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Of course everybody knows the right way to convince conspiracy theorists that they're wrong is to go after them. I don't see what's wrong with having internet

Of course everybody knows the right way to convince conspiracy theorists that they're wrong is to go after them. I don't see what's wrong with having internet trash bins. At least the trash is in a know location, it doesn't spill everywhere. I'm not from the US, the only mentions of those sites I have ever encountered was journalists making a few articles about them.

happytoexplain 6y ago
The goal is not to convince conspiracy theorists that they are wrong, the goal is to prevent them from hurting people or society and, to that end, keep the dangerous ones from organizing anonymously online in large numbers (I honestly don't know if that's possible).
- jmnicolas 6y ago
  If I'm not mistaken the NZ killer was on 8chan? It's the same argument with serial killer movies (at the risk of showing my age there was a strong controversy with "Natural Born Killers" at the time): you don't kill people because you chatted on the internet or watched a movie. You kill people because you had it in you. The things you were exposed before might color your act but that's it.
  - dragontamer 6y ago
    > It's the same argument with serial killer movies Hollywood is infamous for misunderstanding psychology. At best, Hollywood has outdated notions of psychology (favoring long outdated ideas like Freud, because such ideas are exciting). Hollywood sells movies, not understanding. What we're discovering today is that there's a "pathway to radicalization". People are NOT born radical, they realign themselves as radical over time.
    - formerly_proven 6y ago
      Yes, so how is giving internet trash cans like QAnon huge amounts of exposure and thus free advertisement supposed to help?
      - dragontamer 6y ago
        With QAnon politicians reaching mainstream status (Jo Rae Perkins), we're long past that point. QAnon is reaching mainstream, the question is what do we do about indicating that its message should not be tolerated.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - srtjstjsj 6y ago
      > What we're discovering today We who? This was known at least as far back as since Scientology and Holocaust.
  - gameswithgo 6y ago
    > you don't kill people because you chatted on the internet or watched a movie. There is this pervasive idea lately a crazy youtube video or text can't actually be harmful, which just isn't true. Ideas can inspire wars, murder, revolution, they can warp minds. People previously productive can end up obsessed with crazy junk. It is important to protect each other and ourselves from bad ideas. The question is how, of course. Some people violently oppose any form of curation, whether it be censorship by government, or choices made by companies like facebook. Others insist the solution to bad speech is good speech, but I've been seeing that fail on the internet for 30 years. Perhaps higher quality education can help, perhaps improving economic inequity can help. Other ideas are welcome!
    - IngvarLynn 6y ago
      Could not disagree more. Pure information is harmless, beliefs are not. Crazy beliefs emerge from the lack of critical thinking, not from the "dangerous information". Therefore censorship is only good as part of "divide and conquer" strategy.
  - swebs 6y ago
    He was on Facebook too.
  - watwut 6y ago
    You can get radicalized by people you communicate with via internet. Especially when you are isolated irl.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    He left a manifesto which explained why he did it, citing both racist conspiracy theory from chan culture and "mainstream" racist Melanie Phillips.
  - Jetrel 6y ago
    I've long been sympathetic to ideas like this - I remember as a little kid, blowing off the big stigma around the (then-novel) 3d shooters that had just come out, like Doom. Ironically I agree with exactly what you said, but simultaneously think you might miss something in the analysis. I think that maybe a better way to phrase the idea is: In the rare case that you're positive for a trait, you can be incited to it by stimuli. For example, if you have an anger-management problem, you can live quite peacefully, left alone, but you are uniquely dangerous to provoke. Behaviors and stimuli that are harmless to other people cause a violent outburst from you. Same thing with alcoholics and, for example, pedophiles - stimuli that provoke no negative behavior from other people will provoke it in someone positive for a trait. Violent media left us with a tiny driblet of actual killers because only a tiny fraction of people are positive for a trait of being stone-cold killers. -- So what are we afraid of? We have barely any actual killers. We're afraid of enablers. We have a tiny, tiny group of people