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A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

• mlillie 8y ago
  This reeks of both-sides-ism and enablement. "Where does it stop?" is the same slippery slope garbage peddled by #HimToo and #BlueLivesMatter acolytes. But even engaging with the question at face value, the answer is very simple, and the author of this piece didn't try very hard if he couldn't find someone who is able to answer it. In fact, the best answer was given by Karl Popper in 1945. > In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance. That's it. Platforms like Gab are themselves intolerant, and we must continue to be intolerant of them.
  • msla 8y ago
    > But even engaging with the question at face value, the answer is very simple If you think that, you're not engaging with the complexity of the problem, and, instead, trying to shut down discussion. This problem is one philosophers and legal scholars have struggled over for millennia, all around the world. If you think you have a simple answer, you're lying, you're unbelievably arrogant, or you don't understand the problem.
  • froasty 8y ago
    For anyone wanting the full quote from Popper's The Open Society: "Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal. Another of the less well-known paradoxes is the paradox of democracy, or more precisely, of majority-rule; i.e. the possibility that the majority may decide that a tyrant should rule. That Plato’s criticism of democracy can be interpreted in the way sketched here, and that the principle of majority-rule may lead to self-contradictions, was first suggested, as far as I know, by Leonard Nelson (cp. note 25 (2) to this chapter). I do not think, however, that Nelson, who, in spite of his passionate humanitarianism and his ardent fight for freedom, adopted much of Plato’s political theory, and especially Plato’s principle of leadership, was aware of the fact that analogous arguments can be raised against all the different particular forms of the theory of sovereignty. All these paradoxes can easily be avoided if we frame our political demands in the way suggested in section ii of this chapter, or perhaps in some such manner as this. We demand a government that rules according to the principles of equalitarianism and protectionism; that tolerates all who are prepared to reciprocate, i.e. who are tolerant; that is controlled by, and accountable to, the public. And we may add that some form of majority vote, together with institutions for keeping the public well informed, is the best, though not infallible, means of controlling such a government. (No infallible means exist.)"
    • zacherates 8y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
    • manfredo 8y ago
      There is no paradox of tolerance if we're exclusive talking about the tolerance of speech. Even the most abhorrent words are still just words and do not inherently exclude those that disagree with them. /pol/ and Gab are filled with right wing extremists, but the platforms do tolerate left wing extremists as well. The paradox of tolerance only applies when talking about actions. A group that is actively excluding others through discrimination or force may need to be removed to preserve tolerance. Speech does not exclude anyone - if the listener chooses to leave because of it then that is the listener's prerogative (as opposed to, say, being subjected to violence or discrimination).
      • watwut 8y ago
        I think that people in these debates are less interested in whether "words" are ugly and more in political projects pushed by those words. When a guy in synagogue is shooting people, because he happen to believe that they are organizing immigrants to genocide whites, competitive left wing group trying to convince other guys does not make people in synagogue wake up from death. It does not cancel out. You can be simultanously for free speech while accept the reality that words have consequences and words are often said in order to cause those consequences. To make people afraid and dangerous and ready for violence.
        • manfredo 8y ago
          The point is not that the extremism on one end cancels out extremism on the other. The point is, it is possible to tolerate both - there is no paradox of tolerance with respect to speech. As to your second point, the suppression of speech also has dangerous consequences. Plenty of anti-Semitic thought is rooted in the belief of Jewish control of the media. Suppressing speech probably only serves to reinforce this view. The reality is that intolerance of hateful speech rarely makes hate go away. Remember, high ranking Nazi leaders were imprisoned, and Völkischer Beobachter (a prominent Nazi publication) was repeatedly banned and had it's offices raided. It didn't stop the spread of Nationalist Socialism. Some historians believe this suppression only accelerated it's rise. It's like the Streisand effect on a political scale. Aside from instances where the suppression of speech is nearly certain to avoid negative consequences (like specific threats, conspiracy to commit crimes, divulging official secrets or classified information) it is not wise to suppress it. And this doesn't even touch on people attempting to use accusations of hate speech as a political tool (e.g. the "blue lives matter" laws not-so-subtly aimed at suppression of BLM).
  • tunesmith 8y ago
    Define intolerance. That's the whole problem. So being "intolerant of intolerance" is meaningless except as something that signals a different meaning - different lines, different behavior, different standards - to every listener.
    • JoshTriplett 8y ago
      > Define intolerance That thing everyone except the intolerant seem to understand remarkably well, and the intolerant spend a lot of time quibbling over the definition of in a desperate attempt to derail their inclusion in it. Or, more seriously: treating other people as unwelcome or hated or less than human, for reasons other than being hateful and intolerant.
      • tunesmith 8y ago
        Since I don't understand it remarkably well, I must be intolerant? Nice.
        • tenaciousDaniel 8y ago
          The real issue with the parent comment is that it's not sustainable in the end. When they say "everyone but (x) understands this", they are alluding to a sense of shared understanding. That, to a certain extent, is a culture. In a society with several cultures, alluding to a sense of shared understanding is virtually impossible, because the interpretation is at root a cultural one. There's simply no way to guarantee that what they mean by "intolerant" is exactly what everyone else means.
      • wycs 8y ago
        Yes. It is all very obvious. For example, suppose a marginalized group uses the hashtag #killallwhitemen to express the disempowerment they feel from the historical weight of white privilege. This, I think we can all agree, is an expression of righteous outrage through hyperbole, not intolerance. In fact, "white men" in this context does not refer to any person or group of people, rather a self-reenforcing system of oppression and privilege. In this way, we see "#killallwhitemen" is tool of enforcing tolerance in an intolerant society. Now suppose someone were to make an argument like this: "We observe sexual dimorphism to some degree in most animals. Thus our prior should be that it is unlikely that women and men are 100% psychologically identical even when controlling for environment. Because of this it would be epistemically incorrect to assume differences in representation in engineering firms can be explained entirely by discrimination." This argument is clearly reactionary and must be censored, for we know 100% that any difference in preferences, abilities and outcomes between men and women must be explained by environmental effects. To think otherwise would be exclusionary and thus an example of intolerance we must be intolerant of, even in our own thoughts. The person making this argument should be shunned. Even raising the argument should result in immediate deplatforming and perhaps loss of employability. Even this notion of a prior in which you allow yourself to assign a probability to reactionary thoughts must fought, for even a very low prior can be overcome with enough sensory experience.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • travisoneill1 8y ago
    How is a platform that let's you say anything uncensored intolerant? If your definition of "tolerance" is forced censorship, then I don't think you would do so well in Karl Popper's proposed society.
