The interesting thing about this is that nationalism is in general associated with right-leaning politics, and the censorship is far and away being applied more aggressively to those very same right-leaning nationalist groups.
You would be hard pressed to find liberal / progressive content being censored online.
I might have to work harder to find high-traffic social-media accounts peddling stories about the left being censored online than finding the same thing about the right.
But, if so, would that really be evidence that the right was being censored more, or just that its complaints are being amplified more by the very same platforms they claim to be selectively censoring them?
The whole discussion is sapir-whorfed hard by the fake left-right nomenclature. Old-school-leftists, such as communists and socialists are catching ban-hammers, yes that's true. "Pronoun-left" on the other hand is not.
> You would be hard pressed to find liberal / progressive content being censored online.
I think this is a false dichotomy. Whenever speech calls for violence that upsets the current social-political order in the US, it is censored regardless of being "left" or "right;" one example being the very-left chapo trap house crowd on reddit. My understanding that there is less violent content coming from voices identified as "progressives" that tend to value other more acceptable* methods for social change.
* Acceptable meaning something different per platform, but if we are being honest seems to usually mean "can sell mainstream ads space alongside them"
I have no idea how you can keep telling yourself that when the top 10 shared links on Facebook have been nothing but conservative conspiracy theories for over 12 months straight.
That is irrelevant to the claim. Facebook doesn’t share links, the users do. The allegation of bias are associated with inconsistent and/or incorrect applications of their rules.
From the article:
> "Poland blocked human rights sites; India same-sex dating sites"
Clearly that's the wheelhouse of the right-leaning national groups, right? Oh, maybe not.
Or maybe it's the rightwing nationalist governments cracking down on disadvantaged groups?
Amusing how when it's aligned with your viewpoints (suppression of speech for rightwing groups), it's partisan. Otherwise, it's "anyone can get away with it".
Huh? It's the exact opposite. In the US sites like Facebook & Twitter routinely refuse to censor conservative content even if it is against their policies because they are afraid of pissing off Republicans in Congress.
A "liberal" on Facebook calling for the beheading of a conservative politican would be banned (possibly even arrested) immediately. The opposite can and does happen every day, with no penalty.
And all this still isn't relevant because we are talking about government censorship.
I could bet money that the opposite of what you're saying is true. But I think that illustrates a much bigger problem. The society is so polarized, that we can't even agree on basic facts. Something went terribly wrong with the internet and the media and now we're living in two completely different realities, that are fundamentally incompatible with one another.
Yes I think Facebook allowed the Fauci threats as PR to make themselves look neutral. Mark Zuckerberg and his employees have been playing good cop bad cop with us since the beginning to make the public perceive Facebook as a neutral bystander when in fact they're in a large part responsible for the whole mess and are not neutral at all.
You're right, they technically don't. But they ban everything that can be even remotely interpreted as "offensive". To give you one example, I got banned for pointing out the appeal to nature fallacy. I've said that rape and murder is technically natural and yet it's not socially acceptable. Literally just that. Nothing less, nothing more. But someone either misinterpreted that simple sentence or found it offensive because of the context of the conversation, and thus I got banned.
I think that the right has moved the Overton Window so much to the right that they see things that most of the world would see as mainstream (Black Lives Matter, Abortion, Medicare for All, Defund the Police, Anti-Fascism etc) as extreme.
You might want to familiarize yourself with the criticisms of those. You might also want to familiarize yourself with what those organizations and ideologies are actually about beyond their slogan (which in most cases has nothing to do with what the slogan is).
But either way, defund the police is not mainstream anywhere - that’s pretty universally understood to be a fringe (and ridiculous) proposition, and has already proven its devastating consequences.
That's funny that you say that because those who find themselves right of center generally say the same thing. The mainstream media, hollywood, and academia, have become so liberal that the center feels like extreme right to them.
A number of countries have ripped up their police force and started again, to greater or lesser degrees, in the last few decades. The RUC would be a mild case, the Stasi an extreme one.
None of those things, properly understood[1], were in any way mainstream until very recently. And arguably still aren't mainstream.
[1] Obviously, black lives do matter and fascism is bad, but as slogans "Black Lives Matter" and "Anti-Fascism" represent very radical political programs. You should be as suspicious of these slogans as I assume you are of slogans like "All Lives Matter" and "Anti-Communism".
And the fact that people apparently can’t stand to hear this shows how far left the tech overton window has shifted. As if we all were not already aware.
That's not how the Overton Window works. The Overton Window says what kind of opinions are socially acceptable. If you describe those things are mainstream, they're by definition inside the Overton Window. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that you're more likely to be fired for being a nationalist rather than a communist, so that's another indicator that the Overton Window is actually on the left.
I'm not the one you're replying to, but here's how I think the Overton Window works.
Everyone has a personal Overton Window - the set of ideas that they think are reasonable and acceptable, even if they personally don't agree. When most of the personal Overton Windows approximately align on a particular topic, then we have society's Overton Window.
For example, think about gay marriage. 50 years ago, maybe even 20, 95% of society thought that gay marriage was clearly not acceptable. That meant that 95% of society agreed with 95% of society's personal Overton Windows on the topic, and so we had a clear society-wide Overton Window.
Now we have maybe 30% of people who still think that gay marriage is clearly not acceptable. We also have 40% who think that gay marriage is clearly in bounds. Of those, maybe half (so 20% of the population) think any doubts about gay marriage are clearly unacceptable. There is no position which a large majority of society finds acceptable. (All numbers made up, but I think they're in the approximate neighborhood.)
