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Yes, it has, to a degree. C.f. Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, etc. (These voices became much less prominent after their deplatforming.) There's also a deontolog

Yes, it has, to a degree. C.f. Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, etc. (These voices became much less prominent after their deplatforming.) There's also a deontological argument to be made for banning dangerous falsehoods on one's platform.

generalizations 6y ago
It also worked in China when scientists were trying to get word of the virus out in January. Fooled most of the western media.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  This analogy is so dishonest. These people are free to talk about all the conspiracies they want on their own websites, blogs and so on. They are not entitled to having their content hosted on other people's websites though. It's like if I complained that the NYT isn't talking about my coolest new invention and called that censorship. That's very different than the government (not a private company) trying to shut you down from speaking anywhere.
  - generalizations 6y ago
    Except I wasn't talking about the entity involved, I was talking about the efficacy of shutting down the 'misinformation'. Entity A shutdown covid info successfully, and Entity B wants to shutdown election info. That's dishonest? What's dishonest is you misreading my comment and then blaming me for it.
- vkou 6y ago
  You are rewriting history. Western media was not 'fooled'. It's ironic that you are doing so in a thread about spreading misinformation on the internet. January 8th - China identifies new virus causing phenomnia-like illness [1] January 10th - China reports first death from new virus [2] January 21st - The outbreak, which began in December in a seafood and poultry market in Wuhan, a city of 11 million, is spreading: Patients have been identified in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, as well as Taiwan, Japan, Thailand and South Korea. [3] Don't blame our inability to react to the virus on China. The pandemic was raging for months, with news coverage of people being locked in their own apartments, doctors dying, makeshift hospitals getting set up in stadiums, before it exceeded more than a handful of cases in the West. Hell, even after hundreds of thousands dead, we still don't have the political will to do what would have been necessary to stamp it out back in March - massive testing, massive contact tracing, enforced quarantine. If we were to go back in time, and do it again, I think we would arrive at pretty much the same outcome. The 'China hid the facts' [4] narrative has little explanatory power, and its primary purpose is to shift the blame from our own failings. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/health/china-pneumonia-outbreak-virus.html?searchResultPosition=3 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/health/china-pneumonia-ou... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/world/asia/china-virus-wuhan-death.html?searchResultPosition=4 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/world/asia/china-virus-wu... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/health/cdc-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/health/cdc-coronavirus.ht... [4] It[5] did hide the facts, but it hid them so poorly that everyone who was paying any attention, both inside, and outside China was aware of how serious this pandemic is at the start of the year. It's hard to hide the facts about something when you put an entire city under lockdown (But don't cut the telephone and internet lines into it.) [5] China isn't a monolith. To be exact, local government did its best to downplay the pandemic. National government was not very happy with how that went down, and purged their local and regional party branches for their mishandling of the outbreak.
golemotron 6y ago
How do you know? Their voices might just be someplace where you (and people you know) don't hear them. The world of discourse is wider than our awareness.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  You can't know anything, but you can form beliefs that have various levels of confidence. For example, there is reporting about the objective reach of Jones' properties post-deplatforming. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/technology/alex-jones-infowars-bans-traffic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/technology/alex-jones-inf... This type of reporting, plus my priors about how viral media spreads, inform my belief that deplatforming these individuals was moderately efficient for decreasing their reach. But it is an empirical question that would benefit from further study.
  - wolco2 6y ago
    They didn't count app/twitter or other views. So you are measuring two different datasets.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
      I don't need perfect evidence to form beliefs. It seems unlikely that Jones' reach increased on Twitter enough to offset his bans on other platforms. If it did, that doesn't seem consistent with the loss of traffic to his website. After he was banned on Twitter, it seems very unlikely that there was any other platform where his reach grew enough to offset that loss. Anything's possible, but it doesn't seem likely.
      - golemotron 6y ago
        We only see what is in our bubble.
        asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
markkanof 6y ago
I can't necessarily argue the exact wording that you used "prominent", because the folks you listed are certainly no longer visible in the most mainstream venues, but do you really think Alex Jones has lost a lot of the audience that was deep into his content. If anything this just makes him into a martyr and gives his arguments additional fuel because "they don't want you to know the truth".
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  Addressed your question here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25362065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25362065
- jrumbut 6y ago
  The problem is not the 100,000 people who have constructed their whole lives around Alex Jones, that's what Alex Jones had for 20 years of being a mostly harmless crank who makes a good living at it. The problem was giving him access to a much broader public, to sow paranoia and FUD among tens or hundreds of millions of people who actually play important roles in society and don't have time to spend debunking everything they hear.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  I do believe he has lost a lot of juice, but even if the hardcore viewers have stuck with him, he at least is not growing anywhere as fast anymore. If anything, this means he should've been deplatformed much sooner. The longer you wait, the more you are allowing them to grow their roots in.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Yes, I absolutely believe that Alex Jones has lost some of his audience since being "deplatformed". Some of his audience will continue to follow him, some will continue to follow some other source of cray, and some will wander out of the fever swamps. I consider this a positive outcome, even if it's not a perfect one. Also consider that he's lost a lot of his ability to grow his audience, which is no small thing.
RobertKerans 6y ago
Yep. UK based, and Katie Hopkins has thankfully become far less visible after deplatforming (seems to have removed most income streams post-bankrupcy).
- pjc50 6y ago
  Yes, it was notable that merely advocating crimes against humanity (shooting refugees) wasn't enough, and finally libelling a blogger who managed to crowd fund a lawsuit silenced her. Just like Alex Jones.
wolco2 6y ago
Alex Jones seems more prominent now after the deplatforming. Banning on platforms for whatever reason reduces the platforms reach and raises the platform the party moves too. We use to separate people by race now we do it by idea. Now sure martin luther king or lennon would agree.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  I doubt MLK would object to the marginalization of Alex Jones. Certainly modern racial justice advocates are, by and large, not clamoring for his restoration. But, we can't know for sure, and, regardless, his hypothetical opinion on this question doesn't matter very much to me.
  - generalizations 6y ago
    That's not the point. The point is that separating people based on their beliefs is nothing new, and generally frowned upon by history.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
      Forcible, violent segregation by race and declining to publish videos by content and truthfulness are far too dissimilar for me to reason about their relationship in the eyes of history.
      - generalizations 6y ago
        Those are examples, but the principle is the same.
        asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
        Maybe to you.
- pjc50 6y ago
  Martin Luther King specifically said that he wanted people judged on the quality of their character, of which dishonesty is definitely a part.
francisofascii 6y ago
The "ideas" of Alex Jones and Milo are very much alive and well.
core-questions 6y ago
This will work wonderfully as long as Youtube, the near-monopolistic arm of a gigantic corporation that makes its money from analyzing what you see and read in order to influence your behaviour, never bans anything that's actually true in reality. I'm sure we can trust our censors to never do something like that! They have our best interests at heart, right? Nothing like this could ever go wrong, there's no examples from history or fiction about anything like that. Nope, it's always Wonderful Good People that only ban things that Bad Evil People would like, and reality is totally black-and-white, and only Bad Evil People would think otherwise.

