I would like to see evidence that “deplatforming” actually reduces hate globally instead of simply moving it elsewhere, because I haven’t seen any, and until then this is simply an unfounded belief (i.e., “bullshit”)
Bullshit is saying "well, we can't possibly get rid of it, so may as well let it stay where ever it shows up."
“Bullshit” is taking the easy way out by mass-automatic-deplatforming instead of addressing the bad thought head-on.
I still disagree though - I think Reddit probably agreed with you for most of its existence, but evidence indicated that rationality and clear arguments weren't winning, and the virality of these ideas was too potent to be overcome by a few people who were willing to wade into the cesspool. So they drained the cesspool.
I agree with you that, if we could be sure that there would always be enough people to argue against racists, and do so calmly and rationally, then we would be better off not censoring racism, and instead letting the debate play out. But I don't think we live in that world.
On what grounds do you base your own sense of "rationality and clear argument" as superior to that of the apparent majority of people that you refer to as "the cesspool"?
In my experience, the majority is "I don't have any interest in arguing." Leaving the cesspool to those few who do want to argue.
If you believe that either (a) arguments against such people less clear and rational than the racists' arguments, or (b) such people are actually in the majority, then I believe we disagree on things so fundamental we can't have a constructive debate about Reddit's policies.
We might not, but denying the possibility only guarantees we move further away from it.
in this case, user/advertiser metrics
It's even darker than that. There is an organized effort to destroy any public forum that is a place of discourse. For the people and organization paying for the bots, troll farms and social media influencers discourse is exactly what they paying to get rid of. Considering that reddit doesn't have any other business model they had to start fighting back.
You've identified an example where being part of the open conversation led to a woman leaving a hate-driven community.
Other comments point to a scenario where it could be harder for people to find these communities online, as they would have to have significant motivation to find them. I've seen "playbooks" for white nationalist groups where they describe a slow ramping up of ideology that gradually indoctrinates people outside the overton window.
The question is, is the outcome more or less hate crimes if this type of hate speech is deplatformed?
You point to examples in Germany where the effect of deplatforming was negative.
Current forms of media, attention and culture are significantly different.
I'm not sure how to go about this research when each platform simply aims to maintain their own private, profit driven goals?
How do you measure it?
The fundamental fallacy you're making is that you're conflating the act of judgement with the act of sentencing. What a fine world it would be if your justice system were forbidden to sentence people under the expectation that the purpose of a trial were simply to convince the accused to never do it again.
It is irrational to declare that some behavior is 'bad', yet forbid anyone from suffering meaningful consequence for engaging in it.
Rational debate is how you decide which ideas are worth keeping. It is not how you kill the ones that aren't. (You've found that it works sometimes, but you should bet actual counter-actions work far more often.)
That's certainly happening these days.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/27/us/poway-synagogue-shooti... https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/04/27/sunnyvale-c...
Personally I usually don't take overly dramatic comments seriously.
Belief in free speech as a principle assumes that good and right arguments will win out every day in an open public forum.
A lot of people aren't going to be willing or able to actually engage with the real logic of an anti-racist argument. Instead, people use heuristics for this sort of work. In my ideal world, the question of "was this on a big site? or some little blog and/or known racist publication?" would serve as a useful heuristic re: what arguments to bother with. This is how newspapers generally settled out. Is it in the paper? If yes, then there are at least some standards. If no, e.g. if it's some vanity publication, then squint a little harder.
These sorts of things have happened every time we've had a big shift in information distribution technology. There's an explosion of ideas with no real markers to differentiate them, and mass chaos for a while as people sort it out. Then eventually people identify the signs of trustworthy info distributors, and it settles back down. If a platform allows racists to flourish, they're not going to remain a place that people can trust. I would like to see Reddit remain a place that has some amount of trust, so I'm happy they banned the really nasty racists.
But reddit is already compartmentalized. Subreddits for fringe ideas are those "plenty of little sites", especially when they are delisted from the front pages.
