I think we can't reasonably be doing front page stories every time one of these things gets reported. It's going to keep happening. Different people have different feelings about that, but we've had thousands of front-page-thread comments on much more important stories than Bannon's dumb podcast channel. At some point we should just refer back to those threads. I don't need to see Bannon's culpability litigated on HN; we're getting to Politico levels of granularity here.
YouTube bans Steve Bannon's podcast channel
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Re: YouTube bans Steve Bannon's podcast channel
#182The only reason tech companies are doing this is because the democrats have a trifecta and they want to be in their good graces in order to avoid regulation. It's not about decency, it's about power.
it's arguably the inverse of this. They're doing it because they don't feel threatened by a Republican administration any more. With or without specific regulation threats the workforces and often also leaders of these companies would have done it years ago.
Democratic members of congress have repeatedly called for the breakup and/or regulation of "big tech", just for different reasons.
Re: YouTube bans Steve Bannon's podcast channel
#183The lies are 100% of the reason the capital riot happened, so yes, they do need to stop. Fox News lies every single day. What do we expect from a population of people that only hear these lies, day in and day out? They're going to react just like they did on 1/6.
I'd argue the reason these type of people are pissed off is because they have been incessantly attacked for 4 plus years while watching the media turn a blind eye to anything that disparages any minority or "protected class." We spent 10 MONTHS watching riots every day. DC was BURNING in July.
Protesting racial injustice (peacefully) is absolutely required.
Claiming such protests are "violent mobs" is nothing new: https://twitter.com/BerniceKing/status/1300196044693741574/p...
Also note that some of the violence was instigated by the police: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/26/opinion/blm-p...
OTOH mobs in DC, Michigan were motivated by "masks=slavery" & "election fraud" both of which are completely imaginary, and EXACTLY one "leader" has been promoting it: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-longstanding-history-c...
Re: YouTube bans Steve Bannon's podcast channel
#184The only reason tech companies are doing this is because the democrats have a trifecta and they want to be in their good graces in order to avoid regulation. It's not about decency, it's about power.
Or maybe they are doing this because an unprecedented (in the US anyways) social media coordinated mob was perhaps less than a few minutes away from capturing and doing god knows what to the entire line of succession of our government.
The big tech oligarchs couldn't give less of a shit about that.
Re: YouTube bans Steve Bannon's podcast channel
#185The lies are 100% of the reason the capital riot happened, so yes, they do need to stop. Fox News lies every single day. What do we expect from a population of people that only hear these lies, day in and day out? They're going to react just like they did on 1/6.
The underlying problem with this whole idea of banning "seditious lies/libel" is that it's not strategically consistent. If you ban people (especially political leaders!) from complaining that the election was stolen, what happens is that the next election will definitely be stolen, and no one will be able to do anything about it. Then that whole political side throws their support behind some military figure instead…
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Re: YouTube bans Steve Bannon's podcast channel
#186> At some point the lies need to stop. It's politics. Everything is lies.
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Re: YouTube bans Steve Bannon's podcast channel
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is very true. Tens of thousands of Trump supporters showed up to DC this last week, attending one of several fully-legal, fully-permitted protests. Almost all events and participants were peaceful. A few hundred walked into the capitol complex, and I am guessing most did not initially plan to do so but got caught up in the moment, following those in front of them. Of those few hundred, an even smaller group was…
You say it like “getting caught in the moment” and assaulting the Capitol is something completely reasonable that anyone in that situation might do.
Too many people are trying to rationalize the polarization of our society, focusing exclusively on the ends and ignoring the means.
Remember NPR's puff piece justifying looting? Or (I think) CNN's reporter standing in front of a burning building while saying that the BLM protests were mostly peaceful? (They were, but the not-peaceful bits were downplayed in an obviously biased way). There was another interview I saw where some guy was talking about the change they wanted to see, and peace and justice and so on, and was interrupted when in the background the crowd cheered when they finally managed to topple a traffic light (that traffic light never hurt anyone)
Re: YouTube bans Steve Bannon's podcast channel
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
We've banned this account for abusing HN with ideological flamewar and ignoring our many requests to stop. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of which ideology they're for or against. We especially ban accounts that have been using HN primarily for that, as yours has. That's a key indicator of bad-faith use of the site, and is obviously against the rules. When this came up yesterday, someone raised the common o…
Dang, I grew up in Soviet Union and what I see in the last couple days looks exactly like communists doing in 30s (removing unwanted people from photos, firing from work, kids betraying their parents to authority, etc). While I don’t know the history of this account, I don’t think this comparison is far fetched and it is way closer than I thought I will ever see after coming to US 20 something years ago.
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Re: YouTube bans Steve Bannon's podcast channel
#189So many politicians are guilty of misrepresenting the truth or even downright lies; the last two Democrat candidates have been guilty of outright lies as well. Who will be the arbiter of this blurry line of truthfulness.
Re: YouTube bans Steve Bannon's podcast channel
#190Bannon said on this podcast that he would mount Anthony Fauci and Christopher Wray’s “heads on pikes” outside the White House as a “warning to other bureaucrats.” This was a few months ago. I presume he has been saying similar things since then. For years, the defense of these assholes has been “Oh, that’s just rhetoric, it’s not meant to be taken literally.” Well, we’ve just seen what happens when it gets taken lite…
Gonna need to ban a lot more people than Bannon if you're going to ban everybody who used figurative calls to violence and was associated with some group which engaged in violence. Especially given 9 people died in BLM protests last year.
Regarding this incident Zuckerberg didn't ban him at the time because he said that Bannon didn't even violate his sites policy in regards to how many times you have to say things like this before getting banned. He reacted with a removal of the video. Zuckerberg was correct and for all the hate leveled against him he seems to be one of the only people who is resisting political pressure and fighting to enforce policy fairly and unarbitrarily.
An extremely broad amount of people will once or twice say something like this regardless of political affliation and the banning of Bannon here is mostly a mixture of hindsight and bias and arbitrariness. Bannon wasn't banned today based on an equally applied sober reading of social media policy, but because the capitol riots happened. Trumps supporters messed up a building and got themselves killed and that's being used as a pretence to treat other Trump supporters arbitrarily online for the greater good because they're just too dangerous.