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Comment by mieseratte | Hacker News Reader

> We wouldn't tolerate the existence of an Islamist site that glorified and helped perpetrate mass incidents of terror against our society.

I certainly would tolerate those sites. Free speech arguments aside, you can't kill the hydra, but you can severely degrade intelligence operations watching that hydra. Best case the bad guys all end up on sites already being surveilled, worst case they slip under the radar.

We had this problem years ago, hacktivists targeting ISIS channels. They scatter to the winds, intelligence ends up doing more work for less rewards.

Feel good outrage made things worse.

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Exactly this. These sort of folk started congregating on 8chan when they got pushed out of 4chan. I certainly don't condone mass shootings, white supremacists, etc., but if you think denying 8chan hosting is going to solve this problem, you are sorely mistaken. All it does is force these people into more concentrated forums where there is less push back and opposing views to their radical ideas. Ultimately, it forces them into corners of the internet that are harder for outside groups to locate and monitor for potential threats.

I'll be quite honest, I don't know what a "good" solution here is, but I really don't think this is it.

> I'll be quite honest, I don't know what a "good" solution here is, but I really don't think this is it.

At the very least a good post-mortem analysis would be nice.

I guess I'll settle for watching the finger-pointing dumpster fire.

On the other hand making them harder to access also makes the ideas spread slower because if you get all of say white supremacist sites off Google you massively cut down on the number of random 'normies' that will fall in and get swept up in the group. Same thing applies but is probably even more effective for getting groups off the regular internet all together because then you have to convince someone to install TOR (or whatever the new flavor of the month is) to get them into the funnel.

Disagree. Of course people recongregate in less well-known haunts, but there's a cost to them in doing so, it massively inhibits recruitment, and when there's an influx of new users after the sinking of a platform security standards tend be much lower, making it that much easier to infiltrate.

In war, degrading your enemy's communications and lines of supply is often more effective than engaging in battle.

Lone wolf attacker has no supply line to degrade. The El Paso shooter used 8chan to distribute his manifesto, we have no indication that caused his radicalization.

Empirical evidence suggests that the 'lone wolf' stereotype is not well grounded in reality, and that social networks can be essential for the development of both ideological conviction and the acquisition of practical know-how.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321955758_End_of_th...

While we need to wait for more detail to fully understand the path of radicalization, I am moderately confident in predicting the El Paso shooter visited 8ch regularly for at least 6 months, probably much longer, but posted infrequently if at all.

That makes sense when the hydra is just quietly plotting. But what about if the site is the hydra's head-growing organ, i.e. radicalization platform? Disrupting recruitment seems like a viable strategy against hydras of all sorts.

That only works if you're actually going to act on the intelligence gathered from having the discussion centralized. That's something the U.S. is clearly willing to do with, e.g., ISIS. But even what limited programs we had towards combating white nationalist terrorism were canceled by Trump.

And a few months later ISIS died because the lack of easily-spread propaganda destroyed its ability to recruit susceptible idiots to its cause to replace all the soldiers that were being killed.

IOW, mission accomplished.

ISIS is still very much an active organization, even if they don't control physical territory any longer.

I think that was sarcasm / a George W. reference, or least assume it is since I was referring to events circa 2015.

Is that what you honestly think happened?

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