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Comment by holidaygoose | Hacker News Reader

Can we try to figure out sociologically, why by default unmoderated social forums become far-right oriented?

Is it because:

- People on the far-right are magnitudes more vocal and active online than those on the left? That they spend a magnitude more time posting and voting on the internet?

- Or when people are anonymous, they reveal their "true selves" more which exhibits more far-right (selfish, tribal, conservative) values.

- Or we are underestimating how many people are on the far right, because they are constantly censored so in our minds we think they are the minority but maybe they're about half of the online population?

I'm just trying to figure out why it takes herculean effort to shift things enough to the left to be publicly palatable. And if so, then then it seems like any social forum is going to require heavy censorship/moderation to even be tolerable to the general public.

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Most social sites lean left, and far-left dialog is generally tolerated in those places, while anything right of center is demonized in a gradient of intensity the further right you go.

Your own scenarios exhibit this, for example:

- You ask if the far-right are magnitudes more vocal, ignoring the comparison to the extremely vocal far-left which is heard regularly on mainstream social media

- You conflate "conservative" with "selfish", presumably ignoring the selfishness of the extremes at both sides.

Frankly, I think the left (and by extension, most social media sites) are WAY more comfortable with censorship, banning, hiding, etc., especially of ideas that don't align with the left. (Typically characterized as "evil".)

The far-right, on the other hand, I think is a lot more tolerant of at least the notion that "other" speech exists. They'll insult you, make fun, etc., but the compulsion to censor others is far less frequent.

So when you have a whole segment of the political spectrum treated as evil and silenced, they tend to gravitate to fora that enable speech, even if unpleasant speech. The far-right might be most noticable on those platforms, but if you look carefully, you'll see a whole gradient of right-ness.

And even some lefties!

> The far-right, on the other hand, I think is a lot more tolerant of at least the notion that "other" speech exists. They'll insult you, make fun, etc., but the compulsion to censor others is far less frequent.

The right thinks explicit "censorship", which happens via the community or site owner, is bad.

Implicit "censorship", however, which happens when the targets of racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia[0] leave the site, is just fine.

[0] or their allies or people who don't want to be surrounded by assholes.

Well put.

The Left typically wants to silence/ignore while the Right typically wants to fight/berate about it.

Berating people to the point that they leave the discussion is the same thing as silencing.

Also, "berating" is a kind word. We're talking about "I have the right to exist" vs "we should systematically exterminate/enslave people like you"

Do you know what happens when people don't want to deal with harassment due to a certain position they hold? It's called self-censorship, and the far right censors people all the same by harassing, berating, demeaning people etc until they leave or censor themselves. That's a common tactic of sites like Voat.

Weird, r/anarchocapitalism will ban anyone who is on the left, and r/conservative will ban conservatives who speak out against Trump. Even r/TheMotte will ban people for things like tone. I've yet to find these mythical spaces where conservatives tolerate speech they in particular don't like.

Oh, but they definitely do exist. On 08chan, 0chan, and millchan they do not have post moderators. Anything goes including illegal content.

https://imgur.com/NakH7Rd

The chans are the exception, and not the rule. Most normal human beings don't use any of the chans, but there are tens of tens of millions of subscribers to the online conservative spaces on Reddit and Facebook, and they're all ban happy.

Another popular story today was about parler, a twitter clone which allows mostly all legal speech besides obscenity. It may be a conservative safe space, but its not ban happy.

You can read their speech policy: https://legal.parler.com/documents/guidelines.pdf

People don't want to be exposed to content that dehumanizes them, argues for their extermination, or targets harassment against them. There are large swaths of the population who are targeted by the far right in this way. These targeted groups simply wont deliberately return to a site that consistently provides them that experience, there's simply no reason for them to.

These large segments of the population will demand moderation from platforms they use to protect them from targeted harassment. It's these sorts of platforms that have the potential to truly become massive.

Platforms that are strongly moderated from day one (e.g. don't allow targeted harassment of minorities) don't need a "herculean effort to shift things enough to the left to be publicly palatable." A good example is the Reddit alternative raddle.me or even hacker news.

> people don't want to be exposed to content that dehumanizes them, argues for their extermination

The left does this on Reddit/Twitter constantly towards right wing people and no one bats an eye. It's like maybe those in power are extremely biased towards the left.

I don't think that there's an equivalency between the advocacy for the genocide of black people, Jews, trans people, etc and opposing someone for their political beliefs.

Perhaps there'd be more legitimacy in a comparison to the vitriol on the left against billionaires and cops, but these are positions of power, not identity groups one is born into. All revolutionaries of all political persuasions will oppose those in positions of power currently.

Approximately no-one on reddit or twitter is saying that straight people shouldn't be allowed marry. Plenty of people on both are saying that I shouldn't be, though. To take just one example.

