Everyone is applauding this because they hate Trump, but take a step back and see the bigger picture. This could backfire in serious ways, and it plays to Trump's base's narrative that the mainstream media and tech giants are colluding to silence conservatives (and maybe there could even be some truth to that.) I know the Valley is an echo chamber, so obviously no one is going to ever realize this.
It can’t be all perfectly achieved, but to do nothing, as they were before, could be now determined to be a worse case than providing these annotations to flagrant misuse by the highest impact profile that they can’t do away with entirely.
One way to look at this is that that's exactly what Twitter has started doing. The president violated the TOS, and got the treatment prescribed under the TOS. His EO yesterday essentially asked for everyone to be treated in accordance with the TOS, so he's (ironically) getting exactly what he asked for.
It remains to be seen whether, in compliance with the EO, they apply this to everyone in a transparent and uniform way from now on. I hope they do.
Ultimately the more and more "dangerous" opinions and people who share those opinions are silenced the more and more dangerous they become in reality.
EDIT: The nature of this comment is intended to be observational not advocational.
0 - https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-10-19/trump-...
So what?
There’s no law prohibiting these types of businesses from supporting a political candidate. They could plaster a huge “Vote For X” banner at the top of every person’s profile. Don’t like it? Don’t use it.
It’s not like Twitter is tax-exempt which would prohibit it from endorsing candidates like Churches.
It's within their rights to do take these actions, fact checks and hiding/deleting tweets, to protect their ecosystem. If it is questionably legal because it may influence the election, then I haven't seen the law it is breaking. I see a better argument for showing Twitter promoting Trump's feed to drive clicks as an in kind donation which could quickly break legal campaign donation limits.
Twitter has taken a stand here and I do think they should apply their policies evenly. Will they effectively apply this to everything or even have the capacity built out now to do so? I doubt it. They are a business who needs user engagement to drive profit from ads. If they constrain their most clicked tweets it could lower their revenue even if initially those tweets get attention for being removed.
EDIT: Scroll down a bit, the original poster made their account private a few moments ago
...but I think a greater concern we can all agree on, is that for the type of communications that Twitter does - Twitter is effectively a monopoly. The people being censored here can't even themselves go to any alternative platform, because there's really no other platform at that scale for that content format.
...that's a bigger problem, because it gives Twitter the power to shape global communications unilaterally. Something no corporation should have the power to do.
I think, broadly, that censorship should be regulated by democratically elected bodies - not corporations.
This is an uncomfortable, rude, politically incorrect truth - but we're not going to have a productive discussion about "silencing conservatives" if we can't admit it.
It is absolutely possible to advocate for the political positions of conservatives (looking through the 2016 GOP platform, for instance - limited government, federalism, avoiding trade deficits, repeal of Dodd-Frank, auditing the Fed, right-to-work, opposition to abortion, support for the electoral college, removing gray wolves from the endangered species list, etc., etc.) without behavior that runs afoul of the norms. If there's a case where Twitter suspends someone for opposing Dodd-Frank, then we should absolutely criticize Twitter. (And I think there's a legitimate discussion to be had about where the line is about criticizing the government's pandemic response vs. spreading misinformation, for instance.) But saying "Conservatives really like to advocate for shooting people without due process, Twitter doesn't permit the advocacy of shooting people without due process, therefore Twitter is biased against conservatives" is more of a statement about conservatives than about Twitter.
Remember that Twitter gets something like 500 million tweets per day. If it took someone working minimum wage 15 seconds to decide whether or not a tweet violates their ToS, Twitter would spend 30 million dollars a day on this, and the results probably wouldn't even be that good. So they don't do that, instead focusing resources where they will have the most impact.
I am also pretty sure they are not trying to censor conservative viewpoints. If Joe Biden starts telling people to go shoot looters or that Mitch McConnell murdered one of his aides, I am sure they will add a little note to those tweets.
Deplatforming works.
Looting always leads to shooting. This is a simple fact.
I'm horrified that so many people think me saying that is glorifying violence. I don't understand it in the slightest. Seeing this tweet by Trump get silenced absolutely convinces me that there is a conspiracy. Not so much against the right, but against truth.
And Senate Republicans have openly asked judges to resign so they can be replaced by conservative judges, and their justification for why it's okay to do this so close to an election but it wasn't okay to confirm Garland so close to an election literally amounts to "Obama's a Democrat, Trump's a Republican."
That makes it sound like Trump used it in a similar fashion.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/where-does-phrase-...
As a Twitter user, I've been concerned with this as well. Clicking on the Minneapolis riots "trend", roughly 1/3 of the top tweets were promoting violence while the overwhelming majority of the remainder were merely sympathetic toward the violence, with only a small sliver denouncing the violence. Note that I don't follow violent or far-left accounts (generally a-political tech accounts, and I'll unfollow people who have especially authoritarian or hateful views in either direction), yet these are overwhelmingly promoted to me (in general, not just in the particular case of the MN riots) either in trends or in the random "here, have this extreme, toxic Tweet from another follower of someone you follow" Tweets that Twitter tosses into my feed. I'm not sure that Twitter is actively promoting extreme left-wing views (it could be that Twitter's user base is really just so far left that its algorithms just can't find any moderate content for me or something), but I don't blame anyone for thinking it does.
EDIT: I'm aware this is a controversial topic, but I'm curious if I'm being downvoted because people don't believe my characterization of my timeline/trends or because my tone was less than thrilled with the volume of left-wing tweets I'm shown or something else. I'm a heretic and I don't deserve my Internet Points, so take them away, but indulge my curiosity about your specific objections! :)
Although it may mean fewer people become part of the community it would also mean that those that remain with it are now more isolated from the outside world and increase the precieved level of persecution? Would this then correlate with an increase in action?
I don't know the answer to this, it seems logical to me that each of these answers would be yes, but I definitely think it is a topic worth investigating and discussing.
“The country wasn’t based on executive orders,” Trump said at a South Carolina campaign stop in February 2016. “Right now, Obama goes around signing executive orders. He can’t even get along with the Democrats, and he goes around signing all these executive orders. It’s a basic disaster. You can’t do it.”
I know I'm probably pissing in the wind here, but I was looking forward to a president ceding some of his power back to congress, so this one really sticks in my craw. Oh well.
