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Comment by daenz | Hacker News Reader

I don't think we're quite there yet, but it conjures up modern-day videos of people being accused of white supremacy and told that the evidence for it is the fact that they don't see it. I wish I was joking. This[0] was posted recently on one of my hyper-progressive acquaintances Instagram. Does it not have a similar level of paranoia as when people chased witches or communists?

0. https://i.imgur.com/0mzw6D8.png

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I think that's wrong in a way that's kind of subtle. It seems to equate the system being created by intentional minds with the system being an intentionally-created one. But intentional people can still be non-intentional participants in emergent phenomena.

Tweaking it brings up an important point that's made in debates here on HN about privacy, censorship, etc., in relation to developer ethics. That is, if you are an intelligent and intentional participant in building something, and you're not thinking about second-order effects, the system you're building will still have them.

The intention in making Facebook more "engaging" probably wasn't to have radicalizing isolated communities. But Facebook was intentionally developed toward more engagement, and that was the result. Ask people who worked on the project and they'll almost certainly tell you they had no intention of worsening the situation in Myanmar. But the system that led there was still intentionally created.

Not that it necessarily addresses your actual point, but regarding Facebook, engagement is the malicious intention. Claiming that Facebook developers didn't intend to spread memetic plagues, only to increase engagement, is like claiming that armed robbers didn't intend to shoot people, only to steal their money.

You say this as if "socialism" and "communism" aren't routinely deployed as scare words against everyone to the left of Mitt Romney. That paranoia is still present — it just goes unnoticed because the censorship campaign was largely successful.

This is "whataboutism." Rather than relate to validity (or invalidity) of my point, you are re-framing the argument ("You say this as if") in a way that suggests I need to defend someone else doing something else.

FWIW, I read the parent as agreeing with your overall claim, but pointing out that the situation is actually even worse than you implied. (Namely, that the communist witch hunt never really stopped, and is ongoing concurrently with the white supremacist witch hunt.)

It’s not whataboutism — I'm disputing your implication that censorship is an illiberal exception to the norm. You would have the reader believe that there is a unique and notable paranoia surrounding accusations of white supremacy, when in fact it's a fairly typical manifestation of the proud American tradition of suppressing "problematic" viewpoints.

There's not much of an equivalence between some professor saying something illiberal and the apparatus of state power doing something illiberal.

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