History doesn’t have any precedent for this. Algorithmically defined echo chambers are a new frontier for society to tackle. We’ve tried the option of waving our hands and hoping for the best, and what we got was a literal riot at the holiest of holies. Maybe it’s time for society to reject extremists on the internet, like we reject them in our local communities.
The fact the echo chambers are algorithmically determined or not is quite irrelevant -- the end result is the same -- cults. The historic precedent for minimizing bad influences of cults is decentralization and distribution so as to prevent systemic failure cascades in case where cultish behavior is endemic. This is federalism and anti-monopoly policies (for either government and private enterprise).
The solution, therefore, is that these centralized echo chambers need to be broken up into smaller pieces.
The end result is the same, but the mechanisms that create and persist that phenomenon are now a billion dollar industry driven by very smart people with shareholders that they answer to. The result is that the effectiveness and pertinacity of these creations far outstrip anything ever seen before in human history.
And yet, decentralisation and the social networks' "hands off" policies were exactly what started those cults.
Those trolls, movements and "subcultures" were not started on r/all. They came from niche subcommunities which were effectively unmoderated before they gained media attention or from 4chan and all the other -chan, -booru, etc sites which already were exactly the kind of small decentralised, free-speech-above-all-else services you're talking about.
> The historic precedent for minimizing bad influences of cults is decentralization and distribution so as to prevent systemic failure cascades in case where cultish behavior is endemic.
If this is anything more than repetition of dogma then please explain how exactly this should be applied to the current situation. What should be done?
They assume they will control the monster they're creating forever, believing it could never be subverted by their ideological enemies or even end up creating an ideology of its own that oppresses every other ideology. They're playing with fire that has to potential to hurt far more than themselves or their perceived enemies.
By "they" do you mean the companies that own those platforms? Or somebody else? Do you mean that someone else could take their platforms away from them?
I assure you that in the US, the threat posed during a resurgent white supremacy similar to Wilmington 1898 is NOT someone being banned from a social media platform
Can you elaborate? I don’t view Trump as being that far in likeness from David Duke, other than that Trump masks his hateful rhetoric every-so-slightly. Are you also all for having Davie Duke back on Twitter? And what in history enforces the idea that banning Trump is bad? I can’t think of a single incident that would indicate it will be anything but a boon for society.
This reminds me of when a teacher finally blows-up at the idiot student that has been incessantly disrupting class and has him suspended and all the non-crazies can get back to being productively educated. This is a good thing.
Edit, to add: not every shushing is the same. The context and circumstances can drastically change the nature of the shush.
That and the temptation to ban more and more for an ever widening definition of wrong thought will be impossible to resist. Every time some entity gains this type of control, the use of it always ends up expanding until it reaches a breaking point. After that, things get really messy for everyone involved.
Well, they didn’t ban him because he thinks wrong things. They very clearly banned him because his words on the platform were intended to cause violence and stop the democratic process in the US (but mostly only the former). I think it’d be foolish not to ban people who use Twitter to communicate plans to perform acts of violence. If anything I hope they (along with other platforms) use this opportunity to get better at it.
Don’t forget this is Twitter exercising its right to free speech. If Trump is upset, he’s free to do the same and make his own Twitter-like platform. I’ve seen a few open source ones posted here that he could fork.
So you want this idiot to continue to have a platform to incite violence? You may be a student of history but your understanding of it is poor and honestly you sound like someone who supports this traitor.
And then the article ends with "Trump is quickly losing access to all the platforms where he once was able to spread his message freely, but groups of his supporters will still be able to gather online."
I have been thinking about this a lot lately. I personally know many conservatives who do not support Trump, have never supported him, and are now scared.
I wonder - will any sane person vote R for the next decade? What would that do to your image? Best case scenario the Reps clean up their act. Worse case scenario the US becomes a one-party system when our corporate overlords realize they can just get rid of any politicians they don't like.
I really hope the republicans can clean up their act and become a reasonable choice again.
That being said, I think they will need to prove their commitment to reasonable governance as the minority for the better part of a decade before I am willing to seriously consider them again.
>>I wonder - will any sane person vote R for the next decade?
I actually wonder what Rs are doing...chasing the 'base' has literally destroyed their brand. And the 'base' isn't big enough to win national elections... So what is their logic ??
