The ban works

This week, most of the world put on a collective sigh of relief when Joe Biden was inaugurated as president without anything incredibly terrible happening. That does not include the most stubborn loyalists in the Trump train, which haunts Wednesday.

On the Donald Trump board, banned by Reddit for rampant hate speech and harassment, users went in melt mode and named each other as the last surplus of hope that Donald Trump would somehow overthrow the election results and continue to disappear for another four years or more. Great Awakening, the kind of Reddit-banned hub for QAnon theorists who believe Trump secretly waged the pedophile war, has a state of complete reality failure because they believe Trump would storm the inauguration and arrest Sleepy Joe.

Those who appear on normal sites may have noticed a minor downtick in total fear, although Trump remains banned on Twitter, has been banned from Facebook indefinitely, and faces similar ruin on a number of other social media networks. Prohibition of other pro-Trump personalities involved in the Capitol incident apparently also lowered the temperature in the room.

Can things finally improve? No, do not be a dipshit. Here’s this week’s Hellfeed.

Facebook: Uh, the oversight committee will handle it

This week, the company handed over the decision on whether to permanently remove Trump’s exclusion from the company supervisory board, the (presumably) independent body he formed to make decisions about moderation. The Supervisory Board is made up mostly of lawyers, scholars, journalists and human rights activists, and it will be one of its first major decisions – and an opportunity for Facebook to unilaterally control the idea CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, and other board members who can be said on the website.

The council’s decisions are binding, meaning Zuckerberg can not just decide to dominate it, and deliberation will take 90 days, after which Facebook has a week to enforce its decision. This means a final decision on whether the former president can spread bad diatribuses, thin lies, and general pleas for millions on the site will only come in April.

Trump’s ban on Twitter and Snapchat is permanent. He was also banned indefinitely from Shopify and Twitch, while other social media companies are the victim on his supporters and groups involved in the Capitol riot.

(The ban works VAT)

‘A October report of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, followed the spread of fraud, conspiracy theories and misinformation about the US electoral system and determined that the key factor was an institutionalized attempt at disinformation by Trump and his allies in the GOP and the mass media . Social media, according to the study, played only a secondary role, promoting the organized astroturf promotion of a relatively handful of superspreaders.

Look, Twitter, Facebook, and other sites’ decisions to chop off the giant’s head have apparently had an immediate and dramatic impact. Without Trump actually pushing this stuff down the throats of the supporters, a early study by the analysis firm Zignal Labs, it was found that conversations about election fraud on various sites decreased from 2.5 million the week before only 688 000 mentions the week after. Other hashtags like #FightForTrump, #HoldTheLine and “March for Trump” have dropped by 95 percent or more.

Parler is not in a good place right now

Parler, the social media site for people who are more interested in reading Dan Bongino’s opinions on things than hanging out with friends or family, is not having a pleasant month. Parler was flooded with death threats and ask for violence of extremist groups before the riots in the Capitol, and its users were predictable implied as involved. So Google and Apple kicked off its app from their stores, while Amazon Web Services ended its cloud hosting and beat it offline for days. So far, it has only managed to return in the form of a “Technical Problems” page with quick messages from various right-wingers.

The site took on two more bricks this week. Parler sued Amazon in a legally dubious attempt to force the company to bring it back, and the short-term goal was to persuade federal courts to issue an order forcing Amazon to reopen it. charge while the case continues. Per NPR, Judge Barbara Rothstein submitted the request for instruction in terms that are very bad for Parler’s legal luck:

“The Court explicitly rejects any suggestion that the balance of shares or the public interest favor AWS be compelled to present the kind of abusive, violent content in this case, especially in light of the recent riots at the U.S. Capitol,” he said. Rothstein wrote. “That event was a tragic reminder that incendiary rhetoric – faster and easier than many of us would hope – could turn a legitimate protest into a violent uprising.”

Second, Home Guard Committee chairwoman Carolyn Maloney sent a letter to the FBI this week asking the agency to investigate Parler because he is a “potential facilitator of planning and incitement related to the violence.” Parler has immunity from civil or criminal liability for most of the users’ horrific content under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and the request to the FBI may fall flat. But Maloney also said the letter was a prelude to a congressional inquiry by Parler and other websites that facilitated right-wing extremism – which may have exposed it to subpoenas and likely meant CEO John Matze would be the latest in ‘ a series of social media performances dragged before Congress to testify. Maybe he will do better as the 8chan stranger.

