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You can't censor it away completely, but you can help the redeemable extremists __know__ they're indulging in extremism by forcing them to go to fringe websites
by ralmidani 6y ago
You can't censor it away completely, but you can help the redeemable extremists __know__ they're indulging in extremism by forcing them to go to fringe websites rather than allow them to stay on Twitter and Facebook as if nothing is wrong. As for the "deplorables" who know what they're doing and will never question it or feel any remorse, we should not be giving them a megaphone.
sources[0]: I was susceptible to extremist thought (not actions, fortunately) when I was younger. The sense that I might get into trouble if I participated in fringe websites kept me from going further down the rabbit hole. I kept reading mainstream news and sites, and while I would give a lot of things an extremist spin in my mind, eventually the narrative stopped making sense.
sources[1]: https://twitter.com/iyad_elbaghdadi https://twitter.com/iyad_elbaghdadi (can't find the specific Tweet, but he went through a similar experience, and almost became a full-blown extremist Muslim, before the sites he used to frequent were taken offline).
- jdlyga 6y agoDefinitely agree. Back a year ago when you saw this kind of stuff all over Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc it felt so normalized. But now you have to go to fringe websites. It's still out there of course. But it's very back-alley and definitely makes you take what people are saying with a grain of salt.
- ralusek 6y agoAnd would you describe things as having gotten better this last year? And I don't mean in the sense that you see less of what you think there should be less of online, because then of course it's gotten better if that's the variable being minimized. I mean, do you think the state of extremism and political unity has improved via marginalizing views held by enormous portions of the population?
- ForHackernews 6y agoYeah, absolutely! In the US, Trump lost the election and we have a genuine shot at police reform for the first time in a generation. In Europe, the pandemic has exposed the incompetence of empty populism.
- CyberRabbi 6y agoIf it’s difficult for you to see political opinions with which you disagree being normalized, imagine how they feel.
- Falling3 6y agoIt's completely disingenuous to categorize statements like "the US tax code is too complex" and "Jews are starting forest fires with space lasers" both as just 'political opinions'.
- CyberRabbi 6y agoIt’s only “disingenuous” if you aren’t a liberal. I’m a liberal so I believe people are free to hold any opinion they want as long as they are not promoting direct harm to anyone else and I will not be shamed out of a liberal position by exceptional strawmen.
- NoodleIncident 6y agohttps://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/marjorie-taylor-greene-qanon-wildfires-space-laser-rothschild-execute.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/marjorie-taylor-gree... Blonde, sure, but IDK if I'd call her hair straw.
- bavila 6y agoI truly love this exchange. Any rational person, upon hearing a suggestion that Jews are responsible for starting forest fires by using laser beams from space, would quite naturally dismiss the claim as nonsense. And the claim is so ludicrous on its face that a rational person would, quite justifiably, assume that it could only ever be offered as a strawman. Yet, here we are--with a duly elected congresswoman of the United States House of Representatives subscribing to (or at least passively entertaining) said strawman. There are, perhaps, too many well-intentioned, good-natured, level-headed people out there who are simply far too sheltered from the outright insanity that is permeating throughout our society. They are far too quick to assume that human nature tends toward the same pursuits of truth, justice, and liberty which they value--and that merely offering a level playing field for ideas to compete will inevitably result in the triumph of those which are most noble. While this bright-eyed and bushy-tailed approach to life is certainly tempting to adopt, it is quite disconnected from the world around us. Rationality and competence are under siege by people who do not adhere to an evidence-based view of reality. One cannot be reasonable with unreasonable people. Moderation and ostracization are perfectly valid tools for dealing with such individuals.
- vkou 6y agoIt also has much lower reach. Ideas are viral - and don't spread very well when they have less exposure. You don't see too much pro-Al-Qaeda or ISIS material on Facebook or Twitter. Somehow, we've managed to censor that extremism away.
- tanseydavid 6y agoI have to wonder out loud whether many commenters actual took the time to read the article. Because the responses seemed heavily skewed towards "Yeah, but..." responses that sort of ignore the article's main point.
- vkou 6y agoThe article's main point is that apparently, 10-15% of the population voting for unabashed fascists is a colossal policy failure. Whereas I don't actually see that as a problem. In any given population, about ~10% of it is going to be sympathetic to fascism. That is what it is. It's an appealing ideology for a lot of people. The problem is when you get closer to 40%, or 50%, and unabashed fascists start making their way onto first, and second-rate political party tickets, as opposed to ineffectively screaming into the void on third-rate ones. We've just had a bit of a brush with that, here. Not interested in repeating it.
