Hacker News Reader

Comment by controversy | Hacker News Reader

Don't prohibit speech. That's it. Repugnance is part of life. If you suppress speech, you only push it underground. Light is the best disinfectant. Daryl Davis, a black musician, attends Klan rallies (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORp3q1Oaezw). By knowing who to speak with, he's helped people out of that racist pit.

I extend speech so far to include calls to violence. Then you know who to watch and who to protect. Hiding this does nothing but make intel harder to get. You can't try to prevent radicalization, because you've pushed it so far out of the light, it might as well be a mole. They'll still eat the roots of your modern democracy, but you'll be surprised.

View on HN

Honestly I think this just doesn't work out this way in reality. First of all, we know that deplatforming racists/fascists does actually help to stop the spread of racist/fascist ideas.

Secondly, and I think this is the more salient point, encountering racist/sexist/transphobic/whatever speech as a person who is the target of such rhetoric is immediately harmful and othering, especially when these views aren't actively challenged or disavowed by society. This doesn't even include the possibility that hearing hate speech might trigger some prior trauma experienced because of one's identity.

By taking this stance, you're implicitly advocating the allowance of direct threats to other people's very existence, under the justitification that everyone will be better off that way because it's all out in the open. To me, that just sounds like you don't really understand the impact that hate speech can have on a person's ability to live with the same freedoms and opportunities that other members of society enjoy.

Example: You have a job interview downtown, but you're black and the Klan has a parade scheduled that day, and you're scared of the calls for violence. You don't make the interview, so you obviously don't get the job. You were denied the opportunity to because of the 'free speech' of others.

I for one would like to see more focus on Freedom of Association alongside Freedom of Speech in discussions like these - you can argue whatever you like, but nobody has to listen to you or give you a platform (and if you're a fascist, they shouldn't, and should be actively deplatforming you because your ideas are so awful/dangerous).

My response is that everyone should carry. If the Klan goes nuts, the Klan gets shot. Eventually the system will react an equilibrium.

I agree with your freedom of association. My only note would be that removing people from the means of financial transactions is the same as limiting speech.

I tend to prefer solutions to social problems where no one gets shot.

As do I. The fact of the matter is that the cops average 11 minutes to respond in good areas. They take longer in high crime areas. Further, we've seen that the cops are generally bad people. So leave policing to the average person.

If the Klan attacks people, they can freely be shot. If the Klan parades around in their sheets, meh.

Carrying doesn't prevent anyone from getting shot. And there were plenty of instances in the US where the Klan attacked blacks with few repercussions.

Vengeance doesn’t bring back the dead.

The prisoner’s dilemma has the equilibrium of defect-defect.

If racists regularly shoot ethnic minorities, that means members of those minorities have good reason to shoot first in preemptive self-defence; there will inevitably be errors, and then the ethnic group the racists belong to will do the same, and suddenly you have a literal race war.

Likewise for any other distinction that people fight over besides race.

First of all, we know that deplatforming racists/fascists does actually help to stop the spread of racist/fascist ideas.

How do we know that? Has a study been done? Are there surveys that track it over time?

Racists beliefs have decreased over the past 50 years. I haven't seen any evidence it's spiked since the advent of the internet.

More visible? Sure. But more visible doesn't mean more people hold those beliefs.

By induction - repeated exposure to ideas increases their staying power in the mind - see advertising.

If one accepts the premise that fascist ideas spread by exposure, then one way to limit their spread is to limit said exposure.

Sidenote: I'm increasingly frustrated with this increase in veneration of scientific studies, as if studies are the only way or even the best way of attaining or approximating truth. I would like to see more acceptance of lived experience as admissible evidence in matters of debate.

> First of all, we know that deplatforming racists/fascists does actually help to stop the spread of racist/fascist ideas.

People often claim this but there doesn't seem to be any real evidence of it. You get a short-term effect because the target has to regroup, but then they move to a platform with no moderating influences and become even more radicalized. See Voat.

> Secondly, and I think this is the more salient point, encountering racist/sexist/transphobic/whatever speech as a person who is the target of such rhetoric is immediately harmful and othering, especially when these views aren't actively challenged or disavowed by society. This doesn't even include the possibility that hearing hate speech might trigger some prior trauma experienced because of one's identity.

