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Comment by Gabriel_Martin | Hacker News Reader

Many seem to have been completely taken in to it, yes. And given it seems to have lead to deadly consequences already, I don't think it's unreasonable for these companies to consider it a huge liability.

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Are you aware of what other things have led to deadly consequences? Communism, socialism, green terrorism, and self driving cars come to mind.

Totally, and then you have unfettered capitalism and corporatism, kakistocracies, oligarchies and lawn darts. Unfortunately, unlike all of those things, the FBI, Homeland Security[1] and Congress [2] actually found that white supremacists and other far-right-wing extremists are the most significant domestic terrorism threat facing the United States.

So, when social networks' legal/liability or moderation teams take action on the precise content that was used to foment a coup, it's not terribly shocking from a legal perspective.

1: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/04/white-supremacists-...

2: https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/s894/BILLS-116s894is.xml

StopTheSteal is not a slogan of white supremacists. In fact, it has nothing to do with white supremacism. Are you saying that 60 million or so people in the US are white supremacists?

That's not a very generous interpretation of what I said.

That’s how many people think there was funny business in this election, IIRC, so what exactly are you saying if it isn’t that 60M people are extremists who need to have their voices silenced?

The number of people repeating misinformation isn't really relevant. You really seem to leverage many various fallacies, like slippery slope and argument from incredulity. My exact statement was, in context to the facts about white supremacy and far right extremists, both groups having a well documented presence at the attempted coup, that when social networks' legal/liability or moderation teams take action on the precise content that was used to foment a coup, it's not terribly shocking from a legal perspective. You seem to be shocked though, why is that?

Where is this 60 million number coming from?

This is simply whataboutism.

No it’s not. The post I’m responding to made a case for why censorship is fine in this case. That reason applies very very broadly.

If we are ok with that reason, then we are ok with that reason, and we must acknowledge what else is caught in that net.

> If we are ok with that reason, then we are ok with that reason, ...

This is a slippery-slope fallacy. Facebook removing content containing speech directly associated with highly illegal activity doesn't mean the country is becoming socialist.

I have no idea what you are talking about. I never said it was becoming socialist. I gave a simple warning that the reason is enough to silence vast swaths of public discourse.

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