> If people had called one another to prepare this, would we say that the phone was responsible for the attack? And would we try to ban phones?
That's a moot point, because an attack like this can't realistically be organized via one-to-one communication. It needs a broadcast medium, which the phone network isn't.
> Really? How did past revolutions and terrorist attacks get organized? You realize most of world history existed before the Internet, right?
Yeah, of course. Broadcasting means one-to-many communication. Before modern technology, those things were organized using other kinds of one-to-many communication, such as in-person meetings, rallies, and through newspapers and other kinds of publications.
Movements aren't organized one-to-one like on a telephone, because that's a far slower way of spreading a message. It's also an unreliable medium, as the children's game "telephone" shows.
In my home town, we had a local group of mostly old folks, largely right-wing, who would have monthly luncheons with local politicians, and the group was literally called the Phone Tree because that’s how they organized. Although in this case the “Phone Tree” was a primitive robodialer owned by the head of the organization and used to disseminate recorded announcements of when the next luncheon was and who would be the guest/s.
The machine was literally called a "Phone Tree". Presumably because it was intended as an automated replacement for an old-fashioned phone tree. And, back to the root point, telephony can be used to organize political activity, at least in the form of getting all the old gun nuts in town to show up for a luncheon with their state legislator.
Unnecessarily combative comment. There's a reason why radio and television stations are among the first things seized in a coup. Broadcast media is crucial.
The idea that this summers riots were at all comparable to an attack on our nation's legislative body as it certified results of an election is repugnant and absurd.
Its easier to point fingers at the other side than take any blame for your own.
The insurrection at the nations capitol is a singular event, one that Republicans need to reckon with on its own terms. Some have done this, and I applaud them. They are proving to be the grown ups in the room.
What makes you think I'm on a side? I see hypocrisy all around. I think the capitol protests should not have happened, and the people who participated in them should be held accountable.
I agree with you that the capitol riots and the summer riots are incomparable. The summer riots were much worse, lasted longer, targeted innocents rather than political institutions, were widely excused and often promulgated by the newsmedia and politicians, are still talked about as if they were just, continually avoid criticism by cowardly saying that such points are a "distraction" in the face of things like the capitol riots, and use dishonest sleights of hand like the changing of language from "riot" to "attack" to gaslight.
I think the scale of events resulting from a statement are taken into consideration. Terrorists have sprung up after being radicalized by what they heard from one politician or another, but we typically won't consider the politician responsible for those actions.
This probably starts going into whataboutism territory, but doesn't this stuff tend to go both ways? I'd postulate we can probably find a few damning quotes made on Fox as well.
I'll note I'm very ignorant on this topic as I haven't actually watched television or any of these networks in years.
Examples are everywhere, you just have to not be in a bubble and be open to seeing it. I could keep going but you tell me, do you need more?
AOC: "The whole point of protesting is to make ppl uncomfortable." [-1]
Slate: "Non-violence is an important tool for protests, but so is violence" [0]
Vox: "Riots are destructive, dangerous, and scary — but can lead to serious social reforms" [1]
Pelosi: "we welcome the presence of these activists" vs "our election was hijacked" [2]
"CNN Promoted Charged Leftist Rioter Who Masqueraded As Reporter Despite No Credentials, Urged Assault On Capitol" [3]
Chris Cuomo: "Show me where it says that protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful" [4]
Supercut of news media justifying and excusing riots: [5]
Daily beast and salon writer Arthur Chu calling for explicit murder of people he calls Nazis: [6]
Difference in tone & presentation of NYT covering violent riots: [7]
Sally Kohn, USA today writer: "I don't like violent protests but I understand them" [8]
Kamala Harris: "Protests should not let up"
Maxine Waters "If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store... You get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them."
Nancy Pelosi: "I just don't know why there aren't uprisings all over the country. Maybe there will be soon."
Ayanna Pressley: "There needs to be unrest in the streets"
(I would agree that some of the politicians' quotes are a little weak, but in the name of consistency, these are at least worse than some types of language from Trump that would be called out as violence.)
