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Comment by lappet | Hacker News Reader

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

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).

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.

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 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.

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

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.

So Al Qaeda etc would be legal in the US?

No? Militant Islamism, however, is.

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?

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