The Stuff removed / changed / pulled relating to Trump

Agema

You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver
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In which we see the return of a flagrantly racist, sexist, homophobic, antisemitic webcomic. Charming.
There's nothing wrong with racists, sexists, homophones and antisemites as long as they support your point of view on internet "censorship".

And hey, if they're right on that, doesn't that mean they're probably right about the other stuff too?
 

XsjadoBlayde

~it ends here~
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The fake crusade for free speech


Very curious information, and by curious I mean flagrantly unsurprising.
 
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Schadrach

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Dude, it's way older than that. It''s been rattling around for decades if not centuries.
True, but there's a certain irony to invoking Obama's use of it. Also, I by default assume no one is aware of anything that happened more than ten years ago, no more than 1 year ago if it directly contradicts their politics. It saves me a whole lot of being disappointed in humanity.

Because they get attacked and shut down by the opposition, like what happened to Parler, Gab, etc. Cloud companies stop hosting them. Payment processors stop processing payments for them.
Any excuse for the biggest tech companies to kill off any upcoming competition. Anything bad that needs an alt-tech platform to be "punished" in some fashion happens hundreds or thousands of times over on Facebook, Twitter and/or YouTube.

There's nothing wrong with racists, sexists, homophones and antisemites as long as they support your point of view on internet "censorship".
Stopped clocks, twice a day and all.

I assume you consider the FIRST STEP act to be an evil thing that must definitely be repealed since it was a result of the Trump admin? As opposed to an act that merely didn't go far enough, like I do? Hell, I use FIRST STEP as one of those rare examples of Trump doing something good.

And hey, if they're right on that, doesn't that mean they're probably right about the other stuff too?
No. It turns out that when someone makes multiple statements (especially on unrelated topics) that they need to be evaluated separately.
 
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ObsidianJones

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Can we just point out that Twitter bans thousands of people a day? No one cares about "OMG CENSORSHIP" when they are ousted.

No one cared when Twitter banned Revenge Porn


People quickly got over it when Milo Yiannopoulos got banned, and saw that if they weren't complete asshats, they could still share their thoughts.


And it's not like people are unaware. As in the Milo article, people are praising themselves for cracking Leslie Jones.

Within the alt-right’s fortified castle on Reddit, users were positively gleeful over Jones’s upset reaction, particularly at r/KotakuinAction and the notoriously offensive r/OpieandAnthony. (Warning: Link may contain racial slurs and hate speech.)

"We finally made one of them fully implode," reads one typical response at the Trump forum r/The_Donald. It’s unclear who "We" and "them" are, but it’s a safe bet that "we" encompasses the general alt-right movement and "them" is a mix of anything including feminists, progressive internet communities (so-called "social justice warriors" in alt-right speak), and the four new Ghostbusters themselves.

The tone on Twitter was likewise oddly triumphant
The argument seems to really boil down to "... but I WANT to be a complete asshat, yo! Why must you take that away from me?! You're mean for denying me the ability to torment someone else!"
 

Houseman

Mad Hatter Meme Machine.
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Can we just point out that Twitter bans thousands of people a day? No one cares about "OMG CENSORSHIP" when they are ousted.
On the contrary, many of these people do complain, and many do care when they are made aware of it.
It's just that exponentially more people are made aware of Trump's banning, than some random internet celebrity.

The argument seems to really boil down to "... but I WANT to be a complete asshat, yo! Why must you take that away from me?! You're mean for denying me the ability to torment someone else!"
Like I said before:
I like how the argument is always framed as the people who are being censored are always in the wrong, and the people who are doing the censoring are always in the right. It's almost as if people considered the matter objectively and didn't try to preemptively justify the act, they would see the flaw in their argument.

What if a liberal were kicked out of a Republican-run restaurant for the crime of sharing liberal opinions?
 

Seanchaidh

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Meanwhile:


Organizers of peaceful protests against police brutality face 48 years in prison. It's political correctness gone mad!
 
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Agema

You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver
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No. It turns out that when someone makes multiple statements (especially on unrelated topics) that they need to be evaluated separately.
Unfortunately, that's not quite how it works in practice, as extremist recruiters know perfectly well.
 

Schadrach

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People quickly got over it when Milo Yiannopoulos got banned, and saw that if they weren't complete asshats, they could still share their thoughts.
I was actually more offended that Jones herself wasn't also punished. If you actually paid attention as it all unfolded, it basically started with some random nobody asshat saying something racist to Jones, and Jones responding by retweeting it and telling her followers to get them. Literally telling her tens of thousands of followers to directly attack someone, even if that someone was a real shithead should have counted as a TOS violation. That tweet from her stirred up the broader asshat coalition, and Milo taking part in that was what got him banned (as he rightly should have been for pretty direct TOS violations).

