6 ms·

Agreed, and this should be the retort to any curtailing of free speech in the name of safety. Its the same argument as allowing “the_donald” to exist on Reddit.

Agreed, and this should be the retort to any curtailing of free speech in the name of safety. Its the same argument as allowing “the_donald” to exist on Reddit. You will not stop an ideology by denying them a platform. Better to debate them in an open forum, even if they are evil. The only way to counter bad ideas is with good ones.

softawre 9y ago
There was a recent /r/science article that suggested the banning of coontown and fatpeoplehate resulted in less hate on the platform as a whole. Would you argue this hate moved to other avenues of the web? I'd bet some of it did, but some people just stopped being so hateful on the internet once their cesspool went away. https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/6zg6w6/reddits_bans_of_rcoontown_and_rfatpeoplehate/ https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/6zg6w6/reddits_ban...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- katastic 9y ago
  It's conflation to compare coontown with the_donald. Go there right now. You won't find "kill the jews" posts. You won't find "kill the gays/black people" posts. You'll find a ton of supportive people with a particular worldview--and there's nothing wrong with that. If you assume the people you disagree with are "insane" or disregard them as "full of hate" then you'll never understand why they think the way they do and the division in our world continues unabated. It still blows my mind that people who support the currently elected president, are considered a hate group. If the other candidate had won, would we consider her subreddit a hate sub? Would we care what the losing party thought about her subreddit? We all know the answer to that: "No." I have never before seen an election where "only one candidate is considered a human being." Strange times.
  - neuronexmachina 9y ago
    I was curious and peeked over to see what's currently popular over at the_donald. Some of the top-voted recent links: * "UN Globalists are on suicide watch after President Trump's speech" * "One of the best quotes of the speech. Socialist cucks BTFO!" * "This tweet from David Brock's cucks is less than 2 weeks old and has already aged terribly." * "Can you imagine a world without Islam?" * "HE TRULY IS A GOD AMONG MEN" (God-Emperor Trump) * "Since 9/11 there have been ~35,000 deadly Islamic terror attacks; that's an average of 2,000 per year... So let's (A) NEVER FORGET, (B) PRESS F, and (C) DRIVE. THEM. OUT. FROM. THE. EARTH!"
    - katastic 9y ago
      Bill Maher, once heralded as an extreme left liberal (who supported gay marriage and marijuana legalization in the early 90's when nobody thought either would ever happen), consistently talks about the "threat of Islam to democracy". Is he a neocon now? And should we remove his speech to "reduce hate" the same way you're suggesting the_donald be removed?
      - viraptor 9y ago
        You pivoted away from the topic. Bill Maher case may be interesting to discuss, but doesn't change whether the_donald calls for hate. Which actually looking at the subreddit shows it does.
        katastic 9y ago
        Not at all. Which is the hate? Either Bill Maher (a liberal hero) is a racist islamaphobe, or, the_donald users who share the same views as him... aren't islamaphobes. Because unless we're not talking about Islamaphobia, what else did you actually see that could be considered "hateful"? Because on that same sub you'll find people of all colors, and most religions discussing things. You'll find legal immigrants. You'll find ex-Muslims and atheists. You'll find gays. You'll find women. You'll find Brits. You'll find lifelong Democrats and Libertarians. You'll find ex-"Bernie Bros" who were furious at the DNC's betrayal of Bernie Sanders. You'll find people who grew up under Communist rule. I know, because I've seen every single one of those on that sub and almost every one of those demographics has posted a picture of themselves with a MAGA hat at one point or another. If you want an actual white supremacist sub, you're thinking of /r/uncensorednews which actually lists Jews with (((triple parenthesis))). That's a pretty sharp contrast to the_donald. But it wouldn't be, if the_donald was as hateful as been claimed.
- wutbrodo 9y ago
  > resulted in less hate on the platform as a whole The study is interesting, but this is decidedly not what it says, and you should be wary of overinterpreting its arguments. If you look at the definition of hate speech they used, it was defined as "the vocabulary of the subreddits in question". This isn't a general complaint about hate speech being slippery and hard to pin down, it's a criticism of the fact that defining it as the specific vocabulary of the subreddits in question is a huge confounder. What the study's conclusion boils down to is: "If you ban a subreddit, the exact vocabulary (in-jokes, etc) of that subreddit declines." Well, duh. This is an especially tautological result for communities that have such a rich vocabulary of in-jokes (and slurs) :( There's not much in the paper to suggest that the emigrants from coontown and FPH aren't expressing the exact same ideas elsewhere, without using the exact same lexicon that they developed in their original communities. I would be surprised if this result didn't replicate for pretty miuch any community that has its own internal vocabulary and in-jokes, such as nominally pro-social-justice subreddits or even narrow political subreddits like /r/anarchism or something.
- KGIII 9y ago
  You should visit voat.co and see where they went. It's pretty much a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  From the POV of Reddit, their users, and their advertisers, does it matter? It's not there anymore, so they're good.
matt4077 9y ago
