7 ms·

That's the danger in going to such lengths to shut down disagreeable viewpoints. People say "make your own website", but that becomes a race to the bottom when

That's the danger in going to such lengths to shut down disagreeable viewpoints. People say "make your own website", but that becomes a race to the bottom when we start politicizing server hosts and ISPs. When you completely shut people up, that doesn't mean they're gone, and now you don't know what they're thinking. Meanwhile you're actually tyrannical because a monopoly on information makes the mass 80% believe that everyone thinks like the MSM, which isn't true, then everyone is surprised when it turns out there's lots of people who don't support the establishment.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
What other options do you have if you can't educate or have intellectual discourse with people who are fabricating reality or deeply believe in conspiracy theories? It's like trying to pull someone out of a cult like Scientology. Of course, attempt to engage to improve the situation and help someone obtain ground truth on their own from legitimate information sources, but when it's obviously hopeless insulate yourself against those who could harm and move forward. You don't have to support the establishment, but you also don't have the right to violence because you feel slighted.
- gpm 6y ago
  What I would prefer is removing moderators, aggressively fighting bots, and putting reasonably neutral parties in the moderation position. The second part of that is hard/expensive, but it is a path forwards to some level of discourse between the people using these subreddits and everyone else. Driving these communities to different sites means that people get in much stronger filter bubbles, that's probably not a good thing. To take the example of /r/conservative on reddit right now, the subreddit currently bans anyone who says anything at all critical of Trump, and mostly only let's people who have a history of saying supportive things talk. That's not good for reddit, or the country as a whole. But if reddit just removed the current batch of moderators and those rules, and had someone enforce some reasonable standards of discourse but not enforce politics, I think it could turn into a force for good. To put it in your own terms, my preferred solution is to try and make it possible to "have intellectual discourse with people who are fabricating reality or deeply believe in conspiracy theories", instead of just making it so those people go fabricate their reality elsewhere.
  - afuchs 6y ago
    A problem that has demonstrability arisen with even neutral moderation is that, no matter the moderation criteria, a vocal subset of those who are affected by that moderation will still complain loudly about being censored. This applies even to moderators removing death threats and calls to violence. There are many examples of complaints that doing so is censorship even though it is hard to make a good faith argument against the justifications for removing such posts.
    - gpm 6y ago
      "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good"? I'm not claiming this is a perfect solution, I'm sure you're right there would be complaints, and I'm also sure that no perfect solution exist. It's just not that easy to deradicalize people, and it's just not that easy to deal with people actively attempting to deceive and radicalize the public. I do think it would probably be a superior solution to what is being done right now, where there are even more complaints, and you get increasingly "strong" filter bubbles.
- deleted 6y ago
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- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  The problem is not just that the people deciding what gets edited/blocked could, at some point in the future, be Nazis or Stalinists or whatever - bad people censoring the good to make their propaganda be the only thing that's heard. That's bad, but the real problem is this: You can be wrong. You can be wrong when you're absolutely sure that you're right, and you can be wrong on things that really matter. Be very careful about blocking "wrong" viewpoints, because you can be wrong about what's "wrong". Note well: I am not at all saying that Trump supporters are right. I am saying that you are not omniscient enough to be qualified to decide what should be blocked. Nobody is.
  - neaden 6y ago
    No, I'm pretty confident that Nazi's are a-ok to be blocked. The people with "6 Million Wasn't Enough" T-shirts storming the Capitol were the bad guys, they want to murder me, I don't owe them shit.
- jakearmitage 6y ago
  > if you can't educate or have intellectual discourse with people who are fabricating reality or deeply believe in conspiracy theories Why do you want to go to great lengths and "educate" people on your point of view?
  - watwut 6y ago
    Because otherwise they will try to overturn elections and install one party state. Or because their opinions leads them to construct bombs or shoot people.
    - jakearmitage 6y ago
      This is a textbook example of a straw man.
      - watwut 6y ago
        How is it strawman? Those are actual real world actions people commited, because of their opinions. Not even month ago. Ignoring yesterday, there was plan and attempt to execute Mitchigan governor last few months. There was Nashville boombing, likely due to whatever conspiracy theory that man believed. Even Elliot Rodger had opinions largely from incels chans.
        jakearmitage 6y ago
        Let me use another scenario. 1969, Brazil. Members of a revolutionary group kidnapped the US Ambassador. After that, and a few other incidents, the government used the same argument you presented to review and approve contents of newspapers, magazines, radio shows, movies and correspondence. Do you believe it is OK to do this, in order to disrupt their planning? Do you believe it becomes not-OK if the target of domestic terror is a tyrannical government? The very same situation has happened across all of South America throughout the 20th Century. [1]: https://www.insidehook.com/article/history/kidnapped-why-an-american-ambassador-was-taken-in-rio-in-1969 https://www.insidehook.com/article/history/kidnapped-why-an-...
- ravenstine 6y ago
