Vendors have every right to not want to host people they don't support.
If you really cared about free speech, you would demand that the government run their own hosting platform in which no one could be deplatformed. But I'm pretty sure no one actually wants that.
Not always.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...
> If you really cared about free speech, you would demand that the government run their own hosting platform in which no one could be deplatformed. But I'm pretty sure no one actually wants that.
Some people did argued that. I personally have no opinion on nationalizing the hosting platforms or social media.
True. But I don't want to work with a vendor who makes use of that right.
And, outsourcing unconstitutional restrictions to private companies who have achieved near monopoly control of the space is almost worse.
By this standard Chomsky would argue Parler "prefers Stalinist standards." Do you believe they do?
Centralised communication platforms all eventually trend towards echo chambers.
Decentralisation is the key to restoring unfettered free speech.
Gab is a Christian safe-space
The core problem is that anybody can call themself a Christian. Anybody can say that they're following Christ's teaching, living a Christian life, etc - regardless of how closely it tracks with the things that Christ did or said.
(By "can", here, I mean can in a practical sense. I mean that these things occur. I do not mean that any of these things are approved of by any particular natural or supernatural being(s).)
By extension, anybody can hang up a shingle and call themselves a Christian church. As a result, you have thousands of Christian sects. These sects exist within a spectrum ranging from somewhat pro-semitic to rabidly anti-semitic.
Even within sects - especially the largest - you will find that adherents are scattered over a pretty broad range of that spectrum.
So, yes - there are a fair number of anti-semitic Christians. Their existence should not come as a surprise to anyone.
And that's before we consider eschatology...
I don't believe a site focused on anti-Semitism is a "Christian" site or full of people practicing the teachings of Jesus.
That seems like a perfectly reasonable conclusion and not a thought-terminating cliche at all. I guess we can all just pack it in and go home, no point in even debating this issue anymore. Everyone is a Stalinist.
At least, me and my fellow kids had that naive belief. Maybe the older folks online already knew better.
Cancel culture is spreading fast.
I fear that there is definitely something brewing in our online habits these days, and it may be significantly damaging to society.
The problem however, is that removing these groups will not inherently solve them. I would support removing of these extremists if i thought it would do good. It however, won't. It will further build the fire of self-victim identification and extremist views which fuel them.
We need another approach at solving this problem. Of which i think is two fold:
1. Groups (both the left and right) struggle to stand up against the undesirable extremists within.
2. Our ingestion of information is not filtered enough by our own brains. We consume freely, and largely due to extremists and bubbles we end up consuming garbage.
All of this said, i feel like attempts at dealing with Parler is vastly different than the "cancel culture" which attempted to rename the https://rubocop.org/ tool. One is a misguided answer to extremists - the other is an attempt at protecting hurt feelings over bad words. Very different.
If they're not, as your question seems to imply, then "all" conservatives are racist/etc. But i'm not saying that, i'm saying the racist ones are the extremists.
Likewise the people who mean well, but are incorrect, on the left who tried to rename Rubocop are extremists.
>A person who advocates or resorts to measures beyond the norm, especially in politics.
Someone calling for UBI five years ago could be called an extremist. Though it does need someone to define 'the norm'.
It’s literally illegal in America to incited and plot murder and insurrection against the government of the USA. Not joking, not boasting, but actually plotting and then executing the plan for real.
There’s a perfectly reasonable argument that while merely disseminating such messages as a platform may not be criminal, that knowingly disseminating or facilitating such discourse while being fully aware of it is reckless and irresponsible. I think if Amazon doesn’t want to behave recklessly and irresponsibly in that way, that’s a reasonable position for them to take.
There’s clearly a cultural blind spot here. If these were Islamic terrorists plotting a repeat of 9/11 nobody here would have any concerns about this.
The First Amendment does not prohibit private entities from limiting speech, we don't have to imagine.
What's your solution to the problem above? The government forcing the bank to retain the customer?
Over the span of about the prior 10-12 years in China the authorities there decided to crack down on speech online increasingly. For a time, in the early 10-15 years of the Internet there, China actually had a modicum of loose (not free) speech online, where you had a bit of room to talk about subjects that were close to taboo. That's all gone now and has been for years. That process of erosion, crack down, is what it feels like is happening in the US, merely under a different mechanism; instead of a central government authority implementing the oppression, it's mob platforms like Twitter and Facebook where the platforms openly allow hyper aggressive and concerted attacks to take place as a matter of routine. And even though it's not the government doing it, the effect is similar: they go after your life, your job, your friends, your character, your home, your family, your safety, anything they can.
The only solution is to abandon services like Twitter and Facebook, deplete their power. About 15-20% of my Facebook friends (quite normal people, not extremist types, not privacy advocates, etc.) are abandoned ghost accounts now, deleted, paused, etc. In talking to some of them, they got a taste of the horrible nature of how FB can be used as an attack mob platform, how ugly and or toxic it can be, and they wanted no part of it. Hopefully that process keeps spreading.
This decade we'll see a massive rise of walled encrypted communities, where outsiders will largely be kept out for the safety and health of the community. Outsiders will be treated with intense scrutiny, like we were back to living in tribal times (intellectually we're back to living in tribal times). People will begin to live in intellectual silos online to protect themselves from the attack mobs. They won't be decentralized as techies would hope, they'll still be centralized and hosted in the cloud. Interestingly this process will make the divisions in the US worse, the bubbles will become worse; and it will also be considered a big problem by authorities as extremists will begin very commonly using these walled-off encrypted groups/communities to organize out of sight (Parler / Gab will end up as a public fluke, most of those people will end up in hidden-away silo'd communities as the scrutiny continues to get worse on their bad ideas). Authorities will use this process as another argument to go after encryption.
Now would be a good time to build a new version of a social groups platform. Ning as a concept will end up being a $50-$100 billion product, although not quite as they envisioned the concept (they flubbed the entire thing). You want to lean in to selling to tribal intellectual isolation, intellectual bubbles, bet on that not against it, for that's the direction and there is absolutely nothing that's going to stop it. Public Facebook will shrink, public Twitter will shrink, private isolated social groups will dramatically expand. Whoever makes this easy and safe (encrypted, no data leaks, no hacks, top focus on security), in the cloud in a centralized manner, will win and win very very big.
edit: To the downvoters. I know you don't like it, I understand. That doesn't matter, it's the future regardless and nothing is going to stop it. It's about the most obvious thing, frankly; comparable odds to the sun rising tomorrow. It's almost comical that people think you can stop the expansion of the tribalism, the intellectual bubbles, at this point. It's going to get dramatically worse. There is one clean solution to the attack mobs as the tribalism expands, and that's going to be isolated social groups that are weary of outsiders, encrypted, in the cloud. My advice to anyone that reads this: focus on protecting yourself, your family, your friends, anyone you care about; the US is gone, lost; and as the tribalism expands, as the violence, chaos and mobs expand, you're not going to have energy or time to dedicate to grandiose silly fantasy notions like saving the world or fighting the intellectual & political ocean tides, your thinking will need to get more primitive, more self-interested. I'm not talking about survivalist absurdity, I'm talking about general personal welfare in a time of intense social/cultural strife and unraveling, where people will be increasingly at eachothers throats.
While I don't agree with its content, I don't believe in people like hosting providers applying moral tests to their users. The Government/law should be the only people shutting them down.