Month: January 2021

Enlarge / The Chinese embassy in the US posted this tweet on Thursday morning. Twitter removed it on Friday evening. (credit: BULENT KILIC / AFP) (Photo by BULENT KILIC/AFP via Getty Images)

On Thursday evening I wrote about a tweet by the Chinese government's US embassy praising China's treatment of its Uighur minority. According to the tweet, China was in the process of "eradicating extremism" among the Uighurs, which the government claimed had "emancipated" Uighur women. "Gender equality and reproductive health were promoted, making them no longer baby-making machines," the embassy claimed.

When I asked Twitter about this on Thursday evening, a spokesman told me that "this Tweet is not in violation of our policies." The tweet stayed online for most of the day on Friday. But on Friday evening, the tweet disappeared, replaced by a notice that "this Tweet violated the Twitter Rules."

"After further review we have taken action on this Tweet for violating our rules against dehumanization," a Twitter spokeswoman told Ars on Friday evening. "We prohibit the dehumanization of a group of people based on" their religion, race, or ethnicity, among other categories.

Enlarge / Google's corporate headquarters. (credit: Alex Tai | SOPA Images | LightRocket | Getty Images)

Google has banned the conservative social media app Parler from its Play Store for Android.

In a statement to Ars, Google said it was enforcing long-standing policies requiring that social media apps remove "egregious content like posts that incite violence."

"We’re aware of continued posting in the Parler app that seeks to incite ongoing violence in the US," a Google spokesman told Ars. "In light of this ongoing and urgent public safety threat, we are suspending the app’s listings from the Play Store until it addresses these issues."

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

Twitter has permanently suspended President Donald Trump's personal Twitter account due to repeated incitement of violence, the company announced Friday night.

"After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them—specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter—we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence," Twitter said in a company blog post this evening.

On Wednesday, in the wake of the insurrectionist violence at the US Capitol, Twitter gave Trump a 12-hour suspension and required him to delete three tweets that it saw as continuing to promote, endorse, or glorify the violent event.

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  The Moto G Play (2021), for $170. There's a rear fingerprint reader, a top headphone jack, and a teardrop front camera mount. [credit: Motorola ]

Motorola has announced most of its 2021 lineup all at once, so we have a big pile of phones to sift through. Meet the Moto G Play (2021), Moto G Power (2021), Moto G Stylus (2021), and Motorola One 5G Ace. These names all really roll off the tongue.

There's no way we're making sense of this without a big table, so here we go:

If we compare this to last year's lineup that was announced around this time, the cheapest phone used to be the $150 Moto E (2020) and now it's the Moto G Play (2021) at $170.  That extra $20 includes a big battery upgrade from 3550mAh to 5000mAh, an extra GB of RAM, and an upgrade from Micro-USB to the modern world of USB-C. Everything has a big 5000mAh battery other than the Moto G Stylus, which has to carve out some space for storage of the eponymous stylus.

Enlarge / The image currently at the top of r/donaldtrump. (credit: Reddit)

On Friday, Reddit joined this week's response to violent online rhetoric as spearheaded by President Donald Trump and removed its "r/donaldtrump" community, the site's largest existing community dedicated specifically to Trump. Visiting any of that community's pages now leads to a simple message pointing to Reddit's rules about "inciting violence," which starts by saying, "Do not post violent content."

Without a citation of specific Reddit threads or a formal announcement from Reddit administrators clarifying the move, users may be left wondering about the exact reason for the removal. It's possible, for example, that the community page was punished for reposting Trump's speeches and statements from earlier in the week, which alternated between false claims about election fraud, calls to action by his followers in response to his claims about fraud, or sympathetic statements about the seditionists who stormed the US Capitol on Wednesday.

While searching through r/donaldtrump archives is a bit unwieldy (owing to how such archives are maintained at sites like archive.is), cursory searches point to the community hosting pre-protest conversations about the January 6 protest, usually with titles pointing to Trump's direct request that his followers from across the nation attend. The issue may also have come from multiple claims at r/donaldtrump shortly before its shutdown about Wednesday's seditionists being disguised as "antifa," despite a majority of Capitol building invaders being identified with clear links to white nationalist organizations and calls for a violent January 6 protest.