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I don't know if I know the solution, but I know one thing that isn't the solution: silencing everyone who disagrees with you. A lot of the people complaining a

I don't know if I know the solution, but I know one thing that isn't the solution: silencing everyone who disagrees with you. A lot of the people complaining about "toxicity" on the internet seem to be under the impression that if we "deplatform" the so-called toxic people, that will fix things. But on the contrary, that makes things worse. If someone says something awful on the internet, and everyone either ignores them or politely presents a counterargument, they either move on because they feel they've been heard, or they engage in a polite discussion. Maybe they change their mind, maybe they don't. If they really can't engage in polite discussion, then they come across as making their ideas look worse, so they aren't really doing much harm. If someone says something awful on the internet, and everyone rails about how awful it is and gets them banned, then that person is angry, and that anger motivates them to keep posting about it everywhere and spreading their idea. Meanwhile, they will integrate that idea into their identity, which makes it far harder to change their mind. And if you actually manage to get them to go away, they will go to cesspools like Voat, where they are even less likely to be exposed to ideas that change their mind, and where in fact they are likely to be exposed to even worse ideas. Let's get some perspective: what you're complaining about is people saying things you don't like on the internet. Yes, what they are saying spreads ignorance, but the solution to ignorance isn't silencing the ignorant, it's education. MLK and Harvey Milk both recognized that the source of the bigotry they fought against was fear borne of ignorance. But the average left-leaning person today doesn't see bigots even as people any more. All it takes nowadays is for someone to say one of a list of banned phrases and they're completely written off as even human. If we're going to bridge the gap here, we on the left have got to consider that we might be the toxic ones. I've found that when I actually talk to so-called "toxic" people politely, they are willing to listen. It's not them that are causing the polarization.

