So it's just another platform. It happens to be a platform people flock to because they are 'no platformed' in another service.
The big companies are really limiting speech. You can't have separate black/white bathrooms, in many places your business can't allow indoor smoking, you can't limit employment based on certain things if you want equal opportunity employer benefits, yet we have no protection for speech.
Daily Stormer (which is honestly so crazy I couldn't tell if it was a parody) can't be hosted by any major or minor providers. No one will give them space to speak. When that many companies gets to control all the platforms, when Google can fire a guy for a well thought out opinion, they effectively censor dissenting idea.
I'm not saying I like gab. It's seriously full of voat type users, but they should have a place where they can speak.
Daily Stormer (which is honestly so crazy I couldn't tell if it was a parody)
If you examine the Nazi ideology, it really is at a psychotic level of cynicism. They don't care if you are a true believer, or if you're doing it for the lulz, or if you're a psychopath whose incentives happen to align. So long as you go along, it's fine.
If you go far enough left on the political spectrum, you arrive at the same place. (The rapists and murderers were made into bosses in the Gulag.) However, for some reason, speech that is almost as vile from the left is given a softer treatment.
Both far extremes are identitarian. Both far extremes advocate violence. Both the Postmodern Left extremists and the Nazi extremists reject logic. Both extremes are collectivist in that both extremes reject the classical Liberal formulation of individual rights. All of the above are facts that you can cite in the writings of thought leaders of both groups.
It's true that it's a false equivalence between neo-Nazis and Antifa. But crapping on individual human rights in one's political interest is wrong either way, and both groups do that. It doesn't matter if steam is at 220 degrees or 440 degrees. It's going to scald you either way. It doesn't matter how bad, so much as that both are bad!
I agree completely. The alternative is that the bad ideas get hidden away, and not seeing the light of day, they begin to fester sort of like social rot. Or worst, people turn to violence. Free speech is not only about being heard, but about weeding out bad ideas.
A great book on the subject is Kindly Inquisitors by Jonathan Rauch. He can explain the importance of free speech much gooderer than I ever could. :)
A webapp will inherently lack some optimizations that a native app could provide. Wouldn't this suggest some uncomfortable analogies with net neutrality "slow lanes"? Certainly not a one-to-one mapping, but there's enough similar shape to give me pause.
To me, not providing services to those who spout hatred and violence, is also an expression of one's free speech. Having free speech doesn't mean you're free from consequence.
Funny part about this is that Daily Stormer has hosting, DDoS protection and DNS service even a registrar now (Bulletproof.ai), but they can't find a TLD that won't censor them.
Google isn't saying it that content can't exist in an app -
they're saying the app doesn't have a sufficient level of moderation for dealing with issues that do occur.
What’s a sufficient level of moderation? I’m seriously asking. Would love to see some self reported and also verifiable stats from all the platforms being discussed here.
Any moderation would be a start. Gab's whole raison d'etre is to be an unmoderated social network where you can post the hate speech which would get you kicked off more mainstream networks.
Anecdotally, when I tried Gab, the ratio of violent racist content to normal content was way way higher than on other platforms (even if the absolute amount is much higher on twitter due to popularity, the ratio is lower).
You won't be able to find speech inciting credible threats of unconditional violence against specific individuals that won't be taken down after being reported, no. "Racist speech" doesn't necessarily meet the bar.
The big companies are really limiting speech. You can't have separate black/white bathrooms, in many places your business can't allow indoor smoking, you can't limit employment based on certain things if you want equal opportunity employer benefits, yet we have no protection for speech.
Daily Stormer (which is honestly so crazy I couldn't tell if it was a parody) can't be hosted by any major or minor providers. No one will give them space to speak. When that many companies gets to control all the platforms, when Google can fire a guy for a well thought out opinion, they effectively censor dissenting idea.
I'm not saying I like gab. It's seriously full of voat type users, but they should have a place where they can speak.