That assumes that all users on Twitter are equal. By Twitter's own rules [1], there are two classes of users. Elected officials are held to a different standard. That's why this tweet is hidden behind a click, rather than removed. That's why Trump hasn't been banned despite repeatedly violating the TOS that he agreed to when he signed up for his account.
It makes sense to me that if elected officials (a tiny fraction of the population who already have a much bigger voice than the common citizen) are allowed to break the plebeian rules, then social media platforms should be more willing to point out when they're doing so.
[1]: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/public-intere...
That's what the tweet says, there are screenshots in the replies.
I think the realistic truth is that Trump doesn't really have a precise idea about what he's saying quite a bit of the time. His defenders rush in, and shape his words into their best possible light, and of course his opponents shape his words into their worst possible light.
Which version did Trump mean? Almost certainly neither: his modus operandi has been to say many vague things, and gauge the reaction to determine his next steps. Part of this process means simply speaking a LOT, and saying things that are vague and inflammatory. What better way to read a reaction than to ensure you create a reaction in the first place? In this sense, his words only have as much power as we keep giving them, and yet no one one seems to have learned this lesson.
You seem intelligent and well-spoken. I believe that when you say "looting always to leads shooting" you mean something like "when people are looting, it's unfortunately almost inevitable that there will be violence." (Please correct me if I've got you wrong.) When Trump says it, he doesn't tend to mean anything in particular. As usual, he's trying to drum up controversy.
And so, there's a difference in context between when you might say it, and when the president says it. It's not simply the case that I believe you hold a genuine belief, and that Trump is pressure testing his next controversy. It's also the case that you're a private citizen, willing to explain and qualify your claims, while Trump is the head of country, intentionally saying inflammatory things during difficult times.
[edit]
Apologies, I actually had no idea there was a particular history to the phrase "when looting starts, shooting starts"
There's no hidden meaning here.
>"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." This federal law preempts any state laws to the contrary: "[n]o cause of action may be brought and no liability may be imposed under any State or local law that is inconsistent with this section."
There is no such requirement.
Twitter is well within its rights and ethically totally clear to "police" a sentiment from the President of the United States, while letting much more severe sentiments from egg accounts go un-policed.
Moderation isn't an algorithm, a binary condition, applied perfectly to an input set to get a deterministic output. It's subjective, and that's both OK and correct.
There’s plenty of evidence that many sites (twitter included) allow violent speech from specific groups because they’re worried of the political backlash. These groups still complain about being silenced just the same, despite blatantly violating the TOS.
It doesn’t work. You’re just giving dangerous and violent people a platform to organize, encourage and enable violence. As a platform owner, you can’t just hope they’ll behave if you treat them nicely.
POTUS has the most popular (and currently most controversial - note, that's _controversial_ not _extreme_ or some other morph) so it's easy to see why Twitter are on top of it. Other blue-checked accounts, whilst more "important" than unverified, just simply don't compare to the importance and prevalance of POTUS' account.
The next time the Democrats control the Senate and the Republicans the whitehouse, I wouldn't expect them be interested in confirming any judges right before a Presidential election either.
Ideally the enforcement of every rule should apply to everyone equally, but in practice we see the police behave differently towards different people, we see tax audits and penalties applied mostly to people without the means to defend themselves and we see how apparently the law and government rules don't even apply to Trump. The world still goes on and we somehow deal with all of this.
Twitter enforcing their own rules is just going to be more of the same.
What about setting up a blog on whitehouse.com? Most normal people can't get the same audience, but Trump's not normal.
>If they only selective moderate accounts, then that protection may not survive in court.
Even assuming there was a service moderating by purely political guidelines, I don't see how 230 would stop applying. Otherwise, a lot of websites will be screwed. For instance, any website run by a political party that allows comments.
>that's a bigger problem, because it gives Twitter the power to shape global communications unilaterally. Something no corporation should have the power to do.
The solution to a monopoly abusing its power isn't to write piecemeal law curtailing things as they come up. The solution is to get rid of the monopoly (breaking it up, making it so competitors join the market, etc).
But this order isn't about monopolies. It's a party plank and rallying cry.
My only nit with what you said is with this: "when people are looting, it's unfortunately almost inevitable that there will be violence."
I would say that looting is violence. I would further add three things. 1. that self defense is justified when violence against your person and property is committed. 2. Even more importantly, it is the job of the police to stop these violent crimes, at gunpoint if necessary. 3. Even more tellingly, if anybody here's livelihood or home was getting looted that person would be calling the police to do their job.
It's not only acceptable but actually ethically correct to hold those with more power to higher standards of responsibility.
It's therefore not only acceptable but actually ethically correct to enforce these rules more proactively against the President of the United States than some Russian bot account.
Moderation, at scale, is a very tough problem to solve.
It's worse than that. There were at least three high ranking Republican Senators who said that if Clinton won the election, they would go her entire 4 (or 8) years without confirming any Supreme Court nominees, keeping any vacant seats open until there was a Republican President again to fill them.
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of — any action voluntarily taken in __good faith__ to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected
...and that specific requirement has been specifically referenced in Trump's recent executive order.
Twitter is not tax-exempt but is certainly lawsuit-exempt to a large degree. The entire reason twitter has not be sued into oblivion for the actions of it's users is because of the protections Section 230[1] grants them.
But here is the pinch. Section 230 protection applies only as long as you act as platforms for 3rd party speech. But when they start plastering "Vote for X" banners on their websites of their own violations, they go from being platforms for 3rd party speech to 1st party publishers. That effectively removes the Section 230 protections twitter enjoys.
I much as I hate to say it, Trump might be right this once. Twitter has stopped being a neutral platform enforcing consistent policies for quite some time now.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
Completely agree with your second point though (not that there is any collusion to silence conservatives - but that this whole situation will be taken that way and used to energize that base).
If conservatives feel they are being silenced but cannot recognize that the views 'censored' are often bigoted, racist, or simply unpopular or abhorrent outside their bubble, then what do you to? If you call out blatant racism you are less likely to find the user recognize their racism, apologize, and not use such language again and more likely to be called a snowflake and have that behavior turned up a notch. If the original comment is then downvoted by the community or removed by mods then it will enforce that persons view that they are being attacked. This is incredibly common on Reddit where users often include a 'bring on the downvotes' type edit after stating something intolerant or clearly false.
