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> Stand on the street corner all you like, at least your terrible ideas will be limited by the physical world. The Internet, though, with its inherent ability t

> Stand on the street corner all you like, at least your terrible ideas will be limited by the physical world. The Internet, though, with its inherent ability to broadcast and congregate globally, is a fundamentally more dangerous medium. The notion behind this seems to be: "We must protect the idiots of the world from terrible ideas." Why does this rub me the wrong way so much? I guess it's such a depressing view of our fellow humans?

bdhess 7y ago
It’s not implying that many or most people are idiots or untrustworthy. But that there are extreme outliers at the fringes. Before the internet, they’d mostly be unable to find each other. With the internet, they can build self-reinforcing “communities” on the basis of hate, intolerance, or really anything. If they just stayed in that bubble it’d be fine, but unfortunately sometimes they bring machine guns to department stores.
- disgruntledphd2 7y ago
  But surely this is the price we pay for the connecting abilities of the Internet? I'm not sure we can start censoring and still retain all the benefits. Regardless of how much I hate 8chan, I'm still pretty worried about the precendent these kinds of actions set.
- snikeris 7y ago
  > Before the internet, they’d mostly be unable to find each other. With the internet, they can build self-reinforcing “communities” on the basis of hate, intolerance, or really anything. If they just stayed in that bubble it’d be fine, but unfortunately sometimes they bring machine guns to department stores. I don't think the internet is fundamentally different here. You could have made the same argument when the printing press came out.
  - islon 7y ago
    The printing press is heavily moderated.
    - mrkstu 7y ago
      Where and how exactly is traditional printing regulated? I can buy a high end typesetting laser printer and print anything I want on it- if it isn't child porn/top secret/libelous I can print anything I want that I've originated. Can I steal other's content and sell it, no, but I would call existing regulations almost non-existent for original content.
      - stcredzero 7y ago
        Where and how exactly is traditional printing regulated? Publishers. There are documented cases of writers and genres being blacklisted and suppressed. (Though in fairness, you might find more than a few of them unsavory.) I can buy a high end typesetting laser printer and print anything I want on it- if it isn't child porn/top secret/libelous I can print anything I want that I've originated. Sure, but good luck with the promotion and distribution.
        mrkstu 7y ago
        Neither of which are regulation/moderated- just expensive or needing domain expertise and manpower. It may be 'moderated' in the sense of an optical cable vs a copper one- by its nature there is impedance in the copper one limiting its potential carrying capacity. In that sense the internet vs traditional publishing have a different ability to scale. But Hitler's rise didn't need the internet- Mein Kampf found fertile soil due to economic depression and already extant racist attitudes latent in the populace. China finds ideas contained in books by Locke/Milton/Paine or the Magna Carta to be extremely dangerous- and that they are and I'm sure they're be ingested wholesale in Hong Kong right now, where the Great Firewall isn't in full effect. We need to counter evil thought with the only available agent that will actually work- better argued thought that seizes on vigorous ideas that instill a deep abiding respect for their fellow men/women and the potential of civil society to overcome the divisions we've placed among ourselves.
  - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    When a problem gets orders of magnitude bigger, it can be considered a fundamentally different thing. Requiring different solutions.
    - the_snooze 7y ago
      I feel this is something that technically-inclined people tend to downplay too easily. Scale matters. Scaling something up changes its very nature and implications. Just because we can enjoy party poppers doesn't mean we're cool with flashbangs exploding near us.
- mrec 7y ago
  Counterpoint: BoingBoing recently reported on French politicians trying to get "stigmatizing agricultural activities" covered by their proposed hate speech laws. As ever, if it can be abused, it will be abused. https://boingboing.net/2019/07/10/hateful-content.html https://boingboing.net/2019/07/10/hateful-content.html
  - nickloewen 7y ago
    Thanks for the reference. But as far as I can tell, this didn’t pass. And I disagree with your conclusion—showing that people may seek to abuse anti hate speech legislation isn’t sufficient to prove, I don’t think, that the legislation will be abused. Edit: removed comments on US “ag gag” laws cited in the linked article, after I read a little more and learned that they may not be so similar as was implied in this piece.
    - frereubu 7y ago
