What option do I have then — go to the town square and voice my views? Even going to the town square is illegal in some cases these days, what with COVID restrictions.
I think this is an incredibly dangerous slippery slope, especially given how much our devices act as our "second brains" already.
Is it problematic that people take social rejection as a reason to further radicalize? Sure - but such is human existence - and where is their personal responsibility to observe their social environment and alter their behaviors/beliefs if they are unhappy with the results they are receiving?
But from a policy perspective on the ground, I think the ideal of freedom of speech should eclipse the concerns of private platforms wherever possible. But this is not to say we should not police the boundaries of free speech. In fact, if we had a more strict enforcement policy about unprotected speech like direct threats (such as L. Lin Wood's declaration that people should execute Mike Pence by firing squad [0]), we might not need these platform interventions at all.
[0]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/secret-service-says-...
Maybe we need a "C-SPAN/NPR of social media".
Let's say if these companies are monopolies. Should they still hold the same power?
The main exception is utilities which generally operate as natural monopolies. They should be (and generally are — this is isn’t a new idea) regulated to only be allowed to deny service for limited, specific reasons. There’s room for improvement here. ISPs are relatively new to being treated as utilities and many ordinary regulations that should be in-place are missing.
First, election cycle is over; second, they are not banning one political party.
You don't need it because if you don't do anything wrong you don't really need it.
All the precedents here are well established.
Explicit, credible calls for violence have never been protected speech. Parler’s own TOS forbid it. No moderation effort can be perfect, but we don’t need to argue in this case whether their moderation is sufficient. A violent insurrection was openly discussed and organized by thousands on Parler and then they went and did it. Lin wood called for the execution of the Vice President and many of his followers attempted to do just that.
In terms of the limits on a person or business to control with whom they will do business, utilities — ISPs in this case — should be regulated so they can only deny service for specific, limited reasons. They generally are, though I know this needs improvement.
Beyond that, businesses and individuals should have wide latitude to decide who to do business with.
What concerns me is the strange inversion freedom of speech has undergone in the Trump era. Instead of protecting the people from the government, it’s now invoked to protect the government — and supporters of the current administration — from the people. Now it means suppressing ordinary liberties like the right to not support people, content or speech you don’t want to.
I am in Europe so have not been paying too much attention. Your quote sound like hyperbole, can you show me some evidence that people actually tried to execute the vice president.
Your right to free speech does not oblige private corporations to provide you a platform to speak it.
A corporation refusing to repeat your words does not deprive you of the ability to speak freely.
So go shout your message in Town Square?
If.
The whole reason why they got banned in the first place was because of the incitement.
There have been all sorts of crazy things said since the US election (and before), and there weren't any bans, just "possible misleading statement" tags.
BLM’s mission is to strengthen democracy and justice with the unfortunate side effect of the fringe propagating violence. The core and leadership would rather the violence and property damage wasn’t taking place.
Trump is an authoritarian who is trying to subvert democracy, and his supporters consider violence to not only be acceptable but to be a necessary virtue.
If it were possible to remove disinformation, violence, and property destruction from each movement, BLM would still have an important message, while on the MAGA side I’m not sure what values would remain. What’s the coherent message beyond spite toward the left?
The protestors mission was to prevent the subversion of democracy.
I don't think using one side being mistaken about whether their actions help with their mission as a justification for surpression is fair.
As for the general MAGA message? I'm not red tribe and have no friends who are so take what I say with a grain of salt:
* The USA has gotten worse.
* Immigration is bad and one of the reasons for the USA decline.
* Our (Red tribe) economic interests are not being defended or advanced.
* Red tribe social norms and interests are not being advanced or defended by the centres of power. E.g. values related to family.
* Acceptance and promotion of alternative sexual expressions is bad for the world.
* Globalism is bad.
I agree and like Black Lives Matter because they have a valid point to make, and while it's unfortunate that there are fringe elements causing property damage and there have been instances of violence, that's not central to their mission and most people I know who support Black Lives Matter are against violence and property damage.
I dislike Trump because he's corrupt, incompetent, racist, sexist, a sociopath, and an authoritarian. I feel like it's a valid position to be against those things. However, any politician on any end of the political spectrum can be all those things, so setting those aside, let's look at his actual policies: the only one I can think of is isolationism.
I mean I'm mostly just repeating myself. Feel free to make a counterargument.
I take it "punch a Nazi" wasn't popular in your circle then?
Btw: I think Trump is an incomptent, a populist and a con man. But he's no more racist and sexist than the average american.
Jeez, I hope that's not true.
The BLM leaders were saying "we are marching/gathering to protest police brutality". However things got out of hand. Violence was not their intent. See also the false flag operations against BLM:
* https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-fake-antifa-acount-whit...
