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A common argument in philosophy is that bad ideas should occur in the open - where everyone may ridicule them. When they are cast to the shadows they can grow,

by Nadya 8y ago

BryantD 8y ago
That common argument rests on norms established by millennia of relatively difficult communication. Best not to assume that the same people would come to the same conclusions today. For example, QAnon believers have not had their speech restricted. That conspiracy theory is as open as anything you could name. People have challenged it. It's still going. If you believe that challenging terrible ideas makes those who hold them think twice... why hasn't the exact argument you're using gotten rid of the terrible idea that we should restrict speech? Answer: because logical refutation doesn't work. I am not arguing against the slippery slope. This is a very, very hard and risky problem. I am refuting the misconception that shedding light on bad ideas makes them go away.
- mrguyorama 8y ago
  A number of other silly ideas that still hold traction and do actual damage despite being out in the open and actively refuted: Moon landing conspiracy Anti-vaccers/Vaccines cause autism Fad diets and "detox"s Anti-intellectualism Alex Jones (to the tune of millions of subscribers on his recently killed youtube) Global Warming etc
  - lylecubed 8y ago
    And who decides what is and isn't a silly idea? For 40 years, Americans were told by the government to believe that low fat high carb diets were the key to a healthy life. Not only is that not true, but it's never been true. There was never any evidence to support that stance. And yet, that was the official government policy and subsequently the commonly held belief for 40 years. "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." - Not Mark Twain
    - yifanl 8y ago
      If the problem is "what determines truth", then there isn't an organization out there that could resolve the issue (barring something like the Chinese government, I suppose)
      - SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
        Did you just organically come up with the Ministry Of Truth?
        qu4z-2 8y ago
        I think their point was that unless you're willing to accept Minitrue you don't have an authoritative source of truth to check against.
    - mrguyorama 8y ago
      That's all fine and dandy, but is there actual factual standing behind the positions I listed?
tim333 8y ago
Not much is actually getting censored. The bad stuff just gets moved to less respectable sites. The Stormer for example is still up there if you want to read it.
kodablah 8y ago
> I wait to see what will be next on the chopping block. I wish we didn't have to wait. I wish there was a large enough group of people that would boycott companies that make up the internet infrastructure (e.g. ISPs, registrars, DNS, CDNs, cloud providers, etc) for censoring lawful content. I wish we didn't require mass media articles to get groups of consumers to act in a common interest. And I would prefer it was absolute, regardless of content, because it's frustrating to watch lots of people agree with one decision and then get shocked when these companies become more choosey on the foundation of acceptability that was previously built. To be clear though, I want no government involvement in any way (on the censoring or non-censoring side). I for one will point an Azure sales rep (or hiring recruiter) to this as a reason I will not engage with them. I have the same feeling about CloudFlare's decision. And I really don't like either of the censored groups.
- gamblor956 8y ago
  There was no government involvement in this. Microsoft made a business decision that hosting Gab would subject them to business pressures from other customers/potential customers not wanting to use a service used by hatemongers. That's not censorship. That's the free market at work. Gab is free to host their own website; and if necessary their own DNS servers. Hell, they're free to go Tor-only.
  - kodablah 8y ago
    > There was no government involvement in this I know that, I am clearly saying I don't want it for any consumer-led efforts. > That's not censorship Did you mean to say it's not government censorship or do we just have different definitions of the word? Whether they can host their own site or whatever has absolutely nothing to do with what is and isn't censorship.
    - rainonmoon 8y ago
      If I own a nightclub and it becomes a hotspot for the alt-right, who don't align with my values, and I close down that nightclub for that reason, am I censoring them? No, I'm excluding them from my privately-owned space and refusing to associate with them. Nobody's right is being infringed upon here; they're free to go to any other bar. "Whether they can host their own site" is absolutely relevant to what is and isn't censorship because all of the examples in this thread are still totally free to distribute (and even monetize) their content in public.
yifanl 8y ago
I don't think that's true. If there is a sufficiently large group of willing listeners (or determined trolls), then having a bad idea out there in reach of that audience legitimizes it far faster than private discussion could. At which point, challenging them invites the creation of a cult rather than dispersing the idea. For a frivolous example, my roommate is now convinced that the Star Wars prequels are legitimately good movies because of r/PrequelMemes.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  But is there not a large body of work refuting that idea in the Mr. Plinkett reviews on Red Letter Media?
X6S1x6Okd1st 8y ago
I'd love to see an analysis of if this theory is true. There's another argument for allowing hateful speech which is that it is a containment strategy. It appears that there isn't much to that theory. An analysis of reddit's 2015 banning on r/fatpeoplehate and r/coontown did not see the hateful speech increase where 'migrants' went. http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  I think it's because such banning made it abundantly clear that such behavior was not welcome. So that's more to do with social norms, I guess.
  - X6S1x6Okd1st 8y ago
    Why do you think that?
lylecubed 8y ago
> A common argument in philosophy is that bad ideas should occur in the open - where everyone may ridicule them. Not to get too far off topic, but is this actually true in practice in the real world? Scientific studies have shown that the idea that gets repeated the most often is the idea that "wins". A bad idea gets repeated and spread every time it gets criticized. If the idea proves more "credible" than the criticism of it, then all that criticism does is contribute to the spread of the idea it's trying to kill.
- komali2 8y ago
  I would like to know this as well. Case in point, when I was a kindergarten teacher, kids wouldn't have a concept of race. I'd have white girls asking me if I could put their hair in braids like "the tan girls." But by 4th grade I'd be teaching about slavery, racism, etc, and the kids would be then learning about a concept that was utterly nonsensical to the non-racism-indoctrinated kids. So I'm wondering what would happen if I never taught about racism at all.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - holtalanm 8y ago
    Unfortunately, a lot of racism is picked up at home.
  - NTDF9 8y ago
    Man, I grew up in a third world country where race was a complete non-issue (unless your color made you stick out like a sore thumb, in which case, you'd be a celebrity, not get picked on). Coming to the US is what made me encounter racism. American society really is broken from within when third world countries can get around this but America can't.
    - cdubzzz 8y ago
      I think this is a bit of apples and oranges. There are vast differences between pretty much any two cultures. I spent three years living and working in a third world county where I “stuck out like a sore thumb”. Most people I met assumed I was rich, despite living and working on the equivalent of a local secondary school teacher’s salary. And this was still a hell of a lot more than most people in the country were making, but my local counterparts did not have to constantly deny requests for money and things from strangers. Perhaps a more apt comparison to racism in the US would be sexism in the country I worked in. Men would cat call women constantly to ask for (or demand) sex and marriage. This was just an accepted and normal part of the culture there. It was crazy.
untog 8y ago
I feel as though the "sunlight is the best disinfectant" argument has taken a beating in recent times, and it's not difficult to see why. Take the example of QAnon. It's a movement based around utter nonsense conspiracy theory. It is debunked on a daily basis. It still has a lot of followers. Compare to Milo Yiannopoulos. I remember around the time his social media accounts were banned that people said doing so was pointless, and that banning him would only increase his popularity by making him look like an outlaw. Yet his profile has sunk almost entirely.
- api 8y ago
  I feel like there's an elephant in the living room nobody is seeing, and that's general loss of trust in our institutions. These kinds of ideas have more traction today than they did 20, 50, or 100 years ago because people trust their government and their public institutions less today than they did back then. IMHO a certain amount of this calling for censorship is people from those self-same institutions refusing to look at their own role in undermining the trust basis of our society. How many mainstream journalists bothered to check on those Iraq WMD claims or investigate the realities behind the 2008 financial collapse? How many politicians? Trust is hard to earn and easy to squander. When it is lost it leaves a vacuum. If nobody is trusted the vacuum gets filled by whatever random nonsense sounds superficially good to someone. To me the popularity of crazy populist demagogues is entirely explainable as a response to several large scale and very notable cases where our institutions have burned their credibility. If something isn't done to correct this and start re-earning trust I predict that this situation will only worsen and we'll be facing full-blown fascism shortly. Censorship does not re-earn trust. In fact it does the opposite. Right now hordes of people out there are saying "see! Alex Jones must be onto something or why would they go to the trouble of banning him?!?" Microsoft's threat to ban Gab is the kind of PR money can't buy. I bet their traffic numbers will skyrocket.
