Ideas are the only counter to other ideas and how we communicate those idea is via speech. Suppression only invites martyrdom on the behalf of those suppressed, increasing their credibility.
There's no plausible mechanism by which talking about an idea more and more, makes it disappear. That's all an idea is: something to talk about.
Now, if you want to argue that no ideas should ever disappear, go ahead, but don't cloak it in "antiseptic" language. Antiseptic kills things. If you're talking about antiseptic for ideas, you're talking about killing ideas.
The algorithm will always favor manipulation...
honestly, i just wish users would go back to small communities and indy publishers... It's easy for me to find a music forum or jeep forum with people i want to hangout with but on facebook those that can game/manipulate get the most views and its ALWAYS selling controversy...
I think no one disagrees that it "works" insofar as it stops the bad person from getting their bad ideas out there. Opponents of deplatforming generally argue that the long-term reaction to the deplatforming is worse than the problem the bad person's ideas were causing. Better to counter the bad ideas with good ideas to do long term good.
Not just that the reaction is worse, that the deplatforming erodes the spirit of free speech. I believe free speech is an important part of democracy.
Nobody is listening to his ideas enough to give them underserved credibility.
Defending free speech means defending those we disagree with, and maybe even hate.
People without platforms are still free to speak. If dang banned me from HN I could still go stand on the corner and read my posts aloud and no one would arrest me.
Free speech does not mean I'm entitled to someone else's platform.
You're thinking of the first amendment, there is a nuanced difference between that and the general principle of free speech.
I'll assume you happened to not be aware of this, but there are lots of people online who refuse to acknowledge that difference and continue to spout the "entitled to someone else's platform" persuasion meme, which is kind of what this whole discussion is about: power, or altering the course of future events. If one's ideas & principles are sound, disingenuously censoring opposing ideas shouldn't be necessary. I believe many pro-censorship people know this explicitly (but would never speak it out loud) and others "sense" it subconsciously.
Is the difference between the First Amendment and the moral principle of free speech really that nuanced?
It seems to me one has to be thinking strictly in terms of a single country, a single period of human history, a single document in order to conflate the First Amendment with the moral principle of freedom of speech. This is a very narrow view.
It depends if you're trying to win elections or internet arguments, or to ensure a healthy marketplace of diverse ideas exists, because that is the best way we know of to find the best solutions to problems. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube are where modern people "congregate" and get their "information". Cutting someone off of these platforms dramatically lowers the chances that anyone will hear them, that's the entire point of the action. Claims that dismiss this as no problem "because someone else's platform" are not just saying nothing illegal has happened, they are also essentially saying a free marketplace of ideas is not valuable. This is a very new development in western countries, and it's pretty easy to see how far gone most people are already, even on more intelligent forums like this. Partisan politics trump almost everything on certain topics, even one as important as this.
But if a platform wants to be a "common carrier" and not a publisher with all the responsibilities thereof, it doesn't get to make the distinction, so actually in a very real sense, you are entitled to use the platform of anyone who wants to be a common carrier, by definition.
If you send something controversial via USPS, they don't have any liability for it, and only in very exceptional circumstances would it be intercepted in transit. If they were responsible for everything they carried, the postal service would look very, very different. If it's illegal you can be busted at either end but the postal service itself doesn't care.
Am I being censored or deplatformed? ;-)
I'll see myself to the corner...
I understand that there's a different level of consequence we're talking about here (legal vs comment deletion) but how we treat child porn is the extreme for intolerance and I think it's safe to say child porn is less than it would be in the more "tolerant" alternative. And I actually do mean think, I don't have evidence, and I don't know, so if there's evidence otherwise that some society accepted child porn with the caveat of "this is bad" always being placed beside it and then saw it's usage and distribution drop I would find that pretty damn compelling case.
I would point to other comparables though. What causes a decrease in smoking? Did putting health warning labels on cigarette boxes decrease smoking? How did that compare to banning commercials and removing indoor smoking?
For example, despite what anyone thinks about what Trump says (I think he's an idiot and a clown), he does occasionally say something that isn't complete BS (please don't make me try to find such an example).
