It is an interesting bit of etymology, isn't it?
The quote doesn't really make sense if you use a traditional definition of "witch hunt", because the phrase comes from actual historic trials where the charge was something like "consorting with demons". The penalty was often death, even though people don't actually consort with demons in the real world.
There were no witches, of course, and the underlying causes of real witch hunts are a matter of speculation. Some people say it was a way to get rid of the elderly, some people say that ergot poisoning could have played a role, some people say that mobs are violent and irrational by nature. But everybody who was tried in a historical "witch hunt" was innocent.
Still, with the advent of the internet, it's taken on a new meaning. Today, "witch hunt" means something like "piling on". The target may or may not be guilty, but the phrase implies that their alleged guilt doesn't necessarily merit the amount of attention that they are getting.
It might be interesting to investigate when that change in meaning happened, and why.
> "piling on"
I don't think it's used in that context at all. There doesn't need to be more than one "witch hunter" for something to be called a witch hunt.
> The target may or may not be guilty, but the phrase implies that their alleged guilt doesn't necessarily merit the amount of attention that they are getting.
This is correct.
> Today, "witch hunt" means something like "piling on".
And historically, it often meant moral panic and mass hysteria. Compared to another comment, that's _all_ it means to me when applied nowadays. The mainstream reception of the threat of witchcraft is what's changed. You might see parallels with (theoretical) homosexual conversion in parts of the US, I suppose.
Speculating on historical drivers: coercive confession existed then as it does now. Some law-enforcement officers' careers depended on confessions. After 35,000 to 100,000 executions I bet the technique was pretty smooth.
Lol, I love that quote ("your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches"). It's very true, and not the least bit surprising. The only reason for free-speech focused social media to be a thing is because it is a pushback against bans and restrictions from Facebook and Twitter. But look who these platforms ban: for all the (in my opinion, laughable) talk of how these platforms are "biased against conservatives", last time I checked Twitter wasn't banning anyone for saying the minimum wage reduces overall employment, or that we should return to the gold standard, or that marriage should be reserved for unions of 1 man and 1 woman. They ban people for inciting violence, for repeating provable falsehoods over and over which can lead to violence, for targeted harassment. So your "free speech social media" is primarily for people who want incite violence, or lie over and over to convince people of provable falsehoods, or to harass others.
These platforms absolutely do ban or demonetize people for these reasons. Dennis Prager's video on the Ten Commandments was demonetized and the reason given? "It contains the word 'kill'. Dangerous for children."
They have extremely rigid standards for conservatives and very loose standards for everybody else. That's a real thing and it's something you don't see until you are one of those whose views are being targeted.
Ultimately, I predict that conservative discourse will take a similar path to MP3s: first, it will be targeted by the big powers-that-be. Next, technologies will appear that make it impossible to police or shut down. Finally, corporate America will realize that it's better to work with people than fight them and the discourse will be brought back into the fold and corporations will once again make money off of it.
>”They have extremely rigid standards for people of one viewpoint and very loose standards for people of another.”
It only seems that way to you because you’re seeing only one side getting arbitrarily suspended.
My left-leaning Twitter feed has for years been regularly full of people complaining about how Twitter censors black women, activists, feminists and sex workers, while not doing enough against white supremacists, etc.
Probably the truth is that the standards are just unevenly rigid one day, loose the other, depending on who catches their attention. Policing hundreds of millions of active users is nearly impossible, and adding automated systems increases the risk of false positives.
No doubt that's true on the level of the average user like you and me. What we see for prominent conservatives, however, feels very unfair to me. Perhaps prominent members of other groups are targeted similarly--it wouldn't surprise me.
To be honest, every single time I dig in to a conservative complaining "they are singling me out for my views!!" I do more research and find that it is 99% bullshit. Not 100% bullshit mind you, because it's that 1% that is nominally true so they can leave out the rest of the context.
Here is a more complete discussion of Prager's charges of censorship, and in my opinion they are laughable: https://reason.com/2019/07/18/dennis-prager-who-boasts-1-billion-video-views-a-year-decries-youtube-censorship/ https://reason.com/2019/07/18/dennis-prager-who-boasts-1-bil...
> "Respectfully, senator, that's not right," replied Bhatia, explaining that those videos contained mature topics—murder, rape, etc. He reiterated that they are still visible to the "98.5 percent" of YouTube users who do not opt for restricted mode.
