I understand and broadly sympathise with the sort of ~absolute freedom of speech outlined in the US constitution, but I am completely baffled by this recent push seen here on Hacker News and elsewhere that this freedom should be extended to in effect compel others to publish your speech. This is not in the US constitution, and is in fact completely unconstitutional (1st amendment protects against compelled speech). This almost seems like a push for speech without consequences, that no matter what you say everyone should be forced to provide you with services and support. This would be both unprecedented and also extremely unhealthy for society. It wouldn't even be conservative ideology, as at no point in US history has anything like this been the law, legalising compelled speech would be truly radical and unconservative politics.
You seem to be replying to a different comment than the one I wrote. I am not addressing any legal or constitutional issue.
I am also not advocating for compelled speech.
Very soon, it will be impossible to buy webscale hosting from anywhere but a half-dozen providers. Should those providers be the sole and exclusive authority of what is or is not allowed on the web?
Airlines aren't permitted the authority to decide who flies and who doesn't. Why is AWS?
This isn't a constitutional issue, or even an American one. It's one about the place that censorship has in our civilization.
A tiny number of infrastructure providers should not have a unilateral ability to veto unpopular speech, especially considering, as we just witnessed, the definition of unpopular can change on a dime with the wind.
Today, it's Parler and Stormfront. What will become the target of censorship in five years? Ten?
Increasingly services are linked to our identities, and bans are lifetime. Will creating new accounts after political wind direction changes endanger one's data storage, email, contact lists, or hosting/publishing ability one day? How many individual people or organizations are really provider-independent and could survive losing all of their data at a host because they once belonged to the wrong faction?
I don't agree with this at all and I am tired of seeing "sensible" people here explain how it's important to reach out to fascists and make them feel loved. You're only advocating further normalisation of fascism, and depriving them of the consequences of their actions—consequences that have always been a part of civil society. What's more, that you seem to be more preoccupied with not upsetting these fascists rather than that just a few days ago these very same fascists either attempted a coup or supported a coup does indeed speak of your self-professed naivety (at best). These fascists are a cancer on the body politic and the solution is not to listen to many of the posters here who think that somehow magically the best course of action is simply to do nothing at all, lest we upset the poor lickle fascists.
Just categorizing everyone protesting as "fascists" is ignorant. These people think the election was rigged, and they don't trust institutions. They think that our democracy is at risk, and your solution is to push them, deplatform them, and remove all hope of legal political influence?
Reacting to this anxiety with force is going to cause a war if it continues.
> These people think the election was rigged, and they don't trust institutions.
The don't come up with these conclusions themselves.
Only one very influential "leader", with a Twitter following of 88M, has been claiming elections are a fraud in America:
Appeasing his followers has been tried for the past ~5ish years. That led to Jan 6.
Further appeasement will lead to worse outcomes unless trump is politically and legally, and _socially_ contained.
I disagree and feel that's a very simplistic explanation. If anything the past four years of democrat reaction to Trump has directly contributed to the situation we're in. The failure to acknowledge this simple fact is startling.
If you were a Trump supporter who was just called a fascist, racist, bigot, white supremacist, uncle tom, unintelligent rube during the past four years, and you watched as the media, hollywood, elites, and democrat party tried everything possible to undermine your legally elected President, including unmasking of family/friends/campaign, bogus 2+ year Russia investigation peddled as fact by the pundits 24/7 7 days a week, impeachment #1, daily conspiracies of all variety, and I could go on; would you trust the outcome of the election?
There were hundreds of sworn affidavits including by democrats and independents, factual things worth investigating if not to simply bring closure to the numerous issues, and the democrats instead not only slammed the door shut, they opened have and continue to deride conservatives & Trump supporters.
How on Earth is it not clear why people don't trust the election results or even more so how we ended up with 50,000+ people in DC and a small subset ending up inside the Capitol building?
To top all of that off, for over 3 months this past summer in multiple cities across the nation, blm/antifa threw very often violent protests that were watered down by the media as "mostly peaceful", despite millions of humans seeing with their own eyes what was happening. People were shot and killed in multiple places, multiple police officers were injured and killed. They tried to storm the White House & Portland Federal building.
How can you still claim it's all due to just one person? I find it to be total nonsense.
