Back in the '90s, when you entered AOL Instant Messenger chatrooms there was always disclaimers saying that certain content (swearing, hate speech, sexual material, etc.) were subject to be filtered out, or would cause you to be kicked.
Message boards and forums have always had moderators and admins who could censor at will. You're posting on one right now.
Can anyone explain how Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc. is qualitatively different from any of these other websites?
Then regulate them, break them up, nationalize them, etc. But don't pretend that internet communities don't have the power to moderate their content. It's inherent to the format and has always been with us.
One would imagine in the '90s, AOL was probably as dominant as Facebook or Twitter is today- large enough to push its own alternative to URLs ("AOL Keywords"). The difference was there were far fewer people on the internet and the internet and computers in general were not as significant to our day-to-day lives. I doubt that Twitter today acts any differently from AOL Time Warner in Y2K.
Finally, scale is a measure of quantity, not quality.
That's exactly what's in progress, but this is all new territory and has developed incredibly quickly. Legislation hasn't kept up.
As far as scale, your comment already proves the point. A portal with a few millions users showing some brand pages is nowhere near the same as having a billion people constantly connected with every detail of their lives shared.
AOL was only dominant for a short while as an internet destination, but it wasn't dominant in people's lives and still competed with TV and print media in a mostly broadcast fashion. Modern social media is much more pervasive and powerful than AOL ever was.
Right, that's what the debate that is coming to. Are the platforms the townsquare for speech and should we hold them to a standard of free speech that doesn't just mean "no interference from government"?
Also, a difference of degree can be such that it becomes a difference in kind.
It's just strange to me that the Internet free speech debate is getting so heated after it's been around for as long as the Internet- or at least the Web- has. People are acting like they suddenly realized websites have TOS that include clauses on acceptable content.
You keep skipping over the reason. It's like saying the internet is nothing new because we had radio before. That's how big of a change social media is with the scale and reach.
It all basically happened in a decade, and especially grew in the last few years where even presidents are making news on Twitter first. And when the CEO of Twitter says social media is a right, it further begs the question of what access and moderation really mean.
People aren't in disagreement over what social platforms can do, they're in disagreement over what they ought to do. Why is that so hard for you to understand?
It's hard to understand why they're acting like they woke up yesterday when "Free Speech on the Internet" has been a hotly-debated issue that's existed for as long as the Internet. Why wasn't there mass anger in the AOL days, at least among the web-surfing public? Facebook has existed for over a decade and a half. Why did it take until now for this issue to peak?
You really can't figure it out? It's because today, and not a decade ago, the internet is the primary place for discourse. If you're banned from FB or Twitter, you're effectively banned from having a conversation. 10 years ago this wasn't the case -- only a minority of the population was using the internet as the primary place of discourse, and even then there was far greater stratification over various discussion boards.
This issue has peaked because a few massive corporations have consolidated the internet discussion market share, and they now wield massive power because of it. People want that power to be limited.
It's strange to me because it feels like I've been seen articles about the topic for at least a decade, and people just shrugged their shoulders until the polarization from the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the subsequent culture wars, and deplatforming becoming a major tactic used in the culture wars, kicked it into overdrive.
Pieces like this one [0] read so very quaint now.
I suppose, just like social media's detrimental effects on mental health [1], these advance warnings were just collectively ignored by society- and the tech companies themselves- until very recently. Odd, that.
> If you're banned from FB or Twitter, you're effectively banned from having a conversation.
You can still have conversations with ease by email, IM, phone, and on your own forums on a server you control (or non-electronically such as in person or by paper mail).
What an FB or Twitter ban effectively takes away is broadcasting your material to a vast audience for free.
I don't think the scale argument holds water, because back in the days of AOL, AOL had, by percentage, about as much control over what mainstream user saw as Twitter and Facebook.
I don't recall seeing AOL chatrooms quoted in mainstream news on a regular basis. They may have had a sizeable percentage of the online audience, but it's the "online audience" that's greatly inflated in scale.
Total internet users in 1999 were on the order of 100 million (147mm in Dec 1998 per InternetWorldStats). Today is on the order of 10 billion, very roughly 100x more (4.6 billion, 2020).
Use, interactions, control benefits, and ad spend have grown vastly more than linearly as a consequence.
A large Internet service in 1999 might have 1-10 million users (AOL peaked at ~27 million subscribers in 2002). Those were not connected wirelessly 24/7, but had occasional and intermittant, often dialup, access.
It's disingenuous to compare the relative reach of AOL in the 90s to that of Twitter and Facebook in 2020. In absolute terms, both Twitter and Facebook dominate contemporary discourse at a scale far surpassing any company prior.
It seems as if you and bezmenov actually disagree. AOL was influential online but online was not an appreciable part of the media and national discourse.
So AOL was a big fish in a tiny lake. In comparison today, FB and Twitter both are megaliths that impact how the ocean currents circulate.
Not to mention that the other dominant ISPs were unlikely to have TOS's that were any less restrictive than AOL's. Hell, Prodigy billed itself as family-friendly, so it was likely more censor-happy than both AOL and CompuServe.
There are a few different contingents that frequent HN and bother to look at the comments on posts like this, which results in equal numbers of downvotes on wildly opposing top level comments.
There is a large contingent on HM that doesn’t seem to want to discuss anything that’s related to politics in the smallest way, no matter how directly on topic it is for technology.
So you’ll find stories like this one that should be pretty high up which have been flagged to death and no longer appear on the main page.
One is censorship, that is used by dominant group to silence everyone else.
Another is bunch of minority groups that might have outlandish aims and use free speech platforms to harrass everyone else.
What I don't like that it is left to private company to sort it out and enact their own policies. This questions should be clearly handled on legislative level. In the end of the day a company provides a service, they shouldn't be the judge of how much free speech is allowed/not allowed.
So I would say it is not failure of twitter here, it is just massive failure of our political process, but we all kind of know that already.
the right to post on twitter, or even have a platform isn't a human right, it's not even a constitutional right, it's a 'privilege' the company gives you as long as you don't act like an idiot. Just like every web forum on the internet since aol and newsgroups in the 90s.
W/out twitter you lose a voice you'd never have had if Twitter didn't exist, so by them banning hate speech maybe if your voice matters you'll exercise some caution and prudence when making a statement.
The problem is that the same argument is used in dictatorships to ban people and activist from traditional media(print/TV).
Right now, what prevents Russian government/companies going to twitter and telling them look guys, you just banned your American extremists, can you please do the same for ours. They also practice hate speech, disinformation etc. The only problem is that Russian extremists look like average centrist US democrat.
In terms what is the right and what is not the right is not really for twitter to determine in this case. My point was it should be determine on legislative level what should be on twitter and what shouldn't.
