Reddit Bans Nazi Groups and Others in Crackdown on Violent Content | Hacker News Reader

Reddit Bans Nazi Groups and Others in Crackdown on Violent Content

nytimes.com

70 pointsmhb248 comments

It's really, really not easy to stand up for the rights of Nazis. If you're a Nazi, you can use voat.co as they are very free speech oriented. You don't have to be a Nazi to participate, but it's a good idea to have a thick skin if you do go there.

I go there and talk to the White Nationalists. They are pretty much Nazis. They know I'm not white and that I don't agree with them. They don't scare me. They are scared and powerless, looking for meaning in their empty lives, easily swayed, and not entirely unaware of some of the ironies.

I've actually invited a few of them to my home, but no takers so far.

Point is, I'm not sure banning does any good. Reddit can legally do so. I still think there's a better way to deal with the mentally ill and disenfranchised.

They didn't ban all Nazis. They banned subreddits that posted content (not comments) advocating violence. That included one or two "nazi" subreddits. The article says this in the first paragraph.

That said, thanks for trying to find positive ways to deal with things.

The effect is largely the same, now isn't it? In fact, they recently published a study showing the efficacy of their sub closures from a couple of years ago. People leave, effectively silenced.

They can do that. It is their right. It's okay.

I would guess that people left because there weren't many other subreddits with similar topics to the ones that were banned. But there are other nazi subreddits, and the mods made it clear that it's acceptable to be a nazi as long as they're not advocating violence too much. So I would be surprised if that many people actually left this time compared to last time.

According to a study about Reddit itself, banning can do some good:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/business/reddit-limits-no...

The general principle is sound - people get sucked into extremism when they stumble upon it on a large site like Reddit. Voat, on the other hand, you're not going to find unless you're looking for it.

I mean overall. It helps Reddit maintain their goals. I meant more specifically the problem with, you know, the fact that we still have Nazis.

Perhaps. But at least those who are looking for it are full exposed and easy to see. They are the true extremists. Remove the honeypots (e.g., Reddit) then what?

there's a better way to deal with the mentally ill and disenfranchised

Enabling them is not a good way to deal with them. Allowing easily discoverable safe spaces with which to reinforce their neuroses and paranoia only adds to the problem as new users can more easily be recruited, preyed upon, etc.

This goes for much more than just violent white supremacists, it also applies to things like pro-ana, which creates an extremely dangerous feedback loop for vulnerable, damaged people.

Private sites not only have no obligation to provide the resources for these extreme codependent communities, but as we're learning, they actually hold a moral obligation to remove them when they form in order to prevent their growth.

I'd argue they have no moral obligation to do any such thing. However, they should probably make a pretty clear warning sign.

I fear we will digress too far. In short, I'm very pro freedom of expression. I'm glad voat exists, for example. The people there are often horrible, that is true. But, they still deserve to express themselves freely.

I don't understand why anyone deserves server space and labor resources. They are free to express themselves, but the cost of running a service is not free, and they have no right to those costs.

They can stand in a public square and say what they like. They can have debates in their own living room. They can print up manifestos on their own dime. They have a right to do all of that, and nobody's arguing against that.

It's a bit of a problem, really. They take URLs away, they refuse to host them, etc...

So, I'd say what good are rights if you can't reasonably exercise them?

Don't get me wrong, I really don't like Nazis. They are pretty much the definition of bad people.

So, I try to empathize. We all want to belong to something. They like firearms. Me too. I love a good explosion, though I'd much prefer it not actually hurt anyone.

If I can humanize them, I can understand that they too deserve basic human rights.

Reddit is not a basic human right.

You have a right to free speech, but society has no obligation to provide you a megaphone and a soapbox.

You didn't read what I wrote. Reddit is absolutely free to do this. Voat exists, if they want a place to speak.

I did read what you wrote. You are not arguing for the right to free speech, you are arguing for a right to a platform (yet referring to such as an appeal to free speech).

And there is no such thing. There is no right to a platform for your speech. You are allowed to say it, but nobody has any obligation to repeat, produce, disseminate or validate your speech.

Again, I ask what good is a right if one can not reasonably exercise it?

I also suggest we are veering too far from the topic. To be very, very clear - Reddit is under no obligation to allow anything they do not wish to allow.

No one's rights are being infringed upon. The right to free speech is certainly still in their hands. Their audience is then anyone within earshot.

Your question seems to me to be a red herring, and doesn't seem relevant in the discussion surrounding web-based fora. While "the internet" in some abstract form could be construed as a human right in this modern technological world of ours, the World Wide Web as it stands today very much is not that. The infrastructure is privately maintained, and as such is not granted the protections that the 1st amendment provides. Likewise the services that are built upon the physical infrastructure, namely websites and data-transmission services, are not obligated to enforce rights.

Let's try something.

Do you believe that the Internet should be a basic human right, that affordable access should be made reasonably available for everyone on the planet?

The question is, access to what?

Access to encyclopedic knowledge? Sure. Access to academic literature? Would definitely be a net positive.

Access to the ramblings of every human in existence? Not sure why this would be so necessary.

Quick edit to add: anything that requires instantiation to justify said "right" doesn't seem like it vibes well with the definition of the word "right." For instance, how could the right to internet exist if the internet didn't exist? This is opposed to people's need to communicate (free speech), their need for a safe place to sleep, or to satiate their hunger and nutritional needs. All of these problems exist by nature of us being human, and are inescapable in life by definition. Thus the rights, that we have today to protect people from succumbing to painful and undignified suffering when these needs aren't met, are justified. The same cannot be said of a recent technological invention. No one needs the internet to live.

So, we have a starting point. Now, would you then agree that the primary purpose of a networked group of computers is the exchange of information?

If you will agree to that, will you also agree that communication is information?

If you will agree to that, and to the general concept of the freedom of expression, as an ideal to aspire to and not just a government restriction, would you then agree that even the shittiest people on the planet should be allowed some method for self expression on said connected network of computers in a reasonable manner, so long as said expression is lawful and up until due process, in accordance with their local jurisdiction, takes away said rights?

In other words, they deserve the right to say their vile crap.

Before you say no they don't, I'd like to point out that not that king ago, and in some parts of this world, is censored speech. I'd like to point out that I absolutely guarantee there are those who would silence even you. They find your views absolutely reprehensible. You offend the very fiber of their being. They hate everything you stand for.

Be careful which rights you cede, for you will not always be the decider. Pendulums swing and the repercussions are mighty.

I've traveled, a lot. I've been in combat, war zones, in the midst of refugees, in camps, and in ruins. I've seen what happens when people dehumanize others. I've seen what happens when we lose empathy.

I'm not trying to change your mind. It's the Internet. Nobody ever changes their mind. I am trying to demonstrate a good accounting. Someone has to speak for the rights of all humans. Someone has to have empathy for even the worst among us.

Don't get me wrong. Some folks need killing. But, due process matters, as does empathy, dignity, and honor. Meh... It is just what it is. Things go to hell without it.

As for your point, you don't need a right to bear arms to survive. You don't need a right to speech to survive. You don't need a right to your property, your right to avoid self incrimination, etc... You need those to have liberty.

Edit: email in profile, if you want. I'm quite happy to have rational discourse.

So if you agree that the providers of service on the internet are under no obligation to provide a soapbox for everyone who signs up, what do you recommend that that look like should one be established?

A pretty common sentiment is that you neuter trolls when you remove any chance for anonymity, i.e., you put their reputation on the line. I would be happy to belong to a "free speech-oriented zone" on the internet that required real-life verification. Then people wouldn't be so quick to spread virulent, violent ideologies in such a space. IMO this provides a secondary effect, namely that people would stop taking so seriously those areas where anonymity is provided. Perhaps the interactions can be strongly weighted toward local ones, to provide more accountability. Such a platform would need to be free from any sort of money transactions, especially Facebook's current business model.

Furthermore, empathy has nothing to do with advocacy. The ingredient missing when comparing refugees with white nationalists is that of the fundamental power imbalance. One is certainly free to express empathy for both, but tuning the narrative to equivocate people who are being exterminated with their exterminators is pretty dishonest. Your moral obligation (imo) when presented with people who are being systematically denied requirements for life is to spread and advocate for their survival. Notice that white nationalists are only being challenged on the lines of "liberty" whereas refugees are being challenged on the lines of "life." The DoI says it best, and puts them in a specific order not haphazardly, but deliberately: life comes first (and thus the removal of threats to it), then liberty, then the pursuit of happiness.

This comment might help:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15566320

Right now, they have Voat. But, the recent trend has been more and more aggressive censorship - including from sites that used to tolerate the truly deplorable.

It is a worrying trend. Homosexuality was once deplorable. Transfolk were once deplorable. Atheism was once deplorable. In some parts of the world, they still are. To some people, in your own country, they still are.

Cheer on.