I'm sure I'll be downvoted for saying the above, but failure to at least recognize what I'm saying is a colossal mistake. This is what the other side is feeling.
There is clearly a large disenfranchised segment of the population. They have all kinds of reasons with varying degrees of veracity. Lots of people are trying to ignore it, sweep it under the rug, etc. But the real problem here is that a lot of corps+people are trying to "fix" it by stamping it out. Nearly half of the U.S. voted for trump - so I don't think stamping it out is going to work - but it might lead to worse things.
Do they really think the election was rigged or is that just what they say to signal each other and 'trigger' the libs? These aren't starry-eyed idealists whose naïve beliefs about politics have suddenly been crushed, they voted for for the rudest blowhard on Twitter after having him as President for the last 4 years.
They know he pushes hardline policies, they know he's super-antagonistic, they know he's been impeached for corruption, they know that half of what he says makes no sense. They may not like or approve of Biden (I don't either tbh) but Trump voters absolutely know who he is. Poll after poll has established that a plurality of them them don't really give a shit about democracy and that loyalty to Trump is their top concern.
I think what you're worried about is that if they get shut down they will become more aggressive, and I agree that's highly likely. But the approach of appeasing these people and soothing their ruffled feathers has been tried for years and they have just become more and more aggressive over that time. You have a draw a line somewhere, and their attempt to overrun Congress and halt the confirmation of an election seems like a good place to do it.
OK, most charitably, some of the people protesting unwittingly supported and took part in a fascist coup. Sucks for them I suppose, it's of course an easy mistake to make.
People have sat by and watched for 4 years and did nothing whilst Trump worked to erode institutions, culminating in the American people democratically voting in a free and fair election to oust President Trump. The reaction to that was an attempted fascist coup. Clearly doing nothing has failed catastrophically. Perhaps there are more optimal solutions to this attack on democracy, but the posters here clutching their pearls over what is a relatively light response to an attempted coup should spare the rest of us the faux outrage.
The people you refuse to reach out to by and large are not made up of fascists. And so we will get what always happens when this kind of mindset takes root en masse.
If you can't ban a fascist for instigating violence and a coup attempt then your ToS are worthless and all moderation on every website must be made illegal.
The simple truth is that these knuckle-draggers plotting for Mike Pence to be executed by firing squad would have at every point in the past never been able to reach a "public forum" of any kind. For all the complaints that we need to engage positively with such wonderfully civil discourse, it's only by virtue of the internet that they're being heard at all. Society previously was very good at ignoring these people, and society was healthier for it.
But that person is right. Most of the arguments against private companies banning companies/individuals violating their ToS boil down to something along the lines of "this is a slippery slope, we're on our way to tyranny". But all European countries have limits on free speech and the vast majority are free countries, so all of these arguments are demonstrably false. We don't even have to look to other countries for examples, there has been censorship of various kinds at various times in the US since its founding, and yet there was no inevitable slide to Orwellian tyranny after each instance. The problem is that Americans are far too paranoid—every little thing is perceived an existential threat to you people.
Ummm maybe I'm mistaken but censorship was widespread throughout Europe during the enlightenment and yet the enlightenment still happened. The paranoid American style where anything but free speech in the most absolute and extreme terms is guaranteed to result in tyranny and the destruction of civilisation itself isn't really born out by any of the facts.
It's not the responsibility of normal people to indulge the crazy satanic paedophile conspiracy theories of total lunatics so that said lunatics won't behave like total animals. They stormed the capitol because they believed complete horse shit about how the election was stolen, when it wasn't, and they were incited to do so by the current president.
Just in the last four years:
Anthony Weiner.
Epstein.
Dennis Hastert.
NXIVM.
Matter of public record. Just the ones that come to mind, out of the ones that came to light.
>horse shit
Check yourself. The state of Texas filed suit. Many states joined. Shame the SCOTUS punted, maybe cooler heads could have prevailed.
Please don't equate pedophile conspiricies with this when the former is demonstrably provable. (just because an obvious psyop like Q talks about the topic doesnt automatically make the topic false, on the contrary that could and lijely is part of the intended effect of the psyop)
It enables such dismissals of legitmate questions such as why was Epstein was seen as an intelligence asset? Ignore the facts and jump straight to calling anything you dont like a crazy conspiracy theory so you can ban it!