  - buth_lika 8y ago
    Trust isn't even that hard to earn (though it takes time), but insofar as one depends on intellectual sloppyness or even outright dishonesty for "legitimate" aims" (just think marketing, elections, etc.), then you cannpot attack those fallacious methods as such in those that use them for much nastier things. All that's left then is squabbling about those ends while leaving the means out of the frame, which leads nowhwere.
jhayward 8y ago
This is abstract idealism, uninformed by contact with the real world. Mobs happen. Moral panics happen. People are not at all, not at all, rational beings evaluating the logical correctness of arguments and using critical thinking to vet new ideas. The common spaces have to be policed. People with bad intent have to be dealt with not left for everyone to deal with on their own. It is entirely possible to destabilize a society sufficiently for the social contract to break down simply by allowing bad actors to intentionally poison the social commons. You do not want to see that outcome if you are a non-sociopath human.
- jewelthief91 8y ago
  Experience seems to indicate the opposite I think. The danger of niche mobs and/or terrorism is very real and scary, but losing our freedoms in order to address these perceived dangers is always far worse. For all the fear the "alt-right" has generated, exactly how many people have been come to harm because of them? They probably number in the dozens, which is a terrible tragedy but ultimately is that worth losing our fundamental rights? I personally don't think it is.
  - jazzyjackson 8y ago
    I would argue that the alt-right panic (as in, if I thought white genocide was a thing I'd be panicking too) + nihilist troll tactics elected Trump, which has caused much harm. I think a world where those people were no-platformed more often might be a better world, but of course I can't know. And getting no-platformed isn't losing rights, you can always make your own platform, it gets easier and cheaper every day.
    - jewelthief91 8y ago
      You can't really "make your own platform" though. Ultimately the ISPs could shut down access to any website they don't think their customers should have access to. The only recourse would be for the censored to somehow construct their own physical internet infrastructure, which was so difficult and costly the first time that it was highly subsidized by the government. And do you honestly think you should have the right to determine what elections should be considered "harmful" enough to shut down others speech? There is a wide range of opinion short of the alt-right but in the same direction that could be shut down too, for instance apparently a majority of white people think there is racism against now (https://www.npr.org/2017/10/24/559604836/majority-of-white-americans-think-theyre-discriminated-against https://www.npr.org/2017/10/24/559604836/majority-of-white-a...). Do you think this opinion is so wrong that it should be silenced from the public forum? Do you think it would even be possible to do so?
CommieBobDole 8y ago
This has been my position as well for a long time, but I'm starting to feel like there's an unexpectedly enormous number of people out there with zero ability to critically evaluate information, and it seems as if all a terrible idea needs in order to gain critical mass is that it be emotionally satisfying and generally known. I honestly don't know where we go from here - I continue to believe that giving the state the right to determine what speech is allowed and what's not to be far more dangerous than the alternative, and that's not likely to change. But it's almost as if we've discovered that idiocy is contagious, and the vector is the internet. Maybe it's temporary, because the internet is new - maybe society, having never dealt with a deluge of information like this before has no natural immunity to it, and it will develop over time. Or maybe we've found a loophole in human cognition that will end up destroying us. At any rate, I can't fault a private company for trying to do something about it; it's like a bus company finding out their seats are the vector for some horrible disfiguring viral disease and removing them in an attempt to stop the epidemic.
- lylecubed 8y ago
  > I'm starting to feel like there's an unexpectedly enormous number of people out there with zero ability to critically evaluate information, and it seems as if all a terrible idea needs in order to gain critical mass is that it be emotionally satisfying and generally known. Aristotle observed this in the 4th century BC. He wrote about it in his book Rhetoric. This is by no means a new development.
  - CommieBobDole 8y ago
    To clarify, I didn't mean that people uncritically accepting bad information was new, it was that there's now a means of getting that information to everyone with little to no effort, and the same easy access to good information doesn't seem to do much to mitigate it.
  - buth_lika 8y ago
    It's not in a vacuum though, other things multiply it. Radio was a phase shift and an important factor in enabling fascism along with industrialization. You can say WW2 and the Holocaust wasn't anything new because there's always been war and murder, but that's like saying a glass of water and the ocean are the same. Now we moving towards automated analysis and manipulation of billions of people in real time, combined with incredible means to observe and control, not to even talk of weapon systems; and an astonishing obedience or naivity about it on behalf of the subjects. "This is not new" is no excuse and of no help. You could say this about almost anything... as if we only get a chance to be critical of something and express that criticism (which is the first state of organizing change) the first time something "happens".
skywhopper 8y ago
There are some lines you can't cross. I doubt any philosophers would truly argue that free speech is absolute, and that yelling FIRE in a crowded theater should be protected because it is possible to ridicule the speaker and calm the audience before they stampede each other to death. Malicious intent and incitement of violence are not mere speech.
- dane-pgp 8y ago
  The example of "yelling FIRE in a crowded theater" is maybe not as good as you think: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
mcguire 8y ago
On the other hand, there's no principle that requires an entity like Microsoft to support services it or its customers find repugnant.
- ilove_banh_mi 8y ago
  What do you think of a bakery refusing to make a wedding cake for people they disapprove of?
  - zokier 8y ago
    Sounds perfectly fine by me. Of course they can be named&shamed, but legally I think you should be able to pick your customers (except in monopoly and some other special cases).
    - yontherubicon 8y ago
      That is, I'm afraid, against the law in this country.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    Depends on the reason for disapproval, and how common that same reason is in that particular market.
  - anigbrowl 8y ago
    This is a poor point of comparison, since baking the cake doesn't put anyone at risk, whereas an exhortation to commit violence against specific people does.
    - rainonmoon 8y ago
      It's disappointing this even needs to be pointed out, that simply existing while gay is not the same thing as proliferating hate speech.
      - 8y ago
camgunz 8y ago
These aren't merely "bad ideas". It's hate speech advocating for violence against a historically oppressed group. There is no slippery slope; we know what hate speech and anti-semitism are, and those are the rules being applied here.
anigbrowl 8y ago
A common argument in philosophy is that bad ideas should occur in the open - where everyone may ridicule them. When they are cast to the shadows they can grow, under everyone's noses, in private where only there are they allowed to exist. In private, these bad ideas cannot be challenged by others and people will be convinced to believe in them, with nobody challenging the idea as a genuinely terrible idea. I used to subscribe to this position, but now consider it wrong for several reasons. First, ridicule of a bad idea will have that effect anyway - people who like the idea but not the ridicule will form and gather in niche communities to incubate whatever weird ideas they hold. This is not a bad thing, as such, and can often be productive of new cultural or scientific ideas. Second, everyone is not a rational philosopher. Some people are easily tricked by fallacious arguments, and other people are willing to treat a threshold level of social proof as equivalent to logical validation. Hence the wide currency of 'skeptical' responses to climate change, the dangers of smoking, or evolution - for a suitable fee, you can find some people who are willing to rent out their reputation or credentials and you can then manufacture the appearance of scientific controversy. Third, proponents of bad ideas tend to make bad faith arguments, so challenging a bad idea is treated as equivalent to trying to suppress it anyway. Of course, such weak arguments don't hold up very well in philosophy journals or social fora, but that's because people in those contexts generally have academic degrees or equivalent study and there are fairly well established standards of discourse. If someone consistently makes fallacious arguments or recycles debunked ones eventually they will be ignored. In broader social fora those institutional safeguards are absent, while nontrivial socioeconomic payoffs for the production of bad faith arguments are present - in other words, you can make a good living out of pretending to believe the earth is flat because there's a market for comforting lies that help to relieve people's existential anxieties, and the cost of repeating the false ideas is relatively low compared to the cost of debunking them over and over. Also, you keep making non-sequitur arguments, going from claiming that bad ideas will fester unnoticed in private spaces to slippery-slope 'you're next' arguments within the same paragraph. The latter does not follow from the former, and in fact implies that it is not possible to distinguish between good and bad ideas and that if bad ones are driven to the margins good ones will suffer the same fate despite their merits.
