> What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social? Vocally side with the popular issues, or try to stay completely out of them, to try to avoid becoming a target (e.g., social media presence)?
For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of.
I get the concern you're expressing, but not everything is a slippery slope. This went so far beyond a "popular social issue of the day", as you admitted in your comment. IMO it's worth saving this outrage & concern for if and when something that is more genuinely a popular social issue causes AWS to take down sites. There were surely lots candidates for that earlier this year with a lot of the other protests that went on, were there any instances of sites taken down then? (I'm genuinely asking btw, I didn't hear of any but if there were then I think that is a much more appropriate place to start this conversation from. Certainly people have been fired from their jobs due to cancel culture but I don't know of anyone being shut off of all tech platforms).
It sounds very reasonable up until attempting to identify what, objectively, is the bar to set business policy. Twitter literally claims that "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th." was the straw that broke the camels back [0]. That isn't an objective bar.
Context which "everyone knows" is a political question - a highly political question. If AWS happens to have a similar standard to Twitter then the only way for a business to figure out if it is in breach is by experiment, and AWS just showed it can pull the plug in days with apparently no warning.
> Twitter literally claims that "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.
Well, no, they didn't claim that. They claimed the two tweets, taken together, were the straw that broke the camel's back.
And, yes, I think you could reasonably make the claim that the tweets were innocuous if you throw out the context of the President inciting a violent insurrection on Congress. But, we don't have to blind ourselves to that prior context. Given it, and given the way a number of people received those comments and have been actively organizing for violence around the inauguration since then, it doesn't seem to be to be a close call.
Sure, I agree, but I thought that was kind of implicit in the phrase "straw that broke the camels back". This was the latest individual thing, sitting on a mountain of other things, that finally caused the dam to break.
Could you clarify you position here? I can read your comment a few ways:
1. The president did not incite violent insurrection.
2. None of the presidents actions meet the legal standard for incitement. Full Stop.
3. None of the presidents actions meet the commonly understood definition of incitement. Full Stop.
I think an argument could be made for 1. I’d struggle with 2 or 3. IANAL but let’s consider:
> So we’re going to, we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, I love Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’re going to the Capitol and we’re going to try and give… The Democrats are hopeless. They’re never voting for anything, not even one vote. But we’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.
> So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I want to thank you all. God bless you and God bless America. Thank you all for being here, this is incredible. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Please stop. He went on for two months about how the election was stolen (with no evidence), talked about the 2nd amendment and "how it could solve this", and then sent proxies to talk about "taking it to Congress," not to mention literally thousands of other lies.
Enough with the gaslighting - this was entirely justified.
??? lightgreen was saying it wasn't incitement. nemosaltat, whom you replied to, was -arguing- with lightgreen. nemosaltat said that he was pretty sure it met the legal standard for incitement. Maybe he doesn't say it quite as strongly as you would like, but you can hardly call this "gaslighting".
Do you realize that anyone can claim “incitement” of violence since it’s completely subjective and therefore probably very dangerous thing to be using as a way to determine “guilt”.
In fact I don’t like the tone of your comment and I feel it might be setting some people off.
How about we keep the responsibility with the people actually physically doing the crime. People make their own decisions.
Your logic would dictate the person doing the crime takes no responsibility since they were incited into doing it.
> Do you realize that anyone can claim “incitement” of violence since it’s completely subjective and therefore probably very dangerous thing to be using as a way to determine “guilt”.
That's false. The standards for incitement according to the SCOTUS are defined in the Brandenburg Test and are _famously_ narrow. They include a subjective test of the speaker's intent, and an objective test.
- Subjective: Speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action" (this means, was the speaker intending to produce imminent lawless action).
- Objective: Speech is "likely to incite or produce such action"
In an incitement case here, the objective test is absolutely easy. The crowd broken into the halls of the Capitol, violently disrupted a session of Congress, and killed a police officer. Any lawyer would have no problem arguing in court that the speech that morning was "likely" to incite imminent lawless action.
The harder test is the subjective test of the speaker's intent. Here, we need to show that Donald Trump intended to incite imminent lawless action. That's typically a very hard test, because we can't read minds. But we can use circumstantial† evidence to piece together enough of a picture to allow a jury to convict.
† circumstantial evidence is used all the time to determine intent for crimes in courtrooms all over the United States, and is completely valid evidence. Don't raise "but that's circumstantial!" as a defense, because circumstantial evidence is completely valid.
You didn't disprove anything I said. I said nothing about making a legal case in court and proving. Notice the word claim? Additionally, just because the law is in court doesn't mean it's good or not dangerous. You still NEED a subjective proof to determine guilt. This means the law is inherently flawed because it will be used in a biased way and risks being used to attack certain individuals.
I don't care even a little bit about how you feel of the "tone" of my comment. You're being extremely disingenuous, and using terms like "guilt" and "crime" which do not apply to the current situation. The current situation is: Twitter as a corporate entity believes that Trump's tweets directly led to the events at the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the election and directly incited violence. The vast majority of Americans agree, but Jack Dorsey's opinion is the only one that matters.
By your logic a mafia don who says "it'd be a lot better if [enemy boss] wasn't alive" resulting in an assassination didn't incite violence, and the responsibility should lie with the "people who did the crime" because people make their own decisions. This is a colossally stupid take.
Your post is full of straw man arguments and I'm not sure if you're being intentionally disingenuous, or just have a very poor understanding of political events in general and Twitter's ability to moderate their own platform. Come back if you want to have a real discussion.
Wooooosh the point of me saying that was that ANYONE can label your speech as incitement bud. Again, your tone sounds pretty violent to me and I think you need to be removed from this platform. See how stupid and ridiculous this logic is?
Twitter is being prodded by government officials and working in monopolistic collusion your silly claim about it being a private entity is completely moot. If this is the road you want the US to do down you reap what you sow.
No one acted violently after reading your comment, but people did act violently after reading Trump’s Twitter. If you have an example of someone’s Twitter being taken down for inciting violence were no violence occurred, let us know!
It happens all the time. Possibly a majority of all twitter bans over the last 5 years fit that description. Say racist thing like "Muslims should stay out of the USA" get banned by twitter for "inciting violence against a protected group".
In a way, all political advocacy consists of incitement of violence. Any law not ultimately backed up by the credible threat of violence is just a suggestion. If you don't pay your taxes for long enough, eventually federal agents with guns will come to take you to jail, and if you resist, they'll kill you.
That was the second of two tweets, that they are taking together. This was the other
"The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
They explain the context and how these tweets are being interpreted.
"The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!
"To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th."
I fail to see the issue with these tweets. He is not planning to attend an inauguration because he will not be inaugurated President? Is that such a huge problem? Is it even something that the incoming President was requesting? And what is the issue with the other tweet?
This is a bizarre hill that Twitter chose to spend 10% of their market cap on. It seems like there must have been something else that they could have picked that would have made more sense.
- President Trump’s statement that he will not be attending the Inauguration is being received by a number of his supporters as further confirmation that the election was not legitimate and is seen as him disavowing his previous claim made via two Tweets (1, 2) by his Deputy Chief of Staff, Dan Scavino, that there would be an “orderly transition” on January 20th.
- The second Tweet may also serve as encouragement to those potentially considering violent acts that the Inauguration would be a “safe” target, as he will not be attending.
- The use of the words “American Patriots” to describe some of his supporters is also being interpreted as support for those committing violent acts at the US Capitol.
- The mention of his supporters having a “GIANT VOICE long into the future” and that “They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” is being interpreted as further indication that President Trump does not plan to facilitate an “orderly transition” and instead that he plans to continue to support, empower, and shield those who believe he won the election.
- Plans for future armed protests have already begun proliferating on and off-Twitter, including a proposed secondary attack on the US Capitol and state capitol buildings on January 17, 2021.
> He is not planning to attend an inauguration because he will not be inaugurated President? Is that such a huge problem?
It's pretty significant as it hasn't happened since 1869.
> Do we need to lock up Salinger for inciting violence too?
This is patently disingenuous. Twitter didn't jail the President for inciting violence. They said he wasn't allowed to Tweet anymore.
Could the publisher of Catcher in the Rye have decided to stop publishing it based on that? Yes, they could.
You're also willfully ignoring the fact that _just before_ those tweets the President had incited a violent insurrection that attacked Congress and then praised them saying: "we love you" and "you're special". As I said before, we don't have to be blind to the prior context. This reductionist thinking that we must take these two tweets entirely on their own and devoid of context isn't something I'm going to participate in.
> You're also willfully ignoring the fact that _just before_ those tweets the President had incited a violent insurrection
And we have a justice system to deal with insurrectionists and we have a democratic process with our elected representatives to remove leaders from office. This involves due process and respecting rights honed over 200 years of jurisprudence. It's not done in a corporate backroom by a couple executives with zero public accountability.
Would you be equally supportive if Twitter had deployed a private army of mercenaries to police the Capitol? What's happening here is the digital equivalent. You're busy thanking them because you support what they did. Some of us are stepping back and asking the question: wait, who controls these soldiers and what checks and balances are there on their power to police us? It turns out Twitter owns them and the checks and balances are none. If that doesn't concern you then you're missing the big picture.
Propaganda doesn’t need to be explicit; it’s clear the intent of these messages, just like the veiled messaging in his incitement speech.
It’s clear that once something like a violent insurrection happens the companies previously giving a platform to the one who incited the insurrection are going to give a lot less leeway on anything he says.
Seems odd that this is seemingly hard to understand. If the violence didn’t happen, and he wrote those two tweets he’d still be on Twitter.
You can say anything is a coded message and claim it means whatever you want. The tweet that prompted the initial ban literally said "go home and be peaceful". That is supposed to be an incitement to violence?
Lots of violence happened during the protests this summer too. Should we assume that everyone tweeting about being peaceful then was also sending coded messages supporting the violence?
Are we really going to go with the logic that violence occurred, therefore anything tweeted prior to the violence was an incitement to the violence? And if it appeared to say the opposite of that, then it was actually a coded message that means whatever is politically convenient for us to have it mean?
You can keep claiming it’s one tweet if you like, but you know this is disingenuous. It’s 1 tweet + 4 years of destabilising lies + 1 incitement to insurrection
Propaganda over the ages has been studied very closely, there are known techniques. His incitement speech was a textbook example [1]. Why on earth would anyone give him the benefit of the doubt? He’s a wannabe tyrant.
