This is something I’ve highlighted for years. Radicals, extremists, and terrorists have always been able to roam Facebook and Twitter freely. A few years ago, they finally started working to remove ISIS accounts. However, death threats against conservatives or hunters are often allowed to stay up. I’ve highlighted personal experiences with this many times over the years.
If Apple and Google want to take Parler down because of what happened at the Capital, they have to take Facebook and Twitter down too. Both failed to remove Capital organizers for weeks. Both failed to remove thousands of violent threats. Both failed to remove racist posts. Far more violations happen on Facebook and Twitter, and for much longer periods of time, than on Parler. Therefore, they must be taken down if the attack on Parler was actually about what they claimed.
First, they came for Gab. Now they come for everyone else. Gab has a large and vibrant left-wing community. They aren’t ‘alt-right’ or a ‘right-wing’ platform in the least.
From WaPo:
In the days leading up to last week’s march on the Capitol, supporters of President Trump promoted it extensively on Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram and used the services to organize bus trips to Washington. More than 100,000 users posted hashtags affiliated with the movement prompted by baseless claims of election fraud, including #StopTheSteal and #FightForTrump.
The details, emerging from researchers who have combed the service in recent days, shed new light on how Facebook services were used to bring attention to and boost attendance at the rally, which turned violent when a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol while Congress was in session. The attack resulted in the death of a Capitol Police officer and four other people.
Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg has sought to deflect blame, noting the role of smaller, right-leaning services such as Parler and Gab.
“I think these events were largely organized on platforms that don’t have our abilities to stop hate, don’t have our standards and don’t have our transparency,” Sandberg said in an interview Monday that was live-streamed by Reuters.
Riiiiight.
The far bigger platform with far more users who was used far more than Parler and Gab SHOULDN’T be held to the same standards as Parler and Gab because they do remove posts sometimes. Well, so do the other platforms. Posting illegal activity is a violation of everyone’s terms of services and aren’t permitted or allowed in any capacity. Actually, Sandberg’s deflection of blame is really an indictment of Facebook.
When she says Parler and Gab a ‘smaller’ and ‘don’t have our abilities to stop hate’ she’s admitting that Facebook failed even though they are far more capable than the other two. If Facebook can’t possibly prevent this content, how are Parler and Gab expected to given their small size and lack of abilities to stop it?
The legacy press, such as the New York Times, and activist groups such as the Anti-Defamation League, each also blamed two challenger sites – Gab and Parler – rather than the big sites like Twitter and Facebook where rioters actually planned their activities.
The reality of app store bans is and always has been that Big Tech moderation policies are selectively applied. Big Tech responds not to reality but to the demands of far-left activists who clog the proverbial phone lines of Apple and Google every time a handful of offensive or illegal posts appears on our sites, while ignoring when hundreds of thousands of illegal or offensive posts appears on theirs.
We are documenting millions of illegal posts in our Liberal Hate Machine project which shows just how much hatred and bile is spewed on Twitter, one of our most major competitors. We have been collecting and analyzing over 100 million tweets in the replies section of President Trump’s Twitter account for about a year. We applied sentiment analysis to detect violent and hateful replies. Wait until you see what we found.
Twitter and Facebookboth have huge contracts with Amazon. Facebook has a data deal with Amazon that they kept secret. Twitter uses the same AWS services that Parler used. Yet Amazon hasn’t taken Twitter off the internet for far more violations over a longer period of time than Parler. Why? Probably money. A bigger customer of Amazon asks them to remove the competition and stop the bleeding from the mass exodus away from Twitter and Facebook. Amazon complies with its bigger customer’s requests.
It’s a tale as old as time and may give more teeth to the government’s anti-trust case.