braythwayt 8y ago
That argument works well in relatively small social groups where people generally can be relied upon to act in good faith, and where there are social disincentives to clinging to bad ideas after they have been refuted. When you have a small group with social bonds, you don't have to worry about a bad actor constantly repeating their already-refuted arguments to people who haven't heard the refutation. But when you have the whole internet as your audience, no matter how many times you are refuted, you can say it again and a whole group of people will be hearing it for the first time. I have been on the Internet since the 80s. What I have personally found is that a lot of its social norms were lifted from academia, and they work very well as defaults in a new social media context. Like Hacker News when it was first launched. But eventually, every "social medium" on the Internet has its "Eternal September," when the number of new folks in any conversation outweighs the old hands. At that point, the social norms that worked for the small, cohesive group no longer work. And worse, there are specialist parasites who exploit people's reluctance to change their social norms, and the act in outrageously bad faith. Sites like HN have survived by changing. For all of the popularity on HN of "unrestricted free speech," HN is actually moderated, and that's why it works.
- will_dev_4_food 8y ago
  When you say it’s like this one way but not the other, you have conceded to relativism. You have basically said there is a time and place for stealing someone’s wallet, and that acting as a moral agent in society can be suspended under the right conditions.
  - BugsJustFindMe 8y ago
    I honestly don't understand the connection between what you said and what the person you're replying to said. Can you explain it another way for me?
  - coldtea 8y ago
    Is that a valid argument though? Of course things should be judged on a case by case basis, and not on dogmatic one size fits all rules. Even courts take context into account for the same action (e.g. whether a murder was in cold blood or premeditated, whether someone stole because they were hungry or just greedy, etc). And, yes, "there is a time and place for stealing someone’s wallet", as well.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
gmuslera 8y ago
Not sure how old is that common argument, but they weren't aware of how it was internet social media in the last 5-10 years. Specially counting the well funded campaigns promoting things like climate change denialism, among others. Big hammer censoring is not the solution, as it enables censoring the truth too (that may threaten, incomodate, etc the one handling the big hammer), but sometimes respecting the freedom of the ones that don't respect the same right for others is not a wise policy.
mmanfrin 8y ago
A common argument in philosophy is that bad ideas should occur in the open - where everyone may ridicule them. Unless people with those bad ideas find communities that accept those bad ideas. This is what happens with content bubbles and niche extremist communities.
zokier 8y ago
> A common argument in philosophy is that bad ideas should occur in the open - where everyone may ridicule them Problem is that on internet there is no open commons where the bad ideas can occur; instead they occur generally always on someones service on some level. This leads to the conflicting freedoms of the service providers and their clients.
chaostheory 8y ago
On a more pragmatic note, it's much harder to track these groups as well on the dark web. On the internet, anyone can see their thoughts and it's much easier to track their location as well.
moomin 8y ago
It is a common concept, true. It’s also wrong and not supported by any studies. The reason the idea keeps going is that it keeps getting repeated despite being comprehensively debunked, thus serving as its own contradiction. (Those entertained by intellectual diversions will observe that if you assume that I am incorrect and that in fact the evidence supports OP, you end up with a logically inconsistent position.)
nishantvyas 8y ago
I guess that's not the problem here. Problem is combining ignorance with confirmation bias and then multipling it by distribution engines like FB, Youtube, Podcast etc.... unfortunately information is NOT absolute. it's asymmetrical and heavily influenced by our limited world view, ignorance and confirmation biases.... allowing bad agents to take advantage of this fact and then allowing them to use the massive distribution channels like FB etc. is recipe for unrest.
skybrian 8y ago
Is this an argument in favor of the Streisand effect? After all, most of us wouldn't have known about these posts if Microsoft hadn't asked them to deleted. Or is it an argument that there is not enough social shaming on the Internet? Since that's what we're likely to get instead of reasoned debate. Maybe the old arguments in favor of debating bad ideas need to rethought to account there are so many people posting them, and they don't necessarily deserve attention. It's not 1995 anymore; we know that attention is valuable, and it's important to have efficient defenses against denial-of-service attacks due to spam, trolling, viral post-sharing, and so on. Debating every post of the same old outrage isn't efficient. For bad ideas that aren't new, something like Snopes makes a bit more sense. And I'll point to the Ask Historians subreddit for a good example of how to run a high-quality Internet forum.
adamsea 8y ago
Inciting violence is not free speech, just like yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater is not free speech. The article clearly states that the removed comments incite violence: > "Microsoft received a complaint about specific posts on Gab.ai that advocate ‘ritual death by torture’ and the ‘complete eradication’ of all Jews. After an initial review, we have concluded that this content incites violence, is not protected by the First Amendment, and violates Microsoft Azure’s acceptable use policy," Microsoft said in a statement to The Hill. Are you suggesting that this type of language should be protected by free speech laws?
- stale2002 8y ago
  In the USA, it is only direct threats of imminent violence that is illegal. So yes, according to the supreme Court, those posts are probably legal. It would only be things like "everyone, let meet up at this specific person's house tonight and attack them" that would be illegal.
  - computerfriend 8y ago
    And even then, only if it is deemed likely that that speech would actually incite people to do it.
    - adamsea 8y ago
      Good points. However, Microsoft's Acceptable Use policy may add other restrictions. Context isn't the only important thing but it does matter, and there is a context - both historical and contemporary - around the deleted comments in question. And of course someone could always take MS to court if they feel their First Amendment rights have been violated. The ACLU has supported the freedom of speech of the KKK and Neo-Nazis plenty of times, so it's not as if there aren't resources. Also, while IANAL, Wikipedia says, with regards to the "Brandenburg Test" used to determine "imminent lawless action", there is a "bad tendency" test which may also apply: "In Schenck v. United States[5] the Court had adopted a "clear and present danger" test that Whitney v. California subsequently expanded to a "bad tendency" test: if speech has a "tendency" to cause sedition or lawlessness, it may constitutionally be prohibited. Dennis v. United States, a case dealing with prosecution of alleged Communists under the Smith Act for advocating the overthrow of the government, used the clear and present danger test while still upholding the defendants' convictions for acts that could not possibly have led to a speedy overthrow of the government." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio It would be great if a lawyer could weight in.
zaat 8y ago
That isn't necessary supported by evidence nor is it the most sophisticated view in contemporary philosophy. Good evidence can't be trusted to cause change in mind, see for example the classic paper "Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The Effects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence (https://www.unc.edu/~fbaum/teaching/articles/jpsp-1979-Lord-Ross-Lepper.pdf https://www.unc.edu/~fbaum/teaching/articles/jpsp-1979-Lord-...).
api 8y ago
I'm shocked by how many liberals who really ought to know better are cheering for the deployment of corporate oligopolistic censorship at this scale. We're not talking about just kicking someone off Twitter... now we're talking about kicking them off supposedly neutral public cloud platforms. This is a major escalation and honestly it's changing my mind a bit about the whole issue. I was a fence sitter before but now I'm siding with the libertarian crowd on this one, and I say this as someone who is nowhere near the alt-right politically. We're going from what amounts to forum policing (though on huge scale quasi-public forums) to infrastructure level censorship. No longer can you just "go set up your own site." Even more significantly we are seeing an incredible amount of coordination between corporations on this, proving that competition and diversity in the marketplace is not sufficient to protect the openness of the Internet as a system. Once again: liberals really should know better, especially any that care about net neutrality. This is a really extreme example of ISP traffic discrimination and it sets a precedent that this kind of thing is okay. A top level infrastructure provider blackballing a site for speech should be a third rail regardless of the content in question. Censors always start with the least popular ideas and speakers. They do that for a reason: they want to gauge what they can get away with and they want to shift the Overton window toward increasing support for censorship. They know that few people will overtly stand up to defend Nazis, trolls, and blithering red faced demagogues, so that's where they start. Other popular targets in the past included pornographers, lewd writers and musicians, and religious blasphemers. Two thoughts that ought to keep you up at night even if you are inclined to agree with these moves: (1) What happens if/when the political winds shift and someone like Donald Trump or maybe someone