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Did the early internet activists blow it?

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Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#71

Post by incompatible »

samatman wrote: post #61
incompatible wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance relevant here? Also, if you ask for (legal) spaces for "anything goes" content, you need to campaign not just against "hate speech" laws, but all the other laws that prohibit various kinds of information.

Maybe, but probably not. I encourage people to read the full Karl Popper quote, which contains this: In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary ev…

I'm not sure at what level the tolerance would end: if there's a group on the Internet which occasionally launches or encourages random acts of violence such as beating up LGBTQ people or a bombing or truck attack, does it deserve to be left in peace? Should only the people who commit the real-world violence be suppressed, and site itself left alone to prepare the next attack? Or does a group need to rise to the level of outright rebellion, like ISIS creating its own state in the Middle East, before it needs to be shut down?

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#72

Post by hitekker »

ggm wrote: post #64
hitekker wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A man who styles himself an internet visionary while abdicating his responsibility to the future of the internet is likely to have an ulterior motive when talking about the internet. However I also recognize that our community, like other communities, tend to forgive high status community members, as long as their lies aren’t too obvious.

Well done for simultaneous criticism of him and me. This feels like "if you are not against him, you must be for him" reductionism. I merely note he is capable of being seen, like all of us, as multithreaded.

That criticism wasn’t against you; I was actually thinking about how the community handled Hans Reiser 10 years ago. If you feel personally attacked, though, then that might warrant some introspection.

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#73

Post by heartbeats »

eropple wrote: post #44
heartbeats wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they already are. The crazy screamer on the street corner causes an actual harm to you. To avoid 8chan is trivial; just don't go there. That people get radicalized going there seems like a poor argument. If I understand you correctly, the principle is the following: 1. Someone holds acceptable views. 2. They visit 8chan. 3. They now hold abhorrent views. Why should 8chan be blamed for this, or rather, what did th…

Radicalization is not about opinions , it is about convincing the radicalized to undertake acts of violence and threats thereof for a political purpose . You get, yeah, that these are also places where these little shitheads gather and decide who to brigade (the aforementioned "oh, hmm, that lady has opinions about video games, let's try real hard to destroy her life" dreck that the various chans indulge in when they…

> Radicalization is [...] about convincing the radicalized to undertake acts of violence and threats thereof for a political purpose

I haven't heard it used that way. Wikipedia, abbreviated:

> Radicalization is a process by which an individual comes to adopt increasingly radical political, social, or religious ideals and aspirations that reject or undermine the status quo or contemporary ideas and expressions of the nation.

As in, adopting extreme views. And that raises the question: if you have 100'000 people and tell them all to go read Mein Kampf, then some of them will undeniably go, "yeah that Hitler guy seems like a pretty smart fellow". What is the solution? It can't be to say that extremist speech should be banned. If so, we have to burn most of Western philosophy.

And it seems like "it is morally justifiable to use violence to achieve political means" is just another political belief, correlating strongly with the strength of your political views. So all you are saying is that some political views should be banned. I don't like this.

> And that the management is shockingly hands-off about letting them do it and have been for years now?

The management did nothing wrong. Each site has a different vibe. In the case of imageboards, it's usually 'anything which isn't explicitly prohibited by law'. It's worth noting that 4chan bans the behavior which you describe.

Even if they didn't, it raises an important question: where should the line be drawn?

It seems easy to think of 4chan or 8chan as a discrete entity, which should be shut down. But say that we had some physical entity, like a pub, which for some reason attracted an extremely racist clientele who liked to go have a few drinks and then beat up the immigrants.

Should the pub be held liable for this? What about serverless mailing lists, where I manually put everyone on the list in the "reply to" field, or Usenet? Should that be 'shut down' too?

The thing I don't like about this is that both counterparties are willing. If you're spamming someone, you have person A who sends to person B, but person B doesn't want to hear from person A.

With an imageboard, you have person A who sends to B, C, and D, but B, C, and D all want to hear from A. Should they be stopped in this endeavor?