- throw_nbvc1234 6y agoAnd when the systems/mechanisms for them to oppress their opposition were already put in place in an attempt to limit them from getting that power in the first place. If you go down the path of "censorship", you better get it right. Otherwise you'll probably be worse off in the end.
- vkou 6y agoAs the history of repressive governments has shown, they don't need any help in building these systems. Once they are in power, they really don't give two figs about how open and accepting your society was of viewpoints like theirs, and they can quickly assemble any instruments of oppression that they find lacking.
- betwixthewires 6y agoThis is a shortsighted take IMO. "Fringe" websites are growing rapidly while engagement on the big, normal websites is declining or slowing down. The problem is people want to talk about these things, and if that's what people want to talk about they're going to go where they can talk about them. This is directly addressed in the article (when we say we want to ban hate speech, what we really want to ban is hate, but hate cannot be banned). These big legitimate sites only feel permanently dominating now, but are not permanent by any means. People don't go on the internet and talk because talking is a way to use Facebook, people go on Facebook to talk about what they want to talk about. If people want to talk about edgy or even hateful stuff, they will, and if they can't do that on Facebook they'll do it elsewhere. That's not to even get into the fact that all to often these terms like "fringe websites" are used by entities to shame users into not using their competition, which further degrades the integrity of any anti hate message.
- spaced-out 6y ago>"Fringe" websites are growing rapidly while engagement on the big, normal websites is declining or slowing down. source?
- salawat 6y agoBetter question: If increasing, is it because more topics of conversation are getting binned as 'fringe'? Or are extremists merely circumventing centralized efforts at blocking by moving around, which is exactly what those anti-censorship weenies like me jave been saying will be the inevitable result? The problem you ignore or quash never goes away. It just gets harder and more distributed.
- kelnos 6y agoI don't know about engagement on mainstream sites declining, but the rising popularity of sites like Parler and Gab seems undeniable. Parler's recent (attempted) deplatforming is evidence enough: you don't bother with a tiny fringe site that isn't growing or wielding any influence.
- 6y ago
- Lammy 6y agoYou're still using subjective terms like "extremism" in an objective way that the people on the receiving end of that label may not agree with or appreciate.
- buescher 6y agoNot only subjective terms like "extremism", but religious terms like "redeemable".
- vlanders10 6y agoAlso "remorse", which is quite popular among SJW tribunals when they silence someone on unverified testimony of the popular clique members while refusing to hear the "accused" even once.
- ralmidani 6y agoI'm not even close to being a leftist (but sign me up for Social Justice without the tribunals). Regarding your parent post's objection to "redeemable", it's not used in religious contexts exclusively.
- buescher 6y agoYeah, sure, the original post meant that extremists are redeemable for prizes. The other senses of the term are religious metaphor.
- unethical_ban 6y agoYou and the people who talk like you are getting downvoted because you're contrarian without actually stating an opposition view to what you're ranting about. Someone: Extremism is bad. You: What is extreme is subjective. The next step would be for you to try to give counter points of what you think is extreme that others consider not, or better, what you think is not extreme that others consider so.
- fatsdomino001 6y ago"you can help the redeemable extremists __know__ they're indulging in extremism by forcing them to go to fringe websites rather than allow them to stay on Twitter and Facebook as if nothing is wrong." This is such a terrible idea. All this accomplishes is causing extremists to find echo chambers where they will never actually know what they're doing is wrong. It's much better to keep extremists in mainstream platforms so they can be called out and atleast informed that they are wrong. Your solution is totally backwards and accomplishes the opposite of what you're hoping for.
- tablespoon 6y ago>> "you can help the redeemable extremists __know__ they're indulging in extremism by forcing them to go to fringe websites rather than allow them to stay on Twitter and Facebook as if nothing is wrong." > This is such a terrible idea. All this accomplishes is causing extremists to find echo chambers where they will never actually know what they're doing is wrong. It's much better to keep extremists in mainstream platforms so they can be called out and atleast informed that they are wrong. Your solution is totally backwards and accomplishes the opposite of what you're hoping for. It's not that simple: 1. It's totally believable that someone might follow a neo-Nazi on twitter, if the neo-Nazi avoids Nazi iconography and mainly tweets about Nazi-adjacent topics, but have second thoughts about joining an actual neo-Nazi website. Not all extremists will seek out a fringe echo chamber. Some will, but others will not. The result is likely one where the most-extreme core gets separated from its recruitment opportunities, disrupting the first step in the recruitment funnel. That core may get more extreme in its echo chamber, but its overall movement could end up being smaller and weaker. 2. Counterintuitively, people tend to dig in to their existing beliefs when they're "called out." Also, I'm sure every neo-Nazi has been informed many, many times that they're wrong. Extremism is not a problem of lack of information.
