511–520 of 859 posts
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The data suggests that deplatforming works. Milo; Katie Hopkins; InfoWars et al have all lost their former agenda-setting influence following deplatforming. And studies have shown that banning hate sub-Reddits does _not_ cause that content to “pop up elsewhere”, it causes it to decline overall. It’s important to remember too there are incentives for people to argue and behave otherwise: FB, Twitter, hate-speech monge…
You realize Voat exists right? And Gab? I wrote this about how Voat grew: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/voat-what-went-wrong/ Deplatforming was a big part of that. Deplatforming didn't stop Milo. His base dropped him because he started defending hebeaphiles & pedophile / men being attracted to teens/pre-teens/boys (there's actually something sadder here; with Milo not realizing he was himself abused ... there's an e…
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Deplatforming doesn't work by silencing people, and the environment that you'd have to create to make it otherwise is not an enticing one. So yes, you can often cause the creation of spaces like Voat as a result of deplatforming. Sure, something like Voat pops up. But Reddit improves. And Reddit is where all the people are. There will always be dive bars, there will always be rough online neighbourhoods. But start by…
> And Reddit is where all the people are. All the people in your echo chamber, that is.
There is nothing to fix, except for the attitude of those who think there is something to be fixed, because essentially it's they who demand something unreasonable: censoring of the free speech. It is unreasonable, because that assumes somebody (the person or group, who "fixes" the problem) can and must decide, what is good and bad in regards of what you are saying. And unless this person is you, you always will be d…
Does free speech include yelling down other speakers? In the physical world this rarely happens. But spamming and vandalizing an intelligent conversation with sock-puppets and intentionally disingenuous posts is trivial and universal on the web. Consider a parallel phenomenon: I notice there is outrage among gamers when cheating happens. But ironically cheating in conversation causes less active outrage. Both of thes…
I don't know if I know the solution, but I know one thing that isn't the solution: silencing everyone who disagrees with you. A lot of the people complaining about "toxicity" on the internet seem to be under the impression that if we "deplatform" the so-called toxic people, that will fix things. But on the contrary, that makes things worse. If someone says something awful on the internet, and everyone either ignores…
I'm not a fan of trying to SILENCE anyone, however as a private entity, no corporation is required to allow anyone to use their platform for (nearly) any reason. Twitter can ban me today because they don't like my shoes. Facebook can ban me because Mark Zuckerberg thinks I look funny. Google can ban me because I prefer my Alexa to Google Home. Youtube can ban Alex Jones because he spews hate. Cloudflare can ban whoever those white supremacists were for being racist. Taking away their right to choose their customers is just as much an affront to free speech as government censorship.
Several years ago Sprint kicked off a small number of customers because they were costing the company lot of resources due to their behavior with the company. I absolutely agreed with them, and that's their right. Same with social media, hosts, etc. Nothing stops these people from finding another way to get their message out, but my company nor anyone else has to help them.
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The data suggests that deplatforming works. Milo; Katie Hopkins; InfoWars et al have all lost their former agenda-setting influence following deplatforming. And studies have shown that banning hate sub-Reddits does _not_ cause that content to “pop up elsewhere”, it causes it to decline overall. It’s important to remember too there are incentives for people to argue and behave otherwise: FB, Twitter, hate-speech monge…
> The data suggests that deplatforming works. Milo; Katie Hopkins; InfoWars et al have all lost their former agenda-setting influence following deplatforming. And studies have shown that banning hate sub-Reddits does _not_ cause that content to “pop up elsewhere”, it causes it to decline overall. This is simply not an accurate representation of history. Milo Yiannopoulos fell out of popularity because of repeated iss…
Voat is discussed elsewhere here, too. In short, the point was precisely to get the speech off Reddit because it was poisoning Reddit. People said it wasn’t worth them trying because it would move to other subreddits. It didn’t, it moved offsite entirely.
De-platforming worked for Reddit. OP asked for tech contributions to reducing the amount of polarised speech in online spaces. There is one.
Everyone in the anglosphere is always online and can talk to each other now. Meanwhile our culture is pretty polarized. Conversations that could never be had in the time of top down privately owned broadcast & newspaper media are now unavoidable. I don't think it's a "problem" and I don't think there is or should be a technocratic solution. This is new normal, where political struggle has evolved into a prolonged peo…
GREAT POINT NERD.
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I think its a fallacy at this point to assume the people pushing toxic or objectively wrong viewpoints are trolls. If it ever was 100% trolls, that time has passed and their target audience is expanding their work in earnest. We now have people who 100% believe objectively wrong things and have an obsession to spread their belief as fact. Edit: If there is a solution to this issue, it will depend on the ratio of thes…
When someone on the street corner tells you the world is ending you ignore them. You dont need a complex technical or social solution. When someone tells me that xyz plant oil cures cancer or the earth is flat... I ignore them. If I want to be a troll I may play along or challenge them if its fun. That's the internet. There have always been nutters- they just found other nutters to talk with and you get a loud feedba…
The truth can't advocate for itself.
Encourage people to participate in physical social gatherings that center around non-political issues, like hobbies. We need to start emphasizing what we have in common, help people see that ultimately we're really not all that different from each other. The internet lets people hide behind this isolating veneer that makes it too easy to just shout at each other and behave in extreme ways that would never be socially…
If something is political is only about the level of agreement and not about sanity, decency, or morality. It may be easier to (not) think about divergence of views but that doesn't solve the particular underlying issue isn't real.
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> I don't care if people believe "wrong things". But those beliefs lead to actions, which have negative consequences, which can affect us all.
Indeed, but attacking that with anger, outrage, and witch hunts rather than tact is not only ineffective, it may even create a positive feedback loop.