      This kind of context is incredible important. Boris Johnson spent a decade in Brussels writing up as many stupid suggestions from fringe EU politicians as he could, all of which failed if they got anywhere near a vote (which most didn't), and managed to create the impression that most EU laws were like this. It even got the point where in the recent Conservative leadership election he told a bare-faced lie about EU regulation (to do with smoked fish of all things) and got away with it. Just because someone suggests something doesn't mean 99% of their colleagues don't just roll their eyes and say "anyway, as we were saying..."
      - mindslight 7y ago
        ... eventually Boris Johnson gave up and went home, never to be heard from again. Neither viewpoint absolutely is true, but "As ever, if it can be abused, it will be abused" is the better heuristic. The people pushing the abusive laws are doing so as their day jobs, while their victims necessarily have other livelihoods that constrain their efforts. They don't simply propose the topic once, see that it has no support, and go home. Whomever they're working for has longstanding goals, and each win they get is a step normalizing a bit more of their desired regime. This is why even when the Internet community strongly rebukes new Internet censorship laws (SOPA being a recent example), the same bullshit just comes back again - maybe tweaked to be a little less aggressive, maybe just using a better outrage-event as justifications. And every time it passes, it's a tooth in the ratchet - heads they win, tails we play again. Capitulating a round just accelerates the process.
- buildzr 7y ago
  Considering now that many 8chan users have moved to ZeroNet and Tor based sites, what would shuttering such things mean? I worry that it sets an extremely dangerous precedent, I don't want a Chinese-style great firewall, blocking all peer to peer and anonymization services just to keep out some channers, the vast majority of whom are relatively harmless. I think attacking this from the access to guns angle seems far preferable than access to information.
  - arkh 7y ago
    > I don't want a Chinese-style great firewall But the person you're responding to does. They may not admit it to themselves but that's what they want. When I see this kind of discussion and how "Internet helps terrorists" I imagine them in a military uniform doing the same speech about the Résistance.
    - laughinghan 7y ago
      China's Great Firewall is run by the state. By law you're not supposed to circumvent it. There is no law that says you have to use Cloudflare and if they ban you, you're not allowed to be on the Internet. It just costs you time and effort, possibly money, hopefully reach. What leads you to believe that the person they're responding to doesn't simply wish more private entities would exercise their legal right to listen to their conscience on who is too hateful to do business with? That's not censorship of important information, that's the free market of ideas at work. The Stratechery article explicitly discusses this phenomenon and endorses it. What leads you to believe that the person they're responding to disagrees with the article on this point?
- swebs 7y ago
  There are so many counterpoints to that statement that it's ridiculous. The American revolution, the Russian revolution, the Ides of March, every single coup throughout human history, every single cult, religion, or terrorist organization throughout human history. The only thing the internet changed is the fact that now the NSA has the entire log of all their conversations.
  - pmart123 7y ago
    This is an important consideration that often gets missed in these discussions in my opinion. The methods and means to organize a group of people against oppression often are the same ones to rally a group of people around hatred and violence.
    - stcredzero 7y ago
      As I note above, the entire difference, is whether or not the group gets past the cycle of outrage amplification and onto higher principles, or whether it merely pays lip service to principles, and it's actually outrage that's the "tail wagging the dog." It's entirely analogous to the religion <--> cult spectrum. The former is found beneficial by many and has much to do with community. The latter is really about exploitation and control. In 2019, we need to be skeptical of groups that use outrage to spread, much as we're skeptical of cults. (And this, despite how flowery or "good" their language sounds.)
- stcredzero 7y ago
