Discord Bans Pro-Trump Server From Its Platform (mashable.com) 251
Mashable reports:
We're all judged by the company we keep.
With that adage seemingly in mind, Discord moved Friday to ban a pro-Donald Trump server from its platform. TheDonald, as the server was titled, allowed likeminded individuals to digitally gather and was directly linked to the recently banned r/DonaldTrump subreddit and a separate discussion forum...
"While there is no evidence of that server being used to organize the Jan 6 riots, Discord decided to ban the server called TheDonald yesterday due to its overt connection to an online forum used to incite violence, plan an armed insurrection in the United States, and spread harmful misinformation related to 2020 U.S. election fraud," a Discord spokesperson confirmed over email.
Mashable even notes one comment they'd spotted about shooting politicians.
And the forum's reaction to Discord's ban included "calling Discord 'pedos' and saying 'these CEOs need to be dragged out into the street.'"
With that adage seemingly in mind, Discord moved Friday to ban a pro-Donald Trump server from its platform. TheDonald, as the server was titled, allowed likeminded individuals to digitally gather and was directly linked to the recently banned r/DonaldTrump subreddit and a separate discussion forum...
"While there is no evidence of that server being used to organize the Jan 6 riots, Discord decided to ban the server called TheDonald yesterday due to its overt connection to an online forum used to incite violence, plan an armed insurrection in the United States, and spread harmful misinformation related to 2020 U.S. election fraud," a Discord spokesperson confirmed over email.
Mashable even notes one comment they'd spotted about shooting politicians.
And the forum's reaction to Discord's ban included "calling Discord 'pedos' and saying 'these CEOs need to be dragged out into the street.'"
#mevirtuoustoo movement (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, if you didn't do it about five years ago, you have zero credibility.
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Discord is a chat room operation, mostly for gamers.
oooooh Section 230 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:oooooh Section 230 (Score:4, Insightful)
The previous 45 Presidents don't seem to have had a problem reaching out without social media.
Re:oooooh Section 230 (Score:4, Insightful)
Kinda says something about this one, doesn't it...?
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Re:oooooh Section 230 (Score:5, Interesting)
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Trump burnt his bridges with the establishment media
You can be sure that any press conference called by Trump would be covered by media across the political spectrum.
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Of course, then he has to be coherent and relevant enough to keep them from cutting away again.
Re:oooooh Section 230 (Score:5, Insightful)
Trump burnt his bridges with the establishment media
You can be sure that any press conference called by Trump would be covered by media across the political spectrum.
Yes, but coverage of a press conference would also have commentators and fact checkers.
On twitter, he pipes his voice directly to his people, without annoying fact checkers pointing out where he is bending the truth.
(it was the fact that social media started adding fact-check to his posts that he was annoyed with.)
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"Bending"?
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You can be sure that any press conference called by Trump would be covered by media across the political spectrum.
Perhaps [poynter.org]
From PressThink: [pressthink.org]
* We will not cover live any speech, rally, or press conference involving the president. The risk of passing along bad information is too great. Instead, we will attend carefully to what he says. If we can independently verify any important news he announces we will bring that to you - after the verification step.
* We plan to suspend normal relations with the Trump White House. That means we won't be attending briefings. (We can watch them on TV.) We won't gather around him as h
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Pressthink is just a chap who writes about journalism. His "declaration" has no relation to any actual news organization or any actual policy regarding coverage of Donald Trump.
QUOTE:
I need to clarify what kind of text this is. I am not a news organization with a White House press pass. I am a journalism professor and writer who is also a press critic. Since 2015, I have written a lot about the problem of covering Donald Trump. This post is a further elaboration of that work. It is written in the voice of
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Trump burnt his bridges with the establishment media
You can be sure that any press conference called by Trump would be covered by media across the political spectrum.
Thank you for bringing this up. I was going to mention, if only there was some other way for the con artist to reach out to millions of Americans. Perhaps an office a short walk down from his with cameras and microphones at the ready.
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Trump burnt his bridges with the establishment media
You can be sure that any press conference called by Trump would be covered by media across the political spectrum.
For the next 11 days anyway ...
Re:oooooh Section 230 (Score:5, Insightful)
The previous 45 Presidents don't seem to have had a problem reaching out without social media.
The first 28 presidents were never broadcast by radio and the first 32 presidents never addressed the public via television. Times change.
While I strongly disagree with what the president has done with his bully pulpit in the months following the election, I also don't feel it's the job of private business to censor the president. That is the job of the judicial and legislative branch of government. I guess we are living in a corporatocracy after all.
