Gab’s legal team is flooded with correspondence from Germany. The authorities are utterly concerned about evil speech giving rise to Polit-Satan – coincidentally – shortly before the upcoming general election. CEO Andrew Torba wrote an email to his subscribers contemplating whether fight or flight is the right reaction. Should Gab block German IPs? Or should all those fines and legal threats go straight into the trash bin where all those spam fake invoices go?
Tag: Social Media
Facebook Deleted 150 Accounts of Anti-Covid-Policy Protest ‘Querdenker’
Facebook has removed a whopping 150 accounts because of medical misinformation, hate, an odd violence claim, conspiracy theory, and, of course, for conspiring to do all of this in coordination.
The EU Is Scared of Humor
The EU Commission solicited a report on right-wing extremist’s humour. The writers in charge were Maik Fielitz and Reem Ahmed of the Radicalisation Awareness Network RAN. It isn’t quite clear how they define right-wing extremists, but their enumerations don’t contain Islamists who, as the left is convinced, are ‘conservatives’ that, left to their own devices, would degrade any beautiful desert to a stinking free-market economy. We are no longer looking at ‘backward-looking, stiff and formal’ neo-Nazis, they say. But if it isn’t about all these top-hat, tailcoat skinheads with baseball bats that are abundant in Europe, apparently, who are we looking at? Pepe, of course!
And we look at Saul Alinsky, a ‘civil rights activist,’ who wrote the ‘renowned’ book ‘Rules for Radicals.’ ‘Rules for Radicals’ proposes that humour can be used as a weapon. And while sneering does the trick for the left right now, Alinsky’s idea was supposedly ripped from his innocent and harmless communist intentions and misappropriated to sinister internet memes.
sources:
https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/sites/default/files/what-we-do/networks/radicalisation_awareness_network/ran-papers/docs/ran_ad-hoc_pap_fre_humor_20210215_en.pdf
https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/allensbach-umfrage-mehrheit-der-deutschen-ueberzeugt-die-meinungsfreiheit-ist-in-gefahr_id_13403028.html
Poland Set To Outlaw Arbitrary Social Media Bans and Post Removals
Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro is working on a draft law that might create an anti-censorship regime for social media platforms operating in Poland. Failing to reinstate legal posts despite formal judicial review could carry hefty fines between 50,000 and 50 million Zloty (currently around $13,300 and $13.3 million).
After the platform does not respond positively to the users complaint, he can digitally file a ‘court petition’ which leads to a legal review of his post. If the judge upholds the legality of the post and the platform does not react, the case will go to a newly created ‘free speech council’ that has the power to mete out the penalties.
sources:
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55678502
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/14/poland-plans-to-make-censoring-of-social-media-accounts
Adidas’s Only Female Executive Resigns Over Racism Controversy
Karen Parkin was the only female executive on the board of sports wear company Adidas. The British national had a career of 20 years at the company touching Sales, Business Development and Supply Chain Management. That’s all gone now. Her last field of responsibility was Human Resources and as such she failed to acknowledge the need for affirmative action and anti-racism hysteria at Adidas.
She should soon be corrected. After being called out by Product Manager Aaron Ture, famous for something, maybe, or not, she made a Stalinesque apology. She ‘stood 100% against racism’ and ‘worked to create a more equitable environment,’ she said. Anyway, she “acknowledged”, as the New York Times and other activist papers emphasize, that she had become a burden. In her own words it was ‘the focus on me.’ Her name is Karen Parkin, just in case you missed the focus.
Anyway the company announced a slew of policy changes to pander to the left.
sources:
The Platform Talk
I forgot to mention that you will also always be up-to-date when you are subscribed here on WordPress.
Saudi calls for people to report subversive comments on social media
A Saudi man explores a website on his laptop in Riyadh February 11, 2014. REUTERS/Faisal Al Nasser (Reuters) – Saudi Arabia has urged its people to report subversive comments spotted on social media via a phone app, a move denounced by a human rights watchdog as “Orwellian”. The appeal, announced on a Twitter account run […]
more on Peace and Freedom
Blogs and Social Media – Brainstorming
At the beginning blogs were for the most part a matter of special interests. These artsy photo shots you wanted to display, the recipes of your nana, your life as an Asperger and so on.
Then came Zuckerberg. His college interest was about shaming fellow students. He created Facebook. I’m not using FB, because I started taking interest in such affairs fairly recently, but leave all marketing aside and there is nothing but an ordinary blog. With time some gadgets were added to upload and play videos, send files and so forth, but nothing of it was extraordinary.
The whole reason why almost everybody is blogging now is that we as human beings have a tendency to be mean. And FB was the first ‘mean first’ blogging site.
Along came reddit. This started fairly innocently and was about following news and discussing matters of the day. Mean bloggers + politics = even meaner bloggers. Somehow, the age of doxxing began.
I’m not on reddit either so far and I can’t speak of its shortcomings, but somehow ‘Twitter’ rose up to more attention. Twitter differs from other blogs because never-ending texts were replaced with the one-thought-one-post concept. Anywhere in a discussion a different user can come in and make an argument or issue a correction to a post. Also new is that comments and posts are one and the same thing, giving everybody the same tools to slug it out.
The situation today is that Facebook is the basis for many arrests of political opposition around the world. We can’t prove that the company might even be cooperating, but we know that they are very gullible to governments. Until fairly recently Twitter was more defiant driving governments (like Germany) mad and having the lickspittle media complaining about it on end.
Now Twitter cracks down on its users. The tool gab.ai from Texas promises freedom of speech. However, Germans who access gab.ai receive a warning message not to break the law. If gab.ai is willing to kowtow to the German government (and given the threats to fine them I understand it), I’m sure that they will not resist the Chinese, the Pakistani, the Russians and so forth.
Along comes disqus. Disqus allows more signs per post and groups people into channels. You can join a discussion or issue a new post to one of the established channels. I can’t really tell, but I think that is equivalent to the FB Group concept. Disqus, however, does not have the reputation of constantly blocking users, closing accounts, or (I can’t prove it) passing information to totalitarian governments. They have found their niche by offering a widget that manages the comment section of many blogs (most famously Breitbart News).
As far as I can tell disqus is also better programmed than slow-motion Twitter.
And then of course there is WordPress and (Blogger) blogspot who are very traditional. Their strength is that they still serve the cat-photo-autism-poetry clientele well with features most other sites can’t provide. The weakness is indeed the lack of connection between the different bloggers.
That is my quick, uninformed brainstorming on Blogs and social media. Tell me what you think in the comment section?
Goldstein 