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Just because a belief is civilly expressed does not make it less harmful. For example: people casually believing that the Sandy Hook shooting was a conspiracy d

Just because a belief is civilly expressed does not make it less harmful. For example: people casually believing that the Sandy Hook shooting was a conspiracy drummed up by the government is actively harmful to the families affected by that tragedy. What do you say to those people? How do you solve that problem? And how do you define 'civil'? Because different platforms have different ranges of civility as well.

evilturnip 8y ago
There are thousands of conspiracies floating around. Should we consider them all harmful and ban them? Who decides when a conspiracy becomes harmful? Should we ban flat-earthers from posting their views? After all, if everyone believed it, we would set science back countless centuries. The way to combat false ideas is with truth; a culture that is always searching for the truth. That can only be facilitated by unhindered speech.
- fzeroracer 8y ago
  Do you consider American culture to be one of the more free ones? If so, then why do these conspiracies exist? Why have flat-earth conspiracies and anti-scientific dogma thrived? Why do we have a president that outright denies scientific fact? If combating false ideas with truth worked, then surely these problems shouldn't exist in America, the land of the free. In the arena of free speech, only the values with the most truth should thrive. Yet that's clearly not the case. This is the paradox of tolerance. We can say that unhindered speech is the way of countering harmful speech, but then I ask you: What led to the rise of such harmful speech today?
  - Karunamon 8y ago
    This is the paradox of tolerance. We can say that unhindered speech is the way of countering harmful speech, but then I ask you: What led to the rise of such harmful speech today? You point at anti-science conspiracy theories as a failing of free speech, and you're probably right, but what would you have us do otherwise? A world in which some central authority dictates that certain opinions are never allowed to be expressed, to me, seems like an absolutely horrible place to live, even if it meant that antivaxxers couldn't spread their crap anymore. Furthermore, there is no such thing as a perfect political system. It's not enough to point at what free speech fails at, you also need to suggest what we should be doing instead, and how the failings of that system wouldn't be worse. It's a pretty good comparison to democracy, in my mind. It's the worst system ever invented, except for all of the other ones we've tried.
    - fzeroracer 8y ago
      You live in that world right now. We have a central authority that says 'you're not allowed to call black people certain words'. I always ask this but do you believe that was a mistake? Do you think people have that specific right to exercise their freedom of speech? Obviously there are degrees of harm to speech. We've already collectively determined this as a society. And to me, anti-vaxxers are a great example. We arrest anti-vaxxers if their children suffer due to child abuse. Do you believe that to be a mistake, that they don't have the right to exercise their own beliefs?
      - Karunamon 8y ago
        What central authority would that be? Because I'm pretty sure I can find speech along those line on the top five sites on the internet with little effort. I always ask this but do you believe that was a mistake? Do you think people have that specific right to exercise their freedom of speech? I think I'm unclear on what you're asking, but as an American who sees a great deal of value in that approach, and seeing the fruits of the opposite approach (my go-to example being the UK, where libel laws are significantly more open for abuse), then, yes, I do think people have that specific right - on the level of human rights, even. Do you believe that to be a mistake, that they don't have the right to exercise their own beliefs? That is a different question - speech and action are two different things.
      - tomp 8y ago
        > you're not allowed to call black people certain words' It’s actually much worse, the restriction itself is highly racist; only blacks are allowed to use the “n-word”, while whites (and other races I presume) aren’t.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    > If so, then why do these conspiracies exist? Because that's how the process works. Liars lie and evidence proves them wrong. It doesn't make them disappear from existence, it just makes it so you can discover the truth. Without free speech there are no fewer lies, all you do is suppress the truth. The Party's version is the only version even when it's fiction.
    - joshuamorton 8y ago
      Depends, these conspiracies can and do actively cause harm in the interim though (climate change, anti-vaxxing, pizzagate, and arguably others). Is liars being about to lie worth a body count?
      - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
