YouTube Bans Alex Jones, Following Facebook's and Apple's Lead

> How do we find rules that permit us to say "no!" in the name of good and not have those rules turned against good disturbances of the status quo?

Well, let’s see how deplatforming InfoWars turns out before trying to create general rules about it. I think it’ll work, but no sense in trying to generalize without any data. And maybe we don’t even need general rules, but can do it all on a case-by-case basis.

> and not have those rules turned against good disturbances of the status quo? [...] meanwhile I try to consider how rules can backfire when such things come up.

The people who would misuse rules against hate speech will ban good disturbances of the status quo anyway. Whether or not InfoWars and its ilk get banned will have no bearing on what they do. Trying to create good rules offers no defense against those who refuse to play by the rules.

Helping my partner through depression. I realized I kept trying to excersize control over their recovery e.g. making them go to the doctor, making them do things.

In the process i found that they very much so wanted to be a “well” person and going to the docotor was not something a “well” person does.

So instead of pushing then I just focussed on making it safe for them to be unwell. Through holding space, admitting my own vulnerabilities and issues, and by not reacting negatively to their psychosis symptoms.

I recognized the similarity with other instances of changing peoples minds.

Some people want control, and accepting your ideas reduces their perceived control, so you need to make it safe for them to accept the idea (change their mind) while still feeling in control.

Some people see them selves a good people and admitting their actions are biggoted and hurtful doesn’t fit with that so they rationalize the “others” as bad. To change their minds they need a way to feel like good people even though they’ve done biggoted, hurtful things.

Some people are scared and they will rationalize that fear in some mannor. To convince them that there is nothing to fear from that which they rationalised means making it safe for them to experience fear without that justification.

Well for you it might be clear it is much better than Jones, but from the distance the "us vs them" narrative and the obsession with whatever is the latest "scandal" (Clinton's emails, Weinstein, Trump & Russia) makes it seem like pure tabloid. So you can actually make good argument about NYT being similar to Jones (better crap is still crap).

> Well, let’s see how deplatforming InfoWars turns out before trying to create general rules about it

We can act before we have figured it all out, but we shouldn't postpone thinking about the broader question of when to step in, because the answer won't be simple and we need to have it as good as we can get it BEFORE the next issue comes up, because:

> The people who would misuse rules against hate speech will ban good disturbances of the status quo anyway.

Sandy Hook deniers, Holocaust Deniers - these are terrible people doing terrible things. I don't want to say otherwise AT ALL.

Often an important claim is initially unproven, not generally believed, and _induces discomfort_. Are you suggesting that a colored person is my equal? A woman? A savage? Are you suggesting that the military conducted secret experiments on troops? That the FBI targeted MLK? That the US uses warrantless wiretaps on citizens? That humans can do to other humans what you describe from the concentration camps?

Now we know those claims to be true, but they were initially unpopular. Heck, MLK was disliked/distrusted by the _majority_ of Americans. Silencing the people making those unpopular and uncomfortable claims early would spread injustice.

That's why we want rules - not so that the bad actors can twist them against us, but so that we have a defense against the bad actors shutting down the good actors, and most importantly, so that we have a defense against ourselves being unwitting bad actors. How do I know Sandy Hook was not faked but the DDOS attack on the FCC was? Because both sides were allowed to be heard long enough for evidence to come together.

Saying "the solution is just to never silence anyone" is a popular solution, even though I think it's the wrong one. But "We should only silence those that are wrong" completely dodges how we know who is wrong. Finding a healthy middle ground between these extremes requires work and diligence. If we choose to err on the side of NOT silencing, as I would prefer to, it means the work and diligence becomes all the more important.

Just trusting our intuition as to who is the bad actor that should be silenced has a bad track record.

It's quite clear if you understand the distinction between journalism and infotainment. Journalism outlets spend millions of dollars to staff professional reporters and fact checkers; when they report a story, they've often got a whole team of trained professionals on multiple locations collecting details and interviewing primary sources. When the outlet we're talking about is the NYT or WSJ, those teams are in dozens of countries around the world operating out of large full-time bureaus.

Infotainment outlets hire a couple dozen people to make shit up and put it on a web page and a Youtube video.

Sometimes reality gets tabloidy. Sometimes editors make decisions that optimize engagement and viewership over clarity. CNN and Fox both run pundit shows along with hard news and blur the lines by hosting their hard-news pro's on the pundit shows. But no matter what happens to make CNN seem like infotainment, it simply isn't, because the process that generates it is journalism.