Attacks by White Extremists Are Growing. So Are Their Connections | Hacker News Reader

Attacks by White Extremists Are Growing. So Are Their Connections

nytimes.com

9 pointsmzs7 comments

One reason these attacks will continue to grow is because authorities are not looking for these individuals because they are white. So when they start planning and collecting weapons the flags that would be raised, for say a dark skinned muslim, are not raised for the white extremist. The sad fact is that white privilege applies to extremist mad-men just the same.

Right now when things escalate, there is no "ok lets cool down and take a step back" feature. Whether its on news media or social media.

Instead there is a never ending further stream of negative stimulus being recommended to people who are already triggered. The content sources are given real-time analytics on how to do this more efficiently.

I don't understand why that can't be slowed down.

> Right now when things escalate

What do you mean by "escalate"? I hope you are not using the word "escalate" to describe the murder of hundreds of innocent people by extremist terrorist.

> to people who are already triggered.

These killers are not "triggered" they are just crazy, bigoted, racists who somehow feel the need to kill. Your words sound very sympathetic in suggesting that the solution is to give these killers "time to cool off". The solution is to identify them early and get them some mental help.

If someone troubled has no access to mental healthcare and instead receives a steady stream of negative stimulus over long periods of time thanks to fb/youtube/twitter/news media's engagement algos, what do you think the result is? Think about it everytime a racists watches a racist vid/tweet/post/show/podcast on the side bar there is a endless buffet of further recommendations. All this reinforces whatever it is they believe.

The mental health resources available for the kind of reach social media and news media have does not exist. In most places there is one mental health professional per 20k citizens. This is not going to change overnight.

So what I am talking about is reducing the rate at which (negative/controversial) info recommendation systems/engagement algos pump through the system.

That's what I mean by time out. Reduce the rate at which info flows and the amount of info flowing through the system. This can be done in many ways. Turn off real time analytics to the content producers when they pump out controversial content. Hide/delay the like/view/click counts around polarizing content. Change or remove recommendations around such content etc etc...

Is Elliot Rodger really considered a white extremist now?

I just randomly googled one of the cases -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Munich_shooting and perpetrator "was the son of Shiite Muslims from Iran who came to Germany as asylum seekers in the 1990s." Immediately closed the article

> Immediately closed the article

You shouldn't have done that because a few sentences later the wiki describes how he was motivated by other mass shootings, which is precisely what the article is talking about. Was he a white attacker, well yes, but based on the wiki I wouldn't say he was a supremacist.

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