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> Parler will forever be associated with negative connotations. Parler was created so people would be free of Twitter "Censorship". About the only thing Twitte

> Parler will forever be associated with negative connotations. Parler was created so people would be free of Twitter "Censorship". About the only thing Twitter censored was threats of violence or rape, election misinformation, or extremely blatant racism. Their only appeal was to people who found that kind of speech acceptable. If you market primarily to violent and racist people, you are absolutely going to be associated with negative connotations.

bobthechef 5y ago
Who told you that? I know of many cases where accounts were silenced for none of these reasons. Most recently, the Project Veritas guy was banned from Twitter for his "fake account" after posting a video of a CNN technical director describing CNN's role in ousting Trump[0]. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/15/twitter-bans-james-okeefe-of-project-veritas-over-fake-account-policy/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/15/twitter-bans-james-okeefe-...
- sixothree 5y ago
  Was that why Parler was created?
nostromo 5y ago
> About the only thing Twitter censored was threats of violence or rape, election misinformation, or extremely blatant racism. Twitter blocked the NYPost because they didn't approve of their entirely factual journalism.
- kbar13 5y ago
  cannot tell if sarcasm because the NYPost is very much not entirely factual lol
  - bobthechef 5y ago
    Ad hominem is in bad taste. And mind you, the same can be said of the major news outlets (NYTimes, etc).
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - hcurtiss 5y ago
    There's been a lot of validation of the Biden laptop story, which was the impetus for Twitter shutting down NYPost.
    - jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
      There most definitely has not. It remains entirely unsubstantiated, while several other claims in the post story are directly contradicted by ample public records.
      - patwolf 5y ago
        It's not accurate to say it was "entirely unsubstantiated". Other news sources besides the NY Post (most recently the Daily Mail) have claimed it was authentic, and Biden himself hasn't disputed its authenticity. Regardless of the laptop though, there's clearly a double standard in what Twitter will block with or without proof. The Russian bounty program that was widely reported by the Washington Post and others during the election cycle was unsubstantiated, but no effort was made to block it.
      - pwned1 5y ago
        Hunter Biden admitted it was his.
      - treesprite82 5y ago
        The DKIM signature of the "bombshell email" (Vadym Pozharskyi thanking Hunter for giving him the opportunity to meet and spend time with Joe Biden) is publicly available and can be verified. Other people involved in the emails have also corroborated their legitimacy. The laptop story seems like the most probable explanation of this leak, given the documents and FBI correspondence provided. Most attempts I've seen to debunk it seem dishonest or misleading, like "the PDFs' metadata showed they had been created in the fall of 2019, though the emails were supposedly from 2014 and 2015" as if anyone expected the PDF compilation of incriminating emails to be pre-made by Hunter. While the email is real and the laptop story seems the most probable explanation, the email doesn't necessarily imply corruption on Joe Biden's part or even that he discussed anything business-related with Pozharskyi.
  - zpeti 5y ago
    Please tick which of the following are "factual" sources: Fox, CNN, NYT, MSNBC, Reuters, AP, NPR Thanks.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      There's a spectrum, and all news outlets will have incorrect information published from time to time, be it bad sources or bad reporting. Humans are involved, after all. You'd also have to decide whether you include Fox/CNN/MSNBC's opinion segments in the evaluation, or just the news sections. (Fox and MSNBC are especially screwed in this evaluation if you include the opinion hours.) After that, decide if "technically true but highly misleading" counts as factual or not. The NY Post has a long history of being sensationalist and misleading - there's a reason it's considered a tabloid.
      - zpeti 5y ago
        So is the NY Post the only tabloid in the world? What about the Sun in the UK? Daily mirror? I think based on your requirements all those should be fact checked 100% of the time and blocked when incorrect information is posted right? Or should it only be when it damages the preferred political candidate?
        ceejayoz 5y ago
        I'm not aware of having expressed any "requirements" here. I simply find "the NY Post is a less credible organization than the AP" to be a very sustainable opinion.
  - nostromo 5y ago
    They were blocked for posting a specific article about the Biden family. The article was factual and was of public interest. The fig leaf they used to justify it was that it exposed an email from a public official (a Ukrainian gas executive) and was "hacked/unauthorized" material. Of course, journalists use unauthorized information all the time (Snowden, Trump's tax returns, etc.) without getting banned from Twitter.
    - michaelmrose 5y ago
      Lets be real. The article was a smear campaign designed to put an incompetent traitor whose gross and continued incompetence had killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and whose continued leadership would have threatened the future of American democracy and many of our lives. At some point a pretense of neutrality and the lie that both sides of a story are equally credible can become too costly. Everyone in fact has a perspective and twitter isn't a 100% neutral platform. If you don't like it get your own.
      - downandout 5y ago
        The article was a smear campaign The article was the 100% fact based. The facts laid out in it just happened to not line up with Twitter's preferred election outcome, so they silenced it.
  - ravenstine 5y ago