The solution is not to allow these views and opinions to sit unchecked but to recognize a modern civil society must be intolerant of intolerance and moderate appropriately. Downvote and report racist comments. Apply fact checking to statements, even those you believe or feel to be true as that is a sign of bias. If the user doubles down, move on as there is no value in arguing with someone putting their feelings and beliefs/bias above facts and reality. Perhaps when society or their online community turns their back on their comments they will finally have the time to reflect on why and recognize their behavior was unwarranted and unwanted.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/28/technology/trump-twitter-...
I don't really even think property damage should be included in the definition of "violence" and maybe Twitter agrees with me.
She also didn't say what to burn down. Trump was very clear that looters are who he wanted shot. Burn it down is a common saying that can mean anything from literally burning stuff to just tearing down a system in order to rebuild.
They review everything after an account gets so many likes. The platform is responsible. One day I was doing something dangerous on a live stream -- immediately banned for 48 hours and got a human message. Posts with factual errors about current events -- immediately removed, on pain of platform liability. Human reply. No AI.
The platform is liable for what is published on the platform in the same way a newspaper is liable for what is published in the newspaper.
The liability is changing and so yes Twitter is going to police people.
I welcome this change in liability.
But when you're looking at electoral math that says you're about to have even odds of taking the whitehouse and probably won't lose the Senate, that doesn't really apply.
Generally, if you run the federal government, you don't want states objecting to your agenda. And if the opposition is running the federal government, you insist on your right to do things at the state level.
Watching Democrats and Republicans make the exact same arguments depending on whose in power is absolutely hilarious, and it leads to great soundbites, like those of Trump and McConnell talking about what the President should and shouldn't do... depending who the President is.
That's optional though. The modern media, in the interest of money, has done a good job of causing the population of the US to miscategorize themselves into D/R. If it instead focused on human welfare, then we wouldn't be in this mess.
Twitter only has about 150 million daily active users. That's 1/3 of the population of the USA. There is no way in hell Twitter could ever be considered a monopoly when less than 2% of the world's population even uses their platform actively.
Ironic that a microblogging service leads to lack of nuance. who would of thought?
My first read of trump's tweet was explaining the national guard has to move in because 'looting leads to shooting'. As in, we have to restore order to avoid more people getting shot. At the time Trump tweeted this, there was already one death from a pawn store owner shooting a looter.
So depending on your priors, your PoV, Trump was either promoting violence or trying to quell violence.
culture of 140 characters = more confusion, more division, more tribalism. If we valued well written, long form writing from our leaders we wouldn't be in this mess. Instead, we value twitter and leaders who make great slogans and can push people's buttons in 140 characters.
Update: data https://quillette.com/2019/02/12/it-isnt-your-imagination-tw...
Update: admission https://www.vox.com/2018/9/14/17857622/twitter-liberal-emplo...
She posted that tweet more like 11 hours ago. Since that time it has become somewhat infamous - I've seen it in my deliberately not-politicized timeline and separately here on HN. What is the chance their content moderation team hasn't seen it?
That's actually not true. There are legal bounds to what violence he can and cannot threaten. The President is not a dictator, in which case you would be correct. And we don't have to wait for a court to decide that the order is illegal. Members of the military are actually supposed to refuse illegal orders, not obey them blindly like good little Nazis.
Civil Rights Act? States' rights issue. Same–sex marriage? Let the states decide. Abortion? States should be free to ban.
Edit: swapped "Republican" with "Conservative", since the parties' ideologies have shifted over time.
> Glorification of violence policy
...
> You may not threaten violence against an individual or a group of people. We also prohibit the glorification of violence.
(https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/glorification...)
These companies have become, for many, infrastructural. For these companies (who also sell advertising) to take these kinds of actions would essentially be them bypassing campaign finance rules to give MASSIVE contributions of free advertising to candidates. I think its fair to argue that that would be unacceptable interference.
That's the kind of thing that results in the insidious left-wing bias of sites like Twitter. Moderators who don't believe that property damage is a blatant violation of peoples' rights, but do believe peoples' rights are violated by mere words alone, and moderating in accordance with such views.
That's not at all how section 230 works. Section 230 protections. Section 230 provides protection from liability over what their users post. Whatever content they have of their own on their site is completely out of scope as far as section 230 goes.
[Edit: Reading further down the discussion gives some context. That's... disturbing. Still, you are also assuming bad faith on the part of others, and that's not how things are supposed to be done on HN.]
This is a terrible line of thinking. I'm no Trump fan, but there's a ton of things neither Trump nor Obama should have done as president, and excusing one with the actions of another doesn't make a bad act good.
It is also perfectly fair on the Republican side.
Which is an observation, and which is a directive? I think that is the key question that Twitter is dodging. They want to editorialize with their opinion as to which is which, but not for everyone.
You'll say one thing is "ethically correct", and someone else will say the exact opposite thing is "ethically correct".
Neither of you is right, and neither of you is wrong.
No one needs to do anything here. People can research and find stuff out for themselves, and come to their own conclusions.
Every law called "the Civil Rights Act" passed with overwhelming Republican support. All but one passed with more Republican support than Democratic support. The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 received 80% of the republican vote in the house, but only 61% of the democratic vote.
It goes on to say this can’t be possible because it would mean that conservative content would have to violate rules at 4x the rate of others, and that statistically its highly improbable. Why? It’s a known problem that Twitter has a lot of accounts that are fake accounts from bad actors trying to sow discord in the US political system, and those tend to be right leaning. Didn’t Twitter relatively recently do a purge of a large number of accounts that were deemed fake? That could easily skew the numbers, especially because those accounts tend to engage in the kind of rhetoric that gets you banned.
And then the article points to cases where liberal leaning content doesn’t get banned even though it should. I can also find cases where conservative content violates the rules yet it didn’t face consequences, most prominently the president’s account. It’s not just liberals who get a free pass, so I’m not sure what that proves.
Is it possible there is a bias in how Twitter sensors content? Sure. But that article makes it sound like they have a data driven, mathematically rigorous proof that it’s true, and I don’t think they meet that mark.
If it hasn't, does this mean they are free to ban every conservative viewpoint from their platform, like T_D does for liberal ones? If not, why are we letting T_D behave in such a way?
