YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech | Hacker News Reader

YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

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364 pointsnickthegreek887 comments

When I, a white young boy, grew up in The South and saw the Klan, my father taught me to never do business with them, never enable their behavior, never let their organization rent rooms from venues I may own, and to decline all of their business even if they were paying extra to be your customer.

For as long as he could remember, and his father before him, the Klan and other fringe organizations would always cry and shed tears about how they were being pushed to the edge and ostracized from the local communities. Most of the town ignored these common pleas. We knew how to deal with them and ignore them, we had our inoculated culture. A few businesses were locally known to be "Klan friendly", but it should surprise no one that they are not rich mega-corps.

It seems that in the internet age, this sort of culture of inoculation has not been passed on to the outside world communities, though the far-right ideologies may have. It is normal to decline the business of people you don't want to do business with. It is normal for it to be the fringe believers -- the ones that by their own choice are pushing themselves to live on that fringe. It is the simple free-market economy of supply and demand telling them that their demand is not necessary.

However, my father also taught me to be careful with this pushing of the fringe. It is a delicate balance of liberty with liberty-destroying ideology. The paradox of tolerance, etc. It should be very closely watched.

It is a win for the far-right to have y'all here on HN "disagree with them but still believe they should be here and not on the fringe". They will shed tears in public and privately rejoice at the welcoming change. It is a grant of liberty they suddenly inherited with tech to have had such a huge audience and defenders of their speech on private platforms all this time. It is only now that the culture of inoculation is catching up.

We should watch it closely & carefully though. We shouldn't be shedding tears for them.

Ok, what if this person were a thug and he advocates for a "thug life" (as an arbitrary example, a gangsta rapper)? And let's say he committed a lot of crime and physical harm to other people?

Would you issue the same behavior towards him? Would you be very vocal about it?

This example doesn't feel very "arbitrary."

What is your theory, that no one has ever declined to do business with a rapper? You might want to do some fact checking on that.

On the surface, this seems like a silly example - it doesn't compare in practice. However, if you honestly, in good faith, think that it does, you absolutely should make an effort to form that argument.

I believe that what he is trying to say is that, even though the lyrics are about killing people, selling drugs and so, nobody bans their music and they have the right to express themselves.

Plenty of private companies forbid rap on their premises.

Not youtube, apparently.

That's what we call freedom of association.

You are not as subtle as you think you are.

Posting the most offensive examples of gangster rap lyrics to Facebook or Twitter could easily get you banned or at least flagged/shadow-banned if the songs were about killing people, contained a lot of misogyny, etc. Uncensored gangster rap would definitely violate TOS for a lot of these platforms and would probably get auto-banned by bots. A lot of this music gets flagged as 21+ only on YouTube. Many businesses ban it on premise, and many record companies won't publish it. That's part of why the really extreme stuff tends to have its own labels, stations, channels, sites, etc.

You're allowed to listen to it in private of course, just like you are allowed to read or listen to any racist material you want in private. There are loads of web sites that cater specifically to these circles, and even entire alternative social networks. Like the most violent and offensive gangster rap, it has its own safe spaces and is available to anyone who wants it.

R. Kelly is cancelled.

Agreed. There is much to reasonably debate about where lines are drawn in regards to which private platforms are de facto public squares, if any, and which are not; and what speech is a reasonable cause for being banned from such a platform, and what speech is not. But the fact that there is such a significant amount of hateful, violence-loving speech, and that it is continuously growing, simply overshadows the topic. I'll happily debate those subtleties all day, once we're not driving cars into groups of each other over identity politics, accusing people who are trying to vote of fraud while intimidating them with guns in person, threatening each other with civil war, gleefully mocking victims of politically motivated violence, and, most of all, once we no longer have a US president who encourages all of that hatred.

This is what I wish was more studied. I feel like social media are intentionally designed to cause people to share violent and toxic speech. I hangout on discord in few big servers and I rarely encounter anything outright racist. Might just be because they are all tech related or maybe a no politics rule change the atmosphere if enforced ruthlessly.

There could also be something about speaking in public vs speaking something in semi-private real time chat app. You have time to clarify what you mean or be more empathetic. On platforms like twitter, when I check engagement metrics for replies to the tweet. I see a decrease of 10x often which is to say a lot of people never see past the first tweet a person makes and since tweets are limited by length, they encourage people to respond from their own biases rather than looking at things optimistically.

I do wonder if there is a reasonable path to punishing a platform that is responsible for encouraging content that causes toxic behavior or higher "engagement".

Any thoughts on why the Klan hasn't yet been banned outright?

In the USA, the reason is the 1st Amendment in the Bill of Rights.

Both in text & traditional interpretation, that gives them the right to speak & assemble – but not do other non-communicative actions that would be criminal no matter the motivations.

Wasn't the Klan responsible for hate-mongering and terrorist activities in the past?

The actual terroristic activities are illegal, and Klan members have been prosecuted (and successfully sued) for them. "Hate-mongering" isn't illegal in the US.

So Al Qaeda etc would be legal in the US?

No? Militant Islamism, however, is.

If the Klan would’ve been classified as a terrorist organization they would be illegal they haven’t.

The Nation of Islam is also classified as a hate group by the SPLC however they aren’t banned under the same laws that protect the KKK.

NOI members just like the KKK have been prosecuted in the past for many things, however outside of very limited circumstances there isn’t such thing as guilt by association in the US justice system.

I don't believe it's the case that the USG could have suppressed the KKK by "classifying them as a terrorist organization".

They can classify them as a criminal organization according to RICO.

You may want to read https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-not-rico-...

I always wonder what people are thinking when they suggest that the US could silence an entire viewpoint through invocation of RICO or FTO designation. If the government could have declared an entire line of thought illegal, don't people think we would have done so numerous times already? We couldn't even ban membership in the actual communist party at the height of the Cold War (not for lack of trying, though).

Not an entire viewpoint. I am purely talking about the organization that is the KKK. I know that white nationalism cannot be declared illegal.

Because there is no organization called the KKK.

It's a 100 organizations with 10-30 members who believe they're the true heirs to the KKK. It's be very similar to trying to arrest the head of the Nazi party. There really isn't one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan#Third_KKK

I know this. The KKK, or at least a great many chapters, is an organization that helped coordinate crime. By this, I mean that hierarchical members of the KKK organized criminal acts to be perpetrated by other members of the organization in their hierarchical control. The KKK was 100% a criminal organization that could have been prosectured using RICO. It would not even have been the only overtly political group where this would have been done.

There's a lot of reading you can do about why RICO isn't routinely deployed against ideological white supremacist organizations (including those that refer to themselves as "KKK"). RICO is deployed against organized white supremacist criminal gangs, where there's a centralized "enterprise" and a pattern, rather than a scattering, of racketeering-predicate crimes.

RICO exists. If the criminal activities were systematically prompted by a group, they can be sued and all their members may be prosecuted for these crimes, especially their leaders.

So no, this is entirely incorrect.

RICO is a pretty narrow tool, as it should be. It also isn’t based on group membership, it’s based on involvement in the planning / sponsorship of illegal activities.

It wouldn’t matter how many Hackernews members started coordinating bank robberies; RICO wouldn’t magically allow for the rest of the Hackernews user base to be prosecuted.

Sure. But if Hackernews had a hierarchy and a membership system in which lower-ranking members would do criminal acts organized by their ranking superiors, the organization could be sued under civil and criminal RICO, and then dismantled. While not all members would be prosecuted, a very large amount could be, and the subsequent criminal investigation would make it possible to indict a good proportion of the rest. It would also mean that even lower members could have been prosecuted based on their assistance to various criminal acts.

It is indeed a narrow tool, and yet can be applied to organizations such as the KKK.

I think your problem here is not so much that you don't know what RICO is, as that you don't have a tight grip on what the KKK is. It is probably the case that many, or even most, Klan members are also members of white supremacist criminal gangs. That those gangs are subject to RICO prosecution (a major Aryan gang was taken down that way just last year) illustrates the problem with your argument. The enterprise itself has to be focused on the racketeering-predicate crimes.

Supreme Court rulings[0][1]. They consistently rule in favor of free speech and believe something along the lines of "defending the thought that we hate".

They even sided with the Westboro Baptist Church (the people with the offensive signs)[2] so they're pretty committed to "absolute" free speech.

[0]: https://www.oyez.org/cases/1968/492 [1]: https://www.oyez.org/cases/2002/01-1107 [2]: https://www.oyez.org/cases/2010/09-751

That protection of speech, mind you, doesn’t just extend to the KKK. There are a lot of things people on HN probably like (pornography, violent video games) that have been protected by exactly the same principles.

The important thing to distinguish is that they protect free speech, not free platforms.

People are free to say racist things, produce racist games, setup racist podcasts.

What they aren't entitled to is google showing their racist crap, steam carrying their racist games, hacker news keeping their racist comments uncensored. You are free to burn a flag, you can't force someone to watch you burn it.

If someone feels hurt that youtube censors too much, they are more than free to make their own whitepowertube. The fact that there is a ton of far right media right now shows that they aren't completely without a voice.

I agree with you in general. But would like to add that effective monopolies like youtube should be excluded. Censoring something on youtube essentially means it censored completely for video platforms.

There are other video hosting platforms that work perfectly well, as far as I can see.

Excluding porn youtube is essentially a monopoly. If you can't go to youtube you immediately land in very small and obscure video streaming sites.

If you compare this to the "real" world it would be the same as not being able to say what you want in public spaces. Youtube is THE public space for video content.

They aren't, actually.

I guess "WhitePowerTube" would have been Stormfront? I never visited the site but I remember hearing about it when Google seized their domain name and wouldn't give it back.

There's a nice fantasy about these parts that the deplatforming left somehow created all these platforms and will stop when people they disagree with go away. No. These platforms were mostly created by people committed to free speech, who came under relentless external and internal attacks for years until they bent the knee, and people who try to create alternative platforms are frequently erased from the internet via whatever levers of power those activists can get their hands on. They definitely don't stop and say, well, you created your own website, good for you and best of luck.

> people committed to free speech

That's quite a euphemism for Stormfront!

> the deplatforming left

Maybe I have a different viewpoint because my grandfather spent some years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, but I just see organizations like Stormfront as completely wrong and to be crushed by any legal means.

The endless association of free speech with white supremacy is tiring.

The First Amendment gives a corporation paying to print hateful lies made up on the spot a massive advantage over an honest and thoughtful individual who has spent considerable time and effort to discover the truth.

Now America is facing an epidemic but has a full-time virus misinformation news network. As a result, at least 80,000 Americans have died unnecessarily, and this number grows every day. https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/19/faster-response-prevente...

What will the final death toll be? How many would have been preventable if Americans hadn't been told a pack of lies?

The First Amendment needs to be completely overhauled to deal with this exploit that is destroying the system. Not to patch this terrible security breach "because the Founders" is like refusing to fix a zero-day exploit in Linux "because Linus".

That wasn't a euphemism, I was referring to the origins of Twitter, Reddit, YouTube etc where they were committed to allowing a whole range of viewpoints. So you misunderstood me pretty badly. That's perhaps an argument for free speech you'd find understandable - if you can censor peopleb at will there's always a risk you'll not correctly understand them and incorrectly, unfairly shut someone down.

But they do assault people and commit acts of violence. As do hundreds of other domestic terrorist groups.

Yes, and those acts of violence are crimes at the federal and state level...

The First Amendment protects the content of their speech, however hateful it may be, which means they can generally think whatever they want, and say nearly whatever they want. The dividing line is when speech is action (i.e., yelling "fire" in a theater; the content of the yell is protected but the act of yelling is not).

As far as I know, the Klan doesn't actually exist anymore. In its second most famous incarnation it was a fraternal order like the Freemasons. But that disintegrated in the 40s. Since there's no legal enforcement of the brand anyone can and does use the title for cultural history reasons. Today there are dozens of disparate "KKKs" with no official continuity with the famous KKK that amount to a couple thousand people in a nation of hundreds of millions.

So what would you even be banning other than the word KKK itself?

"Just because they're the problem doesn't mean we aren't."

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-problem

> However, my father also taught me to be careful with this pushing of the fringe. It is a delicate balance of liberty with liberty-destroying ideology. The paradox of tolerance, etc. It should be very closely watched.

Sounds like your father was an honorable man. Honest question: when does pushing the fringe go too far? Is it appropriate for banks to deny their business? Grocery stores?

Most banks and grocery stores are private businesses and being openly racist isn’t a protected class, so it should be up to them, no?

I wasn't asking a question on the legal theory, but a clarification on the OP's own statement that one should be "careful with this pushing of the fringe", which is presumably a moral or pragmatic one.

They definitely shouldn't be here or anywhere. This is the right approach. Government power is not the only power and in contemporary times, not even the greatest power in most affairs. Megacorps have huge amounts of power. Often they use it to hurt people. I can't imagine a single american who hasn't been scammed by some megacorp like comcast, wells fargo, verizon, etc. But, sometimes their incentives align with those of the society at large. We should not hold them back by using the slippery slope fallacy. Most of the time, their incentives don't align with society's, so we should be thankful when these unregulated entities actually help society, even though that is never their goal. Yes, ideally this would be handled by government in some way, but our government is too inept to handle anything these days, including reigning in the power of these megacorps.

Well said. I especially appreciate the distinction you're making between balancing liberty with liberty-destroying ideology.

This is the kind of difficult nuance that I rarely see in these discussions. One one side there's the free speech absolutists, whose arguments tend to ignore the fact that unmoderated propaganda, and hate speech tends to be more addictive, and spread ignorance faster then fact-checking can fix it. The consequences of this sort of callous attitude are literally genocide[1].

On the other hand, there's the 'cancel-culture mobs' (for lack of a better term) which are now censoring regular speech that disagrees, or appears to disagrees, or isn't sufficiently subservient to their opinions. Just yesterday I was sadly reading this depressing thread where Yann LeCun was run off twitter[2] for explaining how bias (in the social science sense) can be traced back to various steps in the ML pipeline (in this case, mainly a feature of the dataset itself, but also the choice of errors, bias vs variance, etc).

The inability to admit nuance is the only thing I can think both these groups share, and maybe what needs to be emphasized more.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...

[2] https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1274782757907030016

> It is a win for the far-right to have y'all here on HN "disagree with them but still believe they should be here and not on the fringe".

Just FTR we are pretty far from accepting the far right here on HN:

tptacek shared some interesting research he'd done a couple of hours ago and it might be of interest to everyone here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23681929

He made a claim, but he didn’t actually share any of his research or data.

I'm fairly certain he can stand for it.

Also, tptacek is fairly far to the left it seems (in an American context) so it actually surprised me quite a bit that he'd write that.

Based on that last observation I think most of us can agree, can't we?

> Based on that last observation I think most of us can agree, can't we?

HN is in a weird place today, very similar to where the Slate Star Codex guy was a few years ago. That is, racist Whites seem to feel safe commenting here (with appropriate dog whistles and what not), but you wonder how long that can last…

In the end, the SSC guy banned more and more commenters but it wasn't sufficient to save him and he ended up deleting his blog [0] when the world turned its eyes to the kinds of discussions he allowed. I expect the same to happen with HN.

dang does a good job keeping people on-message politically (and I'm sure tptacek did as well), but being "racist-adjacent"—which HN absolutely is [1]—isn't a long-term viable position.

Someday soon I expect the racist-adjacent user-banning to kick into high gear on HN (like SSC did) but it will be too little, too late. Eventually, HN will inevitably shut down—and it might be sooner than any of us think.

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/

[1] This is from an hour ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23683033

> In the end, the SSC guy banned more and more commenters but it wasn't sufficient to save him and he ended up deleting his blog when the world turned its eyes to the kinds of discussions he allowed.

That isn't why he deleted it. He deleted it because the NYT was threatening to publish his real name in a way that would make it untenable for him to continue to practice psychiatry.

> [1] This is from an hour ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23683033

To reduce criticism of SPLC to "racism" isn't helping the health of discourse here.

> To reduce criticism of SPLC to "racism" isn't helping the health of discourse here.

"The SPLC is a hate group" is considered healthy, valid criticism to you, coming from an account which then said that "hate speech against white people has been normalized in our society for some time now" and linked to The Bell Curve as proof for the superiority of the white race, but referring to them as "racist-adjacent" is unacceptably reductionist?

The comment "The SPLC is a hate group" is not racist. Even if the person who said it is otherwise racist, it's entirely possible for racists to say things that aren't racist.

Whatever "racist-adjacent" means, clearly it must mean "not actually racist" because if it was racist, I'm sure you would call that.

An outspoken racist falsely attacks one of the great legal defenders of Blacks in America and your argument is, "it's entirely possible for racists to say things that aren't racist."

I'm doubtful you will convince anyone with that argument: perhaps not even yourself.

My argument is that I don't think the user's other comments are relevant to the question of whether the statement is racist.

Now, if you think the statement "the SPLC is a hate group" is false that's fine. I think there is a debate that is worth having here on HN - especially when tech companies are using the SPLC's hate list to justify their deplatforming decisions. In my opinion, the SPLC's use of defamation and fear-mongering for profit make the statement perfectly justified.

Calling it "racist" or "racist-adjacent" is a rhetorical attack that does not serve the purpose of mutual enlightenment. "Racist-adjacent" strikes me as particularly insidious since implicit in that label is the admission that the thing being labeled is not actually racist.

You clearly aren't familiar with the actual history of the splc. Even the name is a bit of a scam, chosen for it's adjacency to Martin Luther Kings civil rights organisation, the SCLC. The founder is a direct marketing hall of famer.

> In the end, the SSC guy banned more and more commenters but it wasn't sufficient to save him and he ended up deleting his blog [0] when the world turned its eyes to the kinds of discussions he allowed. I expect the same to happen with HN.

That's... not what happened? He's explicitly stated that he deleted his blog due to the fact that the NYT are planning on doxxing him in a story about SSC. He's fine with the story itself, and the attention garnered, but does not want his name attached to it and announced to the world via one of America's most popular newspapers due to his work as a psychiatrist. As far as I'm aware, this is not because SSC contains comments about right wing views or anything, but more due to an intent to maintain his privacy to his patients, which he believes will improve their quality of care.

If you think I'm incorrect in the above interpretation, feel free to disagree.

I do disagree, there was a lot of discussion about this on SSC prior to Scott shutting it down. If you just read what's on the site now, you're missing most of the important background information. In particular, the "reporter" at the NYT was clearly looking to get SSC cancelled, so Scott self-cancelled before that could happen, on his own terms.

I'm ambivalent about his decision, but it was definitely his to make and probably is in the best interest of his patients (and himself)—at least in the short-term. The world, however, has lost a really good blog and community.

I've read SSC for a while now, and check in with the community every so often. Before the takedown, there was talk about the reporter writing an article, with the general consensus being "nervous but optimistic".

I'd love to see clear evidence about the reporter clearly looking to get Scott cancelled. The scare quotes on "reporter" are unnecessary.

I'm sad that the blog is down. "Categories are for man" is an essay/lens that I find very valuable. I hope the situation resolves with the blog being up and the NYT not doxxing Scott.

> I'd love to see clear evidence about the reporter clearly looking to get Scott cancelled. The scare quotes on "reporter" are unnecessary.

Here's an example of the NYT providing anonymity to a therapist with a political blog in 2015: https://twitter.com/s8mb/status/1275436187713286144

Here's the NYT protecting the anonymity of female gamers to protect them from harassment (on the same day that Scott took down his blog): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23619347

There are other examples, but those strike me as the most related to Scott's circumstances. It's not proof per se, but it severely undermines the credibility of the statement that it would be against NYT policy to grant the same protections to Scott.

Good find. There were also tweets from the reporter, who said in effect "what do you [Scott] have to hide?" about the SSC story.

Scott's attempt to spin it as a positive story in his farewell letter is, I think, an attempt to both influence the NYT in that direction, but also to keep the focus on the doxxing, and not on why SSC might be controversial. He's trying to keep that part out of the public debate entirely, which seems smart.

Also: I'm sorry you're being downvoted so badly, I don't think it's deserved.

> There were also tweets from the reporter, who said in effect "what do you [Scott] have to hide?" about the SSC story.

Woah, really? That's bad.

> Scott's attempt to spin it as a positive story in his farewell letter is, I think, an attempt to both influence the NYT in that direction, but also to keep the focus on the doxxing, and not on why SSC might be controversial. He's trying to keep that part out of the public debate entirely, which seems smart.

That's actually a pretty reasonable interpretation, and probably flips the script in a way that they weren't prepared for. A couple days ago the NYT ran a piece begging people not to cancel their subscriptions. I didn't read the piece to see if it reference SSC, so it could just be a coincidence, but I know there was the #ghostnyt campaign on Twitter in response Scott closing his blog.

The Daily Beast also reported that some of the staff internally at the NYT (mostly the tech folks) were rather irate at learning (from Hacker News, no less) about the planned doxxing of Scott.

> Also: I'm sorry you're being downvoted so badly, I don't think it's deserved.

Thank you. It's really not that bad and my net karma is actually up quite a bit overall from this thread, but kind words and interesting arguments matter more to me than votes. I won't speculate as to the motivation behind the downvotes, and they won't change my opinions, but I do treat them as an opportunity to look at how I could improve the usefulness of my comments here.

I am well aware that the NYT has been inconsistent at best with their anonymity standards. Definitely undermines that policy.

Still don't think that construes sufficient evidence to claim that this current situation is intended to cancel Scott, or that the NYT's policy is to cancel people who post politically. I don't think Scott was against an article being written about SSC, only that it will contain his name. I'm happy if you think that it can be pieced together from his previous statements, but I don't think there's sufficient evidence presented here.

I agree the reporter was trying to get him cancelled (or at least that seems very likely) but I don't think Scott's decision had anything to do with "the world turning its eyes to the kinds of discussions he allowed". Frankly, regardless of the kind of political discussions on his blog, that kind of exposure would likely ruin his ability to practice medicine. Having the "right" politics matters very little when many of your patients don't.

Scott has spoken many times on SSC that his concern is with his employer—i.e. he's afraid of getting fired for the contents of his blog, and perhaps what he himself has written in the past. That's why he uses a pseudonym online—he's not afraid of his patients, at least, not primarily.

Obviously, if Scott is fired from where he works, he can't continue to treat his current patients—so that's where the harm to "his ability to practice and treat his patients" come in.

He didn't lay all of that out explicitly in his farewell post on SSC, but it's fully consistent with what he wrote—if you're aware of the history of his employment concerns and the likely result of the NYT article sending a bunch of low-info culture warriors after him personally as a result.

People can disagree about his motives, of course. For me, the above is most consistent with everything Scott's written previously, as well as the final farewell post.

Linking to one flagged comment from a green account doesn't really support your position that the entire community is "racist-adjacent". Neither does linking to a blog post that claims Scott shut SSC down to protect his patients support your position that he did it to evade justice.

It is never the entire community. In situations where this kind of drifts occur, most of the group are usually people with little knowledge about activist dynamics and unwilling to consider that people they know/trust may adhere to or have done things they consider abhorrent. Therefore, they tend do be blindsided about stuff that, in hindsight, was obvious.

This is likely why above poster says "racist-adjacent" and not racist-friendly.

I have no particular opinion on HN, but I have noticed that the tech community in general is usually not the most politics-aware group. This makes us pretty vulnerable to this kind of behaviour.

I don't agree that the validity of his claim depends in any way on his character, reputation, or personal political views. The validity of a claim is independent of any attribute of the person making the claim. The only way to make any judgment about the claim is to see the data and methodology.

> Also, tptacek is fairly far to the left it seems

While in the modern US there is a common (and increasingly strong) correlation on average between political attitudes toward race and gender and the left/right economic axis, there is nothing strongly inherent about that. Racism and sexism on the left are not at all unheard of.

(I don't see any evidence that tptacek is a racist or sexist, I just don't think “hey, he's left-of-American-center, so if he says HN is clear of racism/sexism, it must be the case” is even approximately a reasonable position.)

But, in any case, his own description seems to repeatedly focus on explicit misogynistic or white supremacists content, so even were we to take it as gospel it is perfectly consistent with HN being filled with the kind of urbane circumlocution that is frequently used to provide a thin veneer of not-all-that-plausible-in-aggregate deniability over bigoted attitudes.

People reliably will come out to defend white nationalists in every topic it comes up here. And people denouncing white nationalists will be voted down.

Somehow we have the opposite experience. One day, I'll see people claim HN is a safespace for socialists/communist lefties and another day it's a white nationalist haven.

Which is it? :P

dang has commented on this a lot lately and he says it is because we see the other side much easier than our own side.

I agree with him to a large degree:

I personally see mostly problematic content from the left[0] but I guess that is partly my bias.

[0]: for example this comment earlier today that I thought[1] was absolutely crazy "I don't want to participate in spaces where religious white nationalists feel safe" - just try to turn that phrase around to "I don't want to participate in spaces where atheistic colored globalists feel safe" and see if it wouldn't be flagged to death immediately by everyone including me.)

[1]: someone had to tell me that this is basically an euphemism for nazi, to which I had to reply that I would prefer if we just said nazi then because then I could join in despising it.

While it's a euphemism for nazi, I hope you don't just assume that it's appropriate to use "white nationalist" to mean "nazi". Just because other people are being stupid doesn't mean we have to. A white nationalist could be from any political faction and could have different ideas for economic policy. A National Socialist is a very specific kind of person.

Totally agree in case there should be any doubt.

I prefer to call nazis "nazis". It is short and simple and we can all agree that we don't like them.

But then they reply that "whoever you think are Nazis are not Nazis" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14034920).

Well, it's a fair point - if the only people who get banned are actual Nazis, everyone will get called a Nazi before too long.

Actual Nazis are rare. They were rare during WW2 and they're really rare now.

> "I don't want to participate in spaces where religious white nationalists feel safe"

> "I don't want to participate in spaces where atheistic colored globalists feel safe"

The weight there is different though, in the groups you analyse the violence has historically flown in one direction more than in the other. I am inclined to think that there have been historically much less concerns of safety for "religious white nationalists" than for "theistic colored globalists"

> The weight there is different though, in the groups you analyse the violence has historically flown in one direction more than in the other.

I think you are wildly underestimating the violence of a number of non-religious groups: recommended reading includes the reign of terror, Stalin and Khmer Rouge.

... and also non-whites by the way.

Religious white nationalists want me deported or killed. Of course I don't want to be in a space where they are safe.

People say white nationalist instead of Nazi because white nationalists will always deny being Nazis. Someone being nationalist for a race should immediately bring up red flags. There are also small differences. For example some white nationalists are not necessarily antisemitic, which is a characteristic of Nazis, or might even support Israel (though you can be pro-Israel and antisemitic of course), instead focusing their hate on black people, Muslims, etc...

> Religious white nationalists want me deported or killed.

Where do you get that religious thing from? Because for all their faults all major variants of the mainstream religion in US and Europe is pretty clear about not supporting that -to the point that a number of clergy got in real trouble with nazi Germany.

I'm taking the religious part from the OP.

Also yes, while a lot of religious people are very good, the religious people that also happen to be white nationalists tend to be even worse than the garden variety white nationalist.

"Someone being nationalist for a race"

This makes literally no sense.

>People reliably will come out to defend white nationalists in every topic it comes up here.

