Unlimited incitement to violence is not sustainable. Banning them for this is the start; America is going to have a long uncomfortable process of dealing with its media.
It already happened to the left before and it was called the Red Scare of the '50s. It is strange to see the modern left dig up those old repressive practices and adopt the for their own but "those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it" I suppose.
That seems to be GPs point, actually. It's silly when those on the right are pretending that th comparatively minor private exclusion that the more extreme Right is subjected to might sometime be directed at the Left. The Left is used to much worse, at the hands of the State along with private exclusion, routinely.
All this is going to do is create a real market for more decentralisation and censorship resistance, we have a modicum of control now but that's going to evaporate with the next iteration of the web if this trajectory continues
Pearl clutching? Odd. I've heard people say that all summer long about those afraid of the "peaceful protests" turned violent riots that burned down cities and devastated business. This violence was encouraged by all types of politicians on the left and all the big media networks as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eQzLcO5qhY
A small number of people at an almost entirely non-violent rally, a rally where the president encouraged people to "walk down to the capitol house" .. walk, not riot or loot or burn, a small number of people did something horrifically stupid. Most just walked around, a smaller percentage destroyed stuff. Everyone one of them should be charged if they did.
But you know what I also saw? "Pearl Clutching." Every senator and congressman afraid out of their mind because the villages had come into the castle. The peasants were in the kings court, and the village idiot with a racoon on his head was sitting at the seat of The King's Hand playing with her royal gavel.
You cannot possibly talk about the violence on the 6th, without addressing the fact that the media went on and on and on about praising all the violent "peaceful protestors" all summer long.
It did not matter at all when it was the business owners, the minimum wages workers who lost the jobs at stores now condemned, or those losing everything in lockdowns while Pelosi showed America her ice cream collection in her $14k kitchen setup.
But now that they were causing some minor damage, 1/1000 of the damage the democratic left supporters did on inauguration day 2014:
It's suddenly the worst thing on the planet! Unprecedented even!
America has a long history of its citizens taking federal buildings. The Black Panthers, with an armed militia, took the California Capitol in the 1970s and no one died.
Not comparable. We were close to a congressional decapitation on live TV.
They made shields, set a police station on fire, etc, etc. Much worse than the current situation was.
In 2017 a lone left-wing activist caused more Congressional casualties than thousands of militia boys invading the Capitol.
All four of these incidents had white perpetrators, btw. To extrapolate from mainstream Republican positions, we clearly need a complete and total shutdown of all white immigration until we figure out what is going on.
Back to the present day: the climate of lies about the election from Republican leadership up to and including Trump was obviously a factor in the violence in DC. On top of that Trump was there that day, speaking to that crowd immediately before they took action, directly inciting them to violence. There's no deniability to be had.
Appeasement has only emboldened these people to attack America, it's institutions, it's people, and it's values. We must have law and order, and that requires accountability for Trump and his enablers.
Absolutely
> that requires accountability for Trump and his enablers.
Absolutely not. It's words like that that truly frighten me. Have you lost your good sense?
What truly worries me is this part: "his enablers".... what exactly are you saying? That voting for Trump was a crime? That supporting Trump was a crime? That protesting for Trump (but not engaging in violence nor tresspass) was... what.. Terrorism (as the media is now trying to suggest)? No, no it was most definately not. It is very dangerous to use loose words like this which can be interpreted in too many ways, especially now. If you mean to say that Trump committed a specific crime and had co-conspirators, explain it that way and name the conspirators. Otherwise you are going to have a huge percentage of the population believe that you intend to "round them up into camps" or "line them up against the wall" or other things that other very dangerous people have tweeted. Trump supporters will defend themselves, potentially pre-emptively (just like how the war between the states started) and nobody wants that.
I don't associate with a political tribe, I didn't like Trump, and I left America long ago. But I've cautioned my mother who still lives there and who supported Trump all the way (she believes all the nutty theories, but isn't a bad person) that she needs to plan an escape route into Canada. Because I truly fear for her life at this point. Biden and the media keep wrongly using the word "Terrorism" in order to (I'm quite sure) invoke special governmental powers that allow them to suspend all civil and human rights from... who? ... all Trump supporters? And PATRIOT-ACT V2 has landed, all premeditated and prepared, ready for a huge draconian power grab.
