> In general, sedition is defined as trying to overthrow the government with intent and means to bring it about; the Supreme Court, however, has been divided over what constitutes intent and means.
> These acts made it a federal crime to speak, write, or print criticisms of the government that were false, scandalous, or malicious.
It is frightening to me that so many U.S. citizens get their perception of reality through social media channels; that is to say they get messages that are amplified by algorithm with insufficient regard to refutability (and a requirement of evidence to refute or confirm.)
As someone who cannot visit every single polling place in the country (I visited zero and voted by mail) I cannot with absolute certainty proclaim that there there was no widespread, coordinated and shockingly well-concealed election fraud. As a person of logic and reason and based on multiple sources of information that I consider reputable, I strongly believe this did not take place, and I would need multiple, reputable sources of information and likely trusted peer acceptance before I would change my mind to believe it did.
My way of trying to only accept what I believe to be accurate information will always be imperfect, and, at times, fail me. But I believe it is only shades different from what someone who believes in election fraud does. Their sources include the content of speeches made by the President of the United States, news anchors and journalists of conversatively-biased news, and perhaps most importantly, peers they trust liking and sharing those same speeches and articles with them as a stamp of acceptance.
That's a complex and very human problem that is not readily solved with gut reactions, broad strokes and absolutes.
One difference, of course, is that despite there being a significant number of ‘trusted’ sources claiming extensive election fraud - there has been near zero evidence presented by these same sources to defend the claims. That alone should be a red flag that the claims are mere assertions rather than statements of fact.
From my perspective, every article on Reuters included the phrase "claimed without evidence" in regards to election fraud. For me, trusting Reuters, that is sufficient information.
From a believer's perspective, articles mentioned affidavits, eye-witness testimony, court cases being filed, and important, trusted people saying something along the lines of "there is evidence the courts are not even considering!" Presumably if that same believer dug deep enough into individual court cases and affidavits and statements by the judges dismissing cases, they may have changed their mind.
But I don't dig that deep, and obviously neither do the believers. We are wired to our inclination of confirmation bias. When we are already programmed and motivated to find evidence of what we already believe, we do not tend to exhaust every option possible to validate it. We stop when we cross the smallest of hurdles of validation.
I found the confirmation hearing on Wednesday to be very informative on this. There were countless objectors attempting to invalidate the Pensylvannia vote, all echoing each other on a variety of reasons including voter fraud. Republican house members made very convincing arguments on the floor that caused me to wonder what information I was missing.
The democratic house members who argued against the objections easily tore down their arguments. Their largest point with respect to voter fraud was that there were was actually _no_ legal action mentioning voter fraud brought up in the many many court cases launched by Trump's team. The reasoning being because lawyers can have their licenses revoked for intentionally lying about serious accusations and no lawyer was willing to put their career on the line for something they had no evidence for.
I respect everyone's views and consider myself to be somewhat moderate, but damn overall republican house lost a ton of respect from me that night.
I might be convinced to be skeptical if judges say, woah this is damaging EVEN if those judges are Trump appointed, by the same token though, if a Trump appointed judge laughs Trump's team out of the court with a frivolous law suit, I'm doubly sure that there's absolutely no chance of fraud.
The RIGHT, people who supported/enabled Trump have said, nope - nothing to see, all's legit, got any better proof? Kemp for instance was a HUGE Trump supporter, Pence has no reason not to support Trump, yet now he's a "traitor" for doing his job. Seriously. I'd hate to play any board game with these people, you could never win, they'd throw a fit if they lost until you admit they won...
> My way of trying to only accept what I believe to be accurate information will always be imperfect, and, at times, fail me. But I believe it is only shades different from what someone who believes in election fraud does.
> That's a complex and very human problem that is not readily solved with gut reactions, broad strokes and absolutes.
Sadly, though I feel the same as you, this kind of mindset is a vanishing minority in the US, or so it would seem based on most allowed speech these days. One can daily find entire reddit threads about how one side or another is absolutely unreasonable, and one shouldn't even consider that the other side may have reasons. And this goes for all sides. For those of us who try to remain objective and rational, the only option is increasingly to remain silent or find safe spaces (ironically, from the very crowd that popularized the concept of safe spaces). That's the main reason I started spending more time on HN. I've written before, this is one of the few popular places on the internet where being rational and impartial is common, though even here that seems to slowly be changing.
You'll notice the exact same issues voting machines, ballots, etc discussed.
Any person of logic and reason will conclude there was election fraud. Both the democrats and republicans have had 4 years to prepare for it. But also reason and logic says that if both cheated then so be it. The national election system is designed specifically to be gamed. It's not just local voting that has problems - gerrymandering, voting suppression, etc., but the national election as well.
There is no doubt in my mind that Trump and Hillary cheated in 2016. I think the DNC's hubris underestimated Trump and that's why he won. I think this time, Trump's hubris cost him. I mean "china, china, china" gets old after a while.
Rational people understand that both sides cheated and the better cheater won. Only democratic political activists think there was no cheating and only republican political activists think we should overturn the election because of cheating. Rational people understand there was cheating and are willing to live with it because both sides cheated and the system is designed to make it impossible to prove cheating.
The ballots are lost in time, like tears in rain.
As I said in 2016, I will say it in 2020, let the better cheater win. If Trump and the GOP really wanted to win, they should have worked harder.
An yet in 20 years, no one has presented any proof of actual election fraud. However there are tons and tons of evidence that foreign powers like Russia and China troll and spread millions of fake stories to fool more gullible Americans. I don't recall a single democrat saying "the dominion voting machines are fake data!" And yet here we are with a President seeing election fraud everywhere with not one solid piece of evidence. Only accusations.
Agreed. Ours is a system of Darwinism. We provide a very high bar to clear to accuse someone of cheating and it's not often cleared. However, the opportunity is always there to fix vulnerabilities for the next election (see: Russian interference). You can't be mad if you lose, you just have to make sure it doesn't happen again (for the same reason).
> As someone who cannot visit every single polling place in the country (I visited zero and voted by mail) I cannot with absolute certainty proclaim that there there was no widespread, coordinated and shockingly well-concealed election fraud. As a person of logic and reason, I strongly belief this did not take place, and I would need multiple, reputable sources of information and likely trusted peer acceptance before I would change my mind to believe it did.
I have the same views. There are actually some "They stole my election!" people on HN, so maybe they'll read this and reconsider their "reality", but Biden won by several thousands in the 3 disputed states, to pull off voter fraud to swing that many votes require a lot of work, and probably a lot of people, and the problem with having many people is that it's hard to keep something like that secret. And if they were going to steal the presidency, why did some GOP candidates in those states still win seats, why not flip enough things Dem so that the "tyrants" have a comfortable majority?
I think Trump's "They stole it!" proclamations are a scheme to keep his base heated so they can donate to his retirement fund, although yesterdays "We’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue!" (only for him to take the limo back to the White House) probably goes beyond that, that was an incredible "Release the hounds!" moment.
It's infuriating that a significant percentage of the country doesn't listen to reason, haven't even looked at how flimsy the court arguments that Team Total Landscaping have made, but are just screaming everywhere "I know the truth, and the truth is, they stole it!". Then again, many probably would get lost in the first paragraph if they tried to read any court filing. (Not being insulting, but hey, someone must've thought years ago "why spend money to educate children if they're just going to vote you out.".)
This is turning to a rant, but it seems the seditionists in congress who are also still claiming voter fraud without evidence (like Cruz or Hawley) just want to keep the Trump base very very pissed off, and very very motivated.
> it seems the seditionists in congress who are also still claiming voter fraud without evidence (like Cruz or Hawley) just want to keep the Trump base very very pissed off, and very very motivated.
Or they want to keep the crazies on their side, rather than being turned on suddenly the way the insufficiently strident (e.g.,.most visibly recently, Pence) have often been. Still had the effect of contributing to radicalization, but the intent may be more avoiding becoming a target.
The cynic in me can't help but notice that all these platforms are suddenly growing a backbone now that we know Democrats will control both the executive and legislative branches.
I think it's impossible to say. The fact that the capitol got stormed the same day as the democrats won control means it's impossible to disaggregate. It might be a cynical move by Facebook but is it also a cynical move by Betsy Devos? What difference did democrat control make to her?
Resign in the last 2 weeks of his presidency when their jobs don't really matter, make the transition process marginally more complicated by leaving, avoid having to take a stand on the 25th amendment, and they can start trying to rehabilitate their images by pretending they were shocked by the administration they've been a part of for 3.9 years
For cabinet members resigning, it helps them avoid being part of the decision to invoke (or not invoke) the 25th amendment. Betsy can say she resigned, rather than be faced with the decision to remove a President from office. So while not linked to Democrats at all (she was 2 weeks from losing her job anyway), resigning was politically safer.
> What difference did democrat control make to her?
In her case a bigger factor is probably that Trump has also fallen off the grace of a lot of Republicans. The guy is done. He's still massively popular and a threat given his popularity amongst pretty fanatical groups of people, but as far as raw, democratic power he lost his election by a pretty decent margin, and lost the House/Senate for Republicans.
A lot of people who sucked up to him and his rhetoric must be realizing it's time to suck up to someone/something else. He's always attracted an uncomfortable amount of media attention and now that he can't attract political power to remain in office he's a liability rather than an asset.
The difference for me is that these companies are blaming it on the rhetoric of Trump and his supporters. However the rhetoric was no different on the morning of the 6th than it was before that. They are simply judging it based off the fact that the violence inciting rhetoric actually resulted in violence this time. If the rhetoric was the problem, these platforms should have acted much sooner.
> What difference did democrat control make to her?
Nothing imo. Before it was probable that there could be careers and jobs outside of the presidency. With these moves it seems like Trump decided to make his bed with the worst of his base and a lot of people have finally decided that it's a bridge too far. Last-minute attempts to distance themselves after playing along the entire time.
The fact the capital got stormed has more to do with the Trumpist sympathize of the Police, then the protesters themselves. If the were a "normal" police reaction (say midway between BLM and this, like in Hong Kong), they would have never gotten inside, and this would be a non-story.
