A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
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And this is why I find the trend towards deplatforming to be altogether _exciting_. I haven't been this _excited_ about potential changes in how we communicate since I first installed Skype; when it was still P2P.
There hasn't been this much social pressure on individuals with technical ability for some time, and sufficiently many appear to be attempting to turn that pressure into new ways to communicate. Safely, securely, and in a way that is resilient to outside attempts to silence.
Our current state of affairs is distressingly centralized; we have but a handful of _enormous_ silos of personal information and communication, and progressively less independent sources of content distribution. While it may seem a non-issue when it's ethnic supremacists and fascists being silenced; it's a situation precariously vulnerable to abuse by the powerful. These experiments in decentralized communication and data storage couldn't come any sooner.
A platform's identity and ability to attract an audience are determined by the activities they accept / cultivate, not vice versa. Infowars wanted to be on Facebook because it made it easier to sell your grandparents vitamin supplements, but Facebook felt that leaving them on make it a place families (and their grandparents) won't visit. Gab would like to use Stripe or Paypal because they are trusted payment providers, but those networks felt they'd stop being trusted payment providers if they let Gab stay on.
And there's plenty of reason to think they're right: super-permissive platforms exist and work (4chan et al.), they just don't attract the same broad audience. When people complain about being deplatformed, they're just saying "the platforms that accept me aren't popular enough". I'm glad our internet is enough of a distributed commons that many platforms are broadly accessible -- but nobody owes you an audience at the most popular ones.
This is perfect.
I thought the media distortion was bad in the 80's/90's. Now I realize I didn't realize how much worse it could get.
The lesson of history is clear: You shouldn't let rule of law break down. Media and the judiciary should remain impartial and not push an agenda. Suppressing expression while letting the extremists commit violence in the streets just makes things far worse.
Interesting. Something I might say: given that the reigning government was supporting this stuff, as well as an animated and violent mob from the general population; and given that the "deplatforming" under discussion is done via social pressure, corporate action, and/or conceivably government intervention: how would any kind of mechanism for "deplatforming" have done anything to stifle this RTLM? If anything, such a mechanism would have been directed at dissenting voices.
"One of the major reasons that RTLM was so successful in communication was because other forms of news sources such as televisions and newspapers were not able to be as popularized because of lack of resources." Apparently there was a dissenting radio station, but Wiki says "Radio Muhabura had a much smaller audience, probably because it broadcast in English instead of Kinyarwanda", which is unfortunate. So I guess there was no need for the government to deplatform any dissenting voices, because there weren't any significant ones. Therefore, one could argue that the Rwandan genocide is an illustration of what might happen if the ruling party+mob manage to deplatform everyone who disagrees with them. :-)
What are you calling a breakdown of the rule of law here? Which law is supposed to decide who Facebook is required republish?
What are you calling the media here? In this case people are writing their own content, and the folks being deplatformed definitely and unapologetically had an agenda.
What would impartial possibly mean? We are talking about publication of opinions, not journalism or science.
As for being "exposed and argued down", there will always be folks who won't stop an atrocious argument. They didn't sign up for a productive synthesis of ideas, and nobody else signed up for their boorishness and abuse, so it's up to the listener to walk away - as these platforms are doing. That's not suppression of expression, it's standing up for the value of your own time and community. If there is a backlash, maybe it will be more constructive than the original trolling was.
What happens when you or those who share your opinions don't get accepted by the popular platforms?
...Actually, that may mean they get more involved in politics, so that's kind of scary.
E.g. breastfeeding on Facebook, lgbt content generally, the drone strike reporting app on iOS, sex work adverts after FOSTA etc.
Then there's the illegal stuff like fraud websites, ddos control domains, and anything to do with copyright infringement.
It's noticeable which people only show up to defend far right speech on the internet.
Many people pointed towards lgbt content being taken down and said: "Look, you guys brought this on yourselves." The implication being that some vocal lgbt people were pushing for censorship of other people, but it ended up being used against themselves.
I think the solution is to require platforms over a certain size to allow all of these things. Platforms are not held responsible for many things due to being platforms. The government could amend those rules and say that if they want to be protected under those rules and they are larger than X then they should allow freedom of expression/speech.
Platforms such as Twitter, reddit, and Facebook are already treated by many like public spaces. Perhaps this would fall in line with their.
> Many people pointed towards lgbt content being taken down and said: "Look, you guys brought this on yourselves."
Nah, LGBT content being taken down or deemed obscene despite not being explicit or pornographic is the default state of society and has only recently (past 20 years) been more permissive.
This is true and you might think that recent history would give the left pause about calling for increased censorship, but that does not appear to be the case.
The public street is the broader net where everyone can have a voice and decentralization is probably a more useful strategy. If you feel strongly that free speech on the internet is essential don't ask facebook to tolerate deplorables while others demand it kick them off.
When the deplorables kick puppies and blow up children you will certainly lose the argument.
Instead consider building or contributing to decentralized communications that are challenging to block under the ideal that a platform where its hard to block deplorables from communicating with one another is also free of interference for more savory communications.
I'd say these are the online equivalents of pseudo-public spaces[0], "[spaces] that seem public but are actually owned by corporations"
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jul/24/revealed-pseu...
Gab very much wants you to believe they're just a Twitter alternative with no intrinsic slant (though they've been overt about being a home for nationalists in their own materials). But that's just a grift.
"It's noticeable which people only show up to defend far right speech on the internet."
Then platforms got kicked off the platform platforms "build your own platform platforms"
What reason is there to assume those platform platforms will not get kicked off the platform platform platforms?
These people are not arguing in good faith.
The issue, as I'm reading the parent comment, is that it's beginning to appear that no one is willing to stand up and say "look, it's not that I support this or that view, it's just that, well, if people are going to spout nonsense it might as well be here where can all observe them", because doing so would be so against current social normal it would be irresponsible.
"come a little closer mouse so that I may better catch you and eat you..."
Why on earth should society bend over backwards to aid spoiled deliberate attention-seekers when there are 7 billion other people who are actually trying to resolve problems that need our actual attention.
These "malingerers" are using up valuable medical staff's time they could be spending upon actually ill patients!
As you suggest, they have no individual legal obligation to serve a business that may cause bad press/high risk/whatever. But when you can enough of them pointing in the same direction, it creates the chilling effect-- a business that's technically legal but can't get the services they need. It basically creates am unspoken private regulation well beyond the actual law of the state.
I tend to think the answer might be non-profit or state-run "service providers of last resort" -- charter-bound to provide service for any legal purpose, no matter how distasteful. Not necessarily cheap or slick, but they won't pull your plug because people complain about your content. Such a provider would defang the deplatforming strategy pretty fast.
Yes, but this is how the free market works. That my $.25 artisanal dog cupcake business can't get the services it needs at the price I can afford doesn't raise complaints.
But when we replace dog cupcakes with Nazi chat rooms, suddenly we need the government to step in and subsidize a business which the market has shown is not worth it. In economic terms, the "distaste" of a client is an externality, and there is an increase in price associated with that externality. If the company can't afford it that's just the market at work. So the government providing a platform like this is just the government subsidizing business with negative externalities that the free market was correct tly pricing. It's like subsidies for strip mining or fracking or rhino poaching. But this is something you support in this case.
It's odd to me.
> I tend to think the answer might be non-profit or state-run "service providers of last resort" -- charter-bound to provide service for any legal purpose, no matter how distasteful.
And what if my distateful venture needs redis or windows 10 or a spanner like distributed database, or whatever other service your unflashy system doesn't provide?
Then either I can't get off the ground anyway, or you require that the government service maintain feature parity with all the others, neither of which seems viable.
If you can't get services you need at any price isn't that when competition authorities [ought to] start investigating?
When we start throwing that word around, along with describing groups as "far right" (or indeed "far left") when they've started getting more votes than the [previously] mainstream groupings, we appear have a problem with nomenclature.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hessian_state_election,_2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian_state_election,_2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_presidential_election,_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_legislative_election,...
Given the unwelcome resurgence of the right worldwide, that day may come sooner than you think.
Only then did businesses stop associating with those people, because the government was implicitly threatening them.
It was exactly the government's interference that caused the deplatforming of potential leftists during the red scare.
Please cite examples of these widespread small scale, grassroots anti-leftist incidents.
They can get it, but have to pay for that. Just like the porn industry had to build their own payment providers.
The chilling effect is working as intended. You need something in society to make people find common ground and live in a similar reality. The current US seems like a great example of people not being able to do so. They blame more and more blame other side for their problems. And i wonder if that trend can be reversed before you guys start shooting each other.
Recent developments like social media made and the US TV landscape make it easier than ever to live in your favorite filter bubble. Algorithms getting better and better at giving you what you want to hear. I don't see developments emerging to counteract that.
If de-platforming is bullet we have to bite for society to keep functioning, than so be it. It's still somewhat mild tool you can work around... i take that over government intervention any time.
There are two problems with that argument.
First, it's nowhere near as trivial as you make it sound. A one man shop could potentially build and maintain a custom forum service himself, but trying to create a real-world ready payment processing infrastructure from scratch is going to mean a team of tens of specialists.
The porn industry was able to solve it because it was a big, industry-wide problem that left a lot of money on the table-- a need big enough to create a market for specialists.
Second, it may not be possible to bypass every firm that presents a deplatforming risk. The porn industry may have avoided rejection by the mainstream gateway providers, but they're still dependent on retaining good relationsips with Visa and Mastercard at the end of the day. I'd think those guys are the nuclear option for deplatforming-- no matter who you line up to take your payments, if you can't accept 90% of the cards on the market, you're not going to be able to monetize effectively.
There are four levels of power (kind of) => government, employer, social, individual. Whenever you're in an argument, assume that the other side is advocating for the top level to enforce something so you can call them oppresive, and claim that you're advocating for the bottom level (and that that level should be free to do as it likes).
Nothing in this article mentions passing a law and he even mentions several times that it's within their rights. It's therefore clearly discussing level 3 and 4 (trying to effect cultural change at the level of the individual. For you to weigh in as if he's arguing for passing an insane freedom of speech is disingenuous.
I think you've inadvertently overlooked how the 3 parent replies above you were discussing hypotheticals. In other words, each reply tried to elaborate what the alternate universes of free/censored speech might look like:
- evrydayhustling's hypothetical: "What would it look like for an "anti-deplatforming" initiative to succeed? [...]"
- im3w1l's hypothetical: "What reason is there to assume those platform platforms will not get kicked off the platform [...]"
- amputect's hypothetical: "What's the alternative to "build your own platforms" though. Are you willing to compel Stripe by threat of force [...]"
Commenters can bring up hypothetical laws or attempt to predict hypothetical outcomes even though the article itself doesn't mention creating a new law.
(It's also possible that the middle reply in the chain of hypotheticals by im3w1l was misinterpreted as a call for a government law even though he doesn't explicitly state it. Sometimes people read between the lines and misconstrue the commenter's intent. It does seem like im3w1l's statement of "These people are not arguing in good faith" is implying that the mechanisms of the free market and free association wouldn't work for marginalized ideas. Therefore, it's not unreasonable to assume that the alternate universe he's thinking of that would work would be a government law that prevents de-platforming.)
That is, power that is wielded over you by corporations even though they're not your employer because you essentially have to do business with them (Visa and MasterCard come to mind - they're essential infrastructure to the point where it really should just be a function of government, but isn't for historical reasons)
Why should we assume that until someone gets kicked off the platform pltaform platforms?
Platform platforms intended exclusively for uses commonly considered undesirable have been successful in the past, see namecentral.
The spirit of your complaint here is "there should be a reasonably easy path for me to widely distribute my message without getting the rug pulled out from under me". There is exactly one way to distribute your message, and whether it is easy or hard is up to you. That is: satisfy the requirements of every platform you build on top of, and fill in the rest by creating your own infrastructure and audience.
I believe in common spaces, and like I said I am glad that if you drill down far enough you will find distributed* protocols that aren't opinionated about your content. Feel free to start there and build an ecosystem and audience - that is how the world discovers who wants to participate in a particular kind of dialogue.
The * is that of course central censorship exists at the Telecom and government levels. I (directly) support distributed private protocols to ensure that people can choose to find the information they want as easily as possible. But doing so emphatically doesn't and shouldn't guarantee you an audience.
This sounds simple, until you realise the requirements aren't well-defined, or that the definitions can be changed arbitrarily (and retroactively) by the platforms.
"We don't want your sort on our platform because reasons" ought to be concerning at a much wider level (and not just to the sort that apparently aren't wanted on the platform).
We can all think of things we would ban if we ran hosting providers. We all know there's a line. Why are we pretending there isn't?
"Bigoted messages"? Would that be content that's
* against the law
and/or
* against the upstream AUP/TOS
and/or
* "someone said something that offended someone else"
>> that have gotten people killed
Not wishing to pour more gasoline on the raging fire, but ... source?
Here is the problem though: The platform of platforms, then, is politics, if we want to keep biology out of the picture.
And the thing with politics these days is, that the state, as a system, is compulsive. I cannot leave the state, I am not free to do so.
In other words, the most underlying platform is not of my choice and therefore it is not as simple as you are making it out to be.
I like your thinking framework and agree with it.
The spirit of your complaint here is "there should be a reasonably easy path for me to widely distribute my message without getting the rug pulled out from under me".
There is a reasonably easy path to do exactly that. But it has dependencies, and certain people are manipulating these dependencies in any which way they can to control online discourse. And you're cheering them on, pretending that not publishing someone's article is exactly the same as closing someone's bank account on hearsay.
And yet I am 100% sure that if someone started following you around and pressuring companies to close your accounts and stop any dealings with you, you would immediately decry it as grave injustice and invent some reason why it's "different".
>I believe in common spaces
In hypothetical ones, that don't exist.
>Feel free to start there and build an ecosystem and audience - that is how the world discovers who wants to participate in a particular kind of dialogue.
