Have to been on Reddit, specifically /r/politics? There are calls to violence all the time. Nobody bats an eye because it's calls to violence against the "bad guys."

I assume you've got some citations for that, right? I have been to r/politics and people get banned pretty quickly for calling for violence. I just went through the top 20 threads, and there isn't a single call for violence to be found.

Indeed. When evaluating reddit threads and content, its important to distinguish between highly upvoted and visible content, and content that was downvoted or deleted to oblivion. A -1000 call for violence in one subreddit is not equivalent to a +1000 call for violence in another.

Parler is banning those posts as well: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/09/politics/parler-lin-wood-... The point is that there are bad actors and bad voices across these platforms, including those that are "okay" like Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter.

But they aren't. You can go there right now and find posts calling for violence. They have no automated system and have no plans to implement one which is why they were kicked off AWS. From the AWS letter they were kind enough to post:

>Recently, we’ve seen a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms. It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service. It also seems that Parler is still trying to determine its position on content moderation. You remove some violent content when contacted by us or others, but not always with urgency. Your CEO recently stated publicly that he doesn’t “feel responsible for any of this, and neither should the platform.” This morning, you shared that you have a plan to more proactively moderate violent content, but plan to do so manually with volunteers. It’s our view that this nascent plan to use volunteers to promptly identify and remove dangerous content will not work in light of the rapidly growing number of violent posts. This is further demonstrated by the fact that you still have not taken down much of the content that we’ve sent you. Given the unfortunate events that transpired this past week in Washington, D.C., there is serious risk that this type of content will further incite violence.

Except you can't go there now, because it's been pulled from AWS.

I am not going to go through and find some examples but there have been calls for violence there. I remember the entire Sandman period of time with many people saying he "what a punchable face"....

Edit to add: Also what happens behind doors on invite only subreddits?

Edit to add further: https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitPoliticsSays/comments/bmtdqb/ch...

CHapoTrapHouse got banned but....CTH is invite only.

There is a German saying that goes something like "if there’s a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you've got a table with 11 Nazis.”

Twitter had a policy against misgendering and had locked her out of her account several times before banning her. If this is something Meghan thinks is worth getting banned over, that's on her. Most people just don't care what pronoun somebody wants to be called, so the non-asshole thing to do is to just use their preferred pronoun.

> so the non-asshole thing to do is to just use their preferred pronoun.

I agree. I completely agree. I myself call the transgender people in my life by their preferred pronoun.

I also find compelling someone's speech by threat of banning them to be disgusting. Especially when there's a block button available. If you don't like what someone's saying, you can literally ignore everything they say.

Herein lies the conundrum for me - for, what seems to be, an increasingly large group of people, its not enough to simply stop interaction with people they don't like, those people have to be removed from the landscape altogether. I just do not see this ending in any positive way.

Blocking does not scale if you interact with a lot of people (see many famous examples of celebrities quitting Twitter over harrassment), which is something Twitter would obviously want its users to do. To make it easier, it makes absolute sense to me for Twitter to enforce clearly defined civility rules.

> Blocking does not scale if you interact with a lot of people (see many famous examples of celebrities quitting Twitter over harrassment), which is something Twitter would obviously want its users to do.

This seems to be viewed as a sort of "bug" of scale; I see it as a feature. If you become extremely popular and your voice is amplified, you're going to have to contend with being criticized and scrutinized to a greater degree.

I fall into the Sam Harris & Joe Rogan Greater Internet Reply Theory: "Don't read the comments. You can't read the comments." Jamie Foxx said it best on why you don't need to read them, "Sometimes the comments'll get in that ass."

I will simply never agree with removing someone for the content of their speech. I do think that you eventually reach a point of harassment (for example, if you reply to every single tweet of someone you don't like with, "You're a cunt."), but by-and-large, a lot of the "problems" simply result in people not being able to ignore others, either by using a button on a website, or just by sheer willpower of not looking at a comment.

Her speech was not compelled. She was removed from twitter. She wasn't unpersoned. She isn't in a gulag. Stop hyperbolizing and your concerns get a lot less concerning.

> Her speech was not compelled.

"Don't say this thing, or we'll ban you forever from the platform."

If I walk up to you and say, "Don't say this thing, or me and my 9 associates here will punch you in the face," that's compulsion. Period.

That you're equating being removed from twitter with being physically threatened is telling. They aren't comparable. A physical I threat of violence is compelling, yes, in a way that being removed from a website isn't. She could post the same thing on HN, right now. So compelling!

Good. It should be telling. I'm all-in on free speech. I support the right of everyone, anywhere, to say whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as it adheres to the First Amendment.

Chomsky said it best: "If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.”

And you're welcome to hold that view. But conflating threats with 1st amendment protected action is dumb.

And yes, Twitter, under the first amendment, is free to associate with whomever they want (or to refuse to associate with them)! Twitter isn't compelling Meghan Murphy to do anything anymore than than twitter is, at this moment, compelling me to give them my wallet.

On the other hand, if you said "Give me your wallet, or me and my 9 associates here will punch you in the face," you'd be committing a crime.

That's the difference between being kicked off twitter and punching someone in the face. One of them is a crime. No matter how purely you uphold the principle of free speech, it doesn't make sense to compare someone who doesn't share those values to a criminal.

> A saying from a nation with collective psychological trauma of over 100 years. No thanks.

Well, they do know what happens when you let Nazis and their apologists/enablers get a toehold in public discourse, so maybe they actually have something useful to contribute to the discussion.