They had zipties, bombs, weapons and gallows. Can you imagine if one of those people who've spent 2 years reading hateful news about AOC would've done if they managed to make it to her office? Honestly January 6 could've ended much worse, and if something isn't done to put a break to the vitriot going unchecked on Parler, it very well may happen.

These people were recruiting and planning everything on Parler, doxxing and sharing information. This is what happens when a platform goes unmoderated. People like to think that a 100% free speech platform is great, but every instance of it I've seen has devolved into child porn, doxxing and violence.

By what measure are you attributing all of this to any App specifically? What if 60% of the violent offenders were radicalized via Twitter? If this were a court case all of the platforms would be implicated.

On what ground will you stand on to prevent another crypto war? [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars

If 60% is from Twitter, we eradicate 60%. Good

You are not eradicating anything. You are removing people them from your view AND pissing them off in the process. A time tested key for success.

The poster and I aren’t doing anything; Twitter, a private company, is refusing to publish their words to limit their legal and brand liability if another coup is attempted. It’s hard for me to argue that they shouldn’t with the laws as written without a law degree. And similarly I have a hard time arguing that the law should be changed where they are disallowed from doing so.

Deplatforming from what I understand works in deradicalization at the population level. That is, if you want a smaller population of radicals, you deplatform them. If you want less radical behavior, you deplatform them.

(NOTE: the following paper also covers what happens to the radicals who remain radicals post-deplatforming, which is super interesting.) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/02673231209220...

This worked against ISIS and I didn't see anyone complaining about free speech then.

Exactly. They have no right to the megaphone that social media offers.

Let them build their own websites and find their own audiences.

This is quarantining of ideological violence.

This is the same thing an abuser says to their spouse.

Please provide an example because what you're saying doesn't make sense to me.

Making them leave (= leaving them) will be bad because it “will only make them angrier” and it won’t really solve anything.

Just because it’s also used by abusers doesn’t mean it’s always incorrect. Clearly the divide has been growing, and if you think deplatforming the right (which of course immediately went on to create their own platforms, so there’s now left wing and right wing echo chambers) isn’t at least partly to blame, then what is?

Sure, it's possible (probable?) that all the people planning violence on Parler are going to continue somewhere else.

But do you really think that the world would be better off if they were allowed to continue on Parler? Should nothing be done?

It is already happening. The community has contingency plans for each of their communication channels being shut down.

One of the things not in the news is that a 30K user discord server was shut down this week. The community is switching to matrix.org/telegram/signal and has slick on boarding media to funnel users onto these platforms with step by step guides on how to setup accounts and get vetted. The on-boarding process is better documented by these groups than the services themselves.

I've also seen contingency comms plans in opposition groups starting to form should platforms try to cull both sides in an attempt to been seen as playing fair.

What's the end game look like for communities who want to avoid moderation? Things like decentralized immutable message ledgers with vetted in person trust chains becoming an in-demand/enabling technology. If it is mathematically possible to secure comms it will be used.

My personal take? Address the root causes of the disaffected population. Monitoring and reacting is fools game.

I agree with addressing the root causes, but that's a separate issue that Amazon/Apple/Google aren't responsible for.

It seems like this argument boils down to: if the community violating the TOS is organized enough that shutting it down won't stop them, then an exception should be made to the rules.

> that's a separate issue that Amazon/Apple/Google aren't responsible for.

The problem is that no one is responsible for this issue. There is no existing social construct that can address this problem.

> then an exception should be made to the rules.

By all means shut down communities. Just keep in mind that it won't solve the long term problem.

A time tested key for success of what exactly?

These moves successfully de-platformed and pissed off racists and terrorists, very good.

I think the point is that "pissing off" radicals is more cathartic than useful. What moderate people want is to thwart their ambitions, but ideally de-radicalize them so that they are no longer dangerous people in need of thwarting. The main argument I see against a move like this is that it may temporarily achieve the former but only at the expense of the latter.

Personally, I believe that de-platforming is a useful tool when radicalization is spreading like a contagion, but only if it is applied in a consistent way and with well defined boundaries.

Yeah I agree.

But de-platforming the radicalizing accounts is an effective way to de-racalize.

Radicalization is the process feeding someone an explanation for feelings they already have. We have to address the root cause. For a huge segment of people the root cause is the hollowing out of the middle class over the last 50 years. We're completely incapable of solving this problem with the same economic tools we've been using.

Taking away communication kicks the can down the road in the same way.

Yes I don’t disagree that addressing the root cause is important.

But we should disable radicalization immediately because they already organized to attack the capitol.

> For a huge segment of people the root cause is the hollowing out of the middle class over the last 50 years.

I keep hearing this, but the data shows a different story. Trump supporters (and Republicans) in general are wealthier than Democrats, and the country as a whole.

See https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps...

You are limiting their ability to recruit and viralize their message.

These are terrorists we are talking about, not conservative grandparents sharing memes on facebook.

Hate crimes and the related seem to involve a very small tiny amount of people dedicated to the cause of genocide and a revolving door of a much larger contingency who is susceptible to in the moment but eventually decides it's too extreme, not for them, etc and killing people of a religious group/racial group/political ideology doesn't achieve their goal of the other group actually isn't trying to kill them.

The exact same arguments were made for info wars when they were banned. There was a big jump in numbers the first couple weeks and when they could no longer recruit the susceptible they disappeared from all serious discussions of conservative view points. Elimination of bad faith arguments doesn't actually amplify those views on timescales that actually matter.

All of the platforms are used to radicalize terrorists. Not just Trump, look at Anwar al-Awlaki or Anjem Chaudhry. All platforms need to work together to eradicate incitement to violence.

The problem with this is that it doesn't end with parler and similar. It ends with a new bill being passed where the ability to make communication platforms of anything is effectively stripped from any small person from making. It will be delegated solely to big corporations with government approval.

The NYT Daily podcast yesterday had some insightful info from some of their reporters on the ground.

The president was basically communicating with the mob through Twitter. Ten minutes after Trump tweeted that his VP was a coward and a traitor, the mob that had invaded the Capitol started chanting, "Give us Pence". This is as the U.S. VP is also being evacuated.

“Coward and a traitor.” Is that an actual quote or are you editorializing?

The actual Tweet is “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country”.

I do also recall that he called out Pence during the speech leading to the riot as well.

However the thing that stood out the most to me at that speech is that his son said they would make the party the “Trump Republican Party”, which seemed to indicate a coming purge.

Now at the time, I thought it would be a nonviolent purge, but considering the riot I am not sure what was actually intended since his followers took that to mean Pence should be hanged.

> There were 600,000 to 800,000 people there.

Citation needed.

And what were the differences between these two protests?

What was the purpose of the protests over the summer? What was the purpose of the protest on Jan 6?

It's dishonest to equate the two. Jan 6 protest existed explicitly to overthrow the democratic transfer of power in this country.

Multiple explosive devices were found, guns were found, and the crowd came armed with pepper spray and tasers and clubs. They also were wearing body armor. Your representation of the events of Jan 6 is completely at odds with all the video evidence (and there is a lot of that) that exists.

The murdered a cop, ffs.

That's what happens when your commander in chief is a narcissistic liar who creates chaos for his own benefit.

The "most powerful military in the history of the solar system" did not deploy for roughly 4 hours. The rioters were leaving on their own accord when the backup finally arrived.

Maybe you should reconsider your point.

It's also interesting to see how folks will use sarcasm and not speak directly about what they are defending. Do you realize what you are defending?

The person you replied to isn’t defending the action of the mob. They are rebutting the claims being made of what hypothetically could have happened.

“Do you realize what you are defending?” is just a tactic to shut down a conversation you don’t feel like having.

If people want to support the actions of Jan 6, they should be clear about. Tired of wasting time talking around the real issue while they make up fake whataboutisms.

Because that's what this conversation is about. A murderous mob sic'd on Congress by the President because he didn't like losing an election. So again, to all the people defending this action, do you realize what you are defending?

And I'm happy to have this conversation. Folks want to minimize Trump's lies that directly lead to the deaths of 5 people, one of which was a cop beaten to death by his mob, then yes, let's have this conversation.

> not an existential threat to the republic.

Because it wasn't. Not even close. Snowden materials demonstrated a threat to the republic.

This is nothing by comparison.

Inexplicably lax security allowed a mob to get access to the Capitol building and break the windows and fight and take selfies with police (including a few tragic deaths), a bad situation that was corrected within hours.

It's like saying the protests of Summer 2020 put Minneapolis in existential danger, or Seattle in existential danger.

> If they even TRY to replace RBG we burn the entire fucking thing down.

> Sep 18, 2020 https://twitter.com/rezaaslan/status/1307107507131875330

You could make such wild claims (and many on the other side HAVE), but hopefully most people understand that for what it actually is.

---

There's so much exaggeration and hyperbole on all sides, and this just proves provides more evidence for conspiracy theories. It might be your moral right to fan the flames of this fire, but I wish you wouldn't.

The solution to bad speech is more speech, not less.

EDIT: And let's say you're right, that there's large amounts of open unironic sedition in the US. I doubt forcing it onto Gab or elsewhere is really a net win.

Revolutions happen when people believe they do not have a voice. It's mindboggling to think that removing people's ability to speak is going to make people less violent.

You're taking away their peaceable recourse and leaving them with unpeaceable options. What do you think is going to happen??

That just so backwards from what should be the goal. Proponents of free-speech intuitively realize this.

---

WHAT WAS WORSE: The Reichstag fire, or the reaction to it?

Let's take it for what it is: a completely unacceptable act of violence by a few people instigated by the constant delivery of blatant lies.

At first the lies were shocking: "Biggest inauguration ever? What the hell is he talking about? Didn't he see the pictures? Oh, alternative facts.. LOL. Well, good thing they're incompetent and not dangerous."

Now the lies are dangerous. So many were complaining 4 years ago because this arc seemed inevitable. Let someone lie and verbally attack anyone who slightly disagrees with them without repercussion and they'll keep pushing to see where the line is.

So many thought: "I'm sure he's learned his lesson this time!" In reality, you'd have to be blinded by naiveté or something worse to think he was going to change or moderate his behavior or tactics.

