Deplatform Parler good or bad?

[Krakan]

No but we have had Shalcker and Krakan unironically using this argument:

That is kind of funny though not an argument I've personally used. Well maybe in a jest towards endus.

I've made my point here already though and while is been misunderstood nearly constantly it's clear my ideals on the topic are not shared.

[Shalcker]

6) Could be a similar situation to Twitter where they don't like publishing hacked information. Could be that the face-checking algorithm was working in real time and downranking the story as it gathered information. Also 14.

No having any clear policy in place means that decision is arbitrary.

9) Answered in 4. They have the first Amendment on their side.

We aren't talking if they are within their rights to do it (point 5 in article); we're talking if that puts their hand on the scale.

And it does. As such they become political actors, and can be judged by political lens.

11) It's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. See 2.

If it would be "cure" it would be worse then "disease"; but it doesn't even resolve problem, just tries to sweep it under the rug.

12) Fake news is Fake news. It doesn't matter if the reporting is done in good faith. If the source that originally published the false story prints a retraction or updates the story with the proper corrections...it should be allowed to be resubmitted.

Facebook didn't even factcheck article before blocking it. Arbitrary declaration of "fake news" on certain events isn't helping to build trust to their judgements.

13) This is a problem that goes beyond social media. The same thing happens with Cable News...where people are more or less likely to believe a story if it comes from one source and is debunked by another. CNN tells you the election was fair, Fox News tells you it was rigged. MSNBC tells you Trump is a tyrant in the making, OANN tells you that Trump is the greatest President the Country has ever known.

13 is saying that declaring it "fake news" without establishing trust amplifies the story, not suppresses it.

They still get it through other channels.

[postman1782]

No having any clear policy in place means that decision is arbitrary.

We aren't talking if they are within their rights to do it (point 5 in article); we're talking if that puts their hand on the scale.

And it does. As such they become political actors, and can be judged by political lens.

If it would be "cure" it would be worse then "disease"; but it doesn't even resolve problem, just tries to sweep it under the rug.

Facebook didn't even factcheck article before blocking it. Arbitrary declaration of "fake news" on certain events isn't helping to build trust to their judgements.

13 is saying that declaring it "fake news" without establishing trust amplifies the story, not suppresses it.

They still get it through other channels.

Yeah no, if they are still following channels that are pushing bullshit, then they deserve to remain fucking ignorant.

[Shalcker]

Yeah no, if they are still following channels that are pushing bullshit, then they deserve to remain fucking ignorant.

Sure, as long as US deserves to be divided.

[postman1782]

Sure, as long as US deserves to be divided.

And thanks to your country shilling fake news as so called real news, you know, like the bullshit Hunter Biden laptop story, and gullible people bought it, it probably will remain that way.

[Forogil]

For two; that they're the same in this is pretty much a given; they are both privately-owned establishments and there is no meaningful, relevant difference between the two with reference to this issue.

According to you, but any reasonable observer would notice that there's a large difference between what you can do in your private home and what you can do in a publicly visible place like twitter. (Yes, I know that in addition to this difference - there can also be a difference between a private home and privately-owned establishment can also be seen as different, but I wrote "someone's house" not "someone's pub".)

Others have claimed that some privately owned places, like shopping malls, in some jurisdictions are treated like public places that cannot limit free speech.

So, you have utterly failed in proving the equivalence; and I see no point in further continuing this.

Technically illegal, as it's a violation of protected class legislation, but generally impossible to prove without a confession or a lot of supporting evidence, like a comprehensive analysis of who is asked to leave, and isn't, and why/why not.

Good that you see this point.

This is why nobody cared when r/The_Donald was banning people willy nilly for "being Democrats" or "challenging the God-King Trump" or whatever. It's stupid bullshit, but within their rights, it just means we'll consider them assholes and go on with our day.

That was just a sub-reddit. Had it been reddit in general and other social media at the same time it would have been more problematic.

However, even if I see a problem with relying on the benevolence of private companies I don't see any alternative.

[Shalcker]

And thanks to your country shilling fake news as so called real news, you know, like the bullshit Hunter Biden laptop story, and gullible people bought it, it probably will remain that way.

Yeah, yeah, it's all wily Russians, no Americans are to blame, no sir! /s

[postman1782]

Yeah, yeah, it's all wily Russians, no Americans are to blame, no sir! /s

Keep trying.

[Shalcker]

Doesn't matter. Parler could have had 10 accounts or 10 million

The percentage of users of parlor breaking Parler's ToS is immaterial.

You mentioned "amount of users" yourself; why would you do that if it was immaterial?

Clearly Twitter and Facebook should be driven off the internet by the same measure.

[Elegiac]

You mentioned "amount of users" yourself; why would you do that if it was immaterial?