In the end of the day twitter is a massive part of the political process. People exercising their rights, complaining to their representatives, supporting them, spreading their message.
So if you ban entitties from twitter, you ban them from political process. And I do think some entities should be banned, but it shouldn't be up to twitter, it should be up to us citizens to decide that.
If we think that holocost-deniers, nazy sympaphizers or whatever should be banned from social media bring it to the vote, pass the law, hopefully it will stand supreme court challenge and move on.
Not quite. The key difference is that dictatorships will also shut down independent publications they accuse of wrongspeech.
Nobody is arguing Stormfront should be shut down. In fact, the argument looks more like "Twitter is no more obligated to host the QAnon conspiracy theory than Stormfront is to host a weekly editorial from the head of the Anti-Defamation League."
They should just use the admin panel to start posting different stuff, a distributed re-education campaign with shadowban for user-generated content
I'm sure they granted themselves this power in the Terms of Service, if not then I'm sure they've granted themselves the power to update the Terms of Service
It's been encouraging to see companies grow a backbone and crack down on harassment and hate campaigns, and not hide behind cowardly cries of "free speech." Twitter has taken too much time to do this, but recently they've been doing it more. Even Reddit, notorious for powering and consciously allowing hate campaigns, has cracked down more.
It's also been interesting that the proponents of allowing these campaigns to continue say that stopping them will indeed lead to totalitarian censorship of "free speech."
Granted we must always be vigilant against social pressure going too far. For example, the mob that formed to find the Boston marathon bomber over-zealously targeted the wrong people, risking their lives. We must learn from things like this.
But to jump from banning hate campaigns on private platforms, to total censorship, is an impressively intellectually dishonest juggling act.
Agreed, for starters, nobody's using shortwave jammers. The rest of the internet is right on the other side of the wall.
Hell, people used to criticize these walled gardens. when did the argument change to the gardener shouldn't have control of the garden instead of free thinking people shouldn't let themselves be trapped behind a wall?
That Chrissy Teigen was on the Epstein flight logs and involved in sexual depravity, despite being a minor at that time; that pictures Tom Hanks takes of random roadside detritus are secret signals to a worldwide network of Satanic pedophiles; that there is video of Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin sexually abusing a child and cutting off her face; that Michelle Obama was secretly assigned male at birth and should be called "Michael"; and so on.
Also, just look in the replies of any regular person who attacks QAnon claims on Twitter and you will see responses accusing them of being a pedophile, a murderer, a Satanist, and claiming that they, their families, etc. will be imprisoned or executed.
I've been following "Q" out of curiosity since when it started posting. Not sure if it's a pied piper op, as Wikileaks said, or something else. However I've not seen any of the things you listed as examples of hateful content. You can search all the posts yourself. "Chrissy Teigen" and "Hanks" show no results. Clinton is mentioned but none of the "cutting off her face" stuff. Where did you get these ideas?
https://qposts.online/?q=Teigen&s=keyword
"QAnon" is the community of people who subscribe to the idea that "Q" is leading them to some hidden truth. I got these ideas by seeing thousands of people identifying as QAnon followers express every one of the ideas I listed above. You just have to look at any one of those famous people's tweets to see QAnon replies baselessly accusing them of horrible things. The codeword used for the supposed Clinton video in QAnon is "frazzledrip".
The nature of "Q", or at least the current person publishing under that guise (likely Jim and/or Ron Watkins), is that they rarely make any kind of concrete claims or predictions, but they've certainly made allusions to Moloch, Satan, cannibalism, etc. when referring to political figures. It's the responsibility of "bakers" in the community to take "Q"'s "crumbs" and come to conclusions. Certainly these conclusions have been widespread in the community for years and have not been spoken against by "Q".
People keep forgetting that 1984 assumes a singular authoritarian control, not multiple authorities and the freedom to choose one, several, or none of them.
What if Google and Twitter deside that those "alternatives" are hateful for disagreeing politically and stop linking them on their platforms making it extremely difficult/impossible to find them?
Sure, exactly like that. People who believe there’s a vast conspiracy of celebrities to drain “adrenochrome” from children to gain eternal life or whatever aren’t a protected class, after all.
Yes, provided they are not deciding on the basis of someone belonging to a protected class. Hence a cake maker can cheerfully refuse your business on the basis of you wanting a cake that says “Jennifer Garner Eats Babies” but not on the basis of you, say, being homosexual, or Black.
That means I can refuse servicing you based on, for example, the clothes you’re wearing, right? Or maybe because I don’t like your hair? As far as I know people with bad hair is not a protected class.
I’m trying to figure out how do you know the basis on which some private enterprise decided to refuse to provide their service to someone. Is it based on their stated reason?
> I’m trying to figure out how do you know the basis on which some private enterprise decided to refuse to provide their service to someone.
If you’re trying to understand the basis by which courts figure this stuff out, what we’re talking about here is the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which is civil law, and the evidentiary standard that applies is “preponderance of evidence”.
The businesses’ stated reason is certainly one piece of evidence that courts weigh, but it’s far from the only one. If you refuse me business based on what I’m wearing, but I can show you regular do business with people wearing the same thing, or I can demonstrate a preponderance of evidence that you knew I was homosexual and had made statements to the effect that you would refuse to serve homosexuals, courts aren’t going to just take you at your word.
It seems to me someone blocked on Twitter for alleged right- wing hate speech could easily demonstrate instances of left- wing hate speech which didn’t result in blocking on the same platform.
That would be analogous to the clothes example, right?
Your political beliefs aren’t a protected class wrt interactions with private entities under the Civil Rights Act, and there’s no other relevant right to not be blocked by a private individual or business if they don’t wish to hear or disseminate your speech, so yes, there’s nothing legally actionable there.
If I understood your point correctly, a company could get in trouble for refusing to service someone based on some stated reason (e.g. your clothes) if it can be shown that they do serve other people that match that given reason.
It seems to me that the situation with Twitter is the same, if it can be shown that they justify banning some people based on hate speech, while refusing to ban other people performing the same kind of speech.
They will only get in trouble if first they ban people of a protected class, and secondly it can be shown that their stated reason for banning was a lie covering their desire to actually ban people of a protected class or represents a bias against those members merely via statistical fact.
Merely being arbitrary in enforcement or inconsistent isn’t enough to automatically trigger government protection.
If you say that this isn’t fair, then I agree. However the class protections are pragmatic and serve to reduce social disruption. Like it or not, people are a lot less worked up over being discriminated against due to being democrats, than they are for being Catholics.
> If I understood your point correctly, a company could get in trouble for refusing to service someone based on some stated reason (e.g. your clothes) if it can be shown that they do serve other people that match that given reason.