Going after Trump fans is just center-left back-slapping, and all the worse because ignoring the police partisanship is extremely reckless and irresponsible.
Our civil liberates will continue erode for no good reason, and our institutions will be no safer. Replace the police with something else they're not afraid to hold accountable. If there is to be a monopoly of violence, it must be held only in (small d) democratic authority.
That is true, but the chain of command for a decision like this isn't that large - in the long run a company is dominated by economics, but you still have to understand that those decisions are implemented by people.
One thing I've learned these past 4 years is that most Americans don't "care" about much until you start shitting in their backyard. Democrats or not, I think there will be an outcry of "social media did this to us" and legislation will be used to get this "behind us".
The cynic in me says, this is why changes or repeal of section 230 is possibly dangerous in that government officials already have the big social media sites under control but don't want any one springing up who is not; control being their definition of what is fake news and such.
Now an interesting consideration, for both supporters and Donald Trump himself. What happens if he is effectively locked out of all the big social media sites? Does a site which lets him on suddenly catapult to the top or does it get shouted down by pressure originating from the users who are on the sites which locked him and his supporters out?
I mean we are in a unique situation where by a very public official is being locked out of his accounts because of his actions and his supporters are being similarly locked out. That has never happened before and its both awe inspiring and frightening all at once.
I'd rather think these platforms suddenly realize the keyboard warriors they've been entertaining (as in, hosting) on their platforms are actually capable of carrying out brutal violence...
Is that necessarily a cynical take on things? Seems actually pretty rational on their part to do that to avoid a potential backlash by the Trump-led government. It was probably a good play that led to a better long-term outcome.
This is not an original idea/thought that I have, but feel repeating it is vital:
This whole censorship crusade that the Facebook, twitter & now reddit is on is a dangerous precedence we are setting for our society. Whatever they call it, this is censorship.
Already due to AI suggesting similar contents on services like Facebook & Youtube and the design of sub-reddits on reddit, we have living inside echo chambers. Atleast users have an option of searching for different contents on the platform. It's a bit easier to come out of the echo chamber. Now, by pushing people off the platform, echo chamber platforms are coming up like parler & rumble. The divide is widening.
I am not sure what other options are there, but censorship is the worst option.
Like you listed above there are lots of options still available, that's not really the limiting factor here. I believe a more subtle and harder barrier to overcome for posting controversial Internet content is going to be the credit card companies or payment processors. They are much fewer and if they refuse to do business with you you'd have no means to pay for any service you might need. Except, of course, for cryptocurrency...
EDIT: One option I think you forgot is using one of the existing hosting providers but hide the web service under a TOR hidden service. That way people can't track it back to your hosting provider to complain about the hosted content (and you can use encryption of the content that is decrypted on the fly when being served by the web server) if you worry about the hosting provider doing some scans of customer content tho that seems very unlikely to me.
You're not sure what the other options are? You've seen it.
Which is worse, censorship of people calling for the violent otherthrow of the democratically elected government. OR what we've seen this week - people literally overthrowing the democratically elected government of the US.
Oh and by the way- when the MAGA hat wearers have taken over, sure as hell they aren't going to be defending your right to equivocate between the people violently overthrowing democracy and the people not allowing a violent overhtrow of democracy.
It's further fanning flames as well. Censorship is a coarse option and bound to inflict the collateral damage of instilling in the reasonable a sense of voicelessness. Beyond setting a precedent and creating something that can be used against us, we're creating more people we seek to deplatform.
Question, can I go into /r/conservative on reddit and post anything I want? Or do the mods limit what can or cannot be said there? Curious your take on that? Maybe we should just end moderation altogether. I'm curious what dang would have to say about that.
Now, not that this magically justifies it, but it is censorship made by large companies on information that is viewed by a large number of U.S. citizens. The content being targeted is important and relevant.
The content is misinformation about the integrity of the federal government, the election process, the thousands of individuals involved in maintaining the integrity of the election, the merit of every individual's vote and every eligible voter having their right to vote, the election representing the will of the people rather than being overridden by courts and legislators and so on.
This information is coming from a propaganda machine, a disinformation machine. And that machine includes President Donald Trump, complicit members of the Senate and Congress, various state and local legislators... that is to say powers of government with a vested interest in maintaining and expanding their power over people through means of manipulation.
> Political censorship exists when a government attempts to conceal, fake, distort, or falsify information that its citizens receive by suppressing or crowding out political news that the public might receive through news outlets. In the absence of neutral and objective information, people will be unable to dissent with the government or political party in charge.
I'm generally against the idea of banning subreddits because they just move elsewhere. However, if this is going to be the official stance of Reddit admins, I encourage them to take a look at /r/sino and a few other communities that regularly violate the rules.
Exactly. When a group move out of Reddit, it's no longer their problem. They can't be blamed for whatever racist/terrorist stuff is posted on donald.win, as it's not on reddit
Deplatforming works. A few people follow to other sites, but most don't. It also becomes harder to attract new cultists if one is shut out of major services.
Yes, it is one of the methods used by Russian government to silence the opposition. Though the platforms are usually privately owned, they all 'independently' decide that some content can't be allowed on them.
As has been so often quoted on HN, "The 'Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." I see no reason for things to be different this time.
I've been having this argument more and more lately. People keep coming around to "surely, we must prevent *THIS* content?" and every time the answer is no. Somehow, we seem to be forgetting how free speech benefits us all, but only when it is categorically FREE and there are not exceptions "just this one time"
Why just the other day, I had friends blow up on me for daring to suggest that a particular type of bigoted speech should remain legal.
The free exchange of ideas is a prerequisite for a just world. You cannot build one without it. If you place limits on the free exchange of ideas, "just for this one really bad kind of thing", then you have forfeited your own future ability to resist WHEN - not if, but WHEN - a good and true idea is wrongfully labelled harmful and banned by the same mechanisms.
Every single authoritarian regime in history has made speaking ill of the leadership a crime. Every last one.
You, like a lot of other people, confuse free speech with "but mom, the other kids won't let me play with them!". Actually the only threat to freedom is trying to imply that a company or any other association or institution ought to be compelled to host someone else's speech.
Being able to kick the idiots out and not compelling other people to amplify their nonsense is a basic mechanism of any society that wants to function.
Also the free exchange of ideas isn't a prerequisite for a just world, it's the consequence of a just system. You can "free exchange of ideas" yourself into a gulag if the population is dumb enough. Exchanging ideas is a process that can go as wrong as it can go right, it's a process, not a set of values.
What built the just institutions you like in the US were semi-aristocratic founding fathers, I went to school in a school system that was built in Prussia, colloquially called "a military with a country", and the civic code in France was written by Napoleon. People in Singapore are prosperous because Lee Kuan Yew had his wits together, not because they enjoy a lot of free exchange of ideas.
It's sane and capable elites building lasting institutions that afford you the luxury of free exchange of ideas, even if this offends the egalitarian myth that is popular in the US. Sorry to say it, but mom, pops and Donald Trump being able to post on Twitter doesn't built functioning states.
An underlying issue is the formation of the digital world - what once was a town square is now a (ex.) Facebook page, or network of Twitter followers.
The mechanism of communication exchange have changed so rapidly, that compelling companies to abide by free speech is a tough legislative decision. Yes, they’re corporations and can decide who to have and who not.
But an emergent phenomenon are people using these services as their lens to the world. This was obvious in the last election, red or blue, it was obvious whose side big tech was on. They were not unbiased, as I think they should be.
I’d say just as AOC wanted to get a list created of trump political supporters/affiliates (not general public, but a stepping stone away) and essentially cancel them, the same rhetoric is used to ban forms of speech. “It’s for the better”.
Another reason for controlled speech is a patronizing one, that “you’re head/emotions can’t handle X form of speech”.
Let people decide what they want to see. If I want a censored Twitter, or Wild West Twitter, let me choose. Though I understand the impracticality of forcing this on a corporation.
The only thing banned should be what is illegal. Let legislatures and judges determine it.
We're so used to communicating online that we can't even see how absurdly powerful the tools at our disposal actually are. Posting on social media isn't like chatting with your friends at the bar - it's like shouting into a colossal, ear-shatteringly loud megaphone aimed directly into the ears of billions of people. A system like that probably shouldn't even exist, let alone be put in the hands of every person above the age of thirteen [1].
You wouldn't say I was being censored because MSNBC decided to air Morning Joe instead of my hour-long documentary about how the moon landing is fake. They simply aren't obligated to grant me the power of their massive communications network if they don't like my content. In what I can only call a massive failure of judgment, Twitter, Facebook etc. have outsourced their editorial decision-making to algorithms designed to maximize their profit.
This is not the same as making speech a crime. You still have the right to speak your mind, with your own voice, on any street corner you want. You can even print out fliers if you can convince anyone to take them from you. That was true before Facebook, and it will be true after they're gone. Now if the government tries to threaten this form of communication, I'll be right there with you protesting.
But on other side of free exchange of ideas we have this idea of cancellation, which results from freedom of speech + freedom of association. As part of freedom of speech, we can also use that speech to narrate moral perspectives of whether some speech is good or bad.
Freedom of association also implies the right to choose not to associate with people due to characteristics like religion, race, wealth, etc.
Some people have made laws outlawing discrimination based on some of those characteristics. This is a kludge, with all kinds of annoying implications.
The classic argument in favor of unconditional freedom of association is, "If some companies are refusing to deal with some group of people for stupid reasons, then they will get outcompeted by other companies who don't have such prejudices and can therefore hire cheaper workers or charge higher prices."
This argument works less well when certain extremely valuable services (some would call them "essential") are provided by a small group of huge companies, and entry by new competitors is very difficult.
The solution I would favor is reducing those barriers to entry. Ideally by repealing laws that I think are unjustified in the first place.
In particular, for these social networks with their network effects, but also have something that sucks (be it "they use dark patterns", "they ban people for bad reasons", "their 'feed' algorithm is bad"), why can't someone create a "better network" that acts as a new interface to the old network, but also has better features or has additional members that aren't part of the old network?
