Gab.com, A Social Site that the Pittsburgh shooter used, is being deplatformed - Sensationalist Headlines

Nobody wants to be seen as "the webhoster that hosts white supremacist content" and nobody should be forced to be. If these skinheads want to host their skinhead site they'll have to do it themselves.

If neo-Nazis want to have a platform then that's fine, but if no-one else wants to provide it for them then the onus is on them to sort it out themselves, no-one else has a responsibility to do that for them.

I fail to see your point. Are you saying that you think ethnic cleansing is something that could become okay to society, and that we should accept it now just to be sure? Again, why should we protect extremist content?

This is effectively suggesting it makes sense to force people to create their own entire internet for every set of views that disagrees with one another, because that's what you'd need to do. It's wrong to begin with to blame hosts for the content on hosted websites, it's similar reasoning to how people in this thread seem to see my anti-censorship stance as supporting them.

It's also wrong to blame hosts for not wanting to host white supremacist content and then calling it "corporate censorship" when they don't.

I don't see ethnic cleansing ever becoming popular, the point is that there are extremist (and again extremist is a very nebulous definition, and who decides what's what is also a problem) views that exist today that probably will become okay in the future as society progresses, and there always will be. This is a very generalized argument about why free speech is good: Without free speech, unpopular ideas will never be allowed to prove themselves or even exist. Minorities get persecuted, it narrows and slows the progression of society.

Sigh. What I'm arguing is that maybe it shouldn't be up to Twitter or Facebook to decide what is and isn't okay to post anymore. These companies are now such primary ways of communicating that maybe it shouldn't be up to the corporate boardroom to decide. I'm aware this is how it has functioned since the dawn of the internet, thank you very much, but that isn't really a good argument for keeping it that way. We don't have this discussion in, uh, threads about leftist twitter accounts being taken down by mass flagging because, well, we agree that's bad?

Hosts are responsible for what they're hosting, especialy when it has a real impact on the real world like it just did. Where are your posts about what the far right governement is currently doing to free speech and counter powers, its almost like you dont actualy care about it and only about defending the right of skinheads to say "gas the kikes" everywhere online https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/297971/11462e59-c846-492d-b6a6-4ec59d452e5b/image.png https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/297971/f2a98b71-e18f-4803-b671-980cf9a23d50/image.png

What's happening is that sites like these act as echo chambers for extremists, which is becoming increasingly dangerous. I don't understand why you're willing to see past reality to support your hypothetical idea of a better world. I don't think your idea would work in practice. Letting extremist ideologies grow is really dangerous. Again, it really feels like you're thinking about this like a robot, ignoring reality.

And you seem to be effectively suggesting that someone who insists on smelling like shit shouldn't be excluded from social gatherings because that's mean.

Depends. Are they extremists? If not, why even bring it up?

If I ran a webhost so I be forced to host something I don't want to host? No, I shouldn't be. If no-one wants to host their stuff then they need to do it themselves. This is not even necessarily political, it could be anything but no-one has any responsibility to host stuff for them.

He brought it up as an example.

Currently hosts are not actually legally responsible for what they're hosting for the most part. We can decide to make hosts not be responsible on any level and cement that fact by creating legislation to prevent hosts from discriminating based on content. This is something we get to decide as a society, it's not a basic law of nature. Seriously this shit where you're accusing me of not actually caring about this, and having a secret trumpian motive is the most disingenous shit in this thread. It's ad-hominem, but it also just tells me you're too incompetent to argue the actual points like other people here are doing. I don't post as much in the politics subforum as in sensationalist headlines, but i doubt there's even anyone who agrees with trump's stance in those threads for me to argue or discuss anything with.

So what, you want to legislate how theses companies work to force them to host nazis organising terrorist attacks and spreading death ideologies. And trust the governement instead. With Trump in power right now who said he wanted major newspaper and counter powers to be taken down because they criticised him. Nobody has the right to use a private service. There's a million other ways to communicate.

This is the point people seem to be missing. The fact that they are neo Nazis doesn't matter (although neo Nazis are obviously scum this should not even be a question), you don't have a given right to use private services, it is up to them to choose to take you on as a customer. Let's say I wanted to host a website based around dog pics but I was turned down by every webhost for whatever reason but I still wanted to host my dog pics. I'd need to go and host it myself, wouldn't I? The fact that Gab is political doesn't give it any special rights. If no-one wants to host you you need to host it yourself.

your agenda is obvious in every thread, give me a break

Its not that im ignoring this, i have a different understanding. Those sites began to exist with popularity to begin with after those people got kicked off other sites. Pushing them further underground i beleive will increase the effect of the echo chamber. This is like two schools of thought about this clashing. In my school of thought, it'd be best to operate reddit, facebook, twitter etc as free speech sites where those people wouldnt have been kicked off to begin with. By extension, their echo chamber effect would be limited at the starting line, censorship on the main sites drives people off those main sites to the only places they are allowed to talk and this prevents that entirely. We get the full view of ideas in one place, good and bad and allow ideas to fight it out on their own merits, in a sense. School two is the censorship, step one is kick unpopular views off the big sites. Then, once on a site like voat, they are constantly exposed to the most concentrated versions of that extreme content, leading to increased and faster radicalization rates. Your solution seems to be to then follow them to voat and delete the whole site, and then play continuous wack a mole with undeground echo chambers... of course, this is an impossible end goal, they can move to tor and other decentralized anti censorship tech, and ultimately you're helping reinforce those echo chambers. Meanwhile, the main sites (reddit, twitter) don't just stay stable and be happy with the first wave of censorship, they get tighter and tigher over time with stricter and stricter censorship until it too is an echo chamber, but of whatever the most popular views at the time. That is why i don't like this second school of thought about this, i think it's a dead end with a bad end. I hope i've done a decent job illustrating my position at least. I feel like school of thought 1 has already been proven to a limited extent, and that we're seeing the recent bad being massively amplified a result of school 2.

