This is the crux of the issue. Not only is Parler NOT moderating hate speech on their platform, they pretend as if moderation is anathema to their model, thereby further enforcing the views of their users as all encompassing. They exist for the sole reason to provide a particular community, one that is fomenting insurrection and terrorism.
For people interested, this is the moderation system according to an interview the CEO gave ( https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/sway-kara-swisher... ).
> Well, the way we work on our platform is we put everything to a community jury. So everyone’s judged by a jury of their peers in determining whether the action is illegal or against our rules. And so if reported, it goes to a jury of people’s peers. And if it’s deemed illegal, promptly deleted. But, you know, the jury of five people get to decide. And it’s a random jury, so they don’t know each other. They don’t know what they’re voting. They just get the independent facts of the situation and they make their own judgment call. We’ve actually been inviting journalists and other people to join the jury as well, so that we have a nice transparent jury system.
Calling it now. The horseshoe theory is about to manifest in the most real way possible. Silicon Valley is going to clamp down on first amendment rights and vindicate the garbage insurrection we're seeing now. You'd think Americans would've learned something about blowback.
The social media platforms we use influence our democracy in a big way. The fact they can share ownership with hostile and non-democratic regimes is curious.
This isn’t a complex concept. The idea that a company can continually host people planning an insurrection and not get shown the door by the free market is actually a radical idea.
And that’s before we cover the fact that you are arguing that the government should force private companies to associate with people based on their political affiliations. That sounds authoritarian to me.
Either way, Apple selling a bunch of stuff gives you no right to access their equipment. Nor does it make giving the government the right to reach in and compel Apple to do business with people and entities they don’t want to. That’s authoritarian, and if you think that won’t be abused by a later administration, I’m not sure what you’ve been paying attention to for four years.
If you think Apples so big that they have too much influence, then what you need is antitrust law, not the first amendment.
I agree. I was just taking issue with your analogy because your app getting banned from App Store isn't comparable to getting banned from the local Starbucks. On multiple levels. Acting like it is is misrepresenting the issue.
Pretending that anyone has a right to either is not only entitled nonsense, it's downright authoritarian. What is being advocated here is that the government should come in and force Apple to do business with fascists and terrorists against their will. Even if you imagine that this will encourage "free speech", and I promise you it will not, this is a power that will come to haunt us all if you give it to the government.
No one is stopping you from self-publishing your manifestos and selling them out of the trunk of your car, metaphorically speaking.
Or literally, in Josh Hawley’s case.
Should've thought of that before repealing net neutrality.
Now... is that one post beyond what HN should allow? Probably not, and it's not my call, we'll see what dang says. But imagine a whole community of people like you warning constantly about imagined terrors and existential threats. And everyone gets to one-up each other.
That's what Parler is. Before long you get senior thought leaders like the President's former attorney (or whatever Lin Wood is) expressly calling for the Vice President to be executed to stop an imagined "steal" of the election. And then the mob attacks the VP and congress trying to do exactly that.
It has to be stopped somehow, right? We can't have online communities pushing real world violence. And it all starts with content moderation. The reason this seems so extreme is that it should have happened LONG ago.
This is what Glen Greenwald was arguing that the left has been doing.
When The_Donald was on reddit, it was more easily monitored in one place. People who used it at least were forced to confront evidence daily that they weren't holding the majority opinion. And grownups from the platform could remove (and report to LE) the worst stuff.
When you ban those people from mainstream platforms, you do deny them some of an audience. But you also encourage them to make their own echo chambers and congregate elsewhere, which may be on the balance worse.
Now we see the same things happening with Twitter / Parler and Gab.
It's definitely hard to know where to draw the line. Karl Popper and all that.
I believe there's quite a bit of data now that shows that deplatforming tends to work. I have forgotten all the names, but someone named "Milo" seems relevant, and wasn't Alex Jones also banned from somewhere and lost a lot of influence since?