Who would have thought that another conservative story about censorship would turn out to be bullshit.
It’s not like the people parroting them have the impetuous to check though, it’s much easier and more comfortable to drone on about “YouTube blocking a video about the 10 commandments” over and over until it becomes your reality, where you’re persecuted.
Are you referring to Donald Trump?
Multiple studies have shown that Facebook and twitter do not censor conservatives. This has been well established and anyone who argues otherwise is either ignorant or arguing from a position of bad faith.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/10/two-new-studies-show-again-that-facebook-doesnt-censor-conservatives/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/10/two-new-studies-show-again...
> What we see for prominent conservatives, however, feels very unfair to me
I find this extremely ironic given that the slogan "facts don't care about your feelings" is attributed to conservatives in particular
> These platforms absolutely do ban or demonetize people for these reasons. Dennis Prager's video on the Ten Commandments was demonetized and the reason given? "It contains the word 'kill'. Dangerous for children."
That's unlikely due to a anti-conservative bias though. YouTube is notorious for their aggressive demonetisation of content.
In any event, there is a definite difference between demonetisation and censorship. Nobody is obligated to pay you for telling them what you think .
Well that's what you say but that's not true, to be marked as domonetisatised also lowers your view counts since the video stops showing up, it also might not show for subscribers.
Youtube is also able to monetize your video, but since people have reported seeing adds on demonetized videos, you just don't get the money.
> That's unlikely due to a anti-conservative bias though.
Can you point me out to left leaning content that gets demonetized constantly so I could compare with the right leaning one. I've not seen this happen in people I've subscribed and would like to see if this claim has any merit.
I don’t know this person’s political stance, but I can’t help but be reminded of this story. A woman shot YouTube staff when her channel was demonetized. I think people who view social media as targeting right wing views are seeing reality very narrowly. Politics don’t appear to be involved with this case.
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/nasim-aghdam-the-youtube-shooting-and-the-anxiety-of-demonetization https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/nasim-ag...
> Well that's what you say but that's not true, to be marked as domonetisatised also lowers your view counts since the video stops showing up, it also might not show for subscribers.
I understand these to be separate issues that get lumped together because Google changed the way their recommendation engine worked to de-emphasise the importance of subscriptions around the same time as advertisers started to care about where their ads played. Happy to be proved wrong, but I had a quick look around on the internet and couldn't find a reasonable source to contradict me.
> Youtube is also able to monetize your video, but since people have reported seeing adds on demonetized videos, you just don't get the money.
This might be right, it might be wrong, but it isn't censorship.
> Can you point me out to left leaning content that gets demonetized constantly so I could compare with the right leaning one. I've not seen this happen in people I've subscribed and would like to see if this claim has any merit.
I don't watch much 'left leaning' content, so I can't readily provide an example, but a lot of true crime and history channels are constantly having videos demonetised for touching on non-advertiser friendly themes. I know this because they constantly complain about it!
Demonetization standards are universally fairly strict yet arbitrary, and they are based on the desires of the advertisers. Plus, "YouTube won't pay me for my right-wing propaganda" doesn't make someone a victim.
It does make them a victim if content on the other side is not demonetized at the same rate for the same arbitrary reasons. When that happens, you wind up with well-funded speech that continues on one side, and the other side fades away (which is what partisan individuals would like to see happen to their opposition, but is unhealthy for society).
But the very fact of YouTube's existence ensures that sincere and effective political commentators do not need their speech to be 'well-funded' for it to be easily accessed by millions of people. And the aspects of political speech that do involve significant donor funds like paid TV slots are overwhelmingly not dependent on or supported to any significant extent by YouTube channel revenues.
Sure, demonetization makes YouTube political commentary an unprofitable business model which is unfortunate for people who would like to earn a living from it, but free speech isn't about Google's advertisers owing anybody a living, and if people are only willing to express a particular view for click revenue then that political position has much bigger problems than Google,...
But it’s all about incentives. If they are financially incentivizing one side and not the other, it leads to a dramatic imbalance in the amount and quality of content on either side. If they wanted a healthy ecosystem, they would either even-handedly apply demonetization policies, or demonetize all political content across the board. They are, unsurprisingly, doing neither of these things.
The right have been pushing this narrative that they are being unfairly treated by platforms such as YouTube for some time now (long before the capitol riot). I strongly encourage you to look deeper into this because it is not an accurate picture of what is really going on.