My impression is that it would be "against the site's terms of service", and there may also be allegations of copyright violation, and that anyone who made such a thing would eventually get sued. Well, could we change the law so that the site would have no standing to get sued?
I think that, fundamentally, the principle would be, "If users can use a site through the site's interface, then they can also use it through someone else's interface. The site is free to try to detect the difference and block people who do this, but cannot get the law to punish anyone." So the site can either play cat-and-mouse with those developing better interfaces, or they can improve their own interface enough to keep their customers; in terms of banning people, they could either fix their banning practices, or just gamble that those who care enough to use the alternate interface are a sufficiently small group.
No right is absolute, because there are areas where exercising one right might infringe on another right.
Everyone has a right to their life, which is one of the most sacrosanct rights, but in self-defence you might still rightfully kill someone else. Those intersections of rights are always a fine line to walk on and you have to be careful so it is not abused. Just putting one right above the other can never be the solution.
Also freedom of speech has its limitations. Defamation is one case where I guess most people can get behind.
I think one could also make the case here, where there is a real danger that democracy can be lost.
I'm going to skip over defamation for now, both because I'm not a lawyer and because it's slightly more complicated. You can tell that's different because nobody preemptively censors defamation - it's a suit brought after-the-fact and then argued. Skipping it...
No. If "real danger Democracy can be lost" is your measuring stick, then whatever "Democracy" you have in charge is free to defend itself against any speech that may fight it. It's free license for the government to shoot down dissent and not reasonable.
Think of it this way. There is a lot of harmful speech which, in a perfect world, we could prevent. But because power corrupts, we cannot afford to give out the power to prevent speech because it is too easily abused. The benefit of preventing [harmful speech x] is not worth the cost of granting the government the power to jail you for speaking counter to what it believes is right.
> Somehow, we seem to be forgetting how free speech benefits us all
In normal times, I would agree. Philosophies and ideals like this effectively discourage people from taking action. That makes a lot of sense during times of peace when our asses aren't actively on the line.
However, these are not normal times. We are facing a threat that might just overwhelm our society and rob us of our way of life. We must act now to neutralize the threat or risk going extinct. We can sort out the ethics of it all later.
So you're okay giving someone else the power to declare something "a threat" and sacrificing your rights to neutralize it? China is perfectly happy to declare all kinds of opinions threats to their way of life and disallow them from being spread. What's different?
You are not thinking it through. An imperfect analogy to help make the point: You can't put a backdoor in encryption "just for the good guys" because there's no way to prevent that backdoor being used by other actors. Similarly, you can't put restrictions on speech "just for the really bad things" because there's no way to prevent things being labeled as "really bad things"!
Maybe reddit should completely end moderation then? So progressives and liberals can take over /r/conservative and post anything they want without fear of being banned? No more 'flaired users only'?
because that's ALSO censorship, no?
Also, who's stopping you from starting a reddit competitor and saying whatever you want? You have ZERO rights to THEIR customers, their users, etc.
I mean, can you go to the local news station and get on the air whenever you want? Because they aren't saying what you want to hear? No. They control who they put on the air. Social media is no different in this aspect.
You're thinking I'm upset specifically about reddit banning the group because that's the article I posted it on. That's sensible, and on me somewhat for not being quite clear enough.
I'm upset at the broader topics that are always brought up when articles like this are posted. I also have an opinion about what reddit should or shouldn't do, but the post you're responding to is not it.
The irony of people complaining about free speech and censorship when this happens is if you post ANYTHING even remotely against the current narrative in those subs you will be immediately banned by mods. You can literally quote trump word for word in /r/conservative and get banned if it happens to go against today's collective reality.
Rules for thee but not for me is the modus operandi and Wednesday was just an extension of that.
It's one thing for a mod in a forum to ban someone, as it sometimes only represents the opinions of that mod, and maybe be backed by rules (and trends)
It's another thing for social media to do it. although they are all private companies, they remain a very global big force, that do not have reach only in the US, but are global and can do the same and affect many countries and politics across the globe.
Soon, if not already happening, politics will be pushed to one side or the other.
And it won't be for stopping hate speech, it will and it is so that they can make even more money.
On the bright side, I am an optimistic person, and since they dared block the president of the USA, maybe be they might not flinch anymore at blocking pedophiles, hitmen, terrorists, and all sorts of vile users on their platforms.
It's one thing to my favorite dictatorial mod to do one thing, but a reddit admin, to do another thing?
You are free to create any website you want, if you can find hosting to support your message. The internet still is mostly free and wide open.
An audience though is something you earn, these networks have EARNED their audience. What you're wanting is the equivalent of walking into the 7 o'clock news and demanding to be put on the air so you can tell everyone about your goat's birthday party on Saturday.
Seriously, nobody cares about your goat's birthday party. ABCD news has ZERO reason to put you on the air, you have zero rights to their audience, or to a platform at all.
Platforms like twitter/facebook/etc are NEW. It's an EARNED thing, as long as you're a good global citizen you can keep participating, when you go against social norms you get cast out, like pretty much every civic organization in the history of the world.
Town Drunk, sex offenders, felons, etc. all cast out for going against norms. Should they all get equal platform time to defend themselves 24/7 and everyone is required to let their content go across their feed on social media? How's that not also authoritarian, sounds a lot like communism to me...
The state seizing control of private business communication channels and forcing it open for everyone regardless of their message whether it's a birthday party, or terrorist organization recruiting message.
it's not just reddit, i'm talking about social media in general getting too involved in politics, but only when it suits them and only when it is trendy
I just checked out http://thedonald.win/ and it has gotten a lot more extreme since it was moved off Reddit. I think it would have not gotten as extreme if it were in the Reddit ecosystem still.
Groups becoming more extreme when they exodus is fine and part of the calculus. The reason to take it off of Reddit is to prevent more followers from joining up with them.
Stormfront is extreme and everyone knows about them. (Literally a white-nationalist website). But without a foothold on Reddit, they lack the ability to gain followers.
When LUE was banned from GameFAQs decades ago, they just formed up their own group (G00Ns, Something Awful, etc. etc.). They were no longer GameFAQ's problem, and GameFAQs no longer had to deal with its members slowly becoming indoctrinated by an group bent on posting pornography on video game forums where children were active. The rest of GameFAQs got better.
Ditto with 4Chan when they kicked the Gamergate people off to 8Chan. 4Chan got better, though the Gamergate dudes grew more extreme.
It's the Amiga effect. The smaller a group is the more radical the membership.
Having thedonald.win be a cesspool isn't all bad. If someone is on the fence and goes to check it out their first reaction is likely to be of disgust, especially if the userbase is hostile to "noobs" because they're paranoid about infiltration.
> Groups becoming more extreme when they exodus is fine and part of the calculus. The reason to take it off of Reddit is to prevent more followers from joining up with them.
Is this really any better than religious idealogues burning books that aren't its Bibles, lest people get tempted to reject their faith or question their ideologies?
Or North Korea blocking any information about capitalist successes, lest that cause their citizens to question the communist / fascist ideologies they've been exposed to and cause more followers to switch?
Pretending that there aren't other opinions because you're worried that people can't properly evaluate and weigh the evidence / ideas is a weak excuse for censorship.
Of course, I should mention that I do not support many of the prevailing sentiments in r/DonaldTrump - but we should be better arming individuals with better critical thinking and believability weighting abilities, rather than resort to censorship.
"Censorship is telling a man he can't have steak just because a baby can't chew it." - Mark Twain.
I'm willing to bet it'll go the same way as Voat. Except Voat actually had a diversity of topics to discuss when it founded (although it turned to garbage in a few weeks), this website is laser focused on one demagogue.
They had access to a much larger community on Reddit. This way you have to try to find the site, and you won’t just have it appear on your /r/all or front page
Put your finger on the Median Republican line and it either moves left or stays put. The political divide has not been the republicans.
In the last year that changed for many reasons. The republicans have now moved. That political divide is now much larger. That 'more extreme' that you've noticed is because the political divide has shifted.
I dispute this assessment, it’s a drastic simplification and the comparison only starts in 1994, which is after a heavy swing in America to the right throughout the 80s and 90s. If anything, what the article shows is a regression to the long-term political mean, not a move left.
A great example I happen to have favorited on YouTube, check out the healthcare debate in 1971 [0]. It’s essentially Medicare for all (D) vs practically Obamacare (but from an R).
Same. I've long worried lurking there was going to cause more harm than it's worth (for example, by letting me inadvertently slip into extremism) but the ability to predict what happened this week so easily and warn people about it who considered going was well worth that risk.
Also I read there they are losing their SSL cert or something, so that might be how centralized, non-legal authority manages to shut them down. (Which, it probably goes without saying, should scare the shit out of anyone who cares about the principles of the free Internet.)
> Which, it probably goes without saying, should scare the shit out of anyone who cares about the principles of the free Internet.
I worry more about Google et. al. killing the free and open internet by creating centralized walled gardens. I worry more about legislative attacks on encryption, about the overzealous use of copyright law and the sorry state of intellectual property generally.
If service providers want to deplatform centers of radicalization, I think that's ok.
A private company choosing who to allow on their platform? Seems like the freedom to me. And in the absence of any government action against these domestic terrorists (they have been planning exactly this violence for weeks), it's great to see private companies step in and take action.
These website clearly radicalize some people. I too lurk from time to time on thedonald.win and far-right subreddits, you can see that over there reality is completely distorted, calls to violence are constant and they just feed off each other's insecurities, fears and hate.
Nothing good comes out of these places, regardless of where in the political spectrum you position yourself (except maybe downright fascists). Look at what happened at the Capitol, did he further the right's agenda? Of course not, if anything it put them in a much more awkward situation.
Reddit admins are enablers and they share a part of the blame. Remember how subreddits like /r/jailbait and /r/creepshots were allowed on the website for months, if not years (among many others I can't be bother to remember, including some extremely explicitly racist ones)?
Then it's always the same thing, some news outlet or politician talks publicly about how Reddit hosts fascists/pedos/racists or something like that and within two days you have bans and a heartfelt post by the admins saying how they felt that it was their duty to do something and "think of the children" and all kinds of bullshit.
