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You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

freddiedeboer.substack.com

351–360 of 863 posts

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

#351
You can't censor it away completely, but you can help the redeemable extremists __know__ they're indulging in extremism by forcing them to go to fringe websites rather than allow them to stay on Twitter and Facebook as if nothing is wrong. As for the "deplorables" who know what they're doing and will never question it or feel any remorse, we should not be giving them a megaphone.

sources[0]: I was susceptible to extremist thought (not actions, fortunately) when I was younger. The sense that I might get into trouble if I participated in fringe websites kept me from going further down the rabbit hole. I kept reading mainstream news and sites, and while I would give a lot of things an extremist spin in my mind, eventually the narrative stopped making sense.

sources[1]: https://twitter.com/iyad_elbaghdadi (can't find the specific Tweet, but he went through a similar experience, and almost became a full-blown extremist Muslim, before the sites he used to frequent were taken offline).

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

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this might be false equivalence. People far on the left (except from some nas-bols; which I’ve never encountered in the wild) call them selfs anti-facists. It is clear who their greatest enemy is. In fact far left groups (like food not bombs, etc.) often engage in social programs called mutual aid where the goal is to spread propaganda through helping the masses.

> spread propaganda through helping the masses. 1%'er motorcycle clubs, mafia organizations and radical religious cults are notorious for doing this as well.

Again fails equivalence. Mutual aid is not causing anybody harm. In fact it is not mutual aid by definition if it does cause harm.

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

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> right-wing extremists have killed 329 victims in the last 25 years, while antifa members haven't killed any https://www.businessinsider.com/right-wing-extremists-kill-3...

> while antifa members haven't killed any https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killings_of_Aaron_Danielson_an... Yesterday: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/imez-wrigh... Edit: This just in! https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1370281113239891969 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEWsJ8SvlMY Antifa are clearly one of the most violent organisations active today. Borderline terrorists (= "action or threat desi…

Youre right, the article is old, antifa has killed a single person, its only 300 times more murders from the right than antifa now. of course also ignoring that antifa medics were attempting to provide medical aid to danielson when the right pushed them away

As for those other 2, the first has nothing to do with antifa, the second is a trash fire where no one was hurt

I also like how your response to statistics is individual stories

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

#354
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the other way around: these phrases are neutral observations and reasonable opinions, perhaps reasonable reactions to insanity of well-known political slogans - importantly, it's something a random person can come up independently, without reading the exact words first. But at some point, these phrases rapidly become politicized, and this catches a lot of people off guard. You voice your thoughts, fully expectin…

There was no "all lives matter" until there was "black lives matter" and people wanted to say they don't like the message. It is quite dishonest to claim that this phrase is neutral and not a political slogan.

> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

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

#355
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, a recent example of environmental shaming that worked was the reduction of littering from cars. Roadside cleanup helped, but tossing stuff out of car windows used to be significantly more common. What’s notable is no organization benefited from littering so there is little pushback on the subject, just millions of people behaving slightly differently.

The tickets for littering are huge.

And exceedingly rare.

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

#356
I have some unprofessional sociological suspicions, so I will lay them out as assertions with this caveat serving as the blanket qualifier.

First, some observations:

1. Research has found that the probability of conspiratorial thinking is quadratic with respect to political extremism in either direction.

2. Dangerous political movements are predicated on an "us v. them" mentality, almost by definition of dangerous. What makes a group dangerous is precisely the fact that they are willing to harm people in concrete ways, and willingness to harm requires a targeted "them".

3. Distributed censorship and other forms of persecution are actually conspiracies with an inherent "us" and "them." The more groups (media companies, government, etc) censor similar ideas in similar ways for similar reasons, the more apt appears the description "they conspired against those ideas."

Therefore: the problem with censorship is that it makes the conspiracy theorists right. Censorship is also an acknowledgement that the censor and censored are in fact different and opposing groups. No longer can the censor say "come on guys, we're all on the same team here," they have ceded that high ground.

Both of these effects can actually help extremist groups attract new people. As they say Plures efficimur, quitiens metimur a vobis: semen est sanguis Christianorum: the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.

HOWEVER

All of this analysis is a kind of "perfect sphere on a friction-less plane" view of the market of ideas. We must not fall into the trap of thinking that if we removed all censorship, the market of ideas would be efficient. If censorship is an effort to artificially devalue some ideas, there is also the countervailing force of amplification which artificially inflates.

The problem is that money has always (and technology has recently) enabled people to distort the market of ideas through amplification. There are actually bad actors (e.g. Russia) who actively amplify ideas beneficial to their interests by putting engineered talking points into fake social media accounts.

I do not believe it is possible to fight such a strategy on the same terms. Amplifying contrary ideas simply increases polarization. Attempting to re-level the playing field via censorship has the problems I listed earlier.

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

#357
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is extremely odd to find so many on Hacker News arguing for laws to say "that server you own and run in your house that hosts a small web forum...that's a public space now, I mean if for you the scale simply doesn't come into equation, then yeah, I guess Twitter, serving millions and millions of users and being used for communication by many public figures is exactly the same thing as a random server in someone'…

You've avoided answering the question: if Twitter and other private platforms are suddenly "public spaces" due to scale...what does that mean? Practically? These are businesses with costs, expenses, legal liabilities (i.e. copyright and defamation law), advertisers to keep happy for revenue. You're demanding the government step in and nationalize a business which in no way has a monopoly on a concept which has never…

It probably means changing laws to allow users to hold internet platforms liable for harms caused. All parties can then have their day(s) in court. That seems fair to me.

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

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im sure the foot soldiers of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot had that exact same purity of thought, the exact same infallible self-belief and the exact same absolute certainty they were on the right side of history.

Maoists and National Bolsheviks are a really small minority inside leftist circles, you will have to look for a long time before you encounter one in the wild. And when you do, and if you are a leftist, you will most likely shun them. Racism is usually not tolerated by the left.

Varg is pretty much a textbook NazBol. Thing is people won't stop tripping over each other to label him far-right/Nazi before hearing anything he says. Pretty likely this is happening to most other of their ilk as well.

In the five years or so I spent hanging out with Socialist Party USA folks, I met loads of Maoists, including a former party chairman. There were a lot who were Trotskyists out in the open and Maoists if you got them drunk enough to talk freely.

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

#359

I no longer think there is a sincere effort to reduce extremism. When you view what platforms and governments are doing through the lens of their thinking they can create just enough managed extremism to use as a pretext for both crackdowns and further leverage, they are in fact succeeding magnificently. The question isn't whether they will succeed at creating or suppressing extremism, but whether democratic governan…

There's advantage to promoting the imminent danger of an enemy in order to motivate voters to support your efforts to protect them from it. If the military doesn't have a big enemy, who needs a big military?

Pretty much every candidate for high office I can remember has run on a platform of fighting SOMETHING (nazis, communists, terrorists, socialists, crime, etc). Extremism is good for business, if your business is self-promotion.

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

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deplatforming solves a problem. And only temporarily in the abundance of VPN & encrypted technologies. IMO it makes things even worse since these groups will congregate in secret much further away from the public eye where they can perpetuate unbalanced and unhealthy ideas.

> IMO it makes things even worse since these groups will congregate in secret much further away from the public eye where they can perpetuate unbalanced and unhealthy ideas. That result makes it more difficult for law enforcement to follow their movements, but it also has the effect of making it more difficult to recruit new members and spread their ideas. The whole reason social media has been so powerful in spreadi…

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