        > Is liars being about to lie worth a body count? The body count of truth tellers not being able to tell the truth is dramatically higher. Imagine the result if Richard Nixon had put climate scientists in the same box as you would put anti-vaxxers.
        joshuamorton 8y ago
        I don't really buy "unrestricted free speech is worth letting people die over". Sure, censorship can be harmful, but if the best argument your can put forward is a slippery slope, thats not particularly compelling. Hypothetical harms are generally less harmful than real ones.
        AnthonyMouse 8y ago
        > I don't really buy "unrestricted free speech is worth letting people die over". I don't really buy "restricted speech is worth letting people die over". > Sure, censorship can be harmful, but if the best argument your can put forward is a slippery slope, thats not particularly compelling. What slippery slope? Censoring climate scientists is the first thing politicians in the pocket of oil companies would do with censorship powers. > Hypothetical harms are generally less harmful than real ones. The actual harms of censorship are widespread and well-documented. If you want to go straight for the serious examples, look at The Great Leap Forward, Stalin's purges or the holocaust. In each case there were not only direct large scale executions of political dissenters, the censorship allowed other atrocities to be kept quiet. Much of the scale and inhumanity of the holocaust wasn't discovered until the end of the war as a result of Nazi censorship, and keeping it quiet allowed it to continue for longer with less opposition both domestically and internationally. For example, the US could have entered the war earlier. But it also goes all the way down to pedestrian squabbles where people disagree over matters of life and death at smaller scale (e.g. the safety of a building or a bridge). Censoring true facts has literally been fatal countless times.
  - chrisco255 8y ago
    The true reality is that the most persuasive ideas survive, not the most truthful ones. The challenge for the scientific community is to make sure to remember that persuasion matters as much as logic and facts do, if not more.
  - evilturnip 8y ago
    If by 'harmful' speech you mean conspiracies, I would argue they've always been around. It's not a new problem. People have always filled the gaps in their knowledge with unjustified beliefs. However, your answer would be to deplatform those who would post such ideas. Do you honestly think that would make it better? Did deplatforming Alex Jones help people? It just galvanized those who believed there was a conspiracy and made him all the more popular. How about we take on the hard task of trying to actually reach those who we believe have false ideas. For example, how do people respond to flat-earthers? Constant ridicule and laughter. The reason they believe in these theories is a lot more complex and nuanced than merely that they are 'stupid'.
    - fzeroracer 8y ago
      Deplatforming Alex Jones gave him a slight bump in popularity after it occurred, followed by it falling off a cliff shortly after. Also in your example of responding to flat-earthers what other alternative is there when they refuse to listen to reason? When you can't engage with them on any level? Why is it my responsibility for example to be the one to engage with people who might view me as being a lesser human being due to my skin color or sexual preferences?
      - acct1771 8y ago
        Could that have been because the platform people would use to see his new content was no longer able to be used for this purpose, and people have been cordoned into walled gardens so long the general public is no longer aware of alternatives?
    - nl 8y ago
      Deplatforming Alex Jones has helped enormously. One of the Sandy Hook parents wrote how she is able to check her mail now without getting multiple threats in the mail every single day.
  - acct1771 8y ago
    > Yet that's clearly not the case. Ugh...yes, it is. Our people are just too stupid to find the dissenting opinions.
  - pishpash 8y ago
    This is actually an old problem. The value of free speech as a utilitarian goal, as opposed to being an absolute right which even the American system doesn't quite believe, is in having an unfettered marketplace of ideas. But if all ideas are equally valuable then there is no apparent value to truth and no consensus. You certainly wouldn't design a network protocol like that where nothing is allowed to converge. This sort of thing is glossed over in the regime of approximate consensus which holds most of the time in most communities, but when things get really divisive and intractable, or when there are deliberate adversarial attacks, I don't think there is a consistent philosophical resolution.
  - tomp 8y ago
    Politicians always play with the truth. E.g. Obama repeated the “pay gap” lie because it served his political agenda.
- enraged_camel 8y ago
  >>The way to combat false ideas is with truth This is extremely naive. As the saying goes, a lie can go around the world before the truth can finish putting on its shoes. edit: maybe rather than downvoting (which is a type of censorship) y’all should provide a response.
  - tomp 8y ago