Ah, no, I didn’t quite spell that out.
They can get in trouble if their stated reason for refusing service doesn’t line up with the way they treat other people who behave the same way, IF that disparity in behaviour can help build an argument that the preponderance of evidence suggests that their real reason for refusing service was related to your membership in a protected class. They’re free to behave inconsistently in general.[1]
So if Twitter says they banned 17k QAnon accounts for coordinated misinformation campaigns but for whatever reason you could show that a bunch of other misinfo networks they knew about weren’t banned, and all the QAnon accounts were also known to twitter to be Unitarians, and this was part of a pattern of behaviour towards Unitarian accounts, that might be legally actionable.
But if there’s no underlying, unifying element to these 17k accounts that’s protected, Twitter is free to ban them from their service even if they’re not very consistent about enforcing their TOS.
[1] Which isn’t to say that behaving inconsistently is smart, precisely because it can open you up to these kinds of arguments if your inconsistency starts to look like a pattern of behaviour towards a protected class.
I’ve found this link [1] though I have no idea if what they say is accurate. But they seem to claim companies actually do have to behave consistently in this regard:
[...] you can refuse to serve someone even if they’re in a protected group, but the refusal can’t be arbitrary and you can’t apply it to just one group of people.
To avoid being arbitrary, there must be a reason for refusing service and you must be consistent.
[...] you must apply your policy to everyone. For example, you can’t turn away a black person who’s not wearing a tie and then let in a tieless white man. You also can’t have a policy that sounds like it applies to everyone but really just excludes one particular group of people. So, for example, a policy against wearing headscarves in a restaurant would probably be discriminatory against Muslims.
The missing piece of the puzzle is that in US law, there are some very specific groups of people who are carved out as having special protection (the general guiding philosophy is: it's not legal to discriminate against people for some innate qualities, including race or gender).
So the missing piece of the puzzle is: which of the protected groups would every member of QAnon fall under? There's no law against discriminating against people who believe the QAnon conspiracy and spread it.
But the restaurant is required to be consistent applying it, no? Can they refuse service because you’re not wearing a tie while simultaneously serving the guy in flip flops?
>But the restaurant is required to be consistent applying it, no?
IANAL but I don't think so. In the US at least, they can't be inconsistent in a way that correlates to persecuting a protected class (refusing service based on race for instance) but otherwise they have the right - often explicitly displayed on signage to patrons on entry - to be able to refuse service to anyone for any reason.
It's a massive group of people LARPing about the most serious crimes anyone can be accused of and it focuses on new people nearly every day. No trials. Weak evidence. No way for the accused to face their accuser. It's as bad as the worst of "cancel culture".
It's more like a salem witch trial, started by little girls who don't really know what they're doing and who are trying to get a bunch of people murdered because, nothing else to do in 1700's Massachusetts.
Facebook hate groups don't need Twitter accounts to operate. Regardless of the presumably positive outcome for the mainstream timeline, this is likely a futile whack-a-mole move that only benefits Twitter. Hate groups organize in private and output the vitriol with whichever fake accounts they have in possession. The way to definitively solve this societal problem is to help the people caught in the self-radicalisation filter bubble to overcome their real-life problems that fuel the hate. Banning them from the services that played a part in turning them seems a bit hypocritical.
The comparison to hate groups is a little off the mark. QAnon doesn't organize in secret, and so far you're not likely to get fired if someone shows a picture of you wearing a Q shirt to your employer. That said I agree with the broader point that this may not do that much to inhibit QAnon, especially because it exhibits a lot of cultlike belief that might just be reinforced by this ban.
In fact, "Q" predicted this behavior by the social media platforms over a year ago, so the QAnon movement is not, in general, surprised by Twitter. According to their conspiracy, Twitter just checked off a box in the list of items they believe will happen coming up in the future.
As prognostications go, "The mainstream media will find my nonsense so aggressively hateful that they'll kick it off the site" is right up there with "It'll be cold in winter."
Especially when Q controls the level of the aggressive hate in the nonsense.
So, to give a concrete example: one way Q could ratchet back on the aggressive hate in the nonsense is to just stop posting. Stop posting anything. That would ratchet it down.
They didn't make that mistake. They tried to shut down 8kun, repeatedly. So many times that 8kun was able to harden their services with the assistance of the DOD.
I always wondered why the military was helping 8kun. [1]
The fact that I haven't heard of 8kun until right now is indicative of the utility of shutting these things down. If people have to go to a backwater site only known about by word-of-mouth, that's fine. Much better than broadcasting conspiracies through Twitter and FB.
"There is a secret truth to the universe known only to this secret cabal in the back of this drinking parlor" is an old trope. Far more expected than "There is a secret truth to the universe and Twitter is letting the nutters who believe in it multicast it via one of the most populated social networks on the planet." Better for Twitter to give it the axe, lest people confuse a badly-hashed-together conspiracy theory for actual truth.
You not having heard of 8kun really hasn't done a damn thing to slow down QAnon, actually. You're not in their target audience and they don't need you on board to achieve their purposes.
The best way to combat conspiracy theories like QAnon would be for our elites and institutions to stop constantly preying upon the people and lying to them about it via a neutered press, and actually hold some members of their own class accountable for once. The massively corrupt corporate giveaway that was the Covid stimulus is a great recent example. The Epstein case being slow walked by the FBI for 25 years and then trying to sweep it all under the rug with "oops he killed himself while the guards were asleep and the cameras malfunctioned!" is another. As long as this kind of stuff continues, people will attempt (often haphazardly and incorrectly) to understand how and why it isn't being stopped, and who's in charge of it. They will be easy targets for grifters and bunkum artists who rush in to fill the gaps left by complete radio silence on the part of mainstream media sources.
You know, I don't agree with QAnon and think it has many properties of a dangerous cult, but they do at least have one advantage over run-of-the-mill liberals in correctly identifying the ruling elite as the chief cause of the world's problems, instead of constantly focusing blame on "deplorable" Trump supporters with zero actual power or influence.
By recognizing that electoral success doesn't actually translate into direct implementation of the voters' preferred agenda, as both the Trump and Obama administrations starkly demonstrate.
Yeah god forbid we get something like accountability for the financial sector after 2008, an actual end to our ruinous wars in the Middle East, any sort of investment in real infrastructure or re-industrialization in the U.S., or an actual draining of the swamp of corruption in DC. Thank heavens the power elite knows what's best for the voters better than they do.
And by the same coin, thank God we didn't get a giant wall along the border, didn't kick out people from the United States who have lived here their entire rememberable lives, and didn't abolish social security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
The problem with expecting representative government to do "What the people want" is the people want a lot of things. Many of them incompatible. Some of them terrible ideas.