weaksauce 7y ago
> but I know one thing that isn't the solution: silencing everyone who disagrees with you this assumes that the people on the internet are arguing in good faith. they aren't in a lot of cases. the problem i have is willful ignorance and the associated culture that promotes the people that spread lies.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  That actually doesn't matter. Remember, the point of debating publicly isn't to persuade the person you are debating, it's to persuade the people reading the debate.
- cthor 7y ago
  I don't think this is that important because there are far more people reading than posting. Even if the person you're responding to isn't arguing in good faith, there are people reading the discussion with an inquisitive mind. or, see this comic: https://imgur.com/T8egYQl https://imgur.com/T8egYQl
  - Udik 7y ago
    Good comic! But isn't the number of people reading a problem per se? The "deniers", those who keep shifting their arguments until they've gone full circle to the starting point, are not trying to convince you- nor you are trying to convince them. They're competing with you for the attention of the reader, trying to fill the space with the illusion of an argument.
    - weaksauce 7y ago
      the concept is called sea lioning.
  - sagichmal 7y ago
    What makes you think the people reading are reading in good faith?
austincheney 7y ago
> silencing anyone who disagrees with you. Agreed. Disagreement, tolerance, and diversity are healthy. The opposite is censorship, insecurity, and conformance.
- deepspace 7y ago
  A big problem with giving hate mongers a platform is that they do not return the courtesy. Try posting a well-written and well-thought-out criticism of Trump on /r/thedonald and see how many seconds it takes before the post is taken down and you are banned. They are not interested in disagreement, tolerance and diversity. They are only interested in having a platform to spew their hate from.
  - austincheney 7y ago
    That is why moderation and balance are important. r/thedonald is an echo chamber lacking balance, and therefore lacking tolerance, diversity, and mutual respect.
  - pnako 7y ago
    That's a problem with reddit, whose narrow-focused subreddits encourage groupthink. It's not specific to Trump, I'm sure doing the same in pro-Sanders or pro-Warren subreddits will have the same effect. Or indeed pro-Rihanna or pro-Metallica subreddits. You'll have better luck with 4chan. People will call you a lot of bad words for sure, but they will also debate your point to death.
    - hasbot 7y ago
      I remember when /r/politics was full of conservatives, right-wingers, the tea party, what have you. People would ask them to elaborate on their position, ask for references, or point out the flaws in their logic. The response? Moving the goalpost. Or "both sides do it." After a while, I ignored them because it wasn't worth my time to debate them. We won in a way; conservatives eventually stopped bothering to comment in /r/politics and retreated to their safe spaces.
  - 7y ago
asdf21 7y ago
The "toxic" people are trying to be honest about real issues, and they tend to get shouted down for it. Then the real issues persist, decade after decade, but they cannot be talked about, it's too politically incorrect. A few more people try, get shouted down, rinse and repeat the process. Then people wonder why a segment of the population is extremely cynical and bitter and polarized when it comes to any sort of debate on controversial issues... >I've found that when I actually talk to so-called "toxic" people politely, they are willing to listen. It's not them that are causing the polarization. Agree 100%.
- oneplane 7y ago
  Hardly; toxic isn't a word for 'people speaking their minds' or 'speaking up about problems'. It's someone who is abusive, unsupportive, or unhealthy emotionally towards others and in some forms themselves. Or so the dictionaries say.
  - asdf21 7y ago
    As someone who had a seven year account banned from YC previously for debating against socialism, you're wrong. Regular debate is labeled toxic all the time if you are anywhere to the right of pure Marxism on the political scale.
    - oneplane 7y ago
      Just because people mislabel things doesn't mean the meaning of the word suddenly changes. While languages evolve, it's not as simple as having a bunch of people on a website re-declare a word at will. Regarding debate or YC or socialism: unless people get abusive I find it hard to believe that it would be called toxic. If you could link to it or provide an except of content that would be called 'toxic' without that content being 'abusive' that would be helpful.
      - asdf21 7y ago
        I debated against socialism / expanding government in a thread about UBI or something similar. I was told by a mod that my comments were deleted and that they were "tedious" and "idealogical flamebait". When I complained about his moderation by saying this: >A moderator just a hair left of your current moderation approach on the authoritarianism scale would "flag and remove" PG's entire recent article about income inequality with a note calling it "tedious ideological posturing." For that comment, my entire six-year account was banned and I was told to email ycombinator to have it restored. When I emailed to have my account restored, I was told this: >We're happy to unban accounts when people give us reason to believe that they won't repeat the things that led us to ban them. In your case it's a little less clear what that reason might be, since you've expressed how much you dislike a bunch of things about HN, our moderation, and me. But if there's something we could do to help you have a change of heart about those things, let me know. So basically, since I complained about his moderation, he took it personally, and only if I was willing to revoke my criticism of his moderation could I be unbanned..? I was never able to get clarification on what exactly needed to happen for me to get unbanned. The gist was, if you argue consistently in favor of free-market approaches to anything economic, you will be accused of "tedious idealogical flamebait" and eventually be banned. Take it for what it's worth, but I was never what you would call toxic by any standard definition, and those were my results.
lobotryas 7y ago
Agreed. The rhetoric now is even worse because some people maintain that “words = violence” and real violence is needed to shut down this “wrong think”. I think some people would be amazed if they realized that it’s OK when people disagree[0] and doubly OK when people have different opinions on how to fix something[1]. Finally it’s become hard or impossible to stand up for the RIGHT of people to express marginalized opinions lest you yourself get accused of having those opinions. Wonder if the ACLU could ever “get away” with defending free speech even for bigoted groups in 2020. [0] - Some people have genuine and compelling (for them, at least) reasons to be pro life despite society as a whole disagreeing with them. [1] - Plenty of people agree that global warming is a problem, but disagree with the popular narrative on how (or even how fast) they need to fix it.
deepspace 7y ago
The counterpoint to that is that allowing platforms for toxic views to exist and grow (a) "normalizes" these views and (b) makes it very easy for them to recruit new members, since they have a "legitimate" platform to spread their hate from. Personally I am fine with them isolating themselves in cesspools like Voat. While they are not being exposed to contrary views there, they are also not exposing large amounts of other people to their views. Another factor is that toxic views are massively amplified by bots (and the bad actors behind them) and not providing these with an easy-to-exploit platform is a good thing in my opinion.
- pnako 7y ago
  Isolation / segregation / echo chamber (whatever you want to call it) is amplifying toxicity. We used to socialize in the streets, in the marketplace, in towns. Maybe the town's butcher was known to be a bit of a racist hick, but he was still a decent shopkeeper and his kids went to the same school as yours, so you tolerated his antics. There was the town slut, the town's drunk, the guy who was a known communist sympathizer, etc. People with their flaws, and qualities, and somehow we managed to make it all work. What happens when those people now each socialize on their own online social network with people exactly like them? That can't be good.
