This is quite concerning, from the lawsuit itself [1]:
The blacklisting process was accomplished first internally at Instagram/Facebook by automated classifiers or filters, which were then submitted to a shared industry database of “hashes,” or unique digital fingerprints.
This database was and is intended to flag and remove content produced by terrorists and related “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” to curtail the spread of terrorism and violent extremism online.
Where can one learn more about this database? Who decides what goes into this database? Is there a governance process? How about incorrectly identified items?
We are headed back into the times of "guilty, until proven innocent" versus how it should be, "innocent until proven guilty". If the scenario was the following: letting 10 criminals go free, or having 1 innocent person imprisoned, I would always choose the latter.
You know that there's a US terrorist watch list with a million names on it, no due process necessary to be added to it, and no discernible process to be removed from it? That's aside from local gang membership lists, which have the same complete lack of safeguards.
We're not heading back into anything. We love blacklists.
Probably people people who don't fit a certain profile, in the extreme people like kids, old people, billionaires, most politicians, priests, disabled people. Sure kids could grow to become terrorists but I doubt there are any 2 year olds in those lists. I don't know how many women fit the profile of a terrorist though.
The problem is even if you aren't one and even if you are not the one targeted by DHS/FBI, you could still be caught in it if someone with a similar name was caught up on it (like "Judy Smith", an alias used by an actual US domestic terrorist, which significantly inconvenienced a lot of Judy Smiths).
I mean, sure programs like TSA TRIP exists to mitigate this, but in practice no-one outside of TSA readily honors or knows them (and certainly not Equifax, which considering credit scores are widely utilized, would definitely impact their day-to-day life).
There's also the fact you can end up on a DHS list and there seems no real way to get off of it, even after being interrogated by HSI / DHS on many occasions and them seemingly being satisfied you are indeed not a terrorist. See my post below for more on how I know this.
Go through the US border. You'll find out. Even if you are a US citizen. I got thrown on something like this almost a decade ago when I fought alongside the YPG, a US backed Kurdish militia that fought against literal ISIS.
DHS/CBP put me on some fucked up list and now everytime I re-enter the US I get detained, accused of crimes, tossed in holding cell. Last time it was 16 hours and they involuntarily took me to two hospitals, got a warrant to "internally search me" (anally), and drove me 60 miles to two different hospitals against my will while chained and cuffed while being accused of being a smuggler with no basis whatsoever. Later the hospitals sent me the bill, even though I never consented to anything, and there was no true medical reason for being dragged to the hospitals against my will, and despite DHS/CBP lying and saying they would pay for the hospital bills. I also filed complaints with the board for the medical professionals, and of course was told that a nurse can perform a law enforcement "search" without consent even without a warrant (the warrant was actually not served until after I went through the hospitals) and without even a court order or even being arrested (I wasn't arrested).
Yes that's right, the Arizona nursing board says nurses can act as sworn law enforcement and can search you without even a warrant or probable cause and even if you never consent to any medical care or even being touched, and that they can provide medical care against your consent even if it's not an emergency and without a court order or warrant and without you even having been arrested. DHS has taken profit off of this opinion and now uses nurses to search people on their list without having to get their own hands dirty and minimize their own constitutional limitations.
Let me count a few other occasions. Another time I was told I would never be allowed to re-enter the US; yes that as a US citizen I could not enter the United States. On yet another occasion I was told my passport would be cancelled, even though there's no real legal mechanism for them to do that. You can imagine what it's like to smile and nod your head while being told these wild lies by officers who may even be poorly trained enough to believe this themselves. It's always 4+ hours of detainment to cross a border along with intense attempted interrogation by DHS/HSI detectives. Ah yes, I've been fingerprinted and "booked" by DHS as well, on what basis I don't understand, even without being arrested.
I have never been charged of any crimes, I have no criminal record, and in fact the only thing I did "wrong" was help protect people from actual terrorists.
So yeah, if you want to find out. Jus cross the border, turn around and come back. You'll find out quite agressively.
>So yeah, if you want to find out. Jus cross the border, turn around and come back. You'll find out quite agressively.
Were you deployed or did you go there on your own? Joining with a militia and fighting in a war zone full of terrorists is the sort of activity that should trip all the red flags. US-backing doesn't necessarily mean the group is without their own controversies and if you weren't deployed how the hell do they actually know what your goals were while you were there?
I get it, your situation sucks ass and you shouldn't be subject to abuse but you're absolutely not a normal case and 'fighting with a foreign militia' is exactly the sort of activity customs is going to want to know the story behind.
Should something that "trips the red flags" result in someone being treated that way? I would think at this point the security police would already know the "story behind" it, or if they don't it doesn't seem like more of the same kinds of interrogations are going to help; do you think they learn more of the "story behind" it each time? Or, what do you think the point of that treatment is? Do you think it is making the country safer? (and after all, as a US citizen who has not been charged of any crime, he is eventually let back into the country each time. So... what is the point of this?)
>Should something that "trips the red flags" result in someone being treated that way?
There's a lot to unpack in their post, the situation sucks for them and I'm not defending the treatment they received, I am pointing out that they aren't a normal citizen if they go to high risk areas and fight with foreign militias.
>I would think at this point the security police would already know the "story behind" it
Cross enough times and a citizen with a boring enough life will probably receive some scrutiny over why they cross so much. I dated a foreigner for many years and at some point her country started to get suspicious of me wanting to overstay. The Americans just wanted to know if I was a smuggler moving drugs or cash back, that's it. The country I was going to was not an active warzone, though when I first crossed as I was younger to 'meet friends I met online' this triggered some extra scrutiny.
> Do you think it is making the country safer?
Vetting citizens returning from fighting with foreign combatants probably does fit the exact scenario of making the country safer. There is no way possible for US government to know (nor should they know) what a citizen is doing every second of their life. Having to go through a secondary and receive questioning about what they've been up to in a high-risk area is not unreasonable.
I think you have some reasonable views on this. I hope someday DHS/CBP is taken over by a person such as yourself, because they basically have free reign at the border as a "constitution free zone" and most citizens who never travel don't care to petition their representatives to make any changes.
If you have some time I encourage you to read the experience of Ms. Cervantes, a woman "legally" finger raped by border patrol / physicians.
If all they did was "try to find out" and then letting me go when they are either satisfied or I stop talking and they have no probable cause a crime has occurred, I would have never made this post.
It's clear to me these lists are as much about extra-judicial punishment as "finding out." I do not think a place exists in our society for these lists that impose against the freedom of citizens to travel without some sort of due process to petition a court for removal and/or some way to "drop off" the list after X years of living as a free peaceful citizen in harmony with others. Law enforcement officers should be tasked with enforcing the law, not with harassing people about things that are non-criminal, like fighting against ISIS (believe it or not there is no law that prevents you from fighting in a foreign militia, and in fact I do not believe any American has ever been charged for fighting with YPG.)
Have you ever crossed a US border by land or sea or flown into the US? Customs agents handle ports of entry, border patrol handles the border between ports. Both are under CBP under homeland security but wear different uniforms, different job activities. They mentioned crossings and most citizens not wanting a headache use the legal crossings.
It all gets blurred if you're a US citizen. We don't get our passports stamped at all. Quite often they aren't even checked on the way out. CBP has combined task of border patrol and customs enforcement. As someone who's interacted with CBP many a time I get the impression the same officer often takes on both tasks.
