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Removing Holocaust Denial Content

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Re: Removing Holocaust Denial Content

#561

Post by davidivadavid »

UncleMeat wrote: post #542
jcadam wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

History is written by the victors, eh? I guess we'll just have to wait and see (or, rather our descendants will).

History isn't written by the victors. This is a common if pithy misunderstanding. For example, there has been explicit effort among historians over the last 40 years to give voice to previously silent actors throughout history. Examples include women, the poor, and the colonized.

I don't think it's a misunderstanding so much as a tautology. "Giving voice" is something victors decide to do on their own terms, they're still the ones writing history.

Re: Removing Holocaust Denial Content

#562

Post by kazinator »

ignoramous wrote: post #14

Admirable move. I think Facebook (and all its properties), Twitter, and other hyper-connected social networks must show a healthy level of intolerance towards groups and ideologies that are beyond reason and recall, especially when those said groups are overtly and unmistakably intolerant themselves. This heavy-handedness isn't an encroachment on free speech but a necessary impediment to keep the spirit of free speec…

Of course, some people who are "unmistakably intolerant" make references to, and promote holocaust-denying material.

Holocaust deniers as such aren't "unmistakably intolerant" though; disputing the facts surrounding the holocaust doesn't ipso facto make someone intolerant, let alone unmistakably.

Is everyone who disputes facts intolerant? Is someone who believes that the world was formed 7000 years ago intolerant? Are flat-earthers intolerant?

Re: Removing Holocaust Denial Content

#563

Post by shadowgovt »

jonahx wrote: post #460
shadowgovt wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If petitioning your employer to fire you for something you said works, maybe you said something that your employer would fire you over? That's, again, not harassment and threats, it's your employer using freedom of association to deny guilt by proxy for spreading someone else's lies, threats, and harassments.

> If petitioning your employer to fire you for something you said works, maybe you said something that your employer would fire you over? Possibly, but there is another possibility which also occurs with alarming frequency: The employer, feeling bullied and afraid of bad press, demonstrations, etc, makes a calculated risk vs reward decision: Is keeping this employee worth the (possibly existential) risk to my busines…

If an employer fears bad press, perhaps it's because the thing their employee did is unpopular and their business is built on public perception?

I mean, we can keep digging, but at the end of the day the story keeps resolving to "Someone said something people didn't like and there are consequences." Technology has made it easier, by dint of lowering the cost of investigation of a person, to apply those consequences; it hasn't changed the rules under which society has operated in general. We block those consequences in terms of government intervention; we've never back-stopped them in terms of private intervention outside of some very, very specific class constraints.

If we want to discuss whether holocaust denial should be a protected class constraint, that would fit the existing (US) mold for constraint of reaction to speech by private citizens, but good luck finding popular support for holocaust denial protection.

As the comic says, defending a position by citing free speech says that the most compelling virtue of your words is that they're not literally illegal to say.

Re: Removing Holocaust Denial Content

#564

Post by will4274 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #316
jcadam wrote: post #155

To save free speech, we have to destroy free speech. In the future, some historian is going to write the seminal work on the decline and dissolution of the United States - and there's going to be an entire chapter dedicated to social media.

lol do you think the criminalisation of holocaust denial is a new invention that somehow needs to be studied by future historians? Most democratic countries on this earth, except for the US , not only ban holocaust denial on private platforms, which is insidious historical revisionism, but punishes it by law. I have absolutely no idea how someone can be so childish as to not see that rights have their limitations to…

> Most democratic countries on this earth, except for the US, not only ban holocaust denial on private platforms, which is insidious historical revisionism, but punishes it by law.

Pretty much only Germany and bordering countries actually. Democracies outside of Europe pretty uniformly do not ban Holocaust denial. See e.g. India.

Re: Removing Holocaust Denial Content

#565

Post by JumpCrisscross »

ravenstine wrote: post #371
kick wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook isn't a collection of books, and it isn't a collection of speech: the speech is a side effect. Facebook is a virality engine. How do you get content that's appealing to the widest variety of people shoved into their faces? The popularity of a President almost always goes up by starting a war, because the American public loves war. It's how Bush Jr. got the popular vote after losing it so miserably the first…

> Facebook is a virality engine. How do you get content that's appealing to the widest variety of people shoved into their faces? Couldn't someone have said the same thing of the printing press in the year 1440?

> Couldn't someone have said the same thing of the printing press in the year 1440?

Yes, and they did. Society went through a period of disruption and experimentation and came out on the other side with new institutions and cultural norms.

The same is happening here. That suggests what's considered acceptable for pamphleteers and public speakers may not be acceptable on an auto-curating micro-targeting real-time nonlocal platform like Facebook.

There was a balance between free speech and the common interest and it's been disrupted. Holding as absolute policies and norms from mass broadcasting in the era of social media is delusional.