  - deepspace 7y ago
    As I mentioned in another comment, what happens today is that they already socialize in their own online social networks with people exactly like them. They do not tolerate one iota of dissent or open discussion, and will ban anyone with contrary views or criticism. If we allow them space on our open platforms, without demanding that they tolerate our views, that does not result in any kind of real conversation, it just allows them to spread their toxic views around.
    - luckylion 7y ago
      Have you ever actually talked to people who are unlike you, or hold extremely different view points? Because this whole "the do not tolerate one iota of dissent or open discussion" is very far from my experience. It's true, you usually can't engage people when they are pumped up on adrenaline shouting at each other on Twitter, but that's like jumping into the middle of a brawl and saying "those people will never be able to have a conversation" when they don't immediately stop fighting and listen to you. I've talked to people from far left to far right, from vegans to conspiracy theorists, and with very few exceptions, all of them were happy to explain their ideas and viewpoints and were pretty accepting when I expressed a different opinion. They may well believe that I'm wrong, but they didn't mind talking to me after learning where I disagree with them, and they didn't become combative either. I believe a very important part about "open discussion" is to be honest and compassionate. Don't talk down to people, don't mock them, don't tell them they are scum, or evil, or destroying humanity etc and then say "they don't tolerate dissent" when really they just don't react kindly to hostile behavior.
anigbrowl 7y ago
But the average left-leaning person today doesn't see bigots even as people any more. I spend the bulk of my time studying extremist discourse and communities. Extremist bigots take it as read that people of the wrong ethnic/religious/political group are either not people or at best inferior people, and direct their efforts to promoting those views, planning how to eliminate those they dislike, and normalizing that behavior. You are, essentially, projecting the characteristics of bad actors onto other actors who are warning and complaining about said bad actors. I've found that when I actually talk to so-called "toxic" people politely, they are willing to listen. It's not them that are causing the polarization. That's a tactic known as 'entryism' designed to leverage your nice, conflict-averse personality as a vehicle for normalization and possible future recruitment.
- enraged_camel 7y ago
  Exactly. Extremists who espouse intolerance count on the tolerance of the opposing groups to get themselves accepted and their extremist viewpoints normalized. When they do get deplatformed, marginalized and discredited, they complain about it, which itself serves to recruit people, especially those who are unfamiliar with such tactics and mistakenly think that their side is being unfair.
  - TallGuyShort 7y ago
    My problem with this "intolerance-is-okay-against-the-intolerant" thing is I'm lumped in with some extremist politics because of my religion. I don't feel at all treated as an individual (or even treated fairly) by either the left or the right. Some people who identify as the same religion have been homophobic. Since I was of voting age, I have never been against legalizing gay marriage, or treating homosexuals differently in the law at all. But I get flak for my religion from the tolerant left. They stereotype me every bit as much as the right stereotypes Islam. But they sure think they're being tolerant, by supposedly shunning intolerance.
    - sofal 7y ago
      One reason why it is difficult for me to tell is that I personally know a lot of people who say the same thing, i.e. that they are in favor of gay rights, but then they donate thousands of dollars a year to an extremely powerful and wealthy religious corporation that consistently preaches against homosexuality, drives gay teenagers to suicide, and puts their financial and political weight toward preventing gay rights in multiple states.
databus 7y ago
Communicating financial or medical lies can lead to repercussions. The same should be true for communicating false political information.
- smrq 7y ago
  I don't know, there's still a lot of dialogue about healing crystals and essential oils out there.
  - anigbrowl 7y ago
    That's true, but you don't see too many people raiding oncology forums on behalf of big quartz.
streb-lo 7y ago
I disagree. The problem is the loudest groups of people are people with the strongest political opinions. Regular people are busy. They have neither the time nor desire to police internet arguments or play the counter argument game. And even if someone does, regular people don't have time or desire to wade through it. One thing that I noticed when I had a Facebook account was that apart from a few exceptions most what I would consider well-adjusted people rarely participated in political discussions. Sure, people on average might be apolitical but there is no shortage of political content on Facebook -- it just predominantly seems to be driven by people using pseudonyms or with much less stake in their social identity. Another issue is that both politcal parties in the US seem to believe that they can achieve their goals by shifting the Overton window and they are incentivized to polarize people and hijack online platforms to do this. This leads to a huge black-hole of representation for any sort of average political view online which cannot be countered with the above logic.
bonaldi 7y ago
The data suggests that deplatforming works. Milo; Katie Hopkins; InfoWars et al have all lost their former agenda-setting influence following deplatforming. And studies have shown that banning hate sub-Reddits does _not_ cause that content to “pop up elsewhere”, it causes it to decline overall. It’s important to remember too there are incentives for people to argue and behave otherwise: FB, Twitter, hate-speech mongers who want easy access to large audiences — All have commercial cause to act in favour of more and more extreme speech. People like that benefit from more and more extreme speech. They permit or encourage it on their platforms. This in turn causes the white blood cell count of the body politic to spike as it tries to counteract the bile and hate. This angry counter-speech then gets presented as “polarisation”. The solution to ignorance _can often be_ silencing the ignorant, yes, in order that the educators can be heard. Would we still have an anti-vax problem if FB banned it across its properties? Really? Banning disruptive speakers works. Every pub landlord knows it.
- kabouseng 7y ago
  And then something like Trump or Brexit happens, and the left had no idea it was coming because a lot of people's viewpoints were silenced / deplatformed....
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- pnako 7y ago
  Would we still have a pro-vax problem if FB banned it across its properties?
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    Yes, obviously. Do you think there aren't any anti-vaxxers with the ability to build a website?
    - bonaldi 7y ago
TomMckenny 7y ago
>silencing everyone who disagrees with you That is not remotely what is being suggested. Toxicity is when a site devoted to people mourning a synagogue massacre is overwhelmed by spamming neo-nazis. Toxicity is annihilating a site's function: a site where climate scientists discuss findings needs to be free of an flood of spam from climate change deniers and paid petroleum sock puppets. Such a site exists for people to do their job not waste every day repeating the same basic information available elsewhere easier to people who came intentionally to disrupt.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  > > silencing everyone who disagrees with you > That is not remotely what is being suggested. > Toxicity is when a site devoted to people mourning a synagogue massacre is overwhelmed by spamming neo-nazis. > Toxicity is annihilating a site's function: a site where climate scientists discuss findings needs to be free of an flood of spam from climate change deniers and paid petroleum sock puppets. Such a site exists for people to do their job not waste every day repeating the same basic information available elsewhere easier to people who came intentionally to disrupt. You only have to look around on this thread to see that "silencing everyone who disagrees with you" is exactly what's being suggested. Reddit/Facebook/Twitter are being held up as examples of places where deplatforming has worked, and where deplatforming should be more broadly applied. These aren't single-function sites. Moderation to keep discussions on a topic existed long before deplatforming, and is not the same thing.