Similarly, I thought it a great example of how the TOS isn't evenly applied that someone doxed notable asshole Mike Cernovich and posted dox and instructions on how to file anonymous police tips against him on her blog, with a sample that makes him sound like a heavily armed, roided-out drug dealer included. She then tweeted that and someone who we're not allowed to talk about who had 40k followers at the time retweeted that to her followers - which in neither case was worthy of punishment (despite it being doxing, instructing readers to harass the target and being pointed to by someone with a large number of followers for no apparent reason except to direct harassment his way). In fact, the person who retweeted it later had her org made a Twitter Trust & Safety partner. Despite that being the literal opposite of what should have happened.

Unfortunately, that's not quite how it works in practice, as extremist recruiters know perfectly well.
I tell you, the sky is blue. Therefore, we should kill everyone who isn't white and prop up God Emperor Trump by divine right! Deus Vult! Is that how that's supposed to work?

Hell, I guess that explains why 2+2=4 is a racist statement, if stating one thing accurately is a short circuit way to get people to embrace anything else you say up to and including white nationalism and genocide.
 

CaitSeith

Formely Gone Gonzo
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There is also other reason for things being pulled: conspiracy charges. The rioters who entered the Capitol could be charged of conspiracy, and they weren't exactly careful with not leaving evidence in social media ("freedom of speech" comes with the fine print "in case of a crime, anything you say may be used against you in a court of law"). Naturally, a lot of people, big and small, participated in such discussions, fantasying in storming the Capitol, without realizing it may actually happen or that it might be consequences. These removals not only silences the mainstream advocacy in favor of more rioting, it also erases evidence of people who participated in the conspiracy, but never went to the Capitol.

Still this isn't nearly as bad as with the Dixie Chicks.
 

Agema

You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver
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Hell, I guess that explains why 2+2=4 is a racist statement, if stating one thing accurately is a short circuit way to get people to embrace anything else you say up to and including white nationalism and genocide.
The aim of recuitment is never to show someone a swastika tattoo and ask them if they want to crack some Jewish skulls. Unsurprisingly, that turns most people right off.

It's to break in with some gentle middle ground. Earn trust and sympathy, a sense of amity and community. And then manipulate people's drive to conformity and agreement to slip in slightly more edgy stuff, and then take it further, and so on. That's a lot of how the average cult works. Unless you hadn't noticed 70% of a major US political party believes an election was fraudulent despite there not being any evidence, and some of them were prepared to sack the seat of the legislature over it.

So yeah, I think you do have a responsibility to think carefully about who you want to normalise as right thinking people, because that's how a lot of the more extreme people are looking to get their foot in the door.

Acting like the human race are a bunch of supremely rational creatures of logic is a major way people manage to completely fuck things up: just take a look at the bullshit economics has come out with on that score.
 
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Dwarvenhobble

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Can we just point out that Twitter bans thousands of people a day? No one cares about "OMG CENSORSHIP" when they are ousted.

No one cared when Twitter banned Revenge Porn


People quickly got over it when Milo Yiannopoulos got banned, and saw that if they weren't complete asshats, they could still share their thoughts.


And it's not like people are unaware. As in the Milo article, people are praising themselves for cracking Leslie Jones.



The argument seems to really boil down to "... but I WANT to be a complete asshat, yo! Why must you take that away from me?! You're mean for denying me the ability to torment someone else!"
Part of that is it wasn't a full ban across the board. Milo was banned from twitter but not facebook, youtube, instagram and everything else at the same time.

You want to talk about an unfair ban Sargon being banned for sending gay porn to white supremacists would probably be a more unfair ban.

As for Revenge porn it's a difficult one round consent etc also no-one was too upset because who the hell uses twitter as their sole source of porn?
 

Revnak

We must imagine Sisyphus horny
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Oh and also adding this


Apple is now being sued by people to pull Telegram from the store.
Pulling Telegram would be horrible. It’s widely used in the Middle East as a method of communication that avoids government surveillance and censorship. In some places there really isn’t an alternative for internet communication let alone social media (the latter of which I don’t care about).
 
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Schadrach

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Apple is now being sued by people to pull Telegram from the store.
If Telegram were big enough or well known enough among the target demos then they already would have. Because it's really about half a dozen or so tech companies watching each other's backs and preventing alternatives from gaining too much traction, while allowing them to exist just enough to avoid antitrust issues.

They just wait for an excuse to kill an alternative, regardless of what chicanery is going on on the larger platforms - for example, most of those arrested for being involved in the Capitol Riot didn't have active Parler accounts and most of the coordination related to it wasn't done on Parler (rather on Facebook), but it makes a good excuse to try to kill Parler. Credit card companies pulled support from PornHub because of a NYT article that suggested with the right search terms you could find CP on there which is taken down when reported but gets reposted because users can post, and just ignore the literal millions of reports to NCMEC regarding CP on Twitter and Facebook.

a method of communication that avoids government surveillance and censorship.
Can't have those, if you let those exist, then people might say things that are not approved on them.
 
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