A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming • Hacker News Board

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#121

Post by stcredzero » Sat, Nov 03, 2018, 2:20 AM UTC

CamperBob2 wrote: post #117

stcredzero wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For awhile, the Soviets could "deplatform" people from their lives entirely by threatening them or sending them to the Gulags. They held things together for many decades through that continual disruption. Yes, you can coerce people with your advantages, and it will work for awhile. You can even create enclaves where you can keep undesirables out. But no, that never wins in the end.

Because being banned from Twitter is totally like being sent to a gulag.

Granted, I'd rather you only take my speech than my physical freedom and my life. However, if society starts taking away practical freedom of speech, who is going to speak up? Why wouldn't the big companies and the government just pressure Google and Facebook to get everyone to shut up about it? This is why freedom of speech is foundational.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#122

Post by happytoexplain » Sat, Nov 03, 2018, 2:22 AM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #95

dragonwriter wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Deplatforming is a dangerous step for a free society, Deplatforming is simply the a natural consequence of the operation of the marketplace of ideas, a central necessity for a free society. If ideas don't have to compete for the privilege of access to resource to relay them, there is no marketplace of ideas, and society drowns in noise. > The big risk is this: when only a few entities funnel so much societal discou…

Deplatforming is simply the a natural consequence of the operation of the marketplace of ideas That's just as silly as if someone had said, "Certain people losing their 1st Amendment rights is simply the natural consequence of the operation of the marketplace of ideas." It's nonsense, because once you let people start silencing others, there is no more free marketplace of ideas. That's pretty much like some Victorian…

This is a pretty blatant example of demonizing mischaracterisation via totally arbitrary metaphor. It's poison to conversations.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#123

Post by pvg » Sat, Nov 03, 2018, 2:24 AM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #111

pvg wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are free to make whatever argument you want - what you can't do is deliberately misrepresent the other person's argument, which is what you are doing. HN even has a weird rule about that involving quotation marks. There's no 'technically' about this, you're doing it, it's bad and you shouldn't.

I'm not misrepresenting the other's argument at all. I'm clarifying it.

No you aren't. You don't get to decide what the other person's argument is and then rail against that. It's a pretty fundamental rule of reasonably civil discourse. I'm sure you've seen dang berate people about this but in case you haven't:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:dang%20quotation&sort=b...

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#124

Post by stcredzero » Sat, Nov 03, 2018, 2:24 AM UTC

uabstraction wrote: post #113

throwawaysea wrote: post #22

This is a good article that explores many of the angles involved. Deplatforming is a dangerous step for a free society, especially when so much power is accumulated in a few platforms* The big risk is this: when only a few entities funnel so much societal discourse or control our communication infrastructure or process payments, those entities making arbitrary decisions about who they serve has similar impacts and ri…

> Deplatforming is a dangerous step for a free society, especially when so much power is accumulated in a few platforms I disagree here. Communities like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc, have grown to such enormous scales, that their eventual fracture is inevitable. Whether it takes the form of griefers getting the boot, or communities leaving on their own accord, the root problem is the same. You simply can't put a b…

If you take the riffraff from the pub and inject them into the library, you're going to have a bad time.

According to Kevin Creehan, his grandson, Irish fiddler Junior Creehan was always amazed that Irish Traditional music became a thing for pubs. To him, it had started out as thoughtful people gathered around in their kitchens playing music together. I can attest that a trad session can be a contemplative and even a bit trance-like.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#125

Post by claudiawerner » Sat, Nov 03, 2018, 2:25 AM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #96

mlillie wrote: post #2

This reeks of both-sides-ism and enablement. "Where does it stop?" is the same slippery slope garbage peddled by #HimToo and #BlueLivesMatter acolytes. But even engaging with the question at face value, the answer is very simple, and the author of this piece didn't try very hard if he couldn't find someone who is able to answer it. In fact, the best answer was given by Karl Popper in 1945. > In order to maintain a to…

This reeks of both-sides-ism and enablement. The whole point of Free Speech is to enable all sides of any issue to have their say. That is a fundamental mechanism against totalitarianism. In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance. Sorry, but Karl Popper's idea is just Orwellian nightmare fuel. "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength." Tolerance is to live…

>Tolerance is to live and let live.

This is one reading of tolerance, but there are multiple (as expounded by Popper and Marcuse too, for instance). I don't think considering an idea badly because it's used as fuel is a good thing. A quick counterexample to the idea that tolerance means to allow anything and everything is that if I were to tell you I tolerate your presence, but you begin to make annoying sounds continuously, my tolerance would quickly change to intolerance.

Tolerance is a democratic principle, since it relies on the idea that nobody has an absolute claim on the truth, but as critical theorists as early as the 60s pointed out, this democratic idea depends on an informed populace to distinguish ideas as they are - to that end, in society we don't tolerate some views, such as the teaching of creationism in schools.