How does your outburst relate to my comment? What obligation does twitter have to give anybody a voice? Especially a voice that has incited a violent insurrection. I don't see how Twitter are struggling to maintain user trust, except for those that believe violent insurrection is a good thing.
The outburst was a reaction to the question of why people would give him the benifit of the doubt. He was entrusted (non violently, but begrudgingly by some Americans) with the ability to command the United States' nuclear arsenal. Violent insurrection is how the republic that governs the people who operate Twitter was started, there can be good parts of it. I don't trust that Trump incited the violence, nor that it's a good idea to blame him and dismiss objection.
> Violent insurrection is how the republic that governs the people who operate Twitter was started, there can be good parts of it
So you're comparing the insurrection that happened last week, in a mature, functioning democracy to the overthrow of rule-from-afar by a king? Are you sure that a violent insurrection in America, today, could be a good thing? An insurrection is usually to replace the embedded status quo. What should democracy be replaced with that's better? Do you believe totalitarianism/fascism is really a better system? Because that appears to be Trump's preferred system of government.
> I don't trust that Trump incited the violence
He staged a rally called the "Save America March" with a speech loaded with violent imagery and threats to "weak republicans" with phrases like "We have someone in there who should not be in there and our country will be destroyed and we're not going to stand for that" with repeated phrases like "fight like hell", giving the impression that there were similar marches around the country, etc. etc. all carefully crafted to make it seem like today was the day that, if the mob didn't do something about it, they would lose democracy itself. Making it appear that the election was still ongoing, putting it in the present tense, and that in 1 hour's time, it would all be over. He even laid out plans for what he would do in office going forward, like a State of the Union speech. It was all timed to finish 45 minutes before the electoral college votes were due to be counted.
This was after Guiliani had called for "trial by combat".
If you haven't seen the full transcript of his speech, I would encourage you to dig it out. The incitement is absolutely plain as day. It's textbook propaganda and was designed to rile up the crowd to believe they, the "real Americans" (like Hitler's "real Germans"), could stop what he was decrying as a fraudulent election.
I get it that if you're a Trump fan or a Republican, you may be willing to give more of a benefit of the doubt. But to a non-partisan (I'm not American, but deeply concerned by what I can see from my part of the world) it's plain as day.
We're going to go with the logic - and evidence - that Trump has been doing this for years. Even before he was president he was threatening violence if he didn't win the nomination. [1]
So it is spectacularly, flagrantly, and most of all utterly unconvincing to suggest that he - I don't know - misspoke? Didn't mean it? Was widely and unfortunately misinterpreted by an angry crowd he just happened find himself in front of with kindness and good will to all men in his heart?
None of that is even remotely plausible.
Twitter, Amazon, Facebook, etc are perfectly justified in shutting him up, for the safety of all Americans, and very possibly the rest of the world.
Once we've dealt with this threat, we can come back and have a debate about media control in all of its forms. And when we do that we can include the trad media too, because they have a lot to answer for.
But for now there are more pressing problems. Whether or not Twitter did the right thing isn't anywhere close to the top of the list.
Sure, once we've won the War on Terror, you'll be able to get on a plane without taking your shoes off again and we'll shut down the NSA program to spy on everyone. Once we end the scourge of drugs, we'll restore your 4th amendment rights and end civil forfeiture. The people who take your away your rights to bolster their own political power have always been very conscientious about giving them back later.
Multi-decade concerns start out as immediate concerns. If you only care about freedom when it's easy and convenient to protect, you just plain don't care about freedom.
Loss of Twitter use isn’t loss of freedom. No laws have been changed. He’s just lost access to a private company’s services. It is not the same as any of the things you list
If you think this is about Trump's freedom to tweet, you've sorely missed the point. It's about our freedom to hear differing points of view and make up our own minds about them.
If a handful of corporations with mostly homogeneous ideologies control who is allowed to talk to the public, then we don't have any real choice when it comes time to vote. We only get to choose from a pre-approved list of options that all have to conform to whatever Twitter and Facebook deem is acceptable. Twitter and Facebook et al are unelected and accountable to no one. That's not democracy. That's a corporate dictatorship with sham elections.
> If you think this is about Trump's freedom to tweet, you've sorely missed the point
I really haven't. Trump is the only western leader to have been banned from the mainstream social media platforms. You can't claim this is the thin end of the wedge, this is a reaction [by those platforms] to the risks to western democracy in its entirety. They gave him four years of rope to hang himself with, it was only a direct attack on democracy itself that caused this action.
> If a handful of corporations with mostly homogeneous ideologies control who is allowed to talk to the public, then we don't have any real choice when it comes time to vote.
Trump has all the means of communication that any previous president has had. All he has to do is stand at a lectern and talk and it will be broadcast on national television.
Again, he wouldn't have lost the access that he had if he hadn't tried to directly attack the entire system of democracy itself. All the other lies he's told over the years were allowed to be seen.
> corporate dictatorship
That's a laughable leap, sorry. If he hadn't incited a violent insurrection, and if he wasn't a few days away from the end of his tenure then we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Let me put this another way. Do you think everybody, no matter what harms they cause, deserve a voice on all platforms? Would you expect Twitter to host the voice of Hitler?
Ultimately, they are private companies, they have no obligation to balance, fairness, access. It seems the state forcing corporations to do their bidding would be far more of a slippery slope than the president, who has tried to actually destroy democratic process, being banned from a platform.
I don’t think you can really pick this part the way you are approaching it. There were many many other tweets that added up to this, and Twitter really didn’t decide that any particular tweet was a problem until people chose to be violent after reading them.
I'm aware of the wider context, and I didn't mean that in complete seriousness. I was just pointing out the extremely one-sided bias on display. We've had our cities burned down and dozens of people murdered in the name of leftist causes, and all we get is denial that the violence is even happening, or baseless claims that it's all committed by alt righters who somehow flourish in zones controlled by violent leftists. CHAZ de facto seceded from the Union, and Portland was borderline in that respect. While the riot in the Capitol was very serious and reprehensible, it was not even remotely a coup and the overall level of harm was low compared to the violent harm constantly caused by and celebrated by the left all last year. It's abundantly clear that violence is good and healthy as long as it's committed by the left, and it's okay to stamp out groups that find that abhorrent. The tech giants do not have the slightest problem with violence. They have a problem with their political opponents. This is a political power grab that is affecting thousands of people who have not committed any crime.
I'm all for prosecuting people and groups that have actually committed violence. In the court system, not by unaccountable decrees from the billionaire ruling class, and not with collateral damage involving thousands of innocent people.
I say this living in Seattle. Nobody burned down my city. Chaz was pretty interesting; I visited and talked to people there. It was not a threat to the Union. :)
The things you seem to think are abundantly clear are not clear to people who lived through the events you’re hearing about.
OK then add this to context, they had also just determined that pipe bombs had been located in 4 places (Capital area, RNC Headquarters , DNC Headquarters, and in a pickup truck bed). So if someone who was revered and you felt wrong enough to stage a potential coup or insurgence for wasn't going to be some place and still hadn't condemned your behavior, yet those who were permitted to do the wrong (in the mind of the insurgence) you were just given a green light and location. That is where it breaks down. He was also stating he was moving platforms, so then those who were prepared to perpetrate the violence would know where they could celebrate it with the person they felt had been wronged.
Now personally I took more umbrage with the fact that he hadn't been kicked off previously, I personally Don't think that the previous comments should have ever been allowed to be made on the platform since he should have been removed for TOS violations.
Also for those asking how this should impact businesses going forward, a smart company should have a mitigation plan in place for any similar issue. It would have been strange if this was the first occurrence, but just look back a few years for 8Chan. This isn't the first time, especially for an application that a bunch of the users had used since QAnon had gone there previously.
This thread started out talking about on what grounds a vendor like AWS might refuse service to a service like Parler, and what those who run companies might want to do to mitigate this risk.
You switched it to talking about on what grounds Twitter might refuse service to the President of a country or other powerful person. Which you got lots of takers to discuss that, but it seems like a very different discussion to me.
Wow, the contrived reasoning in that Twitter statement is beyond belief:
Trump: "I totally disagree with the outcome of the election [...] there will be an orderly transition [...] I will not be going to the Inauguration"
Twitter's interpretation: I don't think the election is legitimate, therefore I disavow my statement that the transition will be orderly, therefore you should commit violence. Also, since I won't be at the inauguration, you're free to do terrorism there without risk of harming me personally.
> Twitter literally claims that "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th." was the straw that broke the camels back [0]. That isn't an objective bar.
When President Trump published this tweet, he knew full well extremists are actively planning to attack the inauguration on January 20th.
There isn't a clear, objective bar in this kind of situation. Jack Dorsey, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos each decided for themselves if they were willing to stand by and allow Trump and Parler to continue along the path of inciting violence on January 20th.
The people voted to remove Donald Trump from office and he wouldn't and still does not accept it coupled with his calls to violent action. If he's willing to drag the entire country I can only imagine what he would try to do to a company that defied him, Trump is an abuser. While any of these companies could have taken action, I understand to some extent why they did not. It doesn't make it right, doesn't mean I condone their lack of response, but I can see why a company did not go heads up with this person and waited for the appropriate time to take action.
From a risk management perspective, this does not seem like a safe assumption to make. The DailyStormer got "canceled" by vendors for not even trying to moderate content that actively promoted violence (among other horrible things). Now Parlor gets "canceled" by vendors for not doing a good enough job trying to moderate content promoting violence. The bar for getting "canceled" is already moving down and honestly any company that is hosting user-driven content needs to have a plan for how to make sure they stay below that bar. Part of that plan should be projected scenarios about how low the bar will go....
Part of what is really dicey here too is that the result of getting this calculation wrong is basically annihilation for your service (unless you think you can operate without "every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers"). The stakes are really high!
The result of doing nothing is that in 15 years, the US becomes Germany, pre-WW2.
You can think of it as vendors getting 'canceled' for progressively less severe offenses.
Or.
You can think of it as people waking up to offenses that have been allowed to go unchallenged for way too fucking long. People 'waking up' or no longer keeping their heads down being the result of the current administration transitioning to a Lame Duck status.