I don't know much about how often conservatives get "demonetized", because I don't follow any.
But I would suspect that the same (but opposite) goes for you, since I constantly hear about non-conservatives getting demonetized.
The problem for conservative outlets is that we have to believe their word that they are being prosecuted.
But their word means absolutely nothing because they have zero credibility since they would be saying these exact same things no matter what.
If you always cry fire, you end up in a situation where people don't care if you are lying or that your house is on fire.
>. Finally, corporate America will realize that it's better to work with people than fight them
Conservative media isn't 'the people' and these tech companies aren't the corporates. The tech companies follow this policy because otherwise their employees walk out.
And the so called conservative media is a very tiny super elite spending a ton of money trying to pervert traditional values into a death cult for personal gain.
Indeed. "Conservatives" have for decades been complaining that Christians are being persecuted... meanwhile the vast majority of the house and senate identifies as Christian and no president has ever identified as any other religion.
To them, it seems, not getting everything they want qualifies as persecution.
While I do feel that conservatives pull out the persecution complex... using that as the entire basis for dismissing arguments seems disingenuous.
The problem for <i>feminist</i> outlets is that we have to believe their word that they are being prosecuted.
>tech companies aren't the corporates. The tech companies follow this policy because otherwise their employees walk out.
We at $bigname law firm aren't corporate, it's just if we hire poc our employees will walk out. -someone before the civil rights era.
I have the argument that the policy implemented are inherently biased against conservative groups. For example, a policy about misgendering would disproportionately affect conservatives because they feel that sex is an immutable characteristic.
>using that as the entire basis for dismissing arguments seems disingenuous.
You are right. The tech firms could be more transparent about the rules they apply and which ones are violated. The ambiguity is indeed solvable, but considering the state of the world, it seems like a low moral priority to me.
>We at $bigname law firm aren't corporate, it's just if we hire poc our employees will walk out. -someone before the civil rights era.
That's disingenuous. Your comparsions fails in five ways:
1. Its not about who gets hired, its about who is served as a customer
2. The violated rules of these firms are also defined as criminal behavior by law in all of the western world, so to 'serve the customer' you are talking about being an accessory in a crime. Even if public prosecutors don't make a habit of prosecuting companies when they are simply the platform, companies have an obligation to their shareholders to not take unnecessary risks.
3. None of this has anything to do with traditional or conservative values. Both the far-left and far-right have been creating a lot of propaganda suggesting that traditional values include racism, sexism, sedation, anti-semitism, etc.
4. The employees walking out is a realistic problem, because there is barely any supply of death cult members with the intellectual and educational background required to perform the job. I'm sure lots of people work at these tech companies that have traditional values, like a small government and low taxes, or a more family centric focus on life. But at this point those people are referred to as 'traitors' by the same so called conservative media
5. People's skin color isn't a choice. They are born with it. Your views on the other hand are a choice. There is accountability and liability. You can be an anti-semitic person and post a video about how to cook an egg without it being removed from youtube. You just can't express anti-semitic views on somebody else's platform. Not complicated nor an issue.
They didn't ban a former prime minister of Malaysia for stating "Muslims have the right to be angry and kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past". They wouldn't even remove the tweet. This was his response to a French school teacher being beheaded in Paris by a Muslim parent, angry that he was teaching freedom of expression includes freedom to offend.
They didn't ban Kathy Griffith for holding up Trump's decapitated head either. You wouldn't get away with doing that to Biden's head.
Mahathir's tweet was removed.
deleted 6y ago
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I think you are, deliberately or not, leaving out important context (e.g. Twitter did remove the tweet from the Malaysian ex-prime minister), but regardless, even if I fully accept your point that Twitter and FB don't apply their rules fairly, you're still left with the fact that the only people who really need a "free speech" social media platform are folks that are mad that they can't demand the killings of millions or that they can't display fake severed heads. And literally every one of these "free speech" platforms (Parler, Gab, Voat) was immediately turned into a cesspool of conspiratorial rantings, hatred and racism.
Voat was probably my "favorite" of all. Literally the only reason it got any traffic were people were mad they could no longer post to r/fatpeoplehate.
> Lol, I love that quote ("your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches"). It's very true, and not the least bit surprising.
It's not quite true though.
