Why do you think we have a Military? Why do you think we have a criminal system? Why do you think we have Justice and Courts?
The whole creation of the United States was unethical because every citizen was of the British Crown and were traitors.
Or, are you not aware of your history and that this de platforming is only making the other side message much more stronger.
It really is eye-widening how many people fail to see the consequence of removing a service, and how it hinders intelligence, counter intelligence and general observation.
This is the point that supporters of de-platforming fail to recognise. They preach "Build your own platform" yet they still persist to de-platform until the target cannot be de-platformed off the internet.
After all their efforts, Gab is still alive since they are self-hosted and once Parler is taken off of AWS, they will open more Gab accounts.
I can only see that it will either lead to Gab receiving a wave of new users from Parler or these ex-Parler users will start creating encrypted group chats on Telegram or Signal which also cannot be taken down.
What even is a "lie?" Someone disgruntled that is an USA citizen? That is not an USA Citizen?
It's like everyone forgot Politicans jobs are to play the wind, say the right words, garner support and always stay in the limelight of what society thinks they "represent."
I've been reading old newspaper articles/time magazines from the 1940s-70's and it's amazing how different the world itself, from media really represents and how these companies all join together on a message such as this.
No it would not, since they are not doing it by means of the law. They do not need to force them by law, because key figures in Twitter and prominent leftist politicians belong to the same party and work for the same common goal - elimination of any possibility of dissenting from the partisan platform in any public space, and strict uni-party control of all speech on the internet (at least within the United States).
> Why haven't these "censored" politicians won any lawsuits to get un-censored, then
Because Twitter is a private company not covered by First Amendment, duh...
I'm sure there's legitimate, law-abiding users of all of these things that get caught in the crossfire... but if the platforms will not impose a minimal amount of moderation one shouldn't be surprised that others will want to deny them services and business relationships.
Even if not, why is Apple or any other organization obligated to host them?
You lost your wager. Majority of Parler users are not. If you dig enough, you can find shit - just as easy as on Twitter or Facebook, which hosts hundreds of violent groups and thousands of stupid comments which can be interpreted as advocating violence, though in 99.9% of cases it's just people being stupid on the internet - but majority of the users aren't that. It's just regular people who happen to be to the right of Jack Dorsey politically.
You even quoted “either” and cropped off “or”.
Even a completely galaxy brain position on speech that promotes private platforms which must allow completely unmoderated content actively promoting and organizing violence... hanging out with the people doing that is tacit endorsement.
> Participating without challenging that is giving it a veneer of legitimacy
That's bullshit, and moreover, this is asinine and dangerous bullshit. Any idiot can write anything on a public site, and there's no moderation team in the world that can police everything with 100% accuracy. Facebook and Twitter, despite millions spent on moderation, are full of hateful content and host hundreds of violent groups. Twitter used to host Hamas and Hezbollah until 2019. Does it mean every single Twitter user until 2019 were sheltering terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah? This is just idiotic. Of course no user can know who else writes what on a large public service, and no user owes to anyone to police the content of large public service. It makes as much sense as demanding me to police the speech of everyone in my city or move out. Only my city has a million people and twitter has hundreds of millions - so it's more like either you police the speech of everyone in your country or you must emigrate. Or you are responsible for everything anybody ever said within your country. As I said, utterly asinine, idiotic and dangerous. I am not talking about specialized forums that are explicitly declared as belonging to particular movement - like Stormfront - I am talking about generic platform that is open to anybody and hosts millions.
> and lending plausible deniability to a platform clearly designed for them.
This is example of circular logic. You declare that Parler is platform for specific kind of bad people, and when you're pointed out that vast majority of the users aren't those people you claim the platform is "clearly designed" for a tiny minority and all the vast majority is just "gives plausible deniability" to them. It's like claiming the whole USA is built to enable the Zodiac Killer, and everything all the people do is just giving him veneer of legitimacy and that's the point of whole USA existing. That's how you are sounding.