    I don’t think bad feelings count for “actively harmful”. Also, you can always just not read the internet to avoid bad feelings. NSA surveillance was a conspiracy theory before Snowden, so I don’t think the “conspiracy theory” accusation warrants censorship.
  - repolfx 8y ago
    I don't think citing a random saying is a great way to rebut an argument, let alone support a claim of naivety. Here's another saying for you: you can fool some people all the time, and all the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time. In other words, eventually the truth wins out. I guess our sayings cancel out.
mc32 8y ago
This is a valid criticism. Let's say something truly unsavory was said about a valued relative, etc. It's hurtful. But, I think it's less hurtful then not being able to have dissident ideas expressed. For examples, we have Russia and China. They will censor topics using "civility" and whatever else in their arsenal to crush dissent. Personally I think that is worse.
- pishpash 8y ago
  Well, it usually starts with a genuine desire for civility, but as they say, power corrupts and once you give power over speech to censors (and you see this even on moderated boards), they tend to abuse their power for other purposes. It's not a problem because of repressive societies, they are the symptoms. It's a problem with human nature.
  - fzeroracer 8y ago
    And yet, with zero moderation boards also very quickly turn into fetid cesspools. One just has to take a look at Voat to see what I mean. Moderation, like many things, has to be taken in moderation.
    - DoreenMichele 8y ago
      Gives new meaning to the old expression "Moderation in all things, including moderation."
chrisco255 8y ago
It's not the belief that is harmful per se. It would be the harassment of those affected that is harmful. To give an alternative conspiracy that was given a lot of oxygen, many believed that Bush caused 9/11. Conspiracies themselves are often wrong, but occasionally correct. I don't believe that one was correct, but for example, Edward Snowden's NSA revelations were initially derided as conspiracy. It's important that even those types of ideas be allowed to compete in the marketplace of ideas. The problem I see isn't so much that people harbor conspiracies, but that they do so without interacting with the world at large. They do so in a bubble, and in a bubble, a conspiracy can be amplified. This is how extremism develops. The core problem is that people aren't interacting with enough different types of people in order to moderate their own behavior.
- acct1771 8y ago
  ...would you believe Bush didn't cause, but closer to "accidentally allowed", 9/11?
- acct1771 8y ago
  Also, the term you're looking for is "conspiracy theories", not "conspiracies". Common misconception for some reason.
adventured 8y ago
> What do you say to those people? How do you solve that problem? That's not a problem that needs to be "solved." It's not necessary to force everyone to think alike, or believe the same things. It's not necessary - or desirable - to try to force everyone to never think/believe mean things or unhappy thoughts. It's similar to saying: how do you solve people that believe in ghosts or god or unicorns (particularly if you're an atheist and believe that's all bunk). Consider hardcore religious people that believe most people are going to burn in hell, and or they believe that most dead people are in hell. Now ask the same question: isn't that offensive to those people that are going to supposedly burn? Isn't it offensive to the memory of the dead? Solve what, that people are allowed to believe what they want to (including offensive things)? The censorship it would require to constrain all of it would be horrific, authoritarian to the nth degree. The world didn't end because of all the 9/11 conspiracy theories. Thousands of people died in those attacks. Yet the conspiracy theorists proclaimed that a plane never hit the Pentagon, that there were no people on the plane that crashed in PA, that all the Jews stayed home that day, and so on. That doesn't need solving, people will never stop believing and saying crazy things, you can't force it to end. As longer duration examples, JFK and the moon landing conspiracies persist five decades on, and will never cease to exist. If NASA couldn't solve that with 50 years of education and the extraordinary amount of evidence they've provided, what hope is there for the other items.
- fzeroracer 8y ago
  Okay, now let's apply your example to something a bit more violent. People that believe black people are sub-human and deserve less rights. At what point do we no longer tolerate their opinions? For example, would you believe it's bad for someone to be censored on HN because they talked about how much they hated black coders? At a certain point we deemed as a society that those sort of views are considered bad. Do you think that was a mistake?
  - adventured 8y ago
