7 ms·

I’ve said it before: I find this highly disturbing. Especially the sense in which it is coordinated. Amazon, Google and Apple acting together to shut down a pla

I’ve said it before: I find this highly disturbing. Especially the sense in which it is coordinated. Amazon, Google and Apple acting together to shut down a platform that has been very clear about its stance on content moderation from the outset. Free speech is not just any value. Sooner or later you will find yourself on the side of an issue where your speech will be attacked. Then there is the always present double standard. Why did Twitter allow “Hang Mike Pence” to trend last night? Where are the suspensions and permanent bans? Again, sooner or later we will all find ourselves on the other side of the double standard.

sneak 6y ago
Americans seem to feel much the same way about censorship these days as they do about their own personal privacy: "It doesn't affect me or my life/views presently, so I don't see a reason to object to it." - The "I have nothing to hide" sort of thing.
- rmrfstar 6y ago
  Most Americans are actively hostile to privacy, not just ambivalent. If you tell them, "Alice doesn't carry a cellphone, because she thinks it shares her real time location with advertisers, hedge funds, private investigators, debt collectors, bounty hunters, and the government," most will conclude that (a) Alice is mentally ill, or (b) Alice is a degenerate criminal. Either way, Alice needs to be investigated. That means the state needs to interview her colleagues and neighbors, and subpoena her bank and medical records.
  - sneak 6y ago
    I don't believe that this is true.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
Someone 6y ago
For me, closing down “bad enough” actors is a good thing, but the big question is “Who’s going to decide who are those, and what’s ‘bad enough’?”. I don’t think the answer to that should be “a few people at large companies that are, at best, kept at bay by rich people buying or selling the company’s shares” (their customers have too little choice to exert much pressure. I also don’t see protests at BigCo’s headquarters or angry mobs storming BigCo HQ to force them to change course (other ways to exert pressure), but maybe I’m not looking far enough into the future) These large companies act as judge, jury and executioner, and don’t allow appeals.
cafed00d 6y ago
> Why did Twitter allow “Hang Mike Pence” to trend last night? Where are the suspensions and permanent bans? Thus is a brilliantly good question! My big takeaway from reading Twitter’s blog behind Trump’s suspension is that the words of a tweet themselves are not particularly deterministic of policy violation or enforcement. What seems to be the clincher is the _interpretation_ and their _real world effect_. For example, Trump’s recent tweets taken collectively _and_ the effect of his supporters’ March on the capitol were starkly different than the “hang mike pence” or the women’s March (for example’s sake) that happened a few years ago on the capitol. In both the latter cases, there is no credible threat of real world violence. Similarly, “Hang Mike Pence” tweets have no predictable certainty to cause any harm to Mike Pence or anyone in the political community the same way Trump’s tweets about skipping Biden’s inauguration (and therefore being a good target to attack by his supporters etc etc), OTHOH, are. Twitter’s blog obviously has more context and better explanation. What I’m trying to say is that, it seems like _interpretation_ of tweets & _determination of real world effects_ is what leads to policy enforcement. Of course, that is susceptible to human judgment and error. But I don’t think it rooted in coordinated outright bias against conservative voices.
paulddraper 6y ago
"Hang Mike Pence" was temporary. But there are plenty of other examples. I'm old enough to remember Kathy Griffin and Trump's severed head. Or "If they even TRY to replace RBG we burn the entire fucking thing down". https://twitter.com/rezaaslan/status/1307107507131875330 https://twitter.com/rezaaslan/status/1307107507131875330 How is that not the same? Regardless of whether there policy should or shouldn't be to remove violence, the bias in how they apply it is very clear. EDIT: Feel free to downvote. Don't hold back.
BenTheElder 6y ago
Without commenting on the rest ... > Then there is the always present double standard. Why did Twitter allow “Hang Mike Pence” to trend last night? Where are the suspensions and permanent bans? Actually, they intervened and stopped it. https://www.newsweek.com/twitter-stops-hang-mike-pence-trending-1560253 https://www.newsweek.com/twitter-stops-hang-mike-pence-trend... Also note: > Journalist Yashar Ali tweeted a screenshot of the topic trending, indicating that the phrase had been tweeted over 14,000 times. Ali noted that most people were "quot[ing] some of the insurrectionists" at the Capitol, rather than making direct threats against Pence. He wrote that the phrase "shouldn't be allowed to trend." See also despite the URL: https://nypost.com/2021/01/09/twitter-allows-hang-mike-pence-to-trend-hours-after-trump-ban/ https://nypost.com/2021/01/09/twitter-allows-hang-mike-pence... > “We blocked the phrase and other variations of it from trending. We want trends to promote healthy discussions on Twitter,” a company spokesperson told The Post. “There are Rules for trends — if we identify accounts that violate these rules, we’ll take enforcement action.”
8note 6y ago