The price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance. Yes, you should absolutely be actively paying attention. No static rule will allow you, or me, or that guy over there to go back to not paying attention.
The irony of censoring people being, “the price of freedom”.
Serious question, why do you think that disenfranchising groups of their ability to communicate online is going to prevent social strife and violence instead of intensifying it? Banning theDonald didn’t help, the Daily Stormer being banished from the web didn’t change anything, kicking so many reactionaries off of Twitter that they went off to make Gab didn’t help, and destroying Parler and kicking Trump off social media isn’t going to help.
How is silencing a group that feels oppressed going to help anything?
This, “conservatives are turning into literal nazis” narrative is extremely toxic to public discourse and needs to completely stop.
People need to stop hiding behind the first amendment and "but censorship" as a way of allowing democracy-threatening activity. Speech has ALWAYS had limitations. You cannot yell "fire" in a movie theatre. You cannot publish falsehoods that harm a person's reputation. You cannot reveal classified information. You cannot imitate a police officer. Why is "you cannot incite violent terrorism" suddenly controversial? Particularly when these are private corporations making the decisions, who are not duty-bound to enable free spech in the first place?
Yes, like handing the keys to public discourse over to a private corporation and then defending their right to censor it as they please.
>You cannot yell "fire" in a movie theatre.
Actually, you can. This is protected by Brandenberg as I understand it.
>You cannot publish falsehoods that harm a person's reputation.
Sure, thats defamation. I agree that should be illegal.
>You cannot reveal classified information.
You can also sign an NDA!
>Why is "you cannot incite violent terrorism" suddenly controversial?
Because without the freedom to "incite violent terrorism" we are essentially captive to the whims of the government.
To quote Thomas Jefferson. "What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure."[1]
The whole letter I take this quote from is worth a read.
>Actually, you can. This is protected by Brandenberg as I understand it.
Brandenberg says that the government can't restrict inflammatory speech unless it's "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action". The case specifies three requirements for punishing speech: 'intent', 'immenent lawless action', and 'likely to incite'. Shouting 'fire' is discussed in the opinion as potentially prosecutable:
> The line between what is permissible and not subject to control and what may be made impermissible and subject to regulation is the line between ideas and overt acts.
> The example usually given by those who would punish speech is the case of one who falsely shouts fire in a crowded theatre.
> This is, however, a classic case where speech is brigaded with action. See Speiser v. Randall, 357 U. S. 513, 357 U. S. 536-537 (DOUGLAS, J., concurring). They are indeed inseparable, and a prosecution can be launched for the overt acts actually caused. Apart from rare instances of that kind, speech is, I think, immune from prosecution. Certainly there is no constitutional line between advocacy of abstract ideas, as in Yates, and advocacy of political action, as in Scales. The quality of advocacy turns on the depth of the conviction, and government has no power to invade that sanctuary of belief and conscience.
P.S. the theater company can ban you for being a nuisance even if it's not illegal.
Riversflow, the reference to the replenishment of the "tree of liberty" is unhelpful. It's cliche and generates far more heat than light.
The real reason it can be dangerous to ban speech connected with "terrorism" is the quoted term is so poorly defined as to potentially be almost anything abrasive and unpopular. I haven't seen any cohesive explanation of how the occupation of the Capitol January 6 was terroristic in nature, and yet the event broadly is being criticized as such, exemplifying why high-stakes laws against ill-defined things could have a chilling effect far broader than just those things we all agree should not occur. Is the line when protesters are unlawfully in a location? Like the middle of a street? When they advocate for things that are not currently lawful, e.g., changes in law? When they are agitated, animated and frighten their neighbors?
That’s the standard illustration of the Schenk (which suppressed what is widely now recognized as core political speech) “clear and present danger” test, which probably comes to a different result under the Brandenberg “incites imminent lawless action” test which replaced it
They're not 'hiding behind it'. They believe that suppressing speech makes extremism worse in the long run.
Speech has limitations, but banning an entire social media network at the decision of tech oligarchs instead of the actual legal limits on speech is a precedent many see as escalation of the conflict. I do. This is a giant mistake that will breed resentment and do nothing but confirm to Trumpists that there is, in fact, a conspiracy against them.
> spew their hate of anyone who is not a white conservative?
This is extremely biased and ignorant. For one, there are plenty of non-white non-conservatives on the platform. Your statement here reveals much about your biases.
You are basically removing platform of communication is ok for people that hold opinions other than the mainstream politically-correct ones. This is exactly the sort of things authoritarian government such as China do.
>Why is "you cannot incite violent terrorism" suddenly controversial?
When it takes pages to describe why something is inciting violence, and the result is huge numbers of people arguing it both was and wasn't inciting violence - including very, very intelligent people on both sides - then maybe it's not as cut and dry as you make it out to be. Or is everyone who disagrees with you either disingenuous or stupid?
But the thing is, have you actually read the stuff on Parker this is about? These people are actively inciting violence. Their leaders are encouraging violent assaults on democratic institutions. They really aren’t that different from what happened in Germany in the late 20s and 30s. Whether they also come to resemble Germany in the late 30s is irrelevant.
Err, so what?, the supreme court has a pretty strict definition per Brandenburg. And I agree with the court's opinion there,
> "These later decisions have fashioned the principle that the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."
I could be wrong, but I don't think anyone advocating for it, especially from behind a keyboard, actually expected storming the capital to happen, and it seems like it only happened as a result of law enforcement essentially giving it it's blessing. As pointed out by your sibling comment, calling a group of people who mostly milled around the capital "insurrectionists" is just fallacious, and tells you how loaded this whole thing is. I'm extremely concerned that this spectacle is going to be used to curtail our liberties the same way 9/11 was used to pass the Patriot act.
I feel like I'm in crazy town when I see so much being done to stop "inciting violence". Isn't it ultimately the responsibility of the public to not act on such incitements? When a group becomes sufficiently disenfranchised the most radical members transition from trying to make peaceful change to calling for revolution. If the disenfranchisement continues unabated more and more members of the group will be convinced of the need for action. This is fundamentally why the U.S. exists, and I think it is the right of the oppressed group to self-advocate and self-determine.
So in that sense I don't think that anyone can honestly say that calls for violence are never appropriate. Any revolution, even a velvet one, is going to have some fringe of people calling for violence or it will never come about. Should western media have shut down the Arab spring for the same reason? What about #freepalestine? There were plenty of calls for violence against Trump, and nobody seemed too concerned. Should Kathy Griffin have been blackballed?
If we define this group of people as predominantly non-college educated, non-hispanic white males, then we are talking about a group whose deaths of despair (suicide and drug overdose) rate has tripled in the last twenty years, a trend that has likely intensified significantly during the lockdown [1]. Now I could be wrong, but I don't think they are killing themselves because they aren't allowed to be racist, rather I think it's because non-college educated rural americans[2] are being and have been marginalized.[3]
Perhaps we should try and lift this group up instead of grinding them down and using them as a scape goat for problems primarily related to wealth inequality.
> When a group becomes sufficiently disenfranchised the most radical members transition from trying to make peaceful change to calling for revolution.
I'd agree that there is a sizeable proportion of the population that feels left behind. However, a large portion of the people present on Jan 6 were not the disenfranchised. There were a worrying number of CEOs, Active Military, Doctors, and Lawyers present.
> Perhaps we should try and lift this group up instead of
grinding them down and using them as a scape goat for problems primarily related to wealth inequality.
This is overwhelmingly what people like Bernie Sanders and AOC are trying to do. The rhetoric of both is based around trying to help working people by introducing social safety nets with the express purpose of giving people like them some room to breath financially. Have you seen how those policies have been received? Instead they elected an authoritarian millionaire who stoked division and xenophobia while cutting taxes for everyone but them.
They've been convinced that the reason they're struggling is the fault of illegal immigrants, the Chinese, feminism, and leftists. Propaganda that has carried over from the Cold War leads them to reject any policy that might actually help them as "communism". As a block they vote overwhelmingly for policies that only serve to enrich their bosses and the people producing the propaganda. They'll rant for hours about how awful Obamacare was going to be, but then happily tell you about how much they love the "ACA" that they're currently making use of.
We've reached a point where they're behaving more like a spouse who won't leave their abusive husband. The best thing is remove the source of that abuse for long enough that they might come to some degree of sense.
Here's the thing. If you've paid attention for more than fifteen minutes to feminists complaining about mistreatment, you'd know that one of the oldest tricks in the deflection playbook is to play the "agreeableness" card, asking people to calm down and be reasonable. At its best, it's a delaying tactic, playing for time while you continue to enjoy the fruits of inequality. I don't like it when it happens to women. I'm sure as hell not going to tolerate it being turned toward me.
When they say "literal nazis", they mean literal nazis, not figurative nazis.
I don't think the entire GOP it turning into Nazis. I can't recall the last time I heard someone say they believed it. However, I don't think every German, or even most Germans, in WWII were Nazis either. That didn't stop the Nazis from being in charge. It barely slowed them down.
In order to get his 49% of the votes, #45 had to scrape the bottom of the barrel, courting every non-liberal element of society. The GOP leadership has publicly recognized these groups and groups like them as members of Team GOP. They seated them at a table as if they deserve to be peers with the folks you claim to represent.
Let me ask you a serious question. Was it worth it to win that way? Really? What entitles anyone who says 'yes' or 'maybe' to be painted with a separate brush from the people who delivered the victory at "any cost"?
If getting you, or all of us really, looking in the mirror is going to be predicated on treating you with the respect you plan to earn once they've treated you as if you've earned it, then buddy, you're going to be disrespected for an awful long time. Read the warnings, take some umbrage. I certainly am.
So what do we do instead? Just continue down this path until 75% of Americans "feel oppressed" and that "BLM and Antifa and Democrats are Marxists and enemies of the people"? Yeah? 'cause that's not working out.
Or are you kind of thinking it is working out and it's your desired outcome?
The Right is excellent at projecting and playing "the victim" so I wouldn't be surprised.
>This, “conservatives are turning into literal nazis” narrative is extremely toxic to public discourse and needs to completely stop.
I would never refer to a conservative who recognizes the legitimate results of our free and fair elections as a Nazi! Now the question is, why in the flying MOTHERFUCK do I need that qualifier?
