The "right" was merely copied from an ancestor post.

Correct. We hate nazis.

Those are the “far right” (or “far left” depending on your views) in those contexts.

The point remains: extreme views will gravitate to these platforms.

That is “far right”.

If you don’t prefer that title call it “extremist views”; it’s irrelevant what you label it; the point remains entirely valid.

Because it’s often one and the same: the “identity” of the people on them are the ones spreading hate speech and disinformation. You don’t need to sugar coat it as “not-sanctioned speech”, nobody is banning anyone for saying “hey I support Donald trump!’ They are banning people for saying “trans people will burn in hell” and “the Jewish cabal that run the world are eating babies and that’s why Biden stole the election and the democrats will be executed on TV by trump”.

Unfortunately this kind of speech comes from mostly one side of the political spectrum. Yes, I’m sure you can cherry pick random left-leaning Twitter users saying dumb things, but it’s not quite on the same level as you can find on ParlerWatch[1] for example.

Gabs founder: https://i.redd.it/u8mbqmrh41k61.png

1. https://old.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/top/?sort=top&t=month

Saying racist sh*, and wanting to restrict the rights of minoritys is waaaay different then protesting against an opressive regime.

It is a shame, that the far right were and are able to use the ccp-protestors for their meanly targets.

It's a great movie, but a metaphor not a "time-shifted documentary", unless I missed the latest Qdrop.

Interesting position.

As glen greenwald says, censorship eventually is always about those in power staying in power. Unless you are in power it’s sad to see so much pro censorship these days.

Read up on Ira Glasser at the ACLU or watch the documentary. Why did he as a Jew defend neo nazis?

Censorship is a product of political extremism though, it has no basis in one political ideology, only in how aggressively it is applied to society.

Unfortunately you have to sign up to see comments, I wonder why...

The court documents (https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/parler-llc-v-a...) from their case against Amazon contain other examples of hate speech.

You're comparing an entire polluted pool that is unfit to swim in with a single floating turd in the ocean.

   far left                         far right
   <---------------------------------------->
                             [Overton Window]
                         perceived      perceived
                         far left       far right

> If a person thinks that perhaps, maybe, there's 2 genders and not 700+

Nonsense comparison. No-one thinks there are 700+ genders.

> That maybe we should not be providing chemical treatments to toddlers for gender reassignment

Toddlers aren't being given medication for gender reassignment, this is blatantly false.

> If they believe that math isn't actually racist

No-one is seriously suggesting that math is racist.

> How about people who criticize Islam and argue that it is a fundamentally violent ideology?

Again, missing the point. The issue is when Muslims are treated badly based on stereotypes of what they believe.

> How about gender affirming treatment for kids who cannot physically know what sexuality properly is because they haven't been through puberty? Someone's a bit off their gender role? Tomboy, nah, they're a boy, time to stuff them full of hormones. Concerns that this just might be insane are again, labeled hate.

Trans girls have horrible anxiety about going through puberty. It's not them being "a little off their gender role". It's a fundamental dread about being given an irreversible treatment of hormones that will change their voice and secondary sexual characteristics.

Puberty is far more irreversible than HRT. The percentage of people who detransition is tiny; far more people who transition are much happier for doing so. It is also incredibly difficult to actually get HRT. The therapy is beyond the reach of most children. It's a total boogieman that this is happening left and right and all of the children are getting stuffed full of synthetic hormones.

Please educate yourself more.

Anti-trans positions are up there with "gay people are going to sexually assault my children" or "being gay is disgusting 'cause I don't like thinking about anal sex". Complete and utter bullshit based on unfounded fears.

This is a perfect example of two major issues going on:

1) America is catering to the lowest common denominator of who is offended and therefore creating a race to the bottom for societal norms (i.e. you considering your example to be hate speech, but I don't...but society currently feels the need to make sure you feel comfortable in your safe place)

2) 95% of the platform discussion may be in the form of your "Free speech" example, but if there's any occurrence of your "Hate speech" example, the entire platform is labeled a "Hate speech" platform....and this feeds back into issue #1

Liberals are being called racists and anti-democracy as a way of attacking and deplatforming anyone who disagrees with the leftist tribe. This isn't about values, it's about tribal allegiance.

