To our knowledge no one is using GabTV to specifically livestream adult content and certainly not charging to access this live content because that is not possible on Gab. Can you please cite any specific examples for our review if you have discovered any? Currently only GabPro accounts can livestream content, but Gab native video uploading can be used by anyone including free version users. I think you may be conflating GabTV livestreaming with Gab native video uploading. Further, anyone can view and access any native video or livestreaming content for free on Gab without processing any payments through Stripe or anyone else. We do not offer any form of "exclusive" video unlocking access features via GabPro.
Secondly, we have several protocols and user guidelines in place to prevent any illegal activity on the site. We work with law enforcement regularly and see to it that any illegal content is reported to the proper agencies. We also have several technical features in place such as PhotoDNA to scan for and report any illegal content, machine learning systems that detect nudity which is not properly labeled NSFW, and user guidelines that require any adult content to be marked as Not Safe For Work; which is a setting that is on by default for all users and public-facing links. Both our User Guidelines and our GabPro Content Creator Agreement state that we do not allow any illegal activity on our service.
We believe these guidelines and our user agreements already cover what your own guidelines require and we will certainly take action on any offending accounts if you can point us to specific violating examples. We will also work to add improved reporting features to GabTV videos to make it easier for users to flag this content in the future.
We are happy to jump on a call if it is easier to discuss because some of your requests are not clear. For example your demand that we remove all adult content from the entire site, which is a bit unreasonable considering the many technical and user guidelines we have in place to ensure the specific Stripe guideline you cite is not violated and that no illegal activity is happening on the site.
Please advise
Andrew Torba
CEO, Gab.com
PS HN: We release our API today. Hit me up if you want to build something cool: andrew@gab.com https://developers.gab.com/
>While Torba paints this as a free speech issue, YC told BuzzFeed that he was kicked out for “for speaking in a threatening, harassing way toward other YC founders” — particularly in this Facebook comment:
>“All of you: fuck off. Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling bullshit and shove it. I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a President into office, cucks.”
>Torba had also tweeted a screenshot of another founder’s Facebook comment (the founder’s name was removed) that “being a black, Muslim or woman in the USA is going to be very scary” with his own comment: “Build the wall.” Then, in another thread, a YC alum alluded to Torba’s behavior without mentioning him by name, prompting him to jump in: “Say my name when you talk about me, coward. Build the wall.”
Please keep on hacking; doing what you are doing and never stop or be intimidated - you are an inspiration to other hackers who also have viewpoints not accepted by the mainstream.
This is categorically false. People who love and want to defend free speech go there. If you want to continue living in a bubble world, stay on Twitter.
Yeah that is total BS. I don't deny YCs success in business, but I wish They would leave politics culture wars to the politicians and culture warriors.
Twitter has been extremely heavy on censorship this year. Dozens of high-profile users banned, hundreds 'shadow-banned', and unbelievable levels of hashtag manipulation. Twitter is not in favor of free speech, on top of being a terrible business.
Which users were banned for expression of opinions? I initially wrote "high profile", following your comment, but I don't actually care. High profile or not, that would make me worry.
I know Milo was banned based on the accusations that he'd orchestrated harassment of Leslie Jones, but I haven't heard of anyone being banned simply for expressing a political position.
As far as hashtag manipulation goes, I'm not sure what you mean. If you just mean they don't put some hashtags on trending, that may or may not be a bad approach to promoting healthy debate, but it's not a free speech issue.
Look into why Charles Johnson was banned. They took a statement he made that obviously meant "I am going to write a news story about this person that will be very bad for them" and tortured it into a death threat, and banned him for life.
There is literally no defense of this because it was so obviously a bad-faith interpretation, and yet other people have very obviously put people in actual danger, like Spike Jones tweeting George Zimmerman's parents home address, and nothing happened to them. Johnson, whatever you might think of him personally, was banned forever for something he obviously did not even do when you look at the tweet. If they like you, you can say almost anything. If they don't almost anything can get you suspended.
The hashtag trending thing is another case of this, if they basically like your message then they'll let it trend, if they don't then they'll suppress it. You can only really derive that this is happening from observing in very specific ways, no one actually tells you they do this. They have other tricks too, if an undesirable hashtag gains popularity, out of nowhere a misspelled hashtag autocompletes, to "nudge" you to a dead end hastag that nobody is listening to. It's fairly obvious once you become aware of it, because popular hashtags autocomplete, unpopular or not-trending ones don't, but "roach motel" hashtags somehow bypass this. Nobody knows globally what this single corporation decides to let be widely heard and what it invisibly suppresses. It is a free speech issue because private or not, as the Arab Spring stuff demonstrated how much influence Twitter has on society, which makes it one. This is the bog-standard, not-full-of-shit liberal position. It's even Chomsky-endorsed.