Reddit is 4chan wearing a tie to try to look more business friendly.
These subreddits and websites don't host free speech, they host hate speech. I have zero issue drawing a line in the sand here. "First they came for the fascists, and I said nothing because I'm not a fascist, and the world was a better place. The end."
> for example, by letting me inadvertently slip into extremism
You are right to worry - I remember reading an article about (FB?) moderators on anti-vaxxer pages finding themselves inadvertently internalizing that worldview, despite previously consciously not believing in it. The human mind appears to absorb information after repeated exposure, despite any conscious efforts not too - I assume it's similar to how the placebo effect works even when the person "knows" it's a placebo.
You’re not required to have an SSL cert behind cloudflare anyway, CF provides the cert the browser sees. You then put a self-signed cert on your origin and CF will accept it.
> Which, it probably goes without saying, should scare the shit out of anyone who cares about the principles of the free Internet
Big tech companies are largely left-leaning internally (which isn't surprising since California is the most left leaning state), so there is nothing to fear as long as you lean left yourself, (i.e. I guarantee you won't be censored for left-leaning speech any time soon).
If you wonder why they are threatened consider parler and the things people post there.
Please forgive the language it is verbatim and I think threats of violence are more offensive than bad words.
> You had better be ready partriots! It is go time very soon. We must attack all central communications to big cities are democratic cities. Fiber optics telecom bridges supply routes we can starve those motherfuckers to death. The people are ready it is time.
>We got to give it until Monday but after that partriots we must take the fight to them, make that rally look small. Load your magazines gather your things it's time to go and take out the sorry bastards.
While we worry about the very legitimate question of what the limits of free speech are and how we ought not to create a situation where anyone serves as the gate keeper they are planning to kill us and install an autocracy.
I am of the potentially unpopular mindset that we need to get our hands dirty to preserve our freedoms from these people. Worrying about being a gatekeeper when these people gladly, and openly, threaten our peace and lives is ridiculous.
Let's shut them down, shut them out and generally rebuke them. History shows that higher order ideals generally need to be preserved with actions when words have failed, and make no mistake we are past words with these folks.
You mean, the things a tiny handful of people post there. Most posters are center-right and don't advocate violence.
I would also note that there's been plenty of talk of violence against conservatives on left-leaning platforms, Twitter especially but many others. These people are never called out even if they talk about "rounding them up and putting them in camps" and similar Nazi-like talk, even killing them seems to be permissible. I've reported lots of such tweets and sometimes they're taken down, other times, not.
The people screaming "Free Speech" are well aware of the content and viewpoints espoused by sites like Parler and T_D. The fact of the matter is that they are supportive of people being killed and white supremacist autocracy being installed.
That's the danger in going to such lengths to shut down disagreeable viewpoints. People say "make your own website", but that becomes a race to the bottom when we start politicizing server hosts and ISPs. When you completely shut people up, that doesn't mean they're gone, and now you don't know what they're thinking. Meanwhile you're actually tyrannical because a monopoly on information makes the mass 80% believe that everyone thinks like the MSM, which isn't true, then everyone is surprised when it turns out there's lots of people who don't support the establishment.
What other options do you have if you can't educate or have intellectual discourse with people who are fabricating reality or deeply believe in conspiracy theories? It's like trying to pull someone out of a cult like Scientology.
Of course, attempt to engage to improve the situation and help someone obtain ground truth on their own from legitimate information sources, but when it's obviously hopeless insulate yourself against those who could harm and move forward. You don't have to support the establishment, but you also don't have the right to violence because you feel slighted.
Incitement has been a limited carve-out from the First Amendment pretty much from the beginning. Stating a political view is different from threatening your opponents with violence.
I suspect we're not very far off. However, completely anonymous, decentralized, uncensorable network ideas like Freenet, TOR, I2P never really took off only because they needed a critical mass to support them: they're not technologically infeasible, they just didn't have enough support to get off the ground. If half the users of the "normal" internet are banned from it, they're going to start discovering peer-to-peer systems - that's what happened with the internet itself, after all.
> When you completely shut people up, that doesn't mean they're gone
It does mean that they cannot effectively find other people with the same opinion, cannot organize, and cannot spread their opinion effectively. Suppression of opinions _works_ (unfortunately, I must say).
Taking that option away from people scares me a lot more than the MAGA mob. People storming government buildings can also be a good thing (uprisings against oppressive governments). It wasn't in this case, obviously, but the damage this mob caused, including the lives lost, is nothing compared to the absolutely terrifying situation of a totalitarian government and all communication platforms being "curated".
Wikipedia was threatened for having B709D3A0CD2FEC08EAFCCF540D8A100BB38E5E091D646ADB7B14D021096FFCD on a web page.
ISPs are frequently threatening to disconnect customers who serve files, and sites that are large enough to have their own connectivity have had this for 20 years.
"Under the provisions of the DMCA, we expect that having been duly notified of this case of blatant copyright violation, Andover will remove the above referenced comments from its servers and forward our complaint to the owner of the referenced comments. "
Except in this case, this isn't a copyright violation. I have never heard of a case of a website being shut down by an ISP for advocating violence. If that was the case, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter or any social media platform wouldn't exist.
> Moreover, they've gotten threats from their ISP that they have to delete certain posts or be shut down. (which seems scary to me)
Agreed - though I find it's more of a headache than scary. On end, I don't like the fact that increasingly internet infrastructure is acting as a de facto judge in deciding what speech is and isn't allowed. I empathize with both parties. ISPs don't want to host speech they feel is abhorrent, and I'd probably do the same thing were I in their position.
I'm much more accepting of platforms like Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, et. al. taking down groups and banning members than I am of infrastructure providers doing the same. The former kicks people off of large communities, but people can still put together their own websites. When it gets the the point that I might not even be able to serve plain HTML that I wrote myself, because nobody will even let it go through the wires that's when I start thinking utility regulation in ISPs, DNS, etc. is necessary.
Cloudflare's CEO was very humble when taking down sites. When talking about taking down the Daily Stormer, "Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet... No one should have that power.” [1] I largely agree, though I'd offer the caveat that something needs to have this power but it should be an institution like the courts rather than individuals in corporations.
> ISPs don't want to host speech they feel is abhorrent
But where does this end? Does the phone company want to allow conversations they find morally reprehensible? Does apple want to send iMessages that denigrate their company?
> I empathize with both parties. ISPs don't want to host speech they feel is abhorrent, and I'd probably do the same thing were I in their position.
I don't emapthize with the ISPs here. Internet access has become a utility which is required to participate in many parts of the economy and society. Utilities should not be allowed to refuse to service someone who is using the service legally.
If someone is hosting illegal content, that's a different story.
A smart Republican would nave realised that big internet companies are against him, and would have made plans accordingly.
If Trump had been competent, he wouldn't have attacked net neutrality, he would have said net neutrality is a wonderful idea, and extended it to other layers of the protocol stack.
He would also have got on board when people like Elizabeth Warren talked about breaking up Facebook and Amazon.
I never heard of thedonald.win and took a peek over there just to see what a cesspool of banned users looks like.
JFC. It's a circus of terrible thinking and baseless anger over there. If that site is getting a lot of traffic, you folks who consider yourselves above such things better start fighting for what is actually true and good, because what is not true and not good is exactly what is festering over there, and if they don't get their vote, they WILL get violent again, just see how they attacked Lindsey Graham at the airport just now for breaking rank on principle... and sweeping these folks under the rug will not eradicate the cancer
I don’t think it’s irrelevant. Keeping it off Reddit means that less gullible teenagers (which are a large percentage of Reddit’s user user base) will come into contact with it.
OP likely posts to the site regularly. An thinks the site is an excellent place full of patriots that just so happens to want to stop an evil ring of pedophiles that just so happen to be filled with all of Trump's political enemies.
I love doom scrolling as much as the next guy, just make sure to get some mind bleach. Find a nice fiction podcast or take up electronics. Both sides will consume your mental health if your not careful.
> one of the top websites in the US in terms of traffic
There's something odd going on with their traffic. I've been on the front page of Reddit and thedonald.win at the same time, and either virtually nobody on that site reads the articles or the upvotes counts are being massively inflated: the upvote to pageview ratio is waaaay lower on thedonald.win then I've experienced on Reddit and HN.
> Also, please don't judge me, I just have a morbid curiosity to see what these people are talking about and how they think.
I read thedonald.win daily too. It feels like r/watchPeopleDie, some sort of morbid curiosity. Currently they're claiming Trump's concession video yesterday was deep faked. Very entertaining and scary at the same time.
I have the same curiosity but it is more about being worried that the balkanization of the Internet will have serious negative outcomes down the line, such as what we saw 2 days ago, except progressively worse.
Everyone IMHO should be peering into other bastions of thought
For reference, this is higher than infowars (#507 in the US) but far lower than Breitbart (#72 in the US), to name other, um, right-wing conspiracy-promoting sites.
This is also lower than amazon.ca in the US (#354), apparently. That probably says something.
Yeah, this is a win. You can go to this guy's party at his house. And I don't have to worry about the guys at his party wandering into mine. And vice versa.
To stretch that analogy: all is fine, except for "this guy's" neighbors, they are in for a terrible night. And when the crowd at "this guy's party" is heated up and collectively starts harrassing people on the street, it gets even worse.
My point: Fine indeed, as long as they "stay there". But they won't. This goes for any online community: it has effects outside of that community.
The last place I worked paid hard-earned money during a recession to migrate their properties off of CloudFlare because they were providing CDN services to the Proud Boys and the CEO had made some equivocal statement that they didn't think it was their responsibility to police content. It's an interesting topic and possibly a genuine slippery slope about what sort of responsibility service providers have over their customers use of their platform. It's one thing for dangerous content to be hosted, moderated and monetized on a platform like facebook. But what about just caching it blindly?
You're joking, right? I for one am proud of Cloudflare for taking a stand against cancel culture, because one of these days it could hit you or me and I want to support people who will stand in behind me in the name of free speech.
Seeing how they call for war, killing people, and overthrowing the government daily if not hourly I can’t imagine why CF continues to provide them services. Truly, you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. I mean you probably will on some of the *chans but it’s pretty freaking bad over at TD win.
