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The author theorizes that this ban will inflame tensions, but I don't believe that's true. Look at Reddit's ban on toxic subreddits. They found that banning tox

The author theorizes that this ban will inflame tensions, but I don't believe that's true. Look at Reddit's ban on toxic subreddits. They found that banning toxic subreddits reduced the toxicity in the website as a whole, and that "post-ban, hate speech by the same users was reduced by as much as 80-90 percent." [1] Reddit is just a closed system of communities; YouTube is one such community in the larger system of social media. I think YouTube made the right calculation that this will in fact _reduce_ tension and slow the momentum of this destabilizing movement. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/11/study-finds-reddits-controversial-ban-of-its-most-toxic-subreddits-actually-worked/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/11/study-finds-reddits-contro...

effingwewt 6y ago
I see this argument all the time. Sweeping opinions you don't like under the rug doesn't make them go away. People will still hold the same opinions they will just do so where you can't hear them. I prefer the racist I can see. This pushes them underground and radicalizes them. You mentioned reddit. Do you remember what voat became when reddit closed down subs? That hate didn't go away it just moved and concentrated itself.
- joe_the_user 6y ago
  Sweeping opinions you don't like under the rug doesn't make them go away I think we need to look at that carefully - especially, how much of youtube hate is well-considered, articulated positions and how much is people just "swept into the propaganda." That's a complicated question but think the medium of video tends to be worst form for well-considered opinions and the form most likely to just be a carrier of irrational-emotional/progandistic messages. It's real time stream of imagines/words quality makes it hard to consider the logic of an argument and easier to get swept up in the emotions of a claim as well as easier to think that, say, an image of a scientist gives legitimacy to a claim,etc. I think this quality was demonstrated back in the days of TV as mass medium.
  - seppin 6y ago
    No but feeding one opinion, slightly more radical than the last over and over very much does cause an increase in radical and extremist views. This isn't about removing hate, this is about making sure it's not promoted at scale.
    - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
      Did you read the policy? It has nothing to do with hate or extremism at all. What are you referring to?
- Talanes 6y ago
  Exactly, this just seems like a great way of accelerating polarization. Make sure that everyone who has at least one opposing view is driven away to a place where they will rapidly be exposed to every opposing view.
- kennywinker 6y ago
  The idea is not to sweep them under the rug, but rather to stop the uptake of new people. A lot of people go to reddit for funny pictures, and end up being exposed to some very radical ideas. Those same people might never be drawn to a more fringe site. Banning posters doesn’t stop them from holding their views, but it seems like it may stop them from spreading. It’s a gamble, but i think it’s worked in reddit’s case
  - Jetrel 6y ago
    Nailed it. It's epidemiology for ideas.
- FlyMoreRockets 6y ago
  > Sweeping opinions you don't like under the rug doesn't make them go away. Memes require connectivity to replicate.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  You are trying to intentionally muddy the waters here. Vaccines, masks and who won the election are not "sweeping opinions you don't like". People have actually died due to the anti-vaxx movement, leading to +50% Measle deaths in 2019. These are hard facts and these decisions are a matter of life or death. No one is blocking opinions. Trump has failed to prove election fraud in over 50 cases so far, and the safe harbor deadline has now past, which is why Youtube has now put this rule in place. It is now confirmed that Biden has won the election, and anyone claiming otherwise is intentionally lying. If they had proof, they would've shown it in court, where there are real consequences, not on social media where anything goes.
  - effingwewt 6y ago
    Im not intentionally muddying anything he mentioned reddit. That was a ban of hate speech specifically, not anything to do with masks, elections, or anything you mentioned. I agree with others about radicalization and slowing the spread of misinformation but it's a fine line to walk and throwing around reddits bullshit like it will work for real life scenarios isnt going to help anything. Deplatforming legitimizes and empowers fringe groups and that's not something we need to be doing. As for your rants about trump etc I agree they just had no basis in my and parents arguments.
    - ehsankia 6y ago
      My bad, I was arguing about the Youtube ban. As for reddit, they kept T_D along, but subs like that regularly leak out and brigade other subs, which is why they were banned. Not for the information they share. Also, many of the comment sections devolved into doxxing and treats, which is also against global rules. Reddit generally doesn't give a shit about how true or false the opinions are in a sub as long as they don't break global rules and leak to other subs. So no, they were not banned for "sweeping opinions you don't agree with" either.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    100 million people died due to communism and socialism. Should we censor that?
wkjenjkwenf 6y ago
Sure, it reduced tensions on reddit, but what about tensions everywhere else? The author doesn't care about how toxic Youtube is, he cares how toxic the US is. Pushing these radicals onto radical websites only further radicalizes them. That should be an axiomatic fact, yet nobody seems to understand it.
- Ottolay 6y ago
  Maybe because it's not an axiomatic fact. There has been niche radical internet communities for ages. It has only been with the radical communities coming into the mainstreams ones (reddit, twitter, and facebook)that the radical communities exploded.
  - saurik 6y ago
