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Tech Groups Step Away From Gab Network After Shooting (ft.com)
Tech companies including PayPal and Stripe have suspended their services from Gab, a social network catering primarily to US conservatives that had been used by the man accused of killing 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue. From a report: The moves are likely to reopen the debate about the limits of free speech online and the potential for social networks to radicalise users. Gab was launched two years ago by tech entrepreneur Andrew Torba, who became frustrated with what he perceived as a bias against conservative views on California-based social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. His site soon attracted controversial rightwing figures, including Richard Spencer and Alex Jones, who had been suspended or banned from other social networks. Robert Bowers, who has been charged over the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on Saturday, was among Gab's hundreds of thousands of users, the company confirmed on Saturday. Mr Bowers, whose profile on Gab featured images of guns and white supremacist iconography, made anti-Semitic posts and threats on the site just hours before the shooting. Since Saturday's shooting, Gab has been accused of not doing enough to prevent free expression from tipping over into hate speech on its site.
Online payments companies PayPal and Stripe, as well as hosting provider Joyent, all said they would stop Gab from using their services, [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled, alternative source] citing violations of their terms of services, which do not allow hate speech. Gab slammed the moves as "direct collusion between big tech giants" against it. This weekend is not the first time that Gab has been sharply criticised for the content it hosts.Last year, after a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Google removed Gab from Google Play, its mobile app store, claiming it violated its policy on hate speech.
Online payments companies PayPal and Stripe, as well as hosting provider Joyent, all said they would stop Gab from using their services, [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled, alternative source] citing violations of their terms of services, which do not allow hate speech. Gab slammed the moves as "direct collusion between big tech giants" against it. This weekend is not the first time that Gab has been sharply criticised for the content it hosts.Last year, after a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Google removed Gab from Google Play, its mobile app store, claiming it violated its policy on hate speech.
Says it all.
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/f...
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Something happened as a god excuse to shutdown the remaining platforms before the election. The worst mistake made by the blog-o-sphere was consolidating into platforms that had a strong ideological bent and zero interest in free-speech.
These are all non-government corporations making these decisions. If Gab is free to conduct their service how they wish without government intervention, so is PayPal and Stripe. Simple as that.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Let's be real here. This is all about Donald Trump's vile and hateful bigotry and conspiracy theories put into practice by his supporters.
Why are we even talking about social media? The President of the USA has encouraged his supporters to slaughter minorities and liberals and they are putting his words into action.
This isn't complicated. It's treason, it's terrorism. But it isn't complicated.
Torba can whine all he wants, but in the free market one is free to associate, or not associate, with who they want. No one says PayPal or Google have to deal with Gab.
As to Gab being a "conservative" social network, if conservatives believe saying Jews should die, that only white men should be in power, that women deserve to be raped, then sure, why not. Because that is what you'll find there.
This is almost as hilarious as white supremacist Robert Rundo fleeing the country he complains is being taken over by foreigners, and being arrested in Central America. If he didn't like people who weren't white, why would he try to hide in a country where his white skin would stand out?
All these damn trees are in the way!
All these virtue signalling assholes have lost the plot. WE dont need to be saved, we want free speech.
If you can't see the vile disgusting edges of speech, then you dont know where the middle is. When you hide, curtail, restrict, and lie about speech then the publics perception of it over time becomes warped and allows for true evil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Let the other assholes say their stupid and vile stuff and we are big enough to point our fingers and laugh at them or even take them seriously and fix it ourselves.
No, the issue is that Gab takes the platform / common carrier position while facebook and twitter exercise a degree of editorial control. This means that Gab is not liable for hosted content while facebook and twitter are.
That might be their official position but a little context is required.
Gab was started as a direct response to alt-right and white supremacist personalities getting kicked off of Twitter, it's the White Supremacist Twitter.
It doesn't really matter what their official policies are, they're a social networking company created to serve an extremely controversial community, they can't pretend extremists on their platform are some random unfortunate situation no one could have predicted.
I stole this Sig
Watch CNN and it is nothing but hate towards all things Republican.
Watch Fox and it is nothing but hate towards all things Democrat.
The only thing that differentiates them from Social Media is they have total control of the narrative.
who got away with knowingly laundering money for drug cartels for years (decades?), got to keep all the profits and had little to no repercussions ($100 million dollar fine sounds like a lot unless you consider the profits they made from the illegal activity).
They way I look at it is like this: Police yourselves so the gov't doesn't have to. See here for a far more amusing take on it though
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Here comes the flood of free market conservatives mad at private companies for making private decisions. LOL.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
There is no service that has been created that cannot and has not been used for evil. But don't think for a moment that certain groups are not quick to recognize when one group uses the actions of the few to imply support similar desire by the whole.
It has taken some time, but many have managed to make even liberty look like it is only a tool used for oppression.... my my my how much work must have gone into convincing people that you cannot be allowed to manage yourself and must instead have your liberties managed for you. All in the name of keeping you safe.
