Gab has been hacked and 70GB of data leaked

it's not censorship when you like it!

*) we = right leaning americans

https://cnsnews.com/news/article/penny-starr/state-dept-offi...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_obscenity_law

Blasphemy is different but I haven't seen corroborating evidence of that.

Even if they did ban blasphemy, it would still be less strict on banning speech than Twitter where entire heads of state have been banned for saying words people don't like (or for being from Iran)

Compounding this is PR and network effects. Once they become known as the place for the far right, then more far righters go there, and more distant people avoid it.

Things should be said based on the inherent merit of what they say, not be said just because it's not literally illegal to say them. If the only reason you can find for justifying what you say is that nobody has made a law yet to stop you (and we do have laws to stop some things from being said), then perhaps you need to find a better thing to say.

Non-degenerates know that long lasting liberty comes with responsibility, and that responsibility is moderation and correction.

The far right operates in degeneracy. They may fly the banner of freedom but they fly it alongside nazi flags so what do symbols and ideals even mean for them.

Generally the argumentation presented is a dogwhistle for fringe elements (nazis, other unpleasant people, etc). Sadly they are currently dominated by far-right ideologies (and ofc the inevitable sexual predators).

The center and left in the US are normally not in favor of hate speech, while the right is more supportive of it.

What happens then is people who want to discuss hateful topics and post hateful speech can't easily do it on the current popular social media platforms, so they need alternatives. That's the market for Gab and Parler mostly.

At this moment, it happens that the far-right in the US has a very "hateful adjacent" messaging. They generally support and promote populist, nativist, collectivist authoritarian, and conspiracy-minded ideas. Those often overlap with hate of immigrants and non-white Christians, as well as hate of liberals and social democrats due to believing in their participation in demonic conspiracies. They also tend to suggest violent and authoritarian methods to get what they want, like killing their opposition or storming the capitol, and other forms of violent insurection. Thus they fall in the market category of Parler and Gab pretty strongly.

It's mostly the far-right aka radical right, the regular right in the US does not all prescribe to these and don't all have "hateful adjacents" messaging.

Also some more extremist current left movements also have "hateful adjacent" messaging, though maybe less so, when they do it's often targeted specifically at the far-right, most likely as a reactionary measure.

Also, there are reports of such left-leaning accounts being banned and censored on Parler and Gab, hard to say how true this is, but even if a rumor, it keeps the less radical right from trusting them. And so they are often considered to falsy upheld free speech.

It's liberal in the same way it would be liberal to have a party where you walk around naked and smear feces on each other.

Definitely a liberal party, but not one that most people want to participate in. Most people would rather have moderation where you're not allow to scream the N word at blacks. Which concentrates N word screamers and similar onto these free speech forums

I signed up on Gab recently to see what people were talking about on there, and the discussion is far less diverse than Twitter (there's just no comparison). Twitter has X, Y, and Z Twitter, whereas Gab basically seems to be just Q Twitter these days.

And on Gab, you'll get shouted down within milliseconds if you post something that doesn't fit the general vibe, and you'll probably be called a f#g for your trouble. (I've seen the same thing on so-called "patriot" live streams that also claim free speech absolutism but then ban you for saying anything they don't want to hear, even good-faith efforts to explain the motivations of the "other side.")

Therefore, I can confidently claim that Twitter, just as an example, cares more about and does far more to promote free speech than Gab ever could or will, even though they don't use "free speech" as a marketing cudgel.

> Free speech used to be something all Americans supported and defended.

It's not that most Americans don't care about free speech. It's that most Americans understand that constitutional free speech means the government can't infringe on your speech, except in limited circumstances (like extortion, inciting violence, inciting panic, divulging classified material, etc).

The reason companies like Gab and Parler market 'free speech' to the far right, is because the far right often engages in trolling, harassment, incitement to violence, disinformation, and bigotry in social media. As such, they run into the moderation policies of those platforms and at some point start running into bans. Not to say other parts of the political spectrum don't run into moderation and bans too, but it's a bigger problem right now for the far right.

