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Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

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Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#831

Post by tinyhouse »

tinyhouse wrote: post #575
crocodiletears wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earlier footage indicates the first man shot was attempting to start a fight with the militiamen, but there's a gap in the timeline where nobody was filming before the fight broke out. The NYT has a very good article on the subject (and I'm a man who's very critical of the NYT) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/us/kyle-rittenhouse-kenos...

OK I found a video showing the first fatal shooting [1]. It's not as clear as the video showing the mob chase (where it indeed looked like self defense) but from what I can tell the person who died got shot while running away from the shooter (it's hard to tell where the shooter is exactly during this time). Doesn't look like self defense to me. Hopefully there are better recordings of the whole incident. Warning: th…

Update: I take it back what I said. I found another video [2] that clears the picture. The guy wasn't running away from the shooter, he was chasing the shooter and throwing something at him. He then kept running after him and the shooter turns around and shoots him. The confusing part is that she shooter is shown coming from behind after the shooting happened. But it's because he goes around the car after the shooting and comes from the other side. I now believe all the shooting he did that night was self defense. He wasn't supposed to be there and play police but that's a different story.

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmji3EVxqLM

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#832

Post by gruez »

betterunix2 wrote: post #772
gruez wrote: post #762

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In case anyone tries to claim that the founders intended for the most expansive possible understanding of freedom of speech, the fact is that one of the earliest laws passed in the United States was a law that censored criticisms of the Federal government (in an attempt to crack down on foreign misinformation campaigns): I'm not sure whether that proves your point. The wikipedia article says that it was controversia…

The fact that the law was passed by the same men who ratified the constitution says a lot about their concept of freedom of speech, even if it was controversial and short lived. If the founders really meant for free speech to be as expansive as it is today it is hard to see how such a law could have been passed in the first place.

>The fact that the law was passed by the same men who ratified the constitution says a lot about their concept of freedom of speech

You can also argue that it was defeated by the same men who ratified the constitution, and that the "free speech" side ultimately prevailed, therefore they really did mean free speech to be that expansive.

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#833

Post by saghm »

mynameismonkey wrote: post #722
saghm wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't this get done as part of the manual review of an app's source code? It seems like this wouldn't necessarily have to be automated

And right after that we can remove any FTP client that uses the FTP protocol to download content Google doesn't like. We should scan all apps that use a common, published protocol to make sure the protocol is not being used to consume objectionable content. /s The app is not the service; the protocol is not the platform.

I think you might have misread my comment; I wasn't suggesting whether a course of action was correct or not, but just explaining how it could technically be feasible. I interpreted the comment I responded to as not understanding how it would be possible for Google to have done this a certain way, and I was theorizing one possible way they might have done it.

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#834

Post by sfkdjf9j3j »

bccdee wrote: post #227
ng12 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's the first amendment and there's the concept of free speech. This absolutely violates free speech but does not violate the first amendment. The only current framework to protect freedom of speech from private companies is to designate them as common carriers, e.g. phone companies legally cannot police what is said over their wires.

I don't think it's necessarily anti-free-speech. The idea of free speech is that everyone should be able to express their opinions without being prosecuted for it, not that everyone is entitled to a platform for those opinions. You should be able to write an article about absolutely anything, but you're not entitled to put it in my newspaper. I of course agree that the mastodon ban is a bad move because it sets a dou…

I think what a lot commenters are saying is that within their conception of the bigger idea of free speech they do consider themselves entitled to have their thoughts distributed by established platforms. Or put more mildly, platforms like Google ought not ban people for their content because it's the right thing to do. But I don't see many people advocating for government intervention, not with specifics anyway.

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#835

Post by KirinDave »

oehpr wrote: post #749
input_sh wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That by itself implies that every URL you visit has to be looked up to see if there's a related discussion. No way I'd trust any add-on/startup/mega corp to do that. I barely trust Mozilla to keep my history on their servers, and that's only because they only keep the last few months and purge older data.

nope, you'd simply distribute a bloom filter to everyone, and then you could transmit hashed urls. you could easily make this privacy safe.

