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Comment by typon | Hacker News Reader

Irrelevant. Most of the original users of /r/theDonald migrated theDonald.win, which became one of the top websites in the US in terms of traffic.

They're behind Cloudflare and constantly DDoSd these days it seems like it.

Moreover, they've gotten threats from their ISP that they have to delete certain posts or be shut down. (which seems scary to me)

Also, please don't judge me, I just have a morbid curiosity to see what these people are talking about and how they think.

View on HN

Same. I've long worried lurking there was going to cause more harm than it's worth (for example, by letting me inadvertently slip into extremism) but the ability to predict what happened this week so easily and warn people about it who considered going was well worth that risk.

Also I read there they are losing their SSL cert or something, so that might be how centralized, non-legal authority manages to shut them down. (Which, it probably goes without saying, should scare the shit out of anyone who cares about the principles of the free Internet.)

As in let's encrypt is going to blacklist their domain? Sounds unlikely.

It doesn't really matter. If this starts being a problem, we'll use a decentralized web of trust for SSL. It doesn't have to be centralized.

Yeah I'll admit I didn't follow it completely and didn't care enough to investigate. I'm sure it'll bubble up here if it does with more details just like when they got nuked from Reddit. Arguably sites like this one are a good way to gauge the true robustness of the Internet - given the situation this week they clearly now are in the realm of law enforcement, but up until these rather insane events to me their continued presence was an existence proof that speech on the web is still in a good place. Now if they get taken down I won't judge it too harshly against that thesis since they basically fomented a theoretical insurrection by the letter of the law, even though in practice the "coup" turns out was never a real threat given how ridiculous things went once the dog caught the car.

You didn’t need to look at those sites to predict what was going to happen.

I disagree, as someone who observed this site as well as everything else, I can tell you at least for me my prior was heavily influenced by the shift in tone, sentiment, and desperation I observed there relative to the usual din of more front-facing social media grifters.

Oh, I think that’s just a convoluted way of saying you lived in a bubble.

It was quite clear that this was going to happen. No one on my timeline is shocked at all. In fact, I’ve been complaining about these deplorables since 2013 (even before the phrase was coined).

What bubble are you referring to? Saying it was obvious now doesn't say anything about having good predictive ability. My recollection is up until about Monday, most people were asleep on this. And then around Tuesday the zeitguest was this was going to be a dumb clown show. The number of people claiming that violence was inevitable and the capitol was going to be stormed, outside of the obvious circles, was in my experience marginal.

I wasn’t trying to offend you. Everyone lives in a bubble or several.

My timeline consists mainly of 80% American minorities and 20% graduates from elite US universities (with some overlap between the two groups obviously). What about yours? No one on my timeline was surprised. And if they were, they were privileged white people (no offense just being honest when talking about Harvard/MIT grads).

These insurrectionists complained all year about wearing masks. Some of them even shot retail workers because they were so upset. How could you not see this coming?

It’s sort of hard for me to tell based on your comments. Do you live in the U.S. and where about? I could see how one would be surprised if they lived abroad and only used mainstream social media to gauge what’s going on.

But if you’ve lived in the U.S. and read any of the think pieces in mainstream newspapers or even popular Medium articles over the last 4 years, you would have likely learned about the surge in domestic terrorism committed by white supremacists. There were so many articles, especially this past year in the summer. How could you not have read any of them?

Well, I do know that those sort of articles get downvoted on HN and don’t surface to the top. I’m not sure why articles with titles like “FBI confirms a surge in domestic terrorism” aren’t important to HN. (That was sarcasm.)

I literally had a conversation with dang@ the other day about this, and he didn’t believe me.

I live in the US. The specific thing I am talking about here is a) the expectation the protest would turn violent and b) the expectation that the protestors would storm the capitol. This thread is already too deep and I'm getting a bit burned out on responding to everything here, but in general my own bubble (point taken, no offense intended) implied the former was unlikely (through the eyes of centrist Republicans) and the latter was a fever dream but never actually could manifest in reality.

Oh, I see. My bubble was well aware of how violent these people are and were going to be. I mean, they like guns. They talk about killing people all of the time. They look and sound crazy. These are the people whose ancestors (adults and children) had picnics while watching men being hanged in the early-to-mid 20th century.

