A judge in a long-running Unite the Right lawsuit has recently attempted to settle several side avenues to the main case, in one instance pointing out that a campaign to discredit his law clerks was irrelevant.

The Sines v. Kessler case has slowly worked its way through the Charlottesville U.S. District Court since it was filed in October 2017, less than two months after the deadly rally. The lawsuit targets key organizers and participants of the white supremacist rally and was filed on behalf of a number of Charlottesville-area residents by Integrity First For America.

Recently, U.S. District Judge Norman K. Moon denied a motion from defendants Jason Kessler, Matt Parrott and Nathan Damigo that called on the judge to recuse two of his law clerks for alleged personal connections to a plaintiff, Elizabeth Sines.

In Moons denial, he wrote that the defendants were pushing on an open door, and not asking for any relief that is different from the status quo because the named clerks had never been involved in the case.

They promptly informed me of the potential conflict and have heeded my instructions not to work on this case, Moon wrote. Rather, my career clerk has assisted me on this matter whenever I have found the assistance of a law clerk useful. Such measures are routine in the event of a law clerk conflict.

Moons order came the same week U.S. Magistrate Judge Joel C. Hoppe, who also has presided over the case, ruled that John DiNucci, an attorney representing white supremacist and University of Virginia graduate Richard Spencer, could withdraw from the case.

During a telephonic hearing earlier in the month, DiNucci argued he should be allowed to withdraw as Spencers attorney because he had not been paid in months. Spencer claimed his financial woes were due to deplatforming efforts and asked for a week to develop a payment plan, which was granted.

According to Hoppes order, on June 18 DiNucci informed the court that he stood by his motion to withdraw, which the court subsequently granted.

Another issue plaguing the case was seemingly concluded during a Thursday telephonic hearing.

Since January, defendant James Alex Fields Jr.s state trial attorneys Denise Lunsford and John Hill have repeatedly filed motions arguing they cannot produce documents responsive to the case. The attorneys have argued that the documents are non-privileged and are unable to be produced because of a confidentiality agreement they signed with Charlottesville Commonwealths Attorney Joe Platania.

Hoppe denied their motion to quash earlier this month, which prompted a motion to reconsider.

Less than a half-hour prior to Thursdays hearing, Lunsford filed supplemental evidence of a 2017 Charlottesville General District Court order that prevented the dispersal of case materials in an effort to protect the privacy of Fields victims.

Lunsford argued that this order, which she had been unable to locate prior to the hearing, prevented her and Hill from providing much of the documents requested by the plaintiffs. She also argued that the discovery requests put an undue burden on her and Hill, who are not parties in the lawsuit and only represent Fields on the state criminal level.

Describing this evidence as beyond the 11th hour, Joshua Siegel, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, countered that the court order did not meet the standard for a motion to be quash and should have been brought up months prior.

After a nearly two hour hearing, Hoppe said he would respect the Charlottesville General District Courts order and the parties would need to request a change to the order, which could then allow Lunsford and Hill to share responsive documents.

According to Siegel, the plaintiffs expect to wrap up depositions in the next three weeks and the case is still on track for a three-week trial in October.

Go here to read the rest:

Judge allows withdrawal of Spencer's attorney - The Daily Progress

Amid calls for racial justice in Canada, the United States and around the world, a letter signed by group of prominent writers, artists and academics, including Margaret Atwood and J.K. Rowling, argues that supporters of social justice should also practise civility and not stand in the way of a free exchange of ideas.

A Letter on Justice and Open Debate, published in Harpers magazine on July 7, says that restrictions on expression and debate weaken full participation in democracy.

The letter has been attached for vague wording and lack of references to specific terms or examples of what it is describing.

While the letter makes no specific references, many believe it is decrying what is known today as call-out culture or cancel culture.

We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.

The letter has sparked heated public discussion about whether support for a public figure can be withdrawn in response to what critics deem objectionable behaviour or opinions.