"People should be marginalised, and made second class citizens, and marginalised people should be kept marginalised" is a pretty common theme on the far right. It is rare on the far left; not that it's non-existent, but there just aren't that many sincere Stalinists or similar left.

What dehumanising content are you seeing from the left? I mean, if it's just "the other side are bad people" stuff, well, everyone does that. The "these classes of people should be socially and politically suppressed" stuff is overwhelmingly from one side, though.

> People should be marginalised, and made second class citizens, and marginalised people should be kept marginalised" is a pretty common theme on the far right.

What? Not that there is no one with this view but it is an extreme minority. Same with people calling for the killing of all cops on the left, very small minority.

No it's not. For example, being against gay marriage is still a fairly mainstream social conservative position; opposition in total is around 35% across the US[1]. You don't hear much about it anymore because it's viewed as politically infeasible even within those circles, but if they could do it they absolutely would.

Just look at the recent supreme court ruling that made it illegal to fire people based on you being gay or transgendered. Tons of conservatives shot back on that one. I don't know how you can look at a viewpoint like, "yes, employers should be allowed to fire you for merely being gay" and think that that doesn't mean they want to keep marginalised people marginalised.

1 - https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-ga...

You should reflect on your privilege if you think it's only a small minority holding views that people that aren't straight white males are worth less.

An extreme minority explicitly hold the view publicly, but what's not an extreme minority are people who take the long road around saying it and people who have kneejerk reactions to any proposed changes to the status quo.

Mike Pence is one example and he's the VP. Calling it an 'extreme minority' when there are multiple examples of high-level politicians holding views like that seems disingenuous.

As far as I can tell, there are no politicians or indeed anyone with significant power calling for the killing of all cops.

The _president of the US_ literally just approvingly retweeted a video of a supporter yelling 'white power': https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trump-whit...

Unless Nancy Pelosi or someone starts retweeting videos demanding the liquidation of the kulak class, you'll forgive me if I don't take your claims of 'extreme minority on both sides' all that seriously.

Normal people won't tolerate being on the same forum with huge assholes. Especially assholes who are bigoted, rather than just generally angry/jerk-ish. The far right happens to contain a lot of this kind of person.

The far left has people who are also very angry, but they're generally not as bigoted. The demographic they're most angry at is rich people, which is punching up instead of down at least.

And most of the rhetoric there simply isn't as vile. It's stuff like, "take rich people's assets so we can redistribute it equally". I may not agree with seizing wealthy people's stuff, but that's nowhere near as offensive as "kick out all the gay/non-white people".

I would say reddit is on the far left not the far right, you can't have any opinion that isn't towards the left on reddit with being attacked.

You might be interested in what one of the foremost sociologists studying white supremacy online has to say about this: https://contexts.org/articles/the-algorithmic-rise-of-the-al...

> You might be interested in what one of the foremost sociologists studying white supremacy online has to say about this: https://contexts.org/articles/the-algorithmic-rise-of-the-al....

Depends on how relevant you consider a social "scientist" having build a career on creating a bogeyman on mixing up nationalism, extreme right and white supremacy. A former columnist at "Huffington Post", she is now writing a book on "Undoing White Womanhood". Calls herself a "change agent" on her own webiste.

Sounds rather like "anti-White" activist to me, like an intellectual Robin DiAngelo.

It's because mainstream moderated sites don't censor far-left views, so those people have no incentives to move to unmoderated sites. For example, /r/MoreTankieChapo isn't even quarantined.

Everyone else has no strong reason to leave the existing platform.

There are quite a few people on the left in the gun community who do.

Option 4: poorly moderated forums tend to fill with people banned by most other forums, such as Nazis. And various other undesirables, too; I gather voat had a big influx when Reddit banned its paedophile subreddits, and another one when FPH et all were killed.

So if 1% of the population are far-right extremists, but most normal platforms ban or restrict them, any new platform with poor regulation will tend to fill with them.

I do think that the very extreme (and thus bannable) far right _are_ probably more common than ditto on the far left; you just don't get that many Stalinists, anywhere. But the normal left (and normal right) aren't generally nasty enough to get banned everywhere, so most of the internet's displaced population of commenters is far right.

I think there is an aspect of option 1, too, though. In Ireland a while back we had a referendum on allowing same-sex marriage, which passed by 62%, and another one, on legalising abortion (until then only legal in very limited circumstances), a few years later, which passed by 66%. Now, if you'd gone based on web polls and opinions being expressed in the comments on mainstream sites, you'd have assumed that both would fail by a landslide; it was really kind of incredible. Comments on news sites etc were grossly unrepresentative of the actual public mood; the right really does seem to be a lot noisier.

