How Hate Groups Forced Online Platforms to Reveal Their True Nature | Hacker News Reader

How Hate Groups Forced Online Platforms to Reveal Their True Nature

nytimes.com

73 pointsjayess103 comments

I know everyone is going to say "but Nazis", but I think this incident should really drive home just how quickly dissenting opinion can effectively be purged from the Internet and just how much power tech companies truly wield over us. Yeah yeah I know, it's great because they stood up to Nazis but next time it won't just be them. It's very easy to label just about anything as "hate speech".

And yeah yeah, "private companies can't censor, only the government can", but has anyone stopped to consider that Google et al have very obvious political affiliations and can exert their control over the Internet in order to further their agendas? If you're not concerned with the implications of this you're not paying attention.

It's been part sad and part fun to watch. Usually they use pedophiles to convince us to give up our freedoms but nazis are working just as well this time around.

"...but has anyone stopped to consider that Google et al have very obvious political affiliations and can exert their control over the Internet in order to further their agendas?..."

Have you, yourself, stopped to consider the possibility that large corporations have had very obvious political affiliations, and have been exerting their control to further their agendas since long before Google existed?

Have you considered that Google, Facebook, etc. can control public discourse and what information people can see in ways never before thought possible?

Have you considered that advisers for Nixon's first Presidential campaign made the same complaint about network television?

My only point here is that many, many companies have been exerting their control for many, many years to further the varied agendas of their principal shareholders.

This really is nothing new.

Not new. But better. More effective. Which is worse.

more effective than the kronen-zeitung?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronen_Zeitung

> have been exerting their control to further their agendas since long before Google existed?

It's an old idea that corporations control discourse to further their political agendas, but previously those agendas were hard to discern.

The new information that has become clear in the last few months, at least to me, is that their political agendas tend to be that of the Democratic party.

> I know everyone is going to say "but Nazis", but I think this incident should really drive home just how quickly dissenting opinion can effectively be purged from the Internet

Nazi/White Supremacist opinion is still all over the internet, so it doesn't seem to “effectively be purged”.

You can't expect any platform to provide free speech unless it's designed to make censorship impossible. Such as Freenet, or Tor onion services.

Edit: Here's the juicy quote:

> The recent rise of all-encompassing internet platforms promised something unprecedented and invigorating: venues that unite all manner of actors — politicians, media, lobbyists, citizens, experts, corporations — under one roof. These companies promised something that no previous vision of the public sphere could offer: real, billion-strong mass participation; a means for affinity groups to find one another and mobilize, gain visibility and influence. This felt and functioned like freedom, but it was always a commercial simulation.

Didn't the Tor guys say they were going to do something about hate speech?

If they can, Tor is total bullshit. So no, I seriously doubt that they can. And that's, in my opinion, a very good thing.

Edit: OK, so Tor exits could filter on URLs, and even MitM TLS to filter on keywords. But that has always been forbidden, and grounds for the bad exit flag. Exits are allowed, and indeed encouraged, to block ports that are commonly abused. And unfortunately, more and more that includes port 22 :(

> ...just how quickly dissenting opinion can effectively be purged from the Internet...

But not quick enough to keep them from electing a US president who they embrace as their own.

Really, there was nothing quick about it. It's more like watching the straw that finally broke the camel's back.

>how quickly dissenting opinion can effectively be purged from the Internet

I'm not sure it can be purged from the internet at all. It can be purged from some US companies but will pop up elsewhere.

To illustrate - ISIS site http://jihadology.net/

Buy illegal drugs online https://www.reddit.com/r/Dream_Market/comments/6v5ghq/whos_b...

etc. The internet is very hard to censor.

It can be done. Child porn (I'm in no way endorsing the viewing of it obviously) is extinct from the internet as we all know it. And when talking about smaller instances like the Daily Stormer it becomes clear that internet censorship is very real and very possible.

Freenet is part of the Internet, and it's full of child porn. Indeed, it's rather a honeypot for authorities to exploit. So much for plausible deniability.

Yeah, I was thinking with drugs, ISIS and child porn while the internet is almost impossible to censor, it's also not that great at protecting privacy with the result that the bad guys often get arrested or killed eventually.