that will dare to do crimes (say, shooting up a synagogue) when there are clear and present consequences for it. I'm quite sure, however, we have a still small, but much, much larger group that are "latent" trait-positive for violence. They'd do it - if they could get away with it. What we're really scared of is a third group - which might be a group so large that it could be anywhere from 30-60% of our society. People who could be coerced into not caring about the violence. That third group is the people who are trait-positive for gullibility (and several other related traits). I think it could very well be "most people" - a plurality if not a majority. These are what enable horrible things. People who have bought into propaganda really don't do anything, and that's exactly what's so horrible about them; because they don't express some sort of obvious, negative externality in their neighbors and coworker's lives, nobody really cares if they believe horrible things. Because they don't really "act on" those beliefs - they don't go out and do things that hurt people. But they also don't intervene when a crime aligning with their beliefs is perpetrated. And that's what's so scary. When a black man would get lynched in the old south, the real thing that made it possible was the hundreds of other bystanders who felt like the black guy deserved it. If they didn't exist, such a killer would rapidly be brought to justice. But instead, since so many were okay with it (and even cheered it on), not only would the killer get away with the act, but quite a few much more "minor" trait-positive people participated in it - people much less naturally driven to kill, but who could work up the courage to do so if they could get away with it.
swebs 6y ago
>Of course everybody knows the right way to convince conspiracy theorists that they're wrong is to go after them. All this work to shut them down by various organizations can even accurately be described as a conspiracy. (Though more of a conspiracy-fact since they're so shameless about it)
jameskilton 6y ago
> At least the trash is in a know location, it doesn't spill everywhere. Please do a little more research and thought before posting such things. There is no "trash can", it IS SPILLING EVERYWHERE. We even have a QAnon supporter most likely headed to Congress. People are dead because of these hate-filled groups. Shutting them down saves lives, not only in the US but throughout the world. You can't just "leave these groups alone" because the last thing they will ever do is keep to themselves. Hate groups only want two things: to spread their hate and to get rid of the people they hate. To let them be is to support their agenda, and in doing so, people die.
- bogwog 6y ago
  I wonder how many Qanon believers are hate-filed extremists, people going through mental health issues, or just edgy kids/teenagers. I doubt that the people who would actually commit a public shooting are in the majority, and I strongly doubt that taking down their website is going to kill the group. If anything, it will just strengthen the beliefs of the paranoid people who frequent it. What we should be doing is going after Youtube and other companies that are actively radicalizing people and turning them into Qanon crazies with their irresponsible recommendation algorithms. If Youtube stopped recommending conspiracy theory videos, Qanon and other communities like it would stop growing and would likely die a slow and uneventful death as people simply lose interest.
  - commandlinefan 6y ago
    > going after Youtube So... actual government-mandated suppression of free speech?
    - mhoad 6y ago
      Allow me to reframe this. Considering they are both now considered groups posing a terrorism threat according to the FBI we would hold a platform like YouTube to the same standard on QAnon that we do on ISIS. You can’t host propaganda from either group because they both have an extremely high likelihood of leading to real world violence based on historical evidence. That isn’t an unreasonable standard.
api 6y ago
I sympathize with this view, but visit Reddit /r/qanoncasualties for a counterpoint. On one hand I am pretty close to a free speech maximalist. On the other hand, I do believe in the “fire in a crowded theater test.” I am starting to think that certain forms of public speech, namely that which harms large numbers of mentally ill people or has the potential to create a huge outburst of stochastic terrorism, may fail that test. The Internet changes things because now you can have a billion people in a crowded theater and one person can yell fire. On the stochastic terrorism front: a less ethical person hacking the President’s Twitter account could have tweeted “The storm is upon us! Where we go one we go all!” followed by some instructions and probably killed more people than the 9/11 attacks. One person. All they would have had to do is guess “maga2020!” as a password if reports are to be believed. Meanwhile we spend hundreds of billions on defenses to prevent such attacks... which would have been worthless in the face of one person guessing a dumb password and leveraging a meme-plex to mass trigger the mentally ill. This is what is possible today. Attacks only get better. We do have a problem. I am not sure going after the platforms is right or will work, but I can’t think of anything else. Sure they can move to Tor, less popular boards, etc. but the point is to shut down the mass scale propagation machine that depends on access to wide platforms. This will at least contain the cult to a smaller and thus less dangerous group.