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Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

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Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#941
post #919
post #857

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The consequences of unfettered freedom to propagate lies on mass communication platforms under the banner of "freedom of speech" has directly endangered the democratic proces in the US, less than a week ago. So to throw your own phrase back at you - it seems pretty obvious to me that democracy is threatened by what we currently think of as freedom of speech on mass media platforms, just as much as you think it would…

Not the person you replied to but I have seen an echo of this sentiment multiple times on HN in the past few weeks. In the end, if you believe that the population at large has to be shielded from what is now a large volume and range of types of speech, it means that you implicitly don't trust them to make the right choices on their own. And if you don't trust them to do that, then it never was about democracy to begi…

Again, it's not about opinions when outright lies and fantasy have lead to an actual attack on democracy and democratic institutions in the US last week.

Couching this in terms of disagreement with opposing or unnaproved viewpoints is to (wilfully?) miss the point.

Democracy apparently cannot function when demonstrably false information flows so unstoppably and in such quantity. This is not theoretical. To repurpose a quote from Ben Goldacre, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts.

I'm not proposing a solution here, more pointing out a failure mode in the curre t setup. But I disagree that having unfettered lies abounding is the only way to execute democracy. Again I would ask - do you consider Germany undemocratic?

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#942
post #925

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Over the summer, some were waxing poetic about how "riots are the language of the oppressed" and arguing that burning someone's business to the ground isn't violence but rather "just property damage". When you put violence against property and literal murder on the same moral footing you are being an apologist for more severe violence. Property can be replaced. Businesses can have insurance. The murdered police offi…

> When you put violence against property and literal murder on the same moral footing you are being an apologist for more severe violence. Right, thankfully no one is doing that (I've seen you around other threads and straw man arguments like this one are beneath your usual high standard of discourse). Everyone here agrees that the people responsible for murdering the police officer ought to be held criminally accoun…

>Right, thankfully no one is doing that

You seemed to do that further up this thread. When confronted with questions about the violence on 1/6 you responded with references to the violence perpetuated by BLM protesters. However I can't find a single instance of collective violence at the BLM protests that comes close to a mob beating a police officer to death like happened in DC.

As far as I have seen, there were no murders committed by BLM protesters as part of any protests, riots, or whatever you want to call them. Even in this post you are still referring to "BLM murders". In a previous comment a few posts up I directly asked you how many murders occurred at these BLM protests and you didn't respond. Is that because you know that the person to person violence that occurred at these events was routinely instigated by the police, other right leaning people, or people using deadly force in response to looting?

And like I said previously, we are already comparing millions of people protesting over months in cities around the country to thousands of people in one city protesting on one day. There were vastly more opportunities for violence at the BLM protests and yet the only person to person violence seen appears to be in response or initiated by people on the other side.

I appreciate the complement and agree with most of the second half of your post, but it isn't just the origins or motivations for these two groups that differentiate them. One was much quicker to instigate violence against people.

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#943

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my friend, how will they melt away? It just was'nt imagined. If we step back to 2018 - No BLM, no capitol riots -- no one would even imagine a AWS pulling the plug. As a startup, it used to be a no-brainer to start on AWS first. The advice given then was not get entired by AWS goodies that locks one to the platform, but one never thought much of using EC2 What i started arguing for was that there will be an interface…

> If we step back to 2018 - No BLM, no capitol riots -- no one would even imagine a AWS pulling the plug. There has always been content which you cannot host on Amazon. Prior to Parler, Amazon booted Wikileaks, Amazon also doesn't host pornography, there are other carve-outs as well. You are highly indexed on this one event, but it's not unique or particularly eye opening. 8chan suffered a similar fate for exactly th…

i have been twitter, FB, parler and 8chan. For some reason, never checked out gab.

have you been on all of this?

I sincerely can tell you that parler is no worse than twitter. 8chan - different story.

hence, unfair comparison - that it is hate speech (which even though 1A protects it, we can agree that there is a line that could be crossed - lets not argue about that line here) my contention is that in parler (or a future app's case) -- it may not be hate speech, but 'speech we hate' -- since that definition is made by same entities.

I want to know if you are just following what you heard from media, or first-hand.

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#944

Earlier quoted context omitted.

College degrees are not a relevant metric. What percentage of the population are being taught fundamental critical thinking skills? How many are taught how to evaluate the quality of data and the quality of sources? How many people have a good grounding of statistics? Or civics? Or logical fallacies? How many people can describe the scientific method? I don't have many vivid memories of my primary school education bu…

Very few people are being taught this anywhere. Even M.D.s (some of the most intelligent and educated among us) have so little statistical knowledge they can barely reason about novel type 1 versus type 2 errors.