The "base" is basically "people who don't consume as much Democrat-aligned media". It doesn't matter if Republicans try to appeal people outside the "base", because those people won't get the message. They will only get the message they get from the media, which in almost 100% of cases that I've looked into is completely different from what the Republicans actually said. They have no real choice.
If you're on the highway and you find that everyone else seems to drive on the wrong lane, it may be worth considering if it isn't you who is driving on the wrong lane.
A slim majority is not "everyone else". Your rhetoric marginalizes 40-50% of the country. Why feed into the division and conflict like this? Why have this knee-jerk reaction of hateful dismissal? Don't we need some degree of mutual respect and cooperation?
In terms of politics? Not much. Lots of arguments with spouses and other family... I won't pretend these people represent the majority of conservative voices.
Edit: I realized this probably isn't a very informative comment. To maybe give a better picture, here are the kinds of people in my social circles who dislike Trump:
- The 'liberal' Christian: people who are fiscally liberal (free healthcare and college, "love thy neighbor" types) who are socially conservative (not fans of LGBT or identity politics).
- The 'conservative' Christian: people who like Trump's policies but not his persona. They see Trump as the opposite of a good Christian, e.g. he is worldly, arrogant, impious, etc. They think he is a sign of the moral decline of American society.
- The libertarian: these people really care about small government and policy. They realize Trump claims to care about these things but really doesn't. They get upset when he does things like take military action against Iran, or bans some apps with an Executive Order.
The takeaway is all these people are ""Republicans"" simply because there is no real alternative that they feel represents them.
No conservative voice has value, in your mind? Surely there is a word of difference between a conservative voice and the voice of a confederacy advocate, or similar far-right voice?
Does conservative mean something different in the US?
Cynically, I think this has less to do with politics and more to do with avoiding 'wrongful death' type lawsuits. With perhaps a side of "don't scare the advertisers".
What I have observed today on social media is that censorship has been ramped up dramatically all in one day. And I don't mean Trump. I'm seeing even posts from conservative accounts that unequivocally condemned the capitol raid getting deleted, and entire accounts being deleted with no notice. This to me feels a lot like a digital political genocide, the culmination of an ascendant group with significant power (progressive left allied with tech giants) suddenly unleashing it upon their political enemies.
I dislike Trump, but the claim that he has incited violence is without evidence, and we see that in Twitter's blog post announcing his ban (https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...), since it offers no hard evidence and only subjective leaps of the imagination. The call to delete his account because of the current political context is unacceptable, and it is also total hypocrisy given that this logic was not applied when BLM riots caused billions of Dollars in damage in the last year. It's also hypocritical given that nearly identical incidents (riots at the capitol) have taken place several times before and not resulted in this type of coverage or censorship. Several of these incidents are in the past few years, such as the climate riot which AOC participated in (https://theintercept.com/2018/11/13/alexandria-ocasio-cortez...) or the riots concerning Brett Kavanaugh's appointment (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/04/kavanaugh-su...) or the 600-person riot protesting immigration law (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/womens-march-protesters-call...).
This isn't about riots. It isn't about violence. It isn't about a coup. It isn't about Trump even. It is only about big tech bowing down to the new incoming leaders who control their fates, and with the changing of the guard, they have become comfortable showing who they are - powerful partisans who will put the power of their monopolies to work if left unimpeded. That should scare anyone who knows where this path leads based on history. I'm genuinely worried, because as always, these changes come in response to an event that scared people and now they are naively welcoming authoritarian changes.
The other “riots” you refer to are not riots. They appear to all be sit-ins. No windows were broken or police overpowered/attacked.
These types of protests are common in the Capitol (and I’m pretty sure in most other US legislatures buildings). People often enter legally, protest, refuse to leave, and then are arrested. This is not what happened on January 6th.
You’re redefining the word “riot”, drawing an arbitrarily line between allowed/disallowed activities that constitute a riot, and also dressing up riots you agree with in favorable terms by calling them a “sit in”. The definition of “riot” is at https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/riot and all the events I named were unequivocally riots. Their acts were clearly illegal and it’s why they were arrested. Please don’t excuse criminality that agrees with your politics. This is exactly the hypocrisy underlying the spate of censorship that was normalized today.
I think that a big difference to people is whether or not the event was violent.
Many protests involve civil disobedience; I think very few people here would condemn all illegal protests.
