It got less media play but the founder of the Hind Foundation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hind_Rajab_Foundation) that is going after IDF soldiers for war crimes that happened in Gaza got his Instagram account taking down at the same time, but it wasn't restored:
It seems that there are repeated waves of account deletions affecting those not in power and only if you raise a huge stink is it undone but only on a per-account basis. And each of these waves slowly erodes those voices. It sort of feels like a strategy.
Erasure from the internet (suppression) of free speech and 'unwelcome' perspectives is just going to get wider and more subtle considering the same people/motives that are vested in Social Media are having their sticky fingers now also in "AI" chatbots.
That's why it's paramount that we as somewhat privileged, informed people now chose truly open and distributed platforms (mastodon, etc) instead of keep on posting x and other zucker-SM network links that keep users in their walled zoo.
That is the classic problem of decentralized networks, if it is big enough there will be spam at which point you will need moderators to sieve it out. But I think AI can also be helpful here instead of having centralized moderators we can have AI (hopefully self-hosted/decentralize) moderate your network graph for bots/spam.
> The current platforms are overrun by them but seemingly only by choice. A truly open platform would be a bot playground.
You seem to be assuming two things. First, that there is an "easy" solution to this which is available as a result of centralization, and second that there isn't a decentralized one.
The first one is pretty hard for a service which is trying to use a gamable algorithm to show you posts from total randos, regardless of centralization.
As an example of the second one, suppose that your feed shows entirely or heavily disproportionately posts/reposts from people you follow and the people they follow, and you can turn off the second one for specific people. Then if you don't follow bots, you don't see bots. Replies show up if either the reader or the original poster follow the reply poster, and by default for the poster of what it's a reply to or if they choose to make it visible to everyone who follows them.
Now bots can show up to post replies, but only one person will see them and they'll be at the end of the list and marked as someone they have no connection with. On top of that, the user's client can do any kind of algorithmic bot detection they want.
There's also a huge asymmetry between what clients know about each other and what the platforms know about the clients. Bot detection is only really feasible by the platforms.
If a platform was open then we could spin up blocklists for known or suspected bots. We created blocklists for bittorrent. We create and manage blocklists for ads. If we had direct control over our social media feeds we would create blocklists for bots too.
Indeed, and zero-knowledge attribute-based proofs - if done genuinely! - could even by bound to a citizen's id and still be anonymous, which would allow: one person -> one voice and solve bot and disinformation traffic.
But it depends, as much of the solutions to our current problems, that things are solved correctly on the root. In this instance, trustworthy government and transparent processes that guarantee zero-knowledge and free, equally, genuine speech and discussions.
I organized a peaceful protest in Sun Valley Idaho in 2021 on Reddit, and within 10 days my account was suspended, all my 15 years of posts and comments deleted. This was done in parallel with an operation conducted by an army of psyop bots that would try to scare people about it, claiming I was a terrorist, crazy, etc.
I was surveilled and harassed by the FBI during this time as well.
The post is so vague that it isn't clear what this is about. I would suggest just creating a new reddit account under a different email? Are not the main limits to reddit accounts is 3 months age and 1000 Karma? That is super easy to achieve, no need to wait years to restore your old account. Just make a new one. You are also allowed to have multiple reddit accounts, just do not double vote on things.
Meet Jordana Cutler, Meta's Public Policy Director for Israel and the Jewish Diaspora [1], previously a senior adviser reporting to Benjamin Netanyahu, the chief of staff at the Israeli embassy in the US and party chairman of the Likud Party, who has bragged about suppressing any pro-Palestinian content [2].
At least you didn’t organize on BlueSky, where nobody would show up but you’d be villainized by 100 people for some minor transgression they found in your post.
Brad Lander is posting on BlueSky about him and a bunch of other American Jews and Israelis who were assisting with a olive harvest and essentially acting as human shields against settlers.
IDF detained the Americans but let him go because he's a public figure. The rabbis are still detained. Go figure.
Maybe it's because Brad Lander "proudly" invested New York City's money in Israeli weapons company Elbit Systems during the midst of the Gaza genocide. That should count for something.
I haven't either. I don't use any of the general algorithmic feeds, only my following feed and algorithmic feeds for particular technical topics of interest. The ability to do that is exactly why I'm using BlueSky rather than LinkedIn or Twitter for this sort of information.
On Twitter, you can't get away from some random offensive racism, e.g. against Indian students at football games, or whatever the 2 minutes hate is ranting about on a certain day. In BlueSky, I get all signal and pretty much zero noise.
BlueSky also has far better tools for stopping dogpiling than Twitter, by stopping the quote-tweet phenomenon. All around a much much healthier place if one chooses the healthy direction.
Amazingly, the top replies to their post about targeted harassment are from accounts trying to redirect anger at several accounts that are common targets for dogpiling. It's deeply baked into the BlueSky culture and I don't know how it came to be like that.
I've tried to prune my feed to keep it out, but now the problem is that journalists I follow eventually find themselves targeted by a BlueSky dogpiling campaign and leave the platform.
EDIT: A lot of responses are trying to blame the dogpiling victims are saying the problem doesn't exist. Let me give you one recent example, where Rick Brewster made a proof of concept of Paint.NET running on Wine and got dogpiled so hard that he deleted the post and backed out: https://bsky.app/profile/rickbrew.bsky.social/post/3muiv4phe...
It was really jut the people least agreeable to Twitter's new ownership. Whether you view like or dislike of Elon as toxic is more down to personal taste. I find the culture there perfectly pleasant.
A lot of the dogpiling is from people who come out and say some dumb shit and demand respect. When they get ridicule for their ridiculous take, they play the victim.
That being said, there's also the tumblr->twitter->bluesky contingent who have always loved dogpiling and they're mostly there because the site doesn't have musk boosting nazi posters.
> A lot of the dogpiling is from people who come out and say some dumb shit and demand respect. When they get ridicule for their ridiculous take, they play the victim.
Literally victim blaming.
The recent high profile example was a person who made a proof of concept of Paint.net on Wine and got dragged across the website so hard he felt he had to delete it, apologize, and abandon the project:
> A lot of the dogpiling is from people who come out and say some dumb shit and demand respect. When they get ridicule for their ridiculous take, they play the victim.
Literally victim blaming.
---
If you say something outrageous in the 'public square' and you get mocked for it by the public, how are you a victim?
I don't know why that would happen to someone trying to make a paint.NET clone, but that's also certainly not the type of post the person you replied to was talking about.
> I don't know why that would happen to someone trying to make a paint.NET clone, but that's also certainly not the type of post the person you replied to was talking about
You’re not seeing it. Everyone who dogpiled the Paint.NET on Wine guy also thought they were doing legitimate mocking of a guy who said the wrong thing in a public square. The people who didn’t like AI thought it was valid to create a harassment campaign against him for using AI as part of his process. The people who thought all things Microsoft must be opposed thought it was valid to create a harassment campaign for making a Microsoft product work in more places.
Everyone in each of these campaigns thought their crusade was valid and the victim brought it upon themself. That you can see it being invalid in some cases is getting close to realizing why it’s a problem. Not everyone agrees on what’s right or wrong, but these public shaming campaigns serve to try to force everyone who disagrees out of the platform to strengthen the echo chamber.
You’re already noticing that you’re outside of the acceptable echo chamber thoughts because you don’t understand why the Paint.NET project would attract harassment. If you supported that guy and your post got traction, you too could get dogpiled. Do you think you would have said anything “outrageous” in the public square by questioning why anyone would criticize that guy?
I don't think people responding independently to something you post online is harassment.
Do you?
For example, if 500+ people replied to my comment here with why I'm wrong, I don't see how I'm some victim. People have their right to voice their opinions. I'd just ignore replies to that comment when I'm tired of engaging.
> If you say something outrageous in the 'public square' and you get mocked for it by the public, how are you a victim?
Consider two ways of responding to someone saying something you don't like.
1) You post a reasoned critique of what they said. People who agree with you repost your critique so that a lot of people read it. Your purpose and effect is to convince people that they're wrong rather than punish them for disagreeing with you.
2) You accuse the other person of being an evil villain/pedo/nazi/terrorist. No reasoning is provided because their guilt is self-evident from the fact that you're pointing at them in an accusatory manner while wearing your tribe's official colors. The others are expected to not only do the same but also cut ties with them and try to have them harassed/fired/arrested/assaulted. Anyone who tries to rise to their defense is subjected to the same treatment.
The second one is just bullies using tribal loyalty as a pretext to rationalize their vacuous hostility.
On Bluesky even the most centrist, moderate views are often dogpiled as "something outrageous". I got dragged into a flame war because I posted something to the effect of "I dont think communism would magically solve all our current problems"
bsky is primarily seeded with a culturally anti-AI, human-centric artist (illustrators, gamedevs, hobby coders, writers) core — these are the first folks who wanted to leave twitter/X but continue to share their art. Rick's og dogpiled post is now deleted so I don't know the exact drama, but I'd bet good money that he was either introducing AI features to paint.net, or trying to ship some vibecoded stuff no one asked for that is obviously vibecoded, and advertising them to the core hater-group as something they would be excited about.
I'm not defending the dogpiling behaviour or even anti-AI sentiments in general. However, no one is entitled to saying things to people who don't want to hear it and receive only positive feedback for it. Sometimes even if you're excited about a thing, you have to keep it to yourself until you're in a room with others who would actually share your excitement. AKA maybe bsky isn't the place for him to share that excitement, and IMO that's neither good nor bad, but it's important to know that when you're cultivated a large-ish audience.
It's intrinsic to the medium. The Twitter-like format is inherently toxic and irredeemable. It can't be fixed.
The microblogging format with likes and reposts selects for short highly viral stuff that pokes at the brain stem. Rage bait, trolling, lynch mobs, and stupid brain rot stuff are all ideal forms of content for this medium. Nuanced and genuinely insightful ideas are too long.
I think short form content in general is bad. Short form video seems to be less actively toxic but more brainless and attention-destroying. Short form content is the refined sugar (or in some cases the crack or the fentanyl) of discourse.
Reddit-style sites (like this one) are better but still suffer from these problems. HN avoids the worst of it by having a culture and mod policy of downvoting trolling and low-effort crap.
I think one reason why HN is somewhat saner, is that computer nerds are one of the few demographics today who still largely post from a real computer and keyboard. Smartphones with their small screens and keyboards discourage longform text no matter how much people claim to be proficient writers on them, but people on HN don't have the same obstacle to typing a couple of substantial paragraphs with actual depth and nuance.
I am reminded about the effort and patience it required to have long-form conversations on fidonet with people 2-3 states away due to the bbs hop delay. While the topics weren't necessarily particularly serious, the effort required to have any communication at all meant both sides spent time and effort.
I often think back to this early networked communication as stark contrast to the ease and rapidity we communicate today and how that same easy and rapidity has driven the quality into the ground.
No public votes, and mods that aren't insane is what keeps HN quality reasonable.
I was active on Reddit up to 2018 or so, and at that point it was already sliding full speed towards the cesspit it is today. Public votes destroy dissenting views, and moderators treat the site as their personal fiefdom. There aren't a lot of danish communities left on the internet, but r/denmark was getting unbearable because of constant tone policing, finger wagging and micro management by the mods. That, and constant low effort meme spam. And that subreddit was far from being the worst case.
> It's deeply baked into the BlueSky culture and I don't know how it came to be like that.
Bluesky was the refuge for Blue MAGA after Elon came out for Trump. That group (myself included at the time), comprised the majority of the user base and growth. Most have since returned to X, I stopped using Big Social media altogether. Bluesky leadership had a number of fumbles along the way that I suspects puts them post peak forever.
Someone dubbed "the running of Will Stancil" which I think describes a particular phenomenon of anti-engagement. I think there are some of anti- derangements about.
But generally these things cluster very strongly around specific people.
Alas Journalists I think are high value targets. Ideally they'd use tools like blocklists to help each other defend against dog piling. Ideally we'd have more automated response systems to detect and manage problems, which we could build, because of how Bluesky data is (so far, "spaces" incoming which change the gane) all public data. Blocking posts etc. The ability to handle this problems is much higher on Bluesky than elsewhere.
This can happen on Bluesky. It sucks. But for most people it's not an issue at all. It does unfortunately drive off some higher profile people though.
HN sure seems desperate to believe BlueSky is the bad spot. I suspect other networks too have metrically built up this defense systems for themselves, to justify their continued use. x spectacle of posts to sing the propaganda song that this is the bad place over here, it's too left, it's too woke, it's too activist, it's too digpiley. It seems unmoored, completely unhinged to me.
It would be interesting to figure out if these that do the dogpiling are real users or not. It does not reflect my experience on BlueSky. But I am just a single datapoint.
Without the discussion getting crazy, as a participant, do you think No Kings is poorly named? For an outsider like myself, it seems like a confusing movement. I mean the guy was elected, so obviously not a king. And couldn't even change the name of the art center, so not that powerful. So the king thing seems misplaced? And when they ask the people at the protest, they can't seem to articulate what the point is, except they don't like the guy's policies and conduct.
Kings disregard democracy and do what they want. This is precisely what this elected official continues to attempt to do. No kings is a reminder that he and all other elected officials are not kings.
"No kings is a reminder that he and all other elected officials are not kings."
It would be great if the "other elected officials" part turns out to be true, but my in my experience I don't see that happening. Have there been any policy proposals out of No Kings that would create better oversight and accountability?
There are ideas for how to improve representation, which comes first. I do not get the feeling that current elected officials are interested in ceding their position, power, and prestige.
One of the good ideas are expanding ranked choice voting.
One of the bad ideas is justifying gerrymandering because the other side is doing it too.
Roughly only 10% of House seats are actually competitive. This is a problem that needs fixing.
The sheer number of participants implies that leadership can ignore those ideas at their peril. So if they don't know what the No Kings ideas are, they ought to look them up.
Agreed. A No Executive Orders protest would be more clear and would be one I could get behind. It does seem like it would be good to limit the scope of Executive orders. Like, many were asking, how can he just close down the department of education with an exacutive order? Oh, it's because the department of education was formed by an excutive order of an earlier president in the first place.
The scope of Executive Orders is already limited by the Constitution. What additional limitations are you asking for?
In some cases Presidents have issued orders that exceeded their legal authority. The effects of those are eventually blocked by the judicial system, although that necessarily takes some time.
Well, a president should certainly be held accountable for any executive order that is overturned on constitutional grounds. Not only should the president have (and use) plenty of legal counsel to avoid this, but a president stepping beyond constitutional bounds is acting illegally which (a) none of us should and (b) ought not go unpunished.
Held accountable how? Like a fine or something? Maybe a strongly worded reprimand from the judiciary to be added to the president's formal HR employment record?
DHS literally telling federal court judges that they are going to continue extraditing someone in face of a court order not to, that they are not going to turn a plane around.
ICE refusing to make officers available to law enforcement for investigation of issues.
A lot more happening than "making executive orders", though kudos to Trump for trying to sign executive orders that even his own DOJ are not just illegal, but unconstitutional.
Do you think making things up and attributing them to other people is more or less constructive than replying to what they actually said? Do you usually get a great response when you go for cute X clapbacks, or... what?
He's not attempting he's fucking doing it. Which to me signals deeper problems with our supposed "system of checks and balances" that we're taught since grade school. The system was specifically designed to prevent this, and yet it's happened. Whether Trump is impeached or imprisoned or whatever is secondary to plugging the holes he used to do this in the first place.
While I agree with you, there is also the fact that America chose Trump 2.0 - something we should try to understand and learn from. We, the credentialed elite (most people do not have a college degree), have failed to help our neighbors and fellow citizens.
The advent of the computer changed how automation impacted society. We (majority of HN audience) benefitted immensely, rising in wealth and social acclaim, while at the same time failing to create new tasks for regular people, who's jobs we replaced with technology.
I can't vote anyone out alone, so groups/ideas like No Kings seek to collect people around some general organizing principle. Involved people are more likely to vote and it's possible that you highlight the issues for people who aren't aware or energized enough to vote.
Plus, protests can influence other people in government, outside of elections.
There was an attempted self-coup last time he was voted out. I think it's pretty reasonable to be extra reactive to anti-democratic tendencies from him.
Keep an eye on the Texas Senate race and what happens if Talarico wins. Paxton has granted himself the ability to investigate election fraud as the sitting AG.
Let's see if the will of the people is honored, or if the king steps in too.
January 6, 2021 is well known. There are numerous examples leading up to, on the day, the years after, and even the first weeks of 2.0 - all interconnected - all anti-democratic.
"NoKings" is one identity for the resistance to autocratic tendencies and the backslide of democracy seen globally. We does not need to be so literal, step back to see the full picture.
What specifically on January 6th, 2021? Asking people to remain peaceful and respect law enforcment is criminal in your book? (Twitter immediately censored these tweets on that day, btw)
Go rewatch the rally, there are plentiful anti-democratic statements.
Then watch the riot and explain to us how more than 100 officers were injured and why the people who did that deserved pardons, please, I am curious for the current justifications on the hard right
interesting justifications or absolvement... is this a reframing of the planted FBI conspiracy theory?
Are you saying those people who Trump pardoned, he did not call "his people" or "true patriots"? Are you objecting to the video evidence of the crimes committed by those same people on an individual basis?
Have you looked at any of these cases yourself (done your own research)?
Are you open to considering that anti-democratic statements were made by the people on stage at the rally?
How about the part where he was pushing Pence to certify the "alternate electors" instead of the real ones? There's a reason some of the protesters were chanting "hang Mike Pence", and it's not because they disliked his haircut.
Returning votes to a state to check in with the state and see _IF_ they want to substitute a different slate of electors was a perfectly legal action at the time. They created a new act in 2022 to make that illegal called "Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022".
Are you implying some kind of collective punishment that Trump is somehow responsible for what everyone of a certain political alignment says?
Are you claiming that seven Republican state chairs decided to send "alternate electors" to DC, even though they lost all the relevant recounts and court cases, without at least Trump's approval? I can't prove you're wrong, but I don't buy it.
What I can say with certainty is that, when Trump pressured Pence to certify the alternate electors in spite of losing the recounts and court cases, that's not legal, and that's on Trump.
The No Kings protesters seem to want to disregard democracy because they don't like the current president. Repeatedly claimling the sky will fall given an election result seems to be undemocratic. Which certainly goes both ways, but right now it is the democrats who have fallen into this line of thinking. What has he done that is any more undemocratic than previous presidents?
I agree the far left says concerning things, as I do the hard right.
The difference to me today is I see intentional cruelty to our fellow humans by those currently in power. Especially from the likes of Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller.
Naming taxpayer-funded public facilities for a living politician has been historically unusual in America. LaGuardia Airport and Shushan Airport in New Orleans were both named for sitting politicians because they were strongmen or allied with strongmen.
Living ex-presidents were not fair game until the partisan late 1990s. It was still done primarily as a posthumous tribute. Naming taxpayer-funded facilities for a sitting president who hopes to find a way to run again was not done under Franklin Roosevelt and has always remained drastically outside of the Overton Window. While in office, Trump has now directed attention to making the following public items promote his personal brand, name, image or likeness:
US Passports, US entry visas, US Naval class of vessels, US Institute of Peace federal building, National Park entry passes, and currency struck by the US Mint;
Moreover, presidential staff have confirmed that the president has asked for New York Penn Station to be renamed for himself before he would agree to release congressionally approved federal funds for its improvement. He also explored having Washington Dulles International Airport renamed for him; since then, his supporters have renamed Palm Beach International Airport (IATA PBI) for him and changed the IATA designation to DJT.
The president recently diverted over $22MM from Homeland Security and Border Protection to pay for television commercials featuring himself talking about causes dear to himself. I have not tracked whether this spending went to all major broadcast networks or was directed to be spent at networks that the president considered deserved the tax money. The third commercial "was virtually identical to an ad for Trump's Republican reelection campaign in 2024 and showed him walking down a hallway as his voice can be heard warning of a 'final battle' against 'globalists' and 'warmongers'." The president has reportedly agreed not to continue spending government money on this series but refuses to reimburse taxpayers the $22MM.
Naming stuff after himself is certainly a good demonstration of his narcissistic tendencies and is tactless. I do think the criticism over this is fair but I don’t consider it that high on my list of priorities given it doesn’t materially affect anyone. We should probably have limits, and a good demonstration of that is the failure to rename the Kennedy Center.
I do agree that the ads should be criticized, but there is precedent for previous presidents having done something similar, not that it makes it above scrutiny but rather not so bad.
We can care about many things at the same time. We also care about the humanitarian crisis created by Elon Musk from dismantling USAID and RFK Jr. from running HHS based on medical misinformation.
I have enjoyed our many threads we have had. I appreciate you keeping this civil. Feel free to have the last word, I do enjoy the push back and your perspective.
> I don’t consider it that high on my list of priorities
The problem many Americans have is that these are the top priorities of the president. Even the Iran war was more about him and his legacy, to "be the guy" who ended it, not understanding Iran's ability to inflict damage on allies and close the straight, because Trump removed many of the people who have been analyzing this for decades. Perhaps there were good reasons prior presidents have not decided to do this.
Then he turns around and does deals with Putin while blaming Zelensky for diesel prices... it's all so shameless, it should be shameful.
If you listen to oval office or state room events in full, you will hear him forget what he is talking about and go to his standard ballroom, arches, name on this or that. He's more focused on himself than anyone else.
Iran was going through a humanitarian crisis after the Iranian regime killed tens of thousands of civilians, not to mention the nearly 50 years of oppression and suffering that the IRGC has inflicted. The approach of appeasement was disastrous and gave the Iranian regime a lot of money.
So you want constant war in Ukraine? What did Obama do when Russia took Crimea? What did Biden do during the Russia-Ukraine war that improved the situation?
He’s a narcissist, but so are all of them but Trump is probably more tactless about it than most.
He went to war for his legacy and miscalculated badly, because the people who understand the region and the IRGC were fired or pushed out. He was sending Witkoff and Kushner (real estate guys) to negotiate nuclear topics, alone, without experts in nuclear science or Iran / IRGC.
My expectation is they do to Trump what they did to Carter.
All true, and all both alarming and disgusting... with one nit.
In 1926, coinage was struck with the image of the sitting president, in honor of the nation's 150th anniversary. It turns out that Trump on coins for the 250th anniversary has precedent.
The rest of it... yeah. Appalling, especially when you put it all together like that.
I don't think any other president promoted anything like January 6, and doesn't recognize an election of a president to this day - undermining democracy, the same democratic system that elected him twice.
Just that alone is enough I think.
But you can also see his disgust to western democracies, and his fascination with autocracies, the vast majority of them are extremely incompetent - thank God for that at least.
What has he done that is any more undemocratic than previous presidents?
You're joking right? In just the past 48 hours he attempted to remove over 20,000 people from the voter rolls. A preliminary check of the data revealed that more than half of these people were born in the U.S. and thus were automatically entitled to vote.
Last week he attempted to denaturalize a sitting U.S. legislator based on supposed irregularities in her immigration paperwork from when she was a child...even though the paperwork had been reviewed without issue by the federal government when it was first submitted and again to confirm her eligibility for office at the start of her first term (which began during Trump's first term).
He has openly mused about using the Secret Service to assassinate people he doesn't like. For the past 2 years, he has been threatening to jail and murder his opponents, and ordered his DOJ to prosecute his opponents for made-up crimes.
A variety of sources, some more frequently than others depending on current events and interests and some subscriptions have lapsed (the new york times, npr, foxnews, the wall street journal, national review, al jazeera, the guardian, the telegraph). I would recommend you and others do the same.
Ilhan Omar’s alleged corruption and immigration fraud and the rampant fraud in Minnesota are good examples where the left leaning media has ignored but others have not.
The executive (1/3rd of the government) being capricious with the press is _undoubtedly_ embarrassing and unamerican, but is so far away from the behavior of a true monarch that the name "no kings" is still farcical at best.
That's one example, there are daily reminders to why "NoKings" has staying power as a movement, compared to the Indivisible brand. I suggest watching a full segment from the oval office, listen to the things that preoccupy his mind.
I do agree there is a ton of hyperbolics in NoKings / Indivisible / the left. I work within these organizations, enduring it, to temper their messages and opinions. Minds are moved in real life while biases are reinforced online. It's hard to forget there is another human with different experiences when you sit face to face.
Oh my parents and their partners go to all the no kings rallies. I can see the size of the movement dwindling over time. I'm very happy someone is attempting to temper though, because, as I've said for a decade now, the hyperbolics drive way more support for your opponents than they do for your cause.
The way out starts with community. I cannot understate how much getting involved has positively impacted my life. We have to interact with those different from us if we are to find collaboration and compromise.
Here are some things Obama did that were unprecedented or very concerning regarding the press:
* Obama extensively used the Espionage Act to uncover government sources used by the press and also against the press directly
* Obama secretly subpoenaed the phone calls of AP reporters
* Obama didn't allow or severely restricted photojournalists
I don't think that it is good to ban the media from the White House, and I do think the much of the criticism is fair, but to then claim that this is undemocratic is wrong.
Both parties, the oligarchy, are the problem. Power continues to concentrate in the President, Congress does nothing. SCOTUS polls marginally better, the Press has ceased fulfilling their role. Wealth inequality reached an all time high in America. We The People are furious for varied and valid reasons.
I do think there's a problem and certainly agree with the general sentiment. I also do think we probably have it better than most other countries. So, perhaps we can deal with the oligarchy and fraud within our system. I do think that is what led many to vote for Trump, in that they feel failed by both parties and Trump was an outsider, similar to Bernie's ascendance.
I agree, I have not heard it put better than The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel. It goes beyond party politics to the failures of Liberal Democracy stemming from its own success.
I just watched Trump talk for 5 minutes sitting at the desk in the oval office about how he gets to choose what he likes and the blathering about a seriously good question being 'fake news'. The president acting like a petulant toddler makes me feel like the name couldn't be more appropriate.
He tried to overturn an election, his destruction of executive agencies is both unprecedented in scope and illegal in manner, he breaks the law constantly to enrich himself, and he repeatedly ignores the will of the legislature. It isn't "I don't like his tax rates, he's a king". His conduct is anti-democratic.
The Project 2025 agenda (only that latest in a long series of Heritidge Foundation plots), to destroy thr federal government to shatter universities, to generally keep the government from functioning, in a desire to pull people towards libertarianism, towards disbelieving in government, was terrifying to America during the election. Terrifying. No one wanted it.
Today though, this plan to destroy the government is in full effect. It's had remarkable success with the quadfecta of GOapnhouse & Senate doing nothing, allowing the president to seize the power of the purse, enact recisions, whatever. And the partisan hack joke of Florida election recount denier "justices" enabling him at every turn, using shadow docket rulings at an unheard of rate to step in to deny the regular courts their normal motion of things, to forward dear leader along. Executive power we have no belief they will continue to espouse when it's a Democrat in a hopefully less gilded tacky ass White House. Project 2025's progress undoing America & governance has been a horror. https://www.project2025.observer/en
You might consider the guy who organized the Project 2025 paper, as well as several authors, sit or talk with Trump every day. If you have familiarity with the contents, you can see the actions towards their goals.
Russ Vought and Stephen Miller are notable examples.
These people are not hiding this fact, they ar rather proud and loud about it. What they have also done is convince a number of people to go out and disavow the connection on their behalf.
What are you trying to say though?
What you said has nothing to do with my comment.
You said it was "terrifying to America" and "No one wanted it".
That's your opinion. It's your opinion that you stated as a fact. I think a lot of people wanted it. I personally know many people who were excited about it and wanted it. It may be terrifying to leftists, but certainly not to America as a whole.
You might slow down and stop reacting emotionally. I'm not the same person.
> not to America as a whole
Most Americans now favor changes to the government which would require constitutional changes. They may not all use the same words, but there is a significant consensus things are very broken.
It's weird how terrorists trying to blow up the nation with guns and bombs get such a bad rap, but the people actively proudly working to dismantle and tear down America within don't suffer the same wrath.
I agree with your original statement. Some people did want this. Some small percent. Who are traitors to America, who want to destroy it. I don't think those people deserve anything but antipathy and to be persecuted as traitors.
No Kings is a catchall for no tyrants or authoritarians. It's what the founding fathers were worried bout when setting up the US representative democracy with checks and balances and a constitution. They didn't want a president to act like a tyrant or a king.
I don't think they had a wealth tax back then, but if that's somethings the voters had wanted their representatives put into law, I don't see why not. And yes I do support it to prevent even great concentrations of wealth across generations.