And to be clear, anyone calling for violence should also have similar actions taken against them. But, me shouting get out the guillotine to my 10 followers is different than POTUS saying the same thing.
What is the most annoying about this, though, is the tweet they chose to "Fact Check". (I use quotation marks because "fact checking" by linking to CNN and WaPo is not fact-checking at all, rather an appeal to a different authority.)
The tweet they chose to police is speculation about the future. If I say the boiling point of water is 50 degrees, you can fact-check that. Its an objective truth that water boils at 100c.
If I say mail-in votes will cause election fraud, you cannot prove or disprove that statement. All you can do is show me someone else's statements, opinions, and predictions on the matter.
Given that Trump says so much objectively false stuff, it annoys me they didn't go after one of those tweets instead.
You catch the most flak when you're over the target...
Our laws explicitly forbid the national military "taking over" in such situations -- the national guard (state military) is who is supposed to be deployed.
When you see content like you are talking about, do you report it using the websites’ tools? Please be honest.
I'm not being facetious. Isn't this something the right is actually proud of? I mean, they actually boast about not being "politically correct" (something the rest of the western world calls "common decency").
I'm not sure I believe that claim. I think that looking at past history of voting fraud shows pretty conclusively that _vote by mail_ fraud has always been a very low percentage.
Sure, it's possible that _some_ fraud might happen, but looking at data from Oregon, it's happened two times in twenty years (_from my reading of the conservative database that was linked somewhere yesterday -- sorry :) -- I might be off by an order of magnitude, but it's still small_). That seems like an _extremely_ low incidence rate, and seems a small price to may for the idea that maybe more people will be likely to vote, due to not having to stand in line at polling places, deal with vote suppression efforts, or even just because it's more convenient to fill it out on your own schedule ahead of time.
Now, many will say that states like CA and other large states, who haven't had a large-scale rollout of vote-by-mail with the history and planning that Oregon had, will face more fraud than Oregon did. I think that's actually a very believable point -- we are not going to have a perfect rollout. However, I'd also like to point out that we've had two decades of electronic voting machines that have been proven to be absolutely insecure, as well as numerous cases in other states of voters who have been unable to vote because their polling places were under-staffed or closed too early.
Voting by mail is a proven method that scales well to ensure that larger portions of the populace have the opportunity to vote. It's being considered in light of wanting to limit in-person gatherings. It very unlikely that it's some conspiracy to promote fraud.
If you want to be editorializing people's content then you are a publisher and then you are responsible for the content they write.
The point of social media is that each person is their own publisher and own their own words.
Oterwhise lets just regulate Twitter and FB and Youtube like a publisher and lets see them handle the lawsuits.
"Perhaps conservatives are simply more likely to violate neutral rules regarding harassment and hate speech. In such case, the observed data would not serve to impugn Twitter, but rather conservatives themselves."
If he meant something more measured, he should have said something more measured.
... and then say "no, they need to be ideologically neutral" when they act in ways you dislike.
If fraud was committed successfully, it's not going to show up in the data. You won't know at all. It's like saying "there's no evidence of a cover-up". Well of course there isn't, that's the point.
I've heard plausible methodologies for carrying out mail-in vote fraud that would be undetectable. E.g. mail containing ballots being diverted/"lost". I can neither prove nor disprove this is happening though.
I agree that electronic voting is an even worse idea than mail-in voting.
And you were expecting that from someone who draws a significant amount of fame from "You're fired!", and "I'm the boss", "I have total authority"??
Given limited resources, don't you think it's undeniably correct to direct those resources where they are more effective?
For just about anything you want the alt-right has their "free speech" alternatives. The thing they are whining about is that the reach of these alternatives is way, WAY lower than the reach of the companies/projects of the alt-right. Almost as if the free market actually works and people deliberately choose to not engage in platforms dominated by alt-right hate mongers...
The PATRIOT Act is hardly a champion of many patriotic things. Names mean... very little, so I'm not sure your point.
"Every faction in Africa calls themselves by these noble names - Liberation this, Patriotic that, Democratic Republic of something-or-other... I guess they can't own up to what they usually are: the Federation of Worse Oppressors Than the Last Bunch of Oppressors. Often, the most barbaric atrocities occur when both combatants proclaim themselves Freedom Fighters."
No, it would not, because generally left-wing people don't spread lies with the intention to dissuade people from voting (quite to the contrary, the left wing is fighting for people to have the right and means to vote) or call for storming the White House and start shooting.
Just about every other editorial on right leaning outlets that complain and moan about political correctness?
Oh, and actual self-identified right leaning HN/Redit users. Just ask, many of them will be quick to tell you (some version of) "political correctness is BS".
(To be clear, I know not all right-leaning people think this way, but a very large proportion do).
Just so I'm clear, are you arguing that avoiding political correctness is not a core tenet of a large part of the conservative base? I thought it was a badge of honor for many?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Party_System [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Party_System
Teetering on the brink of an epiphany.
Personally I think they are just trying to call out a moron. But so what if you are trying to "interfere" with the election. Corporations are allowed to interject their own beliefs and politics too
Example 1 - Drumming up support for a war with Iran. No it's not correct to direct resources to where they are most effective. (According to me.)
Example 2 - Trying to get homeless people in SF back on their feet. Yes, direct resources where they are most effective. (Again, according to me.)
But in example 1 if we ask the same question to a war hawk in congress, they'll give you the exact opposite answer. In example 2 if you ask Ayn Rand, again you'll get a different answer.
No one is objectively right or wrong in any of these cases.
I think it's completely possible for a popular pro free speech platform to exist provided it is able to be more user friendly or have some other killer feature.
The entire purpose of Section 230 is to provide protection against civil liability for platforms who publish mere words from their users. Is your position, then, that if we remove the insidious left-wing bias from our political system, there's no need for Section 230 because platforms can never be liable for the mere words that they republish?
Are all of the commentators who are asking for Twitter's Section 230 protections to be removed, including the president, part of an insidious left-wing conspiracy?
It appears as though you are deliberately misinterpreting this statement to confirm your biases.
This statement is obviously intended to be interpreted as “the state will shoot looters (and possibly other protesters) when there is looting during a political protest”. If you genuinely don’t see it this way after considering all of contextual history of racial violence and injustice, it must benefit you to have your head in the sand
> database of prominent, politically active users who are known to have been temporarily or permanently suspended from the platform. … Of 22 prominent, politically active individuals who are known to have been suspended since 2005 and who expressed a preference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, 21 supported Donald Trump.