If you actually believe that these people are far-right racists then there is a strong chance that you are being fooled by tribal manipulation.

I'm personally more centrist overall, but I've tried as much as I could to give an unbiased summary, though being unbiased in those cases is hard. I'm trying not to judge the behavior, just observe it.

One thing I have observed is that the current moderate left in the US does seem to align more with Canada/UK/France style of free speech, with a broader definition of what is considered hate speech and stronger enforcements against it. Where as the right seem more aligned with the traditional American view on it, where hate speech is limited only if it can be shown to have directly and immediately caused lawless action.

This seems to be the crux of the issue as well. With the big social media platforms available today, it has enabled hateful speech to have more reach at a wider scale than ever before. It also enabled not only Americans to reach others, but even non-Americans can promote and propagate hateful messaging in a targeted and strategic way. The question is what if anything should be done about this, could it lead to instability and divide and throw the country in turmoil, or maybe it's actually a good thing and will allow more voices to be heard and considered.

It's the age old trade off of free speech and restricted free speech. Where do you draw the line? What risks are there on either side of it?

And my observation has been the right leaning Americans seem to still consider that there should be no regulations on this, and everyone everywhere, even non Americans, should be allowed to freely share, promote, upvote, and target any message they want, even hateful, no matter the intent behind it, because upholding the right to speak up and against the government is more important and so we should stay as far as possible from threading water or any slippery slope.

And my observation is the left leaning Americans seem more cautious, and think some regulations might be needed, to make sure that no bad actor takes advantage of this, or that discourse doesn't rely purely on emotions and hate targeted reasonings. And that not doing so would actually bring more instability and chaos, and the risk of threading the line between restricted but still free speech and non free speech is worth it, or maybe an exagerated concern, where they don't think in practice it would be difficult to distinguish dissenting views from hateful ones or those with bad actors behind them.

It's only now that social media has come along and has democratized publication of text, images, and video that free speech as it relates to private businesses is becoming an issue. Maybe in the future a majority of people will decide that social media is the proverbial public square and change the law to reflect that. But the prevailing paradigm to this point has been that a company has a right (and some responsibilities) to make rules about what people post on their platform.

Discourse within the "acceptable" range has been true free speech certainly, but step outside those boundaries and throughout US history there have been serious repercussions. Common law courts have long recognized that if you walk up to someone on the street and scream obscenities at them you have no recourse when you get punched in the face - the concept of "fighting words". Even today no one bats an eye when a restaurant doesn't allow a patron to dine there when they don't meet the restaurant's arbitrary dress code or if the patron has an "offensive" t-shirt slogan. Various forms of ostracism have been used against people speaking out against what is acceptable since human society has existed.

State Governments have punished speech they don't as well. For example in the South pre-Civil War many southern states made it illegal to publish anti-slavery books, newspaper articles, and speeches. You could literally be arrested for speaking against slavery in any form.

I think the actual social norm you're talking about is acceptance of conservative political discourse and opinion. Certain kinds of political discourse have been verboten in the US (eg people were fired and blacklisted for communism) so that's not new as a concept, but this is the first time in US history there is strong pushback against conservatism.

To some degree I see this social pressure as being weaponized because so much of the US is gerrymandered and tiled in the favor of conservatives*. Despite being a minority party Republicans control a majority of state legislatures. CA gets two senators. A group of 11 rural conservative states representing the same population gets 22 senators. When a rump party that represents a strict minority of the population gets to continuously impose its will, change voting rules, pack the Supreme Court, and so forth are you truly surprised when a lot of people get angry? When some people are no longer willing to be polite about politics?

When the normal relief valve - elections having consequences - gets subverted for decades that pressure must find relief somewhere.

The pressure is even more intense now that the major conservative party in the US is openly embracing nationalism and at least some are openly advocating for ending democracy: whether you agree with it or not the Republican party has declared war on the majority of the US population. Some people are going to see that as an existential threat and respond accordingly.

