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Those days ended fast. I saw it happen. On my forum, that very question was asked, and it wasn’t a philosophical debate. It was an operational one - how do we b

Those days ended fast. I saw it happen. On my forum, that very question was asked, and it wasn’t a philosophical debate. It was an operational one - how do we balance free speech ideals vs actual forum evidence. The framework that fits the evidence and the ideals was 1) we want a market place of ideas to function 2) there is content that easily dominates and sidelines all other ideas. 3) there are Maliciously engineered arguments that need complex rebuttals to Massive emotional payloads, which will never be accepted. 4) cat videos, pictures and memes will out perform everything else We let things be for a long time. Very light touch approaches. It doesn’t work. The good ideas will become irrelevant before theY are even read, and that is long after bad ideas redefine reality. The underlying nexus is that our ideals on free speech do not take into account human wetware bandwidth. If reality must be perceived, and the perception system is flooded, then it doesn’t matter how good our science or reason is. The system is still blind.

sfblah 6y ago
Can you give some specifics of #3 just for color? I'm not interested in debating or trolling at all. I'm just curious what people say that does this. Is it just people cheering for Trump or something?
- lordCarbonFiber 6y ago
  Tones of statements fall under that header. It can be Trump supporters tallking about election fraud, nazis talking about "race based IQ distributions" or transphobes talking about "bathroom predators"; there's no shortage of these kind of bad faith low effort "arguements". There are mountains of high quality sources you can use to argue against the claims but it takes many times the work than just showing up to "just ask questions" as bigots are want to do. Having a 0 tolerance policy for these kinds of people makes your space safer for maginalized communities and ends up with better debates/discussions over all since, as i alluded to, these arguments aren't actually in good faith or rooted in any sort of data.
  - sfblah 6y ago
    No interest in wading into the specifics of these topics obviously. But, it occurs to me that deciding which topics are troll topics and which ones aren’t confers a lot of power. I have actually seen people banned from communities when coming armed with pretty detailed data and thorough argumentation. I wonder if there’s a principled way to separate low-effort trolls from those simply willing to argue the unpopular side of a controversial topic.
    - mistermann 6y ago
      There is a principled way I'd think, but very few minds remain anymore that haven't been corrupted by incompatible heuristics.
    - croon 6y ago
      I don't moderate anything anymore, but I generally have an n strikes policy when debating with someone. If I spend [not insignificant amount of time/mental energy] with you just to disprove something inane, and you do that to me n times, I won't argue with you anymore, even if the n+1th time happens to not be completely baseless. At that point it's either explicitly on purpose, or implicitly linked with a bias that makes them susceptible to bullshit that confirms said bias. I don't know if there's any ab initio way of knowing if someone's spouting nonsense on purpose or not, so character patterns are hard to scale. But that's why moderation online is harder and faster than in real life, because you don't have a 1on1 interaction in the same way. It's up to netizens to behave and think before speaking.
    - lordCarbonFiber 6y ago
      You have to always remember it comes down to scale. The fact that making the claims is always less work than debunking them already has the balance of power way off into the claimant end. So anyone moderating anything is going to turn to heuristics; you can see which topics tend to attract people acting in bad faith and at the very least have extra standards on. I'll go back to trans people since Ive personally got the most experience debunking bigotry in that arena, what are the odds that some random user on an unrelated forum has independently researched something that's going to completely flip established science on its head? It's fairly low, and allowing argument just creates a false debate. To use examples I would hope get everyone on board, think flat earthers. There's no version of that discussion that doesn't end with "here are all the data suggesting a round earth + things you can literally do yourself with a bit of math and a car" vs "that's just what the <insert boogieman that's a thin metaphor for marginalized group> want you to think". Since you know how it ends, just ban it to start. Hell you can see the consequences of not holding a firm line on these sorts of things in this thread. There are people literally "just asking questions" about "men in women's sports" as an example of the "terrible reddit censorship"; as if it's not transparently obvious what they're doing. So you have to ask yourself, even if you could reliably id anyone who wanted to argue in good faith (i'd argue this is considerably harder than you'd think though that's more of a gut feeling /shrug), if their goals are "convince the world that <race, gender, nationality, sexuality> is causing harm" what is the value of giving that a platform even if you're willing to expend the emotional energy to debunk it (over and over and over and over because even if you have some kind of metric, your users don't and if allowed someone always feeds the trolls).
- artemisyna 6y ago
  Not the OP, but as an example: Take a flat earther argument that's explanations within explanations within explanations to cover whatever "what about x?" type of questions you have. Change "flat earther" to whatever conspiracy theory/controversial topic of the day, and there you go.
  - mistermann 6y ago
    How to build a strawman 101.
- Pfhreak 6y ago