Indeed. And that's Freenet's problem. It does a great job of obscuring locally stored content. The majority of data on your box may be child porn, but nobody can tell. However, Freenet relies on randomized request and data forwarding for deniability. That seemed reasonable, a decade ago.

But investigators have figured out how to determine that a particular node has handled pieces of a particular file. Not that the user loaded or requested the file. Just that their node handled part of it. And of course, IP addresses aren't obscured.

So investigators run nodes, and serve child porn. And then they accumulate IPs of peers that handle pieces of said child porn. And get subpoenas for those in their jurisdictions, and raid users. And have experts that bullshit juries about how Freenet works.

Understandably, most defendants settle. Except, for example, that guy who's rotting in a Philadelphia jail.

Plus the definition of "hate speech" is broad enough to include people who hold Biblical views on social issues which is not an insignificant portion of the American population.

> Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. - Article 19, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948

A lot of people here have been trying to defend free speech as a human right, and a right that all people and corporations have a responsibility to preserve. No matter how many appeals to authority, appeals to history or long-winded explanations used all these arguments have fallen flat on people who either don't agree with free speech, or believe it's only the problem of a small number of institutions.

I believe there's enough people who support speech as a human right that these companies will end up on the wrong side of history and be superseded by more content-neutral hosts. It would be nice if this had more support, but there's enough people demanding companies, who are denying service to groups with the intention that they are unable to find hosting elsewhere, that I think the near future of speech is safe, and will come back stronger.

EDIT: Reworded second paragraph

I am having a hard time deciphering what your position is.

Appears to be: pro free-speech and against the moves of censorship by companies like Facebook and Cloudflare.

Key point of the article:

> Questions about how platforms like Twitter and Reddit deal with disruptive users and offensive content tend to be met with defensive language invoking free speech.

> In the process of building private communities, these companies had put on the costumes of liberal democracies. They borrowed the language of rights to legitimize arbitrary rules, creating what the technology lawyer Kendra Albert calls ‘‘legal talismans.’’

> What better way to avoid liability and responsibility for how customers use your product? It was also good marketing. It’s easier to entrust increasingly large portions of your private and public life to an advertising and data-mining firm if you’re led to believe it’s something more.

I've noticed this most distinctly with Reddit. Why haven't all the hate subreddits been banned? /r/physical_removal was exhorting for the deaths of thousands months prior to Charlottesville. The admins proclaim free speech, but under this thin excuse, lies their business model.

Toxic users are extremely active. They have to be. Spewing vitriol, spreading hate, posting canards necessitate constant engagement.

Looking at the tables of monthly metrics, who is more valuable? That one user with 10,000 internet points flaming other users every hour of the day, or the occasional commenter who writes longwinded but intellectually honest posts?

I can tell you which one is far more numerous, and I can tell you which one Reddit raised millions on.

Ultimately, I would argue that this pretense is is designed to morally justify the power these platforms wield over their users. To do any less, especially for an overly-dominant player, sets the stage for regulatory action, backed by popular demand.

edit: removed slight political slant.

>Why hasn't /r/the_donald been banned?

He did win the election. You can ban extremists but I'm not sure banning fairly mainstream stuff is the way to go.

Correct, I have shifted my intro to focus on extremists.

physical_removal was banned.

> The platforms’ sudden action in response to an outpouring of public grief and rage resembles, at first glance, a moral awakening and suggests a mounting sense of responsibility to the body politic.

Resembles is the key word here. Many of the sites knew this stuff was going on and didn't mind at all. Unfortunately I think this is all reactionary and they're not going to keep these policies up. They only care they're getting bad press, not because they ACTUALLY care about the issue.

For example it's nice that Twitter removed a bunch of problematic accounts, but there are TONS more. Reddit still has plenty of very problem subreddits. I'm sure there are still problematic Facebook pages.

Will they clean those up as people stop watching? Or did they 'do somethinrg' so now they're good?

> Will they clean those up as people stop watching? Or did they 'do somethinrg' so now they're good?

If companies were honest in their EULA (or employment agreements), they would simply say that you will be removed if you cause the company to receive bad press.

Much like Apple and many of its app review terms I wish some of these companies would actually enforce their EULA.

