Gab and things with no moderation

To me, this type of great power wielded by the big tech companies is something that really needs to be examined. Yes, the companies are private, but they control WAY too much of our communication to just write those sorts of censorship behaviors off as okay. Conservatives at places like National Review have been concerned about this sort of thing for some time, because the politics of these giants leans way left and it has been conservatives feeling the bias. For example, Dennis Prager has been talking for a while about the YouTube bias against Prager U's videos:

www.nationalreview.com/article/441400/google-youtubes-prageru-censorship-prager-universitys-conservative-videos-censored

And National Review recently had an article, which I can't find now, in which the author's Tweets have been blocked from some sort of promotional process Twitter has within its system - sorry I can't remember the details - but the Tweets were not allowed to be promoted due to phrases such as "illegal alien". These Tweets, which the author put in the article, were research-based facts about illegal immigrants that were not inflammatory or defaming in any way, but apparently simply using the word "illegal" was enough to trigger Twitter's internal bias.

What worries me is that the left really does not mind censorship these days, if the speech doesn't go along with their partisan viewpoint. And it seems they are okay with these tech giants because the owners and CEOs wear tee shirts and promote progressive causes. But this is a VERY dangerous place in unchartered territory, and we need to do a lot of soul searching and analysis to figure out the correct path forward.

I think we ALL should be extremely wary of Google and the like, and the abuses it takes with its search engine and our privacy. This is not good nor right nor American, and we're just ignorant sitting ducks who are too reliant on their services and too ignorant to know how to avoid them.

Speaking of sitting ducks, I just recently heard about search engines that do not track you such as duckduckgo duckduckgo.com/
and startpage - www.startpage.com/

Beyond that, I'm lost myself on what to do, but I find this entire subject extremely concerning.

Cassandra, the administration is not "right-wing". Trump is not "right-wing". Trump's blowhard statements are not anywhere near as damaging or concerning as a giant tech company's (Google's) actions which reach into the vast majority of our households, privacy, behaviors, etc. And Trump has raised important issues about the bias in mainstream news, which for the public, is actually a good thing to help us be more aware and more wary of what we're reading. I don't agree with Trump a lot of the time, and I am disappointed at some of the things he's done, but the MSM HAS been unfairly biased against him in many instances, and in many instances has exaggerated or misrepresented the facts in order to make him look bad. When you find a journalist whom Trump has jailed for faithfully reporting the news or even an opinion piece, please let me know and I will join you in your concern and outrage.

So, I created an account on Gab and am cautiously offering a few "gabs" to see what's up...and watching the feed to see what's down.

Nothing earth-shattering so far.

On the "Which is worse" front, I think it's apples and oranges. Trump can be--and is--awful in this regard. He's hardly an example of a politician willing to listen, willing to let the opposition be heard. Exactly the opposite.

But...every fucking thing is not fodder for a Trump comparison. Twitter and FB have been actively kicking out people for points of view, for expressions of the same. Google the company has recently fired someone over a point of view. And now Apple and Google are essentially preventing a competitor to FB and twitter--one that is explicitly saying it won't block people for points of view--from competing. Gab may be exactly what some are saying: twitter for racists (and trolls). I can't say I really know, at this point.

Be that as it may, I can say I'm not happy with what seems to be happening here, as the idea of the internet as a place for the free exchange of ideas seems to be coming to a rapid end.

On the same front: mobile.nytimes.com/2017/08/24/technology/okcupid-christopher-cantwell.html?referer=https://t.co/XAO5Dk7nMX



Someone is going to be deciding what qualifies as "hate, and what does not, and it's going to be a subjective standard as a matter of course.

Don't hurt yourself reaching, there. Trump isn't right wing because he doesn't have a coherent enough position to be any of wing. But "bias in mainstream news" - oh yeah, the big, bad Liberal Media. Do you think Trump has actually made people more "aware" of anything, when he labels basically every news agency that reports negatively on him "Fake News"? Is a crowd chanting "CNN sucks! CNN sucks!" thoughtful commentary on CNN's reporting, or is it a crowd that would go burn CNN to the ground if Trump told them to?

As for Gab, it was basically set up as a Twitter alternative for the Alt-Right, on the (probably correct) assumption that they were too vulnerable to getting booted off of Twitter. They have been trying to create a number of alternatives to "traditional media" lately, everything from replacing Firefox with Brave to replacing Twitter with Gab to replacing Wikipedia with Infogalactic. Basically, any company they consider "converged" (i.e., taken over by SJWs/liberals) they want to supplant. Now they are talking about finding an alternative to Google. (Heh, good luck with that.) Unsurprisingly, like any social media platform, it's not like you're necessarily going to find the deep end of the cesspool as soon as you set foot in it. I'm sure most of the conversations are pretty banal and innocuous. 4chan isn't all porn and rape jokes either.

Getting back to celaw's latest dutiful parroting of spoon-fed talking points, Google's extensive reach is a legitimate privacy issue, and while the Alt-Right's motives for being suspicious of Alphabet Inc. may be suspect, they're not wrong to point out that the way many people (myself included) have essentially most of their social media presence, online accounts, passwords, and cloud storage all tied one way or the other to a small handful of big companies is certainly cause for concern. Especially if you are a "controversial" person, it behooves you not to be in a position where one Google engineer can lock you out of all your accounts with little recourse for recovery.

That said, being "controversial" in this context usually means things like advocating the deportation of all Jews back to Israel, organizing harassment campaigns against online feminists, running Neo-Nazi sites, and other dickish behavior. While it certainly falls under the protection of the First Amendment, private companies do have a right to implement "No Nazis" policies or even "Don't be a dick" policies, with "dick" being defined according to their own subjective criteria. If you fear you might wind up being in that category, take precautions accordingly.

