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Comment by MBO35711 | Hacker News Reader

My apologies. Might I ask a question, please? How do we otherwise stop the internet being hacked to support these vile creatures?

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I'm concerned that "censorship of bad views" leads to radicalisation. e.g. if you have concerns that are morally unacceptable to express, the only place you can express those concerns are in morally unacceptable areas.

I think the hope of censoring bad views is to increase that friction before people get there; make it harder for 'ordinary' people to stumble across vile sites, and reduce access to vile sites to those determined to get it.

I'm concerned that having a hammer of "censorship makes this problem goes away" makes it easier to see other social problems as nails. One line to draw is "censor speech which directly incites or leads to violence". It seems the line NZ is drawing (and ISPs preemptively drew) is "objectionable" or "injurious to the public good". That seems much easier to abuse.

I think blocking 4chan and 8chan means their users will resent the establishment even more. Considering this is the demographic whose resentment was influential enough to play a role in the election of Trump in the US, I think society needs to think twice before stamping the boot into their face.

I know some people who will feel that blocking these sites was an affront to their identity. And like it or not, the number of people who feel this way is not small, and their influence even less small. You can't just stamp them out, and you're radicalising them further.

No, those people very much need a boot stamped into their face (metaphorically). The vast majority are cowards who hide behind anonymity or in their sick community. Catch a few and make an example of them and the vast majority will back off. I'm talking about NZ here, I understand the situation in the USA is different and worse.

In fact, though, they won't be cut off. 4chan and 8chan are both accessible to me here in NZ with no tricks.

I think it's DNS blocking with the ISP-provided DNS servers. Perhaps you're using google public DNS already?

In Australia I believe it was blocking at the IP address level, so requires a VPN to circumvent. But only for some ISPs.

After Reddit kicked out CoonTown and some of the other hate subs a few years ago, hateful content all over Reddit dropped. A few people went all huffy-puffy and started this Voat thing, but most just stayed on Reddit and ... stopped posting hateful crap.

So ... it does work. People don't radicalize on their own, they do so in a community, and they behave according to standards in the community. Sites like 4chan and 8chan are especially deceptive since it's a mix of people (not just white supremacists) who will slowly radicalize (part of) the general population there.

This makes it different from StormFront and all the explicit neo-Nazi websites. You don't go to StormFront to post memes fur teh lulz, only to get slowly drawn in to a white supremacist world.

We have abundant evidence that not censoring bad views also leads to radicalisation. So your argument is weak.

Wouldn't that put them on even ground essentially but one option has far less collateral damage? The burden of proof is usually on the one proposing a change.

I’m really interested in that. Do you have links to any studies or other sources?

The problem is people stumbling on literal neo-Nazi propaganda on random YouTube videos and the like (which is not hard to do right now). I don't care about neo-Nazis sharing neo-Nazi content among themselves, these people are too far gone, I care about neo-Nazis recruiting.

As for your "sliding slope" argument, literally no one is confused about the difference between literal neo-Nazis who rant about (((replacement))) and everyone else. The entire point just isn't relevant. It's a red herring. It's like "they'll ban cars next!" when discussing speed limits. No one is confused about the difference between speed limits and banning cars, either. It's just not what's being discussed.

I don't know what you mean by hacked, but this would have been less of an issue if New Zealand had not tried to censor it. The Streisand effect is very real. If you're looking for a technical solution, there is none. The most valuable feature of the Internet is its resistance to censorship. Cut off one head, and two more shall take its place.

Hacked, in this case would mean that the violence was designed to drive traffic towards the manifesto, which would have otherwise vanished into obscurity. But I take your point regarding censorship.

Streisand effect doesn't apply here. It's about relatively small thing being blown up by a disproportionate reply.

This isn't some small event, everyone already knows about it.

How do we stop the roads from allowing those vile creatures to walk on them?

There are many possible solutions, but each of them invites a further question: "is it worth it?"

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