8 ms·

How Hate Groups Forced Online Platforms to Reveal Their True Nature

73 points by jayess 9y ago

MBCook 9y ago
> The platforms’ sudden action in response to an outpouring of public grief and rage resembles, at first glance, a moral awakening and suggests a mounting sense of responsibility to the body politic. Resembles is the key word here. Many of the sites knew this stuff was going on and didn't mind at all. Unfortunately I think this is all reactionary and they're not going to keep these policies up. They only care they're getting bad press, not because they ACTUALLY care about the issue. For example it's nice that Twitter removed a bunch of problematic accounts, but there are TONS more. Reddit still has plenty of very problem subreddits. I'm sure there are still problematic Facebook pages. Will they clean those up as people stop watching? Or did they 'do somethinrg' so now they're good?
- random023987 9y ago
  > Will they clean those up as people stop watching? Or did they 'do somethinrg' so now they're good? If companies were honest in their EULA (or employment agreements), they would simply say that you will be removed if you cause the company to receive bad press.
  - MBCook 9y ago
    Much like Apple and many of its app review terms I wish some of these companies would actually enforce their EULA.
irishasaurus 9y ago
"This was also a moment these hate groups were anticipating; getting banned in an opaque, unilateral fashion was always the way out and, to some degree, it suits them." I think this is the viewpoint all coverage needs to employ. That these groups are already trying to frame themselves as victims and media needs to preempt this by framing their cries for what they are, a quick slip and fall scam. *Edited for clarity
- Spivak 9y ago
  Surely your irony detector must have went off writing this statement. One of the core message of these groups is that the media is biasing their coverage against them in an attempt to sway public opinion and your suggestion is to prove their point?
  - irishasaurus 9y ago
    My suggestion is to highlight the tactic so others can see it for what it is.
    - Spivak 9y ago
      I honestly don't know if it would help. You could try and argue that they're setting themselves up as victims but the other side of the coin is that they're exposing the true feelings and cruelty of the people they've been claiming are using their power to discriminate and silence them. I don't think there's much to be gained by putting on a circus that exposes the Nazis as the scheming bad guys -- it's already in the name. They're provoking a reaction from groups and people who have been long claiming to be tolerant and respectful of dissenting views. The way I see it the only way out is to be the better people, let them say and do as they please, challenge and criticize their ideas openly, respectfully, and with evidence, and be secure in the fact that in the long run they'll be proven wrong.
1053r 9y ago
The irony of this article is deep. It is literally making a "First they came for the neo-nazis, and I said nothing" argument. As a coworker of mine just said, "We might be standing on a slope here, but it isn't really slippery."
- tbrownaw 9y ago
  First they came for the damn commies, but McCarthy was before my time.
gedy 9y ago
I just cannot see the difference between banning those 'far right' groups while allowing 'far left' which are basically the same. The red flag, pictures of Mao, Stalin are as hateful to me as Hitler and Nazi imagery, especially given the 10x body count that revolutionary communism resulted in.
- matt4077 9y ago
  When did you last see a rally of people with posters of Stalin marching through the street? What's the left-wing equivalent of the hundreds of armed militias in the US?
  - gedy 9y ago
    > What's the left-wing equivalent of the hundreds of armed militias in the US? Maybe Berkeley? The Portland riots? That was frightening behavior.
    - random023987 9y ago
      > Maybe Berkeley? The Portland riots? That was frightening behavior. You mean Antifa? Those aren't leftists, those are anarchists. They believe that government is incapable of protecting against fascism, and are instead committing vigilante violence. This doesn't represent the "left", who would instead fight fascism through constitutional and judicial protections. They only thing Antifa has in common with the left, is they both hate fascism. But they have completely different views on the role of government.
      - dragonwriter 9y ago
        > You mean Antifa? Those aren't leftists, those are anarchists Antifa isn't all anarchists, those that are are mostly specifically anarchocommunists, and anarchocommunists are emphatically leftists.
        random023987 9y ago
cm2187 9y ago
This endless stream of articles, posts on HN, counter demonstrations, is giving to a tiny minority of a few thousand extremists a media coverage they could only dream of. Kind of like terrorism, the more you make a big deal out of a terrorist attack, the more you encourage the next one. But newspapers and TV news aren't in the business of rational moderation.