And my bubble was well aware that they were going to storm the Capitol because protestors often try to get past the police barricade and the police were going to go easy on them.

Note: I wasn’t downplaying that visiting sites like the one you mentioned was helpful. I do that from time to time as well to troll them but also to get the full perspective.

> I mean, they like guns. They talk about killing people all of the time. They look and sound crazy.

Nonsense, you've built a straw man. Maybe you've been hanging around 4chan too much and assuming that a subset of swamp creatures from the low parts of the internet represent the millions of Americans who support the President, but I assure you the overwhelming majority of conservatives are nice, hard-working people.

30+ people died as a direct result of the media-condoned protests over the past summer, led by blm/antifa and associated groups. Did your bubble predict that? Do you think those killings, burnings, lootings, violent behaviors were justified? If so, why is it ok for one group to protest in such a manner, but not the other?

Shouldn't we as a society, especially including the mainstream media, have a strict and principled standard that we apply?

deleting my comment as parent seems to be uninterested in discussing an opinion that goes against their own.

dang@, where ya at?

No, your comment was just inappropriate. dang@ is the moderator.

And I don’t have discussions with delusional people. I wrote a super long reply to someone else as you clearly saw. But they weren’t talking like brainwashed people.

But if you did want to delete your comment instead of being passive aggressive, please do so.

daniel957, I deleted my comment because of YOUR passive aggressive response to whistle to the moderator. Nothing I said was threatening, harassing, or otherwise outside the scope of a discussion on a very sensitive topic in this country.

This is a public discussion platform and not a one-sided filter bubble. Many people will have different perspectives and it is indeed healthy to listen to and consider them, even if you disagree.

You made a throwaway to spout your conspiracy theories. How can we have a discussion?

which part is a conspiracy?

>Which, it probably goes without saying, should scare the shit out of anyone who cares about the principles of the free Internet.

Service-providers giving the boot to « problematic » users is as far as I know as old as the Internet.

Example?

I have about 30 examples, none of which will ever be shared on the Internet!

For example, I know that Hezbollah had problems finding an ISP back in the 90s.

When I worked at an ISP years back, if we had a DDOS attack against a customer the way we handled that was to drop all traffic incoming towards that customer's IP at our external peer level (meaning the bigger ISP we were getting most of the external Internet from). That was necessary so all of that DDOS traffic wasn't eating from the bandwidth available to all other customers that weren't being DDOS-ed. But it also meant that the DDOS-ed customer was losing all Internet access (which wasn't really much of a change considering that they were receiving a DDOS that filled all their allocated bandwidth).

Repeat customers that would get DDOS too many times (cybercafes would fall into that category often) would have to either pay more to cover for the cost of the network engineers dealing with the DDOS or get the boot.

From what I remember it's quite similar with many service providers, including hosting providers. Their TOS will allow them discretion to stop providing services to anyone that may negatively impact their business, it's not like there's any law that forces them to provide service to a customer.

Goatse

Back when I was a kid the red-headed step children of the Internet were the warez, neo-nazi, « revolutionary » (read bomb-making), spam and snuff sites. I'm probably missing a few categories. And that's just the contentious stuff. There are things that even the most zealous free speech maniacs would have a hard time convincing themselves should be allowed even a modicum of publicity. Child porn is the most blatant one.

So you're literally using banning child porn to justify banning political discussion: exactly what free speech advocates predicted when censorship hit the internet.

Plotting the overthrow of the government isn't political speech

Although more complicated than just "provider bans speech", this was an interesting case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_Technology_Center_v.....

Everything to do with warez for one, even sites that didn't directly host IP-infringing content, would very often get the boot because it's a huge hassle for hosts to deal with the amount of trouble these websites generate.

Yes and it's always been contentious, and as the Internet integrates itself more and more into our lives, the questions about which layers of the network stack ought to follow which principles are worth continually focusing on.

I've been on the Internet since 1994, and it has always been the case that if you made a sufficiently odious pest of yourself over a long enough period of time, that someone would contact your university, employer or ISP, and you would lose your account, or at least your access to Usenet.

