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Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

thehill.com

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Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#291

Post by pcwalton »

microcolonel wrote: post #277
tptacek wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting thing for him to say, because Gab is absolutely and obviously a white nationalist social media platform. Want another example? Arguing with Ken White (Popehat) on Twitter, the official Gab account RT'd a white nationalist mocking Ken for having adopted Asian children. https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1026849669425520640

Granted it was in response to Ken making fun of "incels". Presumably the point is that an infertile person who is not particularly attractive has little to stand on when mocking people with poor romantic success... or something to that effect. It's not my Tweet (and I have no bone to pick with Ken White), but wouldn't take this as solid evidence that Gab (or the person operating the Gab Twitter profile) agrees in gen…

Cowardly obscurantism is the standard tactic of white supremacists and others with loathsome views. They know that if they come right out and say what they believe, they will get nowhere. So they engage in slight of hand and dog whistles in order to recruit the gullible. Andrew Torba's entire platform is built on this obscurantism.

It would be an insult to my intelligence to claim that the target of this tweet is anyone other than the Jews, for example: https://twitter.com/thetomzone/status/1027695084236668928

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#292

Post by 0x8BADF00D »

anigbrowl wrote: post #276
devtul wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Saudi Arabia letting women drive was/is deemed a bad idea. Some cultures think it is a bad idea to not cut off the clit of girls. There are Islamic scholars that will go at length on how you should discipline physically your wife, for her own good. In those places/societies opinions against all of it would be considered wrong ideas. If you stiffen speech, you don't just stop the society from regressing, you also r…

Yes, proposing that a group have more rights that they don't currently enjoy is just like saying a group should be suppressed and have their rights curtailed.

People don’t get more rights than others. All individuals get the same unalienable rights, and that is a universal truth which is self-evident.

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#293

Post by inevitable2 »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #245
inevitable2 wrote: post #44

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -John Gilmore Lately this is getting absurd. I believe this quote is still true, but the amount of 'I don't like what is being said so therefore you should be silenced' is going too far. I don't agree with what this guy said (or even know who he is aside from what was said in the article), but I'm alarmed that Microsoft would go after Gab for a user on G…

Characterizing this kind of thing as just "I don't like what you said" is not being honest with your argument.

It is pretty honest in my book. In looking at Patrick's Gab posts, he is clearly an anti-Semite (I don't condone) but given there is no evidence in this article of what was actually said we're missing the context. Gab on their twitter states it was due to a 'phishing urls'[1] and not calls to violence. I know in the article they state "‘complete eradication'" in as a quote from microsoft as part of the reasoning, but if that is true than why would they mark it as phishing to Gab and then make that statement to the hill? The article doesn't fully add up. In looking at Gab's community guidelines they prohibit calls to violence and threats to people (ie things not protected by the 1st)[2]. I will take Gab on good faith that they would adhere to the values in free speech (1st amendment) and remove posts or ban a user if they violate these terms. If they were in violation I would assume they would have removed the posts and/or banned the user and responded to microsoft staying so.

[1] https://twitter.com/scottbudman/status/1027612769913253888 [2] https://gab.ai/about/guidelines

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#294

Post by corerius »

api wrote: post #200
Nadya wrote: post #31

A common argument in philosophy is that bad ideas should occur in the open - where everyone may ridicule them. When they are cast to the shadows they can grow, under everyone's noses, in private where only there are they allowed to exist. In private, these bad ideas cannot be challenged by others and people will be convinced to believe in them, with nobody challenging the idea as a genuinely terrible idea. It gives b…

I'm shocked by how many liberals who really ought to know better are cheering for the deployment of corporate oligopolistic censorship at this scale. We're not talking about just kicking someone off Twitter... now we're talking about kicking them off supposedly neutral public cloud platforms. This is a major escalation and honestly it's changing my mind a bit about the whole issue. I was a fence sitter before but now…

I just wanted to pop in and say that I agree 100%.

Good post.

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#295

Post by pcwalton »

patrickg_zill wrote: post #290
tptacek wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting thing for him to say, because Gab is absolutely and obviously a white nationalist social media platform. Want another example? Arguing with Ken White (Popehat) on Twitter, the official Gab account RT'd a white nationalist mocking Ken for having adopted Asian children. https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1026849669425520640

I just created a Gab account to try to find hashtags or accounts that are not WN. There are some, but of course, Gab just passed 500K accounts (no idea how many are active: they are privately held and don't publish a breakdown unlike publicly-traded TWTR, which has 335 million monthly active users) so it's tough to find exactly which non-WN communities there might be... I am not sure if you are saying that Gab is "ma…

> I just created a Gab account to try to find hashtags or accounts that are not WN.

You did what Andrew Torba wanted you to do. He wants people to come for "free speech", to "give it a fair chance", and so forth, so that they can be exposed to, and grow to accept, neo-Nazi rhetoric.

It's a scam. Don't fall for it.

