61–70 of 254 posts
Wow, look at the previous post on that site, from the same guy: "They are rigging elections, they are botching troop withdrawals to flood western countries with refugees, the American border is being invaded by hundreds of thousands of people, they are buying up single family homes and pricing you out of the market, they are printing endless money and inflating your currency."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. It can result in a contempt charge, if the recipient does not comply. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contempt_of_Congress
Reading the first couple of sentences, it looks like Contempt of Congress applies only if you ignore a subpoena. It doesn't appear that Congress used subpoena powers (I may be wrong in this assumption) for this request, and Gab's reply to their request for information was optional. Of course, Gab understands that to ignore the request altogether would have left them open to further harassment by the government, and t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's terribly put. The American concept of freedom of speech has nothing to do with access to public forums but rather is a limit on government action against your ability to run your own forum (newspaper, etc), and if you consider that when the Constitution and Bill of Rights were actually written, most Americans had significantly less forums. A few newspapers made up almost the entirety of public forums when the ri…
>that Facebook and Twitter should not be forced to support insurrection and violence masquerading as free speech. Where is "force" coming into this other than various government demands and threats?
This entire debate is about making private networks such as Facebook into "public/government spaces", thus meaning the Bill Of Rights would apply to a private company (an outrageously anti-Constitutional concept) and it would count as government censorship for Twitter to ban an insurrectionist like Trump.
Funny test: this post has 61 votes, 16 comments, is 21 minutes old and is on front page. It will be "dead" and off the front page in the next hour if usual hn moderation is applied. This usually happens to thread where majority of comments go against the grain. Edit: thread is a bit over 1 hour old, 125 points, 119 comments and on page 4. All the other threads on page 4 are of comparable vote/comment count but at lea…
Sometimes it's because a lot of people (not mods) flagged it; sometimes it's because the flame war detector is tripped and a mod may choose not to reset it. They'll tell you.
anyone want to bet Gab's internal operations haven't been penetrated and monitored by several antagonistic parties since shortly after their inception? With all respect to their efforts, I looked at some of the code they posted, and didn't see anything to indicate they'll have much luck protecting their operations against the high grade, ideologically motivated opposition they've drawn.
Technology has had this problem for a long time - the yellow newspapers of the 18th century arguably started it; the phenomena of toxic radio personalities began immediately after radio was invented. Goebbel's movie propaganda was a critical part of Hitler's rise to power.
The internet, and platforms like Twitter, Reddit, Gab, 4chan, take this to a whole new level. They are the ultra-centerfuges of online discourse, distilling and concentrating the extremes of human discourse into a dense, self-sustaining mass of negativity.
And yet we generally don't get an equal and opposite mass of positivity. I believe the central reason is that humans are super biased to address human negativity, rightly judging it to be the greatest threat at small scale, but wrongly judging it at scale. For example, the 9/11 attacks killed ~2,000 people. Car accidents in the US in 2001 killed ~30,000 people. But one event was rooted in negativity - hatred, rage - and the other was not. So one got trillions applied to it's solution, and the other got nothing.
In a worldwide search of 7B people, I believe you can find a self-sustaining mass of hatred on every side of every topic.
We may need a modification to the free speech law in the presence of a sea-change in speech technology. Perhaps "slow speech" (offline, or online and decentralized) should remain perfectly free, but "fast speech" (online and centralized) should be censored - to defuse any given critical mass that threatens to explode into hatred and rage.
I think it would also be useful to enforce a convention that differentiates between speech and paid-for speech. In this way we can more accurately identify who is speaking as a form of expression, and who is speaking as a means to an economic end. The former should be protected from censorship, and the latter should not.
> American citizens may have freedom of speech, but they find themselves with vanishingly few public forums in which to exercise it fully. Well put. As we've also seen from numerous leaks and incidents over the years, big business and government often works hand-in-hand, with revolving door policies and barely legal indirect bribes happening regularly. That the government is now seeking to curtail the First Amendment…
What pressure? Gab is not in trouble. You just don't have the right to conspire to overthrow the government. It's well-understood that Gab is not in any danger, but its members are if they did.
"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."
Just because the causes have not been enumerated lucidly or coherently doesn't mean that there's not two different peoples in the USA who would like to dissolve the political bands connecting them to one another.
Feels like Gab just made itself a target of direct investigation. While you may not agree with how Congress acts, thumbing your nose at them directly is a great way to have the focus put solely on you.
> American citizens may have freedom of speech, but they find themselves with vanishingly few public forums in which to exercise it fully. Well put. As we've also seen from numerous leaks and incidents over the years, big business and government often works hand-in-hand, with revolving door policies and barely legal indirect bribes happening regularly. That the government is now seeking to curtail the First Amendment…
Free speech is good for antifa, bad for pboys. Free speech is good for pboys but bad for antifa.
They are both groups of hoodlums and both have the same rights to free speech, but people will want whoever they agree with more to enjoy it and those they agree with less to not enjoy the rights.
Wow, look at the previous post on that site, from the same guy: "They are rigging elections, they are botching troop withdrawals to flood western countries with refugees, the American border is being invaded by hundreds of thousands of people, they are buying up single family homes and pricing you out of the market, they are printing endless money and inflating your currency."