And those are the cases where bans would tend to fail, i. e. people that had years to grow a loyal fan base, collect names & emails, etc. If it works in those cases, it should be extremely powerful when being used a bit more proactive. Anybody watching /r/thed... would have known it's toxic two weeks in, before it had time to spiral entirely out of control.
But by the point they have a large community together, they'll go somewhere else and be worse. Better would be to constantly prune off the worst bits of the community that are most over the line rather than purging all at once (which guarantees a migration).
It's hard to disentangle what the exact causes are, but it sure seems like the discourse has gotten even worse over the past couple of years even as these types of deplatforming choices have been made.
e.g. thedonald.win is infinitely worse than /r/TheDonald was.
I do also worry a bit about a few powerful parties becoming intermediaries to communication (Twitter, Facebook) and imposing their own standards, too. Right now the choices being made are relatively benign, but will they always be?
Once you have an isolated pile of mostly violent extremists with no content control-- go ahead and censor away, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controvers...
Can't be the only one. Reddit was a libertarian cesspool at the time, a crime for sure. RIP Mr.Swartz <3
Seems like a function of a democratic government, not Jeff Bezos. Because Jeff Bezos isn't the government. Well, maybe, but not officially right?
What more could the FBI want than to have every extremist in the country communicating from one centralized server on AWS? Sad. Now they'll probably adopt a secure decentralized communication strategy and form into cells that can't easily be tracked.. wait, this happened before didn't it
Every bit of his comment is a valid concern and Matt Taibbi had a similar and sadly predictive post about this a few weeks ago on this subject [1].
[1] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-youtube-ban-is-un-american...
"As the Supreme Court held in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the government may forbid “incitement”—speech “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and “likely to incite or produce such action” (such as a speech to a mob urging it to attack a nearby building)."
https://www.britannica.com/topic/First-Amendment/Permissible...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Constitution_is_not_a_suic...
Contrast this with Parler, who just doesn't give a damn. Complete abrogation of responsibility, except to kick off accounts that make fun of their "influencers" (shout outs to Devin Nunes's Cow!).
Do you see the difference here? Do you see why there might be some, shall we say, recalcitrance to do business with the latter?
IMHO, incitement isn't real. It's just spreading blame to people who just made sounds come out of their head. It's barely different than a thought crime.
The Volokh Conspiracy discussed this just the other day:
https://reason.com/volokh/2021/01/08/can-president-trump-be-...
If that's anywhere near the best case that can be made, Trump is toast.
There are others involved in this whole affair that have almost certainly crossed that line, and they should be made into an example by being prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. There are some things that are not to be tolerated in a democracy if you want to keep that democracy.
On January 6th, people marched on the Capitol, injured many Capitol police members, and broke in while literally calling for Pence's head and having erected a gallows.
On January 7th, Wood said "Get the firing squads ready. Pence goes FIRST."
Is this incitement of violence? Why or why not?
Unless there was someone with an actual firing squad or what have you while he is speaking, it's not directed towards immanent lawless violence. Your own timeline points out that it was made a day later.
Now, that doesn't make it any less repugnant, it just means that this particular speech can't be incitement unless there's some other events that let it fit the standard.
Everyone has gone nuts lately. Even other lawyers like Ken White of Popehat were musing about some events being an "argument for the gallows" on Twitter.
I don't know that word. ;)
"imminent lawless action" and "likely" are the important words here.
Imminent lawless action here usually means there's a specified timeframe (as clarified in Hess v. Indiana). Given that many people are explicitly talking about January 18th and January 19th violent action, it's hard for me to see how this standard isn't met. Daydreaming the overthrow of the government and murder of specific elected officials a week from now is not protected speech, especially when made credible by violent action a few days ago.
Unless one of those "many people" is Lynn Wood himself, that doesn't count. You can't just stitch statements from multiple unspecified people together to meet the requirements. Now, he's said a lot of things and maybe there's something not mentioned here that I don't know about that rises to that standard, but the fact that you think that merely "daydreaming" can rise to the standard shows me that you probably haven't read what they were saying in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
I completely disagree. The context in which speech is uttered has bearing on whether it is likely to cause immanent [sic] lawless action. If someone else says January 18th, and you provide concrete suggestions and a plan to do so, without mentioning January 18th, you're not magically off the hook.
