> The company’s aggressive pursuit of growth, coupled with lack of moderation in the app, has already led Signal employees themselves to publicly question whether growth might come from abusive users, such as far-right groups using Signal to organize. Lol what? What exactly does far-right mean in this case? Why intersperse irrelevant political digs at another ill-defined faction? Does far-right just mean non-progress…
Far-right or hard-right are terms often used nowadays to refer to any dissident who questions government leadership, the security apparatus, or the war machine. I have learned to ignore these and other labels from the MSM as meaningless. I am not denying that actual fascists exist, but these labels are used to scare us into believing or supporting particular positions such as cracking down on any dissidents.
That's factually incorrect. There's anti-authoritarian tendencies both on the right and the left, although right-wing anti-authoritarianism (also called libertarianism) is usually very inconsistent and leads to a paradox of "freedom of oppression/exploitation". Far right never meant anti-State capitalists.
Far-right refers historically to conservative and reactionary political groups, in particular it referred to royalists when the left-right concept was invented after the French revolution.
Nowadays, the term refers specifically to fascists, the political movements who believe in empowering the State to protect and develop Capital. Or as Mussolini put it, « Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power ».
From a quick glance the Wikipedia looks very detailed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-right
> cracking down on any dissidents
Well there is a huge crackdown on dissidents. However, except for the January 5th crew, it's very clearly not a crackdown against the right, but against the anti-authoritarian left (anarchists) and to some extent the authoritarian left (marxist-leninists) in the US context (see: COINTELPRO, Leonard Peltier, Mummia Abu Jamal...).
With so many trials, arrests and physical assaults against militant ecologists, zadists and anti-racist activists such as in the NODAPL case or against Cop City in Atlanta, it's hard to say the far-left isn't concerned by political repression. On the other hand, with so many terrorist attacks committed by white supremacists on US soil and so little reaction from the establishment, it's very clear that the powers that be are very complacent with the far right.
To go back to lands i know more about, in the EU, islamist attacks are only a few percents of all terrorists attacks. Yet the media only talks about those as if racist militias did not exist. On the other hand, eco-anarchists sabotaging ecocidal industrial projects such as in Notre-Dame-des-Landes or Sainte-Soline get called "eco-terrorists" on every media by the establishment, despite never spilling blood in their actions. And so many comrades rot in jail for daring to believe in a better world.
I'm not saying the term "far-right" can't be misused to misrepresent various (moderate) conservative positions, but claiming it's a rhetorical trick used by those in power to prevent dissent is far from the truth.