Having been fighting at a war zone on a voluntary basis with no official role is exactly the sort of thing they should be asking questions about, but these forced anal cavity searches are essentially rape and used as torture device which is despicable.
Sadly the border is the one exception where filming/recording an official in execution of their duties is illegal (constitution "doesn't apply" at the border). Same to cell phone operation. There's no way to record it. And I get strip-searched when I cross the border by officers who have found themselves quite desperate to find something, anything, to charge me with.
I would say the banning of recording at the border is something DHS/CBP counts on in order to enable their pattern of abuse. And when they lie in their warrant, it helps them greatly as it's purely your word against theirs.
And doesn't "the border" get defined as something like 100 miles from every "port of entry", which not only includes land borders and the coasts but also internal international airports?
In seriousness, many in the Jan 6 mob, and in the supporting supremicist militia are terrorists and no doubt also US citizens. At least 10s, possibly hundreds of thousands. Not the colloquial mental model but fit the definition nonetheless.
People who believe those actions were justified are not "evil" in the sense they want to do evil things for the sake of it. I think, as a complete outsider to US politics, they're just genuinely thinking they're the good guys fighting against the truly evil ones, the ones who are not respecting democracy (I think they believe the election was stolen, right?)... a good person may feel it's their duty to fight by all means necessary for democracy or whatever system they believe religiously to be the "right" one. And that doing things that appear evil to defend the good fight is justified... every single war in human history was fought on these terms: by people believing so strongly to be in the right that they are willing to kill their enemy. If you think a crowd starts a riot or a country starts a war because they're simply evil and want to do evil things, you're probably watching too many movies and not understanding human behaviour, including your own.
If you're saying those people who stormed the US Capitol building had "terroristic tendencies", well, I think nearly every person does. We all argue, fight, and probably even kill given the right (wrong) circumstances.
Completely agree that "good" vs "evil" are terms relative to a particular institutional/political bias, and while it is impossible for any person to be outside ALL institutional/political frames, it is vitally important from the "inside" to be refreshed with outsider perspectives from time to time.
What strikes me- as an American who thinks Trump is a sociopath as well as a grifter and who suggested the "terrorist" framing earlier in this thread- what strikes me as an opportunity in the public conversation with and about Jan 6 and Trump that has not been explored in any way is the fact that the vast majority of those who came to the Capital, even those with violent intent, spoke about and believed they were acting with a patriotic duty- exactly the same duty that those of us who looked upon those actions with horror and disgust feel and experience.
I think there is an opportunity for a political actor to speak to the Trump audience and start from that place of patriotism, that place of dury- that is what all "Americans" have in common. It should be possible to tell a story that stays on the path of what is common to all patriots, and in doing so start to repair the broken views of those currently in the Big Lie faithful.
However, no political actor has actually done so. Maybe the time is not right. Maybe the visionary who can craft that story isn't yet with us.
In their absence- there IS good and evil because here there ARE sides. The world that those with violent intent came to the capital to enshrine are evil, and terrorists, from my perspective- the above notwithstanding!
Sometimes politics fails. And you have to take sides.
Stop trying to ruin his life. Saying random things around the capitol doesn't make someone a terrorist. He's just trying to live his best life now no thanks to people like you
I dunno man I hang out in libertarian circles and know plenty of men and women going “camping with their friends” on the weekend. They’re spending their time doing target practice and prepping for if shit hits the fan here in the US.
I’d guess every one of those people is on a domestic terrorism watchlist as “potential terrorists”. They’re all good guys and haven’t done anything illegal, but the feds don’t know that.
Do you really imagine anyone with a gun who goes out target shooting with friends is a terrorist? How about that armed fellow who shot last month's mall shooter dead? Most people think he's a hero. He saved a lot of lives.
“Owns a gun” immediately puts you in an elevated threat category in my mind. That’s not the same as believing something specific like they are a “terrorist” but i’d be surprised if I was rare in thinking that way.
What a sadly ignorant, bigoted and unrealistic world view. This statement reminds me of the era when all gay men were treated as suspected pedophiles.
There are more guns in America than people. 99.99999% of guns will never be used in a crime. An American who buys a car is far more likely to hurt someone with their car than someone who buys a gun is to hurt someone with that gun.
Most gun owners use them to target shoot as a hobby, or hunt deer. Some people also consider them a supplement to locks on their doors as home protection.
There are more guns in america than people, but only 32% of americans own guns.
I am way more likely to be hurt by a car - you’re right. The presence of cars in an environment puts me at an elevated threat level. When I’m standing waiting for a light I often try to make sure there is a pole between me and traffic.
But with very few exceptions, it’s hard for someone to bring a car into environments where I am not expecting them. Guns, not so much.
If you own a lockpicking set, i believe you when you say it’s for fun and learning - but to pretend owning it does nothing to the risk that you might unlock my front door is just denial.
When DHS flagged my passport gun ownership was one of the first things they asked me about. I don't think ownership is enough to flag you but your answer or lack thereof undoubtable is placed in the database for whatever sort of assessment they use.
You got a bit trigger happy to score points for Team Gun and missed that this person is actually on your side.
> I hang out in libertarian circles
> They’re all good guys and haven’t done anything illegal
That said - raising the one single isolated case of a person with a gun helping to stop a mass shooting, while conveniently forgetting the hundreds of such attacks that have occurred in past couple of years is IMO pretty disgusting. If I were making the argument that gun ownership was not a cause for suspicion I'd be giving mass shootings an extremely wide berth.
I have no idea what they think they are preparing for, but it sounds like the kind of people who want a new civil war. And those people tend to be bad.
or perhaps they are just fed up with bowing to a government that doesn't work for them? The USA was founded by terrorists too, from the POV of Britain...
"No, they are terrorists who want a civil war" is not the comeback you think it is. The people who think like that should be on watchlists and the registries that prevent them from buying guns.
The last civil war in the united states happened something like two life-times ago. Being prepared for the possibility of an unwanted civil war is not the same thing as wanting to start one. Given that war within the border of the US in a lifetime is historically well within "one unlucky 6-sided dice roll" it doesn't seem that weird of a thing for people to worry about, or possibly even somehow "prepare" for.
Which has nothing to do with the person I was responding to who talked about "bowing to the government" and how revolutionaries are always perceived as terrorists.
In that case, I would point out that trying to extrapolate a rate of civil wars from black swan events seems almost impossible. It's happened one time in US history (two if you want to count the American Revolution).
And how do these people's preparations help in the event of a civil war?
Based off inconclusive evidence, I speculate that your name is Walter.
Speculation is a valid form of discourse and has a non-negligible chance of being accurate. What is the value in your attempted invalidation of such discourse?
"The FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database is the U.S. government’s primary watch list, and what people usually mean when they refer to the terrorist watch list. It contains about 1 million records. About 5,000 of those records — 0.5 percent — are about Americans."
"As of 2017, there were about 1.16 million people on the TSDB; the great majority are foreigners, but the list also includes approximately 4,600 U.S. persons." [1]
Always choose 1 innocent person imprisoned? I guess you meant the "former" not the "latter" :-)
Interesting with the hashes. Seems impossible to detect such "poisoning of the hashes" i wonder if anyone with access could ... Submit a hash of a profile photo of someone, to cause him/hey troubles?