    How was Twitter supposed to know that unless they independently investigated the story at the same time as NYPost before NYPost broke it? This is the danger with censoring "fake news". Obviously there's a huge grey area, since I don't think many people would object to censoring falsehoods that are agreed upon to be harmful to the public, like claiming that 5G spreads COVID-19. But with something like the Hunter Biden story, who exactly are these companies like Twitter to almost immediately censor such stories, whether they seem specious or not? Do they hire people specifically for their background in journalistic ethics? Yes, they are private companies. We are also treating them as arbiters of truth and have handed a massive amount of power to them. They can absolutely censor what they want to censor, but that doesn't mean people are wrong for pointing out the bias and the danger present in exercising such strong armed control over what information people want access to. By the way, telling people they can't see something only makes them want to see it more. Can we hardly blame people for distrusting Twitter because, for some reason, Twitter had an interest in hiding a story of political interest counted to their own? If Twitter is only to sanction stories that they believe are true, then they are completely falling flat when it comes to the sheer amount of specious tripe that comes out of the mainstream media. I can't count on both hands the number of times I've read articles making claims based on a study, only to use Sci-hub to look up the actual study and find that it completely contradicts the claim some journalist was making.
  - spoonjim 5y ago
    That wasn’t the basis on which Twitter suppressed the Hunter Biden story. Overall I think Twitter’s heart was in the right place as they know that the average voter can’t be trusted with the future of the country, but I can see why people are upset.
    - hcurtiss 5y ago
      "Twitter’s heart was in the right place as they know that the average voter can’t be trusted with the future of the country" -- that's an extraordinary statement. Who do you believe should be trusted with the future of the country? Social media platforms?
      - spoonjim 5y ago
        People who aren’t morons
  - roenxi 5y ago
    While I certainly believe there is an objective truth that can be divined by patient review of the facts, the Twitter, Inc. HQ is a long way down the list of places I would look for guidance. Twitter can certainly kick whoever they want off their platform for whatever reason. However they don't know anything more about breaking news than the rest of us. They cannot have banned a breaking story because it isn't true, the reason being that they couldn't know. If they banned a NYPost article based on the newspaper's reputation, that is a ban on a strictly political opinion.
- luxuryballs 5y ago
  They also, on Jan 6th, deleted Trump posts and video post telling people to not be violent and unlawful and disorderly, and saying anyone doing otherwise will be brought to swift justice, right before banning him, all so they could feed the narrative that Trump wanted people to invade the Capitol.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    That video included the statements "We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everyone knows it, especially the other side." and "This was a fraudulent election..." They were removed for being a repeat violation of the conduct he'd already been warned to avoid.
    - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
      I share your view of the situation, but it is fucking frustrating that "the other side" including the person you replied to probably will keep seeing it the way he described, even after you writing this explanation...
      - luxuryballs 5y ago
        I’m the person, and I don’t see these things as one or the other. The election results questioning thing is a totally different topic but it doesn’t change the fact that people literally attempted to claim Trump wanted an insurrection and Twitter could have continued to flag things with their “election results” blurb rather than pulling the entire post. I think we all can see what the common denominator is here... why not allow both the condemning of violence and lawlessness as well as the ability to “trust but verify” on election results? Mitt Romney said “an audit won’t satisfy them only telling them the truth will” only nobody to this day even knows the truth yet, the best we can say is that we aren’t sure, and that leaves it open for either side to say they are sure about their angle.
        ceejayoz 5y ago
luxuryballs 5y ago
Parler censored a post referencing “breast milk” so I don’t buy for a second that it wasn’t always about political censorship.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- heterodoxxed 5y ago
  A ton of leftist comedians joined to crack jokes about right-wing people on there and they were almost all immediately banned.
mc32 5y ago
They also block any skepticism around COVID-19, origins, transmissibility, whether toddlers need it, efficacy, side-effects, etc. I’m against anti-vaxxers as any rational person, but you ought not censor discussion around it, particularly when we’re still learning about the disease, treatment, counter measures, etc. They allow doxxing of some people but then have policies against doxxing of other people. So there is good reason for an alternative if we want DIA-logue rather than echo-chambers.
- ogre_codes 5y ago
  I’m ok with Twitter blocking people who are ciculating lies that are prolonging the virus which has fucked our economy and killed millions of people. Conspiracy theories about viruses are literally killing people. I’d file that right in the category of shouting fire in a crowded theater.
  - mc32 5y ago
    Twitter is not Official News (Granma, Pravda) nor is it the Ministry of Truth (though it tries) Even when we read official statements and we accept Twitter's censorship, we don’t actually know if Twitter is making the right or wrong call. WHO and CDC officials have equivocated themselves multiple times. Meaning they have contradicted themselves meaning they have countered their own arguments. Debate is healthy. Suppression is not healthy. It’s getting to be Orwellian and Dystopian. They are allowed to be wrong but not others. They are allowed to re-write history. China has it where you report fellow citizens for "mistaken beliefs". I fear we're going down the same path and people are doing it happily. It's concerning.
zionic 5y ago