But what is that have to do with No Kings being a protest against the president acting like a tyrant?
The UK had a wealth tax back then in the form of a land value tax paid by landowners.
Several of the colonies had general property taxes on land, buildings, and physical property which continue today. Given that "capital" was not a thing back then and wouldn't be for almost 200 years, these property taxes were in effect wealth taxes.
And somehow the federalist society folks stick their head in the mud and make up some nonsensical interpretation, violating the clear and obvious interpretation, to justify further eroding rights and democracy. A party of greedy and traitorous fools taking down the country they pretend to love, enriching themselves at every step.
They were describing their experience dealing with kings and people who want to be kings. King is a personality type, not only a role. In more clinical settings they’re called narcissistic sociopaths, which is what Trump has proven himself to be, so that’s why we call him a king. Sometimes their title is “dictator”, sometimes it’s “emperor” or “fuhrer” or “chairman”. In this case his title is “president”, but he acts like a king, so that’s why we say we don’t want kings. This applies equally to wannabe kings.
He's referred to himself as a "dictator". CPAC put out imagery likening him to Caesar. He's referred to himself as "King" and put out that ridiculous AI generated image of him as a king. He put out that ridiculous AI generated image of him as Jesus (and then later gaslit reporters about it). Him and his campaign have repeatedly stated ideations for an (unconstitutional) third term "and beyond".
> except they don't like the guy's policies and conduct.
That too, but his conduct rises above "policies I don't like"; he has shown direct contempt for the other branches of our government. For example, his administration has essentially dismantled or destroyed various functions in violation of the Constitution: take USAID as an example here: USAID is an agency created de jure by Congress, yet it has been de facto dissolved by the administration. We all learned, I think, in grade school, that the job of the executive is to implement the laws passed by Congress. From an article at the time about it:
> “The President does not have constitutional authority to ignore a statute that establishes a department or agency,” says Saikrishna Prakash, a law professor at the University of Virginia.
He holds the judicial branch in contempt too: quite literally any time any judge does anything he disagrees with, the judge is blasted as "left-wing radical", even and including cases where the judge was a GOP-appointee. Further examples include ignoring judicial orders and depriving people of access to the courts by physical force (see the many cases of the administration's removal of people from the country; to put it one way: "For depriving us, in many Cases, of the Benefits of Trial by Jury", or "The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U. S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene" — Justice Sotomayor, joined by Kagan & Jackson.)
> I mean the guy was elected, so obviously not a king.
The point of the protest is to prevent him from making himself a king.
> And couldn't even change the name of the art center, so not that powerful.
This is really weak cherry picking. He has successfully removed medical care from millions of Americans, started foreign wars of aggression, destabilised several countries, probably tanked US international reputation for a generation... he is incredibly powerful.
You could argue he did change the name: the name “Kennedy” is nowhere to be found on the building. The Kennedy Center is in state of existing but also not. It’s mandated to exist, it’s funded, there’s laws and courts that say it should be opened and operational… and yet, it isn’t because one man doesn’t want it to be.
A bunch of European countries (including all of Scandinavia) are constitutional monarchies, and they don't devolve into the sort of anti-democratic behaviour we're all seeing from Trump. As a UK resident, I would prefer if the UK were a republic on general principle, but I fail to see the monarchy causing any real large-scale harm to society (individuals like Andrew notwithstanding).
The real point they should be making is "no more despots". Some despots are kings, but some are styled presidents, such as Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un.
Also, legitimately elected or appointed officials become despots all the time. Hitler had a plurality (but not outright majority) of votes in 1932. Salazar was an MP and minister of finance, and actually legitimately tried to resign from that role several times over many years before he was eventually nominated to the role of prime minister. Ferdinand Marcos won the Philippine presidential election in 1965 with some amount of intimidation, and the Philippines only formally became a military dictatorship under his rule in 1971.
In many ways, that's the scariest scenario — people who legitimately get elected to power, and then use that power to solidify their illegitimate rule.
> As a UK resident, I would prefer if the UK were a republic on general principle, but I fail to see the monarchy causing any real large-scale harm to society (individuals like Andrew notwithstanding).
I'm not a UK resident [obviously] but I thought the parliament was explicitly superior to the monarchy? Isn't the monarchy essentially cultural theater at this point, for centuries now? The moment the king causes a crisis by stepping out of his very narrow lane, one Act of Parliament could make the monarchy a memory, right? I suppose he could refuse ascent then, and that would be a legitimate constitutional crisis.
Yeah, it's a mostly ceremonial role. But that's my point, really — it's not the title, it's the behaviour.
I would argue that, even though it's not my preference, there is real political value in the monarchy today still. E.g. Charles's speech to Congress[0] has a certain weight to it that wouldn't be there if Charles were an elected leader instead of a monarch.
Like first of all I would call a person who tries to pass the checks and balances of a democracy, even if they fail, the target of the ideals or “no kings”
And while we can disagree with the extent to which any one act or bribe elevates someone to dictator, and whether or not all the accusations are true, can you not understand why someone caught up in the narrative ecosystem happening over the past few years may develop the perspective that Trump is trying to consolidate power?
Also “no folks who incrementally Test the limits of power and fail” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
> Like first of all I would call a person who tries to pass the checks and balances of a democracy, even if they fail, the target of the ideals or “no kings”
Its incredibly frustrating to talk to people that take the position of "Well eventually they gave up after pressure from the courts and legislature, so no harm no foul." There's a difference between doing things that have a reasonable legal basis that the courts disagree with and what much of this administration was doing -- sometimes fragrantly ignoring court orders until D politicians got involved to pressure compliance.
Using the 2020 coup attempt as an example, yes, the courts shot down his attempts. The issue is that *he even tried* -- the attempt was transparently not good-faith concern about election integrity.
A common bad faith political tactic is an attempt to derail conversation and reframe it around linguistic pedantry, to discredit an activist movement by pretending not to comprehend its rhetoric. The same thing happened with "Black Lives Matter" and "Defund the Police." Instead of talking about actual issues, all of the oxygen was taken up with futile attempts to litigate the specific meanings of these terms.
One of the first AI slop nonsense coming out of the White House was Trump wearing a crown on a mock Time magazine cover with "Long Live The King" printed on it.
NoKings has name recognition. I volunteer with my local Indivisible, but people know this name far less.
Trump acts like a king, even if he was elected. He gets tributes and requires deference, clearly visible from the foreign and corporate donations, and behavior of the Republican Party. Or take the "super intelligence" thing, him dictating what a technology shall be called, lest you become an ENEMY OF AMERICA. Or the repeated attempts to silence the media. If we consider the Kennedy Center you brought up, Trump's name was on there, then removed by court order. His response was to close it in spite. The Kennedy Center remains closed to this day, until he gets his way.
Trump has tried to violate most of the Bill of Rights. There are reasons people see every day for why NoKings sticks and resonates.
I do agree NoKings (and broadly the far left) have really bad messaging, a product of echo chambers (imo). I suspect the Democrats will learn the wrong lessons from the midterms... sigh.
Most political movements (and arguments) in the US use hyperbole. No Kings is hyperbolic to show disapproval of Trump's actions. This single-sided bias on a conceptual is also a hall mark of most political movements in the US. It's fine if someone takes a similar action that I see as good, but it's bad if I think it's bad.
Before I get hated out of existence, please note that I don't like either party or political tactics in general because they've devolved into politically commercialized populism without any empathy or critical thought. Just as an example, deportations under Trump are roughly on trend with Obama, Trump targeting activities are similar to Obama targeting conservative groups with the IRS, Obama lied in the SoTU about the gender wage gap, Obama was hard on journalists (highest prosecutions?) Like Trump has been, and Obama ignored court orders such as issuing immigration permits in violations of a order similar to Trump ignoring orders. I could sit here and hope that any of these abuses results in better oversight, but that would be naive based on the history.
Edit: if you're going to disagree, at least contribute to the discussion.
Deportations under Obama may have been approximately equal to under Trump. Obama did it without nearly so much violence, though.
Obama lied in the SoTU. Um, OK? I mean, we should expect better than that, but are you seriously saying that Obama lied as much as Trump does?
For me personally, the single biggest thing was January 6, the whole "alternate electors" thing, and Trump pressuring Pence to accept the alternate (fake) ones. That was a full-blown attempt to steal an election that he lost. That I do not forget and do not forgive. And if you can show me something Obama did that's on that scale, well, I'll be surprised.
"Deportations under Obama may have been approximately equal to under Trump. Obama did it without nearly so much violence, though."
Is there good data for that or is it observation bias?
I'm not saying scale is the same. I'm saying that these abuses will continue to happen without accountability. The scale argument is not an excuse, merely a manifestation of cognitive dissonance.
> Is there good data for that or is it observation bias?
In fact there is, these numbers are published by the government. Trump has still not averaged what Obama did, nor topped the the greatest numbers of all time, so Obama is still greater than Trump, much to Midas's chagrin I suppose, given how much Trump talks about Obama, like Obama lives rent free in Trump's head. /s !/s
And now you're likely on some kind of watch-list or database, and accomplished approximately nothing except making yourself feel morally superior to others. Congratulations! Much winning.
I spread the words of Michael Sandel to hundreds of left wing people, so they might come back towards the center. That they might acknowledge their complicity in creating the situation we find ourselves in. The constituents of NoKings is far more diverse than you know. Try joining us next time to see with your own eyes.
Please reflect on how this comment of yours relates to your prior comment to which I replied, and how others might perceive to to be equally applicable there. I do not understand where I said anything about your politics, can you tell me where or how? I thought I was replying to your perspectives on NoKings
There are a lot of heated comments here today, we all need to chill a bit. Why did you choose the words you did in your first reply to me?
"Network effects" is just "the emperor with no clothes": People believe it matters because people say so.
There's no reason why Emperor Zuck's court can't be disrupted by some monkey king yet to appear.
We're at the dawn of the Third Age of the Internet.
Someone has to be the Frodo to take Facebook & Twitter's rings into Mount MySpace and melt them down into the same puddle of lava as the legacy media that came before them :)
Did you miss the little ripple that grew into a tsunami called TikTok?
Although it didn't aim to replace "traditional" social media, it became enough of a threat to US homogeneity.
Even though TikTok doesn't even try to improve its messaging and friend UX etc, a lot of young people in Asia (outside China) use it as their primary platform.
It’s absolutely a real thing. The people in my life use WhatsApp because that’s what everyone else they know uses.
I don’t use WhatsApp, which just means I’m not on the group chat. Nobody uses my preferred option because nobody but me is on it, which means not much actual chatting is happening.
Don’t worry No Kings day is a joke organized by a Never Trumper and with the goal of making sure nobody protests like France and instead protest in a way where it’s just a humiliation ritual.
To each their own, but I would not like to be in France during those riots. (Also, does the outburst of violence actually result in more changes being done? If no, then what’s the point; if yes, then the most violent organiser policy wins; does not seem like a winning strategy)
they understand, the problem is that they agree with Meta.
They are happy with the outcome but have no courage to say it directly so they hide it behind these "questions"
"Facebook is not a person. Facebook should not have "rights" nor "political views"."
In the USA, the supreme court has ruled a corporation DOES in fact have rights. Like the lawsuit of advertising medicine that a state banned-- the SC ruled that was infringing the rights of corporations to "express" their speech.
As someone from UK, I find this whole "Corporations have more rights than I do" very disturbing but thats how it is
That's why I write "should" and not "does". And in the UK and the EU, corporations also have more rights than they should (according to my worldview anyway). I think you should find the UK and EU laws disturbing in the same way as the USA's. Corporations also have way less liabilities (example: imagine if you could deduct your "operating expenses" (e.g. food) from your taxes, in the same way corporations do) and face way less penalties for their misdeeds than you do, which a bigger problem.
While you're right in a literal sense, I think it's pretty hard to dispute that Zuckerberg can operate unabated due to his majority ownership of voting shares.
That's actually a pretty good illustration of my point. Because Facebook has many of the rights that people have (own property, enter contracts etc.) but very few of the liabilities (can't be imprisoned, rarely ever pays any fines in practice), Zuch can use it as a proxy to do a bunch of shady stuff, that he wouldn't do if he risked being held personally liable for it.
If companies as a legal concept didn't exist in their current form, then we wouldn't have this problem of one person, or more commonly many people, using them as a proxy to get away with a bunch of unethical stuff. Often way more unethical that whatever Facebook / Zuck is doing, such as destroying ecosystems, prioritizing profits over worker safety, etc.
There are obvious reasons why it's expedient to grant the same rights to a collective organization as to its constituents. If you're getting confused by the abstraction, you're welcome to pretend that the board of Facebook (which is comprised of humans) are exercising their individual rights to free speech.
I'm not the one being confused here, though it's fun to see you're already resorting to ad hominem. It reveals a lack of actual arguments, as does your appeal to obviousness.
But yes, I'd like to see the board of Facebook and the boards of many other companies being held liable for the actions of those companies. But for some reason, it's only ever "expedient" to grant companies the rights rightfully belonging to people, and never "expedient" to impose the same sorts of liabilities on them as on people. (Not that a non-physical entity such as a company could ever practically face the same penalties as a physical person anyway, which is another ("obvious" in your parlance) reason not to grant them those rights.)
If I was interested in going down the ad-hominem route I'd claim that you simply see the status quo as "obvious" because you lack the power of imagination to consider a more sensible alternative.
In fact, I think your argument is so backwards it actually supports my case. Why do I need to "imagine" that the owners of the company are using their rights to free speech as individuals (which is obviously not what is actually happening)? Why can't they just actually use those individual rights?
You don't like a trawling boat emptying out the lake in your village? Just imagine that the boat's captain is using a fishing rod to do the same, that's clearly a comparable situation!
I think I understand why people make this connection but I don't actually think there is one. Freedom of speech is possibly the #1 thing people get confused over, due to the similarities between "I don't like your speech" and "I want your speech to stop" and "I want the government to stop your speech."
What I'm seeing is an argument for, "I don't like Facebook's speech. I think you shouldn't like it either. So I think we should all walk away."
"Freedom of speech" is used as shorthand for both the general culture of open listening to disagreeable views, and for a series of laws related to the first amendment.
98% of the time people are talking about the former, and the only ones confused are the people assuming they're talking about the latter and linking the face-palm-worthy "showing them the door" XKCD.
There's also a blurring of private/public in certain instances. There were cases in the 1980's regarding free speech rights in a shopping mall. Privately owned, but a public space (defacto public square).
> 98% of the time people are talking about the former
I'd say damn near 100% of those 98% will still cite the constitution, sometimes even crying "1st amendment!" in lieu of "free speech," so I'd say your overall point is wrong. They are basically saying both at the same time, with intent, while still not understanding it.
I think I was responding to you when I accidentally responded to someone else (perhaps, I'm a bit confused now, but that's my fault).
How is it obviously not true (genuine question)? I am not an American myself, but used the American definition as it's the simplest (it's very absolutist, as per my understanding). But what definitions exist where it is not defined in terms of how the government can treat you? I'm from Canada. We have concessions against hate speech, for example (maybe the US does too, though? I'm not sure). But "free speech" doesn't mean you are free criticism from fellow citizens or even businesses based on what you say.
Sure, some people are talking about the former but are genuinely mixed up about the latter.
What do you feel would be the good-faith way to respond to such people?
Surely it's not by sidetracking into pedantry about the law, which at the end of the day both they and you know that's not what they're really fired up about.
I think that any reasonable person who is just misinformed is going to understand, possibly after some time if they are the sort who find it hard to admit they are wrong. Otherwise, if they are going to try and claim that "No, constitutional 'free speech' means I can say whatever I want without consequence from ANYbody" then I don't think there is a good-faith way to argue that.
Anyone who is "fired up" about free speech but feels that their freedom of speech is being violated by someone other than the government has an explanation to give.
If the explanation is that they feel that other people have an obligation to listen to them, then I don't care.
My freedom of speech includes the freedom to reject other people's speech. If they can't tell the difference between a disagreement and suppression of speech, then that's their problem. The generous interpretation is that they don't fully understand the issue. The realistic explanation is that many people value their own freedom of speech over the freedom of others to the extent that they view disagreement with their views as an attack on their right to hold their views.
Essentially, "freedom for me but not for thee", and I don't rightly care about what enemies of freedom are "fired up" about.
But at the end of the day, much of what conservative "free speech" protests against big tech have been about has been that big tech drew a line on things like violence and hatred of protected classes, and conservatives don't like being told that their ideas, while legally allowed, are not welcome in polite company.
I'm not American. I chose to use American terms they have (from what I understand) the simplest definition in that it is considered absolute. Other countries have concessions for things like hate speech and other such matters (and yes, there is a lot of nuance to it). But my point was is that "free speech" is in regards to how the government treats you, not: "I can come to your business and treat you like shit and you have to sit there and take it."
EDIT: I just realized you were not responding to me... oops!
> conservatives don't like being told that their ideas, while legally allowed, are not welcome in polite company
As long as there are a litany of people like you who are totally comfortable with a double standard like this, the only option for conservatives is to exercise power and forcefully shove the shoe on the other foot until you change your mind.
I hate that, but I don't really see another way we'll ever get a culture of free speech, because people like you are completely comfortable exercising power towards a culture of, ironically, "free speech for me but not for thee"
An informed and educated populace is essential to the function of any universal democracy. The regulation of capital is essential to maintain efficient markets. It follows that the regulation of capital with respect to communications is necessary to maintain democracy and efficient markets under a notionally capitalist system.
There's clear moral valence to this issue. The popular (mis)understanding of freedom of speech as applied to corporations is in direct contradiction to the notional principles of western sociopolitical ideology. Resolving this conflict is only difficult because of our conditioning.
This lesson doesn't make sense in a two-party system where the two parties have wildly different levels of trustworthiness.
The left suppressing lies only opens the door to the right suppressing the truth, because the right was an enemy of truth and a spreader of lies from the beginning. The answer can't be "allow the lies so the truth has a chance to survive", that's just a compromise that brings us further from the truth.
Demanding neutrality on truthfulness in mass communication, especially during extreme political turbulence, is a terrible idea.
You're missing the point - if someone, broadly and irrevocably, is responsible for deciding what is true and repressing things that say otherwise, then that mechanism, even if used truthfully by one party and viciously by another, is itself a bad mechanism by virtue of being so easily abused. The very existence of a "bad others" in your government implies you do not want to give power to government.
That is the whole point. if you add power while you're in office, you better believe that power will be used against you while you're not. It's not about good vs bad, it's about giving power to an organization that itself can be flipped good or bad by one election.
Of course "ours==good, theirs==bad" is a different, dangerous cognitive problem, but institutional power creep is orthogonal and needs to be fought regardless to protect all of us from that power being used against all of us. That is a prerequisite to civil society wherein we're forced to live with people with completely different world views.
Because right now, platforms can and do cave to government pressure, so they're just thin proxy enforcement arms against dissent.
> The left suppressing lies only opens the door to the right suppressing the truth, because the right was an enemy of truth and a spreader of lies from the beginning.
It must be so nice to live in this imaginary world where the left does no wrong whatsoever but the right is the evil incarnate.
Furthermore, who decides what lies are and what truth is and who is responsible for enforcing this?
It’s honestly a very dangerous mentality. It’s what makes people do things like murder Charlie Kirk in cold blood for doing nothing other than speaking words, or attempt to shoot Trump at a campaign event.
It leads them to become the very bigots they think they are fighting against.
Wasn't the Trump shooter a registered republican? Not to mention, the Charlie Kirk shooter from a conservative family, and the attack had more to do with internet culture than leftism?
That is true. I remember the second of the two inventors on the early mRNA patents had some concerns, and suddenly his interviews got taken down. And everyone seemed happy about it. The first inventor was all in, and had many interviews posted.
Yeah but what GP is commenting on is that you can't make the argument "deplatforming is okay because free speech doesn't apply to companies" and then complain about deplatforming in this instance.
I agree with GP that the arguments one makes should reflect one's actual reasoning, e.g. "I believe it's wrong to say thing X and therefore I support deplatforming in that instace".
But because "I support deplatforming in every instace" sounds stronger many people falsely claimed that to be their reasoning.
And now they're forced to deal with the consequences, i.e. being called hypocrites.
> Yeah but what GP is commenting on is that you can't make the argument "deplatforming is okay because free speech doesn't apply to companies" and then complain about deplatforming in this instance.
I suspect that the argument you're referring to is more like "free speech does not imply that all deplatforming is unacceptable." Again, it is not the case that the only 2 consistent views are "all deplatforming is unacceptable" or "all deplatforming is acceptable."
Did you try reading my comment before replying? Because I never claimed anything close to "the only consistent viewpoints are ..." Reading what I wrote might also give you a clue as to what argument I was referring to, because it's not what you "suspect".
I think the main reaction (at least in tech circles) is that companies like Meta have the power, the legal protection, the political cover, and the indifference to shut down anyone on their platform. So making them the sole provider for your tech and communication is a huge risk.
And this incident (negligent takedown of a community on an important day) demonstrates the point perfectly.
> There is no legal definition of "hate speech" under U.S. law, just as there is no legal definition for evil ideas, rudeness, unpatriotic speech, or any other kind of speech that people might condemn.
> In the United States, hate speech is protected by the First Amendment. Courts extend this protection on the grounds that the First Amendment requires the government to strictly protect robust debate on matters of public concern even when such debate devolves into distasteful, offensive, or hateful speech that causes others to feel grief, anger, or fear. (The Supreme Court's decision in Snyder v. Phelps provides an example of this legal reasoning.) Under current First Amendment jurisprudence, hate speech can only be criminalized when it directly incites imminent criminal activity or consists of specific threats of violence targeted against a person or group.
Not everyone thinks we should be free to spread hate. Germany has good historical reasons to ban holocaust denial. Rawanda has good reasons to ban genocidal speech. No more going on the radio to say, "Cut down the tall trees".
The reason to not platform hate speech is the same reason you're not allowed to yell fire in a theater or bomb in an airport without their being one. Or say you're going to kill the president. Even the US has limits on what can be said, including liability laws. You can't just defame your neighbor and not face legal repercussions if they take you to court.
One can imagine this argument during the Salem Witch trials. "She's a witch" wasn't just a joke back then. It could get someone burned at the stake.
The US has good historical reasons to ban the promotion of socialist/communist ideology, yet I don't think many people on the left would be down with that.
Maybe. Except "organizing a peaceful protest" is a question of intent, not of consequences. The total destruction of Paris and the curious case of Jewish stores being targeted while muslim owned stores being protected by the following mobs is a great example. The people who started the protests? Naive students. The people who actually showed up? Different people. Very different.
You've erected a strawman. The argument was not "free speech doesn't apply to companies", it was the exact opposite, i.e. a company's prerogative to control speech on their platform comes downstream of their own free speech rights. This remains true today and the article does not argue otherwise.
No, the argument is definitely "you have no expectation of free speech if you're using e.g. facebook to deliver that speech". Which is certainly an opinion to have, but in my view a silly one. You might as well say that if you chose to send mail using a "private company", it's that's company's "free speech right" to inspect your mail and throw it away if they don't agree with the contents.
> if you chose to send mail using a "private company", it's that's company's "free speech right" to inspect your mail and throw it away if they don't agree with the contents.
That's somewhat true currently.
If you ship mail or packages with UPS, FedEx, Etc they are allowed to open and inspect what you send. The USPS is not allowed to do that, not without a warrant. When people ship drugs via mail they use the USPS for that reason, that it's more difficult for them to obtain warrants to discover suspected drug shipments while a UPS or FedEx will happily open any package they suspect may not be legal to send.
First of all, there's a massive difference between transporting a private package from point A to point B vs hosting someone's speech on a privately owned platform and broadcasting that speech through a privately owned network, with wider consequences that do not come into play when dealing with private correspondences between parties.
Next, paying a fee to a private company to ship your package confers certain obligations about what you are entitled to, when you are utilizing a privately owned platform for free, you are not entitled to anything.
Finally, a private company is certainly within their rights to refuse to ship your package based on an any legal criteria they choose.
> when you are utilizing a privately owned platform for free, you are not entitled to anything.
Factually wrong. Both when paying, and when using something "for free", there's a contract in place (terms & conditions, etc.), and that contract also needs to obey local laws. I don't know if you've ever heard of GDPR, but that's one example of things you are entitled to when using a "privately owned platform for free". Even the USA has laws regarding this, though less strong than GDPR (look it up).
> refuse to ship your package based on an any legal criteria they choose
The question here is what is a "legal criteria". And just because the law is a certain way today, doesn't mean that's the way it should be. It used to be legal to kick people out of restaurants because you didn't like the color of their skin, it's not today. It used to be legal to fire people because they were members of a union or other political group, it's not today. (All depending on your country's laws of course.)
Also, the point of an analogy, is to illustrate a point through a comparable situation. Pointing out that there's a "massive difference" but never explaining what the difference is and how it affects the validity of the comparison, is just a (very common) misunderstanding of what an analogy even is.
There's an old old idea here, the Paradox of Tolerance, that might help alleviate your confusion:
> But we should claim the right to suppress them [intolerant ideologies] if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols."
It came from Karl Popper, the guy better known for philosophy of science and using "falsifiability" as a primary criteria for what's science/not-science.
That the "free speech" crowd that said "we must allow all hateful and intolerant speech" sure does seem to quiet up when those advocating for open societies get silenced!
Any ideology can be plugged into the "paradox of tolerance" and it works just fine, including yours [EDIT] and mine. That is why it is worthless. What is your defense if the conservatives, who currently have the political upper hand, invoke the paradox of tolerance against the left to justify suppressing them?
It should also be noted that [EDIT] the preceding sentence to Popper's quote is omitted: "In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise."
thank you for the attempt to enlighten me, but how could someone not have heard this quote when internet commies resort to using it like some unquestionable gospel whenever they rush to defend trillion dollar corporations suppressing dissent of the working class?
3) it's not an unquestionable gospel, it's something to be considered and carefully see it it applies, or is valid
4) I have literally never seen another person cite the Paradox of Tolerance, something that I learned about decades ago, so imagine my surprise at your sarcastic response.
If this is such a common response in your experience, why don't you have any critique of it, other than strawmen?
The search shows 34 pages of comments and that doesn't include [dead] comments. I'm surprised it's that few; I suspect there's a time cutoff even though the settings says there isn't.
I can't be sure what you're trying to imply, but it certainly doesn't imply that anybody else should have encountered this topic in HN. I'm on here a lot, but only see a tiny fraction of the site, and it only comes up at most every couple of days across the entire site.
But even if somebody had encounters it a lot, it certainly doesn't excuse illogical behavior if only attacking straw men, refusing to engage at all, and make up weird insults about communism.
I notice that you too have no counter to it!
In a society that wants to minimize violence in daily interactions, we still allow it to happen. Claiming that the desire to minimize something means a total ban is just a childish and simple way to approach the issue. The residual of others to engage with the idea further proves how little they have thought about it.
No. "They" cheered when it was used to deplatform hate speech.
Deplatforming people organizing a peaceful protest is very different. If you cannot understand how that is different, then I worry about your critical thinking skills.
was peaceful dissent about certain policies of 2020-2022 also "hate speech"? because, if I recall correctly, it was being suppressed with unprecedented zeal on every single platform. again, with applause.
These conversations often end up in some weird motte and bailey where you argue that you care about free speech, but it turns out that you actually just thought COVID was not real/not significant/not dangerous/not an emergency. So your issue ends up not being that they made a decision on it (free speech concern), but that you feel it was the wrong decision (content-specific concern).
So before we go back and forth on the intricacies of content moderation, can you briefly describe your beliefs on COVID?
Well I wasn’t the one who said “it’s hate speech.” There are a number of things that get content-moderated.
Hate speech, porn, bullying, doxxing, disinformation, Islamist propaganda, violent imagery, revenge porn, animal abuse imagery, incitements to violence, criminal planning, drug dealing, arms dealing, gambling, fraud, etc
As a free speech maximalist, are you willing to defend all of those with the same vigor as the COVID case? Or do you too actually draw a content-based line somewhere (while pretending you don’t?)
what the platforms do is put "no porn" in the ToS, then turn a blind eye to the porn they like but apply talibanic definition of "porn" to things they dislike.