I am not afraid of the deplorable on Voat. You know what does scare me? Children with access to real military weapons, not their daddy's AR. A keyboard warrior with bad grammar and a Nazi flag is a pretty horrible person. I've seen worse.

You're not scared. That's fine. For all I know, you have no reason to be scared of white nationalists, because to them, you're not the threat. That doesn't make it any safer for a large portion of the United States or other Western countries where these sentiments are popping back up.

We know Africa and South America and Southeast Asia are still relatively dangerous. That doesn't excuse the sentiments that are building here in the US whatsoever. It actually doesn't factor at all into this discussion because they are totally off the radar for people who should be provided the liberty of living without constant breathing down their neck and "go home" and "jews will not replace us." Where does the liberty from harassment and execution factor into your liberty ethics?

The issue is also not what happens right this moment, but what happens in 10 years' time when people have been surrounding themselves and their family and friends with this rhetoric. The history of the Nazi party following the fall of the Weimar republic doesn't span months, it spans a decade or more. What reason is there to deny some people the "right" to demonize and alienate minorities solely on the basis of inaccurate judgments when things could get a lot worse down the road? The slippery slope, after all, has two faces. We can just as easily say that granting some liberties now causes a lot of hurt down the road as removing them.

I'm not white. I'm quite distinctly not white. They would harm me, if they had the courage and means.

You would deprive them of their liberties without due process and you would do so out of fear. You justify it and call it rational.

That is how I see you. That is what I see when I read what you write.

I don't expect to change your views. I will point out that that sort of thinking is how the US ended up with things like the PATRIOT Act and FISA courts. Fearful people are not rational people, they are rationalizing people.

In ten years, do you want to live in some authoritarian society where every thought and expression must be approved by the public? Where no dangerous thought must be expressed? Where those declared deplorable must be silenced and shunned? Where there exist an oppressed class for their very thoughts, without acting on them?

I do not. I am not afraid. I am more afraid of ceding my liberties and my empathy. I am more afraid of a day when you are not allowed to speak out against Nazis.

A group could set up their own server, but then their DNS provider drops them, so they solicit funds but then payment processors drop them. Sometimes the post stops delivering physical mail to your house because you wrote a book they don't like. There are a lot of choke-points.

> But, they still deserve to express themselves freely.

Um, why. What makes you think this. If someone's opinions are stupid and abhorrent, why should they not experience an immediate and firm response, in ban-hammer form.

Why do you want to give ignorant idiots a platform to spread their ignorant idiocy to other ignorant idiots (and e.g. provoke easily influenced mentally ill idiots who might want to drive cars into crowds).

Because we as a society have decided even the least among us deserve a base amount of human rights and freedoms and those aren't taken away without due process in a just society.

I don't expect to change your mind. It's okay. I'm just really, really pro human rights. I've seen places with massive deprivations of rights. That's not okay.

Please explain what human rights have to do with anything in this thread.

As another commenter pointed out, there is no human right to post racist bullshit on a privately run online forum.

I don't think you actually read what I said. Please do so. You will note that I point out that no rights are violated and even provide an alternative. You asked a question, I gave you the answer.

Please, really, read all the words and what I write, not what you think I write. Start from the top post, as all my replies are contextual.

I read what you wrote, and I read the whole thread, and the context.

You brought up human rights in the context of this discussion more than once, what else are we supposed to take from that, than that you think 'human rights' are remotely relevant to the topic of banning nazis from reddit, which they aren't.

What happens when there is no place left for the deplorable? The 'net was meant to work around censorship. Look at what it has become.

Reddit is just another brick in the wall. They can do this. Indeed, perhaps they should. But should we cheer it on? What happens when there are no reasonable means left for the deplorable to speak? What happens when censorship isn't fraught, when empathy is eschewed, when due process is forgotten?

Those are not Reddit's responsibilities. They are our responsibilities, as a society. It is very much a human rights issue, but not Reddit's sole responsibility. Right now, registrars refuse to even host domain names.

I'm not saying these are good people. Quite the opposite, really. Cheer the censorship on, it is your right. I'll stand up for your rights too.

This is what I wrote about content I allow on my Mastodon server: https://blog.freeradical.zone/welcome-to-my-living-room/

In summary, I totally defend your right to say anything you want, however abhorrent. But if I'm hosting your content - especially when you're not paying me to do so - then I have a right to decide what I'll allow you to say from the platform I own. Your words reflect both on you and me.

I would never support a law like "Nazis can't post stuff on the Internet". I absolutely, 100% support a private organization's right to say "say what you want, but we're not going to help you".

You are conflating the “least” among us with the “worst” among us. We actually only have sympathy for the former.

I'd argue your use of 'we.'

Have you ever seen what happens when we dehumanize our enemies? Have you seen what happens when we lose empathy?

These people you hate are, without a doubt, able to exhibit some pretty poor behavior. Most of them are children looking to belong, mentally ill, and those who prey on them - also probably mentally ill. Those that are adults were usually reached as children and come from abusive childhoods.

And you have no sympathy. It's okay, you're not required to. It isn't easy to empathize with Nazis. I can understand the unwillingness to try.

How do you empathise with a actual Nazi?

Would you empathise with Reinhardt Heydrich? How?

Well, I empathize with Hitler because he wasn't treated terribly well by those around him who should have been supportive. His dietician reportedly added bone marrow to his soups without his knowledge because she "despised" his vegetarian diet, and his Austrian cook would sometimes add animal broth or fat to his meals, which would then be noticed by Hitler who insisted on clear soups from then on. Despite Hitler disapproving of cosmetics since they contained animal by-products, Eva Braun had a habit of wearing makeup which Hitler would frequently tease her about.

I think that Eva should have made some sacrifices to make Hitler happier, and it's not like she didn't know the reasons behind it because he was very vocal about his reasons as he would give vivid and gruesome descriptions of animal suffering and slaughter at the dinner table to try to dissuade his colleagues from eating meat.

I have gone through similar experiences so I can empathize with Hitler. This doesn't mean I agree with him overall, but that I understand and share his feelings on a specific subject.

If you strip the humanity from individuals, then you are refusing to try to understand them, which means you don't actually learn anything from the atrocities. When there's a shooting, you try to learn the motives and see where the system failed them. If they were exhibiting symptoms of an untreated mental illness, that lets us know that we need to work on providing better care and diagnosis. If we don't learn from history, then we are doomed to repeat it.

How does any of that about Hitler relate to his policy of exterminating Jews? It's not as if his dietician and Eva Braun were nicer to him he would have decided not to implement the final solution. That's ridiculous.

Once people start actively calling for the deaths of others based on race or religion or creed, that's where the fundamentally opposing ideologies are found that are only resolved through violence.

The lesson we should be learning from history is that appeasing racist fascists doesn't improve things, it only emboldens them by validating their beliefs as acceptable.

I'm not advocating stripping humanity from anyone, because I am fully aware that it is humans who create and commit these abhorrent acts. White nationalists, neo-nazis, whatever you want to call them are absolutely human. They are also all total shithouses that pose a threat to stability and harmony in the same way ISIS do.

They either stop what they are doing, or the blood of both sides runs in the streets. They are the only two options when it comes to beliefs like this. The problem is, the blood running in the streets is often what they want, and what we get.

There's a huge difference between appeasement and allowance of basic human rights, dignity, due process, empathy, and even sympathy.

I have had to lay down suppressive fire. I was willing to do so, but I hoped anyone I hit was killed quickly. I hoped they were killed quickly because, well, I didn't want them to suffer. I hoped they were killed because they were trying to kill the other scared young Marines beside me. Killing them was the only logical thing to do.

I'm not some hopeless naive child. I've personally witnessed human depravities that scar people for life, a fate worse than death.

You're scared of the people on Voat? Go there and read for a week. Go there and talk to them. Go there and belittle them, if you want. Have fun with it. Amuse yourself at their expense. Toy with them and make them dance for your amusement.

When you're done with that, maybe try to change some hearts and minds. You'll have gotten that out of your system and realized how powerless and ineffective they really are. They are powerless keyboard warriors spouting memes and racist slogans in an echo chamber full of logical errors and bad science and bastardized religious quotes.

Also, they hate fat people. Reddit kicked out FPH. No, really, those folks seriously hate fat people, but they tend to stick in their sub.

One sub really likes trees. Like, real trees, not pot.

They are humans. Deplorable humans, I agree. They even have a Linux section. As a Linux user, that makes me pretty deplorable too!

Seriously, go visit them. They are horrible people. However, they are mostly scared children. There's no need to be afraid. They are pretty universally powerless and reviled, even at the national political level - really. No need for hyperbole.

If you want, I will even introduce you on voat.co and you can go harass them until you realize they are just a bunch of really, really stupid, inept, confused, probably insane, brainwashed, morons with a poor grasp of reality and basic literacy.

You're more likely to die on your toilet.