If companies are going to decide what is acceptable on their platforms then they should lose all 230 protections.
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While I strongly disagree with what the president has done with his bully pulpit in the months following the election, I also don't feel it's the job of private business to censor the president. That is the job of the judicial and legislative branch of government. I guess we are living in a corporatocracy after all.
Yeah, about that [tumblr.com].
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Yeah, about that.
So Twitter objects to the president on religious grounds?
Re:oooooh Section 230 (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, about that.
So Twitter objects to the president on religious grounds?
No. Twitter objects because it's a private company and can refuse service to anyone they like for any reason. Just like a casino can refuse service to anyone they like. They don't need some made up excuse about a fake belief.*
Nowhere in the Bible does it say to shun homosexuals, only that homosexuality is a sin. If that is the (il)logic being used, that because homosexuality is a sin according to the Bible service can be refused, the Bible also says that a man who divorces his wife then remarries is an adulterer. I'm certain the baker would refuse service to anyone who remarries, including the con artist, right?
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Has anyone told Trump and his evangelical supporters and Newt Gingrich about this?
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Re: oooooh Section 230 (Score:5, Insightful)
You're part of the problem too. You have two choices when confronted with a significant opposing political force. You can compromise or you can fight. The decision to ignore, dehumanize and/or insult is a decision to fight.
These people will be coming with firearms, not internet quips.
But how do you compromise with a group of people who are basing their opinions on complete and utter lies and are only willing to accept facts that supports their "cause"?
For example, lets say that an election commission was held to investigate the voting system. It finds that there was no fraud, same as all of the audits. Or maybe it finds individual cases, but not enough to change the outcome. Do you really think that that would satisfy them? Any outcome other than what they "feel is true" would become another conspiracy theory and another establishment lie.
Like it or not, these people are evolving into terrorists. And there is a reason why the US, and other countries, do not negotiate with terrorists.
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I also don't feel it's the job of private business to censor the president.
It's always been up to private businesses whether to broadcast the president. TV stations have always had a choice whether to. I would imagine radio stations did as well. Social media having the choice is no different in that aspect.
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I also don't feel it's the job of private business to censor the president.
It's always been up to private businesses whether to broadcast the president. TV stations have always had a choice whether to. I would imagine radio stations did as well. Social media having the choice is no different in that aspect.
There's a big damn difference between choosing to not cover a press conference about new bathroom fixtures in the White House and outright banning the president from your platform for life.
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I also don't feel it's the job of private business to censor the president. That is the job of the judicial and legislative branch of government.
According to the 1st Amendment, you have it exactly backward.
They used different media (Score:2)
They used different media, including the press, physical meetings with groups, proclamations etc.
If they'd had modern tools they'd have used them.
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The previous 45 Presidents don't seem to have had a problem reaching out without social media.
Really? Because the previous president was the first to realise the changing media landscape and it was the previous president who not only had millions of followers with whom he communicated with back in 2008, but who also decided to make Twitter an official part of the Whitehouse correspondents with an official @POTUS tag. In fact said president has had a Twitter account since Twitter was created.
Sure Lincoln didn't use Twitter very much, but then it was also quite a different world. You may not realise t
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The previous 45 Presidents don't seem to have had a problem reaching out without social media.
They relied on The Media, who Trump has spent the last 5 years labeling the Enemy of The People Spouting Fake News (aka: news *he* doesn't like). He kinda painted himself into the corner of having to rely on self-promotional platforms, like Twitter, and now facing the prospect of rolling his own. Media outlets loyal to Trump, like Fox News and, being generous here, Newsmax and OANN will only be able to bend over so much to accommodate him.
I'm losing no sleep over his self-inflicted wounds...
Re:oooooh Section 230 (Score:4, Funny)
Re:oooooh Section 230 (Score:5, Insightful)
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Ever since he got daddy's money he's been following that bit of sage advice: "The best way to make a small fortune investing is to start with a large fortune".
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Trump tried to shit on the Social Media CEOs rice bowl. Now they wont let up....
Yep. He used social media as a tool-- one that had been provided to him for free-- that took him to the White House.
But, he had no loyalty to it-- in a fit of annoyance when some of the social media exhibited a little bit of fortitude, he turned on it.
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He won't be penniless, his capacity for new scams is boundless. Consider that he was shaking down the faithful after the election to "prevent the steal". This from a creature who claimed in the 2016 election he didn't need no stinking big contributors because he was worth $10 Billion and could fund himself. He didn't because he lied about that and went on to tell another 25,000 falsehoods since.
