I remember a few months ago one of the YC alumni building a website to document anyone who supports the RNC for the quoted intention of shaming them and making their lives/livelihood harder. They were so proud of it and advertised it on Twitter. I’ll see if I can dig up the name of one of the authors. They took the tweet down when they realized the audience found them no better than the Nazi supporters of the 30s putting together lists of the Jews.
This doesn’t end well, and people won’t forget this.
Eye for an eye, and then some.
I can see why someone had the urge to build this seeing as this capitol riot was perhaps the biggest threat to american democracy in recent years. What really irks me though is not only how many people brought their phones but also how many actively posted and boasted about their participation on social media.
There is a social media site called "Clapper" that is kind of like TikTok but describes itself as a "free-speech" alternative. Naturally, it is pretty much filled to the brim with conservatives. When the capitol riot happened, hundreds of videos from the event appeared on Clapper. But Clapper acted quickly and seemingly took down all of the videos with geolocation data close to the event at that time. Now, almost nothing can be found there about it.
But the platform is still filled with conservatives who post videos of their laptop screens about the Q conspiracy and "encouraging" videos where they ensure each other that Biden is not yet president and it is not yet over. They seem very technologically illiterate and also very unconcerned about how easily they could get themselves fired for racist or conspiratory content, because they think that this "platform" unlike Twitter and Facebook is somehow on their side. They don't realise that social media platforms cannot advertise when their content isn't "clean" and thus act in their own interest when they ban this type of content, and not in the interest of some opposing party.
So honestly, I think this is just the beginning of such projects, because somehow the people who would do something as ridiculous as storming the capitol keep documenting their crimes and releasing the material themselves... they make it extremely easy for any political opponents.
Invariably when any push is made to bring leftist criminals to justice, activists cry foul, peddle cliches like “riots are the language of the unheard”, attack anyone posting photos or streams of criminals as “doxxing”, and so on.
There is a clear undeniable double standard behind all this (https://www.allsides.com/blog/capitol-hill-breach-riot-cover...), and it involves politicians, social media giants, news media, and everyday people. The fact that places like Ars or Wired are happily normalizing leftist witch hunts, by being less directly and overtly critical than they could be, should alarm everyone. But the rot goes much much deeper.
But that’s not what my comment is about. It’s about the unequal treatment and unequal outrage from a variety of actors in our society, when it comes to the political left versus the political right. It’s about valuing things like responsible disclosure. It’s about leaning from history and not repeating the same mistakes when it comes to witch hunts, or censorship, or whatever else.