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#74

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ethbro wrote: post #31
TomMckenny wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you say, the problem is not 8chan or "the daily stormer" for that matter. But it _is_ Facebook. Anything goes sites like 8chan have so much reality free and bizarre content that they have only the tiniest impact. Yet they provide insight into those mindsets and their trends. But Facebook and Twitter inject extremely harmful falsehoods into reams of fluff and corporate posts. This gives them far more legitimacy, we…

I think this is a balanced appraisal of the situation. Historically, US free speech has been "crazy rant" = okay, "fire!" (in a crowded room) = not okay. And that worked, when distribution was relatively centralized with respect to network size. However, now I think we have a third category, somewhere between the previous two: "fire!" (on a widely- and easily-disseminated medium). The sheer scale of social networks m…

> The sheer scale of social networks makes the effect fundamentally unlike prior scenarios.

Is this even true? There are a billion people on Facebook, but it's not like a given post ever gets seen by more than a small fraction of them. Nearly the entire human race has been reachable by postal mail for over a hundred years; the size of the network really has nothing to do with anything.

What has changed isn't the size of the network, it's the culture. The CDC and a thousand independent doctors say that vaccines don't cause autism, but too many people don't believe them over the mother of a kid who both has autism and was vaccinated, even if that mother has no real evidence that one caused the other.

The problem there isn't that someone is saying something which is wrong, it's that other people are too credulous of unverified claims. Nobody should believe outrageous claims from some random stranger with no domain knowledge and who is contradicted by multiple domain experts, unless they're stricken with enough curiosity to actually replicate the experiment themselves. And even then they shouldn't believe based on the word of the stranger but rather their own observations or those of someone they themselves find trustworthy.

The solution isn't censorship, it's to teach people how to properly evaluate evidence instead of being credulous and easily manipulated fools.

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#75

Post by Barrin92 »

dependenttypes wrote: post #62
Barrin92 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>. If I am free as long as I only do it "The Right Way", I'm not free This is a shallow definition of freedom, the sort of idea of freedom that children instinctively have when they're told to go to bed and start throwing a tantrum and it is largely what the internet was built on, maybe not accidentally by people who in many ways were juvenile adults. There's a deeper version of freedom, a more adult one, that recogn…

> that children instinctively have when they're told to go to bed and start throwing a tantrum Would you be happy if right now someone forced you to go to bed at arbitrary times when you are not tired and potentially had work to do? > who in many ways were juvenile adults Are you calling them immature, youthful, or something else? > a more adult one No, a more authoritarian/collectivist one that consider abstract con…

> Would you be happy if right now someone forced you to go to bed at arbitrary times

the issue is of course, and that's what children don't realise, that seemingly arbitrary rules exist for good reason. In this particluar case it's because children are not able to delay immediate gratification. And I, as an adult, am in fact still constantly obligated to participate in farely arbitrary rituals, at work or otherwise.

>Are you calling them immature, youthful, or something else?

I'm saying they often exist in an environment that is very isolated from larger obligations to a community. The hacker and tech CEO as a middle aged man in a hoodie, often obsessed with youth and in a sort of state of permanent teenage rebellion, persists for a reason.

> that consider abstract concepts such as society and morality as more important than the personal freedoms of a human

society is not an abstract concept, the need for cooperation, order, safety, is present in every decision every day. It's individual freedom that is an abstract concept. In the case of cyber-libertarianism that is prominent in the tech world it's arguably not even 30 years old, and it only functions within a severely restricted space, both physically (say in the valley) or digitally (in some corner of the internet).

>What is this supposed to mean in the context of the internet?

it means that, if the public internet is supposed to be a healthy space, individuals who harm the well being of the larger community need to be able to be held accountable for their anti-social behaviour.

>Which goes back to the point about lgbt rights.

it's true that communities and social cohesion can sometimes unjustly punish people, however well functioning systems are capable of reform, and this is no reason to abolish social order altogether. To put it another way, do you think that within the LGBT community, laws against hate speech on online platforms are popular or not popular? Marginalised groups in particular see the value in collectively maintaining order, they least of all are going to believe in mythical individualism.

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#76

Post by Dylan16807 »

hitekker wrote: post #72
ggm wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well done for simultaneous criticism of him and me. This feels like "if you are not against him, you must be for him" reductionism. I merely note he is capable of being seen, like all of us, as multithreaded.