I am a conservative who doesn't think it was stolen. But I have to point out the double standard. For ~3 years democrats claimed trump only won 2016 because Putin helped him. And they claimed for months that Stacy Ambrams was the actual winner of the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race. Now Republicans are the devil for not accepting this election?
>You do realize that the current president is the ringleader of birtherism, right?
Hillary Clinton, in her 2008 presidential campaign brought the fringe conspiracy theory of 'birtherism' into the mainstream as a rhetorical weapon to discredit her rival, Barack Obama, at least in the eyes of enough potential voters to do some harm. Donald Trump did bring the matter up in his campaign, but quickly repudiated it and never mentioned it again. It does not look like a sustainable assertion that Trump is, or ever was the 'ringleader' of 'birtherism.'
>For ~3 years democrats claimed trump only won 2016 because Putin helped him.
Of which there was concrete proof of election meddling by Russia. Obviously we can't litigate what-ifs, but I'm not sure how the two can be separated.
>Stacey Abrams was the actual winner of the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race.
The guy she was running against was the secretary of state at the time and passed several laws that were very clearly meant to suppress voter turnout before an election that he was standing in.
>Now Republicans are the devil for not accepting this election?
Yes, and for inciting violence and beating a police officer to death with a flag of the steps of the Capitol while saying the pledge of allegiance. Either work to make sure it never happens again or be inextricably linked to it.
This comment highlights how ridiculously politicized HN has become. Just an hour ago this post was downvoted, and somehow has been upvoted despite not adding anything to the discussion
>You know what's even more toxic? Literal Nazis and fascists, the ranks of which have been, if not growing, then clearly emboldened.
What does the word literal even mean at this point? What is fascism to you? What is Nazism to you?
>This group "feels oppressed" because they are not able to exert their will to oppress others.
How is this sentence even appearing on a thread about an app getting removed because they refused to force more stringent moderation onto their users?
> An image of Packer inside the Capitol, whose sweatshirt bore the name of the Nazi concentration camp where about 1.1 million people were killed during World War II, has evoked shock and disbelief on social media. The bottom of his shirt stated, "Work brings freedom," which is the rough translation of the phrase "Arbeit macht frei" that was on the concentration camp's gates.[1]
Apparently the back read "Staff"[2]. While maybe not "literal" Nazis themselves, the people there seem perfectly happy to associate with and receive the support of literal Nazis.
Not to mention, in recent years there's been a rise in adoption of Nazi symbology: 88, Nazi salute, swastikas obviously, plus co-opting of Norse runes and symbols they perceive as associated with the Aryan race.
But it's not just Nazis that are the problem. They're clearly in the minority. There's growing interest in garden variety fascism. Some of the hallmarks of that are nationalism, militarism, submission to authority, anti-intellectualism, fomenting fear of "the other" and outsiders. Umberto Eco has a list [1] that encapsulates and explains these. And, I'm sorry, but a lot of these describe the trajectory of the current Republican Party, especially under Trump's rule. (note: I think the GOP has largely abandoned what we would call "conservatism". Even though many of those left in the party might self-identify as conservative, they have veered into fascist ideology, they just won't admit it)
What are we supposed to make of people carrying the Confederate flag, as well? The Confederate States of America fought a civil war to preserve the enslavement of Black people (as specifically mentioned in most of the state constitutions of the CSA states)- what message are they trying to send by bringing that flag to the capitol building?
Parler's app was the number one download on the app store & play store after Trump was kicked off Twitter.
Then apple and google decided that Parler was not going to be a platform Trump could use, so they kicked the app off.
Then amazon decided that Parler had no place on their computing resources.
Those 2 tweets were interpreted as they were, to suit the political leanings of those tech companies and their political allies. And a legitimate competitor was destroyed into the bargain. This is not reasonable and it is antithetical to the freedoms on which your great nation was founded.
If you, dear HN reader, can't see the threat to your freedom in this then you are blind.
The US democracy may be under stress, so to speak, but it does seem to be working. The democrats will have their man in the white house. Trump will leave.
Oh, and to call that invasion of the capitol an attempted coup is a real stretch. What were they ever going to do other than get arrested??
> Forcing a private corporation to provide a platform for someone else is also a form of tyrrany.
I appreciate that. I am not sure where I stand on this anymore. I agree that they are private corporations with rights. But they are also unprecedented in history in terms of scale, wealth and power. And they just silenced a president and shutdown a competitor. Those are some implications that need to be considered carefully.
The President is perfectly capable of getting a message out without the use of twitter. There's even a room in his house specifically for giving press briefings. To pretend that this is "silencing" him is ridiculous.
> But they are also unprecedented in history in terms of scale, wealth and power. And they just silenced a president and shutdown a competitor. Those are some implications that need to be considered carefully.
Then break them up, they absolutely deserve to be, I just don't think this particular situation is an example of why they should be broken up.
I would like to point out that Parler claimed to be using AWS as a regular hosting provider, so this isn't an area where the market is anywhere near as consolidated, there are thousands of other hosting providers out there who probably don't want to deal with them either.
> The President is perfectly capable of getting a message out without the use of twitter. There's even a room in his house specifically for giving press briefings. To pretend that this is "silencing" him is ridiculous.
Debating, especially on the internet, requires a little generosity when interpreting your opponent's words. Be liberal in what you accept and strict in what you emit. I know that the President wasn't literally silenced. Jeff Bezos didn't send goons to the whitehouse to gag and bag him.
We both know that firing off a tweet to millions instantly is a lot easier than calling a press conference.
Here's a thing every activist knows, from the most benign to the most toxic (by anyone's estimation):
If you wait for the government to provide you every good thing in life, it'll never come.
Governments like to look around at what people are already doing in several locales or regions and either stop them or give it to everybody. The courts get involved and decide whether that's allowed. If the Federal government doesn't like what the courts say, they can use more strongly worded laws so the courts have to agree. We make the last bit difficult so that we don't do it frivolously. It cuts down on overreach, but it also means bad actors tend to get to play a bit longer at the expense of everybody else.
If individuals or corporations are the last word in reasonable political discourse, we will have failed. Not so spectacularly as if we never do anything until Congress says so, but failed nonetheless.
To be clear, I'm not saying this should be the end of this. But someone has to get the wheels of government rolling, and this is fairly typical, if not ideal.
>Oh, and to call that invasion of the capitol an attempted coup is a real stretch. What were they ever going to do other than get arrested??
This reminds me of far-leftists refusing to admit that Islamist terrorism should be counted as terrorism, because, after all, what was killing a few people in an LGBT nightclub going to accomplish for ISIS?
My problem is with the description of that action as a "coup". I'm not defending those people. I'm not informed well enough to do that. But a coup? I don't think so.
Coups generally rely on military support, or some sort of established basis for taking and holding political power. This was not a coup. Or it was the shittest one ever.
If you consider that their aim was to overturn an election by force, then yes, it was a coup attempt. I think they were counting on the military and law enforcement rank-and-file (which overwhelmingly support Trump) to join them.
Clearly, vendors should be made to continue doing business with (some appropriately chosen set of?) clients, because that would be different than post-1933 intrawar Germany...how?
By 'result of doing nothing' I mean vendors turning a blind eye to their clients, instead of dumping them on the side of the road without even the courtesy of slowing the car down first.
I would have thought that was pretty clear from context.
>You can think of it as people waking up to offenses that have been allowed to go unchallenged for way too fucking long
"People" is a general term, "offense" is a relative term. What you may consider an offense, I might consider a complement. Additionally, what you consider an offense today, you might not do so tomorrow. There is no such thing as a static set of provisions that can handle all cases of immorality across all of time and satisfy all people.
>The price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance
The price of freedom is nothing, the price of consequence is eternal vigilance. The only reason you would need to be alerted if someone commits an offense you deem immoral, is so that they can be punished for the offense. You can't reverse an act that someone committed, but sure if you have constant oversight of their actions you can definitely punish them as you see fit. Law is synonymous with punishment, but it is punishment that applies universally to all parties, as opposed to the Terms of Service applied by modern corporations, which (by design) can be applied to whomever and can be ignored for whomever the corporation feels like. Hence why it's a slippery slope.
> The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.
No, parlor wasn't even doing a "good enough job". It wasn't doing _anything_. It's financial backers supported everything with regards to its users going into a violent frenzy.
There really is nothing contentious here, unless you feel that if you know that a group is organizing in your platform with the intent of staging a coup then you're in your right to just let them go about it.
I had an account there for about six months before it went offline. It wasn't a particularly interesting or compelling website. Most people viewed posts of affiliates; there were some memes but most of it was just conservative talking points. The average post being "this person or movement is a jerk because..."
I personally never witnessed any violent discussion on Parler. Again, the website was less compelling than Twitter in all ways; it was more like a news website. I have seen more provocative comments on other forums.
I have personally witnessed violent statements on Twitter over several years usually coming from leftists such as AOC. Part of this is due to the comments being easier to read on Twitter than Parler. I assume bad behavior on Parler was deep in the comments, but the website didn't make those easy to read.
I thought the Parler takedown seemed random. They were used as a scapegoat. If you were a normal user, you used it to hear a different viewpoint but you still lurked on Twitter some because there was no real discussion happening on Parler.
> I have personally witnessed violent statements on Twitter over several years usually coming from leftists such as AOC.
I am very curious for an example of an AOC tweet that you considered a violent statement.
I am thinking you must have a very different definition of "violent statement" than I do, and I'm curious to learn more about it by example. Because I read a lot of AOC, and have never seen anything I would remotely consider a violent statement. But you may consider things differently, what exactly "violence" means, let alone in a statement, is to some extent not entirely set in stone, I agree.
Can you provide an example (or three) of a violent statement from AOC you have personally witnessed, as you say?
She is a real person, it seems only fair to provide an example when making such an accusation.
I can't speak for OP, but #guillotines is a perennially popular hashtag among the Chapo-sphere on Twitter. And those Tweets, let alone the user, are almost never removed.
We might have a different definition of violence; I find it to be a spectrum with multiple levels.
I consider cancel culture a form of violence. There was a tweet from AOC suggesting making a list of all those who worked under Trump; I presume she wants to cancel them. This was dangerous since she was a Congresswoman. There was also a tweet where she voiced support for the riots this summer.
To be fair to AOC, she is not the worst I have seen.