Sure, just like you could convince McDonald's to go vegan with a few carefully worded arguments... ISIS doesn't use twitter to debate you. They use it strictly for outbound propaganda. Even if you could somehow convince those running ISIS accounts of the folly of their endeavours, these are likely to be a tiny fraction of ISIS' people. There are a few dozen social media people in their ranks, but the idea that the bulk of them even have access to Twitter is somewhat laughable. Denying ISIS such propaganda outlets is useful in fighting them. Proof by the free market theorem: they wouldn't use Twitter if they did not consider it better than the alternatives. They are also better informed about their situation, so they're more likely to be right than anyone else. Denying them this possibility must therefore be damaging to their cause. This idea that extreme ideologies are somehow damaged by access to mass media is among the most ridiculous infatuations HN has embarked on, informed almost exclusively by wishful thinking. An ideology that is pushed underground is, and this is almost a truism, strictly worse off than one that has access to these tools. See the recent reddit paper for some numbers, or consider something like r/the_donald: does anybody really believe that community would have been more powerful if it had been relegated to their own platform early on?
- pharrington 9y ago
  Again, exploding people with bombs and using trucks as bullets is already illegal. More to the point, it's important to not conflate extreme ideologies with specific groups which use those ideologies. ISIS uses Twitter to recruit people to ISIS. There are many violent extremist groups that aren't ISIS, and would love to see it's demise.
yung_endian 9y ago
>better to debate them in an open forum, even if they are evil. this implies they actually want to have a discussion and not just spew bile everywhere, dox innocent people, and vote brigade racist bullshit.
ue_ 9y ago
>The only way to counter bad ideas is with good ones. Absolute rubbish; bad ideas spread through people, thus you need to be able to reach people when you counter bad ideas, but people generally aren't controlled by their rationality, they are attached to ideas and stick with them. The idea that if only for example Jewish interest groups had debated the Nazis more, then the Nazis would have been shown to have bad ideas is ridiculous. Some ideas, as Marcuse put it, block the democratic process and this blockage may require apparently undemocratic means to remove.
travmatt 9y ago
I'd suggest that your sentiments map very nicely onto a rationalist view of the world but poorly onto reality. I think this more generally falls into a bias some hyper-logical people propagate, that since they assume they make decisions primarily with logic, that others must do the same as well. It inherently assumes that A) people vulnerable to being recruited into a suicidal death cult are thinking logically, and B) such people can be logically talked out of their ideology. If instead one assumes that emotional connection is the primary driver of the recruiting success in question, it follows that disrupting this pipeline would yield more success than attempting to reason with talented recruiters who aren't trying to have a fair and logical debate.
programmarchy 9y ago
Agree it's better to debate in an open forum. Free speech should permit the exchange of all ideas, even "evil" ones. But isn't it a bit disingenuous to compare r/The_Donald to ISIS, since the latter is inciting violence?
camus2 9y ago
> Agreed, and this should be the retort to any curtailing of free speech in the name of safety There is no free speech issue here, Twitter isn't operated by the government, neither is Facebook or Reddit. My point is, people are still free to set up their own servers at home, running their own app, their liberty to do that is not harmed by Twitter rejecting content. On the contrary, it's an opportunity for free speech advocates to remember that.
- gertef 9y ago
  The concept Free Speech transcends the specifics of the US Constitution's First Amendment. "Complies with US First Amendment" != "Free Speech"
  - rmrm 9y ago
    I don't think Free Speech has ever meant being required to publish others speech. Freedom of the press was meant to ensure you can say what you wish via pamphlets or starting your own newspaper, wherein you own the method of speech. That is why it was fundamental to Free Speech. One has never been able to compel a publisher to publish them. You may have a different concept, but to my way way of thinking that has always been the connection between the First Amendment and Free Speech.
    - KGIII 9y ago
      What's your opinion on cake decorations?
      - s73ver_ 9y ago
        Don't. That is a completely separate topic. Not to mention that, in the state where that happened, sexual orientation was a protected class.
      - Frondo 9y ago
        Please don't use that whataboutism here. But, since you asked, businesses that offer services to the public can refuse service to anyone UNLESS they're refusing a member of a protected class, for being a member of a protected class. White restaurant owner kicking out a black lady because she's belligerent/drunk/whatever -- fine. White restaurant owner kicking out a black lady because she's black -- not fine. Religious bakery owner refusing service because it's Monday -- fine. Religious bakery owner refusing service because the customer is gay -- not fine. But again, please no more whataboutism.
s73ver_ 9y ago
No. You will not stop ISIS by debating with them on Twitter.
vacri 9y ago
> You will not stop an ideology by denying them a platform. Ideologies are routinely stopped by denying them a platform. It's the standard way of stopping an ideology.

softawre 9y ago

There was a recent /r/science article that suggested the banning of coontown and fatpeoplehate resulted in less hate on the platform as a whole. Would you argue this hate moved to other avenues of the web? I'd bet some of it did, but some people just stopped being so hateful on the internet once their cesspool went away. https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/6zg6w6/reddits_bans_of_rcoontown_and_rfatpeoplehate/ https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/6zg6w6/reddits_ban...