Ok, I've not lived in Ireland for 15 years but I find it hard to believe that it has a 'right' that falls into the same definition as that of the US. You can't say that being anti-abortion means you're right-wing and therefore must also hate black people. It is actually possible for people to have a foot in either camp, to varying degrees, on multiple issues.

or keep getting kicked off of the other platforms.

or duplicate accounts to give the illusion of larger numbers.

For example there are a lot of Reddit accounts created with in the 3 months or so very active on the same post pushing the same agenda.

Twitter recently deleted 170k bot accounts that pushed a Chinese controlled narrative related to covid. It's not hard to imagine that other actors are doing the same on reddit in order to stir shit up, and that impressionable real users are falling for it.

My guess would be that attention-seeking and disruptive behaviours are part of the explanation.

In a forum with ten reasonable conversation threads and one highly controversial one, attention is likely to move towards the controversial topic.

The phrase "don't feed the trolls" is well-intentioned but it's difficult to scale the message when so many people are online and can witness and partake in minor and major conversations alike.

It also doesn't help that engagement (regardless of reason for engagement and any human stress created as a result; they're harder for software and metrics to capture) tends to be seen as something to optimize for, both within companies themselves and also by their investors.

Controversial conversations are sometimes necessary. People who repeatedly raise controversial topics to gain notoriety or attention are generally not - although their behaviour may be a sign that they need help in other ways.

> The phrase "don't feed the trolls" is well-intentioned but it's difficult to scale the message when so many people are online

I think this is similar to the economics of spam: the cost of spamming is so low that even if a small fraction of a percent respond and convert, it's still profitable to spam.

People who troll are just looking to rile people up. All they need is one or two people to respond (out of hundreds or thousands or more). Even someone who knows better will occasionally be triggered enough to respond to a troll.

> The phrase "don't feed the trolls" is well-intentioned but it's difficult to scale the message when so many people are online and can witness and partake in minor and major conversations alike.

I wonder if it's possible to have a community where the moderation is more focused on educating people to identify trolling and discourage posters from engaging with emotionally charged/inciting posters. Instead of warning the troller, encourage people to just downvote and move on instead of engaging.

I consider a troll as someone who is seeking to create a strong negative (anger, hate, frustration, etc) emotion in a reader intentionally or unintentionally. I dont know if this is too subjective and impossible to enforce.

Hacker news has excellent moderation, and high standards for comments. Relax them a bit to allow for memes and harmless troll threads like Rick rolls while strictly moderating against those participating in bad faith. Mind you, moderation needn't be by paid or even volunteer moderators. There are various solutions axiall available and the most successful are always multifaceted in their approaches.

Maybe I'm naive, but it seems pretty obvious that it's because technology is mostly full of leftists, so they tolerate their own extremists and ban their opponents. Deplatforming has been a tactic of the left for a while now.

> Maybe I'm naive, but it seems pretty obvious that it's because technology is mostly full of leftists, so they tolerate their own extremists and ban their opponents. Deplatforming has been a tactic of the left for a while now.

I wouldn't say that technology is full of actual "leftists", more a group ranging from overly-myopic liberals who struggle to do what would actually benefit minority communities in a more positive sense to the libertarian types who only end up restricting what people say because it ends up affecting their advertising revenue. Simply by virtue of being in a position of financial power, it's very difficult to hold truly leftist views.

>Deplatforming has been a tactic of the left for a while now.

Deplatforming has been the go to method of the right for at least a century (see mccarthyism) and longer if you include lynching/death as essentially equivalent (ie: you can't speak if you're dead). The left has simply finally got enough critical mass to do it themselves.

I'd expect that it's because if you have some new forum without (as many) restrictions, you get both:

- people who disagree with the restrictions of other places on principle and want a freer alternative

- people who can't say what they want to anywhere else, because it's generally disliked

and most people probably do not want to read stuff from the second group.

>Can we try to figure out sociologically, why by default unmoderated social forums become far-right oriented?

This did not used to be the case. It's a relatively extremely recent phenomenon, that I would say only really coalesced around 2014-2015.

It used to be that the wild west of the internet was, to the extent that it reinforced anything at all, a boon to liberal and left wing politics and organizing. And a lot of the cultural aspects weren't co-opted the way they currently are. Gamer culture was surely unconsciously sexist, misogynist, but not to the extent that it is now where it's a full-on reactionary identity. Internet atheists didn't used to be misogynist right-wing trolls, but they are now.

Trolling was just trolling, it wasn't organized into mobs or propaganda in the sophisticated way it is now. Anonymity and revealing one's 'true self' didn't channel it into a cultural current of toxicity that is now established and ready to welcome those impulse and stoke them and use them to nudge a person into a right wing trolling infrastructure.

I think it's been weaponized by state actors and by bad actors who figured out how to use the tools, to turn everything into a nuclear wasteland. I don't believe it inherently disposes anyone toward any particular set of politics necessarily, and it didn't used to be the case that it got channeled in this way.