The letter is viewed as continuing an argument on the appropriate response to what many see as harmful actions or comments against groups in society. Many also see it as symptomatic of a divide between a long-standing liberal view of free speech and an emerging movement that demands greater accountability for speech and behaviour that dehumanizes certain social groups, such as racialized people and trans individuals.

The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away, the letter reads. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other.

The letter praises movements for racial and social justice as a needed reckoning, but goes on to warn against the stifling of debate.

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.

We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.

Among the supporters is James Turk, director of Ryerson Universitys Centre for Free Expression. He said that the wording of the letter aligns with a robust protection of free expression.

Its expressing concern that theres growing pressure not to debate things, but to simply shut people up.

AbigailCurlew, a journalist and doctoral researcher whose work focuses onsocial media, Internet doxxingand anti-trans digital vigilantes, has her reservations, however.

These people are mostly very rich, have humongous platforms, but to shield themselves from criticism that might be either angry or very sharp, it removes that layer of accountability that they have as public figures, said Curlew.

Asam Ahmad, a writer and community organizer who has written several pieces on thesubject of disposability culture, disagrees with the premise of the letter.

I dont think this letter is about free speech, but about power, he told Capital Current in an email.

Ahmad cited the example of Masuma Khan, who faced disciplinary action at Dalhousie University for a Facebook post related to Canadas colonial past and white fragility.

If this is going to be framed as an issue of free speech, lets seriously discuss who has free speech in this country.

A number of the letters signatories have faced intense criticism in the past for their comments and actions, particularly on topics around race, gender and sexuality.

Bari Weiss, for example, is an American writer who has been denounced for celebrating cultural appropriation.

Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog have garnered criticism for their writing about trans people. Both Singal and Herzog have written stories about people who have de-transitioned, a perspective which has been argued amplifies the phenomenon more than it actually happens. Singal and Herzogs writings have been argued to misrepresent the nuances and complexities of trans peoples experiences and systemic barriers to adequate health care. Singal has argued against the idea that marginalized groups like transgender people should not have to debate their right to exist.

I do think that the letter is just another kind of manifestation of ways to excuse bigotry,

Canadian psychologist Steven Pinker has also been criticized for suggesting that women may be underrepresented in fields of science because of innate biological differences. Pinker has also been accused of dismissing on Twitter the impacts of police brutality on Black people.

Atwood has faced intense criticism in recent years for signing a letter supporting writer and teacher Steven Galloway, who was fired by the University of British Columbia after allegations of bullying and sexual assault. Galloway is suing his accuser and 20 others.

Atwood and the other signatories of that letter lamented Galloways damaged reputation while offering no consolation for the complainants, whose names were leaked to the public and were smeared in the process.

Rowling has experienced public backlash in recent weeks for comments she made about trans people.

She insisted on Twitter that only women can menstruate, which critics pointed out ignores the trans men and non-binary people who menstruate. Rowling defended her initial tweet, suggesting that it is not hateful towards trans people to equate sex with gender.

I do think that the letter is just another kind of manifestation of ways to excuse bigotry, said Curlew, drawing attention to what she considers oppressive and dehumanizing statements made by some of the signatories.

Turk said that the letter should be judged on its content rather than looking at the names of people who signed it.

Criticizing the document or the signatories because somebody who you find reprehensible somehow pollutes everybody who signed the document, I think is really unfair.

Turk warned against the societal limitation of any speech, even if it protects against perceived hate speech. To do so, he argued, would pave the way to allow anyone in society to do the same.

When a group of people decides that they can take that right to act on behalf of all of us onto themselves, its what in (the) old days we did call vigilante justice.

If someone says, Well, this crosses the line and its not illegal, but Im going to stop it from happening, then I think there is a problem, said Turk. If they say, This crosses the line and Im going to denounce them publicly, Im going to stand and protest, or Im going to encourage everyone to boycott them, all of that is part of free expression.

