What is and what is not protected speech has been pretty clearly defined over the years. Honestly though it doesn't matter because these are private companies.
Parler has failed to moderate extremist content and is acting as a platform for radicalizing new users.
Apple, Google, Amazon, and Twitter have a decided independently that the lost revenue and maga tears are worth not having to host far right terrorists.
Parler can host itself if it wants, nobody has made it illegal to be a gaping asshole.
Choosing not to host it because of the content. Of course it is censorship. That people can perhaps publish their opinions somewhere else does not imply that it is not censorship.
Free speech is freedom from the government not private companies.
It's just pure entitlement.
Users can install alternative app stores or apps directly on Android phones. Or even they could buy a Linux phone like the PinePhone and install whatever they want.
But no, they want the audiences built by private companies.
It's funny how those who decry communism so much want state control of businesses.
> Apple and Google are private companies. It is their platform.
Long ago the same applied to water suppliers, electricity suppliers, railroad networks, phone networks.
Each and every time, once these private companies accumulated disproportional amount of power over people, these private companies were forcibly split, nationalized, and/or heavily regulated. This happened on behalf of the people who elect governments to do so.
Do you think modern Apple and Google are very different from Bell System in 1982?
The argument that it must be good because the government was elected by the people is not a good one. People elected fascists in Germany. They elect socialist regimes on a regular basis. It's not automatically good because the majority looks for it.
I'd argue that democracy can only work if there are mechanisms to protect the minorities from the majority. Because otherwise democracy always ends up as oppression.
That was OK. Happened in 1932-1933, and it was not a landslide victory, with only 33-44% of votes. The Holocaust and WW2 were not OK, but they happened in 1941-1945 and 1939-1945 respectively, long after the democratic institutions in Germany were dismantled in 1933-34.
> I'd argue that democracy can only work if there are mechanisms to protect the minorities from the majority.
Not sure I follow. Do you think Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Jack Dorsey and other shareholders of FB/Alphabet/Twitter are a minority who need protection from being oppressed?
"Not sure I follow. Do you think Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Jack Dorsey and other shareholders of FB/Alphabet/Twitter are a minority who need protection from being oppressed? "
All I am saying is that "the elected government did so" does not automatically make it OK or the right thing to do.
Personally I am not a fan of government intervention in private companies.
Many people in this discussion have made the point that for example Parler could simply move their servers elsewhere. Likewise, nothing forces people to use Google, Facebook or Twitter.
> Parler could simply move their servers elsewhere
They can, and they probably will. Gonna take time. Pretty sure they did not expect a coordinated attack from Amazon, Apple and Google at the same time.
> nothing forces people to use Google, Facebook or Twitter.
You’re commenting on hacker news. This means you’re using a PC, or maybe a phone or tablet. Some (likely private) company is selling you electricity you use to power these devices.
Would you be happy if that company cuts your electricity because they don’t like your political views?
If no, what do you think is the key difference from Google, Facebook or Twitter doing their censorship?
A key difference would be that it is easier to replace the services of Google, Facebook and Twitter than of power providers. But even that doesn't seem impossible.
I never said Apple or Google are not entitled to censor stuff.
I fully support the rights of private companies to do that.
People are also entitled to be critical of such moves and to look for alternatives. That's all.
What if Google would openly support fascism. Would you also defend their right to do so, because they are a private company? Would you happily continue to use their products? Or would you prefer to have an alternative?
100% sure that is bullshit. It is already illegal to call for somebody to be killed. If that was a major thing on Parler, it would be a case for the police, not for the Google mods.
Edit: with "universal free speech" I just mean it has to be legal to say things. I am not generally in favor of regulating companies. At the moment they are mostly regulated to censor stuff, though. While I think it also agrees with their own ideology (see Zuckerberg's personal statement), governments have also threatened the social networks if they don't cenor according to the wishes of the governments. (I know about the hate speech laws in Germany, not sure what is the current state of affair in the US).
Parler was set up specifically to provide a place where Trump supporters could discuss sedition, terrorism, and make plans to prevent a handover of power in the case that Trump lost the election.
It is common for people to get banned from Parler for things as simple as questioning the evidence “supporting” various conspiracy theories.
So don’t complain when the entire site gets taken offline due to breaching various terms of service regarding “do not use our platform for terrorism.”
Because it is not so easy to manipulate the price, presumably.
It depends on the trading volume. For many "altcoins" or "shitcoins" it may be true, because they have low trading volume. Bitcoin probably less so these days.
Given the market cap of 800 billion for BTC at the moment, presumably it should by relatively hard to manipulate.
I'd read elsewhere that there was a tiny minority of BTC holders that own 95% of it, no idea of the authenticity of that.
As a Layman, my assumption is the more liquidity in the market, the harder it would be to manipulate and less reason to dump onto the market if a large stakeholder.
I think some of the whales could make the price tank, at least temporarily. They include some governments who seized thousands of BTC from criminal operations.
But I think the same applies to many stocks. If Musk of Bezos would sell off a majority of their shares in their own companies, it would perhaps also move the price.
At the moment, crashes in Bitcoin can also be seen as a good thing because it helps give more people access to Bitcoin. It's even possible that some of the stakeholders (whales with thousands of BTC) occasionally deliberately induce crashes for exactly that purpose.
I suppose there are now some whales, including governments that seized BTC from criminals, that could induce a crash by selling thousands of BTC within a short frame of time. But that may be true for many stocks as well.
They ran the model on historical data. Of 4 a priori known P&Ds, the model detected 2 of them. To say that they've got accuracy of a 50% or "no better than a coin toss", ignores all of the non-P&D events that it correctly didn't identify as a P&D. If you did a coin toss, you would flip the coin much more than 4 times.
You really would also want to have some sort of loss function, or at the very least a general idea of whether you most need to avoid false positives or false negatives. If it was most important to avoid incorrectly saying it's NOT a P&D, then this is not good performance. If you need it to nearly always avoid saying something which is not a P&D (and thus might be a great investment opportunity), but given that you want to avoid as many as you can, 50% might be good.
I'd be really curious to hear Basecamp's opinion on Gumroad, and how they'd compare and contrast their own experience with it (Basecamp is the new name of 37signals).
Basecamp's CEO Jason Fried actually shared his thoughts in a tweet:
"Good read on how Gumroad experiments with work, structure, hiring, and compensation. Re: part time... Little known fact: I hired @dhh
quarter-time (10 hours a week) to build Basecamp way back in 2003. That's all he had, and we made it work."
There should be more awareness about what is going on in hospitals all year round. Media hype can make everything extreme.
And there are many theories to explain, for example NY morgues may have been overflowing because morgue owners were afraid to accept people who died from Covid.
Is there actual evidence that people died because they couldn't receive care? Even in Italy I have not seen the evidence, just YouTube videos of some alleged doctors making such claims.
Serious question. I would love to see evidence of people dying because they couldn't receive care (in the Western world).
So you won't accept video evidence given by named doctors at specific hospitals, thus easily checked by the media or anyone who has anything to do with the hospital.
Named doctors would be a start. Media doing some checking would also be a start. Some person looking like a doctor making claims on YouTube is not sufficient.
None of those reports citing the alleged doctor actually checked with the hospitals.
Maybe that should be the minimum: actually checking the situation, rather than repeating some random claims.
It's the oldest excuse in the book. And exactly why universal free speech is needed. Because otherwise that same excuse will be made every time.
Alternatively, I guess there simply will never be free speech and people will always have to fight to get heard.