Are you seriously under the impression that the impetus to cut entitlements is coming from the broad base of voters and not the ruling class? Trump campaigned on not cutting Social Security and Medicare.
>I do not know what to make of that, other than to suggest the "elite vs commoner" division may not be politically clear.
The mistake is believing "elites" comprise an organized group with a single motivating purpose and unified agenda exercising arbitrary power over the facade of government.
The problem with using terms like "elites" and "ruling class" when referring to American politics is that while they're a great basis for conspiracy theories and class warfare, the simple dimensionality of "left vs. right, elite vs. commoner" don't describe the actual complex dynamics of political reality, or the fact that checks and balances do sometimes work.
Already done, and I find the entire thing entirely wanting.
That's the thing about conspiracy theories, they differ from reality because reality is consistent; conspiracies are merely internally consistent. They break down in the light of real world evidence. A man threatened people in a pizza parlor, demanding to see the pedophile ring running out of the basement of that building. The building had no basement. It would be amusing, or pitiful, if he hadn't had a gun to do the threatening. A theory doesn't deserve a second chance after something as foolish as that.
I wish you the best of luck out there, and I hope you get out of the grip of this 4chan-originated delusion. I wish I could help you, but on this side of the facts, the whole thing is so ridiculous that I don't understand how anybody sees it hang together.
> Why did the IRS stop sending collections notices back in January and stopped all collections actions?... That 4chan conspiracy explains this when nothing else does.
Literally nothing else? Not the fact there's an international pandemic so collections right now are like squeezing money from a stone? Not even the fact they didn't stop (i.e. people kept receiving collection notices right up to the People First Initiative)?
> And besides, that Pizzagate bit you decry as the end of QAnon's veracity hasn't yet reached its conclusion.
The pizza parlor running a pedophile ring out of its basement had no basement. That's as concluded as it gets.
I'm on the side that doesn't naively swallow assertions that collection notices weren't sent in January and February without fact-checking them. The IRS announced increased enforcement in February.
Sure wish he'd use some of that epic strength to actually deliver on some of those high-profile elite pedophile arrests he keeps promising. Trump's first term is almost up and instead of being in prison, Hillary Clinton is chumming around on Zoom calls with Lin-Manuel Miranda. Where's the damn beef?
Can't wait to read Q posts in Feb 2021 about how "Biden winning the election was a necessary headfake, Trump is still secretly the POTUS actually, stay tuned, the indictments will be unsealed any day now."
Unpopular opinion: while I don't oppose the existence of non-moderated social networks in the sense that I'd want them extinguished overtly, I'm not deeply convinced they're good, especially in this decade.
gab.ai gave breathing room for a man to be so radicalized by surrounding himself with anti-Jewish conspiracy that he murdered people at a synagogue. 4chan is a notorious breeding ground of terrible memetic hazards (including, notably, QAnon).
I don't guarantee Fediverse will end up the same, but the alternative services seem to collect mostly fringers who got kicked off of mainstream services with cause, and that's not a group I intend to support with my time and engineering labor. When I see a new social media site pop up, the first question I have is "What stops it from being the next gab.ai?"
Good “first” step. Thing is in a time of public health crisis misinformation is not something we need to put up with. It’s should be blocked, not just not propagate. Social media has indeed become a public health problem.
QAnon is a dynamic LARP. There is no conspiracy that they can't absorb. The anonymity of the authors is a feature, but it also means there is no person who can authoritatively deny that the WayFair conspiracy theory was not related to the core "deep state" one.
Honestly, my analysis of the Wayfair storage bin incident was that it was probably a LARPer (QAnon, 4Channer, Russian/Chinese troll, whatever) who had access to the WayFair vendor admin panel and realized that QAnon followers would eat it up.
That's not the evidence you think it is. In sports analogies That would be the equivalent of brian windhorst tweeting out something and then you saying that it came "Directly from LeBron James".
People are not responsible for what their ignorant fans say.
Is "QAnon" even a person? I am under the impression that is a moniker that has likely been used by numerous unrelated people.
I know believers of this stuff think "QAnon" is a person, but I've not seen any evidence that leads me to believe this is the case and quite a bit of conjecture / circumstantial evidence that suggests at one point the name was being used by a cabal of imageboard moderators.
There was an account on 8chan which would sign posts with "Q" and a unique hash which could be used to prove the identity of a particular person or group posting. Last I looked this account/hash hadn't been heard from in some time though.
No that's not an equivalent. QAnon is not a person in the same way LeBron James is a person. Is there a name for this logically fallacy where someone compares two wildly different scenarios thinking it's somehow related?
If none of us knows the identity of "Q" then anyone can pretend to be their prophet and there is no way to confirm nor disconfirm. This is why I describe QAnon as a LARP -- it's easy for the average person to participate without knowing any rules (because there are none).
Don't you think if your going to attempt to argue against someone you should argue against what they actually said?
If so then why the double standard with Q there are dumb fans who post stupidity for literally everything. You would think people would actually quote the source (always ignored) instead of using a clear falacy of using ones followers to define them.
> People are not responsible for what their ignorant fans say.
This is what I'm arguing against. When it comes to QAnon, you can't know the difference between QAnon, QAnon fans, and any rando who pretends to be either. It's a feature of the LARP.
To be fair, I think they both likely started on 4Chan, which has those same features.
In a way, it's a natural evolution of the "meme", which was originally a word coined by Dawkins to describe the gene of biological evolution equivalent in cultural evolution. Nobody owns a meme. Rarely can we prove who was actually the first to use a meme (KnowYourMeme attempts this, but occasionally can't definitively identify the creator). Memes keep their virility based on the collective LARP that all humans participate in (sometimes the meme goes away and other times it stays active).
Could be, to be honest I don't even know what it's about. But if "QAnon" came from 4chan than the "[whatever] didn't come from 'QAnon' because it actually came from 4chan" doesn't make much sense to me.
It's now banned and ridiculed on the same board. Nearly every poster recognizes it as either an intelligence Psy Op or a LARP. So yes it does contradict that statement.
For those interested in a deep dive into QAnon and its origins I highly recommend this podcast by Robbie Martin. He goes into possible links to Roger Stone and Erik Prince (and therefore ultimately Trump).
Would you please stop feeding egregious comments by replying, a.k.a. feeding the trolls? The site guidelines explicitly ask you not to do this, but to flag the comments instead: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I've banned that account but the damage is caused just as much by the users who perpetuate the flamewar.
Comments like this one are...tricky. While I can see why this one should be flagged (and I'm glad that it was), there's similar enough things that aren't flag-worthy posted all the time.