The governance process is that content producers (ie you and me and our circles) need to stop donating free content to centralized automated censorship platforms run by billionaires, because they fail-deadly for our society once they become the planet default.
This sounds exactly like the CSAM detection lists, you can go back to the threads when Apple introduced device-side CSAM scanning for arguments about that.
Oh lovely, you have to pay to get a copy of the list. Gotta make sure only the entrenched big tech companies can effectively filter out extremist content, huh?
This is exactly what it is. Last I heard, a small team within FB was responsible for actually running the service itself but it could have gotten spun out since then.
It seems like for all the effort we've put into stopping terrorism it's primarily being used against our own citizens rather than to stop any actual terrorism.
I was just curious because I'd never heard or thought about who voted for the Patriot Act. I don't even know who Feingold is but he gets points in my book now too.
Along the same lines, folks interested in this will also like learning about Rep. Barbara Lee, the only person in Congress to vote against the 2001 Authorized Use of Military Force after 9/11.
The Radiolab podcast episode is IMO the best way to hear the telling. The link is to their re-release, which has a bit extra at the end IIRC. https://radiolab.org/episodes/60-words-20-years
Americans across the political spectrum are generally very okay with invasions of privacy, excessive force, rights violations, etc. as long as they’re targeted at the “right” people (criminals that deserve it). They’re incredibly difficult issues to advocate for because most people either a) think the victim deserved it for being a criminal, or b) would eventually think the same given a wide enough selection of victims.
We're okay with it when we see exceptional results.
When, instead, you see a school shooter's search history includes "I'm going to shoot up X school" and the FBI claims that they couldn't have foreseen it happening, then it starts to seem as if the results aren't as exceptional as they claim.
I think I agree with you sentiment, but let me ask this:
If terrorism was being stopped, would you even know it? Said differently, maybe it is working. If it was, what would be the way that you would know that it is working?
The number of successful prosecutions, with guilty verdicts and jail time, on offences under whichever anti-terror statutes you're measuring for effectiveness.
If individual acts of terror are being prevented, but none of the people planning them are put in prison, and are free to walk the streets and try another plot, would you say those laws are effective? I wouldn't.
Putting people in prison is a means to an end, not a goal itself. If anything, preventing violence without locking anyone up is even better than preventing it by keeping potential perpetrators under armed guard.
Maybe on a longer time horizon it won't work as well, but it's already been 20 years since 9/11.
To me it is evidence we need massive reform in the FBI and several other Agencies, and a rebalance of entrapment laws to favor the citizenry not the government
> If terrorism was being stopped, would you even know it? Said differently, maybe it is working. If it was, what would be the way that you would know that it is working?
The government would never pass up an opportunity for good PR. They openly cheer when they assassinate foreign enemies don't forget, even when they're government officials.
At least in America, the relevant organization would be shouting their successes from the rooftops to get more budget, get more goodwill, and make careers on the back of that casework.
Our failures are known. Our successes are secret. --old intelligence agency saying
Shouting successful secret missions just doesn't seem like something they would be doing as it could lead to the "enemy" learning ways and methods and what not. The only people they have to convince are the Gang of Eight.
Uh huh, keep drinking the coolaid. They had no issues publicizing Osama Bin Ladens assassination, and the most recent ones. Or the various drone assassinations.
Plenty of ways to take credit without revealing sensitive info.
> what would be the way that you would know that it is working?
Probably a decrease in successful terrorism attempts or an increase in thwarted terrorism attempts (with neither being attributed to something else instead). I don't think there's any value to this question though, since it can be used to justify literally anything. If a policy needs to prove its own value, then it should be constructed in a way that allows its value to be tracked.
The one in Albany, NY was a joke. The “informant” was a questionable character whose long string of misdeeds, enabled by mysterious good fortune, culminated in the deaths of 20 people.
I'm not a big fan of the Heritage Foundation, but nobody else tracks this statistic. On top that, it's better than they put this information in the clear, if journalists choose to track this in the future they at least have a list someone has been auditing. Lastly, instead of trying to find another source you chose to lecture me on mine, not knowing that there are no other sources. Maybe pack your high and mighty attitude up and put on your thinking cap next time.
There’s no way the security authorities are going to reveal sources and methods for actual plots.
My beef with the Heritage foundation is they present this as clear cut factual evidence while any thinking person, including federal judges overseeing the cases, is almost compelled to call out the nonsensical nature of the cases.
You’re not going to get any type of accounting for this stuff for 20-30 years when the decision makers are dead or retired and actual information gets declassified.
This is an important concept for people to understand.
All aspects of security (policing, counter-terrorism, cybersecurity, etc) are all fundamentally impossible to prove how effective measures taken are. Usually the best we can do is use a proxy measure or test pre/post.
There would be media reports and court cases to point to if any of these measures were effective. As a reminder, virtually every school shooter was monitored or on a watchlist.
The majority of the time the terrorists are our own citizens.
This story is obviously an abuse of the system, but if this stopped natural born citizens who were planning to lock the doors of a busy nightclub and set it on fire it would be doing its job.
But even the system is only partially to blame here. It's really the corrupt employee and lack of oversight that is to blame. The system did allow the corruption to spread to other companies, but even if it was confined to Meta that would still be a lot of damage.
> lock the doors of a busy nightclub and set it on fire
Has it ever? Is there a terrorist watchlist at the doors of nightclubs now? It would also be great if it cured cancer or replaced crumbling infrastructure, but why talk about nonsense?
Stopping radicalization is entirely about situations like this. The people who commit crimes like this don't appear out of nowhere. They were talking about it for months or years ahead of time, usually with like minded people and sometimes with people who are actively trying to destabilize the US.
So the issue here is that anybody can contribute without oversight. Sounds a lot like the issue with that Tay bot, whose contributions led to it being anti-Semitic and all that. I'd argue that its lack of oversight to prevent that sort of abuse is a fundamental problem with the system and not a partial point of fault.
This wasn't a case of "anybody contributing", they literally bought off a Meta employee to do this. Well, I guess anybody can commit a crime, but that's not a fundamental weakness of the law.
Good point, but I think my overall point stands, since the "system" is still inclusive of the processes on top of the submission or in this case, the lack of process. Lots of red flags going on here when thousands of people can be added without notification within gov and really speaks to the capabilities of a company's "extra judicial" tooling.
Are you saying that legitimate dissenters are being illegitimately accused of terrorism?
Or that terrorists are legitimate dissenters (despite the fact that terrorism is by definition using violence and not working within the legal framework?
Or did you mean to say something else?
Yes. For but one example, parents raising disputes to school policies during School Board Meetings are being labeled and investigated as terrorists. I could see it if there were threats of violence; the only threats being made is to displace board members at the next election, aka standard democratic process in a free society.
> the only threats being made is to displace board members
Really? Have you seen every single threat being made, either public or private? I don’t believe it.
When I worked at a large social media website, users would scream bloody murder about unfair moderation. But when I asked customer support, they always had good evidence that the user had terrible behavior in private but pretend to be virtuous in public to gather sympathy.
This is an asymmetric information space. The DOJ/FBI won’t release the actual evidence they have which triggered the opening of an investigation. The people who show up at board meetings are humans and had lives before they showed up. They posted on social media. They met with other people. They have political affiliations. I am fairly certain we will find out that these people made legit threats outside of the public forum that earned further investigation.