You were always perfectly free to go find a new account elsewhere if anyone would have you. But there was always a point where if you passed far enough beyond socially acceptable behavior, your Internet provider might choose to stop doing business with you.

This was especially true in the case of harassment, attacks on network infrastructure, and criminal behavior.

Yes the "point where you passed far enough" is another way of saying there is contention, I'm not sure what your point is. If it was a zero or one state, there is no contention over it.

This is why *chan websites have gotten so popular. Being anonymous in everything you post is refreshing. Short of posting illegal content, almost anything goes.

"Refreshing" in the "great place to plan a coup" sense?

Eventually they are going to find that there's a limit to how much violence you can incite before getting slapped down, legally or otherwise.

No, anonymity is refreshing because a world where you are always on the record with your most formal identity with everything you say runs largely against the ways humans develop their worldviews: by trying on certain opinions, sorting themselves out, and participating in low stakes interactions where they can make mistakes and learn with minimal consequence.

This doesn't mean 'planning a coup' is one of these contexts, but you are focusing on a very narrow example of the broad social system impact of anonymity in online communication.

There's many reasons why I find it refreshing.

Other than anonymity, talking to people who have no incentive to karma-farm is very refreshing.

In websites like Reddit/HackerNews, the karma system gamifies posting. You "lose" if you post any wrongthink, and you "win" when you reiterate whatever is socially acceptable.

This means there are consequences to posting. In *chan websites, there is no consequence to posting your thoughts (or just trolling, because that's fun sometimes).

Are they popular ? They may be infamous, but I feel most of the brain matter has been evacuated from English-speaking boards a decade ago and they at best sustain their existing demographic.

With "Problematic" being subjective, it is indeed scary.

Problematic as in contrarian view?

It's as old as any "service" has existed, nevermind internet.

If you go into a store or cafe and start shouting at the top of your lungs, the owner is free to refuse service, kick you out and/or even ban you from ever entering their store again.

What's the difference between that store owner and an ISP?

You're free to go to any other store that will have you, and is ok with your shouting. If it turns out there are no stores ok with it, whose problem is that? Should store owners be prohibited from refusing service to anyone, no matter what their behaviour?

You can start your own store, so long as you can pay rent, have suppliers that will sell you goods, etc - but again, no one is obligated to do any of that.

(I get there's protected classes that prevent discrimination based on things like age, gender, ethnicity, etc, but that's a separate issue, and tangential to their behaviour which is what we're discussing here.)

That's not really true. The early-ish internet saw plenty of, say, communists peering with Hayek libertarians inside Exodus cages, and other such unexpected arrangements. You also had LUGs, lan parties, BBSs and IRC channels that had very diverse users, but tolerated, and even thrived on, offensive speech and trolls. The community's glue was love of the technology and the medium, with political, ethnic, or other tribal interests being anywhere from completely unimportant to secondary.

Damn near every channel on 2010 EFNet or DALNet would be deemed in violation of most of 2020's TOS. To say nothing of mid-90s EFNet. Whoo-boy, the eggdrop bots logging those channels could get probably a thousand well-known, well-respected developers and network engineers working at FAANGs today fired, if someone took the time.

Not to mention many of us would be quick to identify the people in the logs as fucking crazy people, only to realize we're reading words written by our teenage selves.

> Which, it probably goes without saying, should scare the shit out of anyone who cares about the principles of the free Internet

Big tech companies are largely left-leaning internally (which isn't surprising since California is the most left leaning state), so there is nothing to fear as long as you lean left yourself, (i.e. I guarantee you won't be censored for left-leaning speech any time soon).

That is definitely not true

It is definitely true. There are hundreds if not thousands of right-leaning voices that have been silenced on left-leaning platforms like YT, Insta, Twit, & FB.

I’ve yet to see a single right-leaning voice that was silenced for being right-leaning. Without exception, every one I’ve seen silenced was for calling for violence, using ethnic slurs, or otherwise violating the site’s ToS. It seems possible to me, even likely, that if more right-leaning accounts are being banned then it’s because more of them are breaking the rules.

Also, I find the idea of classifying FB as left-leaning to be laughable.

> otherwise violating the site’s ToS

Your list was pretty narrow in scope until this one. ToS could contain anything and be used to censor speech for any reason.