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- njharman 6y ago
  You can't stop attacks. You can only defend against them. Which means; treat the mentally ill, reduce ignorance (education), and widely and pervasively teach critical thinking skills.
- godshatter 6y ago
  I'm of the opinion that going after the places these people are known to congregate is a bad idea. It pushes them underground, and strengthens their bubble more than even Youtube's or Facebook's algorithms can accomplish. I agree that there is a problem here, but I don't think isolating them more is the solution. My friend's wife went off the rails on the flat earth conspiracy. Thankfully, it's mostly benign as far as conspiracies go. She got in with a certain crowd and started cutting ties with those that gave her grief about it, or that she thought might. She knew the truth, the government was covering it up, etc. It was only through the actions of her husband, patiently bringing up questions and referring to science and hearing her out over a long period of time, that she came clean that she had finally come to the conclusion that she was wrong. The quote about "sunlight being the best disinfectant" has some truth to it.
finnthehuman 6y ago
>I don't see what's wrong with having internet trash bins. I think it's because the busybodies don't have a way to stand down without losing face. Journalists have the real world savvy to not consider it important what political ideas are exposused by piss smelling disheveled streetpeople. But otherwise-"serious" jorunos have been spent the better part of a decade locked in a conflict with people who are mostly 12 years old and/or just trying to wind them up. They can't admit to themselves that they completely dropped the ball on understanding the internet. Even journalists who knew what the internet in the early 2000s seemed to forgot the lay of the land once high-status people got the internet on their cellphones and were shocked that the content on the screen that didn't instantly cater to them. So they will either push enough baddies off the internet to declare victory, or have to accept that they're a fucking embarrassment.
ianai 6y ago
You may not be able to fully understand the scope of the problem precisely because you’re not in the US. You’re not seeing the affect and effects it’s having in day to day life. I’m a white guy. Last week I went through a grocery store after forgetting my mask in my car. I needed to use the restroom badly and didn’t realize I had forgotten the mask until I was mid-stream. That’s when I understood why people were looking at me like a potential threat with fear in their eyes. They probably assumed I was “yet another” anti-masker there to threaten and attack them verbally or worse. (I quickly left to the car and got my mask.)
- briefcomment 6y ago
  Lol, I highly doubt people are giving you weird looks because they think you're a Q acolyte. They're much more likely to think you're inconsiderate for voluntarily increasing their risk of catching covid. I follow Q for fun, and I barely think about it day to day. The average person probably thinks about Q less than once per week, when someone brings it up in the news.
  - pwinnski 6y ago
    You're likely right about the mask. I would give the guy weird looks because of his lack of consideration for others, not because I fear a crazed killer. That said, your experience with Q is not universal. There are many people who take it much, much more seriously than you do and have alienated friends and family members and lost jobs as a result. And, of course, fired a gun in a pizza shop, shot and killed protestors, etc.
    - ianai 6y ago
      The “casual followers” of conspiracy theories aren’t doing anybody any good. They’re just increasing the spread of the disinformation. This stuff needs to be fought, refuted, and relegated to the dustbin of history. “casual following” is the sort of thing that lets this win a place in the core of public discourse and culture.
      - deleted 6y ago
pwinnski 6y ago