Do you actually read the comments you're replying to, or are you just picking a keyword that appears in the text and rattling off whatever comes to mind as a result?
oh, so you aren't just pretending. I'm sorry, I'll spell it out: that comment was not to be taken literally. I just chose porn to make my point, which was that I do not object to platforms having rules, I object to their practice of selective enforcement of those rules.
Good luck defining a content moderation rule that doesn’t require discretion and judgment in how it’s applied lmao
Classic HN to take a problem like this and just assert it’s easily solvable while proposing no such solutions. Even SCOTUS couldn’t define porn and you’re expecting content platforms to define (without discretion!) a far broader set of far squishier concepts at far higher scale.
Both groups of people seem to harbor a lot of hatred, and they seem to want to express it a lot, so your distinction between what is and is not hate speech kind of seems to be based on whether you agree with it or not.
If you find this interpretation to be uncharitable, would you care to clarify what truths this interpretation overlooks?
Ultimately the platform, and yes there are huge grey areas. I don’t think this instance lands in one of them and that’s why Facebook isn’t even claiming it does.
It seems like you’re trying to avoid dealing with the substance of the issue for some reason.
Usually local police if they are on the scene. If they start seeing violence, they start telling people to disperse, followed by tear gas and then rubber bullets.
Personally I find censoring all links to the New York Post Hunter Biden laptop story a couple weeks before a presidential election to be much, much more egregious.
(To be perfectly clear disrupting protests is also very bad!)
My argument is that the principle of election non-interference applied to this specific situation can reasonably yield “we should suppress sharing while we figure out what’s going on.”
It was absolutely reasonable to suspect (in the early hours) that a salacious, bombshell story involving stolen documents published on NYPost without a listed author could potentially have been an actual disinformation attack.
Under that set of facts, the “we should try to limit interference in the election” can reasonably yield the behavior that it did yield.
That's an absurd and frankly offensive standard, and I fear that you already know that.
The same standard could be used to trivially censor literally any information from any outlet. Conservatives could censor all NYTimes articles because they have compelling evidence the NYTimes newsroom is taking money from foreign sources (they are), has a history of releasing false information (they do, all news outlets eventually do), and being biased against conservatives.
In fact, your standard would censor precisely the MOST important stories, because these are the most likely to influence elections.
I didn’t propose a standard. I proposed a principle. The goal of a responsible platform should be to not put its thumb (as a platform) on the scales of an election.
But since you apparently have a better one, how about you propose a standard?
> The goal of a responsible platform should be to not put its thumb (as a platform) on the scales of an election.
You earnestly believe censoring the laptop story was congruent with this principle?
I'm sorry but I just cannot believe that you are a real person. *Obviously* putting their thumb on the scale was the entire point of the censorship! I'm in serious disbelief that you wrote this and posted it.
The part I disagree with is that ""misinformation"" is ever a valid reason for censorship, period.
Even if some speech is known to be false (insofar as your epistemology allows), it should be criticized and proven to be false by more speech, not silenced through censorship.
In any case, I'm still baffled by how you think you've articulated logic that can supports that they "didn't put their finger on the scale". Obviously they did, obviously they knew they did. What other reason could they have for doing it? If your principle were instead "they should put their finger on the scale when opposing actors intentionally spreading false information" at least you'd be consistent.
Though then the irony of this whole thing is that the story was true the whole time.
So that would be option (2), correct? Is there a reason why you didn't just say "Option 2: Content moderation teams should not impede content that they suspect are election interference attempts"
> Even if some speech is known to be false (insofar as your epistemology allows), it should be criticized and proven to be false by more speech, not silenced through censorship.
This is provably false, as in this is not how speech online functions.
The whole system of suppression today, is built around the idea of flooding the channels with more content than can be assessed and analyzed. A room full of people shouting and no one having the time to understand.
It's a good principle but it's been empirically proven that it doesn't work out that way in reality. Misinformation does not get effectively countered by spreading true information after the misinformation has spread. Even spreading it alongside (like with community notes) gives mixed results.
Certain misinformation "works", but censorship also "works", so unless you can detect false information with 0.0% bias, that puts the platform's finger on the scale.
I'd much rather deal with information assymetries from individuals within the community than information assymetries from whoever happens to have control over the platforms, and is willing to use censorship.
I'd also like to add that a lot of these misinformation studies ironically wound up using information now accepted to be true or likely (such as that COVID most likely originated from a Chinese lab) as their "misinformation" - so in a way I'm glad that countering with "true" information didn't unilaterally work.
> I'd much rather deal with information assymetries from individuals within the community
Ah this must be why you're confused. You think the hazard that platforms are trying to manage is from "individuals within the community" and not, for example, foreign intelligence services.
> information now accepted to be true or likely (such as that COVID most likely originated from a Chinese lab)
Lmao uh oh. The mark of the terminally-online has been revealed! Hilarious how many Twitterites have come to simply believe that COVID originated from a lab over the last year or two despite zero new evidence emerging in favor of that theory, and actually tons of evidence against it emerging since then. It's almost like if read false information enough times, you'll just presume it to be true... Curious ain't it?
Most people haven’t spent any time moderating online communities, so they don’t have to test their beliefs against reality. This is fine, frankly you saved yourself being stuck in a fractal hell scape.
However holding to this idea that the “opposition” was deplatformed, is superstition.
I’ve seen communities start with 0 moderation, and become wastelands filled with hate speech, misogyny and harassment. Which then forces moderation to be introduced.
This happens so often, that this happened to the hate groups who were kicked off of Reddit.
Communities have celebrated the introduction of moderation, and celebrated the imposition of rules that mean you can’t be harassed, attacked and targeted.
part of the challenge is that like the car, social media has reorganized societal "infrastructure" itself, such that just a reflexive "the old fashion way" leans on a social organization that doesn't exist anymore
I don’t buy that. The old way still exists, it’s just way less convenient. It reminds me of punk rock bands that self published and followed the DIY approach versus bands that sold out the record label approach. It’s hard to DIY but you can do it if you really want to.
It is very delicious poetic justice. Some liberals warned repeatedly that deplatforming would backfire but were shouted down and ridiculed by illiberal activists hellbent on silencing their foes.
I think there is still consistency between these two things.
Freedom of speech doesn't mean that I have to tolerate a business platforming hate speech. Any platform that stands behind the "free speech" of neo-nazi groups, white supremacists, and violent nationalists deserves criticism for turning a blind eye to what they are enabling. The First Amendment wasn't built to protect citizens' speech from each other; it was built to protect us from government censorship. Facebook doesn't have a legal responsibility to protect that, and I as a consumer can expect them to take an ethical stand against things like ethnic cleansing.
And that is exactly the point the author here is making. Facebook, X (Twitter), even places like Fediverse instances and Bluesky/AtProto sites are privately run spaces with no obligation to respect your freedom of speech.
If you choose these spaces to organize your political cause, you put your movement into another person's hands. Stop doing that. Host your own infrastructure, make it easy to recover and migrate, and start organizing outside of corporate-controlled areas.
Turning to Facebook for political organizing "because everyone is there" is like doing your town-hall meetings at Walmart "because everyone shops there", and then wondering why small businesses don't feel represented in your town anymore.
It's easy to blame big tech, but you can also ask your local bar why they only advertise events through Mark Zuckerberg, and ask why their website is mostly just links to Mark Zuckerberg's websites. Ask them if they have considered that Mark Zuckerberg might not a good obligatory middleman between them and their customers. The core problem is that people have accepted the lie that these corporate-controlled spaces are "the public square", when they are the exact opposite.
Businesses operate in a world as it is now, not as we wish it to be. Facebook has a lot of people there, and also lot of businesses have it as their only webpage. If we want to change the world we start with this version that we currently have. You will have hard time convincing bar owner start renting server or paying web dev if current facebook-page is good enough already now. (Disclaimer: I do not use facebook and I’m quite frustrated when the only webpage for the business is on facebook :( )
In unrelated topic, each person decides how much to spend spend/borrow/save as it is private decision to make, but to control inflation government manipulates bond interest rates which force public to change their behaviour.
You might as well be hosting your own infrastructure by posting a sign in your living room for all the reach you will have. If you want to talk to yourself you don’t need infrastructure.
And barring people from "labeling things" is censorship, so I don't understand your point.
Speech that is hateful towards people because of their identities is hate speech. That is the widely accepted definition. It is not even a legal designation, nor does it need to be to concretely exist.
Denying the existence of hate speech isn't logical, because there are many unambiguous examples of it, and individuals and businesses have plenty of valid reasons not to tolerate it from the company they keep.
But then by your definition, nobody could ever debate immigration or trans or gay issues, because you can label it "hate speeech" and get debate shut down.
Old twitter (and new twitter) was/is private property, and the owners can do what they want with it - be as unfair as they want. Like a biased newspaper owned by a billionaire.
That's the root problem. If you want the websites of (some?) private companies treated as common carriers that's a reasonable position to take, but Twitter was/is working as designed.
(If I was king for a day I'd force all social media to only present you with posts from people you'd actively followed, and to present those posts most-recent-first. I think that single UX change to timelines would clear up many problems we currently have).
Which is one of many reasons why social media, along with the internet in general, ought to be treated as a public utility rather than a private for-profit business.
I don't use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok. I feel like people at least need to go on strike once in a while. Stop using those shitty services for a few days or a week so the landlords will make them slightly less shitty.
I miss out on all the big and little announcements. Sometimes, a family member will forward information to me about a death or a graduation. I find out about these things when I find out about them, just like we used to before the internet.
I dropped Facebook when I realized that their app was snooping on who I called and who called me.
I usually find out much later, and possibly never. This is how things were before the internet. We didn't know everything going on in everyone's life.
In the case of major events, my brother usually lets me know, for example the death of an aunt. Everyone close to me knows I don't use FB, so if they want me to be aware of something in particular, they can text or call me.
>How does that work? People post on FB or IG, AND THEN phone you / write a letter? doubtful...
why is this doubtful?
i am also disconnected from fb/ig/etc. and that is exactly what happens. family or close friends make a post for something important, and i get a call or text. for smaller stuff i get caught up at some point whenever we next talk on the phone for a regular catch up.
That's what it started out as, for sure. However, is it really "staying in touch" these days or is it simply reacting to and maybe adding a response to whatever status or content was placed in your feed.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not some anti-Facebook snob looking down on everyone else. But I have greatly reduced my use of the platform and only really use it for some groups I'm part of. While I do interact with family and friends, saying I use Facebook to "stay in touch" these days is a bit of a reach in most cases.
Frankly this kind of premature excuse making won't get us anywhere. People say they're concerned about the rise of fascism or oligarchy but when it comes to pushing back, even the smallest bit of inconvenience is too much.
The Montgomery bus boycott lasted 381 days. People walked miles and organized carpools to work for over a year.
Now we can't even imagine making the sacrifice to send our friends and family an SMS, let alone getting them to download Signal when they kinda don't want to.
My comment, "For many people, those shitty services are the only way they stay in touch with friends and family," is an observation, not an "excuse" (in your words). The fact is that most people don't even know someone who understands how bad social media is. Moreover, even if they did, as you suggest, download Signal, and even if they use it with the one person in their life who insists on it, they'll still be using Facebook for everyone else. Ingrained habits are hard to change, especially when they are carefully formulated addictions.
I think a lot of people feel like social media scratches the social itch they are feeling.
I think that is simply an illusion though. I have high social needs, and no amount of social media ever fed them in a healthy way.
Just because you are hungry, doesn't mean you should immediately reach for the bag of chips. It's important to reflect how often you do so, and whether that is getting you where you want to be in life. It's hard but really really important.
A lot of people say they are very lonely despite spending all their time on social media. They then change nothing.
Hey metabagel! It's me, Mark Zuckerberg, please come back! Our Q4 earnings report will be due before you know it and our board will have my feet to the literal FIRE if you're not on our platform(s). Please reconsider!
This is, literally (with the politician's name and elections instead of Zuck and earnings), political ads. In big red font, with an accusatory or distraught image of the politician.
Seriously, Mark Zuckerburg doesn't really care that one person left his platform, but he actually would prefer you stay...because if enough do it will affect earnings. But you should leave Facebook not to upset Zuck, but to stop upsetting yourself with what's on there.
In what sense are they shitty? They are actually usable by normal people. This is a big reason they are popular.
I don't like (most of) the content on those sites. This is not surprising. The content is aimed at people who can't use Signal. Such a person is different from me in many ways.
Facebook is cluttered with ads and distracting posts (not from your friends and family). If you use it often enough, you probably stop seeing how terrible it is. Try looking at it with fresh eyes sometime.
Twitter boosts Elon Musk and the things he is interested in.
Widespread algorithmic control and corporate spam spreads architecture?
>They are actually usable by normal people.
Usability is just one dimension. If your site is perfectly usable, yet steals your credit card number and sells it to the highest bidder, it is still a shitty site, just not in usability.
>This is a big reason they are popular.
Really FB/Meta became popular long before they were at their current level of shittiness. Really FB wrote the modern book on new levels of shittiness like selling social graphs and tracking people along with connecting all kinds of other data and stealing information from your phone with overly huge permissions and data gathering.
This is a real problem but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with Zuckerberg or Meta in particular. The article admits it's unlikely that this hour-long ban was a top-down decision. People get banned with no recourse on all the big platforms.
But yes, a solution is for people to host their own content/sites. Or "protocols not platforms"
>a solution is for people to host their own content/sites.
In a perfect world yes. In the reality we live in no.
Why is this the case?
1. Any site that is politically active and capable of upsetting people WILL BE ATTACKED. Can you afford a terabyte of data a second coming your way? Probably not. So you put it behind CF, but now you're vulnerable to their policies closing you down.
2. Any site that is politically active and capable of upsetting people WILL BE ATTACKED. What are you going to do against floods of child porn or death threats posted by users pretending to be on your side, but actually working for the opposition?
3. Any site that is politically active and capable of upsetting people WILL BE ATTACKED. You are now in charge of your website security. Are you any good at it? How are you going to pay for it to be secured? How do you trust the people doing the security?
4. Any site that is politically active and capable of upsetting people WILL BE ATTACKED. How do you plan on getting people to come to your site? If it's upsetting enough to the powers that be any messages containing links to your site will disappear from Meta/X/Google. You are going to have to find neat an interesting, and probably expensive ways to get your message out.
We have consolidated the internet down to a point where it is very very easy for a few small groups to control the general discussion, especially across large diverse groups of people.
Most of this is mitigated completely by making everything read-only except for a small number of users you know personally. That doesn't actually preclude most kinds of political work (e.g. noticeboards for protest organising). It does preclude social media, obviously.
See, the problem here is you've already been put on the footing of the group that loses.
You have to hide like a little mouse in the shadows. Meanwhile the cat gets to track your every move. The cat gets, not only to defend itself where ever it wants, it can say anything it wants about you without you with you having no way to defend yourself.
Can if the cat is both evil and particularly smart it will set up things like its own No Kings forums where every person is tracked and manipulators either block or allow messages based on how much they can control the audience into reaching the opposite goal they actually want.
When someone goes looking for you, who are they going to find? With the modern net, probably not who you want them to find.
> But there is a better solution: build tools that are open, decentralized, and user controlled. And then actually use them instead of just giving more power to Mark Zuckerberg to shut down a protest organization’s account in the middle of one of its big protests.
The problem with that is people are "lazy": they're typically not going to expend extra effort that's not needed to solve the problem in front of them. It's pervasive, and it's one of the big reasons "friction" reducing technology can be really problematic: it turns necessary behaviors into issues of self-discipline (e.g. exercise becomes forcing yourself to haul yourself to the gym regularly in your spare time, instead just walking everywhere because you have to in order to go about your day).
So, IMHO, if you want people to use "open, decentralized, and user controlled" tools in 2026, you have to ban the centralized alternatives. Otherwise you're yelling at clouds, as most people will default to the lowest friction alternative they have access to.
I tried to get a family member to use Signal, and she eventually gave up on it, because she couldn't handle switching back and forth between Messages and Signal. It's very difficult to get people to migrate to better platforms when they have that mindset.
That's why we need to separate the protocol from the UI. There is absolutely no good reason why the different platforms should disallow communication with each other.
I used to use a multiprotocol client, Pidgin, to chat with people on a couple of different platforms. But of course now a lot of chat is on things like Facebook and Google Chat which are supported only by plugins.
But even that is still not enough because I will have to have an account on each of the platforms.
Chat really needs to be like email or SMS; you ought not to need an account with the provider of the person you are sending messages to.
Think about how long it took to get email spam under control (and even so it remains a problem). Think about the ongoing problems with spam phone calls. Now pretend you are someone with no technical background, someone who only sees the UI and does not really understand what happens behind it -- you are not seeing spam on closed systems, you are seeing spam on open systems, what are you going to choose? Also keep in mind that there are worse forms of abuse than spam.
But seriously, there's zero incentive for the folks building these clients to make them interoperable. In fact there may even be disincentive, since the more folks they have on their platform, the more valuable the platform is.
The EU forced Apple to use USB-C on iPhones, because it was stupid and wasteful for people to have two different types of chargers in their home for their small electronic rechargeable devices. Government does have the power to regulate things like this. They would need to be educated to understand the importance and benefit of it.
The EU was actually on the path to forcing everyone to use micro-USB. Thankfully Apple (and others) pioneered USB-C (bringing what it learnt from developing the lightning connector) in the time it took the EU to go from making all of the phone makers sign a Memorandum of Understanding to making it legislation. Now the EU is frozen in time, stuck on USB-C for the forseeable future. The economics to make a device dual port (USB-C and something new) aren't there, so we're not likely to ever see an improvement on USB-C... in an alternative timeline, we could have been stuck on the even worse micro-USB.
Bringing it back to the topic on hand, this is very much an area I wouldn't want to see a heavy handed EU legislate something that just further cements the incumbants and makes everything worse forever... just like mandatory micro-USB would have been. I can totally see the EU legislating something like a mandatory Meta communication protocol with compulsory attestation from Meta servers.
Apple changed to USB-C after Lightning was ten years old, exactly as they promised ten years before. The EU regulation didn’t force Apple to do anything, its deadline was a couple years after Apple switched, and Apple assisted in the creation of USB-C and after they had already switched their laptops.
> If you want people to adopt your thing, it's got to make their life easier, right now, full stop.
But somewhat counterintuitively, you can do that by making their life a little harder first.
For example: leave Facebook/WhatsApp, refuse to communicate over SMS. Have good reasons for each, so you don't come off as unnecessarily difficult. Explain that Signal is far more secure and private than either and just as easy to use. Then using Signal is making it easier to communicate with you. It worked for me.
I left the whole Facebook ecosystem about 10 years ago, but never deleted my account. I left it up as a tombstone that makes it very clear I'm not there and tells people how to contact me.
I don't understand why having more than one chat app is too much for some people. I use signal, whatsapp, discord, irc, google chat, email and messenger without complaint. I can't force people to use my platform of choice so I have to compromise and use what they do with little to no notice on my end. Sure, I am not happy with this situation but I accept it and move on while keeping an eye out for alternatives.
Consider the opposite direction: what if you want to message someone? What if you haven't messaged them in a while? Imagine you have seven messaging apps installed, some of the names you've forgotten ("Discord", is that obviously a messaging app?). Imagine you know that they're reachable somewhere just not exactly where.
I honestly have never had this issue. It's really about focus and effort. If the person is important enough, I will most likely remember how to contact them. I also mostly use email for all important communications so that remains searchable. The other chat apps are all for casual friends and acquaintances that if lost, well so be it.
None of my older relatives use email. They can text however (or iMessage, since it is transparent). Not everyone cares so little for friends and acquaintances.
And what if you want to contact someone? Are they on signal or WhatsApp or telegram? Or is it discord? Which server? How can I find that thing someone sent? Let me just open all those apps and start searching
I think you underestimate how little tolerance the average person has for this kind of friction. These huge platforms win because everyone is on them and it all just works.
You are speaking as someone who gives a shit about technology. Many people don't. "Just another account" is a big ask for many, as lots of people don't have password managers. There are a whole shit ton of people who want to use as few apps as they can. Even lots of tech-savvy people, myself included, feel this way.
> After that you forget it exists until someone messages you.
Until you get a random notification asking you to take steps to keep your account active or whatever. You may not care about this, but many people get stressed out about this kind of thing.
Every app you add to your phone is another potential vulnerability. I'm not installing a random discord or irc app just because that's someone's preferred platform. In fact I haven't installed any chat/message apps at all, I use the Messages app from Apple.
The network effect is powerful. But we also need to be honest with ourselves. Signal is an objectively worse client than Messages, especially when the average person does not value privacy.
The problem is not that people are lazy; the problem with open systems is that they are much harder to moderate and people want effective moderation. Usenet was open, decentralized, and wound up dying because there were too many problems with moderation and white supremacists etc. would show up and flood NGs with their nonsense.
There are also legal issues that kill decentralized/user-controlled systems. Copyright and child abuse are the most prominent, along with terrorism and drug trafficking. Who gets sued or prosecuted when the system is open, decentralized, and user-controlled? The users, and that's why peer-to-peer filesharing died, why so few people are willing to host a Tor exit node, etc. Before talking about banning centralized systems we need to talk about updating the legal system so that it does not force centralization, which is a much bigger project and much harder to get right.
The moderation problem wouldn't have been hard to solve on USENET, it's just that nobody wanted to do it. It could work exactly like moderation does on Mastodon, where each admin is responsible for the content on their server(s). There isn't a technical reason why you couldn't do that, and even give individuals moderation rights on specific lists. Of course, this only affects your particular news server, but it lets the white supremacist post their insane ramblings over on Giganews, while you and I read less toxic version of the thread over on Cozy News. If you don't like the moderation on your server, go find another one.
> that's why peer-to-peer filesharing died
p2p file sharing is still huge, though. Most people just put their seedboxes behind a VPN to avoid getting DMCA notices.
> So, IMHO, if you want people to use "open, decentralized, and user controlled" tools in 2026, you have to ban the centralized alternatives. Otherwise you're yelling at clouds, as most people will default to the lowest friction alternative they have access to.
I disagree. You don't have to ban the centralized alternatives (which is problematic) -- but you do have to make the alternative as frictionless as possible.
Repeal section 230. If they want to shape speech for their own agenda then they should be liable.
Right now they have it both ways. They have the users, money, and data and they speak through their moderation decisions while being legally immune from consequences.
We need something different than "repeal 230" because this is largely believed to be something that will chill speech. Platforms will take down speech out of an abundance of caution.
I'm not exactly sure what the answer is, but we can place two constraints
1. Anyone can say anything online, free speech for individuals
2. Algorithms that act as "editors" are not free speech and should be regulated.
Perhaps the answer is to say that social media algorithms can only be chronological and M0% from your direct network.
Reposts and quotes seem to be one of the core features that enable virality and dog piling. We need to "slow the spread" - to borrow a phase from one of our least favorite times.
Another thing we need is a privacy preserving method for proving humanism online.
Banning targeted advertising is higher on my list of priorities. That business line is one of the most toxic for humanity. Let's go back to placement advertising.
I've thought about this a lot. Section 230 essentially differentiates content sites into two categories, which I refer to as:
1. Publishers. Think CNN, NYT, WaPo, etc. These are first-party sites;
2. Platforms. Think any social media site. They host user generated content ("UGC").
Section 230 doesn't use this exact language. But what it does is remove the strict liability from UGC for (2). So if I post something defamatory on Facebook, Meta isn't liable as long as they satisfy their obligations for moderation, takedowns, etc.
My opinion is that social media sites are essentially cheating. They're now a third category. They enjoy the benefits of being a platform while acting like a publisher.
Think about it this way: let's say a group of users make 1000 posts supporting Ukraine and 1000 posts supporting Russia in the current war. Posts from some of each might make defamatory of erroneous or intentionally false claims. But I, as the platform, use algorithms to surface certain posts and suppress others through a newsfeed, a recommendation panel or whatever. I can tweak that algorithm to surface the pro-Ukrainian posts or the pro-Russian posts. I am essentially taking a position and acting like a first-party publisher but I don't have strict liability issues.
So I don't think we need to repeal Section 230. I think we need to treat content suppression and promotion as being a publisher because that's what you are.
Well said, I concur. There is so much different information being posted that the platform can "say" anything it wants via moderation knobs without liability.
And they literally exercise more editorial control and reach than any magazine or newspaper editorial board ever did.
Section 230 was a Trojan Horse.
If they want to be treated like an innocent carrier (i.e., telco), they must kill their algorithms.
No news media company writes or says the reports of the journalists they publish or broadcast, but they are nevertheless responsible for that content.
If social media wants to control the algorithmic feed for profit, they must be like any media, "fully responsible for their content", and must be held accountable for it.
I've never had a phone company disconnect a phone call because they didn't like what I was saying
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54552101
Twitter was stopping people from tweeting or sending direct messages containing links to the New York Post article about Hunter Bidens Laptop in October of 2020. They put their thumb on the scale.
Apparently, activists need something that is "open, decentralized, and user controlled". Those activists choose to use facebook. That tells me they are at least one of two things:
1. Too stupid to make a plan that could possibly work
2. Too lazy to execute on a plan that could possibly work
Knowing this is a useful signal. It tells me their judgment is terrible, and I should not listen to them ;)
> Apparently, activists need something that is "open, decentralized, and user controlled". Those activists choose to use facebook. That tells me they are at least one of two things:
> 1. Too stupid to make a plan that could possibly work
> 2. Too lazy to execute on a plan that could possibly work
Your comment is a pretty good example of what not to do: society/technology makes good choices harder, so flog individuals about their lack of self-discipline when they don't do yet-another hard thing. People only have so much time and self-discipline, have some empathy.
The only thing the flogging does is give the flogger the chance to feel unjustifiably superior.
> Knowing this is a useful signal. It tells me their judgment is terrible, and I should not listen to them ;)
What you're doing is a generalized method to dismiss anything and anyone:
1. Find a thing.
2. Search for some aspect that isn't perfect. Viciously criticize that aspect.
3. Dismiss the whole thing on account of that aspect.
The only thing that using Instagram tells me about these activists is that they weren't setting out to solve some ideological communication technology problem. They had other priorities.
I would consider myself an activist, but not the Blue MAGA variety. Too much of the issue is people still think they can change minds online. In reality you are just chanting to the base, a negative feedback cycle for bad ideas that do not resonate with those outside your group.
Instead, go to where people all are, real life in the real world. I go out and talk to people all the time. I listen to them before telling them. I'm more interested in getting people talking than I am in changing their minds (right now) and providing them with ideas they are unlikely to hear online. I see my "sapphire gals" (retired nokingers) becoming less extreme, not repeating the shallow talking points. I hear them asking new questions.
Talking and working with others in person is 100x better.
We were able to organize large groups of loosely connected people before social media. Women's sufferage and the Civil Rights movement are two notable examples. Speedrunning the moon landing after Sputnik and Kennedy's assasination another.
And you are expecting countries to play by the rules when their existence in under threat. The EU will get people off Google, off Facebook, off fucking Pinterest even if it means moving back to Teletext.
Idk who you’re talking to or what you’re talking about.
I certainly don’t “expect” (in the normative sense) countries to continue relying on these services. Breaking network effects is hard, but I wouldn’t blame a country for trying and I’d probably be happy with them succeeding (to the extent they facilitate free expression of their people).
Of course, the huge difference is that China also actually invests in replacing them with something. EU doesn't and only France has given it the least of efforts.
But that won't stop EU countries from just outlawing these services.
This is overly harsh; it starts with the (flawed IMO) perspective that people are dedicated "professional" activists rather than amateurs from many different backgrounds who come together around something they care about and grow/evolve/deppen over time. It makes complete sense that they use tools in front of them AND don't necessarily get -what are quite subtle angles to most - all the issues with their use. It doesn't make them lazy or stupid, but if you have the skills & talents to help with this yet do nothing you might be projecting...
More likely these activists chose the most convenient platform for getting their message out. IG is popular and that makes it an obvious choice. Also keep in mind that activists will generally use what they are already familiar with, and Facebook runs three of the most popular platforms i.e. platforms that activists were probably already using before they became activists.
The only reason activists would switch to something else is if Facebook gives them a reason to do so. I doubt this one incident is enough of a reason.
They need to reach people where they are, so basically all the platforms where people hang out. It's not the activists who are lazy - it's people in general, who continue to use FB even though it is cluttered with ads and other distractions.
It's because the corporations were all banding together to censor their opponents a few years ago, so they got used to the idea that large corporations are your friends. The left took an opportunistic stance on this instead of a principled one, despite the fact that they're the side that on paper is supposedly opposed to letting corporations turn into pseudo-governments.