> Examples are everywhere, you just have to not be in a bubble and be open to seeing it. I could keep going but you tell me, do you need more?
If you strip out enough context, you can make any false equivalency you like. For instance: weren't the Allies and Axis in WWII basically the same? After all, they both used guns and bombs to commit violence.
I can't say that I know enough about that part of WWII, but yeah I agree with that statement. Which isn't to say that it applies here. Simply pointing out that stripping out context can lead to false equivalences is lazy, it needs to be shown.
Each of these things certainly has a context that can be gone and read. That's why I included sources rather than not including them. There's also Google.
In addition I'd simply say that whatever your perspective on context is and how it applies to calls to violence and interpretations thereof, that it should be applied equally to all sources from all sides. This doesn't really seem to be what is happening, which is the largest factor in what seems to me a rather clear observation that the newsmedia's portrayal, and those who promote it and give it reach uncritically, are full of shit.
> I can't say that I know enough about that part of WWII, but yeah I agree with that statement. Which isn't to say that it applies here. Simply pointing out that stripping out context can lead to false equivalences is lazy, it needs to be shown.
Well, the key part is that the Axis was centered on the imperial ambitions of a a famous genocidal dictatorship that you've probably heard of. There's pretty much a unanimous consensus that that dictatorship was very, very bad and its allies were not much better.
2. The capitol attack was literally against the results of a free and fair election, and deliberately attacked some of the actual institutions of American democracy. There's also no evidence of infiltration, though such claims are now being made to deflect blame. And the riots often loudly expressed violent aims (e.g. erecting a literal gallows and chanting "Hang Mike Pence" https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hang-mike-pence-chant-capi...).
Notice how none of these entirely out of context quotes are encouraging crowds to overthrow the government to overturn an election.
Also, note that when these people use forceful language, they are talking about fighting for their rights to not be murdered by police. When Trump uses violent rhetoric, he is talking entirely about keeping himself in power.
Phones don't broadcast. A small group of agitators could have used a pirate radio station to call for an attack on the capitol 50 years ago and reach millions of people, which is exactly why pirate radio stations are illegal.
Should we ban every tool that allows you to broadcast? TV, Radio, Tiktok, twitter, youtube, etc? To be fair I think it used to be much much worse when there were only a few broadcast venue, people used to go CRAZY about celebrities, and some shows. It is much better now that conversation and broadcasting takes place on different networks.
The upside of broadcasting is that issues that only minorities experience have been brought to daylight: #metoo, gay marriage, actual insurrections that we should support, demonstrations, health care fight in the US, etc.
Pirate radio stations are illegal because the radio spectrum is finite and without regulation, much of that spectrum would end up jammed and unusable. Pirate radio is illegal for approximately the same reason it’s illegal to drive on the wrong side of the road.
Pirate Radio stations & new LPFM are primarily illegal because Clear Channel/iHeartRadio cannot profit & control the flow of information as well as they do when they have competition. The things Clear Channel hosts, especially on AM, are not even very much different from calling for an attack on the Capitol, having listened to 20+ years (unfortunately) of Rush Limbaugh my grandfather was listening to. You can contact a lot of people on Amateur Radio or CB radio, but it's not illegal because it doesn't compete with big business.
Phones don't pretend to be a moderated public platform. Also, the government has the legal right to monitor phones just as much as they do Facebook via the correct warrants.
Yea the difference in my mind is that the phone company does not moderate content or exercise editorial control over what gets sent over its lines, but Facebook does. So if Facebook decided that this kind of user generated content was acceptable to publish, they should be liable for the resulting problems.
I'm not sure Facebook is acting like an editor here. Those approve every post. Facebook can't practically do they. I'm critical of this case because it's a large group and thus Facebook should have been aware, but it seems like it's a tall order to ask Facebook to migrate everything. Isn't this what section 230 is about? Before you either migrate all our not at all. 230 let's you at least try to moderate (because let's be real, you can't moderate a billion people)
Facebook does act like an editor by way of their algorithms. Facebook's (and other social media's) timelines are no longer limited to the people you explicitly follow.