It's what happens when you're the new kid on the block and the incumbents are appointing Witchfinders General to burn the heretics, because then rather than languishing in obscurity as you would otherwise, you get a huge influx of refugees and thousands of them are witches. Then if you let the witches chase off all the other refugees, you reach the undesired end state.
The way around this is to get big enough that most of your users are not witches. So the incumbents can do it already. Just stop having witch hunts. The witches can't take over when all the witches in the whole world are 0.5% of your user base, and other people only leave once the witches take over. It's a stable equilibrium.
But you can also get there another way, which is when the incumbents are hunting witches so hard that 95% of their refugees are innocent people. Then you just sit there and let everybody in, and your percentage of actual witches isn't so high that you're in trouble.
Unless anybody who tries to do that gets canceled before they can get a large enough user base to outnumber the witches.
There is something wrong with that quote - the point of calling things a witch hunt is that witches don't exist and that the people finding 'witches' are harming a community who haven't done anything. The language has drifted away from its meaning there to the point where it doesn't mean anything.
This isn't absolutely literal. Witch-hunt was a word used to describe McCarthyism, for example. And Communists certainly existed and some of them were working for Stalin. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_espionage_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_espionage_in_the_United...).
McCarthyism has a section on its wiki page called "Victims of McCartheyism" and mentions hundreds imprisoned and thousands of people losing jobs. It was hunting a soviet threat to America which didn't actually exist, and doing tremendous damage while doing so. The article you link on the actual spies is listing maybe tens of names.
And under that section are listed names like Dalton Trumbo, who was literally a member of the Communist Party USA, which was effectively a Soviet puppet organization. The Soviet threat absolutely existed, and has been validated by both US counterintelligence records that have been declassified since the Cold War and Soviet records that came to light as well.
None of this is meant to excuse or justify the excesses of McCarthyism, but rather to explain exactly what McCarthyism was. The Hollywood blacklist were, by and large, a group of people who were “deplatformed” for being enthusiastic supporters of Joseph Stalin. That’s not inherently far off from what a lot of people would favor today.
Twitter bans people for misgendering someone. 5 years ago that wasn’t even a word.
Who exactly is the fringe here?
I thought it banned for a lot more than call to violence (and mostlt calls to violence by right-wingers at that), including a number of right wing positions:
Doesn't Twitter ban people who define "man" and "women" in a way other than self identity and use the pronouns appropriate to that identification?
Doesn't it ban people who go on about how insert-minority is intellectually and morally inferior and should be removed from the country?
Try to find citations - original sources, not right-wing bloggers – for those claims. You’ll see that the first does not happen but the latter does when it crosses the line into racism (race is a legally protected category) and genocide, which is a call to violence.
The rules are not hard to stay within. The disturbing part is that many conservatives self-identify with these extremes.
Yet "the left" can openly suggest "killing all white men" and the likes without being banned.
>they wanted a healthy ecosystem, they would either even-handedly apply demonetization policies,
Videos are demonetized because advertisers don't want to be associated with them. You can't just force companies to compensate what they view as an unprofitable position.
>If they are financially incentivizing one side and not the other, it leads to a dramatic imbalance in the amount and quality of content on either side.
We've currently had well over a century of the far left, socialism, receiving almost no corporate or government financial support. Both groups have been openly hostile towards the position, yet it has somehow managed.
The demonetization policy is to serve their advertisers' priorities, not to promote the health of the ecosystem, and advertisers are unwilling to advertise against an enormous variety of content, including that put out by right wing, left wing and entirely mainstream commentators. It's also inconsistent precisely because it's reactive, defensive and not intended as debate moderation or any kind of evaluation of the actual merits of the argument.
And we're talking about an ecosystem for political opinion on a platform with low payouts here: the incentives are supposed to be convincing people of something you believe to be important, and thousands of politically active people are already prepared to donate time communicating with much smaller audiences than can be reached on YouTube. The health of political debate really doesn't depend on the representation of the sorts of opinions people are only willing to voice in return for a $5 CPM.
The first one I’m sure how it’s well known, considering it has 9 retweets. Yes, it should be taken town, but I can see how it might be a little low on Twitter’s priority list considering he’s just some random Scottish dude, not really an “influencer” or anything.
The second one was definitely bad taste, and I’m surprised it didn’t get taken down considering she’s at least famous, but I don’t think that’s actually calling for him to be beheaded, I think it’s a really shitty attempt at being an art piece.