I'm not clear how twitter shows a double standard? It's the trump folks who were chanting to hang mike pence, and their leader, trump, has been banned. I guess the double standard that the right wingers don't get banned soon enough? Or that wealthy stars don't get banned soon enough? Trump should have been banned before becoming president even
- throwawaysea 6y ago
  If you take a look at https://www.allsides.com/blog/capitol-hill-breach-riot-coverage-demonstrates-media-bias https://www.allsides.com/blog/capitol-hill-breach-riot-cover..., you'll see a deep analysis of a double standard in how media covered this riot versus other such events (including past riots at the capitol!). A significant number of riots took place in 2020, and this is true even in DC. For example just take a look at the photos and videos in https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/31/fires-light-up-washington-dc-on-third-night-of-george-floyd-protests https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/31/fires-light-..., which shows damage on a far greater scale than this recent capitol riot. Lots of people and organizations on Twitter or Facebook had organized these events, which included looting, property damage, vandalism, assaults, arson, and more. Many politicians, such as AOC, condoned and even encouraged these events (see https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames/status/1348030442159689736 https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames/status/13480304421596897...). This extends to news media as well, who often mislabeled violent riots as "peaceful protests" and excused them or covered them in a sympathetic way (see https://dailycaller.com/2021/01/07/media-downplays-blm-antics-riots-change-tune-trump-capitol-riot https://dailycaller.com/2021/01/07/media-downplays-blm-antic... or https://nypost.com/2021/01/08/rage-at-capitol-assault-makes-excuses-for-summer-riots-all-the-more-disgraceful https://nypost.com/2021/01/08/rage-at-capitol-assault-makes-...). All these actors were inciting violence, certainly to the standard Twitter uses to judge them (https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension.html https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...). These other past events included much more significant economic damage in the billions and many more deaths than the capitol riot. So why are all those people and organizations allowed to continue using their social media accounts? Why weren't those same participants, organizes, enablers, and sympathizers criticized just as heavily by politicians, news media, social media, and others? This is a clear double standard, where criminality and violence is permitted if those who are in control of these platforms (news outlets, tech companies) agree with your cause and share your ideology.
sorethescore 6y ago
It's not that complicated, when you incite violent insurrection against the government and people follow through with it, you get shut down. It's not like any of these platforms had a choice given Trump's violent rhetoric and history of lying.
- throwawaysea 6y ago
  Can you quote specific rhetoric which was violent? Twitter did not name a single tweet or written or spoken sentence from Trump where he advocated for violence in their blog post where they announced the ban (https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension.html https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...). I do agree Trump has a huge history of lying, and was continuing to lie with his claims about the election. However, I find the claim that Trump "incited" the riot to be unfounded and am shocked to see everyone use that word so casually. If and when this goes to court, I guarantee they will not be able to prove that Trump incited a violent riot simply because the evidence does not support it. Remember, there were tens of thousands of attendees in DC in support of Trump, across several separate events. To my knowledge, all these events had applied for permits and were granted them, allowing the city and other agencies (like National Park Service) to plan their response and presence. At the capitol, a few hundred people came onto the capitol grounds. Of those, an even smaller subset engaged in theft, vandalism, and other violence. But the vast majority of people that came to DC this last week for Trump did not engage in violence. So how can it be claimed that Trump incited violence? He made false claims about the election, and a small number of people took those claims and used it as justification for criminality. But to me that seems like the fault of those who participated and not really a justification for banning Trump.
  - oivey 6y ago
    The percentage of people who became rioters is irrelevant. Trump talked about marching to the Capitol building and “showing strength” at the rally. His employee, Giuliani, was making comments about hand to hand combat at the rally. Before the rally, he commented that it was going to be a wild day. During the riot, he praised the rioters by referring to them fondly as special people. I don’t think even this rundown does complete justice as to what Trump did. In the context of a criminal trial, Trump could claim ignorance of what his actions meant. I think that would be a hard sell considering he’s a professional politician and the President of the United States. In the context of an impeachment trial, I don’t think claims of ignorance could hold. Even allowing it, that level of cluelessness and recklessness still qualifies as high crimes and misdemeanors.
hans1729 6y ago
