Facebook and Twitter have been hosting violent content for years and years. Facebook has contributed to mass murder. Twitter to countless suicides. Far more deaths can be attributed to their platforms than some goofy right wing startup. These are facts. Big Tech's scale and power means they can exempt themselves from the rules they create.
Are you really telling me Mark Zuckerberg has less blood on his hands than this John Matze guy? After literal genocides were coordinated via WhatsApp?
No, you have a valid point that social media in general needs consideration from all kinds of angles from mental health impacts to legal requirements of platforms. I think people just don't care at the moment because it's targeting a legitimate bees nest of home grown far right groups which range from comical gravy seals to retired vets. It doesn't invalidate the point that these platforms only took this step when administrations were clearly changing behind the scenes which isn't honestly that surprising if you've seen how they treat foreign nations. So after we finish dealing with the app that's platforming the groups actively announcing plans for an armed round two of Wednesday on Jan 17th we should take a hard look at how much power we yield to technology giants.
True, but the violent content is an extremely small portion of the content on their sites, and they act quickly (and sometimes over-zealously) to remove such content when they find it.
Parler does not, and in fact their lack of moderation was their key selling point.
So because Twitter and Facebook are larger and have more resources to stamp out illegal activity (which they still do poorly), that means the violence, death, and algorithmic propaganda should be acceptable to host on their platform vs another? Makes no sense.
Twitter and Facebook don't deliberately host illegal activity, and they stamp it out as best they can. Given that their have hundreds of millions of users in multiple languages posting billions of posts every day, it's a very difficult job and a lot of it requires users to report posts containing illegal activity so they can act on it. (And on that note, I have reported posts on Facebook for illegal or harassing content, and they took down those posts and acted on the offending accounts within 2 hours every time.)
I won't defend FB's or Twitter's algorithms. Based on recent reporting, it appears that internally employees are attempting to change the algorithm so hopefully something will come of that.
Parler and Gab have chosen to market themselves to groups known to engage in violent and illegal activity. Notably, moderate and liberal posts and accounts are immediately deleted or suspended on Parler, while right-leaning posts of any kind and degree of violence remain on those sites indefinitely. This indicates that Parler and Gab have the ability to moderate posts on the basis of content, and simply choose not to.
Are you really telling me Mark Zuckerberg has less blood on his hands than this John Matze guy? After literal genocides were coordinated via WhatsApp?