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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

> Why does this rub me the wrong way

I’m old enough to remember when Judas Priest (the 80’s rock band) was accused of hiding subliminal messages in their songs convincing their listeners to commit suicide, after a kid did so while happening to be listening to Judas Priest. It seems absolutely ridiculous in hindsight, but people believed it, and it was taken completely seriously at the time: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/judas-prie.... The logic here is essentially the same: some internet message boards are “egging somebody on” to do something that they would not otherwise have done, which results in death, so the internet message boards themselves are to blame, and must be censored.

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Unlike the supposed subliminal messages, the egging on is literally on display, in plain English text.

Not really, though. If somebody says "immigration is a danger to our country", that could just as easily mean "vote republican" as it could mean "shoot some random people".

This is based on the assumption that message boards are a one-to-many media like books, radio, movies, computer games, when in fact they are a many-to-many media, which under all empirical observation displays inherently different dynamics than traditional passive consumer media.

There is a reason we dedicate academic branches to these phenomena — they are not nearly as straight forward as argued in this thread.

Religious texts, advertisements, and tall tales have been "egging people on" to do things they otherwise would not for thousands of years. Judas Priest and Internet message boards are not new in this respect.

There is something unique, I think, about these message boards, though. I think most people would agree, the overwhelming majority of humans are reasonably decent—they're not going to murder others, are not overtly racist, etc. And throughout human history, these truly 1-in-a-million horrible people have been isolated, unable to find fellow horribles to befriend and egg each other on. The internet has changed that. No matter how unusual or awful your interests may be, it's trivial to find another group of people who share in these thoughts and interests. I don't know what the solution is, or if there even is one, but this does feel like something truly new.

This "egging on" has been going on throughout the centuries, and has mainly been getting more centralized. Nowadays most people seem reasonably decent, but when exposed to a repeated message of "social consensus" will still generally support going to war against a foreign country.

The novelty is that violence is now being mobilized against subcultures within larger society, rather than comfortably against foreign cultures in far off lands. What we're witnessing is the democratization of media-incited violence, from the general democratizing aspect of social media.

Previously, the privilege was reserved for large corporations that paid the traditional media big bucks to support their massive wars. Now individuals can invest sweat equity in a microcult to accomplish the same on a small scale. And the reason we keep hearing so much about it is that the incumbent gatekeepers are not happy about the competition!

I found this really insightful. The parallels are definitely there.

I'm confused by your stance. Is it your position that ISIS recruitment videos don't work? They spend a huge amount of effort on online recruitment, but 100% of the people that go join them would all have voluntarily done so anyway?

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