Arguments about speech and censorship are really common on HN, and I doubt you're saying they're all off limits, for example I don't think the subthread with
TearsInTheRain was bad. I certainly think that user is wrong, but I don't see why their comment was flagged (unless the answer is "the whole subthread is flag-y).
Twitter isn't the government. Nor are QAnon-conspiracy-theorists comparable to <an ethnic or religious minority group>. So no. You could, however compare Hitler banning the Jews from civil service to Trump creating new guidelines that ban trans-women from shelters.
That is a government action to marginalize a class of people those in positions of power find undesirable.
Twitter might not be the government but it surely is an institution that has a significant amount of power and influence on society. So much so that I think the public should pressure them to adhere to liberal values like free speech and rightly get upset if they dont.
And regarding the fact that conspiracy theorists arent an ethnic group, sure thats right they are not. They are still an ideological group. Are we committed to making a society that works for a diverse range of ideological groups or do we have to fit inside the box of what Jack Dorsey thinks is normal to participate in society? I think the american value of right to pursue happens means powerful institutions should be extremely careful before judging some group as not being normal or fit for society. Or I guess we can give up these values because now we dont like the results.
Twitter isn't going to shoot you. Twitter isn't going to imprison you. Twitter isn't going to unperson you.
If you think Twitter is influential enough that it is quasi-governmental in authority, you should pursue anti-trust regulation.
But otherwise, no Twitter is nothing like a government, and getting kicked off a platform isn't suppression of speech anymore than a me choosing not to publish your book us suppression of speech.
I highly value the right of any entity to express their speech the way that see fit. That includes Twitter's right to kick people off their platform. I don't agree with the weaponization of "free speech" and liberal values that is common among certain groups, as it is used to quell criticism. When you start weaponizing your "free speech" as a way to constrain others, you are no longer reflecting liberal values.
To further add to this, for fuck sake without twitter you'd be de-platformed from the get go, because there's nothing else like it. It literally democratized the ability to be heard on a national stage - so even peons/non-celebrities have at least a marginal voice.
It's not a human right, a societal right, or any other kind of right. It's a privilege, act like a douche, lose the privilege like every forum before it on the internet. Even this one (Hackernews).
Here's a good solution: Don't post hate speech or mis-leading fake news about a pandemic that could cost people their lives, then keep your platform and your voice.
I mean, you can go pretty far left or right on Twitter before you get banned, already.
It's actually asinine that you are defending censorship. Take a moment to think about that. I assume you think it would be a no big deal if Harvard started banning certain ideas and expelling people that talked about them. Perhaps scientific journals should feel free to suppress research that doesnt toe their political line and lets have journalists... well that ones already a joke.
Even if protecting free speech in non governmental institutions shouldnt be written into law it a is an ideal that every person should be defending. Its unreal that this has to be said.
I absolutely support certain kinds of censorship, yes. You do too (for example, I expect you support Youtube's right to keep pornogrophy off it's platform).
That you draw the line on how private entities choose to interact in a different place than I do doesn't make you more righteous.
> I assume you think it would be a no big deal if Harvard started banning certain ideas and expelling people that talked about them.
I certainly hope there are certain ideas that Harvard bans. They certainly ban specific forms of research. That's why we have IRBs, because people, when free to research any topic without any oversight, did awful things to other people.
> Even if protecting free speech in non governmental institutions shouldnt be written into law it a is an ideal that every person should be defending
No. I have no responsibility to assist you in publishing drivel, and the idea that I or anyone else has a moral responsibility to help you publish drivel is nonsense. Much as I have a right to tell you that you are wrong, I also have a right to not help you spread your message. To deny that is a perversion of the right of free expression.
I can't tell if you're being needlessly pedantic, but to clarify: no there are no similarities between the holocaust and getting banned from twitter. The two situations aren't similar, and comparing them is disgusting and shows a lack of empathy for people who have faced actual persecution.
Sure, you can write the words that compare them. No, you should not.
"A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on", that old adage.
But social has supercharged the whole affair, as you say, in speed and scale. Curation cannot solve it, but can it have some role in moderating it? What other tools do we have to throttle the damage? Do we need to axe social media entirely?
The root issue is trust. All curation does is move the "trust" requirement from the poster to the curator, but it doesn't solve for it. In fact, it arguably makes it worse since it concentrates power and reduces inputs.
I think social media needs to reform along our naturally developed behaviors. Small communities with some proximity and a measured flow of information. The instant global stimulus with anonymous accounts is clearly making us lose our minds.
I dont think instant global interaction at this scale with such ephemeral bits of data and complete anonymity works at all. My proposal would be for small regional communities with some connection and identity between participants. Similar to how offline social interactions have always worked.
I don't see how Twitter could change into that though at this point.
So here's a fun thought experiment: If that proposition ("The average person isn’t capable enough to judge information for themselves") were true, what would be the correct way to structure a society to maximize the quality-of-life for people in that society?
"Inalienable rights" is too broad a concept to have an either/or answer to that question. Choose some specific rights and choose to preserve them if they're inalienable.
I'll start: I see nothing in the inalienable right to life incompatible with structuring a society that can maximize quality of life for its citizens who, on average, aren’t capable enough to judge information for themselves.
It's not an argument; it's a thought experiment. From three posts up:
"""If that proposition ("The average person isn’t capable enough to judge information for themselves") were true..."""
I'm interested in exploring the logical consequences of assuming that point, not arguing the truth of the point.
I've generally heard quality-of-life listed under the inalienable right to pursuit of happiness, not the inalienable right to life, i.e. "What's the point of living if you can't ever be happy". But, yes, let's preserve that one as inalienable too. How do we structure a society to preserve those rights if we assume "The average person isn’t capable enough to judge information for themselves?" What does that do to their ability to both enunciate what makes them happy and make the correct decisions to pursue that which makes them happy successfully?
People are able to judge information they encounter. The problem is when there is so much information, that the amount of time it takes to get to a piece of information that is worthwhile to evaluate has long surpassed the amount of time people have to evaluate the information. So good info never even makes its way to them.
I believe it is a function of the medium. Text is so interesting in that how you feel affects how you read and interpret it.
A good example is the line ‘I never said she took the money’
Depending on which words or sets of words you emphasize when saying it out loud, you can get a dozen different meanings out of the sentence. I.e. compressing human communication into text is more lossy than people recognize.
It becomes self perpetuating. If you feel angry, you will read people’s written word as snarky and you will get into a fighting mood. If you internally sing the communication from someone who is obviously trying to troll or be mean, it actually becomes quite hilarious and it will lift your mood (this is advice I give to people some times).
The phrase "more ... than any other account" is hyperbolic at best. The repetitive drumbeat to try to paint Trump as Hitler-esque is strange. Among other things his ability to communicate is severely lacking.
Since we apparently are expressing wishes now, I wish that twitter just didn't exist in the first place.