It's not that people are scared that a few hundred people storming the capital will actually overturn our almost 250 year old democracy. It's that if we don't respond with intense rejection of this behavior, this behavior could easily become an existential threat to the republic. What's to stop the next President from bringing an armed secret service or a willing FBI SWAT team into a Senate proceeding?

The line should have been drawn long before this incident. But now, for sure, if you violently attack the halls of democracy you should be banned from far more than a few private digital platforms.

> if you violently attack the halls of democracy you should be banned from far more than a few private digital platforms

Not many take issue with that. It's banning the hundreds of thousands other people that's the more problematic thing.

> violently attack the halls of democracy

What makes the "attack" on the Capitol any worse than the "attack" on the White House in Sep 2020?

Mostly just how well security worked. That's it.

If security had done it's job on Jan 6, this would be done.

The currents exist either way. It boggles my mind to think that censorship is how to handle dissent.

> What makes the "attack" on the Capitol any worse than the "attack" on the White House in Sep 2020?

Those protesters didn't have bombs and guillotines. And they were being beaten and gassed by police, they weren't killing police officers. I hear you that if that mob killed someone it would be just as bad, 100% agree.

> It boggles my mind to think that censorship is how to handle dissent.

Because you have the right to be a jerk in your own house, but not in mine. Twitter is not Trump's house, it's Jack's and his shareholders. Trump's being a jerk so them kicked him out. Some things that will get you banned on Twitter, FB will let slide and visa versa. If people don't like their policies, they can leave. It's a free market, which is a traditional Republican position. It's never been a Republican position to force a company to allow someone to create their own Terms & Conditions or User Agreement or force companies to accept someone as a customer until this modern "free speech should apply to private companies" movement.

And dissent is different than lying. It's clear his ego can't handle losing and he will desperately resort to pressure folks to "find votes" in Georgia, or pressure Senators to not certify electoral votes that withstood every legal challenge. This isn't normal and this isn't OK. It's not like this is a healthy debate or a passionate dissent that someone's getting deplatformed for. This is a dangerous, self-indulgent, completely self-serving game of lying to the public that's already resulted in multiple deaths.

If Trump gets arrested for speaking his mind in a public park then we have a huge problem. Until then, he can build his own platform and spout his ideas there. No one is stopping him and no one should.

On May 31, they set fire to the Church of the Presidents, threatening the entire city.

(To be clear, as in most cases, I'm sure this was only a tiny minority of extremists.)

> Until then, he can build his own platform and spout his ideas there.

That's exactly what this is about: Parler.

---

EDIT: Not to mention there was an astonishingly low number of casualties for such a deliberately violent attack force.

Setting fire to an empty church (arson) is a lot different than attacking an active session of congress (terrorism) with the stated goal of forcibly blocking the certification of the next democratically elected President (coup). Yes, they're both crimes and both bad, but only in the same way that assault and murder are both crimes and both bad.

Parler is still free to operate. Just don't expect the tacit cooperation of those who understand just how bad situation could have been if the mob actually found Pence and did what they were chanting they wanted to do to him.

Kavanaugh's nomination was stopped by a mob too.

Yeah, but they weren’t instructed to go there by a politician. And their goal was to disrupt, not kill.

This is a classic “both sides” argument.

Are you arguing that both sides have done bad things? Yes, that’s true. Everyone at some point in their life has done a bad thing, so you will always be able to point out “a bad thing”.

Are you arguing that both sides have done bad things of the same degree? No way. I’d love to hear an example of any other party leader in history using the inflammatory language Trump has used, lying about election results to supporters and begging politicians to overturn an election, resulting in terrorism and multiple deaths. This is unprecedented, inexcusable and unfortunately completely predictable.

I don't know of any example in the last 150 years of a party leader doing that.

But this isn't about Trump; this is about Parler and the consistency of AWS is applying to its Terms and Service to of service for hundreds of thousands of users over the weekend.

Trump doesn't even use Parler AFAIK; his actions are related but tangential to the core issue of Parler + AWS.

Parler is not independent though, in the sense that they rely on Amazon servers, and Amazon has a right to decide who they do business with.

Similarly, Google and Apple can choose who they allow to use their marketplaces. On Android I believe Parler wouldn't have too hard a time distributing their app on their own. But granted, on Apple devices, I think installing non App Store software is a non-starter for most people.

This begs a somewhat unrelated question though--why doesn't Parler just live as a web application that doesn't require an app? They would still have to migrate from AWS, but it would still allow people to continue using it despite Google and Apple's decisions, right?

and no one has said that parlor has to shut down. if you agree with the train of thought that if twitter doesn't want you go and start your own, then you apply that same logic to Apple and Google saying they don't want parlor.

What do you think an existential threat to the republic would look like?

1. Nuclear capabilities by North Korea or Iran.

2. Snowden-ish conspiracies by unelected, unaccountable intelligence agencies.

3. Large-scale conflict with China.

4. High-fatality disease: SARS or similar (COVID but more deadly)

Terrorism, foreign or domestic, doesn't even scratch the list of "existential threats." Terrorist acts don't win heats and minds and unless aided by state actors (dirty bombs, etc) are tiny in the numbers game, even for sometime like 9/11.

Governments is several countries have been toppled with exactly this kind of violence.

What about a decapitation strike resulting in the deaths of competing constitutional officers by allies of the president with the intent of subverting the peaceful transfer of presidential power? Would that not qualify as a threat to the republic?

In other words, what if the mob had gotten its hands on Pence, Pelosi, Grassley, or others? Don't you think that would have been a bigger deal than what transpired with Snowden?

Incidentally, there are reports that a number of Republican members of Congress voted in favor of the president on Wednesday because they feared for the safety of their families. It seems plausible that they might have been influenced by the rioters chanting "hang Mike Pence" as they entered the Capitol. Legislators voting against their judgement because of extortion seems a significant threat to the democratic order.

Multiple politicans have assassinated before, the Republic has carried on.

If there were a lot at once...yeah that could be bad.

But frankly there's just so little chance of that happening. If there was a chance in hell of that happening, Security Service/Capitol police would have actually done something about the protesters.

You seem to place a lot of faith in an institution—the Capitol Police—that most would agree failed spectacularly on Wednesday.

It was pure luck that the doors of the Senate were locked and barred just two minutes before the mob arrived. What do you think would have happened if the rioters had gotten there five minutes before they did, when the doors were still ajar? What do you think those men with flex cuffs were intending to do? It seems that one of them was a retired Air Force lt. colonel. What do you think his motivations were?

I don't think we've ever seen terrorism condoned or encouraged by anyone as admired or as powerful as Trump in the history of the country, save the Civil War.

It's not like these are some lunatics, they're obedient fans actively consuming what Trump is feeding them and violently acting on it.

Does he have the right to stand in a public park and spout his threats and lies? Absolutely.

Does he have the right to demand access to a private company platform to spout his threats and lies? No way.

Idiots get kicked out of bars for far less every day.

I think you're confused about the topic.

It's about Parler and its hundreds of thousands of users being deplatformed from AWS, not Twitter banning Trump.

AFAIK Trump doesn't even use Parler.

Sorry, you're right I went on a bit of a tangent there.

I guess the point I was making was that this violent language wouldn't be spreading on Parler if Trump hadn't have abused his Twitter account to drum up this kind of violent extremism with self-serving lies about a free and fair election.

Those hundreds of thousands of users flocked to Parler as a result of Twitter cracking down on this same type of violent speech. So is it really a surprise that AWS cracked down on them too for the same reasons? And Google? And Apple? And Shopify? And others? If you're repeatedly running into bans and suspensions, it could be a multi-company conspiracy to silence you, or it could just be you. I guess that's the debate.

The 1st amendment has limits like yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater or coordinating to murder the VP of the US.

This isn't the same free speech debate as a professor refusing to use gender-neutral pronouns or someone publishing racist research or someone touting conspiracy theories or someone blowing off steam. This is about a small number of users using a platform to illegally threaten and coordinate violence on others in very explicit and direct terms and that platform standing by their right to do so. The only thing stopping them from following through is their low numbers.

What do we want 2 years from now? Parler letting thousands of people threaten to murder Biden, Pelosi, AOC, Romney or every elected official that doesn't subscribe to their version of reality? No way. History tells us this doesn't end well. "Fall in line or we'll shun you" politics is abhorrent. "Fall in line or we'll harm you" politics is the absolute bottom of group behavior. We have laws against violent speech and conspiracy to commit murder for very valid reasons.

Are the threats from the left a problem?

Kathy Griffen holding the President's bloody decapitated head?

Or "If they even TRY to replace RBG we burn the entire fucking thing down"? https://twitter.com/rezaaslan/status/1307107507131875330

Or are those not as dangerous? Or have we simply realized that mass censorship makes the situation even worse?

I guess I don't know how free speech and violent political groups can coexist as violence itself is the most brutal form of censorship.

> Are the threats from the left a problem?

This is a "both sides" argument, that compares apples and oranges. Someone punches a person and someone drives a car into a crowd of innocent people. One is far worse than the other and they're not even in the same ballpark. But when the person who punched someone is "ANTIFA" and the person who drove the car into a crowd is "MAGA" then suddenly we have a debate where there wouldn't have been one if folks had a stronger moral compass than political identity.

Imagine this scenario: A Muslim group with dark skin and long beards, wearing hijabs, led by a billionaire Muslim who dodges condemning 9/11 and openly disparages white people, organizes a "march for Islam" on Marler (Parler for Mulsims) and tries to hunt down various white Christian conservative politicians in the capital building who advocated for the travel ban (killing a police officer in the process) with the stated objective of certifying their Muslim nominee for President who clearly lost the election, yet has been lying about winning and says he'll never concede. Would these same white Christian conservatives being hunted down by a relentless self-serving Muslim politican dust off their near death experience and immediately stand up for Marler and these "very fine" Muslism's right to continue to post their follow up plans for next week?

If modifying the roles in the scenario doesn't feel as comfortable, then this censorship debate might be more related to the social / political identity of those involved than it is about the principle of the debate.

> Or are those not as dangerous?