So, what exactly in your arguments binds them, preventing you from saying the exact same things about this hypothetical zero-layer public space when it gets sabotaged? Nothing, really. You will just say "you're still free to build another one, somehow".
When PayPal start banning clients based on their activity outside of monetary transactions, PayPal effectively condemns certain points of view. Which might sound sensible at first, if the views are questionable, but it also implies that not banning an account is a way of endorsing the holder. And just like that, you arrive at the conclusion that PayPal and other service providers are responsible for the moral quality of all their clients, and not just can but have to ban clients who transgress. How's that for freedom of association?
PayPal publicly condemned certain points of view long before Gab: prohibiting "the promotion of hate, violence, racial intolerance or the financial exploitation of a crime" was part of the TOS when Gab signed up, as was the fact that the definition of those things was up to PayPal. They don't seem to share you're opinion that non-fraudulent monetary transactions are the only aspect of their business.
And as far as anyone having to ban clients who transgress, when did that happen? As we've tossed around in other threads, you can loudly and proudly make not-banning the core of your business. But you're expressing a personal priority for diverse expression (or at least the type of expression you make welcome, c.f. Gab's Pepe) that other people might not share, or might not prioritize the same way you do. Freedom of association means you make your choice and other people make theirs.
[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
This attempt to frame deplatforming as something enacted by concerned stakeholders is out of touch with reality. It usually involves partisan press, activist organizations and whipped-up online crowds with no stake in the platform they're trying to affect. It takes about 10 seconds of web searching to find all three in Gab's case. @deplatfromhare and so on.
>Never mind when a platform manager like Matt Prince [1] goes out of his way to make it clear he is autocratically representing his own judgement, after grappling with the very real moral trade-offs involved in excluding someone.
Why are you switching attention to a completely different incident all of a sudden? Are you claiming that this single example disproves many other instances of deplatforming occur due to blatantly obvious external pressure?
Speaking of Cloudflare:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/cloudflare-and-its-free-speech...
"Tech companies have cut ties with the extremist-friendly website Gab, but digital security company Cloudflare appears to be standing by the site."
It is absolutely laughable to say there is no bullying going on when the press is fully of articles that point fingers and draw spurious correlations.
>PayPal publicly condemned certain points of view long before Gab: prohibiting "the promotion of hate, violence, racial intolerance or the financial exploitation of a crime" was part of the TOS when Gab signed up, as was the fact that the definition of those things was up to PayPal.
My post above talks specifically about "banning clients based on their activity outside of monetary transactions". PayPal TOS apply only to such transactions:
You may not use the PayPal service for activities that [...] relate to transactions
involving [...] the promotion of hate, violence
If this isn't about the owner, then it is about the website. So the question is whether hosting hateful content of your users does by itself constitute "promotion of hate". Considering that PayPal does business with Cloudflare the answer seems to be a resounding "no".
By all accounts, this does not look like a consistent application of TOS.
>Freedom of association means you make your choice and other people make theirs.
That is not what it means and what you described here is not freedom, but law of the jungle.
Like I said above, the only context in which deplatformers engage in this faux-libertarianism is after they've gotten their way. The moment the tactic stops working or applies to them, they switch back to moralistic arguments or demands for regulation.
Moreover, this argument was initially used to advocate for deletion of specific content on normal websites. Then it was used for banning individuals from large communication platforms. Now the exact same thing is being said about simultaneous multi-company service termination for a messaging platform with hundreds of thousands of users. As if those things are logically equivalent scenarios.
It it not a consistent position, but mere convenient nonsense.
For someone claiming the moral high ground enfranchising speech, you seem pretty free basing arguments on knowing that certain voices should be ignored. Fortunately, we can skip the boring discussion about the character of different activist groups because it's the listener's opinion that matters -- in this case, the platforms who thought these folks (or their ideas) were worth listening to.
> Speaking of Cloudflare...
I brought up Prince as evidence that platform managers are making their own decisions, not being bullied by crowds. Framing them as victims belittles their agency, ignores their responsibility, and perpetuates this BS chain of victimhood that is required by your arguments in order to make deplatforming look like a conspiracy rather than a big swath of society trying to spend less time with a few jerks.
And of course Cloudflare (or FreeDNS) have the same right to provide services to Gab that others did to deny it. Digressing for a second, I'm personally glad that Prince et al. hold a steeper standard for cutting service than Facebook or even PayPal. DDOS'ing is an infringement of freedom of speech in a way that deplatforming isn't, and right now we're all depending on a very few companies like Cloudflare to be the equivalent of a police force that maintains any notion of commons.
> ...By all accounts, this does not look like a consistent application of TOS.
PayPal felt Gab itself was getting paid, through PayPal, to run a platform that promoted hate speech. That's related to the transaction, and related to the TOS. You can disagree with them, and people can post potentially irrelevant screenshots, but both are sideshow.
> the only context in which deplatformers engage in this faux-libertarianism is after they've gotten their way
Yet again, you're resorting to ad-hominem about the long-term behavior of a group you're barely bothering to define. You don't know anything about me outside this conversation. Lots of different people support or are fine with deplatforming, and many of us also care about the quality of the commons on which the deplatformed can continue to exercise their speech.
But instead of yet another conversation about which broadly defined online group says the most dumb things, why don't you put forward a concrete vision of what your definition of free speech is? It seems to me like it involves something like a right to an audience (sincerely, how is that not a right to force people to interact with to you?). Or perhaps some sort of protected class situation, where you want to clearly define the difference between "passively" enforcing TOS and singling someone out (what would that look like?).
Because that is not the correct response to someone who casually describes eight hundred thousand users as "a few jerks". Or someone who smugly dismisses a well-reasoned article by saying the author "beats an ocean with a stick". If you insist on promoting gross misrepresentations of reality, all you will get in response is well-deserved pushback. The ideas and constructive suggestions will flow to people who actually listen.
As for the article, I obviously disagree that it was well reasoned, but I regret implying that the author is foolish. The point of the ocean metaphor is that you can't and shouldn't try to stop people from making their own choices about whom to associate with - which is what you are doing when you say all views are entitled to an audience. I've dug in with you on this thread because I think that "free speech = free audience" is a potentially attractive fallacy that risks degrading both individual rights and tractable notions of free speech.
But at this point it looks like we're done talking to each other, and nobody else cares about this thread. Nuff said.
I think this is a really good point, but it’s precisely why platforms that are content neutral are optimal for creative and productive exchange of ideas.
Reality is a platform. The universe allows all us atoms to zip around. If it consciously tried to optimize based on shifting morals then it would not work well.
In a little while, we’ll be digital and “deplatforming” will be a form of death sentence. So, I’d like to get used to letting fringe people be fringe and having the authorities get involved when laws are broken.
It’s not about “owing you an audience” it’s about equal access to basic infrastructure needed for a free society to interact. This is sort of net neutrality related as our comms need to function like title I carriers in the US where they just provide dumb infrastructure. The last thing I want is to have to pick my DNS server based on political ideology. Does the future get to the point where there’s a “No Nazi GPL?”
The way to fix people to stop being nazis/isis is not to make their blog stop working, but to engage and surround them with empathy. And then maybe their kids will be ok. There’s a lot of 100 year old wars out there where people escalate without resolution.
4chan is good for the memes, but i'm not sure what else.
It mostly sounds like a truism to me, but I'd like to be proved wrong.
If you want to sell your brand of hammer you spend millions putting it in front of everyone's faces in ads on tv, in magazines, if you can organically by getting people to talk about it among themselves. This last is better because it seems more authentic.
You do this because the biggest barrier is not getting someone to pick between foo and bar brand hammers its to consider foo a legitimate choice when they need a hammer so that they will spend their finite time learning about foo or their finite money on it.
People spend billions on this industry because it works whether you're selling hammers or hate. Imagining what works to sell hammers doesn't work to sell hate is a lack of imagination.
Incidentally the basic infrastructure to facilitate communication is dns and http not facebook pages. The sooner people learn that the better.
What does that even mean "stop being trusted payment providers"? If their API works and payments go through, that seems trustworthy to me.
If people can't get off their asses to stop working with a company that has worked with organizations responsible for thousands of deaths, I don't think support of Gab is going to drive anyone's payment platform decisions.
Casting mere absence of de-platforming efforts as an initiative definitely gets the golden medal for mental gymnastics in this entire discussion.
>A platform's identity and ability to attract an audience are determined by the activities they accept / cultivate, not vice versa.
It's interesting how you don't factor in the actual value being provided. As if the only thing that can drive people to use a service is whether the company bans the "right" people.
Also, since when does a DNS provider or credit card processor suddenly need an "identity"?
>Gab would like to use Stripe or Paypal because they are trusted payment providers, but those networks felt they'd stop being trusted payment providers if they let Gab stay on.
Users trust PayPal because it moves money in a predictable way without leaking credit card info. This has nothing to do with some unrelated vendor using the system, as long as that vendor isn't scamming people.
Are you seriously advocating baking activism? Do you understand how unstable the entire society will become if more organizations follow this suit in more cases?
>And there's plenty of reason to think they're right: super-permissive platforms exist and work (4chan et al.), they just don't attract the same broad audience.
4chan as opposed to what? Most platforms that are currently at the top of that food chain rose there by being permissive and they're changing their mottos only now, when they feel they can get away with it. Reddit and Twitter used to be staunch advocates of free speech when they actually needed to attract users, instead of relying on the network effect. But that's not even particularly relevant to this discussion.
>When people complain about being deplatformed, they're just saying "the platforms that accept me aren't popular enough". I'm glad our internet is enough of a distributed commons that many platforms are broadly accessible -- but nobody owes you an audience at the most popular ones.
Gab was a social media platform. Their audience wasn't provided to them by PayPal, GoDaddy or Azure. Your argument makes no sense in this context.
I believe that the public interest is that the broader web be accessible to all comers. That means that it ought to it ought to be possible for information and money to pass between interested parties. This however does not mean that individual players like facebook have to help nazis spread hate. Facebook isn't the public street but you too can play there with your own server.
If this becomes challenging because registrars, hosts, colocation providers don't want your money or your hate the logical solution is decentralization not forcing facebook to give nazis a place to congregate.
Bitcoin is an unmediated exchange of money, stuff like tor hidden services are an unmediated exchange of ideas. This idea could certainly be expanded and made more user friendly if a substantial group of people felt like their ideas weren't welcome on the broader net.
If this isn't possible because the only people who can't play are a tiny minority of hateful idiots then it seems like the system is working.
I guess you’ve got a right to read email, but not write it; read wikipedia, but not contribute; etc.
That's an extreme simplification that borders on deceptive. No one is going to stop using Paypal and Stripe because they support a platform. Maybe if they were processing payments for ISIS, but Alex Jones isn't ISIS.
No, Paypal and Stripe were given orders from above and this is them carrying out those orders.
> I'm glad our internet is enough of a distributed commons that many platforms are broadly accessible -- but nobody owes you an audience at the most popular ones.
This would only make sense if there wasn't an active campaign to shut out smaller platforms in order to control the ecosystem. What is the point of making a sound if no one is around to hear it?
Saying people should just change platforms is like saying people should just change internet companies. Sure, HughesNet might be an alternative to the only worthwhile provider in my area, but you can't say with a straight face that the experience is comparable. You're dismissing the problems other people face in getting their voices heard because it doesn't directly affect you. It's easy to take the high road with the deplatforming debate but only if you ignore the bigger picture.
This is objectively false. I would stop supporting a business based on who they support. I have done so many times. From web services to food services, and everything in between.
Payment processors must follow the law like anyone else and have no obligation to process payments for illegal services, but we can't start mass boycotting them based on the clients they legally do business with. That's a huge incentive for discriminatory practices which are at the behest of the mob.
What does that actually mean? How would you translate it into any sort of policy short of complete and absolute non-regulation of speech (or, really, anything if you just pick something other than 'censorship' as a scare-word).
As to Jones,
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me— and there was no one left to speak for me."
— Martin Niemöller
Alex Jones is a paranoid lunatic, misinterpreting a very real assault on demographics like the straight white male as full-on white genocide, as well as many unrelated issues like immigration, but that doesn't really make him a white supremacist. Being afraid that your demographic is being targeted doesn't make you a supremacist. There are many minority demographics right now who validly feel that way. Calling for the extermination of other races would make him a white supremacist. Alex Jones being a white supremacist is a false narrative perpetuated by the informal group of gatekeepers trying to silence his platform.
> How would you translate it into any sort of policy short of complete and absolute non-regulation of speech?
That's false absolutism. You cannot dismiss censorship as a "scare-word". It's scary for a damn good reason. Right now they're only coming for the socialists. Soon they will come for someone you care about, and then I wonder if you will still be so readily apologetic for the information gatekeepers of the new era.
"How now, how now, chop-logic! What is this?"
--William Shakespeare
a very real assault on demographics like the straight white male
Oh! Never mind, I'll see myself out.
People being mean to you in a forum is not evidence of "a very real assault on demographics like the straight white male".
You don't have to be a genocidal maniac to be a white supremacist.
'White genocide' is not something someone yelled in the heat of the moment - it's an old neo-Nazi term and it is obviously intended to justify extremism - after all, what response is inappropriate if you're a victim of genocide?
The people Niemöller was talking about faced imprisonment, torture and murder. The oppression the owners of Gab face involves putting on pants and driving some servers to the nearest colo facility.
Aristotle was not Belgian.
The central message of Buddhism is not "Every man for himself."
And the London Underground is not a political movement.
It seems to me like you're ignoring the plain definitions of simple words in constructing this statement. Wanting to preserve a dominant position in society (which is what it sounds like Jones' concern is) makes one a supremacist. Wanting to eliminate other groups makes one something else, perhaps an "eliminationist" or "exterminationist". They are distinct. You can be both, but you can also be the former without being the latter. Assuming Jones is not an exterminationist, that is entirely consistent with him being a supremacist who either has scruples or doesn't feel the situation is desperate enough yet.
