Gab.com’s Response to Congress
news.gab.com
news.gab.com
Well put. As we've also seen from numerous leaks and incidents over the years, big business and government often works hand-in-hand, with revolving door policies and barely legal indirect bribes happening regularly.
That the government is now seeking to curtail the First Amendment by exerting pressure on these companies should be alarming to anyone.
Being put on a no fly list or terrorist watch list are some examples. Happened all the time during the war on terror.
"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."
Just because the causes have not been enumerated lucidly or coherently doesn't mean that there's not two different peoples in the USA who would like to dissolve the political bands connecting them to one another.
https://kiwifarms.net/threads/biting-the-hand-that-feeds.808...
Before the masses were corralled into walled gardens. If a free and open Internet was a threat to gatekeepers, walled gardens are the solution. You can say anything you want on their platforms, as long as it adheres to the party's content guidelines.
The gate-kept illusion of freedom is arguably more toxic, because it normalizes the curated garden of propagandized views.
Yes, you have more options than broadcast TV, newspapers and radio. Especially if you espouse mainstream views which one would easily find on those sources.
There was a time before eternal September, let's call it August. Google searches were populated by independently run forums and websites. Tech giants were not bent on imposing their political will. Individuals were getting the word out about Hans Blix on independent sites. One can only wonder how Twitter or Facebook's fact checkers would handle that today.
"Experts confirm Saddam has WMD"
In the august days before fact checkers and Facebook, users could still obtain free hosting. They could even post on forums without learning the basics of HTML. That's when the history of the Internet turned.
The total audience for the internet was far less in those days.
To the contrary, the Internet was still growing by leaps and bounds. I propose that the Internet had reached a point where vested interests needed to capture it to maintain control of the narrative.
Now the entirety of society is an "internet addict". I'll admit the nerd inside me feels a bit vindicated, even if horrified overall with where the internet has taken us.
The other day I was thinking back to when I was younger and people freaked out at the possibility of dating someone you met online. Now with dating apps it's the norm.
I'm not sure how old you are, but when is this time you speak of? AOL had users in a walled garden for decades. Then those users moved to myspace, then facebook. You're going to need to be more specific about this magical time when the average user was somehow "free of walled gardens".
The free hosting providers were not engaging in political censorship. Google had a maxim, "Don't be evil". They didn't have infoboxes explaining, "Experts agree that enhanced interrogation is not torture".
Maybe start by explaining how they were worse?
There have always been alternatives to the walled gardens, they have never been larger than their walled alternatives.
Facebook and Twitter are actively policing speech that is not illegal.
That is why your analogy is inapt.
What some people don’t seem to understand about the first amendment is that while the government is obligated to not stop you from publishing, no private party is obligated to assist you.
What some people don't understand about freespeech is that it's a bigger principle then just the 1st amendment protections. Most of us are not arguing that companies ARE violating the law/first amendment. only that political/religious speech restrictions by large gate keeping institutions can have similar negative effects on society. We are arguing for ether more protections to be put in place or even for social change where instead of demanding companies censor these who disagree with us we demand they allow them to speak, EVENTHOUGH we disagree with them.
> Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.
> Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.
> There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.
~ John Stuart Mill, On Library (1859)
Dangerous antivax nonsense is not well moderated on many of those platforms, especially Facebook
We can likely reach pre-2016 levels of Internet freedom again. I'm not sure if Gab is a critical piece of that, but they seem to be doing mostly the right things right now (though I would like to see some sort of /r/all mechanism for popular activity, right now feeds appear to be completely self-curated).
Am hoping that our protections will be renewed because of potential loss of market share, and financial interests. BigTech isn't worth much if they go after 45% of their user population, I mean, product. Because of that I still actively use Amazon, Google, Facebook, and others
In fact, when you realize that the internet has provided more forums for free speech than any technology in history, it beggars belief to suggest that there are less forums now than before.