While I completely get the sentiment: I missed these complaints when platforms didn't grant ISIS free reign to spread their propaganda. Dealing in absolutes doesn't do the nuanced systems governing our reality justice, you should know that. To illustrate: absolutely free speech would imply the right to harmfully agitate kids for whatever your cause is. Does it seem obvious that this is a bad idea? Then just extrapolate "kids are easy to manipulate" to "adults are mostly just older kids". And btw, I know what it's like to be on the other side. That doesn't justify turning a blind eye to the madness that comes with absolute free speech. Either you accept that a line has to be drawn somewhere, or you accept every consequence of absolute free speech. Which, imo, would be a terrible idea with 7 billion people just waiting to be gamed through their fears. Don't get me wrong, I don't consider what we're seeing here unproblematic at all. I just don't consider absolute free speech to be unproblematic either, quite the opposite.
- rimliu 6y ago
  Ah yes, think about the children.
  - hans1729 6y ago
    Oh please, I was illustrating a point. The wide majority of people/"civilians" aren't capable to tell the difference between actual information and propaganda, and since the propaganda is designed to be more appealing, guess which one wins out - the fair player or the one that agitates? This isn't rocket science, you're just turning a blind eye to the consequences as if that helps your case.
- throwaway80332 6y ago
  I'm trying to collect a list evidence on the criminal Trump to have something you can quickly point when refuting confused idiot relatives who support him, but I have not been able to follow everything that has been happening for the past few days, for various reasons. Would you please provide a link to ex-president Trump inciting violence like ISIS? Lesser forms of agitation for violence is fine too.
jrumbut 6y ago
As long as the public square is privately owned we're going to have problems. I think it's great these companies have stopped supporting Parler. The problem is that so much power has devolved to these entirely unaccountable organizations that it feels like an infringement of free speech. We are going to need a stable place for important discourse and that will require carefully designed governance structures, transparency, and independence that no ad supported company can possibly provide.
- gonzo41 6y ago
  Or, don't have any structure and let people host their own little public square themselves. Little mom and pop nazi/terrorist boards on smaller providers all over the web. Twitter is kinda great that I can post direct to the whole world. But that requires a bit of discipline. As an affect I somewhat think through what I'm posting. Much like what we all try to do here. Everyone around here pines for the older internet. And one of the ways to get it back is to have standards, that are visible and enforced on larger platforms so people know, that speech has consequences. And if people want to do their seditious terrorist thing. They can host it themselves and manage all the risk. No public square has every been as big as some of these sites. So maybe the metaphor doesn't work.
  - jrumbut 6y ago
    I don't know about that, I don't remember any real consequences or standards on the early Internet. When it was a technological novelty there weren't organized and well funded efforts to posting in bad faith. I guess it depends how early you're talking about. We're in new territory here,and we need new institutions, new standards.
- rightbyte 6y ago
  > As long as the public square is privately owned we're going to have problems. There is a roofed mall with like 40 stores where I live where three nurses were protesting shoppers crowding. The mall forced them to stand outside the mall. I mean physical "public squares" are not what they used to be and it is a problem.
exmicrosoldier 6y ago
The first battle of the Second american civil war has happened. Every tech company has to choose a side. Instead of a war over slavery, this is a war over shared reality or personal echo chambers, and most of the tech companies have been fighting against shared reality. Please choose wisely and soon. Unified reality or seperate ones. People are planning to overthrow the government of the country you live in, "in your house".
- kilroy123 6y ago
  This seems very hyperbolic. I honestly think 99% of Americans are too lazy to even show up to the "civil war".
Schnitz 6y ago
Hate speech is not protected speech, it's always been that way, even in the US.
- Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
  Not according to the supreme court. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/06/19/supreme-court-unanimously-reaffirms-there-is-no-hate-speech-exception-to-the-first-amendment/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
- Jabbles 6y ago
  This is incorrect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat... The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that hate speech is legally protected free speech under the First Amendment
  - bitwize 6y ago
    The absolutist interpretation of the First Amendment currently in vogue has only been so since 1969. When Biden restructures the Supreme Court, we'll see how long that lasts. Same with the Second Amendment.
andy_ppp 6y ago
Promotion of violence is NOT part of your free speech rights though. If I go to a bar and start loudly suggesting I’m going to attempt to kill someone, surely the police if they hear about this will step in to find out if the threat is credible. Now if my bar has people discussing murdering people all the time, it’s become my bar that the police are going to close down. Freedom of speech has always been about criticism of government, it’s not a right to be able to say whatever mad illegal stuff pops into your head.
nbm 6y ago