Clearly Twitter and Facebook should be driven off the internet by the same measure.

Twitter and Facebook should be subject to significantly more scrutiny for their failure to moderate right wing extremism and political disinformation attempts from countries like Russia and China, yes.

But they actually have moderation practices in place that is within the technical compliance of their hosts ToS. Parler doesn't. Boo hoo. :<

[Egomaniac]

You mentioned "amount of users" yourself; why would you do that if it was immaterial?

It doesn't matter how many users or what percentage...because Parler, the company itself, is the one that was violating AWS terms of service by not having sufficient moderation in place to deal with these posts.

Clearly Twitter and Facebook should be driven off the internet by the same measure.

Twitter and Facebook took action to remove the posts.

Parler did not.

[Katie N]

Twitter and Facebook should be subject to significantly more scrutiny for their failure to moderate right wing extremism and political disinformation attempts from countries like Russia and China, yes.

But they actually have moderation practices in place that is within the technical compliance of their hosts ToS. Parler doesn't. Boo hoo. :<

The people behind those pages should be in prison for allowing subversive content to be posted and not reporting them to the authorities.

[Shalcker]

Twitter and Facebook should be subject to significantly more scrutiny for their failure to moderate right wing extremism and political disinformation attempts from countries like Russia and China, yes.

How exactly will they get more scrutiny if you allow them to moderate public discourse?

But they actually have moderation practices in place that is within the technical compliance of their hosts ToS. Parler doesn't. Boo hoo. :<

Parler does as well.

Amazon didn't complain that Parler didn't have policies in place, they just weren't satisfied with speed of their enforcement.

- - - Updated - - -

It doesn't matter how many users or what percentage...because Parler, the company itself, is the one that was violating AWS terms of service by not having sufficient moderation in place to deal with these posts.

What moderation is "sufficient", and why should Amazon be the one deciding it?

Twitter and Facebook took action to remove the posts.

After the fact. They didn't stop neither planning nor getting HangMikePence trending.

Parler did not.

Parler did as well.

[Forogil]

The people behind those pages should be in prison for allowing subversive content to be posted and not reporting them to the authorities.

That would make sense if the posts themselves are illegal and the ones making them would go to jail.

As I understand that isn't the case in the US at the moment - and the authorities are anyway under controlled by a person who posts such subversive content.

Requiring that platforms stop legal contents makes little sense, and relying on the companies benevolence in doing it voluntarily seems problematic.

[Shalcker]

Here is left-wing perspective:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1...688328193.html

With the deplatforming of forums where trumpists and right-wing figures congregate, there's a lot of chatter about whether and when private entities have the right to remove speech, and what obligations come with scale. The most important - and overlooked - area of this discourse is the role that monopoly plays, and the role that anti-monopoly enforcement could play.

In short, the fact that being removed from Twitter and the app stores and Facebook and Amazon is so devastating is best addressed by weakening those companies by spreading out our digital life onto lots of platforms. Not by strengthening them by giving them formal duties to either carry or remove speech based on its content. These duties will justify all kinds of anticompetitive activity, because only a very profitable company can afford to fulfil them.

It also turns the same companies that failed horribly to craft and uphold moderation standards into private-sector arms of powerful state actors (like domestic surveillance agencies) who defend their right to monopolize the digital sphere as necessary for national security. (recall that the Pentagon intervened in the DoJ's breakup of AT&T in the 1950s, successfully arguing for a stay of execution on the grounds that the Korean War could not be effectively persecuted without AT&T's help - the company stayed intact for 30 years after that)

Competition in the platforms is important, but it's not the whole story. The First Amendment was drafted for newspapers, and most contemporary communications law comes from broadcast and cable regulation. The internet is not a newspaper or a TV station, after all. The discussion of the difference between the American revolutionary era (or the heyday of broadcast TV) and the present moment focuses on technology, but there's a much more important difference to take account of: the presence or absence of a public sphere. The First Amendment contemplates both a diversity of speech forums (newspapers, cafes, halls) alongside of public spaces that are TRULY public, owned by the people through their governments and tightly bound by 1A as to when and whether rules about speech can be enforced. So if the Masonic Lodge won't let you give a speech from its stage, and the cafe throws you out for arguing, and the newspaper won't let you publish an op-ed, you can stand outside of those establishments with a sign or a bullhorn, leafleting and speaking your piece. The government can still restrict your speech on the public sidewalk or in a public park, but not according to its content - only according to "time and manner" (for example, enforcing a noise ordinance after 9PM or ticketing you for blocking traffic).