even to the right of him ends up in control of these powers? Who gets silenced then? A power once created becomes a political entity that can easily be handed off. (2) What happens if/when some liberal cause -- like a reboot of unionization and a new labor movement for example -- really threatens corporate and Wall St. profits at a large scale? Will Neo-unionists get this deplatformed and shadow banned now that it's been legitimized? Will anyone even notice? Again... we are setting a precedent here that this is okay. You really all ought to know better. The reference metric for freedom of speech is the freedom enjoyed by the most offensive and least popular speakers: political fanatics, pornographers, demagogues, hate-mongers, etc. If they are free to speak then you are free to speak. If they're not then the process of clamp-down has started and you are next. There's a reason the ACLU has in the past defended neo-Nazis and other unpopular speakers, and it's not because they support these speakers' messages. It's because you need a canary in the coal mine. Edit: The conspiracy nut devil that hangs out on my shoulder whispers that this combined with the abolition of net neutrality is a coordinated campaign. Use massively unpopular triggering demagogues to get the left to abandon its commitment to free speech while simultaneously using fallacious libertarian arguments to get the right to eliminate net neutrality. Put those together and you have a Great Firewall of America and enough public support from a broad enough subset of Americans to deploy it. (The libertarian arguments against NN are fallacious because ISPs are government backed and sometimes even funded monopolies.) The next ratcheting up would be for peering points to refuse to peer Internet traffic that they don't like, and abolition of net neutrality would allow that. That means Gab (or tomorrow moveon.org, who knows) couldn't even host at an indie hosting provider or overseas. But that's crazy talk right? If sites like Gab get banned from being hosted the next step for them will be to move to decentralized platforms or Tor. If the above is true I predict that this combined with the words or deeds of a few nutjobs will be used to start convincing both liberals and libertarian-minded conservatives to start supporting bans on un-escrowed encryption as well as ISP and cloud provider efforts to block "horizontal" network traffic. This is how you'll be convinced to support a ban on P2P protocols and privacy technologies.
woodruffw 8y ago
> A common argument in philosophy is that bad ideas should occur in the open - where everyone may ridicule them. Then let them occur in the open. I welcome them to the nearest soapbox. It's not clear at all, to this student of philosophy, why neo-Nazis are entitled to time on Microsoft's servers.
Valmar 8y ago
What about good ideas that are squashed by corporations, and are never known about by most of the public, because it might threaten their profits? This includes corporate influence on governments, so that the politicians act as their servants in also squashing said good ideas. Not sure what some of these ideas might be, off the top of my head right now, but I know that some have to exist.
danjoc 8y ago
>Actions like this serve to placate the public. I'm not placated. According to Microsoft, >After an initial review, we have concluded that this content incites violence, is not protected by the First Amendment, and violates Microsoft Azure’s acceptable use policy If the posts were illegal, why isn't the poster being arrested? Where are the real police in this matter? Why are California cops deferring action to the Redmond internet police?
torpfactory 8y ago
It’s certainly possible the people working at Microsoft believe they have a moral duty to keep hate speech like that off their platform. I know that if I worked at a platform company and there were folks advocating physical harm to anyone on that platform I’d been pretty keen to remove them. I don’t think free speech means a platform company has some imperative to offer a level playing field to racists.
zerealshadowban 8y ago
Has Microsoft identified similar posts on Gab in the past, and requested/obtained their removal -- or else? (is Gab acting as a sudden victim?) If not, how is that possible -- since Gab was created to explicitly tolerate pretty much any kind of barely-legal speech under pressure in Twitter? are we to believe that this style of expression is completely new to Gab? (or did Microsoft just now notice?)
edmccard 8y ago
> When they are cast to the shadows they can grow, It's a nice poetic conceit to think of good ideas as thriving in the light like flowers while bad ideas flourish in the darkness like mushrooms, but they both thrive on the same thing -- attention. To make another comparison with things that grow in the shadows: the crawlspace under my front porch is full of bugs and critters, but they didn't get there because I cast them out of my house, and I don't keep my house bug-free by periodically inviting them in for debates.
guessthejuice 8y ago
> A common argument in philosophy is that bad ideas should occur in the open - where everyone may ridicule them. Also, so that good ideas can have their day in the sun. Lets not forget that most "good" ideas were once considered bad ideas. List of ideas that was once considered bad. Abolitionism. LGBT rights. Heliocentrism. Germ theory. Endless list. The idea is that all ideas deserve discussion so that the good rises and the bad sinks. Also, by allowing censorship when you have likeminded people in power, you also allow other people to censor in the future when power shifts. This is just basic stuff you learn in philosophy 101. Unfortunately, we don't seem to be teaching basic principles in high school/college anymore. People naively think that censorship keeps the bad ideas away. Most of the time, it is used to keep the good ideas away. Look at the censorship by the catholic church, soviet union, china, nazi germany, etc. If your ideas have solid footing, you would be against censorship. It's when you can't defend your ideas that people advocate for censorship.
- maeln 8y ago
  There is a big difference between ideas like LGBT/PoC/Women rights, abolitionism, ... and White Supremacy, Racism, Religious Fundamentalism, ... : One advocates for inclusion, social peace and acceptance, the other for exclusion, hate and race/religion war. This is not something we can ignore and treat every ideas like they are the same. In Europe, it's very common to have an exception to Free Speech when it comes to hate speech, and I never saw it being used in the "wrong" way and keep good idea away.
  - guessthejuice 8y ago
    > There is a big difference between ideas like LGBT/PoC/Women rights, abolitionism, ... and White Supremacy, Racism, Religious Fundamentalism, ... : One advocates for inclusion, social peace and acceptance, the other for exclusion, hate and race/religion war. Ideas are ideas. And how do we understand the difference if one is censored? Also, there are plenty of exclusionism and hate in extremist LGBT, feminism, etc communities. It's not fair to compare extremism of one side, but not the extremism of the other side. There are feminists who believe men should be wiped out, there are lesbians who are against trans women and there are trans people who are against gay marriage. But that's not the point. The point is all ideas should be allowed to be expressed so that they can be debated, criticized, etc. It's the american way. > In Europe, it's very common to have an exception to Free Speech when it comes to hate speech Yes. That's why europe gave us such "wonderful" things like nazi germany, the soviet union, fascist italy, etc. Do you know why these existed while US was immune from them? Nazi Germany censored everything they didn't like, soviet union censored everything they didn't like, fascist italy censored everything they didn't like. But we had freedom of speech. It's why the US is the symbol of freedom and not europe in the world. You do realize that in much of western europe, if you criticize islamic fundamentalism or fundamental judaism, it's considered hate speech and you could go to prison for that right? Hell in some places in the world, criticizing religious fundamentalism is an offense worthy of the death penalty. You sure you want to censor all hate or offensive speech? Because atheist speech and lgbt speech is the most censored speech in the world. Most of the world finds these type of speech the most hateful and offensive. Are you really advocating that we ban these speech since it offends so many? How about we stick to principles?
gameswithgo 8y ago
>A common argument in philosophy is that bad ideas should occur in the open Yes we all know about that theory, but what we haven seen happening in the last 10 years as the internet has become populated by the masses seems to suggest that theory is very wrong.
baud147258 8y ago
Another argument against prohibiting speech on some platform is that it will push people platforms without any speech restriction, radicalasing their view.
- betterunix2 8y ago
  Which is what Gab was supposed to be, so that ship has basically sailed.
tryitnow 8y ago
"In one post, Little said he would livestream himself destroying an unspecified Holocaust memorial in the U.S." Ugh. Did you even bother to read the article? This has absolutely nothing to do with "bad ideas." MSFT asked Gab to remove content that "incites violence." MSFT is not cracking down on anyone because they have some disagreement with their public policy positions or political philosophy. Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is not an "bad idea" it's deliberately putting people in immediate danger. Likewise advocating that we physically harm people or commit acts of terrorism against specific locations are not "bad ideas," they're advocating specific actions that will physically harm other people. Obviously, there's no censorship of edgy and extreme ideas by MSFT, if MSFT wanted to do that they would not be hosting Gab to begin with. Instead, all they're doing is cracking down on content which incites violence, which is in violation of their terms of service, and is absolutely not protected by the First Amendment. Finally, can you cite any evidence from the psychological literature showing that shining light on bad ideas changes anyone's mind? Just about everything I've read has suggested that's not the case.