Read up on Dutroux - Belgiums Xfiles or the Franklin scandal or the Finders or... if you think satanist pedophile conspiracies arent real.
Qanon is exactly what you are describing though. Quoting from Bellingcat [1]:
"Here is the core of the QAnon myth: with the aid of a small group of military intelligence officers called the Q team (one or more of whom is supposedly responsible for writing the drops), President Donald Trump is waging a shadow war against a cabal of Satan-worshipping, child-eating pedophiles who are conspiring to obstruct and overthrow him. The military will arrest them en masse in an event called “the Storm.”"
You can see why people would be uncomfortable dipping their toes into that water when so many people have been led to believe in "obvious psyops". Conspiratorial thinking is healthy until it isn't. Be careful about how deep you dive my friend.
I understand, but what I am meaning is that while I have yet to see any credible proof of electoral malfeasance, the other thing has evidence. What I propose is that this hesitancy is engineered as part of the psyop.
> Conspiratorial thinking is healthy until it isn't. Be careful about how deep you dive my friend.
A long time ago I made a decision, after particpating in what could rightfully be called a conspiracy myself (the Iraq war), that I will simply pursue the truth, and will always prefer the ugly truth to a beautiful lie. The fact is that much of the truth tends to touch conspiracy and I will not shirk away from it just because of that fact.
The trespassing and sacking of the capitol is precisely a sign of backsliding on traditionally liberal ideas from the enlightenment, much more so than Twitter banning the number one inciter of the aforementioned insurrection.
The outrage it's generated from all corners of American society seem to run against that idea. Just because a relatively small mob of determined extremists can raid a building for an afternoon does not indicate some kind of earth-shattering, society-changing transformative event.
Popular social media platforms using shaky, uneven, and arguably unjustifiable logic to ban both speech and people from their respective shares of the public sphere is, however, indicative of an ever-growing attack by monopolized social platforms on exactly those traditionally liberal ideas that makes such amazingly diverse and open-minded communities to begin with.
Congress asking for help and the president ignoring it. Governors asking if they could send in help and the executive said no. It took Mike fucking Pence, whose job is NOT to activate the national guard, to activate the national guard before extra help was sent over. What the fuck happened January 6th?
The pure inaction of everyone involved surrounding the situation in the Capitol building should terrify you. The rioters never should have even gotten inside the building.
All valid points. At the very least this mess provides a case study of the potential consequences of reducing law enforcement presence in favor of optics
At a minimum, the mayor de-escalated and restricted the national guard before the march started, and the capital police turned away initial offers of help (they're segregated from other federal police due to separation of powers, and Congress wants it that way).
But yes, can you blame them for not wanting to deploy the national guard, when he got crucified 6 months ago for... Wanting to deploy the national guard to protect the White House from repeated attacks?
It hasn't generated outrage from all corners of society - in a YouGov survey[1], 45% of Republican voters supported the storming of the Capitol and 68% did not view it as a threat to democracy. That still doesn't make it a transformative event per se, but maybe more like a transformatively revealing symptom of a larger problem that already existed?
Edit: not to throw just one party under the bus. Same survey showed 21% of voters overall approved and 32% didn't see it as a threat to democracy. That's still a lot more than an isolated few Americans.
True. All the more important we can't let attacks on our important national symbols cloud our judgement and allow vague claims and anger to steer our decisions.
actual insurrectionists would've have done more than take selfies, commit petty vandalism and wander around in a daze for a couple of hours. it was a boomer chimpout.
the people who are using the language of insurrection/terror etc are doing so with the purpose of creating casus belli to enact retribution on their political & cultural enemies and to turn the war on terror inwards. if we have learned nothing about restraint in the years after 9/11 then we are heading for a nightmare scenario.
> the people who are using the language of insurrection/terror etc are doing so with the purpose of creating casus belli to enact retribution on their political & cultural enemies and to turn the war on terror inwards. if we have learned nothing about restraint in the years after 9/11 then we are heading for a nightmare scenario.
I can see how the actions seem relatively harmless if you consider them in a vacuum.
But this is just goalpost-moving, and it's happened every time something awful has happened over the past 4 years.