This endless stream of articles, posts on HN, counter demonstrations, is giving to a tiny minority of a few thousand extremists a media coverage they could only dream of. Kind of like terrorism, the more you make a big deal out of a terrorist attack, the more you encourage the next one.

But newspapers and TV news aren't in the business of rational moderation.

The interest from HN isn't about the Nazis, but the changing attitudes in the tech industry towards censorship and ideological homogeneity. It would be just as interesting and alarming if it was the other way and communists were getting banned and fired.

It is, in fact, alarming that the communists aren't being silenced, since this is how we ended up with communist regimes the first time around.

My first exposure was American History X like two decades ago. They were a joke then and they are a joke now. One thing is for sure. They are LOVING all this free exposure for their cause.

Also when did we stop calling them neo nazis? I'm sure they love it when you call them Nazis.

The only reason this is even a thing is that white supremacist groups feel empowered by the election of Donald Trump. The argument of his election being the result of angry, racially motivated white men wanting a revolution to maintain white power has been stated so often that it's become banal - and that argument was made by Trump's own supporters.

I don't believe Trump is a nazi, although his comments on Charlottesville make it seem as if he sympathizes a lot more with them than with the people protesting them. Either way, the nazis seem to believe they've elected their god-emperor, so that automatically makes them not a joke.

A good part of it is that regular people don't want to deal with them. They don't want to hear from them, and they definitely don't want to be harassed by them.

Look at the "free speech" platforms, the *Chans. They may not have started out as bastions for neo-nazis and racists, but they became that because, as hate speech and such was not really policed on there, normal people stopped going altogether, leaving only those people behind.

> leaving only those people behind.

If you think only neo-nazis and racists hang out on the Chans, you definitely don't hang out there.

"The strategy [of people who consider themselves the protectors of decency] is weaponized stereotype campaigns. If a site tolerates witches, describe it as a witch site about witchcraft populated entirely by witches. It’s super easy." - http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centrali...

I'm not saying they're the only ones, but you cannot deny that those sites have a large proportion of that kind of content.

Ironically, it's much easier not to interact with that content on 4/8chan than it is on the wider Internet. If you're not there for political shitposting, don't visit /pol/.

"Normal people" have absolutely not stopped using imageboards. Perhaps they feel outnumbered on the boards specifically devoted to politics because every other venue for political discussion bans certain viewpoints, concentrating proponents of those controversial positions in the free speech platforms. That's only one portion of the imageboard use case. Most people are there to talk about anime, video games, technology, or whatever other esoteric hobbies drive them to seek Internet discussion; it's difficult to work in advocacy for fascism to those discussions without catching a ban for being off-topic.

I just cannot see the difference between banning those 'far right' groups while allowing 'far left' which are basically the same. The red flag, pictures of Mao, Stalin are as hateful to me as Hitler and Nazi imagery, especially given the 10x body count that revolutionary communism resulted in.

When did you last see a rally of people with posters of Stalin marching through the street? What's the left-wing equivalent of the hundreds of armed militias in the US?

> What's the left-wing equivalent of the hundreds of armed militias in the US?

Maybe Berkeley? The Portland riots? That was frightening behavior.

> Maybe Berkeley? The Portland riots? That was frightening behavior.

You mean Antifa? Those aren't leftists, those are anarchists. They believe that government is incapable of protecting against fascism, and are instead committing vigilante violence. This doesn't represent the "left", who would instead fight fascism through constitutional and judicial protections.

They only thing Antifa has in common with the left, is they both hate fascism. But they have completely different views on the role of government.

> You mean Antifa? Those aren't leftists, those are anarchists

Antifa isn't all anarchists, those that are are mostly specifically anarchocommunists, and anarchocommunists are emphatically leftists.

> anarchocommunists are emphatically leftists

Perhaps I should have been more specific, and clarify that the antifa values, goals, and belief systems (thank you for the term) anarchocommunisism is completely incompatible with the democratic-social capitalist hybrid model espoused by the contemporary American political left.

You could just as well say communists aren't on the left because communism is supposed to be a stateless society. If we're going to stupidly map all of politics onto one dimension we have to apply our reasoning equally stupid to both sides.

Antifa may not have the same explicit political program as the "mainstream" left but when street fighting happens, they defend the left, not the right.

> Antifa may not have the same explicit political program as the "mainstream" left but when street fighting happens, they defend the left, not the right.

