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A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

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Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#151

Post by archagon »

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…

Totalitarianism is gaining power right now through bad actors operating under the cloak of free speech. The bigger their communities get, the more they infect the communities around them with their hatred and lies. This should be blindingly obvious if you’ve been online for more than a couple of years.

Your mechanism against totalitarianism will lead you straight into a dictatorship.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#152

Post by evrydayhustling »

Reading this article is like watching someone beat the ocean with a stick. What would it look like for an "anti-deplatforming" initiative to succeed? All ideas have equal access to all platforms? Just the big ones? The objective is so poorly formed, it's not even wrong.

A platform's identity and ability to attract an audience are determined by the activities they accept / cultivate, not vice versa. Infowars wanted to be on Facebook because it made it easier to sell your grandparents vitamin supplements, but Facebook felt that leaving them on make it a place families (and their grandparents) won't visit. Gab would like to use Stripe or Paypal because they are trusted payment providers, but those networks felt they'd stop being trusted payment providers if they let Gab stay on.

And there's plenty of reason to think they're right: super-permissive platforms exist and work (4chan et al.), they just don't attract the same broad audience. When people complain about being deplatformed, they're just saying "the platforms that accept me aren't popular enough". I'm glad our internet is enough of a distributed commons that many platforms are broadly accessible -- but nobody owes you an audience at the most popular ones.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#153

Post by DoreenMichele »

stcredzero wrote: post #145
DoreenMichele wrote: post #65

Gab illustrates a “catch-22” around setting out to be specifically a “free speech platform”. You initially appeal to the most fringe elements of public discourse. Your first wave of users are going to be people for whom this has been a problem, and if you’re an absolutist and let them on then suddenly that’s your base. For me, this is one of the more profound take-aways from the article. This piece is very thought pr…

The forums for Free Speech in the 60's also came with a lot of what was thought of as perverted toxic nonsense. Some of that is still thought of as unacceptable today.

There are some very real problems where oppressed people of various sorts have a real need to be able to "speak the unspeakable" in order to sort their own problems. New ideas are also inevitable heretical.

Sorting the wheat from the chaff is a challenge. Trying to not throw the baby out with the bathwater is a challenge.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#154

Post by tptacek »

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'…

Can I offer a different complaint? Mine is: you updated your post to reflect that it had been flagged by HN users, but not with material new information you acquired from the thread before that flag had occurred. That feels a little dishonest.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#155

Post by philwelch »

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…

Actually, platforms that de-platform tolerant platforms like Gab are the real intolerant ones.

I'm being (slightly) facetious, but the point is that Popper's argument, or at least this naive interpretation of it, can be used to justify any intolerance. There's no obvious reason you can't use Popper's argument to justify McCarthyism or the Muslim ban or even Japanese internment on the grounds of the alleged intolerance of their intended targets, or the existential threat they posed to liberalized society. In fact, most actual justifications of those things are based on Popper's argument; it's of the same species as "the Constitution is not a suicide pact" or "are you going to convict Jack Bauer?". This is literally how people tried to justify every violation of civil liberties in American history.

US judicial precedent around the First Amendment has varied over time. The hoary cliche that "you can't shout fire in a crowded theater" comes from a Supreme Court ruling in 1919, Schenck v. United States, that the First Amendment did not protect advocacy of draft resistance. That ruling was overruled, and the standard set by the court in 1969, in Brandenberg v. Ohio, was "imminent lawless action". And I think that standard meets Popper's bar without the risk of it devolving into totalitarianism for the sake of protecting us from totalitarianism. Which, incidentally, has been the sales pitch of every totalitarian regime ever. The next batch of Nazis are going to get power by telling us they need it to protect us from the Nazis.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#156

Post by philwelch »

archagon wrote: post #151
stcredzero wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Totalitarianism is gaining power right now through bad actors operating under the cloak of free speech. The bigger their communities get, the more they infect the communities around them with their hatred and lies. This should be blindingly obvious if you’ve been online for more than a couple of years. Your mechanism against totalitarianism will lead you straight into a dictatorship.