Your theory is directly contrary to various clinical treatments for anxiety (e.g. exposure therapy) which are altogether more healthy and sustainable -- learning to accept that other people disagree with you and have contrary opinions is a much more robust solution than embracing fragility and trying to nerf the world.

Inoculating the population to fascist rhetoric by publicly winning the debate against it with reasoned argument removes its power. Refusing to do so makes it stronger, because then when people are exposed to it, they are more vulnerable having never learned how to defend themselves against it.

> Example: You have a job interview downtown, but you're black and the Klan has a parade scheduled that day, and you're scared of the calls for violence.

You are trying to make a case against speech by making an argument against violence. If the Klan commits violence they should be arrested. If they are deterred from violence by the real threat of arrest then there is no reason to fear going to your job interview no matter what they say.

> Your theory is directly contrary to various clinical treatments for anxiety (e.g. exposure therapy) which are altogether more healthy and sustainable

Reading slurs online isn't exposure therapy. Exposure therapy consists of controlled situations and counseling led by licensed therapists. No therapist would suggest that their clients should expose themselves to abusive and toxic environments as "exposure therapy".

Please don't cherry pick techniques you don't understand from fields you aren't familiar with to support your opinions.

The purpose of exposure therapy is to desensitize the patient to the stimulus, rather than wishing against all evidence that the stimulus would never be encountered, so that when they do encounter it in the world, it doesn't trigger them. The argument isn't that hate speech is exposure therapy, it's that the likes of exposure therapy are a better solution than censorship to prevent people from being harmed by contemptible third party speech.

I've had exposure therapy and seen it at work with others. This talking point really pisses me off. The "likes of exposure therapy" are not exposure therapy. Exposing yourself to something traumatic or distressing (and I mean "distressing" in a mental health sense) is a very tricky thing. Going overboard can have serious consequences. This is why it's done very deliberately, or even with supervision. Randomly encountering triggering content while going about your day is what it's supposed to prepare you for, but it's sure as hell not how it's done.

Please stop spreading mental health disinformation.

You're misreading what I wrote. Here it is again:

> The argument isn't that hate speech is exposure therapy, it's that the likes of exposure therapy are a better solution than censorship to prevent people from being harmed by contemptible third party speech.

The point is, people who are being triggered by third party speech should go get exposure therapy, from a professional, or "the likes of exposure therapy" -- some other treatment -- so that they are prepared for the world, instead of insisting on constraining the world to be only what they're prepared for -- which isn't even possible because the set of ideas different people find distressing are different.

Suppose I'm triggered by the imposition of censorship.

> See Voat.

The retreat to Voat was highly detrimental to the fascists because it massively hindered recruitment, the most effective form of which was to have moderator control of large subreddits not explicitly about politics, but saturated with far-right memes / "ironic" jokes, to slowly normalise and inculcate those ideas in people who are originally just there out of interest in some hobby. In contrast, very few people go to Voat who aren't already true believers. It's a much greater leap than from one subreddit to another.

> learning to accept that other people disagree with you and have contrary opinions is a much more robust solution

If there are people who believe in a Jewish conspiracy to destroy the white race through miscegenation, and they advocate for violent resistance in response, then "learning to accept" that is not in any way a solution.

> Inoculating the population to fascist rhetoric by publicly winning the debate against it with reasoned argument

Two points: (a) the overwhelming majority of political content consists of arguments presented without rebuttal. In the case of far-right content, it almost entirely consists of arguments against straw men, citing pseudoscience, deceitful abuse of statistics, and grandiose appeals to emotion. You can consume countless hours of content without actually encountering a genuine debate.

(b) Have you ever watched a debate between a fascist and a non-fascist? Even in response to comprehensive dismantling of their ideas, fascists remain completely insensible to facts (they can always fall back on "fake Jewish science") or reason. Some small fraction of viewers may be convinced by the debates, but the mere fact of something having been cogently debunked does very little overall.

> In contrast, very few people go to Voat who aren't already true believers.

That's exactly the problem. It creates a space where there is nothing but fascist propaganda so that anyone who ends up there gets trapped in an extremist bubble where nobody who could bring the back to reality ever goes to rescue them.