> they’re tolerated and implicitly welcome
It is telling that you said "implicitly". That means you have no proof they are, but pretend to read minds of Parler users and administrators. Too bad it is explicitly knows internet telepathy does not work. On Parler, all the speech that does not violate the law is tolerated (even though it is not endorsed, or agreed with, of course). As it should be on every free platform. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's called "free speech", and once it was a value of America. Not anymore, of course.
Where is the data please, instead of wild guesses?
They’re a pre-series A startup with a very small staff. If people don’t report things, it’s not feasible to expect that they’ll all be actioned. Instead of reporting the post, activists with an agenda thought it better to cherry pick them and attack platforms. A more honest test would have been to report the content and see if they acted on it. But let’s not kid ourselves, this campaign was disingenuous from the beginning. The real goal is to shut down a perceived enemy in the culture war.
If it were organized on Telegram would you ban Telegram? If it was organized by phone would you ban phones? This is just silly.
These platforms are at this moment currently being used to mass hype up an increasingly armed and paranoid segment of the population hyped up on years of cult-like propoganda, conspiracy, and dehumanizing of their imagined enemies. It was a stroke of luck they did not take out Congress the other day, I'm sure some will try again.
If you want a clue where this ends up unabated and exploited, I encourage you to look into the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
People organize violence on twitter almost every single day.
There is everything wrong with enabling a platform which actively supports violence.
Curious how you take away the bourgeoisie's possessions to establish Socialism without firing a few shots.
Second with that clarification being made, workers have negotiated ownership stakes in the means of production peacefully. Quite a lot of HN members have done it individually. Collective, larger scale negotiations have involved strikes and occupation.
Using my imagination, I’m sure there’s a possibility of organizing the workers who would otherwise use force to defend private ownership.
In all honesty I don’t think any of these things is more likely than just a gradual shift toward social democracy.
After a socialist regime is established, however, I know of no form of socialism that encapsulates violence as a core concept.
Edit to add: it’s probably helpful in illustrating the difference to remove political ideology and highlight other movements which have drawn similar conclusions. As an example, in the Civil Rights era, many people trying to effect change according to officially blessed outlets were sprayed with fire hoses, beaten, attacked with dogs, even murdered. Often in plain sight, sometimes symbolically as a warning to others who might follow their lead. Others drew the conclusion that the officially blessed outlets for the change they sought were a facade, that they’d be similarly violently excluded from shaping the world they lived in. Some of them determined that the only way they could achieve any kind of justice was to reserve the right to use force to achieve it.
Were they inherently violent?
> After a socialist regime is established, however, I know of no form of socialism that encapsulates violence as a core concept.
Whatever your response is, I'm sure I'd give it more credence if there was ever a successful socialist state in history that didn't rely on oppressive violence.
You could say exactly the same for Twitter (remember the Hunter Biden laptop story? Of no you don't, because it was censored there), or even Google which clearly de-prioritizes search results based on their ideologies.
I like the implication that ~half the country is just blanket "unethical" and doesn't deserve to speak.
You're welcome.
I'm pretty okay with the Abe Lincoln angle, but the yoga article is ridiculously fringe thinking that nobody could possibly take seriously.
One day I'd say the idea that AWS is booting people for disagreement with their political stances is a "ridiculously fringe thinking". Or that monuments to Lincoln and Washington (and also Cervantes and Frederick Douglass, why not) will be destroyed as racist is a "ridiculously fringe thinking" and would laugh at anyone suggesting this. Today it is our ridiculous reality.
Pretty much everyone was racist 120 years ago. Less, even, but, still 120 years ago is a safe buffer. I don't think building monuments to people who ordered the massacre of natives in the name of manifest destiny is a great idea, just as I don't think having monuments to Nathan Bedford Forrest is a great idea, either.
America's fetishization of its dead rulers is really second only to ancient Rome, a culture where they literally proclaimed their dead rulers to be gods. Lincoln, Washington, and Cervantes were racist, because the times they lived in were racist. We can do better, and uncritical reverence doesn't help us do that.