He added: But if you physically prevent them from being heard, then I think we have a problem because then youre taking power under yourself.

Ahmad challenged the notion that de-platformed figures experience chill on their free speech.

If this is going to be framed as an issue of free speech, lets seriously discuss who has free speech in this country.

De-platforming refers to a type of activism that seeks to deny a controversial speaker access to a venue or platform for express their opinions.

When very visible people with large platforms are cancelled they are often given even larger platforms to discuss their cancellation.

Curlew acknowledges Canadian law does protect free speech (with such exceptions as advocating genocide or violence) but points out it does not also guarantee a platform to amplify expression.

If a university or a social media platform removes you from that platform because of hate speech, its their decision based on multiple things like public relations and liability, and maybe morals to decide who they platform, she said.

Turk argues that if the rights to freely express are weakened, the most hard hit will be marginalized folks.

The people whose voices are suppressed and for whom constitutional protections for free expression protect most are the people who are challenging conventional wisdom and privilege and orthodoxy, he said.

Curlew said, I have concerns that the free speech that (the letter signers) are advocating for is going to create and is already creating a threatening environment that burdens the free speech of marginalized people.

She said that the idea that space must always be made for unfettered speech, including the possibility of hate speech towards marginalized groups, fails to take up the social context of those groups, citing the example of the continued harsh treatment of transgender people.

Weve gone through a century of really harsh treatment from the state, from police and from the public.

When a group of people decides that they can take that right to act on behalf of all of us onto themselves, its what in (the) old days we did call vigilante justice.

In apublished surveyof 433 transgender Ontarians in 2013, The Trans PULSE Project found that experiences of transphobia were nearly universal among trans Ontarians, with 98 per cent reporting at least one experience of transphobia.

When you have entire groups of people being marginalized in incredibly violent ways, you cant just expect them to engage in theoretical debate about whether theyre human or not. Its not feasible and its kind of a violence in and of itself, said Curlew.

Curlew also contextualized the recent experience of the trans community, which currently faces rising hate crimes and hate speech against transgender people from anti-trans far-right groups.

When we speak out we end up getting silenced by getting doxxed, harassed, by getting death threats, threats of sexual assault. So this chills the climate of free speech, she said.

How are we supposed to engage with the public discourse if the consequences of engaging are that we get attacked or get exposed to violence?

For Curlew, while it is important to hold people to account for their harmful actions, she is ambivalent about de-platforming.

How do you get a person to recognize the harm that they do through dialogue, and find ways to extend chances for redemption?

At the same time, Curlew acknowledges the limits of that type of approach.

I recognize that not everyone has the patience to do that. And not everyones safe enough to do that. And its a really slow process. And sometimes you just cant wait to change peoples minds when your rights are about to be taken away, she said.

Ahmad said the Harpers letter distracts from the broader social context,which exposes the true stakes at play.

Letters like this actually make it far more difficult to have a serious, engaged, complicated conversation about disposability culture and toxic forms of call-out culture, both of which are more harmful and prevalent amongst marginalized communities, and impact writers and artists from these communities far more than those who already hold vast amounts of power (individually and in their professions).

I would even go so far as to say that letters like this make my life and my work far more difficult.

Read more:

The boundaries of free expression are up for debate in the Age of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter - capitalcurrent.ca

Hi and welcome back! Need a jolt of good or at least funny news for your weekend? This might just do ya. Recently, Patreon deplatformed an alt-right nutjob named Owen Benjamin. He decided to hit back at them in a novel waythat has backfired in not only his own face but those of the fanboys who decided to act as his personal army. Today, let me show you what happens when someones personal army turns out to be the Persians, not the Spartans.

Lately, various social-media platforms have been cracking down on right-wing nutjobs (RWNJs) and alt-right loons and their wackadoo ideas. Every day, it seems, some new story emerges about someone in that crowd losing accounts on sites likeTwitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.