I'll say it out loud: though I despise Trump and mourn the damage he and those enabling have caused, I spend more time online looking at pro-Trump, conservative and Republican focused material than anything else. I downvote none of it, even the legit crazy/scary stuff, and in the rare cases I comment, it's carefully worded to be neutral or even sometimes conciliatory, though always honest.
It scares me that many people feel the need to apologize for openly admitting that they looked at material from 'the other side'.
More often, people will refrain from posting their actual, perhaps nuanced views entirely, due to the fear of being judged/attacked/whatever. Didn't Paul Graham write an essay about that?
My wife was writing a research essay to present to our local Toastmasters group, which she is a relatively new member of. She was going over the talk with one of the senior members, one on one, on zoom, and she mentioned, in passing, that our family is going to delay getting the Covid19 vaccine a couple of months, because we've been exercising (essentially) phase 0 (extreme) lockdown consistently since last March. We can do that because we're blessed with the ability to work and (for our son) go to school from home.
The person my wife mentioned this to just lost her shit, and went into a verbal rampage about how to delay getting the vaccine is akin to being an anti-vaxer, how it was immoral to not get it as soon as humanly possible.
To be clear: If any of me, my wife or son came into contact with other human beings with any frequency, we'd get the vaccine as soon as possible. We're not afraid of it.
But others need it before we do.
However, that 'nuance' was entirely lost in an emotional, knee-jerk reaction which reminds me of so many other things we see today.
Was there voter fraud in the 2020 US presidential election? I'd bet my life on it; that there was at least a single single incident of fraud. Did that fraud in any way change the outcome of the election? Of course not.
Apologies for the tangent.
I want to encourage everyone to consider looking carefully, deeply and compassionately at what 'the other side' writes and says. It's not easy to do, but I believe it's a necessary, critical work that all of us need to honestly engage in.
I don't know if those Donald sites are good for that. That is the small Q-anonish minority that was at the capitol. Most of the discussion is not exactly tethered to reality.
I don't think it's entirely fair to suggest that thedonald.win represents the 70 million Trump voters. It represents the attitudes of a few million of the weirdos, distorted further by roleplayers/trolls and international infiltrators.
Your average Trump voter is just a normal Republican. They voted for Trump because there was an R next to his name and defended him because he was on their team. The Democratic voters would be no different if the dems ran an equally ghastly candidate. (They obviously have not done so, and I am not making the claim that's random. I'm not saying 'both sides are the same' in this post.)
It might be useful to understand the thedonald.win crowd, but it ain't 70MM of your countrymen, Americans.
I don't think ISPs should be in the business of deciding what content is allowed or disallowed. If there's illegal content, that's a different thing. But politically disagreeable content? Infrastructure and utility services should not be permitted to make decisions about that even if they are private entities. And I extend this to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. since they all are so big that their ability to censor and control speech is comparable to a government's power. And if you can't exercise speech on those platforms, which are now the public town square, then you effectively don't have that right. Put another way, they are utilities and should be regulated/treated like a public entity.
the people on these communities creates their alternative reality. selectively avoid news/information that can burst their bubble. its the same with /r/politics. both living in massive bubbles with complete opposite realities.
the difference is that r/the_donald is more violent. They cordinate gatherings, "attacks", a violent protests.
r/politics which is liberal bubble is more peaceful but both these communites censor opposing views and is dangerous to democracy
Isn’t it strange that you have to make a disclaimer like “please don’t judge me?”. Quite literally 1/2 of the USA voted for Trump, should you automatically be ashamed of that?
(It’s easy for me to say ofc, I have no horse in this race)
It's a little strange indeed -- the US is at a very polarized time, where discussing such a mainstream thing as supporting Trump is treated like a breach of decorum by some. Very surreal in some ways.
That being said, identifying that the support for Trump is about 50/50 does not _really_ tell the right story here with thedonald.win -- this isn't a representative of the ~half of us in the US who voted for Trump (or would if we voted)...it's a representation of a small, extreme culture, part real and part just trolling.
I doubt OP would have apologized quite so hard for watching Fox News. Fox News's editorial content is somewhat to the right of the average Republican voter, but not by nearly as much as thedonald.win -- that's something that represents mainstream Trump voter (aka Republican voter) worldview.
There are plenty of Trump voters (Republicans in general) who would actually find the contents of that website abhorrent. I would say these people represent a minority (albeit a large one) of Trump supporters.
"Upvote if you still believe Trump will be our President for the next four years. People are forgetting this man is a genius and has always been ten steps ahead. Now is no different."
This is one of the top threads on that site RIGHT NOW. Its easy to judge someone participating in that discussion.
>Isn’t it strange that you have to make a disclaimer like “please don’t judge me?”. Quite literally 1/2 of the USA voted for Trump, should you automatically be ashamed of that?
I dont have a horse in the race neither other than stock market.
It's not that strange. It's why elections are supposed to be confidential. Public opinion is always going to shift. During Clinton's reign we had the clinton crazies who hated him. George W bush? Did anyone like him? Obama derangement was readily labelled racism. Now Trump derangement is very strong. Biden will have his haters, that's coming.
However, the derangement is real and even the illusion you're for trump will gain you hate.
Nitpick: 1/2 of the US did not vote for Trump. In 2016, of the eligible voting populous, only 54.8% voted in the election. Of them, the popular vote was lost by Donald Trump, who got around 63 million votes.
So even winning, it doesn’t really need to be that close to half of the U.S.
Not to say that isn’t a sizable chunk or anything.
Popularity does not imply morality. 46.8% of people voted for Donald Trump (not "quite literally 1/2"), a man who is a known fraud, morally bankrupt in business and personal life, and who has shown himself to be incompetent in office. People who voted for Donald Trump should be ashamed of their vote.
That said, reading what people are saying in an effort to understand and to de-radicalize is not something to be ashamed of.
Readit News
> In general, sedition is defined as trying to overthrow the government with intent and means to bring it about; the Supreme Court, however, has been divided over what constitutes intent and means.
> These acts made it a federal crime to speak, write, or print criticisms of the government that were false, scandalous, or malicious.
It is frightening to me that so many U.S. citizens get their perception of reality through social media channels; that is to say they get messages that are amplified by algorithm with insufficient regard to refutability (and a requirement of evidence to refute or confirm.)
As someone who cannot visit every single polling place in the country (I visited zero and voted by mail) I cannot with absolute certainty proclaim that there there was no widespread, coordinated and shockingly well-concealed election fraud. As a person of logic and reason and based on multiple sources of information that I consider reputable, I strongly believe this did not take place, and I would need multiple, reputable sources of information and likely trusted peer acceptance before I would change my mind to believe it did.
My way of trying to only accept what I believe to be accurate information will always be imperfect, and, at times, fail me. But I believe it is only shades different from what someone who believes in election fraud does. Their sources include the content of speeches made by the President of the United States, news anchors and journalists of conversatively-biased news, and perhaps most importantly, peers they trust liking and sharing those same speeches and articles with them as a stamp of acceptance.
That's a complex and very human problem that is not readily solved with gut reactions, broad strokes and absolutes.
From a believer's perspective, articles mentioned affidavits, eye-witness testimony, court cases being filed, and important, trusted people saying something along the lines of "there is evidence the courts are not even considering!" Presumably if that same believer dug deep enough into individual court cases and affidavits and statements by the judges dismissing cases, they may have changed their mind.
But I don't dig that deep, and obviously neither do the believers. We are wired to our inclination of confirmation bias. When we are already programmed and motivated to find evidence of what we already believe, we do not tend to exhaust every option possible to validate it. We stop when we cross the smallest of hurdles of validation.
In an ideal world is there way to prove definitively that there was no fraud? Or is this something unprovable.
The democratic house members who argued against the objections easily tore down their arguments. Their largest point with respect to voter fraud was that there were was actually _no_ legal action mentioning voter fraud brought up in the many many court cases launched by Trump's team. The reasoning being because lawyers can have their licenses revoked for intentionally lying about serious accusations and no lawyer was willing to put their career on the line for something they had no evidence for.
I respect everyone's views and consider myself to be somewhat moderate, but damn overall republican house lost a ton of respect from me that night.
The RIGHT, people who supported/enabled Trump have said, nope - nothing to see, all's legit, got any better proof? Kemp for instance was a HUGE Trump supporter, Pence has no reason not to support Trump, yet now he's a "traitor" for doing his job. Seriously. I'd hate to play any board game with these people, you could never win, they'd throw a fit if they lost until you admit they won...
> That's a complex and very human problem that is not readily solved with gut reactions, broad strokes and absolutes.
Sadly, though I feel the same as you, this kind of mindset is a vanishing minority in the US, or so it would seem based on most allowed speech these days. One can daily find entire reddit threads about how one side or another is absolutely unreasonable, and one shouldn't even consider that the other side may have reasons. And this goes for all sides. For those of us who try to remain objective and rational, the only option is increasingly to remain silent or find safe spaces (ironically, from the very crowd that popularized the concept of safe spaces). That's the main reason I started spending more time on HN. I've written before, this is one of the few popular places on the internet where being rational and impartial is common, though even here that seems to slowly be changing.
Name it. What sources? Every major news source has been complaining about "election theft" for 4 years and warning about election theft in 2020.
The issue with corrupt elections has been around at least since 2000 ( Bush v Gore ).
Here is an NYU professor giving a lecture about it in 2008 ( about the bush election theft ).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPhL53ol0DE
You'll notice the exact same issues voting machines, ballots, etc discussed.
Any person of logic and reason will conclude there was election fraud. Both the democrats and republicans have had 4 years to prepare for it. But also reason and logic says that if both cheated then so be it. The national election system is designed specifically to be gamed. It's not just local voting that has problems - gerrymandering, voting suppression, etc., but the national election as well.
There is no doubt in my mind that Trump and Hillary cheated in 2016. I think the DNC's hubris underestimated Trump and that's why he won. I think this time, Trump's hubris cost him. I mean "china, china, china" gets old after a while.