  I believe this is called the "Gish Gallop". The idea being that I can come up with many, many more questions that are hypothetical, but that require more energy to answer than they take to ask. Often times the person will combine this with a carefully worded question that has to be unwound by the counter-debater. Like, "Knowing that this will cost working class Americans jobs, why do you want X?" Well... X doesn't cost jobs, X might even create jobs. But now I have to explain that. And if I slow down for even one second, you have an opening to fire off another question or paint me as somehow waffling.
  - mr_toad 6y ago
    > Like, "Knowing that this will cost working class Americans jobs, why do you want X?" A good politician would never answer that question. Instead they would answer a different question that they already had a good answer to. “I think the important thing to remember here is...” This tactic works just as well online. Never directly answer a question you don’t like. Always stay on message. By the time you finish your answer the listener should have already forgotten the question.
    - eropple 6y ago
      Thing is--you are assuming that both sides want to exercise rhetoric. The weakness, and it is a weakness, of the generally liberal discussion participant is that they very often want to discuss what a thing is and what it means. Wonkishness is a positive trait in discussing policy, but it means that rhetoric, no matter how openly disingenuous, has to be addressed; the consequences (or the inanity) have to be dissected, that's part of why they are there. Incidentally, this is what leads to the current state of affairs--the side that is unmoored from any pretense of reality can say whatever the hell they want and will put the other side into knots. It isn't clever, and it is frustrating because your advice is good, but it is real.
    - pasabagi 6y ago
      I find this inappropriate. Politicians are engaged in political messaging - so it makes sense there - but online, we're engaged in conversation. What you're describing is good at putting a message across - but I don't want to have conversations with people who are simply broadcasting a message in my general direction. It's a form of bad faith communication, same as the weighted question. These days, I'd probably just not respond to bad faith communication, but I've historically enjoyed being horrible. Unlike a politician, you don't have to preserve your own credibility in the eyes of onlookers, so you can just be awful if you want.
- sellyme 6y ago
  While it doesn't address the "massive emotional payload" bit, Russell's Teapot is the canonical example of an argument that's easy to make and almost impossible to categorically disprove, despite being factually inaccurate. Now imagine that but about a topic people have strong opinions on, and you get something that requires so much preamble to disprove that those who believe it aren't willing to hear the rebuttal. Basically, you just make something up entirely. If you say that 100,000,000 Americans are killed every year in skiing accidents, that's easy to disprove. But if you post a clip of someone getting punched from an obscure 1970s sitcom that only aired in Hungary and then claim it happened at a restaurant in Denver, that's going to be a lot more difficult to disprove even if the claim is extremely dubious unless you're lucky enough to know the original context. Some of the more common examples of this in recent times include faked tweet screenshots (mildly difficult to disprove as Twitter's search isn't very useful, and the liar can just say "oh they deleted it"), anecdotes about meeting a celebrity and them doing something unacceptable (basically impossible to disprove unless the meeting DID happen but the incident didn't and eyewitnesses can vouch - see also: the Gritty incident), and videos being used to smear a group despite none of the people involved actually being from that group (reverse video search is extremely difficult, and that relies on it being something previously published rather than recorded explicitly for misinformation campaigns).
aaron-santos 6y ago
Makes sense. Lies spread faster than truth, and repetition legitimizes are fundamentally incompatible with the marketplace of ideas mindset.
- sthnblllII 6y ago
  Really? It took a huge mobilization of media manipulation fear mongering and gas lighting to get the American public to swallow the Weapons of Mass Destruction and/or Saddam did 9/11 lies. If people had been free to speak their minds (https://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/21/phil_donahue_on_his_2003_firing https://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/21/phil_donahue_on_his_2...) back then we wouldn't have been lead into that war like lemmings. Information is control. I trust the funny cat lady next door to not start a war with Iran more than I trust anyone on an editorial board of an American newspaper not to. Lies require censorship of truth to survive. EDIT: added a reference. Keep in mind for every anti-war journalist fired for standing up to the official lies there were easily 100 who kept their heads down. Im not scared of flat earth lies. I'm scared of Iraq war or even worse, World War I levels of deception.
  - kibwen 6y ago
    > If people had been free to speak their minds back then What? > Lies require censorship of truth to survive. This is naive. People willfully believe lies if they support their worldview, even in the presence of truth.
  - JoshTriplett 6y ago
    > If people had been free to speak their minds back then Are you under the impression that people weren't free to speak their minds "back then"? People did speak their minds, loudly and regularly. That didn't change the outcome.
    - fatbird 6y ago
      Yes: there were marches of millions of people in all the major cities of the Western hemisphere against what were readily understood to be the lies of the Bush Administration rushing to war. Didn't matter. The invasion of Iraq happened, and millions stood dumbfounded, unable to understand how they could have failed when they clearly got their message out.
MinusGix 6y ago
I think the issue is one of scale. Having non-perfect free-speech is fine on your usual forum site, and somewhat has to be used to ensure quality. While, at the absolutely massive scale that Reddit and other social media giants are at, they (in my view) should essentially have very little to no say in what content appears upon the site. Now, individual moderators for subreddits could be more stringent due to being sub-communities (and thus smaller). This would allow high quality moderation that lets communities focus on topics without as much worry about free-speech issues. Essentially allowing the classic, 'Go build your own social media' be actually possible since the communities that may not like your content are sufficiently small.