There is no incentive to stop terrorists beyond doing the bare minimum to cover one's ass. It's not like anything bad happens for the government. They just get more power every time.
The most extreme examples of this are countries like Pakistan, which derive a great deal of foreign aid from their ongoing 'conflicts' with terror-related groups in outlying territory. Pakistan has very little incentive to ever 'win'.
Then women: “It is important to be able to bypass all courts of law and be able to pronounce judgements at a whim, because a mother died after due process took too long.”
However, I wonder whether this is organized or organic. Is it an emergent property of population density, or is it determined by culture?
- 1 inhabitant/km2 = witch trials, tribe judgements,
- 10 hab/km2 = beginnings of court justice,
- 100 hab/km2 = politically-knee-jerk justice,
- 1000 hab/km2 = Chinese or Japanese-style justice
Or perhaps it is related to the age of the current country?
Actually, most of that effort has been put towards invading other countries. The effort put towards dealing with domestic terrorists (real or imagined) is comparatively small.
That is working as intended. Terrorism and "think of the children" fearmongering were never intended to do anything about terrorism or child abuse. They simply aren't designed for that.
And used against Trump, and similar. There's a reason people were very upset he was kicked off of Twitter - not because they care in the slightest about Trump, but because it's starting us down a path with a very bad ending.
It wasn't the first time he was breaking the rules though. He was kicked not because of that particular event but because the virtue-signalling potential of kicking him outweighed the benefits of keeping him around once he lost the election. The Capitol attack was just a convenient excuse for kicking a troublemaker that according to their own rules should've been gone long ago.
If Twitter truly cared about their rules and acted with integrity they would've kicked him way sooner, but they didn't because he generated them tons of "growth & engagement" while he was President.
You watched a group of idiots who thought they knew something they didn't, cosplaying as characters from their 5th grade social studies textbooks. Just plain ol' mob violence. There isn't anything about that day that would have been viewed differently by Twitter in a pre-2001 mindset.
Yes, some things changed after 2001 -- a media company declining to publish statements they don't want on their platform isn't one of them.
Alternative slates of electors, contingent elections, principled opposition from within the party -- you know, just plain ol' everyday mob violence things.
I think terrorism is premeditated and conducted with hatred. This certainly describes some people who were there, but the problem with a mob is that 90% of the people are just blindly following others and aren’t thinking.
You’re a terrorist if you planned for months to storm the capitol. You’re an idiot if you showed up to see your favorite reality TV star and blindly followed the crowd wherever they went.
Terrorists are not Marvel villains that just want to sow pain and destruction against all that is good.
It's just a label applied to the "enemy", and the enemy usually is not much different than you, they just have a different opinion and a different enemy than you do.
The Capitol idiots are idiots like us that wouldn't storm the Capitol. They don't pray to Satan and bathe in blood. They've just drank a little too much propaganda kool aid like you've done, but from another jug.
Trump isn't the root of all evil. Blindly following personalities and ideologies is the root of all evil.
I must have missed the part where the Jan 6th insurrectionists had machine guns and bombs and took hostages. Pretty alarming, if true. Do you have sources for how these two events are at all similar beyond that both involved unlawful entry into a government building?
What terrorism is now (and for most of the 20th century) is an unbelievably politicized term that for around a decade was synonymous with Muslim who attacks anyone or advocates attacking anyone, including the soldiers occupying their countries. The term originated as a positive thing for late 19c anarchists who simply defined it as a tactic of asymmetric warfare against an enemy that so outnumbers you that they would be impossible to militarily defeat, so you break their morale through random, extremely varied attacks against individuals and small groups over an extended period of time, prioritizing as targets those who would normally feel the safest.
Terrorism isn't about "lawfulness." They just threw that in because violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims is what most countries do at all times. The definition wants to call war "lawful."
What specific acts did the Jan 6th rioters commit that would count as terrorism or insurrection? Is it insurrection to damage public property and disobey government orders? How were they planning on taking hostages without guns? Were they going to beat people with flagpoles?
> How were they planning on taking hostages without guns?
Don't be obtuse. Had members of Congress not evacuated their chambers just the fact a mob was outside the doors would be holding them hostage. Several rioters had flexi-cuffs and other bindings. It's not terribly difficult to hold someone hostage. It's downright easy for a large group of people to imprison a smaller group, especially one composed of unarmed geriatrics.
> Were they going to beat people with flagpoles?
You've got from obtuse to insipid. The answer is yes. They literally beat people with flag poles. Several were armed with guns. Many were armed with other blunt weapons, stolen police weapons, and chemical sprays.
> Don't be obtuse. Had members of Congress not evacuated their chambers just the fact a mob was outside the doors would be holding them hostage. Several rioters had flexi-cuffs and other bindings. It's not terribly difficult to hold someone hostage. It's downright easy for a large group of people to imprison a smaller group, especially one composed of unarmed geriatrics.
Yes it is quite difficult for a group of unarmed and unorganized rioters to subdue a highly trained and well armed security force, much less perform a coup.
What would have been a worse case scenario here? They burst into the capital chamber, subdue dozens of armed guards in unarmed combat, and then seize control of the federal government by threatening to beat members of congress with flagpoles?
There is no evidence of this being anything other than a riot. And for the year 2020, it was a relatively tame one.
Nope, most reports that protesters were "armed" are "stun guns, pepper spray, baseball bats and flagpoles wielded as clubs" and even that is an exaggeration by the media as the number of even those "weapons" were carried by a minority of people.
To date, I believe there are have been only 3 people confirmed to be carrying a gun that was not law enforcement, none of which have been charged with discharging or using those guns in any way.
when you say "they did have guns" most people think it was a armed resistance, it was not and to be most favorable to you it is simply an exaggeration to say it that way, but if I want to be uncharitable I would say you are engaging in disinformation
>they did beat people with flag poles.
Again here, this is an exaggeration, there was ONE incident of that, where ONE person hit another person with a flag pole, ONE.
Well, I regret being hooked by a troll – this is like a layered cake of bad-faith arguments – but for any passers-by who may not already know, they did have guns [0], and describing it as "one incident of beating another person with a flagpole" is so obviously disingenuous as to be laughable [1].
I am not a troll, I am not even the original commentor, I just happen to have a differing view as you, thus you have no recourse or rebuttal than to label everyone that disagrees with you a "troll" because outside of that you may be faced with someone that would challenge your world view
Noted. Intentionally spreading misinformation and willfully misrepresenting the meaning of words, should also get someone banned. This person is not interested in a meaningful discussion, but re-writing history.
Do you think that it does justice to the victims of Jan 6th and the victims of the siege of the Colombian Palace of Justice to say that both of those events are the same crime? They're both deserving of the same punishment?
Attempted murder is the same crime whether done my a compassionate mother with a pillow smothering, or a violent psycho with a grenade. You are making a useless argument.
The fact stands that plenty of people on Jan6 threatened / executed violent action for a political means by an illegitimate authority.
Not an armed team. There were groups seemingly working to prevent the confirmation vote by relocating Pence. The mob provided some motivation for his security detail to do so.
Combined with the attempts to produce tallies from alternate slates of electors; this was an attempt to change the outcome of the election.
