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Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

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Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you say "both sides" argument is getting tiresome. What will you do to the other side? What is making you to take one side and against the other side?

One side is BS, that's why. That is the side which is whining about how an app that was created in order to provide a safe haven for people who are too extreme for other platforms is being treated different from those other platforms .

OK, one side is BS. What makes you think one side is BS? Who told you one side is BS?

Are any of your family, friends, neighbors on the other side?

What will you do to the people on the other side?

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#232
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you give some concrete examples? I think the scale of events resulting from a statement are taken into consideration. Terrorists have sprung up after being radicalized by what they heard from one politician or another, but we typically won't consider the politician responsible for those actions. This probably starts going into whataboutism territory, but doesn't this stuff tend to go both ways? I'd postulate we…

Examples are everywhere, you just have to not be in a bubble and be open to seeing it. I could keep going but you tell me, do you need more? AOC: "The whole point of protesting is to make ppl uncomfortable." [-1] Slate: "Non-violence is an important tool for protests, but so is violence" [0] Vox: "Riots are destructive, dangerous, and scary — but can lead to serious social reforms" [1] Pelosi: "we welcome the presenc…

> Examples are everywhere, you just have to not be in a bubble and be open to seeing it. I could keep going but you tell me, do you need more?

If you strip out enough context, you can make any false equivalency you like. For instance: weren't the Allies and Axis in WWII basically the same? After all, they both used guns and bombs to commit violence.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#233
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not talking about moderation here. I'm talking about the fact that Facebook promotes certain content in user's feeds (including content that these users have no direct relationship to - they're not friends with the author nor follow him) in order to generate "engagement". This should stop. Regarding moderation, it's true that you can't moderate billions of people with 100% accuracy, but you can discourage them fr…

There's something to this. The things people hate about Facebook aren't caused by some user sitting down and typing a post, and in fact that kind of content gets buried in the feed anyway. The problems start with "sharing the story at the top of the feed" and "your friend liked X article which is really an ad". It's a more aggressive version of 90s email chain-letters.

Absolutely. I don't think most of these people woke up one day and suddenly decided "hey let's storm the Capitol".

Instead, these people were groomed over a period of months or years by way of recommending conspiratorial or outrageous content and it finally blew up.

So not only did Facebook create the problem in the first place, they also had plenty of early warnings about what's been going on, but it's hard to consider an increase in "engagement" (thus revenue) as a "warning" and even harder to act upon it.

This also raises another question regarding the efficiency of our intelligence services if large-scale domestic terrorism was organized all in public on a platform they had privileged access to.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#234
post #155

>The Capitol Attack Where was this rhetoric when Antifa and BLM burned and looted for months with the blessings of all corporations and the mainstream media? Surely the Capitol Hill has an insurance policy? Or does that moronic point only apply to the common folk? Susan Rosenberg literally bombed the Capitol in 1983 and now serves as vice chair of the board of directors of Thousand Currents, a " non-profit foundation…

Nice to see Trump/Russia talking points being copied almost word-for-word on hackernews.

And getting up-voted too. I thought the BLM=Looters talking point was debunked a long time ago, given that BLM protests took place mainly in the daytime, while the looting was done by thugs, at night, after the protesters went home. So it is very strange to see that narrative being taken at face value here.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#235
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where you've been living that you didn't hear about the night Trump went into a bunmer. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/secret-service-took-trump-t... https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/george-floyd-protests-05-31... https://www.secretservice.gov/newsroom/releases/2020/05/secr... You'll notice some very interesting words there in the Secret Service write up: > No individuals crossed the White House Fence…

From your own source: > Numerous Secret Service agents were injured, fires set by rioters blazed near the White House and authorities were searching for car bombs > The official initially put the number of agents injured at over 50, but that may have referred to the weekend toll; the Secret Service has since said the number injured on Sunday was 14. 50 people injured is a serious attack. It's interesting that leftist…

You dodged the question with expert precision and ignored your very dishonest insinuation that this wasn't treated as a big deal.

I linked multiple sources precisely to show it's your own fault you didn't know. No one hid or censored it.:

> Does that sound like the scene at the Capitol where Congresspeople were hidden behind a makeshift barricade while an officer was forced to shoot a woman dead literal steps away from them?

When even the Secret Service is referring to them as injuries at a demonstration and saying that despite the injuries (for which 11 people needed medical attention, none of them with life threatening injury) no protectees were ever in harms way... who are you to overrule them?

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And are you seriously complaining that the movement that actually breached the Capitol was... immediately shut down?

Are you daft? You think if the May protestors had actually gotten into the White House they'd just be fine?

