You never answer directly. You always change the subject trying to talk about something else.
I can’t give your posts any credibility unless you reply directly to what was posted.
If you’re going to make off-subject posts, don’t make them replies to my posts about something else. Thanks.
Do you support the Capitol invasion and violence?
Are you a member or do you participate with the many hate groups – Proud Boys, Q-Anon, Neo-Nazis, Neo-Confederates?
Also, please apologize for the false posting you made about me.
McCain and Flake just supported who they wanted to. If this Republican Committee were real Americans they would see them as Profiles in Courage and support their right to do as they wish and say “‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Failing that, why don’t they devote their time to the pandemic hurting America? Why can’t they spend their time and energy helping people rather than hurting them? Like something responsible grownups would do? I don’t see how it helps them to hurt and attack people. It doesn’t make the people they attack want to be on their side, which means less votes for the GOP.
The path to unity is already difficult with mainstream social media encouraging echo chambers and pushing more extreme political views for profits from heightened engagement with their platform algos. One approach would be to get people to spend less time on social media, something I’ve encouraged with friends or family. You can’t have a debate that reaches a consensus when the two sides don’t believe in the same facts.
Broadly, you want people to see both sides of an issue so then most of them will pick some centrist viewpoint in order to be socially accepted (the average person’s opinion is more about conformity than thinking for themselves). If instead you break the world in half by political leanings, now the left moves towards the middle of the leftist group view and the right moves farther right to the center of the right’s supporters. You stop people getting exposed to the middle and that’s more polarizing. The US Presidency has often been, due to our two party primary system, an initially more politically polarized set of platforms to garner primary support from the party base, followed afterwards by the two final candidates moving towards the center to try to capture as much of the middle of the road voters as they can. The current social media is like that, but without ever coming back to the middle.
The reason I see these moves by the tech companies as particularly dangerous is because they’re going to permanently break up the two groups. The politicians might have broken up the tech companies with antitrust laws or regulations, and came close to doing that when they realized that Google or Facebook could pretty easily throw the election to their opponent in ways they couldn’t control. But now each side will be even farther apart and less exposed to the other side because you will have separate news sources, separate social media, separate political discussions, etc.
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But I would say that the problem is much bigger than the one you pose. The big problem that I see is that the government together with the tech monopolies are consolidating their power in a way that allows increasing totalitarian levels of control, suppression of free speech, and violation of human rights. It’s not that one side or the other might win this election, it’s that America may not be a free country anymore and the already widespread government abuses of privacy and free expression will become even worse. A censorship and control platform together with national security tracking of everyone and a police state enabled by “domestic terrorism” laws means that at one point the country will be no longer free and then you’ve laid the groundwork for dictatorship and subsequently violent revolution.
If you know people who came to the US from Eastern Europe or Communist China, ask them what their perspective is on the recent events. Because the ones I know are terrified and see the freedoms they so valued and sought by coming here are rapidly being threatened. The propaganda and centralizing of state power are very similar to Mao’s China and not so far from the total state control of Xia’s China. The only difference now is that we haven’t yet elected our first President for Life.
"More than 300 Black Lives Matter protesters were arrested on June 1, compared to 61 ‘unrest related’ arrests at the Capitol riot Wednesday
When Black Lives Matter protesters converged in Washington, D.C. last summer, they were met with considerable aggression.
D.C. police used military-style tactics, like deploying tear gas to control the crowd as helicopters whirred above and the National Guard patrolled the streets.
By stark contrast, the unruly mob of Trump supporters that forcibly barged into the US Capitol on Wednesday were met with a much smaller and far friendlier police presence, and when the deadly melee ended, only a small number of agitators were placed in custody."
“…more D.C. police were injured and five people, including a police officer, were left dead.”
Trump "wanted to march to the US Capitol with his supporters on Wednesday, where the House and Senate were meeting to certify the Electoral College votes.
But advisers reportedly told Mr Trump “no”, according to people briefed on the discussions, The New Times reported.
Mr Trump also reportedly wanted the National Guard brought in so they could hold off anti-Trump counter-protesters who might turn up."
The group - the Republican Attorney General Association - is made up of some of the nation’s highest-ranking law enforcement and legal officers.