I think this line of thinking is absolutely correct when conspiracy theories are fringe or harmless. You don't believe we landed on the moon? Okay, buddy, have a nice day. Occasionally, though, conspiracy theorists escape the harmless fringe and become actively harmful to society, which is what many of us believe is happening in the USA today. A racist conspiracy theory that posited, contrary to all evidence, that our previous president was born in another country, combined with some conspiracy theories popular among "the Tea Party movement" as they were known, propelled our current president into office, where the theories have snowballed and escalated into shots fired in a pizza parlor, protesters murdered by car, protestors murdered by gun, illegal voter intimidation, and a significant chunk of the population not quite ruling out the possibility that a huge chunk of elected officials and others are part of a cabal of devil-worshipping pederasts who drink the blood of children. Faked moon landings this ain't. Crazy Uncle Roger this ain't. I do live in the US, and I encounter the results of this weekly, sometimes more often. It doesn't take visiting 8kun to be affected by this here. Update: There are people on this page, right here at HN, stating misleading nonsense tangentially related to QAnon. The spread of this stuff is pervasive already.
- cheweh 6y ago
  Note that Obama's birth was a conspiracy around 2008, before 8chan existed. I would argue that "the Donald" on reddit was a driver of Trump's online popularity. This argument is not for striking down individual websites as much as it is for pervasive rumor-quashing. One could look toward China's internet policy to measure the success of playing "whack-a-mole" at the rumor-level. Propaganda there still gets made and spread, it just stays online for minutes at a time before deletion, and so by the time people see it they have no way of asking for clarification on its truth.
  - bleepblorp 6y ago
    I sincerely hope there's some effective middle ground between allowing the kind of unrestrained rumor/conspiracy propagation that puts unhinged people in public office and Chinese-style ubiquitous law enforcement. Neither option is particularly attractive.
- 6y ago
bleepblorp 6y ago
QAnon material has been retweeted by Trump and a QAnon-connected person is expected to be elected to the US congress. A QAnon believer was convicted for blocking a major dam while making terroristic threats[0]. Another believer was arrested for attempting to bomb a religious display in Illinois. [3] A believer in the QAnon predecessor, Pizzagate, shot up a pizza restaurant[1]. The recent attempt to assassinate the Canadian Prime Minister was perpetrated by an individual with Qanon leanings[3]. These incidents are not isolated and are part of a larger pattern of QAnon-connected violence[2][3]. QAnon is, politically, an auxiliary of the Republican party. This, combined with the willingness of QAnon followers to use violence, means that the movement has the potential to be a proto-brownshirt movement. This is not something to dismiss lightly. QAnon is not a self-contained trash bin, it's a cancer that has metastasized into both violence and into the mainstream of American politics. Hello, QAnon downvoters. [0] https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2020/02/11/man-who-blocked-hoover-dam-part-qanon-beliefs-takes-guilty-plea/4724161002/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2020/02/1... [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/police-man-with-assault-rifle-dc-comet-pizza-victim-of-fake-sex-trafficking-story/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/police-man-with-assault-rifle-d... [2] https://www.ctc.usma.edu/the-qanon-conspiracy-theory-a-security-threat-in-the-making/ https://www.ctc.usma.edu/the-qanon-conspiracy-theory-a-secur... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/15/qanon-violence-crimes-timeline https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/15/qanon-violen...
- Camas 6y ago
  Article doesn't mention any bomb and "shot up" is stretching things.
  - bleepblorp 6y ago
    Updated. The QAnon bomber was, indeed, a different incident in Illinois. The Hoover Dam incident only involved firearms and an armored vehicle. And what term other than 'shot up' would you use to describe a deranged person recklessly discharging a firearm as part of a targeted attack?
    - 6y ago
panda-giddiness 6y ago
> I don't see what's wrong with having internet trash bins. At least the trash is in a know location, it doesn't spill everywhere. You're presenting a false dichotomy. The options aren't (1) whack-a-mole or (2) trash-binning. The options are (1) whack-a-mole or (2) whack-a-mole with trash-binning. When you remove the trash bin, you stymie the discourse.
kilo_bravo_3 6y ago
>I don't see what's wrong with having internet trash bins. At least the trash is in a know location, it doesn't spill everywhere. The trash congregates and creates an echo chamber that radicalizes the most vulnerable and leads to them killing people.