- Houshalter 9y ago
  The interest from HN isn't about the Nazis, but the changing attitudes in the tech industry towards censorship and ideological homogeneity. It would be just as interesting and alarming if it was the other way and communists were getting banned and fired.
  - Asooka 9y ago
    It is, in fact, alarming that the communists aren't being silenced, since this is how we ended up with communist regimes the first time around.
- purple-again 9y ago
  My first exposure was American History X like two decades ago. They were a joke then and they are a joke now. One thing is for sure. They are LOVING all this free exposure for their cause. Also when did we stop calling them neo nazis? I'm sure they love it when you call them Nazis.
  - krapp 9y ago
    The only reason this is even a thing is that white supremacist groups feel empowered by the election of Donald Trump. The argument of his election being the result of angry, racially motivated white men wanting a revolution to maintain white power has been stated so often that it's become banal - and that argument was made by Trump's own supporters. I don't believe Trump is a nazi, although his comments on Charlottesville make it seem as if he sympathizes a lot more with them than with the people protesting them. Either way, the nazis seem to believe they've elected their god-emperor, so that automatically makes them not a joke.
caseysoftware 9y ago
I keep wondering how this meshes with the common carrier rules/designation. Does it put Facebook, Twitter, et al at more or less risk as a result? How does this fit with the pro-net neutrality positions that these companies have staked out? "Put simply, common carriers are private companies that sell their services to everyone on the same terms, rather than companies that make more individualized decisions about who to serve and what to charge. [snip] Congress created laws to make sure that phone companies provided basic phone service to all customers on a non-discriminatory basis and at reasonable prices, and created the FCC to regulate them." Ref: https://www.ncta.com/platform/public-policy/why-its-a-good-thing-that-broadband-isnt-a-common-carrier/ https://www.ncta.com/platform/public-policy/why-its-a-good-t...
- matt4077 9y ago
  Those things have nothing to do with each other. Common carrier rules and net neutrality are attributes of companies enjoying a natural monopoly: that of often being the only one running a cable to your door. Besides, Facebook, Twitter etc. crossed that particular rubicon long ago when they started deleting, for examples, images of nudity.
ebola1717 9y ago
Interesting argument. Usually when people make this sort of "virtue signaling," they don't provide much analysis of the history and ramifications, as this article does. Democratically accountable decision makers, uniformly enforced policies and standards, and making these systems actually function like our legal systems, rather than shallowly mimicking them sounds like a huge improvement over the status quo.
- matt4077 9y ago
  "Virtue signalling" is the most tired cliché of an argument. It's cynicism is best demonstrated by the simple fact that it works against anything someone says, as long as it is somehow not completely offensive. It's also a great example of assuming bad faith, and failing Occam's razor: instead of the obvious conclusion that most people tend to emphasise with victims of injustice, it constructs a complicated mechanism to explain how someone can be a bad person using their words and actions that say the opposite.
  - lhnz 9y ago
    Are you also against the terms 'hypocrite' and 'cheap talk'?
    - Apocryphon 9y ago
      Those are more neutral, less loaded terms. Like it or not, virtue signaling is one of those neologisms that has become ideologically slanted, like "homicide bomber" or "microaggression." By all means, it is far better to use common parlance.
      - lhnz 9y ago
        It's not loaded. These terms are synonymous. The word is an apt description of something very real and very common [0]: people hiding their greatest moral failings behind ultimately empty virtuous performances. It's unsurprising that the only people calling it 'loaded' and despairing over the existence of the term, identify with the group it's most often used to describe. And it's unsurprising that they would misunderstand it to be a term that you use to describe virtuous acts instead of sanctimonious frauds. Desperately wishing that you were able to police the language of your political rivals isn't a good argument for getting rid of a phrase. Also, if every time somebody uses the term, and somebody jumps in to say "I think you mean 'they're being a sanctimonious hypocrite'" then really it will just be emphasizing the meaning. I don't see what you expect to gain from this... [0] http://www.thewrap.com/joss-whedon-feminist-hypocrite-infidelity-affairs-ex-wife-kai-cole-says/ http://www.thewrap.com/joss-whedon-feminist-hypocrite-infide...
xienze 9y ago
