The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon

I've been on the internet for decades. I fully disagree with this. EDIT: Mass bannings, aka an "Exodus Event", was the solution to almost all major conspiracies I've witnessed.

1. When GameFAQs LUEsers gained conspiracy theories against the website and other reckless behavior, to the point of harming the website, the solution was to cut off LUE and prevent the public from viewing that message board.

2. I never visited SomethingAwful, but clearly the toxic subset of that community was banned and eventually moved to 4chan.

3. 4Chan's prominence in the late 00s / early 10s was clearly toxic and always was. 4chan was just focused on hitting "safe" targets, such as harassing Scientology / Scientologists. As soon as 4chan's toxic behavior was unleashed to more mainstream ideas, it was clear that the toxicity had to be stopped, and 4chan moderators stepped up their game.

4. 8Chan was created in response to the Gamergate conspiracies, as was some legitimate sites like Resetera (though they took the less conspiracy-minded side).

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For the most part, the bannings on 4Chan worked. We don't see Gamergaters pushing their silly conspiracy theories today, or other vile attacks on people. Furthermore, the doxing / swatting mostly stopped on that subject.

> This move will serve to push these movements underground to Tor or other uncensorable networks where they're even harder to monitor.

Yes, that's called an exodus. But as various websites gain prominence, they discover again-and-again that with prominence comes responsibility.

When you have a group of doxers and swatters visiting your website, you start to punish that subgroup. That's just what must happen. Yeah, its a temporary fix (doxers / swatters will move elsewhere), but at a minimum, it sends the message that such behavior won't be tolerated.

> It also sends a message to them that they're on to something (because if the QAnon conspiracy was real, the "deep state" would indeed try to snuff it out).

Tell me: when a child is misbehaving and thinks "Adults are out to get me", do you go more lenient on them?

EDIT: Adults are just like children: you have to punish bad behavior and reward good behavior. That's just the basis of building a modern society.

This is only true when people participating in the debate operate in good faith and are able and willing to genuinely consider other ideas. Conspiracy theories often have more to do with faith than facts, there are no ideas to debate, so giving them room to breath becomes an opportunity for believers to proselytize. Traditionally, this has been somewhere between funny and annoying, but this is different.

> Flat earthers? 9/11 truthers? Who's next?

Well that's the thing, as far as I know, the big tech companies clamping down on QAnon haven't gone after flat earthers or 9/11 truthers because those believers haven't been connected to multiple violent crimes. Flat Earth "thought leaders" aren't telling believers that elected officials are cult members who kill children, urging them to action. So to your statement, "It's also not clear where this is supposed to end?" I'd say that the response to QAnon is a demonstration of the end -- it is the destination reached when one starts with more benign conspiracy theories.

So there's conspiracy theories that aren't treated as such, and other theories falsely labelled as such.

On one hand I am pretty close to a free speech maximalist. On the other hand, I do believe in the “fire in a crowded theater test.” I am starting to think that certain forms of public speech, namely that which harms large numbers of mentally ill people or has the potential to create a huge outburst of stochastic terrorism, may fail that test.

The Internet changes things because now you can have a billion people in a crowded theater and one person can yell fire.

On the stochastic terrorism front: a less ethical person hacking the President’s Twitter account could have tweeted “The storm is upon us! Where we go one we go all!” followed by some instructions and probably killed more people than the 9/11 attacks.

One person. All they would have had to do is guess “maga2020!” as a password if reports are to be believed. Meanwhile we spend hundreds of billions on defenses to prevent such attacks... which would have been worthless in the face of one person guessing a dumb password and leveraging a meme-plex to mass trigger the mentally ill.

This is what is possible today. Attacks only get better.

We do have a problem. I am not sure going after the platforms is right or will work, but I can’t think of anything else.

Sure they can move to Tor, less popular boards, etc. but the point is to shut down the mass scale propagation machine that depends on access to wide platforms. This will at least contain the cult to a smaller and thus less dangerous group.