Live data from Hacker News

YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

theverge.com

721–730 of 983 posts

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#721
post #48

You are free to speak and exercise your freedom of speech no one really disputes that. You are not, however, anywhere guaranteed or granted the liberty to a platform for your dialog. That is the problem that we are encountering today, people are thinking that there are attacks to freedom of speech and confusing that with the freedom of an establishment to defend their property from damages. I think we can all agree t…

The principle of free speech is older than the United States government.

Yes and so are the philosophies of the extents to which freedom of expression has limits. See John Stuart Mill, Joel Feinberg, Thomas Hobbes. Not even John Locke supported universal toleration, although in his case he wanted to silence atheists. Not enough? How about Herbert Marcuse:

Universal toleration becomes questionable when its rationale no longer prevails, when tolerance is administered to manipulated and indoctrinated individuals who parrot, as their own, the opinion of their masters, for whom heteronomy has become autonomy.

I believe in freedom of expression, I do not believe in or advocate, however, universal tolerance for expressions on private forums. You wish to make a statement, do so on your own. It is the right of the platform to be able to moderate such contents as posted if they desire, its their platform.

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#722
post #254

When I, a white young boy, grew up in The South and saw the Klan, my father taught me to never do business with them, never enable their behavior, never let their organization rent rooms from venues I may own, and to decline all of their business even if they were paying extra to be your customer. For as long as he could remember, and his father before him, the Klan and other fringe organizations would always cry and…

> It is a win for the far-right to have y'all here on HN "disagree with them but still believe they should be here and not on the fringe". Just FTR we are pretty far from accepting the far right here on HN: tptacek shared some interesting research he'd done a couple of hours ago and it might be of interest to everyone here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23681929

All I see here is someone who is mad that there would dare to be people that they disagree with on the internet, and has gone out of their way to find more of this content, in the hopes that they can stifle the speech of these people.

This is the weak action of a weak person who feels threatened by discussion. It's pretty sad that they have the kind of time to spend on doing this for no other purpose than to limit the range of discourse until it fits into what their level of maturity is able to handle.

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#723
post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RICO is a pretty narrow tool, as it should be. It also isn’t based on group membership, it’s based on involvement in the planning / sponsorship of illegal activities. It wouldn’t matter how many Hackernews members started coordinating bank robberies; RICO wouldn’t magically allow for the rest of the Hackernews user base to be prosecuted.

Sure. But if Hackernews had a hierarchy and a membership system in which lower-ranking members would do criminal acts organized by their ranking superiors, the organization could be sued under civil and criminal RICO, and then dismantled. While not all members would be prosecuted, a very large amount could be, and the subsequent criminal investigation would make it possible to indict a good proportion of the rest. It…

I think your problem here is not so much that you don't know what RICO is, as that you don't have a tight grip on what the KKK is. It is probably the case that many, or even most, Klan members are also members of white supremacist criminal gangs. That those gangs are subject to RICO prosecution (a major Aryan gang was taken down that way just last year) illustrates the problem with your argument. The enterprise itself has to be focused on the racketeering-predicate crimes.

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is absolutely about legalities. Look at the complaints that are made when defending this type of content. The call it cancel culture in an attempt to victimize the aggressors as being unduly treated because of their opinion. The boycott has always been a tool to defend civility and putting your money where you're values are. Calling it 'Cancel Culture' is just a new phrase to delegitimize the right of people to st…

They call it "cancel culture" in an attempt to express that people are too willing to boycott nowadays. Certainly a boycott is sometimes justified, but it's a problem if people start organizing a boycott every time they hear an offensive statement.

Please give some examples of where cancel culture has taken things too far.

