You can't censor away extremism or any other problem • Hacker News Board

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

#391

Post by runarberg » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #375

DanHulton wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

“All lives matter” is not a neutral slogan when it is said in the context of the death penalty, nor is it neutral when spoken as a response to “Black lives matter”. It is only neutral when spoken out side of any political context.

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

#392

Post by ttt0 » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

throwaway53453 wrote: post #307

lighttannotwite wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they're still terrible concepts that have been roundly denounced on their own merits Hol' up, "it is ok to be white," is a terrible concept denounced on its own merits? Lol ok It's a good thing that under Critical Theory, since race is a social construction (that's why Black is supposed to be capitalized, because it refers to the construction, not the color) there's no reason besides being "roundly denounced" (whic…

God help the mixed race people who have it from both the left and right...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9352639/Bi-racial-h...

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

#393

Post by mlthoughts2018 » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

morpheos137 wrote: post #374

evan_ wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Thinking it is an unjustified proportion seems exceedingly racist on your part. The equivalency between proportion of attention paid to harmed groups and size of the group, especially for groups as large as ~12%, is inherently quite an extreme racist stance to take.

I’m sure you wouldn’t agree, but that’s exactly the problem. As long as we’ve got people acting like NPR’s current amount of coverage including racial angles is somehow “unjustified” then we clearly need to terraform more and more racial angle of content into the discussion to educate that racist ignorance out of existence.

The same is true for sexism and poverty as well.

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

#394

Post by Lammy » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

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…

It's very rude to say people are "pretending" just because you don't agree with their beliefs.

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

#395

Post by buescher » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 5:11 PM UTC

Lammy wrote: post #383

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…

You're still using subjective terms like "extremism" in an objective way that the people on the receiving end of that label may not agree with or appreciate.

Not only subjective terms like "extremism", but religious terms like "redeemable".

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

#396

Post by marcus_holmes » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 5:12 PM UTC

kthejoker2 wrote: post #229

Ctrl+F "Popper" - zero results found. If you don't provide a cogent counterargument to Karl Popper's paradox of tolerance, I can't take an essay like this seriously. Simply throwing up your hands and saying, "hate exists, let it rain free on the marketplace of ideas" is ... well, not worth a lot. Also, I love the absence of evidence = evidence of absence argument: * Germans have stringent anti-hate speech laws * ...…

I keep running into "but who are the intolerant people these days?"

The J K Rowling mess as an example: clearly someone historically very tolerant. Writes some articles about some areas where she disagrees with the current thinking. Is immediately cancelled. I don't see much tolerance there? Who, exactly, is being intolerant here? Or is it just everyone? Maybe I should not tolerate this any more?

We've totally lost the ability to have a civil discussion about anything with anyone where the participants can disagree about the subject. Part of this, I'm convinced, is that social media doesn't actually allow a discussion. Everyone is screaming in the town square.

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

#397

Post by freebuju » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 5:12 PM UTC

GVIrish wrote: post #266

freebuju wrote: post #76

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…

> That result makes it more difficult for law enforcement to follow their movements

The easiest enemy to go after is an exposed one. The 2nd is a weak one.

> extremists have to move to Signal and Telegram, it makes them less discoverable

Extremist groups do not need to be discoverable. They just need to plant enough conviction into the minds of susceptible and willing hosts. I assure you, not so much energy is required to convert in this case. Certainly not more than religious ones.

Though I need to clarify. When extremism crosses the border of advocating for mass violence. It gains a new universally unambiguous term: terrorism.

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

#398

Post by ForHackernews » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

ralusek wrote: post #384

jdlyga wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And would you describe things as having gotten better this last year? And I don't mean in the sense that you see less of what you think there should be less of online, because then of course it's gotten better if that's the variable being minimized. I mean, do you think the state of extremism and political unity has improved via marginalizing views held by enormous portions of the population?

Yeah, absolutely! In the US, Trump lost the election and we have a genuine shot at police reform for the first time in a generation. In Europe, the pandemic has exposed the incompetence of empty populism.

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

#399

Post by AshWolfy » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

ttt0 wrote: post #363

morpheos137 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I also do not have time to do an analysis right now, and as I mentioned radio content may be different from web content, the number of upvotes my initial comment calling out NPR got suggests my opinion is not unusual.

Remember when NPR deliberately took a video out of context to portray peaceful protesters attacking a random car as if the driver was some sort of white supremacist who tried to hit them on purpose? https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/22/npr-falsely-calls-victi...

They used that photo on an unrelated story, the photo had nothing to do with the story. nice try though. Just admit you were wrong, its ok

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

#400

Post by ralmidani » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

Aunche wrote: post #382

You can censor obvious examples of extremism. I don't think anyone disagreed that Youtube was correct in censoring Isis recruitment videos, for instance. The problem is that people are trying to censor "dog-whistling" extremism. By its very nature, it's a losing battle. Only dogs can hear dog whistles, so there's a high likelihood that you're censoring someone innocent. Also, even if you do censor a dog whistle, they…

You can hear a dog whistle even if you're not a dog. For years, Trump's bigotry was designed to be just subtle enough to get past the media censors, but a lot of people aside from his followers knew exactly what he was doing. The media and big tech only started censoring Trump when he became a danger to American institutions and political figures; endangering the lives of Mexicans, Muslims, and Black people was not deemed extremist enough to warrant censorship.