    Nobody has to tolerate such opinions. Facebook, Twitter, etc. have block / unfriend options. It's extremely easy to avoid sites like Daily Stormer (or whatever the infamous white supremacist site is called?). I intentionally don't hang out with racists, bigots, etc. It's the exact same manner of avoidance. You have to do it in real life, I don't see why the same premise wouldn't hold online. Don't spend time in such places, don't invest into such people on social media. You can't force racists to not be racist, you can choose not to associate with them. > For example, would you believe it's bad for someone to be censored on HN because they talked about how much they hated black coders? HN isn't a monpolist platform (such that it can heavily restrict information distribution across an entire nation or more), as is the case with Google and Facebook. HN strictly policing its own site in the manner it sees fit, doesn't qualify as censorship, in my opinion. When a monopoly platform does it, it is censorship (because the condition of it being a monopoly means there are limited or no alternatives). > At a certain point we deemed as a society that those sort of views are considered bad. Do you think that was a mistake? Not at all. There is widely a societal punishment for such terrible views: you become an outcast in many regards, particularly among the vast majority of people. That society deems such views terrible, does not simultaneously require they be banished / made illegal / censored from all publication (whether books or social media). That cultural battle should in fact occur out in the open. There is no better platform for it than that. You can't nearly so well combat terrible ideas if they're not expressed. When it comes to how a monopoly like Facebook should deal with it (in a context where one believes all people have a right to be able to use it): they should delete illegal posts (underage pornography as one example), and they should perhaps restrict blatantly offensive content to adult readers only (18+ in the US), and require an acknowledgement to view it. There are a few directions that Facebook could go with dealing with Alex Jones types for example, that doesn't involve a heavy handed censorship or ban. Limit the mass distribution of their content, as we might in a public square. We don't generally block people from having one to one, or one to few, offensive conversations in a public square, assuming it's discrete. We do generally stop them from mass distribution to all by shouting offensive things through a large audio setup or similar in public squares. It's an effective means of not denying someone access to public squares (eg banning them from Facebook), while still not turning a platform into an open amplification vehicle for terrible, abusive, offensive ideas. What we're all really talking about here is: should people be censored from being able to offend other people. That central concept is what connects all of these varied speech discussions covering race, religion, sex, gender, political ideology, et al. Should offensiveness be banned? It can't be done, the result of trying to do it is entirely predictable ahead of time. We're seeing countries like Britain attempt it, it's a grotesque absurdity in result. Since what's offensive is inherently subjective and will always vary from one person to the next, it becomes a system of who has power to dictate from moment to moment what's offensive. It becomes a competition of an ever tightening restriction, as each power group adds items to the list (culminating in authoritarianism as freedom of speech essentially entirely disappears). The quest to banish offensiveness ('the right to not be offended'), is a fool's errand at best, and an authoritarian's dream at worst.
lurquer 8y ago
Equating hurt feelings with 'harm' is sophistry. If your speech causes harm, you can sue for damages. A person's belief that Sandy Hook is a conspiracy harms no one. A person can say or believe what they want and I for one couldn't care less whose feelings it hurts. I'm sure King George's feelings were hurt by being called a tyrant. And, I'm sure there were sniveling nimrods who wrung their hands in virtuous concern about the uncivil hate speech of the colonists. Sticks and stones...
- sagichmal 8y ago
  Nobody has said anything about hurt feelings. They are speaking about the families of children killed at Sandy Hook, and the maleficent antagonists who harass them with lies.
  - tomp 8y ago
    So what’s the harm to the families, except bad feelings? Was anyone actually (physically) hurt?
    - zmix 8y ago
      You know, it feels bad, to get physically hurt. To imply, the only damage, that can exist, would be of material nature (here: the meat of your body) gives me the shivers.
      - tomp 8y ago
        Yeah I agree. But the crucial difference is, physical/meat damage is objective, whereas emotional pain is only subjective (you can't prove it to anyone else, and you can also make it up). Basing policy on subjective whims is bad.
        tomhoward 8y ago
        The "reasonable person" is a well-established principle in law, used to test whether someone's subjective claims of harm should be considered valid from an objective viewpoint. Few would question that a "reasonable person" whose child was killed in a mass murder would be harmed by harassment, abuse, and claims the event didn't happen. I'm not normally any kind of bleeding heart, but stuff like this isn't difficult.

