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

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

#221

Post by nindalf » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 12:18 PM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #131

nindalf wrote: post #115

I'm surprised to see people agreeing with this hypothesis ... while commenting on HN. I'm a huge fan of the site rules ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ) and the way they are applied by the moderation team. But that said, HN has the most heavy handed censorship of any site I frequent. Read all the rules from start to finish and ask yourself if you'd be ok following these rules in every Internet foru…

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.

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

#222

Post by akvadrako » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 12:23 PM UTC

nindalf wrote: post #220

akvadrako wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN doesn't have very strong moderation. The things people got kicked off twitter and Facebook for saying would be allowed here, at least if they were on topic and phrased politely.

> HN doesn't have very strong moderation FWIW, I agree. But the people who are shadow banned for trivial offences would probably be writing replies to your comment about this ... if they knew they were shadow banned that is. And we wouldn't be able to read it either way, so it's a moot point. Just one data point, but one of my friends has been shadow banned from HN for years and he never even knew that he was. Say wh…

Didn't he notice that nobody would reply to his comments? Or is the shadow banning quite advanced?

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

#223

Post by adamcstephens » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 12:24 PM UTC

vladvasiliu wrote: post #24

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #4

Like most of these rants against "censorship" they skip over people's rights to restrict speech as a form of speech itself: there is no moral (or legal) right to give people you disagree with a forum or audience to express their view. Calling to silence others (that is, encouraging them to take your view of not giving them an audience) is fine as long as people have a choice on how to respond. If there is some notion…

I think you have a point in that no one has a right to force me to listen to their speech. However, I think that in the case of the monopolies being discussed here, it's different. The issue is that they "enable" speech in a generic way. They don't enable this or that speech in particular. They also don't force A to listen to B's speech. If anything, they do the complete opposite, what with the whole "echo chamber" s…

The argument is we draw the line at public versus private. Elected governments are not allowed to restrict speech, but private companies are. I don’t subscribe to this view, but it’s what the libertarian paternalists think.

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

#224

Post by TheAdamAndChe » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 12:42 PM UTC

leereeves wrote: post #206

runarberg wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the risk of entertaining the no true Scotsman : A leftist that doesn’t empathize with the masses, is not a true leftist.

Unfortunately it can be difficult to tell who empathizes with the masses and who is just pretending to in pursuit of power.

The two aren't mutually exclusive. Power is simply the capacity to influence the behavior of others, and in a democracy, it is leveraged to get anything done.

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

#225

Post by tsimionescu » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 1:54 PM UTC

XorNot wrote: post #182

tsimionescu wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if there were 50 companies, and all of them censored you for saying something really unpopular, would things be any better? Critical infrastructure must be legally protected from censorship and (private, mandate-less) eavesdropping. Whether it is run by a monopoly or many small companies is immaterial.

Critical infrastructure has never been regarded as a public platform. No one has been prevented from buying their own internet connection or DNS names and running their own site over the "common carrier" status internet backbone infrastructure. It's just a lot less useful when your goal is radicalization and you need to hit the widest possible audience to get conversions.

Is that guaranteed? Parler has found that the machines their code ran on could be taken away for having bad opinions. I'm not a defender of fascists, if anything I lean towards being happy when their megaphone is taken away, even when they receive the occasional punch, but the precedent this has set with the power of these companies is frightening for anyone.

What if Amazon will refuse to do with business with people who support unions next? It no longer seems impossible to ke.

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

#226

Post by smaryjerry » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 1:57 PM UTC

kristopolous wrote: post #160

NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not even sure if you're talking about the racist left or the racist right and that is mildly amusing. I don't know a lot (any?) racist right folks, but I know a shitload of racist left and they ALL publicly, verbally, in writing, rail against racism in one breath, and then shit on white people in the next. I acknowledge that this is anecdotal, but still...

Here's three, you need an account to see them. https://gab.com/tags/whitepower https://gab.com/tags/jews https://gab.com/tags/blacks Just scroll. They also have literal Nazi groups such as https://gab.com/groups/248 that are genuinely and sincerely advocating for nazism.