This is incredibly false, Twitter bans for silly things all the time. A friend was permabanned for saying pit bulls commit a disproportionate number of dog attacks. Linking dog attack statistics didn’t matter. Screw Twitter and their censorship, and people like you need to stop doing their dirty work for them and pretending everything is ok.
- sixothree 5y ago
  Parler was not created because of the reasons you cited.
starik36 5y ago
> the only thing Twitter censored was threats of violence There were plenty of calls to violence during last year's summer riots. Twitter didn't censor any of it.
- ogre_codes 5y ago
  Twitter rarely “censors” anything. There are countless examples of people getting multiple death threats and Twitter just blowing it off. Female journalists are frequently targeted with rape and death threats for posting things which are only moderately controversial and Twitter waves it off “this isn’t a violation of Twitter policy”. The people who were blocked at all were generally repeat offenders.
downandout 5y ago
About the only thing Twitter censored was threats of violence or rape, election misinformation, or extremely blatant racism. One of these things is not like the others. Equating rape threats with what Twitter unilaterally decided was “election misinformation” and using that as a basis to silence a sitting President of the United States is an extreme case of censorship that justifiably scared anyone with views that divert even slightly from Silicon Valley’s brand of extreme leftism. Even Jack Dorsey acknowledged that Twitter had entered into dangerous territory with this move [1]. Specifically, he said it ”sets a precedent I feel is dangerous: the power an individual or corporation has over a part of the global public conversation.” [1] https://twitter.com/jack/status/1349510769268850690?s=21 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1349510769268850690?s=21
- AlexandrB 5y ago
  The idea that monopolist, for-profit enterprises are practicing "extreme leftism" belies how far right the US is, at least economically.
  - downandout 5y ago
    I agree with you that Silicon Valley is an odd mixture of socialist ideals and unbridled capitalism. For example, we have tax dodging corporations like Apple pushing to elect people that have a stated goal of implementing massive tax-and-spend initiatives. Somehow it all makes sense in their minds. A cynical person would say that they are just siding with whatever side happens to be popular at the time in order to make more money, knowing that they will be able to avoid the effects of such policies through international tax avoidance schemes. But I think that many of these guys actually believe the things they say, which is an interesting dichotomy.
    - michaelmrose 5y ago
      This is easier than you are making it. The right majority has gone off the deep end. The farthest left minority would jack up taxes substantially. The left moderate majority would increase taxes somewhat in a way that leads to long term prosperity. Allowing the right to take the country on the crazy train to moral and economic destitution is bad for business and the furthest left are a manageable risk. The smart money is in on supporting moderate right and blue majority.
sneak 5y ago
> About the only thing Twitter censored was threats of violence or rape, election misinformation, or extremely blatant racism. This is false. Twitter also censors search, which operates over the tweets they allowed to be posted.
throwawaysea 5y ago
> About the only thing Twitter censored was threats of violence or rape, election misinformation, or extremely blatant racism. > Their only appeal was to people who found that kind of speech acceptable. If you market primarily to violent and racist people, you are absolutely going to be associated with negative connotations. This is not just explicitly false, it is a gish gallop of unsubstantiated insinuations about Parler and/or their customers. I spent some time on Parler, and I was expecting a hellscape but instead literally did not see even one example of the type of content you are listing out here. If it exists, it is exceedingly rare, which makes sense considering Parler had 20 million users. The vast majority of the content was people posting the same content they post on other platforms, to build up a presence on Parler. As for your claims about what Twitter censors - it is certainly not as limited as you claim. Some examples: 1) They censored Zero Hedge from talking about the Wuhan lab leak theory and banned them for months before reinstating them, under the very dubious claim that they "doxxed" the head of the lab, whose contact information was provided on the Wuhan lab website as the public contact for the lab. More recently, once other people starting talking about the Wuhan lab leak theory, it was suddenly okay. 2) Twitter blocked NY Post's story about Hunter Biden under a vague "hacked materials" policy (https://nypost.com/2020/10/15/twitter-changes-hacked-materials-guidelines-after-post-controversy/ https://nypost.com/2020/10/15/twitter-changes-hacked-materia...) - meanwhile, they allowed the NY Times and others to post about Trump's private financial data, and allow "hacktivists" to share illegally obtained materials with no consequence. 3) Twitter censored posts about BLM's founder spending millions on real estate (https://nypost.com/2021/04/16/social-media-again-silences-the-post-for-reporting-the-news/ https://nypost.com/2021/04/16/social-media-again-silences-th...) There's a more extensive list of inconsistent, one-sided application of censorship in social media at https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/15/11-hacks-leaks-and-hoaxes-that-twitter-and-facebook-didnt-throttle-because-they-hurt-trump/ https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/15/11-hacks-leaks-and-hoax... and https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/free-speech/nb-staff/2020/05/28/33-examples-twitters-anti-conservative-bias https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/free-speech/nb-staff/2020/.... Other articles compiling censorship actions also appear in web searches, and they too go far beyond the types of censorship you mentioned. It is clear that US tech giants - who are more influential than most nations - are not in the business of facilitating open discourse and a diversity of ideas. They are simply ideologically biased in their rampant censorship, which is why alternative platforms, heavier regulation, and a renewal of antitrust law are needed.

