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I agree with most of the article, but the author faltered in the area I predicted he would before I began to read. He expresses fear that without some restraint

• ColanR 7y ago
  Well said! > Lastly, to make sites like 8chan out to have no value other than content some might find deplorable is, frankly, as close minded as those who the author apparently fears. It's nice that someone actually came out and said this.
• casefields 7y ago
  What people in general want is exactly that type of censorship. Just look at the way the public in general, media/companies in particular, react when you say Eric Ciaramella's name.
• bsder 7y ago
  There are multiple problems: 1) How do we deal with the fact that an Internet mob can horribly damage a random individual? This is a really serious issue. Even a single stalker can cause a nightmare for a person and they will have difficulty fighting back. An Internet mob can be completely devastating. There needs to be some way for an individual to cost effectively fight back against online "assault"--especially when it's a mob. 2) How do we deal with the whole "stochastic terrorism" problem? Stirring up a bunch of people until finally one of them does something horrific and then sitting back and saying "But I didn't say to go shoot them, I only posted their picture and name with cross-hairs." needs to have some penalty. We didn't used to care about this because only the truly powerful could say "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" and have grievous harm come about. Now, with the Internet, you can be much less powerful and have your words reach far more people--some of whom will be sufficiently disturbed to carry things out. 3) Facebook and Google are effectively monopolies. How do we deal with that? We have historically dealt with monopoly by forcing breakups. The lack of monopoly actions in the last several decades has brought us to where these behemoths have no fear.
  • craftinator 7y ago
    I see a problem with points one and two. That problem is partially what spurred the First Amendment of the Constitution (USA) to be made. Trying to control the speech of people is both impossible and forces escalation. When people desire to communicate, they will do so, about whatever topic they choose. Trying to stifle or manipulate this communication will fail eventually; either those who see themselves as part of the "ruling body" will accept this failure, or escalate with more robust controls. Rinse and repeat this through a few iterations, and you end up with the Great Firewall in China. The only way to deal with communication that turns hostile or negative is to increase the communication skills and tools of those involved. Conflict resolution, empathic reasoning, detailed vocabulary, and strong argument skills will allow people to communicate clearly and reasonably. A communicating group that carries many members who have these skills will be deal deftly with these issues, and carry a thick enough skin and strong enough values not to be swayed by the moral poisoning that tends to happen in forums in question.
  • heartbeats 7y ago
• TomMckenny 7y ago
  As you say, the problem is not 8chan or "the daily stormer" for that matter. But it _is_ Facebook. Anything goes sites like 8chan have so much reality free and bizarre content that they have only the tiniest impact. Yet they provide insight into those mindsets and their trends. But Facebook and Twitter inject extremely harmful falsehoods into reams of fluff and corporate posts. This gives them far more legitimacy, weight and exposure than they would otherwise have. And since those two have made agitating posts part of their business model, regardless of historic levels of societal harm, the problem is not fixed. I would be appalled if anything I built were used to do such harm, I would use every ounce of my being to stop it. If necessary I would shut the whole thing down rather than have my name remembered forever as such a facilitator. Obviously Zuckerberg has a different mindset and is clearly no Alfred Nobel.
  • ethbro 7y ago
    I think this is a balanced appraisal of the situation. Historically, US free speech has been "crazy rant" = okay, "fire!" (in a crowded room) = not okay. And that worked, when distribution was relatively centralized with respect to network size. However, now I think we have a third category, somewhere between the previous two: "fire!" (on a widely- and easily-disseminated medium). The sheer scale of social networks makes the effect fundamentally unlike prior scenarios.
    • catalogia 7y ago
      > "fire!" (in a crowded room) = not okay. I really wish people could find a different expression to convey what they mean by this, because what they/you mean by this is probably worlds apart from what this phrase actually meant when it was formulated. > ""Shouting fire in a crowded theater" is a popular metaphor for speech or actions made for the principal purpose of creating panic. The phrase is a paraphrasing of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s opinion in the United States Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States in 1919, which held that the defendant's speech in opposition to the draft during World War I was not protected free speech under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution." I think we can all agree that protesting the draft should be protected by the first amendment.