The biggest difference between a world where we are locked indoors and connect to one another via the internet and the world we left behind is that there are NO PUBLIC SPACES on the internet. If a cafe kicks you out for your speech, you can picket the public right of way out front. If Twitter kicks you out for your views, you have no constitutionally guaranteed right to stand at its digital threshold and tell everyone who enters or leaves that you got a raw deal.

Now, the state provision of digital services isn't an unmitigated good. US governments at all levels have proven themselves to be utterly surveillance-addled, in thrall to the fallacy that spying on everyone will make us all safer. But surveillance fears aren't why we lack democratically controlled tech. For that, you can thank the same right wingers who are so exorcised about deplatforming today, who, for a decade, have been the useful idiots of telcoms monopolists in the fight over public broadband. American cable and telco monopolists have divided up the country so that the best most of us can hope for is a duopoly, while many others are burdened with monopoly carriers, and millions live in broadband deserts with no high-speed internet at all. The poorer you are, the more your broadband costs and the worse it is. The more rural you are, the worse your broadband is and the more it costs. Homeowners with good broadband see their assets appreciate. If your home is outside a monopolist's profit zone, its price drops. The internet barons like it that way. When Frontier went bankrupt last year, we got to see its internal docs. Guess what? If you have no choice other than Frontier, it treats you as an "asset" because you will pay more for worse service. Even before it announced that it would seek Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Frontier had a well-deserved reputation for mismanagement and abusive conduct. In an industry that routinely enrages its customers, Frontier cares about its share price (its execs are mostly paid in stock, not cash), and share prices are rigged by influential analysts who downrank any company that makes a capitol expenditure that takes more than five years to pay off. That's why Frontier decided to walk away from the $800,000,000 in profits it would realize on a ten-year investment in fiber for three million households who currently make do with Frontier's failing copper network, which often consists of wires draped over trees.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/0...fiber-millions

We've been here before. For decades, you had to live in an urban, affluent area to get electricity; your country cousins burned coal for dinner and used oil-lamps to read by. The New Deal electrified the nation, extending universal service regardless of the business-case. Electricity became a human right, and the US government extended it across the nation (though structural racism meant that it arrived late for majority Black settlements).

Long before covid, underserved towns realized that their very existence depended on decent broadband. The initial experiments with municipal fiber were incredible, jaw-dropping successes. Towns that invested in fiber saw a vast expansion of job opportunities, access to global information and services, and new blood from telecommuters who relocated from big cities. The telcos fucking hated this. How can you sell flaky access to copper wires draped over shrubs for $80/month when the city is wiring people up to networks that are 1,000-100,000 TIMES FASTER at a lower price? In a competitive market, companies would have improved service and lowered prices to compete. Luckily (for monopolists), there's a cheaper solution: buy off state legislatures so they pass laws banning municipal broadband. These laws were promulgated to GOP-dominated statehouses across the country, passed by right wing lawmakers who told their constituents they were "keeping government out of the internet." This is a line that their footsoldiers dutifully parroted during the Obama years, then signed up to Trump FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's order that reversed a late-term-Obama FCC order banning state laws that interfered with municipal fiber project. Unfortunately (for the right), reality has a well-known left-wing bias. 700+ US towns and cities have municipal fiber. They are the only Americans who consistently express satisfaction with their ISPs. Most of these towns vote Republican! Woe betide the rural "red" town that lacks municipal fiber. These have been mostly abandoned by cable companies, so their cable/DSL duopoly has become a DSL monopoly, with prices rising and quality of service falling.

Which brings me back to the First Amendment and public sidewalks. All those people who are trying to find a way to support the "free market*" and also justify demanding that dominant platforms be ordered to carry their speech are living in a hell of their own making.
* Adam Smith popularized the term "free markets" to describe markets free from "rentiers" who collect money without adding value...such as cable monopolists. He DEFINITELY didn't mean "markets free from government regulation."
Because here's the thing: your ISP - and Twitter, and Facebook, and Amazon - is a private company. It is not subject to the First Amendment. It can have any rules it wants about which lawful speech it will tolerate. It can sling your ass out the door on a whim. You know who's bound by the First Amendment? You know who can't suppress your speech based on its content? You know who has to answer public records requests about why you got booted out of its service?

Your local government.

If you had a $70/month, 100GB fiber in your rural house, you could run a kickass P2P messaging server, and while you'd be right to worry about (covert, illegal) government surveillance (use encryption, kids) on that line, you would 100% have recourse if you got booted off. It's not an automatic home run. The First Amendment has exceptions, even beyond "time and manner," and has been substantially eroded by GW Bush and his successors, in the name of fighting terror, animal rights activists and water defenders.
But a lawsuit against your town council for nuking your Turner Diaries fanfic server is a hell of a lot more likely to succeed than griping about Twitter mods failing to grasp the "irony" in your Auschwitz jokes.