Instead of learning to play by the rules of the privately-owned companies granting them these accounts, the nutjobs in question just keep drilling down harder on their wackadoodlery.

Indeed, alt-right loons operate a great deal like toxic Christians. Theyre so similar, in fact, that its all but impossible to tell if any given alt-right loon is a toxic Christian or an atheist (in my experience, theyre divided about 50/50; in todays case, our subject considers himself a firm Christian). Both groups use the same tactics, attract the same kinds of recruits, suffer from the same mistakes in their thinking, want the same basic things, and hate the same outgroups.

More than that, even, they try their hardest to find some twist of Martian logic thatll become the magic key toforcingthese privately-owned companies to put up with them and their noxious presence.

And lately, some of them think theyve found that magic key.

Patreon is a social-media and crowdfunding service/platform that allows users to offer regular monthly donations to their favorite content creators. This site represents one of the main ways that content creators can earn a living these days. Indeed,Ive got a Patreon myself and deeply appreciate my patrons.

Like all such privately-owned sites, Patreon maintains a list of terms and conditions for its creators and users. Since right-wing nutjobbery largely violatesanymeaningful ethical boundary one can imagine, they began cracking down on such nutjobs toward the end of 2018. At that time, they whacked such alt-right luminaries as Sargon of Akkad and Milo Yiannopoulos.

One of the alt-rights current darlingsdu jour, Owen Benjamin, used to have a fairly thriving lil account there. Hes a sometime comedian, podcaster, and actor with some incredibly toxic and erroneous opinions. Last winter, Patreons site owners caught up with him. As the Daily Dot tells us,they banned him. They werent the only ones banning him, either.Instagram, YouTube, PayPal, and Facebookall joined thatparty,most citing repeated violations of their clearly-stated rules about hate speech.

But Owen Benjamin didnt take that bannination sitting down. No way, no sir! He protested and raised a personal army to try to fight the ban byforcingPatreon to take him back.

(Also, at some point he tried to ban-evade with alternate accounts which hes also lost now. Ive just got no words. What a whiny little control-grabbychild. I just want to tell people like that to grow a little goddamned dignity. Never in the world would I ever want to be part of any site or project that didnt want me involved.)

Two of the most idiotic liars on the internet I have ever seen.

A Redditor regarding Vox Day and Owen Benjamin(and he aint wrong either)

Over the years, Owen Benjamin (a Holocaust denier and anti-vaxxer) has built up a large army of creepy, fanatical fanboys. They call themselves bears, with Benjamin himself wearing the nickname Big Bear. And if drive-by Christians think R2D mods can be strict, well, all I can say there is that were the kiddie league compared to Owen Benjamins tightly-moderated spaces.

Shortly after Owen Benjamins bannination, his fellow toxic Christian and wackadoo Vox Day claimed to be filing something against Patreon. Hes since backtracked that claim as apparently both of these conspiracy theorists do often. Its possible Vox Day (real name: Theodore Beale) simply meant he washelpingBenjamin with this ludicrous plan of his, but who even knows or cares.

Either way, at first Owen Benjamin filed suit for USD$2.2M. Then, he upped that figure to $3.5M. And then, apparently he asked some of his followers to file lawsuits alongside him. All in all, about 100 of his fanboys filed lawsuits. All of them appear to have used Benjamins own lawyers to do the filing, and all demanded that Patreon either deal with them or pay Benjamin the $3.5M he wanted.

It was sheer lunacy. I really dont know what they thought was going to happen. Maybe Owen Benjamin thought this plan would get him the money he needs to build his the Northern Idaho fantasy ranch of his dreams, which he seriously namedBearTaria (oh my sides).