evilturnip 8y ago

There are thousands of conspiracies floating around. Should we consider them all harmful and ban them? Who decides when a conspiracy becomes harmful? Should we ban flat-earthers from posting their views? After all, if everyone believed it, we would set science back countless centuries. The way to combat false ideas is with truth; a culture that is always searching for the truth. That can only be facilitated by unhindered speech.

fzeroracer 8y ago
Do you consider American culture to be one of the more free ones? If so, then why do these conspiracies exist? Why have flat-earth conspiracies and anti-scientific dogma thrived? Why do we have a president that outright denies scientific fact? If combating false ideas with truth worked, then surely these problems shouldn't exist in America, the land of the free. In the arena of free speech, only the values with the most truth should thrive. Yet that's clearly not the case. This is the paradox of tolerance. We can say that unhindered speech is the way of countering harmful speech, but then I ask you: What led to the rise of such harmful speech today?
- Karunamon 8y ago
  This is the paradox of tolerance. We can say that unhindered speech is the way of countering harmful speech, but then I ask you: What led to the rise of such harmful speech today? You point at anti-science conspiracy theories as a failing of free speech, and you're probably right, but what would you have us do otherwise? A world in which some central authority dictates that certain opinions are never allowed to be expressed, to me, seems like an absolutely horrible place to live, even if it meant that antivaxxers couldn't spread their crap anymore. Furthermore, there is no such thing as a perfect political system. It's not enough to point at what free speech fails at, you also need to suggest what we should be doing instead, and how the failings of that system wouldn't be worse. It's a pretty good comparison to democracy, in my mind. It's the worst system ever invented, except for all of the other ones we've tried.
  - fzeroracer 8y ago
    You live in that world right now. We have a central authority that says 'you're not allowed to call black people certain words'. I always ask this but do you believe that was a mistake? Do you think people have that specific right to exercise their freedom of speech? Obviously there are degrees of harm to speech. We've already collectively determined this as a society. And to me, anti-vaxxers are a great example. We arrest anti-vaxxers if their children suffer due to child abuse. Do you believe that to be a mistake, that they don't have the right to exercise their own beliefs?
    - Karunamon 8y ago
      What central authority would that be? Because I'm pretty sure I can find speech along those line on the top five sites on the internet with little effort. I always ask this but do you believe that was a mistake? Do you think people have that specific right to exercise their freedom of speech? I think I'm unclear on what you're asking, but as an American who sees a great deal of value in that approach, and seeing the fruits of the opposite approach (my go-to example being the UK, where libel laws are significantly more open for abuse), then, yes, I do think people have that specific right - on the level of human rights, even. Do you believe that to be a mistake, that they don't have the right to exercise their own beliefs? That is a different question - speech and action are two different things.
    - tomp 8y ago
      > you're not allowed to call black people certain words' It’s actually much worse, the restriction itself is highly racist; only blacks are allowed to use the “n-word”, while whites (and other races I presume) aren’t.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  > If so, then why do these conspiracies exist? Because that's how the process works. Liars lie and evidence proves them wrong. It doesn't make them disappear from existence, it just makes it so you can discover the truth. Without free speech there are no fewer lies, all you do is suppress the truth. The Party's version is the only version even when it's fiction.
  - joshuamorton 8y ago
    Depends, these conspiracies can and do actively cause harm in the interim though (climate change, anti-vaxxing, pizzagate, and arguably others). Is liars being about to lie worth a body count?
    - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
      > Is liars being about to lie worth a body count? The body count of truth tellers not being able to tell the truth is dramatically higher. Imagine the result if Richard Nixon had put climate scientists in the same box as you would put anti-vaxxers.
      - joshuamorton 8y ago
        I don't really buy "unrestricted free speech is worth letting people die over". Sure, censorship can be harmful, but if the best argument your can put forward is a slippery slope, thats not particularly compelling. Hypothetical harms are generally less harmful than real ones.
        AnthonyMouse 8y ago