We are at the ultimate highpoint of access to freespeech forums in American history, and to suggest otherwise is nakedly ignorant conservative propaganda pushing an emotional angle against technology corporations who enforce common sense rules against violence, terrorism, and hate speech on their private networks.
I maintain that until Fox News or conservative talk radio is mandated by the government to stop suppressing my free speech rights to have access to the network to say whatever I want, that Facebook and Twitter should not be forced to support insurrection and violence masquerading as free speech.
It's hard to understate how outrageous this lie is. It's like suggesting "folks today have less access to electricity than at any point in American history". It's such immensely stupid lie that how could anyone fall for it?
Where is "force" coming into this other than various government demands and threats?
This entire debate is about making private networks such as Facebook into "public/government spaces", thus meaning the Bill Of Rights would apply to a private company (an outrageously anti-Constitutional concept) and it would count as government censorship for Twitter to ban an insurrectionist like Trump.
And with this radically anti-Free Speech conservative supreme court majority, you better believe that the rights of private networks to publish content free from government interference is still high risk.
Instead he argues that there should be a lot of newspapers, to accurately capture the growing audiences and government should not interfere in the growth of private speech
It was considered virulently anti-Liberty to use government to force a newspaper to print an opinion they disagree with, and that concept remains true today.
If Facebook does not wish to publish violent speech, they don't have to, just like the New York Times editors can choose, just like Fox News can choose, just like every "free speech" newspaper, news channel, or network can choose.
This is the essence of free speech, that the government cannot unfairly control your network and tell you that you can no longer choose what to publish.
It's sad that people are this against Liberty that they demand government forcibly control networks to allow whatever speech the ruling party currently feels is "free".
you can't simply switch off of Facebook the way you would drop a publication you dislike. the network effects keep everyone trapped in. i can't believe we're still having this asinine back-and-forth a full decade after we learned how natural monopolies form via the ordinary dynamics of social graph consolidation.
Metcalfe's law is a thing people, you can read about in on Wikipedia [1] and we can maybe start moving beyond a 1993 understanding of what an internet platform is.
And even if you take the shorter view, there are still more places for people to discuss them. Facebook and Twitter didn’t even exist until the mid-2000s and the Internet has been readily accessible since the late 1990s.
to my generation, this is much more poorly framed by arguing whether Facebook is comparable to a pre-internet private establishment, than it is framed by the internet being simply the air that we breathe, an ether in which sound naturally vibrates and which trying to legislate the dynamics of should seem equally ridiculous.
There will always be a place for people to express themselves, but it may not always be as convenient as some would like. But the Constitution does not require convenience or free amplification services.
This is the entire rub, though. Exactly how convenient it is should be a matter of primal importance to the root relationships between citizen, state, and countrymen that the founders found and advocated for. Beyond the momentary mire of the current legal/political order, one feels that all citizens should have some instinctual understanding and positive desire for the sort of healthy, dynamic, and free social order that we're all ostensibly (or increasingly just nominally) in support of as Americans. Whether this dynamic comes under repression from this type of entity or another is a flatly ridiculous non-sequitur (I'm positive that the founders had the same level of love for the East India Company as they did for the British crown)
Complicating this, the surrounding legal framework and precedents around computing technology is near-universally acknowledged to be in a state of completely hopeless shambles; every critical chunk of the system was designed and implemented in the 20th century, with the assumptions of 20th century media tech casted squarely into them. Exceedingly few TOS and EULA precedents have progressed an inch since the era of 1980s shrinkware tech. The "Congressional inquiry of big tech leaders" parade we continue to put on is a gigantic joke and a gross historical embarrassment. the DMCA and the CFAA routinely horrifies any sensible person that examines them for a couple of minutes.
So two things; while the current legal system collectively catches up to modern tech basics like "how to use an AOL modem", we should be direly concerned that a large portion of the country seems to have abandoned any personal sense of (first creeping, now a torrent) of the predictable horrors incurred under a tyrannical regimes that expressly suppress YOUR (God-given!) constitutional rights.