It's not like democracies last forever but I didn't think I'd be alive to watch the point at which people began to reject it.
This is demonstrably not the case. Just look at the chans.
Conveniently these sites are ignored or handwaved away or are somehow only because of censorship.
That may have been correct 50 years ago, but technological changes since then call it into question.
It used to take a fair bit of effort on the part of information purveyors to get their information out to a wide audience. Generally you couldn't just come up with a bad or wrong argument and get it rapidly spread far and wide.
On the receiving end, it took a fair bit of time or effort to access information. We might regularly watch a scheduled TV news broadcast, read a daily newspaper, maybe also read a weekly news magazine to get a broader or deeper perspective, and also maybe read more specialized magazines for news and information on more specialized topics we were interested in. If we needed to go beyond that on a particular topic, we'd have to go to libraries or bookstores.
This combination of bottlenecks on both the production and consumption end meant that generally by the time bad and wrong arguments could start to get traction past a fringe audience there would have been time to develop good and right arguments to counter them, and that people would see those good and right arguments.
Nowadays, the barriers to widespread dissemination of the bad and wrong arguments are way lower. On the receiving end, instead of getting our information by setting aside time each day to read/watch a small number of high quality, consistent sources, many people get their news as a side effect of social activity. It is much less likely now that when they get a link to that bad and wrong stuff that they will also get a link to the good and right refutation. And remember, because the dissemination barriers are much lower now, they are getting the bad and wrong stuff on multiple topics, so even if someone does send them a refutation on one they might be too busy looking at the sensational bad and wrong stuff from another topic to go back and read the refutation of yesterday's stuff.
I think that most people recognize that it is important to be well informed. 50 years ago it took some work to be well informed, so we had to put some thought and effort into becoming so. Now, it is easy to think that you are getting well informed as a side effect of your other activities.
We weren't smarter back then, or less gullible, but there simply was much less of a grey area between uninformed and informed. Now there is a big grey area and it is easy to end up in it. The "let the good and right win out in open public forums" only works if the people in that forum who think they are informed actually are. If they are in that grey area, all bets are off.
The situation 50 years ago did have some problems, mainly that sometimes a thing that is actually good and right appears initially to be bad and wrong, and those barriers that helped keep bad and wrong things from spreading would also slow down those "really good and right but looks bad and wrong" things, too, so it took longer sometimes to adopt new good things.
We've removed that friction...but we've removed too much of it. You need some friction to slow down a bit so that people have time to evaluate and react.
Racism stems from fear, hate, and deeply embedded cultural tools. You can't "cure" racism through argumentation. Maybe, maybe, you can make people less racist in person -- but on an anonymous forum like Reddit, not a chance.
That's not a product of free speech, it's a product of teaching people how to evaluate thoughts they come across in the wild.
The mechanism I'm proposing is that the current generation has not been exposed to many of the toxic things that reinforced racist beliefs. Slavery, segregated schools, etc. Kids in school are taught why those things were bad and why racism is bad. While not all of society has abandoned racism, there's been enough of a push that the public institutions educating the next generation are making efforts to reduce it.
That's all just observational though. Around here it's not so much racism against black folks but rather against aboriginal folk (and to some extent, middle eastern folks). I hear almost none of that crap from my generation or the younger generations, and still hear horrible amounts of it from older generations. Yes, some people in those generations changed, but it sure seems like the "racism rate" is significantly lower than the mean in the younger generations and significantly higher than the mean in the older generations.
Edit: it's also quite possible that it hasn't gone away in the younger generations either, it's just not considered something that is acceptable to say in polite company.
Edit 2: and thank you very much for making me think more about this!
Don't you see the contradiction here? It can't be both.
Are individual people any less racist than in the past? Who knows? Probably unprovable.
But our perception of the world is not governed by how people are, it is governed by what people do. And every person has a choice to promote, tolerate, or suppress racism. Choosing the latter is what makes the world seem less racist.