Nobody has demonstrated that Trump has committed any crime (AFAIK). I'm sure there will be attempts. But nobody has even pointed to a credible suspected crime (AFAIK). Well respected constitutional lawyers like Alan Dershowitz have weighed in with clear opinion that Trump doesn't need to pardon himself because he has not committed any legally cognisable crime. And that his speeches were not incitement to violence... and Alan gives a long history of speeches that resulted in violence... and America has always punished the violence doers, not speakers, being extremely hesitant to invoke "incitement to violence." In this case it's laughably far from such.. he said walk, he urged peace, he only called for a protest.
But I'm positive many people will attempt to "require accountability for Trump." Go ahead, do so via the court system using the laws of the land. Both political tribes will support that.
Consistently amazed that people seem to think that as long as you don’t literally say “I am inciting you to commit violence!” it can’t be considered incitement.
The right is much more inclined to agree with the characterization that it's mostly terrorists we're killing or that why are civilians around them.
To what some on the right might object is why are we spending all this money on this, which they might even arrive at ultimately the same conclusion as the left but for a different reason.
Even copblock, something both of the more socially liberal wings of the political spectrum can appreciate, has been banned multiple times.
We just suffered a textbook seditious conspiracy against the United States, which was planned on Parler and thedonald dot win. Is there a chance that Google's decision to remove Parler from their app store will only throttle the spread of Parler? Have you heard of the slippery slope fallacy? [1] And if so, why doesn't the prohibition of apps for child pornography produce the harms you cite?
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-di...
How do you think civil wars start? And how many actual wars have been started by lies? Usually by the instigating government or yellow press, but in this case it's DIY yellow press letting people make up their own lies.
The current state of affairs offers nothing more granular than shutting down all of Parler in response to their failure to moderate this speech effectively.
If you can go on there and convince a single person that the election was legitimate, that ballot security measures make it impossible for their beliefs to be true, and that Biden was legitimately elected, it's possible for the proposition "free and open discussion can diffuse false ideas" to be valid, but if you can't, then you might want to reevaluate.
Comparing ~70 million Americans to paedophiles...
Evidence generally supports the notion that deplatforming works. If you remove people from your platform, they generally end up scattered across other platforms or new platforms in smaller numbers. “Alternative” platforms are more likely to collapse, which just makes things worse.
Think about this—when was the last time you heard about Alex Jones or Milo Yiannopoulos? What happened to r/fatpeoplehate or r/watchpeopledie? If you want to find these communities, where do you go? You have to search them out. Maybe you check out one of the chans. Maybe you go searching for Discord invites. But you still keep a Reddit and YouTube account, of course. You keep using Twitter and Instagram and Facebook even though the communities you want are deplatformed.
Most people don’t go through the effort. The communities end up fractured. The alternative platforms like Parler and Voat are often worse for exactly the same reasons that they exist in the first place. That’s why deplatforming succeeds.
I pointed out a class of apps that are banned and asked why we haven't slipped down the slope they described.
> if so, why doesn't the prohibition of apps for child pornography
Forgive me, I was obviously mistaken to bring up freedom of speech or to claim that you were conflating apps/sites that allow freedom of speech with those that allow child pornography.
/s
Edit: fixed my egregious typos.
Of course you are not allowed to possess or distribute explicit photos of actual minors (the same way you are not allowed to possess or distribute human kidneys, or for that matter copies of Windows XP): fortunately, none of these acts are speech, even under extreme straw men versions of free speech absolutism. Easy test: you are still able to convey any of your thoughts/opinions and make absolutely _any_ point to any audience without inconvenience even if you don't resort to these activities.
If the state would use its influence to get one single bookstore in Bumsworth, Arizona to stop selling one specific book on repairing video cameras [2], that would certainly be a free speech issue, and it would certainly violate the First Amendment.
Yes, even if the book remained available in every other bookstore across the nation, and every book discussing other ways of repairing video cameras would remain available for sale in Bumsworth. Just imagine a state attorney trying to use that as a defense, to explain why the "No Video Camera Repairs in Bumsworth Act" does not violate the First Amendment. It would be ridiculous.
You're trying to use the same defense while the leaders of the largest soon-to-be-opposition party are banned en masse in an effort to align industry with the incoming new administration, while people with significant cred [1], who happen to be on bad terms with opposition party in question [3] denounce the whole thing as an "unacceptable act of censorship".