by Nadya 8y ago

BryantD 8y ago

That common argument rests on norms established by millennia of relatively difficult communication. Best not to assume that the same people would come to the same conclusions today. For example, QAnon believers have not had their speech restricted. That conspiracy theory is as open as anything you could name. People have challenged it. It's still going. If you believe that challenging terrible ideas makes those who hold them think twice... why hasn't the exact argument you're using gotten rid of the terrible idea that we should restrict speech? Answer: because logical refutation doesn't work. I am not arguing against the slippery slope. This is a very, very hard and risky problem. I am refuting the misconception that shedding light on bad ideas makes them go away.

mrguyorama 8y ago
A number of other silly ideas that still hold traction and do actual damage despite being out in the open and actively refuted: Moon landing conspiracy Anti-vaccers/Vaccines cause autism Fad diets and "detox"s Anti-intellectualism Alex Jones (to the tune of millions of subscribers on his recently killed youtube) Global Warming etc
- lylecubed 8y ago
  And who decides what is and isn't a silly idea? For 40 years, Americans were told by the government to believe that low fat high carb diets were the key to a healthy life. Not only is that not true, but it's never been true. There was never any evidence to support that stance. And yet, that was the official government policy and subsequently the commonly held belief for 40 years. "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." - Not Mark Twain
  - yifanl 8y ago
    If the problem is "what determines truth", then there isn't an organization out there that could resolve the issue (barring something like the Chinese government, I suppose)
    - SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
      Did you just organically come up with the Ministry Of Truth?
      - qu4z-2 8y ago
        I think their point was that unless you're willing to accept Minitrue you don't have an authoritative source of truth to check against.
  - mrguyorama 8y ago
    That's all fine and dandy, but is there actual factual standing behind the positions I listed?

tim333 8y ago

Not much is actually getting censored. The bad stuff just gets moved to less respectable sites. The Stormer for example is still up there if you want to read it.

kodablah 8y ago

> I wait to see what will be next on the chopping block. I wish we didn't have to wait. I wish there was a large enough group of people that would boycott companies that make up the internet infrastructure (e.g. ISPs, registrars, DNS, CDNs, cloud providers, etc) for censoring lawful content. I wish we didn't require mass media articles to get groups of consumers to act in a common interest. And I would prefer it was absolute, regardless of content, because it's frustrating to watch lots of people agree with one decision and then get shocked when these companies become more choosey on the foundation of acceptability that was previously built. To be clear though, I want no government involvement in any way (on the censoring or non-censoring side). I for one will point an Azure sales rep (or hiring recruiter) to this as a reason I will not engage with them. I have the same feeling about CloudFlare's decision. And I really don't like either of the censored groups.

gamblor956 8y ago
There was no government involvement in this. Microsoft made a business decision that hosting Gab would subject them to business pressures from other customers/potential customers not wanting to use a service used by hatemongers. That's not censorship. That's the free market at work. Gab is free to host their own website; and if necessary their own DNS servers. Hell, they're free to go Tor-only.
- kodablah 8y ago
  > There was no government involvement in this I know that, I am clearly saying I don't want it for any consumer-led efforts. > That's not censorship Did you mean to say it's not government censorship or do we just have different definitions of the word? Whether they can host their own site or whatever has absolutely nothing to do with what is and isn't censorship.
  - rainonmoon 8y ago
    If I own a nightclub and it becomes a hotspot for the alt-right, who don't align with my values, and I close down that nightclub for that reason, am I censoring them? No, I'm excluding them from my privately-owned space and refusing to associate with them. Nobody's right is being infringed upon here; they're free to go to any other bar. "Whether they can host their own site" is absolutely relevant to what is and isn't censorship because all of the examples in this thread are still totally free to distribute (and even monetize) their content in public.

yifanl 8y ago

I don't think that's true. If there is a sufficiently large group of willing listeners (or determined trolls), then having a bad idea out there in reach of that audience legitimizes it far faster than private discussion could. At which point, challenging them invites the creation of a cult rather than dispersing the idea. For a frivolous example, my roommate is now convinced that the Star Wars prequels are legitimately good movies because of r/PrequelMemes.

s73v3r_ 8y ago
But is there not a large body of work refuting that idea in the Mr. Plinkett reviews on Red Letter Media?

X6S1x6Okd1st 8y ago

I'd love to see an analysis of if this theory is true. There's another argument for allowing hateful speech which is that it is a containment strategy. It appears that there isn't much to that theory. An analysis of reddit's 2015 banning on r/fatpeoplehate and r/coontown did not see the hateful speech increase where 'migrants' went. http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf

s73v3r_ 8y ago
I think it's because such banning made it abundantly clear that such behavior was not welcome. So that's more to do with social norms, I guess.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 8y ago
  Why do you think that?

lylecubed 8y ago

> A common argument in philosophy is that bad ideas should occur in the open - where everyone may ridicule them. Not to get too far off topic, but is this actually true in practice in the real world? Scientific studies have shown that the idea that gets repeated the most often is the idea that "wins". A bad idea gets repeated and spread every time it gets criticized. If the idea proves more "credible" than the criticism of it, then all that criticism does is contribute to the spread of the idea it's trying to kill.

komali2 8y ago
I would like to know this as well. Case in point, when I was a kindergarten teacher, kids wouldn't have a concept of race. I'd have white girls asking me if I could put their hair in braids like "the tan girls." But by 4th grade I'd be teaching about slavery, racism, etc, and the kids would be then learning about a concept that was utterly nonsensical to the non-racism-indoctrinated kids. So I'm wondering what would happen if I never taught about racism at all.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- holtalanm 8y ago
  Unfortunately, a lot of racism is picked up at home.
- NTDF9 8y ago
  Man, I grew up in a third world country where race was a complete non-issue (unless your color made you stick out like a sore thumb, in which case, you'd be a celebrity, not get picked on). Coming to the US is what made me encounter racism. American society really is broken from within when third world countries can get around this but America can't.
  - cdubzzz 8y ago
    I think this is a bit of apples and oranges. There are vast differences between pretty much any two cultures. I spent three years living and working in a third world county where I “stuck out like a sore thumb”. Most people I met assumed I was rich, despite living and working on the equivalent of a local secondary school teacher’s salary. And this was still a hell of a lot more than most people in the country were making, but my local counterparts did not have to constantly deny requests for money and things from strangers. Perhaps a more apt comparison to racism in the US would be sexism in the country I worked in. Men would cat call women constantly to ask for (or demand) sex and marriage. This was just an accepted and normal part of the culture there. It was crazy.

untog 8y ago

I feel as though the "sunlight is the best disinfectant" argument has taken a beating in recent times, and it's not difficult to see why. Take the example of QAnon. It's a movement based around utter nonsense conspiracy theory. It is debunked on a daily basis. It still has a lot of followers. Compare to Milo Yiannopoulos. I remember around the time his social media accounts were banned that people said doing so was pointless, and that banning him would only increase his popularity by making him look like an outlaw. Yet his profile has sunk almost entirely.

api 8y ago
I feel like there's an elephant in the living room nobody is seeing, and that's general loss of trust in our institutions. These kinds of ideas have more traction today than they did 20, 50, or 100 years ago because people trust their government and their public institutions less today than they did back then. IMHO a certain amount of this calling for censorship is people from those self-same institutions refusing to look at their own role in undermining the trust basis of our society. How many mainstream journalists bothered to check on those Iraq WMD claims or investigate the realities behind the 2008 financial collapse? How many politicians? Trust is hard to earn and easy to squander. When it is lost it leaves a vacuum. If nobody is trusted the vacuum gets filled by whatever random nonsense sounds superficially good to someone. To me the popularity of crazy populist demagogues is entirely explainable as a response to several large scale and very notable cases where our institutions have burned their credibility. If something isn't done to correct this and start re-earning trust I predict that this situation will only worsen and we'll be facing full-blown fascism shortly. Censorship does not re-earn trust. In fact it does the opposite. Right now hordes of people out there are saying "see! Alex Jones must be onto something or why would they go to the trouble of banning him?!?" Microsoft's threat to ban Gab is the kind of PR money can't buy. I bet their traffic numbers will skyrocket.
- buth_lika 8y ago
  Trust isn't even that hard to earn (though it takes time), but insofar as one depends on intellectual sloppyness or even outright dishonesty for "legitimate" aims" (just think marketing, elections, etc.), then you cannpot attack those fallacious methods as such in those that use them for much nastier things. All that's left then is squabbling about those ends while leaving the means out of the frame, which leads nowhwere.