Kathy Griffen doesn't have the same power as the leader of the free world. Neither does Dr. Reza Aslan, whoever that is. Kathy Griffen's post was messed up and I think they did suspend her for that and made her delete it, right? "Burn the whole thing down" is a euphemism for "start over". Is it inflammatory? Sure. Is it a direct, actionable threat? I don't think so, but I would certainly see it differently if a mob of Aslan's followers showed up carrying torches. Would I have a problem with Twitter deleting the Tweet until he rephrased it to be clear that no violence was intended? No. The more civil our discourse, the more civil our society in my opinion.

I'm all for a very generous line on free speech to make room for very shocking or antagonizing points of views, but when your free speech encourages people to act towards violence and illegally overturning a court-upheld democratic election, I have a huge problem with that because that ultimately leads to more censorship, not less. You think AWS suspending your account and having to self-host is bad? Wait until the capitol mob destroys your business or threatens to kill you. That's true censorship, the kind that's so intimidating and so permanent that you don't dare speak up. That's the kind of censorship the capital mob was advocating for on Parler. Banning a digital account and making you create a new one somewhere else is literally the smallest, most insignificant form of censorship I can think of. And if literally no one will let you create a digital account with them, then maybe it's you and not everyone else. Violence, intimidation and death is the censorship I'm far more worried about. Just look at how brutally effective fascists or the mob can be in censoring entire communities or schools of thought.

> Or have we simply realized that mass censorship makes the situation even worse?

Let's look at Germany who banned Mein Kampf and have "mass censored" the Nazi party, it's symbols and it's ideas. It's not just shunned in Germany to be a Nazi or spread Nazi ideas, it's illegal. Why does Germany believe in "mass censorship"? Because freedom of speech is not all or nothing and censoring Nazis pales in comparison to the alternative of letting Nazi groups freely organize. So, it's not like this road of letting Parlor continue to allow violent political groups to coordinate an uprising leads to more freedom in the long run, it's quite the opposite. From Germany's experience: Want peace and freedom? Then censor those who don't.

In Arnold's recent video (https://twitter.com/Schwarzenegger/status/134824948128487424...) he talks about his father's personal experience with slowly going along with Naziism. I've lived in Germany and Austria and seen the remnants of fascism and it's horrifying. What's even more horrifying is how easy it was for 1930's men and women to dismiss Hitler as "not that bad" or "yeah, he says some outrageous things, but he'd never do it" or "at least he's fighting for Germany" or "he went a little far there, but he won't do it again" or "at least Hitler's on my side" (until he isn't). Sure, people like me might sound alarmist and maybe the capital mob fades quietly into history with no further violence, but my Austrian professor who lived through WWII talked at great length about how seamless and natural the transition from the Weimar Republic to Naziism was and this action at the capital certainly reminded me of his stories, just like it reminded Arnold of his father's story. Giving Parler and the capital mob another shot is not the nail in the coffin for democracy, but it is another notch in violent political extremism's tightening belt. And no one knows which notch is the final one, but when it is, there's no room for anyone to breathe. So, instead of flirting with a violent fascist takeover we're asking Parler's users to please rephrase their beliefs in a non-violent way. Seems a pretty small ask.

Many dismiss the capital mob as lunatics, but Hitler was a 3rd rate fanatic and a recurring failure for years before he took power. In fact, the Weimar Republic wanted to work with him specifically because of how inept and easily manipulated they thought he was. Dismissing the gravity of the capital attack because it failed is a huge mistake in my opinion. Germany wasn't a country of evil citizens who loved Naziism, it was a country of really good people who slowly went along with a few really bad people bending the norms until they had normalized the ultimate censorship: death.

Here we know we have a few really bad people. We don't need to be the good people that go along with it and I'm glad that there are people in powerful positions who aren't.

If you were to end the republic without the usual mass murder (nuclear war, pandemics, etc.) How would you do it?

If you took out the Senate and legislature, would that work? What if you could guaranteed their protection was understaffed when you attempted it?

> If you took out the Senate and legislature, would that work? What if you could guaranteed their protection was understaffed when you attempted it?

Nope, all of the states would appoint new representatives. There are processes for all of these scenarios.

The senate and house are not necessary for the day to day operation if the republic. They aren’t even there all of the time. Killing a bunch of politicians is not a threat to the republic.

This seems naive - if Senators were executed we would possibly be talking about a full blown transition to an authoritarian Trump regime.

In a scenario where a Trump incited mob executes Senators while the police and national guard do nothing is tantamount to a military coup. The replacements would have no reason to believe that their lives wouldn't also be in danger if they didn't certify Trump as the winner of the 2020 elections. At that point Trump has effectively side stepped the Constitution and usurped power through violence - which is literally the end of the republic.

> In a scenario where a Trump incited mob executes Senators while the police and national guard do nothing is tantamount to a military coup.

But that’s not even close to what happened. The national guard doing nothing would require buy-in from the entire military chain of command, which has never been very supportive of Trump.

Nobody died, that's what happened. I'm simply answering your hypothetical if the Senators were actually killed.

If the Sentors and/or the VP were taken as hostages, or worse killed, it would mean national guard was either complicit or incompetent. However, as we know, the Secret Service sadly had to act with deadly force and managed to secure the legislature.

A. If assassination is the method to institute change, SCOTUS would be target #1, due to succession rules. (Side note: Pelican Brief.)

B. I'm not saying there wasn't any wacko who fantasized about overthrowing the the Government and throning an Emperor.

But regime change through force is an impossible task. See: The last 50 years of American foreign policy.

Regimes do change through force. See for example Ghana or Nigeria or Egypt.

However, the impetus has to come from within the country or else the new regime will be seen as a puppet state and face challenges it is unable or unwilling to handle.

> But regime change through force is an impossible task.

Isn't that exactly how most coups are done? Take Iran in '79 as an example.

It would be a big problem, but I don't think so. It wasn't in the realm of possibility on January 6, but for sake of argument.... Say the entire Sentate and House is wiped out somehow. They are not essential for day to day governance. State Governors would make emergency appointments to replace them as a first response. It would be hugely disruptive and chaotic, but I think the republic would survive. The republic is the states. The people in Washington are just the representatives.

They wouldn't wipe out the entire US House and Senate. They would wipe out only those who didn't agree to object to the certification of the Biden's election. They would eliminate Senators and Representatives until Trump was appointed. Now you have an illegitimate president. As you say, the republic is the states, and I don't see how e.g. the Republic of California continues in the Union at that point.

> They are not essential for day to day governance.

Remember that states are not allowed to print their own money as the federal government is. States are now spending vast amounts of money to combat Covid. The federal government is funding these efforts by literally printing dollar bills. If the federal government fails to prop up states, you're looking at states unable to fund hospitals, police, teachers, utilities, etc. If the entire House is eliminated, there's no one to vote on federal budgets, and governors cannot just appoint Representatives as they can Senators -- Representatives must be elected in a special election in their districts according to the constitution. Meaning money from the federal government would just dry up without the House. Obviously the framers never anticipated this edge case.

This could have led to Trump's appointment, depending on how the states were allocated votes (allocated by whom?)

That would have been a very bad situation that I wouldn't want to see how it played out.

Having lived through the collapse of the USSR, the key events could be:

1. New leaders emerge. Industrialists, generals, university professors, even shipyard electricians. They obtain enormous influence through their personal charisma, leadership skills and the political platform they advocate for (think Martin Luther King).

2. Local municipal authorities stop recognizing the central government. They establish democratically-elected councils to temporarily run things in the power vacuum.

3. Security apparatus flips - police and military will stand by, do nothing and just wait to see how the situation develops. Each battalion and police station aims to maintain reasonable peace in their own district (in cooperation with local authorities) and ignores other orders.

4. Having lost all support and control, the central government collapses under its own weight. They may issue orders, but no-one's following them.

5. A grassroots, national assembly type institution with universal popular support emerges to prepare major legislative reforms such as a new constitution to formalize power transfer to new institutions (new government, new parliament). A referendum or general election seals the deal.

In contrast, a bunch of rednecks breaking in for a few hours, taking selfies and stealing minor items is nowhere near this. They have no real leaders, no platform, no support.

> Each battalion and police station aims to maintain reasonable peace in their own district (in cooperation with local authorities) and ignores other orders.

Well, considering that this is how domestic police and national guard already operate in the US—with police operating under municipal authority, or under the authority of the local elected sheriff, and with national guard operating under the authority of each state governor—I don't think observing this would give you any indication that the republic is under threat.

In fact, your points 1, 2 and 3 seem to describe the normal operation of American democracy for the past 200 years or so, with regards to most domestic affairs.

I think this is a good response, but I do urge you to consider that there is not one specific form a failing Republic will take.

Also, I would argue that many of these things did take place. America is fortunate there was a competence problem, but I identify many of the items you listed here as having transpired.

A failed <thing> is still an attempted <thing>.

Orange.

Why are you ignoring that the President instigated the insurrection? Is that irrelevant? The president does have actual power …

More speech is what got us here in the first place

THANK YOU.

>I'm distressed and saddened at how many of the free speech proponents on HN are treating the events of January 6 as if it was just another protest and not an existential threat to the republic.

Could you present an explanation for why?

> If the mob had managed to find and destroy the electoral certificates,

Then nothing different would happen because this particular part of the vote is a formality. Well, the news would be even more one sided on this, but nothing else.

>or if the flex-cuffs guys had captured members of congress

Assuming worse case and he actually killed someone, why would it be much different than attacks in the past like the one at the soft/baseball game. As you said, that it failed is irrelevant to the intended goal.

>The western liberal value of free speech has never extended to incitement of violence.

Yes it has.

First, there is political speech which is going through the most proper channels to enact violence. If you get a law passed, you are forcing people to comply under threat of violence. Talking about changing laws is very central to free speech and includes protecting people pushing even the most cartoonishly evil laws.

But on a more general since, still sticking to US law, the courts have allowed for calls to violence in general and have been very limited in how they restrict it. For example look at all that was said during the summer that was encouraging of riots (not the things said in support of the protests, but said in support of the riots). That is still largely protected free speech.

