A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming • Hacker News Board

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#161

Post by BurningFrog » Sat, Nov 03, 2018, 4:02 AM UTC

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.

This is the "fascism is infectious" theory, under which we are all potential fascists if we just get exposed to the "infection".

By this theory fascism is somehow so inherently attractive that is has to be regulated similar to an addictive drug.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#162

Post by jesssse » Sat, Nov 03, 2018, 4:08 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #32

It's probably unrealistic to expect us to stop seeing threads about this (Gab's #1 objective at this point will be to make more noise and surely something "newsworthy" will happen with them sometime soonish). But it's worth noting that we've had several recent discussions about Gab stemming from the events that occurred after the mass shooting. Here, Jeftovic is arguing from faulty premises. Correcting those premises…

We must protect the rights of "white nationalists" or whatever to organize and speak on the Internet. Free speech is for everyone.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#163

Post by tptacek » Sat, Nov 03, 2018, 4:13 AM UTC

freedomben wrote: post #146

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…

I agree it probably won't matter. I wish it would, but it won't. However, I will be moving a handful of domains to Easy DNS because I appreciate them taking this position. I looked at Gab once a while back and was mostly disgusted, and never looked back, but I don't like this trend toward censoring and deplatforming. I don't worry about my speech being censored because (at least for now) it's relatively popular. But…

You can say that! But: if, rather than just writing a chin-stroking blog post, Easydns had actually hosted Gab's zones, I think they'd find the impact on their customer base would not be net positive.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#164

Post by tptacek » Sat, Nov 03, 2018, 4:15 AM UTC

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…

It sounds suspiciously as if you're drawing a direct comparison between the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War 2 and Gab getting kicked off GoDaddy. That can't possibly be an argument you really want to make.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#165

Post by archagon » Sat, Nov 03, 2018, 4:17 AM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #156

archagon wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Trump proudly came out as a nationalist a few weeks ago and is visibly salivating at the prospect of pitting thousands of troops against a migrant caravan. Unlike the Communists, these people are already in positions of power and are fighting to gain legitimacy by any means necessary.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#166

Post by dragonwriter » Sat, Nov 03, 2018, 4:19 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…

> 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."

Only if you equate exercise of first amendment rights with loss of first amendment rights. Choosing to relay content or not is a first amendment right, compelling other people to do so on your behalf is not.

While there might be a legitimate debate that some positive rights exist, the rights enshrined in the first amendment are negative, not positive.

> There is a lawsuit where a company owned this mining company town, including all of its roads and sidewalks. A Jehova's witness won a lawsuit on the basis of the First Amendment, enabling her to walk about that town and distribute her pamphlets.

But no one entity is positioned the way Gulf Shipbuilding was in Marsh v. Alabama, so as to exercise the power to control the expressive rights of an entire community. Were there a single internet monopoly that did this at any level of the stack, perhaps the situation would be comparable (the fact that broadband ISPs are often local monopolies or in very narrow oligopoly and can essentially gatekeep all internet usage is, in fact, the basis of a common first amendment argument for net neutrality), but this is not the case, which is why Cyber Promotions v. America Online decided that spam filters did not violate the First Amendment.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#167

Post by tptacek » Sat, Nov 03, 2018, 4:20 AM UTC

jesssse wrote: post #162

tptacek wrote: post #32

It's probably unrealistic to expect us to stop seeing threads about this (Gab's #1 objective at this point will be to make more noise and surely something "newsworthy" will happen with them sometime soonish). But it's worth noting that we've had several recent discussions about Gab stemming from the events that occurred after the mass shooting. Here, Jeftovic is arguing from faulty premises. Correcting those premises…

We must protect the rights of "white nationalists" or whatever to organize and speak on the Internet. Free speech is for everyone.

They have the right to organize and speak on the Internet. Not only can they, they can even do it on Twitter! The whole premise behind Gab is kind of a grift. Twitter is choc-a-bloc with white nationalists, many of them with blue checkmarks. The things that get people kicked off Twitter (most notably: targeted harassment) are ostensibly things that also get you kicked off Gab. Gab doesn't want you thinking too carefully about that, of course.

Also: beware the subtexts of brief statements about the rights of white nationalists that begin with "we must".

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#168

Post by archagon » Sat, Nov 03, 2018, 4:22 AM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #161

archagon wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the "fascism is infectious" theory, under which we are all potential fascists if we just get exposed to the "infection". By this theory fascism is somehow so inherently attractive that is has to be regulated similar to an addictive drug.

People are surprisingly easy to reprogram. You can read countless stories of once-liberal parents turning into hateful conspiracy nuts in their old age out of prolonged exposure to right-wing media.

If you see people around you saying “white males are undergoing a genocide” or “brown people are criminals” every day, chances are you’ll eventually start to internalize some of those talking points. Without tremendous effort, we’re nothing more than a rough aggregation of the opinions we surround ourselves with.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#169

Post by tptacek » Sat, Nov 03, 2018, 4:24 AM UTC

evrydayhustling wrote: post #152

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…

When people complain about being deplatformed, they're just saying "the platforms that accept me aren't popular enough".

This is perfect.

Re: A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

#170

Post by woodruffw » Sat, Nov 03, 2018, 4:24 AM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #131

woodruffw wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 d…

There's no conditioning going on. The general population that grew up online in web forums is very much conditioned to accept totalitarian dictates about who can say what, where. Even to the point where they concoct ideology about it. a discussion that's been going on for as long as liberal democracies have existed The US government coming in and telling a private entity, no you must tolerate free speech on your prop…

Not totalitarian (neither of us is in a position of power over the other, and neither of us is advocating for government intervention), and not concocted (these questions belong to a long tradition in Western political thought). If by "conditioned" you mean that public sentiments are changing, sure. But I don't think that demands such a negative description.

The company town case is interesting, but it's just a case. I don't buy that (1) it's sufficiently similarl to the challenges of hate speech on private online venues, or (2) that it constitutes a sufficient body of jurisprudence to make the general subject "historical fact."

Speaking of historical fact: it is not historical fact that the First Amendment was "originally widely recognized by US jurisprudence." In fact, the free expression clauses of the First Amendment barely showed up in America's highest courts until the turn of the 20th century[1]. The first FA case with any modern significance is Eugene v. United States, in 1919.

To be clear: the fact that something's been around for longer than another thing is not a good argument, in my book, for its value. But, in this case, it isn't even factual: both US common law and the judicial canon reflect a far greater emphasis on property rights (and, tangentially, the fleshing out of the federal system) than they do free expression.

[1]: https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/page/first-amendment-timeli...