I am optimistic that we won't tumble down the slippery slope. We do need to be careful about it, though, and watch for threats to democracy from all angles. IMO it wouldn't be such a bad thing if this instance weakened the market dominance of SV and gave room in the market for new entrants. Hosting providers outside U.S. jurisdiction, for example, or decentralized social networks.
The difference is that each instance is a completely separate entity. They live or die on their own. They have to secure their own hosting, figure out their own revenue stream, and deal with law enforcement on their own. It's reddit minus reddit.
> This is a weird case of private companies getting together and voluntarily enforcing the supremecy of the state.
It's maybe weirder than that, because of the involvement of the president. Even if you believe the president was entirely uninvolved and unaware, the purpose of the insurrection was to keep a leader in power, not remove one. The actions of tech companies are both a challenge to the supremacy of the (current administration of the) state and a way of enforcing the supremacy of the state.
The main thing I'm afraid of is that there will be a renewed push to make encryption illegal. Optimistically, I think the actions of these tech companies might help avoid that - if they had done nothing, it would be easier for politicians to demand the ability to take matters in to their own hands.
This seems strictly better than what we have, though, where Twitter or Facebook decide the same. At least you can move instances, or start your own.
EDIT: also to note, email does kind of work this way with administrator applied spam lists. I would not want to use an email service that couldn't or wouldn't filter spam.
IMO this is why federation is an important aspect of decentralized networks, and is commonly listed as a reason for use Mastodon / the fediverse. Each instance can set their own moderation policies and decide what other instances they want to federate with. Notably mastodon.social and the instances related to it haven't become cess pools of hate speech, because they do have strong moderation policies, but for users who want to post that stuff there are other instances they can find.
Where was the "we love you, we know how you feel, please go home peacefully" rhetoric in June? Imagine the inroads that could have been made if Trump actually cared about injustice against Americans! Instead he stoked the fire, and saved his adoration for his cronies to throw them under the bus when they failed to secure him his position as unelected president.
As expected, they don't respond to the letter, but just take the opportunity to climb up on their free speech soapbox. Warner's letter doesn't suggest anything that would further threaten Gab's platform, just asks them not to shred the evidence of crimes that were committed on their platform.
Part of supporting free speech is accepting that private companies are not compelled to publish or support political leaders or their followers. It would be a bigger threat to free speech if Twitter etc. were required to publish the president's tweets just because he's the president. Of course it might end up being a bad idea for tech companies to deplatform the president and his cronies, but doing so is excersizing free speech rights, not restricting them.
In general where two entities free speech rights are in conflict I would suggest it's best to make sure the less powerful entity gets the right of way. As powerful as social media platforms are, they're still not at powerful as the U.S. President.
TOR hidden services are, I think, the only quick and easy way to do this. Pirate Bay has been reasonably successful at staying accessible in the open, but not without considerable expense as I understand.
EFF seems to dislike corporations and governments working together against people, whether voluntary or compelled. I expect they would dislike Tim Cook handing over info, and would dislike Twitter being compelled to carry speech by government officials.
> This is not the same EFF that supported the Freedom of Speech stance by Apple against the FBI when terrorists killed 16 people in San Bernardino.
In both cases the EFF sided with the company's ability to practice their free speech instead of the government compelling them to speak or not speak. Seems perfectly consistent.
Yes, if you get too many people mad at you, you're going to have a bad time no matter how just your cause. In some cases we've decided as a society to protect people who might get a lot of anger directed at them through no fault of their own, like because of their race or sexuality. I doubt we're going to extend those protections to include people who incite violence, but maybe we can extend them in other ways as appropriate to make sure people aren't undeservedly deplatformed.
Sure it does. They made this decision based on what they thought would be best for their company, by both satisfying advertisers and buying favor with the new administration. They balanced those benefits against the users they'll lose based on this decision and decided it was worth it.
Maybe we'll get lucky and find that they were wrong, and that this move causes enough public backlash to give other social networks a chance to thrive (if we're really lucky, maybe even decentralized ones!)
It's decentralized. You can run your own server and post your stuff on it. That doesn't guarantee you a platform in the first place, but PeerTube itself can't really deplatform you. You could be deplatformed further up the stack, though, by your hosting provider, ssl provider, DNS registrar, etc.