• eropple 7y ago
  There certainly are anodyne parts of 4chan--but they're obviously, to the point where your post comes off as disingenous, not the problem. Hell, they could migrate back to Something Awful, like a lot of us who grew up ended up doing. (Which, just recently, torpedoed FYAD, the last vestige of the edgelord era. The FYAD types seem to have fucked off to 4chan and elsewhere. Nobody was surprised.) Hate speech is abhorrent and its purveyors should be ostracized from decent society. But you can deal with the crazy screamer on the streetcorner. The organizational facet is not merely distasteful but threatening. These are places to air doxxed information. They're places to gin up raids. Remember "4chan is not your personal army"? It isn't real anymore, if it ever was. For the last five years, 8chan in particular (largely because 4chan has an ownership group that maybe-just-maybe is scared of real consequences, which tells me that real consequences work) has been the personal army of a lot of sadsacks who, just to name one facet, really really really want to make the lives of women who have the temerity to make or talk about video games really horrible. These places are literally-not-figuratively hives for fascists to radicalize the clueless, and that is a threat at a societal level.
  • bitwize 7y ago
    How dare people go through Zoe Quinn's tweets and discover that she was in a consensual relationship with the man she claims raped her at the time said rape was supposed to have occurred! The people who did this have no other motive than to punish her for being involved in video games while having a vagina! Such hate speech, and all institutions complicit in its spread, needs to be blotted from existence immediately!
    • Craighead 7y ago
      This is a rather poor quality post. This is HN, not KIA.
  • heartbeats 7y ago
    But they already are. The crazy screamer on the street corner causes an actual harm to you. To avoid 8chan is trivial; just don't go there. That people get radicalized going there seems like a poor argument. If I understand you correctly, the principle is the following: 1. Someone holds acceptable views. 2. They visit 8chan. 3. They now hold abhorrent views. Why should 8chan be blamed for this, or rather, what did they do wrong here? Don't you agree that people have the right to hold opinions without interference, and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers?
• bitwize 7y ago
  > To which I have to ask, why is that a problem? Because its a hotbed for hate speech? Because the moment a troll shooter posts his manifucksto to a site, that site becomes "linked to terrorism" and it becomes our social responsibility to shut that site down and ensure that sites like it never rise again. Based on which comments get modded up and which get modded down, this is Accepted Truth on Hackernews. If these principles were applied consistently, what should we do about the newspapers, magazines, and web sites that ran the Unabomber's manifesto in the 90s? Oh, right. Marcuse's principle of repressive tolerance kicks in. That tells us we have a social duty to legally protect expressing a leftist perspective and to criminalize expressing a rightist one.
• incompatible 7y ago
  Is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance relevant here? Also, if you ask for (legal) spaces for "anything goes" content, you need to campaign not just against "hate speech" laws, but all the other laws that prohibit various kinds of information.
  • samatman 7y ago
    Maybe, but probably not. I encourage people to read the full Karl Popper quote, which contains this: In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. The claim isn't that we should denounce those who hold opinions we find abhorrent as intolerant and fail to tolerate them; it's more specific than that, it says that we may need to physically fight those whose 'opinions' are backed by force or the credible threat of it. I don't think vile, anonymous Internet racists rise to this measure. Your mileage may vary. Most of the Interneterati who invoke the paradox of tolerance are saying that, e.g., being intolerant of the LGBTQ, or racially chauvinist, or less than enthusiastically feminist, is grounds for censorship and deplatforming. I don't agree, and don't get the impression Karl Popper would either.
    • incompatible 7y ago
      I'm not sure at what level the tolerance would end: if there's a group on the Internet which occasionally launches or encourages random acts of violence such as beating up LGBTQ people or a bombing or truck attack, does it deserve to be left in peace? Should only the people who commit the real-world violence be suppressed, and site itself left alone to prepare the next attack? Or does a group need to rise to the level of outright rebellion, like ISIS creating its own state in the Middle East, before it needs to be shut down?