And on an even more general scale, the concept of free speech does apply to what the founding fathers were discussing leading up to and during the revolutionary war. Sure, Britain's laws would have punished them for it, but the value of free speech that let them rebel is something that was understood and accepted by those forming the new government.

If you are going with what the founding fathers wanted then you should be comfortable with PRIVATE (as in not the government) companies doing whatever the hell they want within their terms of service. No contract has been breached when Apple, Google, Amazon deplatformed Parler. If you want to make this into "but they control speech on the internet with their reach..." then it is no longer about "what the founding fathers" wanted and you should be willing to make this a non-absolutist argument in which case it is mo longer clear cut that restricting this speech is bad.

You may want to reread the comment I was responding to. I quote it again.

>The western liberal value of free speech has never extended to incitement of violence.

Never implies going back in time. I was pointing out the historical opinion given does not line up with existing evidence. As such your point point about private companies is irrelevant.

Though I can still point out that we are looking at private companies that are serving as utilities and being given special protections (contracts, regulatory capture, and similar) by the government to the extent they can be considered part of the government.

> > If the mob had managed to find and destroy the electoral certificates,

> Then nothing different would happen because this particular part of the vote is a formality. Well, the news would be even more one sided on this, but nothing else.

I can guarantee to you Trump would have used this an excuse to try to stay in power, or at least use it as another excuse on top of the ones he has concocted already. He's taken plenty of advantage of grey areas to wreak havoc on administrative norms. Furthermore, it would likely have emboldened his supporters to undertake further violent action more quickly.

And he'd have had zero supporters at that point. He'd already lost the VP, who refused his request to reject the votes. Absolutely nobody would have stood with him on extending his term as a result of a violent interruption of this ceremony in the Congress.

130 Republicans in the House voted to overturn two states' election results, not to mention he has an undeniable popular following. I seriously doubt he would have trouble with finding support with a lot of people if he had taken advantage of this. His supporters will follow him no matter what. If storming the capitol wasn't crossing the line, quite frankly, nothing is for them.

> The western liberal value of free speech has never extended to incitement of violence

Here is the court precedence behind this in the US.

"Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969), was a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court interpreting the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.[1] The Court held that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action""

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio

You've said it, this ruling only applies to the government. Private companies are not bound by this case law.

Likewise, private companies are not required to host any speech, as long as they aren't discriminatory against a protected class.

Cory Doctrow put it best: Let these companies ban whomever, for whatever (legal) reason. Then, push for anti-trust and decentralization, because the REAL problem is we have an oligopoly controlling social media.

OK, but given that all of the above is true, do you think that deplatforming Parler helps or hurts the overall situation?

What do you think the "deplatformed" people are going to do? Just quit because "oh no our website is gone"?

This event is just fueling the fire IMO.

But realistically, these people have been violating the ToS for a long time. Late enforcement is better than no enforcement. Give them an inch and they'll take a mile.

It's true. The only thing that truly changes behavior is consequences. Arrests for in-person insurrections, trials, convictions, deplatform, disrupt, and I would even say enforce the laws that we do have against incitement of violence, which means arresting people who are posting hateful shit online. This whole thing needs to be busted.

Not doing anything because they might be "upset" is tantamount to surrender. Then they literally are holding us hostage. That cannot be tolerated.

Agree, and will add that this should be backed by LEO's tracking online posts inciting violence to people's doors, arresting them, and letting courts decide if it's a free speech issue.

I absolutely agree as far as arrests and convictions for violence, incitements to violence, and conspiracies to commit violent acts.

However, I think deplatforming is a poor long-term solution. Deplatforming on mainstream platforms inspired and fueled the rise of Parler. Deplatforming gets rid of all carrots and all future sticks the mainstream platform has against a given extremist. I think 1-month to 3-month suspensions are more likely to keep followers around, where the mainstream platform has an opportunity to suggest a mixture of center-left and center-right content to them, and provide carrots to rehabilitate extremist publishers.

As I've posted elsewhere, taking Parler offline is probably a necessary short-term solution to an acute threat, but I think it's rarely the right long-term solution.

Edit: I'm fine being downvoted, but if you have a good counter-argument, please post it or a link to it. Try to change my mind instead of just venting your anger.

They won't have a unified place to plan for their next attack in a few days? Where do you think they planned their attack for January 6? Deplatforming has proven to work, if anything heavily slow down the spread of misinformation. What's the last time you heard about Milo?

The planning wasn't done there, just bloviating. The planning was done on telegram and signal (and to a lesser extent Keybase and wire). Lots of people doing osint on the events could tell you that.

Interestingly, the banning of all these accounts has caused the size of the telegram groups to increase dramatically and the discourse to get much more violent.

As I've suggested elsewhere, I think 1-month to 3-month suspensions are much better than lifetime bans. Suspensions keep followers hanging around the mainstream platform, where you can suggest centrist content to them.

A lifetime ban gets rid of all carrots and all future sticks the platform can offer.

Sure, but do we really want to platform to take an active and knowing hand in shaping politics?

Right now they have an effect through algorithms, but their actions don’t seem to be coordinated towards any goal other than increasing engagement with the platform. This is actively different than pitching centrist content to extremists because the platform owners are centrists themselves.

What if the platform owners become extremists like Parler?

Up until 3 or 4 years ago, I was nearly a free speech maximalist. Now, it seems clear that society is poorly equipped and adjusting poorly to social media.

I think giving more control to centrist platforms is the least bad of all the bad options I see. I'm not sure how to mitigate the long-term risks introduced, but the bifurcation of society appears to be a slow motion car crash in progress.

I'd love to be convinced that there are better options, especially if they allowed me to move closer to free speech maximalism.

I think it would help to change middle school and high school civics curricula by adding cognitive biases, logical fallacies (including some basic statistical fallacies), and other tools to better handle social media.

Yeah imagine there was a plan except "show up to a rally at this time in this place."

I think even many of Milo's fanbois realized he had jumped the shark even before he got deplatformed.

I think shutting down Parler is a necessary response to an immediate and concrete existential threat to the long-term functioning of the American democracy.

However, the deplatforming of Milo was part of the impetus for the creation of Parler. Keeping Milo on and suggesting center-left content to his viewers would have been a better long-term solution, along with suggesting center-right content to viewers of extreme left content. (Edit: actually, come to think of it, you'd want a mixture of center-right and center-left content suggested to both extremes, to make the medicine taste a bit less bitter.)

Deplatforming may be necessary for immediate threats, but it's not a good long-term solution to the problem of polarization. Long-term, deplatforming feeds the conspiracy theories and pushes viewers further from the reach of mainstream platforms.

I'd encourage you to read "Talking with strangers".

There's a section in there about the anchoring effect, which basically talks about how if you increase patrols in the worst parts of town and get crime there down, it mostly doesn't just move "elsewhere". These people had good reasons for being drawn to parler and while it won't stop anybody, it's a significant blow I think.

The counter-argument is that the main draw of Parler was deplatforming (of people who weren't calling for violence) on mainstream platorms. In hindsight (and for some, in foresight), finding some pool of center-left content to suggest to viewers of far-right social media personalities, and center-right content to suggest to viewers of far-left social media personalities probably would have been a much better long-term solution. I also think you'd want to have 1-month or 3-month suspensions for suggesting violence, rather than full deplatforming, to reduce the number of followers who jump to more extreme platforms.

Edit: actually, I think you'd one pool of center-left and center-right content to show to both extremes, to make the medicine taste less bitter.

Vice did a very interesting look into this question following the deplatforming of Alex Jones[1]. As is evident from their article title -- "Deplatforming Works" -- the data seem to say it works.

As for the specific concern you mention, they look into it as well:

"'The good that comes with deplatforming is, their main goal was to redpill or get people within mainstream communities more in line with their beliefs, so we need to get them off those platforms,” Robyn Caplan, a PhD student at Rutgers University and Data and Society affiliate, told me on the phone. “But now we’ve put them down into their holes where they were before, and they could strengthen their beliefs and become more extreme.'

The question is whether it’s more harmful to society to have many millions of people exposed to kinda hateful content or to have a much smaller number of ultra-radicalized true believers."

[1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/bjbp9d/do-social-media-bans-...

I feel like deplatforming because of a TOS violation is much better than "The world's a better place if we deplatform you"

From what I understand, deplatforming actually works to deradicalize people because every time you deplatform, the actual radicalized group lessens. For example, randos from twitter who went to parler to follow their favorite alt-right opinion producer but otherwise don't care about politics probably won't want to follow them a second time and will end up entering less radicalized spaces and then deradicalizing themselves.

At the end you have a small group of severely sick people who can only be helped by therapy, but prevent mass unrest of otherwise normal people who got radicalized only because getting radicalized was as easy as joining a platform.

Do you think that extinguishing the fire of your house burning down helps or hurts the overall situation of arson?

Fear of retaliation is how facism thrives. Deplatforming hate groups works.

I agree with you, but I also don't know what else these companies should do. What happened on Jan 6th was coordinated on a lot of these platforms (including Parler).

It seems like the answer to all these types of issues comes down to education at some point. Not that we all need to learn the same point of view, but that we should learn how to think critically. The people who took part in the insurrection on the capital honestly believe a lot of falsehoods propagated on networks like Parlor, FB, Twitter. They aren't all acting in bad faith.

Seems like these networks/platforms have been forced to take the actions they did because people – all of us to some degree or another – choose what we want to believe, wether there's any evidence or not.

If we're giving that the above is true then the US is basically at war with these people. It's an insurrection.

"If we cut our enemies communications then that's just fueling the fire" is not something you say mid war. You cut and code break and infiltrate and capture and kill and anything else because the time for "deplatforming" and "fuel on fire" and any other business as usual peace time political concept is irrelevant. That game isn't being played any more, the violence game is.

It's like you're playing chess with someone and they just got up and shoved you, and you punched them, and then a bunch of onlookers are all "well what if they had played knight to f4? Would you punch then!? Punching shouldn't be allowed in chess!". Except the chess game ended when they got up and shoved you. Treating these people as political opponents ended when they broke in to the Capitol building with guns and bombs with the stated intent of killing politicians. They're enemies of the state and therefore enemies of institutions that exist thanks to that state and any individual that likes that state.