happytoexplain 6y ago

The goal is not to convince conspiracy theorists that they are wrong, the goal is to prevent them from hurting people or society and, to that end, keep the dangerous ones from organizing anonymously online in large numbers (I honestly don't know if that's possible).

jmnicolas 6y ago
If I'm not mistaken the NZ killer was on 8chan? It's the same argument with serial killer movies (at the risk of showing my age there was a strong controversy with "Natural Born Killers" at the time): you don't kill people because you chatted on the internet or watched a movie. You kill people because you had it in you. The things you were exposed before might color your act but that's it.
- dragontamer 6y ago
  > It's the same argument with serial killer movies Hollywood is infamous for misunderstanding psychology. At best, Hollywood has outdated notions of psychology (favoring long outdated ideas like Freud, because such ideas are exciting). Hollywood sells movies, not understanding. What we're discovering today is that there's a "pathway to radicalization". People are NOT born radical, they realign themselves as radical over time.
  - formerly_proven 6y ago
    Yes, so how is giving internet trash cans like QAnon huge amounts of exposure and thus free advertisement supposed to help?
    - dragontamer 6y ago
      With QAnon politicians reaching mainstream status (Jo Rae Perkins), we're long past that point. QAnon is reaching mainstream, the question is what do we do about indicating that its message should not be tolerated.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    > What we're discovering today We who? This was known at least as far back as since Scientology and Holocaust.
- gameswithgo 6y ago
  > you don't kill people because you chatted on the internet or watched a movie. There is this pervasive idea lately a crazy youtube video or text can't actually be harmful, which just isn't true. Ideas can inspire wars, murder, revolution, they can warp minds. People previously productive can end up obsessed with crazy junk. It is important to protect each other and ourselves from bad ideas. The question is how, of course. Some people violently oppose any form of curation, whether it be censorship by government, or choices made by companies like facebook. Others insist the solution to bad speech is good speech, but I've been seeing that fail on the internet for 30 years. Perhaps higher quality education can help, perhaps improving economic inequity can help. Other ideas are welcome!
  - IngvarLynn 6y ago
    Could not disagree more. Pure information is harmless, beliefs are not. Crazy beliefs emerge from the lack of critical thinking, not from the "dangerous information". Therefore censorship is only good as part of "divide and conquer" strategy.
- swebs 6y ago
  He was on Facebook too.
- watwut 6y ago
  You can get radicalized by people you communicate with via internet. Especially when you are isolated irl.
- pjc50 6y ago
  He left a manifesto which explained why he did it, citing both racist conspiracy theory from chan culture and "mainstream" racist Melanie Phillips.
- Jetrel 6y ago
  I've long been sympathetic to ideas like this - I remember as a little kid, blowing off the big stigma around the (then-novel) 3d shooters that had just come out, like Doom. Ironically I agree with exactly what you said, but simultaneously think you might miss something in the analysis. I think that maybe a better way to phrase the idea is: In the rare case that you're positive for a trait, you can be incited to it by stimuli. For example, if you have an anger-management problem, you can live quite peacefully, left alone, but you are uniquely dangerous to provoke. Behaviors and stimuli that are harmless to other people cause a violent outburst from you. Same thing with alcoholics and, for example, pedophiles - stimuli that provoke no negative behavior from other people will provoke it in someone positive for a trait. Violent media left us with a tiny driblet of actual killers because only a tiny fraction of people are positive for a trait of being stone-cold killers. -- So what are we afraid of? We have barely any actual killers. We're afraid of enablers. We have a tiny, tiny group of people that will dare to do crimes (say, shooting up a synagogue) when there are clear and present consequences for it. I'm quite sure, however, we have a still small, but much, much larger group that are "latent" trait-positive for violence. They'd do it - if they could get away with it. What we're really scared of is a third group - which might be a group so large that it could be anywhere from 30-60% of our society. People who could be coerced into not caring about the violence. That third group is the people who are trait-positive for gullibility (and several other related traits). I think it could very well be "most people" - a plurality if not a majority. These are what enable horrible things. People who have bought into propaganda really don't do anything, and that's exactly what's so horrible about them; because they don't express some sort of obvious, negative externality in their neighbors and coworker's lives, nobody really cares if they believe horrible things. Because they don't really "act on" those beliefs - they don't go out and do things that hurt people. But they also don't intervene when a crime aligning with their beliefs is perpetrated. And that's what's so scary. When a black man would get lynched in the old south, the real thing that made it possible was the hundreds of other bystanders who felt like the black guy deserved it. If they didn't exist, such a killer would rapidly be brought to justice. But instead, since so many were okay with it (and even cheered it on), not only would the killer get away with the act, but quite a few much more "minor" trait-positive people participated in it - people much less naturally driven to kill, but who could work up the courage to do so if they could get away with it.