generalizations 6y ago

It also worked in China when scientists were trying to get word of the virus out in January. Fooled most of the western media.

ehsankia 6y ago
This analogy is so dishonest. These people are free to talk about all the conspiracies they want on their own websites, blogs and so on. They are not entitled to having their content hosted on other people's websites though. It's like if I complained that the NYT isn't talking about my coolest new invention and called that censorship. That's very different than the government (not a private company) trying to shut you down from speaking anywhere.
- generalizations 6y ago
  Except I wasn't talking about the entity involved, I was talking about the efficacy of shutting down the 'misinformation'. Entity A shutdown covid info successfully, and Entity B wants to shutdown election info. That's dishonest? What's dishonest is you misreading my comment and then blaming me for it.
vkou 6y ago
You are rewriting history. Western media was not 'fooled'. It's ironic that you are doing so in a thread about spreading misinformation on the internet. January 8th - China identifies new virus causing phenomnia-like illness [1] January 10th - China reports first death from new virus [2] January 21st - The outbreak, which began in December in a seafood and poultry market in Wuhan, a city of 11 million, is spreading: Patients have been identified in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, as well as Taiwan, Japan, Thailand and South Korea. [3] Don't blame our inability to react to the virus on China. The pandemic was raging for months, with news coverage of people being locked in their own apartments, doctors dying, makeshift hospitals getting set up in stadiums, before it exceeded more than a handful of cases in the West. Hell, even after hundreds of thousands dead, we still don't have the political will to do what would have been necessary to stamp it out back in March - massive testing, massive contact tracing, enforced quarantine. If we were to go back in time, and do it again, I think we would arrive at pretty much the same outcome. The 'China hid the facts' [4] narrative has little explanatory power, and its primary purpose is to shift the blame from our own failings. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/health/china-pneumonia-outbreak-virus.html?searchResultPosition=3 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/health/china-pneumonia-ou... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/world/asia/china-virus-wuhan-death.html?searchResultPosition=4 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/world/asia/china-virus-wu... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/health/cdc-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/health/cdc-coronavirus.ht... [4] It[5] did hide the facts, but it hid them so poorly that everyone who was paying any attention, both inside, and outside China was aware of how serious this pandemic is at the start of the year. It's hard to hide the facts about something when you put an entire city under lockdown (But don't cut the telephone and internet lines into it.) [5] China isn't a monolith. To be exact, local government did its best to downplay the pandemic. National government was not very happy with how that went down, and purged their local and regional party branches for their mishandling of the outbreak.

golemotron 6y ago

How do you know? Their voices might just be someplace where you (and people you know) don't hear them. The world of discourse is wider than our awareness.