>I'm distressed and saddened at how many of the free speech proponents on HN are treating the events of January 6 as if it was just another protest If I'm honest, maybe I'm just a little inured to the events of this year? We had events like the CHAZ where groups of armed protesters declared American soil autonomous, numerous people died, and it took authorities a month to shut the protest down.

I agree... the events of 1/6 "feel" different (certainly the response has been), but I'm struggling to understand why, and that alights in the skeptic in me. Is it just that one cause is deemed righteous, and the other is deemed not?

Just as happy as most to see Donald go, but it's hard to not see this reaction formation on behalf of the left / big tech as manufactured outrage and advantage seeking.

(Genuinely conflicted -- feel free to correct me.)

#1,2 and 3 in the Presidential line of succession were in the building when this happened.

How is this anything but serious?

And they would have all been replaced by the various states. The constitution outlines succession for this reason.

Are you seriously using "we can replace them" as an argument why killing the VP, Speaker, etc. is not that serious?

It’s serious from a murder, terrorism, disruption perspective. It’s not a serious threat to the republic though.

The founding of America was based on insurrection. This western liberal value of speech you speak of is in your imagination because there's no where in the US constitution that says free speech is defined as anything except violence. Any decisions we made on interpreting free speech since its inception are purely arbitrary.

It may be true that those companies don't want to platform sedition, but what if rightful sedition cannot be achieved without being provided a platform? In that case, is it then up to companies to pick and choose which sedition movements they support by virtue of allowing them on their platform?

Yes. If you believe in a libertarian "absolute free speech" principle you should also let private companies decide who they let on their platform. You cannot have it both ways.

In 1967 the black panthers invaded the California capitol building armed with rifles.

Over the summer of 2020 protestors laid siege to the Federal building in Portland for 100 days straight.

I can list tons of riots and violent direct actions that have happened over the years. Read about the NOW bombing in Philadelphia. Oklahoma City. Waco. The Weather Report. On and on and on.

Elevating the Jan 6th direct action, however scary, tragic, and misguided it might be, to some higher level of ‘coup’ or ‘insurrection’ isn’t rational.

It is another chapter in a long line of crazy events happening around political conflict in the US.

As such, it doesn’t, in my opinion, warrant rethink everything.

The events you list are similar in form but different in substance. The substantive difference is that none of the above events were supported and encouraged by a sitting president seeking to overturn his own election loss. It is a violent, physical attack, directed and abetted by the executive against the legislature to prevent it from carrying out its constitutional duty. That is an existential threat to the republic.

A lot of people here are looking at the house on fire and worrying about the water damage from putting it out.

How many riots can you list where the rioters were specifically targeting a joint session of congress, with the VP in attendance, for the explicit purpose of overturning the legitimate US presidential election at the behest of the current US president?

What exactly do you think a coup attempt is?

> If the mob had managed to find and destroy the electoral certificates

You have a lot of replies so sorry if someone else said this, but this wouldn't have been much of a big deal. There are 6 copies of the electoral certificates: one sent to the VP, one sent to the SOS, 2 sent to a federal judge from the state, and 2 sent to a US archivist. I don't know which copies they were using on 1/6. Maybe the VP's? But if they destroyed them, we have others.

For years these platforms have been getting rid of Islamist content. And thats a good thing. How is this any different? Is it because it is so close to home? Probably.

> I'm distressed and saddened at how many of the free speech proponents on HN are treating the events of January 6 as if it was just another protest and not an existential threat to the republic.

You know what else is an existential threat to the republic? A growing group of congresspeople who openly question fundamental American values like the right to bear arms, freedom of association, freedom of religion, a punitive justice system, and the non-redistribution of wealth. Those seditious traitors have been growing in numbers for the past decade. (See what I did there?)

All I'm really saying is you should not act like there wasn't build up to this from both sides.

This country is trying to decide whether it likes being wealthy more than it likes being free, and for the people who were never particularly wealthy in the first place, it's hardly a choice at all. What do you expect them to do, just take it? When have Americans ever done that?

Since 2016 I've tried very hard to understand and empathize with the baffling behavior of staunch Trump supporters. Certainly not to support their politics, but to restore some sense of stability to my world view--that people are generally sympathetic. This especially hit home when hearing my wonderful parents' supporting Trump's hateful rhetoric.

I'm now starting to think that his message is in fact too dangerous to even try and rationalize. The people that follow them are feeling something I don't understand, but there's just no excuse to humor them any longer. His rhetoric is tearing us apart, and it needs to end.

For god's sake, the hate needs to end.

He says things that resonate with their beliefs. America is great, America is good in the world, a strong America is a good thing, get out of foreign wars, get out of bad trade deals, bring back jobs, cut taxes. He did a lot of these things. He was completely unlike any other politician. He didn't try to waffle on both sides of every issue. He spoke his mind, in a brash, rude, blue-collar New York kind of way. He called people names. I never heard real hate in the things he said, though if you wanted to hear it, I'm sure you did.

Thanks for this. I suppose the reason people follow him is often because of his politics, not all of which I disagree with. But I think the hatred he inspires is packed into his rhetoric, and that's what I take issue with.

You may not be able to rationalize their thinking, but you do need to live in the same country together.

If your hope is that now that you've lost patience; they can be pummelled into submission, you may be going down an even darker path...

Some kind of concessions, and a demonstration that Biden is not what they feared might a good start.

Or.. you can have them banned off the internet, thrown off planes, fired from their jobs etc.. sounds like a good plan.

You may honestly be right. This division needs to soften, and that won't happen until everyone finds some common ground and feels accepted. Mocking or belittling will certainly only drive us further and further away from each other.

On the other hand, I don't think we can allow this behavior to be validated in any way. As a people, we need to be able to politically disagree with one another amicably.

This was not a protest for civil liberty, it was an attempt to undermine our current democratic process. They weren't calling for legislative reform, but to reverse the results of the election.

We count the votes and the electorates use those numbers to certify our next president. If people are unhappy with the process, it's perfectly reasonable for them to try and change it.

But lacking any evidence that the process wasn't followed, it needs to be respected, or there's not much point in having it in the first place.

You cannot base your judgement on emotions, especially in times like this.

> His followers have now begun talking about returning with arms. Only fools would assume that these threats are idle talk or jokes.

I don't understand why it is so surprising for anyone, but this is what happens when you're trying to censor people. Banning Trump and censoring his supporters was a mistake, because it's basically like a declaration of war. If the social media waited like a month into the Biden presidency, Trump supporters would scream about the Big Tech into the ether and everything would die down eventually, but instead they decided to do it at the worst possible moment.

This doesn’t make sense to me. Is Twitter or Facebook basically a fundamental human right in the US? Is losing Twitter like losing your ability to own a firearm?

The whole “censorship” label seems quite entitled at best. These are private companies. They are under no obligation to let someone’s crazy uncle talk about hanging the VP of the US or overthrowing Congress.

Donald J Trump has every opportunity to call into Lou Dobbs, Judge Jeanine, Sean Hannity, or Fox News. He can publish directly on Brietbart. He also has the podium in the WH press room, which he doesn’t like to use, and for a decent chunk of the Presidency, had no daily press briefing.

The American liberals cry over the smallest thing, and the conservatives are equally, or perhaps worse entitled cry babies. Twitter owes American individuals absolutely nothing. They’re a business. Presumably they don’t want to get sued because we already knew people were using Twitter to plan another attack on American elected officials and Twitter did nothing.

It's not, but in my opinion it should be. Just like in the EU for example, I believe the banks are legally required to provide you a basic bank account, regardless of what your politics are.

But ultimately, it doesn't matter in this case. It's politics.

To follow Twitter's own line of reasoning: does it make any sense to you to ban a president on the basis that he might say something that might cause violence, and at the same time don't take into consideration what the act of banning itself might cause?

His argument wasn't a legal one, it's a practical one.

The majority of Republicans believe that their votes were stolen at the ballot box. They then got on their soap box to try to peacefully protest this outcome, which is legal, and what politics is about. They were cancelled and shut down at every avenue trying to exercise speech and protest. It doesn't matter that it's the legal right of Twitter to do this, it's that it is an extraordinarily demotivating action.

When people try the ballot box, and then the soap box, they've got one box left. Alienating and dehumanizing people is not an effective recipe for civil peace, even if it's a legal one.

Please stop using HN for political battle. I had to go back almost three weeks to find a post like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25502390. When accounts start using HN for political flamewar, we ban them, regardless of which politics they're battling for. It's not what HN is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm not. It's just that it happens that something relatively significant regarding politics and technology happened lately, and it's top of mind for my commenting.

I was "deplatformed"--aka fired--from my tech job a couple months ago for political views. This is not a neutral issue.

Thankfully I can retire, but not all people are so lucky. What's sad is that after 24 years of coding day and night, this issue so significant I refuse to continue to work in the tech industry. I love technology, but we're at the point where this industry isn't about technology any longer.

Because if there was one thing it wasn't, it wasn't an "existential threat to the republic." Hyperbole like this make it hard to talk about the rest of it reasonably. It was a protest gone off the rails, with a few bad actors, and an embarrasing lack of preparedness by the Capitol Police on that day of all days, given what has been going on all year.

That "protest gone off the rails, with a few bad actors" would have absolutely executed a member of Congress or the Vice President if given the chance. And they got unbelievably close to being able to do that. They had weapons, armor, bloodlust, restraints, and smaller organized extremist groups.

How can you not see that as an "existential threat to the republic"?

> How can you not see that as an "existential threat to the republic"?

I'm pretty high up the spectrum of taking the riot seriously rather than "a protest gone bad", but how would this extreme worst case be "an existential threat to the republic"? The republic is explicitly designed to rout around the death (incl assassination) of the President, let alone more minor political figures. Was Gabbie Giffords' tragic attack an existential threat to the republic?

I'm a hardliner on political violence and want to see the book thrown at everyone who stormed the Capitol, but that's down to the need to set a Schelling fence; it's not even close to "existential".

> Was Gabbie Giffords' tragic attack an existential threat to the republic?