...and they will be voted down quickly.

> And people denouncing white nationalists will be voted down.

Examples please :-)

The closest thing I can come up with is when I kind of reliably get downvoted every time I say I'd support a ban on nazis but that seems to be die hard free speech people, not nazis.

People are voting up people defending molyneux _in this thread_!

> Examples please :-)

The post you replied to was downvoted and flagkilled until I vouched for it. Every post from me in this thread is or has been graytext. Too many other examples just in this thread to enumerate or counteract.

I'm sorry but this very discussion contains the reverse of what you're saying. In a post suggesting that SM isn't racist, he's only concerned for the welfare of black children, I posted a link clearly highlighting the many instances of SM's racism. My post got downvoted, the parent didn't.

Not exactly .. people will come out to defend "free speech". But somehow the cause in question is nearly always far right.

Lots of people seem to conflate how bad someone's speech is with how "free" it is.

There's an entirely innocuous reason for that: free speech isn't a concern for things that nobody is bothered by.

partly because we mostly agree about the rest of it so then there's no need to remind people about free speech.

Given the amount of state violence used against left wing protestors over the last month and the number of active political leaders championing that violence... I really don't agree. Leftist speech is silenced with guns. And the free speech supporters sit silent.

> And the free speech supporters sit silent.

Many of the people who raise objections based on “free speech” every time a private entity declines to actively participate in amplifying right wing speech have been actively cheering the events you describe, and arguing they need to be intensified, not sitting silent.

I did some very small experiments on such a thing a while ago. One was an example of someone being unjustly detained in violation of their rights [1] and another was an actual example of government censorship [2]. The first one was flagged and killed immediately, the second received zero response.

On HN, all of the 'free speech' stories I see always pertain to the far-right and/or incredibly vitriolic individuals getting removed from platforms. They receive massive amounts of votes and spur on large flamewars. HackerNews unfortunately is just as prone to falling into certain narrative traps as other websites and one of them that seems to come up more and more frequently is free speech and individual rights but only as it pertains to the far-right.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20504332

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19976398

The discrepancy could be because Hacker News cares more about technology platforms than Alabama public TV. For an example of HN getting upset about government censorship on a technology platform, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223219

I'm not sure that's the case. Some examples looking back on some of the most popular HN stories tend to align well with either tech platforms or issues dealing with personal rights. Such as [1] or the Snowden and Julian Assange situations [2] [3]. Or for the sake of not cherry-picking, when the Supreme Corut legalized same-sex marriage [4]. Although perhaps somewhat morbidly, the top comment seems to demonstrate one of the problems I find with HN.

With my first story I figured it would fit well with the people that tend to advocate for personal rights because it was an example of an American citizen being wrongfully detained for three weeks, but it ended up flagged because I think people tend to circle the wagon around anything tangentially related to immigration.

The second example was about a direct example of government censorship and the inconsistency of free speech advocates. Google's actions and bending to China for the sake of maintaining profitable behavior is bad, yes, but they also are not the government. The government should be held to even higher standards and yet it seems people are not willing to do so for this administration. An example of that is that people here were praising the administration's threats against Twitter as some sort of pro-freedom move.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21517722

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12494998

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19632449

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9784470

all of the 'free speech' stories I see always pertain to the far-right and/or incredibly vitriolic individuals getting removed from platforms

That's because getting people shut down, cancelled, censored, is a left wing tactic, so of course it always seems to be the right getting censored. Free speech is a value the right hold and the left do not, systematically so throughout history.

That is incorrect. Censorship is on the orthogonal spectrum to to the right-left one. It is in liberal-authoritarian spectrum, where authoritarian end usually has state censorship and liberal end usually has freedom to individuals/corps to their own selective "censorship" (by definition censorship is only by state entities, so the term should be different). Both left and right can be liberal and authoritarian. And in the middle are centrists.

Can you explain why either of these stories is at all relevant to this site?

I come here to get away from the shouty people. You seem upset people here won't let you get shouty. I disagree.

In contrary this person doesn't seem upset at all. What rhetoric are you picking up upset by? It seems reasoned and evidenced logic to me.

That can be interpreted in a very different way

I don't think I've even seen an explicitly racist post here, despite having dead comments turned on, maybe excepting obvious trolling or spam. Implicitly racist posts are usually downvoted.

I have seen downvoted replies that nonsensically infer racism in a post. I suspect that's how I would describe what you're thinking of.

> I don't think I've even seen an explicitly racist post here, despite having dead comments turned on, maybe excepting obvious trolling or spam.

This is self-contradictory. You state that you have never seen explicitly racists posts here, but then you state the exceptions of "obvious trolling or spam". How does a racist post being "obvious trolling" make it not-racist? How does a racist post being spam make it not-racist? Racism abounds in trolling and spam. Spam and trolling are similarly havens for racism.

> Implicitly racist posts are usually downvoted.

That's not my experience.

The spam and trolling is racist, but it's flagged and downvoted to hell immediately. I was responding to someone saying the opposite voting trends exist for racist content.

Because they're not explicitly racist. It's dogwhistling, or talking points, which almost always indicates racism.

Someone saying that black communities should be more policed by dogwhistling that disproportionate crime warrants "assertion of police presence and predictive policing" by willfully misinterpreting statistics is racist, even if it doesn't explicitly say that black people should be harassed by police.

Does it bother you that some of the people most in favor of increased police presence in crime ridden communities are themselves black. Is it more likely that they are racist too, or that their material concerns for their safety are more legitimate than your racism dog whistle detector?

Can this be because your group of "white nationalists" is getting very big and possibly includes a good number of innocent people?

Someone wrote something really interesting here somewhere a couple of days ago:

every time a non-racist says something not correct enough or God forbid even wrong (e.g. on twitter), they are ejected into the other camp. Eventually the other camp's grown from a fringe phenomenon to being noticeably large and everyone laments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23664418

This is a thread topic about white nationalists being banned from YouTube. It has 700+ comments, many of them in defense of the banned. Which of the banned people being defended are not actually white supremacists, but innocents caught in a too-broad dragnet?

No, it's not. It's because people make point-in-time observations about HN and don't see the community working over hours, which is what you have to do, since anyone can make an account and write any comment they want here.

And how did you define "white nationalism"?

HN routinely votes down to the max all kinds of mainstream and legitimate viewpoints that aren't "white nationalism" but aren't supportive of globalism either. Literally any criticism of the EU will hit -4 within hours regardless of how grounded in facts it is. Given the rhetoric that often accompanies that topic, without a doubt some people consider any criticism of the EU institutions or ideologies to be some sort of racist zealotry, although it's utterly mainstream throughout Europe.

> aren't supportive of globalism either.

You understand that when you speak of "globalism" this way, you place yourself as a member of a tiny, if vocal, minority.

Hacker News has a lot of sophisticated, intelligent people from all over the world and that's why fringe political beliefs aren't common. I would add that the collegial atmosphere here means people are unsupportive of naked aggression and anger, which also seems to be a common component of fringe political beliefs.

If it's important for you to criticize the EU and have people listen to you, there are plenty of places to go for that.

My personal belief about the EU is that it like all political systems is flawed and could certainly do with constructive criticism, but has managed to deliver a high standard of living, personal rights, some degree of income equality and even happiness to its citizens for decades now and do it better than any other.

This is why I personally left the United States after thirty years to move to Europe.

Given I'm British, that'd make me a part of the majority actually. And in the USA that anti-globalism candidate won the last election, so, I guess I'd be in the majority there too (barely).

Obviously you're entitled to your view on the EU, but your attitude is why EU supporters lost in the UK and would lose in other countries in the unlikely event their political systems would ever give them a true choice on the matter. You cannot handle genuine, well reasoned, intelligent and sophisticated criticism of the EU so simply try to suppress it.

That mistake is how the EU's supporters in the UK got their asses kicked, despite having way more resources and the full support of the entire global establishment on their side. They thought all "intelligent, sophisticated" people agreed with them ... because they'd shouted down or suppressed everyone who disagreed. They were then shocked to discover that their arguments were deemed incredibly weak by the large section of the population that hadn't already made up their minds.

That's what happens when you deplatform those you disagree with. They don't go away. They keep refining their arguments where you can't see it, and then if one day you go head to head with them - you lose.

> And in the USA that anti-globalism candidate won the last election, so, I guess I'd be in the majority there too (barely).

Trump soundly lost the popular vote. Read up on the electoral college if you're curious; it's a doozy

Fairly sure I could write a comment about how egregiously bad the handling of the financial crisis was in Greece by the EU, or the failings of the Common Agricultural Policy, without getting downvoted to -4.

(I used to consider myself a "cautious/mild euroskeptic" up until the referendum, at which point I've become a hard-remainer)

Try it. Though for some reason Greece seems to be considered legitimate criticism by some EU supporters, perhaps because this "criticism" is in reality a demand for the EU to have done more, rather than less.

This is my experience here.

The opposite thing is true of HN.

> Just FTR we are pretty far from accepting the far right here on HN:

I read your linked piece but came to the opposite conclusions you posted here. Reading tptacek's comment indicates to me that he thinks HN's tolerance of white supremacist content is unacceptable ("I don't believe the status quo is really acceptable...")

I also wonder about his criteria for selecting what is white supremacist content and what is not. Most of the content I see on HN that I consider white supremacist or racist content is written in the form of dog whistles and not overt statements. I personally think the prevalence of that content on HN is somewhat higher than tptacek was catching.

Wait? We have a a “rep” on Twitter? HN is like one of the most civil places on the Internet insofar as ones where any debate of substance happens.

That was not the point of linking to that, but it seems so.

Yes; just search Twitter for "orange site".

HN is pretty well known to be a cesspool of terrible far-right ideas. What's more, they're not mocked or booed off but enabled. You don't endear yourself to the general public by doing so.

"Far right" according to the far-left echo chamber that is Twitter, perhaps. One should never confuse the people who dominate social media with the general public.

Everyone with a strong political commitment sees HN as dominated by the opposite politics to their own. This is an illusion. For everyone saying what you're saying, someone else is saying this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23396632. Both statements are false; it's just a large enough and chaotic enough dataset that you can find examples of anything—and the ones you dislike the most will be the ones you remember the most (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

For sure terrible comments appear. The false part is to say that they're representative of the community—they're not. Commenters with opposite views notice opposite examples, claim those are the representative ones, and are just as wrong. I've mentioned just one counterexample chosen at random, but could as easily link to 50, and another 50 on your side.

Most such posts get downvoted and/or flagged, though it takes a while for the immune system to work. More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23686864

Mention sexism in tech and it'll get flagged off the front page almost immediately, because that's one of the issues where the third rail is too close to HN's own posters that substantial debate is impossible.

Also, civility is not the same as not having abhorrent ideas written up in nice language.

Politics of almost any kind will be flagged quickly here, even if it's tech related.

I've another explanation:

different groups of people flags those for different reasons.

- some flag them because they want to keep all politics out of HN

- some just don't like people arguing

- some flag them because of that guy who invariably will bring out JD as an example that sexism goes the other way too (or to say that it mostly goes the other way even)

- some flag them because from their point of view it looks like women have an easier life in IT in men. (This is not generally correct, but to someone who realizes that there are serious KPIs, bonuses and pats on the back to be had for recruiting women in certain companies it might easily look that way. The flip side being they are often treated like decoration instead of like engineers.)

There are some really big issues to tackle in this space but so many people are so busy accusing the other side while simultaneously shutting their ears that I too will soon start flagging them. I'll also admit to having been part of this problem (the shouting part of it before.)

- someone who was always well liked with everyone but is slowly admitting that the other side had some valid points as well.

> tptacek shared some interesting research

No, he didn’t. He shared the subjective impression which led him to stop the research, but not the results, or even the methodology used to classify content.

Important to recognise that Stefan Molyneux is not far-right, whether or not the far-right are encouraged by his YT channel deletion. I would classify him as an atheist/libertarian.

That’s how you personally might classify him, but many would disagree with you. To my eye, for one, it seems quite obvious that Molyneux is a far-right figure.

Nah; I've listened to a number of his shows. He's a popular political commentator who is anti-communist/leftwing -- that's why they banned him.

You should check out some of the Stefan Molyneux quotes the SPLC has gathered: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/indi...

An example:

> "Screaming 'racism' at people because blacks are collectively less intelligent...is insane."

These all have associated YouTube video links - which are now taken down it seems.

If we can't check the videos, how do we confirm the quotes were really said and in what context?

Racists: 1 Censorship: 0

I sense an implied “/s” in your post. But just in case, there are in-depth critiques that include significant portions of Molyneux’s videos still up: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd_nVCWPgiA

Certainly enough to get a sense for Molyneux’s ideology.

Well now the videos are gone and I can't verify that any of those quotes were truly said. Many of them such as the one liners are obviously missing context as well.

If you break down political ideas into just left and right, the libertarian belief small government with strong property rights puts them fairly far right. Things are of course more complicated, and there may be other members of the far right who disagree with him on many issues, but he'd still be part of the broader "far right."

I vaguely remember seeing that he’d endorsed Trump in 2016, which surprised me because it hadn’t been long at the time since I recalled him advocating completely abstaining from the political system.

I’ve not kept up with him, but it seemed like he was moving in a direction that was incompatible with the extreme libertarianism that brought him into the circles I frequented at the time.

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/indi...

“The whole breeding arena of the species needs to be cleaned the fuck up!” —Podcast FDR2740, “Conformity and the Cult of ‘Friendship’,” Wednesday call-in show July 2, 2014

“You cannot run a high IQ [white] society with low IQ [non-white] people…these [non-white] immigrants are going to fail...and they're not just going to fail a little, they are going to fail hard…they're not staying on welfare because they’re lazy...they’re doing what is economically the best option for them...you are importing a gene set that is incompatible with success in a free-market economy.” —YouTube video, The Death of Europe | European Migrant Crisis, October 4, 2015

“...the Germans were in danger of being taken over by what they perceived as Jewish-led Communism. And Jewish-led Communism had wiped out tens of millions of white Christians in Russia and they were afraid of the same thing. And there was this wild overreaction and all this kind of stuff.” —Stefan Molyneux describes the Holocaust in YouTube video, Migratory Patterns of Predatory Immigrants, March 20, 2016

If one man produces 1000+ hours of content then there's always going to be dodgy stuff when stuff is taken out of context.

('If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him' -- Cardinal Richelieu)

Black vs white IQ is an empirical rather than an ideological question, and a question best ignored, character and culture being more important than raw intelligence. However I'm not going to hang a man just because he failed to ignore it.

The fact that Molyneux is anti-Nazi ('overreaction') as well as anti-communist is very simply consistent with his libertarian philosophy.

are you actually so far gone you think calling the holocaust an 'overreaction to a Jewish threat' actually makes you an anti-Nazi? Jesus that may be the single dumbest thing I've ever read on this site, congratulations.

And, no it's not normal to casually advocate white supremacy in 1000 hours of recorded conversation. Dude's a full on neo-nazi who calls himself a libertarian, which probably puts him in good company with half of that demographic anyway.

Exactly!

If you find yourself defending these words, in any context, you might be the problem! It is -not- normal to say any of this, 1000 hours or not.

Is Stef still claiming to be an atheist? It seemed like he was making up with Christianity in recent years. Just the same, while he used to be an outright anarchist, he went all-in for Trump.

So long as YouTube issues bans to users that are as egregiously racist as klan members I see no problem.

I don't know any of these people, but if they are undeniably white supremacists, then it's a hard sell to dispute this individual action.

But another argument lies in the policy of bans for certain types of speech, and that's the argument that's more pertinent. If we accept that YouTube can ban users for hate speech, then we also accept that YouTube is the arbiter of what constitutes hate speech.

The question at hand is if we can deem YouTube a fair judge.

If YouTube shows itself as an unfair judge, then let's criticize them for that when it happens. Otherwise, having a judge is much better than having no judge at all.

That's the current situation, and maybe it's worked well so far (I don't create content on YouTube).

What appears necessary or at the very least helpful, is to have a very clear terms of service that outlines exactly what is unacceptable so these situations can be avoided in the first place.

One question is, why did it take until now for these bans to come into effect?

Gray areas are always going to emerge. For example, the popular YouTuber Jenna Marbles came under criticism recently for old videos (years ago) that could be construed as hate speech, or at the very least, mildly racist. Does this justify a ban?

A few comments say Stefan Molyneux (again, don't know this guy) is not specifically racist but has white-centric views.

These issues are going to be decided by the discretion of humans, many of them with a geographically-concentric worldview (i.e., Silicon Valley).

EDIT: Stefan, not Peter Molyneux.

> A few comments say Peter Molyneux (again, don't know this guy) is not specifically racist but has white-centric views.

It's Stefan not Peter. But he is very "specifically racist". He believes that arabic people are too dumb for democracy. Among a litany of other terrible statements.

Stefan Molyneux, not Peter.

I’m sadden a bit to see him banned, but haven’t kept up with him in years. He was big in AnCap circles for a while but was a bit “out there” even in that group. He always struck me as somewhat unstable, so I guess it isn’t really a surprise. I don’t even have the urge to go see what he’s been posting.

> What appears necessary or at the very least helpful, is to have a very clear terms of service that outlines exactly what is unacceptable so these situations can be avoided in the first place.

For all of it's concerning parts, the the DOJ recommendations for amending section 230 address that specifically: "Department proposes adding a statutory definition of 'good faith,' which would limit immunity for content moderation decisions to those done in accordance with plain and particular terms of service and accompanied by a reasonable explanation, unless such notice would impede law enforcement or risk imminent harm to others." [1]

[1]https://www.justice.gov/ag/department-justice-s-review-secti...

>One question is, why did it take until now for these bans to come into effect?

I think a lot of social media sites and platforms really believed that it was bad to try to be arbiters, and that an anything-goes system would go well. The fact that this was the easiest option for them probably played a part in this. I think a lot of platforms and their audiences are increasingly seeing that this position as naively optimistic and not backed up by the results.

>Gray areas are always going to emerge. For example, the popular YouTuber Jenna Marbles came under criticism recently for old videos (years ago) that could be construed as hate speech, or at the very least, mildly racist. Does this justify a ban?

I think rules should be and largely are oriented around whether something encourages bigotry, rather than about whether the creator privately has racist opinions in their head. If no one is sure if something is pushing a racist message, then that's evidence it's not doing it. If it's not doing it effectively but maybe trying, then that might be a gray area. I don't think the existence of gray areas is an argument for the extreme no-judges position.

>These issues are going to be decided by the discretion of humans, many of them with a geographically-concentric worldview (i.e., Silicon Valley).

And choosing to allow and promote racists and peddlers of inflammatory pseudoscience is also a decision made by humans of specific worldviews. There's no clean non-political option.

>A few comments say Stefan Molyneux (again, don't know this guy) is not specifically racist but has white-centric views.

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/indi...

He pushes misinformation about races and advocates white ethnonationalism: “I don’t view humanity as a single species...” “The whole breeding arena of the species needs to be cleaned the fuck up!” "Screaming 'racism' at people because blacks are collectively less intelligent...is insane." “You cannot run a high IQ [white] society with low IQ [non-white] people." He seems like the textbook example of the sort of person that rules about racism would target. I guess he doesn't literally say the n-word or specifically advocate actively exterminating minorities, just that it might be good if someone did that or at least some segregation.

How do you feel about this video advocating violence?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijJu75WXLLs

I'm not advocating for any of these people. I'm saying there's going to be scenarios that require nuance to navigate, and that the rules that delineate hate speech should be very explicitly spelled out.

> It is a win for the far-right to have y'all here on HN "disagree with them but still believe they should be here and not on the fringe"...

The "far-right" is becoming a broad term in media usage and will end up in the same place as "racist" where it is a category that catches the views of a good 40% of people. It isn't obvious that wins for the far right is a bad thing.

Nobody is going to lose sleep over the Klan being pushed off Youtube, but Molyneux is not a member of the Klan.

While there are probably examples of that, I find it unlikely that the general use of the "far right" would capture 40% of people very unlikely.

There are so many examples it’s kind of ridiculous. Jordan Peterson, for example, who isn’t even remotely right.

What I mean to say, is that it’s become common for left-leaning media to describe perfectly moderate right positions as “far-right” and “alt-right,” to the point where those terms mean almost nothing to someone who isn’t politically savvy to distinguish.

Calling someone "far right" or "alt right" are effectively dog whistles at this point, used to notify a member of the Democrat party that their standing in the community and probably their income is at serious risk if they do anything to speak positively about the person.

How Jordan Peterson isn’t even remotely on the right apart from him saying it? Any action leaning on the left for him has some evil Marxist influence for him. Also his theories on “Masculinity“ have nothing to do with classical left and right and are de-facto alt-right.

Any action on the extreme left. Not only that, but also the extreme right.

As a result on one hand he's criticized as a nazi/racist by people on the far left (e.g. you, apparently), and as globalist/socialist by people on the right.

Right now, you're right. But look at how definitions are changing.

When I grew up, I was taught that the goal in life was to be colorblind. Race didn't matter, what mattered was what was in one's heart.

Today, I'm considered a racist for these views. The term "racist" has been victim to this definition expansion too. Where it used to be considered "discrimination due to race," it has expanded to mean "discrimination by a majority group against a minority race," a definition that unnervingly doesn't consider hate speech against white people as racist.

At this rate, the definition of "far-right" will expand to the point where anyone not supporting the narrative of the day will be labeled as such. Just like how people were labeled "communist" in the 50's as a way to leverage power over others. It's modern-day McCarthyism, but what is different is that this modern-day McCarthyism is being applied to all the major social media platforms months before an election. The control they're trying to leverage over everyone is stunning.

I agree with this post for the most part, however the problem is they are not simply banning "the klan", nor it is "paradox of tolerance" as it seems we have moves beyond tolerance to acceptance.

The authoritarian left is promoting segregation, promoting speech codes, and also labeling any disagreement with their socialist / communist economic policies as "racist" or "nazi"

All of that said, before I can progress further I would love to know what you believe the "far right" is, because that is not a defined term anymore, every day conservative values and opinions (things like we should have basic immigration control, or should not have government run health care) are now labeled as "far right" and "racist" so it seems to we need a defining of the terms so I can know what you consider to be a "far right" position

I've never seen them IRL. I wonder how prevalent the Klan actually is.

And herein lies the problem: Having pushed the purveyors of "unacceptable ideology" (whatever that may be, decided by whomever) into the black market, we now have made confronting it (by letting our value judgments stand to reason, which they will, if we let them) much more difficult. People behave as though they are completely powerless to stop bad thoughts from following the utterance of particular words in a particular order, which to me is as fundamentally insane as the idea that you can stop murder by simply banning murder, or that you can stop people from using drugs by simply banning drugs.

The central problem is that people are lazy as hell. The answer to this problem and indeed, most problems we face in society, is building and maintaining stronger communities, and encouraging critical thought and an educated and participatory citizenry. But this is incredibly hard, and is incompatible with most forms of grift which people have set up to enrich themselves. In the end, however, this is really a description of all of human history. It will always be the case that building and maintaining a "good" society is incredibly hard work, which most people reflexively don't want to do (in the same way that most people don't want to do the dishes, or take the shopping cart back to the shopping cart corral at the grocery store).

>It is normal to decline the business of people you don't want to do business with.

Wait what? I would love to hear your take on this then,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...

I’m pretty sure we are all aware that anti-discrimination laws exist and have in the US for half a century. Political opinions don’t make for protected classes.

In a small town, everyone knows everyone, so it's easier to exclude them if you want to.

It's a lot harder online when you don't know people, they show up unannounced, they hide their true intent behind plausible deniability and dog whistles, and they just come back with another account when they get sprung.

Inoculation is a good idea. I think this blog post sheds some light on how targeted, intentional, and childish, many of the tactics are and being able to notice them is important. They very much rely on people letting them scatter their pieces all over the web as you say.

https://medium.com/@DeoTasDevil/the-rhetoric-tricks-traps-an...

Twitch and Reddit enacted bans simultaneously:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/29/reddit-bans-pro-tru...

https://www.engadget.com/twitch-suspends-donald-trump-accoun...

Seems odd for multiple independent companies to act in concert like this.

"coincidence"

Why? There is a massive political movement for racial equality happening all over the country. They are responding to pressure from consumers, which they very much should, because all of these companies have ignored these issues for decades. They aren't coordinating with each other in some conspiracy to silence white supremacists. The -people- want white supremacists to be deplatformed (a good thing!).

The fact that it all happened on the same day does imply some kind of coordination though.

This is why you never give into the mob, even when their point is a good one. That's how individual rights are lost to the collective.

No one has a right to post on Reddit or Youtube.

If we want to be concerned about individual rights, we should at least be somewhat accurate about the definition of the word.

When a set small of companies control your ability to communicate freely on the internet and they act in consort it becomes an issue of free speech.

Honestly, we need to rethink this.

For example, I 'own' my sidewalk, but anyone can protest there. A lot of public space is privately owned, but can still be used for protest.

The internet is the new public square. It can be privately owned, but still forced to recognize the rights of the public.

If by “it” you mean privately-owned websites, then no, it cannot be forced to do so. That would be a violation of the websites’ owners own freedom of speech. Not to mention their property rights! I thought the right to absolutely control one’s own private property was the most sacrosanct of conservative values?

"Private" property becomes morally murky when you extend an invitation to the general public to use that space. Doubly so when a small handful of these privately-owned websites are responsible for carrying a the vast majority of the of the discourse on the internet.

As it stands, Google+Youtube, Facebook, and Reddit (1st, 2nd, 4th, and 6th most popular websites in the country) currently have the power to ban, or worse, guide, all discussion of any topic they wish, with no accountability whatsoever. That is a frightening amount of power to have, and one that I don't believe the free market is equipped to deal with its abuses.

This latter problem is something I'm legitimately surprised more people are not concerned about. Just because they're using this power to target something you don't like doesn't mean it won't be used for more nefarious purposes in the future.

I'm not sure what the laws are for physical protests. Do mall car parks and similar places on "private" but non-enclosed land have to accommodate public protest? Is that sort of thing what you're talking about?

I'm leaning towards the idea that platforms with no barrier to entry should be treated as public to some degree, while those with a sign-up process more involved than email and password are still treated as private.

No... I'm talking about things like 'privately-owned public space' in cities like San Francisco (so Salesforce park), or city sidewalks.

In most cities, the land owner even in downtown will own the sidewalks, but there is an 'easement' that says it's a public right of way. However, it's a public space, and anyone can protest or say what they want there. Their freedom of speech is protected, even though the land is private. The land is certainly private because the landowner is responsible for upkeep and can generally modify it so long as the sidewalk meets certain requirements.

Here's an example in New York City where the Occupy protests took place: https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/the-21-million-sidewalk-how...

All this is to say is that we have a model for privately owned public space -- spaces where private interests have certain rights and obligations and ownership but where accomodations for the public must be made.

Here's another example in London and Portland: https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/public-space-battle-playing...

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jul/24/revealed-pseu...

In San Francisco at least -- only using it because I'm most familiar -- certain buildings are required to have public spaces, and you in general have a right to be in this space for free. There are even some beautiful rooftop decks that are privately owned but have been made public to meet the requirement -- like the deck on one kearny.

The pressure is more directly from advertisers. Major consumer brands don't want their advertisements appearing next to objectionable user generated content.