- eropple 6y ago
  This sounds good until you realize that we're dealing with literal-not-figurative fascists here. The world has figured out how to deal with a Nazi. I've linked this elsewhere in the thread, but it is worth understanding the lessons of this story deeply: https://twitter.com/IamRageSparkle/status/1280891537451343873 https://twitter.com/IamRageSparkle/status/128089153745134387... Say you're something anodyne, like /r/RomanHistory or something (I don't know if that's real). For obvious reasons, that is a topic that Western fascists really like; they're gonna come by, even if their "fascist hat" isn't on right that second. But that train's never late, that fascist hat goes on eventually. And the first fascist might be polite. So might his friends. And maybe you see a few off-color jokes that maybe you, as a slightly-but-not-heavily-invested mod, slap down--but those jokes are the way that they start to find each other. And meanwhile, as things grow? What often happens is that one of their more buttoned-up types ends up on your moderation team, because hey, they're Respected By The Community (and this happens in person, too, when it comes to groups and political entities; this is a very common foot-in-the-door tactic). And then it just grows from there. Maybe you've got the spine to "ruin everything" by kicking them out at this point, by cutting out the rot, but that's going to hurt and hmm, maybe it's best to just go along and get along, especially because any time you try to act against it, you've got those folks who pipe up about how Nazis should have freedom of speech too, even if you don't like their ideas... ...and now you have a fascist community. "Strong moderation"--the bartender in that story telling the first fascist to get the hell out--is not something that can be even remotely taken for granted. You must insulate your systems against fascism because it is a hack of the system. The instinctual emotional attack it employs on a liberal order requires so much more work to stop than it does to continue that anywhere it can take root, it can strangle everything else. This is real, and this is what those coded "free speech ideals" are being weaponized to protect while it grows.
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
A huge problem, which is the cause of this far more than "free speech" ever was, roots in these platforms optimizing for engagement. And then vacuous controversy maximizes engagement so you're really optimizing for controversy, which is a dumpster fire. But separating the combatants doesn't just stop the algorithmically-promoted unintelligible flame wars. It stops the debate entirely. You lose the ability to even encounter the other tribe or have any idea what their views or concerns are.
- kibwen 6y ago
  > roots in these platforms optimizing for engagement. I don't think so. This pattern has been observed, and has been a problem, since well before the modern eyeballs-and-engagement-obsessed era of the internet, and before ads were even present on forums at all. What you're describing makes it worse, but even in its absence there is a certain vocal subset of humanity for whom dominating a discussion is its own reward. As a forum grows eventually you will attract one of these people, and from that point on the discourse of the forum will be determined by Survival Of The Loudest.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    The pattern existed, but it was never such a serious problem that so many people started using it to justify the current level of censorship and excommunication until after "maximize engagement" turned it up to eleven.
    - meheleventyone 6y ago
      Oh no it really was. I moderated forums in the late 90s early 00s and it was a lot of work to keep things on topic. Back then of course being a moderator was seen as a thankless service to the community rather than some censoring devil.
- deleted 6y ago
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- jakelazaroff 6y ago
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cookiengineer 6y ago
> The underlying nexus is that our ideals on free speech do not take into account human wetware bandwidth. Damn, this is such a good metaphore, I had to think a lot about it. For my browser [1] I wanted to introduce a fact gathering and linking system, and build it in a way that bias of authors (and publishers) can be guessed when they release a new article. My theory is that Rationalism will never be anything that can exist, because it is the opposite of human nature (or say, the founding idea of our society). The underlying issue is that emotions cause a lot of people to get irrational due to them not being able to differ a potentially dangerous situation with a potentially (equally) good one. I think that most (if not all) of fake news websites were shared because of only a couple of reasons: 1) Humans like to get reinforced in their own perception more than they like to get disagreed with. 2) Articles in these type of publishing mediums appeal to emotions rather than to facts, hence the reason for why they use pictures, videos and other recordings as "evidence" even when they had totally nothing to do with it. 3) Humans are lazy. This is by far the most important point. If it is easy to comply with an emotional statement, and hard to gather evidence to disprove it; the emotional statement will always win. 4) Humans confuse disagreement with punishment. As a kid you get taught that there are negative effects when you disagree with society, or your mum/dad or other authoritarian figures. Rather than to punish kids when they are wrong we should encourage the gathering of evidence, and let them form an argument for both sides. 5) Humans are beings that forget. That is why media for the masses reuses pictures of a situation that happened years ago as "proof" for something clickbaity. Most people won't remember it if it was a situation that had a boring outcome, but they certainly will remember it when it had a negative emotional effect on themselves. 6) Depression is a huge hole where nobody without external support can come out, due to how our thinking nature works. Similar to 5) our brain is wired to remember negative punishments more than positive reinforcements, and that is why we tend to get depressive more likely than we tend to get optimistic...which in turn plays in the cards of fake news because the bad obvious enemy could do some serious bad thing to us. But yeah, these are just my two cents. Due to my browser I thought a lot about this and came to the conclusion that irrational hate speech is worse an enemy than someone might think on first sight. [1] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth
- Tempest1981 6y ago
yibg 6y ago
Plus there is an asymmetry here. Wild “theories” and purposefully inflammatory content is easy to post, and also easy to believe for those that align with them ideologically. Countering them, especially to a degree that can be convincing, takes a lot more work. End result, a lot more of the former and less of the latter.
- birdsbirdsbirds 6y ago
  How come moderators don't fall for those 'theories'? Or more precisely: Why is there a majority of people who upvote those theories but moderators can identify them as what they are and remove them? What has happened to moderators that they can handle the 'theories' that hasn't happened to regular forum members? Whatever that is, can't this be handed out to new members before they are allowed to vote?
  - XorNot 6y ago
    Moderators are there to ensure the community thrives, not to respond to 50 restatements a day of "COVID-19 is a hoax" by people "just asking questions". Part of that is very much ensuring that the front page is not wall to wall conspiracy theories, and members don't have every thread inundated with the same junk.
    - dotancohen 6y ago
      So each time a post "just asking questions" is posted, close it with a link to the explanation of why the idea has already been debunked. Just like a Bugzilla dupe or a StackOverflow dupe.
      - GrantSolar 6y ago
        For a long time, Reddit moderators did not have the tools to do this. Regardless, whenever bad-faith argumentation is removed, the person whose comment was removed paints the event as censorship which just backs up their conspiracy argument more
      - 6y ago
patcon 6y ago
> The underlying nexus is that our ideals on free speech do not take into account human wetware bandwidth. Really well said. I'll admit I lean on "wetware" in these convos too. Free speech perhaps breaks down in net-centric reality. Social norms that worked in a 2D plane of existence are not guaranteed to continue working when physical space constraints start to break down -- when every human agent is networked to every other human agent, oh and also centers of massive compute resources (with operators who have their own agendas)
- starfallg 6y ago
  I would say it's even more basic than that. The "marketplace of ideas" paradigm only works when there is in fact positive incentives to sustain the marketplace. In a environment where it costs next to nothing to disseminate bad information for personal gain, there is no economic mechanism to stop people from doing it. Even if we had unlimited bandwidth, it would be wasted in such a war of attrition.
pryelluw 6y ago
Do you think charging for a forum account would change the outcome? Would having people pay for a user account in order to be able to post on a forum reduce the amount of hate speech and related?
- KozmoNau7 6y ago
  There is a reasonably well-known example of a large forum that charges users for account creation. Something Awful has charged $10 for account creation for as long as i can remember. While I do think it has kept away most low-effort trolls, there have certainly been deeply toxic attitudes and arguments still happened. Doxxing, organized harassment, racism and similar nastiness have certainly been issues with some regularity in most of the subforums. The only reason why it has been kept down is a relatively large team of admins and moderators, and they have been far from infallible, there has been tons of drama in that regard, including at least one mod who literally doxxed other forums users to white supremacists. On the whole though, the discussions there are a lot more civilized than on sites like Reddit. I think the small entry fee is part of it, but also thanks to an active moderation team and the standard policy being to put people in timeout first, instead of insta-banning for any offence. Obviously there are differing views on how well it actually works, leading to various spin-off forums, with different policies and philosophies.
  - marvin 6y ago
    I wonder if you could do that kind of thing on a large scale. Require a small contribution, say $1 a year, and use the proceeds to hire a moderation team that was deliberately coached to allow controversial arguments but prevent malicious echo chambers from poisoning the entire ecosystem. It would necessarily be a less profitable site than the competition, but that might not be a problem as long as it wasn't venture-funded.
    - Gravityloss 6y ago
      There's one way to promote healthy discussion. Instead of just up and downvoting, you can give people the option to vote for "well argued" and "I agree" separately. I've seen a Finnish newspaper site use this.
concordDance 6y ago
Counteranecdote: I remember being on a forum for a good ten years while it had a free speech policy. It worked just fine as in practice social pressures and being shouted down kept any talk of "gas the jews" basically nonexistant. Unfortunately, the forum moderation team became woke and started introducing rules ouutlawing types of speech they disagreed with. This ended up reinforcing a whole load of vicious cycles (conservatives self-censoring, conservatives being ejected, moderation drifting further left) and you ended up with a very nasty circle-jerk of endless posters trying to one-up eachother with the latest scandal about how Evil their enemies were. Surprisingly, it didn't just kill discussion of left vs right on social issues, it killed basically all discussion of non-culture war political topics as well, drowned out by the purity spiral circlejerk.