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
You can't know anything, but you can form beliefs that have various levels of confidence. For example, there is reporting about the objective reach of Jones' properties post-deplatforming. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/technology/alex-jones-infowars-bans-traffic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/technology/alex-jones-inf... This type of reporting, plus my priors about how viral media spreads, inform my belief that deplatforming these individuals was moderately efficient for decreasing their reach. But it is an empirical question that would benefit from further study.
- wolco2 6y ago
  They didn't count app/twitter or other views. So you are measuring two different datasets.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    I don't need perfect evidence to form beliefs. It seems unlikely that Jones' reach increased on Twitter enough to offset his bans on other platforms. If it did, that doesn't seem consistent with the loss of traffic to his website. After he was banned on Twitter, it seems very unlikely that there was any other platform where his reach grew enough to offset that loss. Anything's possible, but it doesn't seem likely.
    - golemotron 6y ago
      We only see what is in our bubble.
      - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago

markkanof 6y ago

I can't necessarily argue the exact wording that you used "prominent", because the folks you listed are certainly no longer visible in the most mainstream venues, but do you really think Alex Jones has lost a lot of the audience that was deep into his content. If anything this just makes him into a martyr and gives his arguments additional fuel because "they don't want you to know the truth".

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
Addressed your question here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25362065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25362065
jrumbut 6y ago
The problem is not the 100,000 people who have constructed their whole lives around Alex Jones, that's what Alex Jones had for 20 years of being a mostly harmless crank who makes a good living at it. The problem was giving him access to a much broader public, to sow paranoia and FUD among tens or hundreds of millions of people who actually play important roles in society and don't have time to spend debunking everything they hear.
ehsankia 6y ago
I do believe he has lost a lot of juice, but even if the hardcore viewers have stuck with him, he at least is not growing anywhere as fast anymore. If anything, this means he should've been deplatformed much sooner. The longer you wait, the more you are allowing them to grow their roots in.
ashtonkem 6y ago
Yes, I absolutely believe that Alex Jones has lost some of his audience since being "deplatformed". Some of his audience will continue to follow him, some will continue to follow some other source of cray, and some will wander out of the fever swamps. I consider this a positive outcome, even if it's not a perfect one. Also consider that he's lost a lot of his ability to grow his audience, which is no small thing.

RobertKerans 6y ago

Yep. UK based, and Katie Hopkins has thankfully become far less visible after deplatforming (seems to have removed most income streams post-bankrupcy).

pjc50 6y ago
Yes, it was notable that merely advocating crimes against humanity (shooting refugees) wasn't enough, and finally libelling a blogger who managed to crowd fund a lawsuit silenced her. Just like Alex Jones.

wolco2 6y ago

Alex Jones seems more prominent now after the deplatforming. Banning on platforms for whatever reason reduces the platforms reach and raises the platform the party moves too. We use to separate people by race now we do it by idea. Now sure martin luther king or lennon would agree.

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
I doubt MLK would object to the marginalization of Alex Jones. Certainly modern racial justice advocates are, by and large, not clamoring for his restoration. But, we can't know for sure, and, regardless, his hypothetical opinion on this question doesn't matter very much to me.
- generalizations 6y ago
  That's not the point. The point is that separating people based on their beliefs is nothing new, and generally frowned upon by history.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    Forcible, violent segregation by race and declining to publish videos by content and truthfulness are far too dissimilar for me to reason about their relationship in the eyes of history.
    - generalizations 6y ago
      Those are examples, but the principle is the same.
      - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
        Maybe to you.
pjc50 6y ago
Martin Luther King specifically said that he wanted people judged on the quality of their character, of which dishonesty is definitely a part.

francisofascii 6y ago

The "ideas" of Alex Jones and Milo are very much alive and well.

core-questions 6y ago

This will work wonderfully as long as Youtube, the near-monopolistic arm of a gigantic corporation that makes its money from analyzing what you see and read in order to influence your behaviour, never bans anything that's actually true in reality. I'm sure we can trust our censors to never do something like that! They have our best interests at heart, right? Nothing like this could ever go wrong, there's no examples from history or fiction about anything like that. Nope, it's always Wonderful Good People that only ban things that Bad Evil People would like, and reality is totally black-and-white, and only Bad Evil People would think otherwise.