Meanwhile if you want to give them a recruitment tool, start censoring anything even slightly right of center so that moderates start looking for a platform that doesn't.

Which plays right into their stupid conspiracy theory narrative because now they have real instances of censorship they can point to in claiming the "truth" they're telling you is being suppressed.

> If there are people who believe in a Jewish conspiracy to destroy the white race through miscegenation, and they advocate for violent resistance in response, then "learning to accept" that is not in any way a solution.

Violence isn't speech. Violence is illegal.

If somebody wants to argue that you shouldn't marry outside of your "race" because of some ridiculous Jewish conspiracy, make the argument why they're wrong. If they commit an act of violence, put them in jail.

> the overwhelming majority of political content consists of arguments presented without rebuttal

It's a discussion forum. The rebuttal is you posting a rebuttal. There are more of you than there are of the fascists, right? Because otherwise we've already got a bit of a problem, democracy-wise.

> Have you ever watched a debate between a fascist and a non-fascist? Even in response to comprehensive dismantling of their ideas, fascists remain completely insensible to facts (they can always fall back on "fake Jewish science") or reason. Some small fraction of viewers may be convinced by the debates, but the mere fact of something having been cogently debunked does very little overall.

You're not expected to convince the zealot. You're expected to convince the audience why the zealot is a zealot. Appeals to "Jewish science" and the like are how they lose the audience, because the only people who are going to buy that are the other zealots.

Having the debate does very much overall, because it's how we got to the point where most people aren't fascists. The fascists are the ones whose ideas aren't strong enough to stand without censoring the opposition. When your position can stand up to scrutiny you don't need to censor the opposition.

Why do you talk so much about these abstract problems while neglecting the real ones? Black people get shot every day and it's not by the KKK or the police, it's by other black people. They are the real danger, not some parade with slogans. Other blacks is the major violence problem facing blacks in America today and has been for many decades but nobody seems to care. Blacks and Hispanics shooting members of their own groups accounts for most of America's excess shootings compared to other high gun ownership countries. But it doesn't fit well with your political ideology so you ignore it.

A more realistic version of your job interview example is that it's in a rival gang occupied part of town. KKK isn't shooting blacks but black gang members are. Facebook doesn't seem to be able to stop that.

No, I'm pretty sure the cops are murdering black people.

Your analysis is sorely lacking in context for <i>why</i> black communities have higher rates of crime (hint: it's systemic racism, namely poverty and overpolicing).

What about spam? Scams? Child porn? Doxxing? People's very personal data? A bounty to hurt a specific person, with included address and identifying information?

There's always an exception. Some amount of moderation is always necessary, and naturally there will always be gray area cases.

> What about spam?

Spam filtering isn't censorship because the recipient doesn't want to receive it. Censorship is removing access to material the recipient would otherwise choose to view.

> Scams? Child porn? Doxxing? People's very personal data? A bounty to hurt a specific person, with included address and identifying information?

All of these things have illegal non-speech components (fraud, child abuse), so you can go arrest the perpetrators directly and leave the platforms out of it.

But do you leave up the porn?

Assign the copyright to the victim. Then they can make a copyright claim.

And in cases where the victim is a child (like child porn) and their guardian is involved in the abuse (which is often the case)?

Then you either wait for the child to be of age to assert copyright, and force them to confront this individually, or you wait for guardianship to unwind and hope the state or foster guardian or whatever is interested in pursuing a copyright violation on behalf of a minor.

Having the minor in the custody of the abuser is by far the more serious problem, so solve that first, and if that isn't happening fast enough, fix whatever is preventing that. Then the copyright claim solves itself -- there would be lawyers lined up in front of your door for the chance to sue child pornographers on a contingent fee basis.

> Assign the copyright to the victim. Then they can make a copyright claim.

Are you really saying that the way to deal with depictions of child-abuse is by assigning copyright to the victim and then asking the victim to deal with it judicially?

This kind of process is onerous even for regular people in non-dire situations, let alone for children who have just been a victim of sexual abuse. By asking from action coming from the child, you are advocating something that is effectively forcing them to re-live the abuse.

Imagine being rescued by the police or some other group, and then having to independently deal with lawyers in the fallout of the case just to get justice done. This is why we have prosecutors and laws for.