> Because we as a society have decided even the least among us deserve a base amount of human rights and freedoms and those aren't taken away without due process in a just society.

Basically, we're pandering to the mediocre. I don't think we should be doing this.

> Because we as a society have decided even the least among us deserve a base amount of human rights and freedoms

And people who advocate against that (like Nazis, racists, homophobes, misogynists, transphobic, etc.) don't deserve a voice.

What's the point of liberalism if everyone does not get to express themselves?

"Why do you want to give ignorant idiots a platform to spread their ignorant idiocy to other ignorant idiots"

Because the only way I can guarantee that "my side" can say whatever it wants, is to guarantee that all sides can say whatever they want.

We have, over many millennia reached a point where tolerance is considered a pretty high virtue - we believe that even if we don't agree with someone, we can live and work side-by-side with them. This is one of the reasons we have stopped trying to kill each other for believing in the wrong religion. This is a good thing.

Note: my first sentence is taken from this clip of the West Wing: https://youtu.be/jmhC9e39aP0?t=181 .

> guarantee that all sides can say whatever they want

The thing is - the Nazis can say whatever they want. No-one is obliged to give them a platform to do that. Which means you actually want to modify it to

> guarantee that all sides can say whatever they want [and be heard]

Which is an entirely different kettle of fish and something we don't have currently (and never will, really, whilst there is an imbalance in money and power.)

I'm not saying anyone is obliged to give them a platform. I'm saying that maybe we, as a society, shouldn't be so quick to call for bans of certain views, or for using our power as consumers to pressure companies to remove such things. It starts with Nazis, and ends with e.g. people on HN saying that Twitter should censor the president. Which at the very least, shows that there is some kind of slippery slope here.

That said, I'm completely sympathetic to companies who choose to kick people off - I'd probably do the same in their shoes! I'm not saying I have a solution for any of these problems - I'm just saying why I find it difficult to so easily throw out the idea of "I may not agree with what you say, but I'll fight to the death for your right to say it".

> slippery slope

Oh come ON.

> I'm not saying anyone is obliged to give them a platform. > using our power as consumers to pressure companies to remove such things

Those two are contradictory.

> Why do you want to give ignorant idiots a platform to spread their ignorant idiocy to other ignorant idiots (and e.g. provoke easily influenced mentally ill idiots who might want to drive cars into crowds).

Because otherwise you would be shocked to wake up and realize that it is your views that are in a bubble and not theirs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzJfMsbe7Ks

Edit: It must be fun downvoting reality. Here: blast from the past - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/23/hillary-clinton-s...

Those who did not pay attention to the unpalatable media had conniptions on TV when Podesta came out.

Yeah I'm quite happy in my bubble of civilised, grown-up, non-idiot racists thanks.

Because it easily becomes "let's prohibit any small minority group the people in power find distasteful or unpopular." The net hates/hated Scientologists, for example, but I'm sure you could find others. Jehovah's Witnesses generally are disliked or have only negative public perception.

1. Don't slippery slope this, we're talking about hate speech. 2. Private company, Reddit can do what they want. 3. Scientologists and Jehovah's witnesses both earned their reputations.

The effect your are talking about seems legit. The flip side about that is if you force these groups out of the public and then into the shadows, that's only proving the paranoia. Does that radicalize things even more? The same kind of viewpoints existed in the mid 90s, underground, and that lead to OKC which was one of the worst terrorist incidents in US history.

Is it better or worse that this is happening in public?

It is worse.

Before it took a bit of effort to work in the shadows, but technology has facilitated a disproportionatly loud 'voice' with little effort.

It would be considered crazy to even have this conversation a decade ago.

That's because a decade ago we pretended that it did not exist by trying to muzzle them. In the absence of the avenues for us to see those nutcases the so called "educated population" believed it was a totally fringe group as no traces of them were visible in the liberal coastal towns not because 10% of their neighbors were not barbarians but because NYT acted as a gate keeper preventing barbarians at the gate from entering. So the population did not realize there were barbarians at the gate. 10 years later, NYT failed as a gatekeeper and there they were, pillaging.

Now instead of saying "Ok, there are barbarians here, we should deal with it reality" we say "Hey, we have a new set of gatekeepers - put on these glasses and you won't see the barbarians raping and pillaging"

I'm really torn on this. On the one hand, these are humans, not monsters; their views can be changed, perhaps, but not if we force them into hiding and radicalize them. On the other hand, giving them power and influence in public spaces, the ability to disrupt other people's discourse and lives at will, is not okay.

I'm not sure there is one best solution. We need to give bigots a chance to change their views, and we also need to protect their victims and potential victims, and those things are sometimes mutually exclusive.

Thought experiment: Replace pro-racism with pro-anorexia. Do you feel the same way? Do you think there are positive results of public, easily accessible communities which advocate and provide support for people to further their eating disorders?

Forcing them into hiding isn't what radicalizes them. We dealt with hidden KKK groups in a pretty stable manner for 70+ years. Maybe it made the worst of them even more extreme in their views due to the persecution. But it kept their numbers limited and their opinions from becoming mainstream.

It's giving them an easily accessible echo chamber that radicalizes them and allows them to recruit. The internet has changed everything.

> these are humans, not monsters

Humans can become monsters.

Nazism and fascism metastasize in open societies. If they have a forum, if they're allowed to congregate online or in real life, they self-radicalize.

I'm extremely pro-free-speech, often to a fault -- but that doesn't apply to actual Nazis or other people who promote hate and violence.

This is really toxic shit and can be impossible to control once it gets going.

> I'm extremely pro-free-speech, often to a fault -- but that doesn't apply to actual Nazis or other people who promote hate and violence.

So you're an hypocrite.

Nazis seek to silence others through violence or threats of violence.

If you believe in freedom.of speech you should seek to protect these minority voices that are being silenced by violence, you shouldn't be protecting people making death threats.

They are not the only ones.

But the problem is saying that Nazis, without violence and threats of violence can silenced. And if you silenced people even before the threats, how can you say you're for the freedom of speech?

Everybody is running into the same issue. Even voat is is banning "subreddits". Turns out managing UGC is a really hard problem.

https://voat.co/v/announcements/163288

Yeah, that was a couple of years ago and a clear line in the sand. No illegal content. A good choice. Free speech doesn't include illegal content.

Well, it doesn't to most rational people.

> Free speech doesn't include illegal content

Isn't that kind of begging the question? "Illegal content" is just a bunch of types of expression that the government has decided to ban.

They are all exceptions to free speech which you accept, which brings your free-speech-absolutist stance into question.

You assumed I was a free speech absolutist. I am not. I am not an extremist. Rights must have reasonable restrictions. They are things like libel, slander, child pornography, classified material by a person who has clearance, etc...

Those are unlawful and are reasonable restrictions with very, very few restrictions. They may be published for use in the court, whistle blowing, or otherwise outlined affirmative defenses established by law or precedent.

I am not an extremist. I am not an absolutist. The right has reasonable restrictions. The question is where those restrictions are. I think I've explained where I believe those should be, though they are scattered in a bunch of comments.

> I go there and talk to the White Nationalists. They are pretty much Nazis.

Nazi is a term loosely used today. Actual 3rd Reich Nazis commandeered by America & the Soviet Union after WW2. Wernher von Braun was a committed Nazi & was allegedly a willing participate in WW2 war crimes. See Operation Paperclip for more info.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Operation_Paperclip

> They are scared and powerless, looking for meaning in their empty lives, easily swayed, and not entirely unaware of some of the ironies.

White Nationalism is the natural response to Identity Politics. In a sense, I don't blame them for not taking the high road, since Identity Politics has not been kind toward white people & the majority of white people think they are discriminated against. Btw, every racial group thinks they are discriminated against, so it seems like Identity Politics leaves nobody happy.

http://www.npr.org/2017/10/24/559604836/majority-of-white-am...

This leads to the real problem being Identity Politics. White Nationalism, Black Power, La Raza, various Jewish groups, etc. are all entities that create dissonance in the communities of America. Whether the members have valid points or not, there is a sense of tribalism & the inherent backlash.

While it's healthy to promote heritage, legacy, & the positive aspects of a cultural identity; Identity Politics sows division by redistributing opportunity (which is unfair from a merit standpoint) & transferring wealth via government policy.

If we are to have a society based on hard work leading to just reward, where opportunity is given to all, then Identity Politics has no place in it. Even if Identity Politics were to balance opportunity, the underlying issues within communities are not addressed. Instead, the government manages opportunity leading to a culture of entitlement, laziness, dispute, grudges, & group hostility.

Hmmmmm weren't we talking about Nazis, not identity politics...

What's your definition of a Nazi? It's difficult to talk about a word that has a fuzzy meaning.

To some elements of the the modern left (i.e. Antifa), it seems like anybody who does not agree with certain ideologies, such as "Equality" (in the Identity Politics sense; again "Equality" has a fuzzy meaning), is equated with being a Nazi.