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The irony here is delicious, one group was fought tooth and nail from even entering the grounds of the White House.

They were teargassed for even being on public property for a photo op! An old man was given a TBI that left him bleeding from the ears and unable to walk for trying to return a police helmet near the _stairs_ to a government building

The other group literally walked into the Capitol and had cops taking selfies with them.

And yet you want to paint the former group as having gotten off easy? It'd be funny if it wasn't so sad.

Imagine trying to paint being against political violence as a partisan issue.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#236
post #232
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Examples are everywhere, you just have to not be in a bubble and be open to seeing it. I could keep going but you tell me, do you need more? AOC: "The whole point of protesting is to make ppl uncomfortable." [-1] Slate: "Non-violence is an important tool for protests, but so is violence" [0] Vox: "Riots are destructive, dangerous, and scary — but can lead to serious social reforms" [1] Pelosi: "we welcome the presenc…

> Examples are everywhere, you just have to not be in a bubble and be open to seeing it. I could keep going but you tell me, do you need more? If you strip out enough context, you can make any false equivalency you like. For instance: weren't the Allies and Axis in WWII basically the same? After all, they both used guns and bombs to commit violence.

I can't say that I know enough about that part of WWII, but yeah I agree with that statement. Which isn't to say that it applies here. Simply pointing out that stripping out context can lead to false equivalences is lazy, it needs to be shown.

Each of these things certainly has a context that can be gone and read. That's why I included sources rather than not including them. There's also Google.

In addition I'd simply say that whatever your perspective on context is and how it applies to calls to violence and interpretations thereof, that it should be applied equally to all sources from all sides. This doesn't really seem to be what is happening, which is the largest factor in what seems to me a rather clear observation that the newsmedia's portrayal, and those who promote it and give it reach uncritically, are full of shit.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#237
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Apple and Google produced viable platforms that people want. Microsoft, Blackberry, and Palm all attempted to do something similar, and the market didn't coalesce around their offerings. Even Amazon tried with kindle/fire. Part of the reason this happens is that developers only have so much ability to diversify, so this is a natural marketplace where only a few big players can survive. The Internet of the 199…

Do you think it had anything to do with buying up competitors and technology that propelled them to domination as well as using their web of other services as an advantage? Even if everything is fair do you think free market theory cares about how they arrived at a duopoly?

I certainly didn't claim it was "fair". I stated that developers are going to coalesce around a small number of providers in a similar space.

They clearly have a dominant position now. Their disruption won't come from phones, just like their rise didn't come from phones either.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you say "both sides" argument is getting tiresome. What will you do to the other side? What is making you to take one side and against the other side?

One side is BS, that's why. That is the side which is whining about how an app that was created in order to provide a safe haven for people who are too extreme for other platforms is being treated different from those other platforms .

To clarify, I'm not defending Parler nor wishing for it to stay online. I'm just calling for the root cause of this incident to be eliminated which is the unhealthy business model of pitting people against each other. This would include Parler but also Facebook and all these social media platforms.

At the moment, Parler is used as a scapegoat to deflect the liability off the catalyst (if not the instigator itself) of the Capitol storming.

Whether you still think my position is BS after this is up to you.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#239
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moral of story: FB and Twitter can do whatever they want, because they have more baby pictures. Any new social network has fewer baby pictures, and therefore can be held to a higher standard, to the point that it will be obliterated before it has a real chance to compete.

> Moral of story: FB and Twitter can do whatever they want, because they have more baby pictures. Any new social network has fewer baby pictures, and therefore can be held to a higher standard, to the point that it will be obliterated before it has a real chance to compete. Eh, not really. You're forgetting the other half of the equation: Parler's niche was the stuff Facebook and Twitter had either banned or discoura…

That doesn't seem to help your argument: it means that people deplatformed from FB/Twitter should also be deplatformed everywhere else, which doesn't sound like a great policy for freedom of speech or fostering a competitive marketplace.

There was a very real chance that Parler could have attracted a lot of mainstream people. Maybe the 70M people who voted for Trump would have gone there, and started posting baby pictures, which would improve their ratio a lot.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#240

It was planned for months, openly on Facebook in plain view of everybody. Remember that when politicians call for more intrusive surveillance in response.

Yeah, it's weird that the discussion has centered around censorship, rather than like... why didn't law enforcement shut this down sooner? Or at least properly prepare for it?

When it happened, there was a reporter on CBC talking about how it was common knowledge in DC for a long time that there was a protest planned there.

So indeed. The real question is why was there seemingly no preparation to handle it.

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