I watched the video and it seemed pretty obvious that the old man responded mockingly to the other person accusing him of white power.
I don’t think the driver was actually chanting white power as a claim that white power was his desire.
Now, there’s certainly an argument for not making such a response and to channel anger better and not joke about such things. But I don’t think retweeting that video is a show of support for white power. Poor taste is much more likely.
You can add levels of meta to disarm any analogy and excuse any statement but that's silly. Yelling 'white power' is goatfucking and that guy is a goatfucker.
Yes but you're trying to make the trivial context and intent complicated and it isn't. Ed Norton plays a goatfucker. We are talking about goatfuckery. Dude yelling 'white power' in public? Actual goatfucking. But no, you say, he was commenting on the absurdity of the goatfucker accusation by fucking some goats. This is precisely the sort of thing the Rule of Goats is about.
I don’t think that’s what the rule of goats is about, but I appreciate your continued commenting.
If your interpretation of the rule of goats is right, then it’s not very useful as it turns lots of people into goatfuckers. And when everyone is a goatfucker, fucking goats isn’t that bad any more.
The point of the 'rule' is that some things are so repugnant, there's no doing them 'ironically' or 'as commentary'. Hence the goats. If, when accused of goatfucking, you produce a goat and start fucking it, you are a goatfucker not a wry commentator on the baselessness of the accusation. If someone at a rally accuses you of racism (by, you know, association since you are rallying in support of someone with a long track record of racism) and you start shouting a virulently racist slogan, you're a racist. It's super-duper simple. Your interpretation is that yelling 'white power' is not actually racist because... some weird meta-thing. The entire purpose of the rule is to act as a terminating condition in otherwise unbounded meta-recursion.
Was that not the very point of some people’s frustration? Why does the intentions of the person on the video need justification, rationalization or explanation?
I agree but brought it up as OP stated that POTUS endorses racism and white power through the tweet. I think I may be automatically biased against his tweets. But if a regular person posted that video I wouldn’t consider it endorsement of white power.
Perhaps if there’s more context on the person in the video that would help. It seems like a frustrated response pointing out absurdity. But if the person flies a nazi flag then that would change my mind.
I don't care what the motivations of the person in the video are, they're irrelevant and I'm not interested in trying to unpack them; it was incredibly poor taste for POTUS to retweet it for any reason. That's the point.
My comment wasn’t whether it was poor taste or not.
I think saying the president is clearly supporting white power because he tweeted this video is incorrect. This video does not support white power. I don’t think it’s intent is to further white power. I think representing its purpose as promoting white power is incorrect, or misleading, or confusing, or anything other than accurate and truthful.
But I agree about the poor taste comment. But I think there’s a big distinction between a rude person and a white supremacist.
Someone says “I bet you beat your spouse and children?
It’s such an insane statement I say “Oh yeah, I’m definite a spouse beater. Beating spouses is a great thing. We all should beat our spouses and children!”
I don’t think that’s ironically condoning domestic violence. It’s an as absurdism response. If I was captured on video with such a response and you retweeted it, I don’t think it’s likely that the retweeter was condoning domestic violence.
Your entire post history is just you repeating the same talking points from a clear side of the political spectrum. But it’s not “hate” when it aligns with your beliefs, I suppose?
Disagreement isn’t hate. Is good to disagree and share differing viewpoints. My above statement was that the guy brought up his disgust for Trump when the discussion was entirely unrelated.
Such a claim may well be doubted, but why do you? Producing counterexamples is relatively easy, comparing to proving a negative, so why don't you provide the ones you have in mind?
I think it's an interesting question to ask, if there are people who aren't the President, who are worse, and are not ostensibly as privileged, what's going on? As I understand it, the system is supposed to prevent those who aren't world leaders from behaving badly.
I mean, the Republicans did try to frame Obama as a radical black separatist and terrorist sympathiser with the whole Bill Ayers/Jeremiah Wright thing[0,1], but they realized calling him a crypto-Muslim (and terrorist sympathizer, and if you want to wonder if he's the Antichrist too we're not going to stop you) would be easier given his name[2].
Don't know what QAnon was, apparently it's not just one person but 7K accounts so a group? I took one visit to the website not long ago and wrote it off as garbage. Obviously there is true stuff mixed in but I'd say the fake news level at least slightly higher then CNN so I can see why twitter would flag it as such. Should they be banned though? Honestly, I'm more for leaving the nonsense like flat earth stuff up so you know who is crazy, but twitter will do twitter things.
A lot of people did that years ago, when Twitter's response to a notorious Twitter troll being elected as President of the United States was to modify their TOS so that there's a "newsworthiness" carve-out that keeps trolls on Twitter.
I’d like to see Antifa added to this growing list as well.
The article states this group has “ties to dangerous real-world activities”. Does anyone know of any? Or is this just conjecture? The article’s statement was fairly vague.
You could start with the guy who charged into the pizza shop back when this all began. Fortunately he didn't kill anyone but he's now in jail after sincerely believed children were being abused and that it was being covered up.
I would think it fairly disingenuous to claim QAnon as a distinct thing with no history or causality and that it appeared fully formed and unchanging.
It should have by rights have disappeared into obscurity after the imminent mass arrests of HRC and other prominent Dems didn't occur; much like the lone gunman inadvertently showed Pizzagate as a hoax.
Rather it has morphed into a moment of sorts that channels people frustrations with anything and everything, with a weird idolisation of Trump the celebrity and now encompasses any alt/far-right fringe idea that is big on conspiracy but generally lacking in theory.
What I think is disingenuous is to want anything to exist in absolute isolation. Sure, Pizzagate and QAnon probably draws from same demographic, but blaming something that that hadn't existed yet and saying that it "should have by rights have disappeared into obscurity after the imminent mass arrests of HRC and other prominent Dems didn't occur" is total bulls*it.
A loose organization with regional groups, ranging from random protesters by proximity to political activists to violent criminals and terrorists, with various claims from generally left/socialist ideologies to outright radical extremism.
I would say "completely disorganised" rather than "loose organisation" and I can't see that changing.
The left is a vast collection of competing factional ideas that in many cases the only common purpose is a demand for change.
Environmentalists can't agree with each other, let alone animal welfare activists who can't agree with native/traditional rights; and theres a range of single issue movements that end up diluting support for bigger picture issues simply by association. I'm not saying that they are wrong or their demands invalid but it draws attention away from the messages everyone could get behind if there was better focus.
It happened with the "Occupy Wall Street" and "BLM" will likely go the same way if it doesn't simply stick to one core message.
I'm on the left, and can concur. Many of us were pissed about Bernie losing, and thinking yeah now's the time for the Green party to win...