Also, to be fair to Twitter, I bet there is a ton of right side violent speech I just personally haven't seen much of it.
I have personally witnessed violent speech on the postmodern side on Twitter because I'm more tuned into people calling for censorship. It's a topic I'm following.
I think the main reason I didn't see it on Parler was because the comment section is hard to read.
Can you provide the specific tweets so we know what you're talking about?
But yes, if you consider "making a list" to be violence, I guess we do have different understandings. I hope you apply this understanding in all directions, to your political compatriots too, telling them they are being violent (presumably in an undesirable way) when they do things like make lists? Or wait, you just presume that she was going to do something? Yeah, I"m curious to see the tweet. It sounds like a lot of presuming...
But cause if AOC isn't the worst you have seen... why did you use her as an example? Like, everyone is always using AOC as an example, when to me she's like one of the smartest and kindest politicians I know, from her utterances. Regardless of what you think of "cancel culture", she's not even a very good example of it, she's not the paragon of cancel culture, that's not really what she does at all. I think it's very unfair to AOC.
And yet, everyone wants to use her as an example. (Including by 'presuming' extra things she hasn't actually done!) Why? If you recognize she's not actually a great example of what bothers you, why did you mention her name as the only specific name example you mentioned?
It's easy to find the AOC list tweet our riot tweet if you google it; I'm currently taking a break from twitter.
AOC was the first that came to mind. Regarding her list, I believe at the time twitter users were citing a law saying what she was recommending was getting close to being illegal. They called it citizen intimidation, yet with more formal wording.
AOC wasn't the best example. The best examples were people saying it was good Rand Paul had been injured by his neighbor and the professor saying Mike Adams suicide was good.
I hadn't seen the AOC tweet you linked. It does appear uniting at first, yet when I looked closer I saw a familiar persuasion trick. It seems like she's applying the argument that anyone who has certain beliefs is a white supremist.
One of the most divisive things these days is labeling all people with conservative beliefs racist. It seems racist has become a catch-all term for anything postmodernists disagree with.
Calling someone racist means you don't listen to them and you can cause them to lose their reputation even if the claims don't have merit. The parody account Titania McGrath helps outline how the definition of racism has changed.
A clearer more accurate statement than the parent statement would be:
I have personally witnessed violent statements on Twitter over several years. Postmodern leaders, such as AOC, have encouraged low levels of violence using the Twitter platform.
This definition of violence is meant to describe violence as a spectrum which includes the destruction of property and destruction of job prospects of conservative individuals.
As far as I know, AOC has NOT tweeted the worst levels of violence. I apologize for using AOC as the primary example. If I could edit the parent statement I would because she is NOT the best example. It is also possible there is a less inflammatory word to describe cancel culture and property destruction than violence; I don't want to mix two things up.
"The thing that critics of activists don’t get is that they tried playing the “polite language” policy game and all it did was make them easier to ignore."
It's about scale. A disagreement that should stay between a small group of people and often could be solved by mediation, a conversation, or community service ends up being a national event.
An individual who has a specialized skillset loses the ability to be economically viable. They might not be able to get another job in the field.
Often, they are being used as a scapegoat.
If you make it impossible for a person to get a job in his or her field because you disagree with what they say, that's a form of violence. If you're going to economically eliminate someone in a scaled way, make sure it's worth it; it should be a last resort. This is really about scale.
I'd appreciate it if you could avoid the term "leftist" in future - this may be a cultural thing, but here in the UK, it's almost always used as a derogatory slur. I get the impression that's also true in NA, but forgive me if that isn't the case.
Can you provide an example of a violent statement posted on Twitter by AOC?
Not to mention that "leftist" is necessarily relative to some other position. In the UK (not to mention continental Europe!), "left" means something rather different than in the US...
I won't use leftist again. My anger at censorship is coming out. The proper academic term is postmodernist; at least that's what the Cynical Theories book by Primose mentioned.
I told my husband I would stop looking at Twitter since it upsets me so I'm handcuffed to find specific proof there. But, I was primarily referring to the list tweet where AOC mentioned gathering republicans who worked for Trump. There have been other similar sentiments expressed by her to punish people over time; she has an activist side which can get aggressive for a Congresswoman.
To be fair AOC isn't the worse I've seen as far as Twitter threats. The worst I've seen is the guy who acted like the controversial professional Mike Adams's suicide was good who is currently a North Carolina professor. Also, there were tweets against Rand Paul which were violent after he got attacked by a neighbor. There have also been tweets for years mostly by random accounts threatening Trump; Gab has organized all the data.
I appreciate the reply. Here in the UK I look on with a mixture of sorrow and fear. Events happening across the pond right now are some of the scariest I've witnessed in my life, but I'm acutely aware of similar issues here if not, mercifully, anything like the same kind of tension. I just want deescalation. I want calm heads and kind hearts to prevail. We need to listen to ourselves less and each other more. Stay safe, America — every last one of you.
Before I started reading AOC's tweets, the right's view of her had seeped into my brain. I didn't know why, but I had a slightly negative view of her.
Once I actually read her views expressed in her tweets I was shocked how reasonable she was. In 100's of tweets I've never seen her say anything that I thought was even remotely radical.
Did you link to a different tweet than you intended? You appear to be arguing that it’s “violence” for a public figure not to be able to disappear past public statements which they now regret. Her position that they should take responsibility for what they said is something most children learn pretty young.
"Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future? I foresee decent probability of many deleted Tweets, writings, photos in the future"
Yes, show me where in those words you find violence. I see someone wanted to hold the enablers of DJT accountable.
> I see someone wanted to hold the enablers of DJT accountable.
So around 40% of the American population. The left loves to talk about the right-wingers doing dog-whistles, this is one from the left. Your commentary also come across as naive or disingenuous when in those days AOC just one of several left-wing politicians and personalities calling for the creation of undesirable lists (again that 40%) to ,when the time comes, get them to pay for enabling Trump. All these within the highly violent BLM protests context.
" I believe injustice is a threat to the safety of all people. Because once you have a group that is marginalized and marginalized and marginalized … once someone doesn’t have access to clean water, they have no choice but to riot." AOC,2020
"When this nightmare is over, we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It would erase Trump’s lies, comfort those who have been harmed by his hatefulness, and name every official, politician, executive, and media mogul whose greed and cowardice enabled this catastrophe."
BTW show me a tweet from Trump calling for violence, seeing how stringent are your standards and how adamant you are that only the right calls for violence you must have examples a plenty.
But I am wasting my time here.You know it and I know it. You have your mind made up.
A half-assed google search wont do. Give me a tweet. These are dark times when I find myself defending Donald Trump against the sycophants of powerful tech barons,consciously willingly to abandon basic democratic ideas like free speech, surrendering them to private entities whose interests are totally misaligned with the public, especially the poor. All of this, "to own the right". The US is fucked beyond repair.
To extend on that... the entire premise of parler was that everyone was censoring them too much(for similar calls for violence) so they needed a platform that was immune from that. well when your entire premise is flawed from the start it's not a stretch to see that they would be targeted from that like stormfront.
You don't get to the level parler got purely because the few extreme users felt censored.
You saw a minority of users taking free speech too far.
This wasn't Amazon, Google's or Twitter's place to act. This was a job for the police and the FBI and really the fact they intervened at all is just so fucking American.
Sounds like reasonable open internet regulation, like the type that "The Left" has been fighting to get for decades, would have really been something useful for Republicans to not oppose simply because of its popularity among the left.
Instead, we are left with mega corporations being the arbiters of their own platforms, Just like those supporting deregulation wanted.
the stuff they were posting on parler was probably illegal[0][1] and parler specifically didn't moderate their violent or seditious rhetoric. (though they did moderate anything that didn't align with their groupthink)
i know the dead comment below won't see this and likely doesn't care but for posterity they were absent in their moderation for many weeks and were knowledgeable of it from the get go: https://twitter.com/cambrian_era/status/1349371372384841730
> It's financial backers supported everything with regards to its users going into a violent frenzy.
The financial backers of Facebook supported the company a lot through its enabling of the Rohingya genocide. But, then again, the Rohingya are not white, nor Christian, and they don't live in a country that can be a potential source of expats (like the UK or Australia, nice, good countries), only of immigrants.
There are lots of horrible things on Parler from what I’ve seen (I don’t have an account, I’ve just seen screen shots). The most egregious example was the post from Trump attorney Lin Wood calling for Pence to be executed by firing squad. It was up for days, and only taken down when this all blew up.
Twitter, though, at least has moderators, and makes an effort to remove threatening content from its service. The speed and efficacy of Twitter's abuse team is a topic for debate, but they have (and enforce) policy.
Parler famously had no such policy, that's why it was so attractive to the insurrectionists. The CEO, even after January 6th, went on record that he didn't feel it was Parler's responsibility to moderate user-generated content at all. Whatever last-minute olive branch they tried extending to AWS regarding a potential future volunteer moderator system obviously wasn't sufficient for Amazon.
Twitter and Facebook took how many years and millions of dollars to scale up a moderation strategy? I guarantee they weren't worrying about moderation at Parler's scale.
Twitter didn't take him down for a week, but they took that post down faster (I think). I regularly report twitter posts that are similar to that - violence mostly. It often takes two or three days, but they do get them taken down.
and i think a key point about this particular example is that Lin Wood is a very visible public figure. This wasn't a single crazy comment buried in a long thread that a moderator could have missed. If there was any good-faith effort by Parler to moderate content, it would have caught the Lin Wood rant.
I can see how you would take it that way, but honestly people have been saying a lot worse on the internet for a long time now.
I believe he's saying that we should have military tribunals to try and execute traitors, but of course those words were implied, not explicitly said.
I agree it's inflammatory for sure, but after all the crap I've seen on the internet, this is hardly a post to justify removing the entire platform this was posted on.
And after the tribunals are setup and operational and people are getting executed - would it be enough then? Or not quite yet still? What's your "this is enough, guys" point? Do you have one?
We got mighty close this time, didn't we? Do we need to get "closer"? Should Nancy Pelosi have had to be captured by some "patriot" with zip-ties and an AR-15?
No, you misunderstand. I don't want a mob to hold a tribunal. I want a real military tribunal that follows all procedures, exposes their crimes and then punishes them.