- fatsdomino001 6y ago> That core may get more extreme in its echo chamber, but its overall movement could end up being smaller and weaker. This is precisely the problem. That core will certainly get more extreme because there's no cross pollination between it and other more moderate groups. I would rather have more people with less extreme views than fewer people with more extreme views, because it's much more likely the more extreme people are a greater danger to society than the less extreme people. > Extremism is not a problem of lack of information. True, but it's more complicated than that. Extremism almost always results when you disenfranchise or ostracize a community. It's much better to integrate it so there's crossflow of information and empathy still. Dehumanizing groups of people also dehumanizes yourself.
- penetraitor69 6y agoAgree 100%. I essentially started going down the "Qanon" rabbit hole a few years before "Q" existed (the tropes have existed in right-wing circles for longer than the specific conspiracy theory has); part of my realization that it was wrong was noticing that the sorts of things I believed were promoted almost exclusively in places also rife with obvious racism, sexism, and antisemitism.
- anonymouswacker 6y agoThis is the mainstream thinking in the US, and why everything is rapidly going to shit. There is no "we" giving people a microphone -- it is a select few oligarchs who wield exceptional control to take away the voice of people whose views run counter to their and their cronies' interests. There is no democracy, representation, or transparency. The coming antithesis will be bypassing the control of the few on the voice of the many, and an Internet 2.0 which will be resistant to the censorship of tyrants and warmongers who comprise the faux-woke... if we still have the electrical grid & network infrastructure to support it...
- unethical_ban 6y agoYour assertion lacks any evidence, supporting argument, or sense. It also offers no solution beyond "some different kind of Internet" but don't describe anything beyond, essentially, decentralization. And that the United States will actually collapse in the near term because Twitter is mismanaged.
- anonymouswacker 6y agoYou're right. I could spend the hours of time to write a thesis here, as if it will make any difference, but I prefer to just play the contrarian while I blow off from work for a few. Take it with a grain of salt, or just mark it as spam, etc. I wonder at what point I will just have this account banned off HN. Big Corporations and centralization of power in the hands of few is bad, and should be obvious. I didn't think one would need to provide evidence that Big Tech/Media is canceling conservatives, libertarians, liberals, greens, and surmise that it is not just because of benevolence or public safety. These are advertising companies deciding what is truth. That some people still cheer as more people that disagree with them are wiped off the de facto public forums on the internet should be scary to the masses who are just one wrong idea from being similarly muzzled. US Government is bought and paid for by these interests, so the logical hope would be for a technical solution by neoanarchists and other disenfranchised groups. It's just a hope, sure... but with the growth of crypto for decentralizing infrastructure (Filecoin, for instance) it seems all but inevitable.
- grawprog 6y agoI've spent a lot of time on the internet over the years and the thing i've noticed about 'extremists' of all kinds, not just idealogical ones, i'm talking like any kind of 'extremist'. That handful of people you find on a forum more devoted to whatever the topic or niche is than everybody else. The people that are there, every day all day immersing themselves in it. They're fairly far and few between and wherever you are, you'll find a handful of them. The rest of the more vocal people tend to be the 'hanger ons'. The ones that are into it as long as a bunch of others are, but will lose interest if the community fades. Then there's the flyby people. The people who just kinda pop in from time to time, but aren't really all that into it. People seem to forget, we call it 'extremism' because it's at the extreme end of what humans consider acceptable. Most people in general are not 'extremists' with anything otherwise we wouldn't call it extreme. It would just be normal. Everyone seems to just label someone as an extremist for a tweet, or an idea, or some words, where in reality a good majority of people being labeled as such are more than likely just normal people saying some dumb shit. Everybody's done it, nobody's perfect anywhere, everybody believes ridiculous things from time to time, everybody's said things they shouldn't, it's just a part of being human. It doesn't mean they're this, that or the other kind of extremist.
