It's chilling how quickly the tech industry has coalesced around oppressive and biased social media censorship policies. A scant few years ago, the tech industry was a beacon of free expression.
You know what’s also chilling? Major tech platforms choosing to publish, amplify, and normalize: white supremacy, antisemitism, serious calls to violently overthrow democracy, conspiracies about the deep state cabal of satan-worshiping pedophiles, the health benefits of drinking bleach, denial of well understood scientific facts, etc.
These things are fine for the town square, since people have free speech, but nobody should be handing them a megaphone that reaches 7 billion people.
Free speech does not mean you are entitled to have your speech broadcast to a global audience.
Honest question, what are you referring to when in regards to published/public content?
All of these topics you've mentioned are and always have been far away from trending ('amplified', 'normalized') pages. You can't go anywhere on these sites and see these topics without searching for them, and when you do the hashtags are either immediately taken over by the rest of the users on the site or taken off of trending deliberately by administrators, often both. Can you provide one example of these topics consistently being 'amplified' or 'normalized' by one of the major tech platforms? I'm talking public content, not private groups. Posts that are 'amplified', not just present. You can find posts from anyone about anything online, so I don't really see what separates these private facebook groups from something like a mailing list. It doesn't seem "normalized" at all.
I’m going by what the article said: “Facebook spent the past year allowing election conspiracies and far-right militia activity to proliferate on its platform, laying the groundwork for the broader radicalization that fueled the Capitol insurrection in the first place.”
Facebook exercises editorial control (moderation) of what user-provided content is published on its site. Therefore if something is there, it’s because their moderation system allowed it to be there. I don’t use Facebook myself so I can’t provide a first-hand example, but it’s increasingly being reported that this content spreads virally through these platforms’ recommendation rabbit-holes and through promotion by end users.
I also don't use Facebook which is why I was asking. Supposedly after some more research it seems that Facebook has a feature that actually recommends private groups to people, which I was not aware of. It's interesting that they choose to do that, then.
The trouble in my opinion comes when these social networks begin to promote content to the user algorithmically. My Twitter feed is filled with content from users I do not follow. It makes up the majority of my feed. Likely, even if it was content that I was following, the most "engaging", or oftentimes "enraging" content, would be the content shown first.
If social networks were largely just content crafted by the people I follow, it would then be more representative towards a digital representation of the in-person social structures that would or do exist.
They make much less money that way though. Your average user would probably also use it less.
Even harder: Who gets to decide who gets the megaphone? I see the problems with "nobody, therefore everybody gets the megaphone", but I see nobody that I actually trust to decide who gets it...
which mythical social media platform choose the amplify and publish "white supremacy, antisemitism, serious calls to violently overthrow democracy", because those I know were and are removing such content
Seriously. That is stuff that nearly everybody's against and is a constant boogeyman brought up by many on the left, but they can't ever seem to demonstrate that it is a pervasive problem. Nobody admits to being a white supremacist because it's basically universally denounced.
But those same folks will happily excuse the whole BLM/Antifa rioting during 2020 where billions of dollars in property damage was caused and dozens of people died.
Weird, I distinctly remember Twitter, Facebook and Google removing Islamic religious content under the guise of stopping terrorism a decade ago. What I don't remember is the current free speech absolutist crowd objecting to such censorship. In fact, I remember them cheering those companies on.
Because they are largely hypocrites. In fact a lot of them identify more with the capitol rioters being delatformed and are scared that they could be next in line, and this was not the case with ISIS for example.
This isn’t so. I and many other free speech proponents did not support that. There were people supporting it, but to the best of my knowledge they appear to mainly be the same people supporting censorship now.
I agree with your use of “chilling” but more in the traditional sense when it comes to expression: that any censorship/bans/etc will likely have a chilling effect on this type of speech. In this case I think “this type of speech” comes down to people expressing their violent fantasies or plans, and I don’t think it’s bad if we have less of that particular kind of speech. As the classic argument goes, however, you can’t have it both ways with both total freedom of speech and some kind of moderating censorship.
