Hacker News Reader

Comment by freeflight | Hacker News Reader

This recent trend is really worrisome. YouTube also shut down quite a lot of channels in connection with the Syrian civil war. Reddit too closed down a couple of subreddits, and admins banned users who shared ISIS related content on the /r/syriancivilwar/ subreddit.

What an utterly useless and counterproductive exercise in de facto censorship. The only thing this does is drive people deeper into the underground, even closer to actual extremists.

Extremist ideas need to be fought with rational discourse, drag them out into the open and let the sunshine disinfect them. Trying to hide them out of sight, like they don't exist, only makes them fester all the more in secret and partly legitimizes these extremists in their view of being unjustly persecuted.

View on HN

Great then. Do you have any ideas then how to stop the radicalisation of young muslims? I'm less inclined to believe that rational discussions with ISIS warriors and their supporters will lead that far.

I live in what used to be one of the most secular countries in the world, and for various reasons our government have encouraged immigration from the middle east for 20 years, providing free education, free healthcare, generous social welfare, and an actively non-racist society. Unfortunately, this didn't seem to automatically integrate many in our society, mainly because of unemployment caused by the originally low "human capital", and partly due to there are many cultural issues that wasn't even socially acceptable to discuss at all until recently.

While many have done great, there are many more that haven't and the 2nd or 3rd generation are still doing pretty bad compared to the natives, which has created street gangs and criminality in many areas, even in small towns.

Among many bad things, one of the results is that we now have many ISIS warriors here, and no plan on how to handle them. It doesn't even seem to be illegal to be an ISIS warrior here.

Many more are susceptible to the propaganda, and in my book, any means stop the propaganda is more than welcome. I really don't understand how large US companies can carry messages from violent extremist like it's no big deal.

> Great then. Do you have any ideas then how to stop the radicalisation of young muslims?

The stuff GP is talking about is generally not being done to "stop the radicalisation of young muslims" but more likely as CYA/good PR. Maybe for some it's genuinely in good spirit but let's be honest here, it's probably not going to make a big difference.

Ideas to stop radicalization? Well, slowing down marginalization first would be a good move and that's going nowhere good in the US right now. Maybe electing representatives and leaders that don't feed on a self-fueled machine of fear would help. To do that you need an electorate with more critical thinking, which means better education. (And here you see you got a catch-22 since you need leaders that fight for better education in the first place...)

Concretely, what "you" as in any average joe can do is not much, but if you want to do something: help people understand their votes, educate them on politics as well as foreign culture, make them travel more.

What a big company like Google/Youtube could do if they cared to fight for it? Probably a hell of a lot more, but they're not in that business honestly.

I wish we could stop the marginalization, but just free education including university, healthcare, etc, isn't enough apparently.

It's a similar problem as other marginalized groups - there must be some dynamics in play that keeps them marginalized.

Maybe it's as simple as their own pride combined with more or less subtle classism (more than racism) from the middle classes that alienates them.

I don't think this is fixable without rather far going measures, like tearing down bad suburbs and rebuild as low scale areas that encourages a high degree of social control that also the middle class would like to live in, forcibly designate schools to assure an even mix of social background, programs for encouraging studies, repress religious influences, some new ideas to punish young criminals without putting them in crime-scools like now, and probably really harsh punisment for repeat offenders.

Nothing of this is likely to happen except harsh punishment that won't do much on its own.

> It's a similar problem as other marginalized groups - there must be some dynamics in play that keeps them marginalized.

It's called having a scapegoat, it's especially obvious in Europe. 30 years ago the scapegoats in Western Europe used to be Eastern Europeans. Refugees from the Yugoslav wars had not been welcomed at all, EU expansion to the East (Poland) resulted in a lot of racist sentiments flaming up along the lines of "These Poles are gonna steal all our stuff and are criminal".

Now, 30 years later, not much has changed. Those that used to be marginalized have now found a new target they can marginalize themselves: Muslim refugees.

Suddenly we have a "European Identity" and that identity even includes Eastern Europeans who seem to have learned very little from their own marginalization and now proceed to do exactly the same things to another group.

It looks like humans always need somebody to put the blame on, stuff just can't go wrong, there always has to be some "evil mind" behind all the ugly stuff that happens.

Hiding any thing from the tops and news and making it underground makes it unpopular and orders of magnitude less spread. Imagine what would happen to spinner if youtube redirected it to something different.

Real actions are already underground, extremism only uses public places to recruit masses to get better selection and financial support. Which is good to cut off.

I bet you're living in first-world country saying that you we should just go and rationally talk to extremists.

> Real actions are already underground, extremism only uses public places to recruit masses to get better selection and financial support.

And it's exactly these public places where their ideas need to be opposed. If you drive them, and their ideas, deeper into the underground there will be no one there to oppose any of their ideas, it will be yet another echo-chamber driven by a victim complex.

> I bet you're living in first-world country saying that you we should just go and rationally talk to extremists.

What else you want to do with them through the Internet? Would you rather censor them and their ideas away like they don't exist, exactly like they try to censor opposing views away in their territories of influence?

How does that make us any better than them? It doesn't, it's hypocrisy at it's finest and exactly the kind of hypocrisy which also drives recruitment.

It's a giant crying shame on our "western culture" which supposedly values "freedom" so much.

> If you drive them, and their ideas, deeper into the underground there will be no one there to oppose any of their ideas, it will be yet another echo-chamber driven by a victim complex.

Exactly. This is the same argument I pose with my neoliberal friend about Ann Coulter, Alex Jones, David Duke, etc.

