Surprise, Surprise
Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain
341–350 of 550 posts
Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
There isn’t a shortage of means to socialize and communicate digitally. Facebook rises and falls on its own merits and if your speech depends on Facebook, that’s a personal problem, and reflects your own personal choices. 20 years ago Facebook didn’t exist. Now we have Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Tumblr, WordPress (both the service and the software), YouTube, SoundCloud, the Fediverse, Twitch, Slack, Discord, iMessa…
Sure, there isn't a shortage of digital communication, but they are responsible for a large proportion of that communication and they hold the power of tilting democracies by choice of those in charge of the company or by seemingly random bearucratic decisions made by their employees. They are a medium of information distribution. If certain phone companies decide to not put through calls years ago in an effort to sw…
There was an argument to be made to treat phone companies like common carriers, I’m not entirely sure that was the best way to handle them, but it happened, and it was a good argument nonetheless, or at least well argued.
Social media isn’t like that at all. Social media proliferates and in different forms and it does so internationally with popular and unpopular opinions easily spreading like wildfire. I have no problem with the Facebooks and the Twitters of the world running their servers with the carte blanche of the private property owners that they are because what you and others perceive as a lack of options and alternatives looks more to me like there’s not a lot of options today compared to how many there will be 20 years from now.
Go look back at the history of the web, here’s an incomplete and not comprehensive list of sites and internet services which have existed, do exist, ceased to exist, got gobbled up by bigger fish and spawned smaller networks of their own and probably in some small way contributed to the political conscience of most Americans alive today and definitely not concerning ourselves with all of the countless web forums, Usenet groups, and mailing lists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_serv...
Classmates.com: 1995
GameFAQs: 1995
Newgrounds: 1995
ICQ: 1996
AIM: 1997
CaringBridge: 1997
Slashdot: 1997
Penny Arcade: 1998
Yahoo Messenger: 1998
BlackPlanet: 1999
Blogger: 1999
Fark: 1999
Kiwibox: 1999
LiveJournal: 1999
Metafilter: 1999
Neopets: 1999
Something Awful: 1999
Xanga: 1999
CrossFit: 2000
DeviantArt: 2000
Radio UserLand: 2000
Wikipedia: 2001
YTMND: 2001
Yahoo Groups: 2001
last.fm: 2002
Meetup: 2002
4chan: 2003
Gaia Online: 2003
LinkedIn: 2003
MEETin: 2003
MySpace: 2003
Second Life: 2003
Steam: 2003
WordPress: 2003
Digg: 2004
Facebook: 2004
Flickr: 2004
hi5: 2004
IMVU: 2004
PatientsLikeMe: 2004
RoosterTeeth Forums: 2004
TV Tropes: 2004
World of Warcraft: 2004
Yelp: 2004
Vimeo: 2004
Dailymotion: 2005
Google Talk: 2005
LibraryThing: 2005
Ning: 2005
Reddit: 2005
YouTube: 2005
CafeMom: 2006
Flixster: 2006
Goodreads: 2006
iLike: 2006
ReverbNation: 2006
Twitter: 2006
Chess.com: 2007
Italki: 2007
SoundCloud: 2007
Tumblr: 2007
Hacker News: 2007
Justin.tv: 2007
Academia.edu: 2008
GovLoop: 2008
identi.ca: 2008
Nextdoor: 2008
Formspring: 2009
Foursquare: 2009
Grindr: 2009
Pinterest: 2009
Quora: 2009
WhatsApp: 2009
Friendica: 2010
Instagram: 2010
Untappd: 2010
Duolingo: 2011
Fishbrain: 2011
I Had Cancer: 2011
Letterboxd: 2011
Twitch: 2011
Whisper: 2012
Google Hangouts: 2013
Slack: 2013
Vine: 2013
Voat: 2014
Yo: 2014
Discord: 2015
Periscope: 2015
Gab: 2016
Houseparty: 2016
Mastodon: 2016
Peach: 2016
micro.blog: 2017
Parler: 2018
So let’s break this down.
> Sure, there isn't a shortage of digital communication, but they are responsible for a large proportion of that communication and they hold the power of tilting democracies by choice of those in charge of the company or by seemingly random bearucratic decisions made by their employees.
No. We are responsible for our own communications and when we don’t trust the messenger, we encode our messages or we use a different messenger. We are also the ones responsible for the upkeep of our own democracy and the upkeep of the institutions which maintain it because it’s ours and our responsibility. Corporations, as it turns out, as organizations which represent the aggregate interests of their owners and employees, are also actors in aggregate within the framework of our democracy, much like name a group of three or more people.
How ten thousand people voted in one place or fifty-thousand voted in another isn’t Facebook’s responsibility, or Twitter’s, or Reddit’s, or Slack’s. It’s the responsibility of every single person who cast their own vote, which should be all of the people who cast votes in every election.
> They are a medium of information distribution.
They are a handful out of the millions of ways that exist to distribute information.
> They are a for profit business ruled by one individual that has extraordinary power. As a society, are we really supposed to just let them do whatever they want just because there are less popular alternatives?
They are dust. If our free speech depended on the whims of one Mark Zuckerberg and one Jack Dorsey, then we didn’t have free speech to begin with. Facebook and Twitter are critters of the last 20 years, there have been others, and there will be more like them, but also entirely unlike them.
