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Comment by Kalium | Hacker News Reader

> To the people that say "Where does it end?" – that's pretty easy. Let's start with curbing speech that encourages harming others.

This may come as a surprise to you, but this response will not be comforting to those with genuine concerns about civil liberties. Avoiding the question of where to draw the final line with the question of where to draw the first one just implies that you intend to draw more lines in the future.

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> Avoiding the question of where to draw the final line with the question of where to draw the first one just implies that you intend to draw more lines in the future.

No, it just implies that we don't need to have the perfect final answer now. Maybe we'll draw more lines, maybe we'll find out we don't need to, maybe we'll decide that this line was drawn too far and pull it back. We don't need to pretend that we have all the answers yet—we don't even need to pretend we have all the questions yet.

You are very wise and thoroughly correct!

Perhaps people might consider offering such elegant points as yours, instead of making the claim that the current line is correct and that's all that matters.

I would argue that the people who are concerned about "what future lines will be drawn" when the first line being drawn is banning white supremacists are the ones who should be making more elegant points.

This isn't the first line though–Facebook already bans things like ISIS propaganda. This is in a similar bucket.

White nationalism isn't even remotely like ISIS propaganda. I am no fan of that ideology for sure but it's actually about something very different than most people think and most people haven't actually spent the time understanding their argument before they form an opinion about it.

Edit: Find it pretty crazy that this can't even be discussed without people accusing me of all sorts of things.

Stochastic terrorism? It's still a terrorism pipeline.

It's all well and good for you to say "white nationalism is very different from what most people think," but that doesn't stop the OP from being right.

Nationalism of all kinds root from an insecurity, and white nationalism in particular is proppogated in colonial societies to encourage the alienation of brown colonial workers via, among other acts, stochastic terrorism.

It's a lot like ISIS propaganda.

How so?

> it's actually about something very different than most people think

Can you explain what you mean by this?

Probably something like:

"We don't encourage people to commit terrorist attacks, we only encourage them to do what it takes to ensure the survival and dominance of the white race."

Yeah it is. I'd prefer not to post example content here on HN, but like most political movements ISIS/jihadis and white supremacists have both a public and private position, and the public one may often appear innocuous or reasonable at first appearance, although there are differences in recruiting tactics, eg https://cchs.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/zaxdzs2371/f/downloads/Na...

> it's actually about something very different than most people think and most people haven't actually spent the time understanding their argument before they form an opinion about it.

That was facebook's policy as of yesterday.

They changed it for good reason, and it was not a small reason to overcome that much inertia.

These recent white supremacist terrorists like the Christchurch attacker all have the same white nationalist memes and talking points on their social media. The Christchurch terrorist said in his own manifesto the white nationalist memes played a part in his radicalization. The white supremacist groups in their guides admit that the their ironic racist memes are propaganda to get people in their funnel and progressively radicalize them.

I'm glad that after these white supremacist terror attacks and seeing how these attackers all share the same things on social media, more people are waking up and realizing these memes are like ISIS propaganda.

One dehumanizes people based on religion and the other dehumanizes people based on skin color. They are both cars, one is blue and the other is yellow.

>White nationalism isn't even remotely like ISIS propaganda.

I don't think so. One wants a caliphate, one wants an ethnostate. The end result is the same for anyone who isn't part of the extremist in-group.

I have genuine concerns about civil liberties, but as others noted, there's a difference between using the power of government to prevent speech and a company refusing to provide a megaphone.

Well, we already have a point of comparison in how platforms handle content from groups like ISIS. The thing about groups who adhere to eliminationist positions is that they so obviously don't care about anyone else's civil liberties, so one could argue that respect for the rights of others is the ante required to sit at the social table.

We always draw a line somewhere when we write a law. Saying "I don't want to draw a line at all" is an attempt to abdicate our responsibility to protect weaker members of society under the guise of some higher ideal that is not threatened by good laws.

You're absolutely right! We unquestionably have a categorical imperative to protect our vulnerable friends, neighbors, and community members.

To those ends, I don't want to not draw lines. I want some kind of clear criteria and process around thw drawing of lines. Perhaps we could consider a system whereby we can make sure that the power to draw lines is not used against weaker members of society under the guise of some higher ideal.

I wouldn't doubt that there are genuine concerns, but what Facebook is doing has nothing to do with actual civil liberties, which isn't something that FB grants or could even take away.

It's a surprisingly comforting response. This ends with decentralization. Let's force all platforms to ban anything even mildly offensive.

Tell us more about your vision for decentralization? Is it anything like twitter.com/BuyThisPlatform ?

I think email works really well as a federated solution. Mastodon is trying to make a Twitter clone that works more like email. That's the logical evolution here IMO. Eventually, we probably arrive at something truly decentralized on a blockchain governed by smart contracts, but that's not at all needed to replace the major platforms. A federated answer similar to email would be good enough. Then each server in the federation can choose what content to replicate or ban.

FB isn't the government though.

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