urbanjunkie 7y ago
You literally have no fucking clue, and have decided to generalise from a sample set of 1 autistic person. Fucking pitiful.
keenmaster 7y ago
If InfoWars says Sandy Hook never happened, and they have millions of followers, ban them. That’s a really low bar for banning. Same with Milo. Not only did he repeatedly lie in a very verifiable way, but he did it with the vigor of a bully. These are toxic people and institutions that don’t care about the facts. They’re after your amygdala, and we are, to some extent, slaves to our amygdala. You can get a PhD and still retain a lot of your most basic instincts, for better or worse. If we are slaves to our amygdala, how do we have civilization at all? We externalize cognition, just like we’ve done since the dawn of time. Culture is externalized cognition. Standards are externalized cognition. They are ways of protecting us from ourselves. If you let anyone get on the world’s largest platform, with the world’s largest megaphone, and shout whatever they want, what do you expect other than the devolution of society? And why should we throw our hands up and say “we built the platform. We built the megaphone. Anyone can use it.” That’s not a mythological embracement of freedom. That’s stepping back from your responsibility to set standards.
- djsumdog 7y ago
  Who decides who's lying and who's telling the truth? Who is the arbitrator of an obvious lie. Declaring something an "obvious lie" has historically been used to keep other people down as well. This goes down a very dangerous road. Banning speech is not the right way to deal with this. When you do, you give the speaker more energy. When people in the civil rights movement in the US was slapped down, it gave speakers like MLKing a source to inspire his people; to stand tall in the face of adversity. The line should be violence. Speech is speech. Speech is not violence (unless is specifically advocates violence and that's been defined in US court cases as not-protected speech). Diablo Valley College ethics professor Eric Clanton was basically let off the hook with a slap-on-the-wrist conviction for hitting someone in the head with a bike-lock .. basically because the person he hit was alt-right. That is fucked up and totally not acceptable. All violence, no matter who it is against, should be the hard line .. and it's not, and that's the real issue.
  - keenmaster 7y ago
    "Who is the arbitrator of an obvious lie[?]" Easy. The final arbitrator is the owner of the platform. It is just one platform. If a platform becomes ban-happy, you can simply walk away, even if you weren't personally banned. Hacker News has plenty of rules and standards, and it will quickly mute and ban someone who violates even a subset of them. That is absolutely not a problem, and the platform is better off for it. It probably has a much larger userbase as a result, so the population of Hacker News users is dynamic, and HN can make decisions that benefit a lot of future users at the expense of a few current users. Why shouldn't HN be viewed negatively for that, but other platforms should? Isn't that arbitrary? ~Thought exercise~: Let's say you were the mayor of a large city. There are multiple areas in the city where you can shout whatever you want during certain hours. Would you let someone hook up an internet-connected megaphone in each area and pipe in hate speech everywhere simultaneously? And what if we were in a future where there were physical bots indistinguishable from humans that crowded into those public spaces, vociferously indicated their agreement, and cheered him on? That future is now. In reality, Facebook owns those public spaces. No one actually goes to that spot in the park anymore. Mark Zuckerberg is the mayor. Oh, and it's not just one city, he's everyone's mayor, everywhere. If you don't use Facebook but you're on Whatsapp, you're still in his jurisdiction. As for the "during certain hours" part? Nope, those internet-connected megaphones are blasting 24/7. Those bots are nodding their heads 24/7. Our mayor also collects megaphone usage fees for himself. He gives you dopamine points, likes, and social validation each time you come back for more. Freedom, yeah.
burnte 7y ago
> I don't know if I know the solution, but I know one thing that isn't the solution: silencing everyone who disagrees with you. I'm not a fan of trying to SILENCE anyone, however as a private entity, no corporation is required to allow anyone to use their platform for (nearly) any reason. Twitter can ban me today because they don't like my shoes. Facebook can ban me because Mark Zuckerberg thinks I look funny. Google can ban me because I prefer my Alexa to Google Home. Youtube can ban Alex Jones because he spews hate. Cloudflare can ban whoever those white supremacists were for being racist. Taking away their right to choose their customers is just as much an affront to free speech as government censorship. Several years ago Sprint kicked off a small number of customers because they were costing the company lot of resources due to their behavior with the company. I absolutely agreed with them, and that's their right. Same with social media, hosts, etc. Nothing stops these people from finding another way to get their message out, but my company nor anyone else has to help them.
- djanlermats2020 7y ago
  The fact that corporations can silence whoever they want doesn't change that silencing everyone who disagrees with you is a bad solution that won't work, sorry.
  - burnte 7y ago
    Me not helping someone speak is not the same as silencing them.
MadWombat 7y ago
Agreed. As I have said previously in a similar discussion, I don't think censorship works very well beyond a few specific cases (yelling "Fire!" in a theater and things like that). I would rather racists and misogynists and all sorts of other assholes were free to express their opinions and engage in debate with the rest of us that that they were hiding in some dark web, invite only circle jerks. Because however distasteful I find the prior, I find the later outright scary.
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  Bad news: Both are happening at the same time, which is colloquially called 'hiding your power level.' See note 11 in the linked article for an example, though you'll want to use Tor or at least Incognito mode. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hide-your-power-level https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hide-your-power-level
yoz-y 7y ago
> I don't know if I know the solution, but I know one thing that isn't the solution: silencing everyone who disagrees with you. I found that ignoring people on IRC who would sprinkle any conversation with racist or misplaced remarks helped me quite a bit. Of course it only affects me, but even after polite attempts to steer the conversation it never changed. Same on Twitter, at some point there is one of me and many of them, the cost to engage is just too high.
ookblah 7y ago
mmm i'll have to disagree with this. sure, in person i think treating people politely will often allow you to come to some kind of middle ground or the very least help you to understand each other. the anonymity of the internet makes it impossible. this isn't even taking into account people are actively just trolling or state sponsored/bots/whatever people trying to muddle a discussion.
buboard 7y ago
silencing/deplatforming is a form of signaling to their in-group rather than an action for the greater good. in general , the more people know they are being watched, and the bigger the audience is, people are more likely to choose their actions based on signaling value, not effect
djanlermats2020 7y ago
It's scary to read the number of people responding to you with "actually, the solution IS to silence everyone who disagrees with me, we should do that as quickly as possible." Especially the number of them who don't even seem to have read past your first sentence.