You mean they attack the right. It's right there in the name, Anti-Fascists!

The enemy of my enemy isn't necessarily my friend. They aren't out there advocating transgender rights or arguing for paid family leave. They are there to clash with Nazis.

>What's the left-wing equivalent of the hundreds of armed militias in the US?

Only a fool tries to draw a distinction between hooded thugs that advocate violence against people they disagree with. Unfortunately there are people openly calling (and committing) violence from all across the political spectrum.

https://www.halseynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/antifa...

I actually remember seeing recent images of this very thing. If you image search for "2017 May Day protests stalin" you will see many different photographs, but to be fair it does look like the same single poster in all of the different photos.

https://redyouthuk.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/may-day-2012-...

Seattle, 2011. But there's probably been more. I don't hang out at these kinds of events.

> The red flag, pictures of Mao, Stalin

Where do you live that you see people marching in the street waving flags of communist dictatorships and ranting against immigrants and... whatever the leftist version of anti-Semitism is... maybe... anti-vaccination? (that's sorta equally irrational)

The left is very much pro-Palestine, anti-Israel. You must not be paying attention.

And if you want to see Communist flags, go to any Bay Area protest. There's always Communist hangers-on in attendance.

> The left is very much [...] anti-Israel.

That's funny, someone should tell that to המחנה הציוני

The man on the street might be pro-Palestine, but all the politicians Left and Right are pro-Israel

> whatever the leftist version of anti-Semitism is

I believe that's just anti-Semetism.

https://jewishjournal.org/2017/07/13/anti-semitism-and-anti-...

They don't rant against immigrants, they rant against the bourgeois. And it's not a theoretical boogeyman, my wife's parents suffered greatly in China by having their property taken from them, a small factory they had worked hard for decades to build. To this day she cannot talk about it publicly for fear of what would happen to her parents.

> They don't rant against immigrants, they rant against the bourgeois.

In America, the "bourgeois" is usually called "The American Dream". Most Americans idealize the middle class income and middle-class lifestyle and middle-class families and middle-class values. Ranting against that is usually a non-starter.

> my wife's parents suffered greatly in China by having their property taken from them

Many people were killed in China, of starvation, political punishment, etc. It should be an object lesson to the world, don't turn your government over to a corrupt dictatorship, even if they promise you communism.

> In America, the "bourgeois" is usually called "The American Dream". Most Americans idealize the middle class income and middle-class lifestyle and middle-class families and middle-class values. Ranting against that is usually a non-starter.

Ranting about the Jews is a non-starter, too, but neo-nazis manage. How much respect do you think the hard left has for the "American Dream"?

> It should be an object lesson to the world, don't turn your government over to a corrupt dictatorship, even if they promise you communism.

"Hey, let's turn over our country to a corrupt dictatorship", said nobody. The fact that communist flags are regularly flown at leftist protests should be a tremendous national scandal and embarrassment, with our media educating the populace on the horrors of communism. They should be no more tolerated than swastika flags.

> How much respect do you think the hard left has for the "American Dream"?

I don't know what the "hard left" is, but I know that teachers, labor unions, and local political leaders are all about jobs and wages.

> The fact that communist flags are regularly flown at leftist protests should be a tremendous national scandal and embarrassment, with our media educating the populace on the horrors of communism.

Look at Boston. Tens of thousands of people marched. There was one guy with some socialist literature, and a couple guys who were anti-GMO food, and then someone trying to sell you a copy of his music CD. But the overwhelming majority stood for free speech, representative democracy, and equal protection under the law.

But let's face it, you can walk into any Starbucks in Boston and find one crazy person there too.

Over a dozen were arrested. I saw a livestream from the perspective of the free speech rallygoers. There were dozens if not hundreds of masked individuals right across the police barricade. It's more than a single random kook. Boston isn't the best example either, because I agree that was largely just people marching against for upstanding American values.

>Many people were killed in China, of starvation, political punishment, etc. It should be an object lesson to the world, don't turn your government over to a corrupt dictatorship, even if they promise you communism.

When Mao's government began, it was very far from a corrupt dictatorship. I've actually never seen anyone say Mao was corrupt, personally, and it's arguable that the thousands of years of Chinese history prior to Mao had been corrupt dictatorships.

