> it appears to be in a bit of a feedback loop as well, since it's obvious that deplatforming groups will make them feel persecuted and even more upset
To me it seems obvious the feedback works in the opposite direction. Deplatforming disrupts the feedback bubbles that radicalize these people.
I personally think they should be allowed to have their space anyway, if they can refrain from inciting violence.
But I would certainly absolutely refuse to do business with them, and have no problem with others making the same decision. People have the right to their repugnant ideas. They don’t have the right to force others to help promote them.
The question here is where "doing business" ends and free speech begins. Arguably, paying for access to the Internet is also "doing business". Maybe paying for access to public utilities is "doing business" as well (if I don't pay my electric bill, I won't have electricity).
What option do I have then — go to the town square and voice my views? Even going to the town square is illegal in some cases these days, what with COVID restrictions.
I think this is an incredibly dangerous slippery slope, especially given how much our devices act as our "second brains" already.
I would be open to a discussion about some kind of “fairness doctrine” for these companies - but as is, if it’s a private company, they are under no obligation to host speech they disagree with.
Is it problematic that people take social rejection as a reason to further radicalize? Sure - but such is human existence - and where is their personal responsibility to observe their social environment and alter their behaviors/beliefs if they are unhappy with the results they are receiving?
I see the point you're making. If we deconstruct the whole matter and look at it from an existential point of view, humans are incredibly constrained in their freedoms by the nature of our existence. In a fundamental way, our language and culture predetermines what we can think and how we think, and our environment is probably a bigger impediment to freedom of speech and thought than anything else.
But from a policy perspective on the ground, I think the ideal of freedom of speech should eclipse the concerns of private platforms wherever possible. But this is not to say we should not police the boundaries of free speech. In fact, if we had a more strict enforcement policy about unprotected speech like direct threats (such as L. Lin Wood's declaration that people should execute Mike Pence by firing squad [0]), we might not need these platform interventions at all.
Agreed — I'm not trying to say I know the answers. However, I do believe there's a role that social media companies have played in this polarization that needs to be addressed. Tristan Harris (of The Social Dilemma fame) makes very good points in this regard. Many of the political problems we have are thanks to to a distorted landscape of information distribution centered around advertising and platform addictiveness.
Isn’t the general solution there to bust the monopoly?
The main exception is utilities which generally operate as natural monopolies. They should be (and generally are — this is isn’t a new idea) regulated to only be allowed to deny service for limited, specific reasons. There’s room for improvement here. ISPs are relatively new to being treated as utilities and many ordinary regulations that should be in-place are missing.
Imagine a TV news network with audience of 1 billion people which will give free airtime to one political party only, especially during the election cycle. How big of an advantage this is and how much is this kind of reach worth? Aren't there campaign laws about this kind of thing?
Explicit, credible calls for violence have never been protected speech. Parler’s own TOS forbid it. No moderation effort can be perfect, but we don’t need to argue in this case whether their moderation is sufficient. A violent insurrection was openly discussed and organized by thousands on Parler and then they went and did it. Lin wood called for the execution of the Vice President and many of his followers attempted to do just that.
In terms of the limits on a person or business to control with whom they will do business, utilities — ISPs in this case — should be regulated so they can only deny service for specific, limited reasons. They generally are, though I know this needs improvement.
Beyond that, businesses and individuals should have wide latitude to decide who to do business with.
What concerns me is the strange inversion freedom of speech has undergone in the Trump era. Instead of protecting the people from the government, it’s now invoked to protect the government — and supporters of the current administration — from the people. Now it means suppressing ordinary liberties like the right to not support people, content or speech you don’t want to.
> Lin wood called for the execution of the Vice President and many of his followers attempted to do just that.
I am in Europe so have not been paying too much attention. Your quote sound like hyperbole, can you show me some evidence that people actually tried to execute the vice president.
Yes, that is true. Why do you people keep saying that? You're 100% legally correct. There's something else that people have and they're called morals and ethics. I, and many others, share that it is moral and ethical for someone to be able to say their repugnant mouth breathing garage however they choose. Then I get to decide if I want to interact with that person. Not some supposedly open to the PUBLIC service.
> I personally think they should be allowed to have their space anyway, if they can refrain from inciting violence.
If.
The whole reason why they got banned in the first place was because of the incitement.
There have been all sorts of crazy things said since the US election (and before), and there weren't any bans, just "possible misleading statement" tags.
Parler is being held to an odd standard here. They need to remove content inciting violence like that on Capitol Tuesday, but the BLM related protests/riots killed more people and damaged more property and whatsapp, facebook, twitter etc kept the inciting comments. :/
There are some important distinctions between Black Lives Matter and Trump’s camp.