* I know the pedants will want to divert discussion to how the US is arranged into separate states deliberately, federalism, etc. I am well aware of those arguments, there is no need to re-hash them. Much like calling universal healthcare and worker protections "socialism", or trying to fine/punish people and take down their video clips due to "copyright claims" all you are doing is teaching the upcoming generations that socialism is better at solving problems, copyright should be abolished, and federalism sucks. Proceed at your own peril.

Leftists are generally aware of this risk, because today there is no shortage of similar social pressure against leftist ideas, and do not think it's a concern. The problem is not that it's never occurred to them.

One reason why it's not a concern is that there's no reason to believe that a principled stand against this tactic by the left will have any influence on the right. Conservatives in Hollywood in the middle of the last century did not blacklist communists in response to any similar activity by communists; they did so spontaneously. So there's no reason to fear an increased risk of use of this tactic. Nobody is getting ideas they didn't already have.

You might be surprised at how fast this kind of thing can turn around.

Imagine if email providers were not allowed to filter. Your email would be totally unusable.

Enacting no filters beyond what's illegal would make most of the internet unusable. Like imagine if HN had no moderation? It would lose its original purpose.

So what do you mean support free speech exactly? Allow people to freely post porn, scams, lies, death threats?

Republicans are pretty unlikely to support such leftist notions as democratizing the means of production, whereas your average FAANG employee just might.

I guess it's the result of having a two-party system.

We all know Merrick Garland should be on the SCOTUS. He isn't because a right-wing senate didn't allow a black president to nominate him.

I've heard this claim asserted before. I am unconvinced. Can you show me some examples?

This is not a free speech issue on any social media.

Amazon had every right to stop illegal activity on their platform.

Why are you saying "probably"? A lot of it was backed up. You can go check for yourself, it was very markedly not limited.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/

Elaborating on that:

There was a mass shooting in New Zealand that was live streamed on Facebook. Now, imagine for a moment, what the public response would be if that had been on parler.

If one wants the govt to ensure free speech, then it is implied it must also ensure a private individuals right to pursue legal actions, such as denial or service or lawsuits.

I'm willing to engage with Conservatives who are genuinely grappling with free speech and aren't falling into those contradictions, but I'm also not going to pretend that Gab has ever been a good faith actor in that conversation. Being upfront about the obviously hypocritical sections of both the far right and many mainstream GOP senators is a necessary part of that engagement. It means acknowledging that Conservatives are diverse, but also being blunt about the overall direction (in the context of the legislation, surveys, platforms like CPAC, and general official party statements coming out) that the party is going is not in a pro-free-speech direction. Because if I'm not upfront about those things, then the conversation just devolves into reexplaining freedom of association for the 20th time. And that devolution of discussion also crowds out the Conservatives who actually do care about free speech who might have something interesting to say.

Part of this is that I actually do care about free speech, so I have a vested interest in making progress during conversations, in moving past basic ideas that the free speech community has already hashed out, and instead engaging with more complicated ideas that are more important right now. I don't want to waste time rehashing the same debates over and over again just because people like Ted Cruz, Andrew Torba, and Donald Trump don't understand the free market. Not only because I don't really want to engage with those people in general, but also because the actual free speech debate matters, and those people are holding it back.

My frustration here was a response to a comment arguing that criticism of Gab as a platform was a sign that Americans overall no longer care about free speech. I'm happy to engage with Conservatives that have more nuanced views, but again, in my experience those are usually not the people who are trying to sell Gab as a free speech utopia. And to the original comment's question of why "free speech" platforms like Gab often tend to market primarily to a very specific segment of the alt right, it's important to understand that it's not because everyone else hates the 1st Amendment, it's because the alt right uses the "free speech" debate disingenuously as a cloak to hide more nefarious goals.

Bolsheviks in Czarist Russia weren't anti-authoritarians, they were just preferred a different authority than was established.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_League

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Shirts_(United_States)

Yup, they did. Which is why they, in large part, bolted from the Democrats twice over the Democrats supporting progress on civil rights, once temporarily (as the Dixiecrats) because of the nature of US electoral politics converging on a two-party system and them not being strong enough alone to displace a major party, and then permanently when the GOP decided to leverage their post-1968 disillusionment and appeal directly to their racist urges, resulting in a partisan realignment over the subsequent several decades. There's a reason symbols of the Confederacy are seen at Republican rallies these days and not generally Democratic ones.