I know everyone is going to say "but Nazis", but I think this incident should really drive home just how quickly dissenting opinion can effectively be purged from the Internet and just how much power tech companies truly wield over us. Yeah yeah I know, it's great because they stood up to Nazis but next time it won't just be them. It's very easy to label just about anything as "hate speech". And yeah yeah, "private companies can't censor, only the government can", but has anyone stopped to consider that Google et al have very obvious political affiliations and can exert their control over the Internet in order to further their agendas? If you're not concerned with the implications of this you're not paying attention.
- purple-again 9y ago
  It's been part sad and part fun to watch. Usually they use pedophiles to convince us to give up our freedoms but nazis are working just as well this time around.
- bilbo0s 9y ago
  "...but has anyone stopped to consider that Google et al have very obvious political affiliations and can exert their control over the Internet in order to further their agendas?..." Have you, yourself, stopped to consider the possibility that large corporations have had very obvious political affiliations, and have been exerting their control to further their agendas since long before Google existed?
  - xienze 9y ago
    Have you considered that Google, Facebook, etc. can control public discourse and what information people can see in ways never before thought possible?
    - bilbo0s 9y ago
      Have you considered that advisers for Nixon's first Presidential campaign made the same complaint about network television? My only point here is that many, many companies have been exerting their control for many, many years to further the varied agendas of their principal shareholders. This really is nothing new.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
s73ver_ 9y ago
A good part of it is that regular people don't want to deal with them. They don't want to hear from them, and they definitely don't want to be harassed by them. Look at the "free speech" platforms, the *Chans. They may not have started out as bastions for neo-nazis and racists, but they became that because, as hate speech and such was not really policed on there, normal people stopped going altogether, leaving only those people behind.
- jquery 9y ago
  > leaving only those people behind. If you think only neo-nazis and racists hang out on the Chans, you definitely don't hang out there. "The strategy [of people who consider themselves the protectors of decency] is weaponized stereotype campaigns. If a site tolerates witches, describe it as a witch site about witchcraft populated entirely by witches. It’s super easy." - http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized-web/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centrali...
  - s73ver_ 9y ago
    I'm not saying they're the only ones, but you cannot deny that those sites have a large proportion of that kind of content.
    - Asooka 9y ago
      Ironically, it's much easier not to interact with that content on 4/8chan than it is on the wider Internet. If you're not there for political shitposting, don't visit /pol/.
- ItsDeathball 9y ago
  "Normal people" have absolutely not stopped using imageboards. Perhaps they feel outnumbered on the boards specifically devoted to politics because every other venue for political discussion bans certain viewpoints, concentrating proponents of those controversial positions in the free speech platforms. That's only one portion of the imageboard use case. Most people are there to talk about anime, video games, technology, or whatever other esoteric hobbies drive them to seek Internet discussion; it's difficult to work in advocacy for fascism to those discussions without catching a ban for being off-topic.
Blackthorn 9y ago
Sites have been doing this for ages for things like terrorist materials and other forms of extremism, but as soon as white people get censored everyone suddenly gets up in arms.
tinalumfoil 9y ago
> Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. - Article 19, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948 A lot of people here have been trying to defend free speech as a human right, and a right that all people and corporations have a responsibility to preserve. No matter how many appeals to authority, appeals to history or long-winded explanations used all these arguments have fallen flat on people who either don't agree with free speech, or believe it's only the problem of a small number of institutions. I believe there's enough people who support speech as a human right that these companies will end up on the wrong side of history and be superseded by more content-neutral hosts. It would be nice if this had more support, but there's enough people demanding companies, who are denying service to groups with the intention that they are unable to find hosting elsewhere, that I think the near future of speech is safe, and will come back stronger. EDIT: Reworded second paragraph
- nnutter 9y ago
  I am having a hard time deciphering what your position is.
  - hanklazard 9y ago
    Appears to be: pro free-speech and against the moves of censorship by companies like Facebook and Cloudflare.