The Vox piece isn't an "admission" that their moderation is biased. Twitter's CEO is "admitting" that the politics of the developers is heavily liberal:
> “We have a lot of conservative-leaning folks in the company as well, and to be honest, they don’t feel safe to express their opinions at the company,” Dorsey said. “They do feel silenced by just the general swirl of what they perceive to be the broader percentage of leanings within the company, and I don’t think that’s fair or right.”
In my view at the end of the day Twitter can police whoever they want and users can leave if they don't like it.
That's not an opinion or a judgement, that's just reality, as much as 1+1=2 or the sky being blue. It doesn't require interpreting anything or contextualizing anything. It's obvious and plain as day, and eyes and ears and integrity and maturity are all that are required to perceive it. I absolutely believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that any reasonable application of any reasonable rules of moderation concerning threats, abuse, and misinformation would have much more impact on a typical Trump supporter in 2020 than anyone else (still faithful in 2020 folks, that's the type of person we're talking about here), and that that would be almost certainly the fault of the individual, and not biased moderation. The only way moderation would affect both sides equally would be if both sides were the same, or composed of the same sort of people.
But both sides have never been the same, and that's more true now than at any time since the Civil War. Except that now Republicans identify with Confederates instead of Lincoln and his ideals, and somehow Democrats flipped from representing Evangelical rural Southerners to representing the industrialized, urban, and successful parts of America, that were represented by Republicans in Lincoln's day.
FWIW I agree with George Washington that political parties themselves are the poison pill that repeatedly divides and screws up America, and that our current system is fatally flawed because it naturally leads to a two-party system, and that two-party systems by definition lead to more corruption and shittier governance. Just because one party is clearly criminally corrupt doesn't make the other party the goodguys, but until (if ever) we get rid of FPTP voting, it's a "pick the lesser evil" situation, and hoo boy is one evil obviously lesser than the other one.
So look at it this way: are the things that conservatives say outside the bounds of common decency of the 1980s? 1950s? 1930s? Then ask if the kind of things that left-leaning users say are outside the bounds of common decency of the 1980s, 1950s, 1930s.
You say that political correctness is just common decency. Your grandparents probably had a different standard for common decency in their day.
It's funny. I went out of my way to de-politicize the question in order to further the discussion and you promptly re-politicized it in order to muddy it. I suspect it's because you know exactly what I'm getting at. You've avoided the core question no less than 3 times already.
I'll try one more time. Please resist the temptation to play word games or make it political:
If Twitter has limited fact-checking capabilities is it not correct — regardless of politics — to direct those resources where they are more effective?
Therefore (again, regardless of politics), Twitter's actions follow perfectly reasonable logic: that Trump's Tweets would face more scrutiny than say, mine.
Thus, your claim that "the rules are being enforced selectively" can easily be accounted for by Occams Razor: It makes perfect sense that more visible accounts face more scrutiny. It would be highly illogical for Twitter to do otherwise.
I don't think that's a good, or even workable solution. Social media companies are not public utilities.
This is why phrases like "we should nuke them from orbit", which might be calls to violence if made by a head of state, are generally seen as satire, because there's no chance of me actually nuking someone from orbit. Context matters.
That's correct. Luckily, objectivity is not necessary.
I just skimmed through that ruling, and couldn't find this. Could you cite where she ruled that twitter couldn't remove his account?
Contrary to your statement, the Civil Rights Acts were not a "precipitating event for politicians switching parties." That doesn't even make sense--why would politicians who were against civil rights join the party that much more strongly supported every Civil Rights Act from 1957 to 1968?
The realignment of southern democrats actually occurred much later. Nixon did not win a majority in any southern state--to the extent he won with a plurality, it was only because the Democratic vote was split between Humphrey and Wallace. In 1976, Carter won with the same east-coast south/north coalition that long voted Democrat; with Ford winning the west coast and mid-west. Reagan won almost every state, but his margins in New York were larger than his margins in Alabama or the Carolinas. Reagan did blow out Mondale in the south in 1984, but I'm not sure how much that tells us. Even by the time of Clinton, he won Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Georgia, not to mention Arkansas.
I think the more accurate take is that the political realignment of the parties on "civil rights" issues happened more in the mid-late 1980s through 1990s. And it happened because the nature of the "civil rights" debate morphed over that time. The battle fronts during the 1980s and 1990s was not eliminating de jure and overt discrimination (the aim of the 1950s and 1960s legislation republicans supported), but measures like affirmative action, which sought to use the power of government to shape private conduct to eliminate existing inequities. That of course maps very cleanly onto longstanding republican versus democrat positions.
(I'll give another example of situations where political alignments change because the issue has changed rather than the "mix of platforms" of the parties. On the abortion front, for example, a significant amount of the debate has moved from talking about whether it should be legal at all, to talking about whether religious organizations should be required to provide healthcare coverage for them, whether the government should support them with public funding, etc. If you're a consistent libertarian, you might have found yourself more aligned with Democrats back in the early 1990s, but more aligned with Republicans today.)
The overall trend is that justice and respect for human dignity has steadily, undeniably, increased over the last several hundred years. Therefore, generally speaking, I would say that yes, a modern 30-something has more "decency" than one of 50, 75 or 100 years ago.
To be totally clear, I don't fault my grandparents or other people that are products of these eras. They aren't necessarily bad people. And certainly, the measure of "common decency" would, of course, be different then.
I just can't wrap my head around longing for a time when society was more constrained/repressive/intolerant. Yes, there are things I think were better in the past, but they are the exception.
(side note: this is not to say I don't think political correctness can go too far, it certainly can. There are exceptions to everything).
The realignment of southern democrats is due more to the fact that, once segregation--which democrats tolerated and republicans didn't--was off the table, they were more aligned with republicans on other issues, such as religion, gun control, abortion, business regulation, taxes, etc.
HN should have a setting so that the most downvoted posts show up at the top of the page... That would save me a lot of scrolling to get to the unpleasant but accurate content.
