WingNews

It is coordinated. Remember when Alex Jones got banned from literally everything on the same day?

The reddit bans wave was leaked in advance. The more actors involved in a coordinated action the harder it is to keep a secret.

Original leak: https://old.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/hh1pjd/redd...

roenxi|5 years ago

This sort of multiple-headlines-in-one-day undermines the argument for bans. In the Alex Jones case in particular it appeared he was being selected for a broader community image rather than actions on specific platforms.

Private companies can't (mechanically, not legally) determine who has a moral right to speak. If we had a magic method for figuring that out it'd have been a feature of politics since at least the Roman Empire. Instead we ended up with things like Robert's Rules of Order where the process is controlled as best as possible to let wildly contradictory opinions get aired.

tptacek|5 years ago

Alex Jones lent a camera crew to Wolfgang Halbig when he travelled to Newtown, CT to harass the parents of the first graders murdered in the Sandy Hook shooting. Years and years from now those sites you're referring to will still bear the shame of not having banned him earlier.

lowmemcpu|5 years ago

For someone who has mostly sat on the sidelines of these debates, the coordination is really disturbing. Who is pulling the strings here?

dmix|5 years ago

> Apparently they're going to ban a large number of subs on Monday and frame it as an anti-racism initiative

Has this been announced or was this just speculation?

CyberDildonics|5 years ago

I don't think it is a matter of keeping it a secret, my guess is that they don't want bleed over to wherever they haven't been banned yet.

slg|5 years ago

>It is coordinated.

Is there any evidence of this besides the announcements just happening on the same day? It could be companies waiting to announce these moves on Monday morning after days of seeing Facebook embroiled in controversy for not doing this. Or maybe one company decided to make this move and other companies fast tracked anything they had planned on this so they wouldn't be viewed as ignoring this issue.

We have no indication one way or another whether this is coordinated. We shouldn't just assume it is coordinated because it is happening on the same day.

psychometry|5 years ago

"WatchRedditDie"? Hilarious. Everything reddit's done today makes me want to use the site more.

dogma1138|5 years ago

> Seems odd for multiple independent companies to act in concert like this

Yes and no, this is less collusion and more to avoid platform hopping basically if one platform bans them they’ll flock to another even if the medium isn’t identical or the platform is not optimal for their use case any platform would do in times like these.

I’m pretty sure at this point when the behavior pattern is known the platforms inform each other of high profile bans.

The others follow suit to avoid being branded as the one that didn’t or worse as the one that accepted the now pariahs “with open arms”.

at_a_remove|5 years ago

If it were platform hopping, it would be ban, then hop, then ban, then hop. It takes time to hop and move all of your content and followers.

This time has not elapsed.

paulpauper|5 years ago

Moloenux has been on YouTube for over a decade. He wasn't evading any bans.

ALittleLight|5 years ago

I don't know about that. Twitter didn't ban Molyneux and I've not seen people branding Twitter as "The platform that permits Molyneux". (Until me, just now)

rickbutton|5 years ago

Why? There is a massive political movement for racial equality happening all over the country. They are responding to pressure from consumers, which they very much should, because all of these companies have ignored these issues for decades. They aren't coordinating with each other in some conspiracy to silence white supremacists. The -people- want white supremacists to be deplatformed (a good thing!).

disposekinetics|5 years ago

This is why you never give into the mob, even when their point is a good one. That's how individual rights are lost to the collective.

patrickaljord|5 years ago

The fact that it all happened on the same day does imply some kind of coordination though.

nradov|5 years ago

The pressure is more directly from advertisers. Major consumer brands don't want their advertisements appearing next to objectionable user generated content.

etherael|5 years ago

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m0zg|5 years ago

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maximente|5 years ago

google legal frequently shares information with legal departments from other tech companies when it comes to moderating/acting upon content/users. in fact, the big tech companies' legal teams share information pretty regularly as they all deal with the same legal hurdles e.g. users from north korea, cuba, ITAR, etc.

it wouldn't surprise me if there was an informal discussion and a decision by google led others to also take action.

Fjolsvith|5 years ago

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beefee|5 years ago

This appears to be coordinated election interference from tech monopolists.

jacquesm|5 years ago

If they were monopolists they wouldn't have to coordinate anything.

eli_gottlieb|5 years ago

Please explain. In which districts in the United States are neo-Nazis affiliated with Stefan Molyneux, David Duke (former leader of the KKK), and Richard Spencer (who was videoed performing a Sieg Heil) up for election, as challengers or incumbents? I was not aware these men were employed by one of the two major political parties, or even one of the two smaller ones.