All that said, if we can make our way past the obvious consequences of limiting speech we might get to a more interesting place. In particular I’m more interested in how social media moderation might change our opinions and laws about speech itself. Does everyone’s speech deserve to be treated the same way by the algorithms that decide what gets traction and what doesn’t? Should the algorithms or platforms themselves be restricted in their “speech” in some way? How do we square our desire to allow corporations to develop algorithms to increase commerce when those same algorithms also necessarily foment rage and violence?
I don’t think it’s worth arguing whether free speech is worth protecting (it is, despite the evils you also have to protect) but I do think it’s worth considering how we think about what constitutes speech when commerce, social media platforms, and algorithms come into play.
I would like to believe you that this would be even handed at all violent talk and extremism, but blm from just months back stands as a major counterpoint.
I'd argue that this has been creeping for a while. At first it's used to ban blatantly illegal posts and obvious spam. However the power to moderate is easily abused. Big Tech is now effectively punishing wrong-think, and it doesn't even have to happen on the platform in question.
It's chilling how quickly radical terrorist groups have coalesced around using social media to coordinate their hatred and their attacks. A scant few years ago, America actively fought terrorists instead of encouraging and facilitating them.
It looks like you've been using HN primarily for political battle. Can you please not do that? It's against the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and it's the line across which we start banning accounts (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), regardless of which politics they're battling for. This is because it destroys what HN is supposed to exist for, which is curious conversation on a wide range of topics.
If there are other accounts doing this, I'd like to know who they are (irrespective of which politics they're for or against). It's impossible for us to look at the history of every account posting like this, but this is a serious problem and it's getting worse, so we're raising the bar.
Off topic but I'm having increasingly more difficulty with the term Terrorist. How'd you call American intrusions in sovereign states? Just somewhat recently the drone strike of the General Soleimani on sovereign grounds were an act of terrorism if perceived through the eyes of most Iranians, and possibly Iraqis as the strike was on their ground. Terrorist is a term that is stretched and applied beyond meaning.
I would define terrorism as forced coercion of an outside group (or group perceived to be "outside") through violent actions. Controlling through fear.
So yes, any assassination, and especially that one, would be terrorism. However, terrorism committed by independent actors makes them terrorists, but terrorism committed by the state is more appropriately classified as military aggression, or acts of war.
The whole point of the military doing anything short of all out war is to scare an "enemy" into compliance through threat of violence. So it's not classified as terrorism for the same reason as lethal action by police is not murder. The blessing of the state changes its definition.
We all know how things are - the world is not a fair place. It never was, and so far its rigged in a way that it never will be. Strong oppress the weak. Skillful strong oppress in a way that weak don't even notice but that's another topic. The word terrorist currently means 'enemy of me', if me is state powerful enough to project its power on others. US took any other meaning internationally from this word over last 17 years pretty effectively.
If you actively object the biggest military in the world, there is no safe place on this planet. A country that effectively uses black op sites to do torture on suspects that would be illegal back home, a country that actively uses a prison to indefinitely detain (and torture) suspects without any legal process (and so on and on... really, there are whole books about this), has absolutely 0 issues with bombing some enemy general. It can be even in the centre of Brusel for all they care, if the benefits outweigh the cons. If they kill 50 kids along, all they do is try to minimize media damage. Do you see many americans shedding tears over this? From outside its pretty hard to spot any, and anybody who cares knows how things are.
Let's not pretend wars are something nice, fair and some gentlemanly approach is applied. Almost anything that works will be used.
See, the general assumption is. If its a white rich nation (except Russia) doing something, its moral. If its a rich ally of the said nations, its moral.
I doesn't matter what they do, commit war-crimes, liberate people from democracy(to free the people) and install dictators, fund terrorists, lie to the international community about wars, kill people in embassies, it doesn't matter. It is you who are at fault, for not being able to understand their deeper moral motives.
Everything that the enemy does, that is either illegal or it's just lies and propaganda to improve their image. They can do nothing right.
Now, With this context you can understand very clearly how to think and feel about who the terrorists are and who the bad guys are.
That seems like the loose understanding between the two. Were the 1944 USAAF bombings of Krupp Stahl works terrorism? They would be according to your understanding.
For example, missiles from unmanned drones hitting civilian targets like schools and hospitals.
Note the statistics here [0] - of course the numbers are very fuzzy but at the worst case scenario it's 1:2.5 civilians: military targets. So for every 2.5 military targets, 1 civilian. That fits the bill for extreme and indiscriminate.