This is misinformation. Security systems were removed. The secret service was deeply compromised. Pipe bombs were deployed and fortunately didn't explode. The response that should have swept these people out the door easily was held back at the highest levels.
This was not a group of yokels. Yes dumb people were there, and they were committing mob violence, but that was not the only thing happening.
Continue to downplay it if you like but don't expect others to be silent while you do so.
I'm of the belief that the Jan 6th attack on the Capitol was a very serious thing and went beyond "mob violence," but I don't believe it was a terrorist attack. ("Attempted coup", etc. may be more appropriate) but the instigators were interested in more than just terrorizing people. Words have meaning.
So you should consult a dictionary. Terrorism isn’t defined by whether it terrorizes people. It it about the threat / execution of violence to further a political end.
I think this might be the first modern event described as a "terrorist attack" conducted almost entirely without meaningful weapons or explosives or incendiary devices.
Either that or calling a rioting mob a "terrorist attack" is hyperbole.
Trump has made many concrete incitements to violence. Telling his supporters to "rough someone up", "someone should punch that person, I'll pay your legal bills", "maybe some of you second amendment folk can do something about Hillary".
This is from February, when the BBC reported it [1]. This recent article from The NY Post doesn't seem to add much more, other than that the judge set the trial for September.
There was a story that came out of a podcast with a couple adult entertainers in the LA/SF area that I think made the rounds here as well that connects nicely to this.
She alleged that her account kept getting shadow banned and she couldn't get it resolved so she started stalking Facebook/Insta mods and sleeping with them to get unbanned.
I think the takeaway from both of these stories is that Meta employees are easily bribed and perhaps some more internal controls are needed to prevent abuse of these platform features.
The Constitution doesn’t stop them from requesting or paying for a service, just ordering companies to do it. This is how they are allowed to buy all your location data, and how the cops usually get all your data from social media (no subpoena needed, they just ask), and how it is that crime perpetrators are zapped off social media almost instantly before regular people can look their posts up.
There’s a big, big loophole that people overlook here. FAANG etc have whole departments of people dedicated to voluntarily turning your data over to the state.
On paper, sure. In practice government doesn't really have to worry about government trying to make an example out of them though and has access to the kind of violence and benefit of the doubt evil corporations could only dream of.
Frankly I think it's a bit naive to imply that big government organizations aren't just as evil and terrible and self serving as big corporate ones. Their error bars of evil overlap a lot.
There is also very little consequence for the gov and very little recourse for the citizen in practice. In the event that someone has the resources to challenge the government, any victory is blunted by the award coming from their (and all of our) tax dollars.
This seems like a surprisingly specific allegation:
>> They claim the bribes were routed from OnlyFans’ parent company, Fenix International, through a secret Hong Kong subsidiary into offshore Philippines bank accounts set up by the crooked Meta employees, potentially including at least one unnamed senior executive.
If that's true, how would they know? And if not, why would they think they know it?
Note that "on information and belief" is lawyeresse for "we don't know this is true, we only have suspicion". Claims 76, 77, 82, and 85 (as well as a lot of the complaint) are so hedged. The claims they're not hedging are more limited: basically "Meta employees were paid to update a database of dangerous individuals and organizations, and Meta shared this database with others (75)" and "OnlyFans' parent company Fenix has a presence in Hong Kong and other countries (78-81)". Claims 76, 77, 82, and 85 must be true... because the alternative would be devastating to their case /s.
There is very little of substance in the complaint. In all seriousness, I think plaintiffs have read public sentiment against tech companies, and I imagine their strategy here is to throw as much mud as they can, bamboozle some credulous journalists, and hope Meta et al settle to avoid bad PR.
Because people insist that Something Must Be Done and the state's not doing it. Even EU regulators don't want to do things, they want to push big tech firms to do it.
Beatings are unlikely though. It's not something you can do with a datacenter.
How are people so utterly naive as to think Facebook would not be awash in terrorism, calls for death etc. if it were not censored?
People are rightly upset Facebook is being used to forment ethnic wars in other countries, if you think things are 'bad' now, imagine what FB would be like unfettered?
'Here I am cutting off the heads of XYZ group, please send money!'
All systems will be abused, and the systems to censor them will be abused ... so we have to do our best with all of that.
It's a bit ridiculous all of this is happening, that OnlyFans guy should probably be in jail.
Yes, I agree that moderation is important and I think Big Tech companies are trying to do this job under difficult conditions. But someone said that they didn’t like private companies taking state responsibilities, and I’m wondering what the statist alternative would actually look like? Maybe that governments run their own social networks, similar to how they maintain public parks where people can gather? Not sure how it would work. People complaining about private companies doing the moderation don’t seem to be proposing alternatives to it.
Yes, there should be public social networks. Even if it is slow and you have to clean your spam every day, it is now as essential as roads and electricity. Governments around the world guarantee the right to free speech and association but in practice this isn't happening. I wonder which country will be the first one to launch a public utility messaging/social feed app.
This isn't a position that social media companies wanted to be in. Blame the people who demand that the social media companies act as censors. This all started when people stirred outrage at a Coca Cola ad appeared before an ISIS video on Youtube and demanded that companies boycott Youtube ads.
I'm really sorry about that, but how do you want people to act? That's why I don't get the whining on 'cancel culture'. Half the baby boomers generation (the middle/upper class part) keep telling their kids and others to 'vote but don't protest' and then, when told their generation controlled every vote target, 'vote with your wallets.
Unless you've never used this phrase or equivalent, you don't get to complain about cancel culture. My generation (well, the one following mine rather) is just applying the advice.
I grind my teeth everytime I hear middle/upper class people complaining at boycotts and 'cancel '. What do you want from them? They can't protest, because of violences against statues and McDonald's, They can't strike without getting teared down by most MSM(and because they need to live and nobody's donating to them anymore, except me and a couple people who remember where they came from), and they don't have representative who look like them and actually did the same job. And always, the patronizing 'haha, they can vote with their wallets'.
Well, now they do, do you want to prevent that too?
>> I grind my teeth everytime I hear middle/upper class people complaining at boycotts and 'cancel '. What do you want from them?
> I want them to present their views, and attempt to convince others of the merits of those views.
> I don’t want them to use bullying, intimidation, authoritarianism, or violence to force others to adopt (or pretend to adopt) their viewpoint.
Are you really equating "not choosing to buy stuff" and "not choosing to watch/attend stuff" with violence? Listen, I get it - you think you're entitled to a revenue stream, that whatever nonsense you build deserves money. Here's the deal though, the free market is also about the spender getting to choose what they spend money and time on. If you don't like it, too bad - no one owes you agreement nor money just because.
Well you quoted a bit about boycotts that included a question about alternatives. This type of quoting is often a technique to declare "the text after this before the next quote is a response". So when you then responded with a point about wanting them to make arguments instead, and emphasized it with "not ... violence", you sure seem to have equivocated them. If that wasn't your intent, my bad and I have no idea what you were intending to say.
The second conclusion assumes you made the violence point of course and is basically substitution:
boycotts = violence = not spending money
People are generally entitled to not have violence directed at them.
(becomes)
People are generally entitled to not have not spending money directed at them.
So you think the yellow jacket movement were riots. Fine.