The second thing, of course, is that all this stuff eventually needs to get resolved in the tangible court of legal opinion. I have no doubt that Mr Torba's constitution claim will fail under our current legal system, and I generally accept the rebuke that the 'digital native' class haven't done enough of the aforementioned positive work themselves to outline how these new usages of these new technologies should harmonize with the constraints and institutional knowledge of the existing legal/political system, which has accumulated a ton of valid merit over its mostly-contiguous 250-year-long history.
At some point there's going to have to be a big palaver regarding one's fundamental right to own, operate, and make sovereign decisions (as a citizen subject to the constitution) about some part of their computing stack. Probably won't get resolved today, but I think Mr. Torba's response seems like a healthy statement to rally around.
Instead, historic public forums were mostly related to in-person meetings - town halls, clubs, pubs etc. These have not been outlawed nor disappeared entirely, but they are almost entirely atrophied. Instead, public discussion has moved almost entirely online. This has created a complex situation, as online forums are almost always private property, unlike the forums of the past.
This situation is creating an unprecedented situation for free speech - as private mega corporations, not bound by the first ammendment, are now in control of a huge percentage of public communication. It seems pretty clear that Facebook or YouTube can't just be handled as publishers, nor as network operators, nor as broadcasters, nor as any other traditional form of communication. We will need to invent a new concept of how such communication should be regulated and moderated.
On the other hand, it's also true there is more public communication, and with higher reach, then probably ever before in history.
The idea that every government and "public" forum in American history was government land is crazy to me. People weren't going into the courthouse to have friendly debates. They were in inns, bars, churches, etc. I would wager the vast majority of all "public forums" you refer to happened in a private location.
Thus this isn't some unprecedented scenario, as the church has controlled public speech in all but the biggest of towns in this manner for our entire history.
I'm reminded of the Red Scare where socialists and communist sympathizers could not meet because all the meeting spaces were private and they were banned from meeting there. So much for historical public forums! What few private forums were available were targeted by the government and its sympathizers for shutdown, violence or worse.
Imagine putting the government that ran the red scare IN CHARGE OF what constitutes free speech and who can publish what.
>We will need to invent a new concept of how such communication should be regulated and moderated.
No thanks, I like Free Speech and Liberty and we never need to invent a new way for the government of the day to control speech.
Last year they were outlawed.
You don't think there should be a difference between platforms and publishers?
So no, that won't work. Try again.
A billboard is a publisher; the content there is clearly governed.
So the criteria seems simple:
* is content freely posted? What is the approval process for content?
* if content is freely posted, are the rules for removing content uniformly applied and viewpoint neutral?
* what mechanisms exist for appeal, protest, modifying the rules, etc?
Platforms are defined by what they don't allow.
Publishers are defined by what they do allow.
One of the problems with trying to use an actor's own policy to distinguish between platforms and publishers is that the goal of creating such a distinction in the first place is to restrict the ability of the actor to undertake certain policies.
Free speech is good for antifa, bad for pboys. Free speech is good for pboys but bad for antifa.
They are both groups of hoodlums and both have the same rights to free speech, but people will want whoever they agree with more to enjoy it and those they agree with less to not enjoy the rights.
The bizarre irony is that this condition is a core tenet of Fascism, which is something the "woke" anti-free-speechists claim to be fighting against.
[1]https://congressionaldish.com/cd-237-hunting-domestic-terror...
Imagine all of the people who have been arbitrarily labelled as "alt-right" in social and traditional media. Do you actually think this is what they generally want?
Many of them self identify as alt-right. It's largely a self-selected identity. They're often proud of the term too. I have yet to see someone mislabeled alt-right when they're a vanilla conservative. Alt-right really is the far right of old but with Gen Z aesthetics.
Gab does not have (and has never had) such records in its care, custody or control.
Does this mean they keep zero user records or server logs?
It's also ironic to claim "sunlight is the best disinfectant, electric light the most efficient policeman" only to protest in response to a lawful demand to preserve records. (Question 7.)