> Why did Twitter allow “Hang Mike Pence” to trend last night? I happened to look at that trend. Nobody that I saw were actually suggesting people do it - they were quoting (or referring to) what was being said by those at the Capitol, and then commenting on it. I don’t see a double standard for those cases, although they did subsequently remove it the trend. Possibly because some people might have been calling for it in the “latest” tab - not a fun place looking at tweets outside the featured tab...
Mikhail_Edoshin 6y ago
The argument "you will find yourself on the other side" is weak. First, it's just a threat in disguise. Second, it's a weak threat because it's hard to realistically imagine Besos or Cook trying to start another Parler. What's happening is just morally wrong. Not because the situation may flip, but because there's a higher moral law to things and what's happening contradicts this law. Even if your side appears to be winning, it's actually losing, because it's losing its soul.
sgt101 6y ago
Isn't this the hidden hand of Adam Smith? If FAANGT doesn't ban/remove the fascists then they face huge commercial pressure - if they do then the commercial pressure (from the other side) is much less. The market is speaking - the CEO's of these companies have decided that the tide has turned and it's in their shareholder's interest to ban. I think this is a terrible way to run society - no company should have the scale or power of these companies, but it turns out that this is what can happen if you run things by a market. To argue that they shouldn't do this is basically arguing against a market economy!
- mikaeluman 6y ago
  I'm not saying Google, Apple and Amazon have broken the law. If Parler sues them, then the courts can decide that. I'm just expressing why I find this disturbing; as you seem to too. In the long run, the market will solve this problem by creating alternatives. It is just a matter of time. I can still express why I think these companies are taking the wrong actions and believe that they have the right to take those decisions. And that there is sensible alternative to a market economy.
- zo1 6y ago
  The market "spoke" by creating the alternatives to Twitter/Reddit/Youtube/etc. The established players are now using their market-share and I guess collusion to basically kick their competitors off the internet and make their functioning more difficult. I think a good analogy might be to call "acceptable speech" a form of "regulation". Traditionally, established large companies are fine with additional regulation because it makes it more costly for small competition to operate and compete with them. Likewise with expecting and making it "the norm" for platforms to police their content and get in to trouble for bad content, they make the operating cost of smaller competitors higher (if those competitors choose to play by the same rules). Right now we're seeing that the smaller competitors are choosing not to play by the same rules, which I think is rightfully making the established companies nervous. From a company perspective it makes them worry about their market share. And also from a personal perspective, the individuals inside those companies worry that the alternatives will allow movements that they don't like to grow.
Faark 6y ago
I really don't like the term "coordinated" here. Seems to imply intent, and maybe a powerful actor pulling the strings. To me the situation feels a lot more like 4 friends sitting together... friend1: hey, you still owe me money, pay me back! friend2: huh yeah me as well! friend3: me as well and planned to pay me back tomorrow. will you even have enough left? better dow it now! Even with this just happening organically on the spur of the moment, triggered by his own behavior, it would be easy for friend4 to feel like there was an orchestrated setup...
wrsh07 6y ago
I think there's a useful divide between "what should a platform allow" vs "what should an app store allow" vs "what should fundamental infrastructure for the web allow" While I think Apple and Google are within their rights to remove an entry point to an app that has incited violence over the past week, I'm not sure I feel the same about Amazon / aws (or GCP if it had been hosted on Google). If you remove Facebook from the app store, we could all still access the web frontend, just not the app. Banning a site from ec2, though, feels more like Cloudflare removing ddos protection. I don't know what was on parler. I don't know how bad it was. My thesis, though (and I think stratechery/Ben Thompson would agree), is that Amazon should require a much higher bar before banning something from ec2 than either Apple or Google do. Fwiw, I don't think this is "coordinated" so much as big companies responding simultaneously to potential (or already ignited) PR fires
timeon 6y ago
Imagine there are countries in developed world where there is no unlimited free speech. Where Nazism is banned. And yet rarely anyone will find himself 'on the other side of the double standard'. It is even rare for proper neo-nazis. Free speech is just utopia.
jmull 6y ago
It looks like “Hang Mike Pence” trended shortly and then disappeared. That sounds like a consistent standard, and effective moderation, does it not? Twitter was willing and able to shut down a credible, widespread incitement to violence. Parler was not.
MichaelMoser123 6y ago
the world seems to have changed, none could have imagined a situation like this some ten years ago; what is happening now would be equivalent to myspace stopping facebook by forcing isp's to cut them off the line. If looks as if the big companies forgot where they came from.

