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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

#281
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.

It's true. And guess which side was antifa.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course not. But institutions matter, and shutting down a governing body through threats of violence has consequences far beyond just the immediate politician's lives.

Shutting down a judicial governing body through nightly attacks for month should also have consequences...but it didn't. I literally watched it happen for months on end with little repercussions by local law enforcement (because they were restricted by the mayor). What happens when you take over multiple city blocks for a few weeks and don't allow any government agencies to do their jobs? That should also have reprec…

It sounds like you are talking about the federal judiciary in Portland? Being specific helps readers understand how to address your comments.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#283
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If we are principled people, and FB is failing to moderate, then any reasonable person who supported Parler's removal would support Facebook's." Is Facebook failing to moderate, or failing at moderation? If the standard is perfect moderation, there is no social media. If the standard is a good faith efforts at moderation, Facebook should be tolerated (if not compelled to do better) and Parler should be punished (unl…

How many massacres and beheadings have been live streamed on FB at this point? And yet very few seem to think FB is the problem.

Brown people don't count, even when they lose their heads. Remember when a plane full of them crashed and there wasn't even a grounding?

It's got to happen to white folk in the US before anything will change.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- The BLM movement is, while poorly framed and easily co-opted by other people, about genuine problems with policing in the United States. Problems that are backed up with verifiable facts rather than scummy used car salesmen and the Inventor of Email™. - The BLM movement, while the source of many large large scale protests (several of which turned into riots and outstayed their welcome) never, at any point, even pre…

A couple cops were killed by blm rioters. Sure they weren't capital police but they were still police. ACAB was all over Facebook and Twitter which at a minimum raised the temperature and hatred towards cops.

Incitement some might call that.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#285
post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fr…

I think you got me confused with someone else. I don't have any other comments in this thread. How can you honestly say "Imagine trying to paint being against political violence as a partisan issue." while doing absolutely everything you can to minimize and excuse left-wing violence?

You read my comment before you replied right?

You completely dodged the one thing that is actually asked of the reader and tried to jump over the fact this entire thread is based on insinuating an abject lie: that anyone downplayed the George Floyd protests or what happened on Pennsylvania Avenue in any way.

-

And how is saying that a successful breach of the Capitol Building while congress was trying to certify a new president that resulted in Congresspeople being subject to a clear and eminent danger...

should naturally be a bigger deal than people the Secret Service of all organizations are saying never posed a threat...

excusing the latter?

It's saying call a spade a spade.

Some people just can't handle that though. They need to act like it's not that big of a deal and the fact breaching the Capitol building tends to turn up the heat more than a group that never made it to the fence of the White House is a conspiracy.

If you can't handle the heat, don't breech the Capitol with Congress in session.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#286
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A decent distinction to make is Facebook on the face of it tries to moderate they're just bad at it and make decisions a lot of people aren't happy with where Parler's moderation system was almost entirely pro forma relying largely on showing reports to a panel of random users.

I'm not sure how hard FB actually tries to moderate extremist political content. They're pretty damn good at quickly taking down child porn and copyrighted movies/music, because those are areas where big money & potential criminal liability are on the line. In contrast, nobody's forcing them to censor political extremism, and the usual "engagement" metrics that they and their advertisers track would likely reward tha…

Most people here could hack together some basic keyword searches for questionable content in a day at the outside. I think we can assume that Facebook already has the tools to run those searches at scale and act on the results.

So I don't think there's any good reason to disagree with you.

At best, Facebook has prioritised "engagement" - i.e. ad revenue - over unacceptable extremism. At worst Facebook is knowingly complicit in the politics and in the polarisation that is being generated.

It would be impossible to know which of those is true without access to internal records. But there should at least be an investigation asking these questions.

And not just of Facebook, but of all the social tech and media giants.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#287
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If people had called one another to prepare this, would we say that the phone was responsible for the attack? And would we try to ban phones? That's a moot point, because an attack like this can't realistically be organized via one-to-one communication. It needs a broadcast medium, which the phone network isn't.

Really? How did past revolutions and terrorist attacks get organized? You realize most of world history existed before the Internet, right?

A small-scale printing press and a little bit of Common Sense [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure public support for removing Facebook from app stores wouldn't be too different than Parler. If we are principled people, and FB is failing to moderate, then any reasonable person who supported Parler's removal would support Facebook's. What would be different between the two decisions is the sheer magnitude of money on the line, in the case of Facebook's removal -- in capital markets, in employment, etc.

"If we are principled people, and FB is failing to moderate, then any reasonable person who supported Parler's removal would support Facebook's." Is Facebook failing to moderate, or failing at moderation? If the standard is perfect moderation, there is no social media. If the standard is a good faith efforts at moderation, Facebook should be tolerated (if not compelled to do better) and Parler should be punished (unl…

I suspect the bar for acceptable moderation will always be just a hair below what facebook, twitter, and youtube can manage. Every time they fail again, they'll be hauled in front of congress and explain how they'll rub a little AI on it. It'll become just a little more expensive to compete.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Far-right terrorism in the US has never really been taken seriously. No one took them seriously. Until the Capitol was attacked. The Feds are starting to roll up high ranking militia members, so hopefully they learned their lesson this time.

Far-right terrorism in the US has never really been taken seriously. No one took them seriously.

That's not really true.

Far-right terror was taken very seriously in 1995 after the Oklahoma City bombing. The FBI hired 500 agents specifically to focus on domestic terrorism [0], particularly the then-new militia movement. Virtually every state and federal law enforcement agency established a domestic terror unit. Through continuous effort they'd pretty much quashed the militia movement by 2004, despite the shift of federal resources to the Global War on Terror post-9/11. However, far-right militias surged again in the Obama years [2].

(Much further back, U.S. Grant used the Army to crack down on the Klan [3]. Unfortunately, his successor Rutherford B. Hayes effectively ended Reconstruction and rolled back much of this progress.)

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120210125747/http://news.bbc.c... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110623153230/http://www.rickro... [2] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/03/08/148217754... [3] https://www.historynet.com/grant-takes-klan.htm

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off topic but I'm having increasingly more difficulty with the term Terrorist. How'd you call American intrusions in sovereign states? Just somewhat recently the drone strike of the General Soleimani on sovereign grounds were an act of terrorism if perceived through the eyes of most Iranians, and possibly Iraqis as the strike was on their ground. Terrorist is a term that is stretched and applied beyond meaning.

I would define terrorism as forced coercion of an outside group (or group perceived to be "outside") through violent actions. Controlling through fear. So yes, any assassination, and especially that one, would be terrorism. However, terrorism committed by independent actors makes them terrorists, but terrorism committed by the state is more appropriately classified as military aggression, or acts of war. The whole po…

That's not the standard understanding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_terrorism
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