  With the internet, they can build self-reinforcing “communities” on the basis of hate, intolerance, or really anything. As you say, such "communities" existed before the Internet. It's just that now, they can better organize to affect the real world. I think Forrest Gump's observation applies here. Even 8chan had some sort of ideology justifying what they said and did. Even the worst scoundrels of history used words like "love" and justice." (And yes, Godwin's Law comes into play if we go down that rabbit hole! So let's not.) If we are to gauge how toxic a group is, I think we need to go to first principles and measure how driven by viral outrage an online group is. It's natural for people to come together because they are outraged. However, when continuing the cycle of outrage, driving more attention, driving group membership, driving more outrage continues for its own sake, there is a problem. It shouldn't be outrage and attention driving a group. It should be higher principles. Unfortunately, outrage is a fundamental fuel of virality in 2019. Today, we need to be skeptical of actors who lean too heavily on the cycle of outrage, whether they're openly reprehensible, or if they merely dress their movement in high language. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc In 2019, the world has long known to be skeptical of religions gone wrong, which we call cults. We need to develop the same kind of skepticism to groups actually ruled by outrage, not principle.
- frereubu 7y ago
  I used to know the person who ran the Teens website on the BBC around 15 years ago. She was at a conference about protecting children online and spoke to someone from the section of the police who dealt with tracking and apprehending paedophiles who met online. Even back then he had seen online meeting points for paedophiles where the fact that they could speak to each other openly about what they wanted to do normalised what they were talking about, and that had lead to real-world consequences. I think about this often when reflecting on how this kind of depersonalised (in the sense of not being present) hate speech seems to be growing and what it might lead to.
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  I’m seeing this sort of implicit dialogue in all of this that goes like: “How much moderation/censorship would have been required to have prevented the El Paso shooter? However much that is, is how much we need”. This line of reasoning ought to scare the hell out of people, since we don’t actually have the slightest clue what actually set him off (he was on 8chan?) Even if I could bring myself to believe the underlying premise: that, if not for 8chan, this guy would have gone on to be an ordinary, law-abiding, productive member of society, but that 8chan itself brainwashed him into becoming a mass murderer, I would _still_ be opposed to shutting it down (and then shutting down the next thing that replaces it, and the next thing that replaces that…) because we’re losing everything else that goes along with it.
  - frereubu 7y ago
    I sort of see where you're coming from, but surely there are a plethora of other places with light moderation and far less hate speech where people could go to discuss things? You seem to be making a slippery slope argument, but I don't really see the start of the slope. I'd also be interested to know what you think of this quote from the Cloudflare CEO: 'If this were a normal circumstance we would say "Yes, it’s really horrendous content, but we’re not in a position to decide what content is bad or not." But in this case, we saw repeated consistent harm where you had three mass shootings that were directly inspired by and gave credit to this platform. You saw the platform not act on any of that and in fact promote it internally.'
    - buildzr 7y ago
      > You seem to be making a slippery slope argument, but I don't really see the start of the slope. Okay, so you ban 8chan. Now they move to another chan... there's about 5 different "bunkers" running the same or similar software to what powered 8chan and with many of the same users that various boards have moved to right now. Some of the larger of those bunker chans are actually on distributed networks. So now what? You have to ban distributed networks? You shrug your shoulders and say "oh well, we tried"? This is where the slope comes in. There's no good ending to it. Worse, as we've seen with 8chan, the farther you push people from the mainstream, the more extreme they seem to become.
swebs 7y ago
>Why does this rub me the wrong way so much? Because you at least subconsciously understand the real intent behind the message. "We must stamp out wrongthink by eroding your rights"
- buildzr 7y ago
  It seems a bit of an oversimplification, but it is the impression I get. Many of the decisions we must make are between those of freedom and security. The security argument is easy, especially after a tragedy, but the slow erosion of rights is only apparent after the fact. I worry that fear will result in rash decisions, creating widespread censorship abilities and banning anonymizing services that can be used to bypass them.
abrahamepton 7y ago
No, the notion is more like "the Internet enables a fundamentally different kind of communication than we've grown up with, and we should rethink our assumptions accordingly." It's just not like other kinds of human communication that we've had for our entire history as a species. Human psychological evolution is thousands of years behind the technical capabilities we've developed in the last few decades. A bit of thoughtfulness in the governance of those capabilities isn't too much to ask.
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  Even if I agreed with your premise that humans can’t be trusted to talk to one another, what makes you think that those same humans can then somehow be trusted to determine when other humans can safely talk to one another?