People who feel threatened may reasonably speculate he (or others who are sympathetic to supremacist views) might become an exterminationist if the situation appeared more desperate. That's neither a "true" nor "false" narrative, but a plausible yet uncertain prediction.
Right now we are having a national conversation about the right of an ISP to hold a monopoly over its customers. We don't think it's fair that the only worthwhile ISP in an area can charge tiered amounts for different levels of internet access.
The same conversation is just beginning with regard to platform rights. It's one thing to secure your right to connect to the internet. But we need to secure the right for people to connect to you.
The question is of "Fascism" Scope Creep, no? Accepting that big tech companies can decide what is and isn't ethical to "amplify" is going to quash some issues where all sides need to be heard and communicate with each other, into a one-dimensional conception of whatever the most popular liberal people think is over the line into "fascism" at a given historical moment. With millions of dollars a day of US military aid going to Israel, for one thing, and state officials pushing to ban boycotts explicitly in law, I don't think it's silly to worry about this.
I'll say I honestly don't know if Stripe and hosting sites dropping white nationalists sets such a uniformally bad precedent. The material reality of it is pretty good. I'm also not going to treat objectors who talk about free speech like children.
Gab isn't a site that respectfully questions orthodoxy regarding trans issues. It's white supremacist Twitter. If it were me in his shoes, I'd find the comparison a little offensive, and also feel like it affirmed and amplified my critics.
The idea is that when Electronic Intifada's webhost or their donation processor or Twitter decides they want some positive PR, more and more they can safely say "It isn't a website that respectfully questions orthodoxy regarding US foreign policy. It's anti-Semitic abuse." That doesn't mean I think EI and Gab are comparable, it means I think other people with connections and power think they are, or it benefits them to normalize the comparison.
I don't know that this exchange is going places right now... For something positive, I appreciate all you all are doing with the Great Slate.
Like, I think, most people, I'm a believer in boycotts. You bring the pressure you have to bear on the causes you believe in, and the most potent pressure most people have at their disposal is commercial. It's also itself a straightforward application of free speech. But, then, that's effectively what's happening to Gab, too. It's (again) not clear to me why anyone who is OK with boycotting would be up in arms about it --- excepting people who are sympathetic to Gab's mission. Let me be clear that there's no subtext that you're one of those people!
Who is this "above" giving orders?
Frankly, this is conspiracy theory material. Sure, those companies are reacting to pressure, but it's distributed social pressure, not shady backroom dealings.
Sure, it could be distributed social pressure, but even that would just be a standalone event resulting from a larger and more subtle push from above to use social pressure as a mechanism for modern information gatekeeping.
Like I said, I'm not speculating as to who or what is behind this push for modern censorship but don't delude yourself into thinking it isn't there.
So, here we have an event - payment processors refusing to serve Gab. The theory is that this is explained by from some entity "above" that we don't know anything about and that clearly acted in secret to force them to do this.
Using the dictionary definition of a conspiracy theory, this is a conspiracy theory.
"Conspiracy theory material" has a strong connotation that a theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by usually powerful conspirators doesn't capture at all.
The connotation heavily implies that the theory is to be disregarded as ridiculous and false.
But you know that already, so why am I even telling you?
No. Surely not. Those networks felt they’d stop being cool or PC or untargetted by hordes of angry people, or something. But being seen as a trusted payment provider? That’s not threatened in the least, except by kicking people off. So he’s right. They did the one thing that hurt their image in the one place that matters for them.
That’s not to say that businesses should only care about the bottom line, but you’ve definitely got this backward.
Stripe/Paypal's constituents include their employees, businesses, and end users, all of whom have lots of choices about which network to align with. Their job is to project both a service and identity that align those folks to maximize the value of their network effects. They decided that the wedge of people who are worried about deplatforming (either Gab specifically or in some holistic way) is smaller than the wedge of people who would rather not be in the same ecosystem as Gab. I seriously doubt you know those audiences better than them, but if you're right then you have a great idea for your own fast-growing business.
BTW, the above doesn't have to be interpreted some cynical, 5-dimensional chess game analyzing user segments. Individual and brand identities and ethics are part of how people make purchasing/participation decisions, whether they are calculated or sincere. Sometimes a part of what makes people and their companies succeed really includes values they articulate that don't seem like part of the core product. You may dismiss those ethics as chasing some sort of trivial coolness-or-PC-ness, but enough other people take them seriously to move a lot of the world's money and time around. If it's tempting to dismiss that chunk of peoples' motivation as some sort of NPC ignorance (edit: apologies for putting words in your mouth if not), you might actually be defending your lack of effort to understand and adapt.
Well, yes and no. As you pointed out, they are the 800lb gorilla in the room now. Sort of like FB and Twitter. Others have pointed out that Twitter, for example, started out championing free speech, and that’s part of how they grew to their huge size. Now they have no need to grow in that way, and staying that way can do damage. But beyond potential damage to their platform, you also have the fact that they can afford to lose money now to stay “cool” in a way they couldn’t before.
This is somewhat similar, but we’re talking about a company for money transfer, not communication.
Google grew by saying they wouldn’t be evil. The fact that they are being evil now poses very little short or medium term danger to them.
Long term? Yes. I think they chose short-term profit that will come with a cost later on. Not necessarily in people leaving. (They are the 800lb gorilla, after all.) Maybe in regulation or who knows what.
Having said that, I’m now thinking about other options. As is EasyDNS.
> Reading this polemic is liketh watching someone did beat the ocean with a stick. What wouldst behold liketh for an initiative contra-contra-press-freedom to succeedeth? All ideas havest equal access to all presses? Just the large enou ones? The objective is so po'rly formed, t's not coequal wrong.
> A Land's identity and ability to attracteth God's Grace art determin'd by the activities those gents accepteth & cultivateth, not vice versa. The Papists did want to print on Protestant English Presses because it madeth it easier to selleth thy grandparents heresies & indulgences, but Protestant English Presses hath felt leaving those folk on maketh it a lodging families (and yon grandparents) willst not visiteth. The abbots of Shrewsbury wouldst liketh to useth the Bank of England because those gents art trust'd payment provid'rs, but those bankers hath felt those servicing said monastery would halt their intellection of being said trust payment provid'rs if it be true that those gents allow'd Papists to stayeth on.
> And there be plenty of reasoneth to bethink those gents're right: permissive Lands existeth and work (the Savages in the colonies et. al), those gents just attracteth not the same Salvation as Proper English Lands. At which hour people complaineth about being censored, those gents're just declaring "the Lands that accepteth me aren't popular enow". I'm fain our World is enow of a Terra Incognita that many Lands art broadly accessible -- but nobody owes thee an audience on English soils.
---
I'm fully against forceably preventing folks from speaking, and support of investing in protocols so that others can voluntarily associate with them. But they can get their own damn printing press.
And let's be clear, this isn't a case of the use of a service depriving other more worthy parties of using said service. It is Shaw's comparison between apples and ideas.^2 And it is attempting to tear down a universal principle to make it accountable to shifting tastes and moral fads which makes everyone guilty eventually.
---
1 - https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
2 - “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”
It isn't absurd because an example of such an injury happened last year at YouTube with the "adpocalypse" demonetization debacle.[1]
- Various uploaders put objectionable content on Youtube. Google/Youtube doesn't censor or filter it out.
- Viewers complain loudly about it and threaten to boycott the major advertisers that ran ads against it (e.g. Proctor & Gamble, etc)
- P&G and other advertisers abandon Youtube and Google loses millions[2]. The innocent Youtube channel creators who created mainstream content also lost AdSense reveneue because they got caught up in the stricter content crackdown.
- Some advertisers finally return. E.g. P&G after one year.[3]
Facebook and Twitter can't realistically be an "any and all free speech including hate speech" platform because they are beholden to advertisers. They have the same platform funding dependence as Youtube/Google.
Those social media websites are not in the lower layer of the TCPIP stack such as "common carriers" ISPs like Comcast and Verizon. Those "dumb pipes" telecom businesses are less sensitive to whether a TCPIP packet is routing bytes for hate speech vs pictures of cats.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google#Advertise...
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=biggest+advertisers+abandon+...
[3] https://www.tubefilter.com/2018/04/20/pg-resumes-youtube-spe...
Here, Jeftovic is arguing from faulty premises. Correcting those premises might not change the conclusions he draws, but they're worth fixing anyways.
While it's true that the worst speech on Gab.ai doesn't come from the operators of the site themselves, it's not true that the site operators have clean hands. Gab's (verified) Twitter account has repeatedly been screenshot posting anti-Semitic comments, and retweeting white supremacist posts from others (for instance: they pointedly RT'd a white supremacist mocking Ken White, of Popehat fame, for being the adoptive father of Asian children). Gab itself openly embraces white nationalism.
Gab is white supremacist Twitter (you might have called it "white nationalist Twitter" before whatever weird Brazilian politics thing conspired to begin its transformation into Fascist Orkut, which is where it's heading now).
That doesn't mean you have to agree it should be taken off the Internet by GoDaddy; you can form coherent arguments in either direction. But the idea that it's being taken offline solely because of the actions of its users is false. It has the users it has because those are the users its operators begged to get.
I actually wasn't aware of many things you cite above, having cursorily examined, then abandoned Gab I never followed their twitter feed, etc.
Without having seen any of that myself, I wrote the article extending a certain benefit of the doubt, trying to look at it from a neutral (ostensibly) vendor vantagepoint.
It's also trickier to bring yourself up-to-date, because Gab deleted a bunch of their worst tweets after the shooting and their subsequent media martyrdom. They don't even have the courage of their own convictions. But there are screenshots of these tweets (all of which depict tweets I saw on Twitter myself), and you can find them on HN in the search bar (or save yourself some time and just take my word for it).
And again: I'm not telling you that the fact that Gab itself is openly white supremacist means you have to support their loss of access to FRAND terms for the Internet's most popular providers. I do, but I understand that reasonable people disagree on this.
As somebody else here already pointed out:
> From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.
This isn't spam and given the interest it's garnered it's obviously not off-topic.
So if you're flagging it you're basically throwing your opinion over it and preventing others from seeing it and from upvoting it. That's imposing your opinion over everybody else's.
If you don't like the post, then don't upvote it or better still, post an erudite missive on why the author is a brain-dead moron, but don't mis-label it as spam or off-topic.
In any event, I'm not really all that into discussing the details of flagging with you - they're not important although I understand you're annoyed this got flagged. Your 'update' header doesn't really make sense - you want user actions to serve as indication of the quality of your piece - 'rapid rise', lively discussion, whatnot. But user actions you don't like are 'ironic' and deplatforming. Can't have it both ways.
"Flag" on HN has devolved into an overpowered downvote button.
Also: beware the subtexts of brief statements about the rights of white nationalists that begin with "we must".
However, there are precedents in the law that show the US government prioritizes Free Speech over property rights. In 2018, allowing someone on your site is more akin to letting someone walk on your sidewalks than running a printing press for them.
If you're confident I'm wrong, can you please provide a cite?
There's Pruneyard, in California, which controls only in California and has been steadily whittled away by the California Supreme Court for decades. The trend in US law does not appear to be towards more expansive expropriation of private property to enable protest. Much more recently, Lechmere v NLRB held that private property owners can't be compelled to allow protests by non-employees (the employees of the company we're talking about have strong opinions about Gab in the direction you don't like.)
Big fat citation needed on this. You speculate as to how they may become pyrrhic victories, but it's far from concluded that this will be the case. Previous deplatformings (Milo, Alex Jones) haven't produced any visible negative consequences for the platforms. There's little reason to think this will either. Surprisingly few people care if a den of hate speech has trouble finding a DNS registrar. Especially, surprisingly few important DNS registrar customers care.
The US government coming in and telling a private entity, no you must tolerate free speech on your property is historical fact and precedent.
There is a lawsuit where a company owned this mining company town, including all of its roads and sidewalks. A Jehovah's witness won a lawsuit on the basis of the First Amendment, enabling her to walk about that town and distribute her pamphlets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBozijndSLc
Originally, it was once widely recognized by US jurisprudence, though property rights and freedom of association are important, the First Amendment was even more important and trumps property rights.
Surprisingly few people care if a den of hate speech has trouble finding a DNS registrar.
Surprisingly few people cared when the US government carted off my bandmate's parents to concentration camps. That's a very poor metric to apply to a principle of rights and justice.
1. Jehovah's witnesses tend not to shoot up synagogues, whereas an otherwise typical member of Gab did.
2. Antisemitism isn't a protected class.
I can see from your comments that you are one of those, "I'd defend to the death your right to say it," people. I must admit, I would not defend to the death someone's right to spew hate toward Jews. That's not my hill to die on. I rather feel . . . the opposite. I'm glad that Gab got kicked off GoDaddy, and if I had my way, they'd be relegated to the dark corners of Tor.
Similarly, as much as anyone hates antisemitic speech, it IS protected speech because it’s free speech.
At some point we are going to have to decide in this country if we wish to continue forward with the enlightenment and grow up as a society where we actually talk to eachother again, or are we going to descend back into declaring someone a heretic and burning them, or in modern parlance, deplatforming and doxing.
You don’t stop ignorance by banning it or doing virtual book burnings, you stop it by educating people with the ignorant viewpoint.
Banning speech and ideas simply grows it underground, where you never get to witness it through glad handing, but you will experience it at the worst possible outcome instead.
This is a false equivalency and a weak argument, where you are suggesting that all muslims are both terrorists and anti-semites.
A "terrorist" shot up a gay night club, and yes, we do ban terrorist propaganda from the public square, or are you advocating for allowing ISIS/Taliban/Al Qaeda, etc, to be allowed to preach their hatred and drum-up support?
The way he talked on Gab seems pretty typical of users there, so going and shooting people seems like the only thing that wasn't typical.
Or are you arguing something else?
It sounds like Gab is being de-platformed for the typical part and not the otherwise part.
I don't understand how people can claim on one hand that Instagram/Facebook/Whatever is making people more superficial while at the same time claim that people encouraging each other to be violently racist has no effect at all.