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
katastic 9y ago
It's conflation to compare coontown with the_donald. Go there right now. You won't find "kill the jews" posts. You won't find "kill the gays/black people" posts. You'll find a ton of supportive people with a particular worldview--and there's nothing wrong with that. If you assume the people you disagree with are "insane" or disregard them as "full of hate" then you'll never understand why they think the way they do and the division in our world continues unabated. It still blows my mind that people who support the currently elected president, are considered a hate group. If the other candidate had won, would we consider her subreddit a hate sub? Would we care what the losing party thought about her subreddit? We all know the answer to that: "No." I have never before seen an election where "only one candidate is considered a human being." Strange times.
- neuronexmachina 9y ago
  I was curious and peeked over to see what's currently popular over at the_donald. Some of the top-voted recent links: * "UN Globalists are on suicide watch after President Trump's speech" * "One of the best quotes of the speech. Socialist cucks BTFO!" * "This tweet from David Brock's cucks is less than 2 weeks old and has already aged terribly." * "Can you imagine a world without Islam?" * "HE TRULY IS A GOD AMONG MEN" (God-Emperor Trump) * "Since 9/11 there have been ~35,000 deadly Islamic terror attacks; that's an average of 2,000 per year... So let's (A) NEVER FORGET, (B) PRESS F, and (C) DRIVE. THEM. OUT. FROM. THE. EARTH!"
  - katastic 9y ago
    Bill Maher, once heralded as an extreme left liberal (who supported gay marriage and marijuana legalization in the early 90's when nobody thought either would ever happen), consistently talks about the "threat of Islam to democracy". Is he a neocon now? And should we remove his speech to "reduce hate" the same way you're suggesting the_donald be removed?
    - viraptor 9y ago
      You pivoted away from the topic. Bill Maher case may be interesting to discuss, but doesn't change whether the_donald calls for hate. Which actually looking at the subreddit shows it does.
      - katastic 9y ago
        Not at all. Which is the hate? Either Bill Maher (a liberal hero) is a racist islamaphobe, or, the_donald users who share the same views as him... aren't islamaphobes. Because unless we're not talking about Islamaphobia, what else did you actually see that could be considered "hateful"? Because on that same sub you'll find people of all colors, and most religions discussing things. You'll find legal immigrants. You'll find ex-Muslims and atheists. You'll find gays. You'll find women. You'll find Brits. You'll find lifelong Democrats and Libertarians. You'll find ex-"Bernie Bros" who were furious at the DNC's betrayal of Bernie Sanders. You'll find people who grew up under Communist rule. I know, because I've seen every single one of those on that sub and almost every one of those demographics has posted a picture of themselves with a MAGA hat at one point or another. If you want an actual white supremacist sub, you're thinking of /r/uncensorednews which actually lists Jews with (((triple parenthesis))). That's a pretty sharp contrast to the_donald. But it wouldn't be, if the_donald was as hateful as been claimed.
wutbrodo 9y ago
> resulted in less hate on the platform as a whole The study is interesting, but this is decidedly not what it says, and you should be wary of overinterpreting its arguments. If you look at the definition of hate speech they used, it was defined as "the vocabulary of the subreddits in question". This isn't a general complaint about hate speech being slippery and hard to pin down, it's a criticism of the fact that defining it as the specific vocabulary of the subreddits in question is a huge confounder. What the study's conclusion boils down to is: "If you ban a subreddit, the exact vocabulary (in-jokes, etc) of that subreddit declines." Well, duh. This is an especially tautological result for communities that have such a rich vocabulary of in-jokes (and slurs) :( There's not much in the paper to suggest that the emigrants from coontown and FPH aren't expressing the exact same ideas elsewhere, without using the exact same lexicon that they developed in their original communities. I would be surprised if this result didn't replicate for pretty miuch any community that has its own internal vocabulary and in-jokes, such as nominally pro-social-justice subreddits or even narrow political subreddits like /r/anarchism or something.
KGIII 9y ago
You should visit voat.co and see where they went. It's pretty much a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
s73ver_ 9y ago
From the POV of Reddit, their users, and their advertisers, does it matter? It's not there anymore, so they're good.

