ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team (opens in new tab)

Moderators are ultimately responsible for moderation. The moderation system is failing when it comes to technology issues with a political tint. (In contrast, it has been pretty good with rage bait foreign policy stuff. Genuinely good discussions around quality content.)

If folks are bandwagon flagging content with a consistent bias, the system should shadow ban their flags for a while.

Any competitor will have to compete not on technical competence or privacy, but on "can I upload lots of HD video?" and "are my favorite celebrities there?"

Offramps to let people migrate easier, syndication to let people leave and still do POSSE, a solution to the problem that all free image hosting eventually attracts CSAM, those are difficult problems

https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/

Anyone who builds what they describe there can expect it to take off faster than ever.

With the right sorts of access given by companies seeking to avoid the ire of the administration, I'm pretty sure even private profiles could be considered to be public.

Nothing here is either surprising or unpredicted. It's just ugly because it's finally happening.

And if anyone is still under the illusion that this is about "law enforcement" or "immigration", this should be a giant waving red flag that it's about racism and authoritarian control.

I admire your optimism.

You can't lay blame on the people doing this and feel like you're done. Unfortunately they're always going to exist. You have to lay blame on the people defending against them. They failed in their defense and here we are.

The difficulty in stopping it scales with how long you let it fester.

Last time it was a world war which could have threatened extinction.

We're still in the phase where people are hoping doing nothing will make it all better or denying outright the threat.

It's more like 20/20 and then that apathetic majority who can't be bothered to care enough to even vote is the rest. Given the nature of liberal and conservative policies, we can all probably see why many of them would be apathetic if we're being honest. But I'm sure those people aren't cheering. They're moreso saying, "See. I told ya so." To any friends and family who thought Trump would be any different. Probably gleefully pointing out to friends who are liberal or conservative that now things are worse.

For that "apathetic majority", they probably now feel vindicated in their decision not to vote and their sense of hopelessness.

And that's sad.

Gonna stop you right there and ask you to back that up. It's not plausible. Especially not if people are actively trying to mess up the "attribution".

Is that true, or is there something more here?

Or were. They've been extremely quiet the last few months. Turns out tyranny isn't so bad when it's aimed at the people you already hate.

This is effectively a strawman argument.

We are not discussing their principles that pertain to whom should be allowed to own guns, nor is that question even relevant to the heart of this topic. We are discussing the core, underlying principle that has been used as the primary justification for WHY people should have a constitutionally-protected right to own mechanized, efficient killing machines. You of course already know: the rhetoric (for literal centuries) has been that the preservation of our system of democracy from hostile internal actors requires a citizenry that has the means to effectively fight back.

Without a noble-sounding pretense of existential importance for 2A defenders to shield themselves with, things start to look a lot more like weighing "guns are fun, plus think about hunters" vs "we should reduce our yearly slaughter rate for schoolchildren to match those of other 1st world countries" and choosing the former. So, when people see what they believe to be the increasingly-obvious beginnings of authoritarian overreach in this country, and at the same time seeing most of the 2A crowd saying absolutely nothing about it, it looks like a genuinely remarkable, thoroughly nauseating display of hypocrisy and selfishness.

> But as a 2A supporter I don't feel any obligation to rage against ICE assembling a social media team. These seem to be completely disconnected concepts.

Dishonest framing aside ("assembling a social media team", like how drug cartels simply assemble a team of chemists, semantics be damned!) and with full context considered, I assume you are stating here that you see no problem with the current actions of this administration, both ICE-related and not, and have caught no whiffs of authoritarian overreach. Otherwise, social media monitoring and tracking teams within an organization that does not have the rules, oversight, requirements, or legal vulnerability of existing (previously) non-partisan agencies with similar teams, would be extremely concerning.

Though after writing this out, I'm not even clear on how much of this is a matter of opinion versus a matter of awareness and understanding of current events. One needs to only look at the events of the last 7 days to find egregious evidence of authoritarian movement, things that would've sent recent Democratic presidents into political exile and impeachment. I just learned that my neighbors and I are enemies of the US last Tuesday - literally, verbatim, "enemies from within" with no additional qualification beyond living in a blue city - for example.