Twitter Suspends American Far-Right Activists' Accounts (theguardian.com)

Twitter has suspended the accounts of a number of American "alt-right" activists hours after announcing a renewed push to crack down on hate speech. From a report on The Guardian:Among the accounts removed were those of the self-described white-nationalist National Policy Institute, its magazine, Radix, and its head Richard Spencer, as well as other prominent alt-right figures including Pax Dickinson and Paul Town. Spencer, who according to anti-hate group SPLC "calls for 'peaceful ethnic cleansing' to halt the 'deconstruction' of European culture", decried the bans as "corporate Stalinism" to right-wing news outlet Daily Caller. "Twitter is trying to airbrush the alt right out of existence," Spencer said. "They're clearly afraid. They will fail!"

Comments

Poor Nazis

[MightyMartian]

It's so hard being a Nazi now a days, for some reason everyone seems to think your a vile repugnant monster.

Re:Poor Nazis

[Anonymous Coward]

The primary issue I find with all of these Nazi claims is that the actual Nazis were the ones using the popular media and personalities to silence and censor and were not the ones being silenced and censored.

Re:Poor Nazis

[OhPlz]

Talk versus the left rioting. You can't see the difference?

Re:Poor Nazis

[nickberry]

Or they allow trending topcis like Rape Melenia...

Re:Poor Nazis

[GLMDesigns]

And, what if they're not Nazi's? Alt-Right != Nazi.

What is an alt-right? He's someone that took the left-wing-identity-politics and applies the principles to European history.

Identity politics, cultural appropriation nonsense is stupid, inane and pathetic. It applies to all groups.

The Alt-Right is an unintended consequence of the modern progressive's university curriculum.

If the Alt-Right is racist then so are proponents of identity politics. Welcome to the world you created.

I, for one, think that identity politics is racist. Now if identity politics is not racist then the Alt-Right is not racist.

(This doesn't mean that there aren't Neo-Nazis and other out there. Only that the broad brush denunciation is inaccurate.

Common guys. Appreciate the nuance of it all.

Re:Poor Nazis

[MightyMartian]

Germany has remained a pretty democratic nation since the end of the Second World War, even after the reuniting with East Germany, and it in fact makes it illegal for many kinds of Nazi and white supremacist speech to be disseminated. So the idea that censorship is the primary creator of Nazi-like regimes is absurd. I'm not defending censorship here, and I don't really even agree with Germany's stance (it made a lot more sense seventy years ago), but you're literally ignoring the most notorious aspects of Nazism and its fellow travelers in space and time. Nazism at its core was a nationalist and racist ideology that proclaimed the Aryan race to be superior and the rightful master of the other races, even to the point of taking upon itself the role of expunging ethnic groups it deemed unworthy or dangerous.

But as we all know, censorship, particularly in the US, is only a *legal* problem when it is the state trying to silence people. Twitter is a private organization, and is within its rights to determine who can and cannot use its service. It has decided that white supremacists and similar far right groups will not be able to use Twitter as a platform to disseminate their views. For the more extreme groups within the Alt-right, this is a problem, because if they're basically stuck on Breitbarts and even more far right sites, well, then they lose the efficiency that a platform like Twitter can offer them. But that really is there problem.

If I was running any kind of site or hosting service, and I had customers or users using my service to promote hatred of ethnic and racial minorities or promote white supremacist ideas, I don't care if I lost their business, I'd cancel their accounts and refund any money I might owe them. I have no desire to silence them, but I don't see why I'm obligated to provide them a platform.

Re:Poor Nazis

[ShanghaiBill]

First they came for the Nazis, and I did not speak out because I was not a Nazi ...

Re:Poor Nazis

[Wycliffe]

I'm sorry but tolerating hate is not tolerance, it's cowardice

But defining hate speech is problematic. Which of these is hate speech:
1) I don't think it's right for a man to marry a man. (A stance taken by many christians)
2) I don't think it's right for a man to marry a 4 year old. (A stance taken by most westerners but still practiced in some countries)
3) I don't think it is right for a man to have sex with a another man. (An old stance that was once common and still held by many christians)
4) I don't think it's right for a black to marry a white. (An old stance that was once common but mostly rejected today)
5) I don't think I should have to help a man marrying a man celebrate his wedding by baking a cake. (A stance taken by many christians)
6) I don't think it is right to refuse to sell a cake to someone because you object to their wedding. (A stance taken by many liberals)
7) I don't think I should have to sell medicine to countries that are going to use it for lethal injection. (A stance taken by many countries in europe)
8) I don't think it is right to kill an infant. (A stance taken by most today but was once common in some cultures)
9) I don't think it is right to kill a baby just because it hasn't been born yet. (A stance still held by most christians)

There is obvious hate speech but voicing your opinion on what you feel is right or wrong and/or not wanting to participate in something that
you feel is wrong is not hate speech. The problem today is that both sides of many debates have decided that their side is morally superior
and think that the other side is immoral or unethical if they have a different opinion.

