Can right-wing populist sentiment be banished from American life by the brute force of social-media censorship? We’re about to find out. Companies say they want to marginalize the violent fringe, but their censorship will grow it instead.
An exception who deserves to be listened to is Alexei Navalny, the Russian democracy advocate and scourge of Vladimir Putin who was poisoned last year.
He pointed out that, unlike the open election process that ousted Mr. Trump, social-media decisions to de-platform
elected officials are unaccountable and arbitrary. “Don’t tell me he was banned for violating Twitter rules. I get death threats here every day for many years, and Twitter doesn’t ban anyone,” Mr. Navalny tweeted.
He added that while Twitter is a private company, “we have seen many examples in Russian and China of such private companies becoming the state’s best friends and enablers when it comes to censorship.”
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Scrambling to deal with a sudden competitive threat to its messaging platform WhatsApp, Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) has released a statement clarifying the upcoming changes to its terms of service.
The privacy concerns have already triggered users to turn to rivals in droves, according to data from Sensor Tower.
Signal was downloaded 8.8M times worldwide in the week after the changes were first announced on Jan. 4 vs. 246K times the week prior. Better service no tracking
Telegram, 2nd best, reached 11.9M downloads (vs. 6.5M), while WhatsApp recorded 9.7M downloads following the announcement, a decrease of 14% from the week before.
We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.”
In District of Columbia, it’s a crime to “intentionally or recklessly act in such a manner to cause
another person to be in reasonable fear”
and to “incite or provoke violence where there is a likelihood that such violence will ensue.”
This language is based on Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), in which the Supreme Court set the standard for speech that
Trump spoke to reporters again on the tarmac of Joint Base Andrews in Maryland and said he didn’t incite the riot. “They’ve analyzed my speech and my words and my final paragraph, my final sentence. And everybody to the tee thought it was totally appropriate,” Trump said.
Trump also lashed out also at Big Tech companies that have censored him following the riot and purged many accounts of alleged conspiracy theorists. Trump was permanently banned by Twitter and banned from using Facebook or Instagram until at least after Biden’s inauguration.
"24/12/2020, China’s market regulator began an antitrust probe into Alibaba & sent investigators to its headquarters
of Hangzhou.
Announcement came after the party’s politburo targeted monopoly businesses to prevent “disorderly expansion of capital”.
The move on Alibaba also came two months after financial regulators dramatically cancelled Ant’s planned $37bn initial public offering, which would have been the world’s largest.
The measures amount to unprecedented squeeze on a business whose ubiquitous services are central to
Opinion FT Alphaville Guest post 6 HOURS AGO
"A strong recovery could be bad for asset prices"
Global liquidity will continue to pour into the world economy. But how will that impact asset prices and the recovery? ft.com/content/4429c2… via @FinancialTimes
Michael J. Howell founded CrossBorder Capital, a London-based advisory investment management company in 1996. He published a book "Capital Wars" on the turbulent rise of global liquidity. In this post, he argues that despite the pool
of cash and credit available to investors breaking fresh records in 2021, global liquidity may prove to be more positive for economies than for asset markets.
When liquidity concentrates in asset markets, measures of so-called monetary velocity — calculated using the ratio of
Congress has co-opted Silicon Valley to do through the back door what government cannot directly accomplish under the Constitution, write @VivekGRamaswamy and Jed Rubenfeld wsj.com/articles/save-… via @WSJ
Facebook and Twitter banned President Trump and numerous supporters after last week’s disgraceful Capitol riot, and Google, Apple and Amazon blocked Twitter alternative Parler—all based on claims of “incitement to violence” and “hate speech.”
Silicon Valley titans cite their ever-changing “terms of service,” but their selective enforcement suggests political motives.
Conventional wisdom holds that technology companies are free to regulate content because they are private, and the