newswriter99 9y ago
"There are hard-right alternatives to Twitter, to Reddit and even to the still-mostly-lawless 4chan." The writer obviously has no idea what 4chan looked like before the fappening.
nemo44x 9y ago
I do wonder how this disagrees with the popular argument in favor of net neutrality? The point being that limiting who can distribute and therefore create access to information is generally agreed upon as unacceptable. Would it be different if service providers (your ISP) made some content they select inaccessible (not net neutral) rather than Google et al?
tim333 9y ago
>...Forced Online Platforms to Reveal Their True Nature The article seems argue that it's just been revealed that Facebook, Twitter, Reddit et al are, shock horror, "profit-driven entities, free to do as they please." As if we didn't know that already. It also kind of paints them as faceless corporations with shady agendas but in the case of Facebook and Reddit they are both still basically run by the programmers that wrote the first code and try run them in a common sense sort of way. Here they are chatting about these kind of things Zuck http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/zuckerberg-investigating-facebook-censorship-after-staff-admit-deactivating-trending-stories-1560059 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/zuckerberg-investigating-facebook-c... Huffman https://youtu.be/CbGxKKJb7vk?t=12m14s https://youtu.be/CbGxKKJb7vk?t=12m14s Edit - changed the Zuck link...
hitekker 9y ago
Key point of the article: > Questions about how platforms like Twitter and Reddit deal with disruptive users and offensive content tend to be met with defensive language invoking free speech. > In the process of building private communities, these companies had put on the costumes of liberal democracies. They borrowed the language of rights to legitimize arbitrary rules, creating what the technology lawyer Kendra Albert calls ‘‘legal talismans.’’ > What better way to avoid liability and responsibility for how customers use your product? It was also good marketing. It’s easier to entrust increasingly large portions of your private and public life to an advertising and data-mining firm if you’re led to believe it’s something more. I've noticed this most distinctly with Reddit. Why haven't all the hate subreddits been banned? /r/physical_removal was exhorting for the deaths of thousands months prior to Charlottesville. The admins proclaim free speech, but under this thin excuse, lies their business model. Toxic users are extremely active. They have to be. Spewing vitriol, spreading hate, posting canards necessitate constant engagement. Looking at the tables of monthly metrics, who is more valuable? That one user with 10,000 internet points flaming other users every hour of the day, or the occasional commenter who writes longwinded but intellectually honest posts? I can tell you which one is far more numerous, and I can tell you which one Reddit raised millions on. Ultimately, I would argue that this pretense is is designed to morally justify the power these platforms wield over their users. To do any less, especially for an overly-dominant player, sets the stage for regulatory action, backed by popular demand. edit: removed slight political slant.
- tim333 9y ago
  >Why hasn't /r/the_donald been banned? He did win the election. You can ban extremists but I'm not sure banning fairly mainstream stuff is the way to go.
  - hitekker 9y ago
    Correct, I have shifted my intro to focus on extremists.
- Blackthorn 9y ago
  physical_removal was banned.
djflutt3rshy 9y ago
>It is worth noting that the platforms most flamboyantly dedicated to a borrowed idea of free speech and assembly are the same ones that have struggled most intensely with groups of users who seek to organize and disrupt their platforms. THIS is what ultimately changed my mind about whether Internet companies should offer "free speech" as a positive. I used to believe that the antidote to hateful speech was simply more speech. But every site that's been tried on, fell to more and more hateful speech, pushing and bending and breaking the norms, until sane people left out of disgust or were relegated to their own, more moderated, parts of the site. Germany and other European countries with anti-Nazi laws have it right (and no, they haven't descended into totalitarian regimes, the slippery slope simply stopped at "Don't be a Nazi".)
- jquery 9y ago
  The laws against hate speech are great until suddenly they aren't. Germany's laws are making it criminal for citizens to engage in honest debate about the refugee crisis. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/06/30/germany-passes-law-against-online-hate-speech/442031001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/06/30/germany...
- ameister14 9y ago
  Germany's and Austria's anti-nazi laws don't seem to be very effective at preventing Nazis, though. A bunch of the Austrian lower and upper houses of parliament are members of a party started by a former SS officer and Germany sent a member of the NPD to the European Parliament.

