Yeah, but that's only because retail investors got locked out of the market at $400. The clearing houses spontaneously jacked up collateral requirements for the stock and almost every broker either locked investors out of trading or explicitly banned additional purchases of the stock.
You can actually compare the timings and see that the second this happened the price imploded.
If the market didn't lock up like that the shorts would have been completely annihilated. The populist play was a good one, but they we're playing a rigged game and the buyers found that out the hard way at the 11th hour.
Is that really true though? Men are overrepresented by multiples among the Homelessness, prison sentences, assult victims, suicides, gun deaths. Often by factors of 2-3x
They're also deeply underrepresented in college, and the gap between men and women going to college is growing. Among young people, especially in cities, women actually out earn men.
Figuring out who's "better off" seems to be entirely dependent on what ruler you're using to measure "better", and which subgroup you're using to do the measurement.
This is one of those cases where the game was definitely rigged, even though no one intentionally rigged it. Every actor in the chain was following their own self interest, but at the end of the day, the guys who got cutoff at the knees during the 11th hour were the retail investors and r/wsb.
I don't think this was a coincidence, but rather a special case of more general rich-get-richer dynamics that we see everywhere in society.
Isn't that exactly what Parler is doing? The reason it doesn't work is because network effects and collective action make businesses that try uncompetitive. Go against the grain and all of a sudden everyone you were trading with that made your business feasible drops you. If any other businesses try to support you in their place, they'll also be singled out and get the same treatment.
The criteria is very clear. If you're part of the outgroup, you get banned, if you're part of the fargroup nobody cares, if you're part of the ingroup you get a signal boost. It's basic human tribal dynamics that we've understood for decades. It explains almost all of the data we've observed so far about which high profile figures do or do not get banned.
Can you really say that they're wrong? There might not be a conspiracy, but the "out to get them" seems pretty accurate. I predict payment processors will also attempt to deplatform parler soon enough.
I think everyone is ignoring the nitroglycerin that's been poured onto what was originally just embers. Every single one of these social media platforms has had an enormous incentive to broadcast viral mind destroying rage-bait to everyone 24/7 for the past decade.
People say that free speech needs to go, but free speech has been working fine for centuries, and allowed formerly incredibly unpopular opinions to take hold, opinions that we now take for granted. There's also plenty of historical precedent for horrible shit promptly happening right after it gets removed.
The solution is not to ban wrongthinkers, or get rid of free speech. The solution is to build our civilizations communication systems in such a way that they incentivize actually productive discussion, rather than this.
> What's the alternative to censorship? How does Truth prevail in the public square?
Even Good Samaritan Chomsky has no response to the Paradox of Tolerance.
As someone who's still on the free speech bandwagon. I think that this situations is pretty straight forward. One of the founding motivations for free speech is that it allows us to form accurate beliefs. Any approach that uses censorship to deal with the problem of misinformation and lying doesn't even pass the sniff test as a solution. This is because if the censor is factually wrong, it's game over. There is no recovery from that situation. The second you start filtering information that disagrees with your beliefs is the second you lose the ability to change them when new information comes in.
You can't fix the issues with free speech by selectively attacking individual topics based on your belifes about ground level truth. You have to do it at least 1 meta level up. Ask yourself, if humanity was a collection of nodes in a network, and social media was the protocol, "how do I choose a protocol which maximises the probability that the nodes in the network all converge to the truth even when I don't know it a priori".
You'll quickly find that platforms like twitter, instagram, and tiktok are the opposite of the answer. Each of them is engineered to minimise critical thinking, source checking, viewpoint sharing, and discussion. Facebook and reddit are bit better, at least on those you can post an essay and respond. Hacker news is even better, it has a simple UI that prioritizes text.
You also get more interesting ideas, like integrated cryptographic signing into social media platforms, or tuning feed algorithms to promote discussion using simple unbiased mechanism.
There's a whole bunch of shit we can do to solve the problem. Most of it hasn't been tried. Don't let people who are extremely intolerant use the paradox of tolerance to shut down opinions, ideas, and cultures they won't tolerate.