Unfortunately the truth is, way too.many people use Facebook and Instagram way too much, and oftentimes you need to cast a wide net so you can reach people where they are.
It's a combination of ignorance and indifference. One of my social groups is around a sport, no necessity for knowledge around technology, and they will never ever leave Facebook. Those roots got laid down 15+ years ago and I would guess about 40% use FB as their sole social media, and another 50% use 1-2 other sites e.g. Instagram or Tiktok, types that are well known. The rest are aware of the existence of other sites and can explore more widely.
This is a solution looking for a problem. Right now, Meta products are the most efficient way for people to organize a protest, even when it's not reliable, so that's what people will use. If it's no longer a reliable way to organize, people will naturally move to something else without much convincing like they do in places like Hong Kong. It's good to have a backup, but it does not make sense to expect them to avoid the largest social media platforms.
If Facebook is really a "utility" then it should not arbitrarily pull the plug on accounts with no recourse. Other utilities have due process for cutting off access: written notice with a clear reason, a chance to dispute, etc. That's because utilities are regulated.
What Facebook has is an opaque process run by AI with no way for most people to appeal.
For the record, the account was suspended because it tripped an automated rate limiter. They then had to get in touch with a human to restore the account.
That's pretty boring, platform agnostic, and not particularly inciteful though I suppose.
I used to deride people complaining about the acts of a private company whose users freely and willfully engage with that company’s services, especially claims about “free speech” when the company owner also has the free speech claim to make whatever policies they see fit for their privately owned business.
Now I think it’s pretty clear that the main limiter of speech is not the government but rather a handful of private companies, so the first amendment is no longer adequate to protecting speech. We need to pass laws about opening these platforms once they reach a certain size. Will we get more neo-nazi profiles? Sure, but that’s the trade off for having a platform for positive revolutionaries and journalists and I think the trade off is worth it.
I started reading (listening to) Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams.
It was really strange. The author seemed to be shocked at (then) Facebook's culture of not getting involved in politics. The author was a part of the effort to convince zuck to be more politically involved. Getting him to meet with heads of state, starting with a junta responsible for atrocities.
In full disclaimer, I didn't finish the book. But it was shocking to me what the author was admitting to. It's like the scene in The Big Short where Steve Carell asks "Why are they confessing?" to which the answer was "They're not; they're bragging"
People are convinced that the only way to get attention is by participating in the technofeudal social networks. The problem is that "attention" is not that useful for making change. Until we realize that more intimacy and some level of friction is a feature when it comes to actual power building and organizing, we're going to keep seeing both the lack of control over access to the social networks as well as the continual 'people share and nothing happens' effects of using ad-driven platforms for organizing.
The term "platform" implies a level of neutrality that doesn't exist in modern social media. The algorithm is making heavy decisions about what messages to amplify and which messages to suppress, on top of the possibility of a human putting their thumb on the scale.
This isn't a new problem. We've always had a few gatekeepers that steer the public narrative. This is a problem that the internet provides a clear opportunity to help solve, but has seemed to fall short. It's a clear blow to all of us techo-optimists.
I want to agree with you—but I think, post-2016, we can now all fully agree that (sadly) there is no such thing as a neutral platform, such that “platform [on the Web]” no longer necessarily implies “neutral platform.”
That is the main issue. I am on mastodon but following someone on another instance of mastodon is not easy for "regular people". Until that is solved people will stick to items like twitter and meta.
AFAIK, most people on Bluesky are on the "main" instance, so that tends to end up being a centralized community which can suffer from the same issues.
Mastodon has a serious discovery problem. IIRC, searches are only within your own instance, except for hashtag searches. This appears to have been an intentional design decision to prevent brigading / pile-ons.
For me, I found it too difficult to locate "my peeps" on other instances, so I switched to Bluesky.
>Unfortunately, most of the “solutions” to this problem that people are suggesting are some form of “force Mark Zuckerberg to be better and not shut off the account we like.” But that’s no way to build a better world. It is, also, the exact same response that MAGA folks had when Donald Trump was banned from social media in the wake of the January 6th insurrection. Their response was to try to force platforms to host the content of people MAGA supported. That cannot be a workable solution, because as political fortunes shift, forcing platforms to host the worst people’s accounts is unworkable for basically everyone.
The bit about "the worst people's accounts" just sounds like a refutation of everything else in the article. The problem was always that it was up to interpretation who "the worst people" are.
IDK why so many people want to die on this hill of not forcing social media companies to extend free-speech rights to their userbase. Facebook didn't accidentally wind up in this position where their TOS can effectively censor entire political movements on the Zuck's whim. They spent decades purposefully angling for this by acquiring competitors and encouraging people to use their platform for any and all communication. They own the audience.
>But there is a better solution: build tools that are open, decentralized, and user controlled. And then actually use them instead of just giving more power to Mark Zuckerberg to shut down a protest organization’s account in the middle of one of its big protests.
Not happening LOL. The decentralized platforms have been there for 10-20 years, hardly anybody uses them.
Back when the shoe was on the other foot, the right tried to make *several* alternative platforms and there was widespread collusion amongst all levels of infrastructure providers to push them off the internet. The same will happen to any platform which seeks to effect political change and attains enough critical mass that it could plausibly do so.
> Back when the shoe was on the other foot, the right tried to make several alternative platforms and there was widespread collusion amongst all levels of infrastructure providers to push them off the internet.
Wow, what spin.
There was no collusion. If we look at Gab, Stripe and PayPal had had numerous issues for a long time leading up to them not accepting payments. I love how you ignore -why- providers cut ties with them: The Pittsburgh synagogue shooter planned and coordinated his efforts on Gab, and when Gab was repeatedly warned about it, refused to do anything. Similarly, though this administration made a lot of it moot, many of the Jan 6 riots were coordinated actively there, same thing (and yes, riots - it was shown in evidence that these were the people who were planning to hurt politicians, staff, law enforcement, and see if they could "capture" Mike Pence to stop his role in certification).
And they were offline for less than a week.
Parler? AWS said that they'd reported over 100 posts to Parler that were active and specific plans for violence and incitement, and been ignored. Following the FBI investigating Parler for its role in coordinating violence on Jan 6, AWS pulled the plug.
It's on the App Store, on Play, now.
But categorizing that as some kind of disagreement on ideology is a hilariously bad take that ignores active coordination of crimes and violence on those platforms.
>The Pittsburgh synagogue shooter planned and coordinated his efforts on Gab, and when Gab was repeatedly warned about it, refused to do anything.
Conveniently ignoring the fact that he livestreamed it on Facebook and their moderators refused to delete it.
Of course thats far from the only time that somebody planning an act of terrorism has a history of concerning posts but somehow other social networks are hardly ever held to this standard.
>Parler? AWS said that they'd reported over 100 posts to Parler that were active and specific plans for violence and incitement, and been ignored. Following the FBI investigating Parler for its role in coordinating violence on Jan 6, AWS pulled the plug.
Well if they were really that "active and specific" they should have called the FBI too. But once again, this sort of standard should have sank every other social network decades ago if it was actually applied equally. Social media is always used to incite riots. Why are you acting like this is unheard of? We have entire social movements with hashtags in their names.
Stupidity is when I bulk post my back catalogue of TikToks. Malice is when a protest that attracted 9 million Americans last time they organized one gets taken down. Notable accounts get special treatment.
Bsky and HN manipulate social network effects too with their discourse controls
None of the faceless legal corporate entities should be trusted; many explicitly argued against common carrier to preserve power over discourse that benefits them
Got suspended on Bsky for pointing out they too rely on data centers; free speech is not possible online.
Not even talking about toxic political speech, just physical fucking truth that might impact the bottom line for a small team of tech bros.
There will be no doubting the genius of the SV PhD crowd never mind they too, a minority of the global population, are temporary and deluded self selecting meat suits with no ability to ensure the future cares about their effort; it's all so clearly just selfish laziness
Am raising my kids to be prepared to denigrate and marginalize Millennials as Millennials hit their glazed over elder phase so my kids generation can be free of the same thought policing and social conservatism
I think people in the West have little experience living under totalitarian regime.
Typical ways of overcoming censorship is creating own lingo, so that it goes past censors or distribution of physical leaflets, underground press and organising resistance offline.
When people want moderation they cry at Zuck, when people get moderated they cry at Zuck. When people are given free and open systems they cry that it’s icky and weird.
even if they were despicable, kiwifarms is case study for this, you can't give yourself a platform, they were DDOSed into oblivion when cloudflare dropped them, donations were blocked by payments processors, etc.
These systems were ALL originally conceived as surveillance and propaganda tools, with a hitherto-unknown-and-probably-unknowable amount of Cold War Leftover/GWoT black money poured into them to get them scaled before their (sometimes extremely hinky) IPOs. Some of the old security state staff even stayed on. In-Q-Tel. LifeLog. Regina Dugan. Douglas Gage, Jim Breyer, Howard Cox. Thiel and Palantir.
They're not deviating from their mission; they're returning to their Dark Enlightenment roots.
You could say the same about techbro culture as a whole - it comes from the missile men culture of the 1950s-1960s, which was . . . pretty cozy . . with some personalities of the Old European Right. To this day you still hear "well we weren't able to get to orbit without the god-given aid of Glorious Aryan Rocketmen". When the truth is a little more venal, more like the various departments of the armed forces couldn't keep their daggers out of each others' backs. But the seemingly-hippy-ish libertarian culture of the Valley was a veneer on some very dark crap.
ANYWAY. The same technologists have also given us the tools to create true open communications, it's just we haven't been living under the barrel of the gun for long enough yet. I suspect all the tricks will be coming out before too long.
If you really want to be in charge of your digital life and rights, you need to get off the proprietary plantation. Facebook/Meta, Microsoft, Google/Alphabet, Apple, Discord, TikTok, Twitter/X, Reddit - all of it.
You don't need to do this all at once, you shouldn't let "perfect" be the enemy of "progress" - every single proprietary platform you migrate away from is a win: you gain more freedom and more ownership over your digital life every time you do it.
Decentralized platforms, federated platforms, self-hostable platforms are where you want to be. Think bluesky, signal (warning: bluesky and signal are still effectively centralized), fediverse, matrix, nostr, peertube, briar, simplex, mastodon, lemmy, loops, stoat, zulip, xmpp, irc, pixelfed, Mail-in-a-Box, nextcloud, cryptpad, linux, lineageos, grapheneos, etc.
and keep using the mainstream platforms as long as you're happy to have billionaires decide what you're allowed to say, what you're allowed to see, how you're supposed to think. it's not like they've ever given you any reason not to trust them completely.
Friendly PSA, hopefully unnecessary: If you attend one of these 'No Kings' gatherings, or any similar gathering, please coordinate with your friends/associates beforehand and leave your phone at home. Or, turn-off your phone or, at the very least, disable all the radios (airplane mode). Also, try to cover your face - Covid mask or big hat and sunglasses, and don't wear any identifying clothing, like the name of your employer. All that might sound paranoid - that's what all my friends tell me. That might be true, but I'm confident DHS also attends these gatherings to collect data. And that data is used to create named lists, the ones you don't wanna be on.
I test a lot of mobile apps, and for various testing purposes I have shielded bags for phones. It's an easy way to have an extra layer of protection because it's physical and tactile, and likely to work even if you messed up some of the other protections you should be using.
It’s funny how political parties either endorse or reject Zuckerberg (he doesn’t like “Zuck”) depending on the season. In 2020 when he was shilling for Biden, and censoring conservatives (and anti lockdown movements , coincidentally), the left loved him . Now, he’s featuring Hitler reels on IG, and apparently censoring No Kings (?), the Right seems to have warmed to him, and the left scorns him.
The fascinating thing about the obvious skew in social and traditional media, such as towards the genocide in Gaza, is that US companies are acting like megaphones for the state. They're doing exactly what China hawks accuse the CCP of doing.
I know as someone who expresses views contrary to the State Department position online on various platforms and sites that I get held to a much higher standard. Throttling, shadow banning, comments and content being put in review, suppression, accusations of violating ToS for doing something as inocuous as describing someone's argument as "utter nonsense" and so on. All while the establishment view can post with impunity. I get held to a much higher standard.
If you want to see how the state treats anyone who protests, look no further than Renee Good and Alex Pretti, murdered in broad daylight by untrained Brownshirts under the color of law. The First Amendment is becoming increasingly theoretical.
can't even take this shit seriously anymore. for years when the left controlled twitter they ruled with an iron fist. twitter, meta (then FB), instagram, youtube, would somehow "completely randomly" come to the same conclusions to deplatform people all at once. even now, britain arrests people for wrong think social media posts. people like james damore lost his job for saying the most innocuous milk toast shit you could imagine. and everyone was fine with it, so long as they were the ones calling the shots.
all the bullshitting about complaining about centralization, third party this and that, freedom of speech, can't take that shit seriously. somehow they uniquely find only violations of these from people in the "other" side of the aisle. it's just so exhausting and obviously bad faith engagement. and the right isn't really any better, they do the same thing, just flipped. i think it's about time we mostly just admit: libertarians are fools (that used to be me LOL), and nobody in western culture genuinely cares about "free speech". everything they support is free speech, everything they dislike is "hate speech" (notice how the narrative changed). it's all so obvious to anyone who zooms out and looks at the larger trends. just get over it and embrace authoritarianism. just be honest about who you are.
A strong culture of free speech is the clear solution to the problem you're describing. I.e. when both political factions censor, the only solution is a strong preference for free speech regardless of who is in power.
that's like saying the solution is for everything to just be perfect. well of course. the problem is, that's not a realistic solution. the whole "No kings" movement in itself is an example of this. trump isn't a king nor is he trying to be, and most of the shit he does is rather milk toast. yet where were the "no kings" protestors when we were discussing forced vaccines? oh that's right, most supported it. where were the "my body my choice" people when we were discussing forced vaccines or else you can't work and feed your family? or yeah as it turns out in that case, it's not really your choice (in any realistic sense).
if the No Kings people truly want to be taken seriously, the best thing they can do is just admit they are wrong about their whole schtick. unfortunately the chances of that happening are exactly zero % since pride stands in the way.
watch and observe. literally nobody believes in free speech. people believe in policies and agendas, and "freedom" is just a tool used to push it. the right wing does this, especially in economics, all the time, where they want the rich to be "free" to fuck the poor. take a step back, observe the trends, and be honest with yourself, and it will be quite obvious that freedom itself is just a tool used in politics, nobody actually believes in it as an end to aspire to. this isn't 1980 anymore. milton friedman is long gone.
The media is mostly MAGA owned. Here's a short list:
- TikTok is controlled by Larry Ellison
- CBS news is controlled by Ellison's son
- The Ellisons will soon own CNN as well
- Twitter is controlled by Musk
- Facebook, Instagram and Threads are under Zuck
- WaPo and Amazon Prime by Bezos
- Old time favourites like Fox and WSJ owned by Murdoch
The owners of this media are also very explicitly involved in pro-Trump editorial content. In short, the playing field is wildly lopsided and unreliable and no tech (decentralized social media, lol) solution will work. Ultimately people will have to elect politicians to explicitly break up and clamp down on this hive of scum and villainy, but people aren't there yet, mentally. Such a solution seems wildly inappropriate today, but my guess is that another 10 years of the last two years will change a lot of minds.
These individuals are all sucking up to the president, but to call them "MAGA owned" is a stretch. They'll kiss whichever ass - democrat or republican - next fills the president's chair, it's just with this emperor-magpie it's very straightforward and easy: shiny & bright == good.
It's the Right wing politicians too. Look at Texas and pornography laws or the IRL book bans. We live in a politics of Win At All Costs, Dominate Those Who Think Differently, i.e utterly broken and anti-democratic.
The problem is the Oligarchy, the are thick from money, power, and hubris
The internet has always had moderation, WTH are you talking about?
It was the right who wanted to repeal Section 230 and have the government take over all social media platforms and regulate them, and make it illegal to ban their speech. The left never wanted anything of the sort.
eh, shit's always off the rails for leftists. it's a huge grift that they have to keep going. that's why places like france, which have implemented many, many of the changes that leftists in America want, still protest non stop. protesting is the grift. you can have government spending at like 50% of GDP (france was 57% recently) funding an endless welfare state with free education, worker protections, unfettered illegal immigration, every leftist wet dream you can realistically think of, and they still protest.
the grift works though, in part because the changes they protest for usually take a toll on the system over time, until the system soft or hard collapses. then you get social unrest. that's exactly you're seeing in france now. i dont even feel bad for france.
I don’t really know or care about what’s going on in France.
But characterizing opposition to Trump as “just leftists perma-complaining,” is incorrect. He’s the least popular POTUS in American history.
This administration has been repeatedly found in court to be violating the law and the US Constitution. It is not a partisan expectation or leftist complaint that the government must follow the law.
Protests worked in Hungary and Poland to help gain widespread support and eventually vote the authoritarians out of office. You want everyone to know there are many people resisting the leadership abusing power.
So these two guys were walking down the street, and one of them was constantly clapping his hands, snapping fingers, and stomping his feet. And finally the other guy got a little fed up with all the commotion, and he stops to ask the other guy, "why do you keep making all that noise?"
And the noisy guy says, "this is to keep away all the tigers and bears!" And his friend says "but there are no tigers and bears anywhere to be seen!" and he goes "See what I mean!"
"Kings" as such aren't the problem as much as "CEOs" as such are any problem. There are good kings who cared about their country and bad kings who didn't. Before Henry VIII there were rules in place to restrict the obedience to kings only as long as the kings obey the rules. In 1570, Pope Pius V then told people that the English government is a lost cause and they were free to disobey Queen Elizabeth I (he actually commanded them to disobey, talk about anarchism!).
Then later in history you had Robbespierre who campaigned on "democracy" and "we must overthrow the monarchy, then things will be great" ... only to installed himself as a dictator, because only he knew the true morality that people should obide by ("terror is a virtue"). No kings... and then what? No CEOs... and then what? Then we just get a different king / CEO / whatever. Their true shackles are in the people themselves, in their own behaviour, in whom they give attention to. Don't give attention to Facebook and Zuck will have no power.
It got less media play but the founder of the Hind Foundation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hind_Rajab_Foundation) that is going after IDF soldiers for war crimes that happened in Gaza got his Instagram account taking down at the same time, but it wasn't restored:
https://www.instagram.com/Aboujahjah/
They also removed the account of slain Palestinian journalists, this time including Pulitzer winning Al Jazeera's Anas Al-Sharif - although it seems it is back now: https://www.youtube.com/post/Ugkx0kN5mUZDFsw7OgRiY3ElLx9DgjM...
It seems that there are repeated waves of account deletions affecting those not in power and only if you raise a huge stink is it undone but only on a per-account basis. And each of these waves slowly erodes those voices. It sort of feels like a strategy.
Erasure from the internet (suppression) of free speech and 'unwelcome' perspectives is just going to get wider and more subtle considering the same people/motives that are vested in Social Media are having their sticky fingers now also in "AI" chatbots.
That's why it's paramount that we as somewhat privileged, informed people now chose truly open and distributed platforms (mastodon, etc) instead of keep on posting x and other zucker-SM network links that keep users in their walled zoo.
… and what about bot traffic? The current platforms are overrun by them but seemingly only by choice. A truly open platform would be a bot playground.
That is the classic problem of decentralized networks, if it is big enough there will be spam at which point you will need moderators to sieve it out. But I think AI can also be helpful here instead of having centralized moderators we can have AI (hopefully self-hosted/decentralize) moderate your network graph for bots/spam.
> The current platforms are overrun by them but seemingly only by choice. A truly open platform would be a bot playground.
You seem to be assuming two things. First, that there is an "easy" solution to this which is available as a result of centralization, and second that there isn't a decentralized one.
The first one is pretty hard for a service which is trying to use a gamable algorithm to show you posts from total randos, regardless of centralization.
As an example of the second one, suppose that your feed shows entirely or heavily disproportionately posts/reposts from people you follow and the people they follow, and you can turn off the second one for specific people. Then if you don't follow bots, you don't see bots. Replies show up if either the reader or the original poster follow the reply poster, and by default for the poster of what it's a reply to or if they choose to make it visible to everyone who follows them.
Now bots can show up to post replies, but only one person will see them and they'll be at the end of the list and marked as someone they have no connection with. On top of that, the user's client can do any kind of algorithmic bot detection they want.
> On top of that, the user's client can do any kind of algorithmic bot detection they want.
Bot traffic is sometimes detectable only at scale.
There's also a huge asymmetry between what clients know about each other and what the platforms know about the clients. Bot detection is only really feasible by the platforms.
> Bot traffic is sometimes detectable only at scale.
They why are the entities with scale seemingly unable to detect it?
If a platform was open then we could spin up blocklists for known or suspected bots. We created blocklists for bittorrent. We create and manage blocklists for ads. If we had direct control over our social media feeds we would create blocklists for bots too.
Indeed, and zero-knowledge attribute-based proofs - if done genuinely! - could even by bound to a citizen's id and still be anonymous, which would allow: one person -> one voice and solve bot and disinformation traffic.
But it depends, as much of the solutions to our current problems, that things are solved correctly on the root. In this instance, trustworthy government and transparent processes that guarantee zero-knowledge and free, equally, genuine speech and discussions.
It's also just paramount not to do your thinking with LLMs. There are some conclusions they'll never lead you to.
Philip K. Dick's short story "Service Call" comes to mind:
https://philipdick.com/mirror/websites/pkdweb/short_stories/...
I organized a peaceful protest in Sun Valley Idaho in 2021 on Reddit, and within 10 days my account was suspended, all my 15 years of posts and comments deleted. This was done in parallel with an operation conducted by an army of psyop bots that would try to scare people about it, claiming I was a terrorist, crazy, etc.
I was surveilled and harassed by the FBI during this time as well.
I've put some of this online on substack
https://webdoodle.substack.com
The post is so vague that it isn't clear what this is about. I would suggest just creating a new reddit account under a different email? Are not the main limits to reddit accounts is 3 months age and 1000 Karma? That is super easy to achieve, no need to wait years to restore your old account. Just make a new one. You are also allowed to have multiple reddit accounts, just do not double vote on things.
> would suggest just creating a new reddit account under a different email?
As someone banned from Reddit, this violates TOS and (for me) resulted in a ban based on some kind of fingerprint that survives cookie wipes.
It is very hard to open a new Reddit account. They do tons of fingerprinting.
The best you can do is keep appealing every day. My friend just got hers back after 667 continuous days of appealing.
Spez is very, very aware of how fucked-up the Reddit ban/appeal system is. He's about to get his yearly dogpiling at ModWorld.
>holds a very conservative viewpoint
Can't have that on Reddit. Honestly, getting your account deleted is them doing you a favour.
Meet Jordana Cutler, Meta's Public Policy Director for Israel and the Jewish Diaspora [1], previously a senior adviser reporting to Benjamin Netanyahu, the chief of staff at the Israeli embassy in the US and party chairman of the Likud Party, who has bragged about suppressing any pro-Palestinian content [2].
[1]: https://www.972mag.com/social-media-ukraine-palestinians-met...
[2]: https://archive.ph/pcbSA
Flor de hija de puta, en otras palabras
Good reminder that Instagram is not a "social network" or a "public square". It is a shopping mall.
This guy? https://embassies.gov.il/multilateral-organizations-france/e...
That's why I organized my protest on mastodon. No one showed up but my subscribers told me how awesome it was that I organized it.
At least you didn’t organize on BlueSky, where nobody would show up but you’d be villainized by 100 people for some minor transgression they found in your post.
Brad Lander is posting on BlueSky about him and a bunch of other American Jews and Israelis who were assisting with a olive harvest and essentially acting as human shields against settlers.
IDF detained the Americans but let him go because he's a public figure. The rabbis are still detained. Go figure.
Maybe it's because Brad Lander "proudly" invested New York City's money in Israeli weapons company Elbit Systems during the midst of the Gaza genocide. That should count for something.
Maybe it's just my feed, but I haven't seen this type of dogpiling on Bluesky.
I haven't either. I don't use any of the general algorithmic feeds, only my following feed and algorithmic feeds for particular technical topics of interest. The ability to do that is exactly why I'm using BlueSky rather than LinkedIn or Twitter for this sort of information.
On Twitter, you can't get away from some random offensive racism, e.g. against Indian students at football games, or whatever the 2 minutes hate is ranting about on a certain day. In BlueSky, I get all signal and pretty much zero noise.
BlueSky also has far better tools for stopping dogpiling than Twitter, by stopping the quote-tweet phenomenon. All around a much much healthier place if one chooses the healthy direction.
Try suggesting that "generative AI might be useful sometimes", and they'll come down to you for supporting the technology of the devil.
There are plenty of pro-ai people on blue sky. The thing about bsky is that you see people you follow, if all are anti-ai, it was your choice.
Bluesky is by and large the leftist version of Truth Social, but with a small group of people who have isolated themselves from the political content.
The problem is big enough that BlueSky is stepping up to take action against it
https://bsky.app/profile/safety.bsky.app/post/3mukm26duos2c
Amazingly, the top replies to their post about targeted harassment are from accounts trying to redirect anger at several accounts that are common targets for dogpiling. It's deeply baked into the BlueSky culture and I don't know how it came to be like that.
I've tried to prune my feed to keep it out, but now the problem is that journalists I follow eventually find themselves targeted by a BlueSky dogpiling campaign and leave the platform.
EDIT: A lot of responses are trying to blame the dogpiling victims are saying the problem doesn't exist. Let me give you one recent example, where Rick Brewster made a proof of concept of Paint.NET running on Wine and got dogpiled so hard that he deleted the post and backed out: https://bsky.app/profile/rickbrew.bsky.social/post/3muiv4phe...
> I don't know how it came to be like that.
The earliest bluesky users tended to be the most toxic users of old Twitter, it's not too surprising
It was really jut the people least agreeable to Twitter's new ownership. Whether you view like or dislike of Elon as toxic is more down to personal taste. I find the culture there perfectly pleasant.
*Some of the most toxic users, maybe (I have no clue, since I barely used it ever), but there are enough left on Twitter for sure.
Most toxic twitter users stayed on twitter.
A lot of the dogpiling is from people who come out and say some dumb shit and demand respect. When they get ridicule for their ridiculous take, they play the victim.
That being said, there's also the tumblr->twitter->bluesky contingent who have always loved dogpiling and they're mostly there because the site doesn't have musk boosting nazi posters.
> A lot of the dogpiling is from people who come out and say some dumb shit and demand respect. When they get ridicule for their ridiculous take, they play the victim.
Literally victim blaming.
The recent high profile example was a person who made a proof of concept of Paint.net on Wine and got dragged across the website so hard he felt he had to delete it, apologize, and abandon the project:
https://bsky.app/profile/rickbrew.bsky.social/post/3muiv4phe...
I'm talking about the out-of-touch article'd class of reporters who regularly get dragged over their tone deaf reporting but sure.
> A lot of the dogpiling is from people who come out and say some dumb shit and demand respect. When they get ridicule for their ridiculous take, they play the victim.
Literally victim blaming.
---
If you say something outrageous in the 'public square' and you get mocked for it by the public, how are you a victim?
I don't know why that would happen to someone trying to make a paint.NET clone, but that's also certainly not the type of post the person you replied to was talking about.
> I don't know why that would happen to someone trying to make a paint.NET clone, but that's also certainly not the type of post the person you replied to was talking about
You’re not seeing it. Everyone who dogpiled the Paint.NET on Wine guy also thought they were doing legitimate mocking of a guy who said the wrong thing in a public square. The people who didn’t like AI thought it was valid to create a harassment campaign against him for using AI as part of his process. The people who thought all things Microsoft must be opposed thought it was valid to create a harassment campaign for making a Microsoft product work in more places.
Everyone in each of these campaigns thought their crusade was valid and the victim brought it upon themself. That you can see it being invalid in some cases is getting close to realizing why it’s a problem. Not everyone agrees on what’s right or wrong, but these public shaming campaigns serve to try to force everyone who disagrees out of the platform to strengthen the echo chamber.
You’re already noticing that you’re outside of the acceptable echo chamber thoughts because you don’t understand why the Paint.NET project would attract harassment. If you supported that guy and your post got traction, you too could get dogpiled. Do you think you would have said anything “outrageous” in the public square by questioning why anyone would criticize that guy?
