However they don't know anything more about breaking news than the rest of us. They cannot have banned a breaking story because it isn't true, the reason being that they couldn't know.
If they banned a NYPost article based on the newspaper's reputation, that is a ban on a strictly political opinion.
They were removed for being a repeat violation of the conduct he'd already been warned to avoid.
The election results questioning thing is a totally different topic but it doesn’t change the fact that people literally attempted to claim Trump wanted an insurrection and Twitter could have continued to flag things with their “election results” blurb rather than pulling the entire post.
I think we all can see what the common denominator is here... why not allow both the condemning of violence and lawlessness as well as the ability to “trust but verify” on election results?
Mitt Romney said “an audit won’t satisfy them only telling them the truth will” only nobody to this day even knows the truth yet, the best we can say is that we aren’t sure, and that leaves it open for either side to say they are sure about their angle.
Alleging fraud is an explicit lack of trust.
In my opinion a complete lack of trust should be the default stance when it comes to voting, we should ideally not have to trust anyone or anything for this.
Except he is NOT right and we DO know. The election was NOT rigged or stolen from him. He lost. Plain and simple.
I was watching the entirety of the events through streamers cameras from start to finish. Were you?
We also know that people have cheated in elections since the dawn of time, in the US it’s typical for each party to just ignore it for the sake of moving along, in this case we found a guy who didn’t care about towing party lines so he decided it was a hill to die on.
Right or wrong if anything he revealed some massive flaws in the system and if voting is as important as people say then it’s probably a good thing to be aware of and scrutinize.
Remember, he could be right, it came down to a mere handful of counties where the results were never able to be verified, and to this day the local officials have been blocking attempts to audit, even after judges ordered it or subpoenas were issued. Maricopa county audit is happening soon I think.
By that logic any tennis match between an excellent player and a terrible one could be said to have been decided by a handful of mistakes and declaring without evidence that those calls were made badly.
The election was fairly lost by a huge margin of the electorate and a substantial EC vote margin. Trump is both a traitor to our country and a liar and you should stop apologizing for him.
Imagine a vote tally machine with a 60% failure rate (https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-815/163875/2020...), that means 60% of the time a single human being decided which candidate the ballot went to. Or how about this: https://postimg.cc/wtBWQpXw
All they needed to do was audit the ballots, it wouldn’t have even taken long. The reason lawyers did their best to block these audits was because they knew it was possible for them to lose if the audits went forward.
This is very much not about Donald Trump.
This is pretty pointless because people have already made up their mind that there’s nothing there and nobody would ever lie or manipulate a count to “save the country from Hitler”, when in reality we still don’t know if that happened or not because everyone with the ability to check agreed not to check. I am not claiming to know there was enough fraud to swing it, just that they never confirmed there wasn’t, they just took the word of the local officials that the counts were correct. To me, that’s absolute insanity, and how anyone who is pro-democracy would support that is beyond me.
The Maricopa audit is happening soon, so that should be interesting. And the Fulton ballots were ordered by a Judge to be turned over a few weeks ago, but the local officials are appealing to block the audit!
Private organizations have long had "follow our rules or be asked/told to leave" policies.
It is completely legitimate to challenge election results. It is legal, and a part of our political process. It shouldn't be surprising either - it's hard to trust an election process that made a hasty and unplanned switch to mail-in voting, that altered the rules of the election arbitrarily (example https://www.npr.org/2020/10/19/922411176/supreme-court-rules...), etc. And with Democrats repeatedly pushing back on very reasonable voter ID laws, it seems that one side really does not want to make elections secure and instead leave security gaps open, which fuels those concerns further. We should all want a maximally-secure election process because it is the most fundamental piece of our political system.
Keep in mind, I am saying this as someone who believes that the amount of fraudulence alleged would not alter election outcomes. Regardless, it's important for our political process to play out in a trustworthy, transparent, and censorship-free way. Your phrasing of "violation of the conduct" tries to lend legitimacy to Twitter's actions. In reality Twitter simply engaged in one-sided censorship, basically providing election and campaign help to the Democrats because they (their executives, their employees) are politically biased.
They allow doxxing of some people but then have policies against doxxing of other people.
So there is good reason for an alternative if we want DIA-logue rather than echo-chambers.
Conspiracy theories about viruses are literally killing people. I’d file that right in the category of shouting fire in a crowded theater.
Meaning they have contradicted themselves meaning they have countered their own arguments.
Debate is healthy. Suppression is not healthy. It’s getting to be Orwellian and Dystopian. They are allowed to be wrong but not others. They are allowed to re-write history.
China has it where you report fellow citizens for "mistaken beliefs". I fear we're going down the same path and people are doing it happily. It's concerning.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/15/twitter-bans-james-okeefe-...