Put it this way, if the government wanted to get all comms around antifa, or any other anti gov anti police protests, would that be okay?
Congress isn't claiming full access. It's asking Gab to preserve certain information while it goes through due process. You have a right to free speech, and the government has the right to investigate persons who threaten violent insurrection.
Remember when Quest was the Only one to buck the Bush admin for access to its logs and everyone else just bent over because mumble terrorism mumble?
This is not how discovery works. The closest analogy would be a rape occurring and the police announcing an investigation, requesting anyone with information to come forward and warning anyone against deleting incriminating evidence.
The analogy is messy because you're comparing a Congressional inquiry with a criminal investigation.
> Gab suspended the account belonging to Robert Gregory Bowers, the man charged with killing 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue last month, shortly after the attack. The site said it backed up all user data for that account and notified the FBI.
"Spreading misinformation" about the election, whatever it means, is not a crime, I can claim that a given election was a subject to, say, Russian collusion, which is a good point to discuss, as Mueller report is full of statements like this:
"[a] statement that the investigation did not establish particular facts does not mean there was no evidence of those facts."
which can be interpreted one way or another, so it is good to have a discussions about that but mainstream social platforms want to silent any discussion that they consider to be "misinformation".
Same with opinions about the most recent election. I don't really care if Biden was chosen properly or not, but I do care if we have right to discuss about this this freely without being persecuted by the Police, chased by Congress commissions, fired from my university, banned from the Internet or payment systems, etc. just because I have an opinion that others don't like.
"They are rigging elections, they are botching troop withdrawals to flood western countries with refugees, the American border is being invaded by hundreds of thousands of people, they are buying up single family homes and pricing you out of the market, they are printing endless money and inflating your currency."
Kind of a sad state of affairs, but that's where we're at right now with political discourse in the United States. (And probably the whole world, to some extent. It's human nature.)
Gab is a site that censors 'obscenity' and whose CEO refuses to deal with journalists if they don't practise the same religion as him.
Gab exists only to facilitate far-right extremism, and 'hate speech' is the only form of unpopular speech for which Torba shows enthusiasm.
There is a natural segregation between the Internet that is for porn, and the rest of it. For bandwidth reasons alone.
The "you hate people for having a different opinion than you" accusation seems to be disproportionately levied against left-ish or anti-Trump sentiment, but pro-Trump sentiment is disproportionately in the flavor of "hating you for having a different opinion", in my opinion.
Reading it again, I think you're right -- I should have been more charitable.
That said, I guess I didn't see the point the parent was trying to make. You see this kind of outrage stuff on Twitter and Reddit a lot as a reason to dismiss or ban someone. For example, if you express the wrong opinion on trans issues you're not allowed to express an opinion on anything Twitter.
I also agree it's something disproportionately levied against those with left-ish views, but I'd argue that's because this is a tactic used primarily by the left. I do also agree that the pro-Trump cohort often hates people with different opinions. I don't think either is good, but one side seems to be more likely to take their "hate" further and use it as a reason to censor.
I mean, the US society is definitely divided, and it seems that the division is surely not 90/10, but probably more like 60/40. What I think is better way for majority is to take over the burden of criticizing the current administration, thus partially disarming opposition.
In response to a request for all “related communications” to terrorism/Jan. 6 etc. It strains belief that they haven’t even discussed these topics internally.
Eliot Spitzer (!) infamously added the addendum "And never put anything in email"
you see powerful people following this advice all the time, like with Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch’s tarmac meeting. He flew in a plane to talk face to face just to ensure it wouldn't get recorded.
They're saying as a company they don't have ownership of records of such discussions, which could be true.
That's true, but the investigation is specifically about criminal actions, not persecution for beliefs.