    I think the idea is more like this: you have two clubhouses, one that has 10 super radical people and one that has 190 people who are less radical. If you take the most radical 20 people from the 190 and force them to go across the street and spend all of their time with the super radical people, those 20 people probably will become somewhat more radical. Now, the 10 people possibly become slightly less radical as maybe do the remaining 170, which might balance things out a bit? But the people who are saying this makes people more radical are concentrating on the idea of taking people on the verge of being super radical and saying that they now only get to hang out with each other and the people who were thrown out of the mainstream long ago... it isn't that that group will "grow" past the people handed to it, but that the people given to it will become radicalized (which might be more dangerous than accepting everyone into the same system and attempting to have them all adjust a bit towards the mean).
- shawnz 6y ago
  I think it's an important consideration what happens to other platforms but I don't agree it's obvious that the net effect of the bans will be negative like you are implying. I think it's pretty disingenuous to say that the problem is that people just "don't understand" your argument.
- Bud 6y ago
malwrar 6y ago
Incels and other such creeps aren't popping up in other places or real life though. Spend a week in a rural place near you and you'll find that people there legit think that "big tech"--who they know is insanely powerful and think are biased against folks like them--attempt to a.) censor people and b.) censor claims about election fraud specifically in regards to "their president" winning. Think about how that might come off to you if you were Trump supporter. You can disagree with that viewpoint but you have to admit you can see what lots of people who totally buy it would think about those actions. Those are people who aren't going to stop talking with each other either, regardless of what we in the "big tech" think.
- rayiner 6y ago
  Bingo. But to be fair Big Tech didn’t cause this problem and it can’t solve this problem. There has been a general breakdown of trust in elites and media institutions over the past 30 years. It’s just spilling over to tech now.
Orou 6y ago
I see these reddit bans referenced every now and then as evidence that censorship works. I think it's important to emphasize these bans are not evidence they shutting down communities changed participants' minds about anything. Further, the paper states that "The empirical work in this paper suggests that when narrowly applied to small, specific groups, banning deviant hate groups can work to reduce and contain the behavior." Trump supporters are not a small group of people and they don't have a single 'meeting point' on the internet that can be banned to break them up. Let's just be careful about comparing strategies used to target niche internet hate groups with tens of millions of Trump supporters.
- jessah 6y ago
  I's not about changing the participants minds. It's about keeping them to radicalize more people by taking away reach.
  - meowface 6y ago
    I suspect there could be a frequency vs. intensity trade-off there. Fewer total radicalizations, but of the ones that remain, they may intensify on average. The "radicalization expected value" so to speak might go up even if the frequency goes down. (This obviously isn't to suggest banning is never a solution, but trade-offs do have to be considered.)
  - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
    There is nothing even remotely radical about questioning an election, which this makes a bannable offense.
    - krapp 6y ago
      They're not questioning an election, they're making baseless accusations of fraud. Conspiracy theories like Sharpiegate, hacked Dominion voting machines and Georgia election workers counting suitcases full of illegal ballots have been debunked. Trump's legal team has filed over 50 lawsuits to date, none of which have exposed any evidence of fraud or criminal conspiracy. The legitimate questioning is being done and the answer is, to an ever increasing degree of certainty, that Biden has won, and won legitimately. QAnon nuts claiming the election is a coup de tat by Red China or a satanic cabal of Democratic pedophiles are not engaged in honest, good faith attempts at validating the integrity of the electoral process.
lawnchair_larry 6y ago
This in no way compares to what reddit is doing. There is nothing “toxic” or hateful about what they have already been applying this ban to. They have already been removing videos that are not partisan and not fake news. Merely being intellectually curious or examining various issues related to the election, even if they ultimately do not conclude that there was fraud, are being removed. It’s fucking ridiculous.
- gruez 6y ago
  >They have already been removing videos that are not partisan and not fake news. Source?
  - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
    https://mobile.twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1337452117934493696 https://mobile.twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/13374521179...
konjin 6y ago
And of course they use a measure of toxic which means "is a republican". Go on the front page of reddit and count how many posts from subs like /r/insanepoeplefacebook, /r/publicfreakout, /r/idiotsincars, /r/trashy, and the like there are, right now it's at 15/25. On most days I've done this is close to 20/25. Today there are 5 posts about the TX appeal not being heard by the SC which has pushed some of the usual garbage off the front page. 5 years ago there were none (or maybe one if you squint hard enough): https://web.archive.org/web/20151212085428/https://www.reddit.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20151212085428/https://www.reddi... Reddit has become a more mean-spirited place the more subs have been banned, and every time the increase in vitriol is used as an excuse to run the next set of bans. People cheer this on until they get banned and then act surprised it happened.
- trident1000 6y ago
  Reddit had a bipolar shift around 2015 before the election. Thats when the main subs were astroturfed and gamed like I had never seen before.
  - konjin 6y ago
    I've heard the same thing about 2008, 2011, 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2019. It's not different this time either. Bad decisions from the top are the reason why the site is getting worse.
    - trident1000 6y ago
