Yes, those poor persecuted "whites". With the minorities running the U.S. now, it's very dangerous for us. I narrowly avoided being sent to one of the "whites" concentration camps myself.
This is certainly true. The "race of users" isn't being "police[d]". It is just a reflection of the subject matter of HN and a reflection of the tech field in general.
You answered your own question. No, serious threats do not use Facebook Messenger. The reason it's limited deploy is technical (for now) not caging. Metadata is more important than content. They will always have the metadata.
Do you enjoy Verizon press releases? "Miles ran", "houses passed". Industry doublespeak. NYC residents invested those billions via rate hikes the PUC granted to Verizon!! It was subsidized even though Verizon claims otherwise. And they didn't deliver.
I trust public company press releases that commit to concrete numbers: there is a cottage industry of plaintiffs' lawyers that bring securities class actions for material misstatements of financial information.
NY residents didn't invest anything in fiber. Verizon got rate hikes because it has been losing billions of dollars a year in NY. Nationwide, Verizon's wireline profit margin is in the low single digits--it's utterly ridiculous to say they're receiving a "subsidy" in the form of above-market monopoly prices.
As I mentioned in my original comment, New York already had fiber networks covering large parts of the city. Verizon was able to access these, which already "ran past" many buildings in the city (including mine), and still never bothered to hook up those buildings as they had already agreed to.
Not going to comment on the efficacy of "used" versus "user" in RMS' argument here. However, your comparison to "Democrap", etc. doesn't seem to fit here very well. The former is a shorthand for his entire argument and technically correct. Facebook "users" are "used" by Facebook. This is their business model. The latter is just simple name calling serving no useful purpose.
Even if that's your thesis, it's still a bad term because it doesn't say anything about why. If you're going to use an atypical term in a debate, it should convey some information about why you hold your beliefs.