By the way, they did convince other they should be supported. Most strikes in my country start with 40 to 60% support (because we actually have political education), and after a day of CNN-like 24h hours news, by billionnaire-owned medias, you see a 10% drop in support. Easy to convince for some more than for others, right?
But anyway.
----------------
>> I grind my teeth everytime I hear middle/upper class people complaining at boycotts and 'cancel '. What do you want from them?
>I want them to present their views, and attempt to convince others of the merits of those views.
>I don’t want them to use bullying, intimidation, authoritarianism, or violence to force others to adopt (or pretend to adopt) their viewpoint.
Yes, so convincing 1 to 5 percent of the population on social media and ask them to boycott a product or a brand is fine then? Exactly my point. Or do you think this is bullying (that would be rich tbh).
Like i said, if you actually said once "vote with your wallet", you don't get to whine about boycotts. I know hundreds of people who boycotted Total (or shell, i was a kid and doens't remember) after one supertanker shipwreck that polluted hundred of miles of coast, were you against this boycott too? Once everybody, including children spend hours cleaning beaches and trying to save birds, once the protests didn't even make national news anymore, and blocking the refinery was met with police force, what do you think they could have done? burn everything? Or boycott one of the dozen companies who who do the same thing anyway, no matter how inefficient that is? What were their options as "resilient adults"?
You see, i know most people complaining about cancel culture agree with boycotting when this doesn't really affect them or their political views. I have uncles who are so hypocritical about it, it mades me laugh to ask them "what should you do" because i love to make them sweat a little.
> I'm really sorry about that, but how do you want people to act?
I want people to think more critically about cause and effect rather than spend all their effort on "raising awareness", which encompasses several behaviors, but the worst of which is spreading exaggerated anger.
> told their generation controlled every vote target,
Boomers control the vote because they're the ones that bother to show up, especially for elections that don't appear on people's social media feed. Seniors are 15x more likely to vote for mayors than those between 18-35 [1]. Fewer than 20% of people know the names of their state legislatures [2]. Meanwhile, there is no shortage of outrage on social media on issues that state legislatures vote for like gerrymandering and now abortion. Rather than research which state representatives are pro-choice, activists would rather yell loudly at the Supreme Court to resign and whine about being disenfranchised when that doesn't work.
> vote with your wallets
Voting with your wallet in this context would be to stop watching Youtube videos. However, they don't want to do that, and instead would rather making exaggerated claims of Youtube supporting ISIS. So social media companies reacted with their half-assed solutions that lead to situations like what is described in the article. Now, you're seeing people making exaggerated claims about Facebook wanting to be censors. I seriously doubt that people actually give a damn about ISIS videos with a few dozen views or the well-being of pornstars. Rather, they really just trying to raise awareness about evil corporations, which is the case with most of the comments here. However, none of this actually contributes to our collective intelligence of how to actually regulate tech or enact anti-trusts. At best, this anger may cause Facebook to do a little more due diligence about adding people to their terrorist watchlist, but the real problem people care about isn't solved.
> I seriously doubt that people actually give a damn about ISIS videos with a few dozen views or the well-being of pornstars. Rather, they really just trying to raise awareness about evil corporations,
Lizard brain just knows that it likes it when the number in the top right goes up. Lizard brain knows that vapid comments and over the top calls to action make it go up faster.
But which generation/social class are the mayor candidates from? Why vote for a representative who doesn't represent you? That was never explained to me. Now, i still vote, but i'm also steadily middle-class and richer than 50% of the people of my country (by wealth, in my 30s).
And voting with your wallet is boycotting. If you boycott, you have to explain to the company why. I'm boycotting Lactalys and Nestle dairy products since 20 years, are you against that too? Or is only the demonstrative boycotts with social media reach you're agaisnt? And in this case, isn't it disingenuous? "I'm pro boycott only if the company doesn't know why you're boycotting them".
There is no justification imho. Like i said, if you ever use the phrase "you should vote with your wallet" or similar, you don't get to whine about boycotts and cacnel culture, this state is your own doing.
> Meanwhile, there is no shortage of outrage on social media on issues that state legislatures vote for like gerrymandering
As there should be - it’s one of the most abhorrent things that legislatures of all stripes have attempted, and those responsible should be held accountable. They have removed any ability to do so via electoral means, and should probably be reasonably happy that people complain on social media instead of something more physical.
Of course they wanted to , they could have denied such requests and let matters go to courts of law, where such matters should be resolved anyway. But it would put a slight dent on quarterly profits so , in the words of Sheryl Sandberg , "I am fine with this"[1]
If Facebook is shoving things in my face that I do not like, then I stop using Facebook. I haven't logged-in for over two years because of that.
If a company I buy products from is spending that money on things I vehemently disapprove of, then I am well within my rights to stop being their customer.
This isn't "cancel culture", this is me choosing how I spend my time and money. What I find onerous are all the people telling me that I'm a bad person for exercising these liberties.
So what I'm hearing is that billionaires who are no longer simply satiated by consumption, are not actively trying to undermine social order to gain power?
Well that wiki page was a wild ride. I don't completely see how it relates, but it was worth reading. I will think about this next time I see complaining on slack about perks being removed :)
"In the years after the failure of the Homestead strike, O'Donnell found himself --blackballed-- from returning to work in the steel industry. Needing to adopt a new career, he moved to Philadelphia and took a job as a newspaper reporter.[12]
In about 1903, O'Donnell accepted a position in government employment as a deputy to the Pennsylvania state factory inspector.[13] This job placed O'Donnell in crowded Pennsylvania tenements and poorly ventilated factories on a regular basis, and he subsequently contracted tuberculosis as a result.[14] Stricken seriously ill by the disease, in November 1905 O'Donnell left the Northeast for the warmer and drier climate of the Southwest, accompanied by relatives, in an effort to regain his health.[14] Newspaper accounts from December of that year place O'Donnell in the city of El Paso, Texas.[15]"
Important to note this is a "terror watchlist" run by a private entity, not a government. It's largely just used by social media to flag groups and account sharing copies of images flagged by them. If the allegations are true, still not a good thing, but "terror watchlist" makes it sound a lot worse than it is.
"watchlist" seems to be an altogether incorrect term for this in the first place.
I guess they probably didn't want to use the term "blacklist" but I'm not sure what the correct term should now be.
Watchlist evokes the meaning "this person is being watched by [authorities]"
Edit: The BBC article (linked here in comments) did in fact use the term "blacklist". GIFCT calls it a "hash-sharing database". The use of "terror watchlist" by NY Post seems to be more clickbait rather than accuracy driven. (Not that this issue isn't pretty terrible).
Your argument is akin to telling someone who was falsely reported to the bank, a private entity, which is then required to share it to authorities. All these apologists suddenly coming out of the woodwork from inactive accounts is just a series of pattern I'm noticing more and more not only on HN but in all public discourse platforms.
It's highly likely that corporations and high networth individuals have realized the power of astroturfing to skew public opinions, especially when most of those audiences do not read past the sensationalized titles.
It's a list that enables an industry to cooperate with each other in order to better comply with a government demand. A government demand that they have been threatened with regulation if they don't sufficiently comply with it themselves.
Unless you're a fan of spam/scams/etc running rampant on every platform we're going to need "censorship lists". So inject some nuance and talk about what types are ok and what types aren't.
