this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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Honestly, that title made me throw up in my mouth a little and the article made it worse.
Not everything needs to be moderated and fear mongering because terrorists are supposedly using certain social media doesn't help that much either.
If criminals can't use a certain platform due to moderation they can simply hop to some other platform.
This post is nothing more than "think of the children".
Rationalization for silencing people that OP disagrees with. Just call them "terrorists" and now it's moral.
OP would've been a member of the Blue Police.
I'm sorry, is there another title you would like to use for mass murderers who engage in mass murder for the purpose of causing terror? Is there somebody here who agrees with ISIS, with their position that people who don't love ISIS shouldn't have heads?
I don't think I need to rationalize my position that scammers and killers are bad and should not be given a free platform upon which to reach hundreds of millions of people with unlimited video uploads. I think that's a perfectly rational position as is.
I don't think opposing neo-Nazi conspiracies makes me a Nazi. I do think you said that in a weak attempt to shut down all rational discussion here.
If terrorists are forced to pay a sysadmin to host a slow, makeshift matrix server in their moms' basement, rather than having free access and unlimited uploads to a global network of 550 million rubes stupid enough to fall for crypto scams, I consider that a win for the world.
If crypto scammers move to some platform nobody's ever heard of, and nobody uses, because it's nothing but crypto scams, I consider that a win for the world.
It's not incoherent to want to make the lives of extremists less convenient. I'm not saying we can or should bother trying to eradicate their access to messaging altogether. I'm saying we should recognize it as a problem and try to address it instead of saying "oh, wow, terrorists use our platform? Cool. Fun. Neat."
Criminals also use things like public restrooms. Maybe we should gate those behind background checks.
If you find a pattern of serial killers using a particular set of public restrooms, you might, in fact, want to consider security of some kind at those public restrooms. Maybe cameras near the entrance and a security guard situated in the damn mall would help.
But that is kind of the issue here isn't it? Bad elements are not inconveniented at all by any of that, it's normal people who suffer from getting censored.
I personally am not willing to give up any online freedoms I have, just on the off chance that it might be inconvenient for criminals.
... how the fuck are they not inconvenienced by that? Can you not agree that telegram is convenient for them? The unlimited fucking video uploads and built-in audience?
Eh. I'm not sure what the real risk is there, IDK how Telegram is going to hear "let's censor terrorists" and end up censoring normal people. And I'm also not sure having a post or channel shut down on Telegram would really lead to suffering, I've never seen or heard of a decent telegram channel... The best ones mostly still seem to be charlatans, maybe a couple for, like, companies or reporters that are just present everywhere, but nothing that actually serves a valuable role in society... But yeah, I don't think there's any huge risk of those charlatans being banned, if they're who you're worried about.
Like, it is objectively convenient and useful and helpful to "criminals" who celebrate after burning children alive by calling their parents and asking them if they're proud, like, kind of goes beyond "criminal," but yeah, they're going to send the videos they took to other terrorists and spread them to checks notes spread terror, which is the whole fucking thing they do.
But also, you're not willing to give up your "freedom" to share videos of people you beheaded on telegram? Is that an important freedom to you?
First off, let me just say that I am not quite sure how telegram works. So far I know it's just a far saver WhatsApp that guarantees that your info isn't being sold.
Second, most of my issues with your ideas of censoring content is meant in a more general sense.
[... how the fuck are they not inconvenienced by that?]
You mean apart from the fact they can just hop over to some other platform?
Also I am not quite sure how you imagine telegram to actually do something against terrorists while also guaranteeing the privacy aspect of the service they are providing. That's literally their whole thing, privacy.
[But also, you're not willing to give up your "freedom" to share videos of people you beheaded on telegram? Is that an important freedom to you?]
I am not even going to bother with all these other straw man fallacies. If you can't have a civil discussion without putting words in my mouth and twisting the meaning of them we are done here.
None of that is true. Telegram is Open Source, but is not safer than WhatsApp in any way. Telegram messages are not e2ee by default, and group chats can not be e2ee, unlike Whatsapp which encrypts all messages end-to-end, always.
There's no real safeguard in place to prevent telegram from selling your data. It probably isn't doing it for now, it claims that it doesn't sell your data, but so does facebook. Their privacy policies aren't that different. Telegram does have your data, it could sell your data, it just doesn't. Note that telegram is not a nonprofit.
I'm not calling for "more general" censorship, I've been quite specific.
How is that not an inconvenience? Moving your entire. organization, finding a platform that won't ban you, finding a platform that will host unlimited beheading videos at high resolution, finding a platform with the same broadcast feature so they can spread propaganda to hundreds of millions of people, finding that all for free... What part of that is just as convenient as continuing to do what they're doing?
Telegram is literally already aware of which accounts belong to Hamas, Pavel Durov has publicly commented on why he doesn't feel like Hamas is a problem, this is not a question of discovering terrorism on the platform, this is a question of figuring out what to do about it.
Privacy is aggressively not a thing Telegram is about. You seem to have fallen for some of their weird marketing. The only things about Telegram that might preserve your privacy are the option to sign up anonymously (a lot of messaging apps have this, and it's not necessarily a good thing), and the fact that it isn't owned by facebook (most messaging apps aren't).
This is especially true of broadcast channels, which any schmuck can view without installing the app or having an account at all.
But that's what I'm talking about. I said Telegram shouldn't provide terrorists with a means to share videos of beheadings, and you have a problem with the freedom-related implications of that, I'm really not sure what your point was.