Tech companies declare war on hate speech and conservatives are worried
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Ex-muslims routinely complain that youtube censors their videos criticizing islam. Videos of brutality (that often contains legal proofs of crimes) are removed if they are used by some hate groups, even if the intent of the recorder was to denounce violence.
In France, hate speech laws are now extended to jail terrorism apologists. OK, why not, I don't have a lot more love for them than I have for nazis. But we are also at war with ISIS, that is labeled a terrorist group. So taking its defense potentially leads to jail and censorship (it has already, actually)
And this is a worrying situation for a democracy: we are at war but we can't have a debate on the justification of that war, because such a debate would require making arguments in favor of ISIS, which is illegal.
Remember, fascism is an ideology that comes from many sides. It is not because there is a racist buffoon in the white house that we must not watch the other fronts it could come from.
-war on fake news
-war on hate speech
You may initially benefit from censorship because you are the initiators and the one's with the pull, but sooner or later, everyone else will start organizing.
When mormons/christian groups/conservatives/etc organize and start flagging atheist/lgbt youtubers/content and getting them taken down, are you going to celebrate censorship?
The beauty of free speech is that as long as everyone has it, you have it too. The problem with censorship is if you can censor, then so can others.
Fine. You don't like hateful racist speech. Ban it. But others don't like hateful atheist/lgbt/etc speech either.
I'd rather live in a free speech world with "hate" than a censored world without "hate".
Given that this has happened repeatedly before, I think the response will continue to be the same when it next happens: mostly challenging the choice to censor those materials, not the choice to censor anything. In the case of, for example, Facebook or Twitter this is already apparently the case (in Twitter's case mostly using their more subtle moderation mechanisms), so yes, the stance of queer leftists who support harsher treatment of racism and such online tends to be based in a belief that being queer can in fact be treated differently in online spaces than, for example, advocating murdering black people. After all, if the status quo of online moderation is already harsher against us, that's clear evidence that it's possible for it to be differently harsh between us and neo-Nazis.
[Edited to correct a typo of "mechanism" in place of "mechanisms".]
You can easily debate whether France should be taking military action against ISIS without claiming that ISIS is right.
This is like saying that because France has laws against gender discrimination, so you could not advocate oppressing women as a show of support for Saudi Arabia, it is now impossible to argue against going to war with the Saudis.
What the law does do is make it harder to instigate more terror attacks within France.
My grandfather escaped the Soviet Union. Stalin's regime killed all of his siblings. All of them.
But yet when I check YouTube, Twitter, and so on I see lots of videos professing communisms values. Hell I've seen a pro-communist march in a city I recently moved from.
Neo-nazis are awful, and Nazis have done unspeakable terrible things in this world.
But to me the Neo-nazis are being actively forbidden from expressing support for another ideology that has been responsible for tens of millions of deaths, while the communists are allowed to do the same thing.
I hate nazis and I hate communists. But to pick and choose which people are allowed to express support for these regimes is inconsistent at best, and tacticitly implying a preference at absolute worst.
This needs to change.
Arguably, Nazism tends to ring more obvious to moderators. There is more than one form of communism that has been implemented, and it's likely these videos alll aren't professing a support of Stalin's bloody reign. Communism also (usually) lacks a racial/nationalist superiority component that calls for the decimation of all others. But that doesn't mean people should be free to use Marx's good intentions to let terrible communist regimes off the hook.
It's probably not a bad idea for people with your experiences to attempt to organize with the goal to inform users and moderators about propaganda videos on their platforms.
Unfortunately, white nationalist (neo-nazi) groups learned a long time ago that PR matters. The average person starts to notice anything that actually looks similar to stereotypical Nazism. The Southern Strategy with Lee Atwater's use of dog whistle terms like "forced busing" and "state's rights" as indirect codes for racism demonstrated not only is public perception very important, but also how easy it is to make fascist beliefs palatable to the average citizen by wrapping it with carefully chosen euphemisms and coded language.
I highly encourage everyone to watch this[1] very well made overview of the current language and other propaganda techniques used by fascists. Unless you have been spending a lot of time over the last few years involved with "alt-right"/etc groups, it can be had to follow because confusion about facts is the goal.
https://www.thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters-inf...
Atwater was referring to the GOP Southern Strategy and how it evolved from 1954 to 1968. He wasn't referring to his strategies during the Reagan election in 1980. I believe he's gotten a bad rap for that. He graduated college in 1973 after that period.