You're also contradicting Volokh, a well-known and well-respected liberal first amendment lawyer's analysis by vaguely gesturing at one of the cases discussed in that very article.
Yes, but immanence [sic] doesn't mean "right this second". It means at an understood point in the future, not during some undefined and indeterminate timeframe.
If everyone else is talking about violent action January 18th, and then you talk about people you'd like killed in the same general conversation, you don't walk just because you never specified the specific time yourself.
> You're also contradicting Volokh, a well-known and well-respected liberal first amendment lawyer's analysis by vaguely gesturing at one of the cases discussed in that very article.
Argument by authority. We have constitutional lawyers on the other side arguing the bar set in Brandenburg is met by Trump's comments alone. e.g. Niehoff, Somin (who writes on Volokh Conspiracy, too). Let alone after the additional context of a violent outbreak and more outright threats.
And where, precisely, is that proposition found to be found in law or precedent?
> We have constitutional lawyers on the other side arguing the bar set in Brandenburg is met by Trump's comments alone
And now you switch subjects again to Trump's comments when we were discussing Lynn's.
You're trying to gesture at an article you haven't even properly cited to blame a different person entirely which does nothing to establish that the authority gestured at even agrees with you in the first place.
Now, if you have, say, a link to a proper legal analysis saying here are these specific statements by Lynn and this is why we think they meet the tests based on these and these precedents, then go ahead and present that. But if you're just going to continue to switch topics instead of trying to make your claims more precise, then I see no reason to engage further.
Here, I'll even help you:
http://userwww.sfsu.edu/dlegates/URBS513/howtodoa.htm
The issue, so that we don't keep changing topics, should be:
Whether Lynn Wood's January 7th statement "Get the firing squads ready. Pence goes FIRST." meets the test for imminent lawless action.
"Let alone" circling back is too difficult to understand?
> Whether Lynn Wood's January 7th statement "Get the firing squads ready. Pence goes FIRST." meets the test for imminent lawless action.
And you don't think surrounding circumstances matter? E.g. would it be different to say this:
A) When there's an actual firing squad there, and Pence is 200' away? B) When you're at the front of a riled-up crowd, some of whom you know to be armed? C) When there had been violence and people hell-bent on killing Pence the day before, and others you're corresponding with are talking about mounting violent effort against the government in the next week? D) As part of the baseline political discourse when there is no armed crowd and no recent political violence and no conversation about a specific date? E) As part of a middle-school debate, when few tempers are inflamed?
The courts get to decide where "imminent" is, and we don't have a clear standard. This is why legal experts disagree. I think we can probably agree A is not OK and D-E is OK.
If we don't include 'C', it's becomes questionable whether Hitler's speech at the Beer Hall Putsch would be 'incitement', and it seems pretty clear to me that we should include it as such-- if not that, what is? Slightly veiling your coordination and inflammatory language gives you a blank check? I don't think so, and I would hope courts would agree.
I'm not likely to respond to you any further because I do not believe you are discussing in good faith.
(It is the latter.)
For the record, the case of the draft protestor being jailed is where the phrase "shout fire in a crowded theater" comes from. Food for thought.
"So we’re going to, we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, I love Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’re going to the Capitol and we’re going to try and give… The Democrats are hopeless. They’re never voting for anything, not even one vote. But we’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country. So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue."
Perhaps that was the point you were trying to make, of course.
"Under the imminent lawless action test, speech is not protected by the First Amendment if the speaker intends to incite a violation of the law that is both imminent and likely." [0]
There's two sub-tests: intention and imminence. Let's start with was it imminent: the plain text is clear, the time was now-- undoubtedly, the call to action was not an obscure point in the future. Supporters were to immediately go down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol complex. But what was Trump's intention? That analysis transcends the text as written. Therefore, we can't outright dismiss the speech as categorically not incitement, because the text alone is not sufficient in determining if the speech is incitement.