"Where do you live that you see people marching in the street waving flags of communist dictatorships"

Happens in Berkeley on a weekly basis, dude. Maybe more often that that -- I don't live there, but I've seen plenty of pictures of people marching with communist flags, etc.

Of course, t-shirts of Che Guevara are everywhere.

The leftist-version of antisemitism is antisemitism. In a study [1] done by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) this becomes clear. On page 29 a graph shows the answers to the following question:

"Thinking about the incident in which somebody attacked or threatened you in a way that frightened you because you are Jewish – who did this to you?"

The answers are, to some, surprising. There are 7 countries listed (Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Sweden and the UK). In only one those countries (Hungary) "right-wing" political views played a majority role. In two countries (Hungary and Germany) "right-wing" political views were a bigger threat than "left-wing" views. In three countries (France, Sweden and the UK) "left-wing" political views were a bigger threat than "right-wing" views. In one country (Italy) they are identical threats.

Less surprising is that the biggest threat overall is neither "left-wing" nor "right-wing": in five out of seven countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Sweden and the UK) "muslim-extremist" views were the biggest threat factor, usually by a very large margin. The lowest threat came from those with "christian-extremist" views, only in one country (Hungary) were these a bigger threat that those with "muslim-extremist" views.

[1] http://www.jpr.org.uk/documents/JPR_2017._Different_Antisemi...

>whatever the leftist version of anti-Semitism is...

It's anti-semitism. That's shared on the left and right, unfortunately. The left couches it in pro-palestinian and anti-israeli rhetoric, but it's mostly just plain old anti-semitism.

And as far as the marching in the street waving communist dictatorship flags, I've seen that about a half-dozen times, mostly in DC. It definitely happens.

I live in Russia, that stuff happens all the time.

>whatever the leftist version of anti-Semitism is...

Like the others said, it's just anti-Semitism. National Bolshevik Party is a good example.

>I just cannot see the difference between banning those 'far right' groups while allowing 'far left' which are basically the same.

Can I ask what websites/pages you are speaking of specifically? I think any group promoting genocide should be removed and haven't seen any liberal equivalents of the daily stormer.

I can give some.

Reddit r/socialism and r/Anarchism are very pro violence against anybody who is not far left.

They support violence against the people who are supporting our current "Capitalist regime".

As they like to say "the liberals get the bullet too".

The practical difference between the two is that revolutionary leftist groups in the U.S. have been essentially toothless since the '60s, (rowdy black bloc protesters and extremist SUV-dealership torching ecologists aside) whereas since the '90s there's been an uptick of organized right-wing extremism in the form of militia movements, white supremacist groups, etc. So one cluster is a group of internet tough guys, and the other cluster are internet tough guys who may or may not be actually affiliated with armed militants.

This is my perception of the current situation, definitely could be helped by a fact check of FBI or other law enforcement stats, though.

You surely do see the difference between "far right" groups and "far left" ones. There are important differences.

America has a history of white supremacy, and so Americans are rightly very concerned about its reemergence into the mainstream. The extreme left does not have white supremacist tendencies; the extreme right does.

If the extreme left were trolling across the Internet at the scale the extreme right does, and if this leftist trolling were leading distraught men into plowing cars into crowds of fellow citizens, we would rightly be more concerned about extreme-left Internet groups. But today, it is the extreme right that does this, not the extreme left. Far-right would-be terrorists are of greater concern and numbers than their far-left counterparts.

The far-left does have fascist tendencies -- I went to UC Berkeley, I've seen it first-hand -- but it simply isn't at the scale the far-right is currently at. This difference of scale is very relevant, and is part of what escalates society's response to the threat.

But I do agree with your sub-point that there's an asymmetry between reactions to Stalin and Hitler. There's probably some historical explanation; disgust toward historical figures is a socially acquired reaction. Excluding countries with special relationships to these men (i.e. Germany, Russia), it would make more sense to treat both with equal disdain and mockery.

Plowing cars into groups of people is mostly done by people following an ideology which is not generally considered to be "left" or "right" as those labels are not used to describe religiously-inspired movements.