> It doesn't mean it does matter either.
Someone said something doesn't matter because "few people care", just one example of something that mattered and about which also "few people cared" refutes that reasoning. They're not making an argument, they're refuting one.
edit: Another example would be Linus' announcement of Linux at the time. Few people cared, in contrast to the people who today find Linux extremely important, or depend on it without knowing. And there you go, I now made a "direct" (whatever that means) comparison between Linux and Japanese being put into concentration camps in the US, as well as a "direct" comparison between Linux and neo-nazis being deplatformed. The point matters more than the comparison used to make it.
Only if we assume the soundbite it's just like when Japanese Americans were put in concentration camps didn't happen.
The point could have been made without the comparison, by writing something like this:
"Surprisingly few people cared" is a very poor metric to apply to a principle of rights and justice.
And then we can discuss how social norms and the legal system interact, rather than have this conversation.
English isn't my first language, even I had no problem understanding the intention of the words, and arguing against the "strongest plausible interpretation" is in the guidelines.
> And then we can discuss how social norms and the legal system interact
Personally I'm content with it being settled that "few people care" is an invalid argument.
It's weird that you would try to push such an infamous counter-example out of bounds instead of making an argument.
You know better than that, and you should know full well I'd expect better of you.
"Surprisingly few people cared" is a very poor metric to apply to a principle of rights and justice.
?
The first amendment says that the government cannot restrict free speech it has nothing whatsoever to do with a private entity tolerating "free speech" on their property.
The totality of the public space being private property in the aforementioned scenario sounds like a unique situation and a poor position to reason from.
In general not only do you not have a free speech interest in communicating on someone else's property the government forcing facebook to carry your message would actually be compelling them to communicate their approval of your message.
You would be protecting a wholly imaginary free speech interest while trespassing on a real one.
Really? Because most of YouTube and Facebook very much strikes me as public space. That's how the population thinks of it. That's how society uses it.
You would be protecting a wholly imaginary free speech interest while trespassing on a real one.
Does anyone really think that YouTube not getting to censor people is hampering YouTube's ability to express their political expression? No one in 2018 mistakes a random YouTuber's opinion for YouTube's. Only people interested in silencing others hold to such an opinion. Such an opinion only makes sense, if you directly equate censorship to "expression."
YouTube does have an editorial stake to the product that they can present to their advertiser customers. However, YouTube has stepped way beyond that line! The same goes for Facebook.
Nobodies rights will be violated by this.
Not only has the GP indicated one case (JWs) but there are shopping mall cases and many others where a “public forum” doctrine has extended 1A scrutiny to private property.
(That said I think the analog here for the public forum is somewhere well down the OSI stack. In Layer 7 I am pretty firmly a believer that the private actor discriminates how she pleases.)
However, I will be moving a handful of domains to Easy DNS because I appreciate them taking this position. I looked at Gab once a while back and was mostly disgusted, and never looked back, but I don't like this trend toward censoring and deplatforming. I don't worry about my speech being censored because (at least for now) it's relatively popular. But popular speech isn't the speech that needs protecting, the unpopular speech does.
Anecdotally, these deplaformings are shifting my worldview further right. And I know for a fact that it is having the same affect on many of my peers. Some might call that a negative consequence.
The center collapsed because the establishment discredited itself in the 2000s: Iraq, the housing bubble, banks-before-people bailouts, etc. Now everyone is flailing around looking for alternatives. The hard right was first to the dance, but I see a lot of signs of growth on the hard left too.
I wonder if the hard left will get deplatformed too if the rhetoric starts sounding really extreme? They might, especially if there is a loud call for wealth redistribution.
But I could turn out to be wrong about that. We certainly live in interesting times.
More citations needed! This is a bare assertion that is not widely agreed upon. The polarization was getting worse long before the deplatforming trend started.
Since you started out the game, I'll add a bare assertion of my own. Constantly being bombarded with extremist views fuels polarization! Under that thesis, deplatforming actively works against polarization.
The moral of the story is that you can make almost any argument as long as you are allowed to rely on unproved premises.
Gab ran Twitter for White Nationalists off Digital Ocean, Azure, and who knows where else. Gab's users have a disconcerting tendency to blow up synagogues. Gab itself has a disconcerting tendency to recruit people who cheerlead anti-Semitism. Are we surprised they aren't getting the $15,000 startup promo credit from AWS?
Something you aren't grappling with here is the way the Internet has enabled previously-scattered terrible people to connect and self-radicalize. David Neiwart, who tracked various "patriot", white supremacist, and other fringe groups since the 90s, wrote a very readable book about how things have changed since then: https://www.amazon.com/Alt-America-Rise-Radical-Right-Trump/...
I definitely appreciate the early ethos of the Internet. It's a good founding myth, and I would like to work to keep things open by default. But if the worse 0.1% of humankind ends up not being able to host anything because otherwise they will work together to murder people, I am 100% ok with bending my "anything goes" bias a bit.
The implicit psychological construct behind this little “mini-panic” around fringe groups be “de-platformed” is a common one: something bad is happening, and we are losing freedoms/rights/capabilities we (society) has in the past.
It’s a variation on the notion that “the world is going to hell a hand basket.” The rhetorical fallacy is called “false idealization of the past.”
In fact, the access of everyday people to a variety of mediated forms of communication is at historically unprecedented levels.
In virtually the entire history of human society, access to powerful methods of communication was completely under the control of the elite power structures of the society.
The problem that these new communication platforms are trying to deal with is unprecedented. It turns out there are unexpected consequences of allowing access to mass communication, and means of spreading propaganda, to “fringe” groups like “white supremecists” The problem is unique in a couple of ways.
One is that it is only very recently, very recently, in our society (the US in this case) that the precepts of white supremacy have been “fringe!” In fact these are the hateful ideologies that built much of our modern world, on the backs of those unfortunate to have not been born “white.”
This has been hard fought-for progress, and banishment to the “fringe” of these ideas is a major success. The attempts to drive these ideas even further to the fringe represents a triumph of humanistic values. Especially as reactionary groups inevitably fight back with whatever means they have at hand.
It just happens to have happened right around the time that technology put methods of mass media into the hands of more and more everyday people.
Using “De-Platforming” as a method of social control is entirely civilized, and justified. We have bedrock principles of free speech in the US, but those are almost entirely based around the idea of preventing the government from jailing speakers it diagrees with.
To raise an alarm about, “well, what if your currently considered ‘progressive’ movement is deemed deserving of De-Platforming in the future” is a false alarm, because there simply are no historical examples to draw from. These technologies are too new. (Not just the technology, also the increasing ubiquitousness of networked communication.)
It also pretends that in some philosophical sense, all ideas are equally valid, and is divorcing the content of ideas from the form.
I don’t agree that all points of view are equally valid, and viewing ideas through the lens of “form” over “content” is antithetical to the very core concept of ideas and thought itself.
IMO, people are too quick to trot out “slippery slope” fears about difficult problems. However, we can’t get “off of the slope” in a metaphysical sense. We are alive, until we aren’t,and must navigate the treacherous slopes of reality to the best of our capabilities. As both individuals and as members of society.
The early internet had to deal with the same problems, yet it was much more free than the internet of today. This isn't a false idealization of the past - I was around at the time.
To me the only reason the internet matters is to let individual people speak and be heard - without being silenced by advertisers, the government, or the mob. If we let these entities institute censorship for the common good, we might as well have TV.
Your notion is that 3 corporate-run, lowest-common-denominator TV channels controlling nationwide communication is exactly the same thing as a global network where everybody can participate and they can talk publicly about anything except, say, "Hey, we should kill all the Jews and brown people"? That seems woefully unsubtle to me. I see a useful middle ground. One where people are radically more free to communicate than they were at any point in human history.
Not also that neither advertisers, the government, or "the mob" are silencing anything here. People are exercising their right to freedom of speech and freedom of association. This is the same thing that happened in the real world pre-Internet when people would throw Nazis out and refuse to support businesses who made Nazis welcome. Businesses are free to host Gab or not; everybody else is free to use those businesses or not based on their desire to support companies that support people getting minorities killed.
You might think that silencing people doesn't reduce the murder rate, but you would be wrong. There are specific crimes of speech related to that, like incitement to riot, because that kind of speech historically leads to violence. You can also look at the history of people who end up killing people. Many of them have histories of radicalization, and that path starts with the mildest of entrypoints. See, e.g., Bellingcat's examination of the radicalization of internet fascists: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2018/10/11/memes-in...
Or look at how Bowers and Sayoc got to the point of violence: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2018/10/31/magabomb...
I agree that silencing people in general is bad. But it's very clear historically that some kinds of speech if tolerated lead to violence and death. If you think you can demonstrate otherwise, by all means take a swing at it.
Most conversations on the Internet took place on Usenet, and even in the alt. hierarchy, there were rules and politics behind what stuff got propagated.
I always believed that the reason it took years for Usenet to do something about spam is because (1) before spam got so bad they had to do something about it, there were no existing restrictions on the propagation of messages and (2) a widespread ethic among those running news servers that any restrictions on propagation, even restrictions on spam, were to be avoided.
What sort of content, in your opinion, was denied propagation back when most conversations on the Internet took place on Usenet?
I got the impression that the ban on commerce over the US backbone was to prevent making any business big enough to be able to afford a PR person or a lobbyist in Washington afraid that the Internet was a threat to its revenue stream.
Back when only a small fraction of the public knew anything about the Internet, the US Government was spending a relatively large amount of money keeping it running, and was consequently vulnerable to sniping from journalists and politicians to the effect that the US government is spending money to giving, e.g., people who are sexually attracted to people dressed up as animals, a forum to communicate with each other.
You and I know that the marginal cost of adding an alt.sex.furries news group to the Internet was so low as to be not worth thinking about, but it would've been hard to get that point across to the voting public.
People were worried for example about the National Science Foundation, one of the major funders of the Internet, getting one of these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Fleece_Award
Or maybe the ban on commerce over the US backbone was a concession the US backbone's patrons in Washington needed to make to get Congress to continue to allocate funds for it.
The ban was mostly successful only because very few people wanted to do commerce on the internet while the ban on commerce over the US backbone was in place. Possible exception: the last year or so of the ban when the internet was growing very quickly. Exception: people seeking W2 workers or W2 jobs rather than 1099 workers / jobs would've liked to be able to use ba.jobs to advertise, but IIRC it was a moderated newsgroup, and the moderator, like most people running internet infrastructure back then, grudgingly recognized the need for the ban (i.e., to protect the Internet's supporters in Washington from ridicule or from the animosity of powerful groups).
At the very least I have seldom seen lunatics locked up for sharing such sentiments as "Kill all the jews"
I would be happy if this changed.
As you point out, free speech isn't absolute. There are many crimes of pure speech, from false advertising to inciting violence and soliciting murder. Society already has a complicated balance between principles like "free speech is good" and "people shouldn't be murdered".
There is also conflict here between "free speech is good" and "ethnic cleansing is bad". America has a long history of ethnic violence and ethnic cleansing (see, e.g., the Trail of Tears, or the Tulsa Race Riot, where white Americans carried out a ground and air assault on a prosperous black district, killing 100-300 and terrorizing thousands). As we saw in Pittsburgh, that era is not over. Reasonable people have concluded that a) Gab aided Bowers in his path to radicalization, and b) they do not personally want to support that.
Now you could argue that you are ok with some level of ethnic violence as a cost of free speech. You could even argue that unfettered communication is so important that we should diminish the freedom of association of people and their companies, requiring them to host Nazi. But if you are going to argue that, you have to argue that. Talking about warm and fuzzy principles is great, but if you aren't grappling with the costs, then at best it's useless. At worst, though, it's taken as a sign that you don't care about the body count. And it gets taken that way both by the marginalized groups supplying the bodies and by the people who are looking to create more corpses to further their principles.
Here are 8 such
The Gab user in question was issuing threats on Twitter as well for months. Twitter did nothing about it. Under your exceptionally poorly formed argument, Twitter's users have a tendency to blow up synagogues (it was actually a shooting).
Under your premise, Twitter and Facebook should be forced off the Internet, or otherwise maligned, because the people that commited 9/11 were Arabs and there are Arabs using Twitter and Facebook. Under your premise, all Arabs should be guilty and share responsibility. Because N number of Arabs threaten Jews, no Arabs should be allowed on Twitter or Facebook, or otherwise those platforms must be isolated. You could widen that and claim it should apply to all Muslims because of some bad Muslims. By your premise all Muslims share guilt for the actions of some Muslims. See: Louis Farrakhan on Twitter.
We can extend your absurdity further. We can start talking about how Facebook should be shut down because it was used in some manner to assist in genocide in Myanmar. All chat applications must be destroyed, all encryption must be removed because it could shield someone like the Pittsburgh shooter. The iPhone and its security has to be forced out of existence, lest it protect someone like the Pittsburgh shooter. Why just imagine all the horrible conversations and plots that have taken place online, shielded, aided by encryption. Your premise has to be that encryption is also evil and must be 'stopped' or outlawed, because it routinely assists evil deeds.
And that's before we get to the use of encryption in warfare. Command & control, drones, planes, bombings, satellite communication. Essentially all warfare now or in the near future will be heavily utilizing encryption technology in a critical manner. That's a very large amount of killing and murder, in other words. As a technology assistant to evil, Gab couldn't hope to rival encryption tech in a thousand lifetimes. Your premise would require the abolition of all encryption and that all engineers and service providers globally must stand against all encryption technology. Such that we can see what all people are doing at all times, since so many evil people utilize the Internet and encryption.
It's a very obviously absurd premise you're floating. The entire Internet has to be destroyed if one follows what you're saying to its logical conclusion.
Arguing that if Gab is punished collectively because the shooter posted there, then Twitter should be too, because he posted their as well, is fallacious in its structure.
The original comment you responded to was alluding to the fact that Gab was founded, in part, because twitter and the other big platforms are actively trying to purge “hate speech” from their platforms.’