        > I don't really buy "unrestricted free speech is worth letting people die over". I don't really buy "restricted speech is worth letting people die over". > Sure, censorship can be harmful, but if the best argument your can put forward is a slippery slope, thats not particularly compelling. What slippery slope? Censoring climate scientists is the first thing politicians in the pocket of oil companies would do with censorship powers. > Hypothetical harms are generally less harmful than real ones. The actual harms of censorship are widespread and well-documented. If you want to go straight for the serious examples, look at The Great Leap Forward, Stalin's purges or the holocaust. In each case there were not only direct large scale executions of political dissenters, the censorship allowed other atrocities to be kept quiet. Much of the scale and inhumanity of the holocaust wasn't discovered until the end of the war as a result of Nazi censorship, and keeping it quiet allowed it to continue for longer with less opposition both domestically and internationally. For example, the US could have entered the war earlier. But it also goes all the way down to pedestrian squabbles where people disagree over matters of life and death at smaller scale (e.g. the safety of a building or a bridge). Censoring true facts has literally been fatal countless times.
- chrisco255 8y ago
  The true reality is that the most persuasive ideas survive, not the most truthful ones. The challenge for the scientific community is to make sure to remember that persuasion matters as much as logic and facts do, if not more.
- evilturnip 8y ago
  If by 'harmful' speech you mean conspiracies, I would argue they've always been around. It's not a new problem. People have always filled the gaps in their knowledge with unjustified beliefs. However, your answer would be to deplatform those who would post such ideas. Do you honestly think that would make it better? Did deplatforming Alex Jones help people? It just galvanized those who believed there was a conspiracy and made him all the more popular. How about we take on the hard task of trying to actually reach those who we believe have false ideas. For example, how do people respond to flat-earthers? Constant ridicule and laughter. The reason they believe in these theories is a lot more complex and nuanced than merely that they are 'stupid'.
  - fzeroracer 8y ago
    Deplatforming Alex Jones gave him a slight bump in popularity after it occurred, followed by it falling off a cliff shortly after. Also in your example of responding to flat-earthers what other alternative is there when they refuse to listen to reason? When you can't engage with them on any level? Why is it my responsibility for example to be the one to engage with people who might view me as being a lesser human being due to my skin color or sexual preferences?
    - acct1771 8y ago
      Could that have been because the platform people would use to see his new content was no longer able to be used for this purpose, and people have been cordoned into walled gardens so long the general public is no longer aware of alternatives?
  - nl 8y ago
    Deplatforming Alex Jones has helped enormously. One of the Sandy Hook parents wrote how she is able to check her mail now without getting multiple threats in the mail every single day.
- acct1771 8y ago
  > Yet that's clearly not the case. Ugh...yes, it is. Our people are just too stupid to find the dissenting opinions.
- pishpash 8y ago
  This is actually an old problem. The value of free speech as a utilitarian goal, as opposed to being an absolute right which even the American system doesn't quite believe, is in having an unfettered marketplace of ideas. But if all ideas are equally valuable then there is no apparent value to truth and no consensus. You certainly wouldn't design a network protocol like that where nothing is allowed to converge. This sort of thing is glossed over in the regime of approximate consensus which holds most of the time in most communities, but when things get really divisive and intractable, or when there are deliberate adversarial attacks, I don't think there is a consistent philosophical resolution.
- tomp 8y ago
  Politicians always play with the truth. E.g. Obama repeated the “pay gap” lie because it served his political agenda.
enraged_camel 8y ago
>>The way to combat false ideas is with truth This is extremely naive. As the saying goes, a lie can go around the world before the truth can finish putting on its shoes. edit: maybe rather than downvoting (which is a type of censorship) y’all should provide a response.
- tomp 8y ago
  I don’t think bad feelings count for “actively harmful”. Also, you can always just not read the internet to avoid bad feelings. NSA surveillance was a conspiracy theory before Snowden, so I don’t think the “conspiracy theory” accusation warrants censorship.
- repolfx 8y ago
  I don't think citing a random saying is a great way to rebut an argument, let alone support a claim of naivety. Here's another saying for you: you can fool some people all the time, and all the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time. In other words, eventually the truth wins out. I guess our sayings cancel out.