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#725

It's a purge. It won't stop with these three. The censorship will continue to get worse and be disproportionately applied to those on the right until all is left with the world. Conservatism has a place in society. I'm not endorsing any of these guys viewpoints nor am I associating them with conservatism in general, because it's a broad group of over 100 million people in the U.S. with a diverse range of opinions tha…

>The problem is they are not approaching the left's extremists with the same fervor This is a false equivalence. The worst of the alt-right are far, far worse than the worst of the extreme left (antifa, maybe? Though there is no alt-left). Good riddance to them, I say. If you want to lead the KKK, and advocate for a white ethnostate, I won't lose any sleep when you can't post videos trying to convince others of the s…

Right! "We are allowed to discriminate because the ones we discriminate against are really bad and we aren't". Every oppressive movement in history started like this.

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Religious white nationalists want me deported or killed. Where do you get that religious thing from? Because for all their faults all major variants of the mainstream religion in US and Europe is pretty clear about not supporting that -to the point that a number of clergy got in real trouble with nazi Germany.

[flagged]

Utter nonsense. The Catholic church was heavily involved in the German resistance, and thousands of Catholic priests were sent to Dachau for it.

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#727
post #233
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why people would down vote you - these are private companies we are talking about and they can do what they want I suppose. However I think the real rub here, that people seem to to have a hard time expressing, is that these platforms are blatantly hypocritical in what they allow or don't allow.

>Not sure why people would down vote you Because the entire argument is a strawman that censorship advocates often use "bruh its a private platform they can do what they want" has the implication that people are calling for the government to step in to block YT actions No one has, people are critical of YT's policy, simply because they have a "right" to do it does not exclude them from public criticism Saying "bruh i…

I didn't say that private platforms can do what they want. I said private platforms have a right to moderation of content on their platform. Does that not count as freedom of expression? The ability remove content contrary to the intended audience seems like something anyone should be granted. If I host a website for children can anyone post smut? Well I just have to keep it because the poster has a right to post smut, that's their freedom and I guess I can just never violate that ever because free speech is absolute and immutable. Likewise if I host a website for sharing videos can I not moderate what content I want shown? What if I don't want people suing me because someone posted pirated videos on my site. Guess there is nothing I can do, its there and it is immutable and I can never remove it because if I did I would be violating the freedom of expression of the user that posted the content. How is that any different from delisting users that post hate speech? Of course we should delist that content if we don't want it. It's my party and I can cry if I want to.

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The first amendment does not grant you the right to a platform. It simply doesn't. This feels a little hand-wavy: in the past there have been "designated free speech zones" that are of course critized organizations like the ACLU as a form of censorship and denying free speech. I don't think it's too crazy to say that speech without a platform isn't speech at all. I'm not saying we should force sites to accept conte…

I agree that we will have to address the privatization of speech at some point. Ultimately I'm not sure where my opinions lie on that spectrum. However, I find it challenging to have to continuously fight white supremacist ideas on platforms, especially considering the --vast-- amount of violence and brutality inflicted on the oppressed for hundreds of years. Should we have a debate at some point about whether the pr…

>>Should we do it -now-, while white supremacists actively use their platforms to incite hate and violence against black and brown people?

Did the banned individuals ever do this? I would be shocked of Stefan Molyneux has ever been recorded advocating violence against persons of color.

Or is he just collateral damage in the campaign to stop those inciting violence?

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#730
post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if you're missing it, but yeah, reverse racism is not a thing. The concept of racism is meaningful in the historical and societal context of systemic oppression. A black person saying "all white people are bad" is not feeding into and exploiting hundreds of years of prejudice stacked against an under-privileged group. Edit: a black person in the US, different cultures are different contexts.

Racism is racism no matter what direction it's pointing. You don't need to have experienced hundred's of years of prejudice to experience racism. Racism is treating someone differently because of their race. It is wrong full stop, no matter the status of the perpetrator or the victim.

Although I agree with you, I understand the parent's point of view. I believe the issue here is one of terminology, i.e. "systemic racism" vs. an instance of racism. So the parent is arguing that you do indeed need to have experienced those years of oppression to experience racism, otherwise its localized racism that ends when you stop talking to that person (vs having no escape from it). To be clear, I'm on the all-racism-is-racism-is-bad side but had a few friends argue the parent's pov
Post reply on HN