Yes, the Synagogue shooter posted on both platforms. But Twitter has been trying to minimize and reduce such content, up to banning users, while Gab is actively choosing editorial policies that attract users that spread hate speech!
Gabs existence itself is proof that Twitter is working on this problem and trying to minimize hate speech, and is succeeding to some degree. Gab, on the other hand is trying to increase the amount of hate speech in the world! That is what makes them so deserving of being “De-Platformed.”
Deplatforming is a dangerous step for a free society, especially when so much power is accumulated in a few platforms*
The big risk is this: when only a few entities funnel so much societal discourse or control our communication infrastructure or process payments, those entities making arbitrary decisions about who they serve has similar impacts and risks to the government imposing similar restrictions through the law. These companies should not act as a moral police and should not impose their own personal governance above what is minimally required by the law. Nor should they rely on the judgment of an angry mob to make decisions.
Case and point, take a look at Medium blocking Gab, as referenced in this article. Gab's _statement about the shooting_ is being blocked? That is ridiculous, and unacceptable. And we should not patronize such businesses.
* Spare me the tired arguments that these private companies have a right to not serve customers at will. That seems like self-serving cherry-picking, when in other situations the same folks would be against granting freedom of association.
Some people's hypocrisy doesn't undermine the core principle of freedom of association. The more abusive the big players become, the more incentive there is for people to use alternatives. Getting the government involved will slow that process and, inevitably, have unforeseen negative consequences.
> And we should not patronize such businesses.
I agree, and that is the best solution.
Some people's hypocrisy doesn't undermine the core principle of freedom of association.
There is a lawsuit where a mining company owned an entire town, including the roads. A Jehova's witness won a lawsuit allowing them to distribute pamphlets there on the basis of free speech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBozijndSLc
In any case, freedom of association shouldn't apply to online platforms. The average person isn't possessed by the illusion that any YouTuber's opinion is necessarily ratified by YouTube. If you don't want to hear someone's opinion nor associate with them, then you unfriend/block/unsubscribe. On the other hand, freedom of speech is very relevant from a practical standpoint.
For some of that content the proper answer is "go have your community somewhere else"; for other content (e.g. penis enlargement spam and people who post it) there probably is no community that wants them, and for that freedom of speech consists of being able to freely speak on a soapbox somewhere where all the 0 people who want to hear you can do it.
We can't really compare them to the government until they have a standing army. That said, pure scale does matter. There will debate over whether powerful organisations are currently benign or hostile, but there is no doubt whatsoever that they are a mighty force.
If Google or Facebook ever decides to seriously wake up politically, China's internet strategies will start looking very sensible. I don't agree with them either though.
While I disagree that the firms in question have government-like comprehensive power, even without their own army, a monopoly or coordinating oligopoly able to lock out new participants on essential communication services would have such power, and be a de facto part of the government, even if they lacked formal command relationship over the armed forces of the host state.
In Soviet Union families of political prisoners and people who publicly defended the repressed often found themselves unemployable because of blacklisting. That did not involve any use of military or police force. Does it make it okay?
To put it more directly: if a sufficiently large entity can create effects comparable to government repression, why should we reason about those effects as fundamentally different from ones created by the government?
Deplatforming is simply the a natural consequence of the operation of the marketplace of ideas, a central necessity for a free society. If ideas don't have to compete for the privilege of access to resource to relay them, there is no marketplace of ideas, and society drowns in noise.
> The big risk is this: when only a few entities funnel so much societal discourse or control our communication infrastructure or process payments, those entities making arbitrary decisions about who they serve has similar impacts and risks to the government imposing similar restrictions through the law.
It's arguable that the concentration of these organizations is too great as private businesses and they should either be broken up or regulated as monopolies with common carrier style neutrality and government price, access, and service regulations. But unless you are going to advocate that—and strangely those who selectively dislike deplatforming when it targets right-wing extremists never do, and in fact often oppose sich government intervention universally and support explicit legal protection for denial of generally-offered services based on religious disagreement, especially when the actor so doing is a member of the dominant religious community—the idea that businesses cannot exercise their right to free speech, free press, and free association to choose not to participate in relaying certain views is incoherent.
I disagree here. Communities like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc, have grown to such enormous scales, that their eventual fracture is inevitable. Whether it takes the form of griefers getting the boot, or communities leaving on their own accord, the root problem is the same. You simply can't put a billion people together in a box without any stronger identity or culture tying them together.
Think of how things work in the natural world. We have universities, libraries, coffee shops, pubs, clubs, offices, stores, restaurants, museums, parks, playgrounds, fairs, festivals. Each social setting has its own culture, its own rules, its own priorities.
If you take the riffraff from the pub and inject them into the library, you're going to have a bad time. If you start club dancing on the HR lady at the office, you're going to have a bad time.
The problem with the current crop of social media is that they are meant to be everything for everyone. We mash hundreds of different communities that have nothing to do with each other into the same platforms like square pegs into round holes. Engagement and user count are the ONLY thing the companies care about - but those KPIs aren't what drive healthy communities.
The future of the web is going to be fractured and federated. The pains being experienced by the big players right now are the obvious outcome of trying to apply the same set of standards and rules to thousands of different sets of people. If there is no set of rules you can make to please everyone, the answer is simple: it is time to split.
According to Kevin Creehan, his grandson, Irish fiddler Junior Creehan was always amazed that Irish Traditional music became a thing for pubs. To him, it had started out as thoughtful people gathered around in their kitchens playing music together. I can attest that a trad session can be a contemplative and even a bit trance-like.
For me, this is one of the more profound take-aways from the article. This piece is very thought provoking.
Sorting the wheat from the chaff is a challenge. Trying to not throw the baby out with the bathwater is a challenge.
There's a difference between letting people express themselves and ratifying hate to fuel more outrage. Doing that is throwing the justice baby out with the bathwater -- also because it's more viral and you make more money and get more political power that way.
It can be hard to find your own voice. It is necessary to have a little latitude when trying to do so.
It gets vastly more complicated when you are trying to do that in some kind of group setting. It easily goes bad places.
Maybe, but then somebody has to make that call and get it right. Who's going to do that? You? The mob?
Giving all ideas the same platform and letting it sort itself out isn't the worst strategy humanity has come up with. You might even call it democratic.
And I don't remember refusing to judge something being the same as ratifying it, I thought that was tolerance. But I guess you're either with us, or against us - there can be no other option. /s
If letting a few people talk about hate is magically going to convince a large majority, either that's condescending or we're fucked as a species.
• The KDE project (to create a nice graphical desktop environment based on the X windowing system) was initially formed around using the Qt library for graphical user interface widgets. The Qt library had, at the time, a somewhat friendly but distinctly non-free license. The first wave of developers on KDE, therefore, were developers who considered proprietary software and/or sketchy licensed to be A-OK.¹ This will probably forever define the development practices of the KDE project.
• The Go language is, by many accounts, a very nice programming language. But it was started, and still run, by Google people, for Google purposes, and with Google backing. This means that the first wave of developers were and are those developers who think it’s perfectly fine to work at Google, or to work with Google to further Google’s goals. People who don’t like Google will of course have stayed away from the Go project at the outset, and so the developer elite of the Go project will probably always reflect Google values and priorities.
1. Those developers who did not agree went on to start Gnome, which is in fact the very reason Gnome was started.
The KDE project is very focused on software freedom and does not consider proprietary software A-OK. This is written in the https://manifesto.kde.org/
I'm fascinated by the power of positioning of the creators of the project and how easily that can go wrong. That has long fascinated me and this is an incredibly powerful example summed up in a nutshell in the paragraph I quoted, which is a rare thing to see.
We have reasonable (not perfect!) empirical evidence that this is not the case[1]. It appears that toxic and hateful movements can only resist disapprobation when they develop a sufficiently large, sufficiently public (in the visibility sense, not the publicly-owned sense) channel. Continually disrupting those channels works.
[1]: http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf
Yes, you can coerce people with your advantages, and it will work for awhile. You can even create enclaves where you can keep undesirables out. But no, that never wins in the end.
I take the scarequotes there to be you admitting that gulags aren't really deplatforming -- it's a government terrorizing its citizens. Nobody in this conversation is interested in building gulags or putting the undesirables in them.
> Yes, you can coerce people with your advantages, and it will work for awhile. You can even create enclaves where you can keep undesirables out. But no, that never wins in the end.
I don't understand this reasoning. I've presented some research indicating that banning hateful online communities actually does have some kind of positive effect, and your response it that it "never wins in the end"? What is the "end" here? Do we have any sort of evidence or overarching political theory that suggests that it doesn't win in the end?
Most of us are on board, intuitively at least, with the notion that you can't have both a dictator and be a democratic republic. Why are we so hesitant to accept that other entities fundamentally conflict with the notion of liberal democracy?
I'm sure that you can find a Soviet study indicating that certain of their programs had an effect against Bourgeois oppressor thinking and activity for some number of years.
Why are we so hesitant to accept that other entities fundamentally conflict with the notion of liberal democracy?
Conditioning a society to accept the practically suppression of free speech fundamentally conflicts with the notion of liberal democracy.
Again, no gulags here. Just Twitter, Reddit, and bad clones of the aforementioned. It's also worth noting that the Soviet Union, at its best, simply was not a liberal democracy. The position that I'm taking is nonsensical outside of a liberal democratic context, so comparing it with various inhumanities under a non-democracy is unconvincing at best.
> Conditioning a society to accept the practically suppression of free speech fundamentally conflicts with the notion of liberal democracy.
We're talking about the scope and structure of liberal democracy itself, a discussion that's been going on for as long as liberal democracies have existed (others have brought up Popper, but Popper cribbed the idea from Immanuel Kant). There's no conditioning going on.
not deplatforming didn't go too well in the US. look at all the white power folks who are showing up, even though they kept their platforms after the civil war.
As for "all the white power folks", they may be loud and they may be a convenient boogeyman, but how many are there really? And isn't it better to know they exist, than have such speech stifled, only to have it surprise you e.g. at the next election? (Talking about the AfD here, before you draw too many parallels)
> I know as “the DNS guys” we have a near pathological aversion to single-points-of-failure, but it’s not a stretch to come to the conclusion for any business that it’s not an acceptable risk to have that possibility just looming there and to do nothing about it.
> That means we will now be looking for backup payment processors.
FWIW, this is exactly what Bitcoin does well: uncensorable payments with no single points of failure. And, by way of anecdata, I currently pay for domain names in Bitcoin already (from gandi).
People buying domain names are probably one of the best demographics to have if you want to take Bitcoin as they are likely to be technically savvy.
What if you run a Plemore/Mastodon server that has users with controversial content? Is it okay for Vultr or DigitalOcean or Amazon to just yank your account? Sure you can claim capitalism and find another provider, but we've seen here that finding another provider is hard and migration is expensive!
I wrote about this almost a year ago when it happened to The Daily Stormer and I still think it's more relevant today:
https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-...
Shutting down platforms just drives people to more extreme platforms. You can't just yell "decentralization" because then you could have providers pulling individual instances of federated ActivityPub/OStatus based software.
At some point we're going to need to address free speech online, because it's not like the real world. You can't just go to another news stand or buy your own printer. There are a limited of people that can host general purpose VMs at a reasonable price with a decent provisioning API.
The domain issue is the most troubling. I don't see any reason a registrar should be allowed to pull domain services from people. Right now it's just content some people don't like, but what if a business starts pulling domain registrar service for business they just don't like, and claim it has to do with hate?
I don't think that any solution is going to be a permanent one, whether it is a law or a technology. I tend to look towards technological advancement to first outpace laws and then the govts slowly catch up. I do think that decentralized storage solutions behind decentralized applications are pretty interesting. There is even something called IPFS which is being pitched as a possible challenger to HTTP. In some of the distributed solutions, the computers holding the data only ever see it encrypted, so the possibility of censorship on that end is mitigated at least for a while. I'm not expert on the topic but I've recently found it very exciting and has given me a glimmer of hope.
Let us cross that bridge when we get to it.
Imagine that you have a piece of rotting meat. It's unsightly and it stinks. So you hide it under the carpet. Now it's gone from view, and the smell is nearly gone. But it's still rotting down there, and at one moment you'll have to face what it will turn into.
The right to free speech doesn't include the right to force your speech on people who don't want to listen to you.
I have no desire to listen to that speech, so I just don't visit Gab. It's not like I've ever been forced to.
"Let's inquisit that heresy when we get to it."
SOME TIME LATER
"Truly, monsigneur, this escalation of the Crusade to extirpate the Lutherans could spiral out of our grasp and trigger a continental conflagration that would disturb the harmony of the Catholic Church and cause us to finalize the fracture in Christendom in its entirety!"
"Let us rupture that schism when we come to it."
SOME TIME LATER
"O Puritan Lawyers! I cannot abide this constant seeking of devilry amongst the burghers; for though thy use the Devil chained and cowed, if the Devil escapeth thine chains placyd upon hym, might he wreck also thine own soul's of pleasant Albion forevermore?"
"Let us burn that witch when we come to it."
SOME TIME LATER
"Je dis, this never-ending mission to purify France of the Anciens Regime could easily escape the control of the Bourgeosie and not only destabilize society but also cause us to perform inhumane deeds against the Third Estate that we will regret in the Eye of Providence for all recorded history!"
"Let's get a-head of that when the time arrives."
SOME TIME LATER
"I say, these attempts to civilize the Savages of the outer colonies could easily escape the oversight of the Provincial Governments and not only jeopardize our economic interests, but enable the performance by Europeans of barbarisms that would surely be worse than the practices of the Savages in the first place!"
"Let us lift the White Man's burden when we reach it."
SOME TIME LATER
"I don't know Comrade, this ten-year-old five-year plan to purify Russia of the Bourgeosie could easily escape control of the Central Committee and not only jeopardize the Revolution, but also cause us to engage in the same Tsarist evils of terror that the Revolution was launched to eliminate!"
"Let's rehabilitate that kulak when we get to it."