      I think its a combo. Ive also been on reddit since the early days and never witnessed a tectonic shift like that.
- TeeMassive 6y ago
  You make a really good point. The toxicity really was upped a notch ever since Tencent got that sweet Chinese money and I think those sub makes sense if you think about it from the point of view of a Chinese Nationalist making fun of White and Black foreigners and the worse stereotypes about Americans and Westerners in general.
twblalock 6y ago
Participants in controversial discourse have long said that the system wants to silence them -- banning such discourse actually makes that true. In the past, they said they were censored and there was a conspiracy against them, and we could all say, no there isn't, you are active on major online platforms and nobody is suppressing you. Now we can't say that anymore. Not only has the suppression they falsely alleged actually started to happen, companies are even proud to publicly announce that they are part of it. This is a total backfire because it makes it even harder to change people's minds by confirming what conspiracy theorists suspected all along. Online platforms have fallen into the trap of making one of the main assertions of online far right nonsense actually become true. It is a massive own goal.
- listless 6y ago
  I wish more people understood this dynamic. I’m married to someone who is caught up in this right-wing cult (it is a cult) and every time a video is removed, it simply convinces her even more that it’s true. If it wasn’t true, why would they hide it? Why do they not want you to see it? BECAUSE IT MUST BE TRUE. This is just the information equivalent of Ruby Ridge - a self-fulfilling conspiracy theory.
- gruez 6y ago
  >This is a total backfire because it makes it even harder to change people's minds by confirming what conspiracy theorists suspected all along. The question shouldn't be "will doing x help the antagonists", it's "will doing x result in a worse outcome for the antagonists". If they gain from either choice, we shouldn't be paralyzed in our response.
  - twblalock 6y ago
    If they gain from either choice, we would be better off with the status quo.
wutbrodo 6y ago
TL;DR: > Look at Reddit's ban on toxic subreddits. They found that banning toxic subreddits reduced the toxicity in the website as a whole, and that "post-ban, hate speech by the same users was reduced by as much as 80-90 percent." No, they didn't ---- > They found that banning toxic subreddits reduced the toxicity in the website as a whole, and that "post-ban, hate speech by the same users was reduced by as much as 80-90 percent." This only holds for the creative (and frankly, dishonest) definition of hate speech that the study[0] used. > First, we automatically extract terms which are unique to the two subreddits that were banned due to hate speech and harassment. The resulting term list includes a number of words that indicate hate speech, as well as some other terms that appear to be specific to the Reddit context. We then qualitatively filter these lists, obtaining a high precision hate lexicon. These lexicons are publicly available to the community as a resource. Not only did they start from a corpus of _words unique to the banned subreddits_, they "qualitatively" filtered it down, with no description of the procedure used. Anyone who's spent any time on smaller subs knows that they, like any online community, develop their own lexicons, up to and including jargon[1]. Everyone who's ever gawked at hate subs like /r/coontown or /r/shitredditsays know that this tendency is on overdrive. A reduction in the vocabulary _unique_ to the banned subreddit means that a ban refugee from /r/fatpeoplehate could be just as active on /r/HamplanetHateMail (a non-banned sub mentioned in the study) but would be counted as vastly reducing her hate speech, as long as she switched from /r/fatpeoplehate's "landwhale" to /r/hamplanethatemail's preferred "lard-ass" (I made these examples up, as I've had little exposure to the fat-activist/fat-hate corners of the Internet in particular). What this study actually shows is: "usernames from banned subreddits don't go to other subreddit's and communicate with the same username in the banned subreddit's hyper-specific jargon". Which is to say, "when a community is broken up and dispersed among other communities, the _specific_ inside jargon of the community is a lot less common, with no reference to whether the substance of the comments have changed". I mean, duh. This would perhaps be excusable in 2015 or something, but one should really know better by now than to uncritically cite popular coverage of sociology studies, particularly social-justice-aligned ones, without at least skimming the paper. Studies on hate speech are particular easy to check, given that (as this study puts it), "there is no universally accepted definition of the phrase"; at a minimum, seeing what they actually define as hate speech is core to understanding the findings. In this case, the authors start with a standard definition from the European Court of Human Rights and torture out a metric that's convoluted, qualitative (in their own words!), and full of holes that the authors don't even pretend not to fill with their own biases. (Seriously, I recommend reading Section 2.2) [0] http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf [1] Some examples: "rentoid" or "renthog" on /r/loveforlandlords, "monkee" on /r/PoliticalCompassMemes, and famously, "shitlord" on /r/shitredditsays back in the day)
throwmehaweh 6y ago
> They found that banning toxic subreddits reduced the toxicity in the website as a whole, Utter nonsense, see r/politics.
camdenlock 6y ago
The issue with your argument is that you assume there’s some universal definition of “toxic” with which everyone should agree. That simply isn’t the case, especially with the content YouTube has decided to block.
- just-juan-post 6y ago
  Completely agree. They got rid of things like the_donald but if you dare look at comments sections you see things like cheering the death of people who spoke out against masks or lockdowns. They got rid of the right-leaning toxicity. They specialize in, profit from, and are ok with left-leaning toxicity.
friendlybus 6y ago
Banning topics frequently cuts losses on trends that are dying anyway. Nobody wants to see ghost town subreddits. It's good for the websites health to keep the place looking alive and clean. Separating the effectiveness of bans from these trendy moments is difficult. Applying a ban on political discussions around 2015-2016 would have likely maintained toxicity.