mc32 8y ago

This is a valid criticism. Let's say something truly unsavory was said about a valued relative, etc. It's hurtful. But, I think it's less hurtful then not being able to have dissident ideas expressed. For examples, we have Russia and China. They will censor topics using "civility" and whatever else in their arsenal to crush dissent. Personally I think that is worse.

pishpash 8y ago
Well, it usually starts with a genuine desire for civility, but as they say, power corrupts and once you give power over speech to censors (and you see this even on moderated boards), they tend to abuse their power for other purposes. It's not a problem because of repressive societies, they are the symptoms. It's a problem with human nature.
- fzeroracer 8y ago
  And yet, with zero moderation boards also very quickly turn into fetid cesspools. One just has to take a look at Voat to see what I mean. Moderation, like many things, has to be taken in moderation.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    Gives new meaning to the old expression "Moderation in all things, including moderation."

chrisco255 8y ago

It's not the belief that is harmful per se. It would be the harassment of those affected that is harmful. To give an alternative conspiracy that was given a lot of oxygen, many believed that Bush caused 9/11. Conspiracies themselves are often wrong, but occasionally correct. I don't believe that one was correct, but for example, Edward Snowden's NSA revelations were initially derided as conspiracy. It's important that even those types of ideas be allowed to compete in the marketplace of ideas. The problem I see isn't so much that people harbor conspiracies, but that they do so without interacting with the world at large. They do so in a bubble, and in a bubble, a conspiracy can be amplified. This is how extremism develops. The core problem is that people aren't interacting with enough different types of people in order to moderate their own behavior.

acct1771 8y ago
...would you believe Bush didn't cause, but closer to "accidentally allowed", 9/11?
acct1771 8y ago
Also, the term you're looking for is "conspiracy theories", not "conspiracies". Common misconception for some reason.

adventured 8y ago

> What do you say to those people? How do you solve that problem? That's not a problem that needs to be "solved." It's not necessary to force everyone to think alike, or believe the same things. It's not necessary - or desirable - to try to force everyone to never think/believe mean things or unhappy thoughts. It's similar to saying: how do you solve people that believe in ghosts or god or unicorns (particularly if you're an atheist and believe that's all bunk). Consider hardcore religious people that believe most people are going to burn in hell, and or they believe that most dead people are in hell. Now ask the same question: isn't that offensive to those people that are going to supposedly burn? Isn't it offensive to the memory of the dead? Solve what, that people are allowed to believe what they want to (including offensive things)? The censorship it would require to constrain all of it would be horrific, authoritarian to the nth degree. The world didn't end because of all the 9/11 conspiracy theories. Thousands of people died in those attacks. Yet the conspiracy theorists proclaimed that a plane never hit the Pentagon, that there were no people on the plane that crashed in PA, that all the Jews stayed home that day, and so on. That doesn't need solving, people will never stop believing and saying crazy things, you can't force it to end. As longer duration examples, JFK and the moon landing conspiracies persist five decades on, and will never cease to exist. If NASA couldn't solve that with 50 years of education and the extraordinary amount of evidence they've provided, what hope is there for the other items.