73 points by jayess 9y ago

> The platforms’ sudden action in response to an outpouring of public grief and rage resembles, at first glance, a moral awakening and suggests a mounting sense of responsibility to the body politic. Resembles is the key word here. Many of the sites knew this stuff was going on and didn't mind at all. Unfortunately I think this is all reactionary and they're not going to keep these policies up. They only care they're getting bad press, not because they ACTUALLY care about the issue. For example it's nice that Twitter removed a bunch of problematic accounts, but there are TONS more. Reddit still has plenty of very problem subreddits. I'm sure there are still problematic Facebook pages. Will they clean those up as people stop watching? Or did they 'do somethinrg' so now they're good?

random023987 9y ago
> Will they clean those up as people stop watching? Or did they 'do somethinrg' so now they're good? If companies were honest in their EULA (or employment agreements), they would simply say that you will be removed if you cause the company to receive bad press.
- MBCook 9y ago
  Much like Apple and many of its app review terms I wish some of these companies would actually enforce their EULA.

irishasaurus 9y ago

"This was also a moment these hate groups were anticipating; getting banned in an opaque, unilateral fashion was always the way out and, to some degree, it suits them." I think this is the viewpoint all coverage needs to employ. That these groups are already trying to frame themselves as victims and media needs to preempt this by framing their cries for what they are, a quick slip and fall scam. *Edited for clarity

Spivak 9y ago
Surely your irony detector must have went off writing this statement. One of the core message of these groups is that the media is biasing their coverage against them in an attempt to sway public opinion and your suggestion is to prove their point?
- irishasaurus 9y ago
  My suggestion is to highlight the tactic so others can see it for what it is.
  - Spivak 9y ago
    I honestly don't know if it would help. You could try and argue that they're setting themselves up as victims but the other side of the coin is that they're exposing the true feelings and cruelty of the people they've been claiming are using their power to discriminate and silence them. I don't think there's much to be gained by putting on a circus that exposes the Nazis as the scheming bad guys -- it's already in the name. They're provoking a reaction from groups and people who have been long claiming to be tolerant and respectful of dissenting views. The way I see it the only way out is to be the better people, let them say and do as they please, challenge and criticize their ideas openly, respectfully, and with evidence, and be secure in the fact that in the long run they'll be proven wrong.

1053r 9y ago

The irony of this article is deep. It is literally making a "First they came for the neo-nazis, and I said nothing" argument. As a coworker of mine just said, "We might be standing on a slope here, but it isn't really slippery."

tbrownaw 9y ago
First they came for the damn commies, but McCarthy was before my time.

gedy 9y ago

I just cannot see the difference between banning those 'far right' groups while allowing 'far left' which are basically the same. The red flag, pictures of Mao, Stalin are as hateful to me as Hitler and Nazi imagery, especially given the 10x body count that revolutionary communism resulted in.

matt4077 9y ago
When did you last see a rally of people with posters of Stalin marching through the street? What's the left-wing equivalent of the hundreds of armed militias in the US?
- gedy 9y ago
  > What's the left-wing equivalent of the hundreds of armed militias in the US? Maybe Berkeley? The Portland riots? That was frightening behavior.
  - random023987 9y ago
    > Maybe Berkeley? The Portland riots? That was frightening behavior. You mean Antifa? Those aren't leftists, those are anarchists. They believe that government is incapable of protecting against fascism, and are instead committing vigilante violence. This doesn't represent the "left", who would instead fight fascism through constitutional and judicial protections. They only thing Antifa has in common with the left, is they both hate fascism. But they have completely different views on the role of government.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      > You mean Antifa? Those aren't leftists, those are anarchists Antifa isn't all anarchists, those that are are mostly specifically anarchocommunists, and anarchocommunists are emphatically leftists.
      - random023987 9y ago

cm2187 9y ago

This endless stream of articles, posts on HN, counter demonstrations, is giving to a tiny minority of a few thousand extremists a media coverage they could only dream of. Kind of like terrorism, the more you make a big deal out of a terrorist attack, the more you encourage the next one. But newspapers and TV news aren't in the business of rational moderation.