Also, one needs to indicate the difference between e.g. a hospital building acting as nothing but a hospital, and one that has been evacuated of patients and used as a militant staging post.
Uuuuuuuum, that is emphatically not the parallel you want to draw here. We did fuck all to prevent extremism from metastasizing and set the Middle East on a course to be a shatter belt for our lifetimes and likely that of our kids. We also killed a bunch of civilians and terrorism was used as a pretext for a hell of a lot of pretty racist policies. Having power means you have to be the grownup in the room. It sucks but the choice is that or a kind of repression that strengthens the grievances of the people you’re supposed to be fighting. The way terrorists work, when they’re successful, is by leveraging the overreaction of their adversary to win adherents, resources, and eventually legitimacy. We can’t let that happen again, we can’t let that happen here, and we sure as hell can’t let it happen with white supremacists.
You mean the fictitious boogeyman "group" that not one member has ever been identified and the movement for black rights that was widely brutalized by the police?
I suppose not, seeing as one is a fantasy and the other clearly had the police paying attention to their plans.
Besides, neither has attempted a coup to overturn an election so it's not really the same is it?
I honestly believe that antifa is not an organized entity.
Antifa exists as a vaguely defined concept around the idea of counterprotesting right-wing groups. Its the same thing as the alt-right, an ill-defined idea that can be whatever bogeyman you want it to be to whoever you want to scare.
This is the problem. You asked if people really don't believe that antifa is real. Obviously it is real in some sense since we are talking about something called antifa, but we have no idea if you are thinking of the bogeyman organization that doesn't exist, and I am thinking of a philosophy of counterprotest.
When people talk about 'getting rid of antifa' there's a reason that so many people on the left laugh. It's because there is a false conception on the right that it is some sort of unified organization like the ACLU or NRA where you can literally be a card carrying member. People on the left understand that there is no such thing, it is just an ill-defined idea.
How is it that this fictitious bogeyman group has managed to take over portions of Seattle, get two people killed in Seattle, and spend months burning down neighborhoods in Seattle and Portland?
Easy, my friend. All it has to do is deny its existence, and ensure that this denial is reflected up and down the stack. Under such cover, it can do anything, and blame anything that goes wrong on its opponents.
Oh right, I forgot about the part where "Antifa" or the BLM protests ended in them infiltrating the United States Capitol, killing guards with fire extinguishers and american flags, stole laptops from members of congress and attempted to sell them to Russia, and were wearing literal Nazi propaganda and claiming a revolution.
An angry mob surrounded the White House and tried to burn down the Church of the Presidents on May 31, 2020.
Trump had to shelter in the bunker, but he was just a coward, and the people were just demanding justice.
> Then came darkness, and with it, another night of mayhem. In the park, protesters faced the familiar pop, pop, pop of pepper bullets and stinging clouds of tear gas meant to push back hundreds of them as they tried, again and again, to break through the police barricades set up around President Trump’s home.
> Later, American flags and parked cars and buildings were lit ablaze — including St. John’s Church, a historic landmark opened in 1816 and attended by every president since James Madison. Firefighters quickly extinguished the basement fire, which police said was intentionally set.
Protesters then, as on Jan 6th, tried to entice officers to take their side;
> A black officer, according to witnesses, briefly took a knee in solidarity with the protesters, who cheered.
> Not long after, another officer made an announcement on a megaphone: “Attention: We will continue to move back unless you break the police line.”
> And again, cheering from the protesters, many of whom appeared to want the officers to join them rather than fight with them.
This is the biggest downer of our time to me. The media/elite control of the narrative is astounding and nearly ironclad - and as best I can tell social media is just being used to reinforce it.
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that if white supremacists performed those same actions, it would be described as a violent terroristic insurrection.
Yeah, I was reflecting back on that incident where BLM tried to breach the White House barriers. It was widely seen as a moment of weakness for Trump and opportunity to dunk on him for lying about it, and protests themselves described in supportive tone "Protesters have turned the newly constructed White House fence into a living memorial to racial justice"[0] / passive voice "started relatively cheerfully ... "tensions between protesters and police mounted ... multiple fires broke out near the White House late on Sunday evening etc etc." not like "an angry mob was about to try to storm the White House and that's bad"[1]
In fact these were really violent, dangerous protests and god knows what would have happened if they had breached the fences. Likely a lot of dead protestors and a major regime legitimacy crisis.