Somebody also compared this to the Scalise shooting. Neither are comparable. This was a mob executing the whim of the sitting President, trying to prevent the legal counting of the votes of the incoming President. Not to mention the symbolic nature of it taking place at the US Capitol, while the entirety of Congress was in session. This is not comparable to lone wolf attacks against singular targets.

I don't think it would have been actually republic ending -- but it sure would have set us on an extremely dangerous path towards increasing levels of extremism, violence.

> How can you not see that as an "existential threat to the republic"?

Because it’s not. Our representatives are not the republic. There isn’t some clause that dissolves government if enough representatives die.

The civil war in which states receded was an existential threat. A bunch of dead Congress members is horrific terrorism but it’s nowhere near an existential crisis. The beauty of our structure is that individuals do not matter in the gran scheme of things.

This has been brought up elsewhere in the thread, but it's not about the individuals dying. It's about the potential for escalating violence and power grabs that come in its wake.

A MAGA mob that managed to kill Senators would likely cause protests and riots to erupt across the country. Likely worse than we saw last summer. Then you have a major danger of counter protesting, and escalating violence between the groups. Then there's the danger of the possible ways in which the government reacts. We already saw Trump last summer threatening to deploy military on domestic soil. The dominos can continue to fall from there, as violence continues, and power consolidates.

Would that have definitely happened, and would that have definitely threatened to end the republic? I don't know. But it's a threat, nonetheless.

This comment explains it better than me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25711602

But that’s all fantasy. The country has the national guard for protests in cities which frequently gets deployed and would be used in these scenarios as well. There is no special power grab that can happen legally so he would need a bunch of life long military generals to agree to a coup, in which case the congress protester attack is irrelevant anyway.

> They had weapons

Are we talking about guns? I didn't see any report that any of these people had a single gun. Yes you can qualify a broom stolen from the janitors cabin as a weapon, but give me a break...

> armor

Wearing a pair of camouflage pants and a bicyle helmet does not qualify as armor

> bloodlust

maybe

> I didn't see any report that any of these people had a single gun.

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/08/politics/us-capitol-riots... mentions, among other things, multiple charges for carrying guns on capitol grounds. + a bunch of illegal gun stuff in the surrounding area.

> Wearing a pair of camouflage pants and a bicyle helmet does not qualify as armor

Above article mentions at least one case where the police charge explicitly mentions a bulletproof vest, and on various photos you can see "tactical helmets" (which could be unarmored, true) and plate carriers

Because in trying to imagine the worst possible outcome, I still see no way Joe Biden is not sworn in on January 20. I grant you some of the people there may have been under delusions that they could stop it, but it wasn't going to happen. I mean god forbid they killed the VP or the Speaker. The rest of the Congress, the military, the states, are all going stand aside and say "OK well, nothing we can do now, it's President Trump for life!"

It's not just about whether Biden becomes President on the 20th. Because there's not really any way they could have stopped that. It's about how much further that could have escalated extremism and violence.

I suggest you read more history. Sudden violent events have, time after time, been used to increase authoritarian control. I can absolutely see a line that starts with "we need to get the Senate safe, also we're going to give emergency powers to the president." Followed by attempts to prevent the Senate from meeting, increasing police and national guard presence. Protests start nationwide. Protests lead to riots and conflict. Suddenly there's an incentive to use a little force to get everything "in order". And maybe just hold on a bit before handing over power.

Especially because the police support Trump.

> we need to get the Senate safe, also we're going to give emergency powers to the president.

There is an actor in your sentence that doesn’t exist in the US government. There is no “we” that would give emergency powers to the president against the will of the congress.

What if the violence ends in everyone who opposes the President losing their lives? They get rid of all Democrats in Congress, and Republicans vote to give Trump emergency powers.

Can’t happen. They wouldn’t be able to achieve quorum to even have the vote. Would need to wait until states appoint replacement representatives.

Not true at all. First and foremost, "the whole number of the House has long been viewed as the number of Members elected, sworn, and living". So if they murdered all of the Democrats the remaining Republicans would have enough members to maintain a quorum.

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RL/98-988

But there are other ways to get around this as well. Specifically, read sections:

- Quorum in the Case of Catastrophic Circumstances

- Voting and Quorum Procedures in the House of Representatives

All Dems murdered would be catastrophic circumstances and would require the 72 hour window with the failure to reach quorum report. That’s plenty of time for states to re-appoint all of the senators and prevent the take over of the upper house.

Who is the "we" that is giving him more powers? Trump is viscerally hated by the Speaker (2nd in line) and most of the House (they already impeached him once) and a significant portion of the Senate. No way he's getting any emergency powers, if the Constitution would even allow it.

For a more competent autocrat-hopeful, the military. Trump's biggest mistake (and our biggest boon in such a situation) is that he spent 4 years making enemies of the top brass. You don't become a dictator when the heads of the military hate you.

How in the world did you get that from my post? No, that is not fine. I don't support rioting at all, certainly not the deaths of random innocents, whether it was BLM or what happened at the Capitol.

Why would you attribute that belief to me, something I gave exactly zero reason for?

I don't support it either.

However, this entire thread is a discussion on justfying the "deplatforming" by tech giants to uphold democracy.

Why these giants act so one-sided is my confusion.

Everyone who is involved in this coup should be arrested immediately

Why isn't Trump arrested yet? since many claims he is the leader of the coup.

Even AOC calls for resignation for supporting a coup attempt. Huh?

In many countries, It's a death sentence (or max jail time) if one tries to overthrow a government.

In US, the punishment is resignation and banned from social media and AWS?

Yeah, some hyperbole is involved here.

I'm old enough to remember when a Bernie Sanders supporter shot a Republican congressman at a baseball practice. Is that an existential threat to the republic that should be laid at the feet of Bernie supporters?

You can't see the difference between a single lone wolf attack at a baseball game, and an entire mob instigated by the President of the United States, at the US Capitol? Taking place while Congress counted the votes of that President's political opponent?

Most of the people at the Capitol were there for peaceful protest.

Trump did not tell them to kill politicians. His rhetoric was extreme, but arguably so is Bernie's.

> Most of the people at the Capitol were there for peaceful protest.

Okay, but there were many there that explicitly wanted violence, came prepared for it, and used the mob as cover.

> Trump did not tell them to kill politicians

Trump doesn't have to explicitly say "kill these politicians" to make the implication perfectly clear. He repeatedly told them he needed them to "fight" for him.

> His rhetoric was extreme, but arguably so is Bernie's

Bernie never incited a mob to storm the Capitol Building, while Congress ratified the votes for his political opponent.

> Bernie never incited a mob to storm the Capitol Building, while Congress ratified the votes for his political opponent.

His supporters most certainly include a fringe of people prepared for violence. I've even seen video evidence of such people working for his presidential election campaign.

Bernie Sanders also endorsed the (thankfully failed) Portland mayoral candidate who was an open Antifa supporter and worshiper of Stalin and Mao.

The question, for any political movement that has violent fringe, to what extent can the responsibility for that violent fringe be set at the feet of either the members of the movement or the politicians who lead it?

Bernie and his followers have never been broadly considered responsible for his radicals, despite his extreme rhetoric.

All summer long we had "mostly peaceful" BLM protests that included a significant minority of violent radicals (both BLM and Antifa) and yet no one took responsibility. In many cases people weren't even prosecuted.

Consider this: on election day, D.C. was boarded up, and it wasn't in preparation for rioting Trump supporters. These are people who generally speaking don't want to over through the existing order. They just want to see the existing order working.

Were they a part of a mob swarming the baseball practice? If so, then yes, they were all complicit for not stopping an escalation of violence. If not, then no, it was a single actor. It's not that hard to apply a tiny amount of critical thinking to avoid false equivalency.

There's a huge difference between a lone actor and the large amount of people who went into the capitol on the 6th.

Most of the people there (including many who entered the building) were clearly not intending or prepared for violence.

So? Many of them were. And the mob provided them cover.

Honest question: do you feel the same about the riots over the past summer?

This is now attempt number 4 in this thread to get me on this point. This is not an "honest question", it's a gotcha attempt.

I am against rioting. Full stop.

> I am against rioting. Full stop.

Great, so am I! But I have been hearing people (both here and from the very politicians threatened on the 6th) excusing and downplaying the violent rioting that occurred over the summer.

This "gotcha" is an attempt to see whether one is dealing with someone that has a consistent set of principles.

Bernie didn't tell him to do what he did, and he was just one guy. This was a large mob, and Trump had just instructed it to do 90% of what it did. The possibility that violence could occur was clear. That's not at all a valid comparison.

And you attest that malatov-throwing, firework shooting, armed, arsonist actors in Summer 2020 wouldn't do the same?

A huge protest with high emotions does mob justice. No surprises there.

Nope, because they weren't interfering with the ratification of a Presidential election. It's one thing to burn out a Target and another to ransack The Capitol while it is in session doing critical constitutional duties.

It's better for people aggrieved by the system to loot and burn down community businesses than government buildings?

That is a very hot take.

Yes, when that government building is the Capitol. It's more about the people inside the building than the building itself.

And not just the Capitol, but the Capitol while the entirety of Congress is in session counting the votes for the incoming President.

It's one thing if this had happened on a random Wednesday, but the timing is what makes it so disturbing.

It's straight out of a wannabe dictator's playbook. The fact that it was incompetent and disorganized doesn't change that.

You're the third person who's responded to my comment with a whataboutism for the BLM protests, something I made zero mention of.

What was your opinion on the BLM protests outside of the White House ?

Okay, putting the ideals of the two events aside, the fact is the police (and national guard) presence was great enough during the BLM protest to make breaching the perimeter essentially impossible, as opposed to the much lighter presence on the 6th.

Exactly and it’s unacceptable that it wasn’t. Who is to blame?

And Trump got absolutely pilloried for having that troop presence at the time.

Because it was a photo op, not a constitutional duty of Congress.

I’m not talking about the photo op, I’m talking about the police presence trying to contain the violent mob earlier in the day.

I'm not sure why you ask, but this seems like a potential bad faith attempt at whataboutism. I don't support any form of rioting. I also don't think what happened outside of the White House was in any way a riot. Certainly not in any way comparable to what happened this week at the Capitol.

