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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

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.
- frereubu 7y ago
  The argument in the linked article, which I found compelling, is that by doing this you significantly raise the bar for participation. That cuts out the casual audience, reduces the audience size for these grandiose manifestos (which seems key to them being posted there), and sends a signal that this hateful content isn't generally acceptable. Of course there will always be truly horrible people but, on balance, I think the benefits outweigh the costs. As I said in another comment, I'm conflicted about this, as everyone should be, and will keep reading about the pros and cons. But at the moment I'm convinced that this was the right move.
  - buildzr 7y ago
    > you significantly raise the bar for participation. This simply isn't true, it's trivial to set up clearnet proxies into such services and they can be easily treated as disposable. The message you send them seems more to be that they need to hunt and hide more for "the truth". The need for that further contributes to extremeified views. It turns out pushing people into deeper and darker recesses doesn't improve their sociability. You can see this difference from communities that used to exist for the content that spawned these on reddit, Twitter to 4chan leading to the spawning of Voat, Gab, 8chan and others. The farther down the line you go the more extreme you get.
pmart123 7y ago
In some capacity, is it better to let something like 8chan exist given law enforcement and the government can actively monitor it and try and prevent such events from occurring? Would changing the laws around what constitutes domestic terrorism allow law enforcement to act more swiftly to premeditated descriptions of such acts on similar forums? Even in the NZ shootings, would it be better to let something like that be uploaded and broadcasted as anyone thinking about going a religious service sees the eminent threat of a terrorist attack in real-time? I don't have answers to these questions given the large trade offs, but I do believe it is another side of this debate to discuss.
- frereubu 7y ago
  I see what you're saying, and if these were small little online groups of, say, ten people, perhaps I'd agree. But one issue here is the audience size it gives people. Media guidelines (although they rarely follow them) say that you shouldn't publicise the names or images of people who commit these crimes, because that's a large part of what they want. The mainstream media are complicit in this too, and they should shoulder a good deal of the blame for that. Online forums are an easy target for the mainstream media because it means they don't have to examine their own part in the problem, but that doesn't mean the place where these events are initially publicised and encouraged shouldn't be tackled too.
grawprog 7y ago
I find the way 8chan's being grouped together as a cohesive whole in these discussions odd. 8chan couldn't be more chaotic and disparate in the kinds of people that were there. There were many different people with a huge range of beliefs. Most people that hung out there from what i could tell were just lonely and had made it their special club outside society. I never went on /pol/, but outside /pol/ plenty of people couldn't stand them. They'd spam other boards with their nonsense and i seen plenty of anons tell them to straight fuck off repeatedly. On the boards i used to use, there were far more threads that had nothing to do with politics or race than ones that were.
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  Yeah, exactly - "there are some bad people on 8chan, therefore it's 8chan's fault" is really fallacious reasoning, but it's pretty popular right now.
- frereubu 7y ago
  I think the issue there is that 8chan didn't seem to do anything about the nastier elements of /pol/. As Prince said, they only took that decision because they felt 8chan were ignoring the problem, which I think is a real one. I'm conflicted about this issue, as any sane person should be, but on balance it felt like the right decision.

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.

frereubu 7y ago
The argument in the linked article, which I found compelling, is that by doing this you significantly raise the bar for participation. That cuts out the casual audience, reduces the audience size for these grandiose manifestos (which seems key to them being posted there), and sends a signal that this hateful content isn't generally acceptable. Of course there will always be truly horrible people but, on balance, I think the benefits outweigh the costs. As I said in another comment, I'm conflicted about this, as everyone should be, and will keep reading about the pros and cons. But at the moment I'm convinced that this was the right move.
- buildzr 7y ago
  > you significantly raise the bar for participation. This simply isn't true, it's trivial to set up clearnet proxies into such services and they can be easily treated as disposable. The message you send them seems more to be that they need to hunt and hide more for "the truth". The need for that further contributes to extremeified views. It turns out pushing people into deeper and darker recesses doesn't improve their sociability. You can see this difference from communities that used to exist for the content that spawned these on reddit, Twitter to 4chan leading to the spawning of Voat, Gab, 8chan and others. The farther down the line you go the more extreme you get.

pmart123 7y ago

In some capacity, is it better to let something like 8chan exist given law enforcement and the government can actively monitor it and try and prevent such events from occurring? Would changing the laws around what constitutes domestic terrorism allow law enforcement to act more swiftly to premeditated descriptions of such acts on similar forums? Even in the NZ shootings, would it be better to let something like that be uploaded and broadcasted as anyone thinking about going a religious service sees the eminent threat of a terrorist attack in real-time? I don't have answers to these questions given the large trade offs, but I do believe it is another side of this debate to discuss.

frereubu 7y ago
I see what you're saying, and if these were small little online groups of, say, ten people, perhaps I'd agree. But one issue here is the audience size it gives people. Media guidelines (although they rarely follow them) say that you shouldn't publicise the names or images of people who commit these crimes, because that's a large part of what they want. The mainstream media are complicit in this too, and they should shoulder a good deal of the blame for that. Online forums are an easy target for the mainstream media because it means they don't have to examine their own part in the problem, but that doesn't mean the place where these events are initially publicised and encouraged shouldn't be tackled too.

grawprog 7y ago

I find the way 8chan's being grouped together as a cohesive whole in these discussions odd. 8chan couldn't be more chaotic and disparate in the kinds of people that were there. There were many different people with a huge range of beliefs. Most people that hung out there from what i could tell were just lonely and had made it their special club outside society. I never went on /pol/, but outside /pol/ plenty of people couldn't stand them. They'd spam other boards with their nonsense and i seen plenty of anons tell them to straight fuck off repeatedly. On the boards i used to use, there were far more threads that had nothing to do with politics or race than ones that were.

commandlinefan 7y ago
Yeah, exactly - "there are some bad people on 8chan, therefore it's 8chan's fault" is really fallacious reasoning, but it's pretty popular right now.
frereubu 7y ago
I think the issue there is that 8chan didn't seem to do anything about the nastier elements of /pol/. As Prince said, they only took that decision because they felt 8chan were ignoring the problem, which I think is a real one. I'm conflicted about this issue, as any sane person should be, but on balance it felt like the right decision.