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Removing Holocaust Denial Content

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Re: Removing Holocaust Denial Content

#591

Post by will4274 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #588
will4274 wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

India flat out has laws that prohibit hate speech and creation of racial disharmony of all sorts. I'm not sure if an Indian court has ever dealt with holocaust denial in particular, probably because there's barely any Jews in India at this point, but Indian limitations on speech go far beyond the genocide-speech laws that exist in Europe. Same of course is also true for Singapore and most other Asian countries.

You may want to check out the Indian supreme court opinion on the topic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_India

Re: Removing Holocaust Denial Content

#592

Post by GordonS »

seph-reed wrote: post #271
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…

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And how can anyone call themselves an adult if they need some third party to come in and censor things for them? You can block, you can mute. You can stick to trusted groups. You can also learn self control and not feed the trolls. If we want to control intolerance effort should be put into making the systems by which we personally and purposely block it from our lives…

> And how can anyone call themselves an adult if they need some third party to come in and censor things for them? You can block, you can mute. You can stick to trusted groups. You can also learn self control and not feed the trolls.

I'm sure many HN readers are perfectly capable of reading, researching and filtering. But let's face facts: many people are gullible at best, and at worst put themselves in an echo chamber where they take everything at face value. I don't want to make this about politics, but a prime example is Trump. The POTUS makes several verifiable lies on a daily basis, and a large segment of people just lap it up.

Re: Removing Holocaust Denial Content

#593

Post by hef19898 »

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #452
konjin wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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". NO U. That aught to be enough for the argument to be closed, but since we like to pretend we're better than that: how can you tell that someone holds bad faith views? I do not have a machine to peer into the soul of man, neither do…

Let's get specific. Should this be allowed, yes or no: >> from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotypes_of_Jews_in_literat... Edit: point of this is to get to the reality of what's said. If you think this is too unpleasant, 5 downvotes and I'll delete it.

Saying what stereotypes about jews are is different from pushing these stereotypes as truth.

Re: Removing Holocaust Denial Content

#594

Post by tremon »

adinisom wrote: post #511
KodoCoder wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free speech isn't the issue here. It's not censorship, it's moderation, and companies have every right to moderate what content is allowed on their platforms. I think it's important to distinguish between the two. Censorship, that is the government proscribing or restricting what people say and thinks in general/public/day-to-day life, is an egregious attack on people's liberty. I think we shouldn't tolerate any limi…

Censorship in the form of moderation often makes sense for businesses seeking to maintain their properties. If I run a forum for car enthusiasts, I should be able to curate the community and limit discussions on locomotives. But what of the platforms that make my forum possible? The Cloudflares the protect from DDoS, the DigitalOceans that provide the servers, the ISPs that provide transit, the Facebooks that provide…

Should they have the freedom to decide they don't like my forum and kick me off?

Yes. Their infrastructure is still private property, and you're using it to provide your own service. Similarly, if you rent a shop space in a food plaza and start a car mechanic's garage there, the owner of the food plaza will kick you out.

That the government has a hard-on for monopolies doesn't change the fact that you're still building your service on private infrastructure.

Re: Removing Holocaust Denial Content

#595

Post by davorak »

saas_sam wrote: post #505
ephimetheus wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holocaust denial is banned in Germany (same as swastikas by the way). It works really well. The only people complaining are literally people trying to twist perception of the arguably worst crime in the history of humanity, to make Germany look like a victim. FB is clearly doing the right thing here. Free speech has limits.

A cursory search reveals your characterization to be inaccurate. Note: I had no real interest in this topic until I read your critique which just sounded totally outlandish to me. The ONLY people complaining about this limitation are people with terrible motives? No legitimate philosophers, political scientists, free speech activists exist with valid critiques? They're all just evil historical revisionists, eh? Doubt…

> Sure enough, plenty of well-reasoned critiques exist from Jewish groups, Noam Chomsky (hardly an anti-Semite), Christopher Hitchens, and others.

Are these armchair critiques? Or are these people/groups putting in serious effort to change things? That indirectly indicates their priority for the issue for them.

Re: Removing Holocaust Denial Content

#596

Post by shadowgovt »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #585
shadowgovt wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a little irrelevant; if someone wasn't complaining, it's likely one's boss wouldn't know. But that doesn't imply it's the mob's fault; it's up to the person who said the things to not say things their employer would fire them for.

The point is the employer wouldn't fire them apart from the mob's pressure. Moreover, mobs are famously fickle and they're happy to descend upon anyone, guilty or not (even irrespective of whether or not today's target was part of the mob yesterday). I really hope we can agree that mob rule is strictly worse than rule of law.

The rule of law doesn't exclude an employer deciding an employee is more trouble than they're worth outside of some very specific situations (class protection, etc.).

Within the constraint of the rule of law, a group of people can organize to petition an employer to remove an employee for behavior A, and the employer can evaluate A and decide whether the group's claims are untrue, A should be removed for the behavior, or it's not worth the time to decide and A should be removed to quiet the group.

Good employers won't do 3, and we should probably shame the employers who do, but I think it opens a Pandora's box to constrain their choices with further law on this topic.

Re: Removing Holocaust Denial Content

#597

Post by mcfly1985 »

boccko wrote: post #557
mcfly1985 wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The Holocaust indirectly lead to (a the abolishment of centuries old anti-semitic laws (from Magna Carta) (b the establishment of the state of Israel. I'm not implying 'they won', but they are in a better place now than they were at the beginning of the century.

Almost like certain aspects may have been exaggerated or have been outright lies.

Re: Removing Holocaust Denial Content

#598

Post by naniwaduni »

evgen wrote: post #517
devthrowawy wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As if any of those things are actually scary. I'm more scared of not becoming north Korea.

All of those things are incredibly rare occurrences, and there is still a greater probability that you will be the victim of one of them than that the country becomes North Korea.

That seems wrong. No matter how I slice it, risk of being North Korea (specifically) seems to clock in at somewhere between 0.1% and 2%, appreciably more than incredibly rare occurrences.

Re: Removing Holocaust Denial Content

#599

Post by TimWillebrands »

codegeek wrote: post #409
lki876 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This heavy-handedness isn't an encroachment on free speech Maybe this is necessary and good, but of course it's an "encroachment on free speech". That's literally what is is. We can obfuscate this by replacing the words "encroachment on free speech" with "heavy-handedness" to get the sentence above. But really what is says if we remove the obfuscation is: > This encroachment on free speech isn't an encroachment on…

How is a lie "free speech" though ? Water is wet. If someone says they don't believe Water is wet, isn't that outright false and has nothing to do with "opinion or free speech" ? Holocaust is a fact so the deniers are just lying correct ?

Having the ability to speak non-truth is indeed freedom of speech.

Re: Removing Holocaust Denial Content

#600

Post by NateEag »

hhjinks wrote: post #334
brianfryer wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be worth considering The Paradox of Tolerance: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance > The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant.

> It might be worth considering The Paradox of Tolerance Or the slippery slope fallacy, as it is known in less ideological circles. The "paradox" simply asserts that a tolerant society will be usurped by intolerant actors. It is in all respects a slippery slope argument.

Remember that "fallacy" means "argument form not guaranteed to produce true results given true inputs."

Outside the context of rigorous mathematical proofs, many fallacies are legitimate, helpful tools.

See for instance "post hoc ergo propter hoc": https://xkcd.com/552/

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