I wouldn't put MDs on such a high pedestal. They're people who specialize, just like people in many other professions, and having little knowledge of statistics beyond an (oft-forgotten) undergraduate-level course wouldn't surprise me. It's a different story for doctors who go the research route rather than practicing medicine, of course.

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#945

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’ve got one of the most educated populations in the world. Europe is only recently catching up to is in e.g. the percentage of people with college degrees.

College degrees are not a relevant metric. What percentage of the population are being taught fundamental critical thinking skills? How many are taught how to evaluate the quality of data and the quality of sources? How many people have a good grounding of statistics? Or civics? Or logical fallacies? How many people can describe the scientific method? I don't have many vivid memories of my primary school education bu…

So if level of schooling achieved is not a good metric for education, what is?

Even if everyone experiences the same schooling, everyone isn’t going to be equally educated.

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#946
post #879

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the people will wake up. The "wake up" approach doesn't seem to be working, but we do need some way of reforming our society around the idea of the mighty middle that is not represented by the extremes.

Or maybe a middle that's not dominated by dogma or ideologies. There's many pieces of truth located pretty far from the center of various political ideologies, but the ideologies taken as a whole also contain a stunning amount of falsehood and simplification.

I would hope we could have both. Honestly, I'm not a fan of the policy platforms of any politicians who have claimed to be in the middle.

Being left or right doesn't mean that you necessarily have to throw reason and critical thinking out the window. Being an extremist, sure; devotion to dogma is often a feature of extremism, but that's not the same thing.

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#947
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean how one side for the last four years has said that Trump "stole" the election due to Russian interference. The fact is, this is all whataboutism. This is all due to instructional failure. Americans increasing do not trust the institutions, the media, the government, 'elites'. This lack of trust is the root cause for growing conspiracy theories. The answer to this is not to stifle speech, but to have more spe…

The Intelligence Committee of a Republican-led Senate confirmed the Russian interference and managed to write a 996 page report with all the evidence. The failure I see is Americans not wanting to read (or skim) the reports but being satisfied with sound-bites. Source: https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...

Couple of things:

1) I'm not an American and don't give a shit about American politics

2) Do you think that Russian interference changed the result of the election? If it didn't than the huffing and puffing about the Russians stealing the election is just as false as Trump's current claims

3) Trump supporters can equally point to affidavits and "evidence" about vote tampering. Whether you believe that evidence or not is another story.

My point was not about trump or biden stealing the election, it was that institutional trust is low. People no longer believe what the government or the media put out. No doubt some of this is driven by the "narrative approach" to truth, where everything tells a story that aligns to a group's ideology.

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#948

Earlier quoted context omitted.

having two strong parties seems like an inevitable artifact of first past the post voting (lesser of two evils thinking, "wasted" votes, etc.), and unless "the people" can constitutionally get something like ranked choice voting done federally, i'm not sure what the way forward is. any thoughts?

> any thoughts? I'm an independent. I like some of the ideas of the Right that they believe that States are governments to experiment with. I'd suggest FPTP and other solutions to just attempt to do this locally and in a State or two. It will get traction, if it's worth it to the governed population. That's my suggestion, start small.

> I like some of the ideas of the Right that they believe that States are governments to experiment with

That's mostly feels like just all talk, though. A concrete example: California would love to do some health care experiments, including going single-payer. However, the state can't do so without permission from the federal government to use Medicare funding in different ways (obviously there is no way a state could fund something like that itself without state-level tax increases that would never get past the electorate). GOP-controlled Congress would never go for that, in part because they don't want to be seen by their base as "supporting socialism", and also in part (I'm conjecturing here) that they're afraid that it'll work and they'll be proven wrong.

From the GOP's perspective it more seems like "states should experiment... as long as they're experiments we agree with".

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#949
post #942

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you put violence against property and literal murder on the same moral footing you are being an apologist for more severe violence. Right, thankfully no one is doing that (I've seen you around other threads and straw man arguments like this one are beneath your usual high standard of discourse). Everyone here agrees that the people responsible for murdering the police officer ought to be held criminally accoun…

>Right, thankfully no one is doing that You seemed to do that further up this thread. When confronted with questions about the violence on 1/6 you responded with references to the violence perpetuated by BLM protesters. However I can't find a single instance of collective violence at the BLM protests that comes close to a mob beating a police officer to death like happened in DC. As far as I have seen, there were no…

> You seemed to do that further up this thread. When confronted with questions about the violence on 1/6 you responded with references to the violence perpetuated by BLM protesters.