bobthechef 5y ago

Who told you that? I know of many cases where accounts were silenced for none of these reasons. Most recently, the Project Veritas guy was banned from Twitter for his "fake account" after posting a video of a CNN technical director describing CNN's role in ousting Trump[0]. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/15/twitter-bans-james-okeefe-of-project-veritas-over-fake-account-policy/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/15/twitter-bans-james-okeefe-...

sixothree 5y ago
Was that why Parler was created?

nostromo 5y ago

> About the only thing Twitter censored was threats of violence or rape, election misinformation, or extremely blatant racism. Twitter blocked the NYPost because they didn't approve of their entirely factual journalism.

kbar13 5y ago
cannot tell if sarcasm because the NYPost is very much not entirely factual lol
- bobthechef 5y ago
  Ad hominem is in bad taste. And mind you, the same can be said of the major news outlets (NYTimes, etc).
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- hcurtiss 5y ago
  There's been a lot of validation of the Biden laptop story, which was the impetus for Twitter shutting down NYPost.
  - jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
    There most definitely has not. It remains entirely unsubstantiated, while several other claims in the post story are directly contradicted by ample public records.
    - patwolf 5y ago
      It's not accurate to say it was "entirely unsubstantiated". Other news sources besides the NY Post (most recently the Daily Mail) have claimed it was authentic, and Biden himself hasn't disputed its authenticity. Regardless of the laptop though, there's clearly a double standard in what Twitter will block with or without proof. The Russian bounty program that was widely reported by the Washington Post and others during the election cycle was unsubstantiated, but no effort was made to block it.
    - pwned1 5y ago
      Hunter Biden admitted it was his.
    - treesprite82 5y ago
      The DKIM signature of the "bombshell email" (Vadym Pozharskyi thanking Hunter for giving him the opportunity to meet and spend time with Joe Biden) is publicly available and can be verified. Other people involved in the emails have also corroborated their legitimacy. The laptop story seems like the most probable explanation of this leak, given the documents and FBI correspondence provided. Most attempts I've seen to debunk it seem dishonest or misleading, like "the PDFs' metadata showed they had been created in the fall of 2019, though the emails were supposedly from 2014 and 2015" as if anyone expected the PDF compilation of incriminating emails to be pre-made by Hunter. While the email is real and the laptop story seems the most probable explanation, the email doesn't necessarily imply corruption on Joe Biden's part or even that he discussed anything business-related with Pozharskyi.
- zpeti 5y ago
  Please tick which of the following are "factual" sources: Fox, CNN, NYT, MSNBC, Reuters, AP, NPR Thanks.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    There's a spectrum, and all news outlets will have incorrect information published from time to time, be it bad sources or bad reporting. Humans are involved, after all. You'd also have to decide whether you include Fox/CNN/MSNBC's opinion segments in the evaluation, or just the news sections. (Fox and MSNBC are especially screwed in this evaluation if you include the opinion hours.) After that, decide if "technically true but highly misleading" counts as factual or not. The NY Post has a long history of being sensationalist and misleading - there's a reason it's considered a tabloid.
    - zpeti 5y ago
      So is the NY Post the only tabloid in the world? What about the Sun in the UK? Daily mirror? I think based on your requirements all those should be fact checked 100% of the time and blocked when incorrect information is posted right? Or should it only be when it damages the preferred political candidate?
      - ceejayoz 5y ago
        I'm not aware of having expressed any "requirements" here. I simply find "the NY Post is a less credible organization than the AP" to be a very sustainable opinion.
- nostromo 5y ago
  They were blocked for posting a specific article about the Biden family. The article was factual and was of public interest. The fig leaf they used to justify it was that it exposed an email from a public official (a Ukrainian gas executive) and was "hacked/unauthorized" material. Of course, journalists use unauthorized information all the time (Snowden, Trump's tax returns, etc.) without getting banned from Twitter.
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    Lets be real. The article was a smear campaign designed to put an incompetent traitor whose gross and continued incompetence had killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and whose continued leadership would have threatened the future of American democracy and many of our lives. At some point a pretense of neutrality and the lie that both sides of a story are equally credible can become too costly. Everyone in fact has a perspective and twitter isn't a 100% neutral platform. If you don't like it get your own.