Re: Removing Holocaust Denial Content

#566

Post by one2know »

bjourne wrote: post #448
iambateman wrote: post #252

Some comments are calling this move intolerant censorship, when it is not. Tolerance is accepting that another person has a different view. But the people who are pushing lies about the Holocaust or a flat earth don’t have a different opinion, they are lying about well-known, verifiable facts. Now, some may say that censors often hide behind “facts” to suppress ideas they don’t like. The difference is that the Holoca…

The slope is incredibly slippery. It starts with Holocaust denial, then pedophilia advocacy, then saying blacks are racially inferior to whites, then to plain old anti-Semitism, then to saying men have higher iq than women, then to militant vegans ("meat is murder you say, incitement!"), then to people wishing that Trump will die in Covid, then to people arguing that U.S. soldiers should be drone-striked. Two weeks a…

We are already well down the slope moving at warp speed. Facebook is obviously selectively choosing what is hate speech according to their leftist political stance. They don't remove hate speech that is anti-police and inciting violence against police (BLM) despite dozens of police having been attacked and maybe half a dozen killings.

Re: Removing Holocaust Denial Content

#567

Post by throwaway894345 »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #546
throwaway894345 wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The kind of speech which is often labelled "harassment" by its opponents is often labelled as "free speech" by its proponents. If they are doing this, then they are contradicting themselves, but in all of the debates to which I've been a party, the free speech position has always held that coercive behavior (threats and harassment including quid pro quo harassment) are out of bounds of free speech. Once in a while…

> If they are doing this, then they are contradicting themselves Not sure I follow anymore. Who is contradicting themselves, and how?

If as you claim, free-speech proponents are arguing that coercive behavior (harassment, threats, etc) are "free speech", then they are contradicting themselves. However, I dispute that this is a general phenomenon, even if there are a few individual free-speech proponents here or there who do contradict themselves in this way. For the most part, free speech proponents are consistent in arguing that threats and harassment are not free speech and should not be treated as such.

Re: Removing Holocaust Denial Content

#568

Post by globular-toast »

Dobbs wrote: post #194
globular-toast wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would be wise to learn why somebody hates you, yes. There might be a very good reason for it.

I've heard the same arguments from hundreds of people. The same misquoted, manipulated statistics, the same concern trolling, the same dog whistles. There isn't any point in listening. Some people hate me for what I am. They want to take my rights away from me, they want to restrict my ability to access medicine, they want to stop me from being in the military (not that I wish to join). Why should I listen to one mor…

Then you have the choice to ignore them. Why do you think you have a right to stop others hearing the same arguments?

Re: Removing Holocaust Denial Content

#569

Post by hangonhn »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #514
hangonhn wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if that may be intentional so that when people to litigate it, it's going to be pretty obvious and leave very little room for doubt.

Generally ambiguity leaves more , not less room for doubt, but IANAL.

Agreed but my point was that in order for such a lawsuit to succeed, it must clear such a hurdle that it leaves little room for anyone to doubt the justifications. IANAL as well so this is just me wondering and hoping someone who's more knowledgable can give some insights.

Re: Removing Holocaust Denial Content

#570

Post by NotSammyHagar »

Certhas wrote: post #360
leftyted wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This heavy-handedness isn't an encroachment on free speech but a necessary impediment to keep the spirit of free speech and free society intact, one where the tolerant voices aren't drained out by the relentlessness and irrationality of the intolerant. What is tolerance? You can't tolerate something if you agree with it. Tolerance means putting up with things with which you disagree. This is an encroachment on free…

This is a typical slight of hand in these discussions. We are talking about deeply intolerant, bad faith actors, and you substitute this with "censoring opinions outside the mainstream". This is deeply dishonest by you. We are not talking about removing peoples right to use a platform because they are out of the mainstream and we disagree with them. That is NOT the reason. There is plenty of non-mainstream opinion ar…

The underlying problem is some people respond to intolerant, extremely misleading attacks. The past decade there has been an increasing ability to find people who are impacted by this propaganda much more successfully than in the past. Everyone points to Hitler - yes, he also was in the right time that his version of BS and motivation impacted people. Today those who want to can utilize these propagandistic methods much more than they can before.

In the past if there was one person more capable of organizing hatred they'd have a smaller impact. Before newspapers it was just in a town. Then you had newspapers (like those in the south accusing blacks of rape and pushing lynching). Then later it was radio and Father Coughlin. Then TV and now the internet.

Still the challenge remains how does anyone decide what's beyond the acceptable. I'm terrified that after Trump there will be a series of more successful destructive manipulators. I don't see why that wouldn't happen.

The reason why this matters even more is the us system where a single vote in a state pushes all those electoral votes together, making it much much more powerful to focus energy on the small misleading stuff. The US has a structural electoral system that makes it matter so much more. Otherwise it would be for a smaller election. I think with time the majority of people will build up 'intellectual armor' against accepting lies. But it's impactful enough now that it's the potential end of america.

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