First case, Why so insecure that you constantly need the other to reaffirm yourself? Second, Why do you need to reaffirm your college education was actually worth something? (Many cases, sad to say but they should sue to get your money back)
Twitter can clearly not fact-check every single tweet on its platform. But what if they did it for every tweet (maybe from a verified account) that X people report for being untruthful? Trump would look bad even if Twitter held everyone to the same standard, and the blue checkmark would come with some responsibility not to lie, so why not?
Second, we're talking about the 1960s, not the 1860s. By that time, the Democrats were already the party of FDR and JFK, and Republicans were already the party of Richard Nixon. JFK won the Carolinas, Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana, and beat Nixon in Alabama and Mississippi, because it was perceived that he had a poor record on civil rights.
The idea that the “party labels flipped” is just blatant historical revisionism. By the 1950s and 1960s, Democrats were the party both of African Americans (who switched from Republicans during the FDR era), the War in Poverty, and southern segregationists. What happened is that, at some point, support for outright discrimination became unviable, and the battle front moved to other issues, such as affirmative action. That naturally fit into Democrats’ willingness to use the power of government to address social inequities.
But should it be illegal? IMO -- no. If this is the hill that some company wants to die on, let them try. Why not?
Thought experiment: If there was a political candidate running on a platform to destroy the internet, I think it would be perfectly reasonable for internet companies to vouch for the competition.
I'm saying this as someone who thinks Twitter in general is stupid, Trump behaves like a clown on Twitter and the best outcome would be if everyone stopped using Twitter.
But you cannot have it both ways, and in that particular issue he is right.
'gnopgnip may be referring to the much broader liability shield, for the content that you do not remove, which is provided by (c)(1) and has no good-faith requirement. That is Twitter's main "legal protection from defamation and libel" that you mention above.
Trump's executive order suggests that the (c)(1) liability shield could go away if you don't meet the (c)(2) good-faith requirements, which I gather is not considered a strong legal position.
Looking at the union numbers, DNC had 46 senators of whom 45 voted for the act while the GOP had 32 of which 27 voted for it. So in union numbers the DNC senators voted 98% for it, while GOP did so with 84%.
Here is a longer article with this information: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/28/republ...
As a result of this both parties changed. The DNC took a stand for civil rights and the southern democrats left. At the same time the GOP got a lot new members that influenced the party and created the new power base for it. Later GOP close victories all relied on the previous southern democrats.
Bigger picture, it is clear that the party depending on the south needs to cater to a voting base that is not very positive to civil rights movement, and the opposite for a party that wants to hold the north. It is important to understand that the DNC took a stand here that lost them the south long term because it was the right thing to do (in their minds).
You are also not really correct in claiming that "later GOP close victories all relied on the previous southern democrats." The 1976 Carter-Ford election was pretty close, with Carter winning by 2% overall. In North Carolina, Carter won by 10 points, while he won New York by less than 5 points. Regan won North Carolina by 2 points and New York by 3 points 1980.
It's no doubt that Republicans gained a decisive advantage in the south eventually, but that happened decades later.
It's absolutely true, and has absolutely nothing to do with moderation "being hard". As someone who absolutely opposes Trump, but also absolutely opposes our many wars and global bombings, I'm horrified on a daily basis (and have been since 2009 when I joined Twitter) by open calls for violence against a wide variety of countries from Syria to Venezuela to Iran. When has Twitter ever suspended anyone (let alone a public figure, or even Trump himself, who has called for violence against other countries many times) a single time for openly calling for violence against the people of any of the countries? The answer is never. Its beyond absurd, bordering on delusional, to pretend that Twitter's actions here weren't nakedly political and have absolutely nothing to do with a standard against, "fomenting violence".
Probably for Mr Trumps relatives the best way out is hope he dies or have him sectioned - in return for a presidential pardon.
An example: Traditional values would say that modern men have less respect for human dignity given the rise in single motherhood. Out of respect men were expected to stick around and help raise a child.
No everyone is going to agree that we are moving in the right direction. It's important to remember that when engaging in political discussions. That people are not often acting out an evil agenda. They are just going with what they think is right.
Discussions on what is the best way forward for society are far more fruitful than the way politics are generally discussed online. Where the other side is evil and it should be obvious to everyone that they just want to see the world burn.
Also isn't political correctness subjective too? Or is there a canonical definition of what is and is not politically correct that I'm unaware of.
I have since changed it to “conservatives”, which is the ideology that supported Jim Crow and opposed the Civil Rights Act regardless of what the party name happened to be.
This link doesn't say what you claim. It's Dorsey talking about the internal social environment at Twitter's offices, not Twitter's moderation policies.
If you believe your side is the good one and the other is bad, it's probably because it's part of your identity. And that prevents you from thinking about it honestly and results in more polarization. Once you accept they're all full of it, you will think more clearly. And you'll have better dialogue with opposing viewpoints.
> Current party lines blur to to the point of falling apart in the context of the 1964 Act, because it was a huge precipitating event for politicians switching parties (particularly Southern Democrats becoming Republicans). You can't directly map "Rs voted for the Act" onto party membership today: there was a very different mix of platforms at that time, only loosely comparable to what we have now.
In the 1950s and 1960s, as today, Democrats were the party of social welfare, regulation, big government, higher taxes, etc. And republicans were the party of big business, tax cuts, religion in schools, etc. Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx haven't voted for a Republican since the 1920s.
Apart from that, the way you phrased it makes it seem like southern democrats defected to the Republican Party because the democrats supported the 1964 civil rights act. That misleadingly implies that republicans didn't support the 1964 civil rights act (even more strongly)--otherwise, why would southern democrats defect to the Republican Party? Standing alone, it's an assertion that makes no sense, and it subtly tars Republicans as somehow having opposed civil rights.
What happened instead is that the issue changed. "Civil rights" in 1964 meant eliminating discrimination at lunch counters and on busses. That victory was won decisively. By the 1980s and early 1990s, the front had moved to things like affirmative action and racal quotas: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1991/01/15/q.... That triggered a realignment, based on pre-existing ideological lanes. The same republicans who supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 could, entirely consistent with their ideology, oppose affirmative efforts to eliminate racial disparities.
> "Oh look at those rednecks who voted for Trump, why can't they get a college education."
