This topic is a Discourse forum successor to the curi blog topic with tons of deplatforming and censorship examples:
Former Republican candidate for Senate had their bank account shut down
People who haven’t violated any clear, written rules often have their income put in jeopardy due to the actions of social media companies. This is one of many such examples. I think it is a major problem that social media companies can put people’s income in jeopardy without any clear reason for doing so, especially when those companies pretend to have objective, written policies that they follow, and especially when those same companies often make tons of money off some of the people they eventually wind up banning.
Brittany Venti was completely demonetized on YouTube due to a strike on an old video. (she talks about demonetization and moving plans in a “tl;dr” part at the beginning which is all that I watched)
Yeah it’s not just right wing people that get deplatformed. thunderf00t seems like a leftist (he generally doesn’t talk politics, but I think he’s flamed Trump and advocated the standard leftist view of global warming) with a science channel who ran into YouTube deplatforming problems for … advocating the mainstream view on coronavirus (he e.g. tried to scientifically debunk anti-maskers claiming that wearing a mask dangerously deprives you of oxygen. this was after the authorities had started telling people to wear masks, not early on.)
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YouTube removed a Chinese human right group:
FYI, Fuentes is an awful anti-semite and seems racist. I tried to get you a link but the Canary Mission video on YouTube was taken down for “hate speech”, maybe because it quoted hate speech.
Oh they have a page specifically about him that didn’t show up on my Bing search.
He’s a holocaust denier.
Careful who you’re defending or what kinda people you’re getting information from.
On November 18, 2019, Fuentes featured in a video posted on Twitter in October 2019, where he mocked and doubted the scope of the Holocaust, using the metaphor of cookies baked in an oven as a euphemism for Jews who were incinerated in crematoria by the Nazis.
Fuentes questioned [00:00:00] whether one could bake 6 million batches of cookies in fifteen ovens, which each take an hour to bake, cooking 24 hours a day every day in five years.
Fuentes said [00:00:37]: “I don’t know, it certainly wouldn’t be 5 years right, the math doesn’t seem to add up there. The math doesn’t quite seem to add up there. I don’t think you’d result in 6 million, maybe 200-300,000 cookies…”
He can’t even math. 15x24x365x5 is 657k not 200-300k.
https://nationalfile.com/breaking-nick-fuentes-banned-from-twitter-following-adl-and-splc-hitpieces/
“These Twitter bans used to matter. Not anymore,” said Andrew Torba, the CEO of free speech social media platform Gab. “Nick has almost 70,000 followers on Gab, almost 40k on Telegram, and gets millions of views on Banned TV and Gab TV. He was smart and built his own live streaming platform that he can’t be banned from. He was smart and embraced alt tech early before this happened. Be like Nick, be smart.”
The CEO of Gab is an idiot and/or a bigot who actually likes Fuentes.
Sites like National File (which I know nothing about) aren’t even like “Fuentes is despicable but I support free speech anyway.” They just seem to like him or something. The article opens:
Fuentes, the conservative populist commentator and host of the nightly show America First, was banned from Twitter on Friday, with Fuentes announcing his permanent ban on Gab and Telegram. It is unclear at the time of writing exactly why Fuentes was banned from the Big Tech platform.
That’s a biased whitewash.
Yeah I think he’s awful. Should have made that clear. Was linking tweet for the fact of Fuentes’ ban, not for the tweeter’s evaluation.
I still don’t think Twitter should ban him, just like I don’t think they should ban people like that nazi guy Richard Spencer. But I’d put him in that category - of awful people who still shouldn’t be banned cuz the tech companies shouldn’t be acting as the speech police.
I’ve noticed that some people on the right who seem to have much more reasonable views overall sanction Fuentes, and I find that troubling.
I also think SPLC is a biased left wing smear group. But in Fuentes’ case they actually have real material to work with… (I haven’t read their piece)
Please don’t link awful content at this forum without disclaimers, warnings, etc. Or just don’t post it at all. Plenty of non-awful people get deplatformed, and there’s no need to spread links to propaganda. You also could probably have found some less biased article that reports the Twitter ban.