I posted his speech because my original comment's parent poster claimed Trump had not suggested his supporters make their way to the Capitol, which is false.
I'm not familiar with the geography of Washington D.C., but "walk down Pennsylvania Avenue" does not seem to me to be the same as "storm the Capital building".
Now, I suppose it's possible that some other part of the speech actually did incite violence, but if this is the worst part, it is not incitement to violence. Not. At. All.
Further, in that speech quoted, Trump specifically says to his followers that Democrats should not be voting.
This one ain't hard to parse.
I'm not aware that the demonstrators were toting guns.
Really, give it up. If you want to argue that Trump incited violence in this speech, you need to find another quote from it in which he does. The one above is absolutely not incitement, as is completely clear to anyone who is not blinded by partisan rage.
By the way, your country could do with less partisan rage right now.
Sorry dude. We don't play half-blind here for the sake of your argument.
And if you want less "partisan rage"--well, plenty of the chumleys who stormed the Capitol are still at large, we can sure start there! Somehow, in comparison, I think me chuckling at Parler getting their just desserts doesn't even rate. ;)
The oft-displayed photos show bats, a spear, body armor, helmets, etc. The QAnon enthusiasts arrested in Philadelphia were armed. At least one individual has been arrested for carrying a loaded pistol on Capitol grounds. It is utterly fanciful to suggest none of the rioters were armed.
Have you even forgotten Trump's exhortation that the "second amendment people" might "do something" about Hillary Clinton?
In order to believe that Trump did not incite violence you must overlook the way he's been beating the drum and fanning the flames all along. Writing out his meandering, discursive speech tries to remove from the picture what we all know he means and intends.
If you believe X because of evidence Y, it does not follow that Z must also be evidence of X, just because you believe X (even if this belief is correct).
Not having the critical self-awareness to recognize this is likely to lead you to believe all sort of things that aren't really true, as you start thinking that everything you see confirms your existing beliefs, even when it doesn't.
Can you explain why exactly it isn't? This claim is repeatedly made, but it has no backing rationale which I would like to understand.
> "giv[ing] them the kind of pride and boldness they need" (not by intimidating them with threats of violence, which would of course be illegal).
You are immediately excluding lawlessness, which defeats the complete exercise of the test (unless you have additional context to provide, which validates Trump's mental state convincingly excludes unlawful behavior). The point of the test is to examine if there was intent for unlawful behavior. Again, that would transcend the text. We would have to place ourselves in Trump's mind, and examine further, and then create a compelling argument for or against mens rea.
Got anything else?
How would that work in practice? Say I run a forum and I want to take down a post that's calling for a mosque to be blown up. Should I need to hire a detective to discover the identity behind the account, file a lawsuit, serve that person some papers, and wait for the case to make its way through the courts? Do I need to leave the post up while that's taking place?
Typically in such cases posts are placed in limbo - still present but usually inaccessible while legal questions are answered.
Courts should be making these decisions, not companies interfering in other companies.
Why?
Because at the end of the day these are questions "the people" need to answer, not unelected managers at tech companies.
A few people do not have the right to silence the voice of millions. That's what's happening, fundamentally, and it is being cheered, and you all somehow think this is going to end well.
But when you act like a ass in my house, you hit the road.
Are you allowed to screech racist diatribes to call for a riot at my bar’s open mic night?
Are you allowed to scream political speech in a shopping mall?
Are you allowed to use the PSTN to organize your criminal enterprise?
The Supreme Court has ruled that free speech on private property is still protected when questions of scale are introduced. There are circumscriptions on that, but it is still protected.
Yes, there are circumstances where the courts have found that private actors have crossed the line into acting like the government (“state action”) and therefore have to follow rules set for the government. But they’ve only done this for private actors that have literally built an entire town and run it like the government. The seminal case in this area was about whether or not the first amendment applied in a company town (Marsh vs. Alabama).