Why not? Because their customers don't like it either.

It all comes down to what is popular and unpopular--which is fine in a marketplace. That's exactly how marketplaces are supposed to work.

It could also be coming from investors. Tencent owns a major chunk of Reddit now.

> Seems odd for multiple independent companies to act in concert like this

Yes and no, this is less collusion and more to avoid platform hopping basically if one platform bans them they’ll flock to another even if the medium isn’t identical or the platform is not optimal for their use case any platform would do in times like these.

I’m pretty sure at this point when the behavior pattern is known the platforms inform each other of high profile bans.

The others follow suit to avoid being branded as the one that didn’t or worse as the one that accepted the now pariahs “with open arms”.

I don't know about that. Twitter didn't ban Molyneux and I've not seen people branding Twitter as "The platform that permits Molyneux". (Until me, just now)

If it were platform hopping, it would be ban, then hop, then ban, then hop. It takes time to hop and move all of your content and followers.

This time has not elapsed.

It’s to prevent this, so you don’t have their user base hope to the other platform to express their anger, it also helps when you share the news cycle.

This isn’t an opinion for or against this pattern just an observation on why it makes sense.

Sort of a pre-emptive revenge, then.

Moloenux has been on YouTube for over a decade. He wasn't evading any bans.

It is coordinated. Remember when Alex Jones got banned from literally everything on the same day?

The reddit bans wave was leaked in advance. The more actors involved in a coordinated action the harder it is to keep a secret.

Original leak: https://old.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/hh1pjd/redd...

> Apparently they're going to ban a large number of subs on Monday and frame it as an anti-racism initiative

Has this been announced or was this just speculation?

https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/hi3oht/updat...

It actually happened today. Check Reddit‘s /r/announcements for the official thread.

"Apparently they're going to ban a large number of subs on Monday and frame it as an anti-racism initiative"

Frame it? It is an anti-racism initiative. It may have side effects as well but that is the main driver.

They did not ban racist subreddits like /r/blackpeopletwitter and /r/fragilewhiteredditor.

If you don't know, to post on /r/blackpeopletwitter you have to send a photo of your skin color to the moderators. They are literally racially segregating users.

Exactly.

Just because someone claims something is anti-racist doesn't make it so. Almost all organized evil is done in the name of something good. Look at how laws like the The Patriot Act are named.

The people behind these bans are leftist extremists going after their rightist extremist enemies. Their "good intentions" are paving our path towards hell.

“While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate.”

https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/rules-reporting/acc...

> “While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate.”

The majority where? I can't find any specifics on what the majority qualifier is applied to (ex: the community in which the speech occurs, the geographic community of the user, etc).

It's even worse than that. People can honestly disagree about whether the term "racism" accurately describes something or whatever, but that's a far cry from actively condoning ("..this rule does not protect...") the whipping up of hate towards a majority of the population. The internet is full of nihilists and misanthropes who genuinely hate everyone and everything - I'm sure they can't wait to abuse this weakness in every way they can possibly think of. All for teh lulz, of course.

I’m guessing the whole thing is very USA centric, and they haven’t really thought through the implications of having users from across the world.

In the majority... in the United States?

So according to this rule, a racial minority can call members of a "majority race" sub-human, but not vice-versa. And yet, majority/minority are regional properties. How do you know a redditor's region in order to moderate their comment appropriately? Or are reddit employee regions the only ones that matter?

It's clearly a farce. Majority/minority status is a red herring. It's used only to enable reddit and mods to selectively apply the rules for their own ends. The fact is, it's unethical to call any race sub-human, regardless of whether the majority shares your views.

> So according to this rule, a racial minority can call members of a "majority race" sub-human, but not vice-versa.

According to academia, this is correct: racism only exists in the context of class based oppression.

Of course, many people disagree with this definition.

I don't know how widespread this belief is but I personally know people who believe this and it seems to be only spreading in the current heavily polarized environment. It is truly astonishing to witness

What does “academia” have to do with anything?

> What does “academia” have to do with anything?

Well, when people are arguing over the meaning of words - in this case "racism" - it is sometimes useful to reference what the "experts" think. There are entire fields of study within academia dedicated to this topic (often but not always including the word "critical").

Of course, whether or not said people have anything meaningful to say on the topic is not broadly agreed upon.

These redefinitions probably grew out of "critical theory" which is taught in social studies. The initial protests citing this line of argument seem to have started on college campuses, so there might be some merit to saying it grew out of academia.

> According to academia, this is correct: racism only exists in the context of class based oppression.

Which is silly on its face. If two opposing races that hated each other held equal power, they might not be able to get the upper hand on the other, but they still hate each other solely on the basis of race. Is this the "non-racist" utopia they're after?

But that policy is not even talking about racism, however defined; it's talking about hate. Hate is hate, no matter who it's directed to. Prejudice is prejudice.

Except it's apparently fine to hate the haters. Dehumanization is alive and well, even among progressives.

Yep, hating the new Nazis is just fine. They're still people, no need to dehumanize them.

Hate is innately dehumanising.

Also, don't be so casual throwing around "Nazi". I've also seen liberals calling for conservatives to be put into camps.

So we can never denounce hatred and bigotry without being hypocritical? We don't want to be hypocritical, right? So we should never denounce hatred and bigotry! Brilliant!

I am super, super tired of "if you denounce bigots that makes you just as bad as them."

If you can't denounce without getting into dehumanization, you're guilty of exactly the same kind of hate that the most virulent racists in history are guilty of.

It's never okay. Not for any reason.

I didn't use the word "dehumanize," did I?

No, but you replied to GP in defense of "denouncing hatred and bigotry" (something they didn't even argue against) without directly addressing a pretty important point, i.e. dehumanization (which they did).

Was there another way I should have read your comment with that in mind?

I suppose I am just very weary of a particular style of argument in this debate, which -- in addition to the tactic I called out -- frequently seems to include restating what the other person said as something worse, and then arguing against that restatement. And with all respect, that's what I think is happening here.

The person who wrote "Dehumanization is alive and well, even among progressives" was responding to someone who wrote "But that policy is not even talking about racism, however defined; it's talking about hate. Hate is hate, no matter who it's directed to. Prejudice is prejudice." (That is literally the entirety of their comment.) So at least the way I read this thread, "dehumanization" was introduced as a rhetorical device to equate "prejudice is prejudice" with "dehumanize your opponents."

Given that I'm being downvoted repeatedly, I guess others don't see it that way, but I'm going to be blunt. I just reread the thread and I do not think I'm the one giving things an unfair reading. I don't see a call for "dehumanization" here, and if folks are going to come down on me for failing to address an argument that isn't being made, I don't know what to say. ("Have you stopped beating your wife yet?")

> The person who wrote "Dehumanization is alive and well, even among progressives" was responding to someone who wrote "But that policy is not even talking about racism, however defined; it's talking about hate. Hate is hate, no matter who it's directed to. Prejudice is prejudice." (That is literally the entirety of their comment.) So at least the way I read this thread, "dehumanization" was introduced as a rhetorical device to equate "prejudice is prejudice" with "dehumanize your opponents."

With respect, that's not at all what's happening. I started this sub-thread with this comment [1] criticizing the wording of the policy which emphatically does not focus on just "hate is hate", and "prejudice is prejudice", but is worded specifically towards protecting "marginalized groups".

And it's quite clear on reddit that it's not applied even-handedly to both minority and majority groups. If you think otherwise, go try defending Trump supporters as an experiment and see what happens.

So my comment here [2] to which you objected was not "restating what the other person said as something worse", but was raising the additional point that, despite the policy, hating on the majority is accepted as perfectly fine on reddit, and plenty of other places (Twitter, Facebook, etc.).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23682471

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23683058

> So we can never denounce hatred and bigotry without being hypocritical?

How do you get from "don't hate the haters" to "don't denounce hatred and bigotry"? Seems like you're missing a step like, "denouncing entails hatred". Do you actually believe that's true?

There used to be this notion of condemning the act and not the person. It actually used to be a progressive principle arguing for criminal justice reform geared more towards rehabilitation than punishment. It's sad that this nuance has been lost.

i hate the hater-haters

> For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority

Are they serious? So basically racism is OK as long as it's toward people who are the majority?

Reddit adopts the "Prejudice + Power" definition of racism, not the actual definition of racism

Reddit's definition seems more contextual, it weighs the dynamics of current economic, cultural, institutional, etc... racism

Here is the Oxford dictionary definition:

"The inability or refusal to recognize the rights, needs, dignity, or value of people of particular races or geographical origins. More widely, the devaluation of various traits of character or intelligence as ‘typical’ of particular peoples. The category of race may itself be challenged, as implying an inference from trivial superficial differences of appearance to allegedly significant underlying differences of nature; increasingly evolutionary evidence suggests that the dispersal of one original people into different geographical locations is a relatively recent and genetically insignificant matter."

If you look at academic definitions, yes, often they will state racism is from the majority to the minority. It is rather odd.

I don't understand this. For all of my life I thought racism = discrimination against someone due to their race. In the same way that sexist = discrimination against someone due to their sex. Ageist = discrimination against someone due to their age. Is this not the clear cut definition anymore? At what point did it diverge?

>Is this not the clear cut definition anymore?

People who want to discriminate on the basis of race and sex have contrived a definition of racism/sexism that exempts themselves.

>At what point did it diverge?

The 1980s apparently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory

If you haven't noticed, we've spiraled down to the point where group think determines what is real, not facts or logic. If you can convince thousands people to scream that something is racist, then it "becomes" racist, no matter whether it meets any factual concrete definition of what racism is. Once this behavior started, it was then used as justification to change the definition of racism to something it never used to be.

An '-ism' is an ideology which is used for organizing the world. The big difference is whether it's an individual ideology or a systemic ideology.

1 person renting out property = a rentier. Private ownership of land = capitalism.

1 person not hiring women = a misogynist. Companies not offering parental leave and assuming the primary caregiver is the mother = sexism.

Zuckerberg saying "young people are just smarter" = a bigot. Focusing on algorithms in software interviews which new-grads will have an easier time solving = ageism.

It's very common to call a prejudiced or discriminatory individual a "-ist" because the individual is subscribing to an ideology. But, that's emphasizing the individual rather than the society. If you only look at individual people as racist, they feel like isolated cases which don't have good solutions. Furthermore, you're absolving people who aren't explicitly discriminatory but who are still supporting systemic discrimination.

- This company will hire anyone who's qualified, but they're full of ivy-league graduates because they rely heavily on campus recruiters. Even though they aren't prejudiced when hiring, they are classist because they cater to high-class people.

- This bank will offer a mortgage to anyone with a steady paycheck and a safe-investment property. However, due to red-lining and racial covenants, Black people weren't able to purchase safe-investment homes so they didn't get good mortgages.

Granted, it's an uphill etymological battle because the individual usage is so common. When people argue for the systemic definition, they're arguing that we should focus on processes rather than individuals.

Yes. The rule basically says that you can't be racist towards white people.

Asians are the majority, not white people.

Got it, so racism against Asians is the go-to now /s

I've commented about this on HN earlier. Censorship will end up swallowing us all.

Now I guess it's ok to hate me as I'm part of several majorities and people seems to like it.

What am I supposed to do now? Hate myself? Allow others to discriminate me? Make a blind eye to those who think it's ok to hate me?

Damn, I never actually heard this being spoken about on reddit.

It's interesting, I'm not from the US and I find it curious that these situations arise. I can understand and empathise with (as a 'person of colour' as it's called over there) the arguments of both sides, but deep down I find this kind of 'positive segregation' morally wrong.

>Damn, I never actually heard this being spoken about on reddit.

That's pretty much the whole idea of censorship.

> If you don't know, to post on /r/blackpeopletwitter you have to send a photo of your skin color to the moderators.

I think there's a good reason for doing that, given that such a sub can almost trivially become a hate sub for mocking people on Twitter, much like fatpeoplehate. "We want our community to be largely black" seems like a reasonable founding principle.

Let's do a CTRL-H test:

"We want our community to be largely white" seems like a reasonable founding principle.

How do you feel about the statement now?

"White" is a catch-all term for light-skinned ethnic groups with "defaultness" in American society. There is no such thing as "white history," "white heritage," or "white culture," except in opposition to "non-default" ethnic groups.

If you change the founding principle to "we want our community to be largely Russian," that would be totally fine by me.

Additionally, opposition to the "largely black" founding principle implies opposition to women-only spaces and other community groupings that are largely accepted in society.

I think this is a copout answer. "White" usually refers to people of European heritage who have lighter skin in America.

What do generic "Europeans" have in common with each other? As a Russian, I feel like my culture overlaps relatively little with French, German, or English. Moreover, which parts of "Europe" are actually included in this taxonomy? Are Romani considered white? What about Southern Italians? Black people in France? It all boils down to "people of European heritage with white skin (whose ancestors wrote books and stuff that I like)," which is wishy-washy and tautological.

I agree it's a bit wishy-washy. But that's what it means. Everyone (in the U.S.) when they say whites, they pretty much always mean anyone with white skin who have European heritage.

Yup, so even if some poor Croatian guy just got off the boat, as long as he looked white enough for Americans, some of them would say he benefited from American slavery of blacks and must renounce his white privilege.

Spend his whole life being taught about white privilege and is never allowed to say that he understands so he has to get re-educated all the time. If he says he has already heard it before and understands then he is obviously a racist Nazi Trump supporter and must violently be re-educated about his white privilege.

Regardless of your origin or connection to American history, I think it's healthy and socially responsible to face your "default privilege." The point isn't to feel guilty, but to become fully aware of the social structures underpinning your country, and to develop a sense of empathy for those who are forced to consider their skin color every day of the year when you can go weeks without even thinking about it. (And I say this as a first-generation immigrant.)

In any case, this has little to do with the original topic of establishing a black-focused community.

Not sure about whites and blacks in the US, but as far as genetics are concerned, (black) Africans have far more genetic diversity than (white) Europeans.

Africans enslaved in America effectively had their original cultures denied and destroyed. That's why it's appropriate to capitalize Black but not white when referring to American subcultures. (Whiteness isn't genetic. E.g. in South Africa under apartheid Chinese people were legally black but Japanese people were legally white.)

Various whites had their cultures denied and destroyed as well. By your logic White should capitalized as well.

Which "various whites" specifically?

Slavs where taken as slaves and is where the word slave derives from.

We capitalize "Slavs".

(FWIW, Slavic culture didn't originate with the enslaved Slavs.)

Then we should also capitalize White as well as Black.

That doesn't make sense. There is no one "White" culture, so when you capitalize the word in the context of United States of America it refers to the KKK et. al., not to mainstream American culture, which developed in waves of lots of different cultures (not all of which are European-derived.) E.g. the Irish. Treated like shit when they first got here, now we have St. Patrick's Day parades. And so we have Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Chinese-Americans, and so on. They kept their cultures.

Now when we talk about African-Americans you gotta remember that Africa is a huge continent, not a single nation or culture. The people who were kidnapped, beaten, chained, subjected to the horrors of the Middle Passage, then treated like subhumans for hundreds of years, they came from many different cultures, they were forcibly prevented from carrying those with them, and so they have formed a new culture, native to the soil of this continent. That's why it's appropriate to capitalize the word "Black" when referring to Black American culture: it's a proper noun.

When you speak of "white people" in America, you're generally referring to the whole American mainstream culture, which is neither genetically nor culturally Caucasian exclusively. The word "White" capitalized as a proper noun refers to a specific complex of "White supremacist" culture.

In sum:

Black - African American

white - Mainstream American (includes everybody: The fictional character Steven Quincy Urkel could be called "white" in this sense.)

White - racist American subculture

>That doesn't make sense. There is no one "White" culture,

There is no one "Black" culture either.

>so when you capitalize the word in the context of United States of America it refers to the KKK et. al., not to mainstream American culture

And yet if you capitalize Black it doesn't mean black supremacists?

Why do you hold different standards to white and black?

>which developed in waves of lots of different cultures (not all of which are European-derived.) E.g. the Irish. Treated like shit when they first got here, now we have St. Patrick's Day parades.

St. Patrick's Day is not specifically an Irish holiday. It is a Christian holiday which is popular amongst Irish.

>And so we have Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Chinese-Americans, and so on. They kept their cultures.

There are many blacks who kept their cultures as well. Not all blacks were slaves. Many voluntarily migrated to the US.

>Now when we talk about African-Americans you gotta remember that Africa is a huge continent, not a single nation or culture.

You are contradicting yourself. You said "There is no one "White" culture, so when you capitalize the word in the context of United States of America it refers to the KKK" and yet you also admit there is no single "Black" culture.

>The people who were kidnapped, beaten, chained, subjected to the horrors of the Middle Passage, then treated like subhumans for hundreds of years, they came from many different cultures, they were forcibly prevented from carrying those with them, and so they have formed a new culture, native to the soil of this continent.

Not all blacks living in the US were slaves.

>That's why it's appropriate to capitalize the word "Black" when referring to Black American culture: it's a proper noun.

But there is no single black culture. You yourself said that white should not be capitalized because there isn't a single culture.

>When you speak of "white people" in America, you're generally referring to the whole American mainstream culture, which is neither genetically nor culturally Caucasian exclusively.

When I say white people I mean white people. I don't mean anything else. I don't mean culture. If I meant culture I would say culture.

I have never seen anybody saying anything different than I said. Please provide examples of mainstream people using the the phrase differently.

>The word "White" capitalized as a proper noun refers to a specific complex of "White supremacist" culture.

You haven't proven that.

I feel like I was really clear. We don't agree, obviously, but I don't want to argue about it with you any more, so I'm going to go ahead and let you have the last word.

We have a culture in common which encompasses languages, religion, music, architecture, food, etc.

I've only ever heard that question asked about us Europeans, for some reason.

You're literally grouping all dark skin individuals into a group saying they share the same heritage and culture when they don't.

Are black people not allowed to have their own communities?

""We want our community to be largely black" seems like a reasonable founding principle."

Freedom of association is a thing. Now, would you agree with the statement, ""We want our community to be largely white" seems like a reasonable founding principle." ?

See comment above.

According to this post [0] only allowing black people to post was a time limited action. As an Aprils fool joke only black people were allowed to post, which resulted in positive feedback from the community, according to the mods. Now everyone can post again, where as black people can get verified and a special flair (a small visual indication next to their username). Some threads [1] are reserved for verified people, but non-black person can also get verified (but might not get a flair).

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/b93w1j/...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/gumxuy/...

That special flair thing is amazing. I had no idea. I wonder how long before we see forums using it for other skin colors and genetic types. It's exactly the opposite of the trend of text-oriented interfaces democratizing access.

Your [1] has three standards for three groups of people.

1. black people who can verify and get a flair

2. non-white and non-black people who can verify but don't get a flair

3. white people can ask the moderators for entrance, but it only says they will will "receive further instructions." It's not clear what these further instructions are supposed to be.

This is racist and if a right wing subreddit did it, they would have been banned years ago.

I find it odd people aren't bringing up the obvious motivation for this. Simply calling it racism seems obtuse.

Anywhere race is a topic and anyone can join, but there is no verification of identity, trolls can claim anything. How do you think it feels to be a Black member of a forum and see a White person who is taken in by a White troll pretending to be Black? Conversely, how do you think it feels to be Black and be arguing with someone White who is sure you are a White troll pretending to be Black?

It's not a trivial problem, and it's inherent anywhere your online identity isn't linked to your real one.

>but there is no verification of identity, trolls can claim anything.

They aren't verifying identity, they are verifying skin color and using the information to then discriminate against their users. A person with verified skin tone and not verified identity can dress themselves in all sorts of lies just as trolls do everywhere on the internet.

>How do you think it feels to be a Black member of a forum and see a White person who is taken in by a White troll pretending to be Black? Conversely, how do you think it feels to be Black and be arguing with someone White who is sure you are a White troll pretending to be Black?

Maybe we should focus on ideas over identity.

>Maybe we should focus on ideas over identity.

I'm not saying it's a good solution in an absolute sense, nor do I have any idea how well it's working.

I'm just saying I think it's obviously motivated by a real and inescapable issue, and I don't think there is a simple and obviously better solution given the constraint that you want to have an online forum where people can acknowledge and discuss things related to racial identity.

I seem to remember some period in history when people of one race were forced to wear a special flair on them . Yellow six pointed star, on a sleeve, or a chest .

While this is informative, it leaves out one big thing. Rule number 1 in the sidebar is "Posts from black people only".

> This sub is intended for exceptionally hilarious and insightful social media posts made by black people. To that end, only post social media content from black people.

If they do they will be called racists and white supremacists.

And I'm the crazy one when I say social media is only banning right wingers.

Complaining about the /r/fragilewhiteredditor subreddit is kind of just proving their point though.

Why should white people tolerate racism against themselves?

/r/fragilewhiteredditor is not racism. Being a "White redditor" is not a race. The sub is not about hating redditors for being white, but for talking about and possibly getting angry at people who are very blind to their prejudice or priviledges

Honest to goodness, it’s a marketing and advertising initiative. I do think some of the subreddits that are being banned deserve it for violating Reddit site wide rules and refusing to stop, among other things. However, Reddit took on the identity of being free speech oriented early on and gradually eroded it over time, and every time they ban a few bad big subs that are indefensible, they usually coincide bans to a large number of other smaller subreddits that are almost ostensibly somehow adjacent but are not really violating any rules in the same fashion. I think this is intentional, because most of the people who would be annoyed by the collateral damage are celebrating because of the headlining bans. This creates quite a conundrum. Maybe this ban wave is truly different, but it would take me by surprise if so. (I didn’t look into exactly what subs were banned yet.)

At this point it feels like Reddit saves the big important bans specifically so they can be announced in ban waves, because by the time they happen the response is always, “how in the world did this take over a year to be done?”

edit: to my point it looks like they banned over 2000 subs this time. I doubt that list hadn’t been growing over time. I checked out one that was apparently for a podcast and the little bit I could view on Wayback Machine looked pretty damn ordinary, with only mildly edgy jokes. Not immediately casting doubt that there is good reason but it sure feels like every other ban wave I’ve seen from Reddit.

Socialist subreddits being banned for glorifying John Brown (who caused an insurrection against slavery in the South) was not an anti-racism initiative. It was probably a PR move calculated to look good to the mainstream media and co., while being able to "both-sides" conservative media.

Yes they also released a new policy update:

https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/rules-reporting/acc...

This sort of multiple-headlines-in-one-day undermines the argument for bans. In the Alex Jones case in particular it appeared he was being selected for a broader community image rather than actions on specific platforms.

Private companies can't (mechanically, not legally) determine who has a moral right to speak. If we had a magic method for figuring that out it'd have been a feature of politics since at least the Roman Empire. Instead we ended up with things like Robert's Rules of Order where the process is controlled as best as possible to let wildly contradictory opinions get aired.

I love Robert's Rules of Order! I'd love to see someone build video meeting software that implemented it somehow. Or does that exist? A brief search was fruitless.

That's a great idea.

The last copy I owned had a great introductory essay, describing the principles a rule of order could help realize: e.g. 1) to focus on potential concrete actions rather than some interminable search for agreement on beliefs; 2) to allow even minority/fringe opinions to get some hearing

> Private companies can't (mechanically, not legally) determine who has a moral right to speak.

Of course not, no one is claiming they are the ultimate arbiters of morality.

But they do have the right to decide who can use their platform (as long as they don’t discriminate against protected groups). The broader public can then judge them positively or negatively for these decisions.

The thing is are these companies platforms like a phone company or are they publishers? Social media companies have argued that they cant be held liable for things posted to their platforms in the past and have tried to position themselves at neutral platforms. When they start to become the arbitrators of what is and is not to be posted they are no longer neutral platforms like the phone company. I do not recall a time when a phone company would cut your service because they found it to be distasteful or controversial.

That said I don't really know what these users were actually banned for saying. It could have been pretty bad and although I might not agree with what they said I hope that people are free to express their thoughts and ideas even though I might find them personally offensive.

>Social media companies have argued that they cant be held liable for things posted to their platforms in the past and have tried to position themselves at neutral platforms. When they start to become the arbitrators of what is and is not to be posted they are no longer neutral platforms like the phone company.

Social media companies don't become more liable just because they moderate. They all do that already. There's no sudden legal line between moderation involving messages with spam or bigotry.

I think anyone amplifying messages on a large-scale in a one-to-many manner, between people that aren't equally engaged in a conversation together, should be considered to start accruing responsibilities over the content of what they're participating in amplifying, in a way that a phone companies largely don't have. I think social media companies have been largely shirking that responsibility by phrasing it as a free speech issue and letting anything go.

It is a gray area and social media platforms sit somewhere in-between being a common carrier and a being a publisher. Your right there is no hard legal line but the more they decide what is allowed and what is not allowed the more they move farther away from being a common carrier.

> Social media companies don't become more liable just because they moderate.

Actually they do:

https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/1997-....

And also: https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/1997-...

It appears that those links describe the conditions before passage of the communications decency act of 1996. That was all overturned by section 230 of the CDA.

My limited understanding is that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (which is apparently one of the most important laws for this topic), passed in 1996, provides very broad protections to web platforms:

1) They can't be held liable for user-generated content, e.g. Facebook can't be sued for a defamatory statement that I make in a post on their platform.

A newspaper that authors and publishes an article making a similar defamatory statement could be held liable. I believe that Facebook could be held liable if the company itself authored and published the defamatory statement, instead of merely distributing my defamatory statement.

2) They can moderate user-generated content visible on their platform as they see fit, without trying to be "neutral" and without losing their liability protections (item 1 above).

Apparently, before this law, internet companies were worried about being held liable for what users said if they did any moderation (and some companies were sued for this).

---

This article seems to be a decent overview: https://www.minclaw.com/legal-resource-center/what-is-sectio...

This longer video (33 mins) from Legal Eagle is nice as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUWIi-Ppe5k. It's been a few weeks since I watched it so hopefully I didn't miss too many important details.

Section 230 protection should not exist. When this was enacted, nothing like Facebook, YouTube,Twitter, etc. existed, and InfoSeek and AltaVista were the leading search engines...

Where does this "publisher/platform" meme come from? It's completely incorrect (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...) but I keep seeing it.

Suggest you give less credence to whoever you contracted it from.

>It is coordinated.

Is there any evidence of this besides the announcements just happening on the same day? It could be companies waiting to announce these moves on Monday morning after days of seeing Facebook embroiled in controversy for not doing this. Or maybe one company decided to make this move and other companies fast tracked anything they had planned on this so they wouldn't be viewed as ignoring this issue.

We have no indication one way or another whether this is coordinated. We shouldn't just assume it is coordinated because it is happening on the same day.

Coordination doesn’t mean collusion, there are plenty of reasons why to coordinate such as to avoid platform hopping and not having to deal with a bunch of angry people flocking to your platform and to share the news cycle.

The likelihood of high profile bans like these not being coordinated is slim.

Collusion has an obvious negative connotation, but any coordination that happens in secret is inherently collusion.

Either way, my request still stands. Is there any evidence to suggest these companies are working together instead of us all just assuming that is the case?

Define evidence, companies share information all the time including their legal departments.

We have had multiple simultaneous ban waves this is not a new occurrence, at this point one would ask for evidence to show its not the case since the fact that this happening is self evident.