In the 2017 EU Terrorism Report [1] - The EU being where I'm based and as such where I have most experience in these matters - done by Europol it is shown that the "left" is a much bigger threat than the "right", with 27 terror attacks executed by "left-wing" terrorists versus 1 attack by "right-wing" terrorists. As an aside, "nationalist" groups are responsible for 99 attacks. Islamic terrorists are responsible for the majority of deadly attacks (135 out of 142 were killed by jihadis).

As to what concerns the amount of "trolling" (in which I include breaking in to sites and downloading their data for later perusal, defacing sites, DDoS-attacking sites and similar actions) done on the 'net I'd say that, at least in Europe, the "left" is far more active than the "right", partly due to the fact that the "left" is better organised. One of the reasons for their better organisation is that "left-wing" organisations are given far more leeway than "right-wing" organisations, something which is related to the difference in reactions to "left-wing" icons (both the older ones - Lenin, Stalin, Mao et al - as well as the newer versions - Castro, Chavez, etc) versus "right-wing" icons (mostly Hitler and those around him). Public support for the latter is a punishable offence in some countries and frowned upon in most. Public support for the former is no problem whatsoever and done quite openly. I've never seen people carrying banners with the portrait of Hitler, I've seen plenty carrying portraits of Marx/Lenin/Stalin and Mao. I've seen banners telling us to follow the good example set by Chavez in Venezuela. I've seen a book fair which has "Lenin's corner" as a regular feature. Not some niche left-wing book fair either, the biggest one in the country and the focal point for the cultural intelligentsia.

Could you imagine a book fair having "Hitler's corner"?

[1] https://www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/2017-eu-terroris...

Why the hell is this about forming teams, one on the left, and one the right, and why are Stalin and Hitler on opposing teams? They formed a fucking alliance, fer crissakes, until one of them decided to betray the other. No honour amongst thieves.

A mass murderer is a mass murderer, regardless what they say they are. Hell, Hitler said he was forming a socialist worker's party, which sounds a lot like a dictatorship of the proletariat. It sounds like the left. Why aren't we saying that Hitler is "extreme left" just like Stalin?

There's something different between the political speech I grew up with in Mexico and what I hear now. Pretty much every Mexican distrusts the government, it's widely acknowledged that all politicians are corrupt, because we see corruption in the police force as a routine, daily thing, and we draw our team lines differently: the government versus the people. Not left vs right, but those with power versus those without. El pueblo unido jamás será vencido; no pasarán; these are our slogans.

There's something weird and pernicious about the way this left-vs-right discourse is unfolding in the English internet, and I see it leaking into other places. I don't like this game where the goal is to find how the opposite side is totally equal to this side and we have to tally the score to see who is more extreme.

I accept the basis of your argument - that point scoring is unhelpful.

However, I feel you're missing the point when discussing censorship.

If censorship is to be justly applied, there must be some objective measure of what is offensive - which then must be applied equally regardless of political alignment. This is definitely not happening at the moment.

Personally, I think a better perspective is to reduce and/or avoid censorship altogether, especially as far as internet infrastructure is concerned. Corporate entities shouldn't be enforcing the views of their stakeholders on the individual.

Free speech is free speech, even if I don't like what you're saying.

> Personally, I think a better perspective is to reduce and/or avoid censorship altogether, especially as far as internet infrastructure is concerned.

Yes! Systems ought to be designed such that censorship is impossible. Not just that we won't censor because we're so liberal and all. No, just plain uncensorable by design.

Edit: language

Yes, exactly.

The irony of this article is deep. It is literally making a "First they came for the neo-nazis, and I said nothing" argument. As a coworker of mine just said, "We might be standing on a slope here, but it isn't really slippery."

First they came for the damn commies, but McCarthy was before my time.

>...Forced Online Platforms to Reveal Their True Nature

The article seems argue that it's just been revealed that Facebook, Twitter, Reddit et al are, shock horror, "profit-driven entities, free to do as they please." As if we didn't know that already. It also kind of paints them as faceless corporations with shady agendas but in the case of Facebook and Reddit they are both still basically run by the programmers that wrote the first code and try run them in a common sense sort of way. Here they are chatting about these kind of things

Zuck http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/zuckerberg-investigating-facebook-c...

Huffman https://youtu.be/CbGxKKJb7vk?t=12m14s

Edit - changed the Zuck link...