The folks on Parler are saying "we need to hang the traitor Pence". And this has been going on for months:
> “Will you and several hundred more go with me to DC and fight our way into the Congress and arrest every Democrat who has participated in the coup?” Holland posted on Friday. “We may have to shoot and kill many of the Communist BLM and ANTIFA Democrat foot soldiers to accomplish this!!!”
* https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/11/cops-n11.html
> One of Lang Holland’s posts reflected Donald Trump’s baseless allegations that the presidential election he lost to Joe Biden was stolen, and said: “Death to all Marxist Democrats.”
> Holland, who led the police department in Marshall, Arkansas, also wrote “take no prisoners” and “leave no survivors”.
* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/09/local-arkans...
> In a popular thread referencing a Trump tweet promoting the debunked conspiracy theory of election fraud, one user asked, "what if Congress ignores the evidence?"
> "Storm the Capitol," was a popular reply.
> Five days later, on January 6, as pro-Trump militia proceeded to do exactly that, the mood on thedonald.win switched to jubilation and outright defiance of police, with thousands joining "watching party" message threads.
> "This is what Trump told us to do!" a top post in one of these threads read.
* https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-01-08/us-capitol-st...
Do you see the difference?
If I could be satisfied that he was the leader then I can acknowledge that as an important difference.
Today they appear to be a bunch of navy seal white power dudes with guns. Scary. That culture kept growing outside of the spotlight in a creepy dark corner.
Apparently their current leader is of Cuban descent as was most of the people in the segment. Out of the eight members in the video, six of them previously voted for Obama.
I don't know too much about them except from what I saw on Vice. Is it really a group of white supremacists?
edit: Reference: The Right-Wing Latinos of Miami: Proud Boys and Refugees https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Qa1f29diE
However, I think deplatforming them has made them more radical. I think that we are going to see this more and more, by isolating people and forcing them to go into places where there are no public postings, nobody is going to see how radical they get. You are going to lose some people but the really dangerous people will wind up reinforced in their belief that they are being persecuted, and if they think they have nowhere to go and nothing to hope for, I think we are going to start seeing some real ugly violence.
There's an adage that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that's obviously been missing in the long winter of the past few years.
I don't think these two concepts are in opposition. Of course, exposure to a toxic ideological viewpoint is poisonous for the recipient, and may in fact entice them to become more toxic themselves (if they are swayed by said reasoning). But a crucial part of the societal contract is to tolerate such toxic viewpoints so as to have the opportunity to redeem those who hold them. In other words, by eating a little bit of the poison ourselves, we are granted the opportunity to save that person from their own poison, by showing compassion and empathy towards them.
People who have hate in their hearts are not entirely bad people. Everyone was once a child, everyone has experienced the mystery of simply existing, almost everyone has experienced love (whether from their parents or someone else), most people enjoy art and music. Evoking our shared humanity and showing compassion for others allows us to break down their toxic ideologies and even reform them to be beacons of compassion themselves.
Perhaps the best and most compelling anecdote to promulgate this way of thinking is Daryl Davis, who, through his talents and love of music, has reformed many of the most hateful people in our country — members of the KKK. I would recommend this TED talk by him, titled "Why I, as a black man, attend KKK rallies": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORp3q1Oaezw. It really encapsulates the power of this viewpoint.
The crucial element here is ensuring that we have channels of communication that allow for this sort of compassionate understanding... I fear that the compression of thought foisted upon us by social media platforms and online communication tools obscures the basic reality of our shared suffering, joy, intrigue, and humanity. These important facets of communication can be lost to the aether of technology, and our true intentions are thereby belied by the incorrigibly weak substrate of written language.
As a note, I think we have discussed the topic of free speech in another thread before. It's good to "see" you again :)
Apocryphal means that the origin of the story is doubtful.
I think you might mean "the adage is incorrect" here.
On the other hand, similarly, an extremist exposed to non-extremists' propaganda potentially may be affected by it as well, decreasing the amount of overall extremism.
Or perhaps the total amount of extremism stays the same and instead it is spread out over large number of people, removing "spikes".
I do not know if it is true. But just an idea to consider - the discussed process of de-platforming removes _two-way_ communication method.
You know, dang, I am an old man. Born in Soviet Union, seen the scars of that brutal regime. Came here without English and money. Went to work. Went to college, then medical school in Chicago, residency in Harvard, and fellowship in NY. Started one of the first medical blogs, in 2004, that still going on. Lots of work in the hospital, big cases.
I would consider my bio full of intellectual pursuits.
Sometimes we make mistakes. Sometimes you make mistakes. Sometimes society makes mistakes, and these mistakes can live for hundreds of years...
Maybe I made a mistake. But maybe what you consider a failure of intellectual pursuit, is your own biases.
But point taken. I’ll limit comments.