To paraphrase what I wrote above, the White Nationalist (aka "the Nazis") movement only gains followers due to the prevalence of Identity Politics being used to affect policy benefiting certain minority groups. White Nationalism is Identity Politics for White People; seeking to use politics to benefit White People and/or creating a white ethno-state. Are you seeing the connection?

Is this any different from groups such as La Raza, the Black Panthers, or any other ethno-state group? If so, how?

Why is Equality an ideology? Isn't it basic human decency?

Lots of people disagree on the exact type of equality humanity should be aiming for.

> Lots of people disagree on the exact type of equality humanity should be aiming for.

It's a complicated domain. There are other measures of humanity, such as Freedom, Liberty, & Incentives for Fitness (i.e. Morality).

The root question is do the ends justify the means?

Do you want Equality of outcome so much that you are willing to adopt Fascism to achieve those aims? Even then, you won't have Equality. As in Animal Farm...

"All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others"

The only way we can possibly achieve Equality is through death, & even then, the dead are unequally remembered.

re: measures of humanity;

I meant humanity as in the species, not as a quality.

>The root question is do the ends justify the means?

I do not believe the ends will ever justify the means, but that is just my opinion on the matter.

>Do you want Equality of outcome so much that you are willing to adopt Fascism to achieve those aims?

I'm personally satisfied with equality of chance such that everyone has an equal chance of doing what they want but are not guaranteed to succeed either.

I would say equality vote is very important it was missing in this country not long ago. I would say that demonstrates an unyielding vein in this country that seems to be against equality. However, equality was achieved without violence. Why is violence required for your argument?

>I would say equality vote is very important it was missing in this country not long ago.

If you mean equality of vote; it's just another version of equality of chance. Everyone gets a chance to vote and be voted for, the outcome may not be equality.

The other option is equality of outcome, which is antithetical to equality of vote.

>Why is violence required for your argument?

It's not. I recognize that sometimes violence is an inevitable outcome but everyone should be looking for non-violent means that make the least amount of people unhappy.

I don't think I ever made violence necessary for my argument tbh...

> Nazi is a term loosely used today.

Not by me. When I say Nazi, I specifically mean someone who publicly identifies with that group, uses their words, wears their clothes, and carries their flag: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/09/alt-weaken...

If you show up to a rally carrying a Nazi flag, I'll unapologetically call you a Nazi. It's only identity politics in the sense that I'm identifying the politics someone espouses based on the symbols and words they're using.

> since Identity Politics has not been kind toward white people & the majority of white people think they are discriminated against

That's true... before Identity Politics, white people had most of the money and power and authority in this country. But now thanks to Identity Politics, white people have only... well, most of the money and power and authority in this country.

Huh.

White people can practice Identity Politics as well. The ultimate expression of Identity Politics is genocide. It has happened many times & is still happening in some parts of the world.

I hope that you can see that this is not a road that we want to go down.

I thought voat.co was good in theory, a place like Reddit without limitations.

Went back the other day after a few months of not visiting and read through some threads. The amount of racism was really noticeable. Seems to be descending into a place where an individual can let their ignorance and bigotry fester among like-minded peers.

I suppose that's the ugly side of having freedom of expression.

There was a study a while back that suggested that reddit's banning of hate groups really did reduce the amount of hate on reddit. That is: GreatApes didn't go and infect other subreddits, and there was a real reduction in the hate on reddit.

That doesn't mean that everyone didn't go off to voat or whatever, but then they have to rely on voat for growth, and can't piggyback on reddit's MAUs.

Full disclosure: I'm a white male.

With that said, I agree with you. That is, bringing these things into the light will do more good then empowering them by marginalizing them.

As you've experienced, by shining your personal flashlight (so to speak), they wither in the light.

Yes, what they're selling is deplorable. But if you believe that the arc of the universe bends towards justice, then letting them stand in the spotlight will show how weak their arguments are.

On the other hand, pushing them into the shadows is where they find their strength.

p.s. Kudos to you for being so brave.

Meh, the thread is dead so I just wanted to say thanks. I am kinda passionate about certain things like liberty. I'm actually pretty moderate, just verbose.

I'm not scared. They don't scare me. They put on a tough face. I've been in places like Somalia. I've stomped all across South America. I've been all across Latin America. I've done South Africa, most of the Middle East, much of Asia, etc...

American White Nationalists marching in parades scare me exactly none. 14 year old American children copying their older brothers on Voat saddens me, not scares me. It doesn't make me very angry. Not anymore. I'm pretty desensitized to it. It mostly just makes me sad.

Seriously...

Think about it... Put yourself in a White Nationalist shoes. You don't even have any real good movies to watch. Even documentaries end with Hitler always getting his ass kicked. In every movie, you're pretty much the asshole. You're, at best, redeemed before dying or going to prison for life.

Man, a White Nationalist can't even really enjoy American History X.

I make fun of them for reading Mein Kampf. "Oh, you expect it to somehow turn out different this time?" I point out the horrible flaws in their race war logic, about how they are horrible out numbered, unpopular, and simply lack the technical expertise or the logistics to achieve even a remote victory in any meaningful numbers.

I make fun of their horrible use of statistics, inaccurate understanding of science and history, and teach them to speak better English. After all, if you're going to convert people to you're side, you're going to have to speak better English. They really aren't very crafty and it's actually kind of amusing that people think they are a serious threat to the fabric of the country.

But, I digress... I just wanted to let you know that there's no bravery. I'm not scared because there's no reason to be scared. I've really invited a few of them to my home. They have my address and a standing invitation. I'd let them visit but not like hold a Nazi rally at my house. The few I have invited are a few that I believe are able to change.

I wasn't doing anything better with my time.

Being a Nazi isnt a mental illness. Sane people were nazis. Last time Nazis were in power they, in fact, murder quite a lot of mentally ill people.

Nazis also dont need to be in power to kill people. Nazis already kill people. Being organized and in sufficent numbers is enough. Being in power mainly means they have less resistance and more ability to do so.

What's your opinion of people wearing Che T-shirts?

I’ve know a few white surpremacist in my life, same take. All scared, powerless, in bad health, drinking and eating bad, love conspiracies.

All say “You don’t talk like your color, etc, etc.”

I do not endorse or share their views however I believe they have a right to self organize and believe what they do.

That being said, businesses have rights to deny services to whoever they please. Especially people who are bad for business!

Twitter has banned over 350,000 ISIS accounts in the last year or two, and that's happened without Hacker News noticing, as far as I can tell. There's not any stories about it that come up in HN search with as many points as this has now.

How is this situation different?

A loud group of HN users are, apparently, very very sympathetic to the wellbeing of violent racists.

I haven't seen any sympathy for Antifa on HN.

In your opinion, are Antifa racists?

It depends on whether you believe racism is power + prejudice or just prejudice. Since I subscribe to the latter, yes.

Who is Antifa prejudiced against? I'm white but I've never felt like they were any danger to me whatsoever.

One could argue that if you have nice things (e.g. nice car, upscale shop windows) certain groups that are assumed under the antifa umbrella would not hesitate to set fire to your car as a protest against capitalism and the power gradients it strengthens. Examplary incidents are G20 protests in Germany.

Assumed by who to be under the Antifa umbrella?

It's not like Antifa is a structured group with a command structure. They are by definition anarchists.

> Who is Antifa prejudiced against?

It seems like Antifa is prejudiced against people with a lighter skin tone.

> I'm white but I've never felt like they were any danger to me whatsoever.

Because Antifa is a bunch of civilians.

Antifa is prejudiced against fascists, and for good reason.

Yeah, that's the travel brochure. From observing them where I live in San Francisco they seem to be violent against anybody right of center and free speech advocates (who may not be right of center). They are also prejudiced against whites in the same way anti-semites are prejudiced against Jews, just swap Jews for white people in their narrative.

You should probably check your biases.

(The vast majority of antifa are white, btw)

I know Antifa is mostly white. That doesn't change anything in my view, because prejudice based on skin color is racism, no matter the color of the person holding that prejudice.

Ah, so you're simply projecting your own prejudices.

"But but but Antifa are the real facists/racists"

Give me a break.

Antifa and Neo-nazis are both a scourge on our body politic. But since pretty much everyone I know agrees about the neo-nazis and their ilk, I feel a much greater urgency to call out Antifa and its ilk.

Your cognitive dissonance is simply astounding.

Huh? It's "astounding" to dislike groups that riot and attack people/property in the pursuit of political aims I disagree with? Is this some George W. Bush "you're either with us or against us" BS?

So you hate a small group of people with a tendency to riot (black bloc), and you project that hate onto all anti-fascists, because you think that makes them just as bad as actual fascists.