"The Internet" was all in A Tizzy because the treaty spelled out some legal procedures (that withdrawing from the treaty would end), and forgot that it was aimed squarely at China.

When your mental model is persistently at odds with the way things work out in reality, you need to reexamine your mental model.

Trump thinks he’s a Republican. A large majority of Republicans enthusiastically agree. I don’t know what you mean by “attribute” but however he got there, Trump is very definitely a Republican.

It might help to recognize that a political party in the US is not one thing. They are a shifting coalition of groups and individuals who have found a way to work together, sometimes comfortably and sometimes not, sometimes for the long term and sometimes not. The policies shift and people change continuously as each tries to get and keep power.

"Green New Deal" harks back to a time when our government was literally being run by a single man.

>The president stayed in charge of his administration...by drawing fully on his formal and informal powers as Chief Executive; by raising goals, creating momentum, inspiring a personal loyalty, getting the best out of people...by deliberately fostering among his aides a sense of competition and a clash of wills that led to disarray, heartbreak, and anger but also set off pulses of executive energy and sparks of creativity...by handing out one job to several men and several jobs to one man, thus strengthening his own position as a court of appeals, as a depository of information, and as a tool of co-ordination; by ignoring or bypassing collective decision-making agencies, such as the Cabinet...and always by persuading, flattering, juggling, improvising, reshuffling, harmonizing, conciliating, manipulating.[149]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt#Presiden...

> Liberalism is not merely valuing liberty, and wishing a high degree of it

The idea that "liberalism is about more liberty" (or something we often hear in France "the left values equality more, the right values liberty more") is something is disagree with _so much_. Liberalism is about laissez-faire, jungle law, survival of the fittest. That means the powerful/rich are very free, the less-powerful are free within the bounds set by the powerful: they have to work long hours in stupid jobs and their whole society (laws, means of consumption, social benefits) is set by the powerful. In effect, almost nobody is free to do what they want, only to do what they manage to get resources for (which is often not much). Being a "wage slave" is just one aspect of it.

You're talking about the French Revolution, which is an _excellent_ example of an uprising of the working class that's been subverted by the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie set the foundation of liberalism on the back of the people's uprise and continues to reap the benefits, the ideals of the revolutionaries most definitely were not aligned with liberalism. We see this again in the second French Revolution, then with the National Council of the Resistance whose ideals and achievements have been deconstructed by decades of liberalist policies.

> Wanting a locality to remain more like it is and retain its character is a desire for a good, it's not an evil thing

I think it's probably the argument that non-conservative struggle the most to argue against, because it's something that's simply not important to them. They just wave it away, because having their locality remain like it is is not particularly important to them. It's not _not_ important, but it's very secondary to making sure that the people's condition (both in this locality and outside of it), ie their rights/freedom/outcomes/wellbeing, is as good as it can be. I personally find it hard to think that one can morally think otherwise, but moral is a very personal thing.

And _in addition_ to having different values on what's important (human's condition versus the locality staying the same), I also believe that more than enough diversity is created, and we need more diffusion of it rather than less. I think the biggest threat to diversity is not people moving across borders, it is global corporations flooding local markets (Americanism is an obvious example, Chinese manufacture flooding Africa is another).

> Biology's the same, animals become different to cope with environmental pressure and we celebrate this. We rightly think it's a richness.

I abhor the very notion that because something is "natural", it is a good thing for society. Especially when we're in the realm of metaphors and analogies.

Quite astounding how right wing ideals have penetrated our political, economic and media institutions to the point where their positions are considered the 'sensible' and 'normal' ones - despite all the harm this ideology causes - yet they still claim to be the victims.

And we've also just proven my point together as well: so many people have been calling ordinary people nazis that when someone actually bring nazi symbols and colours to the convention I refuse to believe it. (And yes, I will check more sources before I claim this happened.)

Edit: read and reread the link. I couldn't find anything to connect the Republican party and all those flags? I specifically searched for "convention", "party" and "stage" based on your comments but I saw nothing relevant.