A friend was permabanned for saying pit bulls commit a disproportionate number of dog attacks. Linking dog attack statistics didn’t matter.
Screw Twitter and their censorship, and people like you need to stop doing their dirty work for them and pretending everything is ok.
There were plenty of calls to violence during last year's summer riots. Twitter didn't censor any of it.
The people who were blocked at all were generally repeat offenders.
One of these things is not like the others. Equating rape threats with what Twitter unilaterally decided was “election misinformation” and using that as a basis to silence a sitting President of the United States is an extreme case of censorship that justifiably scared anyone with views that divert even slightly from Silicon Valley’s brand of extreme leftism.
Even Jack Dorsey acknowledged that Twitter had entered into dangerous territory with this move [1]. Specifically, he said it ”sets a precedent I feel is dangerous: the power an individual or corporation has over a part of the global public conversation.”
[1] https://twitter.com/jack/status/1349510769268850690?s=21
Allowing the right to take the country on the crazy train to moral and economic destitution is bad for business and the furthest left are a manageable risk. The smart money is in on supporting moderate right and blue majority.
There is literally nothing socialist about Silicon Valley. Government spending is not socialism and never has been.
If Silicon Valley supported nationalization, collectivization or unionization, you would have a case. But they don't, in fact they're pretty obviously against all of them.
UBI is not socialist, it has roots in Austrian economics. Most socialists are opposed to it, although some might accept it as a short-term compromise. Like I said, socialism is nationalization, collectivization or unionization. It is not the negative income tax proposed by Hayek which maintains market relations and alienation of labor.
As for universal healthcare/single payer, can you show me people representing Silicon Valley that support Medicare For All? Not just employees, not the proles, but actual power brokers?
If so, why? I'd expect the President of the United States to have communications channels not controlled by a private company.
This is false. Twitter also censors search, which operates over the tweets they allowed to be posted.
> Their only appeal was to people who found that kind of speech acceptable. If you market primarily to violent and racist people, you are absolutely going to be associated with negative connotations.
This is not just explicitly false, it is a gish gallop of unsubstantiated insinuations about Parler and/or their customers. I spent some time on Parler, and I was expecting a hellscape but instead literally did not see even one example of the type of content you are listing out here. If it exists, it is exceedingly rare, which makes sense considering Parler had 20 million users. The vast majority of the content was people posting the same content they post on other platforms, to build up a presence on Parler.
As for your claims about what Twitter censors - it is certainly not as limited as you claim. Some examples: 1) They censored Zero Hedge from talking about the Wuhan lab leak theory and banned them for months before reinstating them, under the very dubious claim that they "doxxed" the head of the lab, whose contact information was provided on the Wuhan lab website as the public contact for the lab. More recently, once other people starting talking about the Wuhan lab leak theory, it was suddenly okay. 2) Twitter blocked NY Post's story about Hunter Biden under a vague "hacked materials" policy (https://nypost.com/2020/10/15/twitter-changes-hacked-materia...) - meanwhile, they allowed the NY Times and others to post about Trump's private financial data, and allow "hacktivists" to share illegally obtained materials with no consequence. 3) Twitter censored posts about BLM's founder spending millions on real estate (https://nypost.com/2021/04/16/social-media-again-silences-th...)
There's a more extensive list of inconsistent, one-sided application of censorship in social media at https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/15/11-hacks-leaks-and-hoax... and https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/free-speech/nb-staff/2020/.... Other articles compiling censorship actions also appear in web searches, and they too go far beyond the types of censorship you mentioned. It is clear that US tech giants - who are more influential than most nations - are not in the business of facilitating open discourse and a diversity of ideas. They are simply ideologically biased in their rampant censorship, which is why alternative platforms, heavier regulation, and a renewal of antitrust law are needed.
Well, seeing as how it was created specifically to host content that moral, reasonable people would find objectionable, it's a fair association.
Is that code for progressives?
Apple has established, clearly and publicly, that you will not say anything they disapprove of with their devices. (This affects Discord also: https://www.osnews.com/story/133306/discord-will-block-nsfw-...)
How long people put up with this is another question.
The pistol emoji has been replaced with a squirt gun, injecting Apple's political views into plain text documents, and,
You can't type the Taiwanese flag emoji on an iPhone in the PRC region at all.
You can always go open a browser and visit any website you want and write whatever you want and Apple can't do anything about it.
Its users generally appear to consider that a feature, not a bug, so I don't anticipate any changes. People have been predicting users walking away from Apple's version of Omelas for over a quarter-century; hasn't happened yet.
I have no issues with him being conservative, I rather enjoy dialog with all sorts of folks. But the disconnect with reality is really something else.
I hope Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter unban Donald Trump next. None of the justifications they provided in January exist any longer. If they don't, I hope decentralized alternatives like BitClout start to take off.