I think literally actively searching for something mostly hidden is very different from it being public. A few fringe social media posts are what you are linking to with few likes and shares, versus large media or tech companies with a reach in not only millions but hundreds of millions of views openly publishing articles blaming whites for everything under the sun.

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

#227

Post by smaryjerry » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 2:22 PM UTC

DubiousPusher wrote: post #111

vbezhenar wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you can do it in theory. The question is, whether you can do it today and whether those attempts will turn out more dangerous than helpful. IT achievements allows for extremely easy exchange of the information throughout the world. You can easily circumvent many kinds of blocking. You have E2E conversations available to masses, so you can't effectively censor anything centrally. Whether that's good or bad i…

> Of course you can do it in theory. The question is, whether you can do it today and whether those attempts will turn out more dangerous than helpful. Allow me to restate my position more precisely. I believe the supresion of information has worked in the past. And based on this I will need very compelling evidence to convince me that we live in a special time when it is impossible and no longer is effective. I'm ha…

The article itself makes the arguments for this. One, hate speech just rebrands. Two, the assumption that what you want censored is what will get censored is false, especially if you feel you are the marginalized group already. So what censorship is effective? Pushing existing already popular ideas that are widely held already. This makes censorship basically useless, and more so creates problems for anyone who doesn’t strictly believe I the most popular ideas. Flat earth is a perfect example of an idea that doesn’t get censored and doesn’t need to be because culture already accepts it is wrong. The truth is almost all ideas don’t need censorship for the same reason flat earth doesn’t. We already make violence and calls to violence illegal which is the generally accepted tipping point of interfering with someone’s life. Censoring views that some may lead to violence is starting to get into a gray area, and censoring views that are just “hate” goes well beyond gray to pure opinion of the person interpreting and we don’t want to give tech companies the ability to deem their interpretation of what we say as “hate” when it has no basis.

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

#228

Post by sleepysysadmin » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 2:24 PM UTC

>Should we stop hate speech? What makes you think we can?

Can we even define hate speech?

If you think that you're going to eliminate discrimination or racism through banning speech by calling it 'hate speech' you're wrong.

When you ban 'hate speech' what gets banned is speech that the people in power hate.

In other words you're not stopping Nazis and people calling for genocide. That basically never happens. Instead those in political power use the hate speech laws to crush political activists and journalists.

Here is Canada for example, hate speech laws have been used against many comedians. Journalists quite often. Book authors even, there are examples where RCMP arrest and jail book authors because their book was critical of the government. No racism or threats of violence. No charges are ever filed and the book stays in publication.

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

#229

Post by kthejoker2 » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 2:25 PM UTC

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 * ... yet there are still German extremists!

... and what if the laws were not so stringent?

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

#230

Post by tgb » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 2:35 PM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #217

gremlinsinc wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The right supports environmentalism and healthcare. They disagree with specific leftist plans. Can you give me one right-leaning healthcare or environmental "plan" that anybody in congress is pushing that will cover every American 100% for healthcare, drugs, mental health, dental, etc? Single-payer is the best plan I've seen because it negotiates rates for drugs in bulk - one price for all of America and the govern…

> Likewise for the environment - the right tends to deny climate change is even happening, so how do they support environmentalism? That answers itself - if someone doesn't believe in a threat, it doesn't make sense to invest in stopping it. > Can you give me one right-leaning healthcare or environmental "plan" that anybody in congress is pushing that will cover every American 100% for healthcare, drugs, mental healt…

> That answers itself - if someone doesn't believe in a threat, it doesn't make sense to invest in stopping it.

But you're the one claiming they're not anti-environmentalism! This is literally what anti-environmentalism is [1]. You might claim that they're not anti-environment though: I doubt anyone would actually choose to destroy the environment if it had no other effect. (Other than the small minority that's in it just to own-the-libs.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-environmentalism