391–400 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can claim that white nationalism has penetrated the White House all you want, but there is no evidence of this being the case.
Uh, Trump invited Steve Bannon into his cabinet. They did not part ways because of Bannon's extreme white nationalist views...
I don't have a strong opinion on this particular issue, but I don't think your comment gets to the core of it. If Facebook decided to ban all Chinese, Islamic, or African-American content, then the conversation would be completely different. People wouldn't say, "so be it -- go set up your own servers". Obviously they have to make a value judgement, and they have done so here and said as much (which I appreciate). In…
It’s interesting that you seem to equate African-American content with White Nationalist content. Facebook isn’t banning content from white people, it’s banning content that is racist by design.
But now they are banning "white nationalism and separatism" in addition. I guess I don't know enough about white nationalism to say if it's racist or not. Like I said, it's a value judgement (and an issue of categorization) that's beyond my expertise.
I don't think separatism is by definition racist. There was the separatist movement in Spain a year ago. The movement is obviously based on race or ethnic background, but it's not obviously racist. There were probably some racists in the movement, but the entire movement may not be racist.
I think they probably made the right decision -- it looks like they considered it carefully. But my point was that the grandparent's framing of the post as a free speech issue is misleading. Facebook ITSELF framed it as a value judgement.
Why are white people specifically targeted. As someone of an Indian background, I've seen plenty of Hindu nationalist content on Facebook, and -- despite it actually affecting my Christian family who are still in India -- there is no ban on that content. Such nationalism has led to more violence and death than any of the white nationalism stories.
Maybe Facebook should ban Hindutva organizing on their platform. That seems a perfectly reasonable position.
I think it's fine if Facebook wants to ban white nationalist content, however I don't trust their judgement with respect to deciding what is "white nationalist" content or not, because as we've seen the MSM will label anything that it doesn't like as racist, and Facebook definitely falls in with this crowd, and this could be just an excuse to block things they don't want because it goes against their political agenda…
Turning benign stuff racist is how modern racists thrive and spread their ideas, and pretending they don't exist doesn't help.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it is your redefinition that is the new one. And the right-wing is not standing on consistent principles when they try to self-servingly redefine freedom as the individual's freedom to appropriate a company's private property only for the case of popular social networks and nothing else.
And the right-wing is not standing on consistent principles when they try to self-servingly redefine freedom as the individual's freedom to appropriate a company's private property only for the case of popular social networks and nothing else. False. As the Marsh case demonstrates, Free Speech takes priority over property rights. No inconsistency there.
At least in the United States, it is the power dynamic that differentiates White Nationalism. White nationalists and their ideology have penetrated the Senate, the White House, and our police force to name just a few places of power. This has huge and potentially violent consequences for non-Whites in the U.S. and needs to be take more seriously. We have seen historical manifestations of this from slavery to contempo…
You can claim that white nationalism has penetrated the White House all you want, but there is no evidence of this being the case.
If your standard is that no one in the White House has said explicitly "I am a white nationalist", then yes, that seems to be true and there is "no evidence".
But on the other hand, notable white identitarian/nationalist/supremacist figures are currently in the White House, have served in recent years, and indeed, there were entire administrations in the past four decades predicated on the belief that white individuals should have different rules in criminal law than non-white individuals, and strategies were pursued to incarcerate or diminish the status of non-white individuals.
Now, you may say "this is not evidence", but that's to my point. Your standard of evidence is different from others, and you aren't entertaining the idea that maybe, just maybe, these things are not coincidental. That a Muslim ban and "Superpredators" and the behavior of ICE/CBP and the implementation of federal criminal law toward low-level drug offenses (instead of much more societally damaging white collar crime usually perpetrated by wealthy white individuals) is just normal political discourse, not influenced by white supremacy.
You could believe that, and I believe it's possible to believe it earnestly. But I would challenge you to consider whether your standard of evidence in this case might be too high, or even impossible to meet for any smart white nationalist. If your standard is so high that, all it would take is for White House officials to "hide their power level" (using chan-board speak) and use metaphor or coded language while accomplishing the same ends explicitly white nationalist outsiders push for, then is it a useful standard of evidence?
Or, lastly, to bring it full circle: is your standard of evidence impossible to meet for someone who is a smart bad faith actor?
At what point do such things change into a public discourse problem? Do we wait until it can be shown that companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. influenced elections because they refused to serve information from a candidate they didn't like? If we aren't already there, it's not long before it is. What do you think would happen if these "private companies" with such deep hooks into our communication infra…
> influenced elections In fairness to Google and Facebook, etc. TV networks have always been super biased and had far more reach than internet platforms - and it was actually conservatives who shut down (with good reason) the "fairness doctrine" that would have forced them to carry content they didn't necessarily agree with.
I am also nearly a free speech absolutist, but I feel that platforms like YouTube and FB are nearly in-scope. I can't specifically say what the criteria is, but there's some notion of how much responsibility they take for the content. Something like the notion of a DMCA shield; where a platform can expose third-party content without consequences so long as they response to take-down requests means that they do not ge…
DMCA is a United States law, isn't it? So what about mix-region content? What about content from a region in which the content is legal but it's not legal in the region from the person making the complaint?
I consider myself a free speech absolutist. Or very nearly so. But that runs both ways. Not only do I think that almost all (to borrow a mathematical term) speech should be permitted, but also that the onus is on the speaker to make themselves heard or to find an audience. No company or platform owes them anything. In earlier times, that meant that no newspaper or printing press was required to print everything sent…
Precisely. I worked on a college newspaper. It was common , had been going on for years and years in face, that a specific hate group would send an order for advertisements, and threaten to sue if we didn't print them. They were usually Holocaust denial ads w/ anti-semitic conspiracy theories. We never printed them, but some schools inevitably did, failing to understand this aspect of free speech. Everyone gets to speak. But if you want a microphone, you have to buy or build it yourself.
Legally, of course, FB is completely right. Morally - try to replace "white nationalism" with, say, "communism" (one can argue communists killed a lot of people, so why not?), "Christianity", "Islam", "Black separatism", "Wiccans"... I could continue forever, but I hope you get the point. If you're consistently fine with any $GROUP put there, no matter how much you love it/disgusted by it, then your position is consi…