If too many people think Twitter is being capricious and arbitrary and politically slanted in what they allow and what they don't, then they will take their business elsewhere.

There is a counter-argument (helping you out here, celaw, so you don't have to find a copy/paste at TownHall) which is the same counter-argument to the principle of unlimited "freedom of association" (calm down, Don, we aren't Venezuela yet!): if one business, or a collection of businesses who are all in agreement, have effectively formed a monopoly that makes it nearly impossible to do business without them, then saying "Take your business elsewhere" is effectively saying "Don't do business unless you cede near-governmental levels of authority to these private enterprises." At some point an Internet platform can become essentially a public utility. But it's ironic that suddenly it's conservatives who are worried that Twitter is being too quick to ban trolls; if it was liberals getting the boot for spewing hate for Trump, you'd be all "Yeah, that's what you get for being a dick."

Rob mentions Gab's claim that "other major social-media platforms have hosted ISIS activity, and child-porn rings, facilitated drug dealing, and carried live streams of murder, torture, and other crimes." What that fails to address is the fact that in pretty much every such instance, those things got shut down as soon as the host became aware of them.

I really HATE it when you, Amadan, continue to insult me with the "cut and paste" stuff. Those comments are stupid and ad hominem and petty and immature. But whatever.

Somone was fired at Google for neither being a dick nor being "controversial". He bent over backwards to try not to be either. Yet he was fired. THAT should concern everyone.

And with the number of indoctrinated kids being churned out of our universities each year, you REALLY think left-leaning academia is not an issue? That's a funny one. The fact that liberal institutions vastly outnumber conservative ones, which you so conveniently wrote down up above, IS an issue! Right leaning liberal arts professors have trouble getting hired and being retained or tenured. It's a self-perpetuating phenomenon. And it certainly CAN bring about a Reichstag in terms of shutting down opposing speech/censorship etc. Where do you think these CEOs have been educated? Jack Dorsey went to NYU. Zuckerberg went to Harvard. Pichai went to Stanford and Wharton. Sheesh.

And once more, a bit further down, you helped my point about Trump when you said this:

That's right -- HE CAN'T DO IT! Yet Google and Twitter and the like can do anything they please with regards to this sort of censorship, because they're "private companies".

So no, I'm not shaking in my boots about Trump like you seem to be.  We have checks and balances. But I definitely am concerned with the likes of Google. At this point, there don't seem to be any checks, and there's definitely not balance.

Here's an example of a conservative college's view on freedom of speech on campus:
hillsdalecollegian.com/2016/04/use-free-speech-to-challenge-and-understand-your-beliefs/


THAT'S what a college should be like. 

That's attacking me, not my opinion.



That's attacking me, not my opinion.

I'm not unintelligent. I was able to gain entrance into a top ten U.S. med school. I was raised in a conservative household. So I think it's not unreasonable to believe that I can read the news or current events and formulate some ideas that...SURPRISE...are similar to National Review or a conservative pundit's without having yet read any piece by them that echoes my sentiments. As a matter of fact, that happens pretty regularly. I wish I could come up with all of my opinions spontaneously, without ever being exposed to or gleaning insights from others' expert opinions, but unfortunately I cannot. If you can, more power to you.

Of your request for research/scholarship regarding the imbalance of faculty in universities, there is a TON about the actual numbers. Rations of D vs R range from a few:1 to over 30:1 (and even up to 60:1 at Brown) depending on the school and department. econjwatch.org/file_download/944/LangbertQuainKleinSept2016.pdf?mimetype=pdf
There are more, but I'm confident you can find them yourself.

Not so much is out there about the systemic hiring practices, though there's certainly a lot of anecdotal stuff, as you hinted at.

Here's a good opinion piece that lays out some concerns: www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0320-shields-dunn-conservative-affirmative-action-20160320-story.html

Of course, this problem may be conservatives who self-select out of these areas before they become professors. And here in this line of thinking, we are getting close to our poor Google-fired Damore who tried to speculate on the possible deeper root of the gender difference in tech jobs -- the root of the problem here could go back further than when one applies to a professorial position. However, if it's discrimination further back - like in undergraduate studies where students don't feel comfortable expressing conservative views or see themselves as discriminated against because of their views, then they might be less likely to pursue that line of academia. Or there could be discrimination at the stage of graduate school application. This is speculation, of course, but not out of the realm of real possibility.

In any event, here are two scholarly articles that examine this in more detail:

yoelinbar.net/papers/political_diversity.pdf

www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=731 - this one goes in depth into speculation about issues like group think that could be at least partially to blame here. Common sense tells me it is.

The bottom line for me is that yes, I do think this imbalance in our universities' political ideology is dangerous. I think that, because the group in the majority likes to stifle the speech of the opposition. And the imbalance has been increasing over the last several years - I recently read an article with nice graphs illustrating this, but I can't find it now sorry. And when our most elite schools turn out extraordinary people like Zuckerberg and Pichai who make or rise to the top of monster tech companies and think nothing of the incongruity of firing an employee for his unique perspective while at the same time saying Google employees should feel safe to express differing viewpoints, then I'm of course concerned. Do you honestly think that if Pichai had been educated with the values of Hillsdale college I showed you above, that he would have so quickly fired Damore? I honestly don't think he would have.

And I absolutely think that Google has done more damage to our privacy, and has demonstrated more concerning big-brother type actions like censorship (altered search engine results, etc) in a vastly far-reaching scope, than poor blowhard Donald Trump could ever in his life or presidency do.