(Stay tuned for my future fundraising drive for a Tuscan dream estate of my very own, which Ive dubbed Villa Space Princess. /s)

Whatever Owen Benjamin and his fans thought would happen, Patreons actual response was to sue 72 of those fanboys. According to that Daily Dot article (relink):

This lawsuit is about keeping hate speech off of Patreon, the company told the Daily Dot via email. We wont allow former users to extort Patreon, and are moving these frivolous claims to court where they belong.

Hmm, they dont sound in the slightest bit nervous about anything. Maybe thats because they instituted two rules in January to both [prohibit] users from filing claims based on the platform kicking off someone else and [require] any who do so to pay the companys attorneys fees and costs.

And the fanboys claims were filed a solid month later, in February.

Oops!

So it seems unlikely that the fanboys will come anywhere close to success here and may be on the hook for alotof money if/when they lose.

These LOLsuite filers seem to be under the impression that Patreon is somehow obligated to deal with their horsesh*t however they wish to dish it to the site. A similarly-minded fundagelical explains the illogic here:

The reason they are in trouble is because they have been deplatforming some of their clients.

They have every right to do so, dont they?

Well, no, in fact. They dont.

They have the right to stop providing their own services, absolutely. Twitter can kick off anybody they want, because their service is free. [. . .]

Owen did business with his patrons, and Patreon, in their Terms of Service, explicitly repudiated any responsibility for these individual transactions.

This is huge.

When Patreon kicked off Owen Benjamin, they werent just removing somebody they didnt like. They were interfering with Owens personal business relations with his patrons.

Intentional interfering with contractual relations has another legal name, and that is: tortious interference.

So there you have it. The alt-right is now trying to claim that by blocking Owen Benjamin from their site, Patreon is in effect blocking him from the people who have contracted with him through the site. After crowing about the alt-rights magical new key to what theyre callingre-platforming,this guy gloats:

Deplatforming has been the recent norm, but that is all going to change.

Sure it is, Jan.

He might be the most selfish, shameful human being Ive ever seen. Hes pissed that he couldnt raise $2 million off of them in 3 days in the middle of the greatest depression this country has ever seen. wow

A YouTube commenter regarding Owen Benjamin(and that one wasnt wrong either)

That fundagelicals gloat-rant was written back in January or so, and so far I havent seen any real success with the tactic. Apparently Vox Day foundsomesuccess before that in using it to get back on IndieGogo after they banned him, but other sites seem to have learned from IndieGogos mistakes and have adapted as needed as Patreon clearly did in January.

In fact, this latest news about Patreon suing Owen Benjamins fanboys (no, I will not call them bears) seems to indicate that the tactic will just become yet another failure in the alt-right World of Failtrains.

Gosh, I guess Owen Benjamin is gonna hafta findanotherway to gain his Idaho Fantasy Ranch.

NSFW for language. Seven minutes of an alt-right loon pouting and whining about how little money his fans are giving him for his dumb Idaho Fantasy Ranch dream. A critic of his uploaded this.

The rest of us might think alt-right loons new strategy makes them look like sovereign citizens or something, but theyre dead serious about it for now, at least.

For now, it sure doesnt look like Owen Benjamin is going to get toforceanybody to put up with him any time soon. Poor baby.

NEXT UP: The new influx of women leaving Christianity. See you tomorrow!

Come join us onFacebook,Tumblr,Pinterest,Twitter, and our forum atrolltodisbelieve.com! (AlsoInstagram, where I mostly post cat pictures. About 99% of my insta consists of Bother being adorable.)

Also please check outour Graceful Atheist podcast interview!

Ifyou like what you see, I gratefully welcome your support. Please consider becoming one of my monthly patrons viaPatreon with Roll to Disbelievefor as little as $1/month! MyPayPal is captain_cassidy@yahoo.com(thats an underscore in there) for one-time tips. You can also support this blog throughmy Amazon Affiliate linkand, of course, by liking and sharing my posts on social media! This blog exists because of readers support, and I appreciate every single bit of it.

