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Comment by deanCommie | Hacker News Reader

I mean Parler hosted credible death threats and actual fascists. Not hyperbolistic "everyone I disagree with is a Fascist"s, but proper worshippers of Adolf Hitler and his agenda.

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.

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If you are going to make such claims, then at least try and be objective about it. Let's start with the toxic hellfire that is Twitter, I'm sure no credible death threats exist there, right?

Whataboutism.

Every. Single. Time.

Over and over, unabated.

But

What

About

Twitter

You know "Whataboutism" isn't a magic word that lets you ignore an argument, right? If Twitter has extremist content (or death threats, or racism, or whatever) and isn't banned, then that is evidence that that's not the real reason for another app to have been banned. Weak evidence? Maybe. Open to argument about proportions of "bad" content? Absolutely. But still evidence.

> You know "Whataboutism" isn't a magic word that lets you ignore an argument, right? If Twitter has extremist content (or death threats, or racism, or whatever) and isn't banned, then that is evidence that that's not the real reason for another app to have been banned

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?

We appear to have very different ideas of what whataboutism is. If twitter and parler are actually different, then just say that. There's no reason to dismiss the argument without meeting it.

> Don't you have anything meaningful to add to the conversation?

And in any event, there's no reason to resort to personal attacks.

Yes it is, I and almost certainly a large amount of people just blip right over whataboutism posts. Everyone is fed up with this style of deflection. Its just.. old. The discussion is about Parler, if you can't talk about it without the constant barrage of "well what about what Twitter does??" then maybe don't hit reply at all.

> And - this is the more important detail - they took no effort to moderate this.

Twitter moderates. Aggressively. They can't keep up with their massive scale, but they make an effort. Parler didn't.

So? Those “fascists” probably use web browsers and email too. Should chrome/gmail be pulled from the App Store because google refuses to moderate their creations?

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