4 ms·

This article is predicated on an unfounded counterfactual. Who knows what would have happened if Trump's twitter account hadn't been banned? Also, it seems a bi

by n4r9 10mo ago

This article is predicated on an unfounded counterfactual. Who knows what would have happened if Trump's twitter account hadn't been banned? Also, it seems a bit off to describe Musk's leadership of Twitter as triggering the return of "the free and open internet".

BobSonOfBob 10mo ago
Funny, the Musk comment tripped me up as well. Since it is clear the Twitter algos and Grok are sycophantic. Yet … the article resonates with me. Deplatforming. Canceling. Suppressing. Has not worked. Moderation. Healthily engagement. Acknowledgement but not acceptance. Can that work?
- testdelacc1 10mo ago
  It resonates with people who aren’t personally affected by the Overton window shifting towards extremism. It’s now more normal to fling racist slurs at people online, and that behaviour is coming offline as well. When we used to “deplatform” racism this sort of talk wasn’t within the Overton window. Of course if you’re not personally affected you’ll say this is fine, marketplace of ideas etc. Let the marketplace sort out if racism should be normalised or not. It doesn’t even lead to better discourse. We’re both here, commenting on this forum right? It’s because the level of discourse here is higher than elsewhere, certainly much better than “free speech” platforms like Musk’s. How can that be, when HN has extraordinarily strict rules on acceptable speech? Even calling someone an idiot can get you banned here, let alone a pajeet or Paki. If you truly believed in freedom of speech, you’d quit a forum moderated like this.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
ch4s3 10mo ago
> This article is predicated on an unfounded counterfactual. I think it's just evaluating the claim that removing these people from a public platform removes their ideas from popular discourse, which obviously didn't work. The article is arguing that failing to engage bad ideas head on leads to increasingly insular an polarized groups within society.
- n4r9 10mo ago
  > which obviously didn't work But... how obvious is that? Perhaps it did significantly reduce those ideas when it was active. Like, if Musk hadn't reinstated Trump's account we could be looking at a different presidency.
  - ch4s3 10mo ago
    Again you didn’t read the article. Read it or fuck off and stop arguing about the headline.
    - n4r9 10mo ago
      Yeah, I read the article. It doesn't address the possibility that the causality could be the other way around. The stuff about Trump and Bhattacharya is just odd. Trump rose back to power after Musk bought Twitter and gave him a platform to spread lies again. Then Trump appointed RFK, who appointed Bhattacharya as a sort of token gesture. The Fuentes stuff is just as odd - his popularity waned while he was censored, but after being reinstated to X he grew his base to a million followers. Again, how does this support the claim that deplatforming was a negative move? I guess there's two competing narratives: deplatforming never worked, vs deplatforming was working until Musk stepped in and undid it. The article does not give any compelling arguments for the former.
      - ch4s3 10mo ago
        Did you read it though ? The article is about negative polarization spirals. You keep missing that entirely.
        n4r9 10mo ago
        There's a bit about that in the "Tyranny of the Intolerant" section. Imo the article isn't so much making a case for that as it is lifting quotations wholesale from Timur Kuran as a sort of appeal to authority to justify it's own narrative. It makes out like it's obvious that Kuran's work explains the rise of Trump and Fuentes, whilst Musk's hijacking of Twitter strikes me as a simpler more natural explanation.
vpShane 10mo ago
Agreed. The internet is a wild ride of walled garden algorithms, dead internet theory, bot comments with other bot comments, like farming, influenced sway-the-masses, scam laden AI generated nightmares with major platforms requiring IDs, biometric verifications where you're fingerprinted, scanned, identified and crapped on. Deplatforming removes a voice to a captive audience where one has entire lively hoods taken from them, their viewpoints suppressed and are forced to other platforms where the userbases are questionable offering their own infinite scrolls and dopamine hits and their own cancel cultures. It is what it is.

by n4r9 10mo ago

BobSonOfBob 10mo ago

Funny, the Musk comment tripped me up as well. Since it is clear the Twitter algos and Grok are sycophantic. Yet … the article resonates with me. Deplatforming. Canceling. Suppressing. Has not worked. Moderation. Healthily engagement. Acknowledgement but not acceptance. Can that work?

testdelacc1 10mo ago
It resonates with people who aren’t personally affected by the Overton window shifting towards extremism. It’s now more normal to fling racist slurs at people online, and that behaviour is coming offline as well. When we used to “deplatform” racism this sort of talk wasn’t within the Overton window. Of course if you’re not personally affected you’ll say this is fine, marketplace of ideas etc. Let the marketplace sort out if racism should be normalised or not. It doesn’t even lead to better discourse. We’re both here, commenting on this forum right? It’s because the level of discourse here is higher than elsewhere, certainly much better than “free speech” platforms like Musk’s. How can that be, when HN has extraordinarily strict rules on acceptable speech? Even calling someone an idiot can get you banned here, let alone a pajeet or Paki. If you truly believed in freedom of speech, you’d quit a forum moderated like this.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]

ch4s3 10mo ago

> This article is predicated on an unfounded counterfactual. I think it's just evaluating the claim that removing these people from a public platform removes their ideas from popular discourse, which obviously didn't work. The article is arguing that failing to engage bad ideas head on leads to increasingly insular an polarized groups within society.

n4r9 10mo ago
> which obviously didn't work But... how obvious is that? Perhaps it did significantly reduce those ideas when it was active. Like, if Musk hadn't reinstated Trump's account we could be looking at a different presidency.
- ch4s3 10mo ago
  Again you didn’t read the article. Read it or fuck off and stop arguing about the headline.
  - n4r9 10mo ago
    Yeah, I read the article. It doesn't address the possibility that the causality could be the other way around. The stuff about Trump and Bhattacharya is just odd. Trump rose back to power after Musk bought Twitter and gave him a platform to spread lies again. Then Trump appointed RFK, who appointed Bhattacharya as a sort of token gesture. The Fuentes stuff is just as odd - his popularity waned while he was censored, but after being reinstated to X he grew his base to a million followers. Again, how does this support the claim that deplatforming was a negative move? I guess there's two competing narratives: deplatforming never worked, vs deplatforming was working until Musk stepped in and undid it. The article does not give any compelling arguments for the former.
    - ch4s3 10mo ago
      Did you read it though ? The article is about negative polarization spirals. You keep missing that entirely.
      - n4r9 10mo ago
        There's a bit about that in the "Tyranny of the Intolerant" section. Imo the article isn't so much making a case for that as it is lifting quotations wholesale from Timur Kuran as a sort of appeal to authority to justify it's own narrative. It makes out like it's obvious that Kuran's work explains the rise of Trump and Fuentes, whilst Musk's hijacking of Twitter strikes me as a simpler more natural explanation.

vpShane 10mo ago

Agreed. The internet is a wild ride of walled garden algorithms, dead internet theory, bot comments with other bot comments, like farming, influenced sway-the-masses, scam laden AI generated nightmares with major platforms requiring IDs, biometric verifications where you're fingerprinted, scanned, identified and crapped on. Deplatforming removes a voice to a captive audience where one has entire lively hoods taken from them, their viewpoints suppressed and are forced to other platforms where the userbases are questionable offering their own infinite scrolls and dopamine hits and their own cancel cultures. It is what it is.