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

Free speech is also your ability to remove platforms. That's exactly what peaceful protesting is.

This seems like it works legally but philosophically I find it highly hypocritical to force companies to host content they don't want to in the name of ensuring free speech. I also find the idea of making two tiers of legality to be sort of cowardly. It's like how Republicans will say abortion is wrong in case of rape or incest; obviously there is a line where you are okay with baby killing, it's just a lot shorter than the pro-choice crowd. You have no problem with "anti-free speech authoritarians" as long as their website is arbitrarily small enough. No you don't, you just need to find a provider who would host you. Speaking of which, no one seems to be blaming the host. They actually seem to be supporting their right as a business to not engage with a client that doesn't align with their business interests. Would just like to point out for anyone reading up to this point that the only "authoritarian anti-free speech garbage" Loth is spreading is that it's okay for businesses to have the right to refuse service. Just want to get that out of the way. I think putting dogwhistles in quotation marks is an illustration of why people are suspect of your motives. The fact that you have seemingly zero interest in pursuing the anti-free speech and authoritarian excesses of the Trump administration or the Republican party at large and the first time you gallantly dash to the rescue of our free speech is when it's defending a website that specifically panders to racists and Nazi's. Just seems weird for a Bernie guy. Didn't you just get done complaining about someone using ad hominem? And here you are accusing someone else of being authoritarian, manipulative, and scummy. This is tangential and not really important but you don't get to rate people then play it off like it's nothing. If ratings didn't mean anything you wouldn't be rating them. If you didn't expect a reaction you wouldn't be rating them. Do you not see the inherent irony of becoming offended when someone accuses you of partisan motivation then going back and accusing them of "demonstrating the problem with polarization in modern politics"? No one wants you to pander to them, they just disagree with your idea that not forcing businesses into relationships with unsavory clients is the canary in the coal mine for free speech. "who decides what's what" isn't a problem, it's the answer: the web hoster. That's why we don't leave this to government and legislate what is and isn't free speech, like you suggested. It's a free market, if a content provider doesn't want to host someone because they find their content too extreme for their subjective taste then that's their prerogative. I find the rest of this post to be unbearably melodramatic. Minorities get persecuted because you don't force Reddit to allow neo-nazi subs? Really? Okay so wait, which is it? In the post above you don't see ethnic cleansing ever becoming popular, but now you apparently see the very possible future of widescale deplatforming and censorship of "left wing ideas" like UBI.

The tune will change and there'll be some new logic invented to rationalize it because people don't want their standards being used against them. The fact is the integration of our society as driven by economic and technological change is being matched by an equal amount of growth in power, social conflict, and echo chamber segregation. We are not mature enough to handle the mass society, and so there's a tendency for it to cannibalize itself and have today's large institutions default to managing the many number of divisions under their scope.

They don't actually care about free speech and are only using it as a defense to undermine it and destroy us all. Solve the paradox of tolerance and then we'll talk. However, large companies deciding what's right or wrong to censor (let's be honest they do it for their own reasons aka pr) is wrong and the fact is that they usually use that power against sex workers and immigrants and minorities and we just don't really talk about it here. The "Canary in the coal mine" argument always uses nazis as the group we should care about and what happens is that the nazis have every concession made to them, giving them undue protection on the platform while the important valuable canary is long dead. Trans person says cis people are scum on twitter after a really bad day: banned within the hour. Alex Jones says that sandy hook victims are all actors and his fans should go "investigate" the parents resulting in them being harassed out of town and unable to visit the graves of their children: That's one strike against you now don't do it again mr Jones. Social media companies have shown themselves to be abusing their power too many times and act like elephants in a china shop with their algorithms going from blunder to blunder like censoring climate change discussion, leaking, being unaccountable and opaque. That's part of why we should have them and other companies fully open-source and worker-controlled. Mattk you should check out the "SJWs" you hate If you want to complain about censorship because the nazis make the news but liberalism's many exceptions (like illegal immigrants and trans people being silently targeted) are what "SJWs" talk about a lot and those groups have long suffered from not being included in this kind of discussion / outrage.

