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Comment by stormdennis | Hacker News Reader

If you remove Holocaust denial content all you achieve is to fuel conspiracy theories. It's completely counter-productive.

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Yeah I don't think so. And such an extraordinary claim requires some evidence.

To begin with, I think it's fair to say that it's doing something rather than leaving things as they are that requires evidence.

Secondly it is arrogant in the extreme to believe that you are critical enough to see deniers for what they are but others must be protected from having to form a reasoned opinion.

I don't have specific evidence but banning things, in general, is counter-productive. It drives the activity underground. Examples include prohibition and narcotics in general.

In the case of Holocaust denial it also suggests a lack of confidence by the establishment, that they fear that the deniers have a plausible case. I, like most people have seen mountains of evidence showing that the Holocaust did happen. All bar a few cranks and simpletons having taken the trouble to look at both sides would surely come to the conclusion that the Holocaust did happen and see the promoters of denial for what they are.

Denying people the opportunity to hear the deniers' case promotes the suggestion that there is a conspiracy concealing the truth from the public.

For instance:

"[W]e recently banned anti-Semitic stereotypes about the collective power of Jews that often depicts them running the world or its major institutions." – Mark Zuckerberg (CEO) & Sheryl Sandberg (COO) of Facebook

Look, I point out the above primarily in jest. (There is irony there, no?) But the other point that I'm making is the above will not be missed by conspiracy theorists.

You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see the dangers of monopolistic corporations controlling speech online. Sure, in this case, nobody can sanely argue with the reasoning, but on the other hand, the last eight years have shown how real the slippery slope "fallacy" actually is.

Although that position may feel correct, do you have any actual data?

It's been shown that deplatforming and moving those nuts out of the mainstream social media channels reduce their influence. There was holocaust denier before Faceook, but their reach was much more limited. Remember that Facebook promotes groups and suggest you content that you're not following, so when holocaust deniers are part of the platform, some people with no exposure to the concept might start getting recommendations to follow this content. Banning it prevents it. They can scream on their small social network that reach 200 people but that won't convince millions of people of joining the movement.

Weird how the true evidence based comment is downvoted here. Regardless of your ideological priors the evidence we have shows deplatforming works to limit dis info spread. I have yet to hear an argument about why we should not deplatform holocaust deniers.

What evidence? There are no references in your post or the post you're replying to.

> It's been shown that deplatforming and moving those nuts out of the mainstream social media channels reduce their influence.

Would you mind linking to the studies you have in mind? In thinking about the likes of The_Donald and its current, banished form.

I got curious about it's current, banished form because I'd missed that bit of the story. It's about what I'd expect except they have a non-CCDA compliant cookie notice with no opt-out. Makes me wonder if that's because they have amateur web devs or if the management didn't want to include it because California and politics.

I also notice that if you search on that community there are lots of references to it on Twitter, Wikipedia, and other places.

It's also been shown repeatedly that censorship has harmful unintended effects. For some reason Facebook saw fit to write a post about this, thereby letting lots of people know about the very speech they're trying to remove. The Streisand effect is already at work.

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