• chillacy 7y ago
  > Let it be an outlet for those who choose to partake in such content I normally don't argue for censorship but I will throw out that if you believe the following things: 1. There exist thoughts and beliefs which are dangerous to (my) society 2. These thoughts and beliefs are normally tempered through social pressure in the dominant culture 3. Through the internet you can create your own subculture which reinforces your thoughts and beliefs to become the new normal Then it makes sense to try to stamp out any places where you can form these groups, since you (the dominant culture) want to maintain the status quo. This isn't necessarily unique to the present day politics, there was a time when civil/economic rights were a radical faction in a broader culture which would want it stamped out too.
  • mikedilger 7y ago
    You certainly may _want_ to eliminate such places and/or such beliefs. But stamping out places or beliefs doesn't really work. People find or create new places, and what is left is just ill-will and further political division. Beliefs become martyred and the Streissand effect draws more people in to investigate. The way to reduce bad beliefs is to, IMHO: 1. Ingratiate and investigate. Respect the people, become their friend, listen to their full arguments (don't imagine straw men), understand their motivations. You might even discover the belief isn't so bad. If you don't, continue on to: 2. Suggest alternate ways of viewing the situation. People will always argue their point and appear to not accept your view. But I've found they almost always actually move slightly towards your point, oftentimes after the conversation, even if they won't admit it. It takes time for a worldview to shift. Arguing makes no sense prior to ingratiating yourself, because if you are an enemy your view will not be appreciated.
    • Mirioron 7y ago
      One very important thing to counter hate is to try to have everyone in society involved in society somehow. People are much less willing to wish ill on others in society (or society itself) if they feel that they are part of it. A lot of stories about people being radicalized start with a person feeling at end of the rope and alone. This isn't something that you can really do online, but it is something that can be done in real life and should probably done more. Friends are a powerful force.
• hnthrowaway4938 7y ago
  >What is hate speech? Absolutely anything that neoliberal Silicon Valley oligarchs and their fringe far-left San Francisco "social justice" activists disagree with. Those two groups have, quite seriously, suggested that the nearly half of the country that voted for Donald Trump are "Nazis" controlled by "Putin's Russian propagand bots." Considering how violent they are (see their allies in Antifa and the California and Chicago ethnic activists who constantly physically attacked white Trump supporters during the campaign) and how once mainstream media outlets like the New York Times openly call for ethnic genocide of unfavored groups, the fact these people are creating the totalitarian technocracy of the future is absolutely terrifying. It's impossible to even have a conversation with these people as they are absolutely convinced of their moral self-righteousness, to the point it would make a Cotton Mather blush.
  • dang 7y ago
    Ok, but please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. It's against the site guidelines because it takes discussion away from curiosity and into smiting enemies. Also, it's repetitive and therefore tedious and therefore off topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• worble 7y ago
  Having been on the internet since a young age, I've always found it strange the internet is, well, so "srs business" these days. The internet has never, and as you say, will never be a harmonious place where everyone will be nice to each other. We can't even achieve this in physical spaces which can actually enforce these kinds of rules! Maybe I'm lucky, but I find it really easy to just disasociate with online comments. Whenever I read something hurtful or mean directed to me on the internet, I can very easily just shrug it off as "some internet person" and move on, although admittedly I've never been target harassed like some people have, which I'm sure is distressing. I think part of this was growing up I was always told: "Don't use your real name online! Don't give out your personal info!", and so for me, being online was always about being someone else, a different persona if you will. These days that seems completely out of the window, everyone uses their real names everywhere, uploads actual pictures of themselves and generally their real life seems directly integrated into their online life, which is just unthinkable for me. This probably makes online abuse just that much more personal for them? I suppose another big change of course is that all the small forums that used to make up the internet are now exceedingly being consolidated into just one or two sites. Again, back when I was a child trawling the internet, if you didn't like one forum, you just hopped to another, and there were always plenty more (sidenot: remember the 'affiliate' tags on sites? I miss those. Made the internet feel more like a big group of communities, but I digress). Of course now, if someone is being harassed on twitter or facebook or something, well, they're not going to go somewhere else because a lot of the competition no longer exists anymore. I don't really know where I'm going with this comment honestly, I'm just ranbling. What I do know is that regulating the internet is, and always has been, completely futile. So long as someone, somewhere, can spin up a forum on a VPS or on a computer at home, and people can connect to it, there's going to be sites hosting every kind of content imaginable. If they can't even bring down the Pirate Bay with the music industries power and money, they'll never stop people saying nasty things.
