> Like this problem is hard. I want free and open communication as much as the next person it's not so easy.

I want free and open communication as long as it does inconvenience me or those in power?

Also remember: public groups and channels on Telegram are public. You can join them and report them if you want.

What you cannot is join my family group and start judging my kids based on what they said one afternoon when they were angry.

The problem here is that because of journalists like these we now have to prepare to defend Telegram against authorities, because some well connected journalists said it was the next evil thing after Parler.

People believe this, just like they believe that MeWe is an alt-right hotspot (it is mostly ex-googleplusers discussing chili growing, general gardening, sharing landscape photos etc - unless maybe I haven't searched for the magic string that unlocks all the evil..?)

The result is that ordinary people shy away from newer, better technology and fall back to/stick with abusers line Facebook.

Yep. Facebook, the place that has hosted much more hate speech than any alternative platform I know of.

> I want free and open communication as long as it does inconvenience me or those in power?

I'll assume you mean doesn't but that's not at all what I'm saying. It's easy to take an absolute stance as long as your blind to or don't care about the consequences of it.

> What you cannot is join my family group and start judging my kids based on what they said one afternoon when they were angry.

What? I don't think I would want to be in your family group chats but regardless I'm specifically talking about huge public/semi-public spaces.

> The problem here is that because of journalists like these we now have to prepare to defend Telegram against authorities

Look this shit sucks. It's terrible that the same group of awful people that seem to poison everything they touch have been flocking to different corners of the internet trying to find a place that won't kick them out to self organize. As Facebook/Twitter/Reddit have shown you don't actually have to get rid of them at large just make a good-faith attempt.

> What? I don't think I would want to be in your family group chats but regardless I'm specifically talking about huge public/semi-public spaces.

The places are public. The police can go there. Even Telegram itself take down public groups that incite violence.

They just don't kick people out for describing themselves as retards.

This doesn't seem to be about "the same group of awful people that seem to poison everything they touch" anymore. Now they want to take away anything they don't feel they control thoroughly, hence the broad attacks on Telegram ans Signal.

There's a lot of people, myself included, who do approach the issue in the way you're describing. But there's also a vocal set of people who... well, it's hard to come up with a charitable view of what their position is. If Taylor Lorenz is legitimately concerned about the dangers of online witchhunts, what in the world is she doing posting names and photos of everyone who was in the room at the time of this incident?

Doesn't Twitter have an anti-doxxing policy?

"Doxxing" is poorly defined enough that I think it's best to just avoid the term. They have a policy against involuntary disclosure of private information (https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info...), but names, physical appearances, and conversations from other apps aren't considered private information.

It would be much easier to take this argument seriously if the most recent example of "deplatforming" (and the prime example in the very article we are discussing in this thread) wasn't a bunch of well funded publications coming to the defense of hedge funds and calling meme culture aware day traders evil Nazis.

Seeing as of late the only prominent examples of the terrible behavior you describe are by exactly the people trying to warn the world of these evil people and save us from them, I'm going to have to file this in "baseless scaremongering."

This is the moral panic of our day. This is our satanic panic, and the people you're defending are our Tipper Gore.

WSB wasn't all that alt-right/Nazi/whatever before the GameStop insanity, but after some clickbait articles equating them with Trump supporters, something like 6 million new people descended on them, some noticeable number of them being Trump/QAnon cultists. I suspect it was a self-fulfilling thing.

No Trumpists were spotted - people just wanted a piece of the pie and say fuck you to the criminals at Wall Street - but it seems the media did their job.

Oh, no. They were spotted. Afterwards. I am not talking about hearsay or "journalism". There was a thread with several tens of thousands of upvotes and someone innocently said to the effect of "that sounds almost like one of those worshippers of the orange god..." and another person said (paraphrasing) "it literally IS, they are an antivaxxer and EVERYTHING, just check their posting history". They were not lying.

That doesn't prove any particular percentage of the newcomers were, but when you see one like that...

But I say again, I believe this was an effect of the articles, not the cause.

You know these things are allowed to be something other than all or nothing, right? You can hold the stance that WSB fiasco is idiotic scaremongering while also acknowledging that there are other internet mobs that do real harm. Because when it comes to WSB I completely agree with you.

My point, well I have more than one really, they are 1) if these evil mobs are really any semblance of a threat, pointing at them every time a blue check decides to go after ideological opponents desensitizes us to it, and 2) the only prominent examples of what you're saying exists and is a danger are perpetrated by the people reminding us of this ever present danger.

You can't defend baseless attacks against things like WSB by reminding us that a real mob of scumbags exist and then expect others to disassociate the two. When an article is written attacking someone that is legitimately going after the evil people on the internet, your point may very well be valid, but in this case it is not. If you want these two scenarios disassociated from one another, perhaps don't associate them with one another.

No that's fine, I think we're actually in agreement. I want also want the two disassociated! It just seems like whenever deplatforming comes up like this people's gut reaction is to say that its bad in absolute terms and that getting rid of the very worst who do real harm is the same as silencing political views you don't like. I absolutely do not want to give off the impression that I approve of the WSB scaremongering. They're a vulgar bunch but it's all in good fun and self deprecation.

Lynch mob is wrong, even if it hangs the right man on occasion.

> You can hold the stance that WSB fiasco is idiotic scaremongering while also acknowledging that there are other internet mobs that do real harm.

You mean like that group that has torched neighborhoods, shot polive officers, shot other protesters, thrown rocks, use baseball bats on police and civilians etc etc?

Or do you mean the really really scary ones like the ones that walked into Capitol Hill and had four lunatics with strips along with them while the rest were busily taking photos?

So I don't have skin in the game here, and I'm definitely no fan of the comment you responded to (not appropriate for this forum and not conducive to real discussion) but I figured I'd point out 1 person was killed at the capitol and she was shot by DC police, another cop was thought to have been killed with a fire extinguisher but that is currently being investigated, and the rest died of heart attacks and things like that. To claim "6 people died" is at least as disingenuous as what you're accusing.

Maybe it was a little disingenuous. Of the 5 (my apologies) that died, 1 was a stroke, 1 was a heart attack, 1 was crushed by the mob, and we know what happened to the other 2.

I could be wrong, but I still don't think there was a single BLM protest this summer where 3 people were killed.

I agree my example was ugly.

I wasn't there, wouldn't have been there if I could (quite on the contrary I'm working on getting people away from such activities.)

Still I think we shouldn't compare the Capitol event with one BLM event but rather compare all MAGA events with all BLM events.