sneak 6y ago

Americans seem to feel much the same way about censorship these days as they do about their own personal privacy: "It doesn't affect me or my life/views presently, so I don't see a reason to object to it." - The "I have nothing to hide" sort of thing.

rmrfstar 6y ago
Most Americans are actively hostile to privacy, not just ambivalent. If you tell them, "Alice doesn't carry a cellphone, because she thinks it shares her real time location with advertisers, hedge funds, private investigators, debt collectors, bounty hunters, and the government," most will conclude that (a) Alice is mentally ill, or (b) Alice is a degenerate criminal. Either way, Alice needs to be investigated. That means the state needs to interview her colleagues and neighbors, and subpoena her bank and medical records.
- sneak 6y ago
  I don't believe that this is true.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

Someone 6y ago

For me, closing down “bad enough” actors is a good thing, but the big question is “Who’s going to decide who are those, and what’s ‘bad enough’?”. I don’t think the answer to that should be “a few people at large companies that are, at best, kept at bay by rich people buying or selling the company’s shares” (their customers have too little choice to exert much pressure. I also don’t see protests at BigCo’s headquarters or angry mobs storming BigCo HQ to force them to change course (other ways to exert pressure), but maybe I’m not looking far enough into the future) These large companies act as judge, jury and executioner, and don’t allow appeals.

cafed00d 6y ago

> Why did Twitter allow “Hang Mike Pence” to trend last night? Where are the suspensions and permanent bans? Thus is a brilliantly good question! My big takeaway from reading Twitter’s blog behind Trump’s suspension is that the words of a tweet themselves are not particularly deterministic of policy violation or enforcement. What seems to be the clincher is the _interpretation_ and their _real world effect_. For example, Trump’s recent tweets taken collectively _and_ the effect of his supporters’ March on the capitol were starkly different than the “hang mike pence” or the women’s March (for example’s sake) that happened a few years ago on the capitol. In both the latter cases, there is no credible threat of real world violence. Similarly, “Hang Mike Pence” tweets have no predictable certainty to cause any harm to Mike Pence or anyone in the political community the same way Trump’s tweets about skipping Biden’s inauguration (and therefore being a good target to attack by his supporters etc etc), OTHOH, are. Twitter’s blog obviously has more context and better explanation. What I’m trying to say is that, it seems like _interpretation_ of tweets & _determination of real world effects_ is what leads to policy enforcement. Of course, that is susceptible to human judgment and error. But I don’t think it rooted in coordinated outright bias against conservative voices.

paulddraper 6y ago

"Hang Mike Pence" was temporary. But there are plenty of other examples. I'm old enough to remember Kathy Griffin and Trump's severed head. Or "If they even TRY to replace RBG we burn the entire fucking thing down". https://twitter.com/rezaaslan/status/1307107507131875330 https://twitter.com/rezaaslan/status/1307107507131875330 How is that not the same? Regardless of whether there policy should or shouldn't be to remove violence, the bias in how they apply it is very clear. EDIT: Feel free to downvote. Don't hold back.

BenTheElder 6y ago

Without commenting on the rest ... > Then there is the always present double standard. Why did Twitter allow “Hang Mike Pence” to trend last night? Where are the suspensions and permanent bans? Actually, they intervened and stopped it. https://www.newsweek.com/twitter-stops-hang-mike-pence-trending-1560253 https://www.newsweek.com/twitter-stops-hang-mike-pence-trend... Also note: > Journalist Yashar Ali tweeted a screenshot of the topic trending, indicating that the phrase had been tweeted over 14,000 times. Ali noted that most people were "quot[ing] some of the insurrectionists" at the Capitol, rather than making direct threats against Pence. He wrote that the phrase "shouldn't be allowed to trend." See also despite the URL: https://nypost.com/2021/01/09/twitter-allows-hang-mike-pence-to-trend-hours-after-trump-ban/ https://nypost.com/2021/01/09/twitter-allows-hang-mike-pence... > “We blocked the phrase and other variations of it from trending. We want trends to promote healthy discussions on Twitter,” a company spokesperson told The Post. “There are Rules for trends — if we identify accounts that violate these rules, we’ll take enforcement action.”