Perhaps it will help if you consider the totality of the scenario; the plans to travel, the bombs and munitions created and acquired; the calls to violence from the president just before the actions; Rudy Giuliani asking for "trial by combat" as the crowd prepared to march on the Capitol. The repeated quotes *from the insurrectionists themselves* announcing that "this is a revolution" and talking about hanging people, coming for their heads, overturning the election.
Quite simply, if you read the definition of insurrection, there's no way to NOT apply it to these events, and sedition to apply to the president and Rudy among others.
>>the people who are using the language of insurrection/terror etc are doing so with the purpose of creating casus belli to enact retribution on their political & cultural enemies and to turn the war on terror inwards.
Seems that way to me too. Time will tell, I guess.
> actual insurrectionists would've have done more than take selfies, commit petty vandalism and wander around in a daze for a couple of hours. it was a boomer chimpout.
Because they were foiled - their targets were successfully evacuated. They sought out Pelosi and Schumer's offices specifically - the ones outfitted in military tactical gear I mean, not the grandma that needed help getting back down the stairs. They built a gallows and were chanting "Hang Mike Pence".
The fact that this was incited by President of US for whom about 70 million voted for despite him showing all these tendencies for pay 4 years would mean that this is intact a huge event. How the hell can any sane person call this a trivial event?
I don't disagree with anything you said. But terrorist violence & sedition are not protected speech. Whether they banned him for the right or wrong reason, he still needs to be banned.
It's true that terrorism & sedition is not protected speech, but it's also true that the logic Twitter is invoking here to connect the tweets to terrorism & sedition is questionable at best. Regardless, why should we accept Twitter banning people for the "wrong" reasons?
> why should we accept Twitter banning people for the "wrong" reasons
I think this confuses "you" with "we".
You shouldn't accept it if you feel it is unfair, and you should express that if you feel the need to, subject to the rules of whatever platform you use to express it.
But "we" (as in the people of the United States), via the powers of government, have no right under the Constitution to compel (or if you prefer, to "not accept") Twitter to allow him to tweet on their platform.
>Just because a relatively small mob of determined extremists can raid a building for an afternoon does not indicate some kind of earth-shattering, society-changing transformative event.
It absolutely does indicate that. Read up on German history.
>I am loving people who don't understand that they are literally supporting billionaires while claiming to be anti-corporate resistance.
The billionaire in question is Trump, isn't it?
>Definition of Liberal used to be: "Willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one's own; open to new ideas. Relating to or denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise."
Well this just comes back to the paradox of tolerance. I consider myself a liberal (in the British or non-American sense) and in my opinion fascism should not be tolerated.
> than the threat of communism, which is rather dead.
Huh? The largest nation on the planet is literally a Communist nation and has its eyes set on being the global seat of power while simulatenously bribing half the world to look the other way.
Well China isn't really communist any more, it sort of began to abandon that with Deng Xiaoping, but regardless, my point is there's truly minimal risk of communists coming to power in any Western country that I know of. I perceive the thread of fascists gaining power in the West as far greater. I should have been clearer, my mistake.
It's still a single-party state guided by a Marxist-Leninist philosophy.
Also, given the not even guarded political opinions of my overwhelmingly-Marxist peers who work in federal civil service jobs in the DC area, I think that we're far closer than you think.
But I will certainly agree the danger is in any collectivist-utopian promise for a government. They all rely on the same brutal methods like ethnic cleansing and tend to look the same other than what's written on their red armbands.
I don't think there's any remotely plausible prospect of America becoming a Marxist state. Your paranoia is noted, however, and it is typical of Americans, and probably in part why your society is so often so unwell (at least, that's my pet theory).
I think people from at least some countries of the world would disagree with you about communism being dead. Is there any major fascist political party in the west that has any kind of msm support? On the other hand, almost every western country has a socialist party in their respective parliament. As liberal doesn't it bother you that ideas which were the cause of so much misery in the world when implemented in communist countries are still being recycled over and over in parliaments of western countries at least as much as a few fascists do?
> I think people from at least some countries of the world would disagree with you about communism being dead
Possibly, but to me in the West I don't feel like there's any remotely plausible threat of communists coming to power in my country or any Western country that I know of.