disown 6y ago
> The author theorizes that this ban will inflame tensions, but I don't believe that's true. Look at Reddit's ban on toxic subreddits. They found that banning toxic subreddits reduced the toxicity in the website as a whole, and that "post-ban, hate speech by the same users was reduced by as much as 80-90 percent." [1] Your analogy only really works if you ban half the population from the US. Sure if you banned democrats or republicans from the country, then you could reduce tensions. But if you censor one side and keep them around, it'll only inflame tensions. > I think YouTube made the right calculation that this will in fact _reduce_ tension and slow the momentum of this destabilizing movement. Does it seem to you that tensions are reducing? If youtube did this after the 2016 election, do you think it would have reduced tensions?
rayiner 6y ago
That only works if the people who are banned are fringe minority nobodies. We’re talking about banning the President of the United States, who although he lost just won 5 million more votes than Obama in 2008. This ends with further destruction of trust in elites, fracturing the media ecosystem, and opportunistic competitors arising. The idea that gatekeepers need to withhold information from people so they believe the correct things is insane and has no limiting principle. We’ve already tumbled well down the slippery slope. Just a couple of years ago, the censorship was just going to be about “flat earth”-type stuff. Now we’re censoring stuff that’s still the subject of active litigation. They’re probably correct about it, but the first application of a terrible idea is usually workable. The Ministry of Truth probably started out to keep misinformation from spreading about vaccination, or something innocuous like that.
- gruez 6y ago
  >Just a couple of years ago, the censorship was just going to be about “flat earth” type stuff. Now we’re censoring stuff that’s still the subject of active litigation. Is litigation supposed to be a indicator of legitimacy or something? Anyone can file a lawsuit for any reason. In addition, most (all?) of the lawusits being dismissed without trial, which suggests they were rubbish to begin with.
  - moralestapia 6y ago
    I am sure you are able to grasp the essence of what @rayiner is trying to say.
    - gruez 6y ago
      And that is? That as long as something's "under litigation" you get a free pass?
    - wtfiswiththis 6y ago
      "LIBERATE MICHIGAN!" -Trump And his militias answered, among their plans: A two week long televised execution spree in my state. Now he lost the election. He lost his state and local cases contesting the election. He lost the supreme court case. All this time him and his enablers have had their foot on the gas, grooming their extremists to sedition. Everyone who rules against them is 'deep state.' Every Republican judge who didn't support the cases are a 'Chinacrat RINO.' Liberals are considered sub-human. There is open talk of executions again. 'Treason against (Trump's) patriots.' They say. Their proof is claims, claims peddled by who? Trump and his enablers. The Koch's properties, Murdoch's. Lately Epochtimes and Newsmax have come into favor since franchises like FoxNews are considered part of the Deep State cabal. What is @rayiner trying to say? Trump lost. He can say how many votes he gained over Obama but he wasn't running against Obama. Trump lost. This needs to end. There has been too many shootings, a 'MAGA bomber.' Right now election officials have mobs outside their homes calling for their deaths. The AZ GOP asked supporters if they are willing to die. Trump lost. He lost. This needs to end. It doesn't matter that @rayiner cannot come to terms and say that Trump lost to Biden. Talking about Obama doesn't matter. Trump lost, him and his enablers need to stop stoking their extremists and cultists because this has gone on too long.
darepublic 6y ago
Reddit seems pretty damn toxic to me.
- rriepe 6y ago
  Toxicity wasn't banned. Just disagreement.
babesh 6y ago
That isn’t even the main argument. The main argument is that there is a concerted effort to let government take away the fundamental right of free speech. That is morally bad. But besides that, it can have the effect of hiding actual truths. The author then considers thought experiments of what would have happened to the Watergate affair and other proven true scandals if there wasn’t free speech.
tempsy 6y ago
That doesn't mean that it didn't create more rage in the rest of society...
noetic_techy 6y ago
The writing is on the wall, eventually there will be bifurcation in Big Tech and Twitter and Youtube will become the walled garden for the left of center only and largely irreverent with conservatives with things like Parlor and BitChute and others taking the exodus. It will turn into a battle for the centrists eyeballs to come to their sides platform or straddle both. The analogy of Reddit banning toxic subs only holds if everyone is ACTUALLY on reddit, most simply left. There is already talk among conservatives of alternative Reddits and Facebooks, alternatives Netflix/Hollywood companies, alternative Fox News even. Many will say "but those will be subject to the same problems of early Twitter and Reddit, how to excise the toxic elements and keep the real discussion." I would say that can EASILY be done without going down the censorship rabbit hole by simply knowing where to stop. Get rid of the illegal stuff, the spam and pornography, and leave the rest regardless of how distasteful it is. Its an Overton Window problem, you just need slightly looser boundary condition on discourse. Stop pretending to be platforms and admit you are indeed publishers to an extent. Give users the ability to filter what they don't want to see and pledge to never bias your algorithms. The cries of the left will be largely irrelevant, they will simply tell you to "go back to Twitter if you don't like it". Once the public loses faith and trust in your company or institution due to your sacrifices in credibility in the name of censorship of one sides information, there wont be any coming back from that loss of face. I'm not saying this is a good or healthy thing for public discourse, but I do think it will come to pass.