Atwater: But Reagan did not have to do a southern strategy for two reasons. Number one, race was not a dominant issue. And number two, the mainstream issues in this campaign had been, quote, southern issues since way back in the sixties. So Reagan goes out and campaigns on the issues of economics and of national defense. The whole campaign was devoid of any kind of racism, any kind of reference. And I'll tell you another thing you all need to think about, that even surprised me, is the lack of interest, really, the lack of knowledge right now in the South among white voters about the Voting Rights Act.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater
The South voted primary Democrat (southern democrat, there were northern democrats that were a different flavor) for 100 years, since 1860 because Lincoln was a Republican and Lincoln burned the South. I mean the South constantly voted majority Democrat up until about the civil rights era in the 1960s when they turned majority Republican. I'm sure you are aware, the South almost always votes majority Republican (in 2008 Obama won 3 southern states though). This shift was due to the Southern Strategy that Atwater was referring to, but did not implement himself. It's absolutely fascinating how much slavery and it's affects are part of this nation. I consider it our "original sin."
1) They deny being a fascist.
2) Euphemism (e.g. I'm a X, not a fascist or talking about purging criminals, rapists and terrorists which is actually code for purging non-white people.)
3) Pedantry. They bog you down and waste your time in a "petty terminological dispute" as they specifically detail why they are not a fascist.
I can't even go on, I feel like I listening to a guide on how to spot a witch.
The highest death tolls that have been documented in communist states occurred in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, in the People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong, and in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. The estimates of the number of non-combatants killed by these three regimes alone range from a low of 21 million to a high of 70 million.
How could communism be implemented without killing people who refused to give up their property, or refused to stop trading with each other?
When Neo-Nazis are violent, the actual violence shouldn't be tolerated, but to ban thoughts is something completely different.
FWIW, I never understood why US citizens would carry a Nazi flag, when they know damn well people in their family were directly affected by it in one way or another.
All so that people can be equal... equally screwed that is.
It was an implementation of (what it called, though there is debate in socialist circles about the validity of the claim) socialism. Communism is the end-state they claimed to wish to achieve, not the thing they implemented, even in theory.
And if I remember correctly labour laws are there because of communists, before people worked for 12 hours a day for a very small salary.
Stalin was both a communist as well as a dictator who didn't trust people. So was Lenin, although he was more manipulative than Stalin and as such did not get the reputation for being paranoid like Stalin. Communism and national socialism and fascism (which is not the same as national socialism) are not all that different once you look past the ideological veneer. All strive for a totalitarian state, all make the individual subservient to that state, all claim to create a better world for those who are being made subservient. All have been tested in practice, none of them have delivered the promised benefits. In all cases the result was a state run by an overclass which was relatively well off compared to the subjugated masses. None of them could handle dissent.
For all three of these totalitatian ideologies - communism, national socialism and fascism - you could argue that those states which claimed to implement them never 'really' followed the doctrine to the logical and supposedly beneficial conclusion but that is a fallacy. It is the ideologies themselves which are at fault as they all try to do away with the individual 'for the good of the state' while people do see themselves as individuals first - especially in situations where the survival of the individual is at stake.
Seriously, since when do people who march for a more equal society are to be compared with people marching for genocide ?
Similarly, do people who spread buddhist ideas in the US advocate for/support the genocide of muslims in Birmania (or whatever it's called in English) ?
Seriously though, you can use neo-Nazis to justify censorship, but then what about the less extreme alt-right? How about the slightly less extreme religious right? How about economically right-wing libertarians? Neo-conservatives? Where do you draw the line? At what point do you decide to move the line slightly one way or the other? This is the problem. You'll always need to draw the line, and wherever you draw it, you're essentially imposing your worldview since your worldview governs where you think that line should be.
And for the record, I don't think tech companies are akin to utilities, they can do what they want within the law, but just drop the charade that their platforms were ever totally free...
As I mentioned a few days ago on a related article, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15122311 , the extremists are good "canaries" for indicating the gradual erosion of freedom of speech. When the edges collapse, the line moves just a slightly bit closer to the mainstream, and a new set of views are considered extremist. Repeat until everyone is brainwashed into a monoculture. That's the scariest part.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297128/matthew-doyle-ar...
"A man in the UK has been arrested on charges of inciting racial hatred on social media, after he tweeted about asking a Muslim woman to "explain" the terror attacks in Brussels. As The Guardian reports, London's Metropolitan Police on Wednesday arrested a 46-year-old man believed to be Matthew Doyle, a partner at a London PR agency."