weaksauce 7y ago

> but I know one thing that isn't the solution: silencing everyone who disagrees with you this assumes that the people on the internet are arguing in good faith. they aren't in a lot of cases. the problem i have is willful ignorance and the associated culture that promotes the people that spread lies.

kerkeslager 7y ago
That actually doesn't matter. Remember, the point of debating publicly isn't to persuade the person you are debating, it's to persuade the people reading the debate.
cthor 7y ago
I don't think this is that important because there are far more people reading than posting. Even if the person you're responding to isn't arguing in good faith, there are people reading the discussion with an inquisitive mind. or, see this comic: https://imgur.com/T8egYQl https://imgur.com/T8egYQl
- Udik 7y ago
  Good comic! But isn't the number of people reading a problem per se? The "deniers", those who keep shifting their arguments until they've gone full circle to the starting point, are not trying to convince you- nor you are trying to convince them. They're competing with you for the attention of the reader, trying to fill the space with the illusion of an argument.
  - weaksauce 7y ago
    the concept is called sea lioning.
- sagichmal 7y ago
  What makes you think the people reading are reading in good faith?

austincheney 7y ago

> silencing anyone who disagrees with you. Agreed. Disagreement, tolerance, and diversity are healthy. The opposite is censorship, insecurity, and conformance.

deepspace 7y ago
A big problem with giving hate mongers a platform is that they do not return the courtesy. Try posting a well-written and well-thought-out criticism of Trump on /r/thedonald and see how many seconds it takes before the post is taken down and you are banned. They are not interested in disagreement, tolerance and diversity. They are only interested in having a platform to spew their hate from.
- austincheney 7y ago
  That is why moderation and balance are important. r/thedonald is an echo chamber lacking balance, and therefore lacking tolerance, diversity, and mutual respect.
- pnako 7y ago
  That's a problem with reddit, whose narrow-focused subreddits encourage groupthink. It's not specific to Trump, I'm sure doing the same in pro-Sanders or pro-Warren subreddits will have the same effect. Or indeed pro-Rihanna or pro-Metallica subreddits. You'll have better luck with 4chan. People will call you a lot of bad words for sure, but they will also debate your point to death.
  - hasbot 7y ago
    I remember when /r/politics was full of conservatives, right-wingers, the tea party, what have you. People would ask them to elaborate on their position, ask for references, or point out the flaws in their logic. The response? Moving the goalpost. Or "both sides do it." After a while, I ignored them because it wasn't worth my time to debate them. We won in a way; conservatives eventually stopped bothering to comment in /r/politics and retreated to their safe spaces.
- 7y ago

asdf21 7y ago

The "toxic" people are trying to be honest about real issues, and they tend to get shouted down for it. Then the real issues persist, decade after decade, but they cannot be talked about, it's too politically incorrect. A few more people try, get shouted down, rinse and repeat the process. Then people wonder why a segment of the population is extremely cynical and bitter and polarized when it comes to any sort of debate on controversial issues... >I've found that when I actually talk to so-called "toxic" people politely, they are willing to listen. It's not them that are causing the polarization. Agree 100%.

oneplane 7y ago
Hardly; toxic isn't a word for 'people speaking their minds' or 'speaking up about problems'. It's someone who is abusive, unsupportive, or unhealthy emotionally towards others and in some forms themselves. Or so the dictionaries say.
- asdf21 7y ago
  As someone who had a seven year account banned from YC previously for debating against socialism, you're wrong. Regular debate is labeled toxic all the time if you are anywhere to the right of pure Marxism on the political scale.
  - oneplane 7y ago
    Just because people mislabel things doesn't mean the meaning of the word suddenly changes. While languages evolve, it's not as simple as having a bunch of people on a website re-declare a word at will. Regarding debate or YC or socialism: unless people get abusive I find it hard to believe that it would be called toxic. If you could link to it or provide an except of content that would be called 'toxic' without that content being 'abusive' that would be helpful.
    - asdf21 7y ago
      I debated against socialism / expanding government in a thread about UBI or something similar. I was told by a mod that my comments were deleted and that they were "tedious" and "idealogical flamebait". When I complained about his moderation by saying this: >A moderator just a hair left of your current moderation approach on the authoritarianism scale would "flag and remove" PG's entire recent article about income inequality with a note calling it "tedious ideological posturing." For that comment, my entire six-year account was banned and I was told to email ycombinator to have it restored. When I emailed to have my account restored, I was told this: >We're happy to unban accounts when people give us reason to believe that they won't repeat the things that led us to ban them. In your case it's a little less clear what that reason might be, since you've expressed how much you dislike a bunch of things about HN, our moderation, and me. But if there's something we could do to help you have a change of heart about those things, let me know. So basically, since I complained about his moderation, he took it personally, and only if I was willing to revoke my criticism of his moderation could I be unbanned..? I was never able to get clarification on what exactly needed to happen for me to get unbanned. The gist was, if you argue consistently in favor of free-market approaches to anything economic, you will be accused of "tedious idealogical flamebait" and eventually be banned. Take it for what it's worth, but I was never what you would call toxic by any standard definition, and those were my results.