“At 1 p.m., we will march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal,” a voice on the call said"
“Its fundraising arm, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, disseminated robocalls to people urging them to head to the Capitol on January 6…”
Steve Marshall, the Alabama attorney general who is in charge of the arm, said he was unaware these calls went out.
“I was unaware of unauthorized decisions made by RLDF staff with regard to this week’s rally,” Marshall said in a statement to NBC News. “Despite currently transitioning into my role as the newly elected chairman of RLDF, it is unacceptable that I was neither consulted about nor informed of those decisions. I have directed an internal review of this matter.”
When reached for comment by Business Insider, RAGA Executive Director Adam Piper expanded on Marshall’s statement.
“The Republican Attorneys General Association and Rule of Law Defense Fund had no involvement in the planning, sponsoring, or the organization of Wednesday’s event,” Piper said. "No Republican AG authorized the staff’s decision to amplify a colleague speaking at the event. Organizationally and individually, we strongly condemn and disavow the events which occurred. Wednesday was a dark day in American history and those involved in the violence and destruction of property must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and held accountable."
They didn’t ban everyone though. FB & T only banned a few people who violated their terms of service, in some cases repeatedly. The same lies can continue to be spread on there as long as they don’t promote or glorify violence.
This has been the case for I dunno how long, at least 2 decades? Fox News Opinion running wild. It’s one thing to present conservative viewpoints, it’s another to promote outright lies and conspiracy theories.
There no government getting together with tech.
Facebook, twitter, apple, google, amazon, discourse, reddit are all separate and independent private enterprises. What monopolies?
There’s no suppression of free speech.
I do, from both. The only ones “terrified about freedoms” or think there’s “centralizing of state power” are those who bought these lies from the right wing nut media. The others are terrified that the President managed to organize a coup by spreading lies about the election, failed, but is still in power and hardly anyone has been punished.
But they’re doing so selectively based on political opinion, and using the violations as an excuse. The employee biases and political leanings of the tech companies are well known and highly left leaning. BLM and the anti-Trump zealots from the past four years made similar violent claims online and were rarely if ever shut down as some recent posts of mine covered.
here are some of the open antitrust cases against GOOG, FB, and AMZN. I’m sure you’d agree on the general face of it that each of those companies (but not the others mentioned) have a dominant position in their industry.
Yes, another part of the breakdown of social consensus has been the politicization of media coverage. I agree Fox is a whole of lot opinion, most of it junk, but I see them more a symptom of the problem that the main TV channels were (and subsequently became even more) left leaning the average American. This disconnect between the liberal media and the average person 15 years ago is what allowed Fox to become super popular (plus they were the only one on the right, rather than a handful of similar competing left leaning channels). Lots of fault to go around, but I think broadly the last 5 years have worsened this since many of the non-Fox media companies have bought into the idea that opposing Trump was more important than unbiased (or even accurate!) reporting, and gave up their journalist ethics. so now “news” is mostly one sides opinion or the other, and not much if any news. It’s a similar problem to the social media polarization, only playing out among the journalists and editors rather than the general public.
no suppression of free speech
Yes, I know I’m using the expression it the causal and not legal sense. But the ability to organize and express conservative views online has been under attack for several years now, and I’m not talking about calls to violence. Hosting providers, payment processors, banks, DDOS protection services and similar real world requirements to running a discussion forum have been increasingly declining to do business with any sufficiently popular conservative group to the point where the few that are left take donations by crypto and nothing else because they know if they tried to take PayPal or GoFundMe or even credit cards, those firms would get bombarded with left wing complaints and cave to the mob.
And when people who are not doing anything wrong and not calling for violence keep getting their conservation venues banned by a combination of the left wing extremists and the spineless or sympathetic corporations, they can get a bit testy and that’s not making things any better. I’ve seen 3-4 such venues destroyed in the past week or so, which sure looks to me more like enemy action than coincidence..
I don’t think so. They very strongly resisted taking any action until now.
The actions they’ve taken are not monopolistic, they’ve independently reached the same conclusion when they acted to ban promoters of violence and sedition. So calling them “tech monopolies” in the context you created (“government together with the tech monopolies are consolidating their power”) is incorrect and misleading, because they’re independent companies acting independently. But we can agree to disagree.