Re:Poor Nazis

[Kielistic]

I would say that technically all Abrahamic religions are supremacist movements. Everyone who isn't us is going hell, we're the chosen people, etc.

Re:Poor Nazis

[Anonymous Coward]

He's someone that took the left-wing-identity-politics and applies the principles to European history.

Only in the loosest, and frankly most American of ways, but you are correct.

The effect of sustained identity politics has driven a generation into a new kind of "white" identity, running against the course of individualisation of at least the last 50 years. In addition to the usual categorization of racial, sexual, and ethic groups, identity politics ranks groups by (lack of) privilege, and as far a this goes, "white" people who have the "most privilege" are constantly criticised -- and at this point it is fair to say -- demonized by the so called "social justice warriors" who comprise the loudest part of academia, and the greater part of the mainstream media.

It's an insane situation which has been allowed to develop, but effectively identity politics has re-divided Americans by race and in particular appears to be provoking a reactionary response from the "white" population. It's worth noting that historically, this group was not so encompassing, and modern day "whites" were once rigidly socially stratified into separate racial and ethnic categories within the USA and other countries. It doesn't appear that identity politics has applied these historical norms, and so the class they have in effect created, or provoked into being created or in the process of creation, is arguably a much broader one than a European or world historian would recognise.

I don't know whose bright idea it was to, in effect, "meme" a new kind of "white" mega-race into existence, but it's something profoundly unsettling to see forming in slow motion in response to the endless, overbearing, pontification from the media and academia on matters of race. I think that Dr. King would first be saddened, then appalled, and finally terrified by the new reality that identity politics has wrought on America. There doesn't seem to be any end in sight, and the media is just making things worse.

What ever happened to the ideal of egalitarianism?

Re:Poor Nazis

[KozmoStevnNaut]

So we're just completely forgetting the actual rioting that happened both times Obama was elected?

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundi...

What about the far-left?

[TheCastro1689]

I've seen news articles about a lot of hate and violent threats towards Trump and others by people, but they aren't banned. Twitter really is as biased as I see in articles, even the ones posted to Slashdot.

Re:What about the far-left?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a private company and they can do as they wish. They don't need to explain their actions to you or anyone else.

Re:What about the far-left?

[mi]

Being "private company" is, obviously, not enough of a defense, as Facebook just found out the hard way, for example. Evidently, some violent hate-groups — such as BLM and the rest of the "anti-Trump" crowd — are more equal than others.

Has Twitter banned any of accounts calling for an assassination of the President-elect? For killing all White people? Obviously not.

But, hey, it is a private company... Maybe. A good illustration on why "hate speech" must remain legal — because any enforcer will be just as biased as Twitter is proving themselves to be.

Re:What about the far-left?

[ClickOnThis]

Does that mean a baker doesn't have to bake a cake for a gay couple?

Let's just try an experiment:

Does that mean a baker doesn't have to bake a cake for a black couple?
Does that mean a baker doesn't have to bake a cake for a Hindu couple?
Does that mean a baker doesn't have to bake a cake for a Syrian couple?
Does that mean a baker doesn't have to bake a cake for a dwarf couple?
Does that mean a baker doesn't have to bake a cake for a Republican couple?

When the right to free speech conflicts with the right to equal protection, you have to decide which right wins. The correct decision is the latter.

Irony

[Anonymous Coward]

One account suspended merely replaced the word "black" with "white" to show the double standard Twitter has with race. For instance, someone would tweet "Can't wait for white people to go extinct" and the account would replace white with black. The person using the "white" tweet was never suspended.

Ahh...

[argStyopa]

It's so charming to watch the Liberal Left endorse censorship without the slightest trace of irony.

You guys really DON'T get it, do you? Or do you think the various actors and their sympathies today will /forever/ agree with your personal morality?

misleading headline

[tchdab1]

Headline falsely implies that the accounts were deleted because they were alt-right or far-right, when they were deleted because they used hate speech. Not a bias in viewpoint, but a cap on hate speech.

Re:Do both Ends of the Spectrum

[Attila Dimedici]

Actually, the left wing equivalent of the "Alt-Right" is the "Ctrl-Left".

Re:Ob. xkcd

[pastafazou]

Unless you're a cake maker...in that case, you can't refuse to make a cake because you disagree with what the customer wants written on it...