Houshalter 9y ago
The interest from HN isn't about the Nazis, but the changing attitudes in the tech industry towards censorship and ideological homogeneity. It would be just as interesting and alarming if it was the other way and communists were getting banned and fired.
- Asooka 9y ago
  It is, in fact, alarming that the communists aren't being silenced, since this is how we ended up with communist regimes the first time around.
purple-again 9y ago
My first exposure was American History X like two decades ago. They were a joke then and they are a joke now. One thing is for sure. They are LOVING all this free exposure for their cause. Also when did we stop calling them neo nazis? I'm sure they love it when you call them Nazis.
- krapp 9y ago
  The only reason this is even a thing is that white supremacist groups feel empowered by the election of Donald Trump. The argument of his election being the result of angry, racially motivated white men wanting a revolution to maintain white power has been stated so often that it's become banal - and that argument was made by Trump's own supporters. I don't believe Trump is a nazi, although his comments on Charlottesville make it seem as if he sympathizes a lot more with them than with the people protesting them. Either way, the nazis seem to believe they've elected their god-emperor, so that automatically makes them not a joke.

caseysoftware 9y ago

I keep wondering how this meshes with the common carrier rules/designation. Does it put Facebook, Twitter, et al at more or less risk as a result? How does this fit with the pro-net neutrality positions that these companies have staked out? "Put simply, common carriers are private companies that sell their services to everyone on the same terms, rather than companies that make more individualized decisions about who to serve and what to charge. [snip] Congress created laws to make sure that phone companies provided basic phone service to all customers on a non-discriminatory basis and at reasonable prices, and created the FCC to regulate them." Ref: https://www.ncta.com/platform/public-policy/why-its-a-good-thing-that-broadband-isnt-a-common-carrier/ https://www.ncta.com/platform/public-policy/why-its-a-good-t...

matt4077 9y ago
Those things have nothing to do with each other. Common carrier rules and net neutrality are attributes of companies enjoying a natural monopoly: that of often being the only one running a cable to your door. Besides, Facebook, Twitter etc. crossed that particular rubicon long ago when they started deleting, for examples, images of nudity.

ebola1717 9y ago

Interesting argument. Usually when people make this sort of "virtue signaling," they don't provide much analysis of the history and ramifications, as this article does. Democratically accountable decision makers, uniformly enforced policies and standards, and making these systems actually function like our legal systems, rather than shallowly mimicking them sounds like a huge improvement over the status quo.

matt4077 9y ago
"Virtue signalling" is the most tired cliché of an argument. It's cynicism is best demonstrated by the simple fact that it works against anything someone says, as long as it is somehow not completely offensive. It's also a great example of assuming bad faith, and failing Occam's razor: instead of the obvious conclusion that most people tend to emphasise with victims of injustice, it constructs a complicated mechanism to explain how someone can be a bad person using their words and actions that say the opposite.
- lhnz 9y ago
  Are you also against the terms 'hypocrite' and 'cheap talk'?
  - Apocryphon 9y ago
    Those are more neutral, less loaded terms. Like it or not, virtue signaling is one of those neologisms that has become ideologically slanted, like "homicide bomber" or "microaggression." By all means, it is far better to use common parlance.
    - lhnz 9y ago
      It's not loaded. These terms are synonymous. The word is an apt description of something very real and very common [0]: people hiding their greatest moral failings behind ultimately empty virtuous performances. It's unsurprising that the only people calling it 'loaded' and despairing over the existence of the term, identify with the group it's most often used to describe. And it's unsurprising that they would misunderstand it to be a term that you use to describe virtuous acts instead of sanctimonious frauds. Desperately wishing that you were able to police the language of your political rivals isn't a good argument for getting rid of a phrase. Also, if every time somebody uses the term, and somebody jumps in to say "I think you mean 'they're being a sanctimonious hypocrite'" then really it will just be emphasizing the meaning. I don't see what you expect to gain from this... [0] http://www.thewrap.com/joss-whedon-feminist-hypocrite-infidelity-affairs-ex-wife-kai-cole-says/ http://www.thewrap.com/joss-whedon-feminist-hypocrite-infide...