On top of that, it doesn't even make sense from a copyright perspective.

Not to mention how problematic copyright is in itself, and how nonsensical your suggestion is, since copyright can and is used as a much more powerful weapon for censorship, when used against criticism for example.

The current system is much better than this. Not having someone yell "fire" and cause harm, or to have propagation of child-abuse dealt without doing more harm to the child are WAY more important than having absolute freedom of harming others (or, as you call it, freedom from censorship).

To quote Joseph Welch, "At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

> This kind of process is onerous even for regular people in non-dire situations, let alone for children who have just been a victim of sexual abuse. By asking from action coming from the child, you are advocating something that is effectively forcing them to re-live the abuse.

Nonsense. Copyright is designed as a profit-generating system. All they'd have to do is deploy a third party to enforce it. There are many organizations that would love do to this work, and on top of that get paid for it out of the judgments against pedophiles. The victims wouldn't even have to be involved in the cases.

And it has the extremely useful property of creating a market incentive to bankrupt pedophiles.

> On top of that, it doesn't even make sense from a copyright perspective.

Hollywood would presumably by very interested to hear of this possibility of holding the copyright to the work of an "actor" without their consent.

> Not to mention how problematic copyright is in itself, and how nonsensical your suggestion is, since copyright can and is used as a much more powerful weapon for censorship, when used against criticism for example.

This is why fair use exists. Copyright doesn't always get that right, but now you're leveling a criticism of copyright implementation at a use case where it doesn't even apply. Pedophiles aren't distributing child pornography for the purposes of criticism.

> All they'd have to do is deploy a third party to enforce it.

Ah perfect, ambulance chasers but for child porn.

This also ignores some major issues: child porn is currently illegal to create and distribute. There are good reasons for this. Once the porn gets old enough, it enters the public domain.

Which means that there's still a potential market for it, and there's no implicit criminality of the creation, but only the distribution of such things.

> And it has the extremely useful property of creating a market incentive to bankrupt pedophiles.

So, we treat child porn the same way we treat movie or music piracy, with the major difference being that victims doesn't have as much money as RIAA and MPAA to fight the pirates, and instead of good lawyers we get ambulance chasers, as pointed by the other poster?

You honestly believe that converting something that is currently a crime into a mere copyright violation will work better at removing the incentive for distributors of child pornography?

You're also delusional if you think distributors of child-porn operate in the daylight. Individual victims (or their proxies) don't have as much power/resources as the government to seek pedophiles just for noticing them for copyrights.

The only thing your suggestion would accomplish is making child-porn de facto legal.

> This is why fair use exists. Copyright doesn't always get that right, but now you're leveling a criticism of copyright implementation at a use case where it doesn't even apply. Pedophiles aren't distributing child pornography for the purposes of criticism.

Fair use makes your idea sound even more evil. Now an abuse victim risking losing a copyright case against a photographer using child-porn for criticism, or if someone uses it in a book for demonstration purposes.

On the other hand, your post is a tremendous idea for a dystopic novel. David Bowie made an album in 1995 about a detective deciding whether or not "Art-related Crime" is art, but you took it to an even darker corner.

> All of these things have illegal non-speech components (fraud, child abuse),

Do you find slander to not fit the bill? And what about calling for a military coup to persecuted anyone they see fit?

> Do you find slander to not fit the bill?

But it's still the same thing -- what does it have to do with the platform? Go sue the actual speaker, and keep collecting damages from them as long as they keep using the platform to publish the slander.

> And what about calling for a military coup to persecuted anyone they see fit?

A military coup pretty obviously falls under a non-speech act which is itself illegal.

> But it's still the same thing -- what does it have to do with the platform?

The platform is the medium that's enabling slander. If Bolsonaro's minions were publishing their fake news and slanderous attacks on newspapers, the newspaper would also be held accountable for it's responsibility of wilfully spreading false information.

> Go sue the actual speaker

It's not an either/or thing.

Similarly, ISPs are also forced to comply with cutting access to services that violate the law.

> The platform is the medium that's enabling slander.

That's a naive take. It's like saying roads enabled accidents and thus must be demolished.

On most countries, usually the specific infriging content is ordered to be taken down, not the entire account.

