The ban is working

This week, most of the world breathed a collective sigh of relief when Joe Biden was sworn in as president without something incredibly terrible happening. That does not include Trump Train’s most stubborn loyalists, who spend Wednesday in a panic.

On the pro-Trump forum The Donald, which was banned from Reddit for rampant hate speech and harassment, users were in fusion mode and turned on each other when the last vestige of hope that Donald Trump would somehow overturn the election results and remain president for another four years or more disappeared. The Great Awakening, the hub also banned by Reddit for QAnon theorists who believe Trump was secretly at war with pedophiles, approached a complete failure state of reality how his Trump belief would invade the grand opening and arrest Sleepy Joe imploded.

Those on sites for normal people may have noticed a minor downtick with general dread, however, as Trump remained banned on Twitter, indefinitely blocked from Facebook and facing a similar disgrace on a number of other social media networks. Banishing other pro-Trump personalities involved in the Capitol incident also seemed to lower the temperature in the room.

Could things finally be looking up? No, don’t be an idiot. Here’s this week’s Hellfeed.

Facebook: Uh, the Supervisory Committee will take care of that

This week, the company delivered the decision on whether Trump’s blockade should be permanent for the Supervisory Board of the company, the (supposedly) independent body it formed to review moderation decisions. The Supervisory Board is composed primarily of lawyers, academics, journalists and human rights activists, and this will be one of its first major decisions – and an opportunity for Facebook to try to scale down the idea of ​​CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other executives to unilaterally control what can be said on the website.

The Council’s decisions are binding, meaning that Zuckerberg cannot simply decide to annul them, and the deliberations will take 90 days, after which Facebook has a week to enforce its decision. This means that a final determination on whether the ex-president can vomit vile diatribes, sparse lies and general appeals to get the attention of millions on the site will not arrive until April.

Trump’s bans on Twitter and Snapchat are permanent. He was also banned indefinitely from Shopify and Muscular contraction, while other social media companies repressed in your supporters and groups involved in the Capitol riot.

(The ban is working by the way)

THE October report at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard tracked the spread of rumors, conspiracy theories and misinformation about the US electoral system and determined that the key factor was an institutionalized disinformation effort by Trump and his allies in the Republican Party and the media of mass. Social media played only a minor role, according to the study, driving organized astroturfing from a handful of superspreaders.

You see, the decision by Twitter, Facebook and other sites to cut off the giant’s head seems to have had an immediate and dramatic impact. Without Trump actively pushing these things down the backs of supporters, a early study Analysis firm Zignal Labs found that conversations about election fraud on various websites dropped from 2.5 million in the previous week to just 688,000 mentions in the following week. Other hashtags like #FightForTrump, #HoldTheLine and “March for Trump” have dropped 95% or more.

Parler is not in a good place right now

Parler, the social media site for people more interested in reading Dan Bongino’s views on things than interacting with friends or family, is not having an enjoyable month. Parler was inundated with death threats and calls for violence extremist groups before the Capitol riots, and their users were predictably implicated as involved. So Google and Apple kicked their app out of their stores, while Amazon Web Services ended its cloud hosting, taking it offline for days. So far, he has only managed to return in the form of a “Technical Difficulties” page with messages of improvement right after several right-wing chuds.

The site brought two more bricks to the face this week. Parler is suing Amazon on a legally dubious proposal to force the company to bring it back online, and its short-term goal was to convince federal courts to issue an injunction forcing Amazon to restart it while the process continues. By NPR, Judge Barbara Rothstein rejected the injunction request in terms that bode very badly for Parler’s legal fortune:

“The Court explicitly rejects any suggestion that the balance of actions or public interest favors AWS ‘obligation to host the type of violent and abusive content in question in this case, particularly in light of the recent disturbances in the United States Capitol,” he wrote Rothstein. “This event was a tragic reminder that fiery rhetoric can – more quickly and easily than many of us expected – turn a legal protest into a violent uprising.”

Second, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, sent a letter to the FBI this week asking the agency to investigate Parler for being a “potential facilitator of planning and incitement related to violence”. Parler has immunity from civil or criminal liability for most of his users’ terrible content, according to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, so the request to the FBI may fail. But Maloney also said the letter was a prelude to a parliamentary investigation of Parler and other sites that facilitate right-wing extremism – potentially exposing him to subpoenas and probably meaning that CEO John Matze will be the latest in a series of executives from social media dragged to Congress to testify. Maybe he will Do it better than the weird 8chan.

