Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/08/21/citing-violence-facebook.html
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In Seattle, where I live, protesters are bringing their own explosives and bricks to toss at police.
“However, we have seen growing movements that, while not directly organizing violence, have celebrated violent acts, shown that they have weapons and suggest they will use them, or have individual followers with patterns of violent behavior.”
So… the Trump campaign?
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I closed my Facebook account earlier this month, after neglecting it for years. Zuckerberg just keeps making that decision look better in hindsight with each passing day.
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Everyone who was fine with the creeping enclosure of the internet commons and private companies shutting down whatever they disliked on their platforms, so long as you happened to agree with it- well, you got what you wanted.
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False equivalencies are the bedrock of Facebook’s and Twitter’s “moderation” policies. Only one side is using social media to promote stochastic terrorism and bigotry, and it’s right-wing populists rather than those who oppose them.
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Is violent overthrow not a part of many communist ideologies?
Not all anarchists or anti-fascists are Communist, and most of these American antifa groups aren’t advocating violent overthrow of the government. If FB was specifically shutting down Stalinist and tankie and violent anarkiddie groups you might have a point, but they’re not.
The groups in question are the people who show up to counter-protest armed and demonstrably violent right-wingers, and they’re being banned because they advocate self-defense.
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Depends on what you mean by “many” and “communist”. But it’s definitely part of the West’s dominant ideology, liberal democracy.
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“However, we have seen growing movements that, while not directly organizing violence, have celebrated violent acts, shown that they have weapons and suggest they will use them, or have individual followers with patterns of violent behavior.”
So they’ll be banning Trump and his followers then?
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So they’re equating antifa with anarchy, and protesters with rioters, just like all the idiots on the right. Not surprised, really.
Delete Facebook.
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Even better, they must be about to ban all governments and their supporters from facebook. Not doing so would be hypocrisy on a huge scale.
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Two years out from shutting down my FB account, it really does feel like quitting smoking… very difficult at first, but as time goes by a feeling of “how did that take up so much space in my life?”
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That depends on what you mean by anarchy. Facebook seems to have decided on a group of anti-hierarchical political philosophies, rather than chaos.
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But were they really getting together on FB? Seems like moving them somewhere else is just doing them a favor.
When the University Socialists were trying to recruit me, a faculty member was very adamant violence would be required to oust the plutocrats (or whatever). So it didn’t seem so outlandish that some would advocate violence. I don’t have a broader point here; I was just asking. Many here in the community have a much better sense what goes on in these circles than I do.
FB gave raw numbers for how many groups were removed, but it didn’t give much in the way of context. I wonder if this is actually a tiny percentage of total Qanon groups on the platform, and what the size of the different groups are. My impression is that there are way more Qanon people in the US than there are anarchists, but it also wouldn’t surprise me if anarchists form more numerous but much smaller groups, due to their voluntarily cooperative but ideologically diverse nature. But also, anarchist/communist ideologies are more popular worldwide, where Qanon’s appeal is hopefully mostly limited to the US.
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This really worries me. If the violent Right-wing people I know are forced off Facebook, they’ll go to some platform built just for them with zero dissenting voices and zero accountability, and their plots and plans will all happen in the dark. We will see a spike in shooting rampages.
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They were only on facebook for outreach anyway. It was where they organise things like mutual aid, all the boring stuff that the press rarely, if ever, reports on.
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We call that 8chan.
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And the NRA. Their whole message boils down to “I’ll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.” What is that if not a call to violence in the face of gun control legislation?
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