PS Here’s an interesting idea for you (and that’s not to offend you, really): try to find and ban someone on a comment that lacks intellectual curiosity and scores political points, and has many upvotes. Surely there’s a comment like that today, somewhere?
I didn't mean to imply that you were lacking in intellectual pursuits or depth or anything like that, and I'm sorry if it came across that way. It's just stock moderation language. All I have to go on are the things an account has posted, especially the recent things an account has posted.
Usually, when people are battling their political or ideological enemies in internet comments, they leave out all of the background and motivations and experiences that have led them to feel the way that they do. That's a shame, because if we included such things it would make it easier for us to relate to each other. It also means that our comments—especially flamewar comments—create a one-dimensional picture of us in the reader's mind. That of course is not an accurate picture of at all, but there's very little information transfer going on in these arguments.
I'm not sure I understood your last suggestion there but we don't consider upvotes when banning accounts. We also don't ban established accounts for just one thing they posted—we'd warn them instead. Bans are for when an account has built up a pattern of breaking the site guidelines. There are some exceptions to that, but they're probably not relevant here.
Thanks for writing such a humane response. I appreciate it.
And just because something is well received doesn't mean that it is right, or moral, or anything, really. Countless speeches were well received before some of the most atrocious events in human history.
The trouble with morality is that if you ask someone if what they are doing is morally justified, they will pretty much always say yes.
It very quickly devolves into might makes right, which is more or less where we're headed.
You seem to believe in upholding right to free speech, which, surely is crucial to the country. However, this other group you speak of is protesting their rights to life and liberty, which they are being actively deprived of by an oppressive regime. Isn’t it slightly unfair? What rights is the right being deprived of? Entitlement to a certain election result or a certain office? That opposes the very definition of this democracy. They have means for their voices to be heard and their issues to be heard, still, by the right’s representatives in Congress. Black people didn’t/don’t because law enforcement was/is being racist and oppressive in unfairly killing them.
The issue people had with the protests this summer wasn't that they were out protesting. It was the fact that literally everything else about daily life had been upended and we were all supposed to be locked down away from friends and family, unless of course you wanted to go protest, in which case you had full government, medical, and corporate blessing to go do whatever you wanted. Then when you were at the protest, you could burn down buildings and cause untold damage to property and the media would look straight-faced into the camera and call it "mostly peaceful".
Great. To that same standard the protests last week were "mostly peaceful". Hardly any of the people who actually showed up in DC were part of the storming of the capital.
My point about morality is that it is a poor justification for why an action is justified in one case and not in another. It basically ends up with "it's right when I do it, and wrong when you do it."
I don't necessarily agree with the conclusions the protesters this summer came to, but I can follow their line of reasoning and see why it is something they felt strongly about. In the same manner, you might not agree that there is a evidence that vote counts were manipulated in the November election, but if you start from that assumption, I think you would agree that someone might want to protest that.
I've heard it phrased that the social contract is basically, "Your rights are my responsibility." I think that's something worth striving for no matter your political position. I hope we can find the will to de-escalate things on both sides to the point that we can actually work towards that goal.
My rights end where others rights starts or something to that effect.
The policeman in the car had a human right not to be executed.
People have a right not to get their homes burned to the ground.
etc.
That does not seem obvious to me AT ALL. Most radical movements in history had no access to the Internet and relied on personal contact to radicalize, e.g. preachers in mosques. This also creates deeper bonds among the members.
If the result of deplatforming from Twitter is that the organization shifts to "meat world", you probably have a more dangerous opponent on your hands.
I'm not too sure about that. For people who are already radicalized and believe that there's a conspiracy of some kind working against them, wouldn't that just "prove" that there is such a conspiracy?
I agree that deplatforming will prevent future people from being radicalized, but what about the people who already are? The whole pizzagate incident shows that there are definitely people who believe all kinds of conspiracy theories, and are convinced enough to act on them.
I wonder what the solution for that is, though.
Ironically, maybe Trump showed us the right solution with his tirade against section 230. i.e. the end of the social media platforms.
I think it will push them off to even more obscure platforms, and the ones that do make it there will be much more extreme and dangerous. They'll be harder to monitor as well.
At some point, a show of force might be necessary.
I find it very hard to believe that people get the impression that Trump was the fascist when you are over here advocating for a fascist method of silencing opposition groups.
Violence and persecution is never the answer.
Now it's basically dead. Was it the deplatforming? Did the world just move on? Nobody knows.
To me it seems obvious the feedback works in the opposite direction. Deplatforming disrupts the feedback bubbles that radicalize these people.
I personally think they should be allowed to have their space anyway, if they can refrain from inciting violence.
But I would certainly absolutely refuse to do business with them, and have no problem with others making the same decision. People have the right to their repugnant ideas. They don’t have the right to force others to help promote them.