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Ron Paul blocked from posting on Facebook
- wallawe 6y agoFor anyone who thought this was just about the recent events, you now know have your answer. It is undoubtedly a political war going on, driven by leftists at Big Tech.
- RoyTyrell 6y agoWhere's your proof of that? Do you think Zuckerberg is a zealous leftist?
- wallawe 6y agoIt's a continuation of what we've seen by big tech over the past several months and years. You've got Kathy Griffin tweeting photos a decapitated Trump head (https://twitter.com/kathygriffin/status/1323893513226870786 https://twitter.com/kathygriffin/status/1323893513226870786) which gets no penalty or ban. This isn't glorifying violence? Yet, people on the right are being banned daily without explanation for things much less egregious. EDIT: if you disagree, maybe try having a conversation instead of downvoting.
- quickthrowman 6y agoKathy Griffin was suspended from Twitter for that, please find a better example.
- wallawe 6y agoThis is from November 4, 2020 right after the election. She might have been suspended originally in 2017, but wasn't this time and furthermore wasn't banned for repeated breaking of the rules. You can click on the link and still see the tweet. Imagine if Trump had tweeted a photo of any Democrat's decapitated head, do you think the reaction would have been the same?
- netsharc 6y agoHuh, but don't you see the difference, one of the president, the other just a semi-obnoxious C-class celeb...
- wallawe 6y agoNo, the twitter rules don't make caveats for different positions in society. They are blanket rules that should apply to everyone equally but are not. That's the entire point I'm making.
- justin66 6y ago> No, the twitter rules don't make caveats for different positions in society. They do, though. (or rather, they did... I honestly have no idea what state their rules are in today, but they've changed some things) It's the only reason Trump was allowed to stay on Twitter as long as he was, and Twitter were transparent about that. [1] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/world-leaders-and-twitter.html https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/world-lea...
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoThen Kathy Griffin should have been booted faster than Trump, not slower. So the data doesn't fit your explanation.
- justin66 6y agoResponded to wrong comment? (I have no opinion on what you’re talking about)
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoTrump is in a position in society that Kathy Griffin is not. So Trump could tweet outside the rules and not have them removed, but Kathy Griffin should not be able to. That's what I think you meant when you said > It's the only reason Trump was allowed to stay on Twitter as long as he was But here we have the data point of Kathy Griffin's tweet staying up while Trump's tweets are taken down and blocked. So I'm saying that datapoint, that tweet by Kathy Griffin staying up, does not fit your "Twitter lets leaders get away with more" explanation. That tweet from Kathy Griffin should have been removed faster than Trump's tweets, but it's still there.
- aeternum 6y agoWe can all choose to stop using facebook, instagram, and whatsapp and their power evaporates. In contrast we cannot choose to stop using the US government. Would you really prefer to have the US government decide what can and cannot be censored?
- Udik 6y ago> Would you really prefer to have the US government decide what can and cannot be censored? Seems fair- after all it is voted by all citizens, not just by the ones that make more noise. Also, there are the citizens' representatives in the parliament, who openly discuss issues and try to establish widely agreed-upon rules.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoSeems completely against the rules. If there's anything the First Amendment applies to, it's the government limiting speech.
- Udik 6y agoFair as well, but then you have to decide: it's either the democratically elected government that sets the boundaries of the free speech, or it's private monopolies that do the same, without anyone's oversight. For some reason (but most probably just because there is a temporary alignment between them and the choices of those monopolies) most US users of HN seem to be fine with censors of free speech being private, undemocratic entities.
- trianglem 6y agoTrump has received many warnings. Kathy Griffin was forced to delete those and she complied and hasn’t erred since.
- wrycoder 6y agoShe re-posted the image in a tweet on 06Jan. Twitter deleted it because it violated their rules.
- filoeleven 6y agoSee wallawe’s link above. That was on Nov 4 and is still live.