lobotryas 7y ago

Agreed. The rhetoric now is even worse because some people maintain that “words = violence” and real violence is needed to shut down this “wrong think”. I think some people would be amazed if they realized that it’s OK when people disagree[0] and doubly OK when people have different opinions on how to fix something[1]. Finally it’s become hard or impossible to stand up for the RIGHT of people to express marginalized opinions lest you yourself get accused of having those opinions. Wonder if the ACLU could ever “get away” with defending free speech even for bigoted groups in 2020. [0] - Some people have genuine and compelling (for them, at least) reasons to be pro life despite society as a whole disagreeing with them. [1] - Plenty of people agree that global warming is a problem, but disagree with the popular narrative on how (or even how fast) they need to fix it.

deepspace 7y ago

The counterpoint to that is that allowing platforms for toxic views to exist and grow (a) "normalizes" these views and (b) makes it very easy for them to recruit new members, since they have a "legitimate" platform to spread their hate from. Personally I am fine with them isolating themselves in cesspools like Voat. While they are not being exposed to contrary views there, they are also not exposing large amounts of other people to their views. Another factor is that toxic views are massively amplified by bots (and the bad actors behind them) and not providing these with an easy-to-exploit platform is a good thing in my opinion.

pnako 7y ago
Isolation / segregation / echo chamber (whatever you want to call it) is amplifying toxicity. We used to socialize in the streets, in the marketplace, in towns. Maybe the town's butcher was known to be a bit of a racist hick, but he was still a decent shopkeeper and his kids went to the same school as yours, so you tolerated his antics. There was the town slut, the town's drunk, the guy who was a known communist sympathizer, etc. People with their flaws, and qualities, and somehow we managed to make it all work. What happens when those people now each socialize on their own online social network with people exactly like them? That can't be good.
- deepspace 7y ago
  As I mentioned in another comment, what happens today is that they already socialize in their own online social networks with people exactly like them. They do not tolerate one iota of dissent or open discussion, and will ban anyone with contrary views or criticism. If we allow them space on our open platforms, without demanding that they tolerate our views, that does not result in any kind of real conversation, it just allows them to spread their toxic views around.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    Have you ever actually talked to people who are unlike you, or hold extremely different view points? Because this whole "the do not tolerate one iota of dissent or open discussion" is very far from my experience. It's true, you usually can't engage people when they are pumped up on adrenaline shouting at each other on Twitter, but that's like jumping into the middle of a brawl and saying "those people will never be able to have a conversation" when they don't immediately stop fighting and listen to you. I've talked to people from far left to far right, from vegans to conspiracy theorists, and with very few exceptions, all of them were happy to explain their ideas and viewpoints and were pretty accepting when I expressed a different opinion. They may well believe that I'm wrong, but they didn't mind talking to me after learning where I disagree with them, and they didn't become combative either. I believe a very important part about "open discussion" is to be honest and compassionate. Don't talk down to people, don't mock them, don't tell them they are scum, or evil, or destroying humanity etc and then say "they don't tolerate dissent" when really they just don't react kindly to hostile behavior.

anigbrowl 7y ago

But the average left-leaning person today doesn't see bigots even as people any more. I spend the bulk of my time studying extremist discourse and communities. Extremist bigots take it as read that people of the wrong ethnic/religious/political group are either not people or at best inferior people, and direct their efforts to promoting those views, planning how to eliminate those they dislike, and normalizing that behavior. You are, essentially, projecting the characteristics of bad actors onto other actors who are warning and complaining about said bad actors. I've found that when I actually talk to so-called "toxic" people politely, they are willing to listen. It's not them that are causing the polarization. That's a tactic known as 'entryism' designed to leverage your nice, conflict-averse personality as a vehicle for normalization and possible future recruitment.

enraged_camel 7y ago
Exactly. Extremists who espouse intolerance count on the tolerance of the opposing groups to get themselves accepted and their extremist viewpoints normalized. When they do get deplatformed, marginalized and discredited, they complain about it, which itself serves to recruit people, especially those who are unfamiliar with such tactics and mistakenly think that their side is being unfair.
- TallGuyShort 7y ago
  My problem with this "intolerance-is-okay-against-the-intolerant" thing is I'm lumped in with some extremist politics because of my religion. I don't feel at all treated as an individual (or even treated fairly) by either the left or the right. Some people who identify as the same religion have been homophobic. Since I was of voting age, I have never been against legalizing gay marriage, or treating homosexuals differently in the law at all. But I get flak for my religion from the tolerant left. They stereotype me every bit as much as the right stereotypes Islam. But they sure think they're being tolerant, by supposedly shunning intolerance.
  - sofal 7y ago
    One reason why it is difficult for me to tell is that I personally know a lot of people who say the same thing, i.e. that they are in favor of gay rights, but then they donate thousands of dollars a year to an extremely powerful and wealthy religious corporation that consistently preaches against homosexuality, drives gay teenagers to suicide, and puts their financial and political weight toward preventing gay rights in multiple states.