Correct, I was comparing the violence in general. This is different than your original claim that I was comparing BLM property damage to the Capitol Hill murder.

> As far as I have seen, there were no murders committed by BLM protesters as part of any protests, riots, or whatever you want to call them. Even in this post you are still referring to "BLM murders".

I'm thinking of incidents like Michael Forest Reinoehl (Antifa). He murdered a right-wing activist and was very explicit that he did it because he believed the right-wing was a threat to Black lives. In any case, we're not going to learn much by looking at the outlier instances of violence; in both cases there are much more uniform trends of lesser degrees of violence spanning from trespassing to property damage to assault. All I'm asking (indeed, all anyone is asking) is that we hold BLM rioters to the same standard as MAGA rioters, BLM assailants to the same standard as MAGA assailants, etc.

> protests, riots, or whatever you want to call them

To be quite clear, I'm distinguishing between the protesters (and protests) who are by definition peaceful and rioters (and riots) who are by definition violent.

> And like I said previously, we are already comparing millions of people protesting over months in cities around the country to thousands of people in one city protesting on one day. There were vastly more opportunities for violence at the BLM protests and yet the only person to person violence seen appears to be in response or initiated by people on the other side.

The murder is an outlier, you can't conclude on the basis of this single event that the broader group is uniformly more dangerous. I don't know what value there is in even trying to compare how dangerous either group is; what's important is that we're holding violence to the same standard and not glorifying some violence and condemning others on political grounds.

> One was much quicker to instigate violence against people.

What? How do you get there? There were tons of assaults recorded on camera during the BLM protests going back to probably 2014 including many unprovoked assaults. In ~2016 one guy went on a killing spree, explicitly targeting white police officers (and as I recall, WaPo or someone released a sympathetic portrait article rationalizing the mass murder). I don't have tremendous sympathy for MAGA folks, but there's half a decade of clips of people getting the shit beat out of them for wearing a MAGA hat in the wrong place, virtually none of which featured prominently in the media.

Again, this isn't about which group is more violent, it's about consistency. Even if MAGA folks are more violent, it doesn't justify us completely letting BLM violence off scot free. If you (universal) failed to condemn years of BLM violence, you have very little credibility to demand justice for an afternoon of MAGA violence.

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#950
post #941
post #919

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the person you replied to but I have seen an echo of this sentiment multiple times on HN in the past few weeks. In the end, if you believe that the population at large has to be shielded from what is now a large volume and range of types of speech, it means that you implicitly don't trust them to make the right choices on their own. And if you don't trust them to do that, then it never was about democracy to begi…

Again, it's not about opinions when outright lies and fantasy have lead to an actual attack on democracy and democratic institutions in the US last week. Couching this in terms of disagreement with opposing or unnaproved viewpoints is to (wilfully?) miss the point. Democracy apparently cannot function when demonstrably false information flows so unstoppably and in such quantity. This is not theoretical. To repurpose…

This is a misunderstanding of the argument I'm making here. To break it down in more direct terms:

Premise A: For something to be democratic, the population has to wield power directly or indirectly by electing representatives. Premise B: we cannot let just any type of speech or information propagate, because certain types of information are liable to make the population do bad things and harm democracy.

The premise B immediately runs into problems with A for a number of reasons:

1. We are implicitly agreeing that there is a caste of people that knows better than the population at large, and we count ourselves within that group when arguing about the topic (the "I'm stuck in traffic" instead of "I am the traffic" conclusion)

2. The flow of information and speech must be controlled so that the population is only exposed to certain things.

If the information or speech flow the population is exposed to must be controlled lest they do the wrong things, and that this control must be exercised by some vaguely defined group of reasonable people that includes the arguer, then in this scenario the population cannot be said to actually wield power and the arguer cannot be said to actually believe in democracy but presumably in some form of technocracy.

You end up with a paradox in which people claim to want democracy while arguing that a control and screening of the population is absolutely necessary for democracy.

To be clear, I am in general agreement with you that unfettered lies pose an existential risk. But it is not in any way a democratic sentiment: it is a technocratic one since in this case you do not trust the population to wield supreme political power on its own, without guidance.

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