Yes having ISIS propaganda decentralized for sure makes for a better world. /s
There are bad people who do bad things, and to say let’s just ignore this because things I don’t want to happen are is ignoring the realities and difficulties of the world. It’s not black and white, and bad things will be done in the name of action.
There's no such thing as bad publishing. If people don't like or want it, they won't consume it. Let people make their own choices about what to read or watch.
If ISIS propaganda can be decentralized and widely available, that means western propaganda (as well as western hard facts and reporting) are decentralized and widely available as well.
Unless you think that all ideologies are equally desirable to end users, this results in a net win for "your side".
People will find what suits them in the moment and go with that. We know that ISIS used the internet incredibly well to recruit with their propaganda, and it was exactly through things like YouTube that they build a large and international audience. So it’s not theory, it’s already happened. You can rely on just drowning out ideas, because the internet allows amplification for bad ideas to get more exposure than they naturally would otherwise.
Are you proposing that we start monitoring phone calls and the mails like we do the internet, and cut off calls and burn mail that involve disapproved talk?
>and to say let’s just ignore this because things I don’t want to happen are is ignoring the realities and difficulties of the world.
Right. Better then to make it so we can't ever hear, record, or react to the realities of a difficult world. Terrorists stop being terrorists when they can't talk to each other on your platform.
Right, throw the baby out with the bathwater. "The only to avoid having laws be abused is to stop having laws".
Listen, I don't like censorship as much as the next guy. But in the real world, lists and platforms without some sort of moderation become of cesspool of the worst that society has to offer.
I'm curious how they know bribery happened. According to the lawsuit details another commenter linked, it outlines a suspicious chain of events but no evidence of actual bribery from what I skimmed through. Maybe that's just how it works and they hope to learn more in discovery though.
Presumably you don't bribe the sysadmins in the US making six-figure salaries. Instead you bribe the outsourced moderators in Kenya who get paid $2/hour to wade through beheading videos to just occasionally misclick.
And presumably you don't pay the bribes directly - you hire a 'reputation management consultant' who takes care of all the dirty work. Then if the news comes out, you can claim you thought they were improving your reputation by sponsoring orphanages or something.
Very peculiar accusations, and it makes no sense that these third parties, not directly involved in the alleged payment scheme, would have come upon all this information.
Of all the people who worked on this, nobody thought it was illegal or land them in trouble? Like, how does one come up with a plan like this, sell it to their colleagues and see it through to completion? The level of entitlement ("laws don't apply to me" or "at most there is going to be a small fine, no big deal" etc) is mind boggling.
We can't expect our corporate overlords to behave ethically, now even expecting them to behave legally is too much to ask, I guess
If they can be bribed once they can be bought twice. And it's a reminder to everyone that if you aren't getting the engagement your content deserves then it's a possibility that you are being deliberately sabotaged.
Shenanigans are common, but this specific kind is not very common.
How could anyone know that? No government cares to investigate this sort of thing, and those individuals who could become aware would mostly be subject to NDA.
Because it's not hard to figure out 'something' is going on, and, the level of 'bribery' in general for these kinds of things at above board corporations is rare.
"Not hard" for whom? The individual private porn producers? ITT you specifically disbelieve those exact people!
Only those who work in the right positions within Meta or one of these other horrible companies would have a good view into this, and they have no incentive to set things right.
I've read (most of) the lawsuit[1] and unless I'm missing something, the allegations seem to be entirely guesswork, and the sex worker bans across multiple websites can be entirely explained by the SESTA/FOSTA law of 2018. The lawsuit notes that in 2018, many adult entertainers were banned from various platforms, such as Instagram, and gives some examples. It then alleges (without evidence) that OnlyFans (and MyFreeCams) models didn't experience such bans. From this, they guess (without evidence) a conspiracy: that the people behind OnlyFans and MyFreeCams conspired with Meta employees to automatically filter out their competitors, and they speculate (without evidence) that there might have been payments routed through an offshore company.
2018 was the year of the SESTA/FOSTA law, which was ruinous to many sex workers. The sudden increase in adult entertainers being banned by Instagram and others is correct, but can entirely be explained by SESTA/FOSTA. You can read about it on Hacker News – here's a link to a Hacker News search about it[2]. The top result has 715 points, linking to an Electronic Freedom Frontier column about it, which begins: "The U.S. Senate just voted 97-2 to pass the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA, H.R. 1865), a bill that silences online speech by forcing Internet platforms to censor their users."
The lawsuit doesn't mention SESTA/FOSTA. It includes no evidence that OnlyFans or MyFreeCams users weren't affected by the SESTA/FOSTA crackdown, and I'm pretty sure they were. A friend of mine is successful on OnlyFans, and if I recall correctly her Instagram was banned and restated at least once. It's a standard occupational hazard for online adult entertainers.
The lawsuit only speculates that terrorist watchlists were used, just noting that they'd have been "ideal" for this: "One or more [Dangerous Individual and Organization] lists, combined with the GIFCT Shared Hash Database and URL sharing program, would have served as the ideal training data for a classifier/filtering tool to create this blacklisting effect, particularly in 2018 and 2019."
The talk of bribery is entirely speculative. After noting that OnlyFans has a Hong Kong office, and "The law of Hong Kong makes it very difficult to obtain discovery for a proceeding in a foreign court", they speculate "Radvinsky could have used either Smart Team International Business Limited Hong Kong or Fenix International Hong Kong to make the scheme-facilitating payments."
I don't read a lot of lawsuits so I don't know what's normal, but this all seems really off to me. Maybe the lawsuit only exists to cause bad press, so journalists can write pageview-harvesting lines like "OnlyFans bribed Meta to put porn stars on terror watchlist" and "OnlyFans squashed competitors in the online porn industry with the help of a bizarre scheme that bribed Meta employees to throw thousands of porn stars onto a terrorist watchlist", and then append "lawsuits" or "according to a group of explosive lawsuits".
Seems like the right response to these blacklists, if they can't be curtailed, is to put literally everyone on them. After, the lists can't be used for anything.
So we have Facebook destroying lives on a massive scale by knowingly wasting people away glued to the screen. They also knowingly exploit base emotions of literally billions of people to antagonise them just to keep them "engaged" and sell some ad space.
I call this "next level" evil.
Regular evil is, where I live, a small developer (housing) went bankrupt and wasted life savings of hundreds of people. They did a lot of absolutely mind boggling stupid stuff and they knew they are running out of cash and still accepted payments from more people. Given history of these cases here, they are unlikely to ever spend even a day in jail and the most it ever gets is couple of mentions in local news.
I feel like I am taking crazy pills having this conversation. Regular evil is letting the air out of someone's tires or lying to your spouse, not wasting away the life savings of hundreds of people.
> So we have Facebook destroying lives on a massive scale by knowingly wasting people away glued to the screen
If you want a proper "Facebook is evil" point, there's always the Rohingya genocide[1] -- "Facebook has admitted that it played a role in inciting violence during the genocidal campaign against the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar"
Whoa what? Wasting away life savings of hundreds of people is way worse than regular evil. Why is that on a different level than Facebook or any major corp who are worse because of more power and scope, but still??
I can barely pay attention to these kinda stories anymore... Anyone could make this shit up just as easily as it could be true, but we rarely ever get any bit of proof. Unless we dedicate our own selves into finding something to give us an idea of which it is..