This wouldn't address a lot of metadata-related privacy concerns.

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#836

Post by prepend »

savingsPossible wrote: post #682
dependenttypes wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which groups?

Does that matter? If op is lying, he or she is lying. But are some groups ok to threaten? Are some people ok to threaten?

I think it matters because sadly I’m at the point where I need to evaluate the death threat for whether it is reasonable to fear from it.

It’s really unfortunate when someone fears for their life and I don’t want that for anyone.

However, lots of people fear for reasons that I don’t think are actually from threats of violence.

I had a friend explain how they literally feared for their life. When trying to console them I learned that the thing that was making them afraid was a friend’s Facebook post about a restaurant that supported some Bible group. Their reasoning was that the Bible group was anti-gay, and they might end up killing them for being an ally of gay friends.

Because of this they feared for their own life and wanted the friend to stop talking about it.

Now of course, there are multiple lame things about Bible groups being jerks, but certainly nothing to make this person think their life was in danger or directly threatened.

I’m not sure how to specifically help that person, but after several episodes like this, I don’t pay much attention to them when they say that they get death threats.

Maybe I’m just jaded but lots of people talk about death threats and I’m sure they perceive them as such. But having the details of the threat helps to differentiate the really dangerous people trying to kill others from the plentitudes of people saying “DIAF” who aren’t trying to kill, just being jerks.

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#837

Post by drummer »

viro wrote: post #91
john_moscow wrote: post #64

For anyone else concerned with the recent Big Tech censorship, people are actively building alternative social medial platforms and they are taking off. The RedditAlternatives subreddit [0] provides a fairly good overview of them. Some are rather extreme, others are more reasonable, but there are alternatives, and it's up to us, the reasonable people, to choose where we want to spend our time and money. [0] https://w…

When your content is too cancerous for Reddit ...maybe the issue isn't Reddit.

Reddit itself became cancer a while back.

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#838

Post by drummer »

mindslight wrote: post #307
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't make the mistake of believing that systems run by human beings are required to be logically consistent.

Don't make the mistake of thinking we shouldn't demand that bureaucratic systems follow logical rules just because they're run by human beings.

"Don't make the mistake of thinking" is where we are heading.

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#839

Post by RedComet »

humanistbot wrote: post #47

The rationale they gave is that hate speech appears on these apps, because some of the microblogging sites that can be accessed via Fediverse have this kind of content. Based on this rationale, I look forward to Google Play removing Chrome, Firefox, and all other web browsers from the store as well.

That's coming soon enough.

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#840

Post by baddox »

RonanTheGrey wrote: post #796
baddox wrote: post #789

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That example is a crowd intimidating people with the intent to compel speech, of course, and they’re using the slogan “silence is violence.” But those are two different things. You could pick any slogan you want and have a mob recite it while intimidating people into agreeing. That’s not an indictment of the slogan.

That would start the discussion of "when does an example become the standard" which I don't really want to go into. Suffice it to say I do not watch the news, I very rarely visit Twitter and do not follow anyone, and that is the only way I have ever seen that expression used - in the news, on Medium, on FB, on anywhere, when I've come across it. "Agree with us or you are violent." I don't think there's a generous way…

> Suffice it to say I do not watch the news, I very rarely visit Twitter and do not follow anyone, and that is the only way I have ever seen that expression used - in the news, on Medium, on FB, on anywhere, when I've come across it. "Agree with us or you are violent."

Have you Googled the term? Apart from the first page or so being dominated by that very recent event of the crowd intimidating people and many other people conflating that event with that slogan, you'll find plenty of articles about what it means: that choosing to not speak out about an issue helps support the status quo. In fact, I've generally seen it used to try to persuade people who don't want to support the status quo that staying quiet or trying to "not be political" is in fact supporting the status quo.

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