  • mjcohen 7y ago
    What would your reaction if information about you or your loved ones was posted and people were encouraged to do nasty things to you or them?
• jariel 7y ago
  "What is hate speech? I'm sure I don't need to elaborate further on what I see wrong with that." Absolutely you need to elaborate. I think your comment implies a misunderstanding of populism and the kinds of things that go on in this world. By that I mean, because we actually do live in a world with a lot of rules, I suggest most people don't realize just how bad it can get. "Anything goes" means ISIS showing beheadings of civilians in order to recruit more young men to the cause which works very well as a recruiting tool. I'd encourage you to look into the Rwandan genocide - it was done through media. Radio broadcasters on either side were lamenting the others as 'cockroaches' 'vile creatures' who needed to be 'exterminated' passing lies and false information and then, at one point, calling for outright murder. The 'war' was not between armies, it was a lot of regular people, taking to the streets, massacring each other with machetes en masse. Like a 'zombie' film come to life. And of course, the idiot teaching people to make sarin gas in their basement for fun, or to make sure that those 'cockroaches in group XYZ' can be slaughtered'. This is what 'anything goes' means. The moniker 'hate speech' can surely be over-applied, for example, in Quebec a comedian was fined $30K for making a joke about a person in a wheelchair. Sometimes uncomfortable arguments are labeled 'hate'. This is ridiculous obviously. But - there's absolutely no doubt that 'hate speech' exists and can foment particularly young minds into some really devious world views. Particularly in the context of 'fake information' the Holocaust, for example, could be 'erased' as a legit element of history. Some of the stuff that is 'normalized' among some kids is pretty shocking, even just some casual use of language. The 'internet' is now the commons, like any other commons, and though we need to err very much in the side of freedom of expression there - will be limited. I see at least two thresholds, 1) the civil commons, like most areas where you can't go around screaming about this or that, like a private office or even a public square where you can't harass people. And 2) more private spaces, people should be able to almost anything they want (i.e. 'almost anything goes) and the threshold should be really high, but true 'hate speech calling for violence' for example should be a problem. ISIS beheading videos should be taken down. People calling for the mass murder of 'some group' can be taken down. If you're trying to teach people to make sarin gas in their basements, this can be taken down. Etc..
• jancsika 7y ago
  > We have a right to exist too. You do. On a separate note: 1. From a technical point of view it's poorly-designed software for 2020. For example: you can't measure how many of "we" are refrigerators. You apparently don't reflect about how that may open up exploits to a wide variety of attackers in "their own space" for the "anything goes" crowd. (Same for HN for that matter.) 2. From a practical point of view this type of software serves as a poor entry point for a persuasive free speech argument. I much prefer using E2EE messaging apps as the entry point for a strong defense of free speech in the digital era. We know bad actors have used them and will likely use them in the future. Nonetheless, the rest of us use them and will fight to continue to do so on principle (e.g., for security in a weaponized internet, for privacy, for research purposes, etc.). Those principles are at the forefront, as is the fear that will be used in the counter-argument and which we must resist. We know the value, we know the cost, and we can argue the point clearly. If we instead start the argument with poorly designed, buggy software that requires a birds-eye view of the network in order to properly assess when and how it's being exploited we're going to be fighting on two fronts. (As well as ignoring the risks of the design as I believe your comment does.)
• anarazel 7y ago
  Because 4/8chan always stay there, and never venture out, right?