    • tptacek 8y ago
      In actuality, Gab bans users for the same reason Twitter does. For instance, when Paul Nehlen tried to organize harassment of another white nationalist figure, Gab banned him. Part of Gab's sales pitch is that it's a refuge for people whose thoughts are somehow too dangerous for Twitter. But contrary to what Gab wants you to believe, Twitter doesn't ban white nationalists. Richard Spencer has a Twitter account. So does Faith Goldy. For that matter, so does Gab, which has posted openly anti-Semitic comments in the past, and still has a verified checkmark!
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      • djsumdog 8y ago
        Gab also banned people who posted anime porn, sending them in flocks to ActivityPub instances.
        • claudiawerner 8y ago
          The users Gab banned were already on such instances by and large, in particular smuglo.li and pawoo.net.
      • hcg 8y ago
        Gab allows much more open racism and spread of those ideas than Twitter does. Really all this says to me is that Twitter should be doing more.
      • pppaul 8y ago
        Faith Goldy is not a white nationalist
  • roenxi 8y ago
    There is a pretty simple resolution to the Paradox of Tolerance - some philosophies can't build communities (eg, a powerful society of anarchists would be overwhelmed by the first organised internal faction to form). Tolerance is one such philosophy - as pointed out by Popper that means tolerating agents trying to undermine core values. My resolution is that people are experiencing cloudy thinking, and using the word 'tolerance' when they mean 'humility'. To have humility is to seriously admit that, while you are ejecting someone from your community, that you might possibly be wrong to do so. A positive community founded on humility would naturally lead to tolerance anyway, because intolerance starts in a firm belief in your own views of the world being correct.
  • nine_k 8y ago
    N. Taleb, "The most intolerant wins": https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict... Looks oddly relevant.
    • stcredzero 8y ago
      If you're looking for the most intolerant, then look to the side that makes the accusations, does the screeching, does the un-personing and de-platforming, and either calls for violence against its enemies, enacts it, or tacitly accepts it. If you want to find the tolerant, find those who advocate for free speech and those who want to engage and make their arguments. That's the side which has learned the value of tolerance, because they're on their back foot.
      • nine_k 8y ago
        Exactly.
  • djsumdog 8y ago
    > #HimToo I haven't heard of this specifically, but the #MeToo movement bothers me greatly, because it implies that we suddenly learned you needed consent for sex; like it was some new revelation. If you look at CDC numbers, just as many men are assaulted sexually as women, but yet the #MeToo movement felt very one directional and didn't talk about assault inclusively of all people. The #BelieveWomen campaign actually goes directly against one of the principal tenants of progressive ideology: Innocent until proven guilty (a tenant of #BlackLivesMatter). The point is these issues are COMPLEX! They are not simple. And when they're not simple, you need to be able to discuss them openly, and frankly. Deplatforming totally fucks that up. People who have never been on to Gab assume it's all hate speech and right-wring religious stuff (I mean .. it is .. or was, but most people didn't actually see it for themselves...they just heard about it and hated). A good counter example: the documentary The Red Pill, where a feminist interviews several people in the Men's Rights movement and learns it was nothing like how it was portrayed as. She had an entirely incorrect view of what they themselves stood for because of all those people yelling at their platform. De-platforming increases polarization. I know it's a meme, but we do live in a society. We need to be able to discuss our differences and find a synthesis between the thesis/anthesis to move forward in a way that's as fair as we can be to everyone. When you push people off platforms, there is no longer speech and discussion. There is only "for us or against us." If you are a feminist in every way, but think trans-women should still be men on their birth certificates, then suddenly you're an anti-Trans, TERF, Fascist, Nazi and nothing you said should be listened to because you're wrong. That's the direction we're heading, and that is sad and terrible. Most humans do act in good faith, and are reasonable, and we need to learn to listen again.
    • 8note 8y ago
      > I haven't heard of this specifically, but the #MeToo movement bothers me greatly, because it implies that we suddenly learned you needed consent for sex; like it was some new revelation it's true though; it's largely in response to somebody bragging about not getting consent being elected to the highest office of the US. Without it, Hollywood would still be thinking sexual assault is just the norm, and women have to accept it if they want to move their carear forward
  • stcredzero 8y ago
    This reeks of both-sides-ism and enablement. The whole point of Free Speech is to enable all sides of any issue to have their say. That is a fundamental mechanism against totalitarianism. In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance. Sorry, but Karl Popper's idea is just Orwellian nightmare fuel. "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength." Tolerance is to live and let live. Oppressing those you disagree with is the very opposite of tolerance. (Even if they are truly horrible people.) If Silicon Valley were tolerant, they'd let Gab live and possibly be a cesspit of horribleness. A society that de-platforms and un-persons everyone and every idea it doesn't like isn't a free society. That's not a free market of ideas. That's totalitarianism through economic hegemony.