sfblah 6y ago

Can you give some specifics of #3 just for color? I'm not interested in debating or trolling at all. I'm just curious what people say that does this. Is it just people cheering for Trump or something?

lordCarbonFiber 6y ago
Tones of statements fall under that header. It can be Trump supporters tallking about election fraud, nazis talking about "race based IQ distributions" or transphobes talking about "bathroom predators"; there's no shortage of these kind of bad faith low effort "arguements". There are mountains of high quality sources you can use to argue against the claims but it takes many times the work than just showing up to "just ask questions" as bigots are want to do. Having a 0 tolerance policy for these kinds of people makes your space safer for maginalized communities and ends up with better debates/discussions over all since, as i alluded to, these arguments aren't actually in good faith or rooted in any sort of data.
- sfblah 6y ago
  No interest in wading into the specifics of these topics obviously. But, it occurs to me that deciding which topics are troll topics and which ones aren’t confers a lot of power. I have actually seen people banned from communities when coming armed with pretty detailed data and thorough argumentation. I wonder if there’s a principled way to separate low-effort trolls from those simply willing to argue the unpopular side of a controversial topic.
  - mistermann 6y ago
    There is a principled way I'd think, but very few minds remain anymore that haven't been corrupted by incompatible heuristics.
  - croon 6y ago
    I don't moderate anything anymore, but I generally have an n strikes policy when debating with someone. If I spend [not insignificant amount of time/mental energy] with you just to disprove something inane, and you do that to me n times, I won't argue with you anymore, even if the n+1th time happens to not be completely baseless. At that point it's either explicitly on purpose, or implicitly linked with a bias that makes them susceptible to bullshit that confirms said bias. I don't know if there's any ab initio way of knowing if someone's spouting nonsense on purpose or not, so character patterns are hard to scale. But that's why moderation online is harder and faster than in real life, because you don't have a 1on1 interaction in the same way. It's up to netizens to behave and think before speaking.
  - lordCarbonFiber 6y ago
    You have to always remember it comes down to scale. The fact that making the claims is always less work than debunking them already has the balance of power way off into the claimant end. So anyone moderating anything is going to turn to heuristics; you can see which topics tend to attract people acting in bad faith and at the very least have extra standards on. I'll go back to trans people since Ive personally got the most experience debunking bigotry in that arena, what are the odds that some random user on an unrelated forum has independently researched something that's going to completely flip established science on its head? It's fairly low, and allowing argument just creates a false debate. To use examples I would hope get everyone on board, think flat earthers. There's no version of that discussion that doesn't end with "here are all the data suggesting a round earth + things you can literally do yourself with a bit of math and a car" vs "that's just what the <insert boogieman that's a thin metaphor for marginalized group> want you to think". Since you know how it ends, just ban it to start. Hell you can see the consequences of not holding a firm line on these sorts of things in this thread. There are people literally "just asking questions" about "men in women's sports" as an example of the "terrible reddit censorship"; as if it's not transparently obvious what they're doing. So you have to ask yourself, even if you could reliably id anyone who wanted to argue in good faith (i'd argue this is considerably harder than you'd think though that's more of a gut feeling /shrug), if their goals are "convince the world that <race, gender, nationality, sexuality> is causing harm" what is the value of giving that a platform even if you're willing to expend the emotional energy to debunk it (over and over and over and over because even if you have some kind of metric, your users don't and if allowed someone always feeds the trolls).
artemisyna 6y ago
Not the OP, but as an example: Take a flat earther argument that's explanations within explanations within explanations to cover whatever "what about x?" type of questions you have. Change "flat earther" to whatever conspiracy theory/controversial topic of the day, and there you go.
- mistermann 6y ago
  How to build a strawman 101.
Pfhreak 6y ago
I believe this is called the "Gish Gallop". The idea being that I can come up with many, many more questions that are hypothetical, but that require more energy to answer than they take to ask. Often times the person will combine this with a carefully worded question that has to be unwound by the counter-debater. Like, "Knowing that this will cost working class Americans jobs, why do you want X?" Well... X doesn't cost jobs, X might even create jobs. But now I have to explain that. And if I slow down for even one second, you have an opening to fire off another question or paint me as somehow waffling.
- mr_toad 6y ago
  > Like, "Knowing that this will cost working class Americans jobs, why do you want X?" A good politician would never answer that question. Instead they would answer a different question that they already had a good answer to. “I think the important thing to remember here is...” This tactic works just as well online. Never directly answer a question you don’t like. Always stay on message. By the time you finish your answer the listener should have already forgotten the question.
  - eropple 6y ago
    Thing is--you are assuming that both sides want to exercise rhetoric. The weakness, and it is a weakness, of the generally liberal discussion participant is that they very often want to discuss what a thing is and what it means. Wonkishness is a positive trait in discussing policy, but it means that rhetoric, no matter how openly disingenuous, has to be addressed; the consequences (or the inanity) have to be dissected, that's part of why they are there. Incidentally, this is what leads to the current state of affairs--the side that is unmoored from any pretense of reality can say whatever the hell they want and will put the other side into knots. It isn't clever, and it is frustrating because your advice is good, but it is real.
  - pasabagi 6y ago
    I find this inappropriate. Politicians are engaged in political messaging - so it makes sense there - but online, we're engaged in conversation. What you're describing is good at putting a message across - but I don't want to have conversations with people who are simply broadcasting a message in my general direction. It's a form of bad faith communication, same as the weighted question. These days, I'd probably just not respond to bad faith communication, but I've historically enjoyed being horrible. Unlike a politician, you don't have to preserve your own credibility in the eyes of onlookers, so you can just be awful if you want.
sellyme 6y ago
While it doesn't address the "massive emotional payload" bit, Russell's Teapot is the canonical example of an argument that's easy to make and almost impossible to categorically disprove, despite being factually inaccurate. Now imagine that but about a topic people have strong opinions on, and you get something that requires so much preamble to disprove that those who believe it aren't willing to hear the rebuttal. Basically, you just make something up entirely. If you say that 100,000,000 Americans are killed every year in skiing accidents, that's easy to disprove. But if you post a clip of someone getting punched from an obscure 1970s sitcom that only aired in Hungary and then claim it happened at a restaurant in Denver, that's going to be a lot more difficult to disprove even if the claim is extremely dubious unless you're lucky enough to know the original context. Some of the more common examples of this in recent times include faked tweet screenshots (mildly difficult to disprove as Twitter's search isn't very useful, and the liar can just say "oh they deleted it"), anecdotes about meeting a celebrity and them doing something unacceptable (basically impossible to disprove unless the meeting DID happen but the incident didn't and eyewitnesses can vouch - see also: the Gritty incident), and videos being used to smear a group despite none of the people involved actually being from that group (reverse video search is extremely difficult, and that relies on it being something previously published rather than recorded explicitly for misinformation campaigns).

