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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

#521
post #354

What is the purpose of the NSA and FBI if they can’t prevent something this obvious? Wasn’t the supposed bargain that nearly unlimited surveillance of Americans would prevent terrorism? What should be done with agencies incapable of fulfilling their most basic functions?

The Pulse nightclub shooter was reported directly to the FBI for being suspicious at a gun store prior to the attack. They did nothing. The surveillance was rolled out under the guise of protecting you, but it never has. It's for control.

What control? There's no control, else deadly attacks to the capital no less should not occur.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the verifiable facts again? Do you have alternative statistics because they're actually on the FBI website and contradict everything you're saying. The riots were most likely political AstroTurf before an election via amplification of convenient (and unfortunate/terrible) imagery to turn out voters. I hate to be stone cold but that's my understanding of what unfolded. We witnessed something similar in 2015.

I should add a caveat around "the BLM movement is about." One of its problems (like many progressive movements) is everyone has a different idea what it is about, and the mainstream media does not help with that in the slightest. So, the original idea there is police in the United States are killing black people for stupid reasons, which is true . There are no statistics to worry about for that one and there don't ne…

>So, the original idea there is police in the United States are killing black people for stupid reasons, which is true.

Is it though? Seems to me you're advocating feelings matter more than facts. I believe it would be more accurate to say "police in the United States are killing people for stupid reasons, which is true." while keeping in mind that those incidents are the exception, not the norm. The police shot 28 unarmed people in 2019. On a population of 320 million.

>This paper explores racial differences in police use of force. On non-lethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities. On the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/empirical_anal...

>We create a comprehensive database of officers involved in fatal shootings during 2015 and predict victim race from civilian, officer, and county characteristics. We find no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities across shootings, and White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers. Instead, race-specific crime strongly predicts civilian race. This suggests that increasing diversity among officers by itself is unlikely to reduce racial disparity in police shootings.

https://archive.is/Xppla

>In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population. The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.

https://archive.is/MIoYJ

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#523
post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They took far right terrorism seriously in the 1870s. They more or less stamped out the (original) KKK while simultaneously giving the south the requisite autonomy to enact Jim Crow. Obviously Jim Crow doesn't square with our modern view but at the time the lack of some systemic way to keep the black people down was a serious grievance that a lot of people had. The government cracked down on the extremists who were s…

> he government never takes people's grievances seriously until there's a "real" threat of extremists getting off the porch I haven't noticed any gay-marriage terrorists on their porches, and yet here we are. Women-for-equal-pay have not been observed cleaning and oiling their rifles menacingly, and yet the law was mended in their favor. And I don't think Irish or Jewish terrorism was a problem in the US, but their p…

> I don’t think Irish or Jewish terrorism was a problem in the US

Both international terrorism (directed at the UK, but sometimes involving direct conflict with the US military) and organized crime-linked terrorism were very big things associated with the Irish in America in the 19th C.

And, on the Jewish side, more recently, Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League was a real thing.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#524

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.

The FBI, hardly a bastion of left-wingers, has been warning for decades that white supremacists have been attempting to infiltrate police and the military.

When polled 25% of active-duty military personnel say they know at least one.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My two cents: Facebook has an algorithm they use to decide what posts are presented to a user. They should therefore loose their section 230 common carrier status. They are the ones deciding to put toxic and divisive information in front of users to drive engagement, instead of simply sharing posts in chronological order and letting users control all the filtering.

You've misunderstood Section 230 : https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...

Thanks for that clarifying link! I still wonder about this, though. Relevant section (c)(1) says:

>No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

I'm hung up on the words "provided by". Facebook's algorithm controls what is presented to each user. They are providing a view of some posts, and not others. Facebook is creating the wall for each user, right?

Or would all this still considered moderation, allowing them to do what they want? Section (c)(2)(B) mentions not being liable for allowing users to control what content is accessed, but doesn't mention when the provider makes decisions like this.

At an extreme, could facebook use their secret algorithm to promote all posts saying "stolen election" to all republicans, demote contrary posts, and still claim claim section 230 protection because they didn't create the posts even though they could choose whatever they want to go viral amongst millions of various posts?

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you expand the definition of terrorism to such an absurd degree (anybody who may need grief counseling) you're diluting actual terrorism. The Pulse nightclub is what real terrorism looks like. And the Christchurch shootings. And 9/11. The storming of the capitol was not at all similar.

> If you expand the definition of terrorism to such an absurd degree (anybody who may need grief counseling) you're diluting actual terrorism. > The Pulse nightclub is what real terrorism looks like. And the Christchurch shootings. And 9/11. > The storming of the capitol was not at all similar. Interesting. What makes 9/11 a terror attack that doesn't similarly make the Capitol Insurrection one? Because they both lef…

Well, for one, almost 3000 people died in the September 11th attacks. Kind of an important point.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#527
post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean the fictitious boogeyman "group" that not one member has ever been identified and the movement for black rights that was widely brutalized by the police? I suppose not, seeing as one is a fantasy and the other clearly had the police paying attention to their plans. Besides, neither has attempted a coup to overturn an election so it's not really the same is it?

How is it that this fictitious bogeyman group has managed to take over portions of Seattle, get two people killed in Seattle, and spend months burning down neighborhoods in Seattle and Portland?

Easy, my friend. All it has to do is deny its existence, and ensure that this denial is reflected up and down the stack. Under such cover, it can do anything, and blame anything that goes wrong on its opponents.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you honestly believe that Antifa is not real?

"Real" and "worth pissing your pants over" aren't quite the same.

Why does that same description not apply to their adversaries?

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#529
post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's chilling how quickly radical terrorist groups have coalesced around using social media to coordinate their hatred and their attacks. A scant few years ago, America actively fought terrorists instead of encouraging and facilitating them.

No they didn’t. Look at the damage done to Seattle and Portland with the full cooperation of Twitter and Facebook.

I missed the part where BLM advocated overthrowing democracy. At worst they advocated to defund police and held obnoxious signs. And despite the right wing narrative, the people carrying signs and doing sit ins were not the ones rioting and looting, but rather getting their ass beat by police.

Re: Capitol Attack Was Months in the Making on Facebook

#530
The one thing that DIDN'T happen in a widespread fashion, as far as I can tell, was the threat of militant groups "backing up" police as election security. Of course there are always isolated incidents, but my impression is that election day itself was surprisingly free of incidents of physical intimidation.
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