… But Gab claims he’s doing well

Gab, the social network that considers itself a “speech-free” site serves as an internet hideout for fascists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other unpleasant people, is on the rise after Parler was taken offline. Between 6 January and 17 January, according to NPR, its user base has doubled to 3.4 million and he has experienced an 800 percent increase in traffic.

Gab, just like Parler, was one of the places where the bitter and hatefully organized the Disasters of the Capitol, and one of its anti-Semitic users posted a message to Gab previously 11 kill and six wounded at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 2018. Gab was chased by his U.S. service providers, including cloud hosts, payment providers and security firms, and serious blow to its operations. It succeeds in crawling back online using cryptocurrency and niche firms such as the domain registrar Epik, which is known for contracts with wit supremacist websites.

There is no reason to doubt that Gab sees an influx of users; it marketed itself directly Supporters of QAnon and other disgruntled right-wingers over the past few weeks. But there is reason to be very skeptical, it also does just as well as it says. A software engineer for Gab’s web host, Sibyl Sytem Ltd., told the Southern Poverty Law Center in February 2019 that its traffic patterns suggested a few thousand or a few tens of thousands of users rather than the alleged 800,000.

Pro-Trump rioters violated the first rule of crime: not to film yourself doing the crime

With effect from January 20, the ongoing Associated Press arrests related to the riot in Capitol blown over 125—For the most part because the offenders streamed almost alive every moment thereof. This week, ProPublica has a interactive timeline of 500 videos drawn from Parler alone (out of over 2500), partly aided by the sloppy design of the site. It’s not even the selfies they took, the text messages that set out exactly where they were, or that most did not even try to disguise their appearance, despite the large media presence.

It is very easy to assume that this reflects a lack of self-awareness on the part of many rioters about the trail of digital evidence they leave behind and the laws they have filmed themselves. But the violence itself was to a large extent the product of incentives for toxic right-wing personalities to go as far as possible in search of viral reach – and for them, the riot comfortably served a dual purpose as deserving spectacle. Also keep in mind that the horde felt so encouraged, reflecting their confidence with which they can go on a rampage no consequences whatsoever, which is not reassuring!

You can ‘t ban me. This is the law

The Polish government, currently controlled by the right-wing populist party Law and Justice, has announced it is drafting a law that will allow social media users to challenge the removal of any post. it’s not illegal. The proposal currently under consideration will give users the right to respond from the social media business involved, which can then be appealed by a government-run “Freedom of Speech Council” and in courts. Law and justice has made it clear that it sees the law as a tool to fight the shadow cabal of left-wing tech executives, who want to censor criticism.

Counterpoint: you are all banned

Uganda order Internet service providers reduced access to all social media sites and online messaging programs before the January 14 election last week. It also blocked access to the internet; it resumed on January 18 and social media is banned ended later. The move came amid brutal opposition to opposition to President Yoweri Museveni’s national resistance movement and was explicitly in retaliation for Facebook banning an “fake” network of accounts and pages linked to the Government Citizens Interaction Center , which is run by the government.

The ban list

• Twitter closed the Chinese embassy to the US from his account after posting a message prompting Uighur women to blow up as ‘baby-making machines’, which apparently refused to delete.
• Twitter also banned ‘@Khamenei_site’, an account allegedly linked to … Ali Khamenei, after placing an image of Trump in the shadow of a drone.
• The far-right provocateur Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet, arrested by the FBI for his role in the Capitol riot, he apparently managed to evade the notice of TikTok’s moderators until recently.
• Steve Bannon slammed back under a rock on YouTube, where he was suspended on 8 January.
• Several QAnon promoters addicted to Twitter have alt accounts and is banned immediately.
• A “rogue moderator” [sic] at 8kun, the center of the QAnon universe, apparently decided to ban the site’s entire / gresearch board and delete all messages. The forum is online again, but all the old threads went down in the memory hole.
• Late Thursday, Italian courts allegedly ordered TikTok blocks access to all users who are not 13 or older after the death of a young woman while recording a viral challenge.