BLM’s mission is to strengthen democracy and justice with the unfortunate side effect of the fringe propagating violence. The core and leadership would rather the violence and property damage wasn’t taking place.
Trump is an authoritarian who is trying to subvert democracy, and his supporters consider violence to not only be acceptable but to be a necessary virtue.
If it were possible to remove disinformation, violence, and property destruction from each movement, BLM would still have an important message, while on the MAGA side I’m not sure what values would remain. What’s the coherent message beyond spite toward the left?
I agree and like Black Lives Matter because they have a valid point to make, and while it's unfortunate that there are fringe elements causing property damage and there have been instances of violence, that's not central to their mission and most people I know who support Black Lives Matter are against violence and property damage.
I dislike Trump because he's corrupt, incompetent, racist, sexist, a sociopath, and an authoritarian. I feel like it's a valid position to be against those things. However, any politician on any end of the political spectrum can be all those things, so setting those aside, let's look at his actual policies: the only one I can think of is isolationism.
I mean I'm mostly just repeating myself. Feel free to make a counterargument.
The BLM leaders were saying "we are marching/gathering to protest police brutality". However things got out of hand. Violence was not their intent. See also the false flag operations against BLM:
The folks on Parler are saying "we need to hang the traitor Pence". And this has been going on for months:
> “Will you and several hundred more go with me to DC and fight our way into the Congress and arrest every Democrat who has participated in the coup?” Holland posted on Friday. “We may have to shoot and kill many of the Communist BLM and ANTIFA Democrat foot soldiers to accomplish this!!!”
> One of Lang Holland’s posts reflected Donald Trump’s baseless allegations that the presidential election he lost to Joe Biden was stolen, and said: “Death to all Marxist Democrats.”
> Holland, who led the police department in Marshall, Arkansas, also wrote “take no prisoners” and “leave no survivors”.
> In a popular thread referencing a Trump tweet promoting the debunked conspiracy theory of election fraud, one user asked, "what if Congress ignores the evidence?"
> "Storm the Capitol," was a popular reply.
> Five days later, on January 6, as pro-Trump militia proceeded to do exactly that, the mood on thedonald.win switched to jubilation and outright defiance of police, with thousands joining "watching party" message threads.
> "This is what Trump told us to do!" a top post in one of these threads read.
The Proud Boys might be an interesting case study. Creator Gavin McInnes along with the group was de-platformed a couple years ago. I remember them at the time seeming like a dangerous group of hipsters, nerds and meatheads.
Today they appear to be a bunch of navy seal white power dudes with guns. Scary. That culture kept growing outside of the spotlight in a creepy dark corner.
Back around the debates when the Proud Boys were in the news, I watched a Vice segment about them.
Apparently their current leader is of Cuban descent as was most of the people in the segment. Out of the eight members in the video, six of them previously voted for Obama.
I don't know too much about them except from what I saw on Vice. Is it really a group of white supremacists?
They are definitely becoming more and more radicalized, but I don't know where you get this white power stuff. Their leader is a minority and many of their members are black, and other minorities.
However, I think deplatforming them has made them more radical. I think that we are going to see this more and more, by isolating people and forcing them to go into places where there are no public postings, nobody is going to see how radical they get. You are going to lose some people but the really dangerous people will wind up reinforced in their belief that they are being persecuted, and if they think they have nowhere to go and nothing to hope for, I think we are going to start seeing some real ugly violence.
Right, dangerous hipster nerds, but they were on the fringes of the mainstream. If I remember correctly, Joe Rogan had Gavin McInnes on his show around that time. He was not by any means "center-right", but at least "acceptable" in the way that Ben Shapiro is today.
There's an adage that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that's obviously been missing in the long winter of the past few years.
There are good reasons to believe that adage is apocryphal. How do you square that with e.g. the mere exposure theory, in which the very act of seeing something makes you more accepting of it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect
I don't think these two concepts are in opposition. Of course, exposure to a toxic ideological viewpoint is poisonous for the recipient, and may in fact entice them to become more toxic themselves (if they are swayed by said reasoning). But a crucial part of the societal contract is to tolerate such toxic viewpoints so as to have the opportunity to redeem those who hold them. In other words, by eating a little bit of the poison ourselves, we are granted the opportunity to save that person from their own poison, by showing compassion and empathy towards them.
People who have hate in their hearts are not entirely bad people. Everyone was once a child, everyone has experienced the mystery of simply existing, almost everyone has experienced love (whether from their parents or someone else), most people enjoy art and music. Evoking our shared humanity and showing compassion for others allows us to break down their toxic ideologies and even reform them to be beacons of compassion themselves.