Yes they are, because that is exactly what newly-insular racist communities will use to bolster up their ideological positions... Cherry-picked evidence that makes their position look rational.
The idea that no racist is thinking rationally is ridiculous.
To the extent rationality is what got them into their racism, that is exactly the amount that rationality can remove them from racism. By definition.
How has that worked in the past?
While it's easy to be a critic and call someone else's view bullshit because you haven't seen evidence, it's not really adding anything to the discussion, it's just being needlessly inflammatory. You could accomplish the same thing by saying something as simple as "The evidence shows it worked for Reddit in isolation, but whether it works globally is unclear. Has anyone seen evidence that it does or doesn't? My gut says it doesn't."
Now when someone goes to analyze and respond they're not starting to argue with someone who dismissed something they may not be familiar with as bullshit right out the gate. It's better to keep an open mind to either possibility under a lack of evidence.
The inchoate pain these latent hate group members feel could be resolved in another way by accurately portraying the source of their problem, and giving them a realistic way of solving it. However, often in our society, we don't provide these things. Therefore, they remain susceptible.
When a hater that tells a powerful narrative gets together with others, this becomes dangerous. The group now validates their beliefs and it becomes self-reinforcing and actionable.
Deplatforming prevents hate groups from getting new recruits by making these stories and groups harder to access. It also is a message to the more marginal members that what they are doing is shunned and they should think hard about what they are doing. Essentially, the idea is prevent these small scale problems from turning into a social movement that would be highly destructive.
Is it a bandaid? Yes. We have to work much harder on our social and economic problems to make sure everyone is included in society and can live a decent life. That would remove much of the impetus for joining hate groups.
Arguments about whether deplatforming has merit should be automatically deplatformed via machine-learning in order to teach everyone a valuable lesson in civics. At least, if I were to create a Hacker News or a Reddit or a Facebook or a Twitter, that would be one of the first things I would build.
This will not end well.
What this ultimately accomplishes is that the public gets to be blissfully ignorant about the blemishes, but these people are operating in the same capacity as before without brushing up to challenges as much
The reason I feels strongly about it is open discussion with racists have led to conversion away from white supremacy that would not have otherwise occurred e.g. Davis - https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinc...
The fear of power of racists operating on a platform like reddit is overblown by virtue that racists seem stronger without it; strongest with echo chambers.
EDIT: since I can't reply to you, yes, by definition, it's seeking it out.
I've seen plenty racists on reddit, they're still around post-censorship.
Putting racists on open platforms stops the second, and if you're so interested in changing their minds, nothing is stopping you from searching them out to do so.
Daryl Davis went I to people's homes and met them in person to befriend and sometimes "convert" them. It wasn't accidental cross pollination. He explicitly reached out.
What if said "on-the-fence" individual visits stormfront? Who's to argue against it there? No one.
> nothing is stopping you from searching them out to do so.
Except there is. Racist forums are walled gardens. They're safe-spaces for white supremacists. They don't invite dissent.
> Daryl Davis went I to people's homes and met them in person to befriend and sometimes "convert" them. It wasn't accidental cross pollination. He explicitly reached out.
In person, correct. If this is to be analogous to the real world, other users on a popular social media platform like reddit are your neighbors. And obscure radical forums are like impenetrable cult compounds. You can reach them out online, when in plain view, but this isn't as easily accomplished in every medium.
More importantly, you're framing racism as an infectious view that could plague just about any innocent bystander. It's more fragile than that, in terms of logical merit (there is none). I think the exposure makes it more vulnerable.
This applies equally to a subreddit. Except now the walled garden has a funnel, since people can accidentally get exposed, but can't see any dissent.
> It's more fragile than that, in terms of logical merit (there is none). I think the exposure makes it more vulnerable.
