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Comment by asdfasgasdgasdg | Hacker News Reader

Ain't gonna happen in this case, for two reasons:

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.

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A muslim shot up a gay night club, we don’t ban Islam or mosques or deplatform Muslims from the internet for holding similarly antisemitic views. To suggest such an action would be roundly decried and the person drummed out.

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.

> A muslim shot up a gay night club, we don’t ban Islam or mosques or deplatform Muslims from the internet for holding similarly antisemitic views. To suggest such an action would be roundly decried and the person drummed out.

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?

If that guy was an "otherwise typical" user of gab, and gab has ~500,000 active users(per wikipedia), why hasn't there been more than one story about gab-user-gone-wild in the media?

Isn't that (the fact this guy shot 11 Jews dead and the other users haven't) exactly what "otherwise typical" refers to?

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 is the violence that people have a problem with not the speech right? I mean if the neighbors upstairs are talking about how much the hate me I don't have a problem though that would change if they knock on my door with baseball bat in hand.

It sounds like Gab is being de-platformed for the typical part and not the otherwise part.

I've got a pretty big problem with the speech too!

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.

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