I'm pretty sure social media platforms all have the same problematic groups set up for one click deletion. If one pulls the trigger it's trivial for the rest to do it too.

It's the same coordination you see in penguins jumping off an ice flow. They'll all bunch up looking for sea lions they know are lurking. Eventually one jumps in or gets pushed and they all jump in right after.

Ban waves aren’t that simple they take time to prepare the legal, PR, community relations and tech support etc required.

While it probably isn’t as spontaneous as the penguins I also don’t see it as some smokey or well these days vapey dark room where they sit around the table with a bunch of dossiers laid out in front of them taking a vote.

There were several posts predicting this exact outcome yesterday on subreddits drama. The people close to the pulse knew.

Do you care to point to something that backs up that claim? I can't find any mention on that subreddit about anything relating to Youtube or Twitch bans.

https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+site%3Areddit.com%2F...

https://www.google.com/search?q=twitch+site%3Areddit.com%2Fr...

Posts about it have been flying for about a day or two now. Example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DeclineIntoCensorship/comments/hh1s...

That seems to be exclusively about Reddit. How does this show coordination?

You're right. I was more pointing out that "people knew" before hand that a ban was coming, which means other platforms/groups knew about it and so could have prepared for it. If anything that's less of an argument that it's coordinated and more an argument that they're piling on after seeing one platform do it.

Thanks, but in my first comment I described exactly that possible scenario of companies rushing these announcements once they realized a competitor was acting on the issue. Once again, I don't know why so many people are assuming this is coordinated.

Alex Jones lent a camera crew to Wolfgang Halbig when he travelled to Newtown, CT to harass the parents of the first graders murdered in the Sandy Hook shooting. Years and years from now those sites you're referring to will still bear the shame of not having banned him earlier.

In my opinion, while a low point even for a high-functioning schizophrenic with a talk show, that is still small potatoes compared to the journalists who repeated the 'WMD's line. And no one is calling for them to be deplatformed.

FWIW, I think that Bush II, Obama and Trump should all be tried for war crimes. Probably Clinton and Bush I, and all the veeps, but I'm not as informed about them.

I'm sure we don't know the half of it.

Figuring out a widely held opinion is wrong is actually not that easy. As such I have a lot more acceptance for those being wrong while promoting the status quo than those intentionally pushing the overton window. The latter is what should require commitment/conviction, to weed out the bad. And seems to be what is getting axed right now.

Investing into shitty companies will make you loose your investment. Why should this be different with ideas?

Funny, I take the opposite conclusion - figuring out a widely held opinion is wrong is not easy, therefore I think we should be slower to condemn people who get contrarian bets wrong.

To extend your metaphor, if I invest in a bad company, sure, my finances will suffer. But if it were that easy to tell which companies were bad there'd be no reason to invest at all. People who bet against the crowd and are right are generally considered heroes. I agree there should be a cost to trying to be a hero, but I don't think we currently have enough of them and I'm leery of making it harder to be one.

The logic you've provided says nothing about whether we should condemn Alex Jones, so I'm not clear what point you're trying to make. Unless you think we should be slow to condemn people who arrange for the harassment of parents whose children were murdered by a gunman in their elementary school. But that seems like an implausibly villainous thing for anyone on HN to believe.

My point is, he seems to be held to a higher standard than 'mainstream' journalists, despite the fact that these mainstream journalists send signals that they should be taken seriously and he does not. That sticks in my craw.

he seems to be held to a higher standard

He's not. Judith Miller was fired from NYT ending her career as a reporter within a couple of years of her original Iraq reporting. Alex Jones continues to make a living being a repugnant human being.

Honestly, you're dignifying this argument. Judith Miller probably believed the story she was selling about Iraqi WMDs, and in the cause itself. She was wrong. Alex Jones deliberately harassed the parents of first graders who had been crowded into a coat closet and shot at close range. This is the moral difference between a negligent doctor and a serial killer.

The distinction is especially material here, because this is the standard-issue message board argument against journalism, or "the mainstream media": that it must be conducted at the highest standards of scrupulous accountability, a standard far higher than any of us hold our own work to (I like to call this "The Djikstra Amnesia Effect"). And if it isn't, its practitioners are no better than Alex Jones.

Publishing official government statements is bad, including when there is no sane way to independently verify them, but slander you've just made up is fine?

They did a bit more than publishing official statements. They were very vocal about denouncing and shaming anyone doubting those statements including my whole country France was attacked, boycotted and more by these people.

Which specific people and newspaper articles?

Do you not remember the whole "freedom fries" movement?

I remember the meme. My question is, who exactly is culpable of what here? It was promoted by some Republican representative: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2842493.stm

Should the media have .. simply chosen not to report it? ""Censor"" mentions of "freedom fries"?

Is the BBC article itself "denouncing and shaming"? Or just the Republican it's quoting?

For someone who has mostly sat on the sidelines of these debates, the coordination is really disturbing. Who is pulling the strings here?

I'm sure it was done in coordination with the advertisers that pulled their ads. Probably a group coordination between the companies and groups like the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP, Sleeping Giants, Color of Change, Free Press and Common Sense that spearheaded the original advertising blackout.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/11/reddit-300-million/

The boogie man, no doubt

I was on ChapoTrapHouse a day before the ban. It was indeed leaked, and the ban happened exactly at the same time that it was leaked. This probably wouldn't have been the case unless it was coordinated.

"WatchRedditDie"? Hilarious. Everything reddit's done today makes me want to use the site more.

I don't think it is a matter of keeping it a secret, my guess is that they don't want bleed over to wherever they haven't been banned yet.

The way different actions spread are like watching the Snowcrash virus in real time. Endlessly entertaining.

google legal frequently shares information with legal departments from other tech companies when it comes to moderating/acting upon content/users. in fact, the big tech companies' legal teams share information pretty regularly as they all deal with the same legal hurdles e.g. users from north korea, cuba, ITAR, etc.

it wouldn't surprise me if there was an informal discussion and a decision by google led others to also take action.

This appears to be coordinated election interference from tech monopolists.

People doing political things you don't like is not election interference, anymore than some billionaire bankrolling right-wing SuperPACs is election interference.

Elections aren't held in a vaccum. People 'interfere' with them by persuading, spending money, and by choosing to give political ideas access to their platform.

Media agencies 'interfere' with elections all the time, by exercising their discretion for the last point, and by actively agitating on the first point.

And why would de-platforming racist white nationalists interfere with the election, anyways? Is there a racist white nationalist on the ballot in 2020, who will be hurt by this?

Both kinda sound pretty undemocratic though, so there’s some merit to the claim.

If they were monopolists they wouldn't have to coordinate anything.

Someone doesn’t understand the terms “election interference” or “monopolists”.

Please explain. In which districts in the United States are neo-Nazis affiliated with Stefan Molyneux, David Duke (former leader of the KKK), and Richard Spencer (who was videoed performing a Sieg Heil) up for election, as challengers or incumbents? I was not aware these men were employed by one of the two major political parties, or even one of the two smaller ones.

If the specific figures being banned are not affiliated with any candidate for election, even under a minor party or for local office, how is this "election interference"?

It's probable he is referring to the also announced ban of Donald Trump's Twitch channel.

How coincidental! Surely I am to think nothing of it. Hey, let's talk about COVID-19 real quick ...

The public square is owned by private companies and they're enforcing anti-first amendment principles. One can't even argue that these banned people can move to another platform if they're all coordinating.

Leftist extremists are effecting public banishment of their rightist extremist opponents.

It wouldn't be as bad if leftist extremists were getting banned at the same time. The problem is that leftist extremists have bullied the mainstream left into extreme action.

Today, Reddit banned the Chapo Trap House left extremist group. From someone not involved in either extreme, it appears to me like they're being consistent and banning people for behavior and not politics. I've not heard anyone calling for George Will to be deplatformed, for instance.

Just checking, but you know the standard for "consistent" is not "at least one far left extremist group was banned" right?

That is absolutely not the definition of consistent, so I have no idea why you've tried to square this circle. Consistent means proportional enforcement without political bias, which has clearly never been a priority for reddit.

After all, reddit has repeatedly targeted right-leaning subs with shadow bans and stealth editing including directly from the CEO. Which left-leaning subs have received CEO stealth editing treatment?

I don’t know. Which left-leaning subs, specifically, have violated the Reddit ToS in the same way that the_donald and the various “clown world” subs did and were not treated the same?

ChapoTrapHouse regularly called for violence and was never deranked, shadowbanned or had comments stealth edited by the CEO, for example.

There are dozens of affiliated subreddits just there.

People get regularly banned for racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and many other kinds of hate, whether their profiles say 'D' or 'R' or something else. If many of their profiles tend to say 'R' or otherwise have similar political views, that's not an indication of bias on the part of platforms.

/r/politics not being banned completely invalidates your point

All people regularly get shot by the police for committing crime and other kinds of violence. Whether they're black white or something else. If many of them happen to be black, that's not an indication of bias on the part of the police.

Just a simple substitution, and now we see that this is just bad thinking.

Absolutely false. It means more of them have been banned, not more of them are participating in that. You're assuming equal enforcement of the rules, with absolutely no evidence to support that.

Reddit after all developed moderation tools like shadow banning and deranking and used them exclusively against right-leaning subs, including stealth editing from the CEO.

What part of the first amendment covers private companies?

but isn't the world of "private property" what the right wants? This kind of world, where there are no longer any public squares, but everything held in private is the world the right asks for. This is the kind of world we end up with. The irony should not be lost on them right?

It's not right-wing as much as a particular kind of very free-market-focused libertarianism. But, yes, I've thought about this discrepancy, too.

In practice, big services like YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, et. al., are going to get heat from all sides of the political spectrum. Right-wingers are positive Twitter is suppressing them, yet left-wingers frequently complain Jack Dorsey is a cryptofascist. Both of them are pushing these theories on... Twitter. And they get thousands of retweets. You would think that irony would not be lost on them, but you would be oh so wrong.

Not quite though. The right -- including libertarians -- often advocate for regulation, just less. You would be hardpressed to find a lot of libertarians disagreeing on whether or not people should be able to protest in privately owned public spaces. For example, sidewalks are privately owned in the United States, but you are allowed to hold a protest on one.

First amendment only protects you against the suppression of free speech from the government. It definitely does not give you the right to say whatever you want, wherever you want. Private companies have complete authority over which speech is acceptable on platforms run by them.

This happened a couple years back when they both made some big policy changes related to guns. I'm pretty sure it's just pressure from major advertisers they both share.

Here is an HN link from it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16643040

It’s like the nuclear arms treaty. If one company doesn’t ban these accounts, it can gain all the users who subscribe to these people and benefit. All companies agree to potentially lose these users, so no one profits from doing the so called “wrong thing”.

Same thing with mask use in airlines. Some companies do not want to enforce mask use until all airlines do it, because they do not want customers opposed to masks leaving them for competitors that do not require masks on flights.

Act individually, and each company is dragged over the internet rage court individually, and as a bonus the last one to act will be roasted as "only doing it because all others did."

Act together, and they are accused of conspiracy.

I guess their PR teams decided the latter is less hassle for them.

> Seems odd for multiple independent companies to act in concert like this.

It shouldn't, all social networks delegate banning "hate content" to the SPLC and ADL. It's much more efficient/effective to do things this way, and more importantly, it assures fair enforcement. Otherwise, you'd have the same content allowed on one platform, but banned on another. This approach is much better for the platforms and their users.

How does outsourcing the decision to the SPLC/ADL “assure fair enforcement”?

Consistency is a big part of fairness, maybe the biggest part. Outsourcing "cancellation" decisions to the SPLC/ADL ensures that people are being consistently banned across all of the major social networks, after a full investigation by non-profits whose entire reason for existence is to do these kinds of investigations. They have, collectively, centuries of experience (and began long before the Internet existed).

Delegating also ensures that cancellations aren't done willy-nilly—the SPLC/ADL are not like a Twitter mob. They have (combined) over a billion in funds to investigate hate speech on the Internet, and to then advise the social networks that they are hosting hate speech—who then make the actual decisions to ban or not ban. Typically, they coordinate and all ban in unison, to avoid weird situations where someone is banned on one (or a few networks), but not all.

Obviously, none of this will feel "fair" to racist Whites, but there are places online (e.g. Gab, Bitchute, etc.) for them to speak freely to other racists where they won't be banned.

I detest Donald Trump and everything he stands for and enables, but the idea of banning him from Twitch makes me imagine a world where he didn't get banned from Twitch and instead tried to pivot to being a full-time game streamer, and that makes me laugh at least a little bit.

He would probably get banned for cheating

It's a purge. It won't stop with these three. The censorship will continue to get worse and be disproportionately applied to those on the right until all is left with the world.

Conservatism has a place in society. I'm not endorsing any of these guys viewpoints nor am I associating them with conservatism in general, because it's a broad group of over 100 million people in the U.S. with a diverse range of opinions that lean to the right. It's extremely important that society be balanced and not tilted to the extremes of either ideology. This process of selective banning and purging will not end well for Silicon Valley. The problem is they are not approaching the left's extremists with the same fervor. In fact they're turning a blind eye to the vicious hate against cops and conservatives on their own platforms.

And a lot of this hate is disproportionate to reality. That is, the perception of the problem exceeds the actual statistical problem.

I'm of the strong opinion that a society needs it's left and right brain to function properly and constructively in order to tackle the diverse set of problems we face. If there is no push-pull give and take between these two groups, then society will become unstable and increasingly more polarized.

I'm a free market capitalist, but with Silicon Valley's recent muscular intervention into free speech, and the overwhelming propaganda power they possess, I fully support the break up of big tech monopolies in social media, search, and app stores.

adapt or be left out

Well. We had several ideological purges earlier in 20th century, and I can tell what will happen next: every netizen will be triaged by a progressive troika, and sent to rehabilitation and education camps. Internet versions (excommunication), or real life ones .

I don't mind purging ideologies that are about racial superiority. Erase that shit.

It is crazy to think that ideas can be extinguished. These purges will serve to further concentrate and radicalize the adherents to these ideologies.

edit: I may have been wrong, it seems deplatforming might work. [0] TIL! I had often read that echo chambers exacerbated radicalization but it seems more research has yielded better data to turn over that conclusion.

edit1: it seems like radicalization is more nuanced, and different ways to handle communities based on its composition (eg. it is different to introduce someone to an ideology vs pushing a person already exposed into a more extreme view). Found this video to be informative [1].

[0]: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbp9d/do-social-media-ba...

[1]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HY71088saG4

Is there evidence of this? It seems like there are two views - that having an "open market of ideas" to debate things is how we should move forward, or that deplatforming is the way to move forward.

Communism, as a political movement, was largely extinguished in the US during the 20th century through purges and deplatforming.

How many communist organizations do you see, these days? How much reach do they have, compared to the 30s? How much political power do they have, compared to the alt-right, today?

Extinguishing that idea into the fringe seems to have worked rather well. As did de-nazification, post WWII. It's only more recently, when platforms started enabling fringe groups, has fascism crawled back into the light of day.

Well, given that Communism was outlawed in the US [0], it seems sensible that the membership numbers would decline. Do you think it is sound policy to outlaw ideologies? I don't think that making something illegal is akin to deplatforming.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act_of_1954

Given that the act was, as said in the article you cited, never enforced by the government, the deplatforming through ideological purges, 'cancel culture', and media suppression is what actually killed the movement.

So, yes, this actually proves my point. Buring ideas, and canceling the people espousing them does, in fact, kill political movements.

If your goal is to drive a political movement into the fringe, deplatforming works. If your goal is to have an utterly tolerant climate for political movements, regardless of how abhorrent they are, then, well, we're all observing how it's working out right now. Not very well, I must say, but there's always time for things to get worse.

Fascism never went away; it was a mortal threat in 1965 when Herbert Marcuse wrote Repressive Tolerance, one of the most influential essays ever written: http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/60spubs/1965MarcuseRepre...

>"Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left."

>"The whole post-fascist period is one of clear and present danger. Consequently, true pacification requires the withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word. Such extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is extreme danger. I maintain that our society IS in such an emergency situation, and that it has become the normal state of affairs. Different opinions and "philosophies" can no longer compete peacefully for adherence and persuasion on rational grounds: the "marketplace of ideas" is organized and delimited by those who determine national and the individual interest."

Hardly. Classical communism died out all over the west even in places without McCarthy, because people in the west could see what was really happening in the USSR and other places. The idea of having a revolution to replace the bourgeoise with the workers was tried, people watched, they saw it led to dictatorship and so it just got harder and harder to be an open advocate for that. "Deplatforming" had very little to do with it.

And really, communism didn't actually die. It just altered its terminology a bit, but the core ideas remained widespread. How do we know this?

Well, one reason is that academia is still full of people who claim to believe in Marxism:

https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/the_prevalence_1.ht...

At least outside engineering subjects. So that's a pretty big hint it didn't really go away.

But another is that what we're seeing happen now is pure Marx. Divide the world into two camps, one that oppresses the other. Argue that the oppressed group is victimised, which is why it's the oppressors that own the assets and the wealth. Argue for fixing this with forced wealth transfers, forced replacement in positions of power. Then start to actually implement it, all backed by reams of impenetrable ideological texts, purges, witch hunts, show trials and so on. Claim at all times it's all about equality, even as deeply unequal systems are created before everyone's very eyes. Dare people to point out the double standards and attack them when they do.

We've seen it all before. The words change - proles and bourgeoise were replaced by black and white, imperialism with white privilege or patriarchy, and so on. But scratch the surface and you find Marxist arguments, still there, they never went away.

Why? Perhaps because anti-communists got intellectually lazy. The USSR and to some extent the Nazis made their case for them (Nazi being "National Socalist", lest we forget). Anti-communists didn't really have to build intellectual arguments for their case when the Berlin Wall was making their case for them.

But it's been decades since the wall fell. People haven't really been pushing back on Marxist arguments until very recently and even now, their intellectual muscles are weakened by inactivity. Meanwhile the Marxists have been camping out in academia for decades, brainwashing generations of students into believing - against all data and evidence - that the world can be neatly split into black and white, victims and oppressors. And now we're reaping the whirlwind.

> The idea of having a revolution to replace the bourgeoise with the workers was tried, people watched, they saw it led to dictatorship and so it just got harder and harder to be an open advocate for that.

Your thesis can't be correct, because:

The idea of fascist ethnostates also ended poorly, the last time around - and yet here we are, watching their ideas enjoy a renaissance.

Observing that ideas have been tried, and have failed, clearly does not kill those ideas. If it did, we wouldn't be having this conversation now.

Sorry. To be more specific it killed:

1. Marxist terminology and the notion of class war ("proles" and "bourgeoise" are now anachronistic)

2. Marxist economic theory and the goal of replacing capitalism

The dream of overthrowing capitalism lives on in squats and hard-left fringe groups, but it's dead and buried in the mainstream. China's adoption of it put the final nail in that coffin.

The more generalised Marxist theory of dividing the world into oppressors/the oppressed lives on and is seeing a resurgence. With that I agree.

Excellent. Look up Yakub, light your torch, and begin that purge.

You will do that, won't you? It's about racial superiority, after all.

Nazis left out of the internet ?

I think most of humanity can live with that.

A purge of white supremacists sounds great to me.

What was the problem with /r/ConsumeProduct exactly?

Not advertiser friendly.

Probably all of the white supremacy in it.

And the 50+ Chapo Traphouse related subs?

No white supremacists on them.

sounds great to me to until I turned my brain on and realized that if you can purge one ideology, you can justify purging any other ideology.

The German state has been banning and imprisoning sympathizers of white supremacist groups for a few decades by now. I'm not seeing a mass censorship of non-hate-based ideologies there.

I'm not seeing the slippery slope. To say that purging one ideology is the same as all means that you see no difference between hateful supremacist positions and any other types of ideas. Which is ridiculous.

This is a fallacy, I'm sorry. It's true that it can be impossible to determine what the specific characteristics of a belief that make it okay to silence, but that _doesn't mean there aren't differences_. We don't know when an acorn becomes a tree, but we know there is a difference. We can safely say that a tree is not an acorn, even though we don't know when that transition occurs.

We _know_ it's wrong to advocate for the ethnic cleansing of people. We _know_ it's wrong to talk about how Blacks are genetically inferior. We _know_ it's wrong to spread lies about how Jews control mass media. We can silence these evil, ignorant beliefs without being afraid that all other beliefs are at risk of being silenced.

A "purge" sounds so scary.

But this is a purge like being asked not to come back to target is a purge.

And it's just as much of an infringement on your rights: none.

I can't argue in good faith with someone who believes that white supremacists should continue to have a platform. I hope you do some research and look back on this comment with shame. White supremacists do not deserve a platform, flat out. Disagreeing with this is explicitly agreeing with white supremacy.

You don't have to agree with someone to think it's wrong to censor them.

Do you think it is correct or incorrect to deplatform white supremacists? Do you think white supremacists deserve a platform?

Edit: I've asked variants of this question several times in this thread, all without response. I can safely assume that those who won't freely answer this question are (attempting) to hide their bias.

Yeah it's kind of shocking to see people defend white nationalist speech on private platforms. Of all the marginalized groups out there why does the group that advocates for the discrimination, removal, or even genocide of historically discriminated and murdered people (black people, indigenous people, Jewish people) need defending?

While those who defend them may disagree, defending white supremacy is in itself white supremacy. They defend it because they believe it.

The thing that still continues to shock me is that there are people here that argue on behalf of white supremacists but still argue that they themselves are not, instead they are playing "devils advocate". At some point, let's call a duck a duck.

people aren't defending these things. they are defending this 'slippery slope' idea that if you give companies the power and support them in banning content based off of ideological stuff, then you risk that 'bannable' content threshold slowly growing.

it's literally a straw man to imply people are focused on individuals in this situation, they are just worried about precedent and the future.

No private platform, even those that claimed to be a "bastion of free speech" [1] when they were first created has ever not banned for ideological stuff. Back in 2015 this same discussion came up [2]. 5 years later we're still worried about sliding down the slope. What is too far? Hating fat people? Hating trans people? Hating black people? Should a private platform allow it all even though people supporting those views actively harm people?

And we can even see what happens when platforms try to truly allow all speech. Voat [3 NSFW] is a good example, Gab is another example. The worst content takes over and your platform gets rejected by most of the world. Way before reddit banned the_donald they had to specifically delist it from the front page because awful content would end up being the first thing people saw. [4]

I also don't expect that Youtube or reddit or Twitter would end up banning all ideological content, religious videos will not get banned one day, discussing electoral politics will not get banned one day, we're not going to slide off the slope because the slope isn't there.

1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/02/reddit-c... 2. https://www.theverge.com/2015/7/15/8964995/reddit-free-speec... 3. NSFW: https://voat.co/ 4: https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/30/13797712/reddit-trump-th...

I think crappy ideas (like white supremacy) should be fought with better ideas (like treating everyone equally regardless of their race).

Censoring/deplatforming will not have the effect you think it will. Nor is it ethically palpable.

This kind of half-measure response is exactly why white supremacy continues to thrive in America. You cannot argue with a white supremacist on reasonable ground, their world view is intrinsically incorrect, and I am convinced that you cannot convince a white supremacist they are wrong through debate.

> Nor is it ethically palpable.

Do not ascribe your ethics onto me. I think it is extremely ethical to deny white supremacists a platform. In fact, it is the most ethical choice. Those who refuse to interact with our society in good faith do not deserve the stage.

Germany has a strong handed approach and white supremacy continues to thrive in Germany.

White supremacy does not thrive in America. That is a fantasy.

I'd love to link you to a Scott Alexander essay at this point which examined that very question and concluded, based on evidence and data, that there might be a few thousand genuine white supremacists in America. But of course he deleted his blog so I can't.

This is why so many people are arguing with you. The statements by the left and the observable reality are so out of whack it's clear it's a "dog whistle", as they like to say. The revolutionary left are using the word white to mean something quite different to its normal definition. It seems rather to be used to mean "anyone who isn't black" or more perniciously, "anyone conservative". Alexander had a great essay on this redefinition of whiteness as well, but alas ...

if you can justify one argument, then you can justify any argument, so all arguments are wrong

This is total slippery slope. Zooming out to the point that you ignore all the specifics isn't useful.

It does to me, too.

Until I realize that some people are now defining silence as complicity with white supremacy. So let's hope that definition doesn't spread, right?

Mandatory posting? Count me in.

Do you make a difference between people who self-identity as that and people labelled by external entites?

It's a free society. If you don't like someone else's house party, build your own. thedonald.win is one such thing.

That is an increasingly cynical view to expose given that the people who decide to do that just get blacklisted by the financial elite. https://twitter.com/TheEbonyMaw/status/1277120076186112000, https://reclaimthenet.org/gab-andrew-torba-visa-blacklisted-...

Thus making the case why alternative financial systems outside their power are essential.

Bitcoin fixes this.

I would say a cryptocurrency with more throughput than a 144p youtube video could confront this.

It's like everything about ads and tracking: your business model is not my problem. Some businesses are just unviable. Compete or die.

Come on... It's not so simple

It's funny I see this comment all the time on HN, but in a very similar scenario recently, where DHH launched Hey app and was stonewalled by Apple, I didn't see a single comment saying "hey just go build your own app store". Telling someone to "just go build your own" is lazy and weightless.

I didn't find the subject interesting but I'll complete the request for consistency here: it doesn't bother me that Apple requires Hey to use in-app purchases.

"Just build your own web host" is feasible, but "just build your own app store" is not because it requires replacing half of your users' mobile phones.

No, it's not. Because eventually you get censored by domain registrars themselves. Not to mention DDoS mitigation providers, payment providers, browsers etc.

Sounds like the majority of society is against the kind of hate and violence these people cheer for, and companies don't want to be associated with it. Is this not capitalism working as intended?

If Visa won't let you fund your hate speech, then I guess go find someone who will. If no one is willing, maybe that says more about you than about them.

Yes, if you, as a nazi or other sort of radical, create services dedicated to "free speech", that include people who are openly nazis, or otherwise genocidal in nature, people will not want to be associated with you. That is a consequence of those views, and private organisations have the right to do that, since they are -- by their very nature -- private.

The types of people that moved to Gab hate "big government" and are against market regulation, but suddenly want the government to step in when companies blacklist them. They want the ability to "just ask questions" when it's clear they only intend to create inflammatory arguments so they get the excuse to degrade people. People like that complain people shouldn't force their views onto other people and then force their own hateful views about abortion, birth control, etc.

I mean hell, r/conservative said this point themselves, in a strikingly moment of hilarious self-awareness:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfAwarewolves/comments/hle529/goo...

The reason they get turned away from every and all social networks thusfar is because they cannot conduct themselves in a civil manner.

it's not a free society. there are lots of laws and regulations in place. Saying this is a free country is a useless platitude.

Gab (twitter alternative) was just blacklisted by Visa last week. There is no recourse. What, should these people build their own consumer credit company too?

https://news.gab.com/2020/06/19/gab-blacklisted-by-visa/

> What, should these people build their own consumer credit company too?

Why would racist Whites stop there? Pretty soon they'll want to build their own governments: literal White nationalism. Republicans are already talking about secession in a positive light…

To protect minorities, the 2nd Amendment has to be gutted as much as possible before that kind of thing happens, even if we must seriously bend the existing Civil Rights legislation to do so (Republicans can't stand up to the NRA, even if they wanted to).