Maybe the attitude will change because you are talking about an entirely different scenario with an entirely different set of circumstances. If the local telecom company or government cut the Gab owner's internet lines that is one thing but it's not remotely what the topic of conversation is on. But it is a left-right thing. Obama's FCC reclassified broadband internet in the name of net neutrality. Trump's FCC repealed it. You wax on about the "integration of our society" and "social conflict" but reality is often a lot simpler than you make it seem.

I don't think any line was crossed by Gab themselves. Youtube had videos from Elliot Rodger and Randy Stair hosted on their platform before they did their thing, should they be shut down? This guy would have done what he did whether or not he had any kind of platform to broadcast his intent on. Speech is for everyone.

Did you not notice their social media posts that are supportive of this kind of stuff?

I don't use twitter or gab. Was actually thinking of getting a gab account but you know. From what I can see they don't support violence, they're just shitposters.

oh well okay then.

/pol/ was just shitposts until it wasn't

Check their Twitter posts from page 1 in this thread. They're stupid conspiracy theorists, they seem to be leaning towards being white supremacist too. So yeah. They might not come out and say they support violence directly, but I'm going to guess that their ideology aligns with that of other far-right extremists.

What makes you say that? Are you talking about their "White" post?

I don't think Gab supports violence. The last thing they want is for someone who uses their website to rant about the Jews for several months then walk into a synagogue with an AR-15. I do think Gab purposefully courts radicals and extremists because that was their raison d'etre and their primary revenue stream, and if one of those guys goes off then thats just the price of "free speech" and anyone who refuses to offer them a platform is a part of the mainstream media or big tech cabals.

I feel like you are confusing some arguments here. The stationary shop owners should not be allowed to not sell to you because you are white, black, gay, straight, right, left or even skinhead in my opinion. They should not be forced to stock up on Race News Now or Pravda just because you want to read them. Same way, you should not be allowed not to do business with people because of what they are, but you should be able to stop doing business with them because of what they want. Of course I am not kidding myself, these are nuanced positions, it is not always easy to see intent and it is easy to hide racist or discriminatory intent in a business decision but thats what the courts are there for. That should be challenged and punished. But in this case whether it is a knee jerk reaction or calculated business move the web hosts absolutely have the right to say we do not want racists to share antisemitic views through our service. I would like to think I would have a different mindset if they were saying we do not want racists to share puppy dog pictures through our service (how would they know if you don't go around spouting racism anyway).

I think Matt50k's argument would have merit if the owner of Gab's internet connection was cut and he was banned from having internet by the government or whatever telecom monopoly is in the area, or they used this wholesale censorship on the company hosting Gab, or any of it's affiliates. I think there is a distinction between access to the internet and the various modes of communication contained therein, and having your own social media website being hosted on someone elses servers. As long as the infrastructure exists to replicate hosting (which it clearly does; either one of their competitors or Gab can do it themselves) then in my eyes no serious breach in ones freedom of speech has been made.

"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant." "it seems contradictory to extend freedom of speech to extremists who, if successful, ruthlessly suppress the speech of those with whom they disagree" Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies Thoses who seek to destroy free speech, free society, and commit genocide if we let them don't deserve free speech.