    - downandout 5y ago
      The article was a smear campaign The article was the 100% fact based. The facts laid out in it just happened to not line up with Twitter's preferred election outcome, so they silenced it.
- ravenstine 5y ago
  How was Twitter supposed to know that unless they independently investigated the story at the same time as NYPost before NYPost broke it? This is the danger with censoring "fake news". Obviously there's a huge grey area, since I don't think many people would object to censoring falsehoods that are agreed upon to be harmful to the public, like claiming that 5G spreads COVID-19. But with something like the Hunter Biden story, who exactly are these companies like Twitter to almost immediately censor such stories, whether they seem specious or not? Do they hire people specifically for their background in journalistic ethics? Yes, they are private companies. We are also treating them as arbiters of truth and have handed a massive amount of power to them. They can absolutely censor what they want to censor, but that doesn't mean people are wrong for pointing out the bias and the danger present in exercising such strong armed control over what information people want access to. By the way, telling people they can't see something only makes them want to see it more. Can we hardly blame people for distrusting Twitter because, for some reason, Twitter had an interest in hiding a story of political interest counted to their own? If Twitter is only to sanction stories that they believe are true, then they are completely falling flat when it comes to the sheer amount of specious tripe that comes out of the mainstream media. I can't count on both hands the number of times I've read articles making claims based on a study, only to use Sci-hub to look up the actual study and find that it completely contradicts the claim some journalist was making.
- spoonjim 5y ago
  That wasn’t the basis on which Twitter suppressed the Hunter Biden story. Overall I think Twitter’s heart was in the right place as they know that the average voter can’t be trusted with the future of the country, but I can see why people are upset.
  - hcurtiss 5y ago
    "Twitter’s heart was in the right place as they know that the average voter can’t be trusted with the future of the country" -- that's an extraordinary statement. Who do you believe should be trusted with the future of the country? Social media platforms?
    - spoonjim 5y ago
      People who aren’t morons
- roenxi 5y ago
  While I certainly believe there is an objective truth that can be divined by patient review of the facts, the Twitter, Inc. HQ is a long way down the list of places I would look for guidance. Twitter can certainly kick whoever they want off their platform for whatever reason. However they don't know anything more about breaking news than the rest of us. They cannot have banned a breaking story because it isn't true, the reason being that they couldn't know. If they banned a NYPost article based on the newspaper's reputation, that is a ban on a strictly political opinion.
luxuryballs 5y ago
They also, on Jan 6th, deleted Trump posts and video post telling people to not be violent and unlawful and disorderly, and saying anyone doing otherwise will be brought to swift justice, right before banning him, all so they could feed the narrative that Trump wanted people to invade the Capitol.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  That video included the statements "We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everyone knows it, especially the other side." and "This was a fraudulent election..." They were removed for being a repeat violation of the conduct he'd already been warned to avoid.
  - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
    I share your view of the situation, but it is fucking frustrating that "the other side" including the person you replied to probably will keep seeing it the way he described, even after you writing this explanation...
    - luxuryballs 5y ago
      I’m the person, and I don’t see these things as one or the other. The election results questioning thing is a totally different topic but it doesn’t change the fact that people literally attempted to claim Trump wanted an insurrection and Twitter could have continued to flag things with their “election results” blurb rather than pulling the entire post. I think we all can see what the common denominator is here... why not allow both the condemning of violence and lawlessness as well as the ability to “trust but verify” on election results? Mitt Romney said “an audit won’t satisfy them only telling them the truth will” only nobody to this day even knows the truth yet, the best we can say is that we aren’t sure, and that leaves it open for either side to say they are sure about their angle.
      - ceejayoz 5y ago

