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

Those Yahoo News hit squads are fierce, I hear they'll write a polite essay about you.

So now he's going full paranoid? Fun.

It feels like it's been a while since I've seen a site host which is this much of a whiny bitch. Man is that twitter just an incredible collection of hilariously hyperbolic cringe.

The media isn't trying to get him killed, they are practicing their free speech rights.

Well first off, Twitter and Facebook are one thing, web hosters are another. And I don't have a problem with ISIS spreading their ideology online. Using it to organize crimes is a different matter.

https://twitter.com/getongab/status/1057032520292806656 they keep going on about how Liberals are sending threats to them and were all peace and loving naizs or bullshit like that but then they send this shit

He sure loves complaining about being censored on the very platform he's complaining on.

So is what you're saying is when Isis used social media to radicalise people and turn them into murderers who then killed people all over the world, we shouldn't have done anything about it and just looked at them doing it. When all it takes to save lives and hurt their mouvement is to shut down their accounts.

You can argue for a lot of things in the name of safety. And I'd draw a very firm line between radicalization and actually planning a specific attack.

Again we're talking about terminating twitter accounts of terrorists who have already killed, are planning to kill again, and are using thoses accounts to facillitate killing again, because they want to destroy the concept of a free society. This is insanely naive.

What part of ISIS ideology seems non-violent to you? It's inherently violent and criminal.

I didn't say it was non-violent. But how do you determine what a violent ideology is? ISIS preaches violence as an appropriate response in much more situations than most others do, but nearly all ideologies sanction violence in some circumstances.

Can't get rid of the first quote, but this is objectively wrong. In your metaphor, you're implying it's the ISP like AT&T refusing to have anti-Semitic thoughts go down their cables. That's not what's happening at all, that's a different situation entirely. The restaurant analogy is waaaay more accurate

Yes, but a resturant analogy is also misleading since the purpose of restaurants is to communciate. Analogies are difficult.

If the local newspaper doesn't like the letter to the editor section of the paper, they don't have to run it anymore.

The issue is that a containment board because a rabbit hole board as I've started calling them. Once you're in, so long as you're open to incredibly dodgy logic or are desperate for an explanation like many are, you're fucking sucked in and the deeper you go the harder it is to pull yourself out. I was a bit time conspiracy theorist from like 12 to 15. I thought 9/11 was done because the US actually had secret alien plans and bodies inside a hidden facility underneath the twin towers...for some reason. I would watch Alex Jones religiously, I was thoroughly stuck until I started going to a private school that blocked all access, and I had teachers who shut me down every time I started speaking up. Yeah, at first I became a more fervent believer but without that pipeline of constant 'information' and 'knowledge', the reasoning that naturally occurs during moments of doubt started to grow and eventually I grew out of it. Isolation and prevention of letting extremist ideas from speaking in a public space is the only way to work. You need to them fester on their own, prevent them from grouping up and prevent them from reaching out.

Censorship is only considered bad when the government does it because under that modal, the government is assumed to be the most relevant -- in terms of power -- entity that could censor or oppress. Corporations have grown to a size where they can easily rival the government in terms of oppression or censorship. They are ubiquitous and extremely powerful. We should be concerned about censorship from corporations because they're powerful enough that it's concerning. We don't hold our government to an anti-censorship standard simply because its name is "the government", we do so because to do otherwise is to give it great power we've deemed it shouldn't have.

While I agree that the rights of corporations should be re considered and lowered, like I said earlier; not all ideas are equal. White supremacy by nature is based off of false logic and unconstitutional philosophy. It shouldn't get a platform

If you extend those limitations/rights to mega-corps, you have to apply it to small business, too. Now you have bakeries that can be legally forced to bake a cake for gay weddings because otherwise they're actively sabotaging their ability to freely express themselves through a marriage ceremony, or something. And boy, what a shit-storm THAT would cause to the theologians.

Driving these groups underground only hinders the capacity of law enforcement to monitor their activities and networks while providing little to no benefit to the public. Social media is a soap box often used by the mentally ill before attacks are planned or carried out. The hosting and payment providers have the right to deny anyone services and it makes sense to avoid any future legal burden when a company as small as gab is not making you any money, I think this decision has very little to do with morality or ethics on their part, especially considering the other sites they support.

Corporations can't do whatever they want. Nobody can, freedom is never absolute and shouldn't be, that's why laws exist to control freedoms for the good of society as a whole so you can't stab your neighbor without consequences. You can't pretend there's no difference between governement and corporations. The governement decides what's legal and what's not, and is above corporations. I'm for control of corporations with sensible laws and regulations, and real consequences if they don't respect them. Everybody should be. Exactly what laws we want and how much control is the real debate here. There's a clear link between the gab platform and an extremist terrorist attack, and webhoster doesn't want to be involved with that. Should it not be their right, should they be forced by law to keep hosting gab? Twitter bans users advocating for murder and terrorists. Do we want a law that forces them to not ban them? Again, if we're talking about terrorists advocating for murder, I think they should be in their full right to ban them. Moving the conversation to "corporations are too powerful" when we were talking about nazis being banned from social medias is weird. Like yeah, I agree, but how is it a bad thing here. There's no slippery slope. It's just nazis being banned from social medias for advocating for murder. Out of all the things large corporations do with their power, this isn't a bad one.