aaron-santos 6y ago

Makes sense. Lies spread faster than truth, and repetition legitimizes are fundamentally incompatible with the marketplace of ideas mindset.

sthnblllII 6y ago
Really? It took a huge mobilization of media manipulation fear mongering and gas lighting to get the American public to swallow the Weapons of Mass Destruction and/or Saddam did 9/11 lies. If people had been free to speak their minds (https://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/21/phil_donahue_on_his_2003_firing https://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/21/phil_donahue_on_his_2...) back then we wouldn't have been lead into that war like lemmings. Information is control. I trust the funny cat lady next door to not start a war with Iran more than I trust anyone on an editorial board of an American newspaper not to. Lies require censorship of truth to survive. EDIT: added a reference. Keep in mind for every anti-war journalist fired for standing up to the official lies there were easily 100 who kept their heads down. Im not scared of flat earth lies. I'm scared of Iraq war or even worse, World War I levels of deception.
- kibwen 6y ago
  > If people had been free to speak their minds back then What? > Lies require censorship of truth to survive. This is naive. People willfully believe lies if they support their worldview, even in the presence of truth.
- JoshTriplett 6y ago
  > If people had been free to speak their minds back then Are you under the impression that people weren't free to speak their minds "back then"? People did speak their minds, loudly and regularly. That didn't change the outcome.
  - fatbird 6y ago
    Yes: there were marches of millions of people in all the major cities of the Western hemisphere against what were readily understood to be the lies of the Bush Administration rushing to war. Didn't matter. The invasion of Iraq happened, and millions stood dumbfounded, unable to understand how they could have failed when they clearly got their message out.

