People should have a chance to speak their mind but in an ideal world decency would prohibit some things from being said. It's dangerous when certain platforms who coordinate with government agencies decide what is acceptable and what is not. I'm not ready for a ministry of truth like snoopes.
A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
461–470 of 473 posts
Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sweet, let's engage in Learned Quote Battle! "How now, how now, chop-logic! What is this?" --William Shakespeare a very real assault on demographics like the straight white male Oh! Never mind, I'll see myself out.
Try to have a debate in any moderately left forum about topics like feminism or economics without having some people come out of the woodwork with character assassination and insults, disregarding your opinion as a priviliged cis white male . It's a real thing and it's ridiculous. I get told all the time I'm not allowed to participate in conversations based on my sex, sexual orientation, and skin color.
I feel like I need to correct you on a couple of things.
People being mean to you in a forum is not evidence of "a very real assault on demographics like the straight white male".
You don't have to be a genocidal maniac to be a white supremacist.
'White genocide' is not something someone yelled in the heat of the moment - it's an old neo-Nazi term and it is obviously intended to justify extremism - after all, what response is inappropriate if you're a victim of genocide?
The people Niemöller was talking about faced imprisonment, torture and murder. The oppression the owners of Gab face involves putting on pants and driving some servers to the nearest colo facility.
Aristotle was not Belgian.
The central message of Buddhism is not "Every man for himself."
And the London Underground is not a political movement.
Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try to have a debate in any moderately left forum about topics like feminism or economics without having some people come out of the woodwork with character assassination and insults, disregarding your opinion as a priviliged cis white male . It's a real thing and it's ridiculous. I get told all the time I'm not allowed to participate in conversations based on my sex, sexual orientation, and skin color.
I feel like I need to correct you on a couple of things. People being mean to you in a forum is not evidence of "a very real assault on demographics like the straight white male". You don't have to be a genocidal maniac to be a white supremacist. 'White genocide' is not something someone yelled in the heat of the moment - it's an old neo-Nazi term and it is obviously intended to justify extremism - after all, what re…
What an incredible strawman.
Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like I need to correct you on a couple of things. People being mean to you in a forum is not evidence of "a very real assault on demographics like the straight white male". You don't have to be a genocidal maniac to be a white supremacist. 'White genocide' is not something someone yelled in the heat of the moment - it's an old neo-Nazi term and it is obviously intended to justify extremism - after all, what re…
What an incredible strawman.
'strawman' you're going to have to look up yourself since I already did all the other ones.
Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
#465> Most successful deplatformings are Pyrrhic victories Big fat citation needed on this. You speculate as to how they may become pyrrhic victories, but it's far from concluded that this will be the case. Previous deplatformings (Milo, Alex Jones) haven't produced any visible negative consequences for the platforms. There's little reason to think this will either. Surprisingly few people care if a den of hate speech ha…
>Previous deplatformings (Milo, Alex Jones) haven't produced any visible negative consequences for the platforms. Anecdotally, these deplaformings are shifting my worldview further right. And I know for a fact that it is having the same affect on many of my peers. Some might call that a negative consequence.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "shifting [your] worldview further right"? When white supremacists are deplatformed, what specific conservative views are you consequently adopting or strengthening? Low taxes? Favoring corporations over labor unions? Strengthening criminal penalties for drug users? Favoring the role of organized religion playing a greater role in society and institutions?
Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
#466While Americans seem obsessed with defining "free speech" as being exactly the same thing as the 1st Amendment, it might help to ask exactly why the 1st Amendment is a good idea. JS Mill argued that censorship is wrong on a rights basis, that it leads to bad ideas being unchallenged, and it leads to people not being able to understand the reason why ideas are rejected. If censorship by a government is harmful, how is…
> "trigger the conservatives" to force them to attack the actions of private companies Conservatives will come to understand that big capital is not a conservative.