It really isn't though, that's why ideological flip-flops, people contradicting themselves, and making shit up as they go along all happen. Like, a familiar point for you might be to mention that the right complains about large tech firms and wants to regulate them, but then makes libertarian appeals. On the other side, you can can see people asserting private property rights when it affects people they don't like and then asserting the right to regulate property when it affects people they do like, then inventing a logic nobody will ever agree upon to dismiss the apparent contradiction. People use liberal values as it's convenient. Tribalism rises when people just stop pretending to stick to consistent and universal principles that at least pretend to be a win-win for all, and they instead just want to play to their interests since they see the other side as doing the same. I don't think it's any coincidence this tendency has come out more with rapidly accelerating change since the 90s collapse of communism, tech boom, and globalization. It revolutionized everything, which is to say it put a lot of things up for grabs or at stake. Basically, tribalism comes in when the same cynical game that defines international politics starts to define us at home. It's all validated by how flip-flops happen constantly in our history, there's too many to list. When I was still an undergrad, I remember when it was explained to me that the best way to understand America's convoluted political and social change is to pay less attention to ideology and more towards changes in the voting base. How they were affected by economic change, how their coalitions broke up, how they defined party splits, and what stake they have in a policy. The ideology just comes in later to rationalize one set of interests as more moral than the other. What I said is a pretty simple way to describe things, though? It's basically a boiled down version of Gramsci.

Without specific examples of the latter I can't really argue with this either way. I do think it's interesting that you have a specific example of hypocrisy on the right but not the left. Yeah but is this really even tribalism? This specific conversation? I don't think it is. It's largely one side saying that a business has aright not to provide a platform for someone elses speech while the other side says that they absolutely do, with one person going so far as to legislating enforced compliance of this duty. I don't know who Gramsci is so I looked him up. We are talking about internet service providers regulating access to certain websites and you somehow feel like "an Italian Marxist philosopher and communist politician" (t. Wikipedia) is relevant. That is what I mean when I say things are simpler than you make them out to be.

/mlp/ "working" is confirmation bias. The brony fad was already in decline when the board was created, the only thing anyone needed to do was wait a year and a half and <90% of them would be gone.

The line is entirely arbitrary. By sympathising with white supremacists and far-right extremist conspiracy theorists, you're gonna be crossing a lot of arbitrary lines.

Im all the way on board with companies doing this but its a bit misleading to say that -- Facebook has a history of not caring what its users saay/say against stuff thats hosted there.

And Twitter didn't ban the pipe bomb dude for brazen death threats until after he had been arrested for sending bombs through the mail. There is a difference between incompetence and condoning (or arguably outright endorsement). .

Nah, sometimes they go a bit too far https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/214834/0084ad22-8a2f-4900-b7fc-aa5ddbf32c2f/Screenshot_20181028-084520_Chrome.jpg The site itself says they don't support calls for violence, but these posts have been up for a month and nothing's been done about them. I don't have any reason to believe the site owners/moderators are violent people, but they're sure as fuck incompetent. Granted, lots of sites are also incompetrnt to a point, but when you have posts and users that are this bad, then you absolutely have to start enforcing harder rules if you want your website to survive.

So essentially, what you lot are saying is, there is nothing a private company can do which you'd consider to be a violation of free speech? Nothing at all? Disregarding the content of the speech, because if you say "only if it's not hate speech" you're probably better off trying to get a law against hate speech passed. Also, wasn't there a case of Infowars or Stormfront or some other prominent far-right website having issue with their domain registrar?

I miss the good old days when Nazis were hung or served a bullet between their eyes.

Not sure why "deplatforming" Gab is effective. Surely if it is a cesspool of alt-righters then we have a website that consolidates identifiable potential Nazis.

Containment boards don't work.

Popper explicitly says that censoring intolerant ideologies should only be done as a last resort in the face of violence- meet fists with fists and bullets with bullets. He explicitly says that censoring harmful views on account of possible future danger is a gross excess. Read the third sentence of your quote. All he's arguing for here is that a tolerant society cannot be completely passive, that when given no other options (no ballots, no legislative redress, no free speech), then suppression of intolerance is necessary to preserve society. I've actually read The Open Society and Its Enemies and it really frustrates me to see people blindly parrot this quote and completely misrepresent his views. Censorship a hateful and intolerant, but unpopular and tiny minority of the population is exactly the opposite of what he argued for.

https://twitter.com/getongab/status/1056713622653554689

So what are we doing after nazis say they will kill jews, and act on it shoot a synagogue and kill 11 people. It's not hypothetical danger and violence. They're killing people right now.