The masses long for justice while the elite and elite-wannabes try to convince themselves that the system isn't completely broken.
> I want a real military tribunal that follows all procedures, exposes their crimes and then punishes them.
Exposes which crimes exactly? Don't tribunals normally take place after you've got a good idea of what the crimes are?
> The masses long for justice while the elite and elite-wannabes try to convince themselves that the system isn't completely broken.
The multi-millionaire son of a multi-millionaire, truly the only person that knows the hardships put upon everyday americans. It's such a shame our hero was hoodwinked by all those nasty corrupt people who just happened to run his campaign, legal team and otherwise generally surround him...
You have opinions. I have opinions. It's easy to jump to conclusions.
We should have trials to get to the truth instead of smearing people for having money and being successful. If we assume the worst about people because they were born into a wealthy family where does that leave us?
You don't believe the swamp could be that corrupt. I do. Is it ok for me to hold that opinion? Is it ok for me to speak it, or will I be silenced for wrong think?
You're still being cryptic about this. I'll ask you again what the basis of these trials should be? who and what should we be investigating?
I'm aware of a few trials that have already happened, my favourites:
Paul Manafort, former campaign chairman of the Trump campaign sentenced to 7.5 years in prison[1]. Collusion with suspected Russian operatives, lying about that collusion. Sentenced separately in Virginia for ~4 years for bank fraud, tax fraud, and hiding foreign accounts[2].
Michael Cohen, former personal attorney to Donald Trump sentenced to 3 years in prison. "charges involving campaign finance violations, tax evasion and lying to Congress"[3].
A fun list of the rest of the swamp dwellers that have been charged or convicted[4].
> If we assume the worst about people because they were born into a wealthy family where does that leave us?
We aren't assuming the worst about people born into a wealthy family. We're asserting that they cannot relate to those born into a lower or middle class family.
> You don't believe the swamp could be that corrupt. I do. Is it ok for me to hold that opinion? Is it ok for me to speak it, or will I be silenced for wrong think?
You're intentionally ignoring the fact that the man who told you there was a swamp is entirely surrounded by people found guilty of some form of fraud or corruption...
> We're asserting that they cannot relate to those born into a lower or middle class family.
That's a big leap to make. I'm sure we have much different narratives we find to be true, but Trump is basically filling stadiums wherever he goes. Maybe he relates to the lower and middle classes better than you are giving him credit for.
> You're intentionally ignoring the fact that the man who told you there was a swamp
To be fair, you have no idea how I came to believe there is a swamp. I thought that long before Trump became president for a variety of reasons.
I'm not going to get into the details of what I believe. There's just too much to cover. I'm not claiming that I could persuade you that I am right. We are on the sidelines in all this. We are in the middle of an information war, and probably have been our entire lives.
> From a risk management perspective, this does not seem like a safe assumption to make. The DailyStormer got "canceled" by vendors for not even trying to moderate content that actively promoted violence (among other horrible things). Now Parlor gets "canceled" by vendors for not doing a good enough job trying to moderate content promoting violence.
If you do a sufficiently poor job, you might as well not even be trying at all. Especially if you court the content as a growth strategy.
Everyone's free to manage their risks however they please, but I personally have no less confidence in AWS than I had before this event. I have updated my understanding of their decision heuristic as it applies to kicking people off their service. But the probability of me or any company I'd manage running afoul of it is far less than the chance of getting struck by lightning.
> The bar for getting "canceled" is already moving up ...
Eh I'm not so sure about that? I mean, "Did your userbase activately participate in a plot to storm the Capitol and potentially take lawmakers and the VP of the State as hostages (or worse)?" is an awfully high bar to clear.
Are we just assuming this userbase doesn't also have twitter, facebook, signal, etc accounts? I recall a lot of live streaming and tweets during the riots.
Exactly. I already had that factored into my prior for whether my business was going to get cancelled by Amazon. I’d actually expect to fade a court for knowingly facilitating the shit on Parler.
If your users use your service for illegal or fraudulent activities, you have no way of stopping them, and your service is on AWS, then you risk being shut-down.
That hasn't changed today. That was true as of September 16th, 2016 (and probably before then as well)
I think things are pretty clear cut, if you want to start a service to obviously harbor fascist user-driven content, then yes, prepare to be cut off from the mainstream vendors. DailyStormer and Parler are explicitly those types of services.
It is a bit disingenuous to suggest that because Parler is down, "mom and pop" websites with comment section attached now need to lawyer up.
> It is a bit disingenuous to suggest that because Parler is down, "mom and pop" websites with comment section attached now need to lawyer up.
This is definitely a straw-man, but at the same time, if your website hosts user-supplied content and you don't have a rock-solid strategy for moderating it, then yeah you probably should be worried. (Though the spammers will probably take down your site long before AWS...)
I disagree, you don't need a "rock-solid strategy for moderating" "user-supplied content", you just need a user base that is by and large not inciting violence, particularly against government officials.
If I run some hobbyist forum where say 1 in 1000 users is posting hate speech or calling for violence, as long as I have less-than-rock-solid moderation that can clean up some of their posts and ban the worst offenders based on user reports, I wouldn't be too worried. It's also in my interest to keep the community healthy.
Now, if 20% or 50% of my users are posting hate speech and calling for violence, yeah I would be worried, but I would be less worried about moderation, and more worried about why my hobby attracts extremists. Might call for some self reflection.
It sounds like you have done your risk analysis and settled on an balance of risk and moderation effort that is acceptable to you. That sounds fair to me.
> Now, if 20% or 50% of my users are posting hate speech and calling for violence, yeah I would be worried, but I would be less worried about moderation, and more worried about why my hobby attracts extremists. Might call for some self reflection.
LOL! I think this is actually the right take! Definitely also applies to your social network...
Maybe it doesn't attract extremists. Maybe extremists just happened to randomly pick your site as the latest site to use for communication.
Just theorizing here, but assume that instead of hosting their own content, web sites with comments are hijacked to host extremists propaganda/plans/violent event, with a pointer to the next web site to use (not IF) but when the current one gets shut down.
The only way to avoid this is to moderate the comments before they are allowed to be displayed. And I'm betting there are a thousand+ web sites that are run by amateurs where this is the last thing on their minds.
Hopefully the fact that scaling and searching would be impossible makes this a non-issue.
Sure but AWS isn’t run by robots (yet!). It’s run by people who understand context and intent. I also very seriously doubt that Parler was turned off without any notice. If a company was getting abused like that, I think AWS would try to help them.
However, based on what is described here (https://theconversation.com/parler-what-you-need-to-know-abo...) `there are policies against “fighting words” and “threats of harm”. This includes “a threat of or advocating for violation against an individual or group”.`
Based on recent examples of Parlor posts it seems like the Parlor moderators were not adequately enforcing this policy.
Twitter literally allows dictators to use their service so your point is moot. There’s a massive double standard being applied. Additionally, the term fascist is used for essentially anything people dislike anymore so forgive if your subjective take or big tech’s take on fascism doesn’t mean a damn thing to me.
The DailyStormer got "canceled" by vendors for not even trying to moderate content that actively promoted violence (among other horrible things). Now Parlor gets "canceled" by vendors for not doing a good enough job trying to moderate content promoting violence. The bar for getting "canceled" is already moving down...
I fail to see how this is a movement of the bar.
Based on these two examples, the bar seems to be that a site gets canceled if a site is used to promote violence, there is a riot, violence happens, and people return to the site to celebrate and promote future violence. That was the bar in both 2017 and 2021. Doesn't seem to have moved.
Given the fact that the attack on the Capitol was a direct attack on the US government, if anything the bar has been RAISED.
Parlor did not have a real, honest, effort at moderation.
It was done poorly, and seems to have been just a fig leaf to say they were doing it. Objectively it was not working. Way way way worse than anything on FB or Twitter.
It seems likely that this is true. But couldn't you get to the same end-result by having good intentions but a bad moderation system? (e.g. I want to keep Nazi content off my service so I subject all posts to a review by 5 other users. That might work until you get a bunch of Nazis that suddenly sign up up-vote each other's content).
Not every new service can afford to moderate things like "FB or Twitter". And this is an important risk to account for.
To clarify, I believe that if you don't think you can adequately moderate your service, then you should absolutely not be running it. If your venders do not think you are doing a good enough job moderating your service, then they should not be forced to do business with you.
All I am trying to say is that it is important to realize that how you moderate your service may very well be judged by your venders and you could have a bad time if they find it lacking....
> Not every new service can afford to moderate things like "FB or Twitter". And this is an important risk to account for.
If you're planning on starting a service built around user generated content, you should have an answer for how you plan on moderating content.
If you don't have a plan for how to address illegal uses of your service (fraud, child pornography, etc), then you run the risk of being shut down. This isn't even a question of "is it or isn't it incitement".
If you want to run on a hosting platform that exists as a business unit anywhere in the United States, if you don't have a plan for moderating at least the most harmful illegal content, you are at risk of being shut down. FOSTA and SESTA make clear that the the service providers and hosting platforms bear some legal liability for this content, and they will shut you down if you don't moderate your platform.
Right I am not disagreeing with this at all. I am just trying to say that "infective moderation combined with apparent indifference" seems less extreme than DailyStormer-style intentional promotion of violent content.
There is still a long ways to go from "infective moderation combined with apparent indifference" to "effective moderation" or even to "infective moderation that we are attempting to fix". But somewhere between "apparent indifference" and "attempting to fix" is a nasty grey area that you don't want to be caught in.
You should be able to identify that a nazi takeover is happening and change your moderation systems accordingly. Any product person who is claiming to own the product should have eagle eyes on how their product is working or not working.
I would bet that any legal standard would involve phrases like "good faith attempt" and "standard of practice". (If you find a circle of Nazis up-voting each other, you'll have to think up a new moderation scheme.)
FaceBook and Twitter are decent examples---their moderation systems are pretty hit-or-miss, assuming good faith.
> The DailyStormer got "canceled" by vendors for not even trying to moderate content that actively promoted violence (among other horrible things). Now Parlor gets "canceled" by vendors for not doing a good enough job trying to moderate content promoting violence.
There is no daylight between the the Daily Stormer and Parler with respect to their willingness to distribute content that promotes far right violence. They also share that same objective as their founding motivation.