  That's not up to you. Real intellectual discourse isn't your way or the highway. You, like anyone else, has the potential to be wrong, and you're probably wrong a lot more than you think you are. If your arguments don't sway people, that's neither your failing nor the failing of those you are trying to convince. When you censor people, that only emboldens them, and proves to everyone that yes, there are people who want to censor discourse. Yes, you are inherently fighting in support of the establishment if you are censoring ideas that the establishment doesn't support. You can't have it both ways. Violence is one thing, but you're also lumping in violence with conspiracy theories, which in turn constructs its own form of orthodoxy. This is why I don't support censorship to such a degree that it invades the public space; all it does is promote a religion of some kind, whether it be Christianity or "the science is settled". By the way, violence only ever seems bad when it goes against your sensibilities. If violence supported your world view, statistically speaking, you are likely to justify it. America was founded on violence, and lots of people throughout the political spectrum believe that the violence was justified. If you build a system that is so technologically perfect that it extinguishes violence from the public space, then you have created a system of slavery. Let's stop pretending that we're against violence and admit that we're against violence of certain agendas.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Pils 6y ago
    > If you build a system that is so technologically perfect that it extinguishes violence from the public space, then you have created a system of slavery. I intuitively get the point you are trying to make (sovereignty, "government has a monopoly on violence," yadda yadda), but I don't think it reflects the real, both contemporary and historical, systems of slavery. Chattel slavery in the antebellum South's relied on extrajudicial violence. International sex trafficking is inherently violent. Modern slavery most often occurs in areas with widespread, violent conflict. Why should we be worried about "benevolent AI overlords" going rogue when historically civilizations with high percentages of unfree people were extremely violent?
    - 6y ago
- enriquto 6y ago
  > people who are fabricating reality good luck on forbidding all religious speech and fiction on the internet!
- throwaway316943 6y ago
  Look at history, it’s just one damn tragedy after another and all without the supposedly super powerful influence of internet filter bubbles and radicalization. The internet isn’t the problem, this is just what humans do. Every age has blamed their problems on the latest technology while being willfully blind to the problems within their own minds. You can’t fight this with censorship or gatekeeping or trusted news sources, trying to force your beliefs on other people just adds to the misery because you’re flawed and ignorant too, everyone is.
  - watwut 6y ago
    But those tragedies happened after series of radicalisations, pretty often after groups intentionally spread lies and hate, when people closed themselvea into bubbles and so on. Pretty often the new technology was the vector by which those came, simply because bad actors seem to be quicker to take advantage of new technology. Also historically, censorship and gatekewping were overall succesfull strategies. I am not saying that it is good thing to do all that much, there is danger in overdoing it, but historically it was effective in suppressing viewpoints.
    - throwaway316943 6y ago
      They’re successful only because they are accompanied by physical violence. If we go down this path again prepare for a repeat of history at the hands of those you give this power to, it’ll probably take a few hundred mega deaths before we learn our lesson again.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
michaelmrose 6y ago
Tor hidden services now for drugs AND crazy. Alternatively freenet not just for pedophiles anymore!
- ravenstine 6y ago
  Admittedly, I don't know what you're getting at precisely. The dark web is certainly an alternative, but it's not exactly a viable one. Tor is basically the manifestation that every right can be abused in some way, especially with low moderation.
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    Think of the availability of decentralized services that are hard to ban as a pressure relief valve for good and bad things. If we we ultimately make it to hard to share legitimate things those things go underground long before they go away. If we look and find that freenet and tor hidden services are only full of kiddie porn, drugs, and crazy we haven't swung to far towards censorship. Right now the crazy is right in the open and hidden services are only for things that are actually already illegal like child porn so it is premature to suppose we are being too restrictive. Based on the fact that we almost lost our democracy we probably need to Crack down more on the hate, lies, and inducement to violence. When you have to go somewhere secret to hear someone suggest we need to massacre some jews we may be approaching an actual balance.
kemiller 6y ago
Incitement has been a limited carve-out from the First Amendment pretty much from the beginning. Stating a political view is different from threatening your opponents with violence.
- jaywalk 6y ago
  The current standard is "imminent lawless action" which is a pretty high bar. Incitement in many cases does not meet that bar.
  - kemiller 6y ago
    Well, perhaps that should be revisited, given that there's history and precedent.
    - jaywalk 6y ago
      Perhaps it's fine as it is.
commandlinefan 6y ago
> we start politicizing server hosts and ISPs I suspect we're not very far off. However, completely anonymous, decentralized, uncensorable network ideas like Freenet, TOR, I2P never really took off only because they needed a critical mass to support them: they're not technologically infeasible, they just didn't have enough support to get off the ground. If half the users of the "normal" internet are banned from it, they're going to start discovering peer-to-peer systems - that's what happened with the internet itself, after all.
tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
> When you completely shut people up, that doesn't mean they're gone It does mean that they cannot effectively find other people with the same opinion, cannot organize, and cannot spread their opinion effectively. Suppression of opinions _works_ (unfortunately, I must say). Taking that option away from people scares me a lot more than the MAGA mob. People storming government buildings can also be a good thing (uprisings against oppressive governments). It wasn't in this case, obviously, but the damage this mob caused, including the lives lost, is nothing compared to the absolutely terrifying situation of a totalitarian government and all communication platforms being "curated".