fzeroracer 8y ago
Okay, now let's apply your example to something a bit more violent. People that believe black people are sub-human and deserve less rights. At what point do we no longer tolerate their opinions? For example, would you believe it's bad for someone to be censored on HN because they talked about how much they hated black coders? At a certain point we deemed as a society that those sort of views are considered bad. Do you think that was a mistake?
- adventured 8y ago
  Nobody has to tolerate such opinions. Facebook, Twitter, etc. have block / unfriend options. It's extremely easy to avoid sites like Daily Stormer (or whatever the infamous white supremacist site is called?). I intentionally don't hang out with racists, bigots, etc. It's the exact same manner of avoidance. You have to do it in real life, I don't see why the same premise wouldn't hold online. Don't spend time in such places, don't invest into such people on social media. You can't force racists to not be racist, you can choose not to associate with them. > For example, would you believe it's bad for someone to be censored on HN because they talked about how much they hated black coders? HN isn't a monpolist platform (such that it can heavily restrict information distribution across an entire nation or more), as is the case with Google and Facebook. HN strictly policing its own site in the manner it sees fit, doesn't qualify as censorship, in my opinion. When a monopoly platform does it, it is censorship (because the condition of it being a monopoly means there are limited or no alternatives). > At a certain point we deemed as a society that those sort of views are considered bad. Do you think that was a mistake? Not at all. There is widely a societal punishment for such terrible views: you become an outcast in many regards, particularly among the vast majority of people. That society deems such views terrible, does not simultaneously require they be banished / made illegal / censored from all publication (whether books or social media). That cultural battle should in fact occur out in the open. There is no better platform for it than that. You can't nearly so well combat terrible ideas if they're not expressed. When it comes to how a monopoly like Facebook should deal with it (in a context where one believes all people have a right to be able to use it): they should delete illegal posts (underage pornography as one example), and they should perhaps restrict blatantly offensive content to adult readers only (18+ in the US), and require an acknowledgement to view it. There are a few directions that Facebook could go with dealing with Alex Jones types for example, that doesn't involve a heavy handed censorship or ban. Limit the mass distribution of their content, as we might in a public square. We don't generally block people from having one to one, or one to few, offensive conversations in a public square, assuming it's discrete. We do generally stop them from mass distribution to all by shouting offensive things through a large audio setup or similar in public squares. It's an effective means of not denying someone access to public squares (eg banning them from Facebook), while still not turning a platform into an open amplification vehicle for terrible, abusive, offensive ideas. What we're all really talking about here is: should people be censored from being able to offend other people. That central concept is what connects all of these varied speech discussions covering race, religion, sex, gender, political ideology, et al. Should offensiveness be banned? It can't be done, the result of trying to do it is entirely predictable ahead of time. We're seeing countries like Britain attempt it, it's a grotesque absurdity in result. Since what's offensive is inherently subjective and will always vary from one person to the next, it becomes a system of who has power to dictate from moment to moment what's offensive. It becomes a competition of an ever tightening restriction, as each power group adds items to the list (culminating in authoritarianism as freedom of speech essentially entirely disappears). The quest to banish offensiveness ('the right to not be offended'), is a fool's errand at best, and an authoritarian's dream at worst.

lurquer 8y ago

Equating hurt feelings with 'harm' is sophistry. If your speech causes harm, you can sue for damages. A person's belief that Sandy Hook is a conspiracy harms no one. A person can say or believe what they want and I for one couldn't care less whose feelings it hurts. I'm sure King George's feelings were hurt by being called a tyrant. And, I'm sure there were sniveling nimrods who wrung their hands in virtuous concern about the uncivil hate speech of the colonists. Sticks and stones...

sagichmal 8y ago
Nobody has said anything about hurt feelings. They are speaking about the families of children killed at Sandy Hook, and the maleficent antagonists who harass them with lies.
- tomp 8y ago
  So what’s the harm to the families, except bad feelings? Was anyone actually (physically) hurt?
  - zmix 8y ago
    You know, it feels bad, to get physically hurt. To imply, the only damage, that can exist, would be of material nature (here: the meat of your body) gives me the shivers.
    - tomp 8y ago
      Yeah I agree. But the crucial difference is, physical/meat damage is objective, whereas emotional pain is only subjective (you can't prove it to anyone else, and you can also make it up). Basing policy on subjective whims is bad.
      - tomhoward 8y ago
        The "reasonable person" is a well-established principle in law, used to test whether someone's subjective claims of harm should be considered valid from an objective viewpoint. Few would question that a "reasonable person" whose child was killed in a mass murder would be harmed by harassment, abuse, and claims the event didn't happen. I'm not normally any kind of bleeding heart, but stuff like this isn't difficult.