This right here is an example of why it's so easy. Part of what I'm reading there is fundamental attribution error. A person, anywhere right now, that can't get a college education in the US is dealing with a lot of headwind. Our education system is punitive, starting with an A and stripping you of points all the way through, causing undue stress, knowing that if you fail, you probably won't have the money to move forward, and will have great difficulty. Rich people get a free pass on this. Put a system like this together and the reason that people can't get educations is situational, not dispositional. We as a society must do better.
I mentioned miscategorization already, which is something that our brains naturally do when seeing people different from us, and requires intentional mental unbundling to see all humans as the same category. This is why racism is so common as well; without intentional work, humans will find categories by which to judge outsiders.
Our social media breaks human relationships because far too many interactions are decided publicly, through shame, rather than through communication. An enormous emotional abuse crisis in the US has now reached the highest levels of society, both private and public, and I certainly put enormous amounts of blame not on the companies that make social media sites, but because our brains are simply not well-tasked to deal with it. Further, the end of comprehensive mental health, particularly CBT and emotional withholding and the damages that they cause so many people and relationships.
I have a strong feeling that in the coming decade, there will be studies in cognitive psychology demonstrating the connection between stock markets and wealth and the base level fear/reward circuitry of the brain, delaying and reducing ethical and social cognition. Causing a focus on economic power rather than social conformity, and thus damaging society.
Regardless, I apologize for blathering, I think about this stuff a lot.
> There were conservative tendencies in American politics before the 1930s, but the modern conservative movement was founded on opposition to the New Deal. The segregationist Democrats, on the other hand, were for the most part eager supporters of the New Deal—provided it was administered in a way that would exclude African Americans from most of its benefits. You do not have to take my word for it—consider the votes: on labor reform, on entitlements, on financial regulation, etc. If the southern Democrats were “conservatives,” then the New Deal was passed on conservative support, which is a very odd claim to make.
My guess is that there is a huge set of people who doesn’t know the origin, and see the statement as more of a statement of fact.
Correct, but it's disingenuous to suggest they're not strongly correlated at the group level.
You normally have the facts on your side, or else you make generous and clear concessions. What is happening here? You are saying such incorrect (or confusing) things.
In point of fact, Democratic presidential candidates began to lose in Southern states because of integration well before the 1970s. Formerly-Democratic Southerners splintered from the Democratic party for explicitly segregationist reasons, and carried several Southern states under a third-party banner, in two different presidential elections (1948 and 1968).
(One of them, Strom Thurmond, is a direct counterexample to your argument that the Civil Rights Acts were not a "precipitating event for politicians switching parties." At least according to Wikipedia, he switched his affiliation to Republican because of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.)
Is this, like, something you haven't read about yet? Or do you have a strong argument that explains the above, which I don't get yet?
I wonder if there is a relationship between the level of competitiveness that a people have for sports with the level of competitiveness that they have in politics and other aspects said people’s lives.
Competitive behavior seems to desire to highlight differences amongst the in-group versus the outgroups. Competitive behavior also excels at drumming up visceral desire to act regardless of whether the desire is rational or whether the act truly and completely satisfies the desire.
Why is it difficult to immediately associate with the largest in-group i.e. all of humanity / all of life itself / the objective truth?
Why not fight a group that has no members i.e. poverty (that which makes and keeps people poor as opposed to the poor), hunger, homelessness, poor health and disease, intolerable / harmful discomfort (difficulty breathing, too much heat, too much cold, too dry, too wet, etc.), pollution, and death (untimely or all death period)?
No. No it isn't. That's patently ridiculous. Almost every decade of the past couple hundred years has consistently seen better human rights (in the Western World at least).
We're talking about: the elimination of slavery, establishment of women's rights, childrens' rights, elimination of colonialism, elimination of authoritarian rule by non-elected persons, elimination of torture, the right to freedom of speech, the right to a fair trial, single digit illiteracy, near zero deaths due to hunger, reduced systemic oppression against minority groups, reduced systemic oppression against non-traditional sexual orientations, universal access to free basic healthcare (caveat: every western country except the US), universal access to free basic education, and, in my lifetime alone we've added access to affordable and near-instant worldwide communication with the right to use it anyway we see fit (within reason). [0]
Now, how (besides the environment) have things gotten worse from a human dignity standpoint in the west?
The one example you gave was indeed a decent one. I know there are other good ones but there's absolutely no way they will add up enough to tip the scales so that you can argue human rights and dignity have gotten worse overall.
----- [0]: The list provided contains generalizations about "Western Countries". The list is incomplete/imperfect in that there will be some exceptions/caveats. In other words, yes I'm sure someone could find something there to nitpick but it's generally true in the big picture.
Sorry, I won't bite. See if you can bait someone else.
Remember nearly everyone used to farm, including the ancestors of liberals. Today's right wing "family farmers" are the people who were most stubborn or least able to learn new things as their way of life shrank and not the representatives of farming in general.
Debatable
Both are owned by the same oligarchs, it's a pretend lesser of evils game that just pendulum swings back and forth every few election cycles and it amazes me people still fall for this kind of rhetoric. Then again, most people fell for Russiagate hook line and sinker too... and when we increasingly get the evidence about how false it was, crickets... The entire democratic party fell for disinformation just as easily as the republicans did. Stop kidding yourself.
Some Democrats like Thurmond did switch in 1964, because once Democrats abandoned their support for segregation, they found they shared other principles with Republicans. But focusing on those isolated instances overlooks and downplays the deep alliance between Democrats and segregationists. Woodrow Wilson, a pioneer of modern progressive “governance by expert bureaucracy” re-segregated the federal workforce. Segregationist Democrats were a key pillar of support for FDR’s New Deal. George Wallace was a segregationist, and also a New Dealer, a champion of labor who called for expanding Social Security. From 1930-1970, the Democratic coalition was glued together by the New Deal, with northern Democrats agreeing to look the other way at what southern Democrats were doing. (I use 1970 as the end date, because those alliances were in place even by Carter’s time: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/jimmy-carters-racist-camp.... Carter would not have won without the South.)
In fact, a minority of Republicans in the 1960s, like Barry Goldwater, did make overtures towards anti-integration forces, in an effort to win southern votes. But they never managed to dismantle the Democratic New Deal coalition in the south. That didn’t happen until much later. And at that point, two major things had happened. Southern states has transitioned from agricultural to industrial. The economy of places like Georgia had boomed by drawing businesses from northern states with lower taxes and less regulation. At the same time, the focus of the “civil rights” movement changed. It moved onto very different issues like affirmative action. I happen to support affirmative action, but it’s hard to deny that it’s an ideologically very different thing than the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Its the class “negative right” versus “positive right” dichotomy that’s always divided conservative versus liberal thought.