> The GIFCT was formed by Meta, Microsoft, Twitter, and Google’s YouTube in 2017 in a joint effort to stop the spread of mass shooting videos and other terrorist material online. When a member of the group flags a photo, video or post as terrorist-related, a digital fingerprint called a “hash” is shared across all its members
In effect, that means a bikini pic wrongly flagged as jihadist propaganda on Instagram can also be quickly censored on Twitter or YouTube, all without the poster or public knowing that it was placed on the list — much less how or why
> GIFCT was formed by Meta, Microsoft, Twitter, and Google’s YouTube in 2017 in a joint effort to stop the spread of mass shooting videos and other terrorist material online
This information sharing should be investigated as a potential breach of competition law. For example, are Snap or TikTok disadvantaged because Facebook, Microsoft and Google are sharing information [1]?
>are Snap or TikTok disadvantaged because Facebook, Microsoft and Google are sharing information
While I think it's ridiculous entities like Meta have taken it up on themselves to have their own "watch lists", in this instant I'd say absolutely not. Indeed I would argue one of the significant reasons Tik Tok is continuing to explode in popularity is they aren't participating in the overt censorship going on in the rest of big tech.
TikTok has had some serious issues with censorship, and is way more directly political than some of the other companies you've named. Like, if you care about this stuff, please be careful of who you try to hold up as a good example.
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread" -Anatole France
There's some nice beach city where people are not allowed to have a nice walk on the beach at night because they made some law to prevent homeless people sleeping there... if only Google was still a proper search engine I could post the link..
Having a trained monkey try to chase you down (presumably with a weapon) sounds terrifying, yet somehow I'm not convinced it would be all together worse than what we have now
Laws are made and signed by the ruling class (not saying all laws are bad, we need them), and they (hopefully) reflect which values the people wants their justice system to protect.
Order can be interpreted in two ways; keeping society stable, but also keeping the order (the status quo) of the social classes as they are.
I've always felt that "large" providers should not be able to ban someone except for something that is illegal in the real world.
Every time I post it people hate the idea "it's a private service you can't tell them what to do".
And the alternative is what exactly?
(And yes, I know there are some details to work out, what is "large", what about Spam, what about offtopic messages. But those are details, my post is about the main idea of banning someone. Hate speech and harassment are already illegal.)
Let's say I've got a website called Jay's Cool Community for Elementary School Kids and their Parents. Steve comes in and starts posting nazi symbology, and as soon as I delete his content he just posts more. Nazi symbols aren't illegal in the country where Steve and I reside, so under your regime I can't boot him from my website. Do I, as Jay, have no recourse now?
Agree but the fact is "all other websites on the Internet" turned into just Google, Facebook, Amazon, Instagram and so on. The web is quite centralized nowadays, getting banned from one of these sites can significantly harm a person.
It is like the difference between a private club and the telephone company.
Should your private club be able to expel neo-Nazis? Absolutely.
Should the telephone company be allowed to disconnect neo-Nazis? That's more iffy. What if they are a monopoly? What if there is an oligopoly, and all the oligopoly firms make the same decision? Neo-Nazis are terrible people, but if we set the precedent that one is allowed to deny them telephone services, will less obviously terrible groups be next?
Maybe we should also let the telephone company disconnect the Islamist violent jihad sympathisers, they are obviously terrible people too. But what happens when some Islamophobe starts stretching the definition of "Islamist violent jihad sympathiser" so that Muslims who have zero sympathy for that get labelled with it anyway? (Yes, the classic "slippery slope argument" – but some slopes really are slippery.)
Some websites, such as "Jay's Cool Community for Elementary School Kids and their Parents", are like a private club. But facebook.com, google.com, etc, they are like the telephone company, not like a private club. Different rules should apply to different kinds of websites.
It is a matter of scale, of market share, of user counts.
Obviously, a website with a few hundred or few thousand regular users is more like a private club. A website with tens or hundreds of millions of users is more like the telephone company.
There is no clearcut boundary, but there doesn't need to be. Competition regulators frequently impose limits on market-dominant firms which they don't impose on small players – yet there is no clearcut boundary between a market-dominant firm and a small player. In practice, many individual cases will be obvious, and in the non-obvious cases, all we need is someone with the authority to make a decision–and if someone else thinks they've made the wrong call, there are the usual judicial and political processes to address that.
Imagine a restaurant that followed your rules (customers are never kicked out unless they do something illegal). Would you eat there? How long do you think it would stay in business?
Hate speech isn't necessarily illegal nor do I know what you have in mind when you say "harassment" is illegal, there are 50 states in the U.S. with 50 sets of laws.
While some would argue that private companies have the right to censor users without exception - when private companies form a near-monopoly on artistic expression online, they should ethically inherit the government's ethical responsibility to protect freedom of expression.
In this case this isn't only a violation of the users' freedom of expression - it is also a clear anti-trust violation as they are abusing their monopoly position for illegal anti-competitive tactics.
What companies have a "near-monopoly on artistic expression online?" I can have a web site up and running in an hour publishing any art I have the right to publish, with just an IP from my ISP and optionally a domain name. I don't need to ask any company's permission.
That's akin to saying that booting someone from the US telephone system isn't censorship because they can always setup their own phone line from their living room to a phone installed on their front lawn - that anyone can come and talk to them on.
The reality of the world is that social media is a completely separate medium from social media. A monopoly on social media is not relevant to the ability to create your own URL.
Except there is no feasible alternative to the phone system for making phone calls (although there are a multitude of video, voice and text chat apps), whereas there are many social media companies and also many blog hosts and VPS services and web server software and so on. You have so many choices. I'd argue that if you want to publish something on the Internet, there has been no better time to do it than today, and it keeps getting better!
If they didn't work together people would instead complain about there being more extremist content. None of these companies want the bad PR from "news" articles saying that they aren't stopping extremist content from their platform.
>it is also a clear anti-trust violation as they are abusing their monopoly position for illegal anti-competitive tactics.
It doesn't look anticompetitive to me considering you can ask to join the group.
This must be one of the most awful sentences I've ever read. There is so much stink crammed into so few words, that I'm actually slightly in awe of how terrible it is. There are so many ways its bad that it feels like a rich knot of bad actions that you could unravel for a whole day and never be bored. At the same time, one of the biggest headlines today is about how Zuckerberg thinks WFH is wrong. I'll tell you something: this is is what's wrong. The people involved in whatever this was should be the ones to be fired most of all.
Selling sex content is also disallowed under Meta's platforms. This could possibly just be a manual error of the person banning the accounts and entering the wrong reason.
Reminder that the suit alleges, and does not prove that OnlyFans did this. Wait until the result of the suit to throw down criticism of the system.
The blacklisting process was accomplished first internally at Instagram/Facebook by automated classifiers or filters, which were then submitted to a shared industry database of “hashes,” or unique digital fingerprints.
This database was and is intended to flag and remove content produced by terrorists and related “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” to curtail the spread of terrorism and violent extremism online.
Where can one learn more about this database? Who decides what goes into this database? Is there a governance process? How about incorrectly identified items?
We are headed back into the times of "guilty, until proven innocent" versus how it should be, "innocent until proven guilty". If the scenario was the following: letting 10 criminals go free, or having 1 innocent person imprisoned, I would always choose the latter.
[1] https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...