> Totalitarianism is gaining power right now through bad actors operating under the cloak of free speech. The bigger their communities get, the more they infect the communities around them.... Your mechanism against totalitarianism will lead you straight into a dictatorship.

Those might have been the exact words of a 1950's McCarthyite. How can you be so sure that you're just just as wrong as they were?

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#157

Post by orangecat »

skedaddle wrote: post #78
mooseburger wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They both happened. It's an accurate description of the state of discourse.

No they didn't. In the two situations he is clearly alluding to 1) the person admitted it was hurtful and unacceptable and that they should not have said it, and the mainstream publisher said they would not have hired her without this understanding 2) the argument the person made before being fired was not simply that there is a non-zero amount of sexual dimorphism in humans, it was concretely that womens' neuroticis…

it was concretely that womens' neuroticism, agreeableness, and other feeling-sy tendencies may explain why they are on average worse leaders, underrepresented, underpaid, etc.

Remove "worse leaders" (which was not in Damore's memo), and it's a plausible theory supported by quite a bit of evidence.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#158

Post by hexane360 »

claudiawerner wrote: post #137
manfredo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is not that the extremism on one end cancels out extremism on the other. The point is, it is possible to tolerate both - there is no paradox of tolerance with respect to speech. As to your second point, the suppression of speech also has dangerous consequences. Plenty of anti-Semitic thought is rooted in the belief of Jewish control of the media. Suppressing speech probably only serves to reinforce this vie…

>The reality is that intolerance of hateful speech rarely makes hate go away. Is there any evidence either way? I don't have the source at hand, but I believe there was some study done that found that Reddit, after removing communities which spread hate, turned out significantly better for it, with less vitriol all round. The hate literally went away. >Remember, high ranking Nazi leaders were imprisoned Here is a quo…

A good recent example of this is Reddit banning /r/GreatAwakening. There was a migration over to Voat and a couple other forums, but total searches for Q and total influence went way down.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#159

Post by jesssse »

archagon wrote: post #151
stcredzero wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Totalitarianism is gaining power right now through bad actors operating under the cloak of free speech. The bigger their communities get, the more they infect the communities around them with their hatred and lies. This should be blindingly obvious if you’ve been online for more than a couple of years. Your mechanism against totalitarianism will lead you straight into a dictatorship.

> Totalitarianism is gaining power right now through bad actors operating under the cloak of free speech.

I do not understand this assertion.

The way I see it, Free Speech is an antidote against totalitarianism, in contrast to Censorship, which is a tool of totalitarianism.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#160

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

stcredzero wrote: post #143
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #135

> Most successful deplatformings are Pyrrhic victories Big fat citation needed on this. You speculate as to how they may become pyrrhic victories, but it's far from concluded that this will be the case. Previous deplatformings (Milo, Alex Jones) haven't produced any visible negative consequences for the platforms. There's little reason to think this will either. Surprisingly few people care if a den of hate speech ha…

Likewise, almost no one cares what a Jehovah's witness has to say. The US government coming in and telling a private entity, no you must tolerate free speech on your property is historical fact and precedent. There is a lawsuit where a company owned this mining company town, including all of its roads and sidewalks. A Jehovah's witness won a lawsuit on the basis of the First Amendment, enabling her to walk about that…

Ain't gonna happen in this case, for two reasons:

1. Jehovah's witnesses tend not to shoot up synagogues, whereas an otherwise typical member of Gab did.

2. Antisemitism isn't a protected class.

I can see from your comments that you are one of those, "I'd defend to the death your right to say it," people. I must admit, I would not defend to the death someone's right to spew hate toward Jews. That's not my hill to die on. I rather feel . . . the opposite. I'm glad that Gab got kicked off GoDaddy, and if I had my way, they'd be relegated to the dark corners of Tor.

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