The night prior, more than 60 Secret Service personnel were injured from thrown bricks, rocks, bottles and fireworks, officials said.
"Secret Service personnel were also directly physically assaulted as they were kicked, punched, and exposed to bodily fluids," the Secret Service said. "A total of 11 injured employees were transported to a local hospital and treated for non-life threatening injuries."[1]
It's impossible to play the counterfactual, but I have to believe months of extremely violent political protests being tacitly allowed/encouraged sent a signal to many in the country that violent political protests are ok or even good, or at least what the other side has coming to them.
I've never understood this "what-about-ism". I see it as a bad faith tactic of deflecting attention from one issue to another, when the person doing it knows exactly how bad and indefensible their chosen stance is, and is trying to downplay it. I think it would be vocal to see why this OP is so instinctively fixated on BLM, Seattle and Portland and not on the Capitol attack. What does this reveal about the OP's own biases and what and whom they consider important?
I missed the part where BLM advocated overthrowing democracy. At worst they advocated to defund police and held obnoxious signs. And despite the right wing narrative, the people carrying signs and doing sit ins were not the ones rioting and looting, but rather getting their ass beat by police.
None of those points take away from it being "a literal sedition zone against the democratically elected government".
If we get a more transparent and verifiable election system in light of (or perhaps in spite of) the assault on capitol hill, then is it somehow justified? I certainly don't think so.
The popular view of it, especially on the Right? A fiction deliberately constructed by right-wing media (notably Fox News) and the Trump Administration.
> Wasn’t it fully supported by BLM
BLM isn’t a single, unified organization, so “fully supported by BLM” isn’t a meaningful phrase. The protests which spawned what was briefly called (by unknown persons) CHAZ before being renamed the Capitol Hill Organized Protest specifically to emphatically repudiate the implication of seditious intent were organized in part by activists identifying with the BLM movement.
> and a literal sedition zone against the democratically elected government?
OK, but what about attacking a federal courthouse for several weeks straight in Portland? All cases had to be moved to another site in a neighboring state. I don't think they should be charged with sedition, but it clearly fits the statute, which states:
"If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire [...] to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States"
Using violent attacks and arson to force a federal courthouse to close down would seem to fit that definition.
While it's true that the reason the mob attacked the Capitol was arguably worse, both antifa and the Trump mob attacked federal buildings and tried to harm those guarding them.
Also, regarding your source: our media has sadly divided into two, so no resource you list will convince anyone.
Either they already read the resource, and so already agree with you, or they don't read it and know better than to trust it, since it's a partisan source.
We would all do better to stop encouraging open partisanship among the media, and reward non-partisan perspectives. NB: this doesn't have to mean non-opinionated perspectives, although those should be clearly labeled as editorials (now, editorials have blended with news).
It's chilling how quickly misinformation merchants, hostile foreign agents, and other bad actors coalesced around using popular mainstream social media as the world's most effective megaphone.
A scant few years ago, they lacked a direct communications channel by which they could radicalize the average American.
How can you explain the radical leftists of the 1960's then? Somehow the Russians (Soviets) must have (I assume you believe it was caused by them) had a communications channel by which they could radicalize all those college students.
What you typed bears little resemblance to anything I claimed.
Yes, I lumped hostile foreign countries in with other sorts of hostile actors. However, I did not claim that they were the only kinds of hostile actors. Nor did I even claim that they were the worst.
Summarizing my views as "the Russians cause everything" is... just wow.
I think it's simultaneously funny and I feel a bit of empathy for them. They imagined puppies and rainbows on their free speech platform, but what they got was Donald Trump tweeting his way into the White House. They facilitated that and it's gotta be a big punch in the gut to people who consider him literally hitler, an existential threat, etc. When they looked around their very liberal cities they felt like they were the 99%, but a shocking reality check came for them.
These things are fine for the town square, since people have free speech, but nobody should be handing them a megaphone that reaches 7 billion people.
Free speech does not mean you are entitled to have your speech broadcast to a global audience.