As someone who is in theory trying to write software for community-sourced documentation and advice, I've been dragging my heels for years watching things play out on reddit and facebook and twitter and now these buffoons and I just don't know if I'm up to the task. My best defense seems to be trying to keep the niche as small as possible and still be worth my while to do the work, and to be perfectly honest, as 'realistic' as I like to be, saying "keep it small" to myself drains quite a bit of motivation out of me.
> So just read and judge every piece of text entered into the whole platform
No. Not at all.
We're software engineers, right? Make the machines do the heavy lifting.
Create a simple keyword based alerting mechanism for known inflammatory language in the languages that you support. There are resources to help you make this easier in multiple languages, i.e. https://hatespeechdata.com/
Add a moderation system for your users to flag abusive content.
Until you grow to a huge size, or unless your platform is courting violence promoting content, there should be a relatively small amount of content you need to manually review and remove.
I seriously doubt that Twitter has no system that internally flags potentially abusive or violent tweets using machine automated classifiers. This stuff is table stakes nowadays for any major service that accepts user generated data.
I'm not convinced Parler is meaningfully different from the DailyStormer in this regard. In fact, I would say DailyStormer is plausibly less capable of promoting violence and terrorism than Parler is, and this shows in current events. In terms of effectiveness and threat level, Parler is clearly greater.
> Why are you using quotes around the word “canceled” for the Daily Stormer.
I was just trying to emphasize that I was using the term in the more loose colloquial sense and not trying to exactly describe the particular actions of the vendors.
> Do you think the issues people had with it were somehow contrived, false, or overblown?
Wow, seriously I am not sure how you could have managed to get this from my comment. Please do not put words into my mouth.
> Why would you even bring that site up tbh?
It is a broadly known example of a website that was dropped by pretty much all major online services (including even CloudFlare). What happened to Daily Stormer generated some interesting discussion around online service provides denying services (see the CloudFlare blogpost on why it terminated Daily Stormer: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/).
As the 'bar' goes 'lower' the reason for other vendors to refuse your money becomes less clear. It is quite clear the Parlor is not someone you want on the books.
> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government.
Step back for a moment and ask yourself honestly: do you really believe, in your heart of hearts, that there was even the slightest, faintest, remotest chance of the dude in the viking outfit overthrowing the US government?
It was a violent protest that got way out of hand, absolutely. There was never even the slightest chance of the government being overthrown though. It's like someone dropped a cigarette butt on the ground and people are leaping on the opportunity to call it attempted arson.
What about the dude with the zip ties and sidearm? What about the dudes who left IEDs in the building? What about the crowd who beat a police officer to death?
No, of course the dude in the viking outfit wasn't going to single-handedly overthrow the government. There was a very real possibility that members of Congress would have been murdered for political reasons by a very large, violent, deadly crowd.
> There was never even the slightest chance of the government being overthrown though.
That doesn't really matter, does it? Isn't it like criminal conspiracy where all that really matters is for at least two people to plan a crime? AFAIK it doesn't matter if the plan is bad, there just needs to be a plan.
The mob of people who stormed the Capitol building beat a police officer to death. If the mob had reached the rooms with Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence, I think they would have been assaulted, too, killing them by accident or deliberately. That would have triggered a Constitutional crisis which could have given Trump grounds to keep power.
Was this a well thought out plan? No. But would it have been enough to derail the process of formally choosing the next President? Quite possibly.
Step back for a moment and ask yourself honestly: do you really believe, in your heart of hearts, that Trump and his supporters were not trying to keep him in power when he had clearly lost the election?
That was their clear goal. It has been for months, and Trump himself has been saying as much in no uncertain terms. They were looking to intimidate, possible kidnap or kill, members of congress and the Vice President in order to prevent the results of the election from being confirmed.
It's easy to get political fatigue in the current climate, I understand the knee-jerk impulse to assume "hey, you're probably overreacting about this political issue". But some things really are a big deal. Like overturning an election.
This is indeed why it is called the "slippery slope fallacy".
It's a fallacy because the implication of a "slippery slope" is that once the merits of this specific idea are evaluated, then all subsequent ideas following will be implemented immediately without a separate debate and discussion of the merits of those ideas.
Pursuant to the current issue: if you're not planning on running a "somewhat moderated" platform where you'll host content calling for violence against the current government representatives, resulting in an actual attempt at a coup...then you've nothing to worry about.
I keep seeing this claim, and it's quite a substantial claim, but I don't see equally substantial evidence to support it.
I see evidence of disgruntled LARP'ers forming an angry mob and causing more trouble than anyone would want, but I don't see evidence of an armed rebellion in a sustained firefight or siege, with all the explosions, rubble, chaos, and loss of life that accompanies an uprising, with the explicit goal of installing a new government.
Is this claim misinformation? Should it be censored?
Failing to succeed at your coup doesn't mean that wasn't what you were attempting to do.
Being stupid about it has never been a criminal defense. "Attempted murder" is still a felony (and you know, the crowd actually murdered a capitol police officer).
They literally erected gallows on the grounds of the capitol, they literally marched through the building chanting "hang Mike Pence". The entire basis of the Q Anon conspiracy is that Donald Trump is preparing to destroy the deep state and retain power. Spend more than a few minutes browsing around Gab (you can just look at the top posts) and you'll see explicit references to overthrowing the government.
You can absolutely argue that this was a laughable attempt to install an illegitimate government and you can absolutely argue that they have no chance of succeeding, but you can't argue it isn't the intent -- it's the entire basis of the Q Anon conspiracy. The laughable nature of their attempt doesn't disprove the intent.
If so, that would be a crime and those people should have been arrested. So what? I love the conservative view that if any liberal anywhere did anything bad, then it’s a get out of jail card for them to also do that bad thing. No dude. A crime is a crime.
That’s quite the straw man. We should separate an issue of moderation and actual motives of the platform itself.
Did the platform have algorithms to make pro-capital storming posts ascend higher than other equally engaged posts?
Did the owner/company make a call to violence?
Did their platform spike in popularity in such a short time frame, they were unable to moderate to the same degree as other platforms? (Even Google struggles with YT moderation, though I understand the volume of content is widely different)
It’s obvious there exist political ties to this. Sure, have Parler respond to a congressional hearing just as other tech companies have had to do. But removing them from all these services overnight, albeit technically legal (so far), reeks of anti trust.
No matter political affiliation, the antitrust precedent set, if unpunished, will pave the way for greater censorship.
This seems like a similar level to price fixing - multiple companies, competing even, coordinating to cancel competition.
This is a new issue we have in the digital age. It should be handled in the Supreme Court.
If clients or customers bring bad publicity to a company they can refuse them service. They can in fact refuse service for any reason that isn't discriminatory in many jurisdictions.
Censorship has nothing to do with this. Any person can host a website from home, pay for a dedicated line, build their own datacenter, find a colo, host on a decentralised network, etc.
Amazon is under no obligation to provide service to Parler. They are not censored by Amazon refusing them as customers.
It's also not relevant to antitrust, literally at all.
A far more dangerous precedent would be compelling companies to provide service to hate groups and terrorists.
Parler wasn’t deleted because of public pressure alone. It was deleted because of AWS customers that threatened to leave. Last thing large enterprise customers want is to be caught up in is a controversy. Amazon made a business decision. No tech executive wants to explain to their CEO that they got boycotted due to a tech vendor choice. If AWs didn’t kick off Parler, the boycott of AWS based customers was coming.
> We should separate an issue of moderation and actual motives of the platform itself
Why though? On some level in seems impossible to make a distinction "from the outside," and I'm not sure it should matter that a decision was made by a person (probably following an Excel spreadsheet) or software.
> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of.
I don't think it is though - the point is who decides if the democratic election was fair?
What happens in a foreign country if their government decides the election isn't fair? Should people be silenced?
Or is it Amazon's job now to work out if worldwide elections are fair and enforce action?
I think the problem is either you are a neutral platform, or you hold too much power.
The United States Government decided it was fair, in many administrative and legal venues, across the country. Many Republican officials and judges affirmed it, even under intense and illegal pressure from the President and his cadre.
This platform was used to coordinate an insurrection against the United States Government, and refused to act against those doing so.
The severity of insurrection in US legal code is such that the military may be deployed domestically, and those service members who abetted it are guilty of an offense whose primary punishment in the UCMJ is death.
This isn't just another political issue. The most existential issue facing the state is the integrity of the Constitution.
> The United States Government decided it was fair, in many administrative and legal venues, across the country. Many Republican officials and judges affirmed it, even under intense and illegal pressure from the President and his cadre.
So if the Russian government and Russian courts decide their election was fair and just, should Amazon shut down any websites which counter that viewpoint?
Because that's the precedent we are presumably setting.
> The severity of insurrection in US legal code is such that the military may be deployed domestically, and those service members who abetted it are guilty of an offense whose primary punishment in the UCMJ is death.
Yep, same in Russia for questioning election. You get sent to gulag. Or in China - what do you mean you are talking about Taiwan being it's own independent country in a group chat?
> This platform was used to coordinate an insurrection against the United States Government, and refused to act against those doing so.
Most of the coordination actually happened on Facebook, not Parler. None of those arrested so far had a Parler account.
We're setting the precedent that supporting White Supremacist insurrection against the United States will get punished the same way each time.
Russia doesn't have democracy, and Amazon isn't a Russian company, so I hardly understand your analogy.
Why would you compare what Russia does to political prisoners with the military's discipline in the United States?
This may be news to you, but military service members are subject to an independent justice system with different protections, different laws, and different penalties.
You're arguing that US corporations should be restricted from taking action to suppress insurrection on the basis of having your head in the sand. The US should be in a state of emergency now, and it's obvious to me that it's solely because a white supremacist has replaced the civilian leadership of our government with those complicit in this act.
You're free to ignore what has happened, or believe in an alternate reality. Some of us would be guilty of violating our oaths were we to do the same.
Despite being headquartered in USA, aws is a global company and these questions about the future is common sense. Not everything is about American politics, people around the world are used to violence happening on your soil, it's just another news.
It's not that easy. If we're talking about an election in Venezuela, the courts would also laugh accusations of election rigging out of the room.
To be clear, I fully side with the U.S. courts here. What I'm saying though is governments and officials lie, you can't always just trust the official story.