Then there's like at least 3 groups trying to start 3 new political parties, those of us pushing for the greens, more pushing for one of the socialist parties, and some even pushing for the libertarian party (I'm a leftist/socialist libertarian, but the libertarian party is NOTHING like a left/libertarian), and some voting for Trump out of spite, or insanity, and the rest probably cow-towing to vote for Biden.
Just ideas alone it's pretty disjointed. No organization. I mean the right/tea party at least was pretty coherent and had a pretty good structure to accomplish their goals.
Leftists though have their own purity tests, and their own minds made up and can be rather stubborn about how to accomplish goals, what those goals should be, etc...
I think we all have ADHD or something.
However, there's no 'terrorism' on the left, or very rare. antifa is not a terrorist org. Show me the deaths, the bombs, etc. I can show you plenty of those on the right though, an antifa terrorist is probably some kid egging or graffit-ing a building. That's about as serious as they get, because most on the left are also pacifists.
The Greens in Australia are a sad case in point. They turn over people like crazy and I suspect that is largely due to the stress and pressure of basically herding cats. I've been silently wondering whether they were even infiltrated by a fifth column who exasperated these internal divisions to break their hold in the Australian Senate as the deciding vote for most issues.
Bernie was unfortunately an outsider who never stood a chance without the power brokers in the Democrat party stepping forward to back him, but the Greens seem to just eat their own.
It’s a slur, a belief that these people are extreme card-carrying Marxists educated at Karl Marx University and completely conversant with Das Kapital in the original german.
But I’ve never met someone complaining about them who could name one of them. It’s like some Boys of Brazil meets George Soros thing with them.
If you're optimizing for "ties to dangerous real-world activities" it's weird that you'd pick anti-fascist protestors before considering cops and soldiers. Cool ideology you have there.
No "antifa" movement has been associated with the same degree of violence and coordinated harassment. There are not tens of thousands of "antifa" members sharing lists of public figures they believe have been or should be executed and fabricating evidence against those figures.
As an antifascist, I'd like to list some things [0] which I haven't done and which I do not imagine are parts of healthy antifascism, but which I can understand that Twitter might ban folks for encouraging or doing:
* Doxxing
* Brandishing weapons in a family restaurant [1]
* Targeting journalists for violence
* Targeting public figures who have been accused of crimes for violence [2]
* Targeting politicians for violence
* Bombing churches (and yes, Satanic temples are just as bad to bomb as Christian churches)
* Invading foreign soil
Could you help flesh out the equivalence here? It seems like quite the false equivalence to me. Antifascist violence is a last resort, not a central desire of the ideology; we've seen police, military police, and now secret police in a continuing escalation of violence by the state; meanwhile, Q's followers seem quite happy to endorse violence as the primary means by which political and social change are achieved, by which detective work is done and facts are learned, and by which discussions are had and consensus is reached.
Willem Van Spronsen who firebombed an ICE facility was a self described antifa [0]
Connor Betts who shot 9 people dead was an antifa sympathizer [1]
James T. Hodgkinson who hurt two officers and wounded Republican Rep. Scalise in a shootout was found to have posted a lot of content comparing President Trump and the Republican party to Nazis [2]. An idea that has been popularized by antifa elements.
This comment was on a dupe thread and I'm adding it here in case this gets un-flagged. There is a good reason to discuss this:
I sympathize with the argument that social platforms are private and can do business (or not) with whomever they please, the counter argument is that these platforms are "Radical Monopolies" (https://wikitia.com/wiki/Radical_Monopoly) apropos of a recent HN thread on Ivan Illich, where the analogy for the effect of being kicked off a platform is not like Ford declining to sell you a car where you can just go get another one, but rather, cancelling your license in Los Angeles.
It's not 1:1, but if you lose your drivers license in a city like LA or non-coastal state, your ability to participate in society (find work, etc) and your social franchise in society is diminished because the automobile has a radical monopoly in American cities.
Twitter and social platforms like Facebook have definitely become radical monopolies for reputation, where if you have no social media presence, you are excluded socially. (Regarding Facebook, try find a date without an instagram page.) Facebook execs even commented publicly early on that people without Facebook accounts should be treated as suspicious.
That QAnon types are so ridiculous and indefensible is what makes them a great example for discussing how and whether to protect minority views. Twitter does have the right to do what they want, and I'm optimistic that these purges will create demand for the divergent platforms that will replace this first generation of them, but to say this right is simple and natural ignores precedents of radical monopolies that were enabled and sustained by political protection, which seems naive. The non-libertarian case for limiting social platforms ability to purge can be summed up in president Obama's thoughts,when he said, "you didn't build that."
Arguably, social platforms that rely on network effects to become radical monopolies didn't "build that," either.
I'm not sure what you mean by "enabled and sustained by political protection" in this context. Facebook and Twitter didn't have to build the web infrastructure, but there were other social networks in existence before those two became dominant. I'm not sure how we perceive their network effects as non-self-built.
Facebook beat out competitors with two advantages: access to primary sources (they primed the network with college students) and requirement to use real names, which set them apart from other persona-based social networks at the time and encouraged people to be their "normal selves" on FB. Turns out, that's what a lot of people wanted; relative to the cyberpunk-esque other options, it felt "normal and safe." They made a market choice and it paid off for them.
Social media could not have originated anywhere else in the world because the platforms were built on freedoms and opportunities guaranteed by the US.
Facebook was a way for people who went to Harvard to tell people they went to Harvard without having to actually say it, and for everyone else to be seen know them - Facebook didn't build Harvard, but it is an effect of it.
Twitter is an artifact of speech protections and nerds, and now that it has arrived it's trying to cast off the taint of trade to become a walled suburb safe for middle class banalities. Did a few thousand lines of code create billions in value, or did a society with a network effect produce it?
I don't think I disagree with your assessment of Twitter, but I don't see the problem. It happens all the time.
The Wild West gave way to towns and suburbs too. Turns out, most people don't want to get shot in the street at high noon, and once the pioneering time is done, that kind of behavior becomes no longer acceptable. Pioneers who have also decided they're done risking having to duel in the hot sun will stick around; pioneers with more risk tolerance (or a thirst for that kind of experience) then often set out for new territory to tame.
It's funny how extending that analogy begs the question in the small matter of what to do about the natives, which is loosely analogous to the problem of social media, where you colonize and coopt, and then have the issue of what to do with the subjugated people. Not a lot of "right thing," and "good guy," stuff there.
The radical monopoly concept captures this dynamic, where products bulldoze culture. Sure, it's progress, but just don't look behind the curtain, and certainly don't be as sanctimonious as the social media platform execs have been.
