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Facebook Says It Is Removing All Content Mentioning 'Stop the Steal'

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Re: Facebook Says It Is Removing All Content Mentioning 'Stop the Steal'

#421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right that religion isn't taught in US schools, however, it is promoted when schools and states work as hard as they can to exclude evolution from public school curriculums. This is effectively teaching the population religion in areas where religion is common and evolution is purged from the school books.

Serious question: can you show evidence where this has actually taken place in the school curriculum in recent times? Anybody can advocate for anything, from wanting to teach Satanism and anti-vaxx science to GMOs cause cancer and "New Math", but the curriculum doesn't bend so easily since there are federal standards. Beyond fear mongering and "leftist memes", any real examples?

In the late 1990s/early 2000s some folks got textbooks to put stickers saying “evolution is just a theory.”

Re: Facebook Says It Is Removing All Content Mentioning 'Stop the Steal'

#422

Tell me how this is wrong: The US is de facto converting to the Chinese model for the internet: All communication must be monitored, damaging content must be erased, and in serious cases, those responsible must be punished. If Parler gets a foreign data center, I expect a "Great Firewall of China" with American characteristics will soon follow.

I would offer two counter examples:

1. It is individuals and individual companies making these decisions, it is not federally required. (And if it was federally mandated, I’m sure impropriety could be handled by the courts.)

2. Companies are censoring the president, one of the main actors of the federal government.

This is hugely different from the Chinese model, where the Chinese government restricts things which are negative towards the government among other things.

At any rate, I’m sure many of the technical reasons are legitimate. For example, does AWS permit you to host bounty-hunting sites, where you could be paid to kill others? I doubt it, and I imagine many people support that stance, even if they do not support kicking Parler. So we admit that some censorship is ok and even beneficial. Therefore, what’s the line? Is it content which is promoting literal illegal activity? Content that likely will lead to illegal actions?

If that’s the case, then perhaps we should be advocating that these rules ought to be applied more evenly to even more types of sites and content. Or, perhaps the rules are applied evenly, and there have simply not been many other similar cases regarding AWS which have gained popularity.

Or, maybe AWS should enforce no rules whatsoever. Then they could become a haven for criminal sites, thus loosing their brand.

At any rate, this seems very different from China, and I’m yet to be convinced that we have started some sort of slippery slope.

Re: Facebook Says It Is Removing All Content Mentioning 'Stop the Steal'

#423
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After 60+ court cases challenging the election fail, and half the population still believe it's stolen, we're completely beyond the realm of misinformation (though there's plenty of that still going on). One side simply wants to seize power and is leveraging the tools at its disposal to do so.

I'm very interested in whether the republican party splits away from it's base - or the moderates leave altogether. One can claim that it's a small portion of the republican party which supported the insurrection - but for the last 10 years that portion has pushed the rest of the party to vote their way.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook Says It Is Removing All Content Mentioning 'Stop the Steal'

#424

Tell me how this is wrong: The US is de facto converting to the Chinese model for the internet: All communication must be monitored, damaging content must be erased, and in serious cases, those responsible must be punished. If Parler gets a foreign data center, I expect a "Great Firewall of China" with American characteristics will soon follow.

The US is becoming like China?

Billionaire tech magnate Jack Ma vs. Xi Jinping: who got to censor who?

vs. Donald Trump: same question...

Seems like the precise opposite.

Re: Facebook Says It Is Removing All Content Mentioning 'Stop the Steal'

#425
post #161

Are we really so stupid that we cannot see through this kind of thing and need to actively censor it to have civilized society continue to function? When do we just give up on democracy completely?

I completely agree. I would like to see some of the other replies here comment on how democracy can function if the citizens are incompetent/stupid. If they can't be trusted to be knowledgeable, then how can they make informed decisions, including voting? And of course, who decides which people hold legitimate positions and which people are ignorant?

Well that's why democracy wasn't the aim of the Constitution. Voters were allowed to pick the one guy in their town who would make decisions for them, and that's it. Idiots have ruined the system that they created for us, and there's no going back.

Re: Facebook Says It Is Removing All Content Mentioning 'Stop the Steal'

#426
I get why Facebook is doing this, but suppressing the discussion of this false claim of election fraud is going to make it more likely that when an election actually is stolen, that companies like Facebook are more likely to stamp out the discussion to match earlier precedent.

Re: Facebook Says It Is Removing All Content Mentioning 'Stop the Steal'

#427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No such defense exists No such defense exists? Have you read this site every time a new wave of social media cancellations happen? After every credit card processing company ban a group of polemical people? "They are a private company they can decide what to do" Well, maybe if you are extracting 70 billion a year from society it is not that simple as "I can decide who to do business with" I think the government wou…

> I think the government would be very interested to initiate an investigation if Shell decided to not fill your tank because they discovered you are a neo-Keynesian, even if there is a Chevron station 3 miles away. Even if that was true, which it is not generally in the US, that's not analogous to what is happening. It's more like if Shell, instead of selling gas for money, was a peer-to-peer gas exchange service, a…

Yeah, what is the trait of the credit card companies,patreon and the hosting companies? Take care of your back, dont bend that much backwards.

Re: Facebook Says It Is Removing All Content Mentioning 'Stop the Steal'

#428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on who you ask. The right-wing media called them terrorists. And since conservatives claim to be "half the country", we can safely say that half the country agreed with that sentiment. I will say that none of them attacked the Capitol to overturn a fair election after being egged on by a sitting president based on a lie that every relevant court in the land has thrown out as utter nonsense. This particular in…

Nonsense. It'll be forgotten a month from now. More people are shot to death on a peaceful weekend in Chicago, and nobody even talks about it.

It looks like you've been using HN primarily for political battle. Can you please not do that? It's against the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and it's the line across which we start banning accounts (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), regardless of which politics they're battling for. This is because it destroys what HN is supposed to exist for, which is curious conversation on a wide range of topics.

Re: Facebook Says It Is Removing All Content Mentioning 'Stop the Steal'

#429
post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's with all the loonies in here? A private company censoring content on its platform is well within its rights, especially when that content conflicts with the company's policies. This has literally nothing to do with freedom of speech.

[flagged]

Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25743214 and please stop using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. That's a failure mode for this site and we ban accounts that do it, regardless of which politics they're battling for. We have to ban them in order to have a chance of surviving for the purpose the site exists for.

Btw, generalizations like "HN has always had a libertarian/right leaning nature" are in the eye of the beholder. I could give you a long, long, long list of the other side saying that the site is dominated by left/etc. views. In both cases it's a cognitive bias, basically a variation of sample bias: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....

Re: Facebook Says It Is Removing All Content Mentioning 'Stop the Steal'

#430
post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Funny because I would consider you brainwashed! Any widespread censorship is enough to raise serious concerns for me.

Please stop using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. That's a failure mode for this site and we ban accounts that do it, regardless of which politics they're battling for. We have to ban them in order to have a chance of surviving for the purpose the site exists for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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