8note 6y ago

I'm not clear how twitter shows a double standard? It's the trump folks who were chanting to hang mike pence, and their leader, trump, has been banned. I guess the double standard that the right wingers don't get banned soon enough? Or that wealthy stars don't get banned soon enough? Trump should have been banned before becoming president even

throwawaysea 6y ago
If you take a look at https://www.allsides.com/blog/capitol-hill-breach-riot-coverage-demonstrates-media-bias https://www.allsides.com/blog/capitol-hill-breach-riot-cover..., you'll see a deep analysis of a double standard in how media covered this riot versus other such events (including past riots at the capitol!). A significant number of riots took place in 2020, and this is true even in DC. For example just take a look at the photos and videos in https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/31/fires-light-up-washington-dc-on-third-night-of-george-floyd-protests https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/31/fires-light-..., which shows damage on a far greater scale than this recent capitol riot. Lots of people and organizations on Twitter or Facebook had organized these events, which included looting, property damage, vandalism, assaults, arson, and more. Many politicians, such as AOC, condoned and even encouraged these events (see https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames/status/1348030442159689736 https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames/status/13480304421596897...). This extends to news media as well, who often mislabeled violent riots as "peaceful protests" and excused them or covered them in a sympathetic way (see https://dailycaller.com/2021/01/07/media-downplays-blm-antics-riots-change-tune-trump-capitol-riot https://dailycaller.com/2021/01/07/media-downplays-blm-antic... or https://nypost.com/2021/01/08/rage-at-capitol-assault-makes-excuses-for-summer-riots-all-the-more-disgraceful https://nypost.com/2021/01/08/rage-at-capitol-assault-makes-...). All these actors were inciting violence, certainly to the standard Twitter uses to judge them (https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension.html https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...). These other past events included much more significant economic damage in the billions and many more deaths than the capitol riot. So why are all those people and organizations allowed to continue using their social media accounts? Why weren't those same participants, organizes, enablers, and sympathizers criticized just as heavily by politicians, news media, social media, and others? This is a clear double standard, where criminality and violence is permitted if those who are in control of these platforms (news outlets, tech companies) agree with your cause and share your ideology.

sorethescore 6y ago

It's not that complicated, when you incite violent insurrection against the government and people follow through with it, you get shut down. It's not like any of these platforms had a choice given Trump's violent rhetoric and history of lying.

throwawaysea 6y ago
Can you quote specific rhetoric which was violent? Twitter did not name a single tweet or written or spoken sentence from Trump where he advocated for violence in their blog post where they announced the ban (https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension.html https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...). I do agree Trump has a huge history of lying, and was continuing to lie with his claims about the election. However, I find the claim that Trump "incited" the riot to be unfounded and am shocked to see everyone use that word so casually. If and when this goes to court, I guarantee they will not be able to prove that Trump incited a violent riot simply because the evidence does not support it. Remember, there were tens of thousands of attendees in DC in support of Trump, across several separate events. To my knowledge, all these events had applied for permits and were granted them, allowing the city and other agencies (like National Park Service) to plan their response and presence. At the capitol, a few hundred people came onto the capitol grounds. Of those, an even smaller subset engaged in theft, vandalism, and other violence. But the vast majority of people that came to DC this last week for Trump did not engage in violence. So how can it be claimed that Trump incited violence? He made false claims about the election, and a small number of people took those claims and used it as justification for criminality. But to me that seems like the fault of those who participated and not really a justification for banning Trump.
- oivey 6y ago
  The percentage of people who became rioters is irrelevant. Trump talked about marching to the Capitol building and “showing strength” at the rally. His employee, Giuliani, was making comments about hand to hand combat at the rally. Before the rally, he commented that it was going to be a wild day. During the riot, he praised the rioters by referring to them fondly as special people. I don’t think even this rundown does complete justice as to what Trump did. In the context of a criminal trial, Trump could claim ignorance of what his actions meant. I think that would be a hard sell considering he’s a professional politician and the President of the United States. In the context of an impeachment trial, I don’t think claims of ignorance could hold. Even allowing it, that level of cluelessness and recklessness still qualifies as high crimes and misdemeanors.