Perhaps the best and most compelling anecdote to promulgate this way of thinking is Daryl Davis, who, through his talents and love of music, has reformed many of the most hateful people in our country — members of the KKK. I would recommend this TED talk by him, titled "Why I, as a black man, attend KKK rallies": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORp3q1Oaezw. It really encapsulates the power of this viewpoint.
The crucial element here is ensuring that we have channels of communication that allow for this sort of compassionate understanding... I fear that the compression of thought foisted upon us by social media platforms and online communication tools obscures the basic reality of our shared suffering, joy, intrigue, and humanity. These important facets of communication can be lost to the aether of technology, and our true intentions are thereby belied by the incorrigibly weak substrate of written language.
As a note, I think we have discussed the topic of free speech in another thread before. It's good to "see" you again :)
I meant something else. When groups are not in their own respective bubbles, indeed, non-extremists might be exposed to extremists' propaganda and potentially can adopt such ideas, and as a result, increase the amount of overall extremism.
On the other hand, similarly, an extremist exposed to non-extremists' propaganda potentially may be affected by it as well, decreasing the amount of overall extremism.
Or perhaps the total amount of extremism stays the same and instead it is spread out over large number of people, removing "spikes".
I do not know if it is true. But just an idea to consider - the discussed process of de-platforming removes _two-way_ communication method.
Please stop using HN for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do this. I'm not going to ban you right now because you've been around for many years and have used HN in the intended way in the past. But please stick to the spirit of the site—intellectual curiosity—in the future. We're all responsible for protecting the commons here, no matter how others are behaving.
You know, dang, I am an old man. Born in Soviet Union, seen the scars of that brutal regime. Came here without English and money. Went to work. Went to college, then medical school in Chicago, residency in Harvard, and fellowship in NY. Started one of the first medical blogs, in 2004, that still going on. Lots of work in the hospital, big cases.
I would consider my bio full of intellectual pursuits.
Sometimes we make mistakes. Sometimes you make mistakes. Sometimes society makes mistakes, and these mistakes can live for hundreds of years...
Maybe I made a mistake. But maybe what you consider a failure of intellectual pursuit, is your own biases.
But point taken. I’ll limit comments.
PS Here’s an interesting idea for you (and that’s not to offend you, really): try to find and ban someone on a comment that lacks intellectual curiosity and scores political points, and has many upvotes. Surely there’s a comment like that today, somewhere?
That's a great story! There's a lot of rich experience for some great HN posts in that, too.
I didn't mean to imply that you were lacking in intellectual pursuits or depth or anything like that, and I'm sorry if it came across that way. It's just stock moderation language. All I have to go on are the things an account has posted, especially the recent things an account has posted.
Usually, when people are battling their political or ideological enemies in internet comments, they leave out all of the background and motivations and experiences that have led them to feel the way that they do. That's a shame, because if we included such things it would make it easier for us to relate to each other. It also means that our comments—especially flamewar comments—create a one-dimensional picture of us in the reader's mind. That of course is not an accurate picture of at all, but there's very little information transfer going on in these arguments.
I'm not sure I understood your last suggestion there but we don't consider upvotes when banning accounts. We also don't ban established accounts for just one thing they posted—we'd warn them instead. Bans are for when an account has built up a pattern of breaking the site guidelines. There are some exceptions to that, but they're probably not relevant here.
Thanks for writing such a humane response. I appreciate it.
Snide comments tend to get such a reception, regardless of which side they are promoting. I am sure "Many colleges would find it difficult to arrange for Ben Shapiro to speak on their campuses" would be received much better than what you wrote.
In my book, there's something fundamentally wrong when one person tells another how to speak. It's dictatorial, anti human rights, even.
And just because something is well received doesn't mean that it is right, or moral, or anything, really. Countless speeches were well received before some of the most atrocious events in human history.
The right threw a pre planned riot because they didn't like the outcome of an election. The left threw riots over unarmed black men being killed with impunity for generations. One of those groups has a moral right to riot.
Do people also have a moral right to not have their business burned to the ground, even when they had nothing to do with George Floyd's death? Asking for a friend.
I disagree heavily. The focus of this conversation seems misdirected, whether intentionally or not. It’s not about the fragility of morality as a system at all, which it of course is because it’s based on consensus. It’s about fundamental principles and upholding them, and how you prioritize those principles.
