I believe it's becoming increasingly clear that merely allowing far-right dialogue online is essentially responsible for ease of radicalization, and that proactive censorship would be the best approach to forestall this.
Because of course, censorship only blocks the material you personally don't want others to view and never material you personally would want others to view. I can see a lot of politicians, especially those getting elected nowadays, wanting to block any discussion of minority rights, LGTBQ+ rights, trans rights, drug reform, abortion, women's health, women's rights, climate change, non-christian religion discussions, etc, etc, etc.
edit: Note that this isn't a straw man argument. All it takes is one to look at the censorship that happened in the US in the 50s and 60s (comic code, movie/television code, mccarthyism, etc. ) to see what is possible.
Publications, preachers, performances, etc. change people’s behaviour and beliefs — if they didn’t, nobody would advertise or campaign. That change can be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ depending on your point of view.
I want the spread of harmful memes to be slowed (and, if possible, prevented), but I also ask myself “What if I’m wrong about what is harmful?” — for example, I don’t believe in the Christian god, and have seen harm done in his name, but what if he actually does exist and banning Christian memes condemns people to hell?
Or sexuality? I know people whose sexuality has been outlawed this decade in much of western Europe, as a result of campaigns by people totally convinced that their preferences are innately harmful, which side is right?
I think solving this is also an important part of safe A.I., so it would still be a very important problem for me even if I didn’t know people directly affected.
Regardless, censorship on the internet is inherently ineffective. If this speech is banned from Facebook, it will move to other forums. If it's made illegal, it will move to the "dark web".
The only real solution to combat this sort of thinking is to debate it directly, refuting arguments rather than shutting them down entirely.
All things considered, I'm not convinced that censoring extreme far-right contents is a long-term net negative for freedom of speech. (Well, it could be, but it's not a given.)
No, but they'd need to pass laws and fight court battles to enable censorship versus merely taking over existing systems of censorship. The latter is much easier to do and much harder to notice or right against. Especially when merely fighting against it is grounds for censorship.
>Yes, but on the other hand, the prevalence of far-right dialogue contributed to the rise of far-right politicians.
Depends on the scale you look at. In a sense, the far right is merely the average person's view as of 50-ish years ago. Censoring to the view of the average person merely ensures that in 50 years you'll be seen as having helped far right ideas. Or in a different way, I don't believe that my current views are the pinnacle of progressiveness (or morality or whatever) and I am loathe to prevent future progressives from being able to push their views forward.
I don't think that's a significant hurdle to any politician with popular support.
Look at Trump, for example, not because I hate him (well I do, but that's not the point here), but because he is a good example of what a politician can do. He rammed into the freaking Supreme Court a candidate that was accused as rapist. And there was nothing the opposition could do.
And the crazy thing is, Trump doesn't even enjoy unanimous support. Far from it.
There's not much you can do once a politician is at power, has a semblance of popular support, and is willing to forego established political norms. Laws? They will change laws, they will take their matter to courts, and they will win.
So I'm still not convinced it's a net positive to have an uncompromising legal roadblock against censorship, when the cost is to increase the chance that someone will rise to power and kick that roadblock away like a tin can.
However, censorship is exactly the wrong thing to do.
If these pockets of knowledge are cordoned off, and inaccessible to causal observers then fewer people will know about them. There will be less people who are well versed in the ideas, and as a result fewer who are able to identify and explain their limits and context. This makes it far easier to radicalize folks.
It's also super intuitive, of course censorship increases radicalization. That's why a corrupt government censors, to have better control of and more precisely manipulate their beliefs. Something that wouldn't be possible if everyone had more information.
So yeah, I disagree.
4chan (and even more so, 8chan) are the pure essence of no censorship, yet everything from Holocaust denial to rampant racism and sexism thrive and fester and spread. The most persuasive ideas are those that are short, easy to digest, and blame someone who's not you for your misery. The truth, well, it can be messy and complicated, and I'm not sure you can get there without shutting down the puerile voices screaming memes of hatred.
Yet this is not the case. Why?
Facebook isn’t required by law to pull down the video. They pull down the video because it’s not profitable (shareholders)
4chan is an example of a pure free market of ideas. Yet only the most toxic of ideologies seem to survive. Why is this the case?