toomuchtodo 6y ago

What other options do you have if you can't educate or have intellectual discourse with people who are fabricating reality or deeply believe in conspiracy theories? It's like trying to pull someone out of a cult like Scientology. Of course, attempt to engage to improve the situation and help someone obtain ground truth on their own from legitimate information sources, but when it's obviously hopeless insulate yourself against those who could harm and move forward. You don't have to support the establishment, but you also don't have the right to violence because you feel slighted.

gpm 6y ago
What I would prefer is removing moderators, aggressively fighting bots, and putting reasonably neutral parties in the moderation position. The second part of that is hard/expensive, but it is a path forwards to some level of discourse between the people using these subreddits and everyone else. Driving these communities to different sites means that people get in much stronger filter bubbles, that's probably not a good thing. To take the example of /r/conservative on reddit right now, the subreddit currently bans anyone who says anything at all critical of Trump, and mostly only let's people who have a history of saying supportive things talk. That's not good for reddit, or the country as a whole. But if reddit just removed the current batch of moderators and those rules, and had someone enforce some reasonable standards of discourse but not enforce politics, I think it could turn into a force for good. To put it in your own terms, my preferred solution is to try and make it possible to "have intellectual discourse with people who are fabricating reality or deeply believe in conspiracy theories", instead of just making it so those people go fabricate their reality elsewhere.
- afuchs 6y ago
  A problem that has demonstrability arisen with even neutral moderation is that, no matter the moderation criteria, a vocal subset of those who are affected by that moderation will still complain loudly about being censored. This applies even to moderators removing death threats and calls to violence. There are many examples of complaints that doing so is censorship even though it is hard to make a good faith argument against the justifications for removing such posts.
  - gpm 6y ago
    "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good"? I'm not claiming this is a perfect solution, I'm sure you're right there would be complaints, and I'm also sure that no perfect solution exist. It's just not that easy to deradicalize people, and it's just not that easy to deal with people actively attempting to deceive and radicalize the public. I do think it would probably be a superior solution to what is being done right now, where there are even more complaints, and you get increasingly "strong" filter bubbles.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
The problem is not just that the people deciding what gets edited/blocked could, at some point in the future, be Nazis or Stalinists or whatever - bad people censoring the good to make their propaganda be the only thing that's heard. That's bad, but the real problem is this: You can be wrong. You can be wrong when you're absolutely sure that you're right, and you can be wrong on things that really matter. Be very careful about blocking "wrong" viewpoints, because you can be wrong about what's "wrong". Note well: I am not at all saying that Trump supporters are right. I am saying that you are not omniscient enough to be qualified to decide what should be blocked. Nobody is.
- neaden 6y ago
  No, I'm pretty confident that Nazi's are a-ok to be blocked. The people with "6 Million Wasn't Enough" T-shirts storming the Capitol were the bad guys, they want to murder me, I don't owe them shit.
jakearmitage 6y ago
> if you can't educate or have intellectual discourse with people who are fabricating reality or deeply believe in conspiracy theories Why do you want to go to great lengths and "educate" people on your point of view?
- watwut 6y ago
  Because otherwise they will try to overturn elections and install one party state. Or because their opinions leads them to construct bombs or shoot people.
  - jakearmitage 6y ago
    This is a textbook example of a straw man.
    - watwut 6y ago
      How is it strawman? Those are actual real world actions people commited, because of their opinions. Not even month ago. Ignoring yesterday, there was plan and attempt to execute Mitchigan governor last few months. There was Nashville boombing, likely due to whatever conspiracy theory that man believed. Even Elliot Rodger had opinions largely from incels chans.
      - jakearmitage 6y ago