1) Interesting that you mention doxxing in the context of Chuck Johnson, since when he was banned for his tweet about Deray, he had already posted home addresses of two NYTimes reporters. That both a) indicates that he was a bad actor, and b) colors how you might interpret comments about "taking out" someone. It doesn't turn it into a threat of violence, but it does make it look a lot more like using Twitter to organize harassment.
The other thing is that this is just a tough way to argue. There's massive amounts of harassment on twitter, and enforcement is incredibly haphazard. Did Spike Lee get a pass because he's a liberal? Or because in 2012, Twitter was completely clueless about any kind of response to harassment?
2) Hashtags: as it stands, everything you've said is your own personal observation and too vague for me to even try and confirm. Rather than repeat myself, let me just reference my other comment about doing the work to prove your accusations: https://hackernews.hn/item?id=12936414
3) I will however, repeat my question from before: is there any political opinion that I can utter as an American citizen that will get me banned from Twitter?
McKesson chose to interpret it as an open death threat, it obviously wasn't but nobody was going to call him on it, and it got Johnson booted off Twitter. I see your point, but that wasn't how McKesson and his fans used it.
Regarding the Spike Lee thing, I'd say he got a pass because he's a celebrity, but who knows. This is kind of my point. You have to piece together pattern out of Johnson's activity on and off Twitter to decide that maybe he was trying to get deray killed by paying people for his home address. On the other hand spike lee directly tweeted "here's george zimmerman's address, share this as much as you can" and nothing happened to him at all. Twitter was aware of it, because many, many people made them aware of it, and they pay special attention to their celebrity accounts. it didn't happen off twitter, it happened on twitter. and it wasn't tangential to some other threat, it was a direct threat. on twitter. tons of people reported it. I just can't hurdle this one. they let it happen and they didn't care.
the commonality across these is that in the best circumstances you're probably a scummy person if you do that, Johnson or Lee, but it's extra terrible when people just tweet addressed with death exhortations and they didn't even know or care if it was correct info. johnson was pretty scummy but his point was made, if you're the new york times nobody seriously is going to hold you to that. if you're spike lee, nobody is seriously going to hold you to that. if you're charles johnson, you're booted off twitter, lose your internet hosting and two dozen newspapers write stories about you.
2. it's not actually that vague, you could take what I said and watch and see if you can observe it. I gave you enough information if you were truly interested. You're not obligated to believe me or do it, of course, I was just sharing my experience. I kind of have a problem proving this is intentional, because I don't run twitter. i used to live close by what I suspected was a crack house once, people were always coming and going, and doing crack outside. Maybe the police could prove it, I can't. but I can tell you what I saw.
You are very correct that it's hard to tell what is intentional and what is not on the part of twitter. I see a lot of bogus claims of shadowbanning where it's really just that twitter is eventually-consistent, and sometimes you try to look at data from one location and its there, someone in another country can see it, though. Roach-motel hashtags, some are more obvious than others, and some are just legitimate misspellings that catch on because that's what everybody types. Example, for a while podestaleaks was autocompleting as podestraleaks. On the other hand, SpiritCooking trended for almost 24 hours before it stopped autocompleting and was replaced with spiritualcooking, which roach-moteled you into ancient sparse tweets about cooking. I can't prove anything, but come on. As far as straight up suppressing trending tweets, it's not even arguable. things trend, then abruptly stop autocompleting and drop off the site globally. they already do this to prevent spam, and it's obvious they do it to shut up some hashtags.
3. Have we not yet gotten to the point where that odious xkcd cartoon has been thoroughly debunked? Freedom of speech goes far beyond being a simple ban on things you can or cannot say or else you will be punished by some authority.
I am sorry if this is long and rambling, I wanted to say what I've been seeing because I am not the only one who has made these observations, and this is a particularly good place I could say it and people with more ability than me to investigate this might see it.
1) The Clint Eastwood case seems to be a fake account: http://nypost.com/2016/11/10/clint-eastwoods-twitter-account..., which doesn't entirely answer the question of why it was banned, but definitely muddies the waters. Do you have an example of someone not potentially impersonating a celebrity?