I'll tell you why. Nobody who isn't an ISIS member has ever been called an ISIS member. However the favorite tactic of American left lately has been calling anyone who they disagree with a Nazi. For example most people are probably politically to the right to the likes of Anthony Fantano or Laci Green. And yet both of them have been unironically branded Nazis, as a quick Twitter search will confirm.

So yeah, if you haven't been already, somebody's probably going to brand you a Nazi at some point and call for your banning from every social platform, no matter how "woke" you think you are. It's just a fact of life.

> I'll tell you why. Nobody who isn't an ISIS member has ever been called an ISIS member.

I do seem to recall a certain presidential candidate calling Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama founders of ISIS...

Painting all Muslim or even brown people as ISIS or terrorists is a pretty common rhetorical tactic of the right.

I still can't fathom the gravity of your first sentence. What it seems to imply about the majority of voting Americans and humanity in general. What a mess.

> I do seem to recall a certain presidential candidate calling Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama founders of ISIS...

The clear and obvious intent of that sentence was to imply their policies allowed ISIS to exist, and that they would not exist had the power vacuum not been created. This new literal reading of everything is just another part of the decline of our political discourse.

When Hugh Hewitt suggested that Trump only meant it that way, Trump objected: "No, I meant he's the founder of ISIS," Trump said. "I do. He was the most valuable player. I give him the most valuable player award. I give her, too, by the way, Hillary Clinton."

Trump then explicitly disagreed with that "clear and obvious intent" re a power vacuum:

HH: I don’t. I think I would say they created, they lost the peace. They created the Libyan vacuum, they created the vacuum into which ISIS came, but they didn’t create ISIS. That’s what I would say.

DT: Well, I disagree.

http://www.hughhewitt.com/donald-trump-makes-return-visit/#m...

> Nobody who isn't an ISIS member has ever been called an ISIS member.

Pause for a moment to consider how dumb such an easily falsifiable statement is before posting it to HN.

Do you post this kind of comment for any hyperbolic statement, or only this one in particular? Because you can do it all day long. I'm pretty sure you understood perfectly well what my point is.

Hyperbolic statements about supporting ISIS have been thrown around a lot and used to support things like the "muslim ban" on immigration. There's a serious problem with people being wrongly accused of supporting terrorism. With actual consequences for the wrongly accused.

What was your point anyway?

Amazing ( well, more like sad ) that the first comments I see are "well, we can agree that nazis are bad, but this is a slippery slope, what about BLM, and antifa"

Nazism - The belief ( on pseudoscience i may add )that other races ( a term that has no scientific basis ) are only worthy of extermination ( death, MDK )

BLM - The belief ( on experiences of some in society ), that Black people are not treated the same in their interactions with the government. Main vehicle, in your face protests.

Antifa - an aggressive anti-hate group ( whose tactics, in the view of some, seem to make them a violent group ). The anti-nazis if you will.

Really? Do these things seem REMOTELY equal?

cue in the nitpicking about my definitions...

PS: to be perfectly clear/blunt, since it seems as I suspected people started nitpicking... One group calls for the extermination of HUMAN BEINGS.. the other calls for the extermination of IDEOLOGY... now see the difference?

free speech DOES NOT and HAS NEVER given you the right to call for the extermination of others... that is as clear cut case of "not protected by free speech" as there is.

and yes.. if you take on the name of "nazi" or "national socialism", well, you don't get to redefine those terms in a "wink wink" manner.

I don’t want to nitpick your definitions, but nazism usually refers to the ideology of the NSDAP, a party that was disbanded at the end of WW2. You probably meant to say “violent racism”, in which case the comparison to antifa, and to a lesser extent blm, seems justified (they are linked by violence).

Nazism calls for the death and extermination of other people, antifa and BLM don't.

There are people in this thread claiming antifa and BLM are responsible for most violence in the last few years. The arguments being put forth by 'the other side' are not what you claim, and 'these folks' are going to couch their arguments the way they want.

Of course people are going to question your definitions when you've gone overboard in making one absolutely wrong and the others absolutely right.

There's bad in both sets, which is why banning 1 group could have an effect on the other 2, eventually.

Really? You think that Nazis are unfairly characterised? That's the hill you want to die on?

If by unfairly characterized you mean every white guy and their jewish grandmother having been called a Nazi in the past year, then I might consider it.

Well to be fair, one is entirely bad, jut to be clear thats the Nazis. There may be some rogue elements in the other groups who perhaps would use violence to further their cause but it is not their fundamental belief. Whereas Nazi ideology specifically calls for the extermination of others, neither of the other 2 groups are anywhere remotely near that position.

There are no good Nazis. Sure there were some Nazis in WWII that were Nazis because they were German soldiers and not necessarily because they wanted to exterminate Jews and gypsies, so some of them did good things (not in the name of the Nazis but because they were not entirely evil people) but anyone claiming to be a Nazi today is doing so because they believe in Nazism ideologically and everything that goes into with it.

This is part of the problem with these debates that I've noticed: it's an attempt on the one hand to carry on the debate purely in terms of free speech, abstracted from the contents of any particular ideology.

And yet, part of what makes you "wrong" to oppose speech of particular groups is that you are just as bad as them. That's a judgment of the "wrongness" of a particular ideology, being directly appealed to, to justify a position on free speech.

For some reason that's supposedly not a slippery slope toward widening the scope of "free speech" to include things destructive of democracy.

Funny how the "slippery slope" argument seems to only get used by people resorting to false equivalencies immediately upon commencement of discussions on this topic.

Right, this is precisely my point. I can't count how many times I've seen people defending hate groups resort to slippery slopes and false equivalences. If you don't give hate groups unrestricted access to audiences, they claim 1984 is supposedly right around the corner.

But if you confront them with the slippery slope of equal logical validity which supports the opposing argument, suddenly they're mindful of the dangers of slippery slope arguments.

If democracy can't stand up to a laughable idea then it was a nice run. If we start taking away fundamental human rights the moment we hear some words we don't like, they probably deserve to destroy our democracy.

What's the point of putting an argument out there and then saying not to nitpick your points? Your entire argument is based around definitions.

Of course your definitions are loose and biased, you know that. You're just venting and telling people you don't care if you're wrong.

You're going to have to point out the specific biases you see, because those definitions look quite accurate to me.

It's not a matter of them being equal. It's whether they are categorized under the new policy and will eventually be banned or not. There's no need to have this false dichotomy where one side must be good and one must be bad. It's possible for both sides to be bad, and it's also possible for one side to be more bad than the other.

In the end, my personal opinion is that any form of inciting violence against civilians should be banned, regardless of what your cause is and how much more "in the right" you are than Nazis on a relative scale, which is a pretty low bar.

Definitions aside, you're just listing "groups" or "ideologies" or whatever you want to call them and then acting like you can objectively determine which are acceptable and which are not. That's also what reddit is doing.

Look, I think Nazism is wrong, I think cops should stop shooting black people for no reason, and I don't really know what "Antifa" is. But I think all of these groups should be able to have subreddits.

I could argue about definition here, and based on your own definitions, "Antifa" might be advocating violence. That aside, the real issue here is that this whole thing seems dishonest to me.

Reddit is banning stuff that generates bad PR. They're banning things that aren't mainstream and things that could be portrayed as advocating/glorifying violence. They aren't going to ban a subreddit for advocating war with North Korea/X country. They aren't going to ban a subreddit for encouraging people to beat up Nazis.

Reddit can do what they like, but I think it's a bad call.

What you're basically saying is "No reasonable person would think this", but the world isn't exactly short on unreasonable people. There's already tension with some social networks where countries want them to censor protest groups, report atheist blasphemers, and so on.

Antifa is certainly not anti-hate. They very much hate anyone that doesn't agree with their narrow-minded worldview, and they condone violence against those they hate. While they are anti-nazi, they are aligned with them in their level of bigotry and violence. Violence is never okay.

>Nazism - The belief ( on pseudoscience i may add )that other races ( a term that has no scientific basis ) are only worthy of extermination ( death, MDK )

I would correct that.

Nazis didn't wholly think that. Not all races where "worthy of extermination". For example, black people in the Reich were largely ignored as a non-problem and left to their own devices and people from the Middle-East were recruited as part of the armed forces. "Honorary Aryan" is a thing they did too when someone proved to be useful (Japanese have been declared as such). Just a short history FYI.

Racism is the more correct term, believing any human inferoir based on their race, and some racists demand extermination. Nazis are a specific subgroup of racists.

Why has free speech fallen out of favour with SV? Ironically, it happened rather silently.

It's not just an Eternal September-like phenomenon. The very same people who used to support it not only don't any more but pretend they never did in the first place.

Speaking of the founding fathers, I ask him what he thinks they would have thought of Reddit.

"A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web? I bet they would like it," he replies. It's the digital form of political pamplets.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/02/reddit-c...

There's no shade of gray here? Either you host nazi propaganda, or you're "anti-free speech?"