You just can't go down that route and expect a good outcome. In fact, I would argue that you're going to end up with the opposite result that you intended because you'll, inadvertently, end up giving more attention to idiotic ideas than the ideas actually deserve.
Gab itself has been deplatformed to a degree, Google and Apple banned their mobile apps and their DNS registrar threatened to yank their domain over certain user posts.
I suppose it depends one what you goal with deplatforming is. If it's convincing people that the ideas that people like Alex Jones and organisations like Black Lives Matter (they're in the article as someone who have similarly been affected) are wrong or hateful then I think it will fail.
Consider the fact that deplatforming (primarily of right wing speakers) in the US became significantly more prevalent around 2014, and 2015. It didn't help in the 2016 election.
A lot of holders of bad ideas have no interest in rational debate. For those people, sunlight is an energy source, not an antiseptic.
When ISIS posts a video of a beheading, there isn't a lot of reasonable discussion going on in the comment section.
I doubt the founding fathers were inviting Quislings to their debating societies during the revolutionary war.
Equating ISIS with supremacists is equating a nuclear bomb with an M80 firecracker.
Viruses thrive through exposure to new hosts.
See, you can prove anything using an analogy.
The question is, should "bad speech" be amplified, promoted, propogated, broadcast, surfaced, and repeated, ON PURPOSE; just so it can get rebuked, debunked, dismissed, and exposed?
(I agree with you, the answer is closer to "The Remedy to Bad Speech is More Speech ... Marketplace of Ideas" however, the question being discussed is more akin to "Theres a limited amout of space at the front page, and people have limited amounts of attention to give, WHO gets the megaphone, and for how long". Its the inverse of "the robust debate principle recognizes that sometimes in a crowd of speakers it is necessary to turn down the volume of certain loud and clamorous speakers in order to give others a chance to speak." Facebook and the algorithm DO DECIDE who to turn the volumn up on, who to promote to the top. They already arent neutral, they already exhibit preference and bias for certain ideas.)
Others are arguing that this is flipping the argument, BUT we are talking about algorithmic placement moreso than true censorship. If someone is allowed to post something but it NEVER makes it into someone elses Newsfeed, is it as good as censored?
There's some evidence deplatforming works:
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbp9d/do-social-...
> “We’ve been running a research project over last year, and when someone relatively famous gets no platformed by Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, there's an initial flashpoint, where some of their audience will move with them” Joan Donovan, Data and Society’s platform accountability research lead, told me on the phone, “but generally the falloff is pretty significant and they don’t gain the same amplification power they had prior to the moment they were taken off these bigger platforms.”
> There’s not a ton of research on this, but the work that has been done so far is promising. A study published by researchers at Georgia Tech last year found that banning the platform's most toxic subreddits resulted in less hate speech elsewhere on the site, and especially from the people who were active on those subreddits.
https://mashable.com/article/milo-yiannopoulos-deplatforming...
The idea that if you just say the right, True (TM) thing then people will flock to it so not only naive it's so obviously wrong if you look at a laymen's perspective on basically any subject. It's also just a waste of time for the subjects typically in question. The communication of ideas has changed. It's a chaotic free for all. We've over done it. It's time to have a serious and reasonable conversation about the current state we find ourselves in, least we shoot ourselves in the foot with blind, headstrong optimism about ideals that don't much the reality of human nature.
In before someone references 1984 blindly and displays the ever-popular dystopia-prediction fetish that's so prevalent in these conversations.
I don't need to prove that to you. Even in your own odd request, you didn't even make the feeble attempt to pretend that you're running a popular media platform. We are talking about extremely popular platforms that inherently give credence to any view points espoused on those platforms, view points that can have far reaching effects. To give you a very specific area that we're touching on, it's internet demagoguery.
Editorialization is not censorship, nutter.
The platforms ubiquity makes them the Hydes Park / Public Square of the modern age- if anything they should be regulated to be content neutral rather than be encouraged to silence certain viewpoints.