The right's war on municipal broadband was its biggest self-own of the 2010s. And while it's not true that "a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged," it might be true that "a municipal broadband activist is a conservative who's been kicked off Twitter." And this is one of those causes (like shutting down private prisons, or opposing foreign wars of aggression) where a substantial slice of the left and the right can come together (at the most local of levels!) to really Get Shit Done. Because the other great victims of America's monopolized broadband are people of color, poor people and working class people (often the same people). They live with digital redlining, where they pay 2X for 1/100th the speeds of their affluent neighbors a block away. They're the ones whose kids are doing homework in Taco Bell parking lots (and getting flunked on their tests because creepy remote proctoring services penalize them for taking their tests in a beat up hatchback and not a private room). The ones who can't videoconference with dying relatives in ICUs or doctors for telemed consults. Who can't apply for work-at-home jobs, or just play games and watch movies and upload their fun Tiktoks and Youtube videos.

The current system serves about 300 senior execs at telco monopolists, and a few thousand investors, and savagely fucks over everyone else. Even rich people in big cities usually can't buy fiber at any price. It's time for our four decade Atlas Shrugged LARP to end. It's time for a bipartisan fiber consensus.

[Vash The Stampede]

Deplatforming is a bad idea and against freedom of speech. The Trump supporters haven't stopping listening to Trump because a lot of them have money and will buy a platform to speak on. All you're doing is isolating them so their rhetoric has a greenhouse effect as it gets stronger without any discourse to give counter arguments. There's a reason why the confederate flag still waves down south when the confederacy has long been beaten almost 150 years ago. Stop trying to isolate people and thinking that will stop their movement, because it has never worked historically and it'll make things worse. Open discourse is the solution, not trying to silence them.

[Magicalcrab]

Deplatforming is a bad idea and against freedom of speech. The Trump supporters haven't stopping listening to Trump because a lot of them have money and will buy a platform to speak on. All you're doing is isolating them so their rhetoric has a greenhouse effect as it gets stronger without any discourse to give counter arguments. There's a reason why the confederate flag still waves down south when the confederacy has long been beaten almost 150 years ago. Stop trying to isolate people and thinking that will stop their movement, because it has never worked historically and it'll make things worse. Open discourse is the solution, not trying to silence them.

Even if we assume that they help, you weren't allowed to make counter-arguments on Parler.
Parler banned liberals and progressives.

The reason why the confederacy is still celebrated in the south is because of nazis with megaphones being able to affect schooling and edit textbooks to downplay the negative impacts of slavery and recontextualise the civil war. To create their own "Parler-ised" textbooks.

'Free speech' is just an excuse to give a megaphone to nazis with ill intent, and to lend credibility to liars. You benefit no one if you put lies right next to truths and say "It's up in the air, 50/50, you choose."

[Felya]

Deplatforming is a bad idea and against freedom of speech. The Trump supporters haven't stopping listening to Trump because a lot of them have money and will buy a platform to speak on.

Yes, and they will... but, they won’t be on social media where people are just talking to friends or looking for entertainment. They will not be able to recruit, using platform that validate their existence due to preexisting user base. They will have to do what Alex Jones and Gab did, create their own web site and persuade people to believe them, based on their merit.

That’s not an attack on free speech... it’s an attack on a cult being able to recruit on their property.

[Endus]

Deplatforming is a bad idea and against freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech has never implied you had any rights to any platform or audience. That's flatly not what the right is about.

The Trump supporters haven't stopping listening to Trump because a lot of them have money and will buy a platform to speak on. All you're doing is isolating them so their rhetoric has a greenhouse effect as it gets stronger without any discourse to give counter arguments. There's a reason why the confederate flag still waves down south when the confederacy has long been beaten almost 150 years ago. Stop trying to isolate people and thinking that will stop their movement, because it has never worked historically and it'll make things worse. Open discourse is the solution, not trying to silence them.

Compare the state of things before Trump and the likes of Gab/Parler, and after.

Things got way worse, very quickly. Because these kinds of echo chambers create a feedback loop of radicalization for their members. This is literally observable.

[Machismo]

Deplatforming is a bad idea and against freedom of speech. The Trump supporters haven't stopping listening to Trump because a lot of them have money and will buy a platform to speak on. All you're doing is isolating them so their rhetoric has a greenhouse effect as it gets stronger without any discourse to give counter arguments. There's a reason why the confederate flag still waves down south when the confederacy has long been beaten almost 150 years ago. Stop trying to isolate people and thinking that will stop their movement, because it has never worked historically and it'll make things worse. Open discourse is the solution, not trying to silence them.

Nope, you are simply wrong.

Do I get to come to your house, and yell racist shit at your family, without you being able to kick me out?