Remember, two things happened at once: the riots, but also the result of the Georgia runoff which indicated a complete shift in governmental control. One cleared the runway for the reaction to the other.

But I'm sure they have your best interests at heart.

This is definitely a moment that will define social media specifically and tech more broadly. Before Wednesday, social media was one thing, and after, it will be another. This is also a bit of a backlog being flushed; many of these decisions were likely made months or years ago, and only accelerated by Wednesday's events.

I see this a little like safety regulations - every regulation is written in blood. Perhaps soon so will every major shift in the tech landscape.

We need to deeply think about all this - allowing peaceful, objective, conservative opinions and policy (such as the Lincoln Project) while condemning hate speech, violence, white supremacy and other racist behavior.

"He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee. " - Nietzsche.

But that’s the problem. Nobody trusts people in Silicon Valley or New York City to decide what those things are. These are people who have internalized ideas like “you can’t be racist against white people” which the vast majority of the country doesn’t share. And they certainly will not apply the same standards to people on the left glorifying violent radicals like Angela Davis. We just saw this happen this summer where the center-left media pretended for months that American cities weren’t on fire.

Your example proves the point. The Lincoln Project are basically fiscally conservative Democrats at this point. They’re not meaningfully conservative on any of the issues that matter to conservatives today: religious liberty, preservation of history, immigration, etc. And it’s not just an American thing. These issues are actually where the US right is increasingly aligned with the European center-right. Censors in NYC and SF would have censored a bunch of stuff people like France’s Macron have been saying lately.

But it's easy to provide real examples of conservative speakers who are experiencing no meaningful interference. So, replace The Lincoln Project with The Federalist.

The problem is that these are not conservative principles. This is just hate spewing, plain and straight.

Hate is an emotion, it is subjective. You might feel hate when you see or hear something, but it is not an intrinsic, objective quality of other people's words.

Without using these emotional trigger words, do you think the citizens of a country should be able to decide who visits them in their country?

To really drive this home:

1) Don't spread hate - there are obvious limits to this. Calling for assassination of public officials counts as hate speech. Saying something offensive is fine as far as it doesn't incite violence.

2) Have an intelligent, evidence based discussion, be respectful and we're trying to move the country forward. Not divide and turn to our own echo chambers. Come to a resolution through debate and concession.

And no wonder the right feels persecuted, because their beliefs are not necessarily hateful yet they are labelled as such by default. It's like drawing the line somewhere arbitrary and then asking the side whose beliefs are on the other side "why can't you discuss this without resorting to hate speech", and "stop complaining because your side is hateful" and "it's okay for companies to refuse you service because your ideas are hate speech and X-ist".

Few examples of acceptable "hate-speech" that falls within that acceptable line: Anti-white Racism. ACAB. Punch-A-Nazi.

Immigration is a good example. Cultural relativism has become broadly accepted among the progressive left. As a result, they increasingly can only see immigration as an economic issue. Preserving the country’s existing culture to them isn’t a valid reason, so they deem it “racist.” This is internally consistent to them. If culture doesn’t make a difference, the only reason not to have mass immigration is potential economic downsides, or limited infrastructure. Assimilation and the “Melting Pot” is increasingly coming under attack for the same reason.

This is totally incomprehensible to conservatives, who reject cultural relativism. They believe the success of a society is based on deep-seated cultural features and social reinforcement thereof. (I once had a Japanese person go through hundreds of years of Japanese history to explain to me why the country has less problems with corruption than many other Asian countries.) Within that framework, “we don’t want our community to change” is a completely valid position. At the very least, assimilation is indispensable.

The idea that immigration is solely about “cost/benefit” and “talent, policies, etc.” is an inherently liberal, and indeed quite radically liberal framing of the issue.

The International Convention on Civil and Political rights recognizes that distinct “peoples’” have a human right to self determination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination. That is, distinct identifiable groups have a right right to self-governance.

That is the basis for national borders as we know them today. But if distinct people have a right to self governance, it follows that nations have a right to control immigration for whatever reason they want, including the characteristics that make them distinct.

It’s wholly legitimate for a country not to take immigrants who they think might change the culture of the country, or not fit in, or simply because they don’t want to. It doesn’t have to be justified with some sort of economic analysis. It’s not “hate spewing” when the Japanese refuse to accept immigrants for no reason other than large scale immigration would change Japan’s culture. It’s likewise not “hate spewing” for someone in Boise Idaho to say “I like my society the way it is, and I don’t want people here who have a different history, political tradition, etc., especially when they’ll be voting on the laws that govern me.”

My family is from Bangladesh. My parents are fairly Americanized, but they really don’t understand some of the subtler things about American culture, like our anti-elitism and love of guns. In Bangladesh, the elite govern and there is no “glorification of the common man.” It was also disarmed by the British, so there is no gun culture. This results in hilarious arguments between my dad and my wife, whose family populated the Oregon coast on the wagon trails, who still hunt for food and hate the government for taking their homestead to build the pacific coast highway. Immigration inherently changes the culture and people are fully entitled to support it or oppose it, or support slowing it or increasing it on that basis.

But liberals usually can’t even see that dimension of the issue because they’ve internalized cultural relativism.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization_Act_of_1790

Also, you’re again painting the issue with a liberal brush by talking about “white persons.” That’s a viewpoint rooted cultural relativism—it overlooks that immigrants don’t differ only by race, but culture, political tradition, etc. It’s also incorrect: for example under the 1921 immigration act there was no restriction at all on immigration from Latin America, while it was restricted from every European country to an annual 3% of the existing population of people from that country. (Of course there was a racist element to it as well with the 1924 Asian exclusion act. But that confirms that there are two separate issue.)