- playingchanges 6y agoUnderrepresented POV I think. ‘Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity’. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
- bleah1000 6y agoThis is just a few people explaining how they de-radicalized. Now imagine the opposite, someone with some slightly bad opinion suddenly finds themselves shut out of the main platforms because of hate speech rules. They now become more radicalized. Due to the number of people constantly being suspended/banned I think there is a greater chance that these people will become radicalized, than someone will realize they have a bad opinion because they got suspended/banned. I'm reminded of Daryl Davis, and the way he de-radicalized KKK members. He did it by talking to them, engaging them in speech. It feels like hate speech censoring could actually lead to more radicalization as people feel persecuted and become even more radical than if you had let them talk. It's a hard problem because you can get radicalization if you allow people to create their own echo chambers of hate. How do you balance trying to avoid creating these kinds of echo chambers, versus creating radicals by pushing them to other sites where there are no restrictions?
- spaced-out 6y ago>How do you balance trying to avoid creating these kinds of echo chambers, versus creating radicals by pushing them to other sites where there are no restrictions? By aggressively removing it to limit how many people are exposed, and ban those who continue to share it despite being warned.
- ds206 6y agoAnd all those evil drug users need to be aggressively removed to limit how many people are exposed to drugs... /s
- eplanit 6y agoWhich is censorship. The thesis of the article asserts it is ineffective, and counter-productive to the parent comment's point.
- loopz 6y agoNo, it is anti-targeted propaganda.
- 6y ago
- Alupis 6y agoCan anyone name a time in history where the people censoring things turned out to be the "Good Guys"?
- Banyonite 6y agoHonestly cannot- doesn't mean there isn't one, but this leads to a possible heuristic worth exploring.
- Pyramus 6y agoYour argument/trope fails for a simple reasons: "They" don't exist. * Here on HN we censor each other. * The US censors basic nudity. * Germany censors denying the Holocaust. * The patent office censors inventions. * Scientists have devised a peer-censorship system. * The police censors your attempts to distribute illegal material. * Banks censor your funds to ISIS. ... the list goes on and on and on.
- wnoise 6y agoAlmost half of those are indeed bad guys, and much of the rest does not fit under the normal meaning of the word censorship.
- Jeema101 6y agoYes. 1945 post-war Germany saw mass-censoring as part of the Allied de-Nazification program: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification "the US Army continued its efforts to denazify Germany through control of German media. The Information Control Division of the US Army had by July 1946 taken control of 37 German newspapers, six radio stations, 314 theaters, 642 cinemas, 101 magazines, 237 book publishers, and 7,384 book dealers and printers."
- Alupis 6y agoPropaganda isn't the same as censorship. It does not appear any of the Allies made it illegal to believe in Nazism, or to write about it, or even dare to own something from the Nazi era. Nonetheless, it's arguable these efforts were futile, likely misguided, and likely drove some to extremism as a result. You cannot simply compel a population to think a certain way. Instead, you must allow the "bad" ideas to be exposed in the public forum, and win over the population through logical arguments. Hiding them away does nothing to disappear them. Regardless, it's pretty well established the average German citizen didn't believe in the extremes the Nazi party had gone to anyway.
- mancerayder 6y agoThere are different types of extremists, and only one type of extremism is targeted by the mainstream broadcast sites. It's tiring hearing the "megaphone" meme. It's a loaded term and means more than its literal meaning. There are extremists on the left and the right. If you only only target extremism on the right, you might think you're doing a service, but in fact you're going to make the problem worse. Here come the downvotes.
- cloverich 6y ago1. In what way does it make it worse? 2. Do you have some common examples of left wing extremism that are rampant and unchecked? I have many examples in my personal Facebook feed of right wing extremism, but few or perhaps no left wing extremism, despite many of my right wing friends voicing a similar complaint.