SOME TIME LATER
> We run the risk that the act of deplatforming can become as extreme as the hate speech it seeks to banish.
Let us cross that bridge when we get to it.
I've been back and forth on distributed storage and blockchain in my mind but my current thinking is that the recent de-platforming is going to hasten the development of alternate solutions that are more robust with regards to censorship. I'm not even considering about whether it is right or wrong, I just think that's going to happen.
If I were NYU, I would simply never book Milo Whatever-his-name-is. Having to deplatform him indicates that someone wanted to platform him in the first place. Kick his useless ass to the curb/kerb, as the case may be.
Hopefully as this wave of authoritarian practices sweeps the globe and the 'net people will simply adopt federated services like IRC or notabug for communication and host it among themselves.
It is unacceptable for monopolists to infringe on peoples constitutionally protected rights. When a monopolist offers a service, they have to provide it to everyone. We can't have electric monopolists cutting power to people because they voted for the "wrong" party. We can't have banks and payment processors making it practically impossible for people to conduct commerce.
Going down that path leads us to where China already is. Calling someone on the phone leads to a message about how the person is socially unacceptable and that proceeding with the call may cause you to be similarly blacklisted. Or, you just get phone access cut off.
If I walked into a local bookstore and saw a whole shelf dedicated to white supremacy, I would rightfully be appalled that it was allowed to exist, because stocking such books would reflect on the bookstore. The Internet is like a bookstore where anyone can write a book and guarantee it's stocked, and free to read, and therefore completely unlike a bookstore at all. Yet we tend to think of online discussion platforms in these terms because the idea of a true online free speech platform where only content that is Actually Illegal is taken down and reported to the authorities accordingly is still incredibly foreign to us at a societal level. Someone who's never used the Internet and never met any (for example) white supremacists in their lives may go online for the first time and see an active discussion among white supremacists taking place, and this causes cognitive dissonance: "I've never met a single white supremacist in my life, yet here's dozens of them, virtually congregating and discussing their racist viewpoints! What the hell is happening? Is the Internet full of racists?" Humans are terrible at comprehending numbers on the scale of "the number of Internet-connected users in the world," so it's hard to understand "the proportion of vocal white supremacists online compared to the total number of people using the Internet in the world is just about as small as you previously thought it was" when they're given the same equal voice as everyone else.
There's no easy solution to this. Unless a massive societal shift in understanding how the Internet works and fits into modern human society happens, "safe" yet censored platforms like Twitter will always be more popular with normal users compared to "true free speech" havens like Gab, and generally-offensive extremist viewpoints will congregate on services like the latter after being kicked off of services like the former, making services like the latter a hard sell to people who don't hold extremist viewpoints themselves, in spite of the promise of unrestricted free speech.
It's been wild seeing the increase of people openly advocating against unfiltered free speech on the Internet as the Internet has gotten popular with the rise of smartphones, to the point where some people seem to consider "free speech" a "talking point" or "dogwhistle" of "the other side."
Until the singularity happens and we become one global consciousness and ascend to a higher plane of being, we're never going to have uniform beliefs as individual members of our species, and people with offensively extremist views will always exist. Silencing their views on a given platform out of a sense of righteousness and justice may feel good but solves nothing. You cannot change peoples' minds or eliminate ideas by making them illegal or against platform policy to express. Once you acknowledge and internalize this, browsing the Internet and occasionally coming across extremist opinions becomes a lot easier to grapple with.
Another fundamental issue is that The News is all about reporting abberational events. When non-local awareness is ubiquitous (via the Internet and social media) literally any statistically improbable event can be reported upon anywhere and treated unconsciously as a statistical constant by its audience.
In other words, people in California get to hear all the improbable dirty laundry about Texas and vice-versa, but we don't get to see the banal, quotidian existence of these places that allows us to relate to them as fellow humans, fellow Americans, etc.
Douglas Adams understood. (Babelfish)
They're also not evolved to deal with TV news.
So, they're saying "I won't help your speech reach millions" runs the risk of being as bad as encouraging the idea that "all $ethnics must die" - speech which as very real and deadly consequences.
I don't know where to even with that. Someone has not though it through at all. Is the rest worth reading?
- Just like users demand feature requests, people who are being deplatformed and people who argue against deplatforming are asking to support a feature called "free speech" and "open communication".
- Violation of contract. Users invest in growing the network and influence in these platforms with understanding that "free speech" and "open communication" will be respected. But overtime, the Valley oligarchs like FB, Twitter, Reddit etc pulled a fast one on their users coming up with draconian rules that wasn't originally part of the platform.
No, it is not. It explicitly is not. Freedom of speech is one right among many other unstated rights held in common by the people. The first amendment merely prohibits Congress from passing a law that restricts it. The wording is clear that this freedom is something that exists inherently beyond the scope of the Constitution, and is certainly not "provided" by the document. We naturally have rights such as freedom of speech. It is from institutions like the government that restrictions are placed on them.
Also, the 9th amendment was included precisely to clarify and codify the fact that the Constitution, in enumerating the rights, is not itself granting those rights or even stating that these are the only rights people have.
So, no, not so much.
Much later, actually; while the Supreme Court grounded incorporation in the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment, which was part of Reconstruction, the doctrine of incorporation was articulated and developed in the 20th Century, starting, IIRC, with Gitlow v. New York in 1925.
Yes, it is. The idea of the authors (and those ratifying the amendment) that a moral right to freedom of speech exists independently may be (all or part of) the reason the Constitution expressly provides and protects the legal right to freedom of speech, by the legal right is provided by the Constitution.
"Where does it stop?" is the same slippery slope garbage peddled by #HimToo and #BlueLivesMatter acolytes. But even engaging with the question at face value, the answer is very simple, and the author of this piece didn't try very hard if he couldn't find someone who is able to answer it. In fact, the best answer was given by Karl Popper in 1945.
> In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.
That's it. Platforms like Gab are themselves intolerant, and we must continue to be intolerant of them.
If you think that, you're not engaging with the complexity of the problem, and, instead, trying to shut down discussion.
This problem is one philosophers and legal scholars have struggled over for millennia, all around the world. If you think you have a simple answer, you're lying, you're unbelievably arrogant, or you don't understand the problem.
"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.
But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
Another of the less well-known paradoxes is the paradox of democracy, or more precisely, of majority-rule; i.e. the possibility that the majority may decide that a tyrant should rule. That Plato’s criticism of democracy can be interpreted in the way sketched here, and that the principle of majority-rule may lead to self-contradictions, was first suggested, as far as I know, by Leonard Nelson (cp. note 25 (2) to this chapter).
I do not think, however, that Nelson, who, in spite of his passionate humanitarianism and his ardent fight for freedom, adopted much of Plato’s political theory, and especially Plato’s principle of leadership, was aware of the fact that analogous arguments can be raised against all the different particular forms of the theory of sovereignty.
All these paradoxes can easily be avoided if we frame our political demands in the way suggested in section ii of this chapter, or perhaps in some such manner as this. We demand a government that rules according to the principles of equalitarianism and protectionism; that tolerates all who are prepared to reciprocate, i.e. who are tolerant; that is controlled by, and accountable to, the public. And we may add that some form of majority vote, together with institutions for keeping the public well informed, is the best, though not infallible, means of controlling such a government. (No infallible means exist.)"
The paradox of tolerance only applies when talking about actions. A group that is actively excluding others through discrimination or force may need to be removed to preserve tolerance. Speech does not exclude anyone - if the listener chooses to leave because of it then that is the listener's prerogative (as opposed to, say, being subjected to violence or discrimination).
When a guy in synagogue is shooting people, because he happen to believe that they are organizing immigrants to genocide whites, competitive left wing group trying to convince other guys does not make people in synagogue wake up from death. It does not cancel out.
You can be simultanously for free speech while accept the reality that words have consequences and words are often said in order to cause those consequences. To make people afraid and dangerous and ready for violence.
As to your second point, the suppression of speech also has dangerous consequences. Plenty of anti-Semitic thought is rooted in the belief of Jewish control of the media. Suppressing speech probably only serves to reinforce this view.
The reality is that intolerance of hateful speech rarely makes hate go away. Remember, high ranking Nazi leaders were imprisoned, and Völkischer Beobachter (a prominent Nazi publication) was repeatedly banned and had it's offices raided. It didn't stop the spread of Nationalist Socialism. Some historians believe this suppression only accelerated it's rise. It's like the Streisand effect on a political scale.
Aside from instances where the suppression of speech is nearly certain to avoid negative consequences (like specific threats, conspiracy to commit crimes, divulging official secrets or classified information) it is not wise to suppress it. And this doesn't even touch on people attempting to use accusations of hate speech as a political tool (e.g. the "blue lives matter" laws not-so-subtly aimed at suppression of BLM).
The believe in Jewish control of media is reinforced by people who push for that theory. Whether there is suppression of speech or not in addition to that is not all that much relevant. Given that those very same groups are the ones that historically did suppressed a lot of speech and their fans did not minded that, I don't think the point stands.
Nazi also got comparably lower sentences then radical communists or left wing for same offenses. Right wing in Germany was treated with more lenience then left wing in Germany during that period. Hitler could be sent to jail for long, till forgotten, but was not. He could be kept there and his jail could be less of holiday then it actually was. Nazi got plenty of support and benefit of doubt on all kinds of levels which along with fear of communism and wish to build a military imperium again played more role then office sacking. It is not like only Nazi were censored at the time or that specially strict rules were applied to them.
More like the opposite - they were seen as patriots that went just a bit too far.
Somehow, nazi openly trying to silence Jews (even before they got power) or democratic politicians did not caused Streissand effect making Jews or democrats more heard. I also remember that their opposition was targeted by Nazi strongly and successfully.
And whether or not the NSDAP would have still siezed power if the crackdown had been more onerous is speculation. Perhaps it would have further incensed the party and only made it stronger.
Suddenly we are talking about 9/11 through we talked about nazism before. Because apparently to you, there is equivalence between being Muslim and being Nazi. As if Nazism had many interpretations (it does not have) or as if it allowed peaceful coexistence with others in some branches. It does not, the ideology itself is closer to ISIS ideology - it demands obedience, violent masculinity, winners take all mentality and demands to conquer the world.
Note that I did not said whether and what limitations should there be on speech. But, my impression is that people who pretend to care about that are more interested in making Nazi sound better then they are.
Regardless of whether there should be limitations on speech, speech we are talking about is especially crafted and designed to make people take violent action. It is done for that purpose and synagogue shooting (or beheading) is its success as intended. Lets not lie or pretend it is otherwise.
I'm sorry but this is such a blatant fabrication that I cannot take any further words you write seriously. Any reasonable reading of my comment would recognize that references to Islam is to serve as an example of an intolerance perpetrated under the rationale of excluding the intolerant (e.g. calls to ban Muslims after 9/11). Did you ignore the part where I prefaced this as a "very dangerous line of thinking"? The whole point is that "intolerance of the intolerant is okay" often fuels intolerant thinking itself. How you concluded that my comments equated Islam with Nazism is beyond me.
To make that point with proper analogy, you would have to use ISIS or al-Qaeda as an example. The trouble is, that such ban would make sense to quite a lot of people. There, the discussion is whether it is ok to lock them indefinitely on island without process or torture them, generally most people are perfectly fine with America not allowing those to enter. There is an actual ban in place for suspect or admitted ISIS members.
The other possible equivalence would be all Germans ban or ban on teaching all German originated philosophies. Which is not really the topic, since the discussion up there was limited to Nazism.
The precipitating issue in Weimar Germany was that a very clear social and cultural divide existed between those engaged in culture production and those involved in maintaining law and order. The former, generally, were the cosmopolitan worldly types and the latter, generally, were the Prussian law and order types.
I would say, like today in America, that there was not a homogenous treatment by society at large. I would argue instead that there was a layering of reactions by different parts of society, each of which had different reactions and frames of reference. You can make sweeping assertions about what "the media" or "the police" said, did, or thought in Weimar Germany, but that's already reducing extremely diverse portions of society to nothing more than singular unthinking mobs.
Yes, Freikorps members and National Socialists frequently received more lenient sentences in the Weimar Republic. This was because of a panoply of factors, not the least of which was that the accused were almost universally veterans of the war. Combined with the aforementioned Prussian law-and-order types that were democratized unwillingly, it's almost a guarantee that, on the whole, judges would view militant reactionaryism as less severe a crime (if a crime at all) than further perceived attempts to Sovietize the Weimar Republic. Conversely, the media tended to excoriate the judicial sectors for being too lenient against reactionaries and too harsh on communists for similar but opposite reasons.
> Somehow, nazi openly trying to silence Jews (even before they got power) or democratic politicians did not caused Streissand effect making Jews or democrats more heard. I also remember that their opposition was targeted by Nazi strongly and successfully.
The Streisand effect is when an already ubiquitous public figure accidentally enlarges the scope of a minority issue by publicizing it. The Nazis could not have created a Streisand effect when they were a disempowered minority party in the same way that the KPD couldn't have created a Streisand effect pre-1933. However, the Weimar authorities and media did create Streisand effects constantly for both the KPD and the NSDAP during the Weimar Republic by patrolling and outlawing various activities of both parties, which definitely contributed to their overall growth and popularity.
Is there any evidence either way? I don't have the source at hand, but I believe there was some study done that found that Reddit, after removing communities which spread hate, turned out significantly better for it, with less vitriol all round. The hate literally went away.
>Remember, high ranking Nazi leaders were imprisoned
Here is a quote from Hitler opposing what you are saying:
"Only one thing could have broken our movement — if the adversary had understood its principle and from the first day had smashed, with the most extreme brutality, the nucleus of our new movement."
You say,
>Aside from instances where the suppression of speech is nearly certain to avoid negative consequences
But isn't the distance between speech and action shorter now than it ever was? Here is a quote from 1965; do you think, with the most recent flash riots organised over the Internet in which people have literally been killed, these words are more relevant than ever?