databus 7y ago

Communicating financial or medical lies can lead to repercussions. The same should be true for communicating false political information.

smrq 7y ago
I don't know, there's still a lot of dialogue about healing crystals and essential oils out there.
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  That's true, but you don't see too many people raiding oncology forums on behalf of big quartz.

streb-lo 7y ago

I disagree. The problem is the loudest groups of people are people with the strongest political opinions. Regular people are busy. They have neither the time nor desire to police internet arguments or play the counter argument game. And even if someone does, regular people don't have time or desire to wade through it. One thing that I noticed when I had a Facebook account was that apart from a few exceptions most what I would consider well-adjusted people rarely participated in political discussions. Sure, people on average might be apolitical but there is no shortage of political content on Facebook -- it just predominantly seems to be driven by people using pseudonyms or with much less stake in their social identity. Another issue is that both politcal parties in the US seem to believe that they can achieve their goals by shifting the Overton window and they are incentivized to polarize people and hijack online platforms to do this. This leads to a huge black-hole of representation for any sort of average political view online which cannot be countered with the above logic.

bonaldi 7y ago

The data suggests that deplatforming works. Milo; Katie Hopkins; InfoWars et al have all lost their former agenda-setting influence following deplatforming. And studies have shown that banning hate sub-Reddits does _not_ cause that content to “pop up elsewhere”, it causes it to decline overall. It’s important to remember too there are incentives for people to argue and behave otherwise: FB, Twitter, hate-speech mongers who want easy access to large audiences — All have commercial cause to act in favour of more and more extreme speech. People like that benefit from more and more extreme speech. They permit or encourage it on their platforms. This in turn causes the white blood cell count of the body politic to spike as it tries to counteract the bile and hate. This angry counter-speech then gets presented as “polarisation”. The solution to ignorance _can often be_ silencing the ignorant, yes, in order that the educators can be heard. Would we still have an anti-vax problem if FB banned it across its properties? Really? Banning disruptive speakers works. Every pub landlord knows it.

kabouseng 7y ago
And then something like Trump or Brexit happens, and the left had no idea it was coming because a lot of people's viewpoints were silenced / deplatformed....
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
pnako 7y ago
Would we still have a pro-vax problem if FB banned it across its properties?
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  Yes, obviously. Do you think there aren't any anti-vaxxers with the ability to build a website?
  - bonaldi 7y ago

TomMckenny 7y ago

>silencing everyone who disagrees with you That is not remotely what is being suggested. Toxicity is when a site devoted to people mourning a synagogue massacre is overwhelmed by spamming neo-nazis. Toxicity is annihilating a site's function: a site where climate scientists discuss findings needs to be free of an flood of spam from climate change deniers and paid petroleum sock puppets. Such a site exists for people to do their job not waste every day repeating the same basic information available elsewhere easier to people who came intentionally to disrupt.

kerkeslager 7y ago
> > silencing everyone who disagrees with you > That is not remotely what is being suggested. > Toxicity is when a site devoted to people mourning a synagogue massacre is overwhelmed by spamming neo-nazis. > Toxicity is annihilating a site's function: a site where climate scientists discuss findings needs to be free of an flood of spam from climate change deniers and paid petroleum sock puppets. Such a site exists for people to do their job not waste every day repeating the same basic information available elsewhere easier to people who came intentionally to disrupt. You only have to look around on this thread to see that "silencing everyone who disagrees with you" is exactly what's being suggested. Reddit/Facebook/Twitter are being held up as examples of places where deplatforming has worked, and where deplatforming should be more broadly applied. These aren't single-function sites. Moderation to keep discussions on a topic existed long before deplatforming, and is not the same thing.

urbanjunkie 7y ago

You literally have no fucking clue, and have decided to generalise from a sample set of 1 autistic person. Fucking pitiful.

keenmaster 7y ago

If InfoWars says Sandy Hook never happened, and they have millions of followers, ban them. That’s a really low bar for banning. Same with Milo. Not only did he repeatedly lie in a very verifiable way, but he did it with the vigor of a bully. These are toxic people and institutions that don’t care about the facts. They’re after your amygdala, and we are, to some extent, slaves to our amygdala. You can get a PhD and still retain a lot of your most basic instincts, for better or worse. If we are slaves to our amygdala, how do we have civilization at all? We externalize cognition, just like we’ve done since the dawn of time. Culture is externalized cognition. Standards are externalized cognition. They are ways of protecting us from ourselves. If you let anyone get on the world’s largest platform, with the world’s largest megaphone, and shout whatever they want, what do you expect other than the devolution of society? And why should we throw our hands up and say “we built the platform. We built the megaphone. Anyone can use it.” That’s not a mythological embracement of freedom. That’s stepping back from your responsibility to set standards.

