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You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

freddiedeboer.substack.com

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Re: You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

#171

Post by chevill »

jackjeff wrote: post #62

I know the article spends its time describing how anti hate speech laws in Western Europe are not working. But frankly they’re not enforced. I think this is why they don’t work. I see censorship has putting dirt under the carpet. People will try again. There’s no accountability. Social media censorship would ban flashing boobs with the same enthusiasm as Nazi propaganda. The latter is not a breach of terms and condit…

>They can’t go about and say things like “all Mexicans are rapists” (a Trump quote) because it would lend them in jail

First of all. I intensely dislike Donald Trump and I'm glad he's gone. I hope its for good. That being said that's not a quote from him. Its an unnecessary and dishonest embellishment of what he actually said. Unnecessary because what he said is bad enough to make the same point.

Finally, if a person simply said the exact quote you listed, and the result is that they were imprisoned, the most offensive thing in this story would be the government that thinks someone saying something nasty and untrue alone is enough to warrant time in jail.

Re: You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

#172

Post by XorNot »

pochamago wrote: post #141
DubiousPusher wrote: post #13

If you cannot censor away opinions, if suppression of ideas doesn't work then why in exactly these kinds of articles do people bemoan it as dangerous? I may agree that most censorship is wrong but it does work. It worked for centuries to help maintain systems of inequality. It worked for centuries to maintain familial control and enforce sexual monoculture in many countries. Information control works so well, it prev…

>If you cannot censor away opinions, if suppression of ideas doesn't work then why in exactly these kinds of articles do people bemoan it as dangerous? Because the unintended consequences are harmful to bystanders. Probably more harmful than to the intended targets, since they're already socially ostracized for their openly bigoted views. Take, for example, the recent upswing in deplatforming. Most of the statistical…

Which statistics?

Re: You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

#173

Post by NaturalPhallacy »

yongjik wrote: post #163
NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This misses the point (that the author of OPs post nailed). It doesn't matter that it doesn't scale. It works, and censorship doesn't. Do you want a (difficult) method that works (personal involvement and direct conversation), or a simple, easy, lazy one (deplatforming/cancel/censorship) that doesn't?

Censorship comes with its own problems, but if your position is that it flat out doesn't work, you'd need a more convincing argument. Nazi censored. Stalin censored. Xi censors. Seems hard to explain if censorship doesn't work.

>Nazi censored. Stalin censored. Xi censors. Seems hard to explain if censorship doesn't work.

Nazis also killed the speakers. Stalin killed the speakers. Xi kills the speakers.

Citing mass genociders as "censorship works" is hilariously bad evidence of censorship working when terminating the speaker most definitely works.

Re: You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

#174

Post by XorNot »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #153
tshaddox wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re making a common mistake, which is to assume there’s some “natural” algorithm that determines which tweets trend, and that human intervention is “unnatural” and unfair. But on the contrary, Twitter’s trending feature (and indeed all distribution on all public social media networks I’m aware of) is active promotion of speech. Humans at Twitter are deciding which tweets trend, regardless of whether they’r…

> I think you’re making a common mistake, which is to assume there’s some “natural” algorithm that determines which tweets trend, and that human intervention is “unnatural” and unfair. That's partly true. I think it's "unfair", or rather disingenuous, only when the company claims there's no manual intervention. I wouldn't really have an issue with a company saying "we're looking to promote this or that speech". I thi…

Why did the rules change? Twitter, and any other private company, has never been under any legal obligation in it's business to provide a public space and it's not clear how you'd even define them as providing one (seeing as how the servers are in Twitter's datacenters, using Twitter's network, paid for by Twitter's revenue).

Literally everything on Twitter is Twitter's property other then where governed by intellectual property law agreements and even then it's still someone's private property they have a right to control!

A country club being very popular doesn't suddenly make it a public space.

Re: You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

#175

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #93
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the right also needs is a realization that some of its beliefs are akin to extremism. And some of the right inspired policies have really really hurt and isolated a significant population. The right needs to soften it's stand on such issues. It's such a generic statement that it's meaningless and could apply to any group of opinions.

Doesn't mean it's wrong... The racists on the right know they're racists. They admit it. The racists I've encountered on the left are the racism-of-low-expectations kind with a dash of openly-racist-against-white-people, and then they go and act morally superior to people who aren't racist against any race. The sanctimony is grating.

> The racists on the right know they're racists. They admit it.

Not necessarily.

Even Richard Spencer, proud Hitler-saluting Neo-Nazi, essentially the founder of the "alt-right", denies being racist.

People know that racism is bad, but a lot of racists will deny being racist while very explicitly saying they don't want to live next to a black person or will call the police just because they saw a black man walking through the neighborhood.