I do wonder how this disagrees with the popular argument in favor of net neutrality? The point being that limiting who can distribute and therefore create access to information is generally agreed upon as unacceptable.

Would it be different if service providers (your ISP) made some content they select inaccessible (not net neutral) rather than Google et al?

Sites have been doing this for ages for things like terrorist materials and other forms of extremism, but as soon as white people get censored everyone suddenly gets up in arms.

>It is worth noting that the platforms most flamboyantly dedicated to a borrowed idea of free speech and assembly are the same ones that have struggled most intensely with groups of users who seek to organize and disrupt their platforms.

THIS is what ultimately changed my mind about whether Internet companies should offer "free speech" as a positive. I used to believe that the antidote to hateful speech was simply more speech. But every site that's been tried on, fell to more and more hateful speech, pushing and bending and breaking the norms, until sane people left out of disgust or were relegated to their own, more moderated, parts of the site.

Germany and other European countries with anti-Nazi laws have it right (and no, they haven't descended into totalitarian regimes, the slippery slope simply stopped at "Don't be a Nazi".)

The laws against hate speech are great until suddenly they aren't. Germany's laws are making it criminal for citizens to engage in honest debate about the refugee crisis.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/06/30/germany...

Germany's and Austria's anti-nazi laws don't seem to be very effective at preventing Nazis, though. A bunch of the Austrian lower and upper houses of parliament are members of a party started by a former SS officer and Germany sent a member of the NPD to the European Parliament.

Interesting argument. Usually when people make this sort of "virtue signaling," they don't provide much analysis of the history and ramifications, as this article does.

Democratically accountable decision makers, uniformly enforced policies and standards, and making these systems actually function like our legal systems, rather than shallowly mimicking them sounds like a huge improvement over the status quo.

"Virtue signalling" is the most tired cliché of an argument. It's cynicism is best demonstrated by the simple fact that it works against anything someone says, as long as it is somehow not completely offensive.

It's also a great example of assuming bad faith, and failing Occam's razor: instead of the obvious conclusion that most people tend to emphasise with victims of injustice, it constructs a complicated mechanism to explain how someone can be a bad person using their words and actions that say the opposite.

Are you also against the terms 'hypocrite' and 'cheap talk'?

Those are more neutral, less loaded terms. Like it or not, virtue signaling is one of those neologisms that has become ideologically slanted, like "homicide bomber" or "microaggression."

By all means, it is far better to use common parlance.

It's not loaded. These terms are synonymous.

The word is an apt description of something very real and very common [0]: people hiding their greatest moral failings behind ultimately empty virtuous performances.

It's unsurprising that the only people calling it 'loaded' and despairing over the existence of the term, identify with the group it's most often used to describe. And it's unsurprising that they would misunderstand it to be a term that you use to describe virtuous acts instead of sanctimonious frauds.

Desperately wishing that you were able to police the language of your political rivals isn't a good argument for getting rid of a phrase.

Also, if every time somebody uses the term, and somebody jumps in to say "I think you mean 'they're being a sanctimonious hypocrite'" then really it will just be emphasizing the meaning. I don't see what you expect to gain from this...

[0] http://www.thewrap.com/joss-whedon-feminist-hypocrite-infide...

There are some phrases which, despite their ostensibly unbiased definition and utility, end up being colored by overuse by one partisan side or another. Immediately jumping to accuse critics of those phrases of being on the opposite partisan side only reinforces the biased nature of the phrase. Are you triggered?

It is interesting that one of the earlier pop uses of "virtue signaling" was on LessWrong, and hence fairly apolitical [A]. But it seems to have been mostly used by the right. If one was to see a lot of leftist groups calling freedom of speech protesters or statue protectors "virtue signalers", then the phrase would indeed retain its original apolitical, universal nature. The article also gives some interesting analysis about how the original term has semantically drifted over the years to become watered down in meaning- at least according to Sam Bowman.

[A] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_signalling

Good response.

I do agree with Sam Bowman that the term is often misused (and that it doesn't make as much sense as it should since the word 'signalling' is meant to refer to costly signals and not 'cheap talk'), however my belief is that people are critiquing because the term is hitting 'too close to home' rather than because the term warrants serious criticism.