A good essay on this is Marcuse's "Repressive Tolerance". Regarding your mention of Orwell, Marcuse made another interesting point; nowadays, the contradiction is hidden within the noun itself, rather than "war is peace", the word "freedom" itself, understood in the context of its ideological use by various proponents (particularly on the libertarian right, I've noticed) already contains the contradiction; the idea it represents is contradictory. Similarly with misleading names and terms.

I do not want to live in a society in which tolerance is absolute, and I doubt many people would.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#126

Post by happytoexplain » Sat, Nov 03, 2018, 2:25 AM UTC

StuntPope wrote: post #88

throwawaysea wrote: post #80

Why is this article being flagged? From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. This story is not spam, and it is not off-topic since it clearly relates to current news in technology.

Even your question to ask why this is flagged is downvoted. I've been noticing this for awhile on Hackernews: no dissent from the narrative is permitted. What a joke.

What is "the narrative"?

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#127

Post by stcredzero » Sat, Nov 03, 2018, 2:26 AM UTC

fzeroracer wrote: post #118

stcredzero wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deplatforming is simply the a natural consequence of the operation of the marketplace of ideas That's just as silly as if someone had said, "Certain people losing their 1st Amendment rights is simply the natural consequence of the operation of the marketplace of ideas." It's nonsense, because once you let people start silencing others, there is no more free marketplace of ideas. That's pretty much like some Victorian…

It is a natural consequence of the marketplace of ideas and of capitalism in general. Capitalism ascribes values to speech. If speech therefore has negative value, capitalism has the imperative to censor or prevent that speech from occurring. I would even hasten to argue that if you don't follow that train of thought you would be inherently anti-capitalist or unable to understand the full extent of the free market. A…

[dupe]

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#128

Post by woodruffw » Sat, Nov 03, 2018, 2:27 AM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #119

woodruffw wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For awhile, the Soviets could "deplatform" people from their lives entirely by threatening them or sending them to the Gulags. They held things together for many decades through that continual disruption. I take the scarequotes there to be you admitting that gulags aren't really deplatforming -- it's a government terrorizing its citizens. Nobody in this conversation is interested in building gulags or putting the u…

I've presented some research indicating that banning hateful online communities actually does have some kind of positive effect I'm sure that you can find a Soviet study indicating that certain of their programs had an effect against Bourgeois oppressor thinking and activity for some number of years. Why are we so hesitant to accept that other entities fundamentally conflict with the notion of liberal democracy? Cond…

> I'm sure that you can find a Soviet study indicating that certain of their programs had an effect against Bourgeois oppressor thinking and activity for some number of years.

Again, no gulags here. Just Twitter, Reddit, and bad clones of the aforementioned. It's also worth noting that the Soviet Union, at its best, simply was not a liberal democracy. The position that I'm taking is nonsensical outside of a liberal democratic context, so comparing it with various inhumanities under a non-democracy is unconvincing at best.

> Conditioning a society to accept the practically suppression of free speech fundamentally conflicts with the notion of liberal democracy.

We're talking about the scope and structure of liberal democracy itself, a discussion that's been going on for as long as liberal democracies have existed (others have brought up Popper, but Popper cribbed the idea from Immanuel Kant). There's no conditioning going on.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#129

Post by pvg » Sat, Nov 03, 2018, 2:30 AM UTC

StuntPope wrote: post #116

pvg wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing 'ironic' about it, flagging is like downvoting. You aren't being 'deplatformed' by some inscrutable power, users just don't think it's a fit for the site.

No, flagging is not like "downvoting", this isn't reddit. As somebody else here already pointed out: > From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. This isn't spam and given the interest it's garnered it's obviously not off-topic. So if you're flagging it you're basically throwing your opinion over it and preventing others from seeing it and from upvoting it. That'…

People commenting on something does not make it 'on topic'. I'm guessing people flagged this because it's the Nth iteration of the same discussion which, by this point, is quite repetitive and tedious. It's a dupe.

In any event, I'm not really all that into discussing the details of flagging with you - they're not important although I understand you're annoyed this got flagged. Your 'update' header doesn't really make sense - you want user actions to serve as indication of the quality of your piece - 'rapid rise', lively discussion, whatnot. But user actions you don't like are 'ironic' and deplatforming. Can't have it both ways.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#130

Post by claudiawerner » Sat, Nov 03, 2018, 2:32 AM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #53

tptacek wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In actuality, Gab bans users for the same reason Twitter does. For instance, when Paul Nehlen tried to organize harassment of another white nationalist figure, Gab banned him. Part of Gab's sales pitch is that it's a refuge for people whose thoughts are somehow too dangerous for Twitter. But contrary to what Gab wants you to believe, Twitter doesn't ban white nationalists. Richard Spencer has a Twitter account. So do…

Gab also banned people who posted anime porn, sending them in flocks to ActivityPub instances.

The users Gab banned were already on such instances by and large, in particular smuglo.li and pawoo.net.