> On the other hand, almost every western country has a socialist party in their respective parliament
I know I'm probably talking to an American here so I guess there's a reasonable chance that everything that isn't libertarian hyper-capitalism is literally Juche communism, but in reality, these mainstream so-called "socialist parties" in the West are overwhelmingly liberal in character. There are exceptions, such as Die Linke in Germany, and yeah I find them pretty vile, but they're mostly irrelevant. For example, I am British and our mainstream opposition party is nominally "socialist" but in actual fact fundamentally liberal and not at all about the overthrow of capitalism.
> As liberal doesn't it bother you that ideas which were the cause of so much misery in the world when implemented in communist countries are still being recycled over and over in parliaments of western countries
For the aforementioned reasons, where European "socialist" parties are more about making capitalism a little bit less American/cutthroat/fuck-you-I-got-mine, rather than literal democratic ownership of the means of production, no, not really. Europe is fundamentally capitalist and liberal.
In the UK you don't have an iota of a "fascist" party to be worried about. I agree that the labour party is only "nominally socialist", but at least from Corbyn forward I would not call them liberal. And they have lost touch with the working people about at the same time as well.
Utterly baffling and genuinely inconceivable. My imagination is running wild trying to imagine what sort of person you might be, assuming you are being honest here.
IS it wrong to always be skeptical and paranoid about the world, the media, the government, the tech companies/any company promising a good thing?
This isn't a new feeling, idea or such - there's always been a counter culture and I enjoy and love tech. I never got into Twitter, and the more accessible tech has become, it seems to have become eternal summer.
Which, on one hand is good - tech is accessible, government "can" be more transparent then ever.
But is it, really? Go back to any presidency generation and you can see the same questions. It doesn't matter if it's the red scare, the pacifist of USA not jumping into WW2 until bommbed at pearl harbor (but had operations in Sino China.) and etc -
That's another issue here, the moving and adaption of wrong think, and tribes forming based if you think one alike - there's so many arguments from how you value money, what is money, what is a good president, if the color of your skin matter, what you do, how you spend your free time, if you allow people to peer onto your social presence, etc
It's just alarming, the slippery slope of internet adaption/culture the past decade really has ushered a dystopia.
But, it seems, according to you, that is "utterly baffling and genuinely inconceivable" where it goes to show, if you don't follow tribe mentality, you are labelled pariah, and then what, excommunicated for questioning the status quo?
It is specifically baffling to have no opinion on Donald Trump, yes, and that is precisely orthogonal to one's opinions on the internet, Twitter, "tribes", technology, or anything that you mentioned in your comment, for that matter.
Put away your pitch fork for a second and think rationally what the chilling effect of this is. It doesn't matter who the president is, what matters is that this is unprecedented that a tech company, that skims the line of being a media company which is usually the mouthpiece/marketing arm for corporations to outsource their engagement has this much control, manipulation and can steer an audience / rewrite an narrative as it seems fit.
Then throw in any politician, and there you go. Can be trunp w/ Twitter. Can be how Facebook abetted genocide Myanmar -- yet you are focused on "what" I think.
That's how deep you are in the rabbit hole, and how deep the user audience for these walled gardens are.
I understand it's hard to separate recent events from the big picture - but that's what it is all about. But it seems no one else sees that.
I don't even have a pitchfork, I was just genuinely surprised by the prospect of someone having no opinion on Donald Trump. That has literally nothing to do with technology whatsoever, if we were cavemen and Donald Trump was a caveman and you said you had no opinion of him, I would still be baffled.
You have an extremely obnoxious, narrow view of the world then, like some child whose yet to develop a Theory of Mind and forgivably fails a false-belief exercise.[0] I suspect you're offended the opinions you're emotionally invested in have apparently been trivialised.
My 90-year-old frail Bangladeshi grandmother cared as much about Trump as she did about Bolsonaro—i.e. not at all. She cared very much about politics domestic to her country though, her husband was a politician.
What is your opinion on the Nigerian Special Anti-Robbery Squad—an important political topic in a country of 200 million people? Or the debate on traditional vs simplified Chinese characters? Or Article 9 of the Japanese constitution? These are things people are very emotionally invested in, are these topics also impossible to not have an opinion on?
Your 90 year old frail grandmother is also not here writing essays about U.S. presidential history. I also find it difficult to believe someone so knowledgeable about such a subject has no opinion whatsoever on Donald Trump