Rational people understand that both sides cheated and the better cheater won. Only democratic political activists think there was no cheating and only republican political activists think we should overturn the election because of cheating. Rational people understand there was cheating and are willing to live with it because both sides cheated and the system is designed to make it impossible to prove cheating.
The ballots are lost in time, like tears in rain.
As I said in 2016, I will say it in 2020, let the better cheater win. If Trump and the GOP really wanted to win, they should have worked harder.
See:
- Hanging chads (ballot got fixed)
- Gerrymandering (currently getting legislated away)
- Russian interference (more oversight currently)
- Electronic voting machines (no longer used...oh wait)
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I have the same views. There are actually some "They stole my election!" people on HN, so maybe they'll read this and reconsider their "reality", but Biden won by several thousands in the 3 disputed states, to pull off voter fraud to swing that many votes require a lot of work, and probably a lot of people, and the problem with having many people is that it's hard to keep something like that secret. And if they were going to steal the presidency, why did some GOP candidates in those states still win seats, why not flip enough things Dem so that the "tyrants" have a comfortable majority?
I think Trump's "They stole it!" proclamations are a scheme to keep his base heated so they can donate to his retirement fund, although yesterdays "We’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue!" (only for him to take the limo back to the White House) probably goes beyond that, that was an incredible "Release the hounds!" moment.
It's infuriating that a significant percentage of the country doesn't listen to reason, haven't even looked at how flimsy the court arguments that Team Total Landscaping have made, but are just screaming everywhere "I know the truth, and the truth is, they stole it!". Then again, many probably would get lost in the first paragraph if they tried to read any court filing. (Not being insulting, but hey, someone must've thought years ago "why spend money to educate children if they're just going to vote you out.".)
This is turning to a rant, but it seems the seditionists in congress who are also still claiming voter fraud without evidence (like Cruz or Hawley) just want to keep the Trump base very very pissed off, and very very motivated.
Or they want to keep the crazies on their side, rather than being turned on suddenly the way the insufficiently strident (e.g.,.most visibly recently, Pence) have often been. Still had the effect of contributing to radicalization, but the intent may be more avoiding becoming a target.
In her case a bigger factor is probably that Trump has also fallen off the grace of a lot of Republicans. The guy is done. He's still massively popular and a threat given his popularity amongst pretty fanatical groups of people, but as far as raw, democratic power he lost his election by a pretty decent margin, and lost the House/Senate for Republicans.
A lot of people who sucked up to him and his rhetoric must be realizing it's time to suck up to someone/something else. He's always attracted an uncomfortable amount of media attention and now that he can't attract political power to remain in office he's a liability rather than an asset.
Lol
Nothing imo. Before it was probable that there could be careers and jobs outside of the presidency. With these moves it seems like Trump decided to make his bed with the worst of his base and a lot of people have finally decided that it's a bridge too far. Last-minute attempts to distance themselves after playing along the entire time.
Going after Trump fans is just center-left back-slapping, and all the worse because ignoring the police partisanship is extremely reckless and irresponsible.
Our civil liberates will continue erode for no good reason, and our institutions will be no safer. Replace the police with something else they're not afraid to hold accountable. If there is to be a monopoly of violence, it must be held only in (small d) democratic authority.
I suppose having positive ESG profile is still an interest. So your statement stands.
Now an interesting consideration, for both supporters and Donald Trump himself. What happens if he is effectively locked out of all the big social media sites? Does a site which lets him on suddenly catapult to the top or does it get shouted down by pressure originating from the users who are on the sites which locked him and his supporters out?
I mean we are in a unique situation where by a very public official is being locked out of his accounts because of his actions and his supporters are being similarly locked out. That has never happened before and its both awe inspiring and frightening all at once.
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This whole censorship crusade that the Facebook, twitter & now reddit is on is a dangerous precedence we are setting for our society. Whatever they call it, this is censorship.
Already due to AI suggesting similar contents on services like Facebook & Youtube and the design of sub-reddits on reddit, we have living inside echo chambers. Atleast users have an option of searching for different contents on the platform. It's a bit easier to come out of the echo chamber. Now, by pushing people off the platform, echo chamber platforms are coming up like parler & rumble. The divide is widening.
I am not sure what other options are there, but censorship is the worst option.
-Don't like it? Make your own image host! X
-Don't like it? Make your own social media! X
-Don't like it? Make your own aggregator! X
-Don't like it? Make your own cloudfare/hosting provider (you are here)
-Don't like it? Make your own ISP!
-Don't like it? Make your own banking/payment infrastructure!
Edit: TIL HN doesn't support emoji
EDIT: One option I think you forgot is using one of the existing hosting providers but hide the web service under a TOR hidden service. That way people can't track it back to your hosting provider to complain about the hosted content (and you can use encryption of the content that is decrypted on the fly when being served by the web server) if you worry about the hosting provider doing some scans of customer content tho that seems very unlikely to me.
Make your own group: valid
Make your own site: valid
Make your own hosting provider: this one is tricky
Make your own ISP: shouldn't be needed
Make your own payment infrastructure: shouldn't be needed
Which is worse, censorship of people calling for the violent otherthrow of the democratically elected government. OR what we've seen this week - people literally overthrowing the democratically elected government of the US.
Oh and by the way- when the MAGA hat wearers have taken over, sure as hell they aren't going to be defending your right to equivocate between the people violently overthrowing democracy and the people not allowing a violent overhtrow of democracy.
The hysterics in this thread are pretty rich.
By definition it is not. Only governments can censor. This is just a private entity making a decision.
You have the right to say what you want, but I don't have to let you into my living room to say it.
You are confusing censorship with a breach of the first amendment.
What if we live in a WALL-E type world where corporations are so large and powerful they effectively govern society?
1 - The community was repeatedly infringing the TOS.
2 - Reddit has liability to what's being posted on it
Really. That's the "worst" option? You can't think of worse things than that?
That being said, I think serious tech companies should not be an enabler of fascists.
Now, not that this magically justifies it, but it is censorship made by large companies on information that is viewed by a large number of U.S. citizens. The content being targeted is important and relevant.
The content is misinformation about the integrity of the federal government, the election process, the thousands of individuals involved in maintaining the integrity of the election, the merit of every individual's vote and every eligible voter having their right to vote, the election representing the will of the people rather than being overridden by courts and legislators and so on.
This information is coming from a propaganda machine, a disinformation machine. And that machine includes President Donald Trump, complicit members of the Senate and Congress, various state and local legislators... that is to say powers of government with a vested interest in maintaining and expanding their power over people through means of manipulation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_censorship
> Political censorship exists when a government attempts to conceal, fake, distort, or falsify information that its citizens receive by suppressing or crowding out political news that the public might receive through news outlets. In the absence of neutral and objective information, people will be unable to dissent with the government or political party in charge.
The alternative platforms tend to die off, though. Like Voat.
Dead Comment
https://gnet-research.org/2020/05/11/weighing-the-value-and-...
Same will happen with the US. Sad.
Why just the other day, I had friends blow up on me for daring to suggest that a particular type of bigoted speech should remain legal.
The free exchange of ideas is a prerequisite for a just world. You cannot build one without it. If you place limits on the free exchange of ideas, "just for this one really bad kind of thing", then you have forfeited your own future ability to resist WHEN - not if, but WHEN - a good and true idea is wrongfully labelled harmful and banned by the same mechanisms.
Every single authoritarian regime in history has made speaking ill of the leadership a crime. Every last one.
Being able to kick the idiots out and not compelling other people to amplify their nonsense is a basic mechanism of any society that wants to function.
Also the free exchange of ideas isn't a prerequisite for a just world, it's the consequence of a just system. You can "free exchange of ideas" yourself into a gulag if the population is dumb enough. Exchanging ideas is a process that can go as wrong as it can go right, it's a process, not a set of values.
What built the just institutions you like in the US were semi-aristocratic founding fathers, I went to school in a school system that was built in Prussia, colloquially called "a military with a country", and the civic code in France was written by Napoleon. People in Singapore are prosperous because Lee Kuan Yew had his wits together, not because they enjoy a lot of free exchange of ideas.
It's sane and capable elites building lasting institutions that afford you the luxury of free exchange of ideas, even if this offends the egalitarian myth that is popular in the US. Sorry to say it, but mom, pops and Donald Trump being able to post on Twitter doesn't built functioning states.
The mechanism of communication exchange have changed so rapidly, that compelling companies to abide by free speech is a tough legislative decision. Yes, they’re corporations and can decide who to have and who not.
But an emergent phenomenon are people using these services as their lens to the world. This was obvious in the last election, red or blue, it was obvious whose side big tech was on. They were not unbiased, as I think they should be.
I’d say just as AOC wanted to get a list created of trump political supporters/affiliates (not general public, but a stepping stone away) and essentially cancel them, the same rhetoric is used to ban forms of speech. “It’s for the better”.
Another reason for controlled speech is a patronizing one, that “you’re head/emotions can’t handle X form of speech”.
Let people decide what they want to see. If I want a censored Twitter, or Wild West Twitter, let me choose. Though I understand the impracticality of forcing this on a corporation.
The only thing banned should be what is illegal. Let legislatures and judges determine it.
You wouldn't say I was being censored because MSNBC decided to air Morning Joe instead of my hour-long documentary about how the moon landing is fake. They simply aren't obligated to grant me the power of their massive communications network if they don't like my content. In what I can only call a massive failure of judgment, Twitter, Facebook etc. have outsourced their editorial decision-making to algorithms designed to maximize their profit.
This is not the same as making speech a crime. You still have the right to speak your mind, with your own voice, on any street corner you want. You can even print out fliers if you can convince anyone to take them from you. That was true before Facebook, and it will be true after they're gone. Now if the government tries to threaten this form of communication, I'll be right there with you protesting.
[1] The Simpsons - Bart's Megaphone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rf_jKzB3SLY
Some people have made laws outlawing discrimination based on some of those characteristics. This is a kludge, with all kinds of annoying implications.
The classic argument in favor of unconditional freedom of association is, "If some companies are refusing to deal with some group of people for stupid reasons, then they will get outcompeted by other companies who don't have such prejudices and can therefore hire cheaper workers or charge higher prices."