He'll make the rounds of the usual right wingnut money circuit. Soon he'll announce his new scam. I don't know wha
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If it was and S230 they would have done it ages ago. This is clearly just a reaction to the armed attempted coup.
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Never make enemies of people who buy ink by the barrel or bandwidth by the terabyte-second. - Abraham Lincoln
Trump is finished (Score:5, Insightful)
The only question is will the Republican party survive this? 2016 Lindsay Graham didn't think so. Impeachment is coming on Monday. McConnell won't give it a vote because the purpose isn't to impeach Trump (that's a side benefit) it's to force the GOP Senators and House Members on Record as either pro-Trump or anti-Trump.
And that's a lose-lose. Trump still has his followers, and they *vote*. But the GOP still has it's moderates and they vote too. It'll create a massive schism in the party. Maybe even split it in two. But the reason we're a 2 party system is because we're winner take all. So if either party splits, even if it's just by 2% or 3%, that party is over.
It will be a good thing (Score:3, Interesting)
Not possible in Winner Take All (Score:2)
Also it's entirely possible, even likely, that the billionaires who's money powers the engine of our politics will just clamp down and restore the Republican party. The sort of person who backed Trump is generally pretty malleable. Trump may be completely cut off from all forms of mass media
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Trump gained power when "the billionaires who's money powers the engine of our politics" propped up the Boehner/McConnell Congress even after they blatantly lied to their own voters who put them in power in 2014. Promises were not kept. Republican voters everywhere felt like they had no one in Washington to represent them. Trump came along and fed off their ire. It was enough to make him President.
If you think the same political fixers and money men can reign back in the average Republican voter now, yo
You might be right (Score:3)
One things for sure though, you and I are gonna find out. I won't lie, I'd love to see the Republican party tear itself apart of this.
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If the Republican party shed the Trump faction, it would be a much smaller party. But if it could then move back toward the center (closer to where it had been, once-- Reagan would be called a RINO by today's standards) that might be quite a win for America.
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Reagan fought for lower taxes, less regulation, and military strength. About the only thing that Reagan did that would make the Republican base turn on him today was offer amnesty to illegal immigrants. In every other respect, a modern Reagan would be a boon to the Republican party, and I think even Reagan would have to admit today that his amnesty might have been a mistake.
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About the only thing that Reagan did that would make the Republican base turn on him today was offer amnesty to illegal immigrants.
How quickly people forget the Iran Contra scandal.
Violating an embargo to arm muslims in order to fund South American fascist efforts would still turn off today's Republican base.
Re:It will be a good thing (Score:5, Informative)
Would be nice to have a center party in the US.
Where the fuck have you been the last 12+ years?
The democrats are the center party. Center-right even! No, I'm not talking about the half-dozen fringe left candidates that the RWM get their base frothing from the mouth about. I'm talking the heart and soul of the democratic party.
Biden is not some liberal leftist. He's an old-school mostly republican voting conservative most of the time. He spent decades in congress being anti-abortion, pro-war-on-drugs, and entirely center-right! And that's who democrats chose to be the head of their party! Paired with a law-and-order prosecutor who put a ton of people in jail for drug crimes. If you had no idea about the 2020 election and I said, "one party has an attorney general who defended the state against charges that the prison overcrowding amounted to cruel and unusual punishment, and a former senator who has voted for anti-abortion bills and outlawing gays from the military", which party springs to mind?
Warren, Sanders, "the squad" and the rest are not in positions of power in the democratic party. They're barely tugging the democratic party towards something one might call progressive or "left". The democratic party has moved into the center to take over the gulf in philosophical and political space that the republicans left vacant when they lurched far-right.
I don't know how you can watch a party gin up a mob of fascists to storm congress to overthrow a vote and think they're centrist. And when you compare the bulk of the democrats against that far-right extremist party, they cover both sides of the center line. The president and vice president elect are definitely to the right of that center line.
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Which would be a great thing for the USA... and I’m conservative.
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There are also Republicans who are Republicans in ideology and are not racist. Republicans, historically, have cared less about race and have been less racist than Democrats. Unless, of course, you are one of the "new" thinkers who considers anyone as racist if they don't identify someone by the color of their skin and treat them accordingly.
Re: It will be a good thing (Score:2)
With party chapters like the one in Nye County, NV the GOP better split, or its in for long term trouble.
https://nyegop.org/2021/01/08/... [nyegop.org]
Yes. This is a fucking real statement from the Chairman of the Nye County GOP. There needs to be a reckoning in the GOP from Trump all the way down.