[1] https://nypost.com/2021/01/09/russian-dissident-alexei-naval... https://twitter.com/navalny/status/1347969772177264644
[2] more pertinently, a book about the acts of the Catholic Church in Bumsworth, or the mafia connections of the mayor of Bumsworth
[3] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-05/donald-trump-us-has-n...
Of course not. The medium
You do realize, both sides of America think the other side is radicalized. This was literally the reaction on Trump's first day of office:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXR3d22BhHs
Have you forgotten about that? Does that look anything like the 6th? No, of course it doesn't. Had those people been let into the State House, it may have burned to the ground in 2017!
> insufficiently moderated community
Section 230 was put in place because it's difficult to moderate effectively when you're trying to launch a startup. Are you saying no one can launch a social network unless they have the money and staff to moderate each an every single post that comes in?
On Wednesday, while our elected Representatives and Senators were in the process of finalizing the count of the US election, armed Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol. Several of these people were carrying zip-tie handcuffs and were hunting for Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer. 5 people died in this insurrection attempt. Here's the video of the QAnon insurrectionist who was shot by the Capitol Police as she was breaking into the area where our elected Reps and Senators had retreated to.
This was an attempt to overthrow our government, and it's a matter of luck that our legislators weren't executed by this mob. Attempting to "Both Sides" this is intellectually dishonest, as a riot in the streets is a categorically different thing than a seditious conspiracy that involved the violent disruption of the finalization of results from our election.
> Are you saying no one can launch a social network unless they have the money and staff to moderate each an every single post that comes in?
I'm not intimately familiar with Section 230, but I don't want my country destroyed. If Google and Apple facilitate distribution of a toxic product that destroys my country, that's a problem for me.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2021/01/08/ash...
"Sunrise planned a sit-in in Pelosi's office and asked Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to help them publicize the event, which she instead decided to join herself...The sit-in took place on November 13. Over 250 protesters showed up to occupy Pelosi's office, with 51 being arrested by Capitol Police."
How are we to know? Four years ago everybody was like "do you really believe a senile ex-talk-show host will withstand a round of debate^W^W^W^W^W become the Republican candidate^W^W^W^W become the president? Come on."
Yet here we are.
You might want to review the facts. The Capitol Police were overwhelmed, our elected representatives, who were in the process of finalizing our election, had to run for their lives, and the layers upon layers of armed forces were not there to protect our representatives. This was a massive security failure and we should never come this close to having our elected representatives taken hostage and executed by insurrectionists. And if that had happened, yes, it would have destabilized the country. How could it not?
What you're witnessing is culture expressing itself, rooted in history, the law, the zeitgeist of the people. And right now the culture is drawing a line in the sand and saying, "don't do that (bigotry, racism, ignorance)". You are free to be on this side of the line or you can start a revolution. So far the good guys are winning. Not Dems or Republicans, but sane people.
Those in power, people here and the arrogance of many others have created an entire generation of people who've been banished, shunned or shouted down any time they had a differing opinion on anything. I personally am done dealing with this bullshit and the problems that have been inflicted on society. I'm done being quiet and, personally, I'd rather join the damned than continue this circus. I'm willing to put everything on the table to end this and ensure that this will never happen again. EVERYONE deserves a voice and a platform; you are more than free to not listen.
ADB doesn't require individual clearance from Google, you can install any apk you like. In fact you don't even need ADB, you can just install an apk downloaded from the web if you uncheck "only verified sources" in settings. Google is merely removing Play Store convenience (and distribution channel safety). Providing that Play Store convenience costs them real dollars for computing resources and they chose to not do that anymore for the app in question.
Businesses don’t have any right to force other businesses to carry their products.
Okay.
Then hosting providers refuse to host.
Payment processors refuse to process your payments for web services.
Your domains are revoked.
Your SSL certs are revoked.
Where does this end? If they have the power to, and they've justified it this far, why wouldn't they keep going?
If a business closes because nobody is interested in buying their products, or a club disbands because nobody is interested in joining, or a pub bars a patron who’s starting fights and nobody blinks an eye. The same thing happens on the internet and suddenly it’s the end of the world.
There is a link, though: people with minority opinions are sometimes so frustrated with the majority that they lash out in frustration in ways that break the site guidelines. People with majority opinions don't usually do it that way. They're more likely to be self-righteous. Either way, though, users here need to follow the guidelines regardless of what their opinions are.
What about the hosting company’s freedom of speech rights? If a hosting company doesn’t want to host your site, that’s their decision. If they don’t want to be associated with a site or app or spend their resources, that’s their decision.