If youve noticed my posts are a wee bit shorter than usual, its because my shoulders been killing me lately. Typing is a severe strain on it, so Ive been trying to keep that activity to a minimum. Please dont worry if I need a break, I know I can take one! <3 you all.

Read more:

Owen Benjamin and His Personal Army (Collided With Reality) - Patheos

It's much easier to grow when you spy on people. Our growth has been slower because we don't spy on people. It's much easier to provide recommendations when you're following people around and watching everything they do, says Bill Ottman, CEO and co-founder of Minds, an open source, decentralised social network that uses cryptocurrency to reward users for engagement. That's a lot of buzzwords, but Ottman, whose aim is to provide a spying free alternative to Facebook says, Facebook and the others are closed platforms that are extracting value from the users.

Ever since the government banned 59 Chinese apps, including TikTok, there has been a scramble to gain ground in India. Various made in India alternatives have sprung up, such as Roposo, Moj from Sharechat, and newer alternatives like Chingari and Mitron. We've also seen the entry of Reels from Facebook's Instagram, which was launched in Brazil, but made a quick appearance in India right after TikTok was banned.

Minds, which has also been slowly growing globally (though its biggest markets are the US and UK), is also keen to make its mark in India. But it's taking on an uphill task many networks have come up with the stated goal of unseating Facebook, such as Ello, and others have set out to be more open and decentralised, such as Mastodon, but the incumbents are still standing.

Ottman argues that Facebook and other big networks are tainted by secrecy. Everyday there's a new scandal. People are looking for alternatives and want to diversify, he says. In India, the fact that a new app is able to launch every day and claim 100,000 or more new users each day suggests that people are definitely looking for networks, but whether these companies will be able to retain or monetise these new users is still unclear.

However, Ottman believes that as more and more people join Minds, they're going to reach a tipping point. The trend is towards open source. We've seen this happen in other areas already. We believe like Linux, Wikipedia, Bitcoin, this is going to happen in social media as well, Ottman says.

Facebook has certainly faced its share of controversy. The Cambridge Analytica scandal during the 2016 US elections was just the tip of the iceberg during the 2019 general elections in India, reports showed how groups were being created to promote inauthentic behaviour and influence elections. Facebook's WhatsApp, the most popular messaging platform in India, was similarly leveraged to gain votes. Facebook has also been called out for letting the US President Donald Trump post what critics say are calls for violence. But can Minds avoid the same trap?

Minds faced its own controversies in 2018, when a lot of hate groups found its free speech ideals a great way to spread their message without worrying about being shut down. After the reports came out, Minds took steps to remove the content, yet it is still working out the line between free speech and hate speech.

Volunteers are now working to translate Minds into different languages, and helping it to grow in places like Thailand and Vietnam. Yet the numbers are low according to Ottman, the platform has 2.5 million registered users, and around 300,000 monthly active users, and approximately 2 million active visitors. That's about double the registered users from 2018, based on the company's statements, and about triple the MAU from the same time.

If you look at how the big networks are behaving like take the algorithm on Facebook, you're only reaching around five percent of your followers when you post, says Ottman. As long as that kind of behaviour keeps coming, they're pushing people away, and find other networks where they can get more exposure.

What we're noticing, in terms of the influencers that are coming and driving a lot of our traffic and monetisation has been the main interest of the influencers who have come so far from YouTube, he adds. A lot of big influencers are scared of losing their revenue on YouTube, or losing their reach on Facebook.

Bill Ottman, of Minds.comPhoto Credit: Andy Culp/ Wikipedia

The core proposition of Minds, to Ottman, is privacy. We're trying to add new features in 2020 to make it more enticing for people to be on board Minds, and more competitive with mainstream apps, while staying true to the ethos of respecting your privacy, he says. However, to many users, it's the fact that you can get paid simply for using the platform.

YouTube pays some creators, but for most of 2020 we have been focussed on monetisation, both blockchain and fiat, Ottman says. Specially now, with COVID-19, people are really looking for independent revenue streams, and combining social media and monetisation will be something that all social networks focus on more.