hans1729 6y ago

While I completely get the sentiment: I missed these complaints when platforms didn't grant ISIS free reign to spread their propaganda. Dealing in absolutes doesn't do the nuanced systems governing our reality justice, you should know that. To illustrate: absolutely free speech would imply the right to harmfully agitate kids for whatever your cause is. Does it seem obvious that this is a bad idea? Then just extrapolate "kids are easy to manipulate" to "adults are mostly just older kids". And btw, I know what it's like to be on the other side. That doesn't justify turning a blind eye to the madness that comes with absolute free speech. Either you accept that a line has to be drawn somewhere, or you accept every consequence of absolute free speech. Which, imo, would be a terrible idea with 7 billion people just waiting to be gamed through their fears. Don't get me wrong, I don't consider what we're seeing here unproblematic at all. I just don't consider absolute free speech to be unproblematic either, quite the opposite.

rimliu 6y ago
Ah yes, think about the children.
- hans1729 6y ago
  Oh please, I was illustrating a point. The wide majority of people/"civilians" aren't capable to tell the difference between actual information and propaganda, and since the propaganda is designed to be more appealing, guess which one wins out - the fair player or the one that agitates? This isn't rocket science, you're just turning a blind eye to the consequences as if that helps your case.
throwaway80332 6y ago
I'm trying to collect a list evidence on the criminal Trump to have something you can quickly point when refuting confused idiot relatives who support him, but I have not been able to follow everything that has been happening for the past few days, for various reasons. Would you please provide a link to ex-president Trump inciting violence like ISIS? Lesser forms of agitation for violence is fine too.

jrumbut 6y ago

As long as the public square is privately owned we're going to have problems. I think it's great these companies have stopped supporting Parler. The problem is that so much power has devolved to these entirely unaccountable organizations that it feels like an infringement of free speech. We are going to need a stable place for important discourse and that will require carefully designed governance structures, transparency, and independence that no ad supported company can possibly provide.

gonzo41 6y ago
Or, don't have any structure and let people host their own little public square themselves. Little mom and pop nazi/terrorist boards on smaller providers all over the web. Twitter is kinda great that I can post direct to the whole world. But that requires a bit of discipline. As an affect I somewhat think through what I'm posting. Much like what we all try to do here. Everyone around here pines for the older internet. And one of the ways to get it back is to have standards, that are visible and enforced on larger platforms so people know, that speech has consequences. And if people want to do their seditious terrorist thing. They can host it themselves and manage all the risk. No public square has every been as big as some of these sites. So maybe the metaphor doesn't work.
- jrumbut 6y ago
  I don't know about that, I don't remember any real consequences or standards on the early Internet. When it was a technological novelty there weren't organized and well funded efforts to posting in bad faith. I guess it depends how early you're talking about. We're in new territory here,and we need new institutions, new standards.
rightbyte 6y ago
> As long as the public square is privately owned we're going to have problems. There is a roofed mall with like 40 stores where I live where three nurses were protesting shoppers crowding. The mall forced them to stand outside the mall. I mean physical "public squares" are not what they used to be and it is a problem.

exmicrosoldier 6y ago

The first battle of the Second american civil war has happened. Every tech company has to choose a side. Instead of a war over slavery, this is a war over shared reality or personal echo chambers, and most of the tech companies have been fighting against shared reality. Please choose wisely and soon. Unified reality or seperate ones. People are planning to overthrow the government of the country you live in, "in your house".

kilroy123 6y ago
This seems very hyperbolic. I honestly think 99% of Americans are too lazy to even show up to the "civil war".

Schnitz 6y ago

Hate speech is not protected speech, it's always been that way, even in the US.

Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
Not according to the supreme court. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/06/19/supreme-court-unanimously-reaffirms-there-is-no-hate-speech-exception-to-the-first-amendment/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
Jabbles 6y ago
This is incorrect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat... The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that hate speech is legally protected free speech under the First Amendment
- bitwize 6y ago
  The absolutist interpretation of the First Amendment currently in vogue has only been so since 1969. When Biden restructures the Supreme Court, we'll see how long that lasts. Same with the Second Amendment.

andy_ppp 6y ago

Promotion of violence is NOT part of your free speech rights though. If I go to a bar and start loudly suggesting I’m going to attempt to kill someone, surely the police if they hear about this will step in to find out if the threat is credible. Now if my bar has people discussing murdering people all the time, it’s become my bar that the police are going to close down. Freedom of speech has always been about criticism of government, it’s not a right to be able to say whatever mad illegal stuff pops into your head.

nbm 6y ago

> Why did Twitter allow “Hang Mike Pence” to trend last night? I happened to look at that trend. Nobody that I saw were actually suggesting people do it - they were quoting (or referring to) what was being said by those at the Capitol, and then commenting on it. I don’t see a double standard for those cases, although they did subsequently remove it the trend. Possibly because some people might have been calling for it in the “latest” tab - not a fun place looking at tweets outside the featured tab...

