I'm not a Trump supporter but all this ban wave seems very selective.

Specially since I've seen so many things considered as "hate speech" on these platforms that were not filtered.

Obviously, YT's ban on Donny is not random or capricious, it's very intentional.

But the larger issue remains that YT is a bad host to begin with and has been for nearly a decade. Maybe the larger YT community, including advertisers, needs a better choice than what it currently uses. Or a better legal framework in which to operate as YT.

I just don't see how to make it less selective. The problems here are categories like "inciting violence" which are just not clear-cut. It's not like a copyright protection case, where it's usually very clear that someone uploaded a copy of Pulp Fiction, and you can set strict rules for the edge cases by saying "fifteen second clips of videos are fine, sixteen second clips are banned, yeah it's arbitrary but it has to be and now we'll apply that fairly."

For "inciting violence" the problems will be like, someone says "Hey everyone get ready to take action on X date. Be prepared! Be at location X! You know what to do! Tell all your friends! Remember your second amendment rights!" And none of those statements are inherently violent themselves, they are all compatible with the sort of peaceful protest that we want to encourage. But the emergent behavior of a whole lot of communication like this can be, well someone is using messages that are individually innocent to organize violent activity, and in many cases they just totally know what they're doing.

In a court this ends up getting decided by a jury, "beyond reasonable doubt", there are rights for the accused, and so on. But nobody has the resources to start a court case over every tweet that says "Bring your guns to the protest tomorrow, I'm bringing mine!"

Hate speech is like inciting violence but even more subjective.

Personally I think we will have an "archipelago" where there are many different online communities with different censorship rules, each somewhat arbitrary. I think the current situation with Trump is a pretty extreme one, and I doubt we will see a similar situation to Parler for quite some time.

If such a ban were to have been placed on Trump, it should have come through at least Congressional vote. Not by unilateral BigTech action.

Again, Facebook has carried multiple live streams of shootings- YouTube has carried plenty of abusive videos and videos supporting violence and terrorism.

From a political perspective they are setting themselves up for attack with this response. Like, still waiting on details but Ron Paul got kicked off of Facebook. How in the heck did that goofy little ol dude incite this?

I also am beginning to notice that with every major act of terrorism in the past couple of years, may God help you if the lunitics used your platform and you were not Google/Facebook/Twitter. If you were one of those three you will just claim oopsie and move on. If you were a small platform then the entire weight of the corporate oligarchy will come down on you while never picking up a mirror.

I also think Fox news and CNN should be held accountable for their radicalization of both sides- hear me out. You have one half of this country that is convinced Trump was literally Hitler, not only that he also was elected by election manipulation via Russia. You have the other half of the country, that lives in a reality where the election has been stolen from them and they're being censored on all major forms of media. They believe the election was stolen by the Chinese.

At some point the media has to be held accountable. Fear porn may sell, but it has a damned high cost.

Please understand I love this community, hacker news is one of the few places I can make a statement like this and expect reasonable and civil responses. And a no way should anyone take what I'm saying personally, I feel the system is broken- I don't think we can survive as a nation with a fractured worldview perpetuated by a 24/7 news cycle amplified by short-sighted memes and microblogs.