That criticism wasn’t against you; I was actually thinking about how the community handled Hans Reiser 10 years ago. If you feel personally attacked, though, then that might warrant some introspection.

If he was being unreasonably well-treated, why did ReiserFS for the most part get dropped like a hot coal just for being associated with him?

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#77

Post by vehementi »

catalogia wrote: post #70
Izkata wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > "fire!" (in a crowded room) = not okay. > I really wish people could find a different expression to convey what they mean by this, because what they/you mean by this is probably worlds apart from what this phrase actually meant when it was formulated. A bit yeah, right on Wikipedia [0]: > The paraphrasing differs from Holmes's original wording in that it typically does not include the word falsely, while also add…

This suggests a better phrase to use: "inciting imminent lawless action" Maybe that's not as dramatic as "yelling fire in a crowded theater" , but I think that's actually a good thing.

Isn't it understood that the person yelling "fire!" is by assumption doing it falsely? The "[falsely] yelling fire in a croweded theatre" is immediately relatable by everyone and conveys the idea. What is the problem?

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#78

Post by samatman »

incompatible wrote: post #71
samatman wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but probably not. I encourage people to read the full Karl Popper quote, which contains this: In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary ev…

I'm not sure at what level the tolerance would end: if there's a group on the Internet which occasionally launches or encourages random acts of violence such as beating up LGBTQ people or a bombing or truck attack, does it deserve to be left in peace? Should only the people who commit the real-world violence be suppressed, and site itself left alone to prepare the next attack? Or does a group need to rise to the leve…

I'm not a big believer in collective guilt.

If someone hangs out and shitposts on a marginal forum, what is the responsibility of the other people on that forum for their criminal actions? If they're co-conspirators, that's one thing, but making shitty memes and shooting up a synagogue are very different things.

I've noticed that every single one of the recent mass murderers from the white supremacist camp has a Facebook account, but no one seems to want to shut down Facebook, just 8chan or whatever.

You mentioned truck attacks; someone recently drove a van through a tent full of people canvassing for Trump in Florida. Do we deplatform wherever he was hanging out online, or is it just the combination of "did a terrible thing" and "has opinions that we don't like" that justifies censorship?

I don't know what the line is, exactly, only that a lot of people are really eager to draw it way before the point I'm prepared to.

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#79

Post by iamnothere »

Barrin92 wrote: post #54
iamnothere wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Likewise an internet without hierarchies, without controls and without enforcement of social taboos, be that by law, by gatekeepers or through exclusion incentivizes the very worst actors to run amok. Social approval should be incorporated into law, (either literal or culturally) because places that don't do it become uninhabitable. (as the current public internet increasingly is). "Uninhabitable?" To me it seems l…

>especially in the gated communities of the social networks. Small community forums are still running as they always have exactly my point, focus on "gated" and "small". What do you think is it that distinguishes gated communities from the generic facebook newsfeed? The right to censor, judge who gets in or not, be able to exclude bad actors, and to have stake and identity when commenting, and to set common rules for…

This sounds like more of an argument for smaller, niche communities. I agree with this. How can you contain all of humanity's diversity of opinion and experience into a single "platform" with coherent norms? You can't. It's a fool's errand. Small communities do manage their own norms in a way that is consistent with the values of their members, and they develop their own methods for doing so; there is no need to create a legal enforcement mechanism.

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#80

Post by ip26 »

mikedilger wrote: post #41
chillacy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let it be an outlet for those who choose to partake in such content I normally don't argue for censorship but I will throw out that if you believe the following things: 1. There exist thoughts and beliefs which are dangerous to (my) society 2. These thoughts and beliefs are normally tempered through social pressure in the dominant culture 3. Through the internet you can create your own subculture which reinforces y…

You certainly may _want_ to eliminate such places and/or such beliefs. But stamping out places or beliefs doesn't really work. People find or create new places, and what is left is just ill-will and further political division. Beliefs become martyred and the Streissand effect draws more people in to investigate. The way to reduce bad beliefs is to, IMHO: 1. Ingratiate and investigate. Respect the people, become their…

People create new spaces, etc, but if you are able prevent the formation of echo chambers that is a victory.
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