    • claudiawerner 8y ago
      >Tolerance is to live and let live. This is one reading of tolerance, but there are multiple (as expounded by Popper and Marcuse too, for instance). I don't think considering an idea badly because it's used as fuel is a good thing. A quick counterexample to the idea that tolerance means to allow anything and everything is that if I were to tell you I tolerate your presence, but you begin to make annoying sounds continuously, my tolerance would quickly change to intolerance. Tolerance is a democratic principle, since it relies on the idea that nobody has an absolute claim on the truth, but as critical theorists as early as the 60s pointed out, this democratic idea depends on an informed populace to distinguish ideas as they are - to that end, in society we don't tolerate some views, such as the teaching of creationism in schools. A good essay on this is Marcuse's "Repressive Tolerance". Regarding your mention of Orwell, Marcuse made another interesting point; nowadays, the contradiction is hidden within the noun itself, rather than "war is peace", the word "freedom" itself, understood in the context of its ideological use by various proponents (particularly on the libertarian right, I've noticed) already contains the contradiction; the idea it represents is contradictory. Similarly with misleading names and terms. I do not want to live in a society in which tolerance is absolute, and I doubt many people would.
      • stcredzero 8y ago
        I don't think considering an idea badly because it's used as fuel is a good thing. An idea that demolishes a foundation idea by melding it with its opposite is a very insidiously bad thing. "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."
  • dvtrn 8y ago
    This reeks of both-sides-ism and enablement It's funny you take this view, as fatigued as I imagine you probably feel about, as you're calling it "both-sides-ism"-I like to imagine there are probably other people out there just as fatigued with watching "both sides" act like neither has some kind of fringe-manifested baggage or serious, fundamental issues that need to be brought to the table and reconciled. Hate to break this to you: there's some ugly problems with how we're talking about issues coming from all over the place. No one is coming to the table here with clean hands, as far as I'm concerned. Some ugly words and tactics being hurled like hand grenades. They're probably not the same, they probably don't exist for the same reasons, nor have the same motivating factors behind them, but there has got to be some kind of decongestant for this idea that polarizing and hurtful speech only comes from one ideological hemisphere. I don't know what it is, but I hope we find one.
    • 8note 8y ago
      I for one, only see one side shooting up synagogues, and locking children in cages
      • dvtrn 8y ago
        My entire point, laid bare, QED.
  • philwelch 8y ago
    Actually, platforms that de-platform tolerant platforms like Gab are the real intolerant ones. I'm being (slightly) facetious, but the point is that Popper's argument, or at least this naive interpretation of it, can be used to justify any intolerance. There's no obvious reason you can't use Popper's argument to justify McCarthyism or the Muslim ban or even Japanese internment on the grounds of the alleged intolerance of their intended targets, or the existential threat they posed to liberalized society. In fact, most actual justifications of those things are based on Popper's argument; it's of the same species as "the Constitution is not a suicide pact" or "are you going to convict Jack Bauer?". This is literally how people tried to justify every violation of civil liberties in American history. US judicial precedent around the First Amendment has varied over time. The hoary cliche that "you can't shout fire in a crowded theater" comes from a Supreme Court ruling in 1919, Schenck v. United States, that the First Amendment did not protect advocacy of draft resistance. That ruling was overruled, and the standard set by the court in 1969, in Brandenberg v. Ohio, was "imminent lawless action". And I think that standard meets Popper's bar without the risk of it devolving into totalitarianism for the sake of protecting us from totalitarianism. Which, incidentally, has been the sales pitch of every totalitarian regime ever. The next batch of Nazis are going to get power by telling us they need it to protect us from the Nazis.
  • int_19h 8y ago
    The "paradox" of tolerance is trivially resolved. As stated, it is misleading, because it conflates two very different thing. A tolerant society, to defend itself, only needs to be intolerant of actions of intolerance - e.g. physical assault motivated by some prejudice. It does not need to be intolerant of intolerant speech, however.
• kmooney 8y ago
  > We run the risk that the act of deplatforming can become as extreme as the hate speech it seeks to banish. Let us cross that bridge when we get to it.
  • colonelpopcorn 8y ago
    Pretty sure we're already here. Ignorant or evil folks won't become enlightened or good if they can't use the internet.
    • fhood 8y ago
      No, but they will be isolated, and an isolated person is powerless person.
      • colonelpopcorn 8y ago
        Seems like a recipe for creating a lot of people with very little or nothing to lose.
        • fhood 8y ago
          Nah, I think the real danger is when they find others who re-affirm their convictions.
          • jesssse 8y ago
            You are advocating isolating, deplatforming, etc.. These are tactics that hurt. Hurt people hurt people. If people are allowed to be heard and socialize, they gain happiness and are less likely to hurt people.
      • nine_k 8y ago
        They are not isolated from each other, they are just detached from those who don't what to hear them. Imagine that you have a piece of rotting meat. It's unsightly and it stinks. So you hide it under the carpet. Now it's gone from view, and the smell is nearly gone. But it's still rotting down there, and at one moment you'll have to face what it will turn into.
• dleslie 8y ago
  > The tech giants today are by their own actions cultivating the motivation and the will to necessitate the creation of their own challengers and everybody is watching closely what works and what doesn’t. And this is why I find the trend towards deplatforming to be altogether _exciting_. I haven't been this _excited_ about potential changes in how we communicate since I first installed Skype; when it was still P2P. There hasn't been this much social pressure on individuals with technical ability for some time, and sufficiently many appear to be attempting to turn that pressure into new ways to communicate. Safely, securely, and in a way that is resilient to outside attempts to silence. Our current state of affairs is distressingly centralized; we have but a handful of _enormous_ silos of personal information and communication, and progressively less independent sources of content distribution. While it may seem a non-issue when it's ethnic supremacists and fascists being silenced; it's a situation precariously vulnerable to abuse by the powerful. These experiments in decentralized communication and data storage couldn't come any sooner.
  • wuliwong 8y ago
    I am right there with you! I am oddly excited by the recent waves of de-platforming. I think they are hastening the next step of development.
    • arto 8y ago
      Indeed, sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better.