2) The Wikipedia page primarily concerns cases where Twitter is ordered to engage in censorship by other countries, not Twitter choosing to censor opinions on its own . I wish they would tell Ergodan where to stick it, but that's not the same as them posing a threat to your speech or mine (assuming you're not from Turkey).
Let me ask you an unambiguous question. I am a citizen of the United States of America, a country with a strong tradition of freedom of speech. Can you offer me any reason to fear that I am going to be censored by Twitter for expressing an opinion (liberal, conservative, fascist, even)? To be perfectly clear, and avoid confusing matters with the issue of harassment, say that I do not @-mention other users.
So that's weird. I looked at her feed, didn't see anything beyond the pale.
On the other hand, I can't quite replicate her search. When I search, I get more results than she does, maybe not as many as I'd expect, but importantly, not the same as her. I can't say "obviously there's nothing here" but I also don't think there's a smoking gun.
If you're concerned about this, you really should not be pointing me to one tweet by one user. You should have reams of evidence, documented, with a timeline, with comparisons to what other users see, etc, etc. If you don't care about convincing people who haven't already bought in, that's ok, but if you do want to persuade, you're going to have to provide something better than this one tweet. (Case in point, downthread, we have a person who's convinced they were shadowbanned, then all of a sudden they check, and they aren't: https://hackernews.hn/item?id=12935624).
Twitter shadowbanned me for posting details of child abuse I experienced that left me disabled. These details included the names of people involved and summaries of acts committed against me. Some of the principals in these acts and all of the accessories to them are employees of a school board, police department, city government, and political boards. I posted links to articles from local media showing that there's a culture of child abuse in the city and that it still pervades more than 25 years after I was abused. I identified a certain juvenile detention facility and explained how it was designed to be and operated as a wholesale child abuse factory. I posted a report from the Department of Justice calling out the state on the ways that it abuses children.
Twitter apparently thinks that trying to effect positive change, to-wit, ending the wide scale child abuse and holding the abusers accountable to law, is a bad thing.
Whatever. Unless it's carefully moderated (ie., censored, to some) it will gather a large collection of angry right-wing posters or angry left-wing posters. One side will harass the other and the other side will eventually go elsewhere. Then it will be just another echo chamber.
If the creator has pivoted to the alt-right, it's a pretty sure guess that it will wind up being another 8chan/stormfront/what have you.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It's a bold statement, but it's my personal opinion and I stand by it. You're free to disagree, but we would have never even considered another accelerator in our position.
> we would have never even considered another accelerator in our position.
Judging by your blog entry your resources were extremely strained; are you saying if YCombinator wouldn't have accepted you that you wouldn't have pursued any other accelerators even if it would have helped or possibly saved your business if it got bad enough? Seems like a short-sighted statement in my opinion.
What if you want to start another company in 3 years, don't get accepted to YCombinator and decide to apply elsewhere? They may read this and use it as a deciding factor.
1. No I would have delivered pizzas, done consulting, or tried to raise money from individual angels. I would have done whatever it took to keep the company alive, but I can promise we would have never even considered another accelerator.
> Alternatively, they may have already graduated high school.
I personally wouldn't care but I've talked to a handful of VCs in my time that were very into their firm that would take any slight against them or their firm as some egregious, unrecoverable thing. Very unreasonable people at times hence my comment.
But... you've got no experience with any other accelerators on which to base that opinion. Uninformed and unrepentantly incendiary is not a great combination.
I'm not saying you're wrong for feeling this way about YC. You aren't. Everyone has opinions they haven't bothered to verify with data, some of which might rub other people the right way. The trick is remembering that they're probably not worth sharing to a large audience, or stridently defending.
You are entitled to that opinion. I agree that Y Combinator is the best, especially for those that are really hungry to win and can make the most out of its unstructured program. YC gives you access to the best.
However, I don't believe accelerators #2-10 are the worst in the world. Which I also think is a disingenuous statement. To others.. things like location, industry relevance, program structure, etc. is a better fit for them or their team. I have friends that have gone through YC and failed miserably. I friends that have gone through TS and have succeeded greatly, by YC standards.
Does the market have too many accelerators that offer little-to-no value? Yes.
Why explain if you can just accept arbitrary passwords, pass them through a hash function and feed its output (in hex format) into your exisitng password handling blackbox, whatever that wonder may be.
:) We believe we are solving a massive unmet need in the market right now and I think Product Hunt did a great job of proving that hypothesis. Appreciate your kind words!
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