"Think of the children!", I cry. If society refuses to acknowledge ideas that they find offensive the ideas don't go away, ignorance just goes unanswered.

Following this line of thinking, maybe it would be more useful for YouTube to recommend more moderate sermons/lectures to people who are looking for extremist videos.

Google could go a step further and insert ads for mental health when people view content like this. The public could also take this upon itself, especially in countries like the UK and Canada, purchasing ads for national mental health services targeting these users.

Yes, you cut human resources and organization can't grow or even retain its size.

>What else you want to do with them through the Internet? Would you rather censor them and their ideas away like they don't exist, exactly like they try to censor opposing views away in their territories of influence?

Isolate and make them unsure. Growth and spread is a thing that feeds their influence. Look, they produce nothing, they invent nothing. The only thing they do is growth. It is obviously just a cancer of idea. The word "extremism" already has a hint in it.

>How does that make us any better than them?

How is mushroom killing a bacteria better than bacteria? I don't know. It's just a way mushrooms are, maybe. Hypocritical bastards!

If seriously, I don't know why you're asking who's better/more right, because there is no absolute right. It is them or you, as it always was. Negotiation can't be done with your natural enemy.

I'm more from semi-eastern culture, if that matters.

You didnt cite examples where this is working.

Sending them from pro to anti propaganda, assuming propaganda works, does work.

You didn't cite examples either, and I'm skeptical of the premise. If reddit started redirecting /r/the_donald links to anti-Trump propaganda, or Youtube started redirecting his own videos to anti-Trump propaganda, no matter how good that propaganda is, I don't believe you that you could change their mind. And those people aren't even radicalised.

I don't have any sources either, but I'm sure that there will be different reactions to such redirects, depending on the individual.

The hardened core will probably feel justified in their beliefs by the attempt to combat them and radicalize even quicker.

But more casual group members might actually change their mind if they are confronted with outside opinions, especially if they hadn't considered them before.

So whether this kind of propaganda is effective or not essentially depends on the makeup of the targeted group. I guess you could try measuring the effect by tracking engagement of the redirected. If they are truly radicalized, they are likely to leave; but if they are more open-minded, they might stay a little longer.

> But more casual group members might actually change their mind if they are confronted with outside opinions, especially if they hadn't considered them before.

Not if they are literally being tricked into being lectured, that's not how you convince any sane person of your credibility, it's, in fact, a giant disservice to your credibility.

You don't convince people through forced lectures, you convince people by engaging with them on an even level discourse to reach a common understanding of the issue at hand.

Also consider the reverse possibility of your scenario: What happens when somebody from the "good side" wants to see what opinions on the "bad side" actually look like? Such a thing might become impossible because every search will only lead to the supposedly "good opinions".

> You don't convince people through forced lectures, you convince people by engaging with them on an even level discourse to reach a common understanding of the issue at hand.

Is that how Trump became presidents? Is he convincing by doing even level discourse? Bullshit. We are still all humans after all and so believe what we want to believe no matter the truth.

If you really want to go there, we can do that, sure. Imho one of the reasons why Trump won is because nobody took him seriously, democrats underestimated him that's why they focused on him as the potential competition, they figured he would be an easy target to tear down.

Didn't exactly play out that way did it? That's why understanding is important, otherwise reality will just come crashing down on you and you won't even understand why it happened. Just like many democrats are now in denial and increasingly behaving equally childish as Trump, blaming everything and everybody for Trumps win except for themselves and their lackluster candidate.

It's gotten to a point where even when Trump does something sensible, like cutting CIA funding for "moderate rebels" in Syria, he's still vilified as having done it "for Russia" or whatever other reason one could come up with for the sole sake of not saying a single positive thing about the current US administration, which is just childish.

My point i wrote already was that he did not win with even-level discourse.

Contrary to what you asserted is it not a requirement to convince somebody to have an even-level discourse with him.

So it is fair to assume our target group behaves similarly cause we are all human. If you look around you you may find lots more examples of this.

Heartily agree.

YouTube is trying to be Big Brother for us. What they don't realize is they're infantilizing all of their users by doing this.

> Reddit too closed down a couple of subreddits

It is disappointing what reddit has become in the past few years. From a genuine open platform to where the admins and the mods are now open and unabashed propagandists.

It is also scary how the traditional media has so easily forced social media to conform to their standards. The promise of social media was that it was the anti-traditional media. Unfiltered, raw, source and open discussion. Now reddit has adopted the exact same standards of traditional media and the rest of social media are following along.

> Extremist ideas need to be fought with rational discourse, drag them out into the open and let the sunshine disinfect them.

I agree. But it isn't just extremism. Look at how the admins are so openly anti-trump. They shut down subs that they disagree with ( alt-right ) and punished trump subs for "spamming". And yet, they openly support the dozens of anti-trump subs.

I'm a liberal who supports free speech and I loved reddit/social media that it allowed open raw discourse ( even if it offended me ). But what is happening to reddit and the rest of social media is really disappointing and quite frankly scary.

To be fair, is the problem with reddit not mostly subreddit moderators? Obviously reddit admins are guilty as well with modifying the algorithm to hide certain types of speech, but it seems to me the biggest problem is moderators.

For the time being, I think a widespread movement to create a well-known convention of /r/{subreddit}_uncensored would help things immensely.

In the case of the scw subreddit it was actually the reddit admins forcing the issue while the subreddit mods heavily opposed it.

So even if you created uncensored subreddits, you would most likely have the admins swoop in just to delete them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com