        Let me use another scenario. 1969, Brazil. Members of a revolutionary group kidnapped the US Ambassador. After that, and a few other incidents, the government used the same argument you presented to review and approve contents of newspapers, magazines, radio shows, movies and correspondence. Do you believe it is OK to do this, in order to disrupt their planning? Do you believe it becomes not-OK if the target of domestic terror is a tyrannical government? The very same situation has happened across all of South America throughout the 20th Century. [1]: https://www.insidehook.com/article/history/kidnapped-why-an-american-ambassador-was-taken-in-rio-in-1969 https://www.insidehook.com/article/history/kidnapped-why-an-...
ravenstine 6y ago
That's not up to you. Real intellectual discourse isn't your way or the highway. You, like anyone else, has the potential to be wrong, and you're probably wrong a lot more than you think you are. If your arguments don't sway people, that's neither your failing nor the failing of those you are trying to convince. When you censor people, that only emboldens them, and proves to everyone that yes, there are people who want to censor discourse. Yes, you are inherently fighting in support of the establishment if you are censoring ideas that the establishment doesn't support. You can't have it both ways. Violence is one thing, but you're also lumping in violence with conspiracy theories, which in turn constructs its own form of orthodoxy. This is why I don't support censorship to such a degree that it invades the public space; all it does is promote a religion of some kind, whether it be Christianity or "the science is settled". By the way, violence only ever seems bad when it goes against your sensibilities. If violence supported your world view, statistically speaking, you are likely to justify it. America was founded on violence, and lots of people throughout the political spectrum believe that the violence was justified. If you build a system that is so technologically perfect that it extinguishes violence from the public space, then you have created a system of slavery. Let's stop pretending that we're against violence and admit that we're against violence of certain agendas.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Pils 6y ago
  > If you build a system that is so technologically perfect that it extinguishes violence from the public space, then you have created a system of slavery. I intuitively get the point you are trying to make (sovereignty, "government has a monopoly on violence," yadda yadda), but I don't think it reflects the real, both contemporary and historical, systems of slavery. Chattel slavery in the antebellum South's relied on extrajudicial violence. International sex trafficking is inherently violent. Modern slavery most often occurs in areas with widespread, violent conflict. Why should we be worried about "benevolent AI overlords" going rogue when historically civilizations with high percentages of unfree people were extremely violent?
  - 6y ago
enriquto 6y ago
> people who are fabricating reality good luck on forbidding all religious speech and fiction on the internet!
throwaway316943 6y ago
Look at history, it’s just one damn tragedy after another and all without the supposedly super powerful influence of internet filter bubbles and radicalization. The internet isn’t the problem, this is just what humans do. Every age has blamed their problems on the latest technology while being willfully blind to the problems within their own minds. You can’t fight this with censorship or gatekeeping or trusted news sources, trying to force your beliefs on other people just adds to the misery because you’re flawed and ignorant too, everyone is.
- watwut 6y ago
  But those tragedies happened after series of radicalisations, pretty often after groups intentionally spread lies and hate, when people closed themselvea into bubbles and so on. Pretty often the new technology was the vector by which those came, simply because bad actors seem to be quicker to take advantage of new technology. Also historically, censorship and gatekewping were overall succesfull strategies. I am not saying that it is good thing to do all that much, there is danger in overdoing it, but historically it was effective in suppressing viewpoints.
  - throwaway316943 6y ago
    They’re successful only because they are accompanied by physical violence. If we go down this path again prepare for a repeat of history at the hands of those you give this power to, it’ll probably take a few hundred mega deaths before we learn our lesson again.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