swebs 6y ago

>Of course everybody knows the right way to convince conspiracy theorists that they're wrong is to go after them. All this work to shut them down by various organizations can even accurately be described as a conspiracy. (Though more of a conspiracy-fact since they're so shameless about it)

jameskilton 6y ago

> At least the trash is in a know location, it doesn't spill everywhere. Please do a little more research and thought before posting such things. There is no "trash can", it IS SPILLING EVERYWHERE. We even have a QAnon supporter most likely headed to Congress. People are dead because of these hate-filled groups. Shutting them down saves lives, not only in the US but throughout the world. You can't just "leave these groups alone" because the last thing they will ever do is keep to themselves. Hate groups only want two things: to spread their hate and to get rid of the people they hate. To let them be is to support their agenda, and in doing so, people die.

bogwog 6y ago
I wonder how many Qanon believers are hate-filed extremists, people going through mental health issues, or just edgy kids/teenagers. I doubt that the people who would actually commit a public shooting are in the majority, and I strongly doubt that taking down their website is going to kill the group. If anything, it will just strengthen the beliefs of the paranoid people who frequent it. What we should be doing is going after Youtube and other companies that are actively radicalizing people and turning them into Qanon crazies with their irresponsible recommendation algorithms. If Youtube stopped recommending conspiracy theory videos, Qanon and other communities like it would stop growing and would likely die a slow and uneventful death as people simply lose interest.
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  > going after Youtube So... actual government-mandated suppression of free speech?
  - mhoad 6y ago
    Allow me to reframe this. Considering they are both now considered groups posing a terrorism threat according to the FBI we would hold a platform like YouTube to the same standard on QAnon that we do on ISIS. You can’t host propaganda from either group because they both have an extremely high likelihood of leading to real world violence based on historical evidence. That isn’t an unreasonable standard.