There's a debate to be had about the power social media giants have over public discourse and whether internet service providers should be able to blacklist companies like they did to Parler. But that still doesn't fall under the umbrella of constitutional free speech. Businesses usually have wide latitude to refuse service to customers, particularly for toxic behavior.

Why do people who espouse free speech want to take away freedom to choose who one associates with?

It seemed every American not on the left is called "far right" from where I am sitting.

Half a dozen of my friends have moved to the States and a few have scolded me for my understanding saying that plenty of centrists are labeled far right.

I'm beginning to glaze over the label now. It doesn't hold any sway for me because it is used so flippantly.

Doesn't mean that other Americans no longer consider free speech important.

To make this obvious, this is not a free speech issue.

That only a subset of the population wants to be marketed to under the banner of "free speech" doesn't mean that people don't care about free speech itself.

(Neither Gab nor Parler have any objection to FOSTA/SESTA's unconstitutional limitations on free speech and neither of them have any interest in standing up for the free speech rights of sex workers, let alone their ability to participate in the free market.)

Is free speech absolute?

If tomorrow, fox news falsely says your family is defrauding the IRS, qould you be ok with that because thwy have the right to free speech?

The intent of free speech is to have tge freedom to criticise those in power. Not to spread hate and divisions in the society.

What I will not defend is someone who knowingly speaks untruths or uses language as a weapon with the intent to hurt others. Just because it uses mouth sounds doesn’t make something speech.

If you think homosexuals are an abomination and an affront to god then you’re free to believe that and tell everyone you know. But that doesn’t mean you should be allowed to shout f*g at a gay person on the street. Only the former is speech, the latter is hate.

It's because private companies don't want to host their extreme views. Private companies free to regulate their own platforms is a very Republican position.

Hobby Lobby and Chic Fil A are perfect examples of right leaning companies imposing their own political views of what is acceptable on their employees and customers.

It would be liberal to regulate what private companies allow or block on their platforms, which is why Republicans complain about being cancelled but don't take action. Forcing companies to allow free speech using regulations is a liberal proposition.

Right leaning people are free to create their own platforms that cater to far right conspiracies, racism, homophobia, death threats, and white supremacists. And that's what they did

A) the actual full scope of the problem of censorship in the real world,

B) the actual rights that other people have to freely associate or filter content they find objectionable, and

C) the actual practical ways to increase free speech access.

Ignoring for a second the ideologies these people espouse, purely speaking as a free speech advocate far right people make my job harder, both because they only seem to show up to advocate for free speech in very selective situations, and because most of their ideas on how to preserve free speech are, frankly, really bad.

Most of the far right crowd isn't going to show up to bat for concepts like Net Neutrality, they're not going to be out campaigning against LGBTQ+ or sex censorship. These are the people I see in my timelines cheering on government intervention into public university curriculums. They push dangerous concepts like Section 230 repeals or nationalizing media companies, and some of their more experimental proposals are just blatantly unconstitutional. It's wild to hear proposals from people who claim that they're free speech advocates that would not hold up under almost any Supreme Court ruling. These people also don't have sophisticated ideas on how to handle spam, pornography, or copyright other than to shrug their shoulders and say that the 1st Amendment shouldn't apply to those things. And their big solution to Twitter censorship is to make new centralized platforms that (for now) cater to specifically them; there's nothing realistic or interesting or permanent about what they're proposing. It's a demographic that likes to say that they're pro-free-speech, but in my opinion a lot of that is just thoughtless rhetoric around the fact that they're mad that different people than them now have power to form their own communities and organize their own social campaigns.