- sarcasmatwork 6y agoFree speech in the form of non-violent speech is not free on the various platforms as they say they are. This is mostly targeted at users with a larger following... As as example if you have a diff opinion, or say something then you might get suspended or banned. Even so when others on the platform are more violent, and encouraging violent acts. Look at twitter accounts of Iran, China, and all the accounts for antifa for example. They use twitter to cause and incite violence, yet they remain. A few come to mind phrases come to mind that may get you banned on FB/Twitter: “#Hydroxychloroquine is a safe drug. "Eric Ciaramella"
- michannne 6y agoIt boils down to this. Left or right is irrelevant, these companies will remove you if you say something they don't want you to say, there's no additional complexity that needs to be analyzed. Any judgement that one needs to make on how to feel about the censoring they do can be made on that simple rule alone. I'm amazed the discussions about censorship have been muddied to this extent where even the past relationships of people have been scrutinized to determine if they were deserving enough of a ban. None of that matters - did you say something they did not want specifically _you_ (the individual) to say at this time? Then they will decide to ban/suspend/remove you. Now how you feel about that is how you feel but there's no reason to even think "Well they let this person say this!", because these companies are not in the business of free speech. They can turn on a dime tomorrow and start banning Antifa members left and right and it still wouldn't change their bottom line.
- _red 6y agoThe corporate party (ie mainstream D's and R's + MSM + BigTech) seems completely desperate. Perhaps its just the quality of blackmail the CCP has on them....
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoI find it very hard in the current situation to view "mainstream D's and R's" as part of any cohesive entity.
- metalliqaz 6y agoPeople don't seem to understand how close we are to an unrecoverable fall into fascism. This is not cultural censorship. Facebook is finally waking up to the reality that lies about our elections are well on their way to starting a civil war. With that display on the 6th, that rhetoric is now over the line. They let it go, right up until the consequences (as heinous as they are predictable) were clear.
- admiralspoo 6y agoGoogle and Facebook already have documented ability to rig elections, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_manipulation_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_manipulation_eff... Politicians, including the incoming regime, are at their mercy and ought to be careful not to step on any toes.
- metalliqaz 6y agoThey don't seem to be shy about criticizing big tech at all.
- the_drunkard 6y ago> lies about our elections for the past 4 years the media spun a narrative of Russian collusion, one that largely proved to be false and filled with fabricated stories. Nanci Pelosi tweet May 2017: Our election was hijacked. There is no question. Congress has a duty to #ProtectOurDemocracy & #FollowTheFacts. https://twitter.com/speakerpelosi/status/864522009048494080?lang=en https://twitter.com/speakerpelosi/status/864522009048494080?...
- hehehaha 6y agoYou mean the investigation that the Trump administration actively obstructed?
- whateveracct 6y agowonder why this is downvoted it's pretty fact-based and in plain sight probably normal HN bias?
- Kattywumpus 6y agoWe really need a better vocabulary for talking about this sort of thing than the 20th century terms of fascism, communism, and liberalism. I don't have the words yet, but we need to start inventing them. We are in a new era, and our disasters won't look like theirs. People who shrug away this kind of censorship with the magic words "private company" are in a dangerous form of denial.
- metalliqaz 6y ago... you say, as the OP links to a fully accessible social media post by Ron Paul. From Techdirt: Moderation is a platform/service owner or operator saying “we don’t do that here”. Personal discretion is an individual telling themselves “I won’t do that here”. Editorial discretion is an editor saying “we won’t print that here”, either to themselves or to a writer. Censorship is someone saying “you won’t do that anywhere” alongside threats or actions meant to suppress speech.
- Kattywumpus 6y agoAs I pointed out above, this is really 20th century thinking. Social media allows for a kind of mob behavior that has shown itself antithetical to the kind of market liberalism most of our current assumptions are based on. Or did you not notice that Parler and its hundreds of thousands of users had literally been systematically erased from the internet yesterday by hounding their service providers? It's bizarre to see the liberal left I grew up with now defending a kind of insane market fundamentalism and corporate control of the commons of free speech without even blinking at the contradiction. I think that liberal left I grew up with is dead. We need a name for what it has become, and where they are taking us.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoHow about "social authoritarian"? Or "non-government authoritarian"? They don't have the power of government behind them, but they manage to be pretty authoritarian without it...
- deleted 6y ago
- waynesonfire 6y agowhy was he blocked?