I ask because it makes you think and hopefully prevent overreaction. Banning apps because of extremists and poor police presence is stupid. I think these people should have been treated the same as the second day of protest where Capitol police were stationed outside after the church was set on fire. There was a lot more time to plan for these event as it was less spontaneous and had many hundreds of thousands planning attendance. I think not having a bigger police presence was pathetic and it was likely political.

I sincerely hope you are correct, but it's difficult to know the following:

1. just how many citizens were sympathetic to the rioters as they saw those events on unfolding on their screens

2. how their collective behavior will change as a result

I wouldn't say that "existential threat" is hyperbole, I'd say that its accuracy depends on the answer to the above questions.

I wasn't worried about the immediate collapse of the America at the hands of the Capitol mob.

Not an answer to your question, but a few interesting data points nonetheless:

"From @YouGov poll: among Republican voters, 45% approve of the storming of Capitol, 30% think the perpetrators are 'patriots', 52% think Biden is at least partly to blame for it, and 85% think it would be inappropriate to remove Trump from office after this. This is not a fringe." https://twitter.com/SMerler/status/1347089854958596098?s=20

Fwiw, a more recent PBS/Marist poll puts Republican support for the attack at 18%.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/homenews/news/53345...

Full poll (pdf): http://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/PBS-...

Damn, those are depressing numbers...

>It was a protest gone off the rails, with a few bad actors, and an embarrasing lack of preparedness by the Capitol Police on that day of all days, given what has been going on all year.

Those "few bad actors" had weapons and tried to interrupt the certification of the new president. They may be idiots because of their poor planning but their intent was obvious to anyone who hasn't drank the kool-aid.

I don't think anyone (certainly not me) is denying some intent of at least a core of instigators to create a disruption, at minimum. They should be identified, charged with their crimes, and stand trial.

And previously a few bad actors attempted to assassinate a number of GOP representatives, yet we didn't see a comparable reaction.

I also seem to recall there were people staging faked but realistic looking beheadings of Trump which was celebrated as free speech.

I really find it fascinating how the US media finds the exception and pretends it's the norm. It's something out of psy-ops.

ONE demonstrator had zip ties, therefore "they had zip ties".

Sure, many were armed and who fired the sole single lethal shot that day? Law enforcement. How is that for peaceful?

The "four people died" narrative is also very telling. One demonstrator was shot by police. One law enforcement officer died of injuries - although details have been very vague. The other two deaths? One heart attack and one unrelated condition. At this point I expect the US media to attribute every single death in DC on that day to these demonstrations just so they can pretend it was an extremely lethal event.

The people "stormed the Capitol" and what did they do once they had it? They took selfies and then left peacefully. That's not a coup or an insurrection, that's a disorganized demonstration that went too far because Capitol police could apparently not keep doors closed.

But I understand. The US media has been priming people for 5 years for this. They've been running influence campaigns and promoting violence the minute Trump won. They spent 3 years talking about Russian collusion and then didn't say a thing when it was proven false. Could you imagine if the Russian collusion narrative had been treated the same way the electoral fraud narrative has been treated?

In a pragmatic way, you are right. This could have ended up much worse than it did. But let's not fool ourselves, the intent of these people was to intimidate officials into disrupting a peaceful transition of power.

They didn't do so because of any actual evidence that the transition was fraudulent, but out of loyalty to one person and a cult of personality. It all just reeks of dictatorship-like behavior to me.

I disagree largely because you're extrapolating the exception to be the rule. There were hundreds of thousands of people there and 99% of them never even entered the Capitol buildings.

I think the most telling part of intent is coming from the arrest data. There have been less than a handful of arrests due to firearms. Two of them were alarming (one had mason jar IEDs, one was making assassination threats at Pelosi). I am sure we will get more of what I would agree with you were "people with an intent to intimidate officials", but they are going to make up less than 99.5% of the hundreds of thousands of people that were there to demonstrate. The bulk of arrests have been curfew related - no surprises there.

I think it helps to put ourselves in the mindset of the people there, regardless of what side you're on. These people were upset that while the "fraud" of 2016 (the Russian collusion narrative) was thoroughly investigated and proven to be false after 3.5 years of dragging the President through the mud, the 2020 "fraud" allegation feels like it's being completely ignored.

And look I do not think there was enough fraud to change the results (I assume that in any election with no voter ID there will be some fraud, period). What I think is problematic is when instead of investigating allegations to appease 70 MM of your constituents, you instead say "no investigation and if you even ask about this you must be de-platformed, banned from the internet, and are probably a terrorist". That response is extremely dictatorial and not the sign of someone acting with good intentions. That's what scares me much more than anything than the fraction of a percent of demonstrators did.

I think I see what you're saying, but it seems like we are focusing on two different aspects of the event. I'm perfectly comfortable with people taking issue and protesting the de-platforming. I personally think it was the right move, but I fully support that others be able to think differently and try to affect change.

But the ban is not dictatorial. It is fully within these private companies' rights to refuse service to the president. And most importantly, this is not the government suppressing the people, it's the people suppressing the government. I can hardly imagine a stronger example of true liberty. Surely in actual dictatorship that would never be allowed to happen.

What these corporations are saying is not "no investigation and you're banned". They're saying they believe Trump purposefully incited people to take action so he could retain power despite the results of the election.

Yeah, this is honestly the best response to the above comment. It was an attempt to disrupt the peaceful transition of power, at the behest of a wannabe autocrat, fueled by lies and conspiracy theories. The fact that it was incompetent and disorganized, and that not everyone there shared that goal, doesn't change anything.

The vast majority of the people there were LARPers who didn't intend any violence.

How does that change the fact that there were multiple armed groups and individuals, many of whom had very clear intentions. Given the chance, they would have absolutely taken hostages, or killed a Senator or the Vice President. And they were able to literally walk right into the Capitol, almost completely unimpeded.

Why does the fact that the majority of them were LARPing change that fact?

> How does that change the fact that there were multiple armed groups and individuals,

I have heard this statement thrown, but have not seen any good photos, videos or any source material proving it. I suspect this is largely because firearms are banned within the Capitol and you would be insta-arrested if you tried. The Capitol is not an open carry or even a concealed carry area, and as we saw from the one death at the hands of law enforcement, they are not shy about using lethal force on even unarmed individuals when you cross certain lines.

I am also extrapolating from the arrest data that there were clearly almost no armed individuals at all. There have been two firearm arrests. That's two out of hundreds of thousands of individuals and in both cases the individuals had their firearms in their vehicles, not on their person - so they were most definitely not "armed groups and individuals".

See: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/10/us/politics/capitol-arres...

I'm genuinely curious, where do you get your news?

What are your information filters that can allow you to believe something like Russian collusion not only was "proved false" but didn't even happen?

Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, Michael Cohen, George Papadopoulos, Richard Pinedo, Alex van der Zwaan, and Konstantin Kilimnik were all indicted, most convicted and imprisoned due to their role in the Trump campaign colluding with Russian agents. What do you think happened to these people?

I have to assume you arguing entirely in bad faith. "Couldn't keep the doors closed"? There were hundreds of people shoving to get in, screaming racial slurs at black police officers and calling them traitors saying they deserved to be executed for not arresting the liberal politicians.

Also, that officer who died who you kind of just dance around? The mob ripped a fire extinguisher off the wall and beat his head in.

The guy who had a heart attack died because the weapon he was carrying intending to use against a congressman went off and killed himself instead.

Intending to use against a congressman ? Did he tell that much to you ?

I also love making threats on social media then flying across the country and taking weapons into buildings where they’re not allowed so I can definitely not use them for anything.

I think there’s a legitimate question as to whether you’re just making this up on the spot because you’re angry, or if there’s any actual evidence of this that you’d care to share.

Do I look angry? I am always a perfectly rational internet forum poster.

https://www.al.com/news/2021/01/alabama-man-1-of-4-people-wh...

Other reports from the field indicate he died by “tasing himself in the balls” while “stealing a portrait of Tip O’Neill”, which could probably be verified with a livestream if you want to watch someone die, which I don’t.

So.... nothing in that link says anything about the guy who had a heart attack being shot.

The rest of your comment seems to be rambling nonsense.

Your epistemological standards and justifications are much different than mine, and really speak to the epistemological challenge we humans face in an age with an increasing volume of information.

And what do you think would have happened to Minneapolis or the Portland courthouse or the White House during the summer riots if there had not been a more competent security response? What happened at the Capitol was serious. So was what happened over the summer. But over the summer I heard nothing by "mostly peaceful protests" as literally billions of dollars of damage was caused and numerous deaths were racked up. Captiol protesters break some windows and I hear nothing but "violent rioting insurrectionists".

Back during the summer, Trump being secured in a shelter because of the riot security risk was LAUGHED at by the left. They accused him of being a coward for being taken to a bunker due to the risk of BLM protesters who burned a church across from the White House. Where's the same media laughing at the Congressional representatives fleeing from the people they're supposed to represent?

Broke some windows? They beat a police officer to death with a fire extinguisher. They entered congress with zip ties, semi-automatic weapons, and placed pipe bombs at the DNC & RNC.

Trump was never in danger.

This harkens back to the very old analogy of why you're not allowed to scream "Fire!" or "There's a bomb!" in a movie theater, and that restriction isn't considered an infringement on free speech. Ergo it is possible (e.g. to deplatform a member of high authority) without it being an infringement on free speech.

Also your comment doesn't really point out specific flaws in their argument. All you do is tack insulting words onto it without any meaningful substance.

The "[falsely] shouting fire in a theater" argument places emphasis on the wrong part of the problem with free speech maximalism.

Most people don't realize "falsely shouting fire in a theatre" was first used to justify locking up peaceful anti-war demonstrators under the flimsy justification that it slowed down the war effort. That's the first clue that it's a bad argument.

Also, Oliver Wendell Holmes was later convinced this was a bad argument[0].

You, and most others, also commonly leave out "falsely" part of Holmes's argument, though it's still implied if not present. (Nobody is arguing that alerting people to the presence of a real fire would be the wrong thing to do. Delaying an evacuation until the fire is violently apparent is more likely to cause a panicked evacuation vs. shouting, no matter how forcefully one can shout. Also, analogies are like cars... they only go so far.)