You seem to believe in upholding right to free speech, which, surely is crucial to the country. However, this other group you speak of is protesting their rights to life and liberty, which they are being actively deprived of by an oppressive regime. Isn’t it slightly unfair? What rights is the right being deprived of? Entitlement to a certain election result or a certain office? That opposes the very definition of this democracy. They have means for their voices to be heard and their issues to be heard, still, by the right’s representatives in Congress. Black people didn’t/don’t because law enforcement was/is being racist and oppressive in unfairly killing them.
To be clear, I don't think rioting is ever morally justified. Peaceful protesting is a different matter.
The issue people had with the protests this summer wasn't that they were out protesting. It was the fact that literally everything else about daily life had been upended and we were all supposed to be locked down away from friends and family, unless of course you wanted to go protest, in which case you had full government, medical, and corporate blessing to go do whatever you wanted. Then when you were at the protest, you could burn down buildings and cause untold damage to property and the media would look straight-faced into the camera and call it "mostly peaceful".
Great. To that same standard the protests last week were "mostly peaceful". Hardly any of the people who actually showed up in DC were part of the storming of the capital.
My point about morality is that it is a poor justification for why an action is justified in one case and not in another. It basically ends up with "it's right when I do it, and wrong when you do it."
I don't necessarily agree with the conclusions the protesters this summer came to, but I can follow their line of reasoning and see why it is something they felt strongly about. In the same manner, you might not agree that there is a evidence that vote counts were manipulated in the November election, but if you start from that assumption, I think you would agree that someone might want to protest that.
I've heard it phrased that the social contract is basically, "Your rights are my responsibility." I think that's something worth striving for no matter your political position. I hope we can find the will to de-escalate things on both sides to the point that we can actually work towards that goal.
"To me it seems obvious the feedback works in the opposite direction. Deplatforming disrupts the feedback bubbles that radicalize these people."
That does not seem obvious to me AT ALL. Most radical movements in history had no access to the Internet and relied on personal contact to radicalize, e.g. preachers in mosques. This also creates deeper bonds among the members.
If the result of deplatforming from Twitter is that the organization shifts to "meat world", you probably have a more dangerous opponent on your hands.
> To me it seems obvious the feedback works in the opposite direction. Deplatforming disrupts the feedback bubbles that radicalize these people.
I'm not too sure about that. For people who are already radicalized and believe that there's a conspiracy of some kind working against them, wouldn't that just "prove" that there is such a conspiracy?
I agree that deplatforming will prevent future people from being radicalized, but what about the people who already are? The whole pizzagate incident shows that there are definitely people who believe all kinds of conspiracy theories, and are convinced enough to act on them.
> To me it seems obvious the feedback works in the opposite direction. Deplatforming disrupts the feedback bubbles that radicalize these people.
I think it will push them off to even more obscure platforms, and the ones that do make it there will be much more extreme and dangerous. They'll be harder to monitor as well.
At some point, a show of force might be necessary.
Really do you want the government to do something similar to the "night of the long knives" like what happened in Germany? Think about what type of message that is sending and what type of society you want to live in.
I find it very hard to believe that people get the impression that Trump was the fascist when you are over here advocating for a fascist method of silencing opposition groups.
In 2011-2014 era, IS*S was huge on Twitter. Not many people seem to remember this happened. They were posting propaganda videos and actively recruiting people on the public timeline. Jack was letting that go on for years. A lot of the terror attacks in that era were tied back to people getting recruited online.
Now it's basically dead. Was it the deplatforming? Did the world just move on? Nobody knows.
ISIS had clear ideological roots in the region, recruitment of socially disgraced military leaders, and a complete power vacuum to fill as they ravished a vulnerable, impoverish and diffuse population. What an absurd, ahistorical example.
Yes, it’s absurd to argue that kicking some people
off a social media website is equivalent to: an existing domestic terror group that has committed organized violence at home and abroad (Al Qaida) is going to produce an even more radical offshoot organization (ISIS) after the government is destroyed by a foreign adversary (USA) leaving an entire geographic region without any projection of force (the Levant).
Many of those “domestic terrorists” have fought against “foreign” terrorists for the government of the United States, having as leaders of their chain of command people who now vilify them (both Bush Jr and Obama). This is Rambo I all over again, only that it doesn’t take place out somewhere in the obscure woods but in the open political field.
To me it seems obvious the feedback works in the opposite direction. Deplatforming disrupts the feedback bubbles that radicalize these people.
I personally think they should be allowed to have their space anyway, if they can refrain from inciting violence.
But I would certainly absolutely refuse to do business with them, and have no problem with others making the same decision. People have the right to their repugnant ideas. They don’t have the right to force others to help promote them.