Is Free Speech Under Attack in this Country?
- Thread starter sturg33
- Start date
nsacpi
Expects Yuge Games
Why would I cancel you...you provide A rated entertainment
cajunrevenge
Well-known member
nsacpi
Expects Yuge Games
It would be wrong of them to cancel/de-platform pillow man.
Runnin
Well-known member
Why does a pillow salesman think he's an expert on voting machines?
nsacpi
Expects Yuge Games
down with the tyranny of experts!
long live pillow man and all deplorables!
free speech and free platforms for all!
murica!
nsacpi
Expects Yuge Games
Cancel culture
I find it hilarious when these goons say "I'm releasing all this evidence on such and such date." If you had evidence, you would have released it by now.
nsacpi
Expects Yuge Games
He will be releasing it Friday.
sturg33
I
The ministry of truth shall decide all of our fates.
That’s hilarious. Proud boys started out as a joke and the media acts like they’re the second coming of antifa, BLM or nazis.
nsacpi
Expects Yuge Games
Jody Williams knew things had gotten out of hand early last month, when a post on the pro-Trump message board TheDonald included a detailed diagram of how to tie a “hangman’s knot” on a noose.
Williams was a moderator for the board and owner of its Web address, so he removed the noose instructions. But within an hour, he said, another moderator quietly restored it near the top of the site. Three days later, on Jan. 6, a real noose was hung on makeshift gallows on the National Mall, amid a violent siege on the U.S. Capitol.
The battle over the noose diagram was just one of many over a site so infested with racist, anti-Semitic and violent content that Williams, 41, an Army veteran who lost a leg in a noncombat accident, often recoiled at what his fellow Trump supporters said and did.
“You might be happy being some ethno-nationalist, but I’m not,” said Williams, recalling his exchanges with a handful of particularly hardcore moderators. “I don’t want anything to do with this.”
The story of TheDonald, a furiously pro-Trump forum that became an online staging ground for the Capitol assault, is a cautionary tale about the Internet’s dark side. What began on Reddit as an online political rally for an upstart presidential candidate turned increasingly foul as Williams fought — and often lost — against what he said were “nefarious forces” determined to advance the most extreme ideologies, including white supremacy.
Williams — who controlled the Web address where the forum moved after Reddit expelled it last year — finally took decisive action on Jan. 21, two weeks after the Capitol assault, after waking to news that a group of other moderators had started their own site and used it to attack him. Soon, Williams used his power as the Web address owner to knock TheDonald offline.
Then he defended himself publicly against his former compatriots, who had criticized him as a “rogue” and a selfish coward. Williams, who lives in Texas and has three young children, also endured death threats, online harassment and FBI questioning, he said.
Moderators at Patriots.win, where some of TheDonald community moved after it went dark, did not respond to requests for comment this week. On their new spinoff site, they have labeled Williams a “sellout” who “betrayed the community … [of] hundreds of thousands of loyal patriots.”
The schism that fractured TheDonald offers a potent symbol of the increasingly tense battles over free speech and extremism on the Web. Online communities that frame themselves as refuges for free expression often find themselves pulled to the fringes, forcing members to either confront the shift or tolerate increasingly radical ideas.
Such dynamics have played out on Facebook and other mainstream social media sites, but they have been supercharged on niche forums such as Gab, 8kun, Parler and TheDonald, which promoted themselves as free-speech zones but ended up trafficking in the worst of the Web.
TheDonald, which Williams said generated more than a million visits a day in December, was perhaps the most popular pro-Trump stand-alone site, and it offered his supporters a gleefully uninhibited forum where followers could laugh about conservative memes and troll liberals without worrying about the content-moderation rules of mainstream social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
Williams saw, up close, the QAnon extremist ideology, Holocaust denial and unalloyed racism. He witnessed repellent people spreading images of child sexual exploitation, flooding an affiliated image board so thoroughly that it had to be shut down.