And if I am reading the subpoena correctly, they're basically looking for data on moderation activity and policies. That would seem be a purely corporate function and not related to actual user postings or any attempt at user identification. Gab claims they are very responsive to government requests related to criminal activity or foreign influence campaigns and that seems to be all they are investigating with this request. If they want to see what users are talking about, they can go in the front door like everyone else. And if they identify criminal activity, they will issue subpoenas or warrants. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Second, when government need to know about criminal activities, they should specify who is it that they want to investigate and for what case, similar to how law enforcement do with a judge request, and not just scan everyone in the platform.
The citizens have gun rights and we have a LOT of guns.
And if you think millions with rifles and handguns can't stop the US government, you've not been paying attention to what happened in Afghanistan.
If it's so essential to the government to invade the private conversations of a company's user base, they should stand by their claims by using subpoena powers.
I believe they're hoping to avoid legal recourse by "requesting" rather than requiring.
Of course, Gab understands that to ignore the request altogether would have left them open to further harassment by the government, and they provided as little information as possible, but still complied with the request.
A subpoena is the risk if you don’t respond to a congressional request. So this is two steps removed from a potential contempt charge.
It’s like asking someone to stop pissing on the church wall instead of calling the police immediately.
I'm personally not a fan of Gab, and their claims on freedom of speech have, in my opinion, been way over blown. Plenty of colloquial evidence of people having been banned/blocked for posting, albeit tasteless, anti-Trump or anti-Christian content.
However, I do agree that Congress does, in general, requests too much from to many. There's a middle ground, somewhere, where Gab could have offered to cooperate, while still maintaining their stance.
anyone want to bet Gab's internal operations haven't been penetrated and monitored by several antagonistic parties since shortly after their inception? With all respect to their efforts, I looked at some of the code they posted, and didn't see anything to indicate they'll have much luck protecting their operations against the high grade, ideologically motivated opposition they've drawn.
Easily implemented, decentralized/self-hosted platforms already exist, but you can't stream/share your vacation videos with your large family because your upload capacity sucks.
Centralized services exist because individuals don't have the capacity to support a Mastodon or Diaspora instance on their own network connections.
And more's the pity.
Technology has had this problem for a long time - the yellow newspapers of the 18th century arguably started it; the phenomena of toxic radio personalities began immediately after radio was invented. Goebbel's movie propaganda was a critical part of Hitler's rise to power.
The internet, and platforms like Twitter, Reddit, Gab, 4chan, take this to a whole new level. They are the ultra-centerfuges of online discourse, distilling and concentrating the extremes of human discourse into a dense, self-sustaining mass of negativity.
And yet we generally don't get an equal and opposite mass of positivity. I believe the central reason is that humans are super biased to address human negativity, rightly judging it to be the greatest threat at small scale, but wrongly judging it at scale. For example, the 9/11 attacks killed ~2,000 people. Car accidents in the US in 2001 killed ~30,000 people. But one event was rooted in negativity - hatred, rage - and the other was not. So one got trillions applied to it's solution, and the other got nothing.
In a worldwide search of 7B people, I believe you can find a self-sustaining mass of hatred on every side of every topic.
We may need a modification to the free speech law in the presence of a sea-change in speech technology. Perhaps "slow speech" (offline, or online and decentralized) should remain perfectly free, but "fast speech" (online and centralized) should be censored - to defuse any given critical mass that threatens to explode into hatred and rage.
I think it would also be useful to enforce a convention that differentiates between speech and paid-for speech. In this way we can more accurately identify who is speaking as a form of expression, and who is speaking as a means to an economic end. The former should be protected from censorship, and the latter should not.
Edit: thread is a bit over 1 hour old, 125 points, 119 comments and on page 4. All the other threads on page 4 are of comparable vote/comment count but at least 20hrs old. If you scroll through page 4 you will not find a single thread as popular and as fresh as this one there. Maybe i'm biased but id like to think that my prediction was at least half correct.
Edit2: thread is ~1hr30min old, page 8 :)
Sometimes it's because a lot of people (not mods) flagged it; sometimes it's because the flame war detector is tripped and a mod may choose not to reset it. They'll tell you.
Can you confirm this thread is around page four or five at the moment?