• wstuartcl 8y ago
  Freedom of speech is a right provided by the constitution. Me, You or privately held platform(s) providing the venue for that speech is not. Just like I will not be allowing GAB like speech from my properties, I will also look poorly upon anyone else hosting that garbage.
  • jsnk 8y ago
    From my understanding, people are not arguing that the Valley oligarchs don't have the legal right to deplatform individuals. The arguments against deplatforming are made in other ways. - Just like users demand feature requests, people who are being deplatformed and people who argue against deplatforming are asking to support a feature called "free speech" and "open communication". - Violation of contract. Users invest in growing the network and influence in these platforms with understanding that "free speech" and "open communication" will be respected. But overtime, the Valley oligarchs like FB, Twitter, Reddit etc pulled a fast one on their users coming up with draconian rules that wasn't originally part of the platform.
  • neuralk 8y ago
    >Freedom of speech is a right provided by the constitution No, it is not. It explicitly is not. Freedom of speech is one right among many other unstated rights held in common by the people. The first amendment merely prohibits Congress from passing a law that restricts it. The wording is clear that this freedom is something that exists inherently beyond the scope of the Constitution, and is certainly not "provided" by the document. We naturally have rights such as freedom of speech. It is from institutions like the government that restrictions are placed on them. Also, the 9th amendment was included precisely to clarify and codify the fact that the Constitution, in enumerating the rights, is not itself granting those rights or even stating that these are the only rights people have.
    • tptacek 8y ago
      The 9th Amendment does not mean that Twitter must allow your speech. In fact, at the time the 9th Amendment was drafted, it didn't even require the states to grant you a right to free expression; that right wasn't incorporated onto the states until Reconstruction. So, no, not so much.
• adamrezich 8y ago
  The problem with free speech on the Internet is that our human minds have not sufficiently evolved to even remotely begin to understand just how fundamentally the Internet changes our perception of our fellow humans. Dunbar's number shows that we're only able to keep track of a very small number of ongoing human relationships relative to the Internet-connected population of the planet, and at a societal level we're used to only hearing ideas from people around us, and those in published works or in mass media such as radio and television. Yet now anyone, literally anyone, can go online and proclaim whatever they want in certain online public spaces. If I walked into a local bookstore and saw a whole shelf dedicated to white supremacy, I would rightfully be appalled that it was allowed to exist, because stocking such books would reflect on the bookstore. The Internet is like a bookstore where anyone can write a book and guarantee it's stocked, and free to read, and therefore completely unlike a bookstore at all. Yet we tend to think of online discussion platforms in these terms because the idea of a true online free speech platform where only content that is Actually Illegal is taken down and reported to the authorities accordingly is still incredibly foreign to us at a societal level. Someone who's never used the Internet and never met any (for example) white supremacists in their lives may go online for the first time and see an active discussion among white supremacists taking place, and this causes cognitive dissonance: "I've never met a single white supremacist in my life, yet here's dozens of them, virtually congregating and discussing their racist viewpoints! What the hell is happening? Is the Internet full of racists?" Humans are terrible at comprehending numbers on the scale of "the number of Internet-connected users in the world," so it's hard to understand "the proportion of vocal white supremacists online compared to the total number of people using the Internet in the world is just about as small as you previously thought it was" when they're given the same equal voice as everyone else. There's no easy solution to this. Unless a massive societal shift in understanding how the Internet works and fits into modern human society happens, "safe" yet censored platforms like Twitter will always be more popular with normal users compared to "true free speech" havens like Gab, and generally-offensive extremist viewpoints will congregate on services like the latter after being kicked off of services like the former, making services like the latter a hard sell to people who don't hold extremist viewpoints themselves, in spite of the promise of unrestricted free speech. It's been wild seeing the increase of people openly advocating against unfiltered free speech on the Internet as the Internet has gotten popular with the rise of smartphones, to the point where some people seem to consider "free speech" a "talking point" or "dogwhistle" of "the other side." Until the singularity happens and we become one global consciousness and ascend to a higher plane of being, we're never going to have uniform beliefs as individual members of our species, and people with offensively extremist views will always exist. Silencing their views on a given platform out of a sense of righteousness and justice may feel good but solves nothing. You cannot change peoples' minds or eliminate ideas by making them illegal or against platform policy to express. Once you acknowledge and internalize this, browsing the Internet and occasionally coming across extremist opinions becomes a lot easier to grapple with.
• throwawaysea 8y ago
  This is a good article that explores many of the angles involved. Deplatforming is a dangerous step for a free society, especially when so much power is accumulated in a few platforms* The big risk is this: when only a few entities funnel so much societal discourse or control our communication infrastructure or process payments, those entities making arbitrary decisions about who they serve has similar impacts and risks to the government imposing similar restrictions through the law. These companies should not act as a moral police and should not impose their own personal governance above what is minimally required by the law. Nor should they rely on the judgment of an angry mob to make decisions. Case and point, take a look at Medium blocking Gab, as referenced in this article. Gab's _statement about the shooting_ is being blocked? That is ridiculous, and unacceptable. And we should not patronize such businesses. * Spare me the tired arguments that these private companies have a right to not serve customers at will. That seems like self-serving cherry-picking, when in other situations the same folks would be against granting freedom of association.
  • patrickmay 8y ago
    > Spare me the tired arguments that these private companies have a right to not serve customers at will. That seems like self-serving cherry-picking, when in other situations the same folks would be against granting freedom of association. Some people's hypocrisy doesn't undermine the core principle of freedom of association. The more abusive the big players become, the more incentive there is for people to use alternatives. Getting the government involved will slow that process and, inevitably, have unforeseen negative consequences. > And we should not patronize such businesses. I agree, and that is the best solution.