These aren’t regulated monopolies that have to serve all customers.
Now, if you want to claim that they should be a regulated market — that’s a whole other discussion.
Do you feel the same way about a company refusing to serve Jews or Blacks? Is it their right?
Of-course this can be challenged in the courts. Well, unless, it's protected by 230.
Political affiliation is a protected class in some states[0].
California[1], for example, also prohibits discrimination on gender identity, ancestry, sexual orientation, AIDS/HIV status, medical condition, political activities or affiliation, veteran status, or status as a stalking victim.
[0] https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/discrimin...
[1] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/california-employmen...
Trying to conflate 230 here is disingenuous and has no role in a strictly business decision about whether of not a business has to accept a customer.
[0] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/california-employmen...
I did some further searches; Madison, Wisconsin[0] and DC[1] forbid discrimination on political affiliation in public accommodations.
[0] https://library.municode.com/wi/madison/codes/code_of_ordina...
Great, I cannot wait!
For business discrimination in general, maybe.
For specifically constraining the expressive freedom of media (including social media) businesses, quite plausibly not, because a statute designating a protected class can't negate other people’s First Amendment rights, since the Constitution is superior to statute law.
Surely, this should all be just OK by your logic ?
The answer is relying on corporate sponsored freedoms is not enough. Open source tools and communication technologies need to be available.
Rather, we're talking about whether or not the government should forcibly allow/deny corporations from supporting extremists. This has nothing to do with government control, imo.
Yet you seem to advocate more government control. You see the dichotomy in your thoughts?
Yes, there are cryptocurrencies available, so if we can fully legalize it and promise that we don't touch anyone's private transactions (as well as businesses officially accepting crypto) - that would be an argument.
For better understanding how bad it is: it's non trivial to even accept worldwide payments for small business/individual in the internet if you are, say, from Ukraine, Russia, China or lots of other countries not processed by stripe/paypal for some political or legal reasons. Apart from that, there is a "free" market of two payment processors in the internet and two card processors =)
It's perfectly normal in Europe to pay for your ecommerce purchases with a bank transfer directly to the merchants account. There are thousands of banks out there, there's no monopoly or oligopoly at play.
However, there clearly is a small number of players in mobile platforms, cloud, and payment, and they act in a unified way. It has been sufficient.
Sure, there are in fact only a small number of players in this space.
>cloud
There are vast amounts of hosting providers. A quick google suggests over 300k, but that sounds somewhat unlikely.
>payment
There are a thousands of banks in the world, most of Europe manages just fine using bank transfers for payments without involving external payment processors.
>It's sufficient to push undesirables to services which are more expensive, more inconvenient, unreliable, and so on. Relegate them to their internet ghetto.
Is this really a problem? That's just the inherent nature of being undesirable.
An acceptable compromise I think would be to have unlisted apps that can’t be found on the top charts or in search but can be installed via the App Store with a link.
Hard not to be alarmed by the pattern here.
Edit: Maybe it was AT&T, not Samsung, but if so that's a broader scope anyway - and my current AT&T Android phone isn't locked down.
In most countries in the world, you can go to jail for saying the wrong thing. This includes countries which are, for all practical purposes, freer than the USA -- like Germany, which hasn't renazified since WWII in part because of its hate speech laws.
So no, not everybody recognizes that unfettered expression is a universal good. There are places which have already experienced the danger of free-speech absolutism.
The US has a number of troops stationed in Germany comparable to the German army. The ideology of Germany has not been left to chance at any point after WWII.
That probably isn't the model that most people look for in their own country's governance.
What if the same happens to the Union ...
I am also particularly worried that politicians will use the threat of regulation to coerce companies into suppressing political opponents' messages. The government can't directly ban speech, but if they can intimidate platforms into censuring political opponents they will have achieved the same effect. Better, in fact, because the politicians' agency in this censorship is not visible.
This is an act of great escalation in an already dicey situation.
I hope I'm wrong when I say this will likely beget more violence.
One woman was shot. 4 others died for medical reasons. One was a heart attack. One was a police officer.
Tragic deaths, to be sure. And the photos really do feel horrific. But do single digit casualties justify all this? Gang violence and crime kills way more people and police officers on a daily basis. Are we really setting the value of our liberal values that low to justify all this censorship and deplatforming?
The events on the 6th, while horrific, have given a handful of big corporations control over national discourse and communication. That scares the daylights out of me. Was this all it took?