It looks like you just are OK to suppress any point of view that you don't like. And not OK with freedom of speech. Fortunately for you - and unfortunately for everybody for whom it's still valuable - US is no longer a country where freedom of speech exists. I am not OK with this, and I think we are entering a period in American history which will be looked by descendants with deep shame and disgust, and this is due to people like you. Welcome to your 1984, and hope you never utter an unpopular thought.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/15/how-israel-marginalizes...
https://www.vox.com/world/2018/7/31/17623978/israel-jewish-n...
https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/12/israel-discriminatory-la...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/19/one-more-racis...
> Israeli law explicitly says that only Jews have the right to national self determination
That's a lie, the law doesn't say that. The law says Jews have the right to national self-determination in their national state - Israel. It doesn't say it is the only case possible of national self-determination, neither could it - how would Israel possibly make law for all other nations in existence?! Just as Japanese have it in Japan, Koreans - in Korea, Swiss - in Switzerland, and Mongolians - in Mongolia, Jews have their national state in Israel. That doesn't mean a Jew in Mongolia or Korean in Switzerland do not have human rights - but it does mean Korea would have Korean and not Mongolian as state language, and that people of Japanese descent may have easier time to get Japanese citizenship than people of French descent. Presenting this completely common occurrence as something exceptional and a proof of "racism" - all the while many other countries around it literally run violent ethnic and religious cleansing, murder their own citizens for "blasphemy" or being gay or wearing wrong dress - with absolutely no complaint from the likes of you, and singling out Israel for exclusion for completely routine and accepted practices among many nations... I can't really decide if it's Antisemitism or plain idiocy, neither do I care. It just another proof that censorious hate for free speech, and willful ignorance often walk hand in hand. You are literally ok to destroy everybody who you think - scratch that, who your feed on twitter, prepared for you by your betters, told you - are "bad", without even trying to understand. And then you pretend you're some kind of enlightened being...
I don't think alex jones should be cut off from the internet or his home ISP, but I don't think twitter, facebook, youtube, google or anyone else has an obligation to broadcast him if they choose not to for example.
And progressives have redefined these words to encompass basically every single political belief of ~half the country. Say something semantically meaningful.
Because if Big Tech is taking a moral high ground I hope it can apply the same policies to itself.
Let's start with Twitter shall we?
How about this 2018 post:
https://twitter.com/MadamePete/status/1017462143279681541?s=...
What has Twitter done to take it down?
2019 post: https://twitter.com/jcmithnoy/status/1085855272793366529?s=1...
2016 post: https://twitter.com/lil_cmb/status/765737247781949444?s=19
2018 post: https://twitter.com/DutchessOfDork/status/100553860903276953...
Can I say that just because you are on Twitter you represent a political ideology aligned with the lunatics above? Looking at the tweets above can I say "I hope Twitter doesn't represent half of the country's ideology. I hope not".
This is the biggest irony of it all. Twitter openly bans right wing accounts while not doing anything to these violent posts by left wingers. you have toxicity in both Parler and Twitter. The only difference is that the right wing toxicity that existed in Twitter shifted to Parler while the left wing toxicity remained behind in Twitter itself. This is balkanization. This isn't solving the problem in any way, shape or form.
And don't even get me started on Facebook, Amazon and Instagram. These websites have promoted anti-Hindu content for years now. Keep reporting accounts and none of them are removed. It requires a massive boycott movement to get them to remove hate content. Take this for example:
https://gadgets.ndtv.com/internet/news/amazon-india-hindu-sy...
"Amazon Takes Down Underwear, Doormat Listings With Hindu Symbols After India Backlash"
Why do they need a backlash to remove something that is obviously egregious?
Not exactly partisan for Twitter to let this slip. Whereas Parler seems to ban anything that argues against the repulsive shit their users share.
"Unethical" is a post-hoc rationalization; what we're seeing now goes much deeper than that.