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#296

Post by NTDF9 »

cdubzzz wrote: post #255
NTDF9 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, I grew up in a third world country where race was a complete non-issue (unless your color made you stick out like a sore thumb, in which case, you'd be a celebrity, not get picked on). Coming to the US is what made me encounter racism. American society really is broken from within when third world countries can get around this but America can't.

I think this is a bit of apples and oranges. There are vast differences between pretty much any two cultures. I spent three years living and working in a third world county where I “stuck out like a sore thumb”. Most people I met assumed I was rich, despite living and working on the equivalent of a local secondary school teacher’s salary. And this was still a hell of a lot more than most people in the country were ma…

Well, the question is specifically discrimination on the basis of race, so apples to apples there.

Maybe other countries score lower in sexism. (btw America does too, we all know that :) ) However, it still doesn't take away the fact that the extent of racism in America is far too high for a first world country.

As much as it pains me to say this, at a societal level, I don't see any difference between my third world country of birth and America. The only difference between my home country and USA is interstate highways.

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#297

Post by manfredo »

tptacek wrote: post #261
patrickg_zill wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original story, is apparently not available at this link, but the footer, also written by Andrew Torba, owner of Gab.ai , is available: https://medium.com/@Torbahax/this-is-a-joke-and-it-is-fake-n... partial quote: " Gab is absolutely not a “white nationalist social media platform.” We are a free speech social media platform. We welcome everyone and have since the day we launched. My co-founder Ekrem is a Muslim…

That's an interesting thing for him to say, because Gab is absolutely and obviously a white nationalist social media platform. Want another example? Arguing with Ken White (Popehat) on Twitter, the official Gab account RT'd a white nationalist mocking Ken for having adopted Asian children. https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1026849669425520640

I think it's important to distinguish between platforms that host content of a given topic, and platforms that are specifically set up for a certain topic. For example, Reddit has /r/motorcycles, but I wouldn't call it "a motorcycling discussion platform". I'd call advrider.com or bayarearidersforum.com motorcycle discussion platforms. They're websites specifically set up for motorcycling related discussion. A website that takes a strong stance on free speech like Gab probably has a significant overrepresentation of White Nationalists, by virtue of displacement - most other big platforms ban this content so they migrate to the few places that do allow it. In that sense I think it's fair to call Gab "a platform that tolerates white nationalist" but not "a white nationalist platform".

Equating tolerance of an idea as endorsement for an idea is the root of a lot of problems we see today, in my opinion.

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#298

Post by jackvalentine »

autoexec wrote: post #286
jackvalentine wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but bad ideas are forced to spread in hidden places without refute then bad ideas are the only ones getting any voice and they win by default. They win by default in those dark places. Important distinction.

The people in those dark places the ones you have to worry about. Most people don't hold dangerously wrong ideologies like neo-nazis do. What amount of rhetoric or marches or speeches would convince you to be a nazi? If you are like most people no amount ever would. The most vulnerable out there are the ones who find themselves isolated. Those who end up in the dark places or are simply raised in them from childhood.…

Nazis in dark spaces have always existed - their modern grasp of distribution on internet platforms is what has changed.

For years stormfront was a well known butt of jokes about racists, but it existed. What has changed is nazis have started using the new distributive platforms (youtube, facebook, twitter etc) to spread their word outside of the dark space.

All we need to do, is deny them that distribution. Motivated racists will still find their stormfront but they'll stop achieving the bycatch of people who didn't have the skills/motivation to seek out other racists on the internet.

Without distribution their views are repugnant but largely ineffective.

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#299

Post by pcwalton »

colllectorof wrote: post #265
tptacek wrote: post #146

Having read the article but not knowing anything about the posts themselves, I think most of this thread misses the point. Clearly Microsoft knew it was hosting Gab and what Gab was. There's a troll argument that suggests Gab is just "free speech twitter", but of course that's not the case: I've been screenshotting the front page for months, from a random anonymous account, and every time I've done it the front page…

If there is a large enough group of people that's effectively banned from mainstream social media, it's entirely natural that they will be over-represented within the largest platform that doesn't ban them. This doesn't mean the platform in question is designed specifically to cater to those groups.

So? Andrew Torba is obviously a neo-Nazi.

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#300

Post by 0x8BADF00D »

moomin wrote: post #139
tinalumfoil wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are better off hearing a bad idea and hearing it refuted then never hearing a bad idea. You could say, "well then detractors of the idea will have to keep refuting it" and you'd be right. That's how public forums work, and I hope you don't take everything your parent's believed for granted just because their detractors have already been "refuted".

There are an infinite number of bad ideas in the world. No-one’s life would be improved by hearing them all.

Maybe not. But is one’s life diminished by hearing bad ideas? I don’t think so. For instance, the idea that the Earth is flat is laughable. But my life doesn’t deteriorate nor improve based on that idea. We can all agree it’s a stupid idea, laugh at it, and move on.
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