I don't think people responding independently to something you post online is harassment.
Do you?
For example, if 500+ people replied to my comment here with why I'm wrong, I don't see how I'm some victim. People have their right to voice their opinions. I'd just ignore replies to that comment when I'm tired of engaging.
> If you say something outrageous in the 'public square' and you get mocked for it by the public, how are you a victim?
Consider two ways of responding to someone saying something you don't like.
1) You post a reasoned critique of what they said. People who agree with you repost your critique so that a lot of people read it. Your purpose and effect is to convince people that they're wrong rather than punish them for disagreeing with you.
2) You accuse the other person of being an evil villain/pedo/nazi/terrorist. No reasoning is provided because their guilt is self-evident from the fact that you're pointing at them in an accusatory manner while wearing your tribe's official colors. The others are expected to not only do the same but also cut ties with them and try to have them harassed/fired/arrested/assaulted. Anyone who tries to rise to their defense is subjected to the same treatment.
The second one is just bullies using tribal loyalty as a pretext to rationalize their vacuous hostility.
2) Clause B) That person is actually a nazi or pedo or terrorist. What is wrong in pointing this out?
On Bluesky even the most centrist, moderate views are often dogpiled as "something outrageous". I got dragged into a flame war because I posted something to the effect of "I dont think communism would magically solve all our current problems"
People casting such mean allegations ought look in the mirror.
Paconbork, I see no sign of this. You are being ridiculous. And this network doesn't deserve any of this slander.
bsky is primarily seeded with a culturally anti-AI, human-centric artist (illustrators, gamedevs, hobby coders, writers) core — these are the first folks who wanted to leave twitter/X but continue to share their art. Rick's og dogpiled post is now deleted so I don't know the exact drama, but I'd bet good money that he was either introducing AI features to paint.net, or trying to ship some vibecoded stuff no one asked for that is obviously vibecoded, and advertising them to the core hater-group as something they would be excited about.
I'm not defending the dogpiling behaviour or even anti-AI sentiments in general. However, no one is entitled to saying things to people who don't want to hear it and receive only positive feedback for it. Sometimes even if you're excited about a thing, you have to keep it to yourself until you're in a room with others who would actually share your excitement. AKA maybe bsky isn't the place for him to share that excitement, and IMO that's neither good nor bad, but it's important to know that when you're cultivated a large-ish audience.
> I don't know how it came to be like that.
It's intrinsic to the medium. The Twitter-like format is inherently toxic and irredeemable. It can't be fixed.
The microblogging format with likes and reposts selects for short highly viral stuff that pokes at the brain stem. Rage bait, trolling, lynch mobs, and stupid brain rot stuff are all ideal forms of content for this medium. Nuanced and genuinely insightful ideas are too long.
I think short form content in general is bad. Short form video seems to be less actively toxic but more brainless and attention-destroying. Short form content is the refined sugar (or in some cases the crack or the fentanyl) of discourse.
Reddit-style sites (like this one) are better but still suffer from these problems. HN avoids the worst of it by having a culture and mod policy of downvoting trolling and low-effort crap.
I think one reason why HN is somewhat saner, is that computer nerds are one of the few demographics today who still largely post from a real computer and keyboard. Smartphones with their small screens and keyboards discourage longform text no matter how much people claim to be proficient writers on them, but people on HN don't have the same obstacle to typing a couple of substantial paragraphs with actual depth and nuance.
I am reminded about the effort and patience it required to have long-form conversations on fidonet with people 2-3 states away due to the bbs hop delay. While the topics weren't necessarily particularly serious, the effort required to have any communication at all meant both sides spent time and effort.
I often think back to this early networked communication as stark contrast to the ease and rapidity we communicate today and how that same easy and rapidity has driven the quality into the ground.
No public votes, and mods that aren't insane is what keeps HN quality reasonable.
I was active on Reddit up to 2018 or so, and at that point it was already sliding full speed towards the cesspit it is today. Public votes destroy dissenting views, and moderators treat the site as their personal fiefdom. There aren't a lot of danish communities left on the internet, but r/denmark was getting unbearable because of constant tone policing, finger wagging and micro management by the mods. That, and constant low effort meme spam. And that subreddit was far from being the worst case.
I miss the dk.* Usenet days.
I believe you misspelled 'Digg culture', sir.
> It's deeply baked into the BlueSky culture and I don't know how it came to be like that.
Bluesky was the refuge for Blue MAGA after Elon came out for Trump. That group (myself included at the time), comprised the majority of the user base and growth. Most have since returned to X, I stopped using Big Social media altogether. Bluesky leadership had a number of fumbles along the way that I suspects puts them post peak forever.
Someone dubbed "the running of Will Stancil" which I think describes a particular phenomenon of anti-engagement. I think there are some of anti- derangements about.
But generally these things cluster very strongly around specific people.
Alas Journalists I think are high value targets. Ideally they'd use tools like blocklists to help each other defend against dog piling. Ideally we'd have more automated response systems to detect and manage problems, which we could build, because of how Bluesky data is (so far, "spaces" incoming which change the gane) all public data. Blocking posts etc. The ability to handle this problems is much higher on Bluesky than elsewhere.
This can happen on Bluesky. It sucks. But for most people it's not an issue at all. It does unfortunately drive off some higher profile people though.
HN sure seems desperate to believe BlueSky is the bad spot. I suspect other networks too have metrically built up this defense systems for themselves, to justify their continued use. x spectacle of posts to sing the propaganda song that this is the bad place over here, it's too left, it's too woke, it's too activist, it's too digpiley. It seems unmoored, completely unhinged to me.
It would be interesting to figure out if these that do the dogpiling are real users or not. It does not reflect my experience on BlueSky. But I am just a single datapoint.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49539919
Mastodon HOA is infinitely more vindictive than Bluesky.
No it isn't. Cite your sources.
Also a reminder that Mastodon isn't one place. It's a network of instances. Bluesky is one and only one.
Yawn. That's a low effort rebuttal at best.
You go and open an account and post anything even remotely positive about LLMs and AI. You'll also get a harassment campaign against you as well.
Doesn't matter if you're localLLM, green energy, etc. AI = evil and there is no middle ground.
And Mastodon is a federation of disparate servers. But they are by and large extraordinarily ai-hostile nearly everywhere.
Well, I believe the answer is in POSSE. Publish (on your) own site, syndicate elsewhere.
Reach the people, but make clear that there is an authoritative source that is ~not~ less rented.
Small note, your strikethrough isn’t rendering, making it read like emphasis “that is not less rented” which probably isn’t what you intended :-)
I didn't even know about it until I heard it on HN a day later. I went to a NoKings in the flesh instead of cosplaying from social media.
Without the discussion getting crazy, as a participant, do you think No Kings is poorly named? For an outsider like myself, it seems like a confusing movement. I mean the guy was elected, so obviously not a king. And couldn't even change the name of the art center, so not that powerful. So the king thing seems misplaced? And when they ask the people at the protest, they can't seem to articulate what the point is, except they don't like the guy's policies and conduct.
Kings disregard democracy and do what they want. This is precisely what this elected official continues to attempt to do. No kings is a reminder that he and all other elected officials are not kings.
"No kings is a reminder that he and all other elected officials are not kings."
It would be great if the "other elected officials" part turns out to be true, but my in my experience I don't see that happening. Have there been any policy proposals out of No Kings that would create better oversight and accountability?
There are ideas for how to improve representation, which comes first. I do not get the feeling that current elected officials are interested in ceding their position, power, and prestige.
One of the good ideas are expanding ranked choice voting.
One of the bad ideas is justifying gerrymandering because the other side is doing it too.
Roughly only 10% of House seats are actually competitive. This is a problem that needs fixing.
Yes, but have any of those ideas come out of the No Kings or actively promoted by the movement?
The sheer number of participants implies that leadership can ignore those ideas at their peril. So if they don't know what the No Kings ideas are, they ought to look them up.
yes, they are talked about regularly
Hundreds of executive orders okay only when my guy is in charge
Agreed. A No Executive Orders protest would be more clear and would be one I could get behind. It does seem like it would be good to limit the scope of Executive orders. Like, many were asking, how can he just close down the department of education with an exacutive order? Oh, it's because the department of education was formed by an excutive order of an earlier president in the first place.
The scope of Executive Orders is already limited by the Constitution. What additional limitations are you asking for?
In some cases Presidents have issued orders that exceeded their legal authority. The effects of those are eventually blocked by the judicial system, although that necessarily takes some time.
Well, a president should certainly be held accountable for any executive order that is overturned on constitutional grounds. Not only should the president have (and use) plenty of legal counsel to avoid this, but a president stepping beyond constitutional bounds is acting illegally which (a) none of us should and (b) ought not go unpunished.
Held accountable how? Like a fine or something? Maybe a strongly worded reprimand from the judiciary to be added to the president's formal HR employment record?
> strongly worded reprimand from ...
Chucky Cheese specializes in this /s !/s
DHS literally telling federal court judges that they are going to continue extraditing someone in face of a court order not to, that they are not going to turn a plane around.
ICE refusing to make officers available to law enforcement for investigation of issues.
A lot more happening than "making executive orders", though kudos to Trump for trying to sign executive orders that even his own DOJ are not just illegal, but unconstitutional.
Do you think making things up and attributing them to other people is more or less constructive than replying to what they actually said? Do you usually get a great response when you go for cute X clapbacks, or... what?
He's not attempting he's fucking doing it. Which to me signals deeper problems with our supposed "system of checks and balances" that we're taught since grade school. The system was specifically designed to prevent this, and yet it's happened. Whether Trump is impeached or imprisoned or whatever is secondary to plugging the holes he used to do this in the first place.
While I agree with you, there is also the fact that America chose Trump 2.0 - something we should try to understand and learn from. We, the credentialed elite (most people do not have a college degree), have failed to help our neighbors and fellow citizens.
The advent of the computer changed how automation impacted society. We (majority of HN audience) benefitted immensely, rising in wealth and social acclaim, while at the same time failing to create new tasks for regular people, who's jobs we replaced with technology.
But you can just vote them out. End of story. No Kings. Maybe I'm just too literal in my thinking.
I can't vote anyone out alone, so groups/ideas like No Kings seek to collect people around some general organizing principle. Involved people are more likely to vote and it's possible that you highlight the issues for people who aren't aware or energized enough to vote.
Plus, protests can influence other people in government, outside of elections.
There was an attempted self-coup last time he was voted out. I think it's pretty reasonable to be extra reactive to anti-democratic tendencies from him.
Let me ask you this: what is the purpose of a protest?
Keep an eye on the Texas Senate race and what happens if Talarico wins. Paxton has granted himself the ability to investigate election fraud as the sitting AG.
Let's see if the will of the people is honored, or if the king steps in too.
Please, cite examples.
January 6, 2021 is well known. There are numerous examples leading up to, on the day, the years after, and even the first weeks of 2.0 - all interconnected - all anti-democratic.
"NoKings" is one identity for the resistance to autocratic tendencies and the backslide of democracy seen globally. We does not need to be so literal, step back to see the full picture.
What specifically on January 6th, 2021? Asking people to remain peaceful and respect law enforcment is criminal in your book? (Twitter immediately censored these tweets on that day, btw)
https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1346912780700577792?s=2...
https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1346904110969315332?s=2...
Go rewatch the rally, there are plentiful anti-democratic statements.
Then watch the riot and explain to us how more than 100 officers were injured and why the people who did that deserved pardons, please, I am curious for the current justifications on the hard right
Same question to you, are you implying collective punishment applies to Trump because of what some who claimed to be his supporters at the time said?
interesting justifications or absolvement... is this a reframing of the planted FBI conspiracy theory?
Are you saying those people who Trump pardoned, he did not call "his people" or "true patriots"? Are you objecting to the video evidence of the crimes committed by those same people on an individual basis?
Have you looked at any of these cases yourself (done your own research)?
Are you open to considering that anti-democratic statements were made by the people on stage at the rally?
How about the part where he was pushing Pence to certify the "alternate electors" instead of the real ones? There's a reason some of the protesters were chanting "hang Mike Pence", and it's not because they disliked his haircut.
Returning votes to a state to check in with the state and see _IF_ they want to substitute a different slate of electors was a perfectly legal action at the time. They created a new act in 2022 to make that illegal called "Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022".
Are you implying some kind of collective punishment that Trump is somehow responsible for what everyone of a certain political alignment says?
Are you claiming that seven Republican state chairs decided to send "alternate electors" to DC, even though they lost all the relevant recounts and court cases, without at least Trump's approval? I can't prove you're wrong, but I don't buy it.
What I can say with certainty is that, when Trump pressured Pence to certify the alternate electors in spite of losing the recounts and court cases, that's not legal, and that's on Trump.
The No Kings protesters seem to want to disregard democracy because they don't like the current president. Repeatedly claimling the sky will fall given an election result seems to be undemocratic. Which certainly goes both ways, but right now it is the democrats who have fallen into this line of thinking. What has he done that is any more undemocratic than previous presidents?
> disregard democracy because they don't like the current president
What, specifically, do you think this means? Do you think they're trying to install a new government without a vote?
Or is "disregard democracy" just word salad nonsense that you're repeating for some reason?
Yes, they (some democrats and No Kings protesters) seem to want to do some very undemocratic things.
I am very concerned with much of the rhetoric on the left. I used to be more concerned with the right.
I agree the far left says concerning things, as I do the hard right.
The difference to me today is I see intentional cruelty to our fellow humans by those currently in power. Especially from the likes of Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller.
Naming taxpayer-funded public facilities for a living politician has been historically unusual in America. LaGuardia Airport and Shushan Airport in New Orleans were both named for sitting politicians because they were strongmen or allied with strongmen.
Living ex-presidents were not fair game until the partisan late 1990s. It was still done primarily as a posthumous tribute. Naming taxpayer-funded facilities for a sitting president who hopes to find a way to run again was not done under Franklin Roosevelt and has always remained drastically outside of the Overton Window. While in office, Trump has now directed attention to making the following public items promote his personal brand, name, image or likeness:
US Passports, US entry visas, US Naval class of vessels, US Institute of Peace federal building, National Park entry passes, and currency struck by the US Mint;
Moreover, presidential staff have confirmed that the president has asked for New York Penn Station to be renamed for himself before he would agree to release congressionally approved federal funds for its improvement. He also explored having Washington Dulles International Airport renamed for him; since then, his supporters have renamed Palm Beach International Airport (IATA PBI) for him and changed the IATA designation to DJT.
The president recently diverted over $22MM from Homeland Security and Border Protection to pay for television commercials featuring himself talking about causes dear to himself. I have not tracked whether this spending went to all major broadcast networks or was directed to be spent at networks that the president considered deserved the tax money. The third commercial "was virtually identical to an ad for Trump's Republican reelection campaign in 2024 and showed him walking down a hallway as his voice can be heard warning of a 'final battle' against 'globalists' and 'warmongers'." The president has reportedly agreed not to continue spending government money on this series but refuses to reimburse taxpayers the $22MM.
Naming stuff after himself is certainly a good demonstration of his narcissistic tendencies and is tactless. I do think the criticism over this is fair but I don’t consider it that high on my list of priorities given it doesn’t materially affect anyone. We should probably have limits, and a good demonstration of that is the failure to rename the Kennedy Center.
I do agree that the ads should be criticized, but there is precedent for previous presidents having done something similar, not that it makes it above scrutiny but rather not so bad.
He also renames bodies of water, mountains and even AI then has a tantrum when people don’t use them. This ain’t troubling behavior?
Sure, you are free to care about naming things when there are humanitarian crises throughout the world.
We can care about many things at the same time. We also care about the humanitarian crisis created by Elon Musk from dismantling USAID and RFK Jr. from running HHS based on medical misinformation.
I have enjoyed our many threads we have had. I appreciate you keeping this civil. Feel free to have the last word, I do enjoy the push back and your perspective.
not just a tantrum, but calling those people enemies of America
> I don’t consider it that high on my list of priorities
The problem many Americans have is that these are the top priorities of the president. Even the Iran war was more about him and his legacy, to "be the guy" who ended it, not understanding Iran's ability to inflict damage on allies and close the straight, because Trump removed many of the people who have been analyzing this for decades. Perhaps there were good reasons prior presidents have not decided to do this.
Then he turns around and does deals with Putin while blaming Zelensky for diesel prices... it's all so shameless, it should be shameful.
If you listen to oval office or state room events in full, you will hear him forget what he is talking about and go to his standard ballroom, arches, name on this or that. He's more focused on himself than anyone else.
Iran was going through a humanitarian crisis after the Iranian regime killed tens of thousands of civilians, not to mention the nearly 50 years of oppression and suffering that the IRGC has inflicted. The approach of appeasement was disastrous and gave the Iranian regime a lot of money.
So you want constant war in Ukraine? What did Obama do when Russia took Crimea? What did Biden do during the Russia-Ukraine war that improved the situation?
He’s a narcissist, but so are all of them but Trump is probably more tactless about it than most.
> Iran was going through a humanitarian crisis
That is not why Trump started his own forever war. In fact he told the Iranian "help is on the way" and then never showed.
https://nypost.com/2026/01/13/us-news/trump-tells-iranians-k...
He went to war for his legacy and miscalculated badly, because the people who understand the region and the IRGC were fired or pushed out. He was sending Witkoff and Kushner (real estate guys) to negotiate nuclear topics, alone, without experts in nuclear science or Iran / IRGC.
My expectation is they do to Trump what they did to Carter.
All true, and all both alarming and disgusting... with one nit.
In 1926, coinage was struck with the image of the sitting president, in honor of the nation's 150th anniversary. It turns out that Trump on coins for the 250th anniversary has precedent.
The rest of it... yeah. Appalling, especially when you put it all together like that.
> In 1926...
Populism and nationalism were on the rise, much like today. Hopefully we reflect on history and don't do another world war.
I don't think any other president promoted anything like January 6, and doesn't recognize an election of a president to this day - undermining democracy, the same democratic system that elected him twice.
Just that alone is enough I think.
But you can also see his disgust to western democracies, and his fascination with autocracies, the vast majority of them are extremely incompetent - thank God for that at least.
What has he done that is any more undemocratic than previous presidents?
You're joking right? In just the past 48 hours he attempted to remove over 20,000 people from the voter rolls. A preliminary check of the data revealed that more than half of these people were born in the U.S. and thus were automatically entitled to vote.
Last week he attempted to denaturalize a sitting U.S. legislator based on supposed irregularities in her immigration paperwork from when she was a child...even though the paperwork had been reviewed without issue by the federal government when it was first submitted and again to confirm her eligibility for office at the start of her first term (which began during Trump's first term).
He has openly mused about using the Secret Service to assassinate people he doesn't like. For the past 2 years, he has been threatening to jail and murder his opponents, and ordered his DOJ to prosecute his opponents for made-up crimes.
Do you not consider it damning that so many shouldn’t be on the voter rolls?
Ilhan Omar certainly seems to have very concerning immigration records and given that a judge has signed the search warrant.
I think you have gone into conspiracy theory territory that I’m not familiar with.
Where are you getting your information from?
A variety of sources, some more frequently than others depending on current events and interests and some subscriptions have lapsed (the new york times, npr, foxnews, the wall street journal, national review, al jazeera, the guardian, the telegraph). I would recommend you and others do the same.
Ilhan Omar’s alleged corruption and immigration fraud and the rampant fraud in Minnesota are good examples where the left leaning media has ignored but others have not.
> What has he done that is any more undemocratic than previous presidents?
Can you recall any other instance where FoxNews boycotted the White House press pool in support of left wing media outlets?
That is unprecedented as far as I know. What did Trump do that inspired FoxNews to make this choice?
The executive (1/3rd of the government) being capricious with the press is _undoubtedly_ embarrassing and unamerican, but is so far away from the behavior of a true monarch that the name "no kings" is still farcical at best.
'the press' is seen as a pillar of democracy, without which the rest of things fall apart.
it's more important than you make it seem.
That's one example, there are daily reminders to why "NoKings" has staying power as a movement, compared to the Indivisible brand. I suggest watching a full segment from the oval office, listen to the things that preoccupy his mind.
I do agree there is a ton of hyperbolics in NoKings / Indivisible / the left. I work within these organizations, enduring it, to temper their messages and opinions. Minds are moved in real life while biases are reinforced online. It's hard to forget there is another human with different experiences when you sit face to face.
Oh my parents and their partners go to all the no kings rallies. I can see the size of the movement dwindling over time. I'm very happy someone is attempting to temper though, because, as I've said for a decade now, the hyperbolics drive way more support for your opponents than they do for your cause.
Both extremes are shrinking, independents grow. This is a good thing. The far left and hard right do not represent the majority of people.
Occupy Oligarchy, we are the 99%
Heck yeah, I appreciate you!
The way out starts with community. I cannot understate how much getting involved has positively impacted my life. We have to interact with those different from us if we are to find collaboration and compromise.
Here are some things Obama did that were unprecedented or very concerning regarding the press:
* Obama extensively used the Espionage Act to uncover government sources used by the press and also against the press directly
* Obama secretly subpoenaed the phone calls of AP reporters
* Obama didn't allow or severely restricted photojournalists
I don't think that it is good to ban the media from the White House, and I do think the much of the criticism is fair, but to then claim that this is undemocratic is wrong.
Both parties, the oligarchy, are the problem. Power continues to concentrate in the President, Congress does nothing. SCOTUS polls marginally better, the Press has ceased fulfilling their role. Wealth inequality reached an all time high in America. We The People are furious for varied and valid reasons.
Occupy Oligarchy, we are the 99%
I do think there's a problem and certainly agree with the general sentiment. I also do think we probably have it better than most other countries. So, perhaps we can deal with the oligarchy and fraud within our system. I do think that is what led many to vote for Trump, in that they feel failed by both parties and Trump was an outsider, similar to Bernie's ascendance.
I agree, I have not heard it put better than The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel. It goes beyond party politics to the failures of Liberal Democracy stemming from its own success.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vp5qsEuUOWo
Maybe the best time to express disapproval of kings is before they happen.
More confusing, they change the name of the protest when they organize in places that actually have a king.
> they change the name of the protest when they organize in places that actually have a king
why tho? it's No King_s_
you can have one
Sounds pretty humiliating.
I’m glad this situation doesn’t affect you personally, and I hope that continues, but history suggests it won’t.
I just watched Trump talk for 5 minutes sitting at the desk in the oval office about how he gets to choose what he likes and the blathering about a seriously good question being 'fake news'. The president acting like a petulant toddler makes me feel like the name couldn't be more appropriate.
He tried to overturn an election, his destruction of executive agencies is both unprecedented in scope and illegal in manner, he breaks the law constantly to enrich himself, and he repeatedly ignores the will of the legislature. It isn't "I don't like his tax rates, he's a king". His conduct is anti-democratic.
The Project 2025 agenda (only that latest in a long series of Heritidge Foundation plots), to destroy thr federal government to shatter universities, to generally keep the government from functioning, in a desire to pull people towards libertarianism, towards disbelieving in government, was terrifying to America during the election. Terrifying. No one wanted it.
But Trump disavowed it, said that's not what he was running on. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/29/us/politics/trump-project...
Today though, this plan to destroy the government is in full effect. It's had remarkable success with the quadfecta of GOapnhouse & Senate doing nothing, allowing the president to seize the power of the purse, enact recisions, whatever. And the partisan hack joke of Florida election recount denier "justices" enabling him at every turn, using shadow docket rulings at an unheard of rate to step in to deny the regular courts their normal motion of things, to forward dear leader along. Executive power we have no belief they will continue to espouse when it's a Democrat in a hopefully less gilded tacky ass White House. Project 2025's progress undoing America & governance has been a horror. https://www.project2025.observer/en
> was terrifying to America during the election. Terrifying. No one wanted it.
If you can't separate your personal opinion from a factual statement like this, you're not someone worth listening to.
You might consider the guy who organized the Project 2025 paper, as well as several authors, sit or talk with Trump every day. If you have familiarity with the contents, you can see the actions towards their goals.
Russ Vought and Stephen Miller are notable examples.
These people are not hiding this fact, they ar rather proud and loud about it. What they have also done is convince a number of people to go out and disavow the connection on their behalf.
What are you trying to say though? What you said has nothing to do with my comment.
You said it was "terrifying to America" and "No one wanted it".
That's your opinion. It's your opinion that you stated as a fact. I think a lot of people wanted it. I personally know many people who were excited about it and wanted it. It may be terrifying to leftists, but certainly not to America as a whole.
> You said it was "terrifying to America"
You might slow down and stop reacting emotionally. I'm not the same person.
> not to America as a whole
Most Americans now favor changes to the government which would require constitutional changes. They may not all use the same words, but there is a significant consensus things are very broken.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/07/28/most-amer...
It's weird how terrorists trying to blow up the nation with guns and bombs get such a bad rap, but the people actively proudly working to dismantle and tear down America within don't suffer the same wrath.
I agree with your original statement. Some people did want this. Some small percent. Who are traitors to America, who want to destroy it. I don't think those people deserve anything but antipathy and to be persecuted as traitors.
No Kings is a catchall for no tyrants or authoritarians. It's what the founding fathers were worried bout when setting up the US representative democracy with checks and balances and a constitution. They didn't want a president to act like a tyrant or a king.
Would the founding fathers support a wealth tax and do you?
I don't think they had a wealth tax back then, but if that's somethings the voters had wanted their representatives put into law, I don't see why not. And yes I do support it to prevent even great concentrations of wealth across generations.
But what is that have to do with No Kings being a protest against the president acting like a tyrant?
The UK had a wealth tax back then in the form of a land value tax paid by landowners.
Several of the colonies had general property taxes on land, buildings, and physical property which continue today. Given that "capital" was not a thing back then and wouldn't be for almost 200 years, these property taxes were in effect wealth taxes.
Reading the Federalist Papers these days feels quite ominous. So many passages describe Trump to a T.
And somehow the federalist society folks stick their head in the mud and make up some nonsensical interpretation, violating the clear and obvious interpretation, to justify further eroding rights and democracy. A party of greedy and traitorous fools taking down the country they pretend to love, enriching themselves at every step.
They were describing their experience dealing with kings and people who want to be kings. King is a personality type, not only a role. In more clinical settings they’re called narcissistic sociopaths, which is what Trump has proven himself to be, so that’s why we call him a king. Sometimes their title is “dictator”, sometimes it’s “emperor” or “fuhrer” or “chairman”. In this case his title is “president”, but he acts like a king, so that’s why we say we don’t want kings. This applies equally to wannabe kings.
Yup, people can get hung up on specific words instead of seeing the category with term de jour.
Saw this super interesting interview the other day. The Students - What the Greeks would call our government.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=205IdzGJMJs
I do not believe you have been "reading the Federalist Papers".
I do believe you read a blog post where someone told you there were passages which "describe Trump to a T".
This one, probably: https://archive.thinkprogress.org/how-hamilton-warned-in-the...
I suspect you have projected instead of responding to the best possible interpretation
I suspect you did a quick search to find something you thought would back up this projection
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2SD8nzsQzIHnOi2zSTwP... (readings)
Since I write almost zero code these days, I have far more time for reading and writing human.
Trump posted on twitter/x several AI pictures of himself as a king, that’s where the name comes from
He's referred to himself as a "dictator". CPAC put out imagery likening him to Caesar. He's referred to himself as "King" and put out that ridiculous AI generated image of him as a king. He put out that ridiculous AI generated image of him as Jesus (and then later gaslit reporters about it). Him and his campaign have repeatedly stated ideations for an (unconstitutional) third term "and beyond".
> except they don't like the guy's policies and conduct.
That too, but his conduct rises above "policies I don't like"; he has shown direct contempt for the other branches of our government. For example, his administration has essentially dismantled or destroyed various functions in violation of the Constitution: take USAID as an example here: USAID is an agency created de jure by Congress, yet it has been de facto dissolved by the administration. We all learned, I think, in grade school, that the job of the executive is to implement the laws passed by Congress. From an article at the time about it:
> “The President does not have constitutional authority to ignore a statute that establishes a department or agency,” says Saikrishna Prakash, a law professor at the University of Virginia.
He holds the judicial branch in contempt too: quite literally any time any judge does anything he disagrees with, the judge is blasted as "left-wing radical", even and including cases where the judge was a GOP-appointee. Further examples include ignoring judicial orders and depriving people of access to the courts by physical force (see the many cases of the administration's removal of people from the country; to put it one way: "For depriving us, in many Cases, of the Benefits of Trial by Jury", or "The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U. S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene" — Justice Sotomayor, joined by Kagan & Jackson.)