This argument works less well when certain extremely valuable services (some would call them "essential") are provided by a small group of huge companies, and entry by new competitors is very difficult.
The solution I would favor is reducing those barriers to entry. Ideally by repealing laws that I think are unjustified in the first place.
In particular, for these social networks with their network effects, but also have something that sucks (be it "they use dark patterns", "they ban people for bad reasons", "their 'feed' algorithm is bad"), why can't someone create a "better network" that acts as a new interface to the old network, but also has better features or has additional members that aren't part of the old network?
My impression is that it would be "against the site's terms of service", and there may also be allegations of copyright violation, and that anyone who made such a thing would eventually get sued. Well, could we change the law so that the site would have no standing to get sued?
I think that, fundamentally, the principle would be, "If users can use a site through the site's interface, then they can also use it through someone else's interface. The site is free to try to detect the difference and block people who do this, but cannot get the law to punish anyone." So the site can either play cat-and-mouse with those developing better interfaces, or they can improve their own interface enough to keep their customers; in terms of banning people, they could either fix their banning practices, or just gamble that those who care enough to use the alternate interface are a sufficiently small group.
Everyone has a right to their life, which is one of the most sacrosanct rights, but in self-defence you might still rightfully kill someone else. Those intersections of rights are always a fine line to walk on and you have to be careful so it is not abused. Just putting one right above the other can never be the solution.
Also freedom of speech has its limitations. Defamation is one case where I guess most people can get behind.
I think one could also make the case here, where there is a real danger that democracy can be lost.
No. If "real danger Democracy can be lost" is your measuring stick, then whatever "Democracy" you have in charge is free to defend itself against any speech that may fight it. It's free license for the government to shoot down dissent and not reasonable.
Think of it this way. There is a lot of harmful speech which, in a perfect world, we could prevent. But because power corrupts, we cannot afford to give out the power to prevent speech because it is too easily abused. The benefit of preventing [harmful speech x] is not worth the cost of granting the government the power to jail you for speaking counter to what it believes is right.
In normal times, I would agree. Philosophies and ideals like this effectively discourage people from taking action. That makes a lot of sense during times of peace when our asses aren't actively on the line.
However, these are not normal times. We are facing a threat that might just overwhelm our society and rob us of our way of life. We must act now to neutralize the threat or risk going extinct. We can sort out the ethics of it all later.
You are not thinking it through. An imperfect analogy to help make the point: You can't put a backdoor in encryption "just for the good guys" because there's no way to prevent that backdoor being used by other actors. Similarly, you can't put restrictions on speech "just for the really bad things" because there's no way to prevent things being labeled as "really bad things"!
because that's ALSO censorship, no?
Also, who's stopping you from starting a reddit competitor and saying whatever you want? You have ZERO rights to THEIR customers, their users, etc.
I mean, can you go to the local news station and get on the air whenever you want? Because they aren't saying what you want to hear? No. They control who they put on the air. Social media is no different in this aspect.
I'm upset at the broader topics that are always brought up when articles like this are posted. I also have an opinion about what reddit should or shouldn't do, but the post you're responding to is not it.
Dead Comment
Rules for thee but not for me is the modus operandi and Wednesday was just an extension of that.
It's another thing for social media to do it. although they are all private companies, they remain a very global big force, that do not have reach only in the US, but are global and can do the same and affect many countries and politics across the globe.
Soon, if not already happening, politics will be pushed to one side or the other.
And it won't be for stopping hate speech, it will and it is so that they can make even more money.
On the bright side, I am an optimistic person, and since they dared block the president of the USA, maybe be they might not flinch anymore at blocking pedophiles, hitmen, terrorists, and all sorts of vile users on their platforms.
Why? Removing a subreddit isn't the same as banning a user.
A ban is a ban is a ban.
You are free to create any website you want, if you can find hosting to support your message. The internet still is mostly free and wide open.
An audience though is something you earn, these networks have EARNED their audience. What you're wanting is the equivalent of walking into the 7 o'clock news and demanding to be put on the air so you can tell everyone about your goat's birthday party on Saturday.
Seriously, nobody cares about your goat's birthday party. ABCD news has ZERO reason to put you on the air, you have zero rights to their audience, or to a platform at all.
Platforms like twitter/facebook/etc are NEW. It's an EARNED thing, as long as you're a good global citizen you can keep participating, when you go against social norms you get cast out, like pretty much every civic organization in the history of the world.
Town Drunk, sex offenders, felons, etc. all cast out for going against norms. Should they all get equal platform time to defend themselves 24/7 and everyone is required to let their content go across their feed on social media? How's that not also authoritarian, sounds a lot like communism to me...
The state seizing control of private business communication channels and forcing it open for everyone regardless of their message whether it's a birthday party, or terrorist organization recruiting message.
Stormfront is extreme and everyone knows about them. (Literally a white-nationalist website). But without a foothold on Reddit, they lack the ability to gain followers.
When LUE was banned from GameFAQs decades ago, they just formed up their own group (G00Ns, Something Awful, etc. etc.). They were no longer GameFAQ's problem, and GameFAQs no longer had to deal with its members slowly becoming indoctrinated by an group bent on posting pornography on video game forums where children were active. The rest of GameFAQs got better.
Ditto with 4Chan when they kicked the Gamergate people off to 8Chan. 4Chan got better, though the Gamergate dudes grew more extreme.
Having thedonald.win be a cesspool isn't all bad. If someone is on the fence and goes to check it out their first reaction is likely to be of disgust, especially if the userbase is hostile to "noobs" because they're paranoid about infiltration.
Is this really any better than religious idealogues burning books that aren't its Bibles, lest people get tempted to reject their faith or question their ideologies?
Or North Korea blocking any information about capitalist successes, lest that cause their citizens to question the communist / fascist ideologies they've been exposed to and cause more followers to switch?
Pretending that there aren't other opinions because you're worried that people can't properly evaluate and weigh the evidence / ideas is a weak excuse for censorship.
Of course, I should mention that I do not support many of the prevailing sentiments in r/DonaldTrump - but we should be better arming individuals with better critical thinking and believability weighting abilities, rather than resort to censorship.
"Censorship is telling a man he can't have steak just because a baby can't chew it." - Mark Twain.
The .win ecosystem is trying to parallel reddit and its doing so much faster by pulling in high profile departures.
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/thedonald.win
Dead Comment
Put your finger on the Median Republican line and it either moves left or stays put. The political divide has not been the republicans.
In the last year that changed for many reasons. The republicans have now moved. That political divide is now much larger. That 'more extreme' that you've noticed is because the political divide has shifted.
A great example I happen to have favorited on YouTube, check out the healthcare debate in 1971 [0]. It’s essentially Medicare for all (D) vs practically Obamacare (but from an R).
[0]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eBFJ7vv8vDU&feature=youtu.be
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They're behind Cloudflare and constantly DDoSd these days it seems like it.
Moreover, they've gotten threats from their ISP that they have to delete certain posts or be shut down. (which seems scary to me)
Also, please don't judge me, I just have a morbid curiosity to see what these people are talking about and how they think.
Also I read there they are losing their SSL cert or something, so that might be how centralized, non-legal authority manages to shut them down. (Which, it probably goes without saying, should scare the shit out of anyone who cares about the principles of the free Internet.)
Service-providers giving the boot to « problematic » users is as far as I know as old as the Internet.
I worry more about Google et. al. killing the free and open internet by creating centralized walled gardens. I worry more about legislative attacks on encryption, about the overzealous use of copyright law and the sorry state of intellectual property generally.
If service providers want to deplatform centers of radicalization, I think that's ok.
A private company choosing who to allow on their platform? Seems like the freedom to me. And in the absence of any government action against these domestic terrorists (they have been planning exactly this violence for weeks), it's great to see private companies step in and take action.
It doesn't really matter. If this starts being a problem, we'll use a decentralized web of trust for SSL. It doesn't have to be centralized.
Nothing good comes out of these places, regardless of where in the political spectrum you position yourself (except maybe downright fascists). Look at what happened at the Capitol, did he further the right's agenda? Of course not, if anything it put them in a much more awkward situation.
Reddit admins are enablers and they share a part of the blame. Remember how subreddits like /r/jailbait and /r/creepshots were allowed on the website for months, if not years (among many others I can't be bother to remember, including some extremely explicitly racist ones)?
Then it's always the same thing, some news outlet or politician talks publicly about how Reddit hosts fascists/pedos/racists or something like that and within two days you have bans and a heartfelt post by the admins saying how they felt that it was their duty to do something and "think of the children" and all kinds of bullshit.
Reddit is 4chan wearing a tie to try to look more business friendly.
These subreddits and websites don't host free speech, they host hate speech. I have zero issue drawing a line in the sand here. "First they came for the fascists, and I said nothing because I'm not a fascist, and the world was a better place. The end."
Hate when that happens..
You are right to worry - I remember reading an article about (FB?) moderators on anti-vaxxer pages finding themselves inadvertently internalizing that worldview, despite previously consciously not believing in it. The human mind appears to absorb information after repeated exposure, despite any conscious efforts not too - I assume it's similar to how the placebo effect works even when the person "knows" it's a placebo.
Big tech companies are largely left-leaning internally (which isn't surprising since California is the most left leaning state), so there is nothing to fear as long as you lean left yourself, (i.e. I guarantee you won't be censored for left-leaning speech any time soon).
Please forgive the language it is verbatim and I think threats of violence are more offensive than bad words.
> You had better be ready partriots! It is go time very soon. We must attack all central communications to big cities are democratic cities. Fiber optics telecom bridges supply routes we can starve those motherfuckers to death. The people are ready it is time.
>We got to give it until Monday but after that partriots we must take the fight to them, make that rally look small. Load your magazines gather your things it's time to go and take out the sorry bastards.
While we worry about the very legitimate question of what the limits of free speech are and how we ought not to create a situation where anyone serves as the gate keeper they are planning to kill us and install an autocracy.
Let's shut them down, shut them out and generally rebuke them. History shows that higher order ideals generally need to be preserved with actions when words have failed, and make no mistake we are past words with these folks.