Biden has the right kinds of policy ideas, but he needs to go further. https://joebiden.com/gunsafety/

> Close the “hate crime loophole.” Biden will enact legislation prohibiting an individual “who has been convicted of a misdemeanor hate crime, or received an enhanced sentence for a misdemeanor because of hate or bias in its commission” from purchasing or possessing a firearm.

> Close the “hate crime loophole.” Biden will enact legislation prohibiting an individual “who has been convicted of a misdemeanor hate crime

Can you not see the new loophole? Simply convict anybody we don't want owning a firearm of a made up misdemeanour or hate crime. 2A BTFO.

> 2A BTFO

Right? Incredibly clever, and I think that kind of precedent can be taken much further by the courts if they had any kind of backbone...

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic. The main point seems to be that in absence of rule of law and due process, armed revolution will come, so let's subvert the rule of law to prevent that? What am I missing?

> What am I missing?

No laws or "due process" are being broken when Gab—a social network created to host as much hate speech as possible—is denied access to Visa's financial network.

I'm not suggesting we "subvert the rule of law", I'm suggesting we use the existing laws (and pass new ones when needed, like Biden wants to do) to disarm racist Whites before they attempt to kill vulnerable minorities.

Literally yesterday there was a racist White couple in St. Louis [0] pointing guns at peaceful protestors—safeties off, fingers on the trigger. Under Biden's proposed legislation, they could easily be given a (well-deserved) hate crime misdemeanor and then have their guns taken away. That's "due process" and "the rule of law" at work.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/29/us/st-louis-couple-protest-fi...

it's only a matter of time before thedonald.win gets deplatformed by payment and internet service providers for thoughtcrime

yep that's what I'm thinking too.. I'm surprised cloudflare hasn't banned them yet, but I know it's coming.

parler supports free speech, tho, right?

except they're banning liberals:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr...

Perhaps that is what it might take for the people who are receiving a taste of their own medicine to stand up for free speech. I doubt it, but it is nice to remind them that they don't have a leg to stand on.

No because they don’t want to be on Parler, they’re just proving a point.

A significant portion of right-wing people do not support parler or the shady circumstances surrounding it. They are not a tu quoque example.

You know they banned leftist subs too, but as always with free-speachers, those never count.

Like where were you guys when Arkansas literally banned Howard Zinn? What about when South Carolina banned the words 'climate change'?

Sorry but you all just don't come across consistent enough to be taken seriously.

[1] https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/ark-bill-introduced...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/12/north-caroli...

A friend of mine calls this supporting freeze-peach.

I'm what you might call a "free speecher" and I think both of these are wrong.

Luckily the "ban Howard Zinn" bill was never actually passed, and actually led to far more people reading him (Streisand effect there):

> Rep. Kim Hendren’s bill to prohibit use of the late Howard Zinn’s books in Arkansas public schools died quietly in committee, of course, but it had great unintended consequence: Some 700 copies of Zinn’s book, “A People’s History of the United States,” were sent free to teachers and librarians throughout Arkansas thanks to the controversy.

https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2017/04/04/how-kim-hendre...

> Conservatism has a place in society.

I wholeheartedly agree, and I've not heard of anyone calling to censor conservatives. Most or all of the people being de-listed are people who are breaking their platforms' terms of services. They might happen to be mostly conservative, but it seems like today it's mostly conservatives who are breaking the rules and calling for violence, doxxing people, etc. Reddit just kicked out some leftist groups for doing the same stuff, as was appropriate.

> I'm a free market capitalist

"...except when I disagree with it."

>The problem is they are not approaching the left's extremists with the same fervor

This is a false equivalence. The worst of the alt-right are far, far worse than the worst of the extreme left (antifa, maybe? Though there is no alt-left).

Good riddance to them, I say. If you want to lead the KKK, and advocate for a white ethnostate, I won't lose any sleep when you can't post videos trying to convince others of the same evil ideas.

>The worst of the alt-right are far, far worse than the worst of the extreme left (antifa, maybe? Though there is no alt-left).

Nah, there are plenty of people advocating for explicit ethno-separatism on the far left -- just look at Louis Farrakhan and his lefty pals. They just don't have very big YouTube channels. People more-or-less naturally ignore them except when they turn out to protests to hijack an ostensibly liberal or socialist cause.

The same group that classifies Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam as a hate group (the SLPC) is also saying that the idea that there is a liberal equivalent to the alt-right is a misconception. And you disagreed with what I was saying, but then yourself also stated that there is a large difference between the people who were banned and extreme leftists: the size of their audience.

Louis Farrakhan is not left-leaning. He’s as conservative as they get. He just happens to not be a white supremacist.

Tell that to the Women's March, damnit.

> The worst of the alt-right are far, far worse than the worst of the extreme left (antifa, maybe? Though there is no alt-left).

There are people that support Stalin and Mao, which is just bad as supporting Hitler.

They are called Tankies by leftist for a reason. They're cultist dogmatist and shunned by all but their peers.

That's reassuring to hear.

> This is a false equivalence. The worst of the alt-right are far, far worse than the worst of the extreme left (antifa, maybe? Though there is no alt-left).

Nope it’s just equivalence: https://panampost.com/panam-staff/2020/06/23/the-links-betwe...

(FWIW: I’m quite pro-BLM. I don’t believe in guilt by association. My point is that there are high-profile people in relatively mainstream organizations that are proponents of murderous leftist dictators.)

Those things are literally not related, and, conveniently enough, panampost if a far right "news" website.

Supporting Maduro doesn't invalidate their fight. Supporting marxism doesn't invalidate their fight. Supporting Cuba doesn't invalidate their fight.

Oh, by the way, those three are countries or ideologies the US have actively tried to destroy. Should I go and make my own website claiming the US government for dozens of years has been the number one exporter of terrorism in the world ?

Oh, right, it actually is. And still, it's still not related to the damn subject.

> Supporting Maduro doesn't invalidate their fight. Supporting marxism doesn't invalidate their fight. Supporting Cuba doesn't invalidate their fight.

That’s exactly what I said:

> I’m quite pro-BLM. I don’t believe in guilt by association.

I’m responding to an entirely different point:

> The worst of the alt-right are far, far worse than the worst of the extreme left

I don’t think this statement is accurate given how many people on the extreme left embrace murderers like Maduro. Violent extremism is a problem on both sides.

As to Pan Am Post, your assertion that it’s a “far right” site is exactly why so many people are concerned about Twitter and Facebook censorship. Pan Am Post is libertarian with a Latin American focus both in terms of content and the contributors. From Wikipedia:

> According to Richard Scheines, dean of the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences of Carnegie Mellon University, PanAm Post is "an incredibly rich online site that covers news and offers excellent analyses of all regions in the Americas".[6][7] In 2019 and 2020, the PanAm Post was ranked in a Forbes article as one of the most prominent free-market magazines in the world measured by social media impact.[8][9]

> I don’t think this statement is accurate given how many people on the extreme left embrace murderers like Maduro.

I do not support Maduro, in fact I'm pretty ignorant overall about Venezuelan politics. But if the same measurement stick is applied to US presidents, a lot of Americans are neck deep in trouble given the usual US foreign policy.

If supporting murderers like Maduro is a sign you're on the extreme left and indefensible, does that mean that supporting murderers like Obama, Clinton and Bush equally makes you indefensible? I'm really trying hard to find the validity of this argument. In reality, everyone in politics has blood on their hands. Welcome to the horrible world we live in - no one has been able to build a society without massive violence yet. Though some try.

Right! "We are allowed to discriminate because the ones we discriminate against are really bad and we aren't". Every oppressive movement in history started like this.

>Conservatism has a place in society.

It does. I've also been confidently assured by my conservative friends that conservatism is a very different politics from racism, fascism, and neo-Nazism. I would not really consider the question of whether I myself am a human being or, as Richard Spencer has posited, a "soulless golem", to be a conservative vs liberal fight.

None of those banned are conservatives. There is nothing conservative about their views.

/r/lgbtconservative isn't conservative?

That's not a Youtuber listed in the title. I was referring to those people

I have a vision for what could end up happening. We will see a bifurcation of Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Reddit into a conservative and liberal version. There appear to be many (apparently unsuccessful) attempts right now to do exactly that. The recent swath of bans could change that however.

It's not too dissimilar to message board culture from the aughts. You essentially had federated versions of Reddit. It looks like we're destined for that again because people can't stop peeing in the grownups pool.

those day weren't all that bad. The nazi wannabe's had their own place, and almost everyone believed in Godwin's rule.

Twitter, YouTube, Facebook serve a global audience - but the “conservative”/“liberal” dichotomy you describe is unique to the USA.

If social media companies will be bifurcated as you say, it’ll be a tiny fraction of their American audiences - leaving the rest of the world sticking with the mainstream. Those smaller Ameri-centric sites will fail to reach critical-mass needed to sustain themselves in the long-term and hopefully those movements will fade into the background.

Your comparisons to the *chan imageboard splintering is apt, but look at how the more extreme chan sites have been having in finding a web-host (with enough capacity) to host them.

The bans will expand to the rest of the world soon enough. There is no way to satisfy this beast and no border that will contain it.

After Biden wins, I'd guess we'll have a couple years of laxer enforcement and that will doom the alternatives.

> Twitter, YouTube, Facebook serve a global audience - but the “conservative”/“liberal” dichotomy you describe is unique to the USA.

Not really. Many other countries also have a left-wing/right wing split in their politics. There is a lot of sharing of thought and cross-influence between right-wing politics and left-wing politics in different countries. Figures on the British right like Lord Monckton [1] or Nigel Farage [2] find many admirers in American and Australian conservatism. Conservative American journalists write puff pieces extolling the virtues of Marion Maréchal [3].

And I think you will similarly find a lot of exchange of ideas and thinkers on the political left between different countries too.

[1] https://www.heartland.org/about-us/who-we-are/lord-christoph...

[2] https://ukipwsx.org/nigel-farages-speech-at-us-heritage-foun...

[3] https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/marion-marech...

You can't be a free market capitalist and then deny a free capitalist business their own terms and conditions as to whom they choose to do business with.

>Conservatism has a place in society.

Literal white supremacists and nazis however, do not. Those people should be pushed so far off any platform that their only option left is to be the crazies screaming on Times Square that the end of the world is coming.

These people actively contributed to fostering hatred in societies, And no, you will not fight them off with debates. The time it takes you to rebuke a single one of their arguments means they can spew a dozen more of theirs.

By the way, it's not free speech. The government isn't banning them.

>By the way, it's not free speech. The government isn't banning them.

Free speech is a principle outside of the 1st amendment.

...but since "literally" now means "figuratively" I honestly don't know where the line is.

It reminds of how in China, the CCP keeps around a few minor political parties to maintain the illusion that they aren't running a one party state. Any political parties which threaten the authority of the state are banned. The eight minor parties are like the token conservatives (think people who voted for Evan McMullin to protest Trump). The banned parties are everyone else.

Except Molyneux is not a "literal white supremacist and nazi". He is a conservative.

Conservatism has a place in society. Racism, bigotry, hate, and white supremacy do not.

The fact is that American "conservatism" now is so run through with hate and vitriol and othering that no one can tell where one starts and the other begins.

The logical fallacy that this is a "slippery slope" is ridiculous, and the number of people who are crying about losing the "freedom" to attack, incite, and threaten others is astonishing. The number one terrorist threat in the US right now is right-wing militant groups, condoning threats and violence towards anyone who thinks different than them.

It's pretty clear to most that deplatforming people with hateful, violent, and dangerous messages is less of a threat to society than allowing them to keep spreading their vile hate. This isn't some arbitrary thought experiment or a white-room theorycrafting; people are dying because of this kind of hate.

Conservatives who distance themselves from hate and bigotry and violence are fine, and I can live with those people, but the American far-right are a blight on society and private corporations are within their rights (and, I would say, responsibilities) to actually enforce their own policies against these people.

From a EU perspective, US Conservatives are pretty extreme though (not to even mention the religious variation).

There seem to be some idea here on HN that racism/white-supremacy bullshit is somehow comparable with an oppressed scientist being persecuted by a dogmatic clergy for their new found facts. That maybe, in the future, these ideas will prevail and become acceptable again, when the oppression slowly subsides.

Is this really what you think racism is? Some oppressed idea that needs a room because maybe it's actually a bit correct and we'll only know about it if we don't suppress the racists?

But these things are objectively wrong. The above scenario isn't there. If you somehow think so, I think that says more about you than those that want to be intolerant towards intolerance. Please explain yourselves.

I don't think people would have a problem with this if the political public squares (YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, etc) - and that IS what they are - applied these policy changes to everyone equally.

What's happened is we've already gone over the edge. Racism has been redefined to only be effectively possible by white people in the West. The intention of this change is racist in itself.

Putting aside freedom of speech, what people likely have a problem with is all the OTHER racists on YouTube NOT getting banned and instead being PROPPED UP.

These bans are political, not civil justice. If these racists were A) a real problem, and B) not singled out as a faction among multiple other racist factions, then people might believe this is fair.

To those that contend that criteria A has been met: The modern rise of white supremacists in the West is being spurred by racist politics; it's almost as if they want to corner these people into extremist ideas.

I am an adherent to Daryl Davis' way of dealing with racism, and that's by understanding the root causes of it and addressing them.

These bans are a farce, and meant to consolidate far-leftist power - not liberal power.

> I am an adherent to Daryl Davis' way of dealing with racism

For those who are unfamiliar, Davis is a black American who has directly befriended and changed the minds of a number of Ku Klux Klan members. He has a collection of their former robes that serve as trophies. In my view, he's a stunning role model.

This article describes his approach in more detail: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/the-aud.... If you search his name, you'll find a lot more, including a fascinating documentary: https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/accidental-courtes....

He is definitely an inspiring story, but I wouldn't call him a role model. It is not the burden of each person who is a minority to befriend those who hate them, and his approach is undeniably a dangerous one.

I read your comment and wrestled with the dilemma of making the effort to rebut vs just down-voting you and walking away.

Firstly, your comment contains a bunch of unsubstantiated opinion.

"...we've already gone over the edge". What edge?

"Racism has been redefined...". Where? By whom?

"The intention of this change is racist in itself". Who's intention? The 'racism redefiners'? If they're a large group, how can they all have a unified intention? Is there some manifesto you can point to, or something that exposes the 'intention'?

"What people likely have a problem with...". The use of the word 'likely' tells me you're just guessing here.

"...all the OTHER racists". This implicitly acknowledges the banned people mentioned are in fact racists, but it sounds like you're defending these racists by pointing out that there are different racists being treated differently. "Stop picking on OUR racists! There's some other racists over there too!".

"These bans are political...". How are these political? Do you have any data to show that takedowns vs takedown requests vary significantly by political view.

"If these racists were A) a real problem...". If racism is a problem, and these people are racist, then by definition, these racists are a problem. Given you've acknowledged (implicitly above) that these people are racists, then you must be suggesting that racism isn't a real problem.

"...singled out...". Do you have evidence that no other 'factions' (to use your word; I'd say 'flavours') of racists have not been taken down? Remember, some being left up doesn't mean that none have been taken down.

"...then people might believe this is fair". While I'm sure some people don't believe this is fair (you might be one of them), do you have any evidence to show that this is a commonly held view?

"The modern rise of white supremacists in the West is being spurred by racist politics; it's almost as if they want to corner these people into extremist ideas." This has to be one of the most atrocious arguments I've ever heard. Let's leave aside that the racist roots behind many political groups (e.g. Klan, Nazis) go back decades if not way into the 19th century. Your argument here is like saying that a rise in domestic violence is being spurred by feminist ideas.

"...they want to corner these people into extremist ideas". No one is making racists more extreme. Racist ideas and 'theories' (to the extent that these exist in any cogent form), are largely unchanged over time. What has happened is that the bulk of western society has been, and continues to, redefine what is 'acceptable'. Racists now (like chauvinists) find themselves on the other side of a shifting boundary. No one has 'cornered' them, they just haven't moved while society has.

"I am an adherent to Daryl Davis' way of dealing with racism". Good. His approach is centered on educating racists. However this approach is not at all at odds with blocking hate speech from virtual 'town squares' (which are actually 'corporate plazas').

"... meant to consolidate far-leftist power". Firstly, to consolidate power, the far-leftists would need to be in power. Manifestly untrue. Secondly, unless the Communist Party of America are still alive and kicking, there is NO party that I'm aware of that would be considered far-left by any reasonable person outside of the US (where political definitions are so skewed they no longer make sense).

I'd also point out that the fact you are using a throwaway account to post makes me doubt that you have any intention of engaging honestly on this subject.

EDITED: s/taken left up/left up/

these people and their communities advocate for genocide and normalize nazi worship

you havent been around the internet enough if youre still defending these shitheads go to bitchute and binge varg videos no one cares

I get the impression that your comment is trying to paint any retaliation against racism online as itself a racist act. Is this right? It's hard to tell between the meaningless platitudes and strawmen you've set up for yourself.

Keep in mind that YT had been funneling viewers towards extreme, bizarre, fringe videos for a long time - including quite a bit of hateful content. This is something of their own doing.

YouTube radicalization is a myth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4hq5uVsb5k

I'm not sure what you are watching, but I have never been funneled to anything even remotely like that.

YT sends you videos based on your watch history. If you watch hate videos to see what kind of stuff people are saying then you should delete them from your history to avoid YT finding you more.

Multiple experiments have demonstrated that as you follow recommendations it drives you more and more towards extreme content. If you don’t follow recs it obviously has no “drive” to keep you on as you’re not following the journey. Basically the recommendations system always tries to drive you towards slightly more “engaging” content.

Zeynep Tufekci, amongst others, published about it back in 2018.

Sure but you could say the same of woodworking videos, marble racing videos, or any niche topic.

This is not a surprising outcome; it is totally expected.

> Sure but you could say the same of woodworking videos, marble racing videos

I was replying to someone stating it does not happen.

> or any niche topic.

It is absolutely not limited to niche topics.

> This is not a surprising outcome; it is totally expected.

The drive towards extremism is absolutely not “expected”.

I've been watching youtube for years, and it finds me videos on physics and math, and woodworking, plumbing, and home repair, also electronics.

I even followed the white house for a while, but I get zero political recommendations.

I just now checked the recommendations of several people who are next to me and none of them have any extremist content either.

If you watch extremist content, you'll get extremist content. If you don't, you won't.

What experiments are you referring to? All the data I've seen has not shown any sort of "progression" towards more extremes like you're describing, but often shows the opposite.

Let's look at some real data from [1], which provides a breakdown of how impressions flow between channels. By using the panel on the left side, you can look at specific political leanings. If you pick the left/center/rightdrop down, you'll see that right-wing impressions flow into to more left-wing impressions than right-wing.

In fact, if you pick pretty much any position on the left panel, it looks like impressions from more extreme content flows into more impressions for less extreme content.

[1] https://pyt.azureedge.net/

Can you link to Tufekci's research? I can only find the NYTimes op-ed. Furthermore it's worth nothing that other studies determined the opposite, YouTube disproportionately recommends left leaning content: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.11211.pdf

I think you're right. I don't watch anything political on youtube, and don't receive any political recomendations. Instead, youtube seems to be trying to "radicalize" me into becoming a CNC machinist, presumably because I watch plenty of videos about manufacturing.

Just like google news promoting breitbart, NYP and a whole bunch of others incessantly.

The recommender seems like the biggest problem. The algorithm attempts to maximize engagement, and this extreme content really engages the crap out of some people. The recommender throwing this stuff in people's faces is probably not very good for society.

Back in the day, if you wanted to buy a porn magazine, you could do it but it would be behind the counter, possibly out of sight entirely. It was legal to buy, but it was not being "recommended" to you by the store by virtue of giving it visible shelf space.

I suppose that there is some section 230 argument about why YouTube can't do that, because then they would be exercising editorial control. I'd say that they already are exercising editorial control by having a recommender. I'd much rather have humans exercise that editorial control than an algorithm which is essentially psychopathic. It's an editor that is trying to addict viewers.

My money is on it has the opposite effect, and by banning these people it moves their fans onto fringe platforms that will shuttle them towards even more bizarre/fringe/extreme views.

Here's a study that shows it pushes people towards more moderate videos.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.11211.pdf

YouTube exposes these ideas to hundreds of millions.

Those fringe, extreme platforms are both unknown and already have the stigma or being fringe, extreme platforms. Take a look at Gab, and how The_Donald got laughed out of it because they were not white supremacist enough.

So, yeah, I think I can live with the white supremacists clearly identifying themselves.

This is often claimed, but the data indicates the opposite: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

I listened to "The Rabbit Hole" podcast series this past weekend produced by the NY Times. They actually interviewed YouTube's CEO about this and they have realized that and have made changes to move away from that.

https://www.nytimes.com/column/rabbit-hole

I think that's been pretty much debunked.

Christ, spez is getting hammered in the announcements. I mean seriously, he's basically saying it's alright to be discriminatory against the "majority", whatever that means. Dude doesn't even clarify what that means, just skirts around the question.

Lot of people are wondering why r/BlackPeopleTwitter or r/politics haven't been banned despite blatant racism or calls to violence. People are pretty pissed at spez, to say the least.

Also, kudos to that one user pointing out how 10 mods oversee 90% of subreddits.[1]

I've linked the thread[0]. The comments pointing the insanity are highlighted

What a trainwreck but oh well, enjoy being the next Digg plebbit.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/hi3oht/updat... [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/hi3oht/updat...

Edit: "Spez, answer the fucking question. So is it according to reddit policy, a white person can’t say “all black people are bad” but a black person can say “all white people are bad”? If this is the case, this is racist" (LMAO)

Not sure if you're missing it, but yeah, reverse racism is not a thing. The concept of racism is meaningful in the historical and societal context of systemic oppression. A black person saying "all white people are bad" is not feeding into and exploiting hundreds of years of prejudice stacked against an under-privileged group.

Edit: a black person in the US, different cultures are different contexts.

Is this sarcasm? Because I can give you a couple examples of well documented, savage, systemic oppression of white people.

Are you one of those that thinks history begins in the US 250 years ago?

Even if it did, he's forgetting that US was incredibly racist towards the Irish, and they are as white as they come. Racism is racism, no matter who does it towards whom.

This is the crux of it and why a lot of people logically follow the middle ground such as All Lives Matter and would do so more of it weren't so viciously attacked. As soon as you get into this messy game of "but they did that to this group" and "those others did that only after this group did that thing", etc you're in a spaghetti mess and there is no way of untangling it.

We're witnessing an entirely new oppressed class of people being created right before our eyes in slow motion. When we realize that as a society, we'll have added another layer of complexity and the cycle will be even more difficult to fix.

The middle ground is not logical. That is fallacious reasoning. It may very well be the the most extreme option is correct. It's not often the case, but you can arrive to those conclusions using non-fallacious reasoning.

I'm not advocating or promoting the middle. What I'm saying is that it is logical to take the position I mentioned in the sense that it's the only way to be fair to everyone. That's because the alternative requires you to undo the passage of time or have perfect knowledge of every detail of history (because if you take shortcuts and generalize you're being unfair to innocent bystanders that were never involved).

Two wrongs don't make a right. And redefining one of those "wrongs" to be right because it's fixing the first wrong is a mess and people rationally (guess that's a better word for you? I'm not referring to logic in the inductive reasoning sense) see the inconsistency.

It’s convenient to omit that the Irish were not considered “white” when they were being discriminated against. They were instead considered their own, distinct race. In most contexts, “white” implicitly meant “normal” and anyone you want to discriminate against got their own, separate label (see also the Jews and the Romani). That’s the crux of the problem.

>>It’s convenient to omit that the Irish were not considered “white” when they were being discriminated against.

That wasn't out of convenience, I honestly didn't know that. But yes, it makes sense that these definitions can become arbitrary when there is a need for that. That is the problem.

Ugh, sorry. I shouldn't assume intent like that :(

Actually, no. The Irish were not considered white when they were oppressed. This is one of the key components of white supremacy, the definition of white is absurd and ever changing in order to achieve various political goals.

Racism is racism no matter what direction it's pointing. You don't need to have experienced hundred's of years of prejudice to experience racism. Racism is treating someone differently because of their race. It is wrong full stop, no matter the status of the perpetrator or the victim.

Although I agree with you, I understand the parent's point of view. I believe the issue here is one of terminology, i.e. "systemic racism" vs. an instance of racism. So the parent is arguing that you do indeed need to have experienced those years of oppression to experience racism, otherwise its localized racism that ends when you stop talking to that person (vs having no escape from it). To be clear, I'm on the all-racism-is-racism-is-bad side but had a few friends argue the parent's pov

This is a valid but narrow definition of racism. It's not really useful when speaking at a cultural level.

A black person saying "all white people are bad" is a bad thing, but ultimately not a societal problem. The issue is the power dynamic. After years of institutional racism, institutions are racist (shocking!). That's the issue. There are far more white people in power and any one of them being racist has a much wider and more devastating effect on PoC.

I find this statement oddly racist/xenophobic. White people aren't the majority in every country. It seems like you are implying white people are superior to all others, and have control over every country on earth. What if someone from Africa made the same statement, wouldn't that be an issue?

I think it's better to err on the side of disparaging someone based on an immutable characteristic is a bad thing, regardless of who says it.

It's more of a US centric opinion. Obviously I can't speak for other countries. However, if you look at the current leadership of the US it is dominated by white males. That's not a statement of superiority. The fact is PoC have gotten a raw deal in the US for decades. They aren't in positions of power due to the effects of long standing racism.

The civil rights movement was barely a generation away.

To be clear, I'm absolutely not saying whites are better than PoC. I'm saying that people in power in the US are typically white and male due to centuries of racism.

I think it's very, very important to understand that power, not unlike variable scope, is a collection of nested contexts. You could be a member of a dominant ethnic group in a society, but if you are surrounded by a group of armed members of a less-dominant group, in that moment/context, you don't have as much power as they do. If you survive said attack, and the attackers are brought into court, suddenly they would be right back to the system level context where they lack power.

The fact that it's so incredibly easy to poke holes in these theories is, in my opinion, a result of them being created by professional essay writers rather than true social scientists who follow the scientific method and view data as foundational to advancing theory rather than anecdotes.

You sound like someone who doesn't run in the same circles as those in power. Let me clue you in: a few are genuinely racist, most arent, and some are racist in a way that 10 years ago wasn't considered racist. They are being pushed into a corner by people like you YELLING at the top of your lungs that they are racist and that the riot mob is coming for them. They look at decades long careers and think "They think I was just handed this?" while you attack them as white supremacists. You demand that the institutions they run be dismantled. Insert baby in bath water, it's all got to go, no compromise. You can't name why they are racist or how you are going to be able to fix it (hell you don't even broach what sort of landscape the new institution would exist in). It's all just vitriol and acrimony from the likes of you, and it's tearing this country apart. Stop it. Get constructive and grow up.

You need to dig history more before making such statements; also, the concept of racism has nothing to do with any context .

It's really unfortunate to see downvotes for this. The belief in reverse racism in America is pretty widespread and I imagine we'll eventually see people understand what it means to say it doesn't exist.