    • stcredzero 8y ago
      > Spare me the tired arguments that these private companies have a right to not serve customers at will. Some people's hypocrisy doesn't undermine the core principle of freedom of association. There is a lawsuit where a mining company owned an entire town, including the roads. A Jehova's witness won a lawsuit allowing them to distribute pamphlets there on the basis of free speech. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBozijndSLc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBozijndSLc In any case, freedom of association shouldn't apply to online platforms. The average person isn't possessed by the illusion that any YouTuber's opinion is necessarily ratified by YouTube. If you don't want to hear someone's opinion nor associate with them, then you unfriend/block/unsubscribe. On the other hand, freedom of speech is very relevant from a practical standpoint.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• tptacek 8y ago
  It's probably unrealistic to expect us to stop seeing threads about this (Gab's #1 objective at this point will be to make more noise and surely something "newsworthy" will happen with them sometime soonish). But it's worth noting that we've had several recent discussions about Gab stemming from the events that occurred after the mass shooting. Here, Jeftovic is arguing from faulty premises. Correcting those premises might not change the conclusions he draws, but they're worth fixing anyways. While it's true that the worst speech on Gab.ai doesn't come from the operators of the site themselves, it's not true that the site operators have clean hands. Gab's (verified) Twitter account has repeatedly been screenshot posting anti-Semitic comments, and retweeting white supremacist posts from others (for instance: they pointedly RT'd a white supremacist mocking Ken White, of Popehat fame, for being the adoptive father of Asian children). Gab itself openly embraces white nationalism. Gab is white supremacist Twitter (you might have called it "white nationalist Twitter" before whatever weird Brazilian politics thing conspired to begin its transformation into Fascist Orkut, which is where it's heading now). That doesn't mean you have to agree it should be taken off the Internet by GoDaddy; you can form coherent arguments in either direction. But the idea that it's being taken offline solely because of the actions of its users is false. It has the users it has because those are the users its operators begged to get.
  • StuntPope 8y ago
    Jeftovic here. I actually wasn't aware of many things you cite above, having cursorily examined, then abandoned Gab I never followed their twitter feed, etc. Without having seen any of that myself, I wrote the article extending a certain benefit of the doubt, trying to look at it from a neutral (ostensibly) vendor vantagepoint.
    • tptacek 8y ago
      I'm certainly not blaming you for not being up-to-date on the antics of the Gab team! That's not a reasonable ask of anybody. It's also trickier to bring yourself up-to-date, because Gab deleted a bunch of their worst tweets after the shooting and their subsequent media martyrdom. They don't even have the courage of their own convictions. But there are screenshots of these tweets (all of which depict tweets I saw on Twitter myself), and you can find them on HN in the search bar (or save yourself some time and just take my word for it). And again: I'm not telling you that the fact that Gab itself is openly white supremacist means you have to support their loss of access to FRAND terms for the Internet's most popular providers. I do, but I understand that reasonable people disagree on this.
• happilycentrist 8y ago
  In my other writings, I've touched on how these tech companies compromise their stability and reliability when they engage in witch-burning campaigns. For example - once upon a time, I could trust the google search engine, g-mail and the chrome browser. I recommended them to other people, and utilized them myself. But now, I can't in good faith steer folks to any google property, because they run the risk of losing access to their data. Today it's fashionable to cut off GAB, what will the moral panic of tomorrow be? Another example - I used Pay-pal weekly to make purchases and send money to people and causes I supported. But after PayPal began denying service based on what keeps the outrage mob mollified, I've closed my account and have been helping website operating on the dissident right to transition away from a system that might deny them service on a fit of whimsy. Paypal, like so many other platforms, has become too unreliable to be a single point of failure. All of these institutions were, until the last few years, treated like utilities - which bolstered their reputation for reliability. But now, so many of these giant Near-Monopolies have decided to become overtly political, denying their services without any manner of due process or even a reasonable amount of notice to the people being cast off. This damages the brand reliability, and where once customers could rely on their Registrar, Host, or Payment Processor, they now must consider it imperative to have redundant systems - lest they risk having their service cut because they suddenly find themselves on the bad side of "the fashionable opinion" of the hour. (Goal-posts that move by the hour, and today's cleric of the faith can easily find themselves tomorrow heretic). A high-trust business environment is required to maintain the sorts of business relationships a content creator enters into with a platform/host/registrar. The fact is, as it stands now, no content creator, business or group can trust these tech-corporations to maintain a stable relationship - or even adhere to a basic contract - in good faith. Once a company - like PayPal for instance - has proven itself unreliable, it has already done half the work of replacing itself.
• djsumdog 8y ago
  What's interested about Gab is that it wasn't content hosting on another platform (Facebook/Twitter). It was their own platform, that people wrote and built. What if you run a Plemore/Mastodon server that has users with controversial content? Is it okay for Vultr or DigitalOcean or Amazon to just yank your account? Sure you can claim capitalism and find another provider, but we've seen here that finding another provider is hard and migration is expensive! I wrote about this almost a year ago when it happened to The Daily Stormer and I still think it's more relevant today: https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-censorship/ https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-... Shutting down platforms just drives people to more extreme platforms. You can't just yell "decentralization" because then you could have providers pulling individual instances of federated ActivityPub/OStatus based software. At some point we're going to need to address free speech online, because it's not like the real world. You can't just go to another news stand or buy your own printer. There are a limited of people that can host general purpose VMs at a reasonable price with a decent provisioning API. The domain issue is the most troubling. I don't see any reason a registrar should be allowed to pull domain services from people. Right now it's just content some people don't like, but what if a business starts pulling domain registrar service for business they just don't like, and claim it has to do with hate?
  • wuliwong 8y ago
    I agree that there is a difference between deplatforming gab and someone like Alex Jones. I don't think that any solution is going to be a permanent one, whether it is a law or a technology. I tend to look towards technological advancement to first outpace laws and then the govts slowly catch up. I do think that decentralized storage solutions behind decentralized applications are pretty interesting. There is even something called IPFS which is being pitched as a possible challenger to HTTP. In some of the distributed solutions, the computers holding the data only ever see it encrypted, so the possibility of censorship on that end is mitigated at least for a while. I'm not expert on the topic but I've recently found it very exciting and has given me a glimmer of hope.