jhayward 8y ago

This is abstract idealism, uninformed by contact with the real world. Mobs happen. Moral panics happen. People are not at all, not at all, rational beings evaluating the logical correctness of arguments and using critical thinking to vet new ideas. The common spaces have to be policed. People with bad intent have to be dealt with not left for everyone to deal with on their own. It is entirely possible to destabilize a society sufficiently for the social contract to break down simply by allowing bad actors to intentionally poison the social commons. You do not want to see that outcome if you are a non-sociopath human.

jewelthief91 8y ago
Experience seems to indicate the opposite I think. The danger of niche mobs and/or terrorism is very real and scary, but losing our freedoms in order to address these perceived dangers is always far worse. For all the fear the "alt-right" has generated, exactly how many people have been come to harm because of them? They probably number in the dozens, which is a terrible tragedy but ultimately is that worth losing our fundamental rights? I personally don't think it is.
- jazzyjackson 8y ago
  I would argue that the alt-right panic (as in, if I thought white genocide was a thing I'd be panicking too) + nihilist troll tactics elected Trump, which has caused much harm. I think a world where those people were no-platformed more often might be a better world, but of course I can't know. And getting no-platformed isn't losing rights, you can always make your own platform, it gets easier and cheaper every day.
  - jewelthief91 8y ago
    You can't really "make your own platform" though. Ultimately the ISPs could shut down access to any website they don't think their customers should have access to. The only recourse would be for the censored to somehow construct their own physical internet infrastructure, which was so difficult and costly the first time that it was highly subsidized by the government. And do you honestly think you should have the right to determine what elections should be considered "harmful" enough to shut down others speech? There is a wide range of opinion short of the alt-right but in the same direction that could be shut down too, for instance apparently a majority of white people think there is racism against now (https://www.npr.org/2017/10/24/559604836/majority-of-white-americans-think-theyre-discriminated-against https://www.npr.org/2017/10/24/559604836/majority-of-white-a...). Do you think this opinion is so wrong that it should be silenced from the public forum? Do you think it would even be possible to do so?

CommieBobDole 8y ago

This has been my position as well for a long time, but I'm starting to feel like there's an unexpectedly enormous number of people out there with zero ability to critically evaluate information, and it seems as if all a terrible idea needs in order to gain critical mass is that it be emotionally satisfying and generally known. I honestly don't know where we go from here - I continue to believe that giving the state the right to determine what speech is allowed and what's not to be far more dangerous than the alternative, and that's not likely to change. But it's almost as if we've discovered that idiocy is contagious, and the vector is the internet. Maybe it's temporary, because the internet is new - maybe society, having never dealt with a deluge of information like this before has no natural immunity to it, and it will develop over time. Or maybe we've found a loophole in human cognition that will end up destroying us. At any rate, I can't fault a private company for trying to do something about it; it's like a bus company finding out their seats are the vector for some horrible disfiguring viral disease and removing them in an attempt to stop the epidemic.

lylecubed 8y ago
> I'm starting to feel like there's an unexpectedly enormous number of people out there with zero ability to critically evaluate information, and it seems as if all a terrible idea needs in order to gain critical mass is that it be emotionally satisfying and generally known. Aristotle observed this in the 4th century BC. He wrote about it in his book Rhetoric. This is by no means a new development.
- CommieBobDole 8y ago
  To clarify, I didn't mean that people uncritically accepting bad information was new, it was that there's now a means of getting that information to everyone with little to no effort, and the same easy access to good information doesn't seem to do much to mitigate it.
- buth_lika 8y ago
  It's not in a vacuum though, other things multiply it. Radio was a phase shift and an important factor in enabling fascism along with industrialization. You can say WW2 and the Holocaust wasn't anything new because there's always been war and murder, but that's like saying a glass of water and the ocean are the same. Now we moving towards automated analysis and manipulation of billions of people in real time, combined with incredible means to observe and control, not to even talk of weapon systems; and an astonishing obedience or naivity about it on behalf of the subjects. "This is not new" is no excuse and of no help. You could say this about almost anything... as if we only get a chance to be critical of something and express that criticism (which is the first state of organizing change) the first time something "happens".

skywhopper 8y ago

There are some lines you can't cross. I doubt any philosophers would truly argue that free speech is absolute, and that yelling FIRE in a crowded theater should be protected because it is possible to ridicule the speaker and calm the audience before they stampede each other to death. Malicious intent and incitement of violence are not mere speech.

dane-pgp 8y ago
The example of "yelling FIRE in a crowded theater" is maybe not as good as you think: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...

mcguire 8y ago

On the other hand, there's no principle that requires an entity like Microsoft to support services it or its customers find repugnant.

ilove_banh_mi 8y ago
What do you think of a bakery refusing to make a wedding cake for people they disapprove of?
- zokier 8y ago
  Sounds perfectly fine by me. Of course they can be named&shamed, but legally I think you should be able to pick your customers (except in monopoly and some other special cases).
  - yontherubicon 8y ago
    That is, I'm afraid, against the law in this country.
- int_19h 8y ago
  Depends on the reason for disapproval, and how common that same reason is in that particular market.
- anigbrowl 8y ago
  This is a poor point of comparison, since baking the cake doesn't put anyone at risk, whereas an exhortation to commit violence against specific people does.
  - rainonmoon 8y ago
    It's disappointing this even needs to be pointed out, that simply existing while gay is not the same thing as proliferating hate speech.
    - 8y ago

camgunz 8y ago

These aren't merely "bad ideas". It's hate speech advocating for violence against a historically oppressed group. There is no slippery slope; we know what hate speech and anti-semitism are, and those are the rules being applied here.

anigbrowl 8y ago

A common argument in philosophy is that bad ideas should occur in the open - where everyone may ridicule them. When they are cast to the shadows they can grow, under everyone's noses, in private where only there are they allowed to exist. In private, these bad ideas cannot be challenged by others and people will be convinced to believe in them, with nobody challenging the idea as a genuinely terrible idea. I used to subscribe to this position, but now consider it wrong for several reasons. First, ridicule of a bad idea will have that effect anyway - people who like the idea but not the ridicule will form and gather in niche communities to incubate whatever weird ideas they hold. This is not a bad thing, as such, and can often be productive of new cultural or scientific ideas. Second, everyone is not a rational philosopher. Some people are easily tricked by fallacious arguments, and other people are willing to treat a threshold level of social proof as equivalent to logical validation. Hence the wide currency of 'skeptical' responses to climate change, the dangers of smoking, or evolution - for a suitable fee, you can find some people who are willing to rent out their reputation or credentials and you can then manufacture the appearance of scientific controversy. Third, proponents of bad ideas tend to make bad faith arguments, so challenging a bad idea is treated as equivalent to trying to suppress it anyway. Of course, such weak arguments don't hold up very well in philosophy journals or social fora, but that's because people in those contexts generally have academic degrees or equivalent study and there are fairly well established standards of discourse. If someone consistently makes fallacious arguments or recycles debunked ones eventually they will be ignored. In broader social fora those institutional safeguards are absent, while nontrivial socioeconomic payoffs for the production of bad faith arguments are present - in other words, you can make a good living out of pretending to believe the earth is flat because there's a market for comforting lies that help to relieve people's existential anxieties, and the cost of repeating the false ideas is relatively low compared to the cost of debunking them over and over. Also, you keep making non-sequitur arguments, going from claiming that bad ideas will fester unnoticed in private spaces to slippery-slope 'you're next' arguments within the same paragraph. The latter does not follow from the former, and in fact implies that it is not possible to distinguish between good and bad ideas and that if bad ones are driven to the margins good ones will suffer the same fate despite their merits.