@matt4077:

  > Here's an analogy, a term I abhor for the
  > same reason: "mansplaining".
  >
  > It's a similarly cheap and unfair argument, because 
  > it's completely generic and can be used in any
  > discussion. It's also impossible to argue
  > against, because it uses any answer as proof.

Yes, agreed. That term often gets used when somebody isn't merely re-explaining what somebody already knows and is in fact giving new information from their own personal experiences in good-faith.

I don't really use the term 'virtue signalling' anymore, but I do get annoyed when somebody uses it and another person jumps in to tell them that they're not allowed to say it because it is used by the wrong sort of person or because it has no meaning. It does have a meaning and it is sometimes appropriate: male feminists who turn out to be using this identity to cloak their misogyny, politicians preaching about peace but consistently voting to bomb countries, Ivanka Trump harnessing a feminist image to hawk sweatshop clothing, etc.

Actually, I feel the same way about 'mansplaining'. There are cases where men step-in to re-explain what a woman just said to her or to others in a louder, more-confident tone and in these cases I think it's a great word.

Edit: You deleted your comment but I had already written this so I've posted it anyway.

(Sorry for deleting the comment. I wanted to move it into the original one, and see what happens when I add the example from the other side of the political aisle, only to realise I could no longer edit it.)

But none of those examples actually involve self-sacrifice in order to perpetuate falsehood. Those are examples of hypocritically showing off. It's an example of specialized technical jargon that does have valid specific use, but has been watered down to score cheap ideological points, an indictment of the target of being textbook irrational. How ironic that the use of the phrase has become an act of virtue signaling, in of itself!

Er, yeah, a more legible description is "virtue cheap talking" and not "virtue signalling".

But it's quite likely that usage of the latter term has always been a sarcastic jibe about the fraudulent/low-investment quality of the 'virtuous' acts that are being performed.

Here's an analogy, a term I abhor for the same reason: "mansplaining". It's a similarly cheap and unfair argument, because it's completely generic and can be used in any discussion. It's also impossible to argue against, because it uses any answer as proof.

(Replying to myself because the edit time passed)

"This was also a moment these hate groups were anticipating; getting banned in an opaque, unilateral fashion was always the way out and, to some degree, it suits them."

I think this is the viewpoint all coverage needs to employ. That these groups are already trying to frame themselves as victims and media needs to preempt this by framing their cries for what they are, a quick slip and fall scam.

*Edited for clarity

Surely your irony detector must have went off writing this statement. One of the core message of these groups is that the media is biasing their coverage against them in an attempt to sway public opinion and your suggestion is to prove their point?

My suggestion is to highlight the tactic so others can see it for what it is.

I honestly don't know if it would help. You could try and argue that they're setting themselves up as victims but the other side of the coin is that they're exposing the true feelings and cruelty of the people they've been claiming are using their power to discriminate and silence them.

I don't think there's much to be gained by putting on a circus that exposes the Nazis as the scheming bad guys -- it's already in the name. They're provoking a reaction from groups and people who have been long claiming to be tolerant and respectful of dissenting views.

The way I see it the only way out is to be the better people, let them say and do as they please, challenge and criticize their ideas openly, respectfully, and with evidence, and be secure in the fact that in the long run they'll be proven wrong.

"There are hard-right alternatives to Twitter, to Reddit and even to the still-mostly-lawless 4chan."

The writer obviously has no idea what 4chan looked like before the fappening.

I keep wondering how this meshes with the common carrier rules/designation. Does it put Facebook, Twitter, et al at more or less risk as a result? How does this fit with the pro-net neutrality positions that these companies have staked out?

"Put simply, common carriers are private companies that sell their services to everyone on the same terms, rather than companies that make more individualized decisions about who to serve and what to charge. [snip] Congress created laws to make sure that phone companies provided basic phone service to all customers on a non-discriminatory basis and at reasonable prices, and created the FCC to regulate them."

Ref: https://www.ncta.com/platform/public-policy/why-its-a-good-t...

Those things have nothing to do with each other. Common carrier rules and net neutrality are attributes of companies enjoying a natural monopoly: that of often being the only one running a cable to your door.

Besides, Facebook, Twitter etc. crossed that particular rubicon long ago when they started deleting, for examples, images of nudity.

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