I'm not personally a conservative, but I'm pretty sure conservatives are not all hardcore libertarians or objectivists. Some of the intellectual brain-trust of conservative thought is libertarian or objectivist, but a lot of the broader conservative movement is not.
Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
After some thought, here is what really matters. The same people who make demands on companies to effect deplatforming are the ones who post about "freedom of association" for those companies when the deed is done. This is not a real argument, just an excuse. When PayPal start banning clients based on their activity outside of monetary transactions, PayPal effectively condemns certain points of view. Which might soun…
I love how you're treating customers and employees petitioning a company, and then the company taking their concerns seriously, like it's some kind of bullying conspiracy. Never mind when a platform manager like Matt Prince [1] goes out of his way to make it clear he is autocratically representing his own judgement, after grappling with the very real moral tradeoffs involved in excluding someone. PayPal publicly cond…
>I love how you're treating customers and employees petitioning a company, and then the company taking their concerns seriously, like it's some kind of bullying conspiracy
This attempt to frame deplatforming as something enacted by concerned stakeholders is out of touch with reality. It usually involves partisan press, activist organizations and whipped-up online crowds with no stake in the platform they're trying to affect. It takes about 10 seconds of web searching to find all three in Gab's case. @deplatfromhare and so on.
>Never mind when a platform manager like Matt Prince [1] goes out of his way to make it clear he is autocratically representing his own judgement, after grappling with the very real moral trade-offs involved in excluding someone.
Why are you switching attention to a completely different incident all of a sudden? Are you claiming that this single example disproves many other instances of deplatforming occur due to blatantly obvious external pressure?
Speaking of Cloudflare:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/cloudflare-and-its-free-speech...
"Tech companies have cut ties with the extremist-friendly website Gab, but digital security company Cloudflare appears to be standing by the site."
It is absolutely laughable to say there is no bullying going on when the press is fully of articles that point fingers and draw spurious correlations.
>PayPal publicly condemned certain points of view long before Gab: prohibiting "the promotion of hate, violence, racial intolerance or the financial exploitation of a crime" was part of the TOS when Gab signed up, as was the fact that the definition of those things was up to PayPal.
My post above talks specifically about "banning clients based on their activity outside of monetary transactions". PayPal TOS apply only to such transactions:
You may not use the PayPal service for activities that [...] relate to transactions
involving [...] the promotion of hate, violence
If this isn't about the owner, then it is about the website. So the question is whether hosting hateful content of your users does by itself constitute "promotion of hate". Considering that PayPal does business with Cloudflare the answer seems to be a resounding "no".
By all accounts, this does not look like a consistent application of TOS.
>Freedom of association means you make your choice and other people make theirs.
That is not what it means and what you described here is not freedom, but law of the jungle.
Like I said above, the only context in which deplatformers engage in this faux-libertarianism is after they've gotten their way. The moment the tactic stops working or applies to them, they switch back to moralistic arguments or demands for regulation.
Moreover, this argument was initially used to advocate for deletion of specific content on normal websites. Then it was used for banning individuals from large communication platforms. Now the exact same thing is being said about simultaneous multi-company service termination for a messaging platform with hundreds of thousands of users. As if those things are logically equivalent scenarios.
It it not a consistent position, but mere convenient nonsense.
Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love how you're treating customers and employees petitioning a company, and then the company taking their concerns seriously, like it's some kind of bullying conspiracy. Never mind when a platform manager like Matt Prince [1] goes out of his way to make it clear he is autocratically representing his own judgement, after grappling with the very real moral tradeoffs involved in excluding someone. PayPal publicly cond…
>I love how you're treating customers and employees petitioning a company, and then the company taking their concerns seriously, like it's some kind of bullying conspiracy This attempt to frame deplatforming as something enacted by concerned stakeholders is out of touch with reality. It usually involves partisan press, activist organizations and whipped-up online crowds with no stake in the platform they're trying to…
> It usually involves partisan press, activist organizations and whipped-up online crowds with no stake in the platform they're trying to affect.