• happilycentrist 8y ago
  Build their own platforms they shrieked... So they did. Then the people screaming cut their web-hosting, payment processors and tried to steal their domain name. This has nothing to do with freedom of association, and is instead the blatant and open suppression of dissident speech. How very... liberal...
  • nine_k 8y ago
    Suppression of anything that does not fit the Overton window is totally expected. No surprise here. This is why technology should be available to allow certain amount of dissent not be completely squashed. Cultural norms will always call for elimination of certain thoughts completely.
• DoreenMichele 8y ago
  Gab illustrates a “catch-22” around setting out to be specifically a “free speech platform”. You initially appeal to the most fringe elements of public discourse. Your first wave of users are going to be people for whom this has been a problem, and if you’re an absolutist and let them on then suddenly that’s your base. For me, this is one of the more profound take-aways from the article. This piece is very thought provoking.
  • stcredzero 8y ago
    The forums for Free Speech in the 60's also came with a lot of what was thought of as perverted toxic nonsense. Some of that is still thought of as unacceptable today.
    • DoreenMichele 8y ago
      There are some very real problems where oppressed people of various sorts have a real need to be able to "speak the unspeakable" in order to sort their own problems. New ideas are also inevitable heretical. Sorting the wheat from the chaff is a challenge. Trying to not throw the baby out with the bathwater is a challenge.
      • stcredzero 8y ago
        oppressed people of various sorts have a real need to be able to "speak the unspeakable" There's a difference between letting people express themselves and ratifying hate to fuel more outrage. Doing that is throwing the justice baby out with the bathwater -- also because it's more viral and you make more money and get more political power that way.
        • DoreenMichele 8y ago
          I'm aware. I also know that if you are the oppressed person, it can be hard to sort such things out. It can be hard to figure what is legitimate and righteous anger that is nonetheless Verboten to express and what is merely outrage fuel. It can be hard to find your own voice. It is necessary to have a little latitude when trying to do so. It gets vastly more complicated when you are trying to do that in some kind of group setting. It easily goes bad places.
• wuliwong 8y ago
  The conclusion of the article where it speaks about the consequences of de-platforming people leading to 'counter measures' is what I'm thinking will happen. In my opinion, the difference between government censorship and godaddy censorship is that I can just stop using godaddy. Then I can either close my business, use a different service, or try to help build something new to circumvent godaddy. I've been back and forth on distributed storage and blockchain in my mind but my current thinking is that the recent de-platforming is going to hasten the development of alternate solutions that are more robust with regards to censorship. I'm not even considering about whether it is right or wrong, I just think that's going to happen.
• throwawaysea 8y ago
  Why is this article being flagged? From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. This story is not spam, and it is not off-topic since it clearly relates to current news in technology.
  • hcg 8y ago
    People flag controversy because they want to avoid flame wars and this place devolving into political discussion constantly.
  • StuntPope 8y ago
    Even your question to ask why this is flagged is downvoted. I've been noticing this for awhile on Hackernews: no dissent from the narrative is permitted. What a joke.
    • happytoexplain 8y ago
      What is "the narrative"?
    • thinkingemote 8y ago
      It's a guideline on this site to not complain or ask about downvoting
• StuntPope 8y ago
  Article flagged. Nice. Love the tolerance and receptiveness to discussion here.
• woodruffw 8y ago
  > Most successful deplatformings are Pyrrhic victories We have reasonable (not perfect!) empirical evidence that this is not the case[1]. It appears that toxic and hateful movements can only resist disapprobation when they develop a sufficiently large, sufficiently public (in the visibility sense, not the publicly-owned sense) channel. Continually disrupting those channels works. [1]: http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf
  • stcredzero 8y ago
    For awhile, the Soviets could "deplatform" people from their lives entirely by threatening them or sending them to the Gulags. They held things together for many decades through that continual disruption. Yes, you can coerce people with your advantages, and it will work for awhile. You can even create enclaves where you can keep undesirables out. But no, that never wins in the end.
    • woodruffw 8y ago
      > For awhile, the Soviets could "deplatform" people from their lives entirely by threatening them or sending them to the Gulags. They held things together for many decades through that continual disruption. I take the scarequotes there to be you admitting that gulags aren't really deplatforming -- it's a government terrorizing its citizens. Nobody in this conversation is interested in building gulags or putting the undesirables in them. > Yes, you can coerce people with your advantages, and it will work for awhile. You can even create enclaves where you can keep undesirables out. But no, that never wins in the end. I don't understand this reasoning. I've presented some research indicating that banning hateful online communities actually does have some kind of positive effect, and your response it that it "never wins in the end"? What is the "end" here? Do we have any sort of evidence or overarching political theory that suggests that it doesn't win in the end? Most of us are on board, intuitively at least, with the notion that you can't have both a dictator and be a democratic republic. Why are we so hesitant to accept that other entities fundamentally conflict with the notion of liberal democracy?
• asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
  > Most successful deplatformings are Pyrrhic victories Big fat citation needed on this. You speculate as to how they may become pyrrhic victories, but it's far from concluded that this will be the case. Previous deplatformings (Milo, Alex Jones) haven't produced any visible negative consequences for the platforms. There's little reason to think this will either. Surprisingly few people care if a den of hate speech has trouble finding a DNS registrar. Especially, surprisingly few important DNS registrar customers care.
  • stcredzero 8y ago
    Likewise, almost no one cares what a Jehovah's witness has to say. The US government coming in and telling a private entity, no you must tolerate free speech on your property is historical fact and precedent. There is a lawsuit where a company owned this mining company town, including all of its roads and sidewalks. A Jehovah's witness won a lawsuit on the basis of the First Amendment, enabling her to walk about that town and distribute her pamphlets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBozijndSLc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBozijndSLc Originally, it was once widely recognized by US jurisprudence, though property rights and freedom of association are important, the First Amendment was even more important and trumps property rights. Surprisingly few people care if a den of hate speech has trouble finding a DNS registrar. Surprisingly few people cared when the US government carted off my bandmate's parents to concentration camps. That's a very poor metric to apply to a principle of rights and justice.
    • asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
      Ain't gonna happen in this case, for two reasons: 1. Jehovah's witnesses tend not to shoot up synagogues, whereas an otherwise typical member of Gab did. 2. Antisemitism isn't a protected class. I can see from your comments that you are one of those, "I'd defend to the death your right to say it," people. I must admit, I would not defend to the death someone's right to spew hate toward Jews. That's not my hill to die on. I rather feel . . . the opposite. I'm glad that Gab got kicked off GoDaddy, and if I had my way, they'd be relegated to the dark corners of Tor.
• evrydayhustling 8y ago
  Reading this article is like watching someone beat the ocean with a stick. What would it look like for an "anti-deplatforming" initiative to succeed? All ideas have equal access to all platforms? Just the big ones? The objective is so poorly formed, it's not even wrong. A platform's identity and ability to attract an audience are determined by the activities they accept / cultivate, not vice versa. Infowars wanted to be on Facebook because it made it easier to sell your grandparents vitamin supplements, but Facebook felt that leaving them on make it a place families (and their grandparents) won't visit. Gab would like to use Stripe or Paypal because they are trusted payment providers, but those networks felt they'd stop being trusted payment providers if they let Gab stay on. And there's plenty of reason to think they're right: super-permissive platforms exist and work (4chan et al.), they just don't attract the same broad audience. When people complain about being deplatformed, they're just saying "the platforms that accept me aren't popular enough". I'm glad our internet is enough of a distributed commons that many platforms are broadly accessible -- but nobody owes you an audience at the most popular ones.
  • tptacek 8y ago
    When people complain about being deplatformed, they're just saying "the platforms that accept me aren't popular enough". This is perfect.
    • stcredzero 8y ago
      No, it's crazy. In that case, ideas aren't being judged as ideas. It's the same sort of "technically not" dishonesty that Noam Chomsky called out in Manufacturing Consent. Western media did indeed cover events not favorable to the US/Nato side. But it was covered in back pages, in the plainest language. Technically, it's not censorship in the same way as Pravda airbrushed people out of photos was censorship. However, it had pretty much the same effect. I thought the media distortion was bad in the 80's/90's. Now I realize I didn't realize how much worse it could get.
      • ngcazz 8y ago
        I’m sure Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines only wanted their ideas to be seen as ideas, just like all others!
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• mattsfrey 8y ago
  It seems like many people are caught up in the details here and missing the wider principles.. What kind of internet do you want? I grew up with an internet that was entirely open and free, there have always been the hate dens and their garbage. I view domain services as essentially infrastructure, not arbitrators of content. If sites/services are being shut down at the infrastructure level, we've entered a new age of the internet and it is terribly frightening.
  • tptacek 8y ago
    Stormfront is still up and running. They had a hard time getting access to the same QOS and pricing as do sites that companies actively want to host, but at some point we're complaining that white nationalists don't get FRAND terms, and it's a little hard to get worked up about that. Gab ran Twitter for White Nationalists off Digital Ocean, Azure, and who knows where else. Gab's users have a disconcerting tendency to blow up synagogues. Gab itself has a disconcerting tendency to recruit people who cheerlead anti-Semitism. Are we surprised they aren't getting the $15,000 startup promo credit from AWS?
    • mattsfrey 8y ago
      Again, details.. What if every single domain company decides to blackball them? What do they do then? Nothing, they are off the internet.
      • wpietri 8y ago
        I guess they'll have to return to sharing their desire to kill black people the old fashioned way, in person. Something you aren't grappling with here is the way the Internet has enabled previously-scattered terrible people to connect and self-radicalize. David Neiwart, who tracked various "patriot", white supremacist, and other fringe groups since the 90s, wrote a very readable book about how things have changed since then: https://www.amazon.com/Alt-America-Rise-Radical-Right-Trump/dp/1786634236 https://www.amazon.com/Alt-America-Rise-Radical-Right-Trump/... I definitely appreciate the early ethos of the Internet. It's a good founding myth, and I would like to work to keep things open by default. But if the worse 0.1% of humankind ends up not being able to host anything because otherwise they will work together to murder people, I am 100% ok with bending my "anything goes" bias a bit.
• InclinedPlane 8y ago
  Read this instead: https://datasociety.net/output/oxygen-of-amplification/ https://datasociety.net/output/oxygen-of-amplification/
• Krasnol 8y ago
  > The next challenger to Twitter will not be another centralized platform like Gab. It will be decentralized – perhaps a federation like Mastodon, where each node runs its own CoC and community standards – similar to IRC days. You might want to ask Wil Wheaton what he thinks about Mastodon...
  • mothsonasloth 8y ago
    Mastodon is not granular enough, we need a system were every device is a server of content.
  • mmirate 8y ago
    Why is some random actor's opinion unusually important, let alone on a technical topic such as this?
    • Krasnol 8y ago
      Because what happened to him is relevant to the topic.
• jstanley 8y ago
  > Does this mean that if Zerohedge, or Black Lives Matter, two of our clients from opposite ends of the political spectrum, post something, or even if one of their users posts something, that is beyond the pale, then we have to worry about having our finances cut off? > I know as “the DNS guys” we have a near pathological aversion to single-points-of-failure, but it’s not a stretch to come to the conclusion for any business that it’s not an acceptable risk to have that possibility just looming there and to do nothing about it. > That means we will now be looking for backup payment processors. FWIW, this is exactly what Bitcoin does well: uncensorable payments with no single points of failure. And, by way of anecdata, I currently pay for domain names in Bitcoin already (from gandi). People buying domain names are probably one of the best demographics to have if you want to take Bitcoin as they are likely to be technically savvy.
