Google Explains Why It Banned the App For Gab, a Right-Wing Twitter Rival (arstechnica.com)

AmiMoJo shares a report from Ars Technica: When right-wing trolls and outright racists get kicked off of Twitter, they often move to Gab, a right-wing Twitter competitor. Gab was founded by Andrew Torba, who says it's devoted to unfettered free expression online. The site also hosts controversial right-wing figures like Milo Yiannopoulos, Andrew 'weev' Auernheimer and Andrew Anglin, editor of the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer. On Thursday, Gab said that Google had banned its Android app from the Google Play Store for violating Google's ban on hate speech. The app's main competitor, Twitter, hosts accounts like the American Nazi Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and the virulently anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church, yet the Twitter app is still available on the Google Play store. Apple has long had more restrictive app store policies, and it originally rejected the Gab app for allowing pornographic content to be posted on the service -- despite the fact that hardcore pornography is readily available on Twitter. In an email to Ars, Google explained its decision to remove Gab from the Play Store: "In order to be on the Play Store, social networking apps need to demonstrate a sufficient level of moderation, including for content that encourages violence and advocates hate against groups of people. This is a long-standing rule and clearly stated in our developer policies. Developers always have the opportunity to appeal a suspension and may have their apps reinstated if they've addressed the policy violations and are compliant with our Developer Program Policies."

Comments

For the rest of us

[Anonymous Coward]

APK

"When right-wing trolls and outright racists"

[SensitiveMale]

Yeah, that's shitty PC Ars Technica reporting all right.

Fascism

[Anonymous Coward]

Fascism is characterized by "forcible suppression of opposition".

First Google fires a guy who brings up the fact that they are suppressing opposite views. Now they kill off an app for a site with opposite views.

Yup, Google is fascist.

Re:Gab does ban some content

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

Facebook has kill Isreali groups, kill Republican groups, kill police groups. Has anyone actually killed Republicans or police because they were egged on by Facebook groups? (Notice I left out the "kill Isreali groups", since I'm pretty sure those groups ARE complicit in murder) It's still not up to the level the Nazi's did, 11+ million non-combatants. I'm not saying that advocating murder of any group is a good thing, but equating a FB group at the same level as people who fly the Nazi flag and are proud of what it represents is disingenuous at best, and a near-traitorous false equivalence at worst. Nazi Germany was an entity that waged open, declared warfare on the USA. Flying the Nazi flag at a march is "aiding and abetting" an actual enemy of the USA that millions of Americans died defeating.

Re: Because they've abandoned their claimed princi

[russotto]

So you say, I say that's the path to evil. They are evil thoughts, encourage evil and the acts of evil people. I say we don't want vulnerable people and the young to fall under the sway of these evil people who are trying to turn society on each other

You are the moral successor of the killers of Socrates.

Re: Because they've abandoned their claimed princ

[Anonymous Coward]

Here, here.

I'm an older millennial, and I may have lucked out by going to a slightly-shitty (but not terrible or totally poor) almost rural high school. When I was in 9th grade, I had to take a class called "Practical Law." The class must have been designed in the 70s. Unfortunately, it stated facts about US law in many places and most of that was outdated and incorrect. But, the core of the ideals about law were still useful (and arguably more useful than the facts about current law). It was an amazing class. Probably my favorite class in high school. The teacher was a run-of-the-mill conservative guy, and I was a 15 year old naive liberal. But, he did a great job of running an open dialog about both sides and not pressing his opinions as necessarily better (I'm sure he believed that they were, but he was teaching).

Anyway, the next year, they got rid of those books and replaced the class with "Civics" and moved it to 10th grade (American History moved from 10th to 9th). I had to take both classes.(We just skipped American History completely, because I guess there weren't enough books to teach both the 9th and the 10th graders American History.) What a piece of shit Civics was by comparison. Total propaganda, "be good little citizens" bullshit. Practical Law was a class about self-empowerment and self-sufficiency, particularly with regard to the legal system. Maybe they replaced the class because it didn't cover the basics of elections and democracy in the US (I forget). But, regardless if Practical Law had some shortcomings, it was fucking amazing. "Civics" was complete jingoist garbage. I felt like bias couldn't hide very well in the Practical Law book, it was cold and factual. It would lay things like the First Amendment out in cold, hard terms, citing case law (which, unfortunately, wasn't always current, so the class needed a good teacher to deal with that). All about how the citizen lives in the US from a very practical, objective perspective. Fierce individualism has always been a hallmark of American culture and values. I feel strongly connected to that. Both books had to talk about the balance between the Bill of Rights and the limitations the Supreme Court has allowed placed on them.

I always saw this as some sort of shift that I've considered myself lucky to have gotten in before. Just the total tone shift from Practical Law to Civics bothered me. I wish I could remember the content of Civics better. I remembered rolling my eyes a lot after taking Practical Law, but that's mostly what I remember (and, I feel like there was picture of Bruce Springsteen and an American flag somewhere prominent). Maybe it's true and the new ones aren't learning American values the way Gen X and before did.

For me, proper freedom has always been a source of pride over Europeans (and, let's be honest, if you're German, you've got a number of sources of pride over Americans, so it's nice that we have some good ones). I worry that Americans take this for granted. One of my German friends told me that in Germany, you can be pulled over for no reason. The two other Germans agreed. Honestly, that is not better than the USA. That is not where we want to go. We do not want Euro-style restrictions on free speech. That is simply not free speech. Does Germany *really* have such a neo-nazi problem that they couldn't allow free speech? Do they really prefer the peaceful tranquility of "mostly free speech" to the sometimes messy reality of truly free speech? Are they worried that in a marketplace of ideas, neo-nazi-ism will win out (I am not)?

Re: No need to tolerate intolerance

[GameboyRMH]

Look at your nonsensical bigotry against Islam, for example. First you set up the straw man that someone is claiming that radical Islam doesn't exist, then you assert through sarcasm that all of Islam is inherently violent and therefore cannot be allowed to exist, against whole nations existing as proof of the opposite. Then you assert that a purely Islamic world would kill all LGBT people, cherry-picking by suggesting that any other Abrahamic faith wouldn't have the exact same inclinations for the exact same reasons at similar levels of radicalism.

I'm exposing your logical flaws. Have you changed your mind?