effingwewt 6y ago

I see this argument all the time. Sweeping opinions you don't like under the rug doesn't make them go away. People will still hold the same opinions they will just do so where you can't hear them. I prefer the racist I can see. This pushes them underground and radicalizes them. You mentioned reddit. Do you remember what voat became when reddit closed down subs? That hate didn't go away it just moved and concentrated itself.

joe_the_user 6y ago
Sweeping opinions you don't like under the rug doesn't make them go away I think we need to look at that carefully - especially, how much of youtube hate is well-considered, articulated positions and how much is people just "swept into the propaganda." That's a complicated question but think the medium of video tends to be worst form for well-considered opinions and the form most likely to just be a carrier of irrational-emotional/progandistic messages. It's real time stream of imagines/words quality makes it hard to consider the logic of an argument and easier to get swept up in the emotions of a claim as well as easier to think that, say, an image of a scientist gives legitimacy to a claim,etc. I think this quality was demonstrated back in the days of TV as mass medium.
- seppin 6y ago
  No but feeding one opinion, slightly more radical than the last over and over very much does cause an increase in radical and extremist views. This isn't about removing hate, this is about making sure it's not promoted at scale.
  - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
    Did you read the policy? It has nothing to do with hate or extremism at all. What are you referring to?
Talanes 6y ago
Exactly, this just seems like a great way of accelerating polarization. Make sure that everyone who has at least one opposing view is driven away to a place where they will rapidly be exposed to every opposing view.
kennywinker 6y ago
The idea is not to sweep them under the rug, but rather to stop the uptake of new people. A lot of people go to reddit for funny pictures, and end up being exposed to some very radical ideas. Those same people might never be drawn to a more fringe site. Banning posters doesn’t stop them from holding their views, but it seems like it may stop them from spreading. It’s a gamble, but i think it’s worked in reddit’s case
- Jetrel 6y ago
  Nailed it. It's epidemiology for ideas.
FlyMoreRockets 6y ago
> Sweeping opinions you don't like under the rug doesn't make them go away. Memes require connectivity to replicate.
ehsankia 6y ago
You are trying to intentionally muddy the waters here. Vaccines, masks and who won the election are not "sweeping opinions you don't like". People have actually died due to the anti-vaxx movement, leading to +50% Measle deaths in 2019. These are hard facts and these decisions are a matter of life or death. No one is blocking opinions. Trump has failed to prove election fraud in over 50 cases so far, and the safe harbor deadline has now past, which is why Youtube has now put this rule in place. It is now confirmed that Biden has won the election, and anyone claiming otherwise is intentionally lying. If they had proof, they would've shown it in court, where there are real consequences, not on social media where anything goes.
- effingwewt 6y ago
  Im not intentionally muddying anything he mentioned reddit. That was a ban of hate speech specifically, not anything to do with masks, elections, or anything you mentioned. I agree with others about radicalization and slowing the spread of misinformation but it's a fine line to walk and throwing around reddits bullshit like it will work for real life scenarios isnt going to help anything. Deplatforming legitimizes and empowers fringe groups and that's not something we need to be doing. As for your rants about trump etc I agree they just had no basis in my and parents arguments.
  - ehsankia 6y ago
    My bad, I was arguing about the Youtube ban. As for reddit, they kept T_D along, but subs like that regularly leak out and brigade other subs, which is why they were banned. Not for the information they share. Also, many of the comment sections devolved into doxxing and treats, which is also against global rules. Reddit generally doesn't give a shit about how true or false the opinions are in a sub as long as they don't break global rules and leak to other subs. So no, they were not banned for "sweeping opinions you don't agree with" either.
- rayiner 6y ago
  100 million people died due to communism and socialism. Should we censor that?

wkjenjkwenf 6y ago

Sure, it reduced tensions on reddit, but what about tensions everywhere else? The author doesn't care about how toxic Youtube is, he cares how toxic the US is. Pushing these radicals onto radical websites only further radicalizes them. That should be an axiomatic fact, yet nobody seems to understand it.