djsumdog 7y ago
Who decides who's lying and who's telling the truth? Who is the arbitrator of an obvious lie. Declaring something an "obvious lie" has historically been used to keep other people down as well. This goes down a very dangerous road. Banning speech is not the right way to deal with this. When you do, you give the speaker more energy. When people in the civil rights movement in the US was slapped down, it gave speakers like MLKing a source to inspire his people; to stand tall in the face of adversity. The line should be violence. Speech is speech. Speech is not violence (unless is specifically advocates violence and that's been defined in US court cases as not-protected speech). Diablo Valley College ethics professor Eric Clanton was basically let off the hook with a slap-on-the-wrist conviction for hitting someone in the head with a bike-lock .. basically because the person he hit was alt-right. That is fucked up and totally not acceptable. All violence, no matter who it is against, should be the hard line .. and it's not, and that's the real issue.
- keenmaster 7y ago
  "Who is the arbitrator of an obvious lie[?]" Easy. The final arbitrator is the owner of the platform. It is just one platform. If a platform becomes ban-happy, you can simply walk away, even if you weren't personally banned. Hacker News has plenty of rules and standards, and it will quickly mute and ban someone who violates even a subset of them. That is absolutely not a problem, and the platform is better off for it. It probably has a much larger userbase as a result, so the population of Hacker News users is dynamic, and HN can make decisions that benefit a lot of future users at the expense of a few current users. Why shouldn't HN be viewed negatively for that, but other platforms should? Isn't that arbitrary? ~Thought exercise~: Let's say you were the mayor of a large city. There are multiple areas in the city where you can shout whatever you want during certain hours. Would you let someone hook up an internet-connected megaphone in each area and pipe in hate speech everywhere simultaneously? And what if we were in a future where there were physical bots indistinguishable from humans that crowded into those public spaces, vociferously indicated their agreement, and cheered him on? That future is now. In reality, Facebook owns those public spaces. No one actually goes to that spot in the park anymore. Mark Zuckerberg is the mayor. Oh, and it's not just one city, he's everyone's mayor, everywhere. If you don't use Facebook but you're on Whatsapp, you're still in his jurisdiction. As for the "during certain hours" part? Nope, those internet-connected megaphones are blasting 24/7. Those bots are nodding their heads 24/7. Our mayor also collects megaphone usage fees for himself. He gives you dopamine points, likes, and social validation each time you come back for more. Freedom, yeah.

burnte 7y ago

> I don't know if I know the solution, but I know one thing that isn't the solution: silencing everyone who disagrees with you. I'm not a fan of trying to SILENCE anyone, however as a private entity, no corporation is required to allow anyone to use their platform for (nearly) any reason. Twitter can ban me today because they don't like my shoes. Facebook can ban me because Mark Zuckerberg thinks I look funny. Google can ban me because I prefer my Alexa to Google Home. Youtube can ban Alex Jones because he spews hate. Cloudflare can ban whoever those white supremacists were for being racist. Taking away their right to choose their customers is just as much an affront to free speech as government censorship. Several years ago Sprint kicked off a small number of customers because they were costing the company lot of resources due to their behavior with the company. I absolutely agreed with them, and that's their right. Same with social media, hosts, etc. Nothing stops these people from finding another way to get their message out, but my company nor anyone else has to help them.

djanlermats2020 7y ago
The fact that corporations can silence whoever they want doesn't change that silencing everyone who disagrees with you is a bad solution that won't work, sorry.
- burnte 7y ago
  Me not helping someone speak is not the same as silencing them.

MadWombat 7y ago

Agreed. As I have said previously in a similar discussion, I don't think censorship works very well beyond a few specific cases (yelling "Fire!" in a theater and things like that). I would rather racists and misogynists and all sorts of other assholes were free to express their opinions and engage in debate with the rest of us that that they were hiding in some dark web, invite only circle jerks. Because however distasteful I find the prior, I find the later outright scary.

anigbrowl 7y ago
Bad news: Both are happening at the same time, which is colloquially called 'hiding your power level.' See note 11 in the linked article for an example, though you'll want to use Tor or at least Incognito mode. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hide-your-power-level https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hide-your-power-level

yoz-y 7y ago

> I don't know if I know the solution, but I know one thing that isn't the solution: silencing everyone who disagrees with you. I found that ignoring people on IRC who would sprinkle any conversation with racist or misplaced remarks helped me quite a bit. Of course it only affects me, but even after polite attempts to steer the conversation it never changed. Same on Twitter, at some point there is one of me and many of them, the cost to engage is just too high.

ookblah 7y ago

mmm i'll have to disagree with this. sure, in person i think treating people politely will often allow you to come to some kind of middle ground or the very least help you to understand each other. the anonymity of the internet makes it impossible. this isn't even taking into account people are actively just trolling or state sponsored/bots/whatever people trying to muddle a discussion.

buboard 7y ago

silencing/deplatforming is a form of signaling to their in-group rather than an action for the greater good. in general , the more people know they are being watched, and the bigger the audience is, people are more likely to choose their actions based on signaling value, not effect

djanlermats2020 7y ago

It's scary to read the number of people responding to you with "actually, the solution IS to silence everyone who disagrees with me, we should do that as quickly as possible." Especially the number of them who don't even seem to have read past your first sentence.