"The traditional criterion of clear and present danger seems no longer adequate to a stage where the whole society is in the situation of the theater audience when somebody cries: 'fire'. It is a situation in which the total catastrophe could be triggered off any moment, not only by a technical error, but also by a rational miscalculation of risks, or by a rash speech of one of the leaders. In past and different circumstances, the speeches of the Fascist and Nazi leaders were the immediate prologue to the massacre. The distance between the propaganda and the action, between the organization and its release on the people had become too short."
Put another way: why would I paint a target on my back by trying to debate people who actively advocate for my murder? I'm much more likely to shut up and stay safe.
Consider: "blood and soil" and "Jews will not replace us" aren't credible and specific calls for violence, but if I encounter an angry group of people chanting them I'm going to feel unsafe, and I'm certainly not going to do or say anything that makes me read as Jewish. This is literally the conduct on Gab that people are defending!
Unfortunately, hate speech creates a zero-sum situation: you have to choose whether to suppress the hate speech, or the people it targets. There's no way to choose both, and supporting Gab here just tells me that my speech doesn't matter. The law defines this narrowly because law must be black and white, but there's no reason we as a society can't see the (really, really, really dark) shades of gray here.
No, you can choose both (suppress both Nazis and Jews), just not neither.
>“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
"How can one choose to reason falsely? It is because of a longing for impenetrability. The rational man groans as he gropes for the truth; he knows that his reasoning is no more than tentative, that other considerations may supervene to cast doubt on it. He never sees very clearly where he is going; he is "open"; he may even appear to be hesitant. But there are people who are attracted by the durability of a stone. They wish to be massive and impenetrable; they wish not to change. Where, indeed, would change take them? We have here a basic fear of oneself and of truth. What frightens them is not the content of truth, of which they have no conception, but the form itself of truth, that thing of indefinite approximation. It is as if their own existence were in continual suspension.
But they wish to exist all at once and right away. They do not want any acquired opinions; they want them to be innate. Since they are afraid of reasoning, they wish to want the kind of life wherein reasoning and research play only a subordinate role, wherein one seeks only what be has already found, wherein one becomes only what he already was. This is nothing but passion. Only a strong emotional bias can give a lightning‐like certainty; it alone can hold reason in leash; it alone can remain impervious to experience and last for a whole lifetime.
The anti‐Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith; at the outset he has chosen to devaluate words and reasons. How entirely at ease he feels as a result. How futile and frivolous discussions about the rights of the Jew appear to him. He has placed himself on other ground from the beginning. If out of courtesy he consents for a moment to defend his point of view, he lends himself but does not give himself. He tries simply to project his intuitive certainty onto the plane of discourse. I mentioned awhile back some remarks by anti‐Semites, all of them absurd: "I hate Jews because they make servants insubordinate, because a Jewish furrier robbed me, etc."
Never believe that anti‐Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti‐Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since theyseek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. It is not that they are afraid of being convinced. They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side.
If then, as we have been able to observe, the anti‐Semite is impervious to reason and to experience, it is not because his conviction is strong. Rather his conviction is strong because he has chosen first of all to be impervious. He has chosen also to be terrifying. People are afraid of irritating him. No one knows to what lengths the aberrations of his passion will carry him — but be knows, for this passion is not provoked by something external. He has it well in hand; it is obedient to his will: now he lets goof the reins and now he pulls back on them. He is not afraid of himself, but he sees in the eyes of others a disquieting image‐his own‐and he makes his words and gestures conform to it. Having this external model, he is under no necessity to look for his personality within himself. He has chosen to find his being entirely outside himself, never to look within, to be nothing save the fear he inspires in others."
The issue is that by utilizing partial quotes from Popper and Sartre in order to justify presumptive bad-faith censorship, proponents are literally "loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past" solely through an argument from authority.
If I said, without citation, that "Our opponents can only argue in bad faith. Our self-righteousness is infallible because we're sincere and they are not. Never challenge their arguments or sincerity directly, because they will use your generosity against you without ever changing their minds." but without citation of a famous name, how would people evaluate this position?
Outside of who said it, I'd wager that most people would say that it presumes bad-faith and can only serve to ratchet-up and escalate any division already present. If any genuine attempt to understand or be understood was present, the proponent has shut it down from the outset.
Now when you attach a name to it, suddenly that same argument, given different verbiage, suddenly garners either knowing nods of self-righteousness or visceral renunciation, despite the content being quite identical.
Compare your selective Sartre quote with the following:
"The more I argued with them, the better I came to know their dialectic. First they counted on the stupidity of their adversary, and then, when there was no other way out, they themselves simply played stupid. If all this didn't help, they pretended not to understand, or, if challenged, they changed the subject in a hurry, quoted platitudes which, if you accepted them, they immediately related to entirely different matters, and then, if again attacked, gave ground and pretended not to know exactly what you were talking about. Whenever you tried to attack one of these apostles, your hand closed on a jelly-like slime which divided up and poured through your fingers, but in the next moment collected again. But if you really struck one of these fellows so telling a blow that, observed by the audience, he couldn't help but agree, and if you believed that this had taken you at least one step forward, your amazement was great the next day. The [category] had not the slightest recollection of the day before, he rattled off his same old nonsense as though nothing at all had happened, and, if indignantly challenged, affected amazement; he couldn't remember a thing, except that he had proved the correctness of his assertions the previous day." -- [famous person]
Ignoring if people recognized the actual provenance, if I put anti-Semite and Sartre, it'd be upvoted, and if I put Jew / Hitler, it'd be flagged within minutes, yet it says exactly the same thing. And leads to exactly the same dehumanizing attitudes towards living, breathing, fallible human beings.
Nowhere did I argue for the rule to be applied regardless of qualitative differences in who it is applied to, just as justice would take consideration of the individual characteristics of the parties in various circumstances, so does my argument for censorship.
You asserted I'm trying to justify bad-faith censorship. I view the censorship I'm advocating for, the toleration of the ideas of the left but complete intolerance for those of the right, as protective of democratic society, not liberal capitalist democratic society, but peoples' democracy, and this democratic function having been destroyed through misinformation in mass media, taking advantage of the democratic principle that nobody has a claim on the truth.
Since we're in the business of quotes now, here's one from Marcuse, and when you look up the wider context to try and catch me out I hope you'll be as enlightened as I was when you read it:
>Surely, no government can be expected to foster its own subversion, but in a democracy such a right is vested in the people (i.e. in the majority of the people). This means that the ways should not be blocked on which a subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently undemocratic means. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc. Moreover, the restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behavior--thereby precluding a priori a rational evaluation of the alternatives.
As a parting, however, you've not only proven my point, but re-iterated it by repeating another appeal to authority by citing Marcuse, which is literally advocating for tyranny of the majority (which, ironically, is yet another expression of the reactive ur-fascism that this brand of censorship is a symptom of).
That thing everyone except the intolerant seem to understand remarkably well, and the intolerant spend a lot of time quibbling over the definition of in a desperate attempt to derail their inclusion in it.
Or, more seriously: treating other people as unwelcome or hated or less than human, for reasons other than being hateful and intolerant.
That, to a certain extent, is a culture. In a society with several cultures, alluding to a sense of shared understanding is virtually impossible, because the interpretation is at root a cultural one. There's simply no way to guarantee that what they mean by "intolerant" is exactly what everyone else means.
Now suppose someone were to make an argument like this:
"We observe sexual dimorphism to some degree in most animals. Thus our prior should be that it is unlikely that women and men are 100% psychologically identical even when controlling for environment. Because of this it would be epistemically incorrect to assume differences in representation in engineering firms can be explained entirely by discrimination."
This argument is clearly reactionary and must be censored, for we know 100% that any difference in preferences, abilities and outcomes between men and women must be explained by environmental effects. To think otherwise would be exclusionary and thus an example of intolerance we must be intolerant of, even in our own thoughts.
The person making this argument should be shunned. Even raising the argument should result in immediate deplatforming and perhaps loss of employability.
Even this notion of a prior in which you allow yourself to assign a probability to reactionary thoughts must fought, for even a very low prior can be overcome with enough sensory experience.
1) the person admitted it was hurtful and unacceptable and that they should not have said it, and the mainstream publisher said they would not have hired her without this understanding
2) the argument the person made before being fired was not simply that there is a non-zero amount of sexual dimorphism in humans, it was concretely that womens' neuroticism, agreeableness, and other feeling-sy tendencies may explain why they are on average worse leaders, underrepresented, underpaid, etc.
Remove "worse leaders" (which was not in Damore's memo), and it's a plausible theory supported by quite a bit of evidence.
I understand this is hyperbole, but this is the perfect case of how legitimate grievances are derailed by bad actors. Emphasis on the word "entirely".
We don't and can't think in absolutes as a society. Everyone and everything is imperfect to some degree. Women sometimes falsely accuse men of sexual assault. Police officers sometimes kill unarmed black men for good reason. The problem is that these sorts of arguments strip context entirely away—"sometimes" in each case is well under 10%. No one was talking about "entirely" in the first place, so this just morphs a discussion about equality into a much less serious one about human fallibility.
So, sure, those are issues, but let's focus on the 90% of the actual problem at hand. No one is saying sexism and racism are absolutely 100% responsible for everything. But they are extremely significant factors and, more importantly, factors entirely within our control and of our own making.
If you want to figure out the villains, look for the side that is trying to strip the context away and screeching while holding to absolutes. Beware: villains often use the language of the noblest causes, and sometimes people become villains in the pursuit of noble causes.
-poorly paraphrased Chomsky
No. MLK's movement wouldn't have willingly allowed something like that. Nor would Gandhi's. Justice is a universal compass, applying to all people, not the convenient and emotionally satisfying direction of the moment. Hate has no place in a true movement of justice. Those who would tell you otherwise are bad actors using the movement for their own ends, usually power.
Another example of trying to shut down discussion.
For example, a substantial number of people around the world understand 'tolerance' to mean 'nobody insults my religion' which, of course, means 'nobody depicts homosexual relationships'. Therefore, depicting homosexuality is intolerant, hein?
It's an ideological death-cult that won't stop eating itself until there are literally only two of them left, facing one another, pointing, and screaming "HERETIC" at the tops of their lungs.
If I were attempting to shut down discussion, I wouldn't have included a more serious version of the definition, in addition to the observation that it's remarkable how often people who want to play rules-lawyer with terms like "intolerant" or "bigot" or "racist" or "sexist" seem primarily interested in carefully excluding their own behavior, or that of groups they consider themselves affiliated with, or in general how often they're speaking from a position as a member of a privileged group.
> For example, a substantial number of people around the world understand 'tolerance' to mean 'nobody insults my religion' which, of course, means 'nobody depicts homosexual relationships'.
Hence tolerating everyone except the intolerant. Membership in one marginalized group does not provide a free pass for intolerance against another, nor does it entitle you to attack another or make another feel unwelcome. You deserve to not be discriminated against or excluded on the basis of your religious beliefs, but not if you're using them to attack other people or deny their rights based on (for instance) gender or orientation. Likewise for cis women intolerant of transwomen, white women intolerant of people of color, LG in LGBTQ+ intolerant of the B and T, and so on.
Since I can't legitimately reply yet, consider this a reply:
> any group not specifically defined by their intolerance.
So, would that be Hezbollah or Shas?
I'm not sure I agree with that, since the definition of intolerance is obviously rooted in societal norms. In 1950 the statement "two men should not be allowed to marry each other" would not have been seen as intolerant by almost anyone, regardless of political affiliation or sexuality. It would have been considered practically a tautology - so obviously true that no one even spent any time thinking about it. Today, many people in the USA would consider the statement intolerant. So I think your definition just kicks the can down the road to "how do we define who is tolerant?"
I've found this to be true of many different areas. The more certain you are, the less you're open to continuous learning. Have a well-calibrated idea of your own understanding, and scale your confidence accordingly.
In general, the concept of tolerance and intolerance should be fairly universal; the implementation of tolerance relies on a substantial and growing amount of working social knowledge.
For example: (neo-)Nazism is an intolerant ideology because, left unchecked, it would seek to destroy the systems (broadly liberal democracies) that allow people to discuss it.
If we aren't putting her in the white nationalist classification I'm not sure who does end up there.
How is a platform that let's you say anything uncensored intolerant?
That said, the OP is also not right to suggest that intolerance is simple to identify. Like the other comments here say, it's subjective.
Then again, most things in life are subjective. Society has to be pragmatic sometimes and ignore that. Otherwise everything, eg: the legal system, falls apart.
The right of self defense is and long has been defense against immanent physical harm, for the one who does not start the fight.
My resolution is that people are experiencing cloudy thinking, and using the word 'tolerance' when they mean 'humility'. To have humility is to seriously admit that, while you are ejecting someone from your community, that you might possibly be wrong to do so. A positive community founded on humility would naturally lead to tolerance anyway, because intolerance starts in a firm belief in your own views of the world being correct.
Looks oddly relevant.
If you want to find the tolerant, find those who advocate for free speech and those who want to engage and make their arguments. That's the side which has learned the value of tolerance, because they're on their back foot.
I haven't heard of this specifically, but the #MeToo movement bothers me greatly, because it implies that we suddenly learned you needed consent for sex; like it was some new revelation.
If you look at CDC numbers, just as many men are assaulted sexually as women, but yet the #MeToo movement felt very one directional and didn't talk about assault inclusively of all people.
The #BelieveWomen campaign actually goes directly against one of the principal tenants of progressive ideology: Innocent until proven guilty (a tenant of #BlackLivesMatter).
The point is these issues are COMPLEX! They are not simple. And when they're not simple, you need to be able to discuss them openly, and frankly. Deplatforming totally fucks that up. People who have never been on to Gab assume it's all hate speech and right-wring religious stuff (I mean .. it is .. or was, but most people didn't actually see it for themselves...they just heard about it and hated).
A good counter example: the documentary The Red Pill, where a feminist interviews several people in the Men's Rights movement and learns it was nothing like how it was portrayed as. She had an entirely incorrect view of what they themselves stood for because of all those people yelling at their platform.