I’m not trying to convince you of this point, I’m explaining why we can’t have folks in NYC and SF deciding what political ideas can be expressed online. American liberals have increasingly fully embraced cultural relativism, while American conservatives (and most ordinary people around the world) still believe that “culture matters.” Conservatives assume that culture drives societal differences, and, especially combined with a natural pessimism, are terrified of changes in culture. They also tend to live in the vast swaths of the country that have a low foreign-born population and fairly homogenous cultures. Ironically, as an immigrant myself it’s easy for me to understand someone in Idaho who is afraid of the culture of his community changing. Bangladeshis would feel the same way. Asians, in general, are not cultural relativists.

I’m an outsider, have no clue about the fine details, just watching the quarrel degenerate from across the Atlantic.

Usually this is when adults come in to break the fight, drag the screaming parties apart and ground all parties for a week...

Which terrorism does she support? Wikipedia only says that she supports BDS.

> She has supported confessed terrorist Rasmea Odeh, and called for the release of Marwan Barghouti, a leader of the internationally designated terror group al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. In addition to killing many dozens of Israeli civilians, the Brigade did enormous damage to Israeli support for negotiations with Palestinian groups. They were granted amnesty through a Palestinian Authority deal in which they agree to renounce terrorism. Then when Hamas took control of Gaza, they renounced the agreement and resumed attacks on Israeli civilians as Gazan fighters. Angela Davis considers them “freedom fighters” and called for Barghouti’s release, referring to him as a political prisoner. She maintains Odeh’s innocence, and claims her trial was unfair despite International Red Cross observation of the trial and a subsequent confession.

> She has supported confessed terrorist Rasmea Odeh, and called for the release of Marwan Barghouti, a leader of the internationally designated terror group al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. In addition to killing many dozens of Israeli civilians, the Brigade did enormous damage to Israeli support for negotiations with Palestinian groups. They were granted amnesty through a Palestinian Authority deal in which they agree to renounce terrorism. Then when Hamas took control of Gaza, they renounced the agreement and resumed attacks on Israeli civilians as Gazan fighters. Angela Davis considers them “freedom fighters” and called for Barghouti’s release, referring to him as a political prisoner. She maintains Odeh’s innocence, and claims her trial was unfair despite International Red Cross observation of the trial and a subsequent confession.

One that groups like the NAACP and others have been warning about for years if not decades.

Lol the same lincoln project that said on Twitter they are now building a database of all republicans to chastise them forever? Thats peaceful all right.

There is more to it though: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/opinion/lincoln-project.h...

The exact same thing happened when radio was first invented, Nazism rose to power in tandem with mass media that allowed for direct manipulation of people's emotions on a scale that was impossible prior to that.

What do you think about this?

Minority, Women-Owned Businesses Get First Bid on New PPP Loans - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-07/minority-...

What about voices like James Lindsay and Christopher Rufo?

We are doubling down on this new era where we are experimenting with the thesis that Discrimination can and will create (long-lasting) Equity. With policies in place for decades like Affirmative Action in the US and BEE in South Africa I'm not convinced in the thesis. Corporations in the US have now went further with more Corporate Affirmative Action programs like Microsofts commitment to hire more Black employees which is being looked into by the Department of Labor as Discrimination (https://abcnews.go.com/Business/department-labor-investigati...). Microsoft is 4.5% Black employees so they are underrepresented as it is.

How do we have discussions on Race? Can Discrimination create Equity?

“The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist.” ― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

While Trump is technically still POTUS, he is now seen as trying to undermine the rightful, peaceful transition of power to the next president, and what's important is that viewpoint is not only believed by the left, but now huge swaths of politicians and the electorate who at least gave Trump tacit support.

Why shouldn't it be?

For 4 years they said "we won't suspend a sitting president because we recognize our role in society but once Trump's not sitting he's fair game for bans"

I mean POTUS threatened nuclear war on their _social media platform_ and they let it go...

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It's quite simple, allowing sitting POTUS special privileges was a means to avoid limiting the reach of the American leadership to its people.

Well now Trump's a lame duck, and he was abusing the sitting president loophole to turn social media into a lightning rod for groups like the one that stormed the Capitol...

The math must have been very simple for them: give him 12? more days of increasing unhinged antics when he's already supposed to have started transitioning power... or don't.

tl;dr: It's no conspiracy that he was deplatformed right before the end of his term, the combination of the Capitol attack being triggered by him and the fact he was already on his way out was all it took.

You ascribe the timing part to greed, but it's even more easily easily ascribed to not wanting to censor the POTUS if possible while they're in power...

Donald Trump didn't suddenly become less profitable to Twitter after the Capitol attack, if anything he would have been more profitable. Note his "usual" account isn't even the POTUS handle, so it wouldn't have been affected by Biden's take over.

Um... yes? Isn't that the most obvious hypothesis? Occam's razor is a good rule for a reason. Abstract concerns about propriety and truthfulness are one thing. An actual assault on the seat of government is very much another.

Had they acted earlier they would have been punished heavily by the Trump clique, and most likely ousted by their own shareholders, to be replaced by executives that would have done precisely what they have done

Listen, civil rights and social justice are something to be discussed and struggled in the public sphere, which is not corporate life.

You US folks have this Corporatism so deeply ingrained that you are going to drag public discourse into an authoritarian organization where everything is ultimately determined by the Board and not by you. The Board will play along, as long as their interests align and it means free advertisement and good will. But you’re still asking “daddy, can I?”

You want to be political? Unions and party activism out of office hours.

I don't think anyone does.