4 ms·

The problem with Reddit is that, while it's not endorsing the content, it is facilitating it. You can let the white supremacists in your neighbourhood use your

The problem with Reddit is that, while it's not endorsing the content, it is facilitating it. You can let the white supremacists in your neighbourhood use your garage for their weekly meetings and plausibly claim that you're just being neighborly while disagreeing with their purpose. But I'm still going to judge you for helping them out, for making their organizing easier and cheaper, and for smoothing the road for them. When Reddit banned r/fatpeoplehate and r/coontown in 2015, among others, it actually succeeded in reducing the amount of hate speech on Reddit: Working from over 100M Reddit posts and comments, we generate hate speech lexicons to examine variations in hate speech usage via causal inference methods. We find that the ban worked for Reddit. More accounts than expected discontinued using the site; those that stayed drastically decreased their hate speech usage—by at least 80%. Though many subreddits saw an influx of r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown “migrants,” those subreddits saw no significant changes in hate speech usage [0] By making it easy for participants of r/coontown to participate, Reddit actually contributed to the output of r/coontown. [0] http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf

ralusek 9y ago
Letting white supremacists use my garage for weekly meetings is not the same as me building an establishment for the explicit purpose of facilitating conversations of all kinds, and then not kicking out a white supremacist minority for using the facility. My concern with censorship is always 2 fold: 1.) You have to always assume the person who is in control of censorship is the person who doesn't agree with you. Donald Trump has on multiple occasions indicated that he would like to restrict the press's capability to criticize the president, since he has been in power. Kim Jong Un shares a similar sentiment. Would we like that, because there are many Trump supporters who would see absolutely nothing wrong with that. There was a moral majority in the US for a long time that would have preferred to restrict the capability for others to talk about what they considered to be sinful things, such as homosexuality or communism. 2.) You have to realize how quickly things become conflated. Ben Shapiro, a conservative pundit, went to Berkeley to speak, where student groups attempting to ban him from speaking had strung up a huge sign reading "We say no to your white-supremacist bullshit." It's important to note that Ben Shapiro is an Orthodox Jew who is harassed daily by white supremacists online...and has never said a single thing advocating for racial supremacy. In fact, he is hugely opposed to racial, gendered, or national identity politics of any kind. Students wanted to ban him for hate speech simply because they associated him with what they perceived to be hate speech.
- fatbird 9y ago
  Building an establishment to facilitate conversations of all kinds generally does not obligate you to allow every specific conversation. Were it my establishment, I wouldn't permit members of NAMBLA to organize their sex-trafficking trips to Southeast Asia, or white supremacists to organize the next Unite The Right rally. I wouldn't feel at all like I'd betrayed my purpose in facilitating more, and more different, conversations by specifically banning some that are obviously problematic in and of themselves. I also wouldn't feel like I was censoring anyone. My not facilitating their conversation is not the same as my preventing them from having it. I would also be mindful that the presence of nazis and pedophiles in my establishment was itself a barrier to other communities taking advantage of my facilities; if members of those other communities started showing up after I banned them, I'd probably consider it a net win for freedom of expression and conversational facilitation. Also, you're soft-pedaling Ben Shapiro by calling him a "conservative pundit", as if he's in the same inoffensive league as Ross Douthat or David Brooks. He was an editor of Breitbart News, which is now quite openly the voice of the "alt-right"; he departed and got on their enemies list because he was smart enough to realize that Trump was going to damage the cause for a generation--which is why they're going after him, because they were quite happy to have an orthodox jew on staff while he was agreeing with them. He's said a variety of things about Arabs and black people that are flat out racist. He's not quite the bomb-thrower that Milo is, but he still drops nuggets such as "Arabs like to bomb crap and live in sewage". Calling him a white supremacist might be hyperbole, but it's not simply conflating conservative views with nazis. He's a racist asshole who advocates for ethnic cleansing. Maybe white supremacy isn't his conscious goal, but when he facilitates that end, it becomes a bit irrelevant if he's actually written that down on his "A better 2018" list.
intended 9y ago
I think that study is good but I add personal nuance when interpreting its obvious curative suggestion. Its not the ban that worked - as much as the full identification of those groups, the banning of those subs and the negation of the immediate survival attempts of those subs. The whole process is what worked, not just a simple ban.

ralusek 9y ago

Letting white supremacists use my garage for weekly meetings is not the same as me building an establishment for the explicit purpose of facilitating conversations of all kinds, and then not kicking out a white supremacist minority for using the facility. My concern with censorship is always 2 fold: 1.) You have to always assume the person who is in control of censorship is the person who doesn't agree with you. Donald Trump has on multiple occasions indicated that he would like to restrict the press's capability to criticize the president, since he has been in power. Kim Jong Un shares a similar sentiment. Would we like that, because there are many Trump supporters who would see absolutely nothing wrong with that. There was a moral majority in the US for a long time that would have preferred to restrict the capability for others to talk about what they considered to be sinful things, such as homosexuality or communism. 2.) You have to realize how quickly things become conflated. Ben Shapiro, a conservative pundit, went to Berkeley to speak, where student groups attempting to ban him from speaking had strung up a huge sign reading "We say no to your white-supremacist bullshit." It's important to note that Ben Shapiro is an Orthodox Jew who is harassed daily by white supremacists online...and has never said a single thing advocating for racial supremacy. In fact, he is hugely opposed to racial, gendered, or national identity politics of any kind. Students wanted to ban him for hate speech simply because they associated him with what they perceived to be hate speech.

fatbird 9y ago
Building an establishment to facilitate conversations of all kinds generally does not obligate you to allow every specific conversation. Were it my establishment, I wouldn't permit members of NAMBLA to organize their sex-trafficking trips to Southeast Asia, or white supremacists to organize the next Unite The Right rally. I wouldn't feel at all like I'd betrayed my purpose in facilitating more, and more different, conversations by specifically banning some that are obviously problematic in and of themselves. I also wouldn't feel like I was censoring anyone. My not facilitating their conversation is not the same as my preventing them from having it. I would also be mindful that the presence of nazis and pedophiles in my establishment was itself a barrier to other communities taking advantage of my facilities; if members of those other communities started showing up after I banned them, I'd probably consider it a net win for freedom of expression and conversational facilitation. Also, you're soft-pedaling Ben Shapiro by calling him a "conservative pundit", as if he's in the same inoffensive league as Ross Douthat or David Brooks. He was an editor of Breitbart News, which is now quite openly the voice of the "alt-right"; he departed and got on their enemies list because he was smart enough to realize that Trump was going to damage the cause for a generation--which is why they're going after him, because they were quite happy to have an orthodox jew on staff while he was agreeing with them. He's said a variety of things about Arabs and black people that are flat out racist. He's not quite the bomb-thrower that Milo is, but he still drops nuggets such as "Arabs like to bomb crap and live in sewage". Calling him a white supremacist might be hyperbole, but it's not simply conflating conservative views with nazis. He's a racist asshole who advocates for ethnic cleansing. Maybe white supremacy isn't his conscious goal, but when he facilitates that end, it becomes a bit irrelevant if he's actually written that down on his "A better 2018" list.

intended 9y ago

I think that study is good but I add personal nuance when interpreting its obvious curative suggestion. Its not the ban that worked - as much as the full identification of those groups, the banning of those subs and the negation of the immediate survival attempts of those subs. The whole process is what worked, not just a simple ban.