But neither of these are really plotting armed insurrection against a democratically elected government, are they? Not really as vile as spreading word that liberals are baby rapers and calling for their death. It’s like gerrymandering: sure, technically both parties do it, but I only ever here calls to end it from one party, whereas the other does all it can to continue the process, and the scale at which republicans do it is much, much greater.
Dylann Roof, James Alex Fields, Cesar Sayoc, Patrick Crusius. Those are very few of the many, many right wing terrorists this country has produced recently - just the ones I could name off the top of my head. The only examples of left wing terrorist attacks I could find were the SDS and SLA from half a century ago. We don’t have a problem with left wing terrorism. Left wing groups aren’t infiltrating police departments. Sure, there are a few bad actors on the left. But it’s several orders of magnitude different than the right and to say “well both sides do it” is basically just willful ignorance at this point.
Most leftists I interact with want basic healthcare to be covered by tax dollars, living wages, a path to citizenship for immigrants, equal rights, etc. I’ve encountered very few outside of very small little cliques who were actually interested in taking rights away from people or in killing anyone. I was in the WTO protests in Seattle, I have lived in Portland for many years, and now I live in a really red area. The right wingers I encounter(ed, pre-covid) were happy to tell me how they think illegals should be shot, how liberals aren’t really people, how all democrats are pedophiles, how they don’t want (insert minority) living in this community because they’re dirty/criminals/whatever, how they carry a gun at all times in case a black person comes up on them. On and on. Waiting to have a chance to kill a fellow American. This is not something I see from both sides. These are just regular people, not extreme radicals part of some splinter group. This is the run-of-the-mill right wing.
A source for a site that is supposed to be for content too extreme for Twitter has content too extreme for Twitter? Yes, sure, Wikipedia. Every news article posted about Parler from the beginning. The CEO. The court filing after Amazon warned them to implement some moderation policies and they didn’t[0].
Parler was also notorious for banning non-hardcore right-wing opinions, much like how r/conservative is somehow both a “free speech zone” but you aren’t allowed to post dissenting opinions.
Personally, I believe ISIS have a right to believe we all need to live under Sharia law. These wackjobs have a right to believe we all need to live in a fascist state where we can hang gays, Jews, liberals, and dissenters. But I have a right to believe views like that are abhorrent and dangerous and that Amazon and every other host is well within their rights to say, “we prefer social stability, thanks” and I would feel exactly the same about some violent left wing movement (if one existed that wasn’t some boogeyman created by OANN or NewsMax). Twitter removes violent left wing content just as much as it removes violent right wing content. The left just doesn’t bitch about nearly as much, or as loudly. And yes, I’m sure you can cherry-pick a few examples where lefties posted vile shit and it didn’t get removed, then I would cherry-pick some vile shit a right winger posted that didn’t get removed, and we would continue in this fashion indefinitely. It’s hard to moderate content when you have millions of users and millions of bots. No system is going to make everyone happy, but I think calling for the violent death of our democratically elected representatives is over the line, no matter who is making the call, and content like that should be removed. I feel like that’s a pretty sensible line to draw.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/amazoncom-parler/amazon-warned-parler-about-violent-content-before-cutoff-court-filing-idUSL1N2JO274 https://www.reuters.com/article/amazoncom-parler/amazon-warn...
> Would a religion-ist ban really be any more acceptable?
I don't really see religion as any more than personal/group belief; I understand America sees it differently, and privileges religious belief.
Is a religion-based ban more acceptable? yes, race is an immutable characteristic that does not determine or prescribe a persons actions or motivations - "religion" is a systems of belief that absolutely does.
> Neo-Nazis are not targeted under the law for being Neo-Nazis
If the metric for hate speech is guilt-by-association with acts of violence, any ideology that promotes violence is hate speech. Neo-Nazi ideology falls under this category, and I believe "refusing entry" has a lower bar then outright bans on freedom of expression.
> That is in no way comparable to targeting "Muslims"
The Muslim ban was so-called by Trumps opponents. The ban targeted specific countries, and was not an exhaustive list of all Muslim nations.
> The mistake you are making is to conflate the criminal act with the motivation for that act
I'm not sure they are so different. Thought-policing ones own citizens is chilling, but I'm less certain about doing the same to refuse entry - we already filter based on a persons character.