A bit disappointing to see this one go by the wayside. It is almost as if Internet freedom is only relevant here when it relates to partisan's favored champion in the arena.
"...and there was no one left to speak for me"
encryptluks2
FSM is real
Not true. There is no evidence that electric light helps deter crime (and of course sunlight is not a disinfectant either).
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:33WBZA...
Also, how does it work as a metaphor? What are the metaphorical "infections" that "sunlight" defeats? Conspiracies? Fake news? There has never been more information available, and there also has never been more conspiracies and stupid theories about everything.
So, also as a metaphor, sunlight is not a disinfectant.
The first ammendment does not apply to private companies at all -- well, it applies in that it gives them free speach rights themselves, so if you mean by "shouldn't be allowed to interpret" that they shouldn't be legally able to express this opinion, well, that'd be a first ammendment problem.
But it doesn't restrict private company's behavior at all. Private companies are not required by the first ammendment to give anyone free speech at all. Which is a kind of weird thing in this statement, they are speaking as if the first ammendment somehow requires them to do this, or as if private companies should be prevented from limiting speech (in general, that would in fact be the first ammendment problem, to compel the private company to provide a platform! although there are ways around that). But as legally weird or incorrect as I think their reasoning or interpretation of the constitution, I don't know why we would think they wouldn't be "allowed" to express a wrong opinion.
Under what grounds do you think someone would have a claim to sue them? Why do you think it would make it to the supreme court? I think you may not have an educated legal basis for that opinion, but you're still allowed to have it and express it!
What portion of their statement are you referring to? I didn't notice anything in this post suggesting that they're required to support free speech, only that they agree with the underlying principles which inspired that provision in the constitution.
> It is not our place, nor should it be the place of any technology company, to interfere with Americans’ civil rights and sit in judgment over their lawful expression.
To me suggesting a private company "interferes with Americans civil rights" by deciding what content to publish, suggests that private companies have some kind of first ammendment obligation.
But I'm not really interested in arguing about it.
Yes. private companies have the obligation to protect their first amendment rights, as part of their obligation to their investors/owners to maximize profit.
Claiming that private companies has some sort of obligation to you by allowing you a platform for your speech without interference or moderation assumes that such private entities have no first amendment rights.
That's obviously false.
If private entities (which you and I and most everyone else) are required to host the speech of others whether they agree with such speech or not, then I can use the same argument for me being able to come over to your house and play gay, furry, midget, scheiser porn on all your screens, project it on the exterior of your house and you have to allow it. If you don't, you're infringing on my first amendment rights.
Which is, of course ridiculous on its face. Whether it's a screen in your home or a server in one of Facebook's data centers, the principle is the same.
Congress trying to figure out what is happening within the country is fine too. It’s a lot of people and businesses and they don’t know.
>our refusal to change our First Amendment-based moderation policy
This seems like a typical misunderstanding of the First Amendment, which only restricts government action.
>Gab has been the subject of a years-long smear campaign by activist groups and boycotted by virtually every technology company of consequence – Amazon, Apple, Coinbase, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, PayPal, Stripe, and Visa included – because of our refusal to change our First Amendment-based moderation policy.
This article is the most reasonably phrased 'Big Tech is violating my 1st Amendment rights' but it is still not valid. It's open to interpretation whether this is attributable to the cause they state.
>The reality of social media content moderation practices today is that large swathes of commonly-held viewpoints and belief systems are systematically discriminated against on the Internet’s largest websites
This is a non-sequitur following discussion of the first amendment.
>American citizens may have freedom of speech, but they find themselves with vanishingly few public forums in which to exercise it fully.
I wonder whether Gab agrees that businesses have a right to refuse service to anyone arbitrarily, such as not making a cake for a gay couple.
>Our web properties are among only a handful on the Internet where Madison’s “general intercourse of sentiments” can presently flow unimpeded by corporate interests, opaquely funded NGOs, and activist groups
I am very skeptical of that claim.
Oh, and I am very open to anyone who would like to explain to me how this is incorrect.