… but Gab claims to be doing great

Gab, the social network that calls itself a “free speech” website while serving as an Internet hiding place for fascists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other nasty people, it is emerging after Parler was taken down. Between January 6th and 17th, according to NPR, its user base doubled to 3.4 million and saw an 800 percent jump in traffic.

Gab, like Parler, was one of the places where amazement and hateful organized the Capitol Fury, and one of its anti-Semitic users posted a message to Gab before killing 11 and injuring six at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 2018. Gab was kicked out of his US service providers, including cloud hosts, payment providers and security companies, reaching a serious blow to your operations. He managed to get back online with the help of cryptocurrencies and niche companies like the domain registrar Epik, which is known for contracts with white supremacy sites.

There is no reason to doubt that Gab is seeing an influx of users; has done direct marketing for QAnon supporters and other disaffected right-wingers in recent weeks. But there is reason to be very skeptical if she is doing as well as she says. A software engineer for Gab’s host, Sibyl Sytem Ltd., told the Southern Poverty Law Center in February 2019, that its traffic patterns suggested “a few thousand or a few tens of thousands” of users, instead of the alleged 800,000.

Pro-Trump protesters broke the first rule of crime: not filming yourself committing the crime

Since January 20, an ongoing Associated Press count of riot-related arrests on Capitol Hill passed 125—Mostly because the perpetrators broadcast virtually live every moment of this. This week, ProPublica launched a interactive timeline 500 videos taken from Parler alone (more than 2,500 in total), helped in part by the sloppy design of the site. Not to mention the selfies they took, the text posts detailing exactly where they were, or that most did not even try to mask their appearances, despite the presence of the heavy media.

It is extremely easy to assume that this reflects a total lack of self-awareness by many of the troublemakers as to the trail of digital evidence they were leaving behind and the laws they themselves were filming violating. But violence itself was largely the product of incentives for toxic right-wing personalities to be as extreme as possible in pursuit of viral reach – and for them, the mutiny conveniently had a dual purpose as a monetizable show. Also keep in mind that the horde was so encouraged it reflects their confidence that they could go crazy with without consequences, which is not comforting!

You cannot ban me. It’s the law

The Polish government, which is currently controlled by the right-wing populist law and justice party, has announced that it is drafting a law that will allow social media users to contest the exclusion of any post this is not illegal. The proposal under consideration would give users the right to a response from the social media company in question, which could then be appealed by a “Freedom of Expression Council” appointed by the government and in courts. Law and Justice made it very clear that it sees the law as a tool to combat the shadow cabal of left-wing technology CEOs who try to censor criticism.

Counterpoint: you are banned

Uganda ordered Internet service providers will cut access to all social media sites and online messaging applications in the week before the January 14 elections. It also closed Internet access; which resumed on January 18, and social media bans ended later. The move came amid a brutal crackdown on President Yoweri Museveni’s opposition to the National Resistance Movement and was explicitly in retaliation for Facebook to ban an “inauthentic” network of accounts and pages linked to the government-run Citizen Interaction Center .

The banned list

• Twitter blocked the chinese embassy to the US outside of her account, after posting a message accusing Uighur women of “baby-making machines”, which she apparently refused to exclude.
• Twitter also banned “@Khamenei_site”, says that she is believed to be linked to … Ali Khamenei, after publishing an image of Trump playing golf in the shadow of a drone.
• Right-wing provocateur Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet, arrested by the FBI for his role in the Capitol riot, apparently managed to escape the attention of TikTok moderators until recently.
• Steve Bannon slipped from under a rock to YouTube, where he was suspended on January 8.
• Several Twitter-addicted QAnon promoters have created alternative accounts and promptly being banned.
• A “dishonest moderator” [sic] at 8kun, the center of the QAnon universe, apparently decided ban the entire forum / gresearch from the site and delete all messages. The forum is online again, but all the old topics went to the memory hole.
• Thursday afternoon, Italian courts supposedly ordered TikTok blocks access to all users who have not been verified as 13 or older after the death of a young woman while registering a viral challenge.