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Comment by kukx | Hacker News Reader

Just because they legally can does not mean they should censor the official representatives of the voters. The bigger the audience the more important it gets to show all points of views. The sun is the best disinfectant. The wrong ideas should be publicly challenged, otherwise they may silently spread unchecked and surface when it is too late to stop them. You do not need majority to make quick and radical social changes.

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> The sun is the best disinfectant.

That has proven not to be the case. Bringing extremist views into the mainstream by way of social media (and politics) has only strengthened their influence.

This was the real eye opener for me over the past 5 or 10 years. I used to be firmly in the "no censorship" camp, but it seems an alarming number Americans (I'm American and can't speak for any other nation) are not capable of using critical thinking when it comes to political issue that they've already made up their minds about. Close friends and family included.

I don't know the answer to this problem, but it seems our education system needs dramatic improvement.

So people you know are thinking wrong, which shouldn't be allowed? You know this line of reasoning has a long and storied history.

So does not cracking down on hate speech and incitement to violence.

Imagine tut-tutting if the Rwandan government had cracked down on radio broadcasts calling Tutsi people cockroaches and encouraging Hutus to chop them down.

The Rwandan government, or at least individuals involved with the Rwandan government at the highest levels, were making the broadcasts.

If anything they would have cracked down on opposing broadcasts by claiming that, since Tutsis are the historically privileged beneficiaries of colonialism who were collectively responsible for the violent oppression of Hutus, any pro-Tutsi or anti-anti-Tutsi sentiment was unconscionable hate speech while any pro-Hutu or anti-Tutsi bigotry was not technically racism. The power to ban “hate speech” is the power to define “hate speech” and hateful people will use against you the very same weapons you propose to fight them with.

Not really. This is widely believed but attempts to rigorously study that end up finding no evidence for it.

Interesting that you picked Rwanda. The go-to example for the dangers of free speech is normally the Nazis. For instance I'm thinking of a study that attempted to correlate growth in support for Hitler with availability of his speechs on radio or via rallies. It found IIRC no correlation at all.

In fact Hitler was regularly censored, deplatformed and so on yet it didn't stop him, only perhaps slow him down a bit. On the other hand he spent vast efforts on suppressing, censoring, vote stuffing and de-platforming in various nasty ways anyone who spoke out against him - all managed entirely privately via his various organisations, whilst the weak Weimar Republic were unable to stop him.

Dictators are invariably big fans of suppressing free speech, because they know censorship works in favour of whoever is in power. The reason democracy and free speech are so tightly connected is because in a democracy the people in power aren't meant to be able to do anything to stay in power beyond winning the approval of their citizens.

That's not what the poster said. You think you heard "censorship" because you want to hear "censorship" because that's what you want to argue against. But please read their comment again. They literally said they don't know the answer.

Also what that poster did say--and I agree--is that people lack critical thinking skills and have not developed immunity to flat-out bullshit. There's a huge education pipeline problem and our society is at risk because its normal resistance would be to have voters that can think for themselves. Things like flat earth and moon landing conspiracy theories don't need to be "not allowed", they just wouldn't take hold if people could think through basic logic.

Do you see how you're loading and manipulating your words to serve your biased purposes? If an "extremist" view is popular with the "mainstream", it's definitionally not an extremist view. And has it occurred to you that a Republican might consider AOC or Bernie Sanders or Ruth Bader Ginsberg a "dangerous extremist" while a Democrat might consider Trump or Bill Barr or Mitch McConnell an extremist? Is it really that hard to imagine how other people not aligned with you politically might think?

If these views are so wrong, shouldn't it be evident to people? That some mush head labeled something "extreme" shouldn't be enough to ban it. What you are really saying is that you think you would be the best censor.

I think it’s a little more complicated than that. It’s not inherently about the rise of extremist views, it’s more about how the establishment grew complacent with the 20th century media environment only to be caught wrongfooted when the 21st century media environment exposed them as being full of shit. Once everyone realizes that the mainstream media and the political establishment are full of shit, where do we have to go from there except to the extremes?

I think the last few years have proven what you've said really really wrong. Bigger audiences for toxic speech (on both the left and the right) tend to amplify the ideas contained in that speech, and when those ideas are publicly challenged, which they always are, they become politicized and people become entrenched in a giant shouting match that doesn't accomplish anything. People with big audiences on the internet, especially elected officials, should be held to a higher standard than the average user to facilitate better conversations about important topics, not lower standards just because what they're saying is news worthy.

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