For someone claiming the moral high ground enfranchising speech, you seem pretty free basing arguments on knowing that certain voices should be ignored. Fortunately, we can skip the boring discussion about the character of different activist groups because it's the listener's opinion that matters -- in this case, the platforms who thought these folks (or their ideas) were worth listening to.
> Speaking of Cloudflare...
I brought up Prince as evidence that platform managers are making their own decisions, not being bullied by crowds. Framing them as victims belittles their agency, ignores their responsibility, and perpetuates this BS chain of victimhood that is required by your arguments in order to make deplatforming look like a conspiracy rather than a big swath of society trying to spend less time with a few jerks.
And of course Cloudflare (or FreeDNS) have the same right to provide services to Gab that others did to deny it. Digressing for a second, I'm personally glad that Prince et al. hold a steeper standard for cutting service than Facebook or even PayPal. DDOS'ing is an infringement of freedom of speech in a way that deplatforming isn't, and right now we're all depending on a very few companies like Cloudflare to be the equivalent of a police force that maintains any notion of commons.
> ...By all accounts, this does not look like a consistent application of TOS.
PayPal felt Gab itself was getting paid, through PayPal, to run a platform that promoted hate speech. That's related to the transaction, and related to the TOS. You can disagree with them, and people can post potentially irrelevant screenshots, but both are sideshow.
> the only context in which deplatformers engage in this faux-libertarianism is after they've gotten their way
Yet again, you're resorting to ad-hominem about the long-term behavior of a group you're barely bothering to define. You don't know anything about me outside this conversation. Lots of different people support or are fine with deplatforming, and many of us also care about the quality of the commons on which the deplatformed can continue to exercise their speech.
But instead of yet another conversation about which broadly defined online group says the most dumb things, why don't you put forward a concrete vision of what your definition of free speech is? It seems to me like it involves something like a right to an audience (sincerely, how is that not a right to force people to interact with to you?). Or perhaps some sort of protected class situation, where you want to clearly define the difference between "passively" enforcing TOS and singling someone out (what would that look like?).
Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
#469Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No, Paypal and Stripe were given orders from above and this is them carrying out those orders. Who is this "above" giving orders? Frankly, this is conspiracy theory material. Sure, those companies are reacting to pressure, but it's distributed social pressure, not shady backroom dealings.
I have no idea who is the "above", and nothing on which to speculate. The internet's two largest payment processors both pulling out at the same time that Gab loses hosting, and becomes the target of a widespread slander campaign, definitely seems orchestrated. You can't dismiss that as "conspiracy theory material". Sure, it could be distributed social pressure, but even that would just be a standalone event resultin…
The definition of conspiracy theory is: "a theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by usually powerful conspirators" (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conspiracy%20theo...)
So, here we have an event - payment processors refusing to serve Gab. The theory is that this is explained by from some entity "above" that we don't know anything about and that clearly acted in secret to force them to do this.
Using the dictionary definition of a conspiracy theory, this is a conspiracy theory.
Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
#470Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I love how you're treating customers and employees petitioning a company, and then the company taking their concerns seriously, like it's some kind of bullying conspiracy This attempt to frame deplatforming as something enacted by concerned stakeholders is out of touch with reality. It usually involves partisan press, activist organizations and whipped-up online crowds with no stake in the platform they're trying to…
> It usually involves partisan press, activist organizations and whipped-up online crowds with no stake in the platform they're trying to affect. For someone claiming the moral high ground enfranchising speech, you seem pretty free basing arguments on knowing that certain voices should be ignored. Fortunately, we can skip the boring discussion about the character of different activist groups because it's the listener…
> why don't you put forward a concrete vision of what your definition of free speech is?
Because that is not the correct response to someone who casually describes eight hundred thousand users as "a few jerks". Or someone who smugly dismisses a well-reasoned article by saying the author "beats an ocean with a stick". If you insist on promoting gross misrepresentations of reality, all you will get in response is well-deserved pushback. The ideas and constructive suggestions will flow to people who actually listen.