The society-wide Overton Window didn't move. It shattered.
> That's not how the Overton Window works. The Overton Window says what kind of opinions are socially acceptable
"Socially acceptable" is, necessarily, relative to some defined group.
Especially in a political system with limited major parties and partisan primary elections (especially if they are closed, but even if they are open in theory but tend to attract a specific mostly-stable community in practice), and a substantial population that participates in neither parties primaries, considering the Overton Window within each party and/or ideological identity group as well as the "national" Overton Window can be useful. The GP comment could be rephrased without, I think, change of meaning as "the Overton Window of the community of the ideological Right and/or the Republican Party has moved relative to the rest of society such that it excludes much of the window as viewed by those not ideologically tied strongly to the Left or Right faction".
I don't keep track of this, but there is a lot of "canceling" going on recently. If we talk strictly about politics, I did saw a couple of left-leaning people who got fired for politics, because the angry mob went after their employment. But most of the time I see it happening to right-leaning people. And what I never saw was anyone on the left got kicked off platforms like PayPal for example. Though it's within the realm of possibility that the social media just gave me the impression that this is the case. However, considering the fact that basically every corporation and even some of the smaller companies are changing their logos in support of BLM, LGBT Pride etc., I think it's quite reasonable to assume that.
> But most of the time I see it happening to right-leaning people.
And the question you have to ask is how do you see it when it happens to right-leaning people? Is it happening in your immediate neighborhood? Or is this supposed social "cancelling" happening to people who have pre-existing or readily-made-available access to strong, highly-visible, wealthy network that shares their story as outrage fuel and/or enables the socially "cancelled" a highly-visible platform to do so?
Information gathered as unstructured anecdotes, especially absent analysis of the systematic biases in how the information gets to you, is not a reliable basis for drawing conclusions about relative frequency, especially when the topic is specifically differential suppression of viewpoints and information.
Since my experience is the complete political reverse of what you describe (liberals getting away with things that conservatives assume they never could), I think the real answer is that probably there is less censorship in general than people assume.
And I suppose that's probably a good thing.
> And all this still isn't relevant because we are talking about government censorship.
Agreed that the article is about government censorship, and I commented before I read the article.
However, given that the US government at least has shown very little backbone in its threats to regulate social media companies, their tendency toward more censorship also seems concerning.
Are you intentionally trying to gaslight people? This is just straight up false. See Kathy Griffin holding a bloody Trump - a tweet which she’s retweeted multiple times.
OP is probably referring to the Steve Bannon's recent statement calling for the beheading of Dr. Fauci. This has been very widely covered, even by Trumpist media. See:
This kind of political speech has no place in a democratic society. The fact that it comes down to social media and Internet providers to regulate it, however, is reflective of a policy failure. Keeping calls for extremist violence out of the public sphere ought to be the responsibility of the criminal legal system, not private business.
Conservatives and libertarians LOVE to bleat about property rights, but they can't handle it when private parties won't provide free advertising for right-wing conspiracies.
What we LOVE is a market free of force and fraud, and we love rule of law. Within that there are very nuanced conversations to be had about when the threshold for force or fraud has been reached.
Enforcement of contracts is essential to a healthy society, but is it good to enforce a contract where one party either lied or coerced the other to sign? No, or at least not necessarily.
The nature of the contract between social media platforms and their users (both explicit and implicit) has changed dramatically since the days that Twitter was "the free speech wing of the free speech party". Users have sacrificed a increasing amount of privacy for less and less obvious benefit. In the meantime, many people have come to depend upon these services for connecting with others, for their livelihoods, and for news independent of corporate media.
Have the social media companies deceived their users? Or have they forced unconscionable terms upon their users? Have they violated consumer protection laws?
I am not a lawyer. I don't know the answers to those questions. But I do know that there are some lawyers and judges who do think that some of these social media companies have overstepped. We don't necessarily need a civil rights case, or a constitutional amendment, or even to repeal Section 230. All I think is necessary is for existing contract and consumer protection laws be litigated and enforced.
This kind of action would benefit both left and right, and I think is more constructive than opportunistically deciding that "businesses can do whatever they want" when you think it only hurts people on the right.
Twitter is a private company with zero legal authority to enforce anything other than not sharing your tweets.
Be honest that you really want to use the force of government laws to mandate that Twitter spreads your version of free speech across the platform paid for and developed by Twitter.
I honestly think you should stop trying to read minds. You aren't very good at it.
Perhaps you should try reading my words instead and responding to them rather than the imaginary things you pretend I actually think? It might work out better.
Can you please tell me what "my version" of free speech is? Is this different from the normal understanding of free speech? Because I haven't actually said anything about "free speech" other than quoting Jack Dorsey.
While I do believe in the necessity of freedom of speech (not just the first amendment, but a particular set of cultural values) those abstract values aren't my primary concern here. My concerns (across the various tech platforms out there) are:
* the disruption to peoples' businesses that result from the opaque and largely incontestable content moderation process. This is mainly a concern where the content in question does not violate either the law nor the TOS.
* The exploitation of consumers through the gradual degradation of privacy.
* The attempts to undermine consumer rights by removing users' options for legal remedy in the TOS
Basically, if users' are providing value to these platforms through advertising revenue, mine-able private information, transaction fees, etc. what expectations can the users' have with regard to the value they receive and how they are treated by the platforms? I do not think the answer of "nothing" is acceptable.
You would be hard pressed to find liberal / progressive content being censored online.