The reason I take an exception to the characterization above is that through omission framing, it attempts to tarnish Republicans for something they were on the right side of, while absolving Democrats of something they were for a long time on the wrong side of. It also falsely equates very different civil rights policies. It goes to Biden’s “[Romney] wants to put y’all back in chains” rhetoric. No, it was Democrats who wanted to do that. Romney, and modern Republicans, don’t want to use the power of government to affirmatively erase historical inequities. But it was the Romney-type pro-business Republicans that were a bulwark of the Civil Rights Acts.
1) Democrats were the party of white ethno-nationalism, starting in the 1800s. 2) Democrats abandon that plank by the 1960s, joining with longstanding Republican efforts and overturning Jim Crow. 3) Much later, for unrelated reasons, the South becomes Republicans.
Is that about right?
I agree with #1 and #2. I disagree with #3 and I don't see how the facts support it.
First, there's the "much later" part of #3. Here [1] are presidential voting records for the 13 states of the confederacy. In every case but Missouri, there is a) a period of near-uniform Democratic domination from 1880-1944, b) a string of Democratic losses, and at least two Republican victories, by 1972.
(Yes, Carter won several of those states after Nixon's disgrace. To some degree I contest the conclusions you're drawing there: so did Hoover, Clinton, etc to lesser degrees. I acknowledge that many of these states were purple in the 1970s, but I don't think that supports the timeline of #3 in context.)
Second, there is the claim of "unrelated reasons". The idea that "a minority of Republicans in the 1960s" made overtures to segregationist Dems is equivalent to saying "Nixon didn't do anything like the Southern Strategy", right? (Or were you talking about regional races?) Doesn't that assertion, in turn, hinge on the idea that "states' rights" (to pick one example) is not an overture? If so, I would call it a weak argument.
[1]
https://www.270towin.com/states/Alabama https://www.270towin.com/states/Georgia https://www.270towin.com/states/Louisiana https://www.270towin.com/states/Mississippi https://www.270towin.com/states/Missouri https://www.270towin.com/states/North_Carolina https://www.270towin.com/states/South_Carolina https://www.270towin.com/states/Tennessee https://www.270towin.com/states/Texas https://www.270towin.com/states/Virginia
But whichever way they interpret it, all that really matters when it comes to fairness is that they are consistent.
If we look at a very non-hypothetical person named Donald Trump, he wrote "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" immediately after "I won't let that happen" and "the Military" and "we will assume control". Without context, the words could be just an opinion or observation, but in the context he used them, that's not a reasonable interpretation. You don't mention sending in the military (who have guns, obviously) and then mention shooting as a total non sequitur in the next sentence.
If somehow improbably he meant it to be an opinion or observation, he phrased it terribly, and Twitter is within their rights to interpret it how he wrote it.
The question is: if the 1964 Civil Rights Act caused a mass exodus from Democrats to Republicans, why was a Democrat outperforming in Alabama compared to New York even by 1980? Democratic support for the Civil Rights Acts May have broken the “solid south” but that doesn’t mean those people became Republicans—who also supported civil rights. Other things needed to happen.
What those things were: they’re related but not the same as “civil rights.” “Civil rights” isn’t a single policy, but a range of policies with different ideological implications. Republicans strongly opposed de jure discrimination, and supported civil rights laws that eliminated such discrimination. But by the 1970s, the fight had moved to different issues: forced bussing, affirmative action, etc. And the race riots of the 1960s, and skyrocketing crime in cities, made “law and order” hot-button issues. Nixon and Reagan capitalized on southern views on those policies.
Saying that Nixon’s “southern strategy” was rooted in opposition to “civil rights” is a very Democratic way to look at the issue. Nixon helped champion the 1957 Civil Rights Act through Congress. He never backtracked on that. What he did was promise disaffected southern Democrats that he would not use the force of government to integrate private society, and would maintain law and order. (So did Carter, by the way.) It’s maybe fair to say it was an appeal to southern racism, but it was not ideologically inconsistent with his support for the civil rights act, and ideologically consistent with conservatism in general. (I happen to agree that you need affirmative action to erase previous discrimination. But I think it’s not intellectually honest to pretend that opposing affirmative measures to equalize society is on a continuum with opposing measures to eliminate de jure discrimination. They’re categorically different things.)
Apart from that, some reasons were in fact unrelated. Starting in the 1970s, the southern economies moved from agricultural to commercial. Southern states realized they could outbid northern states for business though low taxes and low regulation. Southern cities like Atlanta and Charlotte boomed during this period. That dissipated the New Deal sentiments that had previously tied the south to Democrats.
If you asked me what caused the modern Republican “solid south,” I would not say “the civil rights acts.” I think that an unwarranted attempt to tar modern conservatism in with segregationism, which is especially galling because New Deal liberals were in an alliance with segregationists at that time. I would say the proximate cause is the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, and the economic development of the south as being reliant on low taxes and regulation as a way to outcompete the north.
You use 'dignity' to mean, I think, that an individual has been granted autonomy. So a woman is now free to sleep around, terminate her pregnancies at will, and live her life however she pleases; she has rights. To you, she is being treated with dignity because she has autonomy. But that is not, I think, the way the 19th century mind thought (obviously this is a generalization; but think in terms of the kind of person who would have defined what 'common decency' meant in 19th century America). Dignity back then had to do with comportment and behaving well. What you call 'dignity' they would call 'licentiousness', and it would be considered the antithesis of dignity. One of the words for such a woman was 'indecent'.
You can argue that political correctness is just the decent way to speak, but to assume that it is 'common decency' is to assume an awful lot, especially when using that phrase to put down approximately half of the US electorate. The disagreement on just what constitutes 'common decency' is the exact issue here. One cannot resolve the issue by appealing to it. Conservatives and liberals have a different idea of what is offensive/harmful and what is decent because they have different fundamental values.
Or at least some of them do. A whole bunch of people on all sides are just engaging in thoughtless tribalism and mood affiliation. You are not one of the thoughtless ones, obviously. :)
It is not.
That is all.