luxuryballs 5y ago

Parler censored a post referencing “breast milk” so I don’t buy for a second that it wasn’t always about political censorship.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
heterodoxxed 5y ago
A ton of leftist comedians joined to crack jokes about right-wing people on there and they were almost all immediately banned.

mc32 5y ago

They also block any skepticism around COVID-19, origins, transmissibility, whether toddlers need it, efficacy, side-effects, etc. I’m against anti-vaxxers as any rational person, but you ought not censor discussion around it, particularly when we’re still learning about the disease, treatment, counter measures, etc. They allow doxxing of some people but then have policies against doxxing of other people. So there is good reason for an alternative if we want DIA-logue rather than echo-chambers.

ogre_codes 5y ago
I’m ok with Twitter blocking people who are ciculating lies that are prolonging the virus which has fucked our economy and killed millions of people. Conspiracy theories about viruses are literally killing people. I’d file that right in the category of shouting fire in a crowded theater.
- mc32 5y ago
  Twitter is not Official News (Granma, Pravda) nor is it the Ministry of Truth (though it tries) Even when we read official statements and we accept Twitter's censorship, we don’t actually know if Twitter is making the right or wrong call. WHO and CDC officials have equivocated themselves multiple times. Meaning they have contradicted themselves meaning they have countered their own arguments. Debate is healthy. Suppression is not healthy. It’s getting to be Orwellian and Dystopian. They are allowed to be wrong but not others. They are allowed to re-write history. China has it where you report fellow citizens for "mistaken beliefs". I fear we're going down the same path and people are doing it happily. It's concerning.

zionic 5y ago

This is incredibly false, Twitter bans for silly things all the time. A friend was permabanned for saying pit bulls commit a disproportionate number of dog attacks. Linking dog attack statistics didn’t matter. Screw Twitter and their censorship, and people like you need to stop doing their dirty work for them and pretending everything is ok.

sixothree 5y ago
Parler was not created because of the reasons you cited.

starik36 5y ago

> the only thing Twitter censored was threats of violence There were plenty of calls to violence during last year's summer riots. Twitter didn't censor any of it.

ogre_codes 5y ago
Twitter rarely “censors” anything. There are countless examples of people getting multiple death threats and Twitter just blowing it off. Female journalists are frequently targeted with rape and death threats for posting things which are only moderately controversial and Twitter waves it off “this isn’t a violation of Twitter policy”. The people who were blocked at all were generally repeat offenders.