You can find the same content on reddit that you find in 4chan. The difference is Condé Nast will remove subreddits because it looks bad and hurts their bottom line. 4chan doesn’t have share holders, they barely have advertisers.
Toxic ideologies survives on the Chan because there is no one worried about profit there’s no one to answer to. The entire internet use to be the same way.
But now that some political power that we don't like is emerging, well, a lil censorship never hurt anyone huh?
This very discussion forum is moderated, and very well as far as I can see. Do you think it would somehow be better if the mods weren't here?
It gets morally messy when you consider scale. At what point does it cross over from reasonable moderation to censorship? If Facebook were a country, it would the largest country in the world. Is it okay to censor two billion people because Facebook is not an "official government"?
I'm not against moderation at all but at a certain scale does it cease being only moderation? I would argue yes, but at what point? That's trickier to answer and I can't really say I know.
EDIT: To make my view clear here, Facebook and others are free to remove the videos, I'd prefer if they age-gated and put a warning on them instead, but that's their choice. What I don't like is the way that that some police agencies have been suggesting that mere possession of the video is illegal.
The worst part here is that the attacker himself was suggesting that by hitting on ideas like free speech and the right to bear arms he'd be able to "accelerate" the deepening of political divides. I do not want to be put in a place where I'm forced to choose between fundamental rights and respect for entire races of people, but at this rate I fear that decision time may be approaching. Given time I hope cooler heads will prevail.
1. Platforms weight/select for content that is updated frequently and drives views.
2. Established/agreed upon information is much less likely to get that fed to you.
Consider the flat earth folks, they are churning out thousands of videos on that topic. How often are spherical earthers updating their YouTube channels? And I see similar happening with extremist communities: a flood of ideas and video that just seem unhinged and I'd rather ignore, but in doing so it furthers this gap.
People are going to jump on you for this, but I feel it's necessary to put this in perspective.
Ten years ago, the threat of domestic radicalization was a hot topic, except it concerned radicalization towards fundamentalist Islamic terrorism.
Twitter, Google et al. devoted resources towards identifying Islamic terrorist propaganda, accounts and networks, and then silenced them all.
Today, the threat of domestic radicalization comes from the far right. We should at least be honest and consistent when considering the threat and how we've handled such threats in the past.
If we want less division we should be listening more to each other not less.
On a similar note I recently watched this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc and completely agree with its premise.
Or was that just an example of one of many kids of dialogue that might be dangerous and need to be proactively censored?
The shooter was self described as an eco-fascist and claimed his motivation were two events covered widely by the mainstream media. He was very clearly "of the internet", but are you convinced that deleting "far-right dialogue" would have stopped him?
What about the current state of journalism and politics, which was also very clearly something he aimed to exploit and seems to have manipulated at a far more effective level than past attacks?
Where do we hear conspiracy theories about "the great replacement"[1] coming from? CNN or people like Lauren Southern[2][3]?
Or, the fact that he literally states what he wants (it's the 14 words):
> What do you want?
> We must ensure the existence of our people, and a future for white children.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Replacement_conspira...
Did you forget the dozen or so pages ranting about "white genocide" and "the great replacement"? What about the 49 Muslim people he murdered?
...
If you were calling for censorship against both far right and far left, sure, I would probably disagree but would concede it was a coherence point of view.
But calling for censorship solely against one side, makes someone by definition a totalitarian.
+ We fundamentally change how the Internet works and introduce an omnipotent overseer that enforces norms and behavior. We have to go all the way with this in order to reap the security benefits, half-measures - what we have today - won't work. If we do go all the way, we find ourselves living in a hellish dystopia. This is the top-down, centralized approach.
+ We realize that the only way out is through and ride the wave of rapid information propagation on the Internet, waiting for bottom-up reorganization to take place and the emergence of something new. Censorship has no place here. Extreme points of view should be allowed to diffuse-disperse by exposing them to the rest of the system. This is the decentralized, cybernetic approach.
More to the point, it is my view that events many will see as extreme will keep on happening regardless of which way we choose to go. Today, we are not dealing with increased discussion and development of new ideas (printing press). The feedback loops are getting short enough to give rise to cognitive metasystems. It follows that some blowback will occur. We are watching force projection/meatspace interaction from cognitively dissonant emergent hive minds. This is exactly what bottom-up reorganization looks like. Expect it to intensify.