It's due to extreme virtue signaling, basically cancel culture. These companies have to behave alongside the social pressure or else they're going to lose revenue.
Literally everyone clutching their pearls over this seems to ignore this. Were people under the impression it was reasonable to plot the assassination of the Vice President of the United States on social media sites?
Parler spends most of its moderation effort removing accounts of leftists who argue or make fun of right-wingers on that site. Someone who never even posted anything got their account banned over a screenshot. Yet they refuse to remove calls of violence against elected officials?
I don't even like Mike Pence. But I don't think he should die! He should just retire!
Shouldn’t those offenders face jailtime instead of censorship when inciting violence? To not see the darkness might be worse as you don’t then see the effects of things. Maybe get a psychologist involved, some happy pills and the offenders can make US better instead of being a tax burden?
> Shouldn’t those offenders face jailtime instead of censorship when inciting violence?
How can they face jail, if they are FBI operatives, acting on direct orders?
I means, are we supposed to believe, that FBI — the same FBI that surveils entirety of Internet and have backdoors in FAANG — fails to catch a whiff of ongoing revolts?! And police just yields Capitol to bunch of protesters?!? And they say, that Russian FSB is heavy on theatrics...
They can ban individual accounts calling for violence (which happens on both the extreme left and extreme right). But it's only socially acceptable to ban one of those, the other gets a free ride.
Would you agree that it is Twitter and Facebook's responsibility to ban all BLM-affiliated groups? After all they have organized numerous events that involved mass rioting that resulted in billions of Dollars in damage, many deaths, and disruption to the lives of hundreds of thousands. In many cases, politicians like AOC or news pundits like Don Lemon have condoned this violence, and even encouraged more such action. At times they have gaslighted us by claiming those events were "mostly peaceful" even though there is evidence to the contrary showing criminality far larger in scale than the recent capitol riot (example: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/31/fires-light-...). Those individuals and groups who organized, incited, and participated in such events were not reprimanded and not banned.
So why are they all given a pass? It's because these tech companies are comprised mostly of left-leaning staff and are willing to now exercise their power against everyone else. Until Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon deplatform every single person and group involved in the hundreds of events in 2020 that involved criminal acts, these new acts of censorship will remain discriminatory and unacceptable.
And I frankly don't care much for your example. My grandfather was a Pole who had to fight Nazi invaders, and I have no reservations about him having to put a few bullets over them.
Nazis and fascists do not want a free and fair society. They delight in the violence of it and have no interest in a marketplace of ideas.
The radical left is a problem in Seattle as they are terrorizing the Capitol Hill neighborhood.
Don't take my word for it. Listen to community activist Victoria Beach explain how she is upset for them terrorizing the area and hijacking the Black Lives Matter movement.
My grandmother survived the Bolshevik revolution, a real, actually violent left. That you would even dare compare the "radical left" of the US with actual violent revolutionaries makes me question how much of the matter you actually know.
And what, exactly, is a "trained Marxist"? Can they quote chapter and verse of Capital and The Communist Manifesto from memory?
Having spent a few years on the Fediverse, I've found that "the left" in the US consists mainly of book clubs and struggle sessions.
The book clubs just read and debate theory ad nauseum. They're a joke, and if you gave most of them an AR-15 they'd shoot themselves in the foot.
The struggle sessions look for people slightly less poorly off than themselves to bully. If they can't find a right-winger, they'll happily go after somebody who's only 99.999% on board with their program. Failing that, they'll pick one of their own at random, accuse them of insufficient ideological purity, and bully them. They're a joke, too, only not quite as funny as the book clubbers.
Please stop posting ideological battle comments to HN, regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are.
Fuelling hellflames is against the site guidelines, which ask you to flag egregious rather than replying to them (a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls).
We're trying for something else here than internet default and need users to know the intended purpose and stick to it.
I’m not the user you’re replying to here, but I apologize for making unconstructive comments earlier in the thread instead of flagging. Thanks for all the work you do to moderate this community.
The "virtue" of totally unmoderated speech is just another value you hold that you're misleadingly not categorizing as a "virtue": You're doing it right now.
The very idea of "virtue signaling" is delusional. There is no practical difference between twitter's intent and their action here.
Yes, this is how companies are supposed to work. There are plenty of examples of conservatives trying to “cancel” companies for some perceived transgression as well.