To that end, Minds offers a wallet to its users, and lets them earn for posting to the network. The main differentiator is the wallet you can earn dollars (or your rupees or whatever) or Ethereum or Bitcoin. The gamification element where you receive payment for engagement, with animations and badges makes it more engaging, Ottman adds.

But the problem with this is that an incentive to post topics that generate high engagement comes into the picture. And this in turn leads to influencers posting more and more controversial subjects in order to get more visibility. This is an accusation often levelled at journalists, but they're paid a fixed salary. An influencer on the other hand needs to keep increasing engagement.

A popular YouTuber, food scientist Ann Reardon, highlighted this problem with a YouTube channel called Five Minute Crafts, which she said posts unsafe content because it does well on the algorithm, and raises more money. In her video, Reardon notes, It's more clickable, and clickbait content is what's currently working on the YouTube algorithm, and apparently it works on Facebook too.

Ottman agrees that this is a problem. It is very complex and it is not easy. If you look at how mainstream networks are handling sensationalism and sensitive topics, they're taking a very centralised approach with a small handful of fact checkers and saying This is the truth.' We have started a program to create webs of trust through decentralised identity, based on users and content, he says.

Even within a reputation type system where users are voting and scoring users and content, you'll still have manipulation with bots and trolls and its really an ongoing and never-ending battle against misinformation and spam and bots and trolls. But I do think that the best path is incentivising 'good' behaviour, he adds.

This also means that Ottman sees censoring hate speech as a problem. By banning the content they're making the people more radicalised. Censorship causes more violence than free speech, he says.

In recent times, platforms like Twitter and Reddit have been more active in banning political hate speech. Twitter put [content warnings on Trump tweets], and Reddit [removed a group called The_Donald], which was seen by many as a source of political hate speech. Facebook has also been criticised for not following suit with even its own employees staging a virtual walkout to protest the posts.

But Ottman doesn't agree with these moves. Blocking Trump's tweets, or banning The_Donald was very short sighted in my view. There was a study done on Reddit by Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan, which analysed hundreds of millions of posts. They studied the 2015 ban that Reddit did, he says.

The conclusion of the study was that this just caused the trolls to go to other networks, and encode their language on Reddit, he adds.

Minds, whose board includes Daryl Davis, an African American musician who is famous for attending Ku Klux Klan (an American White Supremacist group) rallies and converting members, follows the same philosophy according to Ottman.

All the increases in bans are resulting in greater polarisation. Look at how divided the US is right now. The major social networks are probably the number one contributors to this because of their policies, and the offensive part to me is that they are acting like they are on the moral high ground, he says.

You should be able to control what you're seeing and I want to be able to control my experience so that I am not seeing that content, and that is one of the greatest challenges that we are hyper-fixated on right now, he adds.

We want to make sure that you don't see anything you don't want to see, while also not making the Internet more toxic, Ottman continues. How this is different from deplatforming hate groups and making them occupy smaller and smaller niches of the Internet isn't clear but Ottman feels that only by engaging with hate groups can we make the world a better place.

Of course, this also means that the burden for making the Internet a better place lies on the more moderate users. People that are fomenting hate need to be reasoned with and pacified and convinced, and this is only possible if we're seeing the toxic elements that Ottman wants to allow us to filter out. There's a level of self-contradiction at play here which raises questions about how successful Ottman can be, which he agrees as well, but sticks by his arguments to say that banning speech is not the solution.

It's way easier to just ban it, to spy on people and feed them good recommendations, and grow the network. But I don't think that giving the control and still staying free are mutually exclusive, it's just a more difficult path, he says.

In 2020, will WhatsApp get the killer feature that every Indian is waiting for? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below.

Continue reading here:

Minds Wants to Pay You to Post on Its Social Network, and Is Expanding Into India - Gadgets 360