Now English is not my first language but are you sure you gave me the correct link, and if so, can you point me to the smoking gun?

Nobody at CPAC made up a stage out of a nazi symbol. Some people made up a narrative to fit a false conclusion they created and produced in the media.

We are quickly approaching "have you stopped beating your wife" at this point.

I don't think it would change anything if they came out and said it wasn't intentional.

Some friends of me got viciously attacked last year over some perceived fraud. They responded by publishing their books sinve they had nothing to hide.

What happened? Story just changed: "They are so crooked they managed to hide it from both the police[0] and a big four accounting company." was tje new story.

[0]: who investigated them for three years, first secretly, then openly after a previous false accusation.

Okay, so what? Should I start adding all the random incidents where people made something that was coincidentally shaped like swastika to the Wikipedia article as examples of modern usage?

> CPAC hasn't come out with a denial that their stage was that shape intentionally.

They did, they called it slanderous.

> slander (noun) - the utterance of false charges or misrepresentations which defame and damage another's reputation

CPAC cancelled some black dude for anti-semitism. They didn't do that after he was saying anti-Christian and anti-white stuff, only after he started saying that Judaism is illegitimate or whatever. But yes, I'm supposed to believe that they're using Nazi imagery on purpose.

That's not true: they denied it almost immediately. Like QAnon, it's a hard question on whether to even acknowledge these kinds of conspiracies[0], since denying them can even help to spread them.

The Trump wing is without question populist, nativist, often conspiratorial, and caught in a cult of personality. But they're not Nazis, and by trying to conflate these things, you do a disservice to the victims of actual Nazism (note the publication I linked to, from a country of founded by Nazi survivors that has quite a few supporters of Trump).

Charlottesville Nazis likely did use it, but they're far from being Trump supporters. They deeply distrust him because of Jared and Ivanka. And they're a tiny, tiny percentage of our population - all extreme right-wing groups combined (neoconfederates, Nazis, militia, etc) are well under 1%. You'll see SPLC trumpet things like "30% rise!" without mentioning how tiny these groups are (and they have a good idea about how small they are, it's just harder to fundraise when you discuss these things).

0. https://www.timesofisrael.com/cpac-denies-stage-was-intentio...

I haven’t seen anyone claiming Russian hacking changed the vote tallies of 2016. I remember the hacking “questions” being quite clear that the results of the election were not in question.

The First Amendment doesn't say you can incite a riot as long as it is a political riot. That a crime is politically motivated (or politically impactful) does not somehow absolve the perpetrator.

They must not have committed any of the following crimes: calling for violence, assaulting another person, or destroying public property.

My girlfriend had at least 3 family members there who went, marched, and went home. None of them were tracked or charged with a crime.

All of the arguments for “free speech” against platform content policies are exactly arguing for consuming someone else's reseources against their expressed direction, so it's provably false that that is sufficient to prevent people from arguing for entitlement based on “free speech”.

I checked and there's no mention anywhere on HN guidelines about bans/limitations.

This info should be made available to users.

Anyway maybe am asking too much from HN....

Also no not exclusively censorship, there are many parts to that definition.

Is there no limit to this? Knowing how horrible human beings can be to each other, is there really no point at which we draw the line and say, no further? Because there very much are numerous examples of where we do so according to the law.

As uncomfortable as it may be, the conversation about who should be silenced must continue. For as long as we face the prospect of fellow humans encouraging their peers to harm other fellow humans for bad reasons, there is no sane alternative. It's probably something we'll have to deal with until/unless the dubious promises of transhumanism become real.

Citation needed. But honestly, it doesn't matter because it doesn't change the fact that this is the libertarian ideal situation. The government is not mandating anything. All "cancel culture" is created from private individuals making their own private decisions, and that includes corporations banning anyone they like for any reason. It's right there in the name "culture". No one is required to do anything, it's just that it's an advantageous decision at the cultural level to do what most people want.

Any suggestion that there is a problem with this is in contradiction to the libertarian idea of free speech.

The American National Socialist shows a huge group of Nazis plus a Swastika in their banner picture, does it really matter then how many followers they have?

Not that it's representative, but it is certainly a "feature" of gab.