With Small Muslim Community, Italy Tries to Stop Extremism Before It Starts
wsj.com
wsj.com
For one week, starting Monday, all political stories and threads will be off topic. We'll kill them when we see them and ask users to flag them. Then we'll see what happens.
That's a misunderstanding of what the policy has been.
Wouldn't it be much better to simply introduce a flagging system for "toxic" discussions (since clearly they can and do start from other, more mundane subjects, e.g vim/emacs) Then whoever doesn't like them can simply filter them out?
I personally try to be as non-toxic as possible in my remarks, since I feel like that prompts way more useful discussion, but I don't mind/don't care if discussions become toxic (since the original news might still be relevant/interesting, and it's really hard for the comments to be 100% toxic), and I believe at least some people are like me in that regard. I also understand other people might think different too, so a filter could be a nice compromise?
Yes, some stories of core interest to this community have political aspects, but those aren't the kind we're going to kill. The concern here is pure politics: the things that get people flaming about party, ideology, nation, race, and religion. A news story about patents or encryption isn't going to have a problem on HN (though a rant may).
You're right that we can't precisely define politics. But this is nothing new. The site guidelines talk about politics without defining them, and we get by. Moderation has a few core principles and the rest is case-by-case judgment calls.
Re flagging systems: HN has got one, but it has proven insufficient to solve the problem of people hurling rocks and feces at each other when the political drugs take hold.
Re filtering out: it's in HN's DNA that everyone sees the same site. Also, if we quarantine political flamewars in their own section, we still have to maintain that section. Few people who appreciate what HN is really for—stories that gratify intellectual curiosity—would go there, making the degeneration worse. The users who primarily want that kind of a site are not the ones we feel most strongly about serving, and conversely, those users really want a different kind of site than HN. That's fair, but we need to clarify what HN is and isn't. We're trying to avoid scorched earth here.
I appreciate that you don't mind the toxicity so much. That makes sense and part of me feels the same way. But the effects we're concerned with are systemic ones on the community as a whole, and there it's a different matter. The culture has a low and sensitive tolerance for toxicity, not a high one. As the culture degrades, the best people slowly leave, and then not so slowly. Meanwhile their replacements show up with wheelbarrows of rocks and feces. That is how open communities on the internet die, and not letting it happen is our top responsibility.
Don't forget that we're talking about an experiment for one week, just to see what happens. If you have any observations about what happens, please share them with us. We don't have a fixed opinion about this.
They don't; Muslims are involved in most of the de-radicalisation and de-extremism work in Europe.
The best we can do is, I think, strongly incentivizing all the reformers. The vast majority of them today are in a sleazy situation. You complain to your compatriots - they'll lash out on you. You complain to the West - they'll ignore you. You complain to the Western right-wing[1] - they'll listen but use it to rationalize more hate.
[0] and if they are at heart, then that's definitely not the message that's being broadcasted to the world [1] for the record obviously it's a hyperbole
Are you accepting the premise that "the Muslim world" turns its back on extremism? Why? How familiar are you with the Muslim world? Who are the people most impacted by radical Islamic terrorism? Here's a hint: it's not non-Muslims! Islam accounts for a quarter of the world's population, and there are tens of thousands of Islamic scholars expressing a continuous spectrum of opinions about the role of Islam in politics, all of which then have to pass through the same lens of geopolitics --- that Egypt has national interests that align imperfectly with those of Turkey, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, &c --- that every other school of thought must. How could you possibly accept such a simplistic premise as "the Muslim world ignores extremism"?
Do you find compelling the idea that Turkey should accommodate ISIS refugees without international subsidy simply because those refugees tend to be Muslim? Ignore for a second that Syrian refugees are not in fact all Muslims and stipulate instead that they are: what does a single shared cultural characteristic really tell us about Turkey's obligations to citizens of other countries? Put it this way: care to guess what the dominant religion of Latin America is? Is it therefore the case that the United States is obligated to accommodate every Latino immigrant?
I'm having a hard time locating a single coherent point in the inflammatory comment you just "certainly agreed to". I don't mean "point I agree with"; I mean "point that exhibits any internal consistency".
Can you help me understand what you found persuasive about it?
I run a personal social media account that's vaguely about Israel with a significant following of Middle Easterners and Pakistanis. I often get messaged by people wanting to do a little bit of debating (amongst the sea of hate mail of course). Which outside of a deep interest is where my personal experience comes from. Part of my family is nominally Muslim too so I'm always eager to look for any signs of Islamic liberalism.
Of course now that you have written it out this way I can understand your reading of that comment too. And, yes, the comment about Turkey I have overlooked.
As to extremism, the real problem is the use of Saudi oil money to pay for extremist imams. Many Muslim refugees have shown up in Europe and reported to the authorities that they find their new "local" imam frighteningly extremist, because that "local" imam was Saudi-funded while their original upbringing in Syria or Iraq wasn't Wahhabi.