xienze 9y ago

I know everyone is going to say "but Nazis", but I think this incident should really drive home just how quickly dissenting opinion can effectively be purged from the Internet and just how much power tech companies truly wield over us. Yeah yeah I know, it's great because they stood up to Nazis but next time it won't just be them. It's very easy to label just about anything as "hate speech". And yeah yeah, "private companies can't censor, only the government can", but has anyone stopped to consider that Google et al have very obvious political affiliations and can exert their control over the Internet in order to further their agendas? If you're not concerned with the implications of this you're not paying attention.

purple-again 9y ago
It's been part sad and part fun to watch. Usually they use pedophiles to convince us to give up our freedoms but nazis are working just as well this time around.
bilbo0s 9y ago
"...but has anyone stopped to consider that Google et al have very obvious political affiliations and can exert their control over the Internet in order to further their agendas?..." Have you, yourself, stopped to consider the possibility that large corporations have had very obvious political affiliations, and have been exerting their control to further their agendas since long before Google existed?
- xienze 9y ago
  Have you considered that Google, Facebook, etc. can control public discourse and what information people can see in ways never before thought possible?
  - bilbo0s 9y ago
    Have you considered that advisers for Nixon's first Presidential campaign made the same complaint about network television? My only point here is that many, many companies have been exerting their control for many, many years to further the varied agendas of their principal shareholders. This really is nothing new.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

s73ver_ 9y ago

A good part of it is that regular people don't want to deal with them. They don't want to hear from them, and they definitely don't want to be harassed by them. Look at the "free speech" platforms, the *Chans. They may not have started out as bastions for neo-nazis and racists, but they became that because, as hate speech and such was not really policed on there, normal people stopped going altogether, leaving only those people behind.

jquery 9y ago
> leaving only those people behind. If you think only neo-nazis and racists hang out on the Chans, you definitely don't hang out there. "The strategy [of people who consider themselves the protectors of decency] is weaponized stereotype campaigns. If a site tolerates witches, describe it as a witch site about witchcraft populated entirely by witches. It’s super easy." - http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized-web/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centrali...
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  I'm not saying they're the only ones, but you cannot deny that those sites have a large proportion of that kind of content.
  - Asooka 9y ago
    Ironically, it's much easier not to interact with that content on 4/8chan than it is on the wider Internet. If you're not there for political shitposting, don't visit /pol/.
ItsDeathball 9y ago
"Normal people" have absolutely not stopped using imageboards. Perhaps they feel outnumbered on the boards specifically devoted to politics because every other venue for political discussion bans certain viewpoints, concentrating proponents of those controversial positions in the free speech platforms. That's only one portion of the imageboard use case. Most people are there to talk about anime, video games, technology, or whatever other esoteric hobbies drive them to seek Internet discussion; it's difficult to work in advocacy for fascism to those discussions without catching a ban for being off-topic.

Blackthorn 9y ago

Sites have been doing this for ages for things like terrorist materials and other forms of extremism, but as soon as white people get censored everyone suddenly gets up in arms.

tinalumfoil 9y ago

> Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. - Article 19, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948 A lot of people here have been trying to defend free speech as a human right, and a right that all people and corporations have a responsibility to preserve. No matter how many appeals to authority, appeals to history or long-winded explanations used all these arguments have fallen flat on people who either don't agree with free speech, or believe it's only the problem of a small number of institutions. I believe there's enough people who support speech as a human right that these companies will end up on the wrong side of history and be superseded by more content-neutral hosts. It would be nice if this had more support, but there's enough people demanding companies, who are denying service to groups with the intention that they are unable to find hosting elsewhere, that I think the near future of speech is safe, and will come back stronger. EDIT: Reworded second paragraph

nnutter 9y ago
I am having a hard time deciphering what your position is.
- hanklazard 9y ago
  Appears to be: pro free-speech and against the moves of censorship by companies like Facebook and Cloudflare.