Reddit, Twitter and others have banned a much wider selection of posters and communities than nazis. Of course they lead with NAZIS! but then it's anything from r/coontown to voting in the wrong thread.

To answer your question, you're not running a bastion of free speech if you ban people for their political opinions.

Fortunately reddit is banning communities that advocate violence, not communities with certain sets of politics. It just so happens that there's a major overlap of political views to inciting violence.

Even the first amendment recognizes that there are limits to free speech- namely when they infringe on other people's rights.

Which political views would those be? Most of the politically-incited violence of the past few years has been left-wing. From Antifa, to the Berkeley riots, to the BLM riots (and BLM-inspired cop executions in Houston), and the "Bernie-bro" attempted assassination.

It was Dallas, not Houston.

>Most of the politically-incited violence of the past few years has been left-wing.

Is this claim based on data or anecdotes?

From the WITS - https://imgur.com/a/nE1of

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

If you know a good replacement, please let me know. That's worldwide data, but even using worldwide data, there just aren't that many violent Nazis out there.

This is going to take me a few minutes...

WITS was discontinued 5 years ago.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/us/politics/theories-mean...

https://www.thenation.com/article/why-does-the-far-right-hol...

[warning, pdf] https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/MurderAndE...

[2015 study; warning, pdf] https://sites.duke.edu/tcths/files/2013/06/Kurzman_Schanzer_...

I'm actually quite certain that antifa has either been infiltrated by agent provocateurs or is populated by useful idiots. I say this as a life long Republican (until March '03).

Edit: Am I supposed to summarize these 4 articles in order to be considered adequate response to a wiki link of an org that was dissolved 5 years ago?

The thing is, free speech must be free, which can include stuff that can be unpleasant. If you want moderate speech, which is what most communities end up for, than that's fine, but it's not free speech.

Free speech is often a double edged sword. For everyone. While it's a nice concept it often carries big burdens that can't be easily tackled.

Reddit used to profess free speech. But the reality is that it's not sustainable as the website grew and started to cater to very different audiences. And as they grew they also needed to start to please advertisers. Which are often times vehemently against a lot of things that would fall under the "free speech"

The answer is easy - because people came face to face with the downsides of free speech, and also how it has been gamed to promote the very worst of humanity, culminating in the election of the most dangerously, maliciously unqualified person to ever lead America.

New evidence can lead to reevaluating opinions.

But there was no reevaluation. It was just silently dropped in favour of "safety."

And of course free speech is being used to promote the worst. You don't need much protection to discuss your favourite brand and their amazing products.

How can there not have been a reevaluation? Any changed policy is the result of reevaluation.

These debates have been happening for a long time on places like Twitter, where the safety vs freedom debate has raged for a long time. And there's a "Reddit bans community" outrage pretty much every year.

A change in policy is just a change in policy. I would expect a reflection on the before and after states, some rationale. Even something as simple as a blog post stating that due to X, Y, Z, Reddit now considers engagement or whatever more important than free speech and will adjust rules and enforcement accordingly.

But there's more to it. It's not only Reddit or some other company. There is a general change in attitude from SV companies towards free speech. Which is what worries me because Reddit is eminently replaceable, Internet culture is not.

The change is not just with companies. You can see the changes here too from the average poster. More shocking than free speech was the turn away from democracy after the Brexit vote went the "wrong way" on this very site.

In the past it was taken for granted that the tech community was mostly liberal. That is no longer the case both here and the country at large.

Exactly: Popular speech requires no protection; the principle of free expression (and free speech laws) protect unpopular and hated speech.

Same reason I would ban someone from my personal forum for spamming racial slurs, violent threats, and all around stupid commentary.

Exactly, because they're being a net negative influence on the quality of discussion on your forum, as decided by you, the proprietor of said forum.

I'm still not sure why people find this so difficult to understand.

I've never believed that free speech meant anyone with a platform or medium was obliged to provide an outlet for any ideology. We are also guaranteed freedom of association, if the owners of reddit find Nazi propaganda repellent, they are free to disassociate themselves from it.

I do understand the growing concern that the internet has reduced the total number of important communication platforms, instead of hundreds of newspapers, radio stations, and TV channels, many people now get their news from a small number of medium - Facebook, Google, Twitter, which increases the risk that alternative points of view will be suffocated.

That's an important problem to solve, but not one so important that I am willing to force them to carry any content, no matter how deplorable, against their will.

> Why has free speech fallen out of favour with SV?

Because Silicon Valley has made its foray into politics. I guess it started all the way back with the first Obama campaign when Google cozied up with him as a candidate. It seemed innocent enough at the time, Google just wanted to get more involved and Obama was the perfect candidate. Then came the lobbying, the healthcare.gov bailout all seemingly innocent enough. Google's just trying to use their influence to be part of the solution, right? Right. But what Google, and SV in general, fails to realize is that politics is never a 1 way street, there is no valve. As SV got involved in politics, politics got involved in SV.

If you'd like another example of this academia is a good place to look. It's hard for us to imagine an apolitical academia, especially since so many fields are political by design, i.e. public policy. But pre WWII these fields didn't exist and you saw a much less political, much more independent academia.

Fundamentally, it is the Eternal September phenomenon - the majority believes in censorship by the majority.

Prominent individuals' opinions have shifted because they are now the establishment. Rather than a VC-funded startup with high upside and low downside, they are now an accounting-based business with high downside and low upside. The majority demands censorship - inevitable with centralized communications technology. And so they're forced to choose between opinions, and might as well go with the popular ones. The rest of the narrative is backrationalization.

I'm thinking, perhaps optimistically, that we are at "Final September" as our less nerdy brethren become accustomed to things we've known for 20 years.

Social media is realizing the new batch of users don't have the stomach for TV-14 content.

So they're bending over backwards to keep their KPIs up, and if that means acting as if Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia so be it.

What tends to happen when toxic subreddits get banned is people who liked them and supported them start whatabouting about edge cases and claim the ban wasn't done "consistently," eagerly pointing out instances of mistaken bans.

It reminds me of the fable, though I forget exactly what it was (edit: Loki's Wager), where someone sought to avoid being beheaded not by claiming innocence but by endlessly disputing where their neck ended and head began.

Hmm. This is going to be interesting. I mean, nearly everyone should be fine with banning Nazis. After all, they're vile and in my opinion don't deserve any place on the world except the inside of a jail cell...

The problem is: where will the line be drawn? What about Black Lives Matter? The more, uh, militant parts of the Antifa movement? Militant animal rights groups (which actually are treated as domestic terrorist groups in some countries!)? All advocate, tolerate or embrace violence in some degree, and as there has been the precedent case of Nazis getting banned, it's going to be difficult.

Of course one can say "we simply don't like Nazis, so we're stricter on them", and I'm fine with that, but I'm not sure if a new (or, for what it's worth, also current government) can't more or less force providers like Reddit (but also Cloudflare and the others who booted Daily Stormer off the net) to revive the "good old Red Scare"...

edit: to clarify, for BLM I don't mean that BLM promotes violence - but there are certainly supporters who believe violence or, in one case, murdering cops, being legitimate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_shooting_of_Dallas_police...). I don't like it myself that the right wing was able to frame BLM as "taking part in the murder", but that image is not going to be corrected soon.

When those groups draw enough ire to affect ad revenue, they will be banned. There are no philosophical debates in the boardrooms of corporations, so let's stop pretending like these moves represent some kind of moral stance.

Can you go into some more detail on how BLM "advocates, tolerates, or embraces" violence?

I'm talking about stuff like this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_shooting_of_Dallas_police...

While I do not see this as being "symptomatic" or representative for BLM, by far not everyone does so, and therein lies the danger in my opinion. People from the right wing, but also so-called "centrists", both already are using this as an excuse to denounce BLM in general...

I think everyone is freaking out about the headline unnecessarily here. From the first paragraph:

has started to implement a new policy to ban content that glorifies and incites violence, and among the first to go were forums for Nazi, racist and white supremacist groups.

They aren't banning Nazis because they are Nazis. They are banning Nazis that glorify or incite violence. And anyone else that glorifies or incites violence. A quick look at /r/blacklivesmatter shows no posts of that nature, but I'm willing to be corrected.

A huge portion of the banned subreddits were zoophilia related too. This was just general housecleaning.

There are circumstances where violence is the only answer. Look at the Arab Spring. In hindsight, Egypt did not fix the fundamental social issues that led to their revolution, but they were faced with a tyrant dictator butchering people in the streets in 2011.

Almost all modern democracies came about through violent disposition of monarchies or dictators, and we only consider those good revolutions vs Nazi revolution or communist revolution being bad because, usually, people only want violence done to prevent violence in the future by the aforementioned murderers on the throne. IE, defend yourself or your neighbor and you are in the right, but if you overthrow the mob just to create your own mafia you are in the wrong.