braythwayt 8y ago

That argument works well in relatively small social groups where people generally can be relied upon to act in good faith, and where there are social disincentives to clinging to bad ideas after they have been refuted. When you have a small group with social bonds, you don't have to worry about a bad actor constantly repeating their already-refuted arguments to people who haven't heard the refutation. But when you have the whole internet as your audience, no matter how many times you are refuted, you can say it again and a whole group of people will be hearing it for the first time. I have been on the Internet since the 80s. What I have personally found is that a lot of its social norms were lifted from academia, and they work very well as defaults in a new social media context. Like Hacker News when it was first launched. But eventually, every "social medium" on the Internet has its "Eternal September," when the number of new folks in any conversation outweighs the old hands. At that point, the social norms that worked for the small, cohesive group no longer work. And worse, there are specialist parasites who exploit people's reluctance to change their social norms, and the act in outrageously bad faith. Sites like HN have survived by changing. For all of the popularity on HN of "unrestricted free speech," HN is actually moderated, and that's why it works.

will_dev_4_food 8y ago
When you say it’s like this one way but not the other, you have conceded to relativism. You have basically said there is a time and place for stealing someone’s wallet, and that acting as a moral agent in society can be suspended under the right conditions.
- BugsJustFindMe 8y ago
  I honestly don't understand the connection between what you said and what the person you're replying to said. Can you explain it another way for me?
- coldtea 8y ago
  Is that a valid argument though? Of course things should be judged on a case by case basis, and not on dogmatic one size fits all rules. Even courts take context into account for the same action (e.g. whether a murder was in cold blood or premeditated, whether someone stole because they were hungry or just greedy, etc). And, yes, "there is a time and place for stealing someone’s wallet", as well.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

gmuslera 8y ago

Not sure how old is that common argument, but they weren't aware of how it was internet social media in the last 5-10 years. Specially counting the well funded campaigns promoting things like climate change denialism, among others. Big hammer censoring is not the solution, as it enables censoring the truth too (that may threaten, incomodate, etc the one handling the big hammer), but sometimes respecting the freedom of the ones that don't respect the same right for others is not a wise policy.

mmanfrin 8y ago

A common argument in philosophy is that bad ideas should occur in the open - where everyone may ridicule them. Unless people with those bad ideas find communities that accept those bad ideas. This is what happens with content bubbles and niche extremist communities.

zokier 8y ago

> A common argument in philosophy is that bad ideas should occur in the open - where everyone may ridicule them Problem is that on internet there is no open commons where the bad ideas can occur; instead they occur generally always on someones service on some level. This leads to the conflicting freedoms of the service providers and their clients.

chaostheory 8y ago

On a more pragmatic note, it's much harder to track these groups as well on the dark web. On the internet, anyone can see their thoughts and it's much easier to track their location as well.

moomin 8y ago

It is a common concept, true. It’s also wrong and not supported by any studies. The reason the idea keeps going is that it keeps getting repeated despite being comprehensively debunked, thus serving as its own contradiction. (Those entertained by intellectual diversions will observe that if you assume that I am incorrect and that in fact the evidence supports OP, you end up with a logically inconsistent position.)

nishantvyas 8y ago

I guess that's not the problem here. Problem is combining ignorance with confirmation bias and then multipling it by distribution engines like FB, Youtube, Podcast etc.... unfortunately information is NOT absolute. it's asymmetrical and heavily influenced by our limited world view, ignorance and confirmation biases.... allowing bad agents to take advantage of this fact and then allowing them to use the massive distribution channels like FB etc. is recipe for unrest.

skybrian 8y ago

Is this an argument in favor of the Streisand effect? After all, most of us wouldn't have known about these posts if Microsoft hadn't asked them to deleted. Or is it an argument that there is not enough social shaming on the Internet? Since that's what we're likely to get instead of reasoned debate. Maybe the old arguments in favor of debating bad ideas need to rethought to account there are so many people posting them, and they don't necessarily deserve attention. It's not 1995 anymore; we know that attention is valuable, and it's important to have efficient defenses against denial-of-service attacks due to spam, trolling, viral post-sharing, and so on. Debating every post of the same old outrage isn't efficient. For bad ideas that aren't new, something like Snopes makes a bit more sense. And I'll point to the Ask Historians subreddit for a good example of how to run a high-quality Internet forum.

adamsea 8y ago

Inciting violence is not free speech, just like yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater is not free speech. The article clearly states that the removed comments incite violence: > "Microsoft received a complaint about specific posts on Gab.ai that advocate ‘ritual death by torture’ and the ‘complete eradication’ of all Jews. After an initial review, we have concluded that this content incites violence, is not protected by the First Amendment, and violates Microsoft Azure’s acceptable use policy," Microsoft said in a statement to The Hill. Are you suggesting that this type of language should be protected by free speech laws?

stale2002 8y ago
In the USA, it is only direct threats of imminent violence that is illegal. So yes, according to the supreme Court, those posts are probably legal. It would only be things like "everyone, let meet up at this specific person's house tonight and attack them" that would be illegal.
- computerfriend 8y ago
  And even then, only if it is deemed likely that that speech would actually incite people to do it.
  - adamsea 8y ago
    Good points. However, Microsoft's Acceptable Use policy may add other restrictions. Context isn't the only important thing but it does matter, and there is a context - both historical and contemporary - around the deleted comments in question. And of course someone could always take MS to court if they feel their First Amendment rights have been violated. The ACLU has supported the freedom of speech of the KKK and Neo-Nazis plenty of times, so it's not as if there aren't resources. Also, while IANAL, Wikipedia says, with regards to the "Brandenburg Test" used to determine "imminent lawless action", there is a "bad tendency" test which may also apply: "In Schenck v. United States[5] the Court had adopted a "clear and present danger" test that Whitney v. California subsequently expanded to a "bad tendency" test: if speech has a "tendency" to cause sedition or lawlessness, it may constitutionally be prohibited. Dennis v. United States, a case dealing with prosecution of alleged Communists under the Smith Act for advocating the overthrow of the government, used the clear and present danger test while still upholding the defendants' convictions for acts that could not possibly have led to a speedy overthrow of the government." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio It would be great if a lawyer could weight in.

zaat 8y ago

That isn't necessary supported by evidence nor is it the most sophisticated view in contemporary philosophy. Good evidence can't be trusted to cause change in mind, see for example the classic paper "Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The Effects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence (https://www.unc.edu/~fbaum/teaching/articles/jpsp-1979-Lord-Ross-Lepper.pdf https://www.unc.edu/~fbaum/teaching/articles/jpsp-1979-Lord-...).