Ottolay 6y ago
Maybe because it's not an axiomatic fact. There has been niche radical internet communities for ages. It has only been with the radical communities coming into the mainstreams ones (reddit, twitter, and facebook)that the radical communities exploded.
- saurik 6y ago
  I think the idea is more like this: you have two clubhouses, one that has 10 super radical people and one that has 190 people who are less radical. If you take the most radical 20 people from the 190 and force them to go across the street and spend all of their time with the super radical people, those 20 people probably will become somewhat more radical. Now, the 10 people possibly become slightly less radical as maybe do the remaining 170, which might balance things out a bit? But the people who are saying this makes people more radical are concentrating on the idea of taking people on the verge of being super radical and saying that they now only get to hang out with each other and the people who were thrown out of the mainstream long ago... it isn't that that group will "grow" past the people handed to it, but that the people given to it will become radicalized (which might be more dangerous than accepting everyone into the same system and attempting to have them all adjust a bit towards the mean).
shawnz 6y ago
I think it's an important consideration what happens to other platforms but I don't agree it's obvious that the net effect of the bans will be negative like you are implying. I think it's pretty disingenuous to say that the problem is that people just "don't understand" your argument.
Bud 6y ago

malwrar 6y ago

Incels and other such creeps aren't popping up in other places or real life though. Spend a week in a rural place near you and you'll find that people there legit think that "big tech"--who they know is insanely powerful and think are biased against folks like them--attempt to a.) censor people and b.) censor claims about election fraud specifically in regards to "their president" winning. Think about how that might come off to you if you were Trump supporter. You can disagree with that viewpoint but you have to admit you can see what lots of people who totally buy it would think about those actions. Those are people who aren't going to stop talking with each other either, regardless of what we in the "big tech" think.

rayiner 6y ago
Bingo. But to be fair Big Tech didn’t cause this problem and it can’t solve this problem. There has been a general breakdown of trust in elites and media institutions over the past 30 years. It’s just spilling over to tech now.

Orou 6y ago

I see these reddit bans referenced every now and then as evidence that censorship works. I think it's important to emphasize these bans are not evidence they shutting down communities changed participants' minds about anything. Further, the paper states that "The empirical work in this paper suggests that when narrowly applied to small, specific groups, banning deviant hate groups can work to reduce and contain the behavior." Trump supporters are not a small group of people and they don't have a single 'meeting point' on the internet that can be banned to break them up. Let's just be careful about comparing strategies used to target niche internet hate groups with tens of millions of Trump supporters.

jessah 6y ago
I's not about changing the participants minds. It's about keeping them to radicalize more people by taking away reach.
- meowface 6y ago
  I suspect there could be a frequency vs. intensity trade-off there. Fewer total radicalizations, but of the ones that remain, they may intensify on average. The "radicalization expected value" so to speak might go up even if the frequency goes down. (This obviously isn't to suggest banning is never a solution, but trade-offs do have to be considered.)
- lawnchair_larry 6y ago
  There is nothing even remotely radical about questioning an election, which this makes a bannable offense.
  - krapp 6y ago
    They're not questioning an election, they're making baseless accusations of fraud. Conspiracy theories like Sharpiegate, hacked Dominion voting machines and Georgia election workers counting suitcases full of illegal ballots have been debunked. Trump's legal team has filed over 50 lawsuits to date, none of which have exposed any evidence of fraud or criminal conspiracy. The legitimate questioning is being done and the answer is, to an ever increasing degree of certainty, that Biden has won, and won legitimately. QAnon nuts claiming the election is a coup de tat by Red China or a satanic cabal of Democratic pedophiles are not engaged in honest, good faith attempts at validating the integrity of the electoral process.

lawnchair_larry 6y ago

This in no way compares to what reddit is doing. There is nothing “toxic” or hateful about what they have already been applying this ban to. They have already been removing videos that are not partisan and not fake news. Merely being intellectually curious or examining various issues related to the election, even if they ultimately do not conclude that there was fraud, are being removed. It’s fucking ridiculous.

gruez 6y ago
>They have already been removing videos that are not partisan and not fake news. Source?
- lawnchair_larry 6y ago
  https://mobile.twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1337452117934493696 https://mobile.twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/13374521179...

konjin 6y ago

And of course they use a measure of toxic which means "is a republican". Go on the front page of reddit and count how many posts from subs like /r/insanepoeplefacebook, /r/publicfreakout, /r/idiotsincars, /r/trashy, and the like there are, right now it's at 15/25. On most days I've done this is close to 20/25. Today there are 5 posts about the TX appeal not being heard by the SC which has pushed some of the usual garbage off the front page. 5 years ago there were none (or maybe one if you squint hard enough): https://web.archive.org/web/20151212085428/https://www.reddit.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20151212085428/https://www.reddi... Reddit has become a more mean-spirited place the more subs have been banned, and every time the increase in vitriol is used as an excuse to run the next set of bans. People cheer this on until they get banned and then act surprised it happened.

trident1000 6y ago
Reddit had a bipolar shift around 2015 before the election. Thats when the main subs were astroturfed and gamed like I had never seen before.
- konjin 6y ago
  I've heard the same thing about 2008, 2011, 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2019. It's not different this time either. Bad decisions from the top are the reason why the site is getting worse.
  - trident1000 6y ago
    I think its a combo. Ive also been on reddit since the early days and never witnessed a tectonic shift like that.
TeeMassive 6y ago
You make a really good point. The toxicity really was upped a notch ever since Tencent got that sweet Chinese money and I think those sub makes sense if you think about it from the point of view of a Chinese Nationalist making fun of White and Black foreigners and the worse stereotypes about Americans and Westerners in general.