- mancerayder 6y agoI have to swallow the fact that any reply means downvotes in this Silicon Valley community, but: 1. Because you're not actually removing right-wing extremism (which would be nice), you're pushing people into the corner. You can't legally or morally prevent people from having extremist views among themselves, having conversations, and in an Internet age you're going to play wack-a-mole if you try to chase after things, monitor and shut things down. Not to mention the overreach inherent in a real crackdown. By punishing them publicly, you feed into conspiracy theories, you feed into the idea that they are victimized, you feed into the idea of bias, and in the end you make people, more, not less radicalized. edit: two more (I think) good arguments. One, the U.S. has less extremism than Germany or France, with regards to right-wing extremism, and yet those countries have hate speech laws and ban books and fine people with extremist views. Yet, the FN in France and the AFD in Germany have power locally and possibly nationally. Two, people will use innuendo and implication and code. Thus, you have to ban the code and innuendo. Is that the path you want to go down, banning and evaluating interpretations of speech that is constantly changing as one thing gets banned and a new one sprouts? This is not new, and we already know this, and we know this from over a century of extremist views. It's not in 2015 that magically extremism started to exist. The correct way to combat right-wing extremism is to let people be lunatics, make it obvious that they are lunatics, reply to the lunatics with logic and reason, and don't infantalize viewers are being influenced by bad views. The "megaphone" theory being espoused by mainstream pro-censorship tech people is a cover for the underlying assumption: I know what's good for you, and I feel if I hide content from you, then I can prevent you from being influenced, in short, I, tech censor, protect you from yourself. I cannot get behind that, and I hope the question that should be on everyone's mind is, who decides what's extremism. 2. Absolutely. Where do you want to start. I could go to Twitter and spend a few minutes to find some, but that would be awkward and appear like cherry picking. There were and still are many posts asking for abolishing of government, of authorities, of institutions. That's been extremist since the 19th century. With regards to racist speech, I offer to you Sarah Jeong (editor from the NYT) tweets which were deleted and apologized (ish) for, but had the editorial board stand behind her and no warnings from Twitter itself.
- wtetzner 6y ago> As for the "deplorables" who know what they're doing and will never question it or feel any remorse, we should not be giving them a megaphone. The problem is that this is a very slippery slope. Who gets to decide what's OK and what's not?
- stretchwithme 6y agoThere isn't a single widely-held opinion that did not begin as an extremist opinion. And plenty of irrational ideas that became widely held.
- hef19898 6y agoOnly that we went already through the most hard core right wing positions, and it didn't end well. These experiments happened in the 1920s and 30s. Same goes for Stalins form of Communism, which by the way has nothing to do with socialism.
- stretchwithme 6y agoJust going by the definitions Google provides first, socialism seems pretty similiar to Communism or at least a superset of it. Communism is intended to produce "a society in which all property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs." Socialism is "a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole." Socialism means the public owning or regulating everything. Communism is definitely about the public owning everything. And socialism is not necessarily about allocating by need the way Communism is supposed to be. Maybe that's the National Socialists in Germany called themselves that. The State didn't own everything but it did try to control everything. For the good of the people. Well, some of the people. The definition of Socialism doesn't address that detail.
- SuoDuanDao 6y agoIt's certainly true, if the only places where people criticise the mainstream consensus are dominated by neo-nazis, that reasonable people are less likely to criticise the mainstream consensus. The downside to that 'solution' is, sometimes reasonable people need to criticise the mainstream consensus. I recently thought of a great example: If the goal is to reduce extremism, one of the lowest-hanging fruit would be to censor all videos of police misconduct. There is no question that seeing the George Floyd video radicalised a number of people. If your solution is that a few tech giants should have memory holed that video as it began to go viral, I'd love to hear you explain yourself.
- loopz 6y agoSo we should not expose abuse and misconduct, just because some fragile minds get upset when brown people speak up?
- SuoDuanDao 6y agoI raised that example to illustrate the problem with censorship as a social engineering tool, there seems to be a lack of nuance around the question. People talk as if the question of whether to censor is identical to whether there are viewpoints that are harmful. That's the wrong question IMHO, of course some viewpoints are harmful. Harmful enough that it would be better if they weren't shared, we can all imagine some. Censorship is like torture, we shouldn't swear it off because it doesn't work, but because the benefit we gain from using it is miniscule compared to the harm received when it's used on us. The George Floyd video is a clear case in point. How many people who were happy to see #45 removed from social media would have been dismayed if the George Floyd video had been similarly removed for the sake of public order? How much benefit did they gain from their enemy being off the platforms compared to the harm it would have done to them if the same tool had been used against them? Society progresses in proportion to the number of uncomfortable conversations. Because they are uncomfortable, we can all be tempted by people flattering us that we don't need to have them. Therefore, it's a tool that tends to be overused. As such, it should be one that reasonable people of all tribes can agree is a sign of hypocrisy, an opportunity for grandstanding when employed by the other side and soul-searching when employed by our own.
- dominotw 6y ago> You can't censor it away completely I don't understand why everyone is saying this. There is not extremist content in north korea.
- tomjen3 6y agoI hold an extremist view that the war on drugs should end now, with all the drugs banned made legal to sell to anybody over the age of majority in that country (so 18 in the US) and anybody serving time in prison for any drug crime be released immediately. People usually shut that down in a way that makes it clear they haven't considered the point and don't respect the opinion. It does not make me question that opinion, it makes me despise them more. Where twitter to stop permitting discussion of drug laws, I would not change my mind.