Re: You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

#177

Post by NaturalPhallacy »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #13

If you cannot censor away opinions, if suppression of ideas doesn't work then why in exactly these kinds of articles do people bemoan it as dangerous? I may agree that most censorship is wrong but it does work. It worked for centuries to help maintain systems of inequality. It worked for centuries to maintain familial control and enforce sexual monoculture in many countries. Information control works so well, it prev…

>If you cannot censor away opinions, if suppression of ideas doesn't work then why in exactly these kinds of articles do people bemoan it as dangerous?

Because instead of treating the disease (terrible dehumanizing ideologies) it treats the symptom (them talking about it).

Instead of a fire, it creates a bomb.

>It worked for centuries to maintain familial control and enforce sexual monoculture in many countries. Information control works so well, it prevents people from even understanding themselves or what they really want in the face of ideologically imposed values.

It worked before the Internet.

>controlling the conversation, its constraints and determining the status quo are profoundly powerful tools.

In the short term. Determining the status quo isn't up to censors. It's up to society. And while censors have some power, they're not omniscient, so they always get circumvented eventually.

Re: You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

#178

Post by didibus »

I think this article is pretty light on alternate solutions. It proposes rationally and intellectually trying to make the other side see why you are right and they are wrong, and makes a kind of snarky claim that somehow that CAN more easily be done, where I'm only seeing a normative idea here, it should be done, but can it?

I'm not so sure it can personally.

I think it forgets that most people are just whatever their surrounding makes them. That's why "trends" are so powerful influencers. That's why you have clear pockets, areas where the people in the same geographic areas all vote mostly similar and share similar values and ideas.

The people who think their way unbiased through value, moral and ideas are rare.

What we're left with in my opinion as viable solutions are two approaches:

1. Censorship 2. Propaganda

Of the two, I think Propaganda is the best. I think we've seen that on both side now, left or right, it's the "trending" messages, tweets, memes, and all that which work best to convince and influence others. Propaganda creates culture, and culture defines peoples viewpoint.

The issue today is all about Propaganda and the powers behind them. What is being most promoted? Retweeted? Recommended?

When you have legitimate bots and troll farms participating in these efforts, and when you have extremists on all sides actively pushing messaging online, it creates new "trends" and it slowly plants seeds in people's head one way or another.

Whichever side I'd be on, I'd focus my effort there to win. Publish messaging, memes, photos, clips, headlines that discredit the other side at every turn, adds haze and confusion, throws shades. And fill every channel with an abundance of your own messaging, values, ideas, alongside catchy positives.

Now do this well, and it also results in censoring the other as a side effect. If you're the thing trending and being recommended, it means the other messages won't reach as many people. If you flood things, the other messages are less likely to be seen.

Re: You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

#179

Post by NaturalPhallacy »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #4

Like 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…

>Like 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.

I don't disagree with this as stated. But the reality is different. When the tech-oligopoly has a mono-ideology and they all censor the same people, and then pull the rug (hosting) out from under competing platforms, and then rip up the signs (dns) pointing to alternatives, and then siege the opposing cities (payment processors ban them) it becomes a much worse problem. That moves from the theoretical to the practical.

> 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.

Yes, because it's not just websites. It's infrastructure and finance colluding with the presentation layer. At what point do we all agree that it's a problem, and admit that the powerful aren't always right?

Re: You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

#180

Post by XorNot »

SiVal wrote: post #109
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #4

Like 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…

By that argument, the US "monopoly or near monopoly" phone company AT&T during the Vietnam War could have decided that anyone who spoke on the phone about their opposition to the Vietnam War was unpatriotic and canceled their telephone service, and leftists who so often now make the argument you're making would have supported their right to do so. "The private phone companies should be allowed to enforce their terms…

They literally could have if the technology and motivation was there, that's why they were considered a monopoly and broken up by act of the state: because the lack of a viable competitor service means that sort of consumer hostile action was possible.

Of course, in reality phone company's exchange the right to monitor what you say for common carrier status which makes them legally immune to the fact you are saying it, and credit card companies do in fact ditch whoever they want because they have no such burden.

The solution in one case is obvious (protect net neutrality) and the solution in the other case would line up with the calls for US Post to be extended to offering basic banking services to ensure an appropriate floor on the transaction market, and as a government entity would have to allow everyone to transact.

It's not clear to me what you seem to think Google, Twitter or Facebook should get in response for becoming a "public plaza" style arrangement which would be detrimental to their business model and wouldn't destroy the rest of the internet in the process? After all is a DDOS attack also free speech? A botnet? What are we going to obligate them to carry and on what basis?

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