matt4077 9y ago

Sure, just like you could convince McDonald's to go vegan with a few carefully worded arguments... ISIS doesn't use twitter to debate you. They use it strictly for outbound propaganda. Even if you could somehow convince those running ISIS accounts of the folly of their endeavours, these are likely to be a tiny fraction of ISIS' people. There are a few dozen social media people in their ranks, but the idea that the bulk of them even have access to Twitter is somewhat laughable. Denying ISIS such propaganda outlets is useful in fighting them. Proof by the free market theorem: they wouldn't use Twitter if they did not consider it better than the alternatives. They are also better informed about their situation, so they're more likely to be right than anyone else. Denying them this possibility must therefore be damaging to their cause. This idea that extreme ideologies are somehow damaged by access to mass media is among the most ridiculous infatuations HN has embarked on, informed almost exclusively by wishful thinking. An ideology that is pushed underground is, and this is almost a truism, strictly worse off than one that has access to these tools. See the recent reddit paper for some numbers, or consider something like r/the_donald: does anybody really believe that community would have been more powerful if it had been relegated to their own platform early on?

pharrington 9y ago
Again, exploding people with bombs and using trucks as bullets is already illegal. More to the point, it's important to not conflate extreme ideologies with specific groups which use those ideologies. ISIS uses Twitter to recruit people to ISIS. There are many violent extremist groups that aren't ISIS, and would love to see it's demise.

yung_endian 9y ago

>better to debate them in an open forum, even if they are evil. this implies they actually want to have a discussion and not just spew bile everywhere, dox innocent people, and vote brigade racist bullshit.

ue_ 9y ago

>The only way to counter bad ideas is with good ones. Absolute rubbish; bad ideas spread through people, thus you need to be able to reach people when you counter bad ideas, but people generally aren't controlled by their rationality, they are attached to ideas and stick with them. The idea that if only for example Jewish interest groups had debated the Nazis more, then the Nazis would have been shown to have bad ideas is ridiculous. Some ideas, as Marcuse put it, block the democratic process and this blockage may require apparently undemocratic means to remove.

travmatt 9y ago

I'd suggest that your sentiments map very nicely onto a rationalist view of the world but poorly onto reality. I think this more generally falls into a bias some hyper-logical people propagate, that since they assume they make decisions primarily with logic, that others must do the same as well. It inherently assumes that A) people vulnerable to being recruited into a suicidal death cult are thinking logically, and B) such people can be logically talked out of their ideology. If instead one assumes that emotional connection is the primary driver of the recruiting success in question, it follows that disrupting this pipeline would yield more success than attempting to reason with talented recruiters who aren't trying to have a fair and logical debate.

programmarchy 9y ago

Agree it's better to debate in an open forum. Free speech should permit the exchange of all ideas, even "evil" ones. But isn't it a bit disingenuous to compare r/The_Donald to ISIS, since the latter is inciting violence?

camus2 9y ago

> Agreed, and this should be the retort to any curtailing of free speech in the name of safety There is no free speech issue here, Twitter isn't operated by the government, neither is Facebook or Reddit. My point is, people are still free to set up their own servers at home, running their own app, their liberty to do that is not harmed by Twitter rejecting content. On the contrary, it's an opportunity for free speech advocates to remember that.

gertef 9y ago
The concept Free Speech transcends the specifics of the US Constitution's First Amendment. "Complies with US First Amendment" != "Free Speech"
- rmrm 9y ago
  I don't think Free Speech has ever meant being required to publish others speech. Freedom of the press was meant to ensure you can say what you wish via pamphlets or starting your own newspaper, wherein you own the method of speech. That is why it was fundamental to Free Speech. One has never been able to compel a publisher to publish them. You may have a different concept, but to my way way of thinking that has always been the connection between the First Amendment and Free Speech.
  - KGIII 9y ago
    What's your opinion on cake decorations?
    - s73ver_ 9y ago
      Don't. That is a completely separate topic. Not to mention that, in the state where that happened, sexual orientation was a protected class.
    - Frondo 9y ago
      Please don't use that whataboutism here. But, since you asked, businesses that offer services to the public can refuse service to anyone UNLESS they're refusing a member of a protected class, for being a member of a protected class. White restaurant owner kicking out a black lady because she's belligerent/drunk/whatever -- fine. White restaurant owner kicking out a black lady because she's black -- not fine. Religious bakery owner refusing service because it's Monday -- fine. Religious bakery owner refusing service because the customer is gay -- not fine. But again, please no more whataboutism.

s73ver_ 9y ago

No. You will not stop ISIS by debating with them on Twitter.

vacri 9y ago

> You will not stop an ideology by denying them a platform. Ideologies are routinely stopped by denying them a platform. It's the standard way of stopping an ideology.