The courts have never found that anything anywhere close to AWS falls under state action. Not only have they not did that, but they’ve said that state action only applies in cases where companies perform functions that are “historically the exclusive domain of governments”, such as running towns. Given that providing web hosting has neither been a government responsibility, nor has it been exclusively a government responsibility, there is a 0% chance that the courts would apply state action to a company like AWS.
There is also no interest by any member of the court to expand state action, liberal or conservative. The last case on the issue saw dissent based not around state action, but whether or not the private actor in question had taken over a contract that constrained them (a private actor bought a former public tv channel). The dissent wouldn’t even cover a case covering AWS.
If I buy every ticket in Yankee stadium and turn it into a rally for Some political issue, is the management required to just deal with it? What law requires that AWS host people who want to overthrow the government?
The more people are involved, the more interest the state has in private property.
This is why for example we have employment and health laws.
Marsh vs. Alabama wasn’t decided because it affected a lot of people. It was decided that way because it was about a private company who literally ran an entire town. It was decided that because they were performing the functions of the government, the rules applied to the government should apply to them.
Since then, Marsh v. Alabama has been “limited to the facts.” Later precedent has clarified that state action only applies in cases where private actors take up duties that are “traditionally exclusive to the state” (Manhattan Community Access v. Halleck). No matter which way you slice it, AWS does not fall under this precedent.
He is another case of a public figure that would’ve gotten positive coverage in the history books if he’d had the good fortune to die a while ago. Him and Giuliani, who also seems unwell.
He either posted something stupid like an idiot and then deleted for damage control, or he's playing five dimensional chess with us, but my money is on the former.
Have Parler done anything specific to attract extremists, other than taking a hard stance on free speech? Just going by their splash page, and values page, I don't see anything that indicates they have.
The fact that it's user base may be overwhelmingly "dregs" seems to just be a function of the lack of free speech in mainstream platforms.
Every platform created for this reason that gains a large following does so specifically because it attracts people who recently got banned from some previous existing service for being terrible. See 8Chan post gamergate or Voat post-banning of r/fatpeoplehate. Not saying it's wrong to be pro-all-kinds-of-speech-allowed-on-platform-that-you-run, but those kinds of platforms usually only surge in popularity when a bunch of people get banned from a more mainstream platform where being a dick is against the rules.
Edit: don't want to make it sound like big tech companies like Twitter / FB and Amazon are "good" for doing this. They're only doing this because they feel pressure to do so. If the execs had a moral compass, they would treat every user the same, and ban people based on the same set of rules.
This does also mean that if it doesn’t die right now, eventually it will when the funders get tired of it.
The site was, for sure, intended originally as a right wing twitter. While they probably don't want extremists, per se, they have made absolutely no attempt to moderate legitimately violent rhetoric (c.f. the Lin Wood threat last week to have Pence executed, which seems extremely frightening in retrospect).
You can see some collected horror shows via aggregation like https://twitter.com/RWParlerWatch and https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/
It is Daily Stormer or 8kun? No, not yet. But it's really, really bad there.
although MeWe had quickly attracted racists and actual nazis too, though.
It wasn't supposed to be like this. If it was just a bunch of right wingers hanging out and complaining, akin to the left-wingers you find on /r/politics or whatever, then no one would care.
But right wing grievance shifted over the Trump years into explicitly violent and insurrectionist rhetoric and imagery. And as of Wednesday that's no longer a theoretical threat.
> In messages obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Wayn told employees last year that he wanted to suspend some of the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who streamed on his site. But, he added, “if today we ban everyone controversial on DLive, the difficulties we will encounter on the growth will be 10x more than having them.”
> The strategy, Mr. Wayn said, was to “tolerate” them while amassing more legitimate video game players who would eventually “dilute” the right-wing community.[0]
Parler isn't run by "extremely principled libertarians," Parler just wants to get its foot in the door. And when taking on a dominant, well-funded incumbent, few users is perhaps better than no users.
It seems to have worked out for Reddit.
[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/technology/dlive-capitol-...
Edit: I'll note that Parler banned the DevinNunesCow parody account. They are fully capable of moderating when they want to, they just don't want to moderate calls for violence.