Small businesses don't exert the same level of power; that's the whole point. If a family-run small-town business refuses to bake a gay wedding cake because they hold strong religious convictions, there are alternatives available. When there are no alternatives because they've grown into a corporation that owns every bakery in a three hundred mile radius, then maybe they need a leash. This isn't anything particularly new when it comes to business regulation, given the precedent provided by anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws. We already recognize that large corporations should be less free in their actions than small ones, the difference is just that those laws have historically been focused on economic power, when now we have to be concerned about social power as well.

I absolutely and vehemently disagree. The fact that you are even comparing even the biggest of corporations to governments in terms of their ability to opress and censor is kind of ridiculous. I hope you intended it to be a hyperbole. Governments make laws. They put people in jail if they disobey them and can catch them. They can literally send people with guns to your house and arrest you if they make a law that says you can't say or do something. The absolutely worst thing that a corporation can do, is blacklist you from their services. The only way this would have an even comparable stopping power is if we are assuming that: There is no practical way for you to get around this block to continue doing what you're doing (i.e. setting up a new account or page under a different name, using a vpn, etc.) There is no other company that can provide you with a comparable service that is willing to put up with your shit better (i.e. a hosting company in some other country that doesn't give a fuck about whatever issue is scaring away hosting providers in your country) Do away with the services of the company altogether and just do the thing yourself (i.e. buy a small server to set up a shitty conspiracy theory forum in your basement) If, and only if, those three conditions are made, then I could sort of see where you are coming from, although I would still disagree on the grounds of still being able to re-organize and try a different approach (something that is pretty hard when a government has put you in jail). I am not a libertarian or anything like that. I just think its so weird liberals try to act like deplatforming is good when it happens to their enemies, but always leave a wiggle room of "the power of corporations to silence people is scary, we should be careful" in case the same thing ever happens in the future to some particularly TOS-unfriendly left-wing activists that they are best buddies with. (Im not saying this is what your'e doing right now, its just a pattern I see.)

While I have nothing against the hate on nazis in this case since they're truly horrible beings, the idea of companies being able to silence what they want really scares me. Especially when people are agreeing to this because it is "good for the people". People is pretty the least consistent or trustworthy element in these cases.

Being banned from an internet service because you broke their TOS isnt being silenced. People have expressed their political opinions for centuries without twitter. Being banned from twitter doesnt make you mute. ISPs can't ban individual users either. Being silenced is being prosecuted for your ideology. Which is possible in some countries where advocating for murder and genocide is illegal. But not in the US. Coincidentaly thoses countries don't have a nazi terrorism problem right now.

People have expressed their political opinions for centuries without radios, TV, or the Internet, but I've never heard that used to imply that free speech protections shouldn't apply to those technologies. Times change, and we could very well get to the point where there is a single monolithic platform (or a handful dominating different domains) that comprises the primary expression of free speech. In that case we might seriously need to think about laws regulating them further, rather than continuing to give them unlimited power. We're not there yet, but it could happen. US law has some precedent- Loraine Journal Co. v. US 1951. In that case, a single newspaper which had basically full control over Lorain, Ohio's print media was sued for their refusal to carry advertisement from companies that dealt with a radio station carried by an upstart competitor. The Supreme Court basically ruled that because the one company was able to dictate who could advertise in a significant geographic region, that they must be prohibited from favoritism in order to keep it fair. It wouldn't be a huge leap to extend that decision from an economic justification to a social one.

I'm surprised by how many people in this thread don't understand how the first amendment applies here. This is about freedom of association, not freedom of speech. Which is actually far more widespread than just the US constitution, both UN and EU have legislation regarding freedom of association, which includes the freedom to not associate with someone. These people are still allowed to participate on the open Internet, they haven't been banned off the Internet. They're just going to have to find business partners that want to associate with them. They can most definitely buy some rack servers and rent colocation space at a datacenter that doesn't have a problem with these types of human garbage. There's no shortage of Nazis in the tech sphere, trust me, they're out there, and they've probably already sent messages to this guy offering support. Donations can be a bit harder, but you can still ask supporters to either do wire transfers or send crypto.

That comparison doesn't work at all, on any level. Twitter isn't all of the internet, and the internet isn't limited to one geographical region. We're not talking about advertising in a newspaper, we're talking about using social medias to advocate for murder and genocide. You can't say times change changed while ignoring how media changed and how the internet works vs how newspaper work. Newspapers always pick and curate whatever news story and opinions they print and nobody would argue against their right to do that. Advertising is a completely different story, it's not a political opinion or statement. They're nothing like a social media.

Many of these arguments were discussed a long time ago during the milo era and they're not all that strong. Police can still find them. They have money and informants. Police doesn't do anything when it finds them so it doesn't even matter because it protects fascists. Antifascists can still find them You can report a guy on social media who says he's going to kill you and the mod team won't do anything. (IE the magabomber) The value of having it in the open for scrutiny is limited. Police won't do much for online hate or harassment either. The benefit to the public is that their recruiting is seriously hampered & they won't be able to terrorize the people on the platforms either. Getting back that level of organization can also be difficult esp. if this keeps happening. Yes, they are not making this choice from morality or ethics that is correct and the solution is to have the company be controlled by the workers and to remove the capitalist motivation to make money above any sort of moral obligation so that we can have transparent algorithms and socially responsible organizations focused on being good global citizens because this will just keep happening otherwise.