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I agree with your broader point that suppression of viewpoints in the marketplace of ideas is a bad idea, but I strongly disagree with the idea that Twitter is

I agree with your broader point that suppression of viewpoints in the marketplace of ideas is a bad idea, but I strongly disagree with the idea that Twitter is inconsistent for treating compositionally identical sentences differently. For example, if you substitute "Swedish" or "German" or something more specific than "European," you get something that doesn't set off alarm bells, just as with "African" (or "Eritrean" or "Egyptian" - although you might set off alarm bells with "Hutu" or "Tutsi.") Why? I would wager at reasonable odds that a randomly selected American organization promoting the "heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent" will actually have an agenda dedicated to marginalizing or removing "undesirable" elements of the population (they will have an explicitly racist agenda, and support - if not directly participate in - hateful, illegal behavior). I would take the opposite side of that bet for the corresponding group with "African" or "Irish" substituted in. Words and symbols need to be understood against the cultural backdrop in which they appear. It means a very different thing to fly a giant national flag in the United States vs. in Germany (during anything other than a soccer match). The composition of a sentence is not sufficient to derive its significance, or its level of moral acceptability. And of course, it's perfectly conceivable to have a non-racist group in America with the description you provided. It almost certainly has happened. It's just not what actually happens in the real world most of the time, for "lots of reasons." It's uncomfortable to get down in the muck and deal with ambiguity and complexity. Evaluating whether or not a statement or group or personality is racist and worthy of approbation is generally really difficult. That doesn't mean it's impossible, especially at the extremes, and especially if you're willing to tolerate a false-positive rate.

xaa 10y ago
I would take your side on most of your bets. But I disagree with your implied conclusion that banning this type of speech is therefore OK. The reason is that it places our government (or Twitter, in this case) in a situation of making impossible judgment calls. A person who is "proud of their European heritage" could be anything from a docile recent Polish immigrant to a rabid neo-Nazi. Yes, you can make probabilistic determinations as to which account or individual is truly racist and who is not, but to what end? Speaking very broadly, we live in a democracy. And the underlying "faith" that is necessary to believe in a democracy is to believe that voters can distinguish between true and false, right and wrong. If we don't have that, we are completely lost. So I choose to believe that voters are mature enough to see alt-right posts on the Internet and, on average, consider the reasoning and reject it. What's the harm of letting voters see the alt-right's arguments and decide for themselves? Either we believe the median voter can come to rational and ethical conclusion or we don't. If we don't, we have much bigger problems than deciding what Twitter's specific censorship policy should be.
che_shirecat 10y ago
Excellent point, context is 95% of meaning, especially around nuanced topics such as race.

xaa 10y ago

I would take your side on most of your bets. But I disagree with your implied conclusion that banning this type of speech is therefore OK. The reason is that it places our government (or Twitter, in this case) in a situation of making impossible judgment calls. A person who is "proud of their European heritage" could be anything from a docile recent Polish immigrant to a rabid neo-Nazi. Yes, you can make probabilistic determinations as to which account or individual is truly racist and who is not, but to what end? Speaking very broadly, we live in a democracy. And the underlying "faith" that is necessary to believe in a democracy is to believe that voters can distinguish between true and false, right and wrong. If we don't have that, we are completely lost. So I choose to believe that voters are mature enough to see alt-right posts on the Internet and, on average, consider the reasoning and reject it. What's the harm of letting voters see the alt-right's arguments and decide for themselves? Either we believe the median voter can come to rational and ethical conclusion or we don't. If we don't, we have much bigger problems than deciding what Twitter's specific censorship policy should be.

che_shirecat 10y ago

Excellent point, context is 95% of meaning, especially around nuanced topics such as race.