Should we still have due process in the external world? After all, the United States is a "safe haven" for people who talk about killing pretty much every minority group under the sun.
> the world is a little more complex than "privacy at all costs."
The line doesn't have to do with the infringement of privacy, it's about whether that infringement is being done by publicly sanctioned power, or the whim of the arbitrary, domineering power of private (tech) actors. Elizabeth Anderson has written quite well on this topic in "Private Government."
In the initial post about the Capitol being shut down,t here were people saying that everyone who broke into the capitol building needed to be tried for treason and executed, or saying that the police should have opened fire and killed anyone who broke in. The mods removed the comments, but HN isn't some paragon of virtue that isn't susceptible to the same calls for violence as any other site.
No, not really. It comes down to how you define "safe haven" - if violent groups are actively moderated and banned, then I don't think it can be called a safe haven. How does the rest of the internet equate to Parler in this respect?
I don't know what people think, we can't read their minds. All I know is if you wanted to find people who want mass executions in the US, Parler would be a safe place to find them, based on what we do know about them.
Facebook and Twitter have millions of people who want mass executions for all kinds of groups, a quick trip into Muslim areas of both services and you'll find moderate and right-wing versions that want execution for LGBTQ+ people. You can find the same desire for marginalization and extermination of other groups. Not every language and dialect has a huge team of moderators that review content and take the appropriate punitive action against malicious users.
I have a Parler account. I have a GAB account. I make accounts on all new social media platforms and communications services. Everyone should. Because you have no idea what platform might be the next Facebook, or which one is going to be the next MySpace.
I hear this a lot, but it makes no logical sense to me. I see a site that is (in)famous for being full of self-proclaimed right-wing "patriots" who are calling for violence against people due to political beliefs.
Someone then decide to associate with these people by joining the site. They may not personally post messages calling for violence, but are now associated with them. And the response is: well sure I'm in the group but I don't actually agree with any of this.
Then my question is: why did you join in the first place? If you don't agree with the most vocal 1% (I SERIOUSLY doubt that number after spending time perusing the site), and you don't denounce what they're saying, what do you expect others to think? We're supposed to read your mind that you're part of a "silent dissent" and just joined the site because...?
People were banned from facebook and twitter for calling for violence, if you switched sites specifically to follow that person I have a REAL tough time believing you don't support them.
Have to been on Reddit, specifically /r/politics? There are calls to violence all the time. Nobody bats an eye because it's calls to violence against the "bad guys."
I assume you've got some citations for that, right? I have been to r/politics and people get banned pretty quickly for calling for violence. I just went through the top 20 threads, and there isn't a single call for violence to be found.
Indeed. When evaluating reddit threads and content, its important to distinguish between highly upvoted and visible content, and content that was downvoted or deleted to oblivion. A -1000 call for violence in one subreddit is not equivalent to a +1000 call for violence in another.
But they aren't. You can go there right now and find posts calling for violence. They have no automated system and have no plans to implement one which is why they were kicked off AWS. From the AWS letter they were kind enough to post:
>Recently, we’ve seen a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms. It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service. It also seems that Parler is still trying to determine its position on content moderation. You remove some violent content when contacted by us or others, but not always with urgency. Your CEO recently stated publicly that he doesn’t “feel responsible for any of this, and neither should the platform.” This morning, you shared that you have a plan to more proactively moderate violent content, but plan to do so manually with volunteers. It’s our view that this nascent plan to use volunteers to promptly identify and remove dangerous content will not work in light of the rapidly growing number of violent posts. This is further demonstrated by the fact that you still have not taken down much of the content that we’ve sent you. Given the unfortunate events that transpired this past week in Washington, D.C., there is serious risk that this type of content will further incite violence.
I am not going to go through and find some examples but there have been calls for violence there. I remember the entire Sandman period of time with many people saying he "what a punchable face"....
Edit to add: Also what happens behind doors on invite only subreddits?
There is a German saying that goes something like "if there’s a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you've got a table with 11 Nazis.”
According to Wikipedia, there are 4,000,000 active Parler users.
You think you can assert with confidence that there are not 40,000 people with Parler accounts who want mass executions?
I'd like to think you're right, but I'm not as confident as you are.
Not after watching someone beat a Capitol Police officer to death with a flag pole flying the American Flag. People think they are defending their country against evil. Like me, apparently.
How many QAnon followers are there? How many believe the most outrageous claims? I would not be surprised if 40,000 do. Would you?
FWIW Wikipedia lists that number of users as of November 2020. It had a huge influx of users in December and obviously January, to the point that it was number 1 in the App Store before it got pulled. So the 4MM user number is probably very off.
Some of these are Verified users - Parler has their Drivers License and Social Security number, and yet they still felt secure in brazenly violating the law like this.
Hey, spoiler alert for people regarding that link -- there's some very strong, graphically violent language. Don't click if you're not in a good head space at the moment.
I pushed back in one direction, and now I'll push back in the other.
I do not think "literally millions" do. That is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence.
I am saddened by extremists like this, on all sides.
I want to win a tough but fair political fight, and I think that's what almost everyone in America wants, too. I'm sorry some people think 60 court cases were simultaneously wrongly decided, but I don't feel sympathy for anyone who thinks the next step is to storm the Capitol.
No, I do not accept that you are "clarifying." You are intentionally moving the goal-posts.
The question we were discussing was whether or not many of the USERS are calling for mass executions.
I provided ample evidence, despite your "find me a single post" challenge.
Now we might want to engage in a different discussion, about whether Parler was correctly moderating that content. But that is not a "clarification," that's a new topic.
I do not have access to information about how long content was allowed to remain before it was removed. Do you?