Look at Catalonia now. Take away political ideology and ask the question - if a majority of Catalonians want independence (and that is a big if), and the Spanish government brings troops to bear upon them, is it immoral of them to organize their own army to fight back? That is inciting violence, but it is in the exact same capacity as revolutions for centuries were organized to overthrow regimes deemed undemocratic or unrepresentative of a people.

Not to say all revolutions are good. The American Confederacy was abjectly bad because their motivation for secession was to continue to own human beings as property. Or how Caesar overthrew the Roman Senate to become a tyrant himself. But unless you categorize the American, French, Spanish, etc revolutions of their times as all being "bad" because they were "inciting violence" then it is not a black and white issue where you can just say "we ban the inciting of violence because were being moral" and wipe your hands clean of it. Its way more complicated than that.

>The problem is: where will the line be drawn?

Intolerance, you draw the line at Intolerance. If BLM, PETA, Antifa want people of other race/class/sexual orientation harmed in any kind of way, sure go ahead and ban them. If on the other hand they want fair treatment, equality or reprieve from targeted brutality, listen to them and see how we as a society can address their concern. If they resort to violence, arrest them and treat them like you would treat a criminal.

It is not really that hard. Right to free speech does not really mean right to say anything anywhere without any consequence.

The irony in this whole thing is, the more tolerant you are to an inherently intolerant ideology like white-spremacy, the less tolerant we become as a society.

> Intolerance, you draw the line at Intolerance.

Not that simple! "Intolerance: unwillingness to accept views, beliefs, or behaviour that differ from one's own".

Does unwillingness to accept Nazi ideology make you intolerant?

>Does unwillingness to accept Nazi ideology make you intolerant?

Yes, Intolerant to intolerance.

Yes, it does.

> Intolerance, you draw the line at Intolerance.

That doesn't work. There are lots of people who are extremely intolerant to people who hold views that weren't very controversial a decade or two ago and are still widely held today; case in point, Brendan Eich (and the intolerant campaign that got him fired). "Unacceptable intolerance" is something that can have very different definitions from one person to the next, so it's not a useful test.

> It is not really that hard.

Drawing the line about what the limits of free expression are in an open society is a very hard problem. Saying it isn't is flippant and frankly wrong.

> The irony in this whole thing is, the more tolerant you are to an inherently intolerant ideology like white-supremacy, the less tolerant we become as a society.

That isn't true either, it can also show societal confidence that ideas like white-supremacy are wrong and that the light of scrutiny will make them look foolish.

I don't want to argue about this on HN, because I don't think this is the right forum. You can argue all you want about how X was discriminated for having Y opinion and how it was not alright. I may agree with you on some instances, however, under no circumstance is is alright to:

1) Own another person 2) Discriminate based on something that people have no control over. Like race, sexual orientation, Gender etc. 3) Exploit somebody's helplessness for your profit.

No matter what age you grew up in, modern society has no place for such ideas. There may be other things that are debatable or in the gray area, but Nazi ideology isn't one of them.

If you don't want to talk about anything that's fine. However, this discussion is about speech about those ideas, not their actual implementation. You don't really seem to be distinguishing between the two.

Why are your morals the ones that deserve free speech?

Because wanting to own other humans, killing people because of their race, gender or sexual orientation are not morals.

moral: adjective - Concerned with the principles of right and wrong behavior and the goodness or badness of human character.

noun - a person's standards of behavior or beliefs concerning what is and is not acceptable for them to do.

Actually, those are morals.

There are cultures and religions around the world that live life differently from you. They believe there should be strong gender norms, have strict codes of conduct for how to live their lives, and expect and enforce those standards on everyone in the community. Do you think they should be silenced?

Black Lives Matter is very specifically an anti-violence organization. The Root has an article debunking the idea they're somehow comparable: http://www.theroot.com/for-white-people-who-compare-black-li...

Nevertheless, the end of the day, privately owned websites on the Internet are not "free speech zones". Each site sets their own rules. There are numerous sites out there where Nazis are welcome (Voat, Gab, the various chans), all available completely free and readily accessible to the public.

When they want to discredit BLM, pundits (e.g. Hannity) just show the video from a few years ago where there are black people chanting, "pigs in a blanket, fry'em like bacon" while marching. They play it over and over again and claim these people are all violent. Yes, it's illogical, no, they won't stop.

It really doesn't matter what your group does, it matters how the public views your group.

If your group is actually violent or not doesn't matter at all.

I think for the intents and purposes of the dicussion, when mentioning BLM it can be safely assumed people usually refer to the violent part fo the group and not the non-violent, peaceful/pacifist part of the group.

> After all, they're vile and in my opinion don't deserve any place on the world except the inside of a jail cell...

Whoa, whoa, stop right there. Who's going to jail? These Nazis are kicked off Reddit, not into some jail cell. Nobody's going to jail, unless they actually punch somebody or something.

(Are there people who calls for throwing all Nazis to jail? Well, of course there are, and that's nothing new. There are even people who want to throw all $(choose your ethnic group) out of America, or so I've heard.)

The slippery slope is not that slippery, after all.

> where will the line be drawn?

It's a difficult question. As much as I'm for free speech and against censorship, I still have the feeling that a line has to be drawn somewhere. For instance, we can't reasonably authorize Isis propaganda on public forums, can we?

Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, I suppose that calls to violence are already forbidden. I'm not familiar with US free speech laws, but I remember that Martin Shkreli has been jailed over some stupid joke on twitter.

> For instance, we can't reasonably authorize Isis propaganda on public forums, can we?

I think we totally can and should. We just need to invest in the infrastructure to identify and respond to it.

Antifa subreddits will be removed?

So they banned Far_Right but https://www.reddit.com/r/farleft/ is ok?

What a cool place Reddit is! /s

Maybe, just maybe, it's because the "far left" subreddit doesn't have content calling for ethnic cleansing?

Just saying.

No, they want to cleanse the bourgeoisie, they're very multi-ethnic in their genocides. And not all of the far left is colorblind, we generally consider people who want to ethnically cleanse white people as far left.

They specifically advocate for inclusion of races, and a destruction of a class system. Nowhere in this does "color" or "ethnicity" make its way into this.

So a bloody bolsheviks style revolution is ok as long as they do it inclusively?

Intellectual dishonesty is a bad look.

Please point me to posts on those subreddits calling for a bloody revolution and the killing of the bourgeoisie? There's been this new meme circulating on right-wing circles that if you are not a card-carrying alt-righter then you must be - by necessity - Che Guevara's second coming. It's pretty disingenuous, and quite silly to be honest.

No, there's a meme among normal people that if you violently riot and attack people and property when you don't get your way politically, you're a nuisance to democratic society and have more in common with the Red Guard than soldiers who stormed the beaches in WWII.

Sure. That's exactly what's happening right now (in the Fox News/Breitbart/The_Donald parallel universe)

Please point to where you think they're advocating bloody revolution, genocide or ethnic cleansing of white people.

I'll be waiting patiently.

Maybe take it as a mark of grim respect.

Far left and anarchist groups are generally considered to be unsuccessful in the arc of modern history, with even China partially adopting western aspects of governance to remain competitive. Their successes are almost entirely in appealing to moderates and with heavy appeasement of capitalism. One of the most famous attempt at true communism ended spectacularly, with a bulk victimization of many marginalized people who had been coaxed out of the shadows by a regime that failed to hold power to protect them.

Far right groups are taken much more seriously, because a conflict they started and escalated blighted an entire continent.

If it seems unfair that it's okay to make a video game (admittedly: a very fun, enjoyable game) about killing nazis by the dozen is pop culture but games about killing antifa can't even get news coverage, maybe that's true. It's because the victors of the last conflict against organized fascism accept violence as a constant reaffirmation that the binding substrate of civilization is democracy. You're "in-tribe" if you're on that train. If you seek to subvert or destroy democracy, that triggers violent a rejection by most of the western world.

A topical example: It's generally regarded as somewhat funny that Richard Spencer gets punched. Technically, it's illegal and we accept violence is no way to treat citizens in principle. Yet a lot of people in the US do hold racist views even if you take a very narrow definition of racism, and we don't see mass punching at scale. Spencer's singled out because he's publicly part of the ideology proposing the subversion and destruction of democracy. This turns off many of the typical restraints we'd exercise. Bannon and Yarvin probably need to be cautious of punch sqads as well as their profile raises.

Perhaps unsurprisingly (and imo, justifiably) so. As a general rule, America bends its own rules when it perceives something taking advantage of said rules. That's not a new thing, and it explains a lot of the legislative dithering that we have seen over the decades and a lot of the political rhetoric we see playing out today.

But I really do want to stress how much fun it is to have pop cultural license to go back and play a mindless game like Wolf2 for a bit.

> Far left groups are generally considered to be unsuccessful in the arc of history

Um, what? China, the Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, just to name a few of the more famous ones. Tens of millions killed in the name of a communist utopia.