If parler were used for inciting civil disorder in Venezuela over the election result and the government comes to AWS and says shut them down, what do they do?
Now suddenly they're the arbitrators of what is true in the world.
I don't want to get too hypothetical here, because I think this time it was pretty black and white.
100% agree - And the problem is that this isn't a 'hypothetical' situation.
Amazon and these large players will absolutely be asked by governments around the world to intervene in similar situations. Sometimes the fraud will be false, but sometimes it will be real - that's the world. Is it now Amazon's job to be the world election supervisor and arbiter of truth and shut down dissenting speech?
And can we trust these companies to act as neutral arbiters of the truth? (As an aside, the answer is absolutely not. See: Google Maps and Crimea / Ukraine / Russia)
Except Amazon aren’t determining what is true for the world, they’re determining it for themselves based on their assessment of the evidence and control only their own actions? This is true of everyone. To impute a stupid decision-making algorithm to AWS and then point out that it’s stupid does not a great argument against AWS’ actual process make.
Except these companies are defining truth in the world.
You said individuals make their own assessment based on the “evidence” - the problem here is that these companies serve up the “evidence”, so if these companies decide to only show you the “correct” evidence then that’s where they begin to define “truth”.
For an example, see Google Maps and Crimea in Ukraine vs Russia.
They certainly have a lot of sway, there—“history is written by the victors”, etc—but that we are having this discussion in the first place seems proof positive that said sway doesn’t prevent people from holding informed, contrary opinions.
> who decides if the democratic election was fair?
The several states, of which all 50 had certified their votes well in advance of January 6th. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if most of the votes being counted were even cast in public.
Just as an example, was the 2016 election 'fair' in your eyes?
There were claims that Russians hacked the election, voting machine issues, voter fraud and suppression. Democratic leaders objected to the legitimacy of the election results. There were even protestors who interrupted the electoral vote counting [1].
Did the big tech companies miss a chance to censor those peddling theories of an unfair election in 2016? Or do we have a moving definition of what constitutes a fair election and is allowable for questioning depending on which side won?
> Just as an example, was the 2016 election 'fair' in your eyes?
Yes, of course. I wasn't happy about it, but I was aghast that so many people voted for a con man, not convinced that it couldn't possibly be true that more people (in the right places, at least) wanted him than the second-worst political candidate I've ever seen run for President.
Also, by the time the certification comes around, the actual voters, all 538 of them, have publicly voted, so not only did I think the election was fair, but by then I knew it was 100% legal.
IMO big tech doesn't really do much censoring until pushed into a corner, now or in the past; they're more about the money than the politics. The Russians (along with a few other players, no doubt) absolutely fuck with our elections, but they do it the old fashioned way -- by spreading propaganda on social media and convincing American citizens to believe in conspiracy theories, and turn against their fellow citizens, etc.
FWIW, no Democrats stormed the Capitol in 2017. The losing candidate conceded, and relatively quickly at that. After losing by a lower margin than Trump in 2020, while beating him by millions of votes nationwide.
There isn't really a good way to spin it. Trump supporters storming the Capitol is bad, but it's actually a fairly distant second place to what the sitting President is doing.
The platform being used for organizing potential mass murder of targeted groups. If the screenshots are correct of what I have seen then AWS had no choice. They would have been liable if something really bad happened and was made aware of this before it happened. Parler has no monitoring of this activity and that is why everyone shut them down once it was exposed.
Note that in the past AWS has been more than open to hosting platforms organizing potential mass murder of targeted groups, to the point of issuing a lawsuit after a competitor was chosen to host the platform. [1]
>For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of.
There's a bakery somewhere that wasn't controversial until they were. In this day and age you can become the subject of a national controversy overnight.
There is a big difference between “controversial” and a place where people are actively planning criminal activity. It’s not close. No bank, for example, could continue serving a known crime org. They themselves would be charged if they did that.
> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government.
I honestly have no political axe to grind here, but I distinctly remember how 4 years ago it was a legitimate talking point on the losing side that 'faithless electors' (or 'Hamilton electors') should step up to deny Trump the presidency ([1], [2]). Michael Moore offered to pay the resulting fines for any Republican faithless electors [3].
To me as an outside observer those seemed like attempts to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. However, neither the politics subreddit nor Michael Moore have been deplatformed. So I'm not sure the criterion you mentioned is entirely correct.
Also an outside observer, isn't the ability to do that the entire point of having electors in the first place? As terrible as the electoral system is, it wouldn't be illegitimate to use it for its intended purpose.
I strongly believe that if Trump or one of his surrogates had tried to bribe electors into certifying him as a winner in 2020, it would have been rightly called an attempted coup and not a legitimate use of the electoral system.
Probably, which might have something to do with the fact that there's no genuine belief that Biden is going to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands due to administrational incompetence, or going to spend his entire term attempting to subvert democracy. On the other hand, it turns out the people who said those things about Trump in 2016 have been proven 100% correct.
The purpose of faithless electors isn't to stop the appointment of arbitrary candidates based on personal preference, it's to stop the appointment of people who are completely unfit for the position. It absolutely makes sense that it would only be justifiable to exercise that option on certain individuals. An individual who blatantly and repeatedly lies about election results and encourages their supporters to commit voter fraud in an attempt to retain power seems like the exact type of person you might want to stop from having that power in the first place.
That's a good point, but I think it actually services to show just how bad this situation was. It's not a stretch to say that faithless electors are a "feature" of the electoral college. One of the stated reasons behind choosing electors rather than voting directly is that the electors could exercise their own discretion in the choice. I agree that it's unscrupulous to attempt to coax electors like that, but it's at least within the bounds of the framework of presidential elections.
This was a crowd of thousands of people, many armed, attempting to interfere with the actual process of counting the votes of those electors. More than a couple members of the crowd had zip ties, which can only be reasonably explained as hostage taking paraphernalia. A literal gallows was erected, and members of the crowd were chanting for violence against Pence and Pelosi (the next two after Trump in the order of succession). A couple IEDs were found on the premise. A police officer was beaten to death. If security hadn't managed to evacuate congress and the VP before the crowd got to them, it seems likely that there would have been deaths among them.
Treating those two things as equivalent is absurd.
To be fair they wanted to do that because they saw Trump as a would-be dictator unwilling to leave power peacefully and deadest on using the government to punish his enemies and line his own pockets. They did THAT to avoid THIS. Being right about the reasons why you are doing things is actually important.
But that isn't the standard that was used. It seems to be something more akin to 'don't not moderate content that encourages...'. Except it isn't quite clear what moderation is considered good enough, as one can look at other sites which hosted and continue to host similar content. Sure, they haven't taken the stance they won't moderate, but they haven't done enough to moderate the content to remove it.
Or is it that stance? Perhaps that was the defining standard, that they took a stance instead of passively allowing it to remain like other sites do (until called out, at which point they'll react based on the size of the call out).
> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of.
This is key advice that a lot of founders seem to forget. Capturing a capital is an extremely bold and risky action, which shouldn't be attempted by anyone with fewer than 4 or 5 high-production cities of their own (some of which ideally also having an Encampment district to support training siege units faster). I encourage new players to focus on obtaining a scientific or cultural victory instead, as these are more straightforward for beginners.
>For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of.
Parler didn't do this, it's users did. Vastly different things.
Ouch, that's going to hurt. USA government is a pretty big customer. Or do we not care about democratic elections in Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Egypt, etc.?
"... something that is more genuinely a popular social issue ..."
We shouldn't let minority rights or freedoms be ignored just because they aren't popular. If this is an important issue to that other person, then they should bring it up for discussion.
Here's the deal from my perspective - if you build a platform you are responsible to have tools to take down clearly illegal activity on the platform, such as plotting the murder of politicians, terrorism, money laundering, etc.
This seems... reasonable to me, even though I understand some tools can/could be misused. In the end its not great that we have to sort of depend on societal ideas of what is right/wrong in the form of social/reputational pressure to moderate things, but at the moment we're at least a bit more likely to not turn that on marginalized groups than at any other time.
> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government.
I agree 100%, viking hat guy should definitely have his AWS account terminated.
Now, let's talk about Russiagate, how the FBI knew it was a fabrication of the opposition party to distract from a campaign scandal, and how we were dragged all the way through an impeachment process in an attempt to install an illegitimate government.
Thank you for saying this. Personally I'm fine with there being rules against things like websites for how to make a pipe bomb or as you mentioned, overthrow the government
> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of.
Ohhhh. You hear that? Overturning a fair democratic election. Where was the same argument when the whole Russia narrative played out - including intelligence agencies trying to "wire" the sitting president and sending agents to his national security advisor's residence to frame him? And trying to plot 25th amendment. And the whole 3years subsequent to that trying to find "collusion".
Also there is no evidence the founders of Parler were actively trying to sabotage the election and install illegitimate president. Some rouge users decided to co-ordinate through apps like Parler and FB. Same applies for FB.
If we want to continue down a path of honest discussion, at no point did people who firmly believed Trump was guilty of collusion with Russia devolve into storming a government building.
And, the Russia topic by and large never called into question the legitimacy of the ballots cast, attempting to disenfranchise voters. The Russia narrative followed a path of legal investigation into questionable situations. Trump did not get impeached for the outcomes of the Mueller report. Dems did not force their way into political buildings. They (at least the mainstream ones) never called for violence.
So, it seems that the left, in the end, did believe it was a fair election in terms of ballot numbers, and never suggested that the democratic election be overturned.
The last part of your statement says something entirely different than the first part. I don't think anyone is claiming that Dems haven't worked hard to undermine Trump during his time in office. Just like I don't think anyone claimed Republicans weren't working to undermine Obama when they took control of the Senate. That's politics, good or bad. But that does not correlate to a belief that a fair election should be overturned.
For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of.
I get the concern you're expressing, but not everything is a slippery slope. This went so far beyond a "popular social issue of the day", as you admitted in your comment. IMO it's worth saving this outrage & concern for if and when something that is more genuinely a popular social issue causes AWS to take down sites. There were surely lots candidates for that earlier this year with a lot of the other protests that went on, were there any instances of sites taken down then? (I'm genuinely asking btw, I didn't hear of any but if there were then I think that is a much more appropriate place to start this conversation from. Certainly people have been fired from their jobs due to cancel culture but I don't know of anyone being shut off of all tech platforms).