MinusGix 6y ago

I think the issue is one of scale. Having non-perfect free-speech is fine on your usual forum site, and somewhat has to be used to ensure quality. While, at the absolutely massive scale that Reddit and other social media giants are at, they (in my view) should essentially have very little to no say in what content appears upon the site. Now, individual moderators for subreddits could be more stringent due to being sub-communities (and thus smaller). This would allow high quality moderation that lets communities focus on topics without as much worry about free-speech issues. Essentially allowing the classic, 'Go build your own social media' be actually possible since the communities that may not like your content are sufficiently small.

eropple 6y ago
This sounds good until you realize that we're dealing with literal-not-figurative fascists here. The world has figured out how to deal with a Nazi. I've linked this elsewhere in the thread, but it is worth understanding the lessons of this story deeply: https://twitter.com/IamRageSparkle/status/1280891537451343873 https://twitter.com/IamRageSparkle/status/128089153745134387... Say you're something anodyne, like /r/RomanHistory or something (I don't know if that's real). For obvious reasons, that is a topic that Western fascists really like; they're gonna come by, even if their "fascist hat" isn't on right that second. But that train's never late, that fascist hat goes on eventually. And the first fascist might be polite. So might his friends. And maybe you see a few off-color jokes that maybe you, as a slightly-but-not-heavily-invested mod, slap down--but those jokes are the way that they start to find each other. And meanwhile, as things grow? What often happens is that one of their more buttoned-up types ends up on your moderation team, because hey, they're Respected By The Community (and this happens in person, too, when it comes to groups and political entities; this is a very common foot-in-the-door tactic). And then it just grows from there. Maybe you've got the spine to "ruin everything" by kicking them out at this point, by cutting out the rot, but that's going to hurt and hmm, maybe it's best to just go along and get along, especially because any time you try to act against it, you've got those folks who pipe up about how Nazis should have freedom of speech too, even if you don't like their ideas... ...and now you have a fascist community. "Strong moderation"--the bartender in that story telling the first fascist to get the hell out--is not something that can be even remotely taken for granted. You must insulate your systems against fascism because it is a hack of the system. The instinctual emotional attack it employs on a liberal order requires so much more work to stop than it does to continue that anywhere it can take root, it can strangle everything else. This is real, and this is what those coded "free speech ideals" are being weaponized to protect while it grows.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago

A huge problem, which is the cause of this far more than "free speech" ever was, roots in these platforms optimizing for engagement. And then vacuous controversy maximizes engagement so you're really optimizing for controversy, which is a dumpster fire. But separating the combatants doesn't just stop the algorithmically-promoted unintelligible flame wars. It stops the debate entirely. You lose the ability to even encounter the other tribe or have any idea what their views or concerns are.

kibwen 6y ago
> roots in these platforms optimizing for engagement. I don't think so. This pattern has been observed, and has been a problem, since well before the modern eyeballs-and-engagement-obsessed era of the internet, and before ads were even present on forums at all. What you're describing makes it worse, but even in its absence there is a certain vocal subset of humanity for whom dominating a discussion is its own reward. As a forum grows eventually you will attract one of these people, and from that point on the discourse of the forum will be determined by Survival Of The Loudest.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  The pattern existed, but it was never such a serious problem that so many people started using it to justify the current level of censorship and excommunication until after "maximize engagement" turned it up to eleven.
  - meheleventyone 6y ago
    Oh no it really was. I moderated forums in the late 90s early 00s and it was a lot of work to keep things on topic. Back then of course being a moderator was seen as a thankless service to the community rather than some censoring devil.
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jakelazaroff 6y ago

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cookiengineer 6y ago

> The underlying nexus is that our ideals on free speech do not take into account human wetware bandwidth. Damn, this is such a good metaphore, I had to think a lot about it. For my browser [1] I wanted to introduce a fact gathering and linking system, and build it in a way that bias of authors (and publishers) can be guessed when they release a new article. My theory is that Rationalism will never be anything that can exist, because it is the opposite of human nature (or say, the founding idea of our society). The underlying issue is that emotions cause a lot of people to get irrational due to them not being able to differ a potentially dangerous situation with a potentially (equally) good one. I think that most (if not all) of fake news websites were shared because of only a couple of reasons: 1) Humans like to get reinforced in their own perception more than they like to get disagreed with. 2) Articles in these type of publishing mediums appeal to emotions rather than to facts, hence the reason for why they use pictures, videos and other recordings as "evidence" even when they had totally nothing to do with it. 3) Humans are lazy. This is by far the most important point. If it is easy to comply with an emotional statement, and hard to gather evidence to disprove it; the emotional statement will always win. 4) Humans confuse disagreement with punishment. As a kid you get taught that there are negative effects when you disagree with society, or your mum/dad or other authoritarian figures. Rather than to punish kids when they are wrong we should encourage the gathering of evidence, and let them form an argument for both sides. 5) Humans are beings that forget. That is why media for the masses reuses pictures of a situation that happened years ago as "proof" for something clickbaity. Most people won't remember it if it was a situation that had a boring outcome, but they certainly will remember it when it had a negative emotional effect on themselves. 6) Depression is a huge hole where nobody without external support can come out, due to how our thinking nature works. Similar to 5) our brain is wired to remember negative punishments more than positive reinforcements, and that is why we tend to get depressive more likely than we tend to get optimistic...which in turn plays in the cards of fake news because the bad obvious enemy could do some serious bad thing to us. But yeah, these are just my two cents. Due to my browser I thought a lot about this and came to the conclusion that irrational hate speech is worse an enemy than someone might think on first sight. [1] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth

Tempest1981 6y ago

yibg 6y ago

Plus there is an asymmetry here. Wild “theories” and purposefully inflammatory content is easy to post, and also easy to believe for those that align with them ideologically. Countering them, especially to a degree that can be convincing, takes a lot more work. End result, a lot more of the former and less of the latter.

birdsbirdsbirds 6y ago
How come moderators don't fall for those 'theories'? Or more precisely: Why is there a majority of people who upvote those theories but moderators can identify them as what they are and remove them? What has happened to moderators that they can handle the 'theories' that hasn't happened to regular forum members? Whatever that is, can't this be handed out to new members before they are allowed to vote?
- XorNot 6y ago
  Moderators are there to ensure the community thrives, not to respond to 50 restatements a day of "COVID-19 is a hoax" by people "just asking questions". Part of that is very much ensuring that the front page is not wall to wall conspiracy theories, and members don't have every thread inundated with the same junk.
  - dotancohen 6y ago
    So each time a post "just asking questions" is posted, close it with a link to the explanation of why the idea has already been debunked. Just like a Bugzilla dupe or a StackOverflow dupe.
    - GrantSolar 6y ago
      For a long time, Reddit moderators did not have the tools to do this. Regardless, whenever bad-faith argumentation is removed, the person whose comment was removed paints the event as censorship which just backs up their conspiracy argument more
    - 6y ago

patcon 6y ago

> The underlying nexus is that our ideals on free speech do not take into account human wetware bandwidth. Really well said. I'll admit I lean on "wetware" in these convos too. Free speech perhaps breaks down in net-centric reality. Social norms that worked in a 2D plane of existence are not guaranteed to continue working when physical space constraints start to break down -- when every human agent is networked to every other human agent, oh and also centers of massive compute resources (with operators who have their own agendas)

starfallg 6y ago
I would say it's even more basic than that. The "marketplace of ideas" paradigm only works when there is in fact positive incentives to sustain the marketplace. In a environment where it costs next to nothing to disseminate bad information for personal gain, there is no economic mechanism to stop people from doing it. Even if we had unlimited bandwidth, it would be wasted in such a war of attrition.

pryelluw 6y ago

Do you think charging for a forum account would change the outcome? Would having people pay for a user account in order to be able to post on a forum reduce the amount of hate speech and related?

KozmoNau7 6y ago
There is a reasonably well-known example of a large forum that charges users for account creation. Something Awful has charged $10 for account creation for as long as i can remember. While I do think it has kept away most low-effort trolls, there have certainly been deeply toxic attitudes and arguments still happened. Doxxing, organized harassment, racism and similar nastiness have certainly been issues with some regularity in most of the subforums. The only reason why it has been kept down is a relatively large team of admins and moderators, and they have been far from infallible, there has been tons of drama in that regard, including at least one mod who literally doxxed other forums users to white supremacists. On the whole though, the discussions there are a lot more civilized than on sites like Reddit. I think the small entry fee is part of it, but also thanks to an active moderation team and the standard policy being to put people in timeout first, instead of insta-banning for any offence. Obviously there are differing views on how well it actually works, leading to various spin-off forums, with different policies and philosophies.
- marvin 6y ago
  I wonder if you could do that kind of thing on a large scale. Require a small contribution, say $1 a year, and use the proceeds to hire a moderation team that was deliberately coached to allow controversial arguments but prevent malicious echo chambers from poisoning the entire ecosystem. It would necessarily be a less profitable site than the competition, but that might not be a problem as long as it wasn't venture-funded.
  - Gravityloss 6y ago
    There's one way to promote healthy discussion. Instead of just up and downvoting, you can give people the option to vote for "well argued" and "I agree" separately. I've seen a Finnish newspaper site use this.

concordDance 6y ago

Counteranecdote: I remember being on a forum for a good ten years while it had a free speech policy. It worked just fine as in practice social pressures and being shouted down kept any talk of "gas the jews" basically nonexistant. Unfortunately, the forum moderation team became woke and started introducing rules ouutlawing types of speech they disagreed with. This ended up reinforcing a whole load of vicious cycles (conservatives self-censoring, conservatives being ejected, moderation drifting further left) and you ended up with a very nasty circle-jerk of endless posters trying to one-up eachother with the latest scandal about how Evil their enemies were. Surprisingly, it didn't just kill discussion of left vs right on social issues, it killed basically all discussion of non-culture war political topics as well, drowned out by the purity spiral circlejerk.