Attention matters. Don’t ask for attention for things that aren’t worthy or are dangerous (just like many people don’t fully see through New York Times propaganda, including people who think they do … so many people also won’t fully see through the sort of propaganda you linked), and draw other people’s attention to them. I’m not trying to be really picky about quality in general. Not every link has to be super amazing. But I think Fuentes stuff crosses a line. (I wouldn’t really want criticism of Fuentes either btw, because why bring him to people’s attention? In general, he does not merit discussion.)
I’m not even convinced that Fuentes should be allowed on Twitter. He’s apparently e.g. called for violence.
OK @ not linking awful content. I really don’t like deplatforming and I think I was being pretty indiscriminate in linking examples. I’ll try to give such things more thought. I’ll at least try to do better disclaimers and whatnot.
I looked online a bit. Interestingly, it seems like some pretty mainstream conservative people are somewhat defending Fuentes, at least vis-a-vis Twitter ban, which I find surprising. E.g.:
I think Shapiro’s claim about Twitter being biased is true, but I’m really surprised to hear him making that claim in this context. I seem to recall him throwing Roseanne under the bus? Some more examples of mainstream people defending Fuentes here (not endorsing article or quotes - just linking it because I find this sudden willingness of mainstream conservatives to defend Fuentes really curious and it gives examples of this):
I had a visceral low-level negative reaction to the idea that an article could be dangerous. Waste of time or not worth paying attention to, I can see - dangerous, I am not so sure. That’s not an argument - I just thought the disagreement was worth noting. I think one mental connection I have is that if something is dangerous, then force can be legitimate to suppress its use. Like a guy running around with a gun in a crowded area is dangerous, and it’s okay to use force to stop him. So if an article or book is dangerous, maybe the same would apply? Anyways I don’t think you’re even remotely an advocate of using force to suppress articles you consider dangerous - I’m just trying to explain and understand my own negative reaction.
I would not link NYT stuff generally because I don’t think it’s very interesting. OTOH if there was an article that had a particular clear example of the broken window fallacy and I thought that was interesting, I would link it, though I’d comment on the error as well…so It wouldn’t be just a bare link potentially spreading misinformation.
I am persuaded that Fuentes is bad enough that he crosses a line.
BTW re: violence, I found something where he seemed to say maybe people should kill state legislators but then walked it back and said no. Is that what you found? It seemed bad but he seems to do stuff in this “haha jk mb?
” (not a real quote!) kind of style which makes it harder to pin down what his actual views are. Though even being in the general area of maybe suggesting political killings is incredibly bad.
Sorry if this is too much stuff related to Fuentes after I agreed that he’s awful and maybe we shouldn’t be talking about him … I had some things to say though, seemed better to say them than not.
No. He said multiple things about violence. I just read a little of the link I gave:
In the section
Celebrating Political Violence
One of the first quotes is:
Time to kill the globalists
And from the same paragraph:
I want the people that run CNN to be arrested and deported or hanged
I imagine he also wants the people who run Twitter hanged about as much as he wants the CNN folks hanged.
Talking about killing state legislators and then walking it back sounds like a way to call for violence while having some sort of (fake) plausible deniability. It sounds like inciting violence, not free speech.
Thanks, I appreciate the reply. And … yikes wtf why are people defending this guy? I knew he was a Holocaust denier and thought that was bad enough (it’s super super awful, to be clear) but still wouldn’t want him to be deplatformed for that. But calling for people to be murdered now is a different matter!
Yeah I think you are right.
The more prominent people defending Fuentes are right wing tribalists who you should not be following/reading/respecting/etc. Reading them is like reading the New York Times – super biased, very hard to recognize and correct for every lie or bias while reading, and if you actually understand how bad they are why would you want to read them? (Besides reading them for opposition research, which I don’t recommend spending your life on.)
I noticed in the preview of the Ben Shapiro tweet you shared that he was careful not to defend Fuentes and focused on legitimately flaming Twitter. (Shapiro is a bad thinker IMO, but he’s not Fuentes-level awful.)
The less prominent people may just be ignorant followers, many of whom are tribalist but not all.
It’s not a big deal once the topic is open and there’s a reasonable purpose/goal to the discussion. The initial link is the part I have an issue with, which just shared biased pro-Fuentes stuff without warnings, criticism, opinions, questions, etc. And in general there are better topics. But at this point in the conversation, I don’t think extra messages about how awful Fuentes is are going to cause a problem for readers.