Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

What I have observed today on social media is that censorship has been ramped up dramatically all in one day. And I don't mean Trump. I'm seeing even posts from conservative accounts that unequivocally condemned the capitol raid getting deleted, and entire accounts being deleted with no notice. This to me feels a lot like a digital political genocide, the culmination of an ascendant group with significant power (progressive left allied with tech giants) suddenly unleashing it upon their political enemies.

I dislike Trump, but the claim that he has incited violence is without evidence, and we see that in Twitter's blog post announcing his ban (https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...), since it offers no hard evidence and only subjective leaps of the imagination. The call to delete his account because of the current political context is unacceptable, and it is also total hypocrisy given that this logic was not applied when BLM riots caused billions of Dollars in damage in the last year. It's also hypocritical given that nearly identical incidents (riots at the capitol) have taken place several times before and not resulted in this type of coverage or censorship. Several of these incidents are in the past few years, such as the climate riot which AOC participated in (https://theintercept.com/2018/11/13/alexandria-ocasio-cortez...) or the riots concerning Brett Kavanaugh's appointment (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/04/kavanaugh-su...) or the 600-person riot protesting immigration law (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/womens-march-protesters-call...).

This isn't about riots. It isn't about violence. It isn't about a coup. It isn't about Trump even. It is only about big tech bowing down to the new incoming leaders who control their fates, and with the changing of the guard, they have become comfortable showing who they are - powerful partisans who will put the power of their monopolies to work if left unimpeded. That should scare anyone who knows where this path leads based on history. I'm genuinely worried, because as always, these changes come in response to an event that scared people and now they are naively welcoming authoritarian changes.

The other “riots” you refer to are not riots. They appear to all be sit-ins. No windows were broken or police overpowered/attacked.

These types of protests are common in the Capitol (and I’m pretty sure in most other US legislatures buildings). People often enter legally, protest, refuse to leave, and then are arrested. This is not what happened on January 6th.

You’re redefining the word “riot”, drawing an arbitrarily line between allowed/disallowed activities that constitute a riot, and also dressing up riots you agree with in favorable terms by calling them a “sit in”. The definition of “riot” is at https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/riot and all the events I named were unequivocally riots. Their acts were clearly illegal and it’s why they were arrested. Please don’t excuse criminality that agrees with your politics. This is exactly the hypocrisy underlying the spate of censorship that was normalized today.

I think that a big difference to people is whether or not the event was violent.

Many protests involve civil disobedience; I think very few people here would condemn all illegal protests.

However, violence is where I (and I think many others) draw the line.

As another data point I heard: Wednesday was the first time since 9/11/2001 that the Capitol was evacuated. Clearly, this demonstration was exceptional in a way that disturbe

Both applicable definitions at the other poster's link literally have a form of the word 'violence' in them.

The word “or” separates the qualifying conditions in the definition linked. Disorder or a disturbance of the peace is enough to qualify an incident as a “riot”. Given the quoted incidents were illegal acts that required authorities to spend time and money to respond to, they were of course a disturbance of the peace, disorderly, and therefore were indeed riots.

And you don't think it's ridiculous to equivocate between events where a police officer is grievously beaten and a woman is trampled and events where people sit quietly and get arrested because some sergeant decides it is disorderly for them to sit there without a permit.

You can see the fear in Duckworth's eyes when she comes up with her baby strapped to her chest and waves at the crowd.

I agree with you. It's a word that means different things to so many people.

It frustrates me when the media tries to make a big distinction between protests and riots. Those words have become emotionally charged.

Rather, if we're going to have discussions about this, we should be sure to be extra clear about what we're trying to say.

I think it's fairly pointless to debate what the precise definition of a riot is. Rather, I was trying express why people see this as different from the "sit-ins" (another wishy washy word) the the poster above you talked about.

The reason that I find Wednesday's acts worse is because of the violence. And I think that there could be a much more productive conversation off of that pretense, than over what is a riot vs a sit-in.

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