twblalock 6y ago

Participants in controversial discourse have long said that the system wants to silence them -- banning such discourse actually makes that true. In the past, they said they were censored and there was a conspiracy against them, and we could all say, no there isn't, you are active on major online platforms and nobody is suppressing you. Now we can't say that anymore. Not only has the suppression they falsely alleged actually started to happen, companies are even proud to publicly announce that they are part of it. This is a total backfire because it makes it even harder to change people's minds by confirming what conspiracy theorists suspected all along. Online platforms have fallen into the trap of making one of the main assertions of online far right nonsense actually become true. It is a massive own goal.

listless 6y ago
I wish more people understood this dynamic. I’m married to someone who is caught up in this right-wing cult (it is a cult) and every time a video is removed, it simply convinces her even more that it’s true. If it wasn’t true, why would they hide it? Why do they not want you to see it? BECAUSE IT MUST BE TRUE. This is just the information equivalent of Ruby Ridge - a self-fulfilling conspiracy theory.
gruez 6y ago
>This is a total backfire because it makes it even harder to change people's minds by confirming what conspiracy theorists suspected all along. The question shouldn't be "will doing x help the antagonists", it's "will doing x result in a worse outcome for the antagonists". If they gain from either choice, we shouldn't be paralyzed in our response.
- twblalock 6y ago
  If they gain from either choice, we would be better off with the status quo.

wutbrodo 6y ago

TL;DR: > Look at Reddit's ban on toxic subreddits. They found that banning toxic subreddits reduced the toxicity in the website as a whole, and that "post-ban, hate speech by the same users was reduced by as much as 80-90 percent." No, they didn't ---- > They found that banning toxic subreddits reduced the toxicity in the website as a whole, and that "post-ban, hate speech by the same users was reduced by as much as 80-90 percent." This only holds for the creative (and frankly, dishonest) definition of hate speech that the study[0] used. > First, we automatically extract terms which are unique to the two subreddits that were banned due to hate speech and harassment. The resulting term list includes a number of words that indicate hate speech, as well as some other terms that appear to be specific to the Reddit context. We then qualitatively filter these lists, obtaining a high precision hate lexicon. These lexicons are publicly available to the community as a resource. Not only did they start from a corpus of _words unique to the banned subreddits_, they "qualitatively" filtered it down, with no description of the procedure used. Anyone who's spent any time on smaller subs knows that they, like any online community, develop their own lexicons, up to and including jargon[1]. Everyone who's ever gawked at hate subs like /r/coontown or /r/shitredditsays know that this tendency is on overdrive. A reduction in the vocabulary _unique_ to the banned subreddit means that a ban refugee from /r/fatpeoplehate could be just as active on /r/HamplanetHateMail (a non-banned sub mentioned in the study) but would be counted as vastly reducing her hate speech, as long as she switched from /r/fatpeoplehate's "landwhale" to /r/hamplanethatemail's preferred "lard-ass" (I made these examples up, as I've had little exposure to the fat-activist/fat-hate corners of the Internet in particular). What this study actually shows is: "usernames from banned subreddits don't go to other subreddit's and communicate with the same username in the banned subreddit's hyper-specific jargon". Which is to say, "when a community is broken up and dispersed among other communities, the _specific_ inside jargon of the community is a lot less common, with no reference to whether the substance of the comments have changed". I mean, duh. This would perhaps be excusable in 2015 or something, but one should really know better by now than to uncritically cite popular coverage of sociology studies, particularly social-justice-aligned ones, without at least skimming the paper. Studies on hate speech are particular easy to check, given that (as this study puts it), "there is no universally accepted definition of the phrase"; at a minimum, seeing what they actually define as hate speech is core to understanding the findings. In this case, the authors start with a standard definition from the European Court of Human Rights and torture out a metric that's convoluted, qualitative (in their own words!), and full of holes that the authors don't even pretend not to fill with their own biases. (Seriously, I recommend reading Section 2.2) [0] http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf [1] Some examples: "rentoid" or "renthog" on /r/loveforlandlords, "monkee" on /r/PoliticalCompassMemes, and famously, "shitlord" on /r/shitredditsays back in the day)

throwmehaweh 6y ago

> They found that banning toxic subreddits reduced the toxicity in the website as a whole, Utter nonsense, see r/politics.

camdenlock 6y ago

The issue with your argument is that you assume there’s some universal definition of “toxic” with which everyone should agree. That simply isn’t the case, especially with the content YouTube has decided to block.

just-juan-post 6y ago
Completely agree. They got rid of things like the_donald but if you dare look at comments sections you see things like cheering the death of people who spoke out against masks or lockdowns. They got rid of the right-leaning toxicity. They specialize in, profit from, and are ok with left-leaning toxicity.

friendlybus 6y ago

Banning topics frequently cuts losses on trends that are dying anyway. Nobody wants to see ghost town subreddits. It's good for the websites health to keep the place looking alive and clean. Separating the effectiveness of bans from these trendy moments is difficult. Applying a ban on political discussions around 2015-2016 would have likely maintained toxicity.