> I mean the guy was elected, so obviously not a king.
The point of the protest is to prevent him from making himself a king.
> And couldn't even change the name of the art center, so not that powerful.
This is really weak cherry picking. He has successfully removed medical care from millions of Americans, started foreign wars of aggression, destabilised several countries, probably tanked US international reputation for a generation... he is incredibly powerful.
Trump did actually get the name changed, then a court said take it down, so he closed the arts center down in spite, which it remains to this day
You could argue he did change the name: the name “Kennedy” is nowhere to be found on the building. The Kennedy Center is in state of existing but also not. It’s mandated to exist, it’s funded, there’s laws and courts that say it should be opened and operational… and yet, it isn’t because one man doesn’t want it to be.
I would go further than that.
A bunch of European countries (including all of Scandinavia) are constitutional monarchies, and they don't devolve into the sort of anti-democratic behaviour we're all seeing from Trump. As a UK resident, I would prefer if the UK were a republic on general principle, but I fail to see the monarchy causing any real large-scale harm to society (individuals like Andrew notwithstanding).
The real point they should be making is "no more despots". Some despots are kings, but some are styled presidents, such as Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un.
Also, legitimately elected or appointed officials become despots all the time. Hitler had a plurality (but not outright majority) of votes in 1932. Salazar was an MP and minister of finance, and actually legitimately tried to resign from that role several times over many years before he was eventually nominated to the role of prime minister. Ferdinand Marcos won the Philippine presidential election in 1965 with some amount of intimidation, and the Philippines only formally became a military dictatorship under his rule in 1971.
In many ways, that's the scariest scenario — people who legitimately get elected to power, and then use that power to solidify their illegitimate rule.
> As a UK resident, I would prefer if the UK were a republic on general principle, but I fail to see the monarchy causing any real large-scale harm to society (individuals like Andrew notwithstanding).
I'm not a UK resident [obviously] but I thought the parliament was explicitly superior to the monarchy? Isn't the monarchy essentially cultural theater at this point, for centuries now? The moment the king causes a crisis by stepping out of his very narrow lane, one Act of Parliament could make the monarchy a memory, right? I suppose he could refuse ascent then, and that would be a legitimate constitutional crisis.
Yeah, it's a mostly ceremonial role. But that's my point, really — it's not the title, it's the behaviour.
I would argue that, even though it's not my preference, there is real political value in the monarchy today still. E.g. Charles's speech to Congress[0] has a certain weight to it that wouldn't be there if Charles were an elected leader instead of a monarch.
0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCUZWnX8JIM
Is it really confusing?
Like first of all I would call a person who tries to pass the checks and balances of a democracy, even if they fail, the target of the ideals or “no kings”
And while we can disagree with the extent to which any one act or bribe elevates someone to dictator, and whether or not all the accusations are true, can you not understand why someone caught up in the narrative ecosystem happening over the past few years may develop the perspective that Trump is trying to consolidate power?
Also “no folks who incrementally Test the limits of power and fail” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
> Like first of all I would call a person who tries to pass the checks and balances of a democracy, even if they fail, the target of the ideals or “no kings”
Its incredibly frustrating to talk to people that take the position of "Well eventually they gave up after pressure from the courts and legislature, so no harm no foul." There's a difference between doing things that have a reasonable legal basis that the courts disagree with and what much of this administration was doing -- sometimes fragrantly ignoring court orders until D politicians got involved to pressure compliance.
Using the 2020 coup attempt as an example, yes, the courts shot down his attempts. The issue is that *he even tried* -- the attempt was transparently not good-faith concern about election integrity.
A common bad faith political tactic is an attempt to derail conversation and reframe it around linguistic pedantry, to discredit an activist movement by pretending not to comprehend its rhetoric. The same thing happened with "Black Lives Matter" and "Defund the Police." Instead of talking about actual issues, all of the oxygen was taken up with futile attempts to litigate the specific meanings of these terms.
One of the first AI slop nonsense coming out of the White House was Trump wearing a crown on a mock Time magazine cover with "Long Live The King" printed on it.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/29/the-slopagan...
Which specific interview are you referring to where a person couldn't articulate a response to a very simple question?
they could have gone with NoTrump which would have had the correct connotation (at least for Bridge Enthusiasts)
I'm using "Occupy Oligarchy" now, which has an even more correct connotation (imo) and is a fun hommage to another movement.
NoKings has name recognition. I volunteer with my local Indivisible, but people know this name far less.
Trump acts like a king, even if he was elected. He gets tributes and requires deference, clearly visible from the foreign and corporate donations, and behavior of the Republican Party. Or take the "super intelligence" thing, him dictating what a technology shall be called, lest you become an ENEMY OF AMERICA. Or the repeated attempts to silence the media. If we consider the Kennedy Center you brought up, Trump's name was on there, then removed by court order. His response was to close it in spite. The Kennedy Center remains closed to this day, until he gets his way.
Trump has tried to violate most of the Bill of Rights. There are reasons people see every day for why NoKings sticks and resonates.
I do agree NoKings (and broadly the far left) have really bad messaging, a product of echo chambers (imo). I suspect the Democrats will learn the wrong lessons from the midterms... sigh.
Most political movements (and arguments) in the US use hyperbole. No Kings is hyperbolic to show disapproval of Trump's actions. This single-sided bias on a conceptual is also a hall mark of most political movements in the US. It's fine if someone takes a similar action that I see as good, but it's bad if I think it's bad.
Before I get hated out of existence, please note that I don't like either party or political tactics in general because they've devolved into politically commercialized populism without any empathy or critical thought. Just as an example, deportations under Trump are roughly on trend with Obama, Trump targeting activities are similar to Obama targeting conservative groups with the IRS, Obama lied in the SoTU about the gender wage gap, Obama was hard on journalists (highest prosecutions?) Like Trump has been, and Obama ignored court orders such as issuing immigration permits in violations of a order similar to Trump ignoring orders. I could sit here and hope that any of these abuses results in better oversight, but that would be naive based on the history.
Edit: if you're going to disagree, at least contribute to the discussion.
Deportations under Obama may have been approximately equal to under Trump. Obama did it without nearly so much violence, though.
Obama lied in the SoTU. Um, OK? I mean, we should expect better than that, but are you seriously saying that Obama lied as much as Trump does?
For me personally, the single biggest thing was January 6, the whole "alternate electors" thing, and Trump pressuring Pence to accept the alternate (fake) ones. That was a full-blown attempt to steal an election that he lost. That I do not forget and do not forgive. And if you can show me something Obama did that's on that scale, well, I'll be surprised.
"Deportations under Obama may have been approximately equal to under Trump. Obama did it without nearly so much violence, though."
Is there good data for that or is it observation bias?
I'm not saying scale is the same. I'm saying that these abuses will continue to happen without accountability. The scale argument is not an excuse, merely a manifestation of cognitive dissonance.
Plenty of lies and corruption on any president if you care to look. https://lists.grabien.com/list/complete-guide-scandals-obama...
> Is there good data for that or is it observation bias?
In fact there is, these numbers are published by the government. Trump has still not averaged what Obama did, nor topped the the greatest numbers of all time, so Obama is still greater than Trump, much to Midas's chagrin I suppose, given how much Trump talks about Obama, like Obama lives rent free in Trump's head. /s !/s
One example: https://latinonewsnetwork.com/community/who-deported-more-mi...
And now you're likely on some kind of watch-list or database, and accomplished approximately nothing except making yourself feel morally superior to others. Congratulations! Much winning.
> accomplished approximately nothing
I spread the words of Michael Sandel to hundreds of left wing people, so they might come back towards the center. That they might acknowledge their complicity in creating the situation we find ourselves in. The constituents of NoKings is far more diverse than you know. Try joining us next time to see with your own eyes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vp5qsEuUOWo
> making yourself feel morally superior to others
One might wonder if your comment here falls into this category.
You have no idea of my politics, and this post reads as nonsense.
Please reflect on how this comment of yours relates to your prior comment to which I replied, and how others might perceive to to be equally applicable there. I do not understand where I said anything about your politics, can you tell me where or how? I thought I was replying to your perspectives on NoKings
There are a lot of heated comments here today, we all need to chill a bit. Why did you choose the words you did in your first reply to me?
"Network effects" is just "the emperor with no clothes": People believe it matters because people say so.
There's no reason why Emperor Zuck's court can't be disrupted by some monkey king yet to appear.
We're at the dawn of the Third Age of the Internet.
Someone has to be the Frodo to take Facebook & Twitter's rings into Mount MySpace and melt them down into the same puddle of lava as the legacy media that came before them :)
>"Network effects" is just "the emperor with no clothes": People believe it matters because people say so.
Which is to say that it matters very much? The dollar only has value because people say so as well.
> The dollar only has value because people say so as well.
I thought it was mostly because the IRS only takes dollars, and they have guns [metaphorically].
I can think of 26 billion reasons why another platform doesn’t just appear and disrupt Meta
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
Did you miss the little ripple that grew into a tsunami called TikTok?
Although it didn't aim to replace "traditional" social media, it became enough of a threat to US homogeneity.
Even though TikTok doesn't even try to improve its messaging and friend UX etc, a lot of young people in Asia (outside China) use it as their primary platform.
It’s absolutely a real thing. The people in my life use WhatsApp because that’s what everyone else they know uses.
I don’t use WhatsApp, which just means I’m not on the group chat. Nobody uses my preferred option because nobody but me is on it, which means not much actual chatting is happening.
Don’t worry No Kings day is a joke organized by a Never Trumper and with the goal of making sure nobody protests like France and instead protest in a way where it’s just a humiliation ritual.
To each their own, but I would not like to be in France during those riots. (Also, does the outburst of violence actually result in more changes being done? If no, then what’s the point; if yes, then the most violent organiser policy wins; does not seem like a winning strategy)
Yeah, the protests in France are incredibly effective... in convincing people to vote for the far right!
I mean the protesters say that Macron IS the far right, so from their perspective there is no way the protests will make things worse.
I can't help but recall the joyous cheers during the deplatforming era. "Freedom of speech doesn't apply to companies" is a particularly vivid memory.
The article is not arguing that Facebook must support No Kings rallies.
It's urging/educating people to rely on Facebook as little as possible, since it is not committed to being a neutral platform.
If you support free speech, you should support facebook's right to express their own political views.
But that does not mean you have to support facebook's political views, or the way they exercise them!
When I see comments like this, I despair at how poorly people understand the basic concept of free speech. Hopefully you're just trolling.
they understand, the problem is that they agree with Meta. They are happy with the outcome but have no courage to say it directly so they hide it behind these "questions"
> facebook's right to express their own political views
Facebook is not a person. Facebook should not have "rights" nor "political views".
The silly idea of treating companies like persons and giving them any "rights" at all is what got us into this mess in the first place.
"Facebook is not a person. Facebook should not have "rights" nor "political views"."
In the USA, the supreme court has ruled a corporation DOES in fact have rights. Like the lawsuit of advertising medicine that a state banned-- the SC ruled that was infringing the rights of corporations to "express" their speech.
As someone from UK, I find this whole "Corporations have more rights than I do" very disturbing but thats how it is
That's why I write "should" and not "does". And in the UK and the EU, corporations also have more rights than they should (according to my worldview anyway). I think you should find the UK and EU laws disturbing in the same way as the USA's. Corporations also have way less liabilities (example: imagine if you could deduct your "operating expenses" (e.g. food) from your taxes, in the same way corporations do) and face way less penalties for their misdeeds than you do, which a bigger problem.
While you're right in a literal sense, I think it's pretty hard to dispute that Zuckerberg can operate unabated due to his majority ownership of voting shares.
That's actually a pretty good illustration of my point. Because Facebook has many of the rights that people have (own property, enter contracts etc.) but very few of the liabilities (can't be imprisoned, rarely ever pays any fines in practice), Zuch can use it as a proxy to do a bunch of shady stuff, that he wouldn't do if he risked being held personally liable for it.
If companies as a legal concept didn't exist in their current form, then we wouldn't have this problem of one person, or more commonly many people, using them as a proxy to get away with a bunch of unethical stuff. Often way more unethical that whatever Facebook / Zuck is doing, such as destroying ecosystems, prioritizing profits over worker safety, etc.
There are obvious reasons why it's expedient to grant the same rights to a collective organization as to its constituents. If you're getting confused by the abstraction, you're welcome to pretend that the board of Facebook (which is comprised of humans) are exercising their individual rights to free speech.
I'm not the one being confused here, though it's fun to see you're already resorting to ad hominem. It reveals a lack of actual arguments, as does your appeal to obviousness.
But yes, I'd like to see the board of Facebook and the boards of many other companies being held liable for the actions of those companies. But for some reason, it's only ever "expedient" to grant companies the rights rightfully belonging to people, and never "expedient" to impose the same sorts of liabilities on them as on people. (Not that a non-physical entity such as a company could ever practically face the same penalties as a physical person anyway, which is another ("obvious" in your parlance) reason not to grant them those rights.)
If I was interested in going down the ad-hominem route I'd claim that you simply see the status quo as "obvious" because you lack the power of imagination to consider a more sensible alternative.
In fact, I think your argument is so backwards it actually supports my case. Why do I need to "imagine" that the owners of the company are using their rights to free speech as individuals (which is obviously not what is actually happening)? Why can't they just actually use those individual rights?
You don't like a trawling boat emptying out the lake in your village? Just imagine that the boat's captain is using a fishing rod to do the same, that's clearly a comparable situation!
I think I understand why people make this connection but I don't actually think there is one. Freedom of speech is possibly the #1 thing people get confused over, due to the similarities between "I don't like your speech" and "I want your speech to stop" and "I want the government to stop your speech."
What I'm seeing is an argument for, "I don't like Facebook's speech. I think you shouldn't like it either. So I think we should all walk away."
"Freedom of speech" is used as shorthand for both the general culture of open listening to disagreeable views, and for a series of laws related to the first amendment.
98% of the time people are talking about the former, and the only ones confused are the people assuming they're talking about the latter and linking the face-palm-worthy "showing them the door" XKCD.
There's also a blurring of private/public in certain instances. There were cases in the 1980's regarding free speech rights in a shopping mall. Privately owned, but a public space (defacto public square).
> 98% of the time people are talking about the former
I'd say damn near 100% of those 98% will still cite the constitution, sometimes even crying "1st amendment!" in lieu of "free speech," so I'd say your overall point is wrong. They are basically saying both at the same time, with intent, while still not understanding it.
From an outside-the-US perspective, this is obviously not true.
I think I was responding to you when I accidentally responded to someone else (perhaps, I'm a bit confused now, but that's my fault).
How is it obviously not true (genuine question)? I am not an American myself, but used the American definition as it's the simplest (it's very absolutist, as per my understanding). But what definitions exist where it is not defined in terms of how the government can treat you? I'm from Canada. We have concessions against hate speech, for example (maybe the US does too, though? I'm not sure). But "free speech" doesn't mean you are free criticism from fellow citizens or even businesses based on what you say.
Sure, some people are talking about the former but are genuinely mixed up about the latter.
What do you feel would be the good-faith way to respond to such people?
Surely it's not by sidetracking into pedantry about the law, which at the end of the day both they and you know that's not what they're really fired up about.
I think that any reasonable person who is just misinformed is going to understand, possibly after some time if they are the sort who find it hard to admit they are wrong. Otherwise, if they are going to try and claim that "No, constitutional 'free speech' means I can say whatever I want without consequence from ANYbody" then I don't think there is a good-faith way to argue that.
Anyone who is "fired up" about free speech but feels that their freedom of speech is being violated by someone other than the government has an explanation to give.
If the explanation is that they feel that other people have an obligation to listen to them, then I don't care.
My freedom of speech includes the freedom to reject other people's speech. If they can't tell the difference between a disagreement and suppression of speech, then that's their problem. The generous interpretation is that they don't fully understand the issue. The realistic explanation is that many people value their own freedom of speech over the freedom of others to the extent that they view disagreement with their views as an attack on their right to hold their views.
Essentially, "freedom for me but not for thee", and I don't rightly care about what enemies of freedom are "fired up" about.
But at the end of the day, much of what conservative "free speech" protests against big tech have been about has been that big tech drew a line on things like violence and hatred of protected classes, and conservatives don't like being told that their ideas, while legally allowed, are not welcome in polite company.
"I'm not American" is a good explanation. America's conception of free speech isn't the only one.
I'm not American. I chose to use American terms they have (from what I understand) the simplest definition in that it is considered absolute. Other countries have concessions for things like hate speech and other such matters (and yes, there is a lot of nuance to it). But my point was is that "free speech" is in regards to how the government treats you, not: "I can come to your business and treat you like shit and you have to sit there and take it."
EDIT: I just realized you were not responding to me... oops!
All good. Still an interesting comment.
My point (less snarkily this time) was that their definition (it's only an issue when the government limits your speech) is really quite narrow.
> conservatives don't like being told that their ideas, while legally allowed, are not welcome in polite company
As long as there are a litany of people like you who are totally comfortable with a double standard like this, the only option for conservatives is to exercise power and forcefully shove the shoe on the other foot until you change your mind.
I hate that, but I don't really see another way we'll ever get a culture of free speech, because people like you are completely comfortable exercising power towards a culture of, ironically, "free speech for me but not for thee"
The meta-lesson here is "do unto others as they'll do unto you after next midterms".
Suppression of misinformation during one era is suppression of protests in another era.
You're right that the reality of the current day is what TFA is about - but GP is mentioning that we built this reality.
Fair. The civil tolerance of speech we don’t like.
An informed and educated populace is essential to the function of any universal democracy. The regulation of capital is essential to maintain efficient markets. It follows that the regulation of capital with respect to communications is necessary to maintain democracy and efficient markets under a notionally capitalist system.
There's clear moral valence to this issue. The popular (mis)understanding of freedom of speech as applied to corporations is in direct contradiction to the notional principles of western sociopolitical ideology. Resolving this conflict is only difficult because of our conditioning.
This lesson doesn't make sense in a two-party system where the two parties have wildly different levels of trustworthiness.
The left suppressing lies only opens the door to the right suppressing the truth, because the right was an enemy of truth and a spreader of lies from the beginning. The answer can't be "allow the lies so the truth has a chance to survive", that's just a compromise that brings us further from the truth.
Demanding neutrality on truthfulness in mass communication, especially during extreme political turbulence, is a terrible idea.
You're missing the point - if someone, broadly and irrevocably, is responsible for deciding what is true and repressing things that say otherwise, then that mechanism, even if used truthfully by one party and viciously by another, is itself a bad mechanism by virtue of being so easily abused. The very existence of a "bad others" in your government implies you do not want to give power to government.
That is the whole point. if you add power while you're in office, you better believe that power will be used against you while you're not. It's not about good vs bad, it's about giving power to an organization that itself can be flipped good or bad by one election.
Of course "ours==good, theirs==bad" is a different, dangerous cognitive problem, but institutional power creep is orthogonal and needs to be fought regardless to protect all of us from that power being used against all of us. That is a prerequisite to civil society wherein we're forced to live with people with completely different world views.
Because right now, platforms can and do cave to government pressure, so they're just thin proxy enforcement arms against dissent.
left = good! right = bad! amirite?
> The left suppressing lies only opens the door to the right suppressing the truth, because the right was an enemy of truth and a spreader of lies from the beginning.
It must be so nice to live in this imaginary world where the left does no wrong whatsoever but the right is the evil incarnate.
Furthermore, who decides what lies are and what truth is and who is responsible for enforcing this?
It’s honestly a very dangerous mentality. It’s what makes people do things like murder Charlie Kirk in cold blood for doing nothing other than speaking words, or attempt to shoot Trump at a campaign event.
It leads them to become the very bigots they think they are fighting against.
Wasn't the Trump shooter a registered republican? Not to mention, the Charlie Kirk shooter from a conservative family, and the attack had more to do with internet culture than leftism?
For example:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18764523
That is true. I remember the second of the two inventors on the early mRNA patents had some concerns, and suddenly his interviews got taken down. And everyone seemed happy about it. The first inventor was all in, and had many interviews posted.
It is not hypocritical or contradictory to believe that deplatforming is appropriate in some cases and not in others.
Yeah but what GP is commenting on is that you can't make the argument "deplatforming is okay because free speech doesn't apply to companies" and then complain about deplatforming in this instance.
I agree with GP that the arguments one makes should reflect one's actual reasoning, e.g. "I believe it's wrong to say thing X and therefore I support deplatforming in that instace". But because "I support deplatforming in every instace" sounds stronger many people falsely claimed that to be their reasoning. And now they're forced to deal with the consequences, i.e. being called hypocrites.
> Yeah but what GP is commenting on is that you can't make the argument "deplatforming is okay because free speech doesn't apply to companies" and then complain about deplatforming in this instance.
I suspect that the argument you're referring to is more like "free speech does not imply that all deplatforming is unacceptable." Again, it is not the case that the only 2 consistent views are "all deplatforming is unacceptable" or "all deplatforming is acceptable."
Did you try reading my comment before replying? Because I never claimed anything close to "the only consistent viewpoints are ..." Reading what I wrote might also give you a clue as to what argument I was referring to, because it's not what you "suspect".
Criticizing Facebook for taking down your content is also free speech.
I think the main reaction (at least in tech circles) is that companies like Meta have the power, the legal protection, the political cover, and the indifference to shut down anyone on their platform. So making them the sole provider for your tech and communication is a huge risk.
And this incident (negligent takedown of a community on an important day) demonstrates the point perfectly.
Conflating deplatforming hate speech and deplatforming people organizing a peaceful protest is certainly a choice.
free speech and hate speech are the same thing. only platforming speech you agree with is, by definition, not free speech.
Standing US law disagrees with you.
Free speech doesn't come from the constitution, it's an inherent God given right.
God forbade bearing false witness or taking His name in vain. Clearly a restriction on free speech.
Why didn't God tell Moses that? For that matter, which God?
I support the idea of inaelable rights, but tying it to divinity is problematic to say the least.
Tell every enlightenment philosopher for using that language then.
Fortunately, we can change the laws in the US, as long as we do not devolve into a full blown autocracy. Our current Oligopolis is pretty damn close.
There is no concept of hate speech in US law:
https://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/hate
> There is no legal definition of "hate speech" under U.S. law, just as there is no legal definition for evil ideas, rudeness, unpatriotic speech, or any other kind of speech that people might condemn.
> In the United States, hate speech is protected by the First Amendment. Courts extend this protection on the grounds that the First Amendment requires the government to strictly protect robust debate on matters of public concern even when such debate devolves into distasteful, offensive, or hateful speech that causes others to feel grief, anger, or fear. (The Supreme Court's decision in Snyder v. Phelps provides an example of this legal reasoning.) Under current First Amendment jurisprudence, hate speech can only be criminalized when it directly incites imminent criminal activity or consists of specific threats of violence targeted against a person or group.
Not everyone thinks we should be free to spread hate. Germany has good historical reasons to ban holocaust denial. Rawanda has good reasons to ban genocidal speech. No more going on the radio to say, "Cut down the tall trees".
The reason to not platform hate speech is the same reason you're not allowed to yell fire in a theater or bomb in an airport without their being one. Or say you're going to kill the president. Even the US has limits on what can be said, including liability laws. You can't just defame your neighbor and not face legal repercussions if they take you to court.
One can imagine this argument during the Salem Witch trials. "She's a witch" wasn't just a joke back then. It could get someone burned at the stake.
The US has good historical reasons to ban the promotion of socialist/communist ideology, yet I don't think many people on the left would be down with that.
Maybe. Except "organizing a peaceful protest" is a question of intent, not of consequences. The total destruction of Paris and the curious case of Jewish stores being targeted while muslim owned stores being protected by the following mobs is a great example. The people who started the protests? Naive students. The people who actually showed up? Different people. Very different.
You've erected a strawman. The argument was not "free speech doesn't apply to companies", it was the exact opposite, i.e. a company's prerogative to control speech on their platform comes downstream of their own free speech rights. This remains true today and the article does not argue otherwise.
No, the argument is definitely "you have no expectation of free speech if you're using e.g. facebook to deliver that speech". Which is certainly an opinion to have, but in my view a silly one. You might as well say that if you chose to send mail using a "private company", it's that's company's "free speech right" to inspect your mail and throw it away if they don't agree with the contents.
> if you chose to send mail using a "private company", it's that's company's "free speech right" to inspect your mail and throw it away if they don't agree with the contents.
That's somewhat true currently.
If you ship mail or packages with UPS, FedEx, Etc they are allowed to open and inspect what you send. The USPS is not allowed to do that, not without a warrant. When people ship drugs via mail they use the USPS for that reason, that it's more difficult for them to obtain warrants to discover suspected drug shipments while a UPS or FedEx will happily open any package they suspect may not be legal to send.
Your analogy is totally ridiculous.
First of all, there's a massive difference between transporting a private package from point A to point B vs hosting someone's speech on a privately owned platform and broadcasting that speech through a privately owned network, with wider consequences that do not come into play when dealing with private correspondences between parties.
Next, paying a fee to a private company to ship your package confers certain obligations about what you are entitled to, when you are utilizing a privately owned platform for free, you are not entitled to anything.
Finally, a private company is certainly within their rights to refuse to ship your package based on an any legal criteria they choose.
> when you are utilizing a privately owned platform for free, you are not entitled to anything.
Factually wrong. Both when paying, and when using something "for free", there's a contract in place (terms & conditions, etc.), and that contract also needs to obey local laws. I don't know if you've ever heard of GDPR, but that's one example of things you are entitled to when using a "privately owned platform for free". Even the USA has laws regarding this, though less strong than GDPR (look it up).
> refuse to ship your package based on an any legal criteria they choose
The question here is what is a "legal criteria". And just because the law is a certain way today, doesn't mean that's the way it should be. It used to be legal to kick people out of restaurants because you didn't like the color of their skin, it's not today. It used to be legal to fire people because they were members of a union or other political group, it's not today. (All depending on your country's laws of course.)
Also, the point of an analogy, is to illustrate a point through a comparable situation. Pointing out that there's a "massive difference" but never explaining what the difference is and how it affects the validity of the comparison, is just a (very common) misunderstanding of what an analogy even is.
There's an old old idea here, the Paradox of Tolerance, that might help alleviate your confusion:
> But we should claim the right to suppress them [intolerant ideologies] if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
It came from Karl Popper, the guy better known for philosophy of science and using "falsifiability" as a primary criteria for what's science/not-science.
That the "free speech" crowd that said "we must allow all hateful and intolerant speech" sure does seem to quiet up when those advocating for open societies get silenced!
Any ideology can be plugged into the "paradox of tolerance" and it works just fine, including yours [EDIT] and mine. That is why it is worthless. What is your defense if the conservatives, who currently have the political upper hand, invoke the paradox of tolerance against the left to justify suppressing them?
It should also be noted that [EDIT] the preceding sentence to Popper's quote is omitted: "In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise."
No it cant, that's just silly.
Popper was a serious philosopher, such a trivial and unserious engagement with the idea doesn't pass muster.
To quote yourself in another post: "I notice that you too have no counter to it!" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50190984) Kind of hypocritical there if that's the best response you can muster when actually presented an argument because that's just plainly the argument from authority fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority).
thank you for the attempt to enlighten me, but how could someone not have heard this quote when internet commies resort to using it like some unquestionable gospel whenever they rush to defend trillion dollar corporations suppressing dissent of the working class?
1,842 results (0.032 seconds)
In an attempt to save some discussion:
1) popper was not a communist, quite the opposite
2) I am not a communist, quite the opposite
3) it's not an unquestionable gospel, it's something to be considered and carefully see it it applies, or is valid
4) I have literally never seen another person cite the Paradox of Tolerance, something that I learned about decades ago, so imagine my surprise at your sarcastic response.
If this is such a common response in your experience, why don't you have any critique of it, other than strawmen?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
The search shows 34 pages of comments and that doesn't include [dead] comments. I'm surprised it's that few; I suspect there's a time cutoff even though the settings says there isn't.
I can't be sure what you're trying to imply, but it certainly doesn't imply that anybody else should have encountered this topic in HN. I'm on here a lot, but only see a tiny fraction of the site, and it only comes up at most every couple of days across the entire site.
But even if somebody had encounters it a lot, it certainly doesn't excuse illogical behavior if only attacking straw men, refusing to engage at all, and make up weird insults about communism.