Tyranny is usually though of as a problem brought on by Government agency... yet the control businesses have gained over our lives it has become clear that economically assaulting another group is more than enough to provide it's own form of tyranny.
Perhaps other businesses should start to refuse to do business with banks that do this as well... or do they too not fear reprisal? All it takes for a business to become suspect is by mere associate with something now... whether that associate is properly represented or not. We are only going to see more and more of this as we continue down this, "those that do not think like me are evil" path. This is the mindset that gets people to agree with mass genocide of entire groups of people and when those groups feel oppressed, no matter the form that oppression takes they will discover now that when avenues of diplomacy or discussion are taken away, they become isolated... and many unfortunately feel that violence is the final resort of regaining any attention for their cause... no matter how terrible other think of them for it.
No worries, the Giant Tech companies are not responsible for what people say on their platforms. Really this is good news. Gab itself was an innovative reaction to increasing censorship. For that matter BitChute and a few others. So fuck PayPal and Stripe. This will result in competition for them. When you shut something that large out, customers are already waiting.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
but that makes things a little hard for the American Right wing vis-a-vis gay rights, so I don't see that happening. Nonetheless if the right wanted this to stop for real that would be the way to do it.
That said, I don't think they do. The right wing own all 3 branches of government and nearly all of the media (they dominate talk radio, Fox News' ratings are much higher than MSNBC and, well, as a lefty I can safely say that MSNBC is right wing on economics, just go watch some of their coverage of Orcassio-Cortez and the Medicare for all Issue).
What I'm saying is this is great for them. It lets them paint themselves not as the ruling class in charge of everything that matters but as an oppressed minority because their extremist aren't welcome. That narrative of oppression grants them sympathy that folks like this normally wouldn't have it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
One Alex Jones follower shot up a pizza place because he thought there was a secret child sex ring in the basement. No doubt the guy who mailed over a dozen bombs this past week also enjoyed listening to Jones. An army of Jones followers sends death threats to victims of crimes all around the country. The fact that most of these morons never managed to actually kill anybody does not mean they are harmless.
As to whether social media was a cause or a symptom is perhaps impossible to tell, but it certainly doesn't seem like it made the situation any better.
BTW, I love how you claim that half of violent crime is committed by Democrats! As if the other half isn't committed by Republicans? But honestly, do you think those "savages" even vote?
dom
it would be pretty bad if banks started booting customers who said things they didn't like.
That may be where we are headed. Conservatives and liberals once talked to each other. Then they started reading different newspapers, watching different TV channels, and moved to different forums on social media. Then forums got banned, and they moved to different social media platforms. Now platforms are being banned, so the next step may be for different ideological groups to have their own app-stores, payment processors, etc.
What is next? "Conservative" and "liberal" grocery stores? Conservatives banned from Whole Foods, and liberals banned from Walmart? Where will Libertarians shop?
All this polarization can't be good for our society.
And correlation is obviously causation.
Any excuse to de-platform conservatives will be takes. Any. Excuse.
This requires a legal fix. Political views must be made a protected category.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The reason they haven't also banned Twitter is that Twitter has a policy of not allowing that kind of thing on its network.
That's complete BS. Twitter allows multiple terrorist organizations to operate on there. They even have terrorist groups like the muslim brotherhood verified. It doesn't get much further in terms of extremism when you're talking about a group that wants to commit genocide because religion tells them to.
Om, nomnomnom...
In the real world, a "party" is a club of people. These people move around, new people entering, other people leaving, and people changing clubs. And there's an interesting history of how and where the many individuals of the club called "Democrat Party" moved to in the decades since and which people replaced the as those left and where these came from. Google it, and google the same for the club "Republican Party". You'll find all the plot twists quite interesting, if not entertaining.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Liberals? They're not liberals. Liberals believe in freedom of speech. They might disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it. You are talking about Leftists. Leftists have little use for free speech and will happily silence those with whom they disagree. As is happening here.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Any excuse to de-platform conservatives will be takes.
I'm not conservative, but unlike you I don't hate conservatives, and certainly not nearly enough to equate the whole of conservatism with white supremacy. What I want to know is why you despise conservatives so much? It's not healthy.
That's what happened here, gab hosted white supremacists and one off then went off and did some actual white supremacist sort of things and now lots of people don't want to do business with gab any more.
Bonus points if you reply with whataboutism involving antifa.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I see this every day on social networking from my liberal friends.
Historically, conservative leaders took the moral high road and measured their words carefully. But now the conservative standards bearer is saying crap like "If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously, OK? Just knock the hell ... I promise you I will pay for the legal fees. I promise, I promise".
Many more statements called "dog whistles" have been made, such as "If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks... Although the Second Amendment people â" maybe there is, I donâ(TM)t know.â
Now you can say this is all just political hyperbole. You might even try to say it's merely coincidence that violent hate crime is up dramatically over the last 2 years.