China is a more complicated story, I think.

But North Korea and pre-Stalin Communist Russia are not regarded as "successful" and Post-Stalin Russia is reasonably rejected as a tenable example of leftism. Cuba, I think, is looked upon more favorably now than when it was more centrally managed?

Is "not real communism" still the go-to counterpoint? Can we excuse the failures of Nazism and fascism by saying they weren't real fascism? I don't think so. Judge political ideologies by their results, not their lofty intentions.

The failure of Communist Russia was in losing power to someone who used fundamentist rhetoric to sieze power and then subvert that system.

Stalin's late Russia was something quite different from where it started. In much the same fashion that we recognize China's form of government fundamentally changed TO Communism we can recognize that it lost hold.

And if you need a source of negative propaganda about Communist government, look no further than China. A sexual harassment crisis it's illegal to talk about, systemic religious and ethnic persecution, a 2 tiered oligarchic economic system, dark but weighty rumors of involuntary organ harvesting... You name it, they got it, where "it" is bad outcomes.

I'm always surprised that there aren't more proponents of modern, IT-informed government systems in our community.

I had to do a double take that the KirinDave talking about politics on HN is the same one I watched years back play and manage a Minecraft server with the Yogscast. What a small world!

Yeah I used to make modpacks for them. It got boring. But I do still stream Minecraft irregularly.

These are the rules posted on /r/farleft:

- No harassment or degrading of any leftist tendency or individual comrades. Debate and disagreements are fine, as long as they remain respectful.

- Sexism, racism, ableism, homophobia, xenophobia, and all other forms of reactionary bigotry have no place here.

- Liberals and other non-leftists are allowed if they are willing to learn about the far-left and should be welcomed.

- Keep the edge to a minimum.

- Shit-posts are allowed, just not shit-shit-posts. Having a different opinion is not a reason to downvote.

- Don't be a jerk.

Doesn't seem like a violent place. Why do you think it merits a ban? Just because of the name?

If you dig into the comments on each of the subs, you will see it isn't just left vs right.

One has doxing/harrasment/violence, the other doesn't.

If they advocate violence.

Clearly the solution is to corralle all fascists onto one big fenced-in echo chamber. What could go wrong?

Possibly, hopefully a very impressive implosion.

There goes /r/The_Donald/

No, they're still there, and no, everyone who disagrees with you isn't a Nazi.

> we will take action against any content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people

This also means that people who encourage you to "punch a Nazi" or that there's nothing wrong with punching a Nazi/racist should also be banned.

That place promotes violence and hate on a daily basis.

If by hate you mean people with dissenting opinions.

This has some examples: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/53d5xb/what-is-rt...

Every time I've been to that subreddit, it only takes perusing the comments for 5 minutes to find way worse stuff. From people being openly racist, to people calling for Hillary Clinton to be raped, etc. Bunch of great people, really :\

I browse T_D frequently and I have not once seen someone calling for HRC to be raped. I'm not saying it never happened but I'm curious 1) how upvoted the commment was and 2) how you've glanced at the site for 5 minutes and saw something that I missed after having browsed the site since 2015

The post was on the front page of r/t_d, so I'm assuming it was fairly upvoted, and had plenty of comments from people supporting the spirit of the message. I remember linking it somewhere else on Reddit, to show just how vile the subreddit was (it was during one of the many discussions like this that try to portray r/t_d as a "high energy subreddit for fans only!")

Nope.

Not at all.

/r/conservative is perfectly fine, as is /r/politics.

/r/The_Donald is effectively 4chan.

Care to give some evidence for your claims?

Go to the sub and click the first post you see.

Evidence provided.

edit: Here is the first non-stickied post I found.

https://g.redditmedia.com/lWzOghJ9C76p2rMmU3CDWhHTtojbXJ9vlu...

> Here is Hillary Clinton shitting herself on 9/11

> Did PETA publicly complain about the handling of that cattle?

> THE SIDE OF BEEF MARRIED A RAPIST!!!

> Hope she had her shitting pants on

First post seen at the top of the front T_D page is this: http://dailycaller.com/2017/10/26/the-last-time-hillary-had-...

Which is making fun of a HRC tweet from last october which said "Happy Birthday to this future president".

Doesn't seem very hateful to me.

edit: Basd on your edit, I'm curious what you find hateful about this? HRC passed out on 9/11/16 and was dragged into a waiting van. There is a longstanding meme (in meme-years) about HRC being thrown into the van "like a side of beef", which explains some comments.

Yes, the comments are crass, but is being crass the same thing as "promoting violence and hate"?

The mod stickies are calmer.

Here is the first non-stickied.

https://g.redditmedia.com/lWzOghJ9C76p2rMmU3CDWhHTtojbXJ9vlu...

There was a T_D user who faked a knife attack. He said it was a black person who did it because "he was white". He immediately posted his bloody hand on T_D and said "apparently I look like a NAZI".

It was later found out that he made it up. He cut himself.

He did it intentionally to stir up hate for black people. The entire sub is effectively 4chan. Crass jokes, fake news, subliminal degenerate brainwashing.

It is a breeding ground for people to hate blacks and brown people.

Do you have a link? I can't find anything after some cursory googling. Also, how did T_D respond when the hoax came out?

Also, do you see a problem with one person doing something bad, and then blaming a whole group?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/28/neo-nazi-sta...

I remember seeing the user post the image on T_D immediately. Can't find it now, he likely deleted it. It was highly upvoted.

I don't remember seeing a "we are sorry about the fake story" post.

> do you see a problem with one person doing something bad, and then blaming a whole group?

I am not saying everyone is lying. I am saying the sub exists to find incredibly colorful stories that center around white people being attacked and victimized to stoke hatred against all non-whites. Muslims/blacks/mexicans/etc.

Here's some threads I can find about it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/6wn655/remember...

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/6wp8p6/what_a_l...

Upvoted quotes: "What a fucking idiot.", "What an Imbecile.", "Did he just commit self-harm just to get attention? What a retard.", "That's pathetic. Disavowed.", "On the bright side, someone stabbed him."

If you think that is what T_D is about, you obviously haven't spent much time there.

Crap, tried to reply to your message and replied to another one instead. Check my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15563490

Do you have an example? Last time this was suggested on HN I held my nose and had a look.

Didn't find any. In fact I found some healthy self-policing in among the muck.

r/the_donald is not just about "disagreeing" it's literally the worst kind of ecochamber of conspiracy theories, veiled (and sometimes not-so-veiled) racism and constant calls to action against "the left". They are such an ecochamber that 90% of the time they speak on memes that nobody else understands (or cares to understand.)

Communities developing their own language and shared understanding is nothing new.

Yes, sometimes racist things are said, but are frequently downvoted or pushed back on. Unless, of course, if you considering being, say, anti-Islam as "racist".

The most common thing I see is that T_D users accept all races and immigrants, but only if they conform to western ideals(say, by not killing gay people or stoning women) and american culture.

Would you say being "anti-Jewish" is racist or bigoted?

I think either word could work

But somehow you don't consider being "anti-Islam" (read: anti-Muslim, because people with that set of prejudices is not going to be threading too thin) racist?

"jewish" has, at least historically, had both an ethnic and religious component; which is why anti-jewish could potentially be described as racist, depending on the time and circumstance.

this is not really the case for islam or christianity; use of "racism" there is a typical "postmodernist race theorist" fallacy used to shut down discussion and avoid addressing arguments.

r/neoliberal is a globalist echo chamber, r/blackfellas is a black racist echo chamber, r/latestagecapitalism is an anticapitalist echo chamber, and r/sandersforpresident is a Bernie Sanders echo chamber.

Reddit's voting system is designed to form echo chambers around a single topic. Why would Donald Trump's subreddit _not_ be an echo chamber?

I'm sure these bans will be totally fair and unbiased.

Reddit can ban whoever they way from their site, and people will simply either have to accept it or move to another site.

Well of course they can.

It's going to be interesting to see how the rights of free association evolve as platforms kick more and more people off of them.

On one hand, most people agree that platform owners get to make the rules for their platforms.

On the other hand, some bans might amount to discrimination based on protected classes.

The most interesting thing imo is that political activities and affiliations are protected classes in California, theoretically political bans are violations just like bans on religion / race. We'll see how it pans out.

https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/78p7bz/update_on_s...

Though Nazis have taken over the conversation, they did ban a bunch of fetish subreddits too.

And yet this is still online: https://www.reddit.com/r/sjwhate/comments/73h7mx/i_fuck_sjws...

While shitty and mean, they aren't advocating for violence in that post.

Do you think mean posts should be outlawed?

I know it is flagged but I want to thank the mods for not truly killing it. It was mostly civil. The mods were pretty decent, and deserve our thanks.

For the most part, the comments were pretty good too. I read them all. ;-)

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