Because I respect the rights of private property, I have to allow social media sites to post rules at the entrance explaining what you’re allowed to do. As long as they enforce those rules evenly, then you know what you’re signing up for when you register an account.

I’ve not heard any legitimate, evidence-backed claim that any of the major sites are enforcing their rules unfairly. Instead, the claims are usually along the lines of:

“I got banned for saying we should do violent stuff! And yet they allow this other ideologically opposite person to have an account!”

“Can you point to a specific post where the other person is saying we should be violent?”

“No, but everyone knows they support it!”

Well, “everyone knows” isn’t evidence.

Would you respect the right of a restaurant to kick out a black family? After all, it's private property.

Suppose it's a white family but they're wearing MAGA hats and the restaurant denies them service. That's nearly acceptable among a broad swath of the population today.

Now suppose it's your mom wearing a MAGA hat (you may not like that she wears one but it's her right, no?) and she gets denied service in a Starbucks. Maybe someone gets violent with her and knocks the hat off her head. Maybe the server spits in her coffee. All of which has happened. Are you still comfortable with "private property"?

Suppose you wander into a restaurant wearing a "Biden-Harris" T-shirt and they say "Get out!" Are you okay with that?

I could keep going, but you get the picture. We can't have a "freedom for me, not for thee" attitude. It has to be universal.

In every one of those cases, I support the nonviolent person. But still, we were talking about social media, not the physical world. None of that addresses whether the right is more or less likely to break the ToSes of social media sites.

"definitely"? Even if true, how do you know either way?

Well, it depends on who's the One True Left. Most TERFy folks also identify as left wing and structure their arguments around historically progressive concepts like anti-essentialist conceptions of gender, but they're already kind of on the chopping block.

We need a name for this, when USA conservatives are so sheltered from political thought that they can't tell the Left from the Centre-Right. Lots of leftist stuff has been censored in 2020, yet one repeatedly encounters this blissfully ignorant sentiment.

https://twitter.com/sunraysunray/status/1320078487970041856

In practice, those big firms are more tiptoeing around right wing then around left wing.

Also in practice, there is way bigger outcry over right wing reedits being banned then left wing reddits. Each time reddit banns a bunch of subs, there is discussion about right wings ones - including on HN. Nobody cares about left wing subs being banned, that discussion never appears.

For the record, I am fine with both left and right reddits being banned right now. But I have yet to see free speech advocates to fret about toxic leftist and feminist places being closed.

>free Internet

A private company choosing who to allow on their platform? Seems like the freedom to me. And in the absence of any government action against these domestic terrorists (they have been planning exactly this violence for weeks), it's great to see private companies step in and take action.

You're oversimplifying this as well as constructing a strawman argument which implies it's a simple issue. It's not. You are on Hacker News, do you think people here are think that the framing you make is objectively the singular one that has any moral standing?

What a fantastic rant

The private companies would very much like to allow them, as they pay their bills and are a big customer. They are choosing not to allow them because they are being strong armed by a part of the political establishment that considers the spread of the information this websites want to share as dangerous for the country or its citizens.

So yeah, there's some government action against this domestic terrorists and it's resulting in private companies banning their websites.

You can agree with the action or not, I think it's a good idea to have infrastructure in place that thwarts the spread of dangerous misinformation, but that shouldn't be censorship. It should be easy to access education and mental healthcare to help people be strong against misinformation on their own and without the long arm of the law having to babysit them.

> A private company choosing who to allow on their platform? Seems like the freedom to me.

I wonder when people stopped thinking. By the same argument, should they be allowed to block all black people?

As reprehensible as it is, legally they absolutely are. Remember how country clubs didn't / still don't allow woman, african americans or jews? Common carriers (stores, hotels, etc) are treated differently, and is very much debated. (ie can a bakery deny service based on sexual preference.)

>can a bakery deny service based on sexual preference.

It is a little more nuanced than that. Bakeries were not denying anybody based on sexual orientation.

If a gay man went to get a straight wedding cake, a non-wedding cake, or a wedding cake for a gay wedding that did not have anything to indicate it was for a gay wedding the bakers would not have denied them.