The current state of slashdot is good place to investigate. These days the comments are filled with people switching to anonymous mode to inject some sort of political statement even if it has no relevance to the story. Sometimes it's just people posting giant ascii swastikas.

I'd assume another reason is that given that a small number of far-right threads/communities exist, you're going to have people leaving simply because people who are against, or at least frustrated with, your existence isn't a great place to be around.

> become far-right oriented?

The problem is not so subjectively limited as to be a right-wing problem. Communities, unless extremely well policed, tend to become gravities of like mindedness when there is a visible vote system. This seems to occur because vote counts, whether positive or negative, are viewed as a form of credibility and because people are generally hostile to disruption and originality.

When you step back from a subjective slant the phenomenon of group think has been well studied.

When reddit first launched, the media and mainstream leaned a bit more right. Reddit had people with pretty heavily left leaning views and also borderline anarchist libertarians flocking to it. Gay marriage and legal weed were actually not incredibly mainstream ideas back then and people who supported these things were often pushed out of many places, but virtually everyone posting on reddit supported it and topics like it popped up daily, mixed among programming news. There was also batshit sovereign citizen stuff and videos of people walking out of court because the court flags had gold fringes and that meant it wasn’t legit, and quite a few people on reddit praised stuff like this.

Now the virtually everybody out there already supports gay marriage and legal weed, and those are a baseline for everything left of center and basically mainstream thought now. Everybody right of that gets pushed out of communities, so whenever some new community pops up, you get a whole spectrum of right of center as well as sovereign citizen types again looking to settle down and establish a community like left of center people did with places like reddit all those years ago. One bad thing for these new communities is that the internet is far more accessible now, and the more extreme members see their chance to finally talk, and those with extreme opinions like talking a lot.

No moderation: right wing posts flourish. Strong moderation: left wing posts flourish.

I think it is because far-right is far less palatable than far-left.

Consider two possible statements:

1. Hitler wasn't that bad.

2. Stalin wasn't that bad.

I think, for most people, the first provokes a much more extreme reaction. Both were objectively terrible human beings, but defending Hitler is seen as far more extreme than defending Stalin.

This has two effects:

Firstly, far-right people are continually kicked out of communities. Far-left people are not. So any new unmoderated community is going to attract these "refugees"

Secondly, nobody notices or cares when a community goes far-left. But its far more noticeable when a community goes far-right.

I think both of those examples would provoke a pretty extreme response in most people, but sincere Stalinists just aren't very common, at all. You see a _bit_ of "Stalinism was actually good" stuff on the internet (weirdly, occasionally from the right; some more confused Russian nationalists have a bit of a Stalin fetish), but you'll see a lot more holocaust denial.

>but sincere Stalinists just aren't very common

Maybe the figure-head isn't en vogue anymore. The methods are always popular.

Leftists(Socialists, Communists, Anarchists) often publically revel in the idea of when "the revolution comes" to put anyone dissenting up against the wall or sending them to a Gulag camp of some sort. I don't find that exactly reassuring. Seeing how "protesters" in the US and Europe act like chinese Red Guards during the cultural revolution, this day doesn't seem far off.

I'm reading the "Three-Body Problem" right now and the first chapter eerily reminded me of the current situation where not being enough of an "ally" to the racial BLM movement is a thought-crime punishable by having your life destroyed.

It's the paradox of tolerance. If you tolerate the intolerant (e.g. right-wing assholes) they will push out other groups through their intolerant behavior. The only solution is to rabidly ban hate speech and similar behavior.

It's because everyone puts up this herculean effort.

There's a large population of people out there with views that annoy left-wing people, who don't really have a place on most internet platforms, because all internet platforms are left wing, because the dominant culture of silicon valley is much more left wing than the mean of, say, US citizens. (And everyone who wants to keep their job pretends to be more left wing than they are, too.)

Anyway, this means there's this mob of people without a place to talk, and they want such a place. So if a place ever opens up that doesn't strictly persecute right-wingers- well, it's like being a town during the inquisition that doesn't persecute witches. Obviously, all the witches are going to flock to you!

It's because everyone puts up this herculean effort.

There's a large population of people out there with views that annoy left-wing people, who don't really have a place on most internet platforms, because all internet platforms are left wing, because the dominant culture of silicon valley is much more left wing than the mean of your average person. (And everyone who wants to keep their jobs pretends to be more left wing than they are, too.)

(Witch metaphor courtesy of Slatestarcodex, may it rest in peace.)

Smart people use their brain to avoid conflict and end up kind of weak in that context. They don't stand their ground. Typically the lean left.

Far-right definitely stand their ground, and can easily go unfazed by logical arguments.

Dicks fuck pussies. We need assholes to shit on the dicks.

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