You're assuming racists will play fair. That's naive. To frame this a different way, I assume that racists will act in their own self interest. If Reddit wasn't useful to them, they wouldn't use it. But here they are (were). Clearly they think it ads value. They've put a lot more time and energy into analyzing their best path forward, and it apparently involved Reddit. Why should we freely give them that ammo.
> What if said "on-the-fence" individual visits stormfront? Who's to argue against it there? No one.
But getting to stormfront is much, much harder than getting to /r/ conspiracy (which has almost a million subs), hanging out for a while, and seeing someone go off about gassing the Jews or the censorship of data on human skull size comparisons, clicking on their profile, and seeing that they also post to /r/sig_heilo_there or greatapes or whatever it is.
And that person was already subscribed to conspiracy, so the ideas that the man is keeping the truth about Jews/affirmative action/the imminent subjugation of white people. It is infectious, despite your disbelief. And then as you are more radicalized, you get invited to a private discord, or to hang out with the cooler people on stormfront. So now this person who, on their own would never have ventured onto stormfront (because who does that) is a member. Radicalization is a process. And if you ever run in to try and stop it, you'll be banned, because they control the subreddit.
Let me rephrase what you're advocating for: allowing white supremacists to freely propagandize will make it easier to prevent the spread of white supremacy. Do you believe that to be true in general (say for extremist religions, or even for nonextremism?)
Like terrorism, so hate.
Those appear contradictory.
Because even on a platform like reddit, these aren't front-page items nor anything that will casually be brought to attention. If you want to share piece of shit ideology, you have to find piece of shit subs, and they're micro communities.
The reason I think the proximity in that instance helps is users are more likely to interact with users from other popular subs. I've seen racists spring up odd places, get downvoted into oblivion, but will engage in argument. In my view it's more important that they engage with the rest of the population.
1. not deplatforming is based on a belief ("sunlight is the best desinfectant, etc.) that, as far as I can tell, isn't supported by much evidence either, at least as far as it's larger-scale effects.
2. it's possible, for example, that having these ideas out in the open and easily accessible actually increases the effect of them radicalising/convincing people who previously didn't have much of an opinion on or care about these issues. This might outweigh the effect of those already radical being exposed to alternative ideas.
3. building on this, I find that generally the 'better' and less hateful ideas are more nuanced and complex, and thus much harder to convey. Especially in online environments like reddit/twitter/etc.
4. there's the 'bullshit asymmetry principle'. it's much easier to produce bullshit arguments for bad ideas than it is to counter them. it also strikes me as much easier to get ensnared by hateful and/or bad ideas than it is to 'escape' them. A bit like how cults work.
5. access to these ideas via Reddit and the like removes one rather important element: collective shaming and having to accept the consequences of particular ideas. While in theory this is a good thing, in practice it can easily lead people down dark paths in isolation.
Having grown up deeply religious, and having spent a lot of time in all sort of fringe communities, I suspect that the net effect of not deplatforming is negative. Ideas are perhaps kind of like viruses. With the internet and places like Reddit, they can propagate freely without the mediating effects of interpersonal contact and various degrees of ostracism or other consequences. They also have a reach that they never had before.
Despite all that, I'm not arguing that we should do something about it. I don't know, and still lean towards accepting this new reality with all its consequences, or at least making sure we have a better understanding before we 'curb' things. But I'm much less optimistic about this new, internet-enabled state of things than I used to be.
Apologies for all this being a bit of a ramble.
Could you think of a reasonably achivable study that would be able to falsify your belief that deplatforming doesn't reduce global hate?
My story is anecdotal, but I can't believe that it's a rare occurrence, because that's basically the mechanism that underpins all fringe organizations based on a shared false worldview. You need people to constantly validate and reinforce that false worldview, or reality will smash that worldview. Barring a subreddit may push a fraction of the active subredditors to another platform if one exists, but the marginally attached subredditors will just fail to follow and the hold that echo chamber had will fade as the echos grow fade to silence, and they won't catch anywhere near as many new people.