The rejection of reserve racism isn't a reaction based on anger like "they hurt me first and more so I can hurt them." That's not what this is about. It's about not minimizing the prejudice black people suffer from every day by comparing it to having to send a picture of your black skin to be a mod in the subreddit mentioned above.

It's about understanding that racism is NOT just an instance of prejudice against someone based on color. It's the entire fucking system and culture we have in America that oppresses black people. It's about the system of power and authority that oppresses black people. When we reserve the word racism for this it follows that it's ridiculous to believe in reverse racism. There is no system that oppresses white people in America. It does not exist.

Is it shitty to be treated differently because your skin is white? Of course. It sucks and it's your right to feel hurt by it, but don't call it racism. Prejudice yes, racism no. Why is this distinction important? Again, because the instances of racism that white people complain about simply do not compare to what black people go through. Using the same word for these things minimizes what black people go through every god damn day.

I think you're right and we should just use a different word instead of fighting against the plain meaning. It shouldn't come as a surprise that when it takes 4 paragraphs to explain why the plain meaning of a word isn't how the word's allowed to be used, there will be a lot of people who don't get it.

You literally have to send a picture of your black skin to the mods of r/BlackPeopleTwitter in order to be added to the country club.

Imagine a subreddit forcing people to send pictures of their white skin to the mods. People would be outraged.

The only good way to use reddit these days is to unsubscribe from all of the default subreddits and only subscribe to small subreddits dedicated to your hobbies/interests. Everything else is garbage.

"You literally have to send a picture of your black skin to the mods of r/BlackPeopleTwitter in order to be added to the country club."

Is this really true? I quit Reddit years ago, even though some of the tech specific subs were awesome. Just couldn't stand supporting a site where the mods were so abusive. I remember the tipping point was a guy on there talking about "Foundational Black Americans", and essentially shitting on recent African immigrants as being second tier to black Americans descended from slaves. It was so vile, and they did nothing about it. He was bullying a second generation Nigerian American about her political beliefs. The mods told me it wasn't hateful to attack someone for their parent's national origin. Which is patently absurd.

The same guy also basically stated that any human who is descended from people who came to the US voluntarily is "white", no matter their ehnicity. It was shocking they allowed this kind of bullying. Ethno-nationalism is horrifying to me.

It's true. If you're not black, you can instead write them an essay on how white people victimized you or something like that so you can be an honorary black user and be allowed to post.

Lol I can't even tell if you're being satirical or not

If only it was satire. https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/gumxuy/...

Yes - 100% true. Try it.

This policy ("send a picture of your black skin") sounds like what they found they needed to do prevent black voices from being drowned out on a site so overwhelming white as reddit. If they'd found white people were capable of recognising that maybe bpt wasn't about them I doubt they'd need that policy.

Well women make up a larger percentage of the population than men. So is misogyny allowed on reddit openly now? Great... EDIT: This was sarcasm.

>"Spez, answer the fucking question."

I'm not Spez but that's a good way to get me to ignore your question.

I haven't watched Stefan in a long time, is he now producing content in the same register as David Duke & Richard Spencer ? It did not seem to be the case a few years ago.

He's always been pretty awful and white-supremacist-adjacent.

This "adjacent" concept has no meaning. Paraphrasing a point I made on Twitter recently:

- Richard Spencer: evil. Created 'alt right' movement.

- Ben Shapiro: called 'alt right' because he's right wing

- Joe Rogan: called 'alt right' because he talked to Ben

- Bernie Sanders supporters: called 'alt right' because Joe endorsed Bernie.

Ergo: by this logic Karl Marx could be considered 'alt right'

Molyneaux might be awful, he might be fine. But the argument one way or the other must be made on his own merits, not those around him.

----

Edit: Replying to dralley due to rate limit:"

I have included an example where there are four links. But 'adjacent' is a plainly silly idea if there is only one link.

If 'adjacent' being silly isn't already obvious, you may be very left wing (since 'adjacent' seems to be a popular argument on the left).

So consider: former KKK member Robert Byrd is in a photo being friendly with Hillary Clinton [1].

Is Hillary Clinton alt-right adjacent? Plainly Hillary Clinton is not alt-right adjacent. That argument would be absurd to make. Guilt by association is evil.

To determine whether Stefan Molyneux's ideas are good or bad, we should consider Stefan Molyneux's ideas. Not anyone else's.

You've included a video of Stefan Molyneux speaking. That's good - we can find out what he has to say for himself. What someone else has to say is irrelevant.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/clinton-byrd-photo-klan/

He didn't "talk" to Ben, he broadcast Ben's ideas to millions of listeners (the majority of which happen to be white).

Joe Rogan is now alt right? That is a quixotic ambition. Let the fools make fools of themselves. When there are stupid ideas proposed in the podcast, I just laugh at it or talk to somebody about it.

As an example, I listened to one of those white supremacy former academics, can’t remember who, and he quips midway through the lecture that Western society developed faster because... we are unique in having a sense of shame. I kid you not. It doesn’t take a neurosurgeon to detect bullshit.

Rogan talks to interesting guests all the time, if you label him adversarial, you will have rejected a lot of people.

Didn't say he was alt right, but he doesn't use his massive platform responsibly. There's a difference between interviewing a presidential candidate and interviewing a white supremacist.

Are you saying Joe interviewed a white supremacist? Who?

What is wrong with that? He did the same with Sanders and they were both interesting.

I mean there's the problem right there — you're talking about Bernie Sanders and Ben Shapiro as if they're two people equally deserving of equal space on an enormous platform of listeners.

Well yes.. I don't see why not. He brings a lot of different crowd, I'm not an American so I don't care about your childish bipartisan politics, but him talking to candidates gave me a better overview than watching 48h of your news channels.

Why are they not? Ben Shapiro is literally a standard conservative talking head who only now is seen as controversial because American politics is insane. And I'm pretty sure it's Rogan's choice who he wants to talk to. Policing that ruins the entire appeal of the podcast and just turns it into exactly what people were trying to get away from, i.e. heavily produced and filtered content on mainstream television such as late night talk shows or whatever

You act like the chain is like 6 links long - it is not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXZ6BZzQeCQ&t=14m01s

Jarod Taylor is very clearly a white supremacist, or as he calls himself, a "racialist". That's one link.

Also about 2 minutes after the timestamp in that clip, Stefan basically admits to being a white nationalist himself, anyway.

Molyneaux: The primary purpose of feminism is to lower white birthrates.

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Appeal-...

No. All the examples except the Karl Marx one are ridiculous, yet you can find ample evidence of them all via Twitter.

Is there a logical fallacy for 'adjacent?' It probably falls under straw man but it might have a specific name.

I used to listen to Stefan Molyneux about 10 years ago because he had some interesting views on free market economics. Now I look him up on Wikipedia and find out he's turned into a white nationalist. What the hell happened?

Perhaps there is an association between strongly supporting principles of free markets and problematic ethics.

Aka, I'll hitch my political wagon to any passing train as long as it gets me there.

Or freedoms to be bad. Freedoms to say bad things, freedoms to lie, freedoms to pollute the environment, freedoms to sell harmful things. They all share a "for my benefit, the collateral damage inflicted on others be damned" element.

There is a strong association between free market principles and the principle of non-aggression.

Others advocate that it is acceptable to use violent aggressive force against people who do not conform to your opinion of how things should be governed.

Tell me where the problematic ethics are again?

(FWIW, I don't watch any of the people mentioned above and have only heard of the first, so I am not here to defend them or what they may have said. I'm only defending the Non-aggression principle, which implies that markets are free.)

non-aggression is not the same as non-oppression. I can non-aggressively disenfranchise a group of people. I believe the problem lies in the trust placed in the free market to take the place of empathy and social unity required for creating and protecting civil liberties and equality.

> empathy and social unity required for creating and protecting civil liberties and equality.

"empathy," but it's OK to use violent aggressive force against people who don't share my empathy.

"social unity," but it's OK to use violent aggressive force against people who don't share our opinions.

The non-aggression principle is the only ethically consistent one. As soon as you advocate for violence to be used, your other opinions mean shit.

A free market is implied by the non-aggression principle, because the only way you can stop people trading freely if they don't agree with you is to use violence.

Civil liberties are protected by individuals themselves, by asserting their rights, and conforming to the non-aggression principle to avoid getting into conflicts with others.

As for "equality", I really could not give a shit. Me and my immediate family come first. My extended family come second. My community comes third. The rest are dead last. It doesn't matter what sex, color, orientation or other perceived victimization they have - if they attempt or advocate for violence to be used against those I care about, they are the problem.

I am a strong proponent of the non-aggression principle, and will interact with anybody on good terms unless they are in violation of it.

Also, regarding trust in free markets: What is a democratic vote? Why does this free market opinion have a free pass but other free market opinions are not allowed?

This is just depressing, man.

> Civil liberties are protected by individuals themselves, by asserting their rights, and conforming to the non-aggression principle to avoid getting into conflicts with others.

Some people are are not in positions to "assert" their rights. Furthermore, by claiming they have a duty to not use violence in order to reclaim the rights being denied you further give power to a group of individuals to are systematically denying people rights. Again, arguments that the free market works this sort of shit it out is just philosophical thinking not founded in reality and obviously coming from a lack of experience with systematic oppression.

> As for "equality", I really could not give a shit.

That's where we're just going to disagree and you reveal your values. There isn't room in the future for people who think this way. You're going to become further polarized as it becomes increasingly clear that the global community is increasingly concerned with equality and you're standing on the sidelines.

> Some people are are not in positions to "assert" their rights.

That some people are unable to assert their rights does not give you blanket permission to violate the rights of others. It is up to their family or guardians to assert their rights in their place.

> Furthermore, by claiming they have a duty to not use violence in order to reclaim the rights being denied you further give power to a group of individuals to are systematically denying people rights.

You just described government.

Everyone has rights. Rights are not granted, they exist. They can only be taken away, and the principle entity which does so is government. Anybody who attempts to take away one's rights is in violation of the NAP, and it should be open season on them. The government should be no exception. Many of the problems are the result of the government being beyond reproach.

A big problem is some people don't understand what is meant by a "right".

You have a right to gain employment, but you have no right to have somebody else employ you. The latter right belongs to the employer, who also has the right to not employ you.

You have a right to be treated by a physician, but you have no right to have a physician treat you. The latter right belongs to the Physician, who also has the right to not treat you.

> Again, arguments that the free market works this sort of shit it out is just philosophical thinking not founded in reality and obviously coming from a lack of experience with systematic oppression.

The government is oppressing everybody. Everybody has experienced this. The problem is not your neighbour, or the white man, or the black man - it's the NAP-violating State which uses violence against other human beings, steals from them and purposely devalues their capital to maintain their status-quo.

> There isn't room in the future for people who think this way.

This is how everyone who can THINK thinks. Others either don't think, or do not say what they really think.

It's very easy to virtue signal and support social justice behind a keyboard, but if you or your family were under threat of violence, you would not give two shits about any of the nonsense you previously espoused and would care only for the immediate safety of yourself and those you love. This is not going to change and should not need to change because protecting your loved ones is a virtue and not a vice.

Rather than pretending this is not the case, it is better to be absolutely clear that this is the case, and work to build harmony with others around the principle that nobody may use aggression against other human beings, else they are to face consequences, where the ultimate consequence may mean loss of their own life.

The killing of another human being in self-defence is a non-violent act and is consistent with the NAP. It is also ethically consistent, no matter what act was performed by the aggressor if the act was deliberate.

Consider Alice to be an aggressor against Bob. Alice commits a violation of the NAP by stealing a loaf of bread from Bob. Is it acceptable for Bob to use deadly force against Alice?

The answer is yes, otherwise, knowing that Bob may use deadly force against her for stealing the loaf, she would not attempt to steal it. Alice, of her own volition, risks her own life for the bread: she values the bread more than her own life. It is only right that Bob agrees, and sees the loaf as more valuable than Alice's life. There is no disagreement here - both Bob and Alice agree that the loaf is more important than Alice's life.

Of course, most humans have empathy and would see the stealing of a loaf of bread as an act of desperation and would rather be charitable than defensive. This does not imply that Alice should have a free reign to go around stealing: she should instead go around begging for alms.

For other kinds of theft, such as valuable item theft, Bob should not need even to justify the use of deadly defensive force. The assailant has made it clear that the valuable item is worth more than their own life.

> You're going to become further polarized as it becomes increasingly clear that the global community is increasingly concerned with equality and you're standing on the sidelines.

I fully intend that to be the case. I want nothing to do with violent lunatics and will instead prefer to interact only with those who share my opinions on the NAP. There are many like me who are electing to "leave" existing systems of robbery and Oppression Olympics so that we can just get on with our lives and be left alone. Thankfully, we now have a key technology which enables this: Bitcoin. Oh, and guns.

Also, in regards to "equality". The problem with the everything-must-be-equal types is that they assume stereotypes are 100% wrong, all of the time, which is simply not true. Even if the stereotype is only 1% true, it is still 1% that say, a potential employer may not want to take the risk on. The correct thing to do here is to educate so that people are clear that the stereotype is largely untrue - but the strategy which is now underway is not one of education, but bullying into submission. This will backfire. For example, the current BLM madness is not going to do any favours for regular black folk looking to find employment. Sorry ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> I can non-aggressively disenfranchise a group of people.

How would you accomplish this non-aggressively, especially if the disenfranchised group resists?

I don't understand, can you clarify?

How can you non-aggressively disenfranchise a group of people? Further, how can you maintain non-aggression if the group you are attempting to disenfranchise resists your attempts to disenfranchise them (which would make clear that your attempt to do so is counter to their wishes, and thus aggressive).

If you try to do something to someone, and they tell you to stop or try to get you to stop, continuing to do the thing is an act of aggression.

Ah, got it. Point taken. I believe what you say is true, but I think the aggression can often be so obscured as to not be visible. Systematically hiring 10% less people of of color, or passing over a resume with a funny sounding name isn't overtly aggressive, but over the course of centuries it becomes quite oppressive. Combine a nuanced action like that with a thousand other nuanced behaviors and you end up with a group of people who are disenfranchised, yet any specific claim they make sounds trite, any specific protest they makes seems out of line with an individual nuanced behavior.

That makes a lot of sense. If each (and every) of the actions is nuanced, I can see a group being oppressed without violence and possibly even without aggression if the oppressors believe they are helping the oppressed with their policies. Though of course the nature of the actions is such that there is plausible deniability should motive come into question. Goodness.

This is one lovely comment thread were two people learned something (ok, at least three -I learned something as well), instead of fighting with words.

Thanks people, I had a rough day on HN today and you put a smime on my face :-)

The simplest means is to deny that the means are aggressive. Deny the discrimination, claim responses are justified, dehumanise the group, reject any peaceful protestor as a disrespectful "son of a bitch" (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2017/09/22...), nonpeaceful resistance "thugs" (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-minneapolis-protesters-th...) even where that represents a small minority, agents provocateurs, or responses to violence or entrapment.

Restrict access to institutions of power such as legislatures, the church, banks and financial institutions, civil service, the military, lower or higher education, business, the ballot box.

Use selection criteria which are impersonal but demonstrably discriminate against the class.

Locate polluting industry in neighbourhoods inhabited by the group. Especially contaminants (lead, mercury, asbestos, etc.) with long term cognitive and behavioural health effects.

Encourage (and prosecute) drugs trade and use in the group's ccommunities. Differentiate in prosecution and sentencing between "their" and "our" drugs.

Establish wholly separate "segregation schools" for the privileged group. Ensure that the privileged poor have scholarship access, but the disenfranchised group does not.

Create exclusions based on redlining, restrictive covenants, actuarial risk, AI, or other mechanisms reducing access to assets, insurance, business financing, and other opportunity-enhancing resources, often "objective" and "based in data".

Interesting speculation. On the other hand, there is an association between strongly opposing principles of free markets and problematic ethics.

Just to be clear, Molyneux had long been an anarcho-capitalist, which is already an extreme take on free market economics. I wouldn’t look too far into it, and I certainly wouldn’t conclude that white nationalism is the logical conclusion of thinking that free markets have their place in society.

Or perhaps the far-right just has the habit to coopt members of others groups. Not only free market supporters, e.g. Sara Winter and Carla Zambelli were from the feminist group FEMEN, and nowadays are Bolsonaro supporters.

Unfortunately, a portion of the 2000s internet rationalist movement radicalized towards these views.

He went bad about 10 years ago. Before that he was halfway decent, however he did have some problematic tendencies, which I'm afraid were amplified and pushed out anything good.

Molyneux, precisely, does not advocate specifically for a white ethnostate where Spencer does. However, Molyneux doesn't oppose one on principle, which for most is too close for comfort so he gets branded as one.

I understand for many that is evidence of guilt but logically speaking that's not the same thing.

That's missing the forest for the trees... advocating for a "white ethnostate" is not the only thing that makes you a white supremacist and that's the real crux of the comparison. Making the distinction doesn't change the fact that he is rightfully lumped in with them on the basis of being a white supremacist. There is more nuance to Molyneux than David Duke, but he's made his views on the subject pretty clear.

The comment tree was about "white nationalism", which is definitely commonly understood to mean "wants a white ethnostate".

Fair, but is the distinction actually important in this case? It seems to me to be more of a means of obfuscating/derailing the discussion of Molyneux's views.

I think precision is important in this context, because people have a bad habit of using terms like "white supremacist" as generic insults against any right-wing figure. Being imprecise diminishes the force of the arguments against Molyneux, who really has made explicit claims that white people are better than everyone else.

I agree with you. I edited my original comment to clarify a bit.

> who really has made explicit claims that white people are better than everyone else.

Where?

It is important, because it implies Molyneux would take steps to build such a state, when he wouldn't on principle. Molyneux is an anarcho-capitalist: he desires there to be no state at all.

It just happens to be a convenient feature of said anarcho-capitalist society that he would be free to oppress non-whites. You're cherry picking one particular argument he makes without considering his other espoused beliefs.

Is it possible that Stefan Molyneux wants one, even though he doesn't actively advocate for it?

Because everything I've heard from him suggests he would love one... which meets your definition squarely.

I listened to some of Molyneux podcasts awhile back. He seemed very gray area, borderline white nationalist, almost consciously ambiguous with just enough plausible deniability. It was a little too close for comfort and I took him off my list.

That said, I don’t think it’s fair to lump him in with folks like Spencer and Duke. I don’t agree with Moleyneux’s viewpoints but think he articulates them well enough that he should be refuted, not scrubbed from existence.

The clever ones are the more dangerous ones. Plenty of people that will strike Spencer and Duke will be lulled to sleep by Molyneux but in the end the agenda is the same.

You might be right but trying to censor stuff on the Internet tends to make it bigger in the long run. For an intellectual threat like Molyneux it would better to confront head on with “logic and facts” than pretend it doesn’t exist.

Or on the flip side, if something he says makes you uncomfortable but you can’t explain why it’s wrong, then you need to step up your rhetoric game.

One of the most effective tropes used by folks like Molyneux is “liberals are emotional and argue with feelings, not facts” - by freaking out and banning a highly articulate speaker like Molyneux the “libs” are only proving his point.

I don't think that is true. Giving the fringe a platform makes it easier for like minded people to find each other and that allows them to create a nice little echo chamber where they can pretend their ideas and concepts are legit and backed up because 'many others feel the same way'. Free speech advocates believe that somehow everything that can be said should be allowed to be said but this does not - in my opinion at least - extend to each and every medium. Handing every moron a megaphone is not a good idea.

"Highly articulate speaker?" Yeah, sure, he might come across like that when he can pick and choose his interlocutors for the weakness of their rhetoric and their arguments, and then just yell over them and drop the call anyway. In a fair fight he'd get his ass handed to him in short order, which is why you never see him in one.

I'm not sure if things like this are exactly grey...

https://twitter.com/StefanMolyneux/status/108248906874151321... https://twitter.com/StefanMolyneux/status/118100374698304307...

I just took the tweets from the other comments here.

> Molyneux, precisely, does not advocate specifically for a white ethnostate where Spencer does.

"The devolution of the US from an Enlightenment Republic to a semi-banana republic is also silenced, since that has a lot to do with racial IQ demographics esp permanent low Hispanic IQ"

What is the implied solution to this alleged problem?

I don't know if one is proposed. As a philosopher he takes it upon himself to best articulate a problem as best he can.

I've been watching the "Hate Thy Neighbor" series recently, and some common threads I am noticing among the individuals involved in hate groups include:

- They rarely admit to being racist, usually strongly arguing that they are specifically not racist

- Most of them have very strong preferences about the correct terminology to use in referring to them, as if their niche hate label of choice helps them avoid the stigmatization of the more common hate labels most of society finds unacceptable.

Many of them really sound like career politicians the way they try to spin their position as not condoning hate or violence, ignore all evidence to the contrary, and quibble over which hate labels they prefer. So yes, very often what a group is not willing to oppose can be very telling about their true position, which is often never admitted to in any kind of straightforward manner.

He carried the momentum of the 2016 meme wars and funneled impressionable anti-establishment pro-Trump types. He was much more focused on eternal truths when his channel was philosophically centered, but self-examining one’s own eternal destination does not get many clicks.

Why is everyone making surprised pickachu face about white nationalism as our culture encourages black nationalism and every other kind of racial tribalism? The problem isn't the color, the problem is the nationalism.

Hasn't black nationalism been essentially dead since the Black Panther party collapsed? You talk about as if it were as immediately dangerous as white nationalism, but I'm not sure it is.

It isn't, but pretending that 70s Kodachrome black nationalism is the same as 1080p60 white supremacism is a useful lie as long as you're talking to somebody who doesn't know any of the history involved.

From a pure strategy perspective I suspect you never want to be the last person to adopt tribalism.

It's curious that people that seem to be racists aren't happy when everyone tries to get along and sing campfire songs about being one people and inclusive. They also aren't happy when people stand up for themselves and reject their worldview.

I'm not convinced that nationalism not based on some intrinsic attribute of its people (like race) is even mostly bad.

1. : loyalty and devotion to a nation especially : a sense of national consciousness (see CONSCIOUSNESS sense 1c) exalting one nation above all others and placing primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations or supranational groups

This, to me, reads that nations should advocate for their own interests first and have that as their primary concern - which seems pretty reasonable. Much in the same way that we have state and local representatives that advocate for the state and the locality in their respective governments, the higher levels up do the same for their entire citizenry on the global stage.

There's nothing inherently icky or oppressive about this kind of mutual self-interest, and it need not imply any kind of dehumanization. It is, of course, possible to take too far (see: xenophobia), but that strikes me as a problem of implementation and general human failings, not as an intractable problem with the concept that deserves it being compared to objective evil.

If the antonym of nationalism is globalism, I think that mindset has bigger problems.

Looks more lucrative

There is a pretty straight line from 'free market economics' (aka exploiting people who are already down) to white nationalism (aka shitting on people that are not 'white' enough). No need to be surprised.

The same thing appears to be happening with Scott Adams (author of the Dilbert comic strips).

What happened is wikipedia turned into a leftist propaganda outlet.

I also listened to him ten years ago. Every week or two I'd pick a new channel to watch to death while working, so I've probably consumed 40+ hours of content.

I heard bits and pieces over the years since that gave me the same reaction - what the hell happened. Although in retrospect the seeds were probably there even back then.

One thing that came out later was him emotionally explaining to the camera that the problem with the world is that women choose assholes to date. Another was his violent fantasy about what he'd do to his mother. That these kinds of outbursts didn't lose him his audience pretty much tells you all you need to know.

It's a shame, as there were a few pieces that stuck with me from when I watched it that I think made me a better person.

It was the first time I'd personally been exposed to ideas (mainly because I was young) like never hit children, it's OK to cut contact with an abusive family, that circumcision on babies is wrong and that you should structure your life to spend a great deal of time with your children if you want to be a parent. They've all pretty much stuck with me until today.

Plus a bunch of interesting in theory libertarian stuff, although I'm so far away from many of his positions it's almost comical (I'm the kind of person that wants high income and capital gains taxes and 100% inheritance taxes to fund a basic income), I find it a good diff on current society.

It's a shame, because if he had progressed towards cuddly-bear Molyneux instead of I-want-to-run-a-cult Molyneux, I think he could have been a positive force instead of the target of what is a pretty well justified ban today.

> if he had progressed towards cuddly-bear Molyneux instead of I-want-to-run-a-cult Molyneux

This is an interesting thing I don't hear talked about much. People often criticize social media because it recommends increasingly extreme content to consumers because doing so drives up engagement.

But what I hear less often is how the reward systems of social media radicalize producers.

If you make your living off YouTube and see that you nuanced, reasoned video essay got 50 views, while you're angry rant got 50,000... you'll start feeling the pressure to make more of the latter. And your natural desire to rationalize your own cognitive dissonance will lead you to believe the things you find yourself spewing.

This is why it's so important to get incentive structures right. Because incentives do what they do whether you want them to or not.

Yes, that's interesting. And it would yield the same boiling frog effect as recommendation systems getting more extreme, because the existing audience of the creator is slowly getting dragged along.

I'm assuming it took years for Molyneux to progress from being a quirky libertarian channel to open hate. There was no single video posted that was like "I've decided I hate women", which would at least give the audience a wake up call so they can decide if they really want to be on this train.

Yes, it's such a weird feedback loop. The leader creates the cult at the same time that the cult creates the leader.

At a more innocuous level, you can see a similar progression in a lot of YouTubers if you dig back through their older videos. Many people start out pretty normal and low-key in their videos. But over time, they become more emotive, expressive, and over the top, until eventually you get to "HEY YOUTUBERS IT'S YA BOY HERE SMASH THAT LIKE BUTTON YEAH LET'S GET IT STARTED..."

I don't think any of them chose to do that, it's just that the feedback loop is hard to fight.

Most likely, he always had these beliefs, but he knew they were socially unacceptable so he kept them to himself. When a massive and lucrative potential audience developed on YouTube, of course he's going to be there to go after those views.

Someone mentioned him to me as a sort of anti-government philosopher. At some point he popped up again breaking down the treyvon martin incident and everything about it seemed pretty gross. Eventually he popped back up again (to me) and got popular with the rise of trump

If you believe that free markets result in a fair outcome, eventually you have to come up with an explanation for why black and brown people have much lower economic and social status in Western capitalist countries. Broadly speaking, there's only a few possibilities:

1. Free markets can result in unfair outcomes in the face of prejudice or historical inequalities.

2. Racial inequality is caused entirely by government regulation.

3. The system works fine as it is, and some minorities just deserve lower status because they're lazy or have low IQs or something.

The most hardcore Libertarians reject (1) because it could potentially justify government intervention. Most of them turn to (2), but since that's a bit of tough argument to make, a few go to (3) instead. And once you decide that minorities are just inferior, it's a pretty straight line from there to white nationalism.