Shockingly when you flat out say that "They're only sending there criminals" (with regards to Mexico) it has affects on how some people view and thus tread Mexicans and/or brown skinned peoples. Repeatedly, examples similar to this have been expected by the left (myself included) to incite discrimination and violence to groups of people.
So this is, imo, the natural outcome of the President saying that the government is broken beyond belief and that it is a literal stolen election.
So, with all that said i don't entirely disagree with you - BUT, this is far from an isolated incident in my mind. This is repeated escalation.
Not entirely true. Much of it is just plain old politics. This was a massive unforced-error by the President, many of his supporters in congress, and his fanatical base.
Do you recall how many years we heard about Benghazi? How many hearings, investigations, and committees there were? This incident was objectively worse than Benghazi. If the Left were as good at offense as the right, this Jan. 6th attack on our government will be investigated, examined, dissected, and discussed incessantly for at least the next 4 years.
It could have, but the DoD and Trump by extension purposefully weakened security and delayed sending in reinforcements to help.
> The mayor literally went out to protest with them yet nothing happened to him.
Was he violent? Did he break any laws? You realize there were multiple former and current Republican elected officials among the seditionists in DC?
> But some how here the death was by the police shooting the protester and some how this is violent?
Well when you have multiple deaths by violence, yes. The below video I found uncomfortable and disturbing, but I link it to provide evidence this was not a nonviolent protest. https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2021/01/09/officer-crushed-in-...
When it comes to that event, the real horror is not "single digit casualties" and that is a naive lens to use here. Disrupting a core institution of our representative democracy - certifying the election results for the President of the United States - in an attempt to overthrow the votes and will of the citizens is horrific and chilling.
And then, 'correction' camps for people that do not fully fit this new beautiful society.
I would contend it is the latter.
it's a pretty common occurrence, historically.
There's a fair point to be made that they'll move on elsewhere, but what if that slightly increased barrier friction is enough to stop them? No harm, no fowl, if that's the case. We traded a small bit of free speech for public safety, the ROI looks good, if it's so.
Don't be so cavalier about what's being lost here. The right to think and to speak freely is a fundamental human right.
I agree with this, and your analysis of the inaccessible cost of those devices people truly can own and control. However, I do not think this is an accurate parallel to the many horrifying political events of this week.
Without this use case people won't realize why open source matters, or phones without control matters, etcetc. While i don't agree with Trump or his party actions, this definitely is waking thousands of people up to how easily even Americans are censored.
This realization is crucial to privacy focused applications, imo.
Either you control your device, or your device will be used to control you.
This is the free market in action. No one is forcing Google or Twitter or FB to do anything; I think they've been very restrained. The libertarians should be happy that it's commercial companies shutting Parler down and not govt. It's only when the president incites violence in an attempt retain power that these commercial entities acted.
Parler is not going to be shut down now. Whoever made this decision, just literally gave them Trump base users on a silver platter.
Maybe the so called free speech absolutists are not as principled as they say.
this is the world of techbro-ism with people making 200k per year living in sheltered neighbourhoods, more concerned about their online speech than having a boot on their neck. It's actually completely in line with the audience of this site
the literally most upvoted comment is some random rant about the 'great purge' let that sink in.
“No” and “not many” are the answers so the comparison with widespread attacks on millions of people’s hard won freedoms are (or should be) definitely more of a concern to wider society.
I disagree. I may be wrong, but it would appear that you feel personally attacked. I am not sure how people storming capital AND fighting cops AND leaving pipe bombs in said building want to kill you specifically. I do not see the connection. Are you a staffer/lawmaker/cop there or something?
I recognize that tensions are high, but shouting "literally neo Nazis" is not a great argument in US for a variety of reasons ( not completely unlike antisemitism, it lost some of its punch ).
If you cannot install an run your own software on a device, you do not own the device.
You cannot praise the removal of Gab or Parlor now and complain later when they take everything else from you. They can increase the Apple developer fees whenever they want. What happens when they start charging you $2,000 a year or $4,000 a year for the right to publish apps? What happens when the two big platforms decide no one can push an app unless their platform has full moderation.
What happens when Google and Apple, for your safety, say all user contributed content must go through their "spam" filter first for any apps?
This is horrific. You may not like Parlor, but it will not stop here. This is a dangerous place we are in and we should all be horrified by it. People are horrified right now, but they're focused on the wrong thing.