For days leading up to yesterday’s electoral college certification, posters used social media sites like Gab and Parler, encrypted messaging platforms like Telegram, and the pro-Trump forum The Donald to organize and share information.
Some messages on the pro-Trump forum The Donald urged the murders of Democratic leaders like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
As the mob prowled the capitol complex, some used livestreaming sites like DLive to boast of occupying lawmakers’ offices. Some even streamed from Nancy Pelosi's office.
While fringe sites aided and amplified yesterday’s mayhem, some of the biggest names in tech have abetted the coalescing of the violent far-right, online extremism researcher @MeganSquire0 told me.
“The mainstream platforms have turned a blind eye to groups and individuals inciting violence and harassing users for years,” she told me.
“After some half-hearted attempts to ban the accounts or tamp down on the violent rhetoric around the election, some of the extremists ended up relocating their audiences to newer, smaller, niche platforms," Squire told me.
Twitter suspended Trump last night, and Facebook did the same, now saying his page is indefinitely suspended. But there's still a ton of this stuff on both sites.
BTW — People like Baked Alaska, while they've been banned from places like YouTube, STILL have Instagram accounts where they're boasting of occupying Pelosi's office.
On DLive — the live-streaming site dominated by far-right voices like "Baked Alaska" (Tim “Treadstone” Gionet) and Nick Fuentes and his far-right/white nationalist "Groypers" — streamers get thousands in donations, and DLive takes a 20% cut.
These people, including the Proud Boys, are extremely active in 1-to-many channels on Telegram, and as @MeganSquire0 has pointed out, Telegram is about to start monetizing channels like that.
The Donald forum was originally on Reddit before being kicked off, and now it's on its own site (not sharing the domain) and apparently, their current host is giving them less than a day to ameliorate all the filth and threats and violence on the platform.
But they're already making backup domains, and I doubt this forum is going anywhere anytime soon.
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Gov. Mike Dewine has signed SB175, the Ohio legislation that includes a "stand your ground" law despite opposition and his own hints that he might veto it because lawmakers refused to take up a modest gun reform package he proposed.
After a 2019 mass shooting in Dayton, Dewine faced calls from protesters to "do something." In response, he proposed an extremely modest reform agenda. The GOP-led legislature in Ohio has blocked his proposals.
Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley: “Gov. DeWine came to our city and stood on stage for a vigil for our murdered friends and neighbors, and then told us he stood with our community in our fight against gun violence. Now it seems that he does not."
"We’re headed right back to where we were on April 1, and I don’t think there’s any appetite among the general population nor of our political leaders to do much more about it,” said Dr. Michael Saag, an infectious disease expert at UAB.
The racist, sexist and homophobic content runs the gamut from a 2018 defense of an Alabama student who used the n-word to a piece in 2016 entitled “Need cotton pickers.”