michaelmrose 6y ago

Tor hidden services now for drugs AND crazy. Alternatively freenet not just for pedophiles anymore!

ravenstine 6y ago
Admittedly, I don't know what you're getting at precisely. The dark web is certainly an alternative, but it's not exactly a viable one. Tor is basically the manifestation that every right can be abused in some way, especially with low moderation.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  Think of the availability of decentralized services that are hard to ban as a pressure relief valve for good and bad things. If we we ultimately make it to hard to share legitimate things those things go underground long before they go away. If we look and find that freenet and tor hidden services are only full of kiddie porn, drugs, and crazy we haven't swung to far towards censorship. Right now the crazy is right in the open and hidden services are only for things that are actually already illegal like child porn so it is premature to suppose we are being too restrictive. Based on the fact that we almost lost our democracy we probably need to Crack down more on the hate, lies, and inducement to violence. When you have to go somewhere secret to hear someone suggest we need to massacre some jews we may be approaching an actual balance.

kemiller 6y ago

Incitement has been a limited carve-out from the First Amendment pretty much from the beginning. Stating a political view is different from threatening your opponents with violence.

jaywalk 6y ago
The current standard is "imminent lawless action" which is a pretty high bar. Incitement in many cases does not meet that bar.
- kemiller 6y ago
  Well, perhaps that should be revisited, given that there's history and precedent.
  - jaywalk 6y ago
    Perhaps it's fine as it is.

commandlinefan 6y ago

> we start politicizing server hosts and ISPs I suspect we're not very far off. However, completely anonymous, decentralized, uncensorable network ideas like Freenet, TOR, I2P never really took off only because they needed a critical mass to support them: they're not technologically infeasible, they just didn't have enough support to get off the ground. If half the users of the "normal" internet are banned from it, they're going to start discovering peer-to-peer systems - that's what happened with the internet itself, after all.

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago

> When you completely shut people up, that doesn't mean they're gone It does mean that they cannot effectively find other people with the same opinion, cannot organize, and cannot spread their opinion effectively. Suppression of opinions _works_ (unfortunately, I must say). Taking that option away from people scares me a lot more than the MAGA mob. People storming government buildings can also be a good thing (uprisings against oppressive governments). It wasn't in this case, obviously, but the damage this mob caused, including the lives lost, is nothing compared to the absolutely terrifying situation of a totalitarian government and all communication platforms being "curated".