That's an interesting point about @POTUS. I wonder if they would still let him use it, and if he had already been using it if they would have blocked that, too.
I don't directly disagree and I feel kind of weird about this too, but the idea that a private company could have been 1) big enough to matter and 2) blocked the head of the government from using the service without literal heads rolling in USSR 40 years ago doesn't match with my understanding of that era.
Actually if Twitter were silently forced to not only carry the president's message but also boost it to everyone's feed and secretly silence his opponents that feels more USSR to me, and feels like almost the opposite of what's happening here.
I actually agree, and I upvoted you because I think this is worth discussion.
My question here though is: does blocking Trump from Twitter really equate to blocking the public from hearing what he's saying? As someone who doesn't use and never really 'got' Twitter it's really hard for me to take Twitter that seriously. Aren't there myriad other and better ways for the president to reach more people? (Note that only a small-ish minority of U.S. adults even use Twitter at all)
I do think sometimes the intent of a person matters when they've committed crime. This is codified in U.S. law. Killing someone in self defense, killing someone because you're angry with them, and killing someone because they're gay and you don't like gay people: each the same crime, but treated differently in U.S. law. I don't know about arson, but I do think that for example occupying a government building because you want the elected officials there to take action on supporting human rights should be treated differently than occupying a government building because you want your favorite candidate to be president despite losing the election.
I do think we should prosecute people who break the law. Maybe not every single one of them, but a lot of them. I personally find the cause of BLM to be just and the cause of MAGA tremendously unjust, so if it were up to me I would show more leniency (within the bounds of the law) to the BLM group. Probably fortunately for all parties, though, it's not up to me.
Are you suggesting that there weren't lots of arrests of rioters and looters this summer? I believe that many people were arrested any time the protests turned violent or in cases of significant vandalism. I know there were many highly reported arrests in my part of the country from the parts of the protests that went out of control.
Still, they weren't insurrectionists. They weren't trying to put someone in power who lost the election. That's an important distinction. Maybe we shouldn't compare them at all, but if we're going to, what MAGA did was worse.
I looked through some of what's here. I don't really have the vocabulary to understand if these items are significant or not. Some of them seem like they might be, some of them seem like they're probably not significant, and some seem to point to evidence that claims of fraud are in actuality a farce.
I do have some trust in our institutions and our court system, though. The fact that there has been bi-partisan dismissal across the board of claims of election fraud - even from judges and officials who are on-the-record Trump supporters - leads me to believe that there is little here of substance. Why would Republican Trump supporters who are proud (perhaps to a fault) of defying the mainstream media suddenly fall in line? They didn't fall in line with the other 'fake news' events throughput the presidency, why this one? Imagine the credibility they'd gain if there was actually enough fraud to change the election, and they found it!
I've seen people point to the fact that many of the cases were dismissed by judges without actually hearing the evidence, due to clerical or timing problems. I am incredulous. In order to accept that, I have to believe that a Republican judge who supports Donald Trump and presumably wanted to see him back in the presidency looked at the lawsuit, understood the situation and it's urgency, and shrugged his (or her) shoulders and said 'sorry, you might be right, but I'm not gonna look at it.' I don't buy it.
I understand what you're saying, but I don't come to the same conclusion. I don't think that there is any amount of certification or 'fair treatment' that could have come from the press that would have made Trump stand down. Every inch of leniency trump and his most ardent supporters get they take a mile. As long as he's up yelling on his soapbox his people are going to try to find reasons to believe him.
Yes, sometimes dead people 'vote', but that happens in all elections and more importantly happens in both parties, but not enough to swing elections.
I have a pet theory (maybe a conspiracy theory, idk) that the reason the Republican officials have been so quick to shut down fraud claims is because any investigations will find just as much or more fraud on their side.
The elections were certified. Not just by the media, also by the courts. Many of them, including the supreme court, have heavy republican representation. If there was any credible reason to doubt the results these Republican officials - many of them outspoken Trump supporters - would have considered it. This isn't about wanting people to feel secure about the election, it's about yelling and screaming until they get the results they want.
I mean ... they don't. Twitter is really not that big of a deal. Removing his ability to tweet means ... almost nothing. He can still talk to the press, post to other social media, hold press conferences from the white house press room, he has no shortage of ways of getting his message out there.