Read about DMCA for example. Youtube channels have specific content taken down, not the entire channel.

> That's a naive take. It's like saying roads enabled accidents and thus must be demolished.

No, it's like saying that roads which are found to be repeatedly causing accidents should be fixed in order to allow everyone to drive safely. Which is what happens in real life.

And you seemed to have turned a blind eye to the fact that ISPs have been for decades complying with court orders to remove access to illegal content hosted and made available by them. You don't need to resort to convoluted apples-to-oranges comparisons to understand the problem and it's solution.

ISPs comply on a national level.

Facebook was demanded to comply on a worldwide level based on a national law.

That's the whole point.

> ISPs comply on a national level.

Wrong. ISPs comply at their service level. They provide a service, thus they are barred from providing it to their customers if their service violates the law.

Facebook's service is breaking the law, thus the court determined it should not. That's the point.

Actually, you're wrong. Facebook strives to comply on a national level only whenever possible.

Here's an article about it: https://www.mic.com/articles/87515/if-you-live-in-one-of-the...

Somehow you missed the fact that Facebook complied with the ruling made by Brazil's court.

https://time.com/5874695/facebook-blocks-accounts-worldwide/

Seems to me that, yet again, a service provider complies with court rulings requesting that illegal content should be taken down.

Please don't assume anyone on HN haven't read the linked article. It lowers the qualitty of discussions and is against guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Given I've quoted the article before on this thread, I can only assume you're acting in bad faith when insinuating I haven't read the article.

With that said, as the article states, Facebook temporarily complied only after the judge increased the sentence with a threat of imprisioning staff.

Facebook is paying lawyers out their own pockets to appeal as per article:

> "Given the threat of criminal liability to a local employee, at this point we see no other alternative than complying with the decision by blocking the accounts globally, while we appeal to the Supreme Court," it said.

"Don't prohibit speech. That's it. Repugnance is part of life. If you suppress speech, you only push it underground. Light is the best disinfectant."

Speech is not Light

In fact, it's usually the opposite.

Most speech is just crude opinion, and the most popular speech has nothing to do with facts.

The 'free speech' arguments are all very academic - yes, of course' freedom of thought' is important.

But the 'real dimension' is not about political conscience, or the realm of ideas.

99% of people live and breathe on 'main street' not 'intellectual street' (including most of us during our daily lives) and it's not about 'ideas' it's just about bullying, sex and harassment.

Unfettered, every anonymous group becomes dick and boob picks, at minimum.

Do you know how the Rwandan genocide was inflamed? Talk radio. The hosts with large audience would, on a daily basis talk about how the Tutsi/Hutus were 'cockroaches' and 'subhuman' and deserved to die. The level of raw hate was on another level altogether.

Then as little confrontational incidents heated up, someone flipped the switch and the radio started calling everyone to 'get out their machetes and kill the cockroaches' and so it ensued.

This was mostly not a 'war' of 'soldiers and guns' - it was like a zombie uprising, people coming out of their homes with machetes and hacking up their neighbours.

I am not advocating for restrictions on civil opinions etc. - in any reasonable situation, people ought to speak their mind, particularly in academia, in the press etc..

But 'in the commons' (even in so called advanced countries) - things could get out of hand very quickly.

What we've witnessed over the last few years with false information about vaccines, a lot of Trump tweets, QAnon, a lot of false information about protests in every direction - is just barely scratching the surface of how bad it could get.

People will believe all sorts of crazy things and the 'angrier 'it is, the easier it is to get them to believe it.

Even in the US there is a small, but still very significant part of the population that would believe almost anything that Obama or Trump tweeted. If Trump decided to tell his base that 'the 2020 elections were rigged, the Army tried a coup, and you need to storm DC with your guns' there would be people who would do it, for example. Left unfettered, some really bad things could propagate, and the most popular voices would wield incredible power.

'Peace is Hard' Obama I think said, he was talking about geopolitical things, but in the commons it's just the same.

People should be able to discuss ideas freely, we need to protect that, but most people are not interested in that.

Consider what happens when the 'fake news' thing truly takes hold, and almost everything people read is completely fabricated. 'The Clintons leave a trail of Murder' - 'Trump secretly financed Putin's rise to power' etc..

It's a legit problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com