But the point isn't about "proof" or causality. The point is trying to understand the opinions, rather than merely dismissing them as "must really really despise conservatives". This sort of speech which is likely to incite hate and maybe leads to violence is reckless. Until only 2 years ago, far outside the norm of what anyone would consider acceptable from the president or other elected officials.
Then again, maybe you'd prefer to believe Republican leaders have acted ethically or may be above questioning. In that case, I suppose the only explanation that fits is some folks must just really really despise conservatives.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
No, the backlash is not for hosting that guy. He was on Twitter and Facebook too. No backlash there. The backlash is for not banning conservative speech in general. But that's just an excuse, really.
The is the Silicon Valley Cabal using this shooting as an excuse to destroy the competition - pure business. Gab was starting to get actual traction as a competitor, and there's nothing a monopoly hates more than a competitor!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I think that the underlying issue there is that Republicans despise Democrats more than they hate Nazis or similar ilk. The same could be said of Democrats who despise Republicans more than they hate Antifa or similar groups. That is, they really don't like the most extreme elements of what could be broadly called their side, but they're too fixated on what the view as their main enemy to care or feel as though acknowledging that group in the same breath as themselves is just an attempt at a smear job. The more crafty (or perhaps the ones who don't minding playing with matches) among the parties even view those extremists as a kind of useful tool.
I think the only thing that really frees us from this is ultimately removing the first past the post election system so that we don't get a concentration of two parties that must naturally exist in opposition to each other. I wouldn't be surprised that if you took the platform for a party and asked everyone who considered themselves to be a part of that party about their honest opinion for all of the different issues, that on average you'd find people only supported about half of those positions personally. They're really only a member of that party because of a few, or perhaps maybe only one, key issue that they view as that important. You don't really find many candidates who are both pro-gun rights and pro-abortion rights for example. Once you free the Republicans from needing the white nationalist vote and the Democrats from needing the Antifa vote, I think you'll get both of those parties telling both of those other groups to fuck right off.
Leftists have little use for free speech and will happily silence those with whom they disagree. As is happening here.
Wrong. Gab hasn't been silenced, they can still happily Gab away at whatever "thinly-veiled-racism masquerading as a nationalist agendas" trips their trigger. They may have to find another web host or plug their own server hardware into the internet, and accept cryptocurrency instead of PayPal.
When you start telling business they can't choose to act on their own morals, you might end up telling Christian bakers they've gotta bake that gay wedding cake, too. I've always said it must take a lot of cognitive dissonance to be an alt-righter.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Horseshit, they haven't been careful about evaluating change in the Trump era, they plowed ahead with changes at a speed the left could only envy. That's because conservatism is actually about the domination of society by an aristocracy. This can be mistaken for resistance to/caution toward change in a society that was recently or is dominated by an aristocracy if you don't look too closely.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
He was an active user of a platform.
He was also an active user of other platforms, such as Facebook.
He also shopped at certain supermarkets and wore clothes of a given brand.
Maybe - just maybe - that doesn't make him belong to any of them. Maybe - just maybe - you're the person trying to shift the narrative and damn Gab by association.
Stop it. You're being a cunt.
While fox quite clearly show a bias, and they gladly admit it, CNN does not necessarily has such a bias. In fact if you both er to check you will find that when it happen they also report bad things said or done by democrats. e.g. just simply example if you want like anthony wiener sexting. This isn't equivalent to fox. that Fox and some right wing people managed to bring a narrative that cnn and co and other media are democrat aligned , shows that they have managed to really control media and people far more than they readily admit.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
And once again we see how deeply dishonest the fallacy of "whataboutism" is. If you want to deplatform people you accuse of being violent extremists you don't get to ignore the fact that all of these tech giants are actively defending groups like antifa and even very blatantly antisemitic fanatics like tankies.
When the entire argument is a claimed moral high ground, or the claimed unacceptability of certain things, then it's 100% legitimate and relevant to bring up when they actually do accept and condone those same things. You don't get to scream "blue shirts are unacceptable" and then turn right around and say "that's whataboutism!" when people start bringing up the thousands and thousands of people in r/commieblueshirtclub.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
> catering primarily to US conservatives
1. That's only seen as the case because they've been systematically deplatformed by twitter.
2. The idiotic notation that there are only two political perspectives is literally six times dumber than astrology.
I'm strongly left leaning, but more anti-authoritarian than left, so I'm seen as right wing buy left wing useful idiots because I oppose their aspirations of authority, and seen as left wing by right wing useful idiots because I oppose most of their social policy.
Gab is laudable for their free speech support. Smearing them is more reprehensible than being the mere host of speech you don't like will ever be.
>The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
—H. L. Mencken
Question everything
Funny euphemism for "nazi"
the Democrats realised bigotry is retrograde humanity and changed. The Republicans with their fundamental christian friends took the opposite route and went retrograde. The wise ones learn from history, the dim ones repeat history
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Yup, the owner is going on Alex Jones to talk about how biased everyone is against his platform used pretty much exclusively by awful people. He's totally neutral.