So I would not call Gab or Parler bastions of free speech, and it irritates me that those sites steal headlines and place themselves at the center of these debates. Both sites are far right echo chambers filled with a lot of people who's primary experience with censorship begins and ends with the idea that nobody should be allowed to block them on Twitter. And neither site is afraid to engage in its own censorship -- the sites bill themselves as 1st Amendment advocates purely based around who they censor, not because they have compelling or innovative ideas about how to run a community in general.

I'm being a little uncharitable here, but I'm not being very uncharitable. I have almost completely given up trying to engage with far right ideas on free speech, because a significant portion of that demographic is only interested in free speech in ways that personally benefit them, and trying to assemble their views into an internally consistent philosophy has frankly been kind of a giant waste of my time. If you're worried about tech censorship, go donate to Mastodon or Matrix -- projects that are filled with people who are actually thinking about free speech in deep, thoughtful, and practical ways.

It is indeed incredible, though perhaps not in the sense that you meant.

America once had a very finite number of publishers who were the primary gate keepers for what published. America suppressed the works of Wilhelm Reich and Henry Miller. America once arrested members of the IWW for engaging in street corner soapbox speak-outs [1]. America engaged in anti-socialist repression on a fairly large scale.[2] It's common to reference an imaginary free speech fundamentalist era somewhere in the US past but, sorry, it's not there.

And, of course, the extreme right only pretend to be true free speech fundamentalists - Note how the dropped Milo Yiannopoulos when his speech offended them.

[1] https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/industrial-workers... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Raids

Imagine someone talking loudly outside your window all night. You’d have laws made about public disturbances. Would you then be a freedom hating communist? I don’t know about that.

Now if you also have a forum where you’d like to have more family friendly conversations. Would you welcome the Nazi hatemongerer? I would think you’d moderate them out.

Imagine you have a church, and an atheist disturbs your mass by shrieking god doesn’t exist. Would you escort them out?

This is so basic to me that I can’t believe people have a hard time grasping something so obvious. I can’t help but think they are being disingenuous.

I agree, and I vote accordingly.

What does that even mean ?

Any one with half a brain will find good ideas from the far left to the far right. This "left vs right" is the dumbest thing we ever came up with. Vote and fight for ideas, not sport teams... keep the fanatism for football

Leftism and rightism are little more than broad, inchoate moral intuitions that are ultimately given concrete form and specific content by ideologies, philosophy and realpolitik.

For example, economic class-driven socialism and wokeness will conflict with each other but both are driven by a thought pattern that's descended from Marxism. Gendercrit feminists and the woke, same thing, but both more or less want to strangle each other.

On the right, you get can have Nietzsche-influenced hyperindividualist überman strivers and a kind of communitarian neo-trad thinking. Both clearly rightist, both in tension with each other. The GOP and the aforementioned localist Christian tradheads are definitely against each other, but not leftists.

List goes on. I'd consider the woke ideology genuinely leftist, it's just not very genuinely pro the little guy, pro the working man. Many traditional Marxists are certainly tearing their hair out from what I've read some.

Take centralization. You see that the Republicans are pro-decentralization. Except they're the party that's trying to delete California's air quality rules in favor of federalized ones. And also delete state net neutrality rules in favor of (lack of) federal ones. Drill down to the state level, and it's clear that their policy on centralization versus decentralization is actually about "the rules should be decided on whatever level we hold power." In states where there is a Republican lock on state government, any Democratic city that dares to pass progressive legislation will not infrequently be met with a state law restricting their ability to pass that legislation. A few states passed laws prohibiting localities from enacting mask mandates. The "bathroom bills" are another example of this effect.

I can't imagine a time that this would have been true in my life.

Dems are pro-regulation, but I don't see that as authoritarian. Republicans want capitalism to determine who has power, rather than democracy.

They both want to socialize corporate losses for billionaires, but Democrats are at least nominally comfortable making them pay taxes.