  - abrahamepton 7y ago
    The premise is not, even remotely, "humans can't be trusted to talk to one another" but rather, "humans have spent our entire existence as a species talking to each other in a different way than we have begun to in the last two decades." The alternative to trusting humans is not to just leave ourselves open to the vagaries of the winds, or whatever, but to allow malicious actors to take advantage of an unregulated medium to pursue their own interests. Not sure why anyone should think that's a better outcome.
    - antepodius 7y ago
      If the alternative requires the construction of a colossal bureaucracy that empowers bad actors in a way that causes even more harm.
commandlinefan 7y ago
> Why does this rub me the wrong way I’m old enough to remember when Judas Priest (the 80’s rock band) was accused of hiding subliminal messages in their songs convincing their listeners to commit suicide, after a kid did so while happening to be listening to Judas Priest. It seems absolutely ridiculous in hindsight, but people believed it, and it was taken completely seriously at the time: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/judas-priests-subliminal-message-trial-rob-halford-looks-back-57552/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/judas-prie.... The logic here is essentially the same: some internet message boards are “egging somebody on” to do something that they would not otherwise have done, which results in death, so the internet message boards themselves are to blame, and must be censored.
- fredley 7y ago
  Unlike the supposed subliminal messages, the egging on is literally on display, in plain English text.
  - commandlinefan 7y ago
    Not really, though. If somebody says "immigration is a danger to our country", that could just as easily mean "vote republican" as it could mean "shoot some random people".
    - atoav 7y ago
      This is based on the assumption that message boards are a one-to-many media like books, radio, movies, computer games, when in fact they are a many-to-many media, which under all empirical observation displays inherently different dynamics than traditional passive consumer media. There is a reason we dedicate academic branches to these phenomena — they are not nearly as straight forward as argued in this thread.
- the_gastropod 7y ago
  Religious texts, advertisements, and tall tales have been "egging people on" to do things they otherwise would not for thousands of years. Judas Priest and Internet message boards are not new in this respect. There is something unique, I think, about these message boards, though. I think most people would agree, the overwhelming majority of humans are reasonably decent—they're not going to murder others, are not overtly racist, etc. And throughout human history, these truly 1-in-a-million horrible people have been isolated, unable to find fellow horribles to befriend and egg each other on. The internet has changed that. No matter how unusual or awful your interests may be, it's trivial to find another group of people who share in these thoughts and interests. I don't know what the solution is, or if there even is one, but this does feel like something truly new.
atoav 7y ago
Sex and violence grab more attention than the cleverest intellectual remark and they usually take less space to be encoded. The design of our internet plattforms is such that these attention grabbers are extremely pushed while valuable statements are drowned. We on HN should know more than anybody that certain design decisions will nudge communications in certain directions (compare facebook to twitter to hacker news). They have different goals one could argue and that their design reflects these goals and one wouldn’t be wrong. Only: the goals on the bigger plattforms are more shaped by advertisement and data collection needs than by the valid interests of the users. Similar to the difference between slotmachines and a board game — both let people play, but the former doesn’t has the best for its player in mind. So when you say this is about the nature about our fellow humans, I’d argue that it is about the nature of the digital Zoos we developed for them.
- skybrian 7y ago
  Yes, this is a design issue, but a very basic one. Simple amplifiers are enough to get bad results. Easy resharing is, by itself, enough to make rumors go viral. Chain letters and all the other crap you see on Snopes depend on nothing more sophisticated than email forwarding. Active content filtering (spam filters that work) is necessary, but the platforms that largely replace email don't have them.
chasing 7y ago
It's not the idiots that matter in this case, it's the innocents that the idiots harm because they've been stoked by especially heinous (and factually inaccurate) ideas.
freen 7y ago
Because you are incorrectly interpreting it: it's not we must protect the world from bad ideas, it's that no one has a responsibility to host ideas that they disagree with. I don't have to host Nazi speech and you are free to do so if you choose.