I gave him a chance because my cousin is one of these "anarcho-capitalism" guys (which is a contradiction, anarchy means lack of a control system or gov't, and capitalism is a power structure) and loved Molyneux. I've always been more of a fan of Richard Wolff and his project, Democracy at Work.[0]

But a less serious intellectual than Dr. Wolff (of Yale, Harvard, Stanford), Peter Joseph of the Zeitgeist Project has made Stefan look foolish.[1]

And an even less serious intellectual than Peter Joseph has caught out Stefan (me), he's one of those that says "communism kills people", but yet "guns do not kill people". If inanimate objects don't spontaneously kill people Stefan, neither do ideas. He's beneath a lightweight on his ability to think clearly.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/user/democracyatwrk

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaP2GJvZlWY

Anarcho-capitalists don't see capitalism as a power structure though. They see it as something natural that emerges organically, without it being imposed on top. They argue that, for example, markets appear in failed states, they emerge even when the states try to suppress them (black markets), and they're a natural outcome of different skills and needs. So it's not a power structure any more than say, mountains are a power structure, even though some people can exploit mountains pretty effectively to gain advantage.

That’s an interesting point, my only immediate thought is that markets and capitalism are two entirely separate entities. Capitalism gets a lot in free credit (no pun intended) riding off the coat tails of market economics.

In short, capitalism is paying others to do your work, but paying them less then the value they produce. Not an attractive proposition since it always trends towards Foxconn without a mechanism to counteract it such as a union.

A market can exist without that, bartering is all you need there.

Yes, I don't remember Stefan Molyneux saying anything racist. Can someone share an example?

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Stefan_Molyneux

Wow that guy's an idiot. He actually claims the Iraq War was a failure because Iraqis have IQs in the 80s and are therefore incapable of accepting democracy.

Racism aside, if you've done even a bit of reading on IQ you know it's been rising for decades if not longer. His Jeffersonian Democracy was built by people with an IQ that would be in the 80s today.

Can you point to some of that reading? Pedantically, that goes against the definition of IQ, where 100 is always average so it can't really increase over time, but your general point about people getting smarter doesn't intuitively make sense to me. Obviously we have more knowledge and resources to build on today, but I've never seen any reason to believe modern humans are smarter from birth than humans born 300 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

See the Flynn Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

IQ by definition averages to 100, but if you compare present populations to past populations without the normalization there's a significant difference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

I'm no expert but my impression is that it's a widely accepted finding in psychology.

The average IQ is 100 by definition and constantly adjusted, yes, but you can keep track of which way it's being adjusted.

My fairly uneducated guess would be improved nutrition and reduced disease burden are big factors.

Several responders have brought up the Flynn Effect. It's relevant.

As a sign of how far the Western ruling class has gone down the rabbit hole, though, note that Flynn's own take on the broader context is now beyond the pale: https://quillette.com/2019/09/24/my-book-defending-free-spee... .

You see these I.Q. numbers posted around the Internet all the time, but few will mention that they are also highly suspect, to the point of being just about worthless.

Here's a relevant thread about some popular papers that made the low numbers known https://twitter.com/spiantado/status/1275783954411347968

Aren't there academic studies that concluded an average IQ of 92 is the threshold for democracy to be adopted by a population? If Im not mistaken these studies came from a University in either Denmark or Norway.

There's a collection of racist quotes from him here: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/indi...

All source videos are removed. No way to double check things anymore. :(

“And there was this wild overreaction and all this kind of stuff”

Holocaust euphemism alert!

"It did strike me that this relentless propaganda for “white women with black men“ would serve to lower the average IQ of the offspring.

You don’t see nearly as much “white women with East Asian men,” whose offspring would tend to have higher IQs on average.

Hmmm..."

- https://twitter.com/StefanMolyneux/status/107731491210229760...

"If I believed in the toxic racist lie of “white privilege,” I wouldn’t have worked so damn hard to succeed.

I would’ve just waited for my racial dividends to pour in and make me successful without having to lift a finger.

“Privilege” is hard work and providing value.

Try it."

- https://twitter.com/StefanMolyneux/status/127693246131906969...

"WOMEN!

STOP taking vain pride in the fact that men want to have sex with you.

You didn’t personally earn those hormones.

Stop pilllaging evolution designed for pair-bonding for petty self-regard."

- https://twitter.com/StefanMolyneux/status/127673601190155878...

"Ladies vote you into socialism.

Men have to fight their way out."

- https://twitter.com/StefanMolyneux/status/127659441227816141...

Not at all but Molyneux disagrees with so many left-of-center ideas that the effort needed to effectively detail how Molyneux is different is great, so he gets lumped in with them.

"The primary purpose of feminism is to lower white birthrates." - https://twitter.com/StefanMolyneux/status/118100374698304307...

"If we had been allowed to talk about race and IQ, the invasion of Iraq would never have occurred, because no one would have been under the illusion that a Jeffersonian Republic was going to emerge from a population with an IQ in the 80s. Opposing science got >500k people killed." - https://twitter.com/StefanMolyneux/status/108248906874151321...

EDIT: added a second quote

Ugh. Those are awful.

Yup, he's bad folks

Your argument is incomplete. I don't dispute that he said those things but what do you claim is the similarity to Spencer or Duke?

Yeah, they're both very racist, to the level of supposing that that white society is inherently superior. The first quote implies a the existence of a conspiracy to lower white birthrates. The second states clearly that Iraqi people would not be capable of forming a just society due to "low IQ". These are definitionally white supremacist talking points.

EDIT: spelling

Thank you for clarifying. However they don't prove your case, and I'll explain why.

Arguing that a conspiracy exists to harm a group is not evidence that this group is superior. It simply does not follow. Yes, I can see how this view might be shared by white supremacists but it simply does not follow from this statement alone. And for the record, I myself don't find his argument compelling.

The second statement goes deeper into Molyneux's thinking to an area where even I fear to tread. On this one I can concede that Molyneux establishes a link between IQ and what kind of gov't is possible in such a population. This _could_ be evidence of white supremacist thinking.

Now let me provide some counter evidence. Could a white supremacist accept/promote a claim that other races have higher IQ than whites? I don't believe so, because that would imply that whites are not superior in one area and throw the whole ideology into confusion. Yet he does so in this tweet: https://twitter.com/stefanmolyneux/status/116998248528916480...

The rush to judgment on someone is part of what's causing so much discord in the US right now. Molyneux is no white supremacist, but he doesn't shield himself from their arguments either.

"“...the Germans were in danger of being taken over by what they perceived as Jewish-led Communism. And Jewish-led Communism had wiped out tens of millions of white Christians in Russia and they were afraid of the same thing. And there was this wild overreaction and all this kind of stuff."

Yeah he's a white supremacist. White supremacy (and associated Fascism), tend to believe in contradictory narratives about their opponents.

If white supremacists can believe contradictory ideas and still be white supremacists, then how are we to determine who is and isn't? By this logic there's no evidence you could give me to prove you're not a white supremacist since contradictions. I don't mean that as a personal attack, but I hope you see how untenable such a line of thinking is.

Also, I do understand the possibility that someone could claim to believe one thing and not actually believe it. It simply requires a higher burden of proof.

If you're asking how people can hold contradictory ideas... then I'd invite you do some self reflection. You probably hold some. We all do. Striving towards clarity of thought takes a while.

As for white supremacists in specific, let's take David Duke and Richard Spencer for example. (As you agreed above they were white supremacists) Both of these people claim to believe in science and reason, yet also believe in the superiority of the white race.

I am not here to do any defending of anyone, but as some people are able to defend themselves as (often rightfully) with "it was taken out of context". Yet every time I have heard anything with molyneux it has seemed to me exactly the opposite. Very few things taken out of context seem very bad. As a whole, on the other hand, I always got the impression he is bat-shit insane. Does he mention white genocide? I doubt it. Does he paint a picture of the world where white genocide is reality ? Well, I would say yes.

I appreciate your point, but both of those tweets are bad even without context :)

Yup. I am firmly in the camp believing that he is a hatemonger. I haven't seen the "white genocide is partly feminism's fault" before, but that pretty much sums up most of what I have heard him say outside of his fanaticism about IQ.

If I had to rank them, I would agree that David Duke and Richard Spencer are a little more blatantly racist than Stefan Molyneux, but why does that matter? If they're all violating the hate speech policy, then they should all be banned, even if David Duke is violating it more.

Polite white nationalism is still white nationalism.

Ten years ago I met him once as a libertarian/free-market conference, he was there with his kids. He seemed like an adorable father at the time.

Wow can people change.

Here's a collection of quotes (from another comment downthread for visibility):

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/indi...

a little teaser:

> Screaming 'racism' at people because blacks are collectively less intelligent...is insane

> The whole breeding arena of the species needs to be cleaned the fuck up

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Stefan_Molyneux is also great.

This is not directly related, but I saw the policy: "videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status"

I'm curious if anyone know the root of "veteran" on this list? I am just not familiar with that kind of -ism (veteran-ism?).

You can't discriminate against someone for having served in the military in the US. Someone who served in the military is a veteran.

Also, the phrasing of their policy is strange. Apparently you can argue all you want that racial group X is inferior all you want, but if you don't try to exclude them from something, that is okay.

I think veterans are considered a suspect class & there exists legislation protecting against discrimination.

I wonder if this policy is valid outside the US. If so, are you allowed to discriminate against veterans of the Wehrmacht, or the SS?

Veterans are a protected class (at least under labor law) in the US based on a 1974 (VEVRAA).

I'm surprised that makes the jump from employment/labor law to speech/politics policies.

Strawman: If I were a politician campaigning and were to say something like, "Veterans do not deserve benefits and I don't think we should fund veteran benefits" or "Veterans do not deserve our blind respect", am I now discriminating and will get banned from the platform?

<#include I–am–not–a–lawyer–this–is–not–legal–advice.h>

My understanding dates to the 1990s but a covered company does not get to pick and choose what areas a protected class may be discriminated against. So, if a class is considered protected from labor discrimination you cannot discriminate against that class in any of your business areas (based on membership in that class. Basically: if someone is a member of a protected class, you cannot discriminate against them, you cannot foster discrimination against them by your employees, products, or services.

My personal opinion is that a candidate who said that veterans should lose benefits as part of their campaign would probably slide through this sort of prohibition, however if that politician called for some sort of action against veterans then they would get censored/banned/whatever.

Again, not a lawyer.

Thanks. I suspect there may be no actual cases of YT actually banning videos for anti-veteran speech, but it is on their list because it is on a list of protected classes.

Soon to be found on Telegram I guess. Seem to be the only growing platform that does not ban opinions. Probably because they do not need to make advertisers happy.

Conclusion: Ads still ruin the internet.

Conclusion: white nationalists ruin the internet

Ads run the internet and fueling rage and hate helps social networks keep engagement high (and sell more ads).

It's disgusting to see racism, transphobia, misogyny, and general hate speech spread by Molyneux and others be normalized as 'opinions'.

They aren't interested in discourse, they only want to spread their garbage while cowordly hiding behind a dated concept of free (hate) speech. Molyneux especially dodges every debate where his oposition is somewhat knowledgeable.

>dated concept of free (hate) speech

Explain further how free speech is a dated concept we don't need anymore.

Some content fosters the development of extremists/terrorists.

This type of content does not use the platform in good faith. It's only objective is to trap listeners in a spiral of extremist content, basically brainwashing them. In some cases this even leads to violent acts. E.g. there have been multiple terrorist acts where it was determined that this extremist content played a crucial role in the enabling of the perpetrators.

We typically do not allow direct incentives of violence or concrete threats. I don't think we should should we allow content where we know that it indirectly leads to more violence.

Without free speech, there would be no LGBT Pride in the first place. They were seen as extremists.

Having free speech but only for people who say mainstream things is equivalent to saying "I like the world as it exists today". That is conservatism by definition.

Without discrimination there wouldn't need to be LGBT Pride to begin with.

White-nationalism was tried and didn't work to say the least. Content creators, like the ones banned, advocate for a world of 50-200 years ago. They are conservatives. Limiting their reach is anything BUT conservatism by definition.

Also, there are plenty of conservatives content creators who user lies and deception to spread their dated believes. The ban only targeted the worst of the worst, the ones that actually advocate for (white)ethnostates.

White nationalists are the canary in the coal mine. Sure, nobody cares about the canary itself. But everyone should care why the canary died, because it has implications for us all.

What is more dangerous to society than white nationalists, are social media websites that want to be our public spaces for discussion while also policing which ideas are acceptable to talk about.

Well if the canary develops into a monkey who convinces the most single minded people to do stupid stuff you might as well get rid of them and get a new canary - which is basically what happened here.

> What is more dangerous to society than white nationalists, are social media websites that want to be our public spaces for discussion while also policing which ideas are acceptable to talk about.

White nationalists kill and social media websites share some part of the blame. To say that the more pressing issue is that they police which ideas are acceptable is laughable when you consider the great extend they allow for extreme views. There are literally still holocaust denies still allowed on their platforms.

There is no need to "normalized as 'opinions'" because these are opinions already. People have them about everything and whether wrong or right doesn't matter it's their opinions and they have (should have) the right to express them as long as they do that in a manner that makes listening voluntary. The concept applies to people who think the earth is flat and the concept applies to people who think trans people have a medical condition. There can't be a reason why it would not. The whole idea is that all opinions must be allowed to make sure there is none who can abuse any power by deciding whats allowed and what not. There is no other way. You can't every draw a line and say everything but X is allowed. Because if you do that you indirectly hinder people from questioning/understanding why X is banned. And you removed any resource about X so there will be people who never heard of X and cant find anything about X because its banned. Now how likely are they going to support that ban if they don't understand X and aren't allowed to talk about it. Not banning X so the majority can see X is "wrong" resolves that problem way better.

Also "hate speech" is a made up nonsense term. Telegram only prohibits "call for violence". Which is kinda where free speech ends. It of course can be tricked by clever use of language. Instead of "Go out and destroy statues and the people who protect them!" which would be a call for violence. one could says "I think everyone should go one and destroy statues and the people who protect them." now it would be an opinion. The good thing is, the people who actually call for violence like terrorists usually don't bother with such trickery.

Also just for clarification I listened/watched none of the people that got banned I don't care what their opinions are. I care about the right to express them. It absolutely doesn't matter whether I agree with what they say or not. I agree with free speech because any alternative is worse.

All words are made up, and hate speech is an established term that you can look up in any relevant dictionary.

> It of course can be tricked by clever use of language. Instead of "Go out and destroy statues and the people who protect them!" which would be a call for violence. one could says "I think everyone should go one and destroy statues and the people who protect them." now it would be an opinion. The good thing is, the people who actually call for violence like terrorists usually don't bother with such trickery.

That's literally exactly what Molyneux and others do. Instead of directly advocating for violence they say things like: 'Whites and non-whites would be better of in their own ethnostates'. Now how do we get there? Well the same people also say that the current political system is corrupt to the core, where ((them)) (a jewish conspiracy) will hold the 'white man' down. Consequently some of their viewers take the matter in their own hands and express violence towards immigrants, most often any kind of brown poeple. Examples include the Canada mosque or the Christchurch perpetrator. Real world examples there hate speech led to vile acts.

Hate speech may be in a dictionary but its not well enough defined to decide whether or not someone actually broke any law. Is commonly used when people disagree but no law was broken. Also the definition often includes some form of "call for violence" but its almost always used to describe something where no call for violence happened. Its kinda like when people use the term "robbery" for "theft" to make it sound worse, with the difference that robbery/theft is well defined and "hate speech" is not. But it clearly sounds worse than the "offending speech" that it probably was.

As I stated above I never listened to anything what this Molyneux said, I do not share or defend his opinions I defend everyone right to express their opinions. Also your quote is prime example of flawed logic. There is zero call for violence in 'Whites and non-whites would be better of in their own ethnostates'. It's not even close to my example about how a call for violence can be formulated as opinion. >"how do we get there?" Peacefully maybe? Maybe not? Maybe its just a really stupid idea and there is no reason to find a way to get there? But anyway there is no call for violence anywhere in the expressed opinion. We could "solve" the wolds poverty problem through mass murdering, that doesn't mean, when I express my opinion to fight poverty, its now a call for violence right? Even if you don't see a peaceful way its still not a call for violence.

>Well the same people also say that the current political system is corrupt to the core[...] That is expressing an opinion.

>Consequently some of their viewers take the matter in their own hands and express violence[...] Consequently? Really? Sneaky false cause logical fallacy you got there. If there is no "call for action" you can not claim the action to be a result of it. People who did something happened to read something many other read too, not people who read something did something because of what they read. Some people are just sh*t to other people and they may justify that with whatever they read and interpret that however they want and even truly believe they do the right thing but is not a cause of what they found to justify it. If millions of people read the Quran and a tiny percentage of them feel the need to kill people because the Quran told them to, don't you think the people are probably the problem and if there would be no Quran they would use whatever there is to justify their killings anyway. And BTW the Quran does in fact contain calls for action but is not banned on the platforms that ban simple expressions of opinions.

> Hate speech may be in a dictionary but its not well enough defined to decide whether or not someone actually broke any law

In many countries it IS defined in such a way.

>"how do we get there?" Peacefully maybe? Maybe not? Maybe its just a really stupid idea and there is no reason to find a way to get there? But anyway there is no call for violence anywhere in the expressed opinion.

If you argue against every option but violence, you indicate your support indirectly.

> Consequently? Really?

Yes. The radicalization patterns are well documented and it starts with self proclaimed intellectuals who use lies to lead viewers down a certain path that leads to even more extreme views.

Same holds for Muslim extremists. And while we don't ban the Quran, we DO ban or investigate some religious groups. Now, this is in some ways more easy because they often meet in real life.

>If you argue against every option but violence, you indicate your support indirectly.

Absolutely not. See my example above about solving the worlds poverty problem. I've never heard of a peaceful solution that I think would work. Therefore I would argue against all ideas and uncover their flaws. That doesn't mean I would support a violent solution at all. Also the "implied support" you seem to talk about is not an action or a call to action it's an opinion. Opinions again go under free speech and it still doesn't matter if the opinions is somehow flawed/wrong/offensive to you or someone else.

For example I could express the opinion that earth would be a better place without humans. That's not a call for action/violence even if is almost certainly impossible to find a non-violent way to achieve this.

>[...]who use lies to lead viewers down a certain path[...]

Lies are protected by free speech if they are expressed to voluntary listeners with no relationship between the parties. There is really no difference between expressing a objectively wrong opinion and intentionally expressing something you know is wrong. See flatearther/hollow earther, Alien abduction believers, homeopaths etc. etc. Whether they believe the crap they teach or intentionally lie never mattered. Homeopaths probably causes thousands of death per year and its a billion dollar fraudulent but legal industry that causes real damage to people who practice it but also to tax payers. Ever heard of homeopaths getting banned for hate speech? For lying? For leading "viewers down a certain path that leads to even more extreme views" like abandoning real medicine?

>we DO ban or investigate some religious groups.

We do that with right and left-wing extremest groups too based on real investigations the applicable laws and court rulings which should respect free speech.

Now with all the reasons mentioned why we should not banning opinions, how about telling us why we should? Does removing some ethnostates sympathizer from YouTube really solve a problem? And if so which one?

Yes, it’s the ads that are the problem, not the blatant racism. What the fuck is the matter with some of you...

Read again lease, it has nothing to do with what the people that got banned this time say. Ads puts people in charge of censoring things who have profit trough ads in minds. They don't give a flying f* about wrong or right, they are not our internet moral compass and have zero qualifications for that anyway.

If you think advertisers refusing to have anything to do with platforms that refuse to serve as a check against hate speech is worse than platforms refusing to serve as a check against hate speech, then you very clearly don’t give a flying duck about right or wrong, either. Get your priorities in order.

That's absolutely correct I don't seem myself as the judge either. I can however decide on my own what I want to read/hear/see and what not and I make use of that. I have no need to brush things right or wrong for others I want to decide for myself and I want other to be able to decide for themselves. The order of priorities is quite clear, its choice and freedom on top and not correctness as defined by whoever is in charge at a time.

You appear to be admitting in plain — though horribly ungrammatical — English that you don’t care about the difference between right and wrong. Why should anyone value the opinion of someone incapable of making simple moral judgements?

You are trying really hard to misunderstand me. Whether something is right or wrong is obviously important but not to deciding whether it should be banned or not because it never should be banned if its an expressed opinion.

There are people who openly say that division though zero gives infinite. There are people who openly say the earth is flat. There are people who openly say there is a dude in the sky that will burn you for you wrongdoings after you die. There are people who openly say some races are subhumans. There are people who openly say gays can be healed.

Where is the difference in all of them? We probably agree that all of them are wrong so that can't be the factor that makes some of these opinions bannable and others not. I'm not incapable of moral judgement for me, I don't want moral judgements be part of the decision making. Because what is banned and what not should not depend on moral judgement of someone. Moral judgement is biased. My own moral judgement is, so why would I want anyone else's moral to be enforced for all. Id rather have 99 garbage opinions not banned than a single falsely banned opinion. Because I can ignore the 99 garbage opinions but I can't "nu-ignore" what I don't knew was there.

Perhaps the problem is that you aren’t making much of an effort to be well understood? Not to be rude, but your writing is so bad that I’m genuinely struggling to make sense of it.

What you seem to be saying is that morality is subjective, and therefore it should be immune from critical scrutiny. Am I off base?

How does telegram make money?

EDIT: just checked their faq and they claim they are non profit for now.

Telegram is just a chat app. What would it mean for video uploaders to "go" there?

Telegram is way way more than that. Banned YouTubers can easily host their videos there for millions to stream. And according to telegrams ToS they won't ban unless you "call for violence".

Chess channel agadmator was taken down by a YouTube bot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSjrYWPxsG8

He speculates the bot detected phrases like "white will always be better here...", etc., then goes on to say that in his ~1800 uploads "it's pretty much black and white to the death in every video".

He appealed, but was immediately rejected by the automated appeals system. The channel was restored when further responses and feedback from subscribers eventually got a human in the loop at YouTube.

This is suspicious. So much for free-speech and open debate. Just let people hear both sides and make up their own minds.

Remember when Noam Chomsky argued for allowing Holocaust deniers to lecture at universities, so that students could make their own judgement and disproof absurd theories? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faurisson_affair Guess it was a different time.

Molyneux earned the ban. I've personally reported him several times. Not to say the other didn't also deserve it, but Molyneux was on my radar.

What did he do to deserve a ban?

> https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Stefan_Molyneux

Stuff like:

> The Left is infested with pedophiles - they promote the welfare state and feminism in order to get protective fathers out of the home, so they have easier sexual access to the children of single mothers.

> The primary purpose of feminism is to lower white birthrates.

You can have freedom of speech, just do it on your own platform if you want to say such nonsense. Makes sense to me that a mainstream commercial platform like Youtube with normal community guidelines wouldn't allow this stuff.

I mean, there's some de facto holocaust apologetics in there, some stuff about arabs being too low IQ to accept the US bringing democracy through invasion, some stuff about the 2008 financial crisis being caused by minorities having too low an IQ etc etc. It's all pretty sad. Not everyone deserves a platform with extremely-cheap infrastructure to reach hundreds of millions of people like on Youtube with a message like this, easily ban-worthy if you ask me.

There's a problem here that is too rarely discussed:

When we do finally achieve substantial decentralized agency for ideas and media, which cannot be censored, it will be tainted in its roots by the fact that these jackasses are the people who will flock to it first.

How can we build a censorship-resistant society where the most creative, peaceful, unifying ideas are the basis of our dialogue?

i think the problem is, some types of groups/ideologies work very well over social media (accusatory messages, memes, rumors, conspiracies) while others that are more thoughtful dont seem to do as well, because they take patience and time to go through

so, in an "open market" it becomes harder to shut down bad ideas with "open debate" (which i would argue we need a way to do, now more than ever)

i think until there is some way to do this in a general way - some kind of "anti-twitter" - these kinds of bannings will just keep happening because no one seems to really know how what to do otherwise...

> i think the problem is, some types of groups/ideologies work very well over social media (accusatory messages, memes, rumors, conspiracies) while others that are more thoughtful dont seem to do as well, because they take patience and time to go through

I can't help but notice that the inflammation of this kind of content dovetails nicely with the profit motive of the medium in question.

If we were able to open and audit the entirety of the algorithmic decision-making regarding what appears in users' feeds, does any of us doubt that hostilities and insecurities are amplified?

I have the same problem with my BBQ. I bought it to keep my food cold, but systematically it heats the food to the point where it becomes burned.

Just in case my attempt at analogy is not clear: on a free speech network you'll get free speech.

Maybe the analogy is more like: if you bought a BBQ to cook food, but cooked plastic trash on it for the first 10 uses.

Will you ever be able to get the plastic taste and smell off of it?

Sometimes I wonder if there are better solutions rather than bans. Banning sounds like sweeping the dirt under the rug. I am afraid haters might concentrate in underground social networks, away from the spotlights, creating a "us and them" situation.

Don't worry, the payment processors and corporate banks with federal charters simply will refuse to deal with them. They won't be able to buy services or connectivity. And then when they try to set up their own payment networks they'll be charged with trumped up KYC law infractions and put in prison.

Can't they still accept paper checks? I think banks are obligated to honor them. Groups like the KKK and the Daily Stormer have managed to stay in business.

Stefan Molyneux not to be confused with Peter Molyneux.

A year or two ago, Canadian conservative professor and YT superstar Jordan Peterson announced he was going to free conservative and "alternative content producers" from the yoke of Valley owned online media companies by creating his own, conservative media platform. What ever happened to this? Vaporware?

It appears conservative content creators knew their days were counted on advertising-financed mainstream media outlets, yet they did not prepare accordingly. Obviously there is a market for their content, what is so hard in organizing and creating their own media outlet?

He did create it, but I haven't seen anything of value on there:

https://www.thinkspot.com/

JP has also been out of the picture for the past year or so.

I think the main issue is most conservatives just aren't interested in a siloed forum; the whole point in commenting is to convince others.

Oddly /r/sino, a CCP, anti-democracy, anti-human rights subreddit that often brigades /r/hongkong is still up.

Edit: oops, this should have been a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23681872

Strange coincidence, considering what happened on reddit earlier

There is safety in numbers, they can argue that reddit did it as well (either in court or somewhere else)

It makes the 'we take our rules seriously' talk look stupid - they only took action because someone else did first

"Videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status."

Not for suggesting a group be attacked. Not "hate". For expressing an opinion on a political subject. Prohibiting that is scary. This is not a good thing, and we will probably regret it in a few years.

Trump would like to shut down criticism of himself, and has tried. Black Lives Matter might be muzzled for inciting to riot. This can backfire, badly.

"Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where ... all the children are above average."

Have twitch and YouTube also followed Reddit in allowing hate speech again majority groups?

I mean the action is coordinated but have the policies?

I don't think so, the policies are set by each social media company, but the targets of those policies are primarily determined by the SPLC and the ADL.

This makes hate speech enforcement fair and uniform across all of the major social networks, and also reduces liability for the social networks since they can point to an objective 3rd-party as the cause of the suspensions.

One hopeful thing that might come from this time of forced isolation: time and space to reflect on what is genuinely meaningful to us in the long term as individuals and as communities.

I guess internet media companies are eager to sort out bugs prior to the 2020 election campaign chaos fueled by interference from foreign political allies

Good riddance!

Yeah. By his own admission, Richard Spencer wants the creation of a white ethnostate in America [1]. A lot of debates featuring this person were going on in college campuses across the country after the 2016 election moved the Overton window enough for people like him to get an audience.

I was not born white, and there is no way I can become racially white. So from a purely self-interested point of view, I'm glad that his "robust philosophical discussions" about this topic are no longer available to Americans.