You mean, the things a tiny handful of people post there. Most posters are center-right and don't advocate violence.
I would also note that there's been plenty of talk of violence against conservatives on left-leaning platforms, Twitter especially but many others. These people are never called out even if they talk about "rounding them up and putting them in camps" and similar Nazi-like talk, even killing them seems to be permissible. I've reported lots of such tweets and sometimes they're taken down, other times, not.
Speaking of gatekeepers, however, I wonder, how soon Google and Apple will boot Parler from their AppStores?
Of course, attempt to engage to improve the situation and help someone obtain ground truth on their own from legitimate information sources, but when it's obviously hopeless insulate yourself against those who could harm and move forward. You don't have to support the establishment, but you also don't have the right to violence because you feel slighted.
I suspect we're not very far off. However, completely anonymous, decentralized, uncensorable network ideas like Freenet, TOR, I2P never really took off only because they needed a critical mass to support them: they're not technologically infeasible, they just didn't have enough support to get off the ground. If half the users of the "normal" internet are banned from it, they're going to start discovering peer-to-peer systems - that's what happened with the internet itself, after all.
It does mean that they cannot effectively find other people with the same opinion, cannot organize, and cannot spread their opinion effectively. Suppression of opinions _works_ (unfortunately, I must say).
Taking that option away from people scares me a lot more than the MAGA mob. People storming government buildings can also be a good thing (uprisings against oppressive governments). It wasn't in this case, obviously, but the damage this mob caused, including the lives lost, is nothing compared to the absolutely terrifying situation of a totalitarian government and all communication platforms being "curated".
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Have you never heard of the DMCA?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25682785
Wikipedia was threatened for having B709D3A0CD2FEC08EAFCCF540D8A100BB38E5E091D646ADB7B14D021096FFCD on a web page.
ISPs are frequently threatening to disconnect customers who serve files, and sites that are large enough to have their own connectivity have had this for 20 years.
This one for example
https://slashdot.org/story/00/05/11/0153247/microsoft-asks-s...
"Under the provisions of the DMCA, we expect that having been duly notified of this case of blatant copyright violation, Andover will remove the above referenced comments from its servers and forward our complaint to the owner of the referenced comments. "
Agreed - though I find it's more of a headache than scary. On end, I don't like the fact that increasingly internet infrastructure is acting as a de facto judge in deciding what speech is and isn't allowed. I empathize with both parties. ISPs don't want to host speech they feel is abhorrent, and I'd probably do the same thing were I in their position.
I'm much more accepting of platforms like Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, et. al. taking down groups and banning members than I am of infrastructure providers doing the same. The former kicks people off of large communities, but people can still put together their own websites. When it gets the the point that I might not even be able to serve plain HTML that I wrote myself, because nobody will even let it go through the wires that's when I start thinking utility regulation in ISPs, DNS, etc. is necessary.
Cloudflare's CEO was very humble when taking down sites. When talking about taking down the Daily Stormer, "Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet... No one should have that power.” [1] I largely agree, though I'd offer the caveat that something needs to have this power but it should be an institution like the courts rather than individuals in corporations.
1. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/17/cloudflare-ceo-says-removing...
But where does this end? Does the phone company want to allow conversations they find morally reprehensible? Does apple want to send iMessages that denigrate their company?
After all, they are private companies! /s
I don't emapthize with the ISPs here. Internet access has become a utility which is required to participate in many parts of the economy and society. Utilities should not be allowed to refuse to service someone who is using the service legally.
If someone is hosting illegal content, that's a different story.
If Trump had been competent, he wouldn't have attacked net neutrality, he would have said net neutrality is a wonderful idea, and extended it to other layers of the protocol stack.
He would also have got on board when people like Elizabeth Warren talked about breaking up Facebook and Amazon.
Presumably violent threats?
> constantly DDoSd
Hmm...
JFC. It's a circus of terrible thinking and baseless anger over there. If that site is getting a lot of traffic, you folks who consider yourselves above such things better start fighting for what is actually true and good, because what is not true and not good is exactly what is festering over there, and if they don't get their vote, they WILL get violent again, just see how they attacked Lindsey Graham at the airport just now for breaking rank on principle... and sweeping these folks under the rug will not eradicate the cancer
They allowed the group to build and grow then once they moved off they killed the sub?
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/thedonald.win
There's something odd going on with their traffic. I've been on the front page of Reddit and thedonald.win at the same time, and either virtually nobody on that site reads the articles or the upvotes counts are being massively inflated: the upvote to pageview ratio is waaaay lower on thedonald.win then I've experienced on Reddit and HN.
I bet they are violating multiple (inter)national laws since years.
I read thedonald.win daily too. It feels like r/watchPeopleDie, some sort of morbid curiosity. Currently they're claiming Trump's concession video yesterday was deep faked. Very entertaining and scary at the same time.
To be afraid of being "judged" for your relatively tame and objective comments speaks volumes about the state of our increasingly polarized culture.
Everyone IMHO should be peering into other bastions of thought
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/thedonald.win
For reference, this is higher than infowars (#507 in the US) but far lower than Breitbart (#72 in the US), to name other, um, right-wing conspiracy-promoting sites.
This is also lower than amazon.ca in the US (#354), apparently. That probably says something.
My point: Fine indeed, as long as they "stay there". But they won't. This goes for any online community: it has effects outside of that community.
Companies like cloudfare are supposed to be dumb infrastructure, not your political cudgel.
Will Cloudflare continue to protect thedonald[.]win? I think we should call Cloudflare out.
https://twitter.com/philipithomas/status/1347621982758719489
--
[1] https://stratechery.com/2021/trump-and-twitter/
I'll say it out loud: though I despise Trump and mourn the damage he and those enabling have caused, I spend more time online looking at pro-Trump, conservative and Republican focused material than anything else. I downvote none of it, even the legit crazy/scary stuff, and in the rare cases I comment, it's carefully worded to be neutral or even sometimes conciliatory, though always honest.
It scares me that many people feel the need to apologize for openly admitting that they looked at material from 'the other side'.
More often, people will refrain from posting their actual, perhaps nuanced views entirely, due to the fear of being judged/attacked/whatever. Didn't Paul Graham write an essay about that?
My wife was writing a research essay to present to our local Toastmasters group, which she is a relatively new member of. She was going over the talk with one of the senior members, one on one, on zoom, and she mentioned, in passing, that our family is going to delay getting the Covid19 vaccine a couple of months, because we've been exercising (essentially) phase 0 (extreme) lockdown consistently since last March. We can do that because we're blessed with the ability to work and (for our son) go to school from home.
The person my wife mentioned this to just lost her shit, and went into a verbal rampage about how to delay getting the vaccine is akin to being an anti-vaxer, how it was immoral to not get it as soon as humanly possible.
To be clear: If any of me, my wife or son came into contact with other human beings with any frequency, we'd get the vaccine as soon as possible. We're not afraid of it.
But others need it before we do.
However, that 'nuance' was entirely lost in an emotional, knee-jerk reaction which reminds me of so many other things we see today.
Was there voter fraud in the 2020 US presidential election? I'd bet my life on it; that there was at least a single single incident of fraud. Did that fraud in any way change the outcome of the election? Of course not.
Apologies for the tangent.
I want to encourage everyone to consider looking carefully, deeply and compassionately at what 'the other side' writes and says. It's not easy to do, but I believe it's a necessary, critical work that all of us need to honestly engage in.
Quality post. Thanks for it.
They were openly writing about throwing liberals off helicopters etc...
70 million people voted for Trump. Understanding them better is not a bad thing.
Does not mean agreeing with them.
And yes, same.
Your average Trump voter is just a normal Republican. They voted for Trump because there was an R next to his name and defended him because he was on their team. The Democratic voters would be no different if the dems ran an equally ghastly candidate. (They obviously have not done so, and I am not making the claim that's random. I'm not saying 'both sides are the same' in this post.)
It might be useful to understand the thedonald.win crowd, but it ain't 70MM of your countrymen, Americans.
Dead Comment
the difference is that r/the_donald is more violent. They cordinate gatherings, "attacks", a violent protests.
r/politics which is liberal bubble is more peaceful but both these communites censor opposing views and is dangerous to democracy
Why not just tour your local Psychiatric Ward?
Please keep downvoting. I bathe in Maga-Moron tears. Poor Snowflakes.
(It’s easy for me to say ofc, I have no horse in this race)
Their worst right now is much worse than expected, I would be ashamed to be associated.
And it's a lot more complicated than who you voted for out of two choices.
That being said, identifying that the support for Trump is about 50/50 does not _really_ tell the right story here with thedonald.win -- this isn't a representative of the ~half of us in the US who voted for Trump (or would if we voted)...it's a representation of a small, extreme culture, part real and part just trolling.
I doubt OP would have apologized quite so hard for watching Fox News. Fox News's editorial content is somewhat to the right of the average Republican voter, but not by nearly as much as thedonald.win -- that's something that represents mainstream Trump voter (aka Republican voter) worldview.
This is one of the top threads on that site RIGHT NOW. Its easy to judge someone participating in that discussion.
No, they didn't.
Edit to add: Downvoting facts?
I dont have a horse in the race neither other than stock market.
It's not that strange. It's why elections are supposed to be confidential. Public opinion is always going to shift. During Clinton's reign we had the clinton crazies who hated him. George W bush? Did anyone like him? Obama derangement was readily labelled racism. Now Trump derangement is very strong. Biden will have his haters, that's coming.
However, the derangement is real and even the illusion you're for trump will gain you hate.
So even winning, it doesn’t really need to be that close to half of the U.S.
Not to say that isn’t a sizable chunk or anything.
Hacker News is a news site so I imagine little to no one on the Trump train is here.
That said, reading what people are saying in an effort to understand and to de-radicalize is not something to be ashamed of.
It is clear, simple and harmonic.
Kudos for the design. I wished reddit would like that way.
Wow, that sucks. What ISP is that? Why can't they just take the money and host the service without censoring other people?
Not to me, because free speech, even in the US, was never "absolutely free" speech - incitement to riot is punishable by law, for one.
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