If this was even remotely true in this case, these chucklefucks would've disappeared in no-time and we wouldn't have a nationalist in the White House right now.

With Trump in power, I'd rather have that freedom of expression was extended to these platforms, so that opposing views can't be weeded out. I'd rather protect all speech rather than support tools that could potentially be used against speech I agree with in the future.

Keep in mind that for the 2nd idea, you drastically reduce the amount of people involved because you create barriers of entry. Less people stumble across the sites, less people find the sites even if they want to, and more people end up joining random other communities instead. The small groups that are left may be more radicalized, but again they'll be so much smaller. It's very clear that big Reddit boards end up harbouring lots and lots of people, and to me that seems a lot more dangerous.

This is part of my point, maybe i should stress it more. Trump is in power, his ideas could become popular, then you have precedent for deleting left wing ideas and censorship from that angle. Sometimes bad ideas get popular and those bad ideas cannot be allowed to delete their opposition when that happens. I'm a supporter of universal basic income, an extremely unpopular idea right now in the US at least, but i think they will become mandatory in the future with increased automation. I want to be able to keep expressing those opinions in the future even if the red-scare comes back and anything even vaguely associated with communism is seen as a no-go area. You do reduce the numbers but increase the level of extremism and radicalization. I don't think numbers are an issue because of a statistical phenomenon called regression to the mean, by nature the more people you have in a group, the calmer and less violent their average views will get. Too small and regression to the mean can't take effect, and the echos get louder and louder and you get more and more violent individuals who dont have a more averaged group to reign them in.

We're talking about nazis spreading an ideology of genocide, organising terrorist attacks, and killing innocents in the real world today. Not middle age guys screaming maga on twitter, which they can. Counter powers work perfectly without allowing nazis on twitter. It works better because nazis don't care about "freedom of expression" and will abuse anything tool twitter gives them to silence anyone who opposes them

But what is stopping other people from taking their business elsewhere and the host suffering as a result? I do not like stupid what ifs but what if the owner of the hosting company is Jewish with family members killed in the Holocaust, why does he or she have to provide a platform for people? If anything the recent rulings on various bakery cases have shown you cannot force someone to disseminate a message they do not want to. For the record I was initially very much against people being turned down by the bakery and supported the initial lawsuits but reading up on the cases more and reading and looking into the rulings I can say I have changed my mind. While I still hold people can provide a service without agreeing with the message I do see how it is the discrimination against the message not the people that is acceptable and I am ok with that. If the issue is internet is far more essential than gay wedding cakes, why not make the government provide free or paid hosting with no content moderation rather than make private companies do it? Or is self hosting not an option at all? The visitors can send cash through mail if paypal does not want to provide them with payment services? Or does censorship extend to the point of not providing people with convenience?

This is censorship against an underdog website. Websites can't control what their users do or be responsible for their actions.plenty of terrorists use Facebook, reddit and Twitter to announce what they are about to do but no one will dare attsck those platforms. It's all about thr money.

Giving liberal democracy hating extremists a platform is dangerous, because the abundance of these ideals in the media and politics does affect people's perceptions and views. The reason the American right has radicalized so insanely is because channels like Fox News and the GOP have given extremist views a platform and normalized them. The free marketplace of ideas fails in this regard. Media should be very, very reserved in giving extremists a platform for the sake of keeping our liberal democracies intact.

Except those platforms are attacked all the time and they do get rid of people on both sides of the spectrum. Remember the Youtube Adpocalypse? The difference is this website is being really fucking dumb with their PR, if they were smart, this would all blow over and they'd be back in business in a week.

So your not fine with far right being given any platform but far left fascists and communists are okay? You know that essentially means you do not support democracy. Everyone is entitled to voice their opinion, you do not have to accept it. I will say, social media is great, it's like a honey pot for idiots, there is no doubt that msny terrorist and murders have been evaded by peoples stupidly and attention seeking on them.

If one day you find yourself on the receiving end of this process I dare say it's time to reevaluate your position or be rightfully shunned. Government censorship is scary because a state is an entity usually run by a small group of people who can construct and control a narrative and if done right and for long enough, no one will ever know. A target of this is a rightful victim. This is something entirely different. If the collective private market (a lot of fucking people from all over the world from all manners of background) all agree that you are a deplorable and harmful existence, you really are deplorable and harmful. You seem to like hypothetical scenarios so let me conjure one up for you: A man refuses to comply with basic hygiene standards, he doesn't wash and has never heard of toilet paper. Is he a victim of discrimination when the bus driver refuses him access to the same bus that everyone else can ride with no issue? (I'm really proud of this one because you can look to real life for an example of what actual discrimination would be)

Gab should have been more organized and kept better watch of their users. They allow posts that promote hate speech and sometimes violence to stay up, even though their rules are against that sort of thing. If they at least pretended to care about these problems with their site, then they would probably be alright, but since they didn't, they're fucked.