The way people talk about social media companies today they make it sound like we need some sort of Social Media Public Commission to control the moderation policies and enforce the publication of government speech. We don’t, because we have what we need: competition and the many many technologies that enable it and a free flow of cash and labor and capital.
It’s disgusting to me how freely conspiracy theorists, socialists, PRC apologists and neo-Nazis can easily congregate and talk themselves up into a furor about seizing the means of killing the Jews before Bill Gates takes over the world and prevents Chairman Winnie the Pooh from leading us into glorious revolution, but that’s the mark of a free society that they can find a way and will always find a way. So is being able to tell the President and anyone else to get off your lawn and/or servers.
Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain
#343It's a positive thing for these ejections to be across the political spectrum, because it makes the demand for distributed moderation come from across the political spectrum. I hope that demand congeals on support for an open blogging protocol, such that people can very easily post once and direct it to multiple platforms or any listener. If this becomes popular enough, and posts aren't owned by a particular platform…
> It's a positive thing for these ejections to be across the political spectrum, because it makes the demand for distributed moderation come from across the political spectrum. It's a positive thing for these ejections to be across the political spectrum, because it de-politicizes censorship, and folks on one side of the spectrum cheering for the other side begin to realize that censorship is always a scope creep iss…
I’m somewhat sure the end result will be banning all political content- which honestly sounds pretty good
Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain
#344How is this not foreign political interference? The UK media has been preaching to us about dangers of Russian election interference for years at this point, but simultaneously they seem completely unconcerned that a handful of wealthy Americans how the power to censor popular media outlets, entire political movements and political activists at a whim. The SWP is massive. I don't know for sure, but I suspect they had…
Australian Rupert Murdoch says hi from his American Fox empire.
Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain
#345More shutdowns: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/01/23/pers-j23.html
Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain
#346First they came for the Trumpists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trumpist. Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist. (to be continued apparently!)
Yes but the Trumpist part is nuanced. Armed people storming political organisations after the call of the ousted person who holds the power of the state, while expecting martial law and denying election results with claims convincing no-one but themselves is when people say somebody should take care these people. It's fundamentally different from people exploring or even advocationg for economical models like communi…
Unfortunately there is a huge double standard with this - for Trump, we're mindreading his words were meant to be violent, whereas for his opponents, "context matters", despite unrest and violent action from all sides.
I don't advocate for violent speech, but it's important at times like this to be even-handed in our policies, because as I've said before, when a group or specific groups start feeling their voices are being silenced, then violence follows soon after.
Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
>How is this not foreign political interference? America doesn't "interfere" in elections, it gently persuades people to follow the true democratic path. Truthfully, it is nothing more than American exceptionalism. Even as our nation spent years outraged over Russian interference, we continued both private and public interference in elections worldwide.
> Even as our nation spent years outraged over Russian interference Only a minority of the country was (supposedly) outraged about the mostly non-existent Russian interference. Most of the US knew it was bullshit the entire time, the Russians had near zero impact on the prior election (amazing how they didn't somehow swing this latest election, given their apparent god-like powers, despite how close it was). Trump's…
If I was American and there was clear proof that Russia had interfered in elections, I don’t care how ineffective it was. I’d want it investigated and stopped.
I’d also rain fire and fury on anyone who interfered with or obstructed those investigations. But that’s me. I suppose caring about free and fair elections in the US is now a partisan issue over there.
For a British conservative that grew up under Reagan/Thatcher it’s all desperately sad and disappointing.
Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain
#348How is this not foreign political interference? The UK media has been preaching to us about dangers of Russian election interference for years at this point, but simultaneously they seem completely unconcerned that a handful of wealthy Americans how the power to censor popular media outlets, entire political movements and political activists at a whim. The SWP is massive. I don't know for sure, but I suspect they had…
Me-thinks that their automated procedure for banning right-wing actors removed large swathes of left-wing actors too. Not surprising really. After all, the SWP describes itself as "revolutionary" and that has got a bad name in recent days. Looks like they will need to make special "permit-list" for the language of left wing parties.
Why would you think they would make a permit list for political pages?
Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Even as our nation spent years outraged over Russian interference Only a minority of the country was (supposedly) outraged about the mostly non-existent Russian interference. Most of the US knew it was bullshit the entire time, the Russians had near zero impact on the prior election (amazing how they didn't somehow swing this latest election, given their apparent god-like powers, despite how close it was). Trump's…
> mostly non-existent Russian interference This is not true. The Republican-led, bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee found, over the course of their 3.5 year investigation, that there was in fact Russian interference. You can find the actual report (all 5 volumes) here [0]. Alternatively, a TL;DR summary can be found here [1]. > amazing how they didn't somehow swing this latest election Let's for a moment, assum…
Thanks for engaging these folks with well-written comments. They may downvote you for speaking the truth and linking to evidence, but hopefully it will plant a seed.
Re: Facebook shuts down the Socialist Workers Party in Britain
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
Facebook is a private company and can do whatever they want.
Sounds good, until the next bail out comes and private companies and their investors has to be saved.
Facebook is not critical infrastructure like banks. Instead of bailing them out they can be simply let to go bankrupt.