I notice that you too have no counter to it!
In a society that wants to minimize violence in daily interactions, we still allow it to happen. Claiming that the desire to minimize something means a total ban is just a childish and simple way to approach the issue. The residual of others to engage with the idea further proves how little they have thought about it.
> "I notice that you too have no counter to it!"
May I point out that I replied to your earlier post?
I haven’t seen anyone complaining about “freedom of speech.” This is a complaint about corporate power.
Yes, and they cheered when the power was aligned with them to deplatform the opposition.
No. "They" cheered when it was used to deplatform hate speech.
Deplatforming people organizing a peaceful protest is very different. If you cannot understand how that is different, then I worry about your critical thinking skills.
was peaceful dissent about certain policies of 2020-2022 also "hate speech"? because, if I recall correctly, it was being suppressed with unprecedented zeal on every single platform. again, with applause.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Medical disinformation during a pandemic?
These conversations often end up in some weird motte and bailey where you argue that you care about free speech, but it turns out that you actually just thought COVID was not real/not significant/not dangerous/not an emergency. So your issue ends up not being that they made a decision on it (free speech concern), but that you feel it was the wrong decision (content-specific concern).
So before we go back and forth on the intricacies of content moderation, can you briefly describe your beliefs on COVID?
I agree 100% with scientific consensus on covid but I also don’t support deplatforming based on viewpoint (vs content).
What’s the distinction you’re drawing between viewpoint and content…?
and so the goalpost moves from "it's hate speech" to "it's whatever we unilaterally decide to be verbotten to speak about".
Well I wasn’t the one who said “it’s hate speech.” There are a number of things that get content-moderated.
Hate speech, porn, bullying, doxxing, disinformation, Islamist propaganda, violent imagery, revenge porn, animal abuse imagery, incitements to violence, criminal planning, drug dealing, arms dealing, gambling, fraud, etc
As a free speech maximalist, are you willing to defend all of those with the same vigor as the COVID case? Or do you too actually draw a content-based line somewhere (while pretending you don’t?)
what the platforms do is put "no porn" in the ToS, then turn a blind eye to the porn they like but apply talibanic definition of "porn" to things they dislike.
Do you actually read the comments you're replying to, or are you just picking a keyword that appears in the text and rattling off whatever comes to mind as a result?
I've long since learned to identify demagogues and ignore them when they play dumb ;)
Ooo ooo, do they use words like "talibanic" to try to draw some undefined-but-definitely-negative associations between dissimilar things?
oh, so you aren't just pretending. I'm sorry, I'll spell it out: that comment was not to be taken literally. I just chose porn to make my point, which was that I do not object to platforms having rules, I object to their practice of selective enforcement of those rules.
bless your heart, and thank you for your time.
Good luck defining a content moderation rule that doesn’t require discretion and judgment in how it’s applied lmao
Classic HN to take a problem like this and just assert it’s easily solvable while proposing no such solutions. Even SCOTUS couldn’t define porn and you’re expecting content platforms to define (without discretion!) a far broader set of far squishier concepts at far higher scale.
Truly classic HN.
Both groups of people seem to harbor a lot of hatred, and they seem to want to express it a lot, so your distinction between what is and is not hate speech kind of seems to be based on whether you agree with it or not.
If you find this interpretation to be uncharitable, would you care to clarify what truths this interpretation overlooks?
Hunter Biden's laptop wasn't "hate speech".
I don’t know of any leftie people who were “cheering” about anything in any direction as it pertains to the laptop story.
I heard plenty about it, so it wasn't suppressed either.
The NY Post lost their twitter account because they wouldn't retract the story.
Not your platform, not your account. It's a lesson everyone needs to learn.
They aren't trying to think critically, they're trying to ragebait and "own the libs."
Left wing speech is hate speech. Prove me wrong.
Who decides if it is a peaceful protest?
Ultimately the platform, and yes there are huge grey areas. I don’t think this instance lands in one of them and that’s why Facebook isn’t even claiming it does.
It seems like you’re trying to avoid dealing with the substance of the issue for some reason.
Usually local police if they are on the scene. If they start seeing violence, they start telling people to disperse, followed by tear gas and then rubber bullets.
Do you have some specific examples that you find equivalently egregious to disrupting an organized protest?
Do you think disrupting an organized protest is inherently egregious?
I think that limiting “vanilla” political speech in general is inherently egregious.
The boundaries around vanilla are certainly blurry, but I don’t think No Kings comes even remotely close to any of those blurry boundaries.
Personally I find censoring all links to the New York Post Hunter Biden laptop story a couple weeks before a presidential election to be much, much more egregious.
(To be perfectly clear disrupting protests is also very bad!)
The story that even the New York Post didn’t list an author on, for fear of it being a false story?
I agree this would be even more egregious if it was thought to be a real story, but even the tabloid that published it didn’t think so.
Pretty sure the link suppression was turned off within like a day, right?
What exactly is your argument here? That social media sites should prevent individuals from sharing content without an attributed author?
My argument is that the principle of election non-interference applied to this specific situation can reasonably yield “we should suppress sharing while we figure out what’s going on.”
It was absolutely reasonable to suspect (in the early hours) that a salacious, bombshell story involving stolen documents published on NYPost without a listed author could potentially have been an actual disinformation attack.
Under that set of facts, the “we should try to limit interference in the election” can reasonably yield the behavior that it did yield.
That's an absurd and frankly offensive standard, and I fear that you already know that.
The same standard could be used to trivially censor literally any information from any outlet. Conservatives could censor all NYTimes articles because they have compelling evidence the NYTimes newsroom is taking money from foreign sources (they are), has a history of releasing false information (they do, all news outlets eventually do), and being biased against conservatives.
In fact, your standard would censor precisely the MOST important stories, because these are the most likely to influence elections.
I didn’t propose a standard. I proposed a principle. The goal of a responsible platform should be to not put its thumb (as a platform) on the scales of an election.
But since you apparently have a better one, how about you propose a standard?
Is it that anyone can post anything?
Sorry, I'm getting distracted by this:
> The goal of a responsible platform should be to not put its thumb (as a platform) on the scales of an election.
You earnestly believe censoring the laptop story was congruent with this principle?
I'm sorry but I just cannot believe that you are a real person. *Obviously* putting their thumb on the scale was the entire point of the censorship! I'm in serious disbelief that you wrote this and posted it.
I've just articulated the logic by which that principle can produce the outcome.
If you disagree with the logic, then identify which part you disagree with. Here are your options:
1. Content moderation teams should not have been suspicious of an unsourced, anonymous story on NYPost based on allegedly stolen material
2. Content moderation teams should not impede content that they suspect are election interference attempts
Which is it?
The part I disagree with is that ""misinformation"" is ever a valid reason for censorship, period.
Even if some speech is known to be false (insofar as your epistemology allows), it should be criticized and proven to be false by more speech, not silenced through censorship.
In any case, I'm still baffled by how you think you've articulated logic that can supports that they "didn't put their finger on the scale". Obviously they did, obviously they knew they did. What other reason could they have for doing it? If your principle were instead "they should put their finger on the scale when opposing actors intentionally spreading false information" at least you'd be consistent.
Though then the irony of this whole thing is that the story was true the whole time.
So that would be option (2), correct? Is there a reason why you didn't just say "Option 2: Content moderation teams should not impede content that they suspect are election interference attempts"
It's been a long time that I've had an engagement with someone with such bad faith. It's really disappointing to see it on Hacker News.
Ah yes, mister 50 day old account, carry on with your evasiveness.
It's telling that you refuse to just follow your own logic and rationale even just a single step further.
> Even if some speech is known to be false (insofar as your epistemology allows), it should be criticized and proven to be false by more speech, not silenced through censorship.
This is provably false, as in this is not how speech online functions.
The whole system of suppression today, is built around the idea of flooding the channels with more content than can be assessed and analyzed. A room full of people shouting and no one having the time to understand.
It's a good principle but it's been empirically proven that it doesn't work out that way in reality. Misinformation does not get effectively countered by spreading true information after the misinformation has spread. Even spreading it alongside (like with community notes) gives mixed results.
Certain misinformation "works", but censorship also "works", so unless you can detect false information with 0.0% bias, that puts the platform's finger on the scale.
I'd much rather deal with information assymetries from individuals within the community than information assymetries from whoever happens to have control over the platforms, and is willing to use censorship.
I'd also like to add that a lot of these misinformation studies ironically wound up using information now accepted to be true or likely (such as that COVID most likely originated from a Chinese lab) as their "misinformation" - so in a way I'm glad that countering with "true" information didn't unilaterally work.
> I'd much rather deal with information assymetries from individuals within the community
Ah this must be why you're confused. You think the hazard that platforms are trying to manage is from "individuals within the community" and not, for example, foreign intelligence services.
> information now accepted to be true or likely (such as that COVID most likely originated from a Chinese lab)
Lmao uh oh. The mark of the terminally-online has been revealed! Hilarious how many Twitterites have come to simply believe that COVID originated from a lab over the last year or two despite zero new evidence emerging in favor of that theory, and actually tons of evidence against it emerging since then. It's almost like if read false information enough times, you'll just presume it to be true... Curious ain't it?
Ironically, the "new evidence" that emerged was in fact "old evidence" that was suppressed.
https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/media/reps/new-doc-drop-slack-m...
https://oversight.house.gov/release/classified-state-departm...
Try re-reading the above comment.
You are (mistakenly) substantiating it though: there has not been new evidence in favor of the lab leak in several years! You're right!
Meanwhile, evidence in favor of a natural origin has continued to pile up.
and nobody is arguing the reverse now that its not aligned with them
they're saying to avoid the whole argument entirely by not using a platform that can deplatform at all
This is bunk.
Most people haven’t spent any time moderating online communities, so they don’t have to test their beliefs against reality. This is fine, frankly you saved yourself being stuck in a fractal hell scape.
However holding to this idea that the “opposition” was deplatformed, is superstition.
I’ve seen communities start with 0 moderation, and become wastelands filled with hate speech, misogyny and harassment. Which then forces moderation to be introduced.
This happens so often, that this happened to the hate groups who were kicked off of Reddit.
Communities have celebrated the introduction of moderation, and celebrated the imposition of rules that mean you can’t be harassed, attacked and targeted.
Then organize the old fashion way people did before social media was a thing. Otherwise, accept the convenience of social media has strings attached.
part of the challenge is that like the car, social media has reorganized societal "infrastructure" itself, such that just a reflexive "the old fashion way" leans on a social organization that doesn't exist anymore
I don’t buy that. The old way still exists, it’s just way less convenient. It reminds me of punk rock bands that self published and followed the DIY approach versus bands that sold out the record label approach. It’s hard to DIY but you can do it if you really want to.
Sure? That’s what the article is arguing for.
It is very delicious poetic justice. Some liberals warned repeatedly that deplatforming would backfire but were shouted down and ridiculed by illiberal activists hellbent on silencing their foes.
I think there is still consistency between these two things.
Freedom of speech doesn't mean that I have to tolerate a business platforming hate speech. Any platform that stands behind the "free speech" of neo-nazi groups, white supremacists, and violent nationalists deserves criticism for turning a blind eye to what they are enabling. The First Amendment wasn't built to protect citizens' speech from each other; it was built to protect us from government censorship. Facebook doesn't have a legal responsibility to protect that, and I as a consumer can expect them to take an ethical stand against things like ethnic cleansing.
And that is exactly the point the author here is making. Facebook, X (Twitter), even places like Fediverse instances and Bluesky/AtProto sites are privately run spaces with no obligation to respect your freedom of speech.
If you choose these spaces to organize your political cause, you put your movement into another person's hands. Stop doing that. Host your own infrastructure, make it easy to recover and migrate, and start organizing outside of corporate-controlled areas.
Turning to Facebook for political organizing "because everyone is there" is like doing your town-hall meetings at Walmart "because everyone shops there", and then wondering why small businesses don't feel represented in your town anymore.
It's easy to blame big tech, but you can also ask your local bar why they only advertise events through Mark Zuckerberg, and ask why their website is mostly just links to Mark Zuckerberg's websites. Ask them if they have considered that Mark Zuckerberg might not a good obligatory middleman between them and their customers. The core problem is that people have accepted the lie that these corporate-controlled spaces are "the public square", when they are the exact opposite.
Businesses operate in a world as it is now, not as we wish it to be. Facebook has a lot of people there, and also lot of businesses have it as their only webpage. If we want to change the world we start with this version that we currently have. You will have hard time convincing bar owner start renting server or paying web dev if current facebook-page is good enough already now. (Disclaimer: I do not use facebook and I’m quite frustrated when the only webpage for the business is on facebook :( )
In unrelated topic, each person decides how much to spend spend/borrow/save as it is private decision to make, but to control inflation government manipulates bond interest rates which force public to change their behaviour.
You might as well be hosting your own infrastructure by posting a sign in your living room for all the reach you will have. If you want to talk to yourself you don’t need infrastructure.
Labelling things "hate speech" is incompatible with free speech.
Stating something confidently without explanation certainly doesn't make it true, especially when it's counter to an entire society's codified laws.
Which society? Germany?
And barring people from "labeling things" is censorship, so I don't understand your point.
Speech that is hateful towards people because of their identities is hate speech. That is the widely accepted definition. It is not even a legal designation, nor does it need to be to concretely exist.
Denying the existence of hate speech isn't logical, because there are many unambiguous examples of it, and individuals and businesses have plenty of valid reasons not to tolerate it from the company they keep.
But then by your definition, nobody could ever debate immigration or trans or gay issues, because you can label it "hate speeech" and get debate shut down.
The Taliban can tweet (pre-Musk) but Donald can't
(I dislike Musk for many reasons but you cannot tell me there were 'no problems' with old Twitter or that every criticism was a 'nothingburger')
Old twitter (and new twitter) was/is private property, and the owners can do what they want with it - be as unfair as they want. Like a biased newspaper owned by a billionaire.
That's the root problem. If you want the websites of (some?) private companies treated as common carriers that's a reasonable position to take, but Twitter was/is working as designed.
(If I was king for a day I'd force all social media to only present you with posts from people you'd actively followed, and to present those posts most-recent-first. I think that single UX change to timelines would clear up many problems we currently have).
If only we had all had such principled foresight. Thank you for this great lesson.
Which is one of many reasons why social media, along with the internet in general, ought to be treated as a public utility rather than a private for-profit business.
I don't use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok. I feel like people at least need to go on strike once in a while. Stop using those shitty services for a few days or a week so the landlords will make them slightly less shitty.
For many people, those shitty services are the only way they stay in touch with friends and family.
I miss out on all the big and little announcements. Sometimes, a family member will forward information to me about a death or a graduation. I find out about these things when I find out about them, just like we used to before the internet.
I dropped Facebook when I realized that their app was snooping on who I called and who called me.
>> I find out about these things when I find out about them, just like we used to before the internet.
How does that work? People post on FB or IG, AND THEN phone you / write a letter? doubtful...
I usually find out much later, and possibly never. This is how things were before the internet. We didn't know everything going on in everyone's life.
In the case of major events, my brother usually lets me know, for example the death of an aunt. Everyone close to me knows I don't use FB, so if they want me to be aware of something in particular, they can text or call me.
So you push your avoidance of FB to those that care about you to work harder to keep you informed? Not very nice.
>How does that work? People post on FB or IG, AND THEN phone you / write a letter? doubtful...
why is this doubtful?
i am also disconnected from fb/ig/etc. and that is exactly what happens. family or close friends make a post for something important, and i get a call or text. for smaller stuff i get caught up at some point whenever we next talk on the phone for a regular catch up.
That's what it started out as, for sure. However, is it really "staying in touch" these days or is it simply reacting to and maybe adding a response to whatever status or content was placed in your feed.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not some anti-Facebook snob looking down on everyone else. But I have greatly reduced my use of the platform and only really use it for some groups I'm part of. While I do interact with family and friends, saying I use Facebook to "stay in touch" these days is a bit of a reach in most cases.
People seem to forget about the phone function on their phones. Maybe this doesn't work across countries, but No Kings is only USA, right?
I do not care for phone calls
The only one of those that allows you to stay in touch with somebody is Instagram. And only barely.
Frankly this kind of premature excuse making won't get us anywhere. People say they're concerned about the rise of fascism or oligarchy but when it comes to pushing back, even the smallest bit of inconvenience is too much.
The Montgomery bus boycott lasted 381 days. People walked miles and organized carpools to work for over a year.
Now we can't even imagine making the sacrifice to send our friends and family an SMS, let alone getting them to download Signal when they kinda don't want to.
My comment, "For many people, those shitty services are the only way they stay in touch with friends and family," is an observation, not an "excuse" (in your words). The fact is that most people don't even know someone who understands how bad social media is. Moreover, even if they did, as you suggest, download Signal, and even if they use it with the one person in their life who insists on it, they'll still be using Facebook for everyone else. Ingrained habits are hard to change, especially when they are carefully formulated addictions.
I think a lot of people feel like social media scratches the social itch they are feeling.
I think that is simply an illusion though. I have high social needs, and no amount of social media ever fed them in a healthy way.
Just because you are hungry, doesn't mean you should immediately reach for the bag of chips. It's important to reflect how often you do so, and whether that is getting you where you want to be in life. It's hard but really really important.
A lot of people say they are very lonely despite spending all their time on social media. They then change nothing.
It doesn't work
It doesn’t work for you. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work for millions of others.
Hey metabagel! It's me, Mark Zuckerberg, please come back! Our Q4 earnings report will be due before you know it and our board will have my feet to the literal FIRE if you're not on our platform(s). Please reconsider!
This is, literally (with the politician's name and elections instead of Zuck and earnings), political ads. In big red font, with an accusatory or distraught image of the politician.
Seriously, Mark Zuckerburg doesn't really care that one person left his platform, but he actually would prefer you stay...because if enough do it will affect earnings. But you should leave Facebook not to upset Zuck, but to stop upsetting yourself with what's on there.
you must be fun at parties
In what sense are they shitty? They are actually usable by normal people. This is a big reason they are popular.
I don't like (most of) the content on those sites. This is not surprising. The content is aimed at people who can't use Signal. Such a person is different from me in many ways.
Facebook is cluttered with ads and distracting posts (not from your friends and family). If you use it often enough, you probably stop seeing how terrible it is. Try looking at it with fresh eyes sometime.
Twitter boosts Elon Musk and the things he is interested in.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/15/elon-musk...
I don't have specific complaints about Instagram or TikTok, other than the algorithm is controlled by oligarchs.
>In what sense are they shitty?
Widespread algorithmic control and corporate spam spreads architecture?
>They are actually usable by normal people.
Usability is just one dimension. If your site is perfectly usable, yet steals your credit card number and sells it to the highest bidder, it is still a shitty site, just not in usability.
>This is a big reason they are popular.
Really FB/Meta became popular long before they were at their current level of shittiness. Really FB wrote the modern book on new levels of shittiness like selling social graphs and tracking people along with connecting all kinds of other data and stealing information from your phone with overly huge permissions and data gathering.
This is a real problem but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with Zuckerberg or Meta in particular. The article admits it's unlikely that this hour-long ban was a top-down decision. People get banned with no recourse on all the big platforms.
But yes, a solution is for people to host their own content/sites. Or "protocols not platforms"
>a solution is for people to host their own content/sites.
In a perfect world yes. In the reality we live in no.
Why is this the case?
1. Any site that is politically active and capable of upsetting people WILL BE ATTACKED. Can you afford a terabyte of data a second coming your way? Probably not. So you put it behind CF, but now you're vulnerable to their policies closing you down.
2. Any site that is politically active and capable of upsetting people WILL BE ATTACKED. What are you going to do against floods of child porn or death threats posted by users pretending to be on your side, but actually working for the opposition?
3. Any site that is politically active and capable of upsetting people WILL BE ATTACKED. You are now in charge of your website security. Are you any good at it? How are you going to pay for it to be secured? How do you trust the people doing the security?
4. Any site that is politically active and capable of upsetting people WILL BE ATTACKED. How do you plan on getting people to come to your site? If it's upsetting enough to the powers that be any messages containing links to your site will disappear from Meta/X/Google. You are going to have to find neat an interesting, and probably expensive ways to get your message out.
We have consolidated the internet down to a point where it is very very easy for a few small groups to control the general discussion, especially across large diverse groups of people.
"CF might shut me down" applies to some groups but not most and certainly not to No Kings
Perhaps, but I'm involved in more than one group.
Most of this is mitigated completely by making everything read-only except for a small number of users you know personally. That doesn't actually preclude most kinds of political work (e.g. noticeboards for protest organising). It does preclude social media, obviously.
See, the problem here is you've already been put on the footing of the group that loses.
You have to hide like a little mouse in the shadows. Meanwhile the cat gets to track your every move. The cat gets, not only to defend itself where ever it wants, it can say anything it wants about you without you with you having no way to defend yourself.
Can if the cat is both evil and particularly smart it will set up things like its own No Kings forums where every person is tracked and manipulators either block or allow messages based on how much they can control the audience into reaching the opposite goal they actually want.
When someone goes looking for you, who are they going to find? With the modern net, probably not who you want them to find.
> But there is a better solution: build tools that are open, decentralized, and user controlled. And then actually use them instead of just giving more power to Mark Zuckerberg to shut down a protest organization’s account in the middle of one of its big protests.
The problem with that is people are "lazy": they're typically not going to expend extra effort that's not needed to solve the problem in front of them. It's pervasive, and it's one of the big reasons "friction" reducing technology can be really problematic: it turns necessary behaviors into issues of self-discipline (e.g. exercise becomes forcing yourself to haul yourself to the gym regularly in your spare time, instead just walking everywhere because you have to in order to go about your day).
So, IMHO, if you want people to use "open, decentralized, and user controlled" tools in 2026, you have to ban the centralized alternatives. Otherwise you're yelling at clouds, as most people will default to the lowest friction alternative they have access to.
I tried to get a family member to use Signal, and she eventually gave up on it, because she couldn't handle switching back and forth between Messages and Signal. It's very difficult to get people to migrate to better platforms when they have that mindset.
That's why we need to separate the protocol from the UI. There is absolutely no good reason why the different platforms should disallow communication with each other.
I used to use a multiprotocol client, Pidgin, to chat with people on a couple of different platforms. But of course now a lot of chat is on things like Facebook and Google Chat which are supported only by plugins. But even that is still not enough because I will have to have an account on each of the platforms.
Chat really needs to be like email or SMS; you ought not to need an account with the provider of the person you are sending messages to.
There is one good reason: abuse.
Think about how long it took to get email spam under control (and even so it remains a problem). Think about the ongoing problems with spam phone calls. Now pretend you are someone with no technical background, someone who only sees the UI and does not really understand what happens behind it -- you are not seeing spam on closed systems, you are seeing spam on open systems, what are you going to choose? Also keep in mind that there are worse forms of abuse than spam.
Jabber would like a word: https://jabber.org/
But seriously, there's zero incentive for the folks building these clients to make them interoperable. In fact there may even be disincentive, since the more folks they have on their platform, the more valuable the platform is.
The EU forced Apple to use USB-C on iPhones, because it was stupid and wasteful for people to have two different types of chargers in their home for their small electronic rechargeable devices. Government does have the power to regulate things like this. They would need to be educated to understand the importance and benefit of it.
The EU was actually on the path to forcing everyone to use micro-USB. Thankfully Apple (and others) pioneered USB-C (bringing what it learnt from developing the lightning connector) in the time it took the EU to go from making all of the phone makers sign a Memorandum of Understanding to making it legislation. Now the EU is frozen in time, stuck on USB-C for the forseeable future. The economics to make a device dual port (USB-C and something new) aren't there, so we're not likely to ever see an improvement on USB-C... in an alternative timeline, we could have been stuck on the even worse micro-USB.
Bringing it back to the topic on hand, this is very much an area I wouldn't want to see a heavy handed EU legislate something that just further cements the incumbants and makes everything worse forever... just like mandatory micro-USB would have been. I can totally see the EU legislating something like a mandatory Meta communication protocol with compulsory attestation from Meta servers.
Apple changed to USB-C after Lightning was ten years old, exactly as they promised ten years before. The EU regulation didn’t force Apple to do anything, its deadline was a couple years after Apple switched, and Apple assisted in the creation of USB-C and after they had already switched their laptops.
"There is absolutely no good reason why the different platforms should disallow communication with each other."
Maybe aside from the increased attack surface and trust issues...
You're asking the family member to make their life worse in the immediate term.
If you want people to adopt your thing, it's got to make their life easier, right now, full stop.
> If you want people to adopt your thing, it's got to make their life easier, right now, full stop.
But somewhat counterintuitively, you can do that by making their life a little harder first.
For example: leave Facebook/WhatsApp, refuse to communicate over SMS. Have good reasons for each, so you don't come off as unnecessarily difficult. Explain that Signal is far more secure and private than either and just as easy to use. Then using Signal is making it easier to communicate with you. It worked for me.
I left the whole Facebook ecosystem about 10 years ago, but never deleted my account. I left it up as a tombstone that makes it very clear I'm not there and tells people how to contact me.
I don't understand why having more than one chat app is too much for some people. I use signal, whatsapp, discord, irc, google chat, email and messenger without complaint. I can't force people to use my platform of choice so I have to compromise and use what they do with little to no notice on my end. Sure, I am not happy with this situation but I accept it and move on while keeping an eye out for alternatives.
Maybe related to how much brain space they're willing to spend on that facet of life?
There are certainly parts of my life that would be more optimized if that weren't a constraint.
What brain space? These apps take seconds to install and get an account connected. After that you forget it exists until someone messages you.
Consider the opposite direction: what if you want to message someone? What if you haven't messaged them in a while? Imagine you have seven messaging apps installed, some of the names you've forgotten ("Discord", is that obviously a messaging app?). Imagine you know that they're reachable somewhere just not exactly where.
I honestly have never had this issue. It's really about focus and effort. If the person is important enough, I will most likely remember how to contact them. I also mostly use email for all important communications so that remains searchable. The other chat apps are all for casual friends and acquaintances that if lost, well so be it.
None of my older relatives use email. They can text however (or iMessage, since it is transparent). Not everyone cares so little for friends and acquaintances.
And what if you want to contact someone? Are they on signal or WhatsApp or telegram? Or is it discord? Which server? How can I find that thing someone sent? Let me just open all those apps and start searching
I think you underestimate how little tolerance the average person has for this kind of friction. These huge platforms win because everyone is on them and it all just works.
You are speaking as someone who gives a shit about technology. Many people don't. "Just another account" is a big ask for many, as lots of people don't have password managers. There are a whole shit ton of people who want to use as few apps as they can. Even lots of tech-savvy people, myself included, feel this way.
> After that you forget it exists until someone messages you.
Until you get a random notification asking you to take steps to keep your account active or whatever. You may not care about this, but many people get stressed out about this kind of thing.
Every app you add to your phone is another potential vulnerability. I'm not installing a random discord or irc app just because that's someone's preferred platform. In fact I haven't installed any chat/message apps at all, I use the Messages app from Apple.
The network effect is powerful. But we also need to be honest with ourselves. Signal is an objectively worse client than Messages, especially when the average person does not value privacy.
The problem is not that people are lazy; the problem with open systems is that they are much harder to moderate and people want effective moderation. Usenet was open, decentralized, and wound up dying because there were too many problems with moderation and white supremacists etc. would show up and flood NGs with their nonsense.
There are also legal issues that kill decentralized/user-controlled systems. Copyright and child abuse are the most prominent, along with terrorism and drug trafficking. Who gets sued or prosecuted when the system is open, decentralized, and user-controlled? The users, and that's why peer-to-peer filesharing died, why so few people are willing to host a Tor exit node, etc. Before talking about banning centralized systems we need to talk about updating the legal system so that it does not force centralization, which is a much bigger project and much harder to get right.
The moderation problem wouldn't have been hard to solve on USENET, it's just that nobody wanted to do it. It could work exactly like moderation does on Mastodon, where each admin is responsible for the content on their server(s). There isn't a technical reason why you couldn't do that, and even give individuals moderation rights on specific lists. Of course, this only affects your particular news server, but it lets the white supremacist post their insane ramblings over on Giganews, while you and I read less toxic version of the thread over on Cozy News. If you don't like the moderation on your server, go find another one.
> that's why peer-to-peer filesharing died
p2p file sharing is still huge, though. Most people just put their seedboxes behind a VPN to avoid getting DMCA notices.