The (stated or implied) falsely part is the crux of the problem. There are countless cases in history where the majority consensus was very wrong, and stopping someone from speaking because it's considered both wrong and dangerous is bad policy. It's just too easy to find something dangerous in any situation to justify silencing. It's much better to condemn all calls for (non-state[1]) violence, regardless of the truth or falsity of their arguments.

It's much better to set crystal clear criteria for what constitutes too dangerous speech, regardless of its truth. Incitements to (non-state[2]) violence is at least a lowest-common denominator. Maybe it's not great, but other lines get murky very quickly, and people quickly disagree over the level of danger.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...

[1] Or, if you're a strict pacifist, simply all calls to violence

[2] Sorry strict pacifists, it's just not practical for the government to ban calls for war or calls for the police to use the state's monopoly on violence to protect people in physical harm.

You've been using HN primarily for political battle. We ban accounts that do that. I had to go back as far as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24231151 to find a comment that was using HN as intended: for curious conversation.

I'm not going to ban you right now because that wasn't that long ago—but please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on.

As for "HN is a liberal" [etc] - the other side makes the same dramatic claims about how your side dominates the site. It's pure sample bias, driven by the fact that we all vastly overweight the data points that we dislike. I've written about this at length: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... - and I could give you a list of hundreds of comments making exactly the opposite complaint about HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25662497, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25434397, etc. ad nauseum.

Feel free to ban me if you’d like to make this place less “inclusive” bro.

HN certainly has a sampling bias leaning towards the content of white, single, liberal SF bros. Because that’s HN’s user base.

"A riot is the language of the unheard" ~ Martin Luther King Jr

In this one instance, I hope he was wrong.

All the people who voted for Trump and who think the vote was rigged feel unheard.

Dr. King was quite perceptive.

We've banned this account for political flamewar. That's not what this site is for, and we ban accounts that do it regardless of which politics they're battling for. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. This is a site for thoughtful, curious conversation on topics of intellectual interest—not bashing enemies.

> Also your comment doesn't really point out specific flaws in their argument. All you do is tack insulting words onto it without any meaningful substance.

Oddly your comment does the same.

Disagree actually. The fire analogy was fine. I would love to see a reply to that.

He is making a false analogy. The Fire argument is tested in court and essentially regulated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the....

The disturbing part about these bans is they seem to be done unilaterally if not coordinated by private for profit tech companies.

Drifting from the original comment here but: Consider this twitter and facebook unilaterally decided to ban the president of the united states... what message does that send to the other world leaders?. Last I checked nobody elected Zuckerberg and Dorsey.

> Consider this twitter and facebook unilaterally decided to ban the president of the united states...

Note that “ban” here is “from using their respective platforms”.

> what message does that send to the other world leaders?

That private parties operating in the US with the freedom provided by its Constitution may choose not to amplify their speech despite their position of authority?

> Last I checked nobody elected Zuckerberg and Dorsey.

Last I checked, the freedom of speech and the press meant you didn't need to be elected to a position of government authority to have the right to decide what messages you were willing to use your resources to amplify.

Am I missing something? The article you linked cites:

    Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969 ... banned speech to that which would be directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action (e.g. a riot).

It seems to directly apply

Censoring a president is far greater a threat to the republic than some silly protest. People like you exploiting a silly pathetic protest to justify censorship is the threat to the republic. I'd rather have the protests than censorship by tech companies.

It is not for a bunch of unelected tech elites to decide whether our elected leaders speak. That's not their job. Once we hand over that power to a bunch of tech elites, then we have the end of the republic.

Nobody voted for Amazon, Apple, Google to be our hall monitors.

If there is a "threat to the republic", then it's the job of the political leaders and law enforcement to deal with it. Not Tim Cook, not Zuckerburg and certainly not the idiots at CNN, foxnews or other media companies.

The collusion between tech and news industry is the greatest threat to the republic. Not some pathetic protest that amounted to nothing.

Have you ever bothered to ask who elected the tech industry to be our masters? Do you really want a bunch of unelected tech elite controlling our lives? Do you want these people to be lords over our elected leaders?

Re: #2, when did the violent parts of the BLM protests enter the seat of national government with intent to harm?

Why you think killing random innocent on the street, burning private properties is ok but storming a government building is not?

Killing random people to make a political statement is terrorism. Isn't it?

Ok. Can u tell me the death till associated with BLM (not attributed to police)? I can - 0.

The deaths in chaz, where police were explicitly banned.

25. And $1B in damage.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/31/americans-kill...

Ah. Read the details. Most were committed by "patriotic Trump supporters"...

Perhaps it is different in your country, but as an American, although both burglarizing an Apple Store and invading the Capitol while chanting that you want to hang the Vice President are crimes, the latter is considered slightly less acceptable.

Also, claiming that opposing the rioters is to claim that “people can’t revolt” is a specious argument. It’s like claiming that executing a murderer is the same thing as committing murder. Both are killings, but one imagines the two to have different motivations. Recall that the founders put down a revolt (the Whiskey Rebellion) not long after their own revolution, and that a Civil War was fought not long after.

> ... the latter is considered slightly less acceptable.

I agree that both are crimes. I am more concerned with reaction of tech platforms. Remember these same tech companies were supporting BLM blindly.

Few months back exPM of Malaysia openly justified beheading in France with no reaction from tech companies.

They always suck-up to China just get a foothold into the Chinese market so thinking they are acting to uphold democracy is a funny idea.

You are right. They wouldn't care less about Uyghur Muslims being put in concentration camps and indulging in forced labour if they can meet their production targets and be profitable.

And before we forget, ISIS literally used Twitter to propagate Islamist ideology until it was finally banned after 2 years of damage being already done! These social media platforms were directly responsible for enabling ISIS to spread its propaganda across the globe and helping in recruiting foreign fighters. These social media companies did nothing until it required Government intervention.

The courts have allowed it, buddy. Who are you to say it was unlawful.

Anyone can have an opinion on the law. I doubt you would say the internment of the Japenese in WWII was legal. But the highest court in the land deemed it to be.

It helps to know that it was often Trump-appointed judges who dismissed his claims. In case you wanted to continue down this path.

I’m not sure I understand how the OP supporting mail in voting is relevant.

They are extremely afraid, freaked out, or paranoid that people are going to use Parler to somehow overthrow the government. But, they were not afraid that people were going to use unverified mail in ballots and ballot stuffing to overthrow the government. In reality we all know their fear is a ruse and this is a power grab.

My understanding is that repeatedly, the courts have shown that allegations about widespread voter fraud are unfounded. Do you have evidence to the contrary?

We have evidence a mob organized on parler to attempt to hang the Vice President.

We have no evidence at all of voter fraud.

In reality we all know that you care more about bullshit voter fraud than actual voter suppression.

Mail in voting was passed by mainly Republicans legislatures, and also it’s good.

Oh, I see. Any shit you don't agree with is "Trump's propaganda" Fuck off.

You can't do this here. I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You're a stabilizing anchor during a tumultuous storm. Maybe more than a few Anchors, actually! ;)

Indeed. Anchor Steam Christmas Ale was fabulous this year.

I fully expect that people who care about this country would be willing to steal the election away from Trump if they believed the nonstop lies about Russian collusion, the "fine people" hoax, etc.

” The western liberal value of free speech has never extended to incitement of violence. My assumption is that the leaders of Apple, Google, and Amazon don't want to provide a platform for sedition.”

This illogical lie get spammed here on every single news discussion about this event, yet no one has still answered why did those platforms allow leftwing/blm terrorists and other violent organizations spread their hate for years?

”Western liberal values” seem to only apply when it doesn’t harm the agenda and interests of the people who vote for the ”right” party.

There haven’t been left-wing terrorists in the US since the Weather Underground. (Who were so ineffectual most of them blew themselves up and we let the rest become obscure college professors.)

If you think there’s been any in the last few decades you should turn off your TV since it’s lying to you.

Do you believe there have been any right wing terrorists in the US in the last few decades?

Interpreting "last few decades" as within the last 30 years, Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolph make the cut.

- 1995 Murrah Federal Building in OK

- 1996 Centennial Olympic Park bombing

Post 2001, Wikipedia has quite a list.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_terrorism#Post-2001

I could see arguing some of these are crimes committed by right-wing groups as opposed to terrorist acts, but others clearly are terrorism.

Yes, there were some yesterday.

January 6 was a "mostly peaceful" protest.

How many "mostly peaceful" protests end up with five dead?

Where were you this past summer? "Mostly peaceful" was the way the corporate press described the summer riots that left dozens dead and did billions of dollars in property damage.

And the rioters were bailed out by politicians including the incoming VP.

That doesn't really answer my question.

It actually does.

I mean, I didn't give you a specific number of such "mostly peaceful" protests, and they didn't necessarily result in exactly 5 deaths, but it is clear that the protest on the 6th was not the only such protest to result in people dying even with the past year.

> free speech proponents on HN are treating the events of January 6 as if it was just another protest and not an existential threat to the republic.

Let me tell you a little story:

On February 27, 1933 communist Marinus van der Lubbe set fire to the Reichstag, the home of the German parliament. He and four communist leaders were arrested.

The event supported the earlier claims of the National Socialist Workers Party, that Germany was on the verge of a communist revolution and only majority by them could stop it.

At the urging of Chancellor Adolf Hitler, President Paul von Hidenburg immediately issued the Reichstag Fire Decree, suspending civil liberties such as freedom speech, freedom of the press, public assembly, and the secrecy of the post and telephone.

The government arrested large numbers of communists, including members of parliament.

In their absence, the Nazis and their allies, the Germany National People's Party, achieved a majority in the legislature. Exactly one month after the Reichstag fire, they passed the Enabling Act to help them against the seditious communists by giving the Chancellor the power to pass laws without parliamentary approval.

Soon after, President Hindenburg died and the President's office was merged with that of the Chancellor Hitler, making Hitler the head of state and the executive, or "Führer und Reichskanzler."

But......the important thing is that they successfully addressed the insurrectionists' attack on the Capitol!