Whether they have the ability to moderate or not is irrelevant. If you can't afford the obligations of a publisher, don't be a publisher.
But how do you codify that in law? I clearly want some moderation (taking down illegal stuff, border line illegal, and etc) but if your choice is "moderate all or not at all" (as my understanding of pre section 230 is) then no one is going to moderate anything at all. I'm not trying to defend Facebook here, but I feel completely ignoring any of the nuance to the situation is disingenuous. It's not like you can moderate a billion people, you could only do your best (I'm not saying Facebook is doing their best). Removing the nuance of the situation to make an easy argument is exactly the problem that got us here in the first place so let's not continue it.
I'm not talking about moderation here. I'm talking about the fact that Facebook promotes certain content in user's feeds (including content that these users have no direct relationship to - they're not friends with the author nor follow him) in order to generate "engagement". This should stop.
Regarding moderation, it's true that you can't moderate billions of people with 100% accuracy, but you can discourage them from posting undesirable content in the first place by associating real consequences such a a permanent ban (or a monetary loss, by charging an entry fee to create an account) or make them earn the privilege of posting content (for example, not being able to post links until your account has certain reputation of good behavior).
Discouraging people from posting bad content, and not amplifying the reach of bad content for engagement's sake should go a long way.
There's something to this. The things people hate about Facebook aren't caused by some user sitting down and typing a post, and in fact that kind of content gets buried in the feed anyway. The problems start with "sharing the story at the top of the feed" and "your friend liked X article which is really an ad". It's a more aggressive version of 90s email chain-letters.
Absolutely. I don't think most of these people woke up one day and suddenly decided "hey let's storm the Capitol".
Instead, these people were groomed over a period of months or years by way of recommending conspiratorial or outrageous content and it finally blew up.
So not only did Facebook create the problem in the first place, they also had plenty of early warnings about what's been going on, but it's hard to consider an increase in "engagement" (thus revenue) as a "warning" and even harder to act upon it.
This also raises another question regarding the efficiency of our intelligence services if large-scale domestic terrorism was organized all in public on a platform they had privileged access to.
This is free expression, they are providing a platform as free as you going in the street and expressing yourself.
If the government wants to censor this type of expression, it must pass laws, and it must dictates what you can say or can't say. With such a move, social medias would become forbidden, or inefficient (as every post would need to be approved before being released).
If this is the world you want to live in, it's fine, but you need to understand the consequences and the ways to get there.
> This is free expression, they are providing a platform as free as you going in the street and expressing yourself.
The street does not automatically reshape itself to promote the most offensive graffiti to as many people as possible.
I wouldn't have a problem with Facebook being hands-off if it was limited to content you explicitly followed in reverse-chronological order (like it used to be), as all you'd need to filter out the bullshit is to not follow bullshit sources. Of course, Facebook's revenue would drop off a cliff if they made this change because bullshit is what drives Facebook's revenue and not the friends/family pictures users originally came there for.
Phones do in fact allow this, the difference is that it doesn't scale up in a 1:many relationship, and the phone users are not incentivized to use the phone more for this purpose over, say, calling their mom.
Phones don't automatically make calls to people who disagree with your opinion or peddle misinformation all the time in order to generate "engagement" for the phone company.
People didn't, because phones are not useful for this purpose. And, yes, if they were, we would be asking ourselves how to prevent their use for this purpose.
The phone network is useful for other uses society deems to be net-negative, such as spammy calls. As a result, technical and legal barriers were erected to curtail such abuses.
Phones provide communication over distances unlike what was previously available. This is something that society has kind of settled into at this point.
Social media is new, and it provides communication fan-out unlike anything we've dealt with before except from people that are powerful enough to be given a platform on major TV networks.