If we actually had a government run system, we could ensure things like accountability for your ideas that you self publish in such a public square because the government itself would have the servers that contain the data. The constitution would limit the government from censoring this platform, but it wouldn't limit the government from implementing more effective methods of processing abuses of free speech such as libel by having an immediate record of what was said. My main point here is that it's easier to agree on what if any free speech limitations should apply if there isn't this proxy layer of "Well corporations can do whatever they want with their servers" and "Well these laws don't apply to what they said because nobody is speaking in the domain that freedom of speech applies to"
We do! Buy a domain, point to your home server, and go to town. Any unlawful messages you spew will be met with seizure of your domain and/or servers, but otherwise you're free to promote or discuss any ideas you see fit.
If you're talking about a government-run social network, that's an interesting idea. I was actually talking about this with someone a few days ago, but with regard to a government run (or government funded) news/journalism publication that reported on facts (as opposed to felings and clickbait).
I think these government-run services would eventually become victim to people's calls for them to be removed...either they are too biased, or not biased enough. A social network in particular...I cannot imagine a social network built and run by the government that ANYBODY would actually want to use.
I find it curious that those who apparently are in such a rush to suppress Bad (TM) ideas adopt the worst ideas of fascists in order to do so.
We've always relied on editorial control for the most part in all of our mediums to make sure that the information being disseminated is reasonably accurate and fit for public consumption. It's not a fascist idea and has absolutely nothing to do with fascism or any type of propaganda for any political party. There's no need to be so absurdly hyperbolic over what is quite frankly, a common sense mechanism when dealing with the proliferation of ideas.
We know that disinformation spreads faster than the truth on several new, internet media platforms these days. The onus is on the people who would so eagerly disregard common sense filters that have been time tested, for them to prove that the danger and harm currently being caused by this new wave of disinformation in every single subject matter will be worth it now, tomorrow, and for the foreseeable future. Take the following:
* Vaccines, health.
* Environment
* Economics
* General politics.
In which subject are the ideals your espousing helping us? Because in each of those subjects I can point you towards real life, damaging consequences that have come about because of unfettered Bad (TM) ideas that spread over modern mediums.
This isn't a theoretical problem. It's happening right now, today.
(setup - 1950 but we have facebook/twitter/youtube/instagram)
Most of the population thinks that people promoting same sex relationships are just hell bent on destroying the good and wholesome America and demand that the leaders of LGBT of the time be deplatformed from that twitter/facebook/youtube/etc.
To answer the heart of your point: any kind of editorial/screening system isn't perfect. We'll get things wrong. We always have, always will. It's still better than what's happening right now on these mediums where we know some portion of the population are "getting things wrong" and we're just allowing it to happen in a free fall fashion. "Do nothing" is never the answer, never has been and probably never will be.
To address your specific example: It's not based on what most of the population thinks. Qualified opinions are a thing. We can talk about what makes a qualified opinion, with your example or any other subject. Notably we see these types of opinions in your example gaining momentum because we're allowing certain groups of people unfettered access to an audience. It's really a bad example in my opinion, but I understand and sympathize with the point you're trying to make.
Unfiltered, unstructured information from unqualified sources tends to prey on our darker nature more often than it appeals to our better senses as people. To kind of expand on implementing practical systems around how we actually function as humans, in a lot of ways the "bad" part of human nature is why we've structured many western governments with explicit separation of powers with checks and balances. There are just some things we gravitate towards as humans that just aren't "good." James Madison in fact said the state was just a reflection of human nature, for the previous reasons. In a lot of ways, we have historically treated information dissemination in the same manner, checking and preventing the worst of our nature when broadcasting and consuming information via editorial controls and trusted, proven sources.
Who qualifies the opinion? The opinion of those that wanted gays muzzled in 1950s were very qualified opinions.
Hell, during the Obama's first term in the office he publicly opposed gay marriage as the President of the United States.
Notice that your comment is being slowly greyed out and my question is already in the negative with you being the only person who actually responded rather than attempt to downvote it into oblivion. And this is on HN, not Reddit.