- Gibbon1 6y agoSedition
- the_drunkard 6y ago> Sedition objecting to a state's election process and /or electoral votes is not sedition. in fact, it's been done by Democratic senators after the 2000, 2004, and 2016 elections. this is part of the democratic process. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/opinion/democrat-republican-electoral-votes.html#commentsContainer https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/opinion/democrat-republic...
- viro 6y agoduring an active insurrection it is. or did you miss the planned attacks on the 17th
- the_drunkard 6y ago> during an active insurrection it is. or did you miss the planned attacks on the 17th sorry, but participating in the democratic process is not sedition. and i would hope we never allow mobs to dictate our participation in the democratic process. whether it involves tallying (or objecting to) electoral votes or confirming a supreme court justice.
- whateveracct 6y agoright but the mob's goal was to dictate our democratic processes. their entire stated goal was to get Trump confirmed as President despite the vote etc
- 6y ago
- b-g-m 6y agoI think our election system would be improved with instant-run-off voting (aka alternate vote), election holidays, and blockchain voting - with citizen blockchains. People counting paper ballots is not bullet-proof. Please don’t cancel my life and career for trusting the integrity of the math behind cryptographic hashing more than black box voting machines.
- Craighead 6y agobut the black boxes just count the paper ballots nobody is cancelling you for being wrong
- nradov 6y agoThe key distribution and management problems make blockchain voting totally unworkable.
- mariusor 6y agoI think pretty soon we'll see a movement for national ids to have an electronic component to them, which would be useful exactly in these kinds of situations.
- andrewmcwatters 6y agoNo you won’t, and it’s exactly why we use the social security system for identification even though it is explicitly stated to not be used as such: Americans consistently shot down attempts to identify its own citizens. Any suggestion otherwise ignores history and why we use what we use today.
- mariusor 6y agoI wasn't thinking about the US when I wrote that to be honest.
- tanseydavid 6y agoI sure hope that this gets rescinded as a mistake. But if it doesn't I won't be shocked.
- rabeener 6y agoAs a libertarian, he accepts that Facebook has every right to do this. Right?
- Proven 6y agoOf course he does. I do too and I've always said that in comments here. That's how I racked up 100 plus downvotes from socialists.
- mark_l_watson 6y agoHe is anti-war and has interfered with corporate profits. The crazy world that we live in right now unfortunately is an opportunity for evil organizations and people to strip away yet more freedom. I feel like I can almost always personally do the right thing in life, take actions that I later will feel good about. Elite monied interests apparently don’t have any sort of social consciousness or conscience.
- zucker42 6y agoHere are two articles about this: https://fee.org/articles/facebook-suspends-ron-paul-following-column-criticizing-big-tech-censorship/ https://fee.org/articles/facebook-suspends-ron-paul-followin... https://reason.com/2021/01/11/ron-paul-says-hes-been-locked-out-of-facebook https://reason.com/2021/01/11/ron-paul-says-hes-been-locked-...
- techsin101 6y agoSo censorship is cool now?! At all levels: Godaddy, Cloudflare, AWS, Twitter/Reddit... anyone should just go and ban everything unpopular? So much for "I Will Defend to the Death Your Right to Say It." Very much of the following situation... First they came for ...Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
- erichocean 6y ago"Reward your friends and punish your enemies" shall be the whole of the law.
- RickJWagner 6y agoIt's time to re-evaluate restrictions on Big Tech. This is getting scary.
- exabrial 6y agoRon Paul authored the Justice for Breonna Taylor Act. He's always been anti war, anti large government, anti militarized police. Facebook knows regulation is on the horizon. They also know their best bet to stay alive is to kiss up to the new administration and turn the issue into a partisan one. By banning political competitors they're buying themselves four more years of time.
- systemBuilder 6y agoGuys you just have too much faith in AI. AI is NOT all that smart. They probably bloced Ron Paul for the same reason they blocked this ad : https://nypost.com/2020/10/07/facebook-blocks-canadian-onion-ad-for-being-overtly-sexual/ https://nypost.com/2020/10/07/facebook-blocks-canadian-onion...