However, violence is where I (and I think many others) draw the line.
As another data point I heard: Wednesday was the first time since 9/11/2001 that the Capitol was evacuated. Clearly, this demonstration was exceptional in a way that disturbe
The word “or” separates the qualifying conditions in the definition linked. Disorder or a disturbance of the peace is enough to qualify an incident as a “riot”. Given the quoted incidents were illegal acts that required authorities to spend time and money to respond to, they were of course a disturbance of the peace, disorderly, and therefore were indeed riots.
And you don't think it's ridiculous to equivocate between events where a police officer is grievously beaten and a woman is trampled and events where people sit quietly and get arrested because some sergeant decides it is disorderly for them to sit there without a permit.
You can see the fear in Duckworth's eyes when she comes up with her baby strapped to her chest and waves at the crowd.
I agree with you. It's a word that means different things to so many people.
It frustrates me when the media tries to make a big distinction between protests and riots. Those words have become emotionally charged.
Rather, if we're going to have discussions about this, we should be sure to be extra clear about what we're trying to say.
I think it's fairly pointless to debate what the precise definition of a riot is. Rather, I was trying express why people see this as different from the "sit-ins" (another wishy washy word) the the poster above you talked about.
The reason that I find Wednesday's acts worse is because of the violence. And I think that there could be a much more productive conversation off of that pretense, than over what is a riot vs a sit-in.
https://twitter.com/DaveLeeFT/status/1347724201331814401 They banned him from his email lists. Strange Trump tries a sudo(overtish?) coup on the US and the Tech industry sudo coups a sitting president. With only the shrinking broadcast network will soon be his only outlet.
Here is my opinion on this, in case you're interested for some reason.
I consider myself centrist but usually agree with liberal policies, however I also believe in free speech.
I honestly don't have a problem with mainstream platforms banning the radical right, because I don't really care about their speech. In case it isn't clear I think Donald Trump and his policies are awful.
The problem, and the reason I argue we need free speech: I believe any attempt that would actually censor them would also have to censor innocent people caught in the crossfire.
- Suppose these people start using code-words. Now, in an effort to ban these covert discussions, you risk misidentifying and banning random people.
- Suppose these people brigade more moderate groups and subreddits. Now you may ban moderate Conservatives and libertarians who don't deserve to be banned. Believe it or not, there are Conservatives who hate Donald Trump, who are reasonable people, and who occasionally discover flaws in the left party, because even though I mostly side with the left party they aren't perfect.
- Suppose these people move to decentralized platforms like Signal. In order to break or monitor their communication, you must enable Signal to break or monitor anyone's communication, including activists who need it for good purposes.
- Similarly, if governments or ISPs can block these people from hosting their own website, that means governments or ISPs can block anyone from hosting their own website, so in the future they could block the good guys.
Another thing you have to note is that this is a decent amount of the population. Even though they're idiots, you can't ignore them and you can't suppress them. A lot of these people are your average people, they just grew up in a biased society so bias is all they know. When you aggressively threaten and censor them, you're only scaring them, so they become more irrational and dangerous.
Unfortunately I don't know how else you're going to restrict or convince right extremists. I'm sure it's possible, if you offer them something. Or more likely, if they get bored and distracted by something else, which would require the news to stop covering Donald Trump and start covering another, more interesting drama.
Personally, I don't think that these bannings will lead to something as extreme as what you're describing. Specifically, I don't see this leading to a ban of reasonable people.
If I'm reading your thoughts correctly, your main concern seems to stem from the fact that you're assuming the goal is to stop these people from communicating with each other.
However, I don't think that's the point of these bannings. I think the goal is to stop them from reaching a new audience and expanding (however, as I am not a CEO of a major social media company, I can only guess what the motivations are).
In that sense, if everyone switches to using code words, or to using non-broadcast media (eg, Signal), it's significantly less concerning, and there will not be a strong push to ban people from those sites. By only de-platforming clear violators, I bet they can still have a big impact.
That's actually a good point. Idk how many otherwise unbiased people would be convinced that the election was a major fraud, but moving that to other platforms wouldn't hurt.
Step one would be to stop being so sanctimonious and believing that you are their better. You cannot convince someone of something or find common ground if you start off the conversation spitting in their face and telling them how much smarter you are than them.