newswriter99 9y ago

"There are hard-right alternatives to Twitter, to Reddit and even to the still-mostly-lawless 4chan." The writer obviously has no idea what 4chan looked like before the fappening.

nemo44x 9y ago

I do wonder how this disagrees with the popular argument in favor of net neutrality? The point being that limiting who can distribute and therefore create access to information is generally agreed upon as unacceptable. Would it be different if service providers (your ISP) made some content they select inaccessible (not net neutral) rather than Google et al?

tim333 9y ago

>...Forced Online Platforms to Reveal Their True Nature The article seems argue that it's just been revealed that Facebook, Twitter, Reddit et al are, shock horror, "profit-driven entities, free to do as they please." As if we didn't know that already. It also kind of paints them as faceless corporations with shady agendas but in the case of Facebook and Reddit they are both still basically run by the programmers that wrote the first code and try run them in a common sense sort of way. Here they are chatting about these kind of things Zuck http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/zuckerberg-investigating-facebook-censorship-after-staff-admit-deactivating-trending-stories-1560059 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/zuckerberg-investigating-facebook-c... Huffman https://youtu.be/CbGxKKJb7vk?t=12m14s https://youtu.be/CbGxKKJb7vk?t=12m14s Edit - changed the Zuck link...

hitekker 9y ago

Key point of the article: > Questions about how platforms like Twitter and Reddit deal with disruptive users and offensive content tend to be met with defensive language invoking free speech. > In the process of building private communities, these companies had put on the costumes of liberal democracies. They borrowed the language of rights to legitimize arbitrary rules, creating what the technology lawyer Kendra Albert calls ‘‘legal talismans.’’ > What better way to avoid liability and responsibility for how customers use your product? It was also good marketing. It’s easier to entrust increasingly large portions of your private and public life to an advertising and data-mining firm if you’re led to believe it’s something more. I've noticed this most distinctly with Reddit. Why haven't all the hate subreddits been banned? /r/physical_removal was exhorting for the deaths of thousands months prior to Charlottesville. The admins proclaim free speech, but under this thin excuse, lies their business model. Toxic users are extremely active. They have to be. Spewing vitriol, spreading hate, posting canards necessitate constant engagement. Looking at the tables of monthly metrics, who is more valuable? That one user with 10,000 internet points flaming other users every hour of the day, or the occasional commenter who writes longwinded but intellectually honest posts? I can tell you which one is far more numerous, and I can tell you which one Reddit raised millions on. Ultimately, I would argue that this pretense is is designed to morally justify the power these platforms wield over their users. To do any less, especially for an overly-dominant player, sets the stage for regulatory action, backed by popular demand. edit: removed slight political slant.

tim333 9y ago
>Why hasn't /r/the_donald been banned? He did win the election. You can ban extremists but I'm not sure banning fairly mainstream stuff is the way to go.
- hitekker 9y ago
  Correct, I have shifted my intro to focus on extremists.
Blackthorn 9y ago
physical_removal was banned.

djflutt3rshy 9y ago

>It is worth noting that the platforms most flamboyantly dedicated to a borrowed idea of free speech and assembly are the same ones that have struggled most intensely with groups of users who seek to organize and disrupt their platforms. THIS is what ultimately changed my mind about whether Internet companies should offer "free speech" as a positive. I used to believe that the antidote to hateful speech was simply more speech. But every site that's been tried on, fell to more and more hateful speech, pushing and bending and breaking the norms, until sane people left out of disgust or were relegated to their own, more moderated, parts of the site. Germany and other European countries with anti-Nazi laws have it right (and no, they haven't descended into totalitarian regimes, the slippery slope simply stopped at "Don't be a Nazi".)

jquery 9y ago
The laws against hate speech are great until suddenly they aren't. Germany's laws are making it criminal for citizens to engage in honest debate about the refugee crisis. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/06/30/germany-passes-law-against-online-hate-speech/442031001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/06/30/germany...
ameister14 9y ago
Germany's and Austria's anti-nazi laws don't seem to be very effective at preventing Nazis, though. A bunch of the Austrian lower and upper houses of parliament are members of a party started by a former SS officer and Germany sent a member of the NPD to the European Parliament.