If the specific figures being banned are not affiliated with any candidate for election, even under a minor party or for local office, how is this "election interference"?

lowtolerance|5 years ago

Someone doesn’t understand the terms “election interference” or “monopolists”.

vkou|5 years ago

People doing political things you don't like is not election interference, anymore than some billionaire bankrolling right-wing SuperPACs is election interference.

Elections aren't held in a vaccum. People 'interfere' with them by persuading, spending money, and by choosing to give political ideas access to their platform.

Media agencies 'interfere' with elections all the time, by exercising their discretion for the last point, and by actively agitating on the first point.

And why would de-platforming racist white nationalists interfere with the election, anyways? Is there a racist white nationalist on the ballot in 2020, who will be hurt by this?

searchableguy|5 years ago

"coincidence"

erichocean|5 years ago

> Seems odd for multiple independent companies to act in concert like this.

It shouldn't, all social networks delegate banning "hate content" to the SPLC and ADL. It's much more efficient/effective to do things this way, and more importantly, it assures fair enforcement. Otherwise, you'd have the same content allowed on one platform, but banned on another. This approach is much better for the platforms and their users.

LyndsySimon|5 years ago

How does outsourcing the decision to the SPLC/ADL “assure fair enforcement”?

Miner49er|5 years ago

This happened a couple years back when they both made some big policy changes related to guns. I'm pretty sure it's just pressure from major advertisers they both share.

Here is an HN link from it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16643040

at_a_remove|5 years ago

How coincidental! Surely I am to think nothing of it. Hey, let's talk about COVID-19 real quick ...

ReptileMan|5 years ago

The way different actions spread are like watching the Snowcrash virus in real time. Endlessly entertaining.

yongjik|5 years ago

Act individually, and each company is dragged over the internet rage court individually, and as a bonus the last one to act will be roasted as "only doing it because all others did."

Act together, and they are accused of conspiracy.

I guess their PR teams decided the latter is less hassle for them.

danudey|5 years ago

I detest Donald Trump and everything he stands for and enables, but the idea of banning him from Twitch makes me imagine a world where he didn't get banned from Twitch and instead tried to pivot to being a full-time game streamer, and that makes me laugh at least a little bit.

CyberDildonics|5 years ago

He would probably get banned for cheating

dandanqu82|5 years ago

It’s like the nuclear arms treaty. If one company doesn’t ban these accounts, it can gain all the users who subscribe to these people and benefit. All companies agree to potentially lose these users, so no one profits from doing the so called “wrong thing”.

Same thing with mask use in airlines. Some companies do not want to enforce mask use until all airlines do it, because they do not want customers opposed to masks leaving them for competitors that do not require masks on flights.

anticonformist|5 years ago

The public square is owned by private companies and they're enforcing anti-first amendment principles. One can't even argue that these banned people can move to another platform if they're all coordinating.

Leftist extremists are effecting public banishment of their rightist extremist opponents.

It wouldn't be as bad if leftist extremists were getting banned at the same time. The problem is that leftist extremists have bullied the mainstream left into extreme action.

kstrauser|5 years ago

Today, Reddit banned the Chapo Trap House left extremist group. From someone not involved in either extreme, it appears to me like they're being consistent and banning people for behavior and not politics. I've not heard anyone calling for George Will to be deplatformed, for instance.

JoshTriplett|5 years ago

People get regularly banned for racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and many other kinds of hate, whether their profiles say 'D' or 'R' or something else. If many of their profiles tend to say 'R' or otherwise have similar political views, that's not an indication of bias on the part of platforms.

darth_avocado|5 years ago

First amendment only protects you against the suppression of free speech from the government. It definitely does not give you the right to say whatever you want, wherever you want. Private companies have complete authority over which speech is acceptable on platforms run by them.

throwaway29102|5 years ago

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nojito|5 years ago

What part of the first amendment covers private companies?

mempko|5 years ago

but isn't the world of "private property" what the right wants? This kind of world, where there are no longer any public squares, but everything held in private is the world the right asks for. This is the kind of world we end up with. The irony should not be lost on them right?