Mikhail_Edoshin 6y ago

The argument "you will find yourself on the other side" is weak. First, it's just a threat in disguise. Second, it's a weak threat because it's hard to realistically imagine Besos or Cook trying to start another Parler. What's happening is just morally wrong. Not because the situation may flip, but because there's a higher moral law to things and what's happening contradicts this law. Even if your side appears to be winning, it's actually losing, because it's losing its soul.

sgt101 6y ago

Isn't this the hidden hand of Adam Smith? If FAANGT doesn't ban/remove the fascists then they face huge commercial pressure - if they do then the commercial pressure (from the other side) is much less. The market is speaking - the CEO's of these companies have decided that the tide has turned and it's in their shareholder's interest to ban. I think this is a terrible way to run society - no company should have the scale or power of these companies, but it turns out that this is what can happen if you run things by a market. To argue that they shouldn't do this is basically arguing against a market economy!

mikaeluman 6y ago
I'm not saying Google, Apple and Amazon have broken the law. If Parler sues them, then the courts can decide that. I'm just expressing why I find this disturbing; as you seem to too. In the long run, the market will solve this problem by creating alternatives. It is just a matter of time. I can still express why I think these companies are taking the wrong actions and believe that they have the right to take those decisions. And that there is sensible alternative to a market economy.
zo1 6y ago
The market "spoke" by creating the alternatives to Twitter/Reddit/Youtube/etc. The established players are now using their market-share and I guess collusion to basically kick their competitors off the internet and make their functioning more difficult. I think a good analogy might be to call "acceptable speech" a form of "regulation". Traditionally, established large companies are fine with additional regulation because it makes it more costly for small competition to operate and compete with them. Likewise with expecting and making it "the norm" for platforms to police their content and get in to trouble for bad content, they make the operating cost of smaller competitors higher (if those competitors choose to play by the same rules). Right now we're seeing that the smaller competitors are choosing not to play by the same rules, which I think is rightfully making the established companies nervous. From a company perspective it makes them worry about their market share. And also from a personal perspective, the individuals inside those companies worry that the alternatives will allow movements that they don't like to grow.

Faark 6y ago

I really don't like the term "coordinated" here. Seems to imply intent, and maybe a powerful actor pulling the strings. To me the situation feels a lot more like 4 friends sitting together... friend1: hey, you still owe me money, pay me back! friend2: huh yeah me as well! friend3: me as well and planned to pay me back tomorrow. will you even have enough left? better dow it now! Even with this just happening organically on the spur of the moment, triggered by his own behavior, it would be easy for friend4 to feel like there was an orchestrated setup...

wrsh07 6y ago

I think there's a useful divide between "what should a platform allow" vs "what should an app store allow" vs "what should fundamental infrastructure for the web allow" While I think Apple and Google are within their rights to remove an entry point to an app that has incited violence over the past week, I'm not sure I feel the same about Amazon / aws (or GCP if it had been hosted on Google). If you remove Facebook from the app store, we could all still access the web frontend, just not the app. Banning a site from ec2, though, feels more like Cloudflare removing ddos protection. I don't know what was on parler. I don't know how bad it was. My thesis, though (and I think stratechery/Ben Thompson would agree), is that Amazon should require a much higher bar before banning something from ec2 than either Apple or Google do. Fwiw, I don't think this is "coordinated" so much as big companies responding simultaneously to potential (or already ignited) PR fires

timeon 6y ago

Imagine there are countries in developed world where there is no unlimited free speech. Where Nazism is banned. And yet rarely anyone will find himself 'on the other side of the double standard'. It is even rare for proper neo-nazis. Free speech is just utopia.

jmull 6y ago

It looks like “Hang Mike Pence” trended shortly and then disappeared. That sounds like a consistent standard, and effective moderation, does it not? Twitter was willing and able to shut down a credible, widespread incitement to violence. Parler was not.

MichaelMoser123 6y ago

the world seems to have changed, none could have imagined a situation like this some ten years ago; what is happening now would be equivalent to myspace stopping facebook by forcing isp's to cut them off the line. If looks as if the big companies forgot where they came from.