The Internet is no more than 50 years old, and Twitter less than 15. There are no 'natives' here; the "land" Twitter occupied (to absolutely torture an analogy) didn't exist until the twitter.com domain was registered and the service was set up.
There may be people who helped Twitter gain widespread adoption by their fame who are now feeling taken advantage of by Twitter changing its rules to kick them off their service. Maybe we can bend the analogy far enough to call them 'displaced natives?'
Do such people exist though? I'm pretty sure the Venn diagram of QAnon supporters and long-lived Twitter luminaries is two circles. Even if we accept the notion of "Twitter natives," we seem to raise the question of who the "displaced natives" are when regular Twitter users have to put up with this novel conspiracy nonsense.
I'd agree we should put this simile out of its misery, but there were internet "natives," before twitter as there were people who live in the society impacted by it. That twitter's participation in the radical monopoly of online reputation can affect the ability of a barista in a flyover state getting a job shows how people are in fact culturally displaced by the technology.
QAnon is bonkers, but as an example of a culture being displaced by a technology platform, which I argue is the unavoidable effect of the dominance of said platform, this is good example of the effect of these platforms. They aren't neutral. They're welcome to be against whatever QAnon is for, but I don't buy the story that Twitter is virtuous and worthy for doing it, and they're not the little guy or the people, they are the dominant paradigm.
> We will permanently suspend accounts Tweeting about these topics that we know are engaged in violations of our multi-account policy, coordinating abuse around individual victims, or are attempting to evade a previous suspension — something we’ve seen more of in recent weeks.
So is Twitter essentially admitting this rule is only enforced against groups they don't like?
If they're spreading hatred against some groups or harassing individuals why not use these rules instead? Twitter prohibits that already.
Also the timing is interesting given America is having and election in a few months and these Q people are some of President Trump's most devoted supporters. Didn't seem to bother them for over 2 years.
You could have read another 2 paragraphs lower and had your questions answered:
> The spokesperson said while the targeted enforcement against QAnon fell under Twitter’s existing platform manipulation rules, its classification of QAnon as coordinated harmful activity was a new designation. The spokesperson said Twitter was taking action now because of an escalating degree of harm associated with the conspiracy theory.
Q / QAnon only exists because of the Trump election. It's a way for "President Trump's most devoted supporters" to be engaged in the campaign. I wouldn't be surprised if the entire LARP was created by or steered by the campaign team.
I didn't mean to insinuate that all Trump supporters participate in the QAnon thing.
I have yet to see a QAnon follower who didn't also support Trump, so from my perspective being a Trump Supporter is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being a QAnon follower.
> Both far right and left have extremists that shouldn’t be tolerated by anyone.
I'm not sure what you mean by "tolerated" here. I'm fine with calling them out for their silly ideas and actions. Perhaps even "canceling" them if they get too extreme. I'm not interested in actually adopting their techniques.
This has already been stated by them on the record multiple times. The last I seen was on Joe Rogan I believe. In that episode the CEO stated that trans is a protected class and it would be a ban-able offense for a Christian to tell a trans person they are their biologal sex (male / female). Obviously Christian vs Non would have differing viewpoints towards this subject.
She also stated they made they decision internal how they personally feel is best.
Personally, I believe that any monopoly having power to silence a crowd should be held to a legal standard. Ban all or ban none.
Well, the trans policy is written out in their TOS so at least everybody can follow it.
I think Twitter can do whatever they want and personally I'm fine with rules if they actually mean something. But here it sounds like they're just coming up with a bogus reason to delete a lot of people permanently.
The normal penalty for violating most rules that have to do with what you said is a temporary ban. By invoking this one they can go for a permanent suspension straight away.
Free speech the concept is different from the First Amendment, which is different from private companies and private property.
The fringes will always be there, they're just more visible and vocal now. The real issue is whether a platform will choose to be moderated or not, and what tools it offers to users to control their experience. All major platforms are still working on that balance, especially as they become increasingly dominant mediums of expression.
> The fringes will always be there, they're just more visible and vocal now.
And the fringes have enlisted bots to amplify their message, which includes accusations of serious criminal behavior with no evidence that would stand up in court.
I suspect media platforms won't actually be able to fix these problems because they are codependent on the outrage that they create.
For the uniformed: At least, long ago, in the beginning of 4chan, nobody believed this. They purposely made it up for fun and trolling. I seriously don't understand how there are some people unaware of this.
They then purposely pushed it from 4chan to places it would be believed, other forms of social media like Facebook.
The general populace (of social media users) are the ones who eat it up. They eat shit up from an anonymous image board that has always said that
"The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
tl:dr "civil" society has quite literally proved it's simply not ready for the internet. Wonder if this will go down as the Great Filter.
My hunch is every single qanon story is just that, a story. I would imagine groups of students have competitions to come up with the most absurdly plausible story, with the winner able to perceive the odd conspiratorial mindset that so many in the USA seem to have. When a story goes viral they are laughing in some private chat room.
Watching the movie Slackers (2002) recently was eye opening. You'd think this weird conspiracy thing was recent, but Slackers shows it predated the mass adoption of the internet.
The thing is, people like Musk are scared of super-intelligent AIs, but all you really needed is Russian MLbots more intelligent than the median American.
if i hosted a forum i would very likely ban people who posted extreme messages.
but, of course, im small. the relative harm to the extremist is small. they can find another place to spread their awful message. but what if i'm bigger? what if i have monopolized a large portion of political speech within a country? what if my platform is the primary communication channel for the president of the united states? do i then have an obligation to provide a platform to that speech?
what if myself and a few friends own such a significant share of the internet that we can effectively remove extremists from all online participation. they cant host a server. they cant register a domain. they cant use private messenger apps. they cant send or receive money.
to what degree can a person be ostracized from society for having an unpopular opinion.
i certainly don't agree with the views of the taliban. i certainly wouldn't want to be complicit in the hosting of those views. but i have to wonder, if "illegitimate" speech can be removed by a small minority of corporate leaders how long is it before "legitimate" speech is removed?
can a democratic society really exist where all opinions are filtered through a corporate elite? can "problematic" speech be allowed to exist so long as it doesn't call for violence? are calls to violence always evil?
the BLM protests have certainly made calls to violence. should the cause for racial equality be stopped because it offends or threatens a minority (or even a majority) of people? couldnt' the BLM protest be construed as "problematic" or "illegitimate" and removed from the civil discourse overnight?
im asking because i don't know what to do. there doesn't seem to be a clear path forward. there is no "public square" on the internet. its all private. but there's no one left in the "real" public square. the one in meat space. the "public square" has moved onto private property and there's no way to get it back.
Message boards and forums have always had moderators and admins who could censor at will. You're posting on one right now.
Can anyone explain how Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc. is qualitatively different from any of these other websites?