Why did the media collectively declare war on "hate speech" the past few years - culminating in the absurd hit piece on pewdiepie?
Isn't it strange that all the establishment news organizations WSJ, NYTimes, WaPo, etc all went on a industry-wide campaign?
It had nothing to do with "hate speech". Neo-nazis, kkk, etc have always existed. It's about corralling social media and pressuring them to consolidate "news" around the established media.
It's easier to justify taking away your rights/free speech if you can say it is part of the war on "hate speech". Just like it is easier to get people to accept intrusive TSA if you tell them it's part of the war on "terror".
Just like war on "reds/communism/etc" allowed for rights of many to be abrogated by mccarthy. Or the war on drugs allowed for wholesale incarceration of minorities and the toppling of latin american governments.
More and more sites remove comment functionality or hide comments they don't like, forced real-name policy for accounts, etc. Many sites lost any credibility these days.
"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
This isn't to mean they should avoid supporting "freedom of expression" but that these terms come with history and obligations that aren't always obvious.
If a company mentions 1st amendment rights, it isn't realistic to assume it will also have the capacity to correctly and quickly adjudicate all cases of expression that will occur within its service boundaries. People forget how parts of constitutional law itself are specializations with a lot of legal history and precedents.
The summary takeaway seems to be that service providers should avoid using these shorthand legal terms in their terms of service. Providers should try to spell out ToS specifically avoiding as much legalese as possible. Avoid using shorthand legal terms to give the illusion of a neutral position in an attempt to avoid liability.
Con Ed doesn't have this problem and manages to make tons of money, despite providing power to I assume some number of literal nazis.
(whose TL;DR is "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance." )
Of course, it raises the question of who's to say what/who should be "not-tolerated".
> [Tolerance] is an agreement to live in peace, not an agreement to be peaceful no matter the conduct of others. A peace treaty is not a suicide pact.
On the surface, he's right. You don't have to listen to what you don't want to. On the other hand, I have seen his comic frequently cited as justification for not ignoring, but actively hunting down and quashing dissent. In many oppressive regimes, it's not the government enforcing speech restrictions, but rather the party and its independent zealots.
But if you're a libertarian congressman, and Google doesn't like your videos, apparently that is not the case anymore.
If you dont think these infringements on free speech will be used to serve the 1%, empower authoritarianism, and be selectively applied: you are already wrong.
I agree with your last point, care to explain more?
Generally, it's public speech intended offend, harass, or threaten a group of people that is defined by an inherent trait (e.g. skin color, sex/gender, sexual orientation), in addition to legally defined protected classes (e.g. religion, disability).
The SCOTUS has generally ruled that hate speech is protected by the first amendment, with only very narrow exceptions (e.g. credible, imminent threats).
> Black lives matter?
Obviously not hate speech. Asking for the rights of black people to be respected isn't a threat or harassment.
> White lives matter?
Assuming you are referring to groups such as those protesting recently in Charlottesville, then this might be hate speech. A lot of speech wouldn't qualify, but the chants that specifically targeted protected groups probably do count as hate speech. Details matter a lot, but it's probably reasonably safe to assume the protest became hate speech when the chant "You will not replace us!" became "Jews will not replace us!"
> Black lives matter?
Obviously not hate speech. Political opinions are never a protected class.
I have never come across anything Congressman Paul has said that is remotely close to qualifying ads hate speech. He is actually all about granting individuals rights and freedoms. Can you explain?
But anyways, is it really a false equivalence, or is the false equivalence based on newly-invented terms? In other words, even if we both agree we dont like what currently qualifies as hate speech; if we start the process of compartmentalizing speech into acceptable and unacceptable baskets, what is going to stop it? After they finish with Ron Paul and libertarians, who is next up to be silenced?
Now you may think, 'they're just crushing a the alt right and moving on towards libertarians.' "I won't protest because I find the alt right repulsive, and I am not a libertarian."
So tell me, when is the time to protest? When "there's no one left to speak for me?"
To me, we need to protect free speech, not to protect hate speech, but to protect the right to say things unacceptable to say, even if your government, or Google, or anyone, doesn't want you to say it. If you care about the 90%, this fundamental right will always be one of the strongest safe-guards possible against authoritarianism.
Note there is no condemnation of antifa or BLM-- two organizations prone to violence, intimidation and destruction.
The left must stop their downward spiral and restore a decent balance to politics. Help right the ship, please.