• wisty 8y ago
  While Americans seem obsessed with defining "free speech" as being exactly the same thing as the 1st Amendment, it might help to ask exactly why the 1st Amendment is a good idea. JS Mill argued that censorship is wrong on a rights basis, that it leads to bad ideas being unchallenged, and it leads to people not being able to understand the reason why ideas are rejected. If censorship by a government is harmful, how is deplatforming by a near-monopoly different? I suspect some left-wingers argue this in a hypocritical way, because they think it will "trigger the conservatives" to force them to attack the actions of private companies, but this is hardly a good argument.
  • YouAreGreat 8y ago
    > "trigger the conservatives" to force them to attack the actions of private companies Conservatives will come to understand that big capital is not a conservative.
    • wisty 8y ago
      I'm not personally a conservative, but I'm pretty sure conservatives are not all hardcore libertarians or objectivists. Some of the intellectual brain-trust of conservative thought is libertarian or objectivist, but a lot of the broader conservative movement is not.
• justaaron 8y ago
  Despite all the handwringing here, there's no concrete proposal for what to do with rent-seeking attention-seeking deliberatvely difficult individuals whom one has no obligation to entertain the ideas of. If I were NYU, I would simply never book Milo Whatever-his-name-is. Having to deplatform him indicates that someone wanted to platform him in the first place. Kick his useless ass to the curb/kerb, as the case may be.
• tomohawk 8y ago
  A private company has quite a bit of latitude, until it becomes a monopoly (or part of an oligopoly). Monopolists always hide behind the "but, we're a private company" defense. Who wouldn't? Settled law and legal tradition holds that we tolerate a monopoly only when they are regulated and conduct themselves in a manner that is fair to all. It is unacceptable for monopolists to infringe on peoples constitutionally protected rights. When a monopolist offers a service, they have to provide it to everyone. We can't have electric monopolists cutting power to people because they voted for the "wrong" party. We can't have banks and payment processors making it practically impossible for people to conduct commerce. Going down that path leads us to where China already is. Calling someone on the phone leads to a message about how the person is socially unacceptable and that proceeding with the call may cause you to be similarly blacklisted. Or, you just get phone access cut off.
• superkuh 8y ago
  As long as the ISP stays as a dumb pipe there will always be alternatives. Self hosting is the best hosting and these days ISP connections are definitely fast enough to host anyones' small personal site up to a medium size forum. Hopefully as this wave of authoritarian practices sweeps the globe and the 'net people will simply adopt federated services like IRC or notabug for communication and host it among themselves.
• CM30 8y ago
  I've said it before, and I'll say it again; online platforms needed to be treated like their offline equivalents. Why can an ISP not censor traffic but a web host can? Why can the utility company or a credit card processor not 'shut down' customers they disagree with while the likes of Cloudflare or PayPal or Stripe can? There's no logic behind this. No, you can't just say 'offline stuff has a monopoly', because it doesn't. It might in some parts of the US (where choice in ISPs is limited), but it certainly doesn't in much of Europe, other parts of the US or other countries around the world. You've got multiple choices for banks and building societies, multiple choices for electric companies and multiple choices for ISPs, yet we're sane and don't let them discriminate by political views at will. It's time similar standards were set up for online services too. If you market yourself as a platform or network or service that should be morally neutral, then you should be obligated to act that way, just like your offline equivalents generally do. There should always be a way to host a platform for your views, no matter how many people hate them and you in the process. Google and Apple should also be looked into in regards to their app stores too. They're defacto monopolies on their platforms (unless you jailbreak them), and their standards for what's 'acceptable' are clearly broken and biased to all hell. Apparently something like Gab isn't allowed, but dozens of copyright/trademark/whatever infringing ripoffs are? It's fine for apps to ripoff consumers and target kids with exploitative in app purchases but not provide a platform for 'questionable' views? Yeah, that doesn't add up much, and it's clear they're falling short as both a platform and a publisher. Finally, something should definitely be done about the whole 'contact their employer and try and get them fired' crap. I'm not really sure what, but there should be a legal way to stop people trying to screw over people's livelihoods based on online disagreements. Maybe an actual ban on contacting someone's employer/company/coworkers unless it's about illegal activity? I don't know, anything I can think of seems like it'd hurt freedom of speech more in the attempt to save it. But something does need to change, before the laws basically become ineffective and trial by media/mob becomes the judge, jury and executioner.
  • TheAceOfHearts 8y ago
    Unfortunately, credit card processors can and do deny services to people with which they disagree. To give one example: you can't use any mainstream payment processors for anything related to pornography. Also, on Android you can run alternative app stores without having to "jailbreak" the phone. One example of this is f-droid [0]. You just need to change a single configuration option to allow installing APKs from third-party sources. Fortnite is an example of a popular Android game which you have to download and install outside of the Play Store, presumably because they don't want to pay for the large cut that Google normally takes. I think domain name registrars should probably be treated like utilities, although I'd have to think it through very carefully to consider any consequences. I'm generally in agreement that platforms should be neutral, otherwise they should be treated as publishers and be forced to deal with the consequences. It sets a poor precedent when rules are not enforced evenly. [0] https://f-droid.org/ https://f-droid.org/
• SideburnsOfDoom 8y ago
  > We run the risk that the act of deplatforming can become as extreme as the hate speech it seeks to banish. So, they're saying "I won't help your speech reach millions" runs the risk of being as bad as encouraging the idea that "all $ethnics must die" - speech which as very real and deadly consequences. I don't know where to even with that. Someone has not though it through at all. Is the rest worth reading?
• cauwelaert 8y ago
  People should have a chance to speak their mind but in an ideal world decency would prohibit some things from being said. It's dangerous when certain platforms who coordinate with government agencies decide what is acceptable and what is not. I'm not ready for a ministry of truth like snoopes.