[1] https://time.com/4293564/the-billionaire-and-the-bigots/

Meanwhile, I could name serval black activists (some on YouTube) who advocate for Black separatist movements inside the US who have had no, to very little push back from these companies.

Personally I don't really mind people advocating for the creation of a state based on what they perceive as insurmountable ethnic and cultural differences. I think it would be hard to argue peaceful separatist movements have been a force for evil in the world -- quite the opposite in fact.

The only threat from separatists movement in the US -- whether that is the creation of Native American states, European States, or an African State -- would be whether the path to creating such a state is violent. So I struggle on the whole to say, no, Native Americans cannot have their own state. Likewise, if Europeans feel their culture or ethnic group is at threat then I am fine with them advocating for a peaceful separatist movement.

So youtube is going to ban gangsta rap music for the same reasons, right?

What is your aversion to rap music and how is it relevant to this case?

When has Stefan Molyneux ever promoted hate speech?

Bravo Google!

Well done :)

Meanwhile flat earth videos are okay

I mean are flat earthers really so evil that they need to be scrubbed from existence? If somebody is dumb enough to believe the earth is flat then they're surely not in any position where knowing the earth is round would be important to their job.

If anything these videos should continue to exist as a siren call for increased education funding and initiatives.

Flat earthers don't have the effect that their viewers go around shooting people.

Far-right content creators on the other hand enable terrorists like the Christchurch perpetrator.

I've seen dozens of instances of serious racial violence by blm activists recorded in the last few weeks and cheered on by thousands of YouTube videos demanding even more, surely that counts as "enabling terrorists"? Hate crimes units across the country are investigating racially motivated attacks spurring entirely from blm.

You won't see these people happily wanting a race war being banned though.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ksuhDS1SqUI

Some of the leaders are literally calling for whites to wiped out.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/blm-leader-says-whites-sub-hu...

https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/07/black-lives-matter-hy...

The fact that you don't even reference a popular youtube content creators to support your stupid argument shows its value.

Also, both last links are from a cherry-picking entertainment and blog sites, not news sites that actually have editors and the desire to check sources.

Because if the 4th branch of government doesn't report it, it didn't happen. Oddly enough, the older white woman who was shot a block from my house Friday night in a random drive-by shooting didn't get reported. The gunshot and scream must have been faked.

I don’t think you have an argument against the banning of the YouTube channel, more of a call to hypocrisy. I think these are two separate issues and you should not be conflating them.

Shooting people is already illegal. Don't be afraid of information.

"hate speech" is a made up word and neither illegal or "bad". You're applauding a rebranded social score and a secondary justice system.

I can form a trivial argument for why almost any hot-button political opinion is "hate speech", even through the most charitable definition of "advocating violence or diminishing essential human dignity".

- Pro-Life: You don't respect women's bodily autonomy, because you believe women are "less-than".

- Pro-Choice: You don't respect the fetus's right to life, because you believe pre-birth infants are "less-than".

- Pro-War: You don't respect the sacrifices of American troop or those who died on 9/11, because you believe privileged Westerners are "less-than".

- Anti-War: You don't respect the lives of civilians who die in drone strikes, because you believe Muslims are "less-than".

Lately, I've been cross-referencing the language of dehumanization with how uncontroversial it is to express an opinion that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were "necessary evils". And perhaps they were (I've heard the arguments and I'm aware of the historical complexity); yet most Americans suffer little consternation to disregard the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians, in a way that would be horrifying if it was (a) present day, and/or (b) the actions of some out-group rather than our own heroic Nazi-fighting forces.

All that said: I think it's also pretty naive to pretend that emotionally inflammatory rhetoric doesn't exist, or is inconsequential. Lately I've been thinking about a different category: while "hate speech" is shunned in most corners of polite society, our moral tribes largely tolerate (if not encourage) "fear speech": "[Trump / Antifa] is coming to get you". Each side's fear exacerbates the other in a positive feedback loop, akin to the Cycle of Violence.

The necessary evils bit is probably a way to relieve our cognitive dissonance. Anyways, do you have evidence to support your fear and hatred cycle, as well as its prevalence in western society?

> "hate speech" is a made up word

Most words and phrases were made up, at some point. "Hate speech" still has a coherent meaning.

> and neither illegal

Nobody said it was illegal. YouTube is free to ban content creators that haven't broken the law. You agree to those terms when you use the site.

> or "bad"

I understand that the phrase "hate speech" confuses you. But these content creators openly advocate white supremacism. If you don't think that is "bad" I think you should take a deep look inward.

> You're applauding

Yes.

> a rebranded social score

No. YouTube is not assigning a "social score" - they are refusing to pay web hosting fees for racists. That has no effect on any other aspect of these people's lives - their ability to find jobs, make friends, start businesses, etc. is unaffected.

> and a secondary justice system

The comparison of YouTube consequences to the justice system is laughable. YouTube is saying "host your content elsewhere, there are lots of options." The justice system hands down things like forced confinement and the death penalty. There is really no comparison.

Welcome to Soviet Union this time DR ven by capitalism and profits.

It's about time.

Hmm this comes on the same day as Reddit Purge... I wonder if there was some Coordination there.

Some AG's might want to look in that for for their Anti-Trust Investigations

Have a look at that to understand what's going on and where this madness is heading :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1340&v=2vyBLCqyU...

Since these threads often turn out the same way once they get popular enough (assuming they don't get flagged first), a while ago I wrote a comment[0] which can help sum up some arguments from "both sides" of the debate over Internet censorship, and I hope it's useful to those who would otherwise repeat a discussion that's been had many times before in these comment sections.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23136757

You are free to speak and exercise your freedom of speech no one really disputes that. You are not, however, anywhere guaranteed or granted the liberty to a platform for your dialog. That is the problem that we are encountering today, people are thinking that there are attacks to freedom of speech and confusing that with the freedom of an establishment to defend their property from damages. I think we can all agree that art is a medium for free speech but if you graffiti private property without the permission of the owner of said property than the owner of that property has the right to remove the graffiti. Likewise the operator of a website has the same right to remove content they may consider damaging to the value of their property. The only thing that the first amendment provides you with is freedom from prosecution by the government for statements you make. It does not preserve the right to defame, demean, or slander others or their property or to damage the property in a way contrary to the desires of the owner of that property. No one is stopping you though from making your own platform to spread your own message. Although it is also the right of those you may purchase services from to terminate those services if they feel that it devalues their property. For instance if a dns provider decides that website is offensive it is their prerogative to terminate services as a private owner. Same with any content provider, isp, hosting service or social media website. No where in the law does anything grant you an unlimited ability to say anything you want in a private forum and any private forum is entitled to moderating the content on its properties. I wish people would stop conflating free speech as some sort of absolute. It is not. The only case where a platform must provide services outside of the strictest sense of an intended audience is in through US Code Titles that may be applicable by law such ADA accessibilities (these codes are of course regional and may not apply outside the region in which that service is provided).

Edit: Free speech absolutists, isn't down-voting my comment moderation? Ironic. How about just replying instead. I'm willing to engage in debate.

EditEdit: I'm trying to reply to everything as quickly as I can but HN is telling me I'm posting to fast.

> The only case where a platform must provide services outside of the strictest sense of an intended audience is in through US Code Titles that may be applicable by law such ADA accessibilities (these codes are of course regional and may not apply outside the region in which that service is provided).

So we're going to start see ADA accommodations for white supremacists claiming they're mentally handicapped and therefore shouldn't be censored?

While I'm willing to engage in debate I don't see reductio ad absurdum as a valid argument.

SCOTUS uses it regularly to create inventive decisions that defy common sense.

Is it absurd chromium browsers to have a blacklist of hate sites to which it refuses to connect? It is google driven project. Private property.

So yes - if you claim that you are lead by consistent rule based framework - finding the most extreme edge case makes sense (not saying that it makes good policy though)

But declaring the digital monopolists as public fora is a good idea. California already does it with the private property of the malls. The public discourse is where the people are. No one should be forced to listen to you, but if person A wants to hear what person B wants to say - the platform C should have no right to interfere, just because they are medium.

If you are platform - you should be dumb pipe should be valid on all levels of the osi model.

>>The only thing that the first amendment provides you with is freedom from prosecution by the government for statements you make

I agreed with you until this point. You seem to make the common miskate many "but it is private company" people make.

Free Speech is not limited to the 1st amendment. The concept of Free Expression exist outside of the US Constitution

If society does not have respect for Free Expression (and clearly we no longer do) then the constitution can not protect that. The law, and the constitution is simply a reflection of society, at some point if society demands it the 1st amendment will be modified or abolished

This is why intrusions on the concept in wider society also should be opposed not simply only opposing legal intrusions on speech

For YT and other "platforms" the issue is the fact they market themselves as open to everyone, open to all speech, open to all ideas. Even if in 6pt font in legalese they give them selves the authority to suppress any speech they dislike

This IMO is a Deceptive Business practice, if nothing else. YT should have Clearly define, very objected rules around content that are CLEARLY displayed that every reasonable person should be able to understand, and when content is banned they should point to the exact rule that was violated in the suppression notification

Finally one can disagree with YT censorship with out demanding the law come in to stop them. I am generally not in favor of government intervention in YT, I am in favor of Sec 230 Reform (or rather abolishment) and I am in favor of people speaking out agaist YT Censorship. but I would not want some kind content regulation by the government

>>>The only thing that the first amendment provides you with is freedom from prosecution by the government for statements you make

>I agreed with you until this point. You seem to make the common miskate many "but it is private company" people make.

Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, 484 U.S. 260 (1988).

Would disagree with your statement https://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/educational-a...

I am not sure why you believe that case refutes my statements in any way.

Clearly you did not read my statement at all. My entire post is about the different between Free Speech (a concept) and the 1st amendment (the law)

Sorry its taken me so long to reply because everyone has been downvoting me for having an opinion HN says I am posting too fast even after 2 hours of waiting...

Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, 484 U.S. 260 (1988) basically states the first amendment did not protect the students from printing articles in the school newspaper over the objections of the school administration.

> Clearly you did not read my statement at all. My entire post is about the different between Free Speech (a concept) and the 1st amendment (the law)

You said you agreed with everything I said up to this point: The only thing that the first amendment provides you with is freedom from prosecution by the government for statements you make.

The facts are that what I said is indisputably correct. You can disagree with it all you like but that doesn't mean that I am wrong. I get that you trying to say that even if there is not a grant by law that companies should enforce free expression. I am saying that no where is that guaranteed or granted. Additionally you stated:

>For YT and other "platforms" the issue is the fact they market themselves as open to everyone

If you read the terms and services or the community guidelines you can clearly see how absurd that argument is.

To argue that a platform cannot moderate its own content is to say that the owner of that platform does not have the right to its own freedom of speech. The platform as an entity run by its owners also have the right to free expression and it is their right to moderate content that is contrary to the messages then intend to promote. Furthermore, I believe it makes sense to state that the freedom of the platform to curate its message through moderation supersedes the rights of those users of the platform to use it to make statements.

>>Sorry its taken me so long to reply because everyone has been downvoting me for having an opinion HN says I am posting too fast even after 2 hours of waiting...

Yes rating limiting here is annoying and counter productive. I have been rate limited many times.

However it is ironic that a person advocating for censorship is complaining about that. That is what you want right?

>You said you agreed with everything I said up to this point: The only thing that the first amendment provides you with is freedom from prosecution by the government for statements you make.

Ahh I see you misunderstood what I was disagreeing about. That was not to imply you were legally incorrect. No the disagreement was conflating the clear free expression issue and censorship issue with the US 1st Amendment

YT actions are censorship even if they are allowed by law. 1st amendment protect people in the US from censorship by government

Censorship supporters like yourself often point to the 1st amendment as the only protection for free expression. The US Constitution is solely about creating a government and then limiting that government, it holds no power or authority outside of the that context nor should it

This is why I disagree that the 1st amendment should even be mentioned in the context of private censorship. It is a red herring and a straw-man

People that advocate for upholding the ideals of free expression in private contexts normally do not use 1st amendment law as the foundation. Free Expression ideals predate this document and were added because the population at large demanded their right to speak

This is what I want to see a return of, the public demanding corporations uphold free expression as a virtue

Instead we see cancel culture mobs demanding platforms create a safe space where their opinions, statements, and belief are beyond criticism (provided you are in a member of a protected group) because any criticism must be on its face an ism or phobic

as Jonathan Haidt coined this is safetyism – the idea that people are weak and should be protected, rather than exposed, to challenges.

I am firm believer in confronting "bad speech" with "good speech" not simply exiling bad speech off the public square, or in this case large mainstream platforms.

> However it is ironic that a person advocating for censorship is complaining about that. That is what you want right?

No, I do not advocate censorship, I advocate that the freedom of expression of the owner of a venue supersedes the expression of those who use that venue and that it is the right of the owner to moderate the content of his venue so as to not appear to advocate the messages of those users of that venue to express messages that the owner may consider detrimental to the operation of his venue.

Here is an analogy, let's say I operate a concert hall. In addition to hosting musicians and the occasional art exhibit I will occasionally host political rallies for those willing to pay the fees. As a venue operator I don't have a selection bias favoring any party as long as the guests will pay the charges to use my venue. All they need to do is sign my contract that was written up by the lawyer to protect my assets. One day a request is made to rent out my venue. Under the false pretense of a political rally it turns out that its actually a white supremacist speaker spreading a message I do not endorse. As an operator of that venue do I not have a right that supersedes the rights of the those who intend to spread a message of hate to cancel the contract they signed that says I can terminate the relationship at will? I don't want to be seen as advocating that message. Do I not have the right to my own freedom of expression as the operator of my own property? Does the owner not have the right to dissent by termination?

This is not censorship it is content moderation. There is a difference. The problem here is not the owner exercising his free speech as the operator of a venue to decline the use of his platform to spread hate speech. The problem is those who insist that universal toleration should be enforced regardless of the message or the wishes of the owner of any given platform. I have the legal right to terminate service of anyone who would use my venue to spread a message contrary to my intended audience or that violates my personal creed. That too is freedom of speech. That is why I bring up Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, 484 U.S. 260 (1988) as it shows that as an owner of a venue I am entitled to my freedom of expression and that my rights as the operator are not superseded by the users of my venue. If I don't want to advocate a message it is my right to dissent by not providing a platform to a message I don't agree with.

Universal toleration becomes questionable when its rationale no longer prevails, when tolerance is administered to manipulated and indoctrinated individuals who parrot, as their own, the opinion of their masters, for whom heteronomy has become autonomy.

-Herbert Marcuse

"For whom heteronomy has become autonomy." Isn't that the what many of these people are getting deplatformed for? What is closer to heteronomy than white supremacy?

> Free Speech is not limited to the 1st amendment. The concept of Free Expression exist outside of the US Constitution

In other words, neither protected nor guaranteed?

> This IMO is a Deceptive Business practice, if nothing else. YT should have Clearly define, very objected rules around content that are CLEARLY displayed that every reasonable person should be able to understand, and when content is banned they should point to the exact rule that was violated in the suppression notification

Is this not clearly defined enough for you? If not, howso?

https://www.youtube.com/about/policies/#community-guidelines

I have an easy answer to that: Youtube has more users than there are people in US. If you had a service that was used by whole of US, shouldn't that be public?

Imagine there was a single food stall in the entire US. Should you allow food stall which is really controlled by a few share holders and executives at the top to decide whom to feed or not?

Again, the problem is not huge platforms banning toxic people. It's that only a minority has a final say on who gets censored. That's not me, that's not you and many of the hners here.

Edit: I am not saying this in defense of people in the post. I think they are terrible people. I think we can't help some of them but we should help whoever we can by offering rehabilitation and therapy. Many of the viewers of those channels and conspiracy theories need help. Censoring them without lending help to them in any way to improve them always backfires.

> It's that only a minority has a final say on who gets censored.

Not passing judgement either way, just asking: are there any circumstances or platforms in which this ISN'T true?

Somebody would open a competing grocery.

Likewise, racist and bigots can build their own internet platform.

Competition seems to get shut down whenever this happens.

That's a confusing answer to what I said. I am not defending anyone in the post here but just yesterday, visa banned gab's CEO and his family. Now you need to build a payment processor which is not possible for any individual to do so. To how deep you want to go here?

Put your own cables in the sea?

I wrote out a long response and only then starting researching Gab. So instead of my own words, here are some excerpts from their terms of service. If you don't like the counterarguments you're encountering here, you should consider that Gab feels the same way:

> if you don't like what we're doing on Gab.com or simply want to manage your own experience, you can spin up your own Gab Social server that you control

> We have the right to disable any user name, password, or other identifier, whether chosen by you or provided by us, at any time if we believe you have violated any provision of these Terms of Service.

> You agree not to use the Website... To engage in any other conduct which, as determined by us, may result in the physical harm or offline harassment of the Company, individual users of the Website or any other person (e.g. “doxing”), or expose them to liability

> the Company reserves the right to take any action with respect to any User Contribution that we deem necessary or appropriate in our sole discretion

> User Contributions must NOT...be obscene...

And of course all the usual legalese like indemnification and arbitration.

AFAICT, the only difference between Gab and Twitter is that Gab has orders of magnitude less users, and if they ever reached the usership levels of Twitter/Facebook/Reddit I have no doubt they would behave in ways they currently enjoy denouncing. I think they just want to have their cake and eat it, too.

edit: grammar, again haha

> If you don't like the counterarguments you're encountering here, you should consider that Gab feels the same way

I am genuinely curious why you are trying to divert my initial point into a different direction here. I gave an example of gabe to illustrate that there needs to be some hard point for private companies to be responsible or adhere strictly to the legality or public. Visa isn't a small private business that is refusing to work with you. They are a global monopoly. If your argument is there are more competitors, it doesn't matter if they all collude with each like master card does with visa to keep competitors off or does something to restrict people.

I don't mean to divert. Allow me to try to summarize:

You: Gab can't use Visa (A) for reasons, it's not reasonable to suggest that (B) a competitor be built

Gab: we can kick you off (A') for reasons, you can always spin up a Gab instance to run yourself (B')

What is the difference between A and A', and B and B'?

I already explained that. Building an alternative to gab isn't hard. Building alternatives to visa is a bar beyond average people or group of them. I can spin up an instance of mastodon within few minutes. I can't do the same for visa. I can't do the same for google cloud, cloudflare or any of the other monoliths.

This isn't applicable to all the situations but it is one of the factor differentiating gab from visa.

Another is the reach. If gab has the same number of users as youtube, then they should have something to let the public have a choice in what happens on the platform. I don't know where to define the user scale though. it's a hard problem. At 1 billion? Maybe when 90% of the country uses it?

not the same poster, but I think the point they were making had to do with the criticality of services and availability of alternatives?

Should the only grocery store in a town be able to refuse service to an individual that they don't like? It is unlikely a single individual is in a position to open a grocery store that can economically compete with the super-wall-mart.

How about a gas station in the middle of a desert where refusing service might literally result in death?

Instead of arguing criticality, can we reframe in terms of human rights? Political speech and life/health are generally considered basic human rights. Driving in the desert is not, so I don't see it as a valid comparison.

I find it hard to view Twitter as critical to expression of political speech, when other platforms exist... literal soapbox in a park is available, plus Gab, Facebook, mailing flyers, printing booklets, etc.

Access to food is certainly critical to ones life/health, so the government should play some role in ensuring reasonable access. However, the bar for intervention should be high. Is there no grocer at the next town over? No farmer's market? No Amazon Fresh? No ability to grow your own food? If none of those are viable options, then yes, the government likely should intervene in some way.

As noted above, driving (let alone driving in the desert) is not a basic right, so I could not in good faith argue for government intervention in the gasoline/fuel market.

What if the grocery store policy was no alistairSH, for their HN post history.

Are you prepared to compete with the wall-mart superstore?

The decision to nationalize/socialize something is always political. There is no intrinsic public aspect to anything.

If there were only one food stall in the entire US, does that mean people aren't allowed to hunt, forage or grow their own food, or trade for it from someone who does? If so, then you've got a totally different problem on your hands: regulatory capture. If not, then refusing service to a person is very far from killing them.

Edit: grammar

Not sure why you're getting down voted. HN users once again mistaking disagreement for "comment doesn't provide quality debate"

I dont think people would have flocked to these platforms if they'd known that they'd be banned for politically incorrect speech down the road.

"Civil rights isn't politics", so, speech against civil rights isn't politically incorrect.

(there's also definitely PC/P!C speech, but AFAIK that's not what's getting banned).

Thats a great trick just label anything you don't want debated a "right."

To your point, rights only exist if people in society uphold them for you. There isn't anything magical about calling something a right.

Speech can be both politically incorrect and incite flamewars or violence. At some point, public health and safety is the concern beyond politics. I think we want politically incorrect speech to have a space on Twitter so that it can be publicly challenged but it should stop short of encouraging violence like we saw in Charlottesville.

Thanks, learned from the best - the Declaration of Independence. /snark

In all seriousness, what do you view as debatable about civil rights?

i don't think people would have flocked to these platforms if they knew it'd be shared with nazis.

The principle of free speech is older than the United States government.

Yes and so are the philosophies of the extents to which freedom of expression has limits. See John Stuart Mill, Joel Feinberg, Thomas Hobbes. Not even John Locke supported universal toleration, although in his case he wanted to silence atheists. Not enough? How about Herbert Marcuse:

I believe in freedom of expression, I do not believe in or advocate, however, universal tolerance for expressions on private forums. You wish to make a statement, do so on your own. It is the right of the platform to be able to moderate such contents as posted if they desire, its their platform.

It's not about the legalities. It's about whether we have the kind of society that fights bad ideas by showing why they're wrong, or fights bad ideas by screaming and blocking them. These bans seem very much like part of a trend towards the second kind of society.

It is absolutely about legalities. Look at the complaints that are made when defending this type of content. The call it cancel culture in an attempt to victimize the aggressors as being unduly treated because of their opinion. The boycott has always been a tool to defend civility and putting your money where you're values are. Calling it 'Cancel Culture' is just a new phrase to delegitimize the right of people to stand up for civil discourse and to respond to tyranny with their wallets.

They call it "cancel culture" in an attempt to express that people are too willing to boycott nowadays. Certainly a boycott is sometimes justified, but it's a problem if people start organizing a boycott every time they hear an offensive statement.

Please give some examples of where cancel culture has taken things too far.

A Hispanic man in my state got fired 2 weeks ago, because an activist mistakenly thought he looked white and was making an OK sign.

But really, even banning people from Youtube for saying offensive things is too far. The slogan "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" used to be a powerful summary of an ideal we aspired to. Nowadays, I get the impression that most people can't even process it; I expect you'd argue that defending Molyneux's right to spread his obnoxious views means I'm approving of those views.

Not sure why people would down vote you - these are private companies we are talking about and they can do what they want I suppose. However I think the real rub here, that people seem to to have a hard time expressing, is that these platforms are blatantly hypocritical in what they allow or don't allow.

I also don't believe that society generally shares the "private companies can do what they want" point. The Hollywood Blacklist isn't considered as "okay, well, private companies", it's considered wrong.

Many people seem to agree that private companies should be allowed to do whatever they want as long as what private companies want to do is essentially what they want those companies to do. If the company actions change, so does their stance.

Probably getting down-voted because no one appears to be claiming that it is the government doing the censoring.

>Not sure why people would down vote you

Because the entire argument is a strawman that censorship advocates often use

"bruh its a private platform they can do what they want" has the implication that people are calling for the government to step in to block YT actions

No one has, people are critical of YT's policy, simply because they have a "right" to do it does not exclude them from public criticism

Saying "bruh its a private platform they can do what they want" is a pointless observation in the context of this discussion

I didn't say that private platforms can do what they want. I said private platforms have a right to moderation of content on their platform. Does that not count as freedom of expression? The ability remove content contrary to the intended audience seems like something anyone should be granted. If I host a website for children can anyone post smut? Well I just have to keep it because the poster has a right to post smut, that's their freedom and I guess I can just never violate that ever because free speech is absolute and immutable. Likewise if I host a website for sharing videos can I not moderate what content I want shown? What if I don't want people suing me because someone posted pirated videos on my site. Guess there is nothing I can do, its there and it is immutable and I can never remove it because if I did I would be violating the freedom of expression of the user that posted the content. How is that any different from delisting users that post hate speech? Of course we should delist that content if we don't want it. It's my party and I can cry if I want to.

Again you are focused on the legal argument that no one is making

Yes they have the legal ability to moderate content under current law. However that does not mean they are beyond criticism, just because they can do something does not mean the SHOULD do something, and if they do everyone has the equal right to voice their displeasure with said action

>>Does that not count as freedom of expression?

No I do not believe that moderation is "speech" that is dangerously close to the "silence is racist" mantra we are hearing in the wider society. Silence / lack of moderation is not speech, nor is it "endorsement" or anything else

Simliarly defense of the concept of free expression is not an endorsement of the speech being defended. Society it seems have lost the axiom of "I disagree with what you say but will defend your right to say it"

Today you and many others take the approach of "I disagree with what you say so I will pressure platforms to prevent you from saying it"

That is the danger in society, because before too long either you (and people that think like you) or the platforms will push for government limit speech.. As I said in another comment, the Law is simply a reflection of the society, it just takes the law awhile to catch up.

There are still enough of us that do respect free expression to hold off legal changes, but we diminish in numbers every year which to you I am sure is a good thing.

The problem is we are playing chess looking 5 moves ahead and seeing the logical conclusion, where cancel culture people (like yourself) are playing checkers and only looking 1 move ahead

I want to pressure the platforms to uphold free expression as an ideal. you want to destroy that.

> Again you are focused on the legal argument that no one is making.

It absolutely is a legal argument. Furthermore it is an argument that has been ruled on by the courts. Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, 484 U.S. 260 (1988) basically states the first amendment did not protect the students from printing articles in the school newspaper over the objections of the school administration.

That means that as the operator of a platform I as the operator am entitled to my freedom of speech and that as the operator I am allowed to moderate what I want to publish as content. That is a legal fact. Any individual or organization that advocates a message contrary to my views is not entitled to use my platform to spread their message.

It's funny how universal toleration advocates don't see that they are the ones that are quashing the free speech of the owner of a platform. Likewise it seems to me that most the universal toleration advocates also usually promote free market principals so why not the let the free market settle this? Don't like that you got deplatformed? Build your own platform. You are entitled to do that. Then on your platform you can advocate as much hate speech as you want.

> Edit: Free speech absolutists, isn't down-voting my comment moderation? Ironic. How about just replying instead. I'm willing to engage in debate.

Hey if you don't like it, build your own hacker news.

Except in this case its not moderators of the site removing my content, its just people who can't think for themselves slapping the down button on any contrary opinion while saying they support contrary opinions except the contrary opinions that they support of full of hate speech and parroted fascist dog whistles while trying to squash any semblance of reasonable discourse.

> full of hate speech and parroted fascist dog whistles

> trying to squash any semblance of reasonable discourse

pot. kettle.

The fact that you jump to "fascist dog whistles" demonstrates that you are the one doing the parroting.

Do you think liberal democracy and globalized capitalism are somehow less "evil"? Meanwhile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

I myself subscribe to deep ecology, so I see this political name-calling and spineless finger pointing as short-sighted and victim to herd mentality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_ecology

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