You can't censor away extremism or any other problem
freddiedeboer.substack.com
You can't censor away extremism or any other problem
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Re: You can't censor away extremism or any other problem
#2[deleted]
Re: You can't censor away extremism or any other problem
#3I predict this comment section will be full of normative statements.
Re: You can't censor away extremism or any other problem
#4Like most of these rants against "censorship" they skip over people's rights to restrict speech as a form of speech itself: there is no moral (or legal) right to give people you disagree with a forum or audience to express their view.
Calling to silence others (that is, encouraging them to take your view of not giving them an audience) is fine as long as people have a choice on how to respond.
If there is some notion that we have no choice but to enable other's views then our own views become secondary to them. We no longer have absolute control over expressing the views we agree or disagree with.
Is the government or some other absolute authority censoring wrong? Yes. Are powerful monopolies (or near monopolies) wrong to censor? No, because they have the same speech rights as others, the problem there lies in the market power of the monopolies, not their speech.
Re: You can't censor away extremism or any other problem
#5I never understood the point of Strafgesetzbuch section 86a. It does not make any sense to outlaw using Nazi symbols. It's like outlawing symptoms instead of caring for the illness. People will just take it underground and you will have a harder time tracking it down.
Re: You can't censor away extremism or any other problem
#6Let me ask a related question looking at it from the other direction: can you encourage an idea by spreading it more widely?
If not, then propaganda and advertising are both myths that don't really work.
Re: You can't censor away extremism or any other problem
#7> Look: the most powerful governments, militaries, and intelligence services in the world have in recent decades tried to prevent the communications of terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS, using the most sophisticated digital means possible and with the full backing of various publishing and social media platforms. And yet those organizations effortlessly shared their propaganda and their rhetoric and coordinated across distance all the same.
This isn't entirely true [1]:
> As of January 2015, ISIS had reconstituted its regional accounts with strong privacy settings, allowing only a small group of known ISIS supporters to follow the accounts and read their tweets. The content of the tweets—primarily news releases, videos and photos from ISIS’s various provinces—are then disseminated by a number of other smaller accounts using hashtags. After the initial dissemination, the content is more widely distributed, but at significantly reduced levels from early 2014.
> Despite this, the number of new accounts created dropped significantly after the first round of suspensions in September (section 2.5.4), and while we do not have complete data to make a positive assessment, it appears the pace of account creation has lagged behind the pace of suspensions.
Another study about the impacts of Twitter's more aggressive stance against ISIS found, "These findings support the notion that Twitter’s policy deteriorates IS followers’ ability to gain traction on the platform, likely hindering their reach to potential recruits. " [2].
A third study also concluded, "Our data showed that the costs for most pro-IS users of engaging on Twitter (in terms of deflated morale, diffused messages and persistent effort needed to maintain a public presence) now largely outweigh the benefits." [3].
Deplatforming seems to work to reduce the spread of extremist ideas, which then reduces the spread of extremist actions, based on the years of research we've apparently been doing on the topic prior to today. We can reasonably disagree on the philosophy (and this appears to largely be a think piece), but there are practical realities that cannot be ignored.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/isis_tw...
[2] https://extremism.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/zaxdzs2191/f/Digital...
[3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319395856_DISRUPTIN...
[4] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1348147867739975681.html <- where I found this info (there's more here I didn't add to this comment, all credit to @AmarAmarasingam for compiling this data)
Re: You can't censor away extremism or any other problem
#8Let me ask a related question looking at it from the other direction: can you encourage an idea by spreading it more widely? If not, then propaganda and advertising are both myths that don't really work.
Related: can you make an idea more appealing to some people by contemning it?
Re: You can't censor away extremism or any other problem
#9Like most of these rants against "censorship" they skip over people's rights to restrict speech as a form of speech itself: there is no moral (or legal) right to give people you disagree with a forum or audience to express their view. Calling to silence others (that is, encouraging them to take your view of not giving them an audience) is fine as long as people have a choice on how to respond. If there is some notion…
“Free speech” in the moral sense is exactly that people who operate civil infrastructure shouldn’t use their privilege for censorship.
So... people who believe in “free speech” as a moral value will disagree with your first paragraph — and hence, your entire post.
You assume your conclusion, so your argument fails to be persuasive.
“I disagree with what you say, but I’ll fight to the death to defend your right to say it” is a maxim of free speech — and a bold declaration of the exact opposite of your message: if we want a free society, we have a moral duty to aid the freedom of others — not suppress it.
Re: You can't censor away extremism or any other problem
#10Like most of these rants against "censorship" they skip over people's rights to restrict speech as a form of speech itself: there is no moral (or legal) right to give people you disagree with a forum or audience to express their view. Calling to silence others (that is, encouraging them to take your view of not giving them an audience) is fine as long as people have a choice on how to respond. If there is some notion…
This article has nothing to do with whether or not platforms ought to be able to perform content moderation.
The point you are making is just not relevant. Not even tenuously.