And the reason it's blowing up now is because the media monopoly is over. Back when "the media" was ABC, CBS, NBC, AP, UPI, and then-centrist New York Times and Washington Post, nobody was giving the crazies the microphone, on either side. But when Fox and talk radio came on the right, and CNN on the left (and many of the former-center media moved left), then there were people with a slant, and therefore with a motivation to make the other side look silly.

But these people (on both sides) need to reconsider what they're doing. They're making the other side look silly to the mainstream, but they're also helping the fringe of the other side recruit. That may not be a very wise policy...

Leavers calling Remainers "traitors" seems fairly common.

The reaction to the vote however, has been borderline sabotage and very nasty characterizations. This is a symptom of EU being an "all or nothing" entity, of high prestige and privilege. The result being an unmitigated mess on all levels, but do represent legitimate concerns over how EU is run vs local level.

There are many good decisions in EU too addressing broader concerns. So it's a highly complex issue which is hard to solve by a simple vote and by political processes. Yet, that's how they did it this time.

The left (in particular the lefter parties) accuse the right to be racists, islamophobes, antisemites, sexists, at the heel of the bourgeoisie & capitalists, hostile to the working class, and guilty of ecological inaction.

The right (not just the far right, even centre-right like the current party in power) accuses the left to be at the heel of muslims ("islamo-leftist" is thrown around a lot), traitors/threats to their own national identity/culture, weak, slowing down progress, utopists. I might be missing some, I'm biased.

The left's attacks are more personal, more violent. I have an overly-simplified theory of why that is, the left's values are much more centered around the human, and the right's values are much more centered around the economy. That means that everything for the left is personal, it's cutting deep, violation of these values trigger empathy: sadness, anger, feelings of injustice and outrage. Violation of the right's values are much less personal, more indirect, closer to annoyance than outrage.

Of course, being biased I also think that the left's argument are more violent because they're _more true_, the right mostly getting its way. We do live in a liberal world which is very right-wing (despite americans liberal being called "leftists", that always confused me, or even "communists" when communism is so radically opposed to the neoliberalism we have today)

Removing a defining characteristic to force data to fit your model surely isn't good science

I’d guess that by looking at the wide spectrum of governance with an inclusive view of Western democracies, you could come to the conclusion that economically-liberal powers share much in common.

On the other hand, when commentators make these comparisons they’re generally comparing a handful of exemplar Northern European democratic-socialist governments on a subset of hot-button issues (racial and economic justice, foreign policy, economic regulation, etc.) because that’s where the political action is.

What are you trying to say anyway? Cool, so you don’t know what’s going on, and don’t particularly care. So what?

That's insecurity in my book, not weakness. Locking up and disappearing people over what they say shows the government has power over the people, not approval from them.

> Also power comes from the people in single party system as well. They are the one who build economy and meaningfully secure their own environments through various non-obvious systems.

I agree, but in a dictatorship the people are held back from what they could contribute.

> But both taken together along with the systems that they interact through they can be seen as single entity.

Perhaps they seem that way from far away, but the parties can and do change their positions over time and they compete with each other to please the public. A single party system may also respond to the people's will but since speaking your mind publicly is forbidden, you never really know who made a given decision. Someone may get blamed for it but you won't know if they were the true decider. That's why you see the same party maintain control, the top decision makers cannot be held accountable. Mao is still revered despite causing widespread famine, for example.

> Any differences come from the fact that two party system has stronger grip and more stability thanks to delivering one thing that people need and single party systems are struggling to credibly provide, and enemy to hate.

That's right, in a multi-party system the people can hold the previous admin responsible for any failures by electing a new party or individual. It's not so much about people needing an enemy as it is about acknowledging that all people make mistakes. It's hard to get people to publicly take responsibility for their actions and it's next to impossible for that to truly happen when a single party rules. In a multi party state, the losing party has a chance to come back and usually that involves some admission of error, otherwise the public may view them as stubborn. In a single party state, mistakes are either excused forever, or if you fall out of favor, then you have less chance to recover.