Has it? They had free reign on twitter, FB, reddit, AND parler until very recently, with exception of threats of violence AFAIK. Please provide more information about this.
I read a quote somewhere saying “A monopoly corporation is just a branch of your government that you don’t have representation in.” I think this applies to a lot of the actions taken by GOOG, FB, AAPL on their App Store, etc. yes, they have their reasons and maybe they’re even justified, but it’s not a good thing that they should have that power when there aren’t alternatives.
I haven’t followed all of these, so some I know more about than others.
Twitter - someone claiming bans were 95% pro Trump as of 2016. More stats etc here.
I began my analysis by compiling a list of every prominent individual or political party known to have been banned from Twitter since its founding.
Reddit - the main pro-Trump group, The_Donald, had been harassed by Reddit for years, subject to various suppression measures against their popularity, and after that “quarantines” and finally being banned entirely. Each time, Reddit made up new rules and restrictions, eventually banning them for failure to moderate harassment because anyone can feel offended these days, especially people who show up to politically opposed group looking to be offended. They sure didn’t ban /politics or /worldnews for being just as far left as the Donald was far right, but Reddit is run by avid leftists and have taken tons of Chinese money so they’ve got a political agenda.
MailChimp - a popular email list manager turned censor decided that anyone sending out anything “misleading” in their sole opinion was subject to ban and no, they weren’t providing you the list of your email subscribers if you hadn’t already maintained that locally. Conservative blog lists were primarily targeted, as well as those trying to organize peaceful rallies or protests. This was a departure one month ahead of the election (coincidence?) from their previous long standing policy of not caring about anyone less crazy than Alex Jones (the sole exception going back several years).
Facebook I avoid so I’m less familiar. They have been a lot more even handed and profit motivated than politically generally compared to the other big tech companies. They did partially suppress the NYP Hunter Biden exposé but have been more active since the election now that they know which way the political winds are blowing.
A number of smaller forums with free speech were shut down or DDOS’ed under unclear circumstances in the last two weeks. Others were suddenly forced to change hosting providers or the like, again around or shortly after the election and another batch around the recent “coup”.
I think it’s also telling on the news front that you can pretty easily predict the political leaning of a news site by whether they allow comments or not. I haven’t seen too many of the MSM news sites aside from NYT allowing comments at all, while most the right leaning ones do. It strikes me as the difference between telling you what to think and allowing you to discuss things and think for yourself.
If the First Amendment doesn’t protect the rights of people to require non-government corporations to host forums where those people can plan an armed insurgency against the government to overturn a free and fair election, then really, what good is it?
Your attempts to “guide” have consisted of telling them they’re wrong then quashing any opinion to the contrary. That isnt guiding, that’s bullying.
When someone claims there has been (for example) fraud, there’s two ways to react - encourage them to purse the legal challenges to remedy the fraud, or insist they’re baseless and just wasting time and need to just stop. One is guiding, the other only creates more questions and puts people on the defensive.
It’s a half-step away from Spectrum or Comcast filtering the content they’ll deliver to your home. Or phone companies will approve or deny phone service based on what they think you’re going to talk about.
Nice strawman, but it was a simple question looking for an answer not your screed against something I never implied. I just don’t see any ‘carrot’ working now, at least for most.
Georgia had recounts and audits. Results from the recounts were consistent with the initial results, demonstrating that there was no fraud. Trump et. al. continued harping at the fraud messaging regardless of findings from the courts or from the recounts. His followers listen to him and trust in him. It was upon him to “guide” them to the logical, fact-based conclusion that he lost fair and square. But he didn’t do the right thing because he can’t admit to losing at anything. After all, he’s the most intelligent, best president in the history of presidents.
Add to that psychos like Woods, the Kraken, QAnon, Giuliani and you have a never ending crescendo of conspiracy and dilution. It’s like witnessing the birth of a new religion, with myths, demons, gods, miracles and the promise of salvation in the mix. How can you gently “guide” people already trapped by that line of thought to something more logical? You can’t.
