251–260 of 473 posts
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…
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…
A tolerant society, to defend itself, only needs to be intolerant of actions of intolerance - e.g. physical assault motivated by some prejudice. It does not need to be intolerant of intolerant speech, however.
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…
> has similar impacts and risks to the government imposing similar restrictions through the law We can't really compare them to the government until they have a standing army. That said, pure scale does matter. There will debate over whether powerful organisations are currently benign or hostile, but there is no doubt whatsoever that they are a mighty force. If Google or Facebook ever decides to seriously wake up pol…
In Soviet Union families of political prisoners and people who publicly defended the repressed often found themselves unemployable because of blacklisting. That did not involve any use of military or police force. Does it make it okay?
To put it more directly: if a sufficiently large entity can create effects comparable to government repression, why should we reason about those effects as fundamentally different from ones created by the government?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess they'll have to return to sharing their desire to kill black people the old fashioned way, in person. Something you aren't grappling with here is the way the Internet has enabled previously-scattered terrible people to connect and self-radicalize. David Neiwart, who tracked various "patriot", white supremacist, and other fringe groups since the 90s, wrote a very readable book about how things have changed sin…
are you OK with most Muslims not using the internet, because their values are radically different from non-muslims (treatment of women, gays, atheists) and they have a fairly high rate of terrorism compared to other ideologies? It's likely that the internet and places like GAB or whatever site you don't like, is a good place to de-radicalize people as well. and you can't even have a place to de-radicalize when the pe…
that seems like a big assumption.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess they'll have to return to sharing their desire to kill black people the old fashioned way, in person. Something you aren't grappling with here is the way the Internet has enabled previously-scattered terrible people to connect and self-radicalize. David Neiwart, who tracked various "patriot", white supremacist, and other fringe groups since the 90s, wrote a very readable book about how things have changed sin…
are you OK with most Muslims not using the internet, because their values are radically different from non-muslims (treatment of women, gays, atheists) and they have a fairly high rate of terrorism compared to other ideologies? It's likely that the internet and places like GAB or whatever site you don't like, is a good place to de-radicalize people as well. and you can't even have a place to de-radicalize when the pe…
This is untrue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Making credible and specific calls for violece (e.g. "actively advocating for your murder" as you put it) is punisheable by law. There does exist a mechanism to punish people actively working towards causing harm, rather than spreading ideas. Of course, many would try to claim that whole ideas should be off limits - but that's essentially a concession that they're advocating using censorship (whether through governme…
The problem is that, although plenty of speech that is not a call for violence still causes harm, many free speech zealots (and hateful people, in bad faith) refuse to recognize it as such and consider it "spreading ideas". Consider: "blood and soil" and "Jews will not replace us" aren't credible and specific calls for violence, but if I encounter an angry group of people chanting them I'm going to feel unsafe, and I…
No, you can choose both (suppress both Nazis and Jews), just not neither.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> has similar impacts and risks to the government imposing similar restrictions through the law We can't really compare them to the government until they have a standing army. That said, pure scale does matter. There will debate over whether powerful organisations are currently benign or hostile, but there is no doubt whatsoever that they are a mighty force. If Google or Facebook ever decides to seriously wake up pol…
>We can't really compare them to the government until they have a standing army. In Soviet Union families of political prisoners and people who publicly defended the repressed often found themselves unemployable because of blacklisting. That did not involve any use of military or police force. Does it make it okay? To put it more directly: if a sufficiently large entity can create effects comparable to government rep…
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". What happens when you or those who share your opinions don't get accepted by the popular platforms?
...Actually, that may mean they get more involved in politics, so that's kind of scary.
> Most successful deplatformings are Pyrrhic victories We have reasonable (not perfect!) empirical evidence that this is not the case [1]. It appears that toxic and hateful movements can only resist disapprobation when they develop a sufficiently large, sufficiently public (in the visibility sense, not the publicly-owned sense) channel. Continually disrupting those channels works. [1]: http://comp.social.gatech.edu/p…
It didn't work in Europe. Just look at AfD. That in a country that goes so far in suppressing "toxic and hateful movements", its courts have the power to ban political parties, if their platform deviates too far from the norm.
not deplatforming didn't go too well in the US. look at all the white power folks who are showing up, even though they kept their platforms after the civil war.
You might want to ask Wil Wheaton what he thinks about Mastodon...