api 8y ago

I'm shocked by how many liberals who really ought to know better are cheering for the deployment of corporate oligopolistic censorship at this scale. We're not talking about just kicking someone off Twitter... now we're talking about kicking them off supposedly neutral public cloud platforms. This is a major escalation and honestly it's changing my mind a bit about the whole issue. I was a fence sitter before but now I'm siding with the libertarian crowd on this one, and I say this as someone who is nowhere near the alt-right politically. We're going from what amounts to forum policing (though on huge scale quasi-public forums) to infrastructure level censorship. No longer can you just "go set up your own site." Even more significantly we are seeing an incredible amount of coordination between corporations on this, proving that competition and diversity in the marketplace is not sufficient to protect the openness of the Internet as a system. Once again: liberals really should know better, especially any that care about net neutrality. This is a really extreme example of ISP traffic discrimination and it sets a precedent that this kind of thing is okay. A top level infrastructure provider blackballing a site for speech should be a third rail regardless of the content in question. Censors always start with the least popular ideas and speakers. They do that for a reason: they want to gauge what they can get away with and they want to shift the Overton window toward increasing support for censorship. They know that few people will overtly stand up to defend Nazis, trolls, and blithering red faced demagogues, so that's where they start. Other popular targets in the past included pornographers, lewd writers and musicians, and religious blasphemers. Two thoughts that ought to keep you up at night even if you are inclined to agree with these moves: (1) What happens if/when the political winds shift and someone like Donald Trump or maybe someone even to the right of him ends up in control of these powers? Who gets silenced then? A power once created becomes a political entity that can easily be handed off. (2) What happens if/when some liberal cause -- like a reboot of unionization and a new labor movement for example -- really threatens corporate and Wall St. profits at a large scale? Will Neo-unionists get this deplatformed and shadow banned now that it's been legitimized? Will anyone even notice? Again... we are setting a precedent here that this is okay. You really all ought to know better. The reference metric for freedom of speech is the freedom enjoyed by the most offensive and least popular speakers: political fanatics, pornographers, demagogues, hate-mongers, etc. If they are free to speak then you are free to speak. If they're not then the process of clamp-down has started and you are next. There's a reason the ACLU has in the past defended neo-Nazis and other unpopular speakers, and it's not because they support these speakers' messages. It's because you need a canary in the coal mine. Edit: The conspiracy nut devil that hangs out on my shoulder whispers that this combined with the abolition of net neutrality is a coordinated campaign. Use massively unpopular triggering demagogues to get the left to abandon its commitment to free speech while simultaneously using fallacious libertarian arguments to get the right to eliminate net neutrality. Put those together and you have a Great Firewall of America and enough public support from a broad enough subset of Americans to deploy it. (The libertarian arguments against NN are fallacious because ISPs are government backed and sometimes even funded monopolies.) The next ratcheting up would be for peering points to refuse to peer Internet traffic that they don't like, and abolition of net neutrality would allow that. That means Gab (or tomorrow moveon.org, who knows) couldn't even host at an indie hosting provider or overseas. But that's crazy talk right? If sites like Gab get banned from being hosted the next step for them will be to move to decentralized platforms or Tor. If the above is true I predict that this combined with the words or deeds of a few nutjobs will be used to start convincing both liberals and libertarian-minded conservatives to start supporting bans on un-escrowed encryption as well as ISP and cloud provider efforts to block "horizontal" network traffic. This is how you'll be convinced to support a ban on P2P protocols and privacy technologies.

woodruffw 8y ago

> A common argument in philosophy is that bad ideas should occur in the open - where everyone may ridicule them. Then let them occur in the open. I welcome them to the nearest soapbox. It's not clear at all, to this student of philosophy, why neo-Nazis are entitled to time on Microsoft's servers.

Valmar 8y ago

What about good ideas that are squashed by corporations, and are never known about by most of the public, because it might threaten their profits? This includes corporate influence on governments, so that the politicians act as their servants in also squashing said good ideas. Not sure what some of these ideas might be, off the top of my head right now, but I know that some have to exist.

danjoc 8y ago

>Actions like this serve to placate the public. I'm not placated. According to Microsoft, >After an initial review, we have concluded that this content incites violence, is not protected by the First Amendment, and violates Microsoft Azure’s acceptable use policy If the posts were illegal, why isn't the poster being arrested? Where are the real police in this matter? Why are California cops deferring action to the Redmond internet police?

torpfactory 8y ago

It’s certainly possible the people working at Microsoft believe they have a moral duty to keep hate speech like that off their platform. I know that if I worked at a platform company and there were folks advocating physical harm to anyone on that platform I’d been pretty keen to remove them. I don’t think free speech means a platform company has some imperative to offer a level playing field to racists.

zerealshadowban 8y ago

Has Microsoft identified similar posts on Gab in the past, and requested/obtained their removal -- or else? (is Gab acting as a sudden victim?) If not, how is that possible -- since Gab was created to explicitly tolerate pretty much any kind of barely-legal speech under pressure in Twitter? are we to believe that this style of expression is completely new to Gab? (or did Microsoft just now notice?)

edmccard 8y ago

> When they are cast to the shadows they can grow, It's a nice poetic conceit to think of good ideas as thriving in the light like flowers while bad ideas flourish in the darkness like mushrooms, but they both thrive on the same thing -- attention. To make another comparison with things that grow in the shadows: the crawlspace under my front porch is full of bugs and critters, but they didn't get there because I cast them out of my house, and I don't keep my house bug-free by periodically inviting them in for debates.

guessthejuice 8y ago

> A common argument in philosophy is that bad ideas should occur in the open - where everyone may ridicule them. Also, so that good ideas can have their day in the sun. Lets not forget that most "good" ideas were once considered bad ideas. List of ideas that was once considered bad. Abolitionism. LGBT rights. Heliocentrism. Germ theory. Endless list. The idea is that all ideas deserve discussion so that the good rises and the bad sinks. Also, by allowing censorship when you have likeminded people in power, you also allow other people to censor in the future when power shifts. This is just basic stuff you learn in philosophy 101. Unfortunately, we don't seem to be teaching basic principles in high school/college anymore. People naively think that censorship keeps the bad ideas away. Most of the time, it is used to keep the good ideas away. Look at the censorship by the catholic church, soviet union, china, nazi germany, etc. If your ideas have solid footing, you would be against censorship. It's when you can't defend your ideas that people advocate for censorship.

maeln 8y ago
There is a big difference between ideas like LGBT/PoC/Women rights, abolitionism, ... and White Supremacy, Racism, Religious Fundamentalism, ... : One advocates for inclusion, social peace and acceptance, the other for exclusion, hate and race/religion war. This is not something we can ignore and treat every ideas like they are the same. In Europe, it's very common to have an exception to Free Speech when it comes to hate speech, and I never saw it being used in the "wrong" way and keep good idea away.
- guessthejuice 8y ago
  > There is a big difference between ideas like LGBT/PoC/Women rights, abolitionism, ... and White Supremacy, Racism, Religious Fundamentalism, ... : One advocates for inclusion, social peace and acceptance, the other for exclusion, hate and race/religion war. Ideas are ideas. And how do we understand the difference if one is censored? Also, there are plenty of exclusionism and hate in extremist LGBT, feminism, etc communities. It's not fair to compare extremism of one side, but not the extremism of the other side. There are feminists who believe men should be wiped out, there are lesbians who are against trans women and there are trans people who are against gay marriage. But that's not the point. The point is all ideas should be allowed to be expressed so that they can be debated, criticized, etc. It's the american way. > In Europe, it's very common to have an exception to Free Speech when it comes to hate speech Yes. That's why europe gave us such "wonderful" things like nazi germany, the soviet union, fascist italy, etc. Do you know why these existed while US was immune from them? Nazi Germany censored everything they didn't like, soviet union censored everything they didn't like, fascist italy censored everything they didn't like. But we had freedom of speech. It's why the US is the symbol of freedom and not europe in the world. You do realize that in much of western europe, if you criticize islamic fundamentalism or fundamental judaism, it's considered hate speech and you could go to prison for that right? Hell in some places in the world, criticizing religious fundamentalism is an offense worthy of the death penalty. You sure you want to censor all hate or offensive speech? Because atheist speech and lgbt speech is the most censored speech in the world. Most of the world finds these type of speech the most hateful and offensive. Are you really advocating that we ban these speech since it offends so many? How about we stick to principles?

gameswithgo 8y ago

>A common argument in philosophy is that bad ideas should occur in the open Yes we all know about that theory, but what we haven seen happening in the last 10 years as the internet has become populated by the masses seems to suggest that theory is very wrong.

baud147258 8y ago

Another argument against prohibiting speech on some platform is that it will push people platforms without any speech restriction, radicalasing their view.

betterunix2 8y ago
Which is what Gab was supposed to be, so that ship has basically sailed.

tryitnow 8y ago

"In one post, Little said he would livestream himself destroying an unspecified Holocaust memorial in the U.S." Ugh. Did you even bother to read the article? This has absolutely nothing to do with "bad ideas." MSFT asked Gab to remove content that "incites violence." MSFT is not cracking down on anyone because they have some disagreement with their public policy positions or political philosophy. Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is not an "bad idea" it's deliberately putting people in immediate danger. Likewise advocating that we physically harm people or commit acts of terrorism against specific locations are not "bad ideas," they're advocating specific actions that will physically harm other people. Obviously, there's no censorship of edgy and extreme ideas by MSFT, if MSFT wanted to do that they would not be hosting Gab to begin with. Instead, all they're doing is cracking down on content which incites violence, which is in violation of their terms of service, and is absolutely not protected by the First Amendment. Finally, can you cite any evidence from the psychological literature showing that shining light on bad ideas changes anyone's mind? Just about everything I've read has suggested that's not the case.