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From your lips to God's ears
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If you're worried about your guns don't be. Dems do a little bit of lip service when there's a mass shooting but they're not really gonna *do* anything (and if you'd actually like more gun control, tough. Figure some other way out to stop mass shootings).
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If not for gun control policies I would absolutely vote Democrat much more often. I don't agree with everything even on a moderate Democratic platform, but I'm not too far off. Probably if not for lunatic conspiracy theorists and atrocious abortion policies more people forced to vote (D) would also vote (R).
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And you will become a one party system. Or one-and-a-half party system. Like Japan
If the Republican party self-destructed, the Democratic party would split in two.
The Democrats are a coalition of a number of factions. They're united in that they both hate the authoritarian right wing, but if the right wing vanished, they would go separate ways almost instantly.
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It's literally going to split into 1980s republicans on one side (current incoming administration, I might point out) and the progressive/greens on the other side.
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At least the Dem party is diverse enough that in another country it would be considered a coalition of multiple separate parties. Their political stances range all the way from traditional conservative right to center-left and they don't have an authoritarian personality cult aspect like the GOP does. Nobody worships Biden or Pelosi or Schumer the way Republicans have turned into a party that's all about blind loyalty to Trump and little else. It was a bit mind-blowing when the RNC literally declared they h
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trump.
is still alive.
and wealthy.
what could possibly go wrong
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I just don't understand the double standard. Why weren't people outraged during the 2020 riots?
BLM has a legitimate beef. Trump doesn't.
I like how the response from T's supporters (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:I like how the response from T's supporters (Score:4, Insightful)
It's pretty easy to get retarded opinions in a large group of people and highlight it.
In any left wing group you can find half dozen of people saying things like "kill all whites" etc..
It's even how the far right people recruit in first place, they just get those people, paint em as powerful and "join us or they will kill you" etc..
I hope this stupid trick dies, because it's not good for anyone.
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It's pretty easy to get retarded opinions in a large group of people and highlight it.
True enough.
In any left wing group you can find half dozen of people saying things like "kill all whites" etc..
I pay attention to left wing groups, and have never seen that.
About the closest I've seen is "you white people shout down every voice who isn't white. Why don't you just shut up for a while."
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https://www.splcenter.org/figh... [splcenter.org]
It's pretty rare for the SPLC to call out left-wing groups, and yet, here they are . . .
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The problem is those retarded opinions have a) gotten more and more retarded and b) gone more and more mainstream. The far right is now, say, 20% of the Republican party where it used to be maybe 5% (made up numbers, just pointing out the trend).
On the left, this is also true but to a much more limited extent. Instead, their loud mouth voices have gotten louder and they've been granted legitimacy by parts of the media and culture. And their brand of "crazy" is mostly harmless e.g. "guise, parenting is abuse
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In any left wing group you can find half dozen of people saying things like "kill all whites" etc..
While that's not true at all, I don't see why anyone would worry about it even if it was.
Just tell them that you don't identify as white.
What are they going to do? Tell you that you can't identify as what you want?
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proves their point. Trump is being removed because there's too much risk of him inciting violence. And what's their first reaction? "Drag the Pedos out into the street!".
And yet, I don't see these same people saying to drag Catholic priests into the street.
Alternatives (Score:3)
This is awesome (Score:2)
Tech companies created a massive void for rivals to scoop up disenfranchised conservatives.
Don't they remember, nearly half of voters voted for him...
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Yes, I'm sure these rivals will want to scoop up the lowest rung of dipshits the country has to offer and deal with themselves being deplatformed by DNS, hosting, and app platforms.
"Guys, sweet deal! Look, twitter is dumping user StopTheStealRobertsAndPenceArePedos2020! Quick, we should jump on this!"
Censorship (Score:3, Insightful)
While other platforms ( Twitter, Facebook) are banning Donald Trump, Discord is removing a server used by Trump supporters, without clear indications that it is used for any conspiracy.
No matter how bad was the assault, apparently it is going to justify many, many things that nobody in Slashdot would have supported teen or twenty years ago.
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I think you have forgotten how many times "Chimpy McBushitler" was burned in effigy nearly twenty years ago.
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While other platforms ( Twitter, Facebook) are banning Donald Trump, Discord is removing a server used by Trump supporters, without clear indications that it is used for any conspiracy.
No matter how bad was the assault, apparently it is going to justify many, many things that nobody in Slashdot would have supported teen or twenty years ago.
Doesn't matter. Discord is a private company in the same way Twitter is a private company [tumblr.com].
Re:Censorship (Score:5, Interesting)
False. Slashdot is always the first place to point out that no one owes you some right to a public platform or megaphone. Booting someone you don't want to be associated with off your platform has been supported here since the first AC posted some ramblings misusing a reference to the First Amendment.