bdhess 7y ago

It’s not implying that many or most people are idiots or untrustworthy. But that there are extreme outliers at the fringes. Before the internet, they’d mostly be unable to find each other. With the internet, they can build self-reinforcing “communities” on the basis of hate, intolerance, or really anything. If they just stayed in that bubble it’d be fine, but unfortunately sometimes they bring machine guns to department stores.

disgruntledphd2 7y ago
But surely this is the price we pay for the connecting abilities of the Internet? I'm not sure we can start censoring and still retain all the benefits. Regardless of how much I hate 8chan, I'm still pretty worried about the precendent these kinds of actions set.
snikeris 7y ago
> Before the internet, they’d mostly be unable to find each other. With the internet, they can build self-reinforcing “communities” on the basis of hate, intolerance, or really anything. If they just stayed in that bubble it’d be fine, but unfortunately sometimes they bring machine guns to department stores. I don't think the internet is fundamentally different here. You could have made the same argument when the printing press came out.
- islon 7y ago
  The printing press is heavily moderated.
  - mrkstu 7y ago
    Where and how exactly is traditional printing regulated? I can buy a high end typesetting laser printer and print anything I want on it- if it isn't child porn/top secret/libelous I can print anything I want that I've originated. Can I steal other's content and sell it, no, but I would call existing regulations almost non-existent for original content.
    - stcredzero 7y ago
      Where and how exactly is traditional printing regulated? Publishers. There are documented cases of writers and genres being blacklisted and suppressed. (Though in fairness, you might find more than a few of them unsavory.) I can buy a high end typesetting laser printer and print anything I want on it- if it isn't child porn/top secret/libelous I can print anything I want that I've originated. Sure, but good luck with the promotion and distribution.
      - mrkstu 7y ago
        Neither of which are regulation/moderated- just expensive or needing domain expertise and manpower. It may be 'moderated' in the sense of an optical cable vs a copper one- by its nature there is impedance in the copper one limiting its potential carrying capacity. In that sense the internet vs traditional publishing have a different ability to scale. But Hitler's rise didn't need the internet- Mein Kampf found fertile soil due to economic depression and already extant racist attitudes latent in the populace. China finds ideas contained in books by Locke/Milton/Paine or the Magna Carta to be extremely dangerous- and that they are and I'm sure they're be ingested wholesale in Hong Kong right now, where the Great Firewall isn't in full effect. We need to counter evil thought with the only available agent that will actually work- better argued thought that seizes on vigorous ideas that instill a deep abiding respect for their fellow men/women and the potential of civil society to overcome the divisions we've placed among ourselves.
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  When a problem gets orders of magnitude bigger, it can be considered a fundamentally different thing. Requiring different solutions.
  - the_snooze 7y ago
    I feel this is something that technically-inclined people tend to downplay too easily. Scale matters. Scaling something up changes its very nature and implications. Just because we can enjoy party poppers doesn't mean we're cool with flashbangs exploding near us.
mrec 7y ago
Counterpoint: BoingBoing recently reported on French politicians trying to get "stigmatizing agricultural activities" covered by their proposed hate speech laws. As ever, if it can be abused, it will be abused. https://boingboing.net/2019/07/10/hateful-content.html https://boingboing.net/2019/07/10/hateful-content.html
- nickloewen 7y ago
  Thanks for the reference. But as far as I can tell, this didn’t pass. And I disagree with your conclusion—showing that people may seek to abuse anti hate speech legislation isn’t sufficient to prove, I don’t think, that the legislation will be abused. Edit: removed comments on US “ag gag” laws cited in the linked article, after I read a little more and learned that they may not be so similar as was implied in this piece.
  - frereubu 7y ago