And then, perhaps most unnervingly for Williams, he watched terrifyingly extreme online actors playing a very long game of grooming, seeking to recruit the disaffected to their causes.
“They’re like any far-flung terrorist group,” Williams said. “They think they’re going to win eventually, and they just need to slowly drive a wedge in there.”
Williams said he saw other deeply troubling things in private messages on TheDonald and on affiliated communities on Signal and Telegram, two encrypted messaging sites. He believes private channels on all three platforms hosted the most aggressive planning and instigation for the Capitol siege.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/05/why-thedonald-moderator-left/
so many platforms
so much de-platforming
tsk tsk
Williams was a moderator for the board and owner of its Web address, so he removed the noose instructions. But within an hour, he said, another moderator quietly restored it near the top of the site. Three days later, on Jan. 6, a real noose was hung on makeshift gallows on the National Mall, amid a violent siege on the U.S. Capitol.
The battle over the noose diagram was just one of many over a site so infested with racist, anti-Semitic and violent content that Williams, 41, an Army veteran who lost a leg in a noncombat accident, often recoiled at what his fellow Trump supporters said and did.
“You might be happy being some ethno-nationalist, but I’m not,” said Williams, recalling his exchanges with a handful of particularly hardcore moderators. “I don’t want anything to do with this.”
The story of TheDonald, a furiously pro-Trump forum that became an online staging ground for the Capitol assault, is a cautionary tale about the Internet’s dark side. What began on Reddit as an online political rally for an upstart presidential candidate turned increasingly foul as Williams fought — and often lost — against what he said were “nefarious forces” determined to advance the most extreme ideologies, including white supremacy.
Williams — who controlled the Web address where the forum moved after Reddit expelled it last year — finally took decisive action on Jan. 21, two weeks after the Capitol assault, after waking to news that a group of other moderators had started their own site and used it to attack him. Soon, Williams used his power as the Web address owner to knock TheDonald offline.
Then he defended himself publicly against his former compatriots, who had criticized him as a “rogue” and a selfish coward. Williams, who lives in Texas and has three young children, also endured death threats, online harassment and FBI questioning, he said.
Moderators at Patriots.win, where some of TheDonald community moved after it went dark, did not respond to requests for comment this week. On their new spinoff site, they have labeled Williams a “sellout” who “betrayed the community … [of] hundreds of thousands of loyal patriots.”
The schism that fractured TheDonald offers a potent symbol of the increasingly tense battles over free speech and extremism on the Web. Online communities that frame themselves as refuges for free expression often find themselves pulled to the fringes, forcing members to either confront the shift or tolerate increasingly radical ideas.
Such dynamics have played out on Facebook and other mainstream social media sites, but they have been supercharged on niche forums such as Gab, 8kun, Parler and TheDonald, which promoted themselves as free-speech zones but ended up trafficking in the worst of the Web.
TheDonald, which Williams said generated more than a million visits a day in December, was perhaps the most popular pro-Trump stand-alone site, and it offered his supporters a gleefully uninhibited forum where followers could laugh about conservative memes and troll liberals without worrying about the content-moderation rules of mainstream social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
Williams saw, up close, the QAnon extremist ideology, Holocaust denial and unalloyed racism. He witnessed repellent people spreading images of child sexual exploitation, flooding an affiliated image board so thoroughly that it had to be shut down.
And then, perhaps most unnervingly for Williams, he watched terrifyingly extreme online actors playing a very long game of grooming, seeking to recruit the disaffected to their causes.
“They’re like any far-flung terrorist group,” Williams said. “They think they’re going to win eventually, and they just need to slowly drive a wedge in there.”
Williams said he saw other deeply troubling things in private messages on TheDonald and on affiliated communities on Signal and Telegram, two encrypted messaging sites. He believes private channels on all three platforms hosted the most aggressive planning and instigation for the Capitol siege.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/05/why-thedonald-moderator-left/
so many platforms
so much de-platforming
tsk tsk
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