De-platforming increases polarization. I know it's a meme, but we do live in a society. We need to be able to discuss our differences and find a synthesis between the thesis/anthesis to move forward in a way that's as fair as we can be to everyone.
When you push people off platforms, there is no longer speech and discussion. There is only "for us or against us." If you are a feminist in every way, but think trans-women should still be men on their birth certificates, then suddenly you're an anti-Trans, TERF, Fascist, Nazi and nothing you said should be listened to because you're wrong.
That's the direction we're heading, and that is sad and terrible. Most humans do act in good faith, and are reasonable, and we need to learn to listen again.
it's true though; it's largely in response to somebody bragging about not getting consent being elected to the highest office of the US.
Without it, Hollywood would still be thinking sexual assault is just the norm, and women have to accept it if they want to move their carear forward
Wait, when did Trump ever brag about not getting consent? If this is the famous "grab her by the pussy" video, you should really watch the whole thing. He talked about how usually rich men can get women without any work, but this one particular woman wouldn't take his advances, and how he didn't have sex with her.
I don't like Trump at all (I didn't like Hillary either; they're both psychos), but I hate how this clips was taken out of context.
From the Village Voice review (which is not charitable), and remember the context that her doc opens with an exploration of "rape culture":
I feel comfortable calling her “propagandist” because of my own “research” (ie. “reading the top search results”). Here’s something Elam wrote on A Voice for Men in 2010: “Should I be called to sit on a jury for a rape trial, I vow publicly to vote not guilty, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the charges are true.” What excuse would any serious documentarian have for not asking Elam to explain that?
The whole point of Free Speech is to enable all sides of any issue to have their say. That is a fundamental mechanism against totalitarianism.
In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.
Sorry, but Karl Popper's idea is just Orwellian nightmare fuel. "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."
Tolerance is to live and let live. Oppressing those you disagree with is the very opposite of tolerance. (Even if they are truly horrible people.) If Silicon Valley were tolerant, they'd let Gab live and possibly be a cesspit of horribleness. A society that de-platforms and un-persons everyone and every idea it doesn't like isn't a free society. That's not a free market of ideas. That's totalitarianism through economic hegemony.
This is one reading of tolerance, but there are multiple (as expounded by Popper and Marcuse too, for instance). I don't think considering an idea badly because it's used as fuel is a good thing. A quick counterexample to the idea that tolerance means to allow anything and everything is that if I were to tell you I tolerate your presence, but you begin to make annoying sounds continuously, my tolerance would quickly change to intolerance.
Tolerance is a democratic principle, since it relies on the idea that nobody has an absolute claim on the truth, but as critical theorists as early as the 60s pointed out, this democratic idea depends on an informed populace to distinguish ideas as they are - to that end, in society we don't tolerate some views, such as the teaching of creationism in schools.
A good essay on this is Marcuse's "Repressive Tolerance". Regarding your mention of Orwell, Marcuse made another interesting point; nowadays, the contradiction is hidden within the noun itself, rather than "war is peace", the word "freedom" itself, understood in the context of its ideological use by various proponents (particularly on the libertarian right, I've noticed) already contains the contradiction; the idea it represents is contradictory. Similarly with misleading names and terms.
I do not want to live in a society in which tolerance is absolute, and I doubt many people would.
An idea that demolishes a foundation idea by melding it with its opposite is a very insidiously bad thing.
"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."
What do you say to the claim that laws (restrictions on absolute freedom) may be required to guarantee freedom? Does this claim demolish the foundation of freedom by melding it with its direct opposite? From this example, your abstract point is pretty poor; this issue with freedom has been picked up since the time of the earliest philosophers, and they really do seem paradoxical.
That's not to say your concrete (specific) point on intolerance is wrong, but your abstract point about melding an idea with its opposite is poorly founded, and doesn't hold up to a dialectical analysis in place of considering the ideas as binary opposites.
Having completely lost the idea that the right of self-defense is the right to use reasonable force to protect oneself from immanent violence and it doesn't apply when you start the fight. [1]
[1] https://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=864 gives a nice, simple overview of how it works.
Your mechanism against totalitarianism will lead you straight into a dictatorship.
Those might have been the exact words of a 1950's McCarthyite. How can you be so sure that you're just just as wrong as they were?
I do not understand this assertion.
The way I see it, Free Speech is an antidote against totalitarianism, in contrast to Censorship, which is a tool of totalitarianism.
By this theory fascism is somehow so inherently attractive that is has to be regulated similar to an addictive drug.
If you see people around you saying “white males are undergoing a genocide” or “brown people are criminals” every day, chances are you’ll eventually start to internalize some of those talking points. Without tremendous effort, we’re nothing more than a rough aggregation of the opinions we surround ourselves with.
But that's not unique to fascism. By this argument you'd have to ban all ideologies.
You should be more skeptical of your intuitions about which way the arrow of causality points.
Not you, though. No way could YOU be under the influence of a totalitarian ideology despite the fact that you are openly advocating restricting basic human rights.
The balance fallacy will be the death of democracy in America.
Can we start with yours? /s
This has nothing to do with "right-wing rot". We already have ample historical examples of what happens when those wielding power, whether religious, royal, or financial, can suppress views and speech and it wasn't a good thing! The Enlightenment and the birth of the liberal movement (now classical liberalism, I suppose) were in reaction to those abuses and they fought many hard battles to get us the rights we enjoy today. It would be insane to throw that away for a little temporary advantage.
Worse yet, all this anger is a massive distraction. We should be talking day and night about the rampant voter suppression and e-voting security flaws that do actually pose an existential threat to our democracy. But no, let's just focus all our attention on Gab for weeks on end.
In that much, at least, I will agree with you.
And that freedom includes the freedom to say "I don't want to be associated with you".
Any "anti-deplatforming" is, of necessity, forced unwilling speech. Which is sort of the opposite of what "free speech" people should be standing up for. If someone doesn't want to lend you their soapbox, the solution is not to put a gun to their head and order them to hand it over; it's to go build your own soapbox. And if enough people are unwilling to associate with you that it's becoming burdensome to maintain your soapbox (difficulty getting materials, etc.), perhaps that's a sign from the marketplace of ideas that your ideas aren't very good.
No, the "relaying" or "transmission" argument is just a dishonest gambit in 2018. Only idiots believe YouTube thinks everything some YouTuber might say on their own channel. Should AT&T have had the right to cut off phone calls containing speech they didn't like? There were party lines where entire groups of people could hear the same person speak, so it wasn't just one on one communication. Should AT&T have had the right to cut those off because of AT&T's "free speech" rights?
Sorry, but the effect of such a position is to allow large companies to regulate the speech of the general public. Their inability to censor the general public doesn't somehow mean that they lose any ability to express their views to the public. It only curtails their ability to squelch the expression of others.
And that's without getting into the issue where you've just effectively rolled back CDA 230. Why shouldn't sites be able to make and enforce rules for the use of their platforms? And how small can a platform be and still have you put the government's gun to its head and force them to act the way you want? If I run a web site where people can discuss things, are you going to send a SWAT team to my house and have them shoot me unless I stop kicking out Nazis?
For all the hand-wringing you want to do over what is, in the end, an exercise of the right of free association (which includes the right not to associate), you seem completely unconcerned with the kinds of horrific consequences that would come from forcing everyone to provide a platform to the whole world. So maybe first you should practice what you preach -- start tithing in support of causes you hate, listening to lectures in support of those causes, and going out in public carrying signs and banners for those causes. After all, by not doing that, you're already censoring them, and that's horrible!
Right now, they're emphasizing Indian content. it's they're freedom to downplay Western content to get broader appeal to an Indian audience
It's funny you take this view, as fatigued as I imagine you probably feel about, as you're calling it "both-sides-ism"-I like to imagine there are probably other people out there just as fatigued with watching "both sides" act like neither has some kind of fringe-manifested baggage or serious, fundamental issues that need to be brought to the table and reconciled.
Hate to break this to you: there's some ugly problems with how we're talking about issues coming from all over the place. No one is coming to the table here with clean hands, as far as I'm concerned.
Some ugly words and tactics being hurled like hand grenades. They're probably not the same, they probably don't exist for the same reasons, nor have the same motivating factors behind them, but there has got to be some kind of decongestant for this idea that polarizing and hurtful speech only comes from one ideological hemisphere. I don't know what it is, but I hope we find one.
I'm being (slightly) facetious, but the point is that Popper's argument, or at least this naive interpretation of it, can be used to justify any intolerance. There's no obvious reason you can't use Popper's argument to justify McCarthyism or the Muslim ban or even Japanese internment on the grounds of the alleged intolerance of their intended targets, or the existential threat they posed to liberalized society. In fact, most actual justifications of those things are based on Popper's argument; it's of the same species as "the Constitution is not a suicide pact" or "are you going to convict Jack Bauer?". This is literally how people tried to justify every violation of civil liberties in American history.
US judicial precedent around the First Amendment has varied over time. The hoary cliche that "you can't shout fire in a crowded theater" comes from a Supreme Court ruling in 1919, Schenck v. United States, that the First Amendment did not protect advocacy of draft resistance. That ruling was overruled, and the standard set by the court in 1969, in Brandenberg v. Ohio, was "imminent lawless action". And I think that standard meets Popper's bar without the risk of it devolving into totalitarianism for the sake of protecting us from totalitarianism. Which, incidentally, has been the sales pitch of every totalitarian regime ever. The next batch of Nazis are going to get power by telling us they need it to protect us from the Nazis.
A tolerant society, to defend itself, only needs to be intolerant of actions of intolerance - e.g. physical assault motivated by some prejudice. It does not need to be intolerant of intolerant speech, however.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.
This story is not spam, and it is not off-topic since it clearly relates to current news in technology.
For example - once upon a time, I could trust the google search engine, g-mail and the chrome browser. I recommended them to other people, and utilized them myself. But now, I can't in good faith steer folks to any google property, because they run the risk of losing access to their data. Today it's fashionable to cut off GAB, what will the moral panic of tomorrow be?
Another example - I used Pay-pal weekly to make purchases and send money to people and causes I supported. But after PayPal began denying service based on what keeps the outrage mob mollified, I've closed my account and have been helping website operating on the dissident right to transition away from a system that might deny them service on a fit of whimsy. Paypal, like so many other platforms, has become too unreliable to be a single point of failure.
All of these institutions were, until the last few years, treated like utilities - which bolstered their reputation for reliability. But now, so many of these giant Near-Monopolies have decided to become overtly political, denying their services without any manner of due process or even a reasonable amount of notice to the people being cast off. This damages the brand reliability, and where once customers could rely on their Registrar, Host, or Payment Processor, they now must consider it imperative to have redundant systems - lest they risk having their service cut because they suddenly find themselves on the bad side of "the fashionable opinion" of the hour. (Goal-posts that move by the hour, and today's cleric of the faith can easily find themselves tomorrow heretic).
A high-trust business environment is required to maintain the sorts of business relationships a content creator enters into with a platform/host/registrar. The fact is, as it stands now, no content creator, business or group can trust these tech-corporations to maintain a stable relationship - or even adhere to a basic contract - in good faith. Once a company - like PayPal for instance - has proven itself unreliable, it has already done half the work of replacing itself.
JS Mill argued that censorship is wrong on a rights basis, that it leads to bad ideas being unchallenged, and it leads to people not being able to understand the reason why ideas are rejected. If censorship by a government is harmful, how is deplatforming by a near-monopoly different? I suspect some left-wingers argue this in a hypocritical way, because they think it will "trigger the conservatives" to force them to attack the actions of private companies, but this is hardly a good argument.
Conservatives will come to understand that big capital is not a conservative.
There's no logic behind this. No, you can't just say 'offline stuff has a monopoly', because it doesn't. It might in some parts of the US (where choice in ISPs is limited), but it certainly doesn't in much of Europe, other parts of the US or other countries around the world. You've got multiple choices for banks and building societies, multiple choices for electric companies and multiple choices for ISPs, yet we're sane and don't let them discriminate by political views at will.
It's time similar standards were set up for online services too. If you market yourself as a platform or network or service that should be morally neutral, then you should be obligated to act that way, just like your offline equivalents generally do. There should always be a way to host a platform for your views, no matter how many people hate them and you in the process.
Google and Apple should also be looked into in regards to their app stores too. They're defacto monopolies on their platforms (unless you jailbreak them), and their standards for what's 'acceptable' are clearly broken and biased to all hell. Apparently something like Gab isn't allowed, but dozens of copyright/trademark/whatever infringing ripoffs are? It's fine for apps to ripoff consumers and target kids with exploitative in app purchases but not provide a platform for 'questionable' views?
Yeah, that doesn't add up much, and it's clear they're falling short as both a platform and a publisher.
Finally, something should definitely be done about the whole 'contact their employer and try and get them fired' crap. I'm not really sure what, but there should be a legal way to stop people trying to screw over people's livelihoods based on online disagreements. Maybe an actual ban on contacting someone's employer/company/coworkers unless it's about illegal activity? I don't know, anything I can think of seems like it'd hurt freedom of speech more in the attempt to save it.
But something does need to change, before the laws basically become ineffective and trial by media/mob becomes the judge, jury and executioner.
Also, on Android you can run alternative app stores without having to "jailbreak" the phone. One example of this is f-droid [0]. You just need to change a single configuration option to allow installing APKs from third-party sources. Fortnite is an example of a popular Android game which you have to download and install outside of the Play Store, presumably because they don't want to pay for the large cut that Google normally takes.
I think domain name registrars should probably be treated like utilities, although I'd have to think it through very carefully to consider any consequences.
I'm generally in agreement that platforms should be neutral, otherwise they should be treated as publishers and be forced to deal with the consequences. It sets a poor precedent when rules are not enforced evenly.
Maybe there is some way around this, but I have no idea what it might be.
You might want to ask Wil Wheaton what he thinks about Mastodon...