    This kind of context is incredible important. Boris Johnson spent a decade in Brussels writing up as many stupid suggestions from fringe EU politicians as he could, all of which failed if they got anywhere near a vote (which most didn't), and managed to create the impression that most EU laws were like this. It even got the point where in the recent Conservative leadership election he told a bare-faced lie about EU regulation (to do with smoked fish of all things) and got away with it. Just because someone suggests something doesn't mean 99% of their colleagues don't just roll their eyes and say "anyway, as we were saying..."
    - mindslight 7y ago
      ... eventually Boris Johnson gave up and went home, never to be heard from again. Neither viewpoint absolutely is true, but "As ever, if it can be abused, it will be abused" is the better heuristic. The people pushing the abusive laws are doing so as their day jobs, while their victims necessarily have other livelihoods that constrain their efforts. They don't simply propose the topic once, see that it has no support, and go home. Whomever they're working for has longstanding goals, and each win they get is a step normalizing a bit more of their desired regime. This is why even when the Internet community strongly rebukes new Internet censorship laws (SOPA being a recent example), the same bullshit just comes back again - maybe tweaked to be a little less aggressive, maybe just using a better outrage-event as justifications. And every time it passes, it's a tooth in the ratchet - heads they win, tails we play again. Capitulating a round just accelerates the process.
buildzr 7y ago
Considering now that many 8chan users have moved to ZeroNet and Tor based sites, what would shuttering such things mean? I worry that it sets an extremely dangerous precedent, I don't want a Chinese-style great firewall, blocking all peer to peer and anonymization services just to keep out some channers, the vast majority of whom are relatively harmless. I think attacking this from the access to guns angle seems far preferable than access to information.
- arkh 7y ago
  > I don't want a Chinese-style great firewall But the person you're responding to does. They may not admit it to themselves but that's what they want. When I see this kind of discussion and how "Internet helps terrorists" I imagine them in a military uniform doing the same speech about the Résistance.
  - laughinghan 7y ago
    China's Great Firewall is run by the state. By law you're not supposed to circumvent it. There is no law that says you have to use Cloudflare and if they ban you, you're not allowed to be on the Internet. It just costs you time and effort, possibly money, hopefully reach. What leads you to believe that the person they're responding to doesn't simply wish more private entities would exercise their legal right to listen to their conscience on who is too hateful to do business with? That's not censorship of important information, that's the free market of ideas at work. The Stratechery article explicitly discusses this phenomenon and endorses it. What leads you to believe that the person they're responding to disagrees with the article on this point?
swebs 7y ago
There are so many counterpoints to that statement that it's ridiculous. The American revolution, the Russian revolution, the Ides of March, every single coup throughout human history, every single cult, religion, or terrorist organization throughout human history. The only thing the internet changed is the fact that now the NSA has the entire log of all their conversations.
- pmart123 7y ago
  This is an important consideration that often gets missed in these discussions in my opinion. The methods and means to organize a group of people against oppression often are the same ones to rally a group of people around hatred and violence.
  - stcredzero 7y ago
    As I note above, the entire difference, is whether or not the group gets past the cycle of outrage amplification and onto higher principles, or whether it merely pays lip service to principles, and it's actually outrage that's the "tail wagging the dog." It's entirely analogous to the religion <--> cult spectrum. The former is found beneficial by many and has much to do with community. The latter is really about exploitation and control. In 2019, we need to be skeptical of groups that use outrage to spread, much as we're skeptical of cults. (And this, despite how flowery or "good" their language sounds.)
stcredzero 7y ago
