Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

freddiedeboer.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 863 posts

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

#481

Post by runarberg »

cassalian wrote: post #441
runarberg wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The left does not hate white people. It is reactionary rhetoric that is trying to raise a false equivalence. The left hates white supremacy and white privilege . If you are a white person that basks in your privilege, the left doesn’t hate you because of the color of your skin, but because of how you act as a result of it.

There are people on the left that assume that if you have white skin, then you must act a certain way, and that way of acting is wrong. This is based solely on the person's race, no individual characteristics need be considered. If you disagree, then please explain what happened here with coke: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/366132 "Coca-Cola Asks Its Workers to Be 'Less White' to Fight Racism"

Which people on the left? Coca-Cola is very much a capitalist institution and you have to stretch real hard to think of them as left-wing.

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

#482

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#483

Post by grawprog »

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…

I've spent a lot of time on the internet over the years and the thing i've noticed about 'extremists' of all kinds, not just idealogical ones, i'm talking like any kind of 'extremist'.

That handful of people you find on a forum more devoted to whatever the topic or niche is than everybody else. The people that are there, every day all day immersing themselves in it.

They're fairly far and few between and wherever you are, you'll find a handful of them.

The rest of the more vocal people tend to be the 'hanger ons'. The ones that are into it as long as a bunch of others are, but will lose interest if the community fades.

Then there's the flyby people. The people who just kinda pop in from time to time, but aren't really all that into it.

People seem to forget, we call it 'extremism' because it's at the extreme end of what humans consider acceptable. Most people in general are not 'extremists' with anything otherwise we wouldn't call it extreme. It would just be normal.

Everyone seems to just label someone as an extremist for a tweet, or an idea, or some words, where in reality a good majority of people being labeled as such are more than likely just normal people saying some dumb shit.

Everybody's done it, nobody's perfect anywhere, everybody believes ridiculous things from time to time, everybody's said things they shouldn't, it's just a part of being human. It doesn't mean they're this, that or the other kind of extremist.

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

#484

Post by betwixthewires »

jdlyga wrote: post #372
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.

This is a shortsighted take IMO. "Fringe" websites are growing rapidly while engagement on the big, normal websites is declining or slowing down. The problem is people want to talk about these things, and if that's what people want to talk about they're going to go where they can talk about them. This is directly addressed in the article (when we say we want to ban hate speech, what we really want to ban is hate, but hate cannot be banned). These big legitimate sites only feel permanently dominating now, but are not permanent by any means. People don't go on the internet and talk because talking is a way to use Facebook, people go on Facebook to talk about what they want to talk about. If people want to talk about edgy or even hateful stuff, they will, and if they can't do that on Facebook they'll do it elsewhere.

That's not to even get into the fact that all to often these terms like "fringe websites" are used by entities to shame users into not using their competition, which further degrades the integrity of any anti hate message.

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

#485

Post by tanseydavid »

vkou wrote: post #480
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.

It also has much lower reach. Ideas are viral - and don't spread very well when they have less exposure. You don't see too much pro-Al-Qaeda or ISIS material on Facebook or Twitter. Somehow, we've managed to censor that extremism away.

I have to wonder out loud whether many commenters actual took the time to read the article.

Because the responses seemed heavily skewed towards "Yeah, but..." responses that sort of ignore the article's main point.

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

#486

Post by betwixthewires »

vkou wrote: post #480
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.

It also has much lower reach. Ideas are viral - and don't spread very well when they have less exposure. You don't see too much pro-Al-Qaeda or ISIS material on Facebook or Twitter. Somehow, we've managed to censor that extremism away.

Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it isn't there. Do you really believe that because it isn't on Facebook people have stopped believing it? That people don't believe these things, teach their kids, find other avenues to organize? We have not censored anything away, ever, in human history. This article actually directly addresses that.

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

#487

Post by unethical_ban »

anonymouswacker wrote: post #474
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…

This is the mainstream thinking in the US, and why everything is rapidly going to shit. There is no "we" giving people a microphone -- it is a select few oligarchs who wield exceptional control to take away the voice of people whose views run counter to their and their cronies' interests. There is no democracy, representation, or transparency. The coming antithesis will be bypassing the control of the few on the voic…

Your assertion lacks any evidence, supporting argument, or sense. It also offers no solution beyond "some different kind of Internet" but don't describe anything beyond, essentially, decentralization.

And that the United States will actually collapse in the near term because Twitter is mismanaged.

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

#488

Post by ralusek »

runarberg wrote: post #475
ralusek wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no consistent conception of the masses to the left. Traditionally, there is the labor class and the capital class. In the modern left, oppressors and oppressed are typically determined by identity group, but the game is the same. To win the game of leftism, you better pray that you're in the "masses."

True. A Marxist will have a different conception of the masses from an anarchist (even though the intersection is usually pretty large). But I fail to see what that has to do with anything. There is no game of leftism . The goal is to free people from the tyranny of capitalism and fascism (marxists might emphasize the former while anarchists the latter). Leftists generally accept rich folks sympathetic to the cause,…

There is no game of leftism? The game is for the oppressed class to take power from the oppressor class. Who fits into which of those classes is a contentious issue, though as I said, more frequently predicated on identity than anything else.

Also, to be free of the "tyranny of capitalism and fascism," I hope that those are two different categories. Capitalism and fascism are near polar opposites.

It's also important to understand that leftism necessarily ushers in tyranny. It is impossible, not just in practice, but in theory, for leftism to be implemented without an authoritarian state. If you attempt to get around this constraint, it will only be by you failing to describe a state whose outcomes will fall within the objectives of leftism, or by describing an authoritarian state by any other name (syndicates, guilds, unions).

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

#489

Post by alacombe »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #312

The censorship we are talking about is not censorship: it's moderation. Every forum worth using has moderation. The problem today is that most people aren't using user-moderated forums. Instead, they are using corporate-moderated social networks.

"moderation" is censorship.

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

#490

Post by mariksolo »

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 can't take your argument seriously. Simply throwing up your hands and saying, "This theory exists, but it wasn't addressed in the article!" is ... well, not worth a lot.
Post reply on HN