As for conspiracy, you're reading too much into it. None of these platforms seemed to ever want extremist political content. What has changed in the past week is the Republican party lost control of the senate, the Dumbarse in Chief conceded the election, and with only 7 working days left there isn't even really enough time for the incumbent government to go on any kind of offence and push through any legislation as punishment.
Powerful people are tolerated when spewing filth and bullshit. What you are witnessing is what happens to those people when their power is stripped away, so is tolerance towards them.
I've been on /. for decades (Score:5, Informative)
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Reddit too. They don't want to be the next 8chan, the site where some terrorist tells everyone what he is going to do and they encourage him, then a bunch of people get murdered.
And none of this will "silence" Trump (Score:2)
He can call a press conference literally at his residence with a moment's notice, and every word he says will be broadcast across the entire planet.
The only difference is that de-platforming his goons will make it more difficult for them to recruit new people for terrorist activities. The same reason ISIS has been de-platformed.
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If you storm a government building with Molotov cocktails and zip tie cuffs while screaming hang Mike Pence you just might be a terrorist.
I liked social media (Score:4, Insightful)
When it was about sharing pictures of meals and drinks you're about to have. The whole political thing has been toxic.
If you ban all the pro trump platfoms (Score:5, Insightful)
How are you going to communicate with these people, we're just not talking about a few middle aged bearded extremists with zip-tie handcuffs, we're talking about almost half the adult population that saw some virtue in voting for Trump.
Some of them must have valid reasons for believing that Trump would do some good that should be heard and understood, and some of them will be open to reason. Those that fit into neither category can at least be engaged if only to keep tabs on their next kidnapping / storming plans
Technology is making secret communication easier every day, having wingnuts communicate in the open should be encouraged
Re:If you ban all the pro trump platfoms (Score:4, Insightful)
Some of them must have valid reasons for believing that Trump would do some good that should be heard and understood
The best article I've seen on that topic is, strangely enough, from Cracked magazine. Don't let the source fool you, though, it's a well-written and serious piece (though with plenty of laughs to keep it interesting): https://www.cracked.com/blog/6... [cracked.com]
Liberal banning (Score:2)
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It's always going to fester aside ground or under.
The "underground" argument has always been nonsensical. Giving them a free megaphone makes it far far worse.
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There were moderated forums even then where you could be tossed off for being a lying racist sack of shit. The alt hierarchy was where the Neonaz-is hung out, so they were easy to avoid.
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Newspapers are frequently irresponsible for reasons having nothing to do with cost. Most of them just copy/paste Reuters or AP stories without fact-checking them or screening them for obvious bias. That newspapers are losing money is mostly caused by shrinking subscriber bases. They are old-fashioned.
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In return they were supposed to stay neutral and not take sides.
This part is not in Section 230. They still have their own free speech rights, which includes selective moderation. Section 230 covers protection against not perfectly removing illegal content. It does not specify anything you have to perform with legal content.
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Banning these groups validates them to their members.
We are headed into an interesting few years.
One thing for certain is that things will not go smoothly as planned for any entity that thinks it will.
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You and I remember Usenet very differently.
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Remember the USENET Death Sentence?
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Big Tech silencing Trump is despicable, immoral
That's the libertarian future: no constraints on big tech.
and anyone claiming he purposefully incited violence is incredibly illogical, and an outright liar. Anyone paying attention to non MSM news outlets knows there were antifa plants that stormed the capital to make Trump supporters look bad .
We are now learning who the people that stormed the capital were. They all have long histories of being Q-Anon believers and alt-right supporters.
And, this riot and occupation didn't come from nowhere-- there were piles of organizing done on electronic media.
History will show Trump parades and supporters are peaceful and calm,
Some are. But, as it turns out: some aren't.
in the face of leftist hate and far left nefarious actors .
Leftist hate is indeed real... but you ought to have to have noticed by now that Trump reveled in it, and any time he started dropping out of the ne
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I know you're just a troll or a russian/chinese astroturfer, but hey, I feel like biting.
Answer this simple question: How long have you known about Donald J. Trump ?
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Harvey Weinstein?
Forget it. He's rolling. [youtube.com]
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You are the one with low watts in your bulb. Zip ties and some fire extinguisher they were allowed to pick up count as "arms" because wuss incompetent capitol police with guns did nothing? .yeah, nope. just some rowdy white trash that wimps with badges allowed to run wild.
"armed insurrection"? south american countries with real coups are laughing