disown 6y ago

> The author theorizes that this ban will inflame tensions, but I don't believe that's true. Look at Reddit's ban on toxic subreddits. They found that banning toxic subreddits reduced the toxicity in the website as a whole, and that "post-ban, hate speech by the same users was reduced by as much as 80-90 percent." [1] Your analogy only really works if you ban half the population from the US. Sure if you banned democrats or republicans from the country, then you could reduce tensions. But if you censor one side and keep them around, it'll only inflame tensions. > I think YouTube made the right calculation that this will in fact _reduce_ tension and slow the momentum of this destabilizing movement. Does it seem to you that tensions are reducing? If youtube did this after the 2016 election, do you think it would have reduced tensions?

rayiner 6y ago

That only works if the people who are banned are fringe minority nobodies. We’re talking about banning the President of the United States, who although he lost just won 5 million more votes than Obama in 2008. This ends with further destruction of trust in elites, fracturing the media ecosystem, and opportunistic competitors arising. The idea that gatekeepers need to withhold information from people so they believe the correct things is insane and has no limiting principle. We’ve already tumbled well down the slippery slope. Just a couple of years ago, the censorship was just going to be about “flat earth”-type stuff. Now we’re censoring stuff that’s still the subject of active litigation. They’re probably correct about it, but the first application of a terrible idea is usually workable. The Ministry of Truth probably started out to keep misinformation from spreading about vaccination, or something innocuous like that.

gruez 6y ago
>Just a couple of years ago, the censorship was just going to be about “flat earth” type stuff. Now we’re censoring stuff that’s still the subject of active litigation. Is litigation supposed to be a indicator of legitimacy or something? Anyone can file a lawsuit for any reason. In addition, most (all?) of the lawusits being dismissed without trial, which suggests they were rubbish to begin with.
- moralestapia 6y ago
  I am sure you are able to grasp the essence of what @rayiner is trying to say.
  - gruez 6y ago
    And that is? That as long as something's "under litigation" you get a free pass?
  - wtfiswiththis 6y ago
    "LIBERATE MICHIGAN!" -Trump And his militias answered, among their plans: A two week long televised execution spree in my state. Now he lost the election. He lost his state and local cases contesting the election. He lost the supreme court case. All this time him and his enablers have had their foot on the gas, grooming their extremists to sedition. Everyone who rules against them is 'deep state.' Every Republican judge who didn't support the cases are a 'Chinacrat RINO.' Liberals are considered sub-human. There is open talk of executions again. 'Treason against (Trump's) patriots.' They say. Their proof is claims, claims peddled by who? Trump and his enablers. The Koch's properties, Murdoch's. Lately Epochtimes and Newsmax have come into favor since franchises like FoxNews are considered part of the Deep State cabal. What is @rayiner trying to say? Trump lost. He can say how many votes he gained over Obama but he wasn't running against Obama. Trump lost. This needs to end. There has been too many shootings, a 'MAGA bomber.' Right now election officials have mobs outside their homes calling for their deaths. The AZ GOP asked supporters if they are willing to die. Trump lost. He lost. This needs to end. It doesn't matter that @rayiner cannot come to terms and say that Trump lost to Biden. Talking about Obama doesn't matter. Trump lost, him and his enablers need to stop stoking their extremists and cultists because this has gone on too long.

darepublic 6y ago

Reddit seems pretty damn toxic to me.

rriepe 6y ago
Toxicity wasn't banned. Just disagreement.

babesh 6y ago

That isn’t even the main argument. The main argument is that there is a concerted effort to let government take away the fundamental right of free speech. That is morally bad. But besides that, it can have the effect of hiding actual truths. The author then considers thought experiments of what would have happened to the Watergate affair and other proven true scandals if there wasn’t free speech.

tempsy 6y ago

That doesn't mean that it didn't create more rage in the rest of society...

noetic_techy 6y ago

The writing is on the wall, eventually there will be bifurcation in Big Tech and Twitter and Youtube will become the walled garden for the left of center only and largely irreverent with conservatives with things like Parlor and BitChute and others taking the exodus. It will turn into a battle for the centrists eyeballs to come to their sides platform or straddle both. The analogy of Reddit banning toxic subs only holds if everyone is ACTUALLY on reddit, most simply left. There is already talk among conservatives of alternative Reddits and Facebooks, alternatives Netflix/Hollywood companies, alternative Fox News even. Many will say "but those will be subject to the same problems of early Twitter and Reddit, how to excise the toxic elements and keep the real discussion." I would say that can EASILY be done without going down the censorship rabbit hole by simply knowing where to stop. Get rid of the illegal stuff, the spam and pornography, and leave the rest regardless of how distasteful it is. Its an Overton Window problem, you just need slightly looser boundary condition on discourse. Stop pretending to be platforms and admit you are indeed publishers to an extent. Give users the ability to filter what they don't want to see and pledge to never bias your algorithms. The cries of the left will be largely irrelevant, they will simply tell you to "go back to Twitter if you don't like it". Once the public loses faith and trust in your company or institution due to your sacrifices in credibility in the name of censorship of one sides information, there wont be any coming back from that loss of face. I'm not saying this is a good or healthy thing for public discourse, but I do think it will come to pass.