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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

#371

Post by lukebitts »

throwaway53453 wrote: post #316
hef19898 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure what you opinion is. The poem you quoted is aimed at true, real, historically existing Nazis. So it is less applicable at people with somewhat similar views complaining about being called out. Calling them out and confronting them is exactly what the poem advocates for. The same goes for your post about tolerance towards intolerance. And then you complain about anti-white racism, which is not a thing. C…

The right are not the ones cancelling people. It's better to have everyone fighting like hell than one side censored into oblivion.

> The right are not the ones cancelling people

The right is the one failling at cancelling people, but they try just as much as the left

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

#372

Post by jdlyga »

ralmidani wrote: post #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 extr…

Definitely agree. Back a year ago when you saw this kind of stuff all over Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc it felt so normalized. But now you have to go to fringe websites. It's still out there of course. But it's very back-alley and definitely makes you take what people are saying with a grain of salt.

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

#373

Post by uniqueid »

He claims Weimar Germany is an example of failed hate speech laws, but that's a weird claim, since they didn't enforce them (certainly not against Nazis).

Then he has an impassioned section where he claims the hate speech laws from '45 failed. The laws that date back to denazification! But he writes them off, with an exclamation mark, as an utter failure since some people in Germany, 75 years later support the far right. That rather moves the goal posts.

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

#374

Post by morpheos137 »

evan_ wrote: post #362
morpheos137 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever try listening to NPR in recent years? It is really approaching the point of self parody. I would say that at least 80% of NPR "stories" have an explicitly stated racial angle and probably greater than 90% have a gender or race angle. It is literally almost the only thing NPR commentary and analysis segments talk about these days. Yes racism is bad. No it is not reasonable that every single segment is about how s…

> I am seriously interested in a study that quantified the number of NPR news analysis stories that contain explicit commentary on race in 2020. I bet it is over 80% meanwhile the black share of the population is around 12%. Seems to me it would make sense to have the number of stories more proportional to that. What is the connection in your thinking between the proportion of stories that analyze race and the percen…

Almost all NPR stories that analyse race concern "black or brown" people. Why do you think that a disproportionate amount of content should be generated focusing on one issue? If my premise is correct, that more than 12% of NPR content contains racial analysis, I don't feel that the burden is on me to explain why I think this is an unjustified proportion. There are other interesting things to talk about in the world and time is limited. That's why. Why should one issue pre-empt others day in and day out?

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

#375

Post by AnthonyMouse »

DanHulton wrote: post #252
ctdonath wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. Try saying, with genuine honest neutrality, “all lives matter”, “it’s ok to be white”, or “capitalism doesn’t care about race/gender” and see what happens.

Because there is no "genuine honest neutrality" behind those phrases. They're shibboleths. They're commonly understood slogans, used to indicate what side you're on (or at least what side you're opposed to) while SOUNDING innocent. The people who know, will KNOW what you mean when you say them. (And in the incredibly unlikely situation where you'd somehow been exposed to enough of the discourse to come up with these…

> They're commonly understood slogans, used to indicate what side you're on (or at least what side you're opposed to) while SOUNDING innocent.

This confusion was created the other side's choice of name, whether purposely or not.

You start off with a phrase like Black Lives Matter. This is clearly a political slogan designed to provoke opponents into taking the negation of it, i.e. into claiming that black lives don't matter.

The problem with it is that it's too clever by half, because it gives opponents the ability to claim the middle. All Lives Matter.

And it's a two party system so now both the center and the right are standing under the banner of the neutral slogan. Now BLM declares that ALM are really just a bunch of secret racists because otherwise they have to eat the rhetorical self-own.

But this is just an attempt to reassert the politically-motivated original framing, i.e. that anyone who disagrees with any BLM political position -- even if the disagreement comes from the center -- is saying they think black lives don't matter. Which is not necessarily the case.

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

#376

Post by VSerge »

colllectorof wrote: post #333
titzer wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every society exerts social pressure in the form of norms and shaming. People are only sensitive to the shaming they won't accept, which always seems to come from the people they disagree with, and they are completely blind to the shaming that goes on in their in-group.

>Every society exerts social pressure in the form of norms and shaming. HN crowd has a definite knack for packing heaps of erroneous thinking (or perhaps deliberate gaslighting) into compact sentences like these. Deplatforming is a tactic. One specifically designed to exert pressure in a direction not supported by the societal consensus. And yet in nearly every thread about it here, there are highly upvoted comments…

Here's a deplatforming example that is very much in line with societal consensus: when Daech was recruiting teenagers and young adults from Europe, there was a constant struggle, by both platforms and law enforcement, to systematically de-platform the accounts pushing their propaganda.

It is likely that had this propaganda been allowed to run unchecked, there would have been even more people recruited by Daech to go fight in Syria (or get married off), and to attack random civilians in the name of this ideology. Most attacks, if not all, were perpetrated by people who had in large part radicalized online, away from extremist mosques where they might have been more easily detected.

That being said, I don't believe censorship or de-platforming should ever be used outside of preventing the spread of propaganda that results in actual attacks on people. Anything short of this is just talk.

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

#377

Post by molbioguy »

When it comes to "unpopular" ideas and peoples, fear and moral superiority justifies:

censorship -> incarceration -> extermination

The path is plausible and logical if each previous step fails. And heck, the ends (protecting people from hate) justify the means, so why fret over it? I mean, what could go wrong?

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

#378

Post by bena »

caslon wrote: post #103
dmingod666 wrote: post #17

My reading from the outside is, the left needs to realize (I'm sure it applies to the right equally as well) that scolding people into guilt is not a viable approach to affect action or to change perceptions when you're dealing with adults. Neither does boxing people into this, that and that category do any good. Like if all you want to do is dehumanize those guys so you can happily insult / hurt them without hurting…

The winning approach is obviously in waiting for the other side to die off; the left is currently the majority, and the right is, on average, old. In this regard, it's absolutely a "viable approach": By making it low-status to be right-wing, or even by not carrying right-wing views on popular private platforms, it makes the right-wing destined to lose out somewhere along the line simply due to the youth not wanting t…

The weird problem with this strategy is that there's a number of people who become more conservative, for whatever reason, as they get older.

The generation that comprised the hippies are now in their 80s. Mitch McConnell would have been in that generation.

So while the current crop of conservatives are dying off, they are being replaced by new members.

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

#379

Post by bena »

jude- wrote: post #142
jude- wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just think the solution should lie in : 1) dialog 2) laws If they're not willing to be reasonable (like, you don't get to "dialog" about whether or not genocide is appropriate), then the best and most moral course of action could very well be to stop them from recruiting your friends. In the context of tech, this is the essence of deplatforming. Twitter and Facebook cannot censor, since they are not governments.…

[flagged]

Don't pay it any mind. There is a certain class of posts where certain opinions and moods of HN become apparent.

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

#380

Post by skybrian »

nindalf wrote: post #221
skybrian wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like well-moderated sites like Hacker News, but this isn’t going to do anything to prevent extremists from communicating using other forums. What are you going to do, shut down all group chats that doesn’t conform to your standards? It’s a much harder problem than creating a site that has good moderation.

The goal isn't to drive extremism to extinction, it's to make it niche so the mainstream doesn't get infected with it.

Too late.

I mean, sure, it’s nice if it isn’t in your face all the time. I’m glad Google’s SafeSearch exists. But keeping people who are actually curious from finding things is much harder than that, and there are a lot of curious teenagers.

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