131–140 of 366 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The disturbing minority has always been there, we just didn't used to take those fringe ideas seriously. 'Compromise' with the radical fringe is not inherently required.
The proper social immune response is mockery, not outrage or negotiation.
"We are a digital media company providing engaged citizens with fact-based reporting and commentary on politics, policy and culture—informed by conservative principles." A ton of conservative opinion pieces are being posted to Hacker News every single day lately. Often by younger accounts that tend to post a lot of things in a similar vein. Political opinion pieces generally don't belong on HN: "Off-Topic: Most stori…
> A ton of conservative opinion pieces are being posted to Hacker News every single day lately. Yes, but they end up "[flagged]"/"[dead]" way more often than liberal opinion pieces on the same topics do.
The reason 21st century young people have come around against free speech is quite simply because they've experienced it in its purest form: the 2000s internet. The upside: we all pirated a crapload of good music. The downside: new era of fascism. And it's worth noting that the piracy, which is in itself a form of speech, was shut down... But the racism wasn't. Like, if I copied and pasted the above Dispatch article…
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I think this article misses one big point which is how we - the people on this website - have actively constructed a world where advertisers can shift spend really quickly. Brand safety is a big reason for censorship - the idea of keeping ads for a company away from content that people might not like. YouTube demonetizes loads and loads of controversial topics across the political spectrum - and that's a Feature for…
Sorry, I'm not sure I really understand this angle. Usually not wanting to be associated with specific content, and not funding that content wouldn't be censorship. I would expect it exists in the same way in non digital mediums, advertisers can choose how they spend their money.
Come to think of it, for an effective censorship to exist, you don’t really need a hostile government, if private entities that affect your life in a big way are just as big, if not bigger.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I lay blame for a lot of the bipolarism of modern discourse on the ability of people to filter the ideas to which they are exposed to a great degree. The ability? I think the lack of ability. I think it's wrong to assign agency to people over what they see just because they provide inputs to the algorithms.
Its not just the black boxes though. You pick who you follow and hear from as well. Someone who is all in on Bernie probably isn't following many right wing publications and vice-versa. Not many people out there are interested in even being exposed to the other side of things. When public discourse was a physical event, you were forced to hear both sides as they exist in your neighborhood. Now you can choose to ignor…
Were you alive during the 20th century? If so, can you maybe go into more context for what you're referring to, because this was not my experience in my neighborhood.
>instead, listen to a small cult on the other side of the planet if it so suits you. Take, for instance, those few who have left the west to join ISIS
There were cults and converts before the Internet. Some were very famous. You haven't heard of any of them? People...uh...found a way.
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Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar hell. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Meanwhile this thread[0] that rants about the supposed evils of the "US right" (burning Harry Potter books? complaining abut D&D and heavy metal? what is this, 1995?) is not flagged, not dead, and not officially chastised, despite being several levels deep and the originator having doubled-down on the flamebait.
And then, when people say that HN comments seem biased toward the left, you express bewilderment. As I've said before, whether or not you personally apply moderation fairly, the fact is that the community does not, and the leftist bias is obvious. It's much like the supposed bias in policing: if people of one group get the cops called on them, and the people of another group don't, then even if the cops are fair in their interactions, which group are they going to end up policing?
One major distinction this glosses over is the difference between making it so you can't read something (e.g., banning it), and making it so you aren't required to read something (e.g., removing it from the curriculum). Only the former is censorship.
Assuming this is referring to Maus, it wasn’t a part of the curriculum, it was just a book that was available in the library. The school board removed it from the library, clearly in an effort to limit access to it.
I believe in freedom of speech. What I do not believe in is freedom of mass speech. Your responsibility to the truth should increase in line with your reach. Have 1000 followers in twitter and want to talk about starting the next holocaust? Great, say whatever. A million followers? Yeah, that’s a problem. I don’t know how this gets enforced, but we simply cannot give every lunatic a megaphone.
The First Amendment expressly provides for freedom of the press, which was the earliest form of mass speech and the one most directly comparable to publishing something to your "1000 Twitter followers". The only form of "mass speech" that's broadly government-regulated in the U.S. is communication that's broadcasted via the radio spectrum, which is inherently a scarce resource.
But that's not what they're calling mass speech.
It's not helpful to take someone's post and change the definitions out from under them.
To rephrase it without that term: Printing press scale speech is great. This new ability that twitter gives us, trivially reaching millions, was not foreseeable hundreds of years ago, is causing problems, and should be treated differently.