api 6y ago

I sympathize with this view, but visit Reddit /r/qanoncasualties for a counterpoint. On one hand I am pretty close to a free speech maximalist. On the other hand, I do believe in the “fire in a crowded theater test.” I am starting to think that certain forms of public speech, namely that which harms large numbers of mentally ill people or has the potential to create a huge outburst of stochastic terrorism, may fail that test. The Internet changes things because now you can have a billion people in a crowded theater and one person can yell fire. On the stochastic terrorism front: a less ethical person hacking the President’s Twitter account could have tweeted “The storm is upon us! Where we go one we go all!” followed by some instructions and probably killed more people than the 9/11 attacks. One person. All they would have had to do is guess “maga2020!” as a password if reports are to be believed. Meanwhile we spend hundreds of billions on defenses to prevent such attacks... which would have been worthless in the face of one person guessing a dumb password and leveraging a meme-plex to mass trigger the mentally ill. This is what is possible today. Attacks only get better. We do have a problem. I am not sure going after the platforms is right or will work, but I can’t think of anything else. Sure they can move to Tor, less popular boards, etc. but the point is to shut down the mass scale propagation machine that depends on access to wide platforms. This will at least contain the cult to a smaller and thus less dangerous group.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
njharman 6y ago
You can't stop attacks. You can only defend against them. Which means; treat the mentally ill, reduce ignorance (education), and widely and pervasively teach critical thinking skills.
godshatter 6y ago
I'm of the opinion that going after the places these people are known to congregate is a bad idea. It pushes them underground, and strengthens their bubble more than even Youtube's or Facebook's algorithms can accomplish. I agree that there is a problem here, but I don't think isolating them more is the solution. My friend's wife went off the rails on the flat earth conspiracy. Thankfully, it's mostly benign as far as conspiracies go. She got in with a certain crowd and started cutting ties with those that gave her grief about it, or that she thought might. She knew the truth, the government was covering it up, etc. It was only through the actions of her husband, patiently bringing up questions and referring to science and hearing her out over a long period of time, that she came clean that she had finally come to the conclusion that she was wrong. The quote about "sunlight being the best disinfectant" has some truth to it.

finnthehuman 6y ago

>I don't see what's wrong with having internet trash bins. I think it's because the busybodies don't have a way to stand down without losing face. Journalists have the real world savvy to not consider it important what political ideas are exposused by piss smelling disheveled streetpeople. But otherwise-"serious" jorunos have been spent the better part of a decade locked in a conflict with people who are mostly 12 years old and/or just trying to wind them up. They can't admit to themselves that they completely dropped the ball on understanding the internet. Even journalists who knew what the internet in the early 2000s seemed to forgot the lay of the land once high-status people got the internet on their cellphones and were shocked that the content on the screen that didn't instantly cater to them. So they will either push enough baddies off the internet to declare victory, or have to accept that they're a fucking embarrassment.

ianai 6y ago

You may not be able to fully understand the scope of the problem precisely because you’re not in the US. You’re not seeing the affect and effects it’s having in day to day life. I’m a white guy. Last week I went through a grocery store after forgetting my mask in my car. I needed to use the restroom badly and didn’t realize I had forgotten the mask until I was mid-stream. That’s when I understood why people were looking at me like a potential threat with fear in their eyes. They probably assumed I was “yet another” anti-masker there to threaten and attack them verbally or worse. (I quickly left to the car and got my mask.)

briefcomment 6y ago
Lol, I highly doubt people are giving you weird looks because they think you're a Q acolyte. They're much more likely to think you're inconsiderate for voluntarily increasing their risk of catching covid. I follow Q for fun, and I barely think about it day to day. The average person probably thinks about Q less than once per week, when someone brings it up in the news.
- pwinnski 6y ago
  You're likely right about the mask. I would give the guy weird looks because of his lack of consideration for others, not because I fear a crazed killer. That said, your experience with Q is not universal. There are many people who take it much, much more seriously than you do and have alienated friends and family members and lost jobs as a result. And, of course, fired a gun in a pizza shop, shot and killed protestors, etc.
  - ianai 6y ago
    The “casual followers” of conspiracy theories aren’t doing anybody any good. They’re just increasing the spread of the disinformation. This stuff needs to be fought, refuted, and relegated to the dustbin of history. “casual following” is the sort of thing that lets this win a place in the core of public discourse and culture.
    - deleted 6y ago

