This seems completely unrelated to anything that would get Parler back online, unless you're proposing the government do this as a punitive action for taking Parler offline. Google's app store, under whichever of these now separate businesses, could still just reject it for being a haven for Nazis, and Amazon is the one that ultimately took it offline.

Thank you for highlighting how you only care to protect conservative speech. Your railing against cancel culture was more about enshrining conservative speech with extra protections against criticism and consequences than it was about preventing censorship.

Trump promised a hefty regulation of social media companies in 2017, and there was not much conservative flinching. In that context, it is a little amusing that conservative politicians suddenly object to an unregulated act of a private company.

Of course, conservatism has never been a champion of free speech. Rather the opposite, it has been a clamp around the foot of free speech since the birth of the modern liberal democracy. Morals, common decency, patriotism and national security have been the prime excuses. In the 70s they co-opted the rhetoric of classical liberalism, but not really its ideals.

But it isn't really about censorship. It's about the narrative that conservatism is a victim. Despite conservative politicians having used influencer tactics in politics for a long time and hold a ton more punching power online than their counterparts, they need to continuously hold the narrative that they are being held down. Conservatism is literally a dying movement, losing adherents to old age faster than it recruits younger people, engagement is the tool they have. Creating fear of an enemy and make themselves and their voters out to be victims is a good way to do that.

We know from surveys of conservative voters in the US that they believe they are being unfairly censored. Yet data analysis show us that conservative politicians dominate social media. And even more ironic, we know from surveys that the majority of conservative voters favor media censorship.

Parler lost their service provider because a bunch of goons killed people and planned to kill more, yet Parler did not moderate it. They didn't lose it because conservative politicians occasionally copied and pasted their Tweets onto the site.

I don't have a real answer for AWS, but with the app stores, you create competition for app distribution, similar to how PC games are distributed.



Sorry, wrong again. I've consistently argued censorship in the context we are discussing does way more harm to apolitical figures, run of the mill people, etc etc.

lmao apparently not

it's always ignorance

I can see that point in the context of popular media and moderation. Digital peons like us have basically no rights, we get away with little compared to influencers, no-one would bat an eyelid if we are censored and we have absolutely no hope of reaching a human moderator or some sort of appeal.

But we do also have some superior strengths. Needing less of a group we can take things to independent forums, we could (if we wanted) go to the deep web for completely anonymity without needing much infrastructure, our statements are not subject to mob rule (well, not a large mob that most cost us our income at least), we don't need to consider costs to our statement in terms of followers and we can get to say some outrageous stuff without it costing us our careers.

It's easy to focus on what we don't have over what we do have. Our reach might be small, but our freedom of expression is immense compared to large scale influencers.

With the caveat that I don't know what people do outside this forum. But I suspect if anybody had the 12+ hour a day gig it is to be a large-scale influencer, they wouldn't post much here.

Google's licensing agreement for android essentially requires it to be part of an OEM install, and there is precedence:



Vertical integration with tech has always been an issue.

.

Thank you for confirming that you have no idea how the Android app ecosystem works.

Hypocrisy and whataboutism are at a fundamental level why we can't have nice things. I truly believe that.

Completely agree

This post I made earlier seems more apt in this thread.

...

Cumulus Media, one of America's largest talk-radio companies, tells its hosts - including conservatives Mark Levin and Dan Bongino - they will be fired if they don't stop claiming election fraud


Cumulus Media is the second-largest radio station operator in America.

The company owns Westwood One, which hosts prominent talk radio programs
Conservative hosts at Cumulus include Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin, Dan Bongino
The memo sent internally by an executive at Cumulus comes in response to the riot at the Capitol incited by Donald Trump's baseless claims of election fraud

As it turns out, the free marketplace of ideas is both great and horrible for dealing with disinformation. So we turn to moderation, an equally great and horrible instrument for dealing with disinformation.

Perhaps at the end of the day, we're simply dependent on reasonable people with reasonable levels of integrity.

Terrifying I know, society is a scary thing.

Wait until big tech unleashes AI on moderation in version 2.0 so they can absolve themselves of claims of human bias.

Some interesting times ahead!

its always been like this tho. and its not "the left". its the Dems and the liberals. they arent really left. but I guess it can be used interchangeably to some extent and thats proly what you meant. but the leftists are usually the ones censored and marginalized and deplatformed. note all the reddit forums that got axed along with theDonald.

Er, no.

This one you guys on the far left get to share with the conservatives.

France and Germany officials come out against Twitter.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.blo...ts-problematic

They criticize the lack of a legislative framework to deal with these scenarios. It's an objection against the power of social media giants, not the decision itself.

Which is very much in tune with one should expect regarding coming regulation of these matters both from these countries, and perhaps after a while the EU.

if you dont think the far left gets attacked and censored far more than the conservatives then I dont know what to say.

Peeps this shouldn't be a partisan issue. The fact they can target either is the issue.

----

Here is something I just read:



I don't know GG to make stuff up, if what he says is true about none of them being associated with Parler, it's pretty clear they used recent events as cover to rid themselves of a competitor. I really think there should be a investigation on if they colluded.

- Parler is not a competitor, you keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means
- GG is a moron who goes on Fox News all the time to blast Dems with Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham and in this case is trivially and obviously lying



Plus the primary reason for Parler's deplatforming was not necessarily the events of Jan 6 but the fact that people were advocating for + organizing even more violence for the coming days:

Nice work, it's hard to be wrong about every single aspect of your post but you did it

bahahahahahaha

and the UK

USA cannot escape the problem. Social media and the internet is too important these days and the idea that, for example, a candidate with significant support in a democratic election is denied access to it because of the decisions of a few monopolisitic companies is preposterous and not sustainable.

It's pretty clear they don't think social media should be regulating speech. I'm not sure how that's not an objection to the decision. They also think they should regulate it.

There were absolutely people there who posted there. Come on man. This stuff isn't too hard to find--and they'd been planning it for a while right in the open. Before it was taken down there were also posts about these other dates as well as other zany stuff like taking out airlines and amazon.