Since a "single post" has been provided by someone now, it would be nice to see you give them the decency and acknowledge it. There are so many comments here, and they all read in the same way, "well, what about..." and "show me proof" — only for someone to actually go and spend the time to respond, and then be ignored quietly. Discussions here (political ones) feel so childish, I wish we'd be better as a community on those.
Personally, when I discuss politics online I don't expect the other person to acknowledge anything. My audience is all the people on the fence lurking and reading and forming opinions on the topic.
As one (non-American) lurker who is reading this thread to try and get a handle on just what the hell is going on over there, thank you for putting the energy in, and please don't give up.
It's clear that you are arguing in good faith and the other person who keeps moving the goalposts and demanding more proof is not, and moreover it's very enlightening to see this scenarios played out nearly identically whenever I lurk and follow a discussion between the left and right in US politics.
I still think these are not legit death threats by the content of it. Saying things like “a good commie is a dead a commie” might be tasteless but it’s far from being a serious thing. No one is killing communists in the US.
Data, evidence? The threat is in giving the fascist terrorist 1% a microphone not that the other 99% happen to be listening. Parler was lax in policing that 1%.
You just jumped to a conclusion. In another comment in this article I specifically said only messages that are related to the commission of a crime should be released and everything else should be deleted.
> The threat is in giving the fascist terrorist 1% a microphone
The problem with fascist terrorists is not their rhetoric, it's their violence. Allow them to speak their mind and you lower their need for violent action and everyone else gets to show that their ideas are horribly flawed.
It's amusing to think that people seriously believe there are huge swathes of people just ripe to become neo-nazis because someone gave a rousing speech or wrote some tweets - how do you manage not to succumb to these rhetorical titans?
>It's amusing to think that people seriously believe there are huge swathes of people just ripe to become neo-nazis because someone gave a rousing speech or wrote some tweets - how do you manage not to succumb to these rhetorical titans?
Given that exactly this happened 90 years ago and caused the deaths of tens of millions, people are needless to say cautious.
You can't have Hitler without the Treaty of Versailles. He was just a catalyst to an incredibly punitive and emasculating treaty that scarred the psychology of the German people.
If it hadn't been Hitler, it would have eventually been someone else.
I'm going to side with the interpretations of history that are a tad more complex than "he gave a rousing speech, hence, genocide", and there are plenty of them.
That's my opponent's position, not mine. When creating an opposing argument it's almost certain you will have to state their argument (in whole or in part) to produce a refutation.
You're purposefully being reductionist about this. People having their brains hit with racist or violent rhetoric over a long period of time will be changed by that. They human brain adapts to it's environment, expecting certain inputs and if it's receiving /pol light on Twitter then it starts to expect it.
On top of that, it's only a matter of time before they're linked to one of the many .win site that sprang up after Twitter purged the_donald and the Qanon people.
And again, people have been moved to violence and facism in human history, that's not difficult to find.
> You're purposefully being reductionist about this.
I'm really not, and I'd prefer if you started off responding to me by not (mis)characterising my intentions. I'm 100% sincere in my support of free speech and stand 100% behind my comment.
> People having their brains hit with racist or violent rhetoric over a long period of time will be changed by that
Yes, they will, which is why it's good to allow every voice and every kind of viewpoint a chance to be expressed and hence challenged. Unless you think that echo chambers are a good thing?
> people have been moved to violence and facism in human history, that's not difficult to find
Did they occur in places with high amounts of censorship or free speech? The Holocaust wasn't caused simply by one of Hitler's speeches, for example, it was also (among other things) primed by the rampant anti-semitic prejudice that came from the pulpit every Sunday for hundreds of years - which was unchallengable due to blasphemy laws.
Another "win" for the repression of speech someone in power doesn't like, eh?
> There's basically no support for this claim in any literature I can find. Care to cite a historian?
Tell me the literature you looked in first, because I want to know which books can miss such basic facts, and hence what I should avoid. The history of Europe is soaked in blood provoked by differences over what can be said by religious people, to religious people, and of them and their views. Entire wars have been fought over it - are you going to tell me there are historians that are credible who'll claim Europe was a land of toleration? Locke wrote his letter of toleration specifically because of the widespread intolerance and bloodshed.
If you use the word heresy instead of blasphemy and your search may prove more fruitful. It was effect in Europe from the Edict of Thessalonica, which brought the first execution, and in some countries hasn't been repealed from law. If you look up the last people executed under these laws you may even find what they said to deserve execution.
There's a huge degree of just outright horseshit here.
I've been browsing /pol/ for years, hell almost decades. Its a great place to go to get an idea of just how fringe certain elements of society are becoming. I was actually actively browsing when QAnon was making his posts there.
I thought they were just as ridiculous and far-fetched then as I do now. People become radicalized largely because some condition in their life is lacking. For every single successful mechanical engineer that joins ISIS, there's 99 out-of-work coal miners and factory workers who storm the American capital.
Most people who have everything in their life going great don't end up extremists.
I doubt most of the people who stormed the Capitol were out of work coal miners and factory workers. Which is not to say they didn’t have things going badly in their lives, that describes a lot of people.
To quote a violent rioter screaming at the police on January 6th, "We're the business owners of America, and we don't have your back anymore!"
I watched lawyers, doctors and owners of IT companies attack the Capitol.
There are very few struggling coal miners who can afford to fly into DC during the week along with hundreds of dollars in riot gear in order to spend a few days rioting.
This is often brought up, mistakenly, as support for restricting speech based on speech alone when it says no such thing.
Popper draws a clear distinction between those who will have intolerant views but do not engage in violence, and those who do engage in violence. It is only the latter, in Popper's view, that must be restricted.