> So, IMHO, if you want people to use "open, decentralized, and user controlled" tools in 2026, you have to ban the centralized alternatives. Otherwise you're yelling at clouds, as most people will default to the lowest friction alternative they have access to.
I disagree. You don't have to ban the centralized alternatives (which is problematic) -- but you do have to make the alternative as frictionless as possible.
Repeal section 230. If they want to shape speech for their own agenda then they should be liable.
Right now they have it both ways. They have the users, money, and data and they speak through their moderation decisions while being legally immune from consequences.
We need something different than "repeal 230" because this is largely believed to be something that will chill speech. Platforms will take down speech out of an abundance of caution.
I'm not exactly sure what the answer is, but we can place two constraints
1. Anyone can say anything online, free speech for individuals
2. Algorithms that act as "editors" are not free speech and should be regulated.
Perhaps the answer is to say that social media algorithms can only be chronological and M0% from your direct network.
Reposts and quotes seem to be one of the core features that enable virality and dog piling. We need to "slow the spread" - to borrow a phase from one of our least favorite times.
Another thing we need is a privacy preserving method for proving humanism online.
I'm not sure it's possible. Platforms want to be an enticing place for advertisers. Spam, porn, and bots, are all free speech. It's a hard problem.
Banning targeted advertising is higher on my list of priorities. That business line is one of the most toxic for humanity. Let's go back to placement advertising.
I've thought about this a lot. Section 230 essentially differentiates content sites into two categories, which I refer to as:
1. Publishers. Think CNN, NYT, WaPo, etc. These are first-party sites;
2. Platforms. Think any social media site. They host user generated content ("UGC").
Section 230 doesn't use this exact language. But what it does is remove the strict liability from UGC for (2). So if I post something defamatory on Facebook, Meta isn't liable as long as they satisfy their obligations for moderation, takedowns, etc.
My opinion is that social media sites are essentially cheating. They're now a third category. They enjoy the benefits of being a platform while acting like a publisher.
Think about it this way: let's say a group of users make 1000 posts supporting Ukraine and 1000 posts supporting Russia in the current war. Posts from some of each might make defamatory of erroneous or intentionally false claims. But I, as the platform, use algorithms to surface certain posts and suppress others through a newsfeed, a recommendation panel or whatever. I can tweak that algorithm to surface the pro-Ukrainian posts or the pro-Russian posts. I am essentially taking a position and acting like a first-party publisher but I don't have strict liability issues.
So I don't think we need to repeal Section 230. I think we need to treat content suppression and promotion as being a publisher because that's what you are.
Well said, I concur. There is so much different information being posted that the platform can "say" anything it wants via moderation knobs without liability.
And they literally exercise more editorial control and reach than any magazine or newspaper editorial board ever did.
Section 230 was a Trojan Horse.
If they want to be treated like an innocent carrier (i.e., telco), they must kill their algorithms.
No news media company writes or says the reports of the journalists they publish or broadcast, but they are nevertheless responsible for that content.
If social media wants to control the algorithmic feed for profit, they must be like any media, "fully responsible for their content", and must be held accountable for it.
I've never had a phone company disconnect a phone call because they didn't like what I was saying https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54552101 Twitter was stopping people from tweeting or sending direct messages containing links to the New York Post article about Hunter Bidens Laptop in October of 2020. They put their thumb on the scale.
You Facebook et al. to be _more_ aggressive in their content takedowns (out of concern for liability)?
You do realize that will accomplish the exact opposite of what you're trying to achieve right?
Apparently, activists need something that is "open, decentralized, and user controlled". Those activists choose to use facebook. That tells me they are at least one of two things:
1. Too stupid to make a plan that could possibly work
2. Too lazy to execute on a plan that could possibly work
Knowing this is a useful signal. It tells me their judgment is terrible, and I should not listen to them ;)
> Apparently, activists need something that is "open, decentralized, and user controlled". Those activists choose to use facebook. That tells me they are at least one of two things:
> 1. Too stupid to make a plan that could possibly work
> 2. Too lazy to execute on a plan that could possibly work
Your comment is a pretty good example of what not to do: society/technology makes good choices harder, so flog individuals about their lack of self-discipline when they don't do yet-another hard thing. People only have so much time and self-discipline, have some empathy.
The only thing the flogging does is give the flogger the chance to feel unjustifiably superior.
> Knowing this is a useful signal. It tells me their judgment is terrible, and I should not listen to them ;)
What you're doing is a generalized method to dismiss anything and anyone:
1. Find a thing.
2. Search for some aspect that isn't perfect. Viciously criticize that aspect.
3. Dismiss the whole thing on account of that aspect.
The only thing that using Instagram tells me about these activists is that they weren't setting out to solve some ideological communication technology problem. They had other priorities.
Above all, activists need something that other people are on.
TFA (and you) are just discounting the power of network effects. Tells me that your judgment is poor and I should not listen to you ;)
I would consider myself an activist, but not the Blue MAGA variety. Too much of the issue is people still think they can change minds online. In reality you are just chanting to the base, a negative feedback cycle for bad ideas that do not resonate with those outside your group.
Instead, go to where people all are, real life in the real world. I go out and talk to people all the time. I listen to them before telling them. I'm more interested in getting people talking than I am in changing their minds (right now) and providing them with ideas they are unlikely to hear online. I see my "sapphire gals" (retired nokingers) becoming less extreme, not repeating the shallow talking points. I hear them asking new questions.
Talking and working with others in person is 100x better.
Sure, I agree with all that. I don’t think it’s mutually exclusive with the need to be able to organize large gatherings of loosely connected people.
We were able to organize large groups of loosely connected people before social media. Women's sufferage and the Civil Rights movement are two notable examples. Speedrunning the moon landing after Sputnik and Kennedy's assasination another.
Yes? I’m not sure what you’re arguing or what you think I’m arguing.
And you are expecting countries to play by the rules when their existence in under threat. The EU will get people off Google, off Facebook, off fucking Pinterest even if it means moving back to Teletext.
(yes, there were "irc channels" on telext)
Idk who you’re talking to or what you’re talking about.
I certainly don’t “expect” (in the normative sense) countries to continue relying on these services. Breaking network effects is hard, but I wouldn’t blame a country for trying and I’d probably be happy with them succeeding (to the extent they facilitate free expression of their people).
China does that - how is that working out for their population?
Of course, the huge difference is that China also actually invests in replacing them with something. EU doesn't and only France has given it the least of efforts.
But that won't stop EU countries from just outlawing these services.
This is overly harsh; it starts with the (flawed IMO) perspective that people are dedicated "professional" activists rather than amateurs from many different backgrounds who come together around something they care about and grow/evolve/deppen over time. It makes complete sense that they use tools in front of them AND don't necessarily get -what are quite subtle angles to most - all the issues with their use. It doesn't make them lazy or stupid, but if you have the skills & talents to help with this yet do nothing you might be projecting...
More likely these activists chose the most convenient platform for getting their message out. IG is popular and that makes it an obvious choice. Also keep in mind that activists will generally use what they are already familiar with, and Facebook runs three of the most popular platforms i.e. platforms that activists were probably already using before they became activists.
The only reason activists would switch to something else is if Facebook gives them a reason to do so. I doubt this one incident is enough of a reason.
They need to reach people where they are, so basically all the platforms where people hang out. It's not the activists who are lazy - it's people in general, who continue to use FB even though it is cluttered with ads and other distractions.
It's because the corporations were all banding together to censor their opponents a few years ago, so they got used to the idea that large corporations are your friends. The left took an opportunistic stance on this instead of a principled one, despite the fact that they're the side that on paper is supposedly opposed to letting corporations turn into pseudo-governments.
3. they are non-technical people who go where an audience already is
The problem here is the audience is largely their own group and the opposite extreme looking for fodder or to troll. It's the same for both extremes.
They don't organize over Instagram. One of many social accounts had issues. Around 3000 communities participated. They are doing fine.
ah yes. Because they don't know technology their movement has no useful information for you and you already know better than all of them.
Amazing.
Unfortunately the truth is, way too.many people use Facebook and Instagram way too much, and oftentimes you need to cast a wide net so you can reach people where they are.
It's a combination of ignorance and indifference. One of my social groups is around a sport, no necessity for knowledge around technology, and they will never ever leave Facebook. Those roots got laid down 15+ years ago and I would guess about 40% use FB as their sole social media, and another 50% use 1-2 other sites e.g. Instagram or Tiktok, types that are well known. The rest are aware of the existence of other sites and can explore more widely.
This is a solution looking for a problem. Right now, Meta products are the most efficient way for people to organize a protest, even when it's not reliable, so that's what people will use. If it's no longer a reliable way to organize, people will naturally move to something else without much convincing like they do in places like Hong Kong. It's good to have a backup, but it does not make sense to expect them to avoid the largest social media platforms.
If Facebook is really a "utility" then it should not arbitrarily pull the plug on accounts with no recourse. Other utilities have due process for cutting off access: written notice with a clear reason, a chance to dispute, etc. That's because utilities are regulated.
What Facebook has is an opaque process run by AI with no way for most people to appeal.
For the record, the account was suspended because it tripped an automated rate limiter. They then had to get in touch with a human to restore the account.
That's pretty boring, platform agnostic, and not particularly inciteful though I suppose.
It's a good sign when people have to resort to protesting a one hour suspension of one social media account to get worked up about corporate tyranny.
No, there are lots of other reasons to be upset about corporate tyranny.
It was only an hour because people spoke up
I used to deride people complaining about the acts of a private company whose users freely and willfully engage with that company’s services, especially claims about “free speech” when the company owner also has the free speech claim to make whatever policies they see fit for their privately owned business.
Now I think it’s pretty clear that the main limiter of speech is not the government but rather a handful of private companies, so the first amendment is no longer adequate to protecting speech. We need to pass laws about opening these platforms once they reach a certain size. Will we get more neo-nazi profiles? Sure, but that’s the trade off for having a platform for positive revolutionaries and journalists and I think the trade off is worth it.
I started reading (listening to) Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams.
It was really strange. The author seemed to be shocked at (then) Facebook's culture of not getting involved in politics. The author was a part of the effort to convince zuck to be more politically involved. Getting him to meet with heads of state, starting with a junta responsible for atrocities.
In full disclaimer, I didn't finish the book. But it was shocking to me what the author was admitting to. It's like the scene in The Big Short where Steve Carell asks "Why are they confessing?" to which the answer was "They're not; they're bragging"
Techdirt changed my life and a fun fact for those not in the know, is that the Streisand effect was coined by Mike Masnick[0]:
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
People are convinced that the only way to get attention is by participating in the technofeudal social networks. The problem is that "attention" is not that useful for making change. Until we realize that more intimacy and some level of friction is a feature when it comes to actual power building and organizing, we're going to keep seeing both the lack of control over access to the social networks as well as the continual 'people share and nothing happens' effects of using ad-driven platforms for organizing.
The term "platform" implies a level of neutrality that doesn't exist in modern social media. The algorithm is making heavy decisions about what messages to amplify and which messages to suppress, on top of the possibility of a human putting their thumb on the scale.
This isn't a new problem. We've always had a few gatekeepers that steer the public narrative. This is a problem that the internet provides a clear opportunity to help solve, but has seemed to fall short. It's a clear blow to all of us techo-optimists.
I want to agree with you—but I think, post-2016, we can now all fully agree that (sadly) there is no such thing as a neutral platform, such that “platform [on the Web]” no longer necessarily implies “neutral platform.”
>And then actually use them
That is the main issue. I am on mastodon but following someone on another instance of mastodon is not easy for "regular people". Until that is solved people will stick to items like twitter and meta.
AFAIK, most people on Bluesky are on the "main" instance, so that tends to end up being a centralized community which can suffer from the same issues.
Mastodon has a serious discovery problem. IIRC, searches are only within your own instance, except for hashtag searches. This appears to have been an intentional design decision to prevent brigading / pile-ons.
For me, I found it too difficult to locate "my peeps" on other instances, so I switched to Bluesky.
I like it for my use case. It's more like the community around forum instances in the old days. The internet is too big.
I found it to be an absolute chore to find people that I had been following on Twitter.
Bluesky isn't allowed in Texas without verifying your age with Kids Web Services (KWS). X doesn't have that requirement.
It makes me feel good about not using his services.
>Unfortunately, most of the “solutions” to this problem that people are suggesting are some form of “force Mark Zuckerberg to be better and not shut off the account we like.” But that’s no way to build a better world. It is, also, the exact same response that MAGA folks had when Donald Trump was banned from social media in the wake of the January 6th insurrection. Their response was to try to force platforms to host the content of people MAGA supported. That cannot be a workable solution, because as political fortunes shift, forcing platforms to host the worst people’s accounts is unworkable for basically everyone.
The bit about "the worst people's accounts" just sounds like a refutation of everything else in the article. The problem was always that it was up to interpretation who "the worst people" are.
IDK why so many people want to die on this hill of not forcing social media companies to extend free-speech rights to their userbase. Facebook didn't accidentally wind up in this position where their TOS can effectively censor entire political movements on the Zuck's whim. They spent decades purposefully angling for this by acquiring competitors and encouraging people to use their platform for any and all communication. They own the audience.
>But there is a better solution: build tools that are open, decentralized, and user controlled. And then actually use them instead of just giving more power to Mark Zuckerberg to shut down a protest organization’s account in the middle of one of its big protests.
Not happening LOL. The decentralized platforms have been there for 10-20 years, hardly anybody uses them.
Back when the shoe was on the other foot, the right tried to make *several* alternative platforms and there was widespread collusion amongst all levels of infrastructure providers to push them off the internet. The same will happen to any platform which seeks to effect political change and attains enough critical mass that it could plausibly do so.
> Back when the shoe was on the other foot, the right tried to make several alternative platforms and there was widespread collusion amongst all levels of infrastructure providers to push them off the internet.
Wow, what spin.
There was no collusion. If we look at Gab, Stripe and PayPal had had numerous issues for a long time leading up to them not accepting payments. I love how you ignore -why- providers cut ties with them: The Pittsburgh synagogue shooter planned and coordinated his efforts on Gab, and when Gab was repeatedly warned about it, refused to do anything. Similarly, though this administration made a lot of it moot, many of the Jan 6 riots were coordinated actively there, same thing (and yes, riots - it was shown in evidence that these were the people who were planning to hurt politicians, staff, law enforcement, and see if they could "capture" Mike Pence to stop his role in certification).
And they were offline for less than a week.
Parler? AWS said that they'd reported over 100 posts to Parler that were active and specific plans for violence and incitement, and been ignored. Following the FBI investigating Parler for its role in coordinating violence on Jan 6, AWS pulled the plug.
It's on the App Store, on Play, now.
But categorizing that as some kind of disagreement on ideology is a hilariously bad take that ignores active coordination of crimes and violence on those platforms.
>The Pittsburgh synagogue shooter planned and coordinated his efforts on Gab, and when Gab was repeatedly warned about it, refused to do anything.
Conveniently ignoring the fact that he livestreamed it on Facebook and their moderators refused to delete it.
Of course thats far from the only time that somebody planning an act of terrorism has a history of concerning posts but somehow other social networks are hardly ever held to this standard.
>Parler? AWS said that they'd reported over 100 posts to Parler that were active and specific plans for violence and incitement, and been ignored. Following the FBI investigating Parler for its role in coordinating violence on Jan 6, AWS pulled the plug.
Well if they were really that "active and specific" they should have called the FBI too. But once again, this sort of standard should have sank every other social network decades ago if it was actually applied equally. Social media is always used to incite riots. Why are you acting like this is unheard of? We have entire social movements with hashtags in their names.
Stupidity is when I bulk post my back catalogue of TikToks. Malice is when a protest that attracted 9 million Americans last time they organized one gets taken down. Notable accounts get special treatment.
That leads to a situation where some are more equal than others
also, of course, no one should use or let their loved ones use meta’s Muse.
even OAI and Ant are better options
This has been happening for years, and the right was similarly impacted under Biden and, to a lesser extent, Obama.
To be clear, that doesn’t make it right in any way. I just hope that now that both sides have felt that way we might actually see some change.
Bsky and HN manipulate social network effects too with their discourse controls
None of the faceless legal corporate entities should be trusted; many explicitly argued against common carrier to preserve power over discourse that benefits them
Got suspended on Bsky for pointing out they too rely on data centers; free speech is not possible online.
Not even talking about toxic political speech, just physical fucking truth that might impact the bottom line for a small team of tech bros.
There will be no doubting the genius of the SV PhD crowd never mind they too, a minority of the global population, are temporary and deluded self selecting meat suits with no ability to ensure the future cares about their effort; it's all so clearly just selfish laziness
Am raising my kids to be prepared to denigrate and marginalize Millennials as Millennials hit their glazed over elder phase so my kids generation can be free of the same thought policing and social conservatism
They're not even renting. It's free. There's no obligation, no contract other than a EULA, no guarantees at all.
I think people in the West have little experience living under totalitarian regime.
Typical ways of overcoming censorship is creating own lingo, so that it goes past censors or distribution of physical leaflets, underground press and organising resistance offline.
When people want moderation they cry at Zuck, when people get moderated they cry at Zuck. When people are given free and open systems they cry that it’s icky and weird.
Related:
Meta Takes Down No Kings Instagram During Protest Day
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50136881
Oof 500...
Kind of hurts/helps the point, but yeah generally, you should run your own website? Is this the return of the old web?
They run their own website, but they need to reach people where they are, which is on Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, and Elon Musk's Feed.
https://www.nokings.org
even if they were despicable, kiwifarms is case study for this, you can't give yourself a platform, they were DDOSed into oblivion when cloudflare dropped them, donations were blocked by payments processors, etc.
These systems were ALL originally conceived as surveillance and propaganda tools, with a hitherto-unknown-and-probably-unknowable amount of Cold War Leftover/GWoT black money poured into them to get them scaled before their (sometimes extremely hinky) IPOs. Some of the old security state staff even stayed on. In-Q-Tel. LifeLog. Regina Dugan. Douglas Gage, Jim Breyer, Howard Cox. Thiel and Palantir.
They're not deviating from their mission; they're returning to their Dark Enlightenment roots.
You could say the same about techbro culture as a whole - it comes from the missile men culture of the 1950s-1960s, which was . . . pretty cozy . . with some personalities of the Old European Right. To this day you still hear "well we weren't able to get to orbit without the god-given aid of Glorious Aryan Rocketmen". When the truth is a little more venal, more like the various departments of the armed forces couldn't keep their daggers out of each others' backs. But the seemingly-hippy-ish libertarian culture of the Valley was a veneer on some very dark crap.
ANYWAY. The same technologists have also given us the tools to create true open communications, it's just we haven't been living under the barrel of the gun for long enough yet. I suspect all the tricks will be coming out before too long.
surely this will finally get people off facebook right? right?!
If you really want to be in charge of your digital life and rights, you need to get off the proprietary plantation. Facebook/Meta, Microsoft, Google/Alphabet, Apple, Discord, TikTok, Twitter/X, Reddit - all of it.
You don't need to do this all at once, you shouldn't let "perfect" be the enemy of "progress" - every single proprietary platform you migrate away from is a win: you gain more freedom and more ownership over your digital life every time you do it.
Decentralized platforms, federated platforms, self-hostable platforms are where you want to be. Think bluesky, signal (warning: bluesky and signal are still effectively centralized), fediverse, matrix, nostr, peertube, briar, simplex, mastodon, lemmy, loops, stoat, zulip, xmpp, irc, pixelfed, Mail-in-a-Box, nextcloud, cryptpad, linux, lineageos, grapheneos, etc.
if you only want to talk to dozens of you, that is fine.
and keep using the mainstream platforms as long as you're happy to have billionaires decide what you're allowed to say, what you're allowed to see, how you're supposed to think. it's not like they've ever given you any reason not to trust them completely.
Friendly PSA, hopefully unnecessary: If you attend one of these 'No Kings' gatherings, or any similar gathering, please coordinate with your friends/associates beforehand and leave your phone at home. Or, turn-off your phone or, at the very least, disable all the radios (airplane mode). Also, try to cover your face - Covid mask or big hat and sunglasses, and don't wear any identifying clothing, like the name of your employer. All that might sound paranoid - that's what all my friends tell me. That might be true, but I'm confident DHS also attends these gatherings to collect data. And that data is used to create named lists, the ones you don't wanna be on.
I test a lot of mobile apps, and for various testing purposes I have shielded bags for phones. It's an easy way to have an extra layer of protection because it's physical and tactile, and likely to work even if you messed up some of the other protections you should be using.
It’s funny how political parties either endorse or reject Zuckerberg (he doesn’t like “Zuck”) depending on the season. In 2020 when he was shilling for Biden, and censoring conservatives (and anti lockdown movements , coincidentally), the left loved him . Now, he’s featuring Hitler reels on IG, and apparently censoring No Kings (?), the Right seems to have warmed to him, and the left scorns him.
To his credit, he’s an adaptable Machiavellian .
The fascinating thing about the obvious skew in social and traditional media, such as towards the genocide in Gaza, is that US companies are acting like megaphones for the state. They're doing exactly what China hawks accuse the CCP of doing.
I know as someone who expresses views contrary to the State Department position online on various platforms and sites that I get held to a much higher standard. Throttling, shadow banning, comments and content being put in review, suppression, accusations of violating ToS for doing something as inocuous as describing someone's argument as "utter nonsense" and so on. All while the establishment view can post with impunity. I get held to a much higher standard.
If you want to see how the state treats anyone who protests, look no further than Renee Good and Alex Pretti, murdered in broad daylight by untrained Brownshirts under the color of law. The First Amendment is becoming increasingly theoretical.
can't even take this shit seriously anymore. for years when the left controlled twitter they ruled with an iron fist. twitter, meta (then FB), instagram, youtube, would somehow "completely randomly" come to the same conclusions to deplatform people all at once. even now, britain arrests people for wrong think social media posts. people like james damore lost his job for saying the most innocuous milk toast shit you could imagine. and everyone was fine with it, so long as they were the ones calling the shots.
all the bullshitting about complaining about centralization, third party this and that, freedom of speech, can't take that shit seriously. somehow they uniquely find only violations of these from people in the "other" side of the aisle. it's just so exhausting and obviously bad faith engagement. and the right isn't really any better, they do the same thing, just flipped. i think it's about time we mostly just admit: libertarians are fools (that used to be me LOL), and nobody in western culture genuinely cares about "free speech". everything they support is free speech, everything they dislike is "hate speech" (notice how the narrative changed). it's all so obvious to anyone who zooms out and looks at the larger trends. just get over it and embrace authoritarianism. just be honest about who you are.
A strong culture of free speech is the clear solution to the problem you're describing. I.e. when both political factions censor, the only solution is a strong preference for free speech regardless of who is in power.
that's like saying the solution is for everything to just be perfect. well of course. the problem is, that's not a realistic solution. the whole "No kings" movement in itself is an example of this. trump isn't a king nor is he trying to be, and most of the shit he does is rather milk toast. yet where were the "no kings" protestors when we were discussing forced vaccines? oh that's right, most supported it. where were the "my body my choice" people when we were discussing forced vaccines or else you can't work and feed your family? or yeah as it turns out in that case, it's not really your choice (in any realistic sense).
if the No Kings people truly want to be taken seriously, the best thing they can do is just admit they are wrong about their whole schtick. unfortunately the chances of that happening are exactly zero % since pride stands in the way.
watch and observe. literally nobody believes in free speech. people believe in policies and agendas, and "freedom" is just a tool used to push it. the right wing does this, especially in economics, all the time, where they want the rich to be "free" to fuck the poor. take a step back, observe the trends, and be honest with yourself, and it will be quite obvious that freedom itself is just a tool used in politics, nobody actually believes in it as an end to aspire to. this isn't 1980 anymore. milton friedman is long gone.
I believe in free speech. It doesn't take "perfection," actually the opposite.
How many people complaining about this were cheering when FB deplatformed Donald Trump?
I was. Do you not see a difference?
The media is mostly MAGA owned. Here's a short list:
- TikTok is controlled by Larry Ellison
- CBS news is controlled by Ellison's son
- The Ellisons will soon own CNN as well
- Twitter is controlled by Musk
- Facebook, Instagram and Threads are under Zuck
- WaPo and Amazon Prime by Bezos
- Old time favourites like Fox and WSJ owned by Murdoch
The owners of this media are also very explicitly involved in pro-Trump editorial content. In short, the playing field is wildly lopsided and unreliable and no tech (decentralized social media, lol) solution will work. Ultimately people will have to elect politicians to explicitly break up and clamp down on this hive of scum and villainy, but people aren't there yet, mentally. Such a solution seems wildly inappropriate today, but my guess is that another 10 years of the last two years will change a lot of minds.
These individuals are all sucking up to the president, but to call them "MAGA owned" is a stretch. They'll kiss whichever ass - democrat or republican - next fills the president's chair, it's just with this emperor-magpie it's very straightforward and easy: shiny & bright == good.
They have a strong preference for which ass they'd rather kiss and they express that preference with heaps of money.
Left wing politicians wanted Internet moderation.
We got Internet moderation.
Watch out what you wish for.
> Left wing politicians
It's the Right wing politicians too. Look at Texas and pornography laws or the IRL book bans. We live in a politics of Win At All Costs, Dominate Those Who Think Differently, i.e utterly broken and anti-democratic.
The problem is the Oligarchy, the are thick from money, power, and hubris
The internet has always had moderation, WTH are you talking about?
It was the right who wanted to repeal Section 230 and have the government take over all social media platforms and regulate them, and make it illegal to ban their speech. The left never wanted anything of the sort.
So the use of the chilling effects from the White House to eliminate speech wasn’t moderation?
No, that isn't what moderation is, at all. That doesn't even negate my point.
no kings is the biggest limited hangout session, bigger than blm.
~7 million attendees in October 2025.
And what have they accomplished?
Reassured each other and millions of non-participants that they’re not alone in thinking shit has gone off the rails.
There’s a reason autocrats hate protests. It’s because they’d much rather that opposition become doubtful of whether other opposition exist out there.
eh, shit's always off the rails for leftists. it's a huge grift that they have to keep going. that's why places like france, which have implemented many, many of the changes that leftists in America want, still protest non stop. protesting is the grift. you can have government spending at like 50% of GDP (france was 57% recently) funding an endless welfare state with free education, worker protections, unfettered illegal immigration, every leftist wet dream you can realistically think of, and they still protest.
the grift works though, in part because the changes they protest for usually take a toll on the system over time, until the system soft or hard collapses. then you get social unrest. that's exactly you're seeing in france now. i dont even feel bad for france.
I don’t really know or care about what’s going on in France.
But characterizing opposition to Trump as “just leftists perma-complaining,” is incorrect. He’s the least popular POTUS in American history.
This administration has been repeatedly found in court to be violating the law and the US Constitution. It is not a partisan expectation or leftist complaint that the government must follow the law.
Protests worked in Hungary and Poland to help gain widespread support and eventually vote the authoritarians out of office. You want everyone to know there are many people resisting the leadership abusing power.
I guess we'll find out after Tuesday, November 3.
to paraphrase, well you're talking about it, aren't you?
Are you asserting that there has to be a direct objective outcome of every protest?
So these two guys were walking down the street, and one of them was constantly clapping his hands, snapping fingers, and stomping his feet. And finally the other guy got a little fed up with all the commotion, and he stops to ask the other guy, "why do you keep making all that noise?"
And the noisy guy says, "this is to keep away all the tigers and bears!" And his friend says "but there are no tigers and bears anywhere to be seen!" and he goes "See what I mean!"
There has not been a king since 1776, so they are quite successful.
"Kings" as such aren't the problem as much as "CEOs" as such are any problem. There are good kings who cared about their country and bad kings who didn't. Before Henry VIII there were rules in place to restrict the obedience to kings only as long as the kings obey the rules. In 1570, Pope Pius V then told people that the English government is a lost cause and they were free to disobey Queen Elizabeth I (he actually commanded them to disobey, talk about anarchism!).
Then later in history you had Robbespierre who campaigned on "democracy" and "we must overthrow the monarchy, then things will be great" ... only to installed himself as a dictator, because only he knew the true morality that people should obide by ("terror is a virtue"). No kings... and then what? No CEOs... and then what? Then we just get a different king / CEO / whatever. Their true shackles are in the people themselves, in their own behaviour, in whom they give attention to. Don't give attention to Facebook and Zuck will have no power.