With the internet, they can build self-reinforcing “communities” on the basis of hate, intolerance, or really anything. As you say, such "communities" existed before the Internet. It's just that now, they can better organize to affect the real world. I think Forrest Gump's observation applies here. Even 8chan had some sort of ideology justifying what they said and did. Even the worst scoundrels of history used words like "love" and justice." (And yes, Godwin's Law comes into play if we go down that rabbit hole! So let's not.) If we are to gauge how toxic a group is, I think we need to go to first principles and measure how driven by viral outrage an online group is. It's natural for people to come together because they are outraged. However, when continuing the cycle of outrage, driving more attention, driving group membership, driving more outrage continues for its own sake, there is a problem. It shouldn't be outrage and attention driving a group. It should be higher principles. Unfortunately, outrage is a fundamental fuel of virality in 2019. Today, we need to be skeptical of actors who lean too heavily on the cycle of outrage, whether they're openly reprehensible, or if they merely dress their movement in high language. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc In 2019, the world has long known to be skeptical of religions gone wrong, which we call cults. We need to develop the same kind of skepticism to groups actually ruled by outrage, not principle.
frereubu 7y ago
I used to know the person who ran the Teens website on the BBC around 15 years ago. She was at a conference about protecting children online and spoke to someone from the section of the police who dealt with tracking and apprehending paedophiles who met online. Even back then he had seen online meeting points for paedophiles where the fact that they could speak to each other openly about what they wanted to do normalised what they were talking about, and that had lead to real-world consequences. I think about this often when reflecting on how this kind of depersonalised (in the sense of not being present) hate speech seems to be growing and what it might lead to.
commandlinefan 7y ago
I’m seeing this sort of implicit dialogue in all of this that goes like: “How much moderation/censorship would have been required to have prevented the El Paso shooter? However much that is, is how much we need”. This line of reasoning ought to scare the hell out of people, since we don’t actually have the slightest clue what actually set him off (he was on 8chan?) Even if I could bring myself to believe the underlying premise: that, if not for 8chan, this guy would have gone on to be an ordinary, law-abiding, productive member of society, but that 8chan itself brainwashed him into becoming a mass murderer, I would _still_ be opposed to shutting it down (and then shutting down the next thing that replaces it, and the next thing that replaces that…) because we’re losing everything else that goes along with it.
- frereubu 7y ago
  I sort of see where you're coming from, but surely there are a plethora of other places with light moderation and far less hate speech where people could go to discuss things? You seem to be making a slippery slope argument, but I don't really see the start of the slope. I'd also be interested to know what you think of this quote from the Cloudflare CEO: 'If this were a normal circumstance we would say "Yes, it’s really horrendous content, but we’re not in a position to decide what content is bad or not." But in this case, we saw repeated consistent harm where you had three mass shootings that were directly inspired by and gave credit to this platform. You saw the platform not act on any of that and in fact promote it internally.'
  - buildzr 7y ago
    > You seem to be making a slippery slope argument, but I don't really see the start of the slope. Okay, so you ban 8chan. Now they move to another chan... there's about 5 different "bunkers" running the same or similar software to what powered 8chan and with many of the same users that various boards have moved to right now. Some of the larger of those bunker chans are actually on distributed networks. So now what? You have to ban distributed networks? You shrug your shoulders and say "oh well, we tried"? This is where the slope comes in. There's no good ending to it. Worse, as we've seen with 8chan, the farther you push people from the mainstream, the more extreme they seem to become.