pwinnski 6y ago

I think this line of thinking is absolutely correct when conspiracy theories are fringe or harmless. You don't believe we landed on the moon? Okay, buddy, have a nice day. Occasionally, though, conspiracy theorists escape the harmless fringe and become actively harmful to society, which is what many of us believe is happening in the USA today. A racist conspiracy theory that posited, contrary to all evidence, that our previous president was born in another country, combined with some conspiracy theories popular among "the Tea Party movement" as they were known, propelled our current president into office, where the theories have snowballed and escalated into shots fired in a pizza parlor, protesters murdered by car, protestors murdered by gun, illegal voter intimidation, and a significant chunk of the population not quite ruling out the possibility that a huge chunk of elected officials and others are part of a cabal of devil-worshipping pederasts who drink the blood of children. Faked moon landings this ain't. Crazy Uncle Roger this ain't. I do live in the US, and I encounter the results of this weekly, sometimes more often. It doesn't take visiting 8kun to be affected by this here. Update: There are people on this page, right here at HN, stating misleading nonsense tangentially related to QAnon. The spread of this stuff is pervasive already.

cheweh 6y ago
Note that Obama's birth was a conspiracy around 2008, before 8chan existed. I would argue that "the Donald" on reddit was a driver of Trump's online popularity. This argument is not for striking down individual websites as much as it is for pervasive rumor-quashing. One could look toward China's internet policy to measure the success of playing "whack-a-mole" at the rumor-level. Propaganda there still gets made and spread, it just stays online for minutes at a time before deletion, and so by the time people see it they have no way of asking for clarification on its truth.
- bleepblorp 6y ago
  I sincerely hope there's some effective middle ground between allowing the kind of unrestrained rumor/conspiracy propagation that puts unhinged people in public office and Chinese-style ubiquitous law enforcement. Neither option is particularly attractive.
6y ago

bleepblorp 6y ago

QAnon material has been retweeted by Trump and a QAnon-connected person is expected to be elected to the US congress. A QAnon believer was convicted for blocking a major dam while making terroristic threats[0]. Another believer was arrested for attempting to bomb a religious display in Illinois. [3] A believer in the QAnon predecessor, Pizzagate, shot up a pizza restaurant[1]. The recent attempt to assassinate the Canadian Prime Minister was perpetrated by an individual with Qanon leanings[3]. These incidents are not isolated and are part of a larger pattern of QAnon-connected violence[2][3]. QAnon is, politically, an auxiliary of the Republican party. This, combined with the willingness of QAnon followers to use violence, means that the movement has the potential to be a proto-brownshirt movement. This is not something to dismiss lightly. QAnon is not a self-contained trash bin, it's a cancer that has metastasized into both violence and into the mainstream of American politics. Hello, QAnon downvoters. [0] https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2020/02/11/man-who-blocked-hoover-dam-part-qanon-beliefs-takes-guilty-plea/4724161002/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2020/02/1... [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/police-man-with-assault-rifle-dc-comet-pizza-victim-of-fake-sex-trafficking-story/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/police-man-with-assault-rifle-d... [2] https://www.ctc.usma.edu/the-qanon-conspiracy-theory-a-security-threat-in-the-making/ https://www.ctc.usma.edu/the-qanon-conspiracy-theory-a-secur... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/15/qanon-violence-crimes-timeline https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/15/qanon-violen...

Camas 6y ago
Article doesn't mention any bomb and "shot up" is stretching things.
- bleepblorp 6y ago
  Updated. The QAnon bomber was, indeed, a different incident in Illinois. The Hoover Dam incident only involved firearms and an armored vehicle. And what term other than 'shot up' would you use to describe a deranged person recklessly discharging a firearm as part of a targeted attack?
  - 6y ago

panda-giddiness 6y ago

> I don't see what's wrong with having internet trash bins. At least the trash is in a know location, it doesn't spill everywhere. You're presenting a false dichotomy. The options aren't (1) whack-a-mole or (2) trash-binning. The options are (1) whack-a-mole or (2) whack-a-mole with trash-binning. When you remove the trash bin, you stymie the discourse.

kilo_bravo_3 6y ago

>I don't see what's wrong with having internet trash bins. At least the trash is in a know location, it doesn't spill everywhere. The trash congregates and creates an echo chamber that radicalizes the most vulnerable and leads to them killing people.