downandout 5y ago

About the only thing Twitter censored was threats of violence or rape, election misinformation, or extremely blatant racism. One of these things is not like the others. Equating rape threats with what Twitter unilaterally decided was “election misinformation” and using that as a basis to silence a sitting President of the United States is an extreme case of censorship that justifiably scared anyone with views that divert even slightly from Silicon Valley’s brand of extreme leftism. Even Jack Dorsey acknowledged that Twitter had entered into dangerous territory with this move [1]. Specifically, he said it ”sets a precedent I feel is dangerous: the power an individual or corporation has over a part of the global public conversation.” [1] https://twitter.com/jack/status/1349510769268850690?s=21 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1349510769268850690?s=21

AlexandrB 5y ago
The idea that monopolist, for-profit enterprises are practicing "extreme leftism" belies how far right the US is, at least economically.
- downandout 5y ago
  I agree with you that Silicon Valley is an odd mixture of socialist ideals and unbridled capitalism. For example, we have tax dodging corporations like Apple pushing to elect people that have a stated goal of implementing massive tax-and-spend initiatives. Somehow it all makes sense in their minds. A cynical person would say that they are just siding with whatever side happens to be popular at the time in order to make more money, knowing that they will be able to avoid the effects of such policies through international tax avoidance schemes. But I think that many of these guys actually believe the things they say, which is an interesting dichotomy.
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    This is easier than you are making it. The right majority has gone off the deep end. The farthest left minority would jack up taxes substantially. The left moderate majority would increase taxes somewhat in a way that leads to long term prosperity. Allowing the right to take the country on the crazy train to moral and economic destitution is bad for business and the furthest left are a manageable risk. The smart money is in on supporting moderate right and blue majority.

sneak 5y ago

> About the only thing Twitter censored was threats of violence or rape, election misinformation, or extremely blatant racism. This is false. Twitter also censors search, which operates over the tweets they allowed to be posted.

throwawaysea 5y ago

> About the only thing Twitter censored was threats of violence or rape, election misinformation, or extremely blatant racism. > Their only appeal was to people who found that kind of speech acceptable. If you market primarily to violent and racist people, you are absolutely going to be associated with negative connotations. This is not just explicitly false, it is a gish gallop of unsubstantiated insinuations about Parler and/or their customers. I spent some time on Parler, and I was expecting a hellscape but instead literally did not see even one example of the type of content you are listing out here. If it exists, it is exceedingly rare, which makes sense considering Parler had 20 million users. The vast majority of the content was people posting the same content they post on other platforms, to build up a presence on Parler. As for your claims about what Twitter censors - it is certainly not as limited as you claim. Some examples: 1) They censored Zero Hedge from talking about the Wuhan lab leak theory and banned them for months before reinstating them, under the very dubious claim that they "doxxed" the head of the lab, whose contact information was provided on the Wuhan lab website as the public contact for the lab. More recently, once other people starting talking about the Wuhan lab leak theory, it was suddenly okay. 2) Twitter blocked NY Post's story about Hunter Biden under a vague "hacked materials" policy (https://nypost.com/2020/10/15/twitter-changes-hacked-materials-guidelines-after-post-controversy/ https://nypost.com/2020/10/15/twitter-changes-hacked-materia...) - meanwhile, they allowed the NY Times and others to post about Trump's private financial data, and allow "hacktivists" to share illegally obtained materials with no consequence. 3) Twitter censored posts about BLM's founder spending millions on real estate (https://nypost.com/2021/04/16/social-media-again-silences-the-post-for-reporting-the-news/ https://nypost.com/2021/04/16/social-media-again-silences-th...) There's a more extensive list of inconsistent, one-sided application of censorship in social media at https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/15/11-hacks-leaks-and-hoaxes-that-twitter-and-facebook-didnt-throttle-because-they-hurt-trump/ https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/15/11-hacks-leaks-and-hoax... and https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/free-speech/nb-staff/2020/05/28/33-examples-twitters-anti-conservative-bias https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/free-speech/nb-staff/2020/.... Other articles compiling censorship actions also appear in web searches, and they too go far beyond the types of censorship you mentioned. It is clear that US tech giants - who are more influential than most nations - are not in the business of facilitating open discourse and a diversity of ideas. They are simply ideologically biased in their rampant censorship, which is why alternative platforms, heavier regulation, and a renewal of antitrust law are needed.