swebs 7y ago

>Why does this rub me the wrong way so much? Because you at least subconsciously understand the real intent behind the message. "We must stamp out wrongthink by eroding your rights"

buildzr 7y ago
It seems a bit of an oversimplification, but it is the impression I get. Many of the decisions we must make are between those of freedom and security. The security argument is easy, especially after a tragedy, but the slow erosion of rights is only apparent after the fact. I worry that fear will result in rash decisions, creating widespread censorship abilities and banning anonymizing services that can be used to bypass them.

abrahamepton 7y ago

No, the notion is more like "the Internet enables a fundamentally different kind of communication than we've grown up with, and we should rethink our assumptions accordingly." It's just not like other kinds of human communication that we've had for our entire history as a species. Human psychological evolution is thousands of years behind the technical capabilities we've developed in the last few decades. A bit of thoughtfulness in the governance of those capabilities isn't too much to ask.

commandlinefan 7y ago
Even if I agreed with your premise that humans can’t be trusted to talk to one another, what makes you think that those same humans can then somehow be trusted to determine when other humans can safely talk to one another?
- abrahamepton 7y ago
  The premise is not, even remotely, "humans can't be trusted to talk to one another" but rather, "humans have spent our entire existence as a species talking to each other in a different way than we have begun to in the last two decades." The alternative to trusting humans is not to just leave ourselves open to the vagaries of the winds, or whatever, but to allow malicious actors to take advantage of an unregulated medium to pursue their own interests. Not sure why anyone should think that's a better outcome.
  - antepodius 7y ago
    If the alternative requires the construction of a colossal bureaucracy that empowers bad actors in a way that causes even more harm.

commandlinefan 7y ago

> Why does this rub me the wrong way I’m old enough to remember when Judas Priest (the 80’s rock band) was accused of hiding subliminal messages in their songs convincing their listeners to commit suicide, after a kid did so while happening to be listening to Judas Priest. It seems absolutely ridiculous in hindsight, but people believed it, and it was taken completely seriously at the time: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/judas-priests-subliminal-message-trial-rob-halford-looks-back-57552/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/judas-prie.... The logic here is essentially the same: some internet message boards are “egging somebody on” to do something that they would not otherwise have done, which results in death, so the internet message boards themselves are to blame, and must be censored.

fredley 7y ago
Unlike the supposed subliminal messages, the egging on is literally on display, in plain English text.
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  Not really, though. If somebody says "immigration is a danger to our country", that could just as easily mean "vote republican" as it could mean "shoot some random people".
  - atoav 7y ago
    This is based on the assumption that message boards are a one-to-many media like books, radio, movies, computer games, when in fact they are a many-to-many media, which under all empirical observation displays inherently different dynamics than traditional passive consumer media. There is a reason we dedicate academic branches to these phenomena — they are not nearly as straight forward as argued in this thread.
the_gastropod 7y ago
Religious texts, advertisements, and tall tales have been "egging people on" to do things they otherwise would not for thousands of years. Judas Priest and Internet message boards are not new in this respect. There is something unique, I think, about these message boards, though. I think most people would agree, the overwhelming majority of humans are reasonably decent—they're not going to murder others, are not overtly racist, etc. And throughout human history, these truly 1-in-a-million horrible people have been isolated, unable to find fellow horribles to befriend and egg each other on. The internet has changed that. No matter how unusual or awful your interests may be, it's trivial to find another group of people who share in these thoughts and interests. I don't know what the solution is, or if there even is one, but this does feel like something truly new.

atoav 7y ago

Sex and violence grab more attention than the cleverest intellectual remark and they usually take less space to be encoded. The design of our internet plattforms is such that these attention grabbers are extremely pushed while valuable statements are drowned. We on HN should know more than anybody that certain design decisions will nudge communications in certain directions (compare facebook to twitter to hacker news). They have different goals one could argue and that their design reflects these goals and one wouldn’t be wrong. Only: the goals on the bigger plattforms are more shaped by advertisement and data collection needs than by the valid interests of the users. Similar to the difference between slotmachines and a board game — both let people play, but the former doesn’t has the best for its player in mind. So when you say this is about the nature about our fellow humans, I’d argue that it is about the nature of the digital Zoos we developed for them.

skybrian 7y ago
Yes, this is a design issue, but a very basic one. Simple amplifiers are enough to get bad results. Easy resharing is, by itself, enough to make rumors go viral. Chain letters and all the other crap you see on Snopes depend on nothing more sophisticated than email forwarding. Active content filtering (spam filters that work) is necessary, but the platforms that largely replace email don't have them.

chasing 7y ago

It's not the idiots that matter in this case, it's the innocents that the idiots harm because they've been stoked by especially heinous (and factually inaccurate) ideas.

freen 7y ago

Because you are incorrectly interpreting it: it's not we must protect the world from bad ideas, it's that no one has a responsibility to host ideas that they disagree with. I don't have to host Nazi speech and you are free to do so if you choose.