Your first sentence implies I am speaking with a time traveler who doesn't realize they just fell out of their time machine 50 years in the future :) It is definitely not legal to bar people from your business based upon race.

> domestic terrorists

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that you don't have a lot of exposure to terrorism. A bunch of idiots breaking into the Capitol and… mostly wandering around taking selfies? Not really very effective terrorists. It was a stupid, pointless move, and illegal — but a long, long way short of terrorism, except possibly on the very fringes of some three-letter organization's idiosyncratic definition.

I think you can stretch the definition of terrorism to meet them (the congress was evacuated in fear, it influenced political events) but the lesson of 2001- is that any dilution of the term of terrorism is no free lunch, and we ought to understand what will happen if we endorse our leaders treating something as terrorism vs another form of illegal act.

That's an excellent expression of my concern. Also, people who agree with some but not all of the ideas held by "right-wing terrorists" suddenly become terrorist sympathizers, and their friends "associate with known terrorists and terrorist sympathizers". Imagine the context you've heard those phrases in on the news, and what you thought was okay when it happened to those people.

Yes, given this and the actual reality of the situation, I take the stance that we ought to respond to claims of terrorism around this (by our leaders, not individuals) with ridicule and derision, despite any merit, given how dangerous it would be to allow this to be treated by the authorities as a moral justification for a domestic War on Terror.

> mostly wandering around taking selfie

And the ones not taking selfies were running around with zip ties and IEDs. Just because some of them were idiots, doesn't mean they all were.

Edit: how do you think these "idiots" got in? https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=20m04s&v=cJOgGsC0G9U

Is there proof they had actual IEDs? Zip ties are bad, but they're not in the same universe as IEDs. If they had IEDs I'd be way more open to the idea of characterizing this as terrorism, and all that comes with it.

Edit: It sounds like the cops say they found IEDs. I'll be following that closely to update my view on the proper response to this.

Edit2: Actually the report is that the IEDs were not found at the Capitol or as part of that but near the RNC and DNC offices elsewhere, and a pipe bomb was found in a car. So there is no evidence that the people who entered the capitol were carrying bombs. The specifics in this case matter.

> Which, it probably goes without saying, should scare the shit out of anyone who cares about the principles of the free Internet.

I worry more about Google et. al. killing the free and open internet by creating centralized walled gardens. I worry more about legislative attacks on encryption, about the overzealous use of copyright law and the sorry state of intellectual property generally.

If service providers want to deplatform centers of radicalization, I think that's ok.

I worry about all of that as well, but the problem with your last point is you are opening the door for network providers to be the arbiters of what is considered radicalization or not. They shouldn't be the decider of that, our laws should. If the FBI tells them to shut something down with a legal order, and our society has concluded it is just, so be it.

In the limit what you would get is a world where speech is basically under the influence of people who, for all intents and purposes, are operating infrastructure services the whole world runs on.

Those downvoting me I guess feel they trust the arbitrary CEOs of a few large corporations to never deem their actions online of worthy of being censored. Just because you want to live in that world doesn't mean I ought to accept it.

Eh, curation and moderation is a valuable service that many are willing to pay for.

The issue isn't that service providers are arbiters, the problem is that there are so few service providers that one can meaningfully choose from due in large part to the difficulty of taking one's social network along with you.

If service providers had federated communication then it would be a different story.

I agree with you, my argued solution to most of the problems surrounding the Internet is regulation which will create emergent conditions to incentivize decentralization. The design of the Internet got us about 90% of what we needed, but we need our government to close the final 10% of the gap to realize the full benefits of the thesis of the Internet, much like anti-trust laws are a pre-requisite to realize maximal benefits from capitalism. (Not getting into an argument about that here, it's just an analogy in this very narrow sense of regulation leading to outsized benefits.)

What sort of regulation would you like to see?

I've heard folks suggest making it criminal to share or sell user data, for instance, which would be the death of freemium services.

I haven't thought much about the lower level network stacks but I think social media platforms of a certain size ought to have certain legal requirements to do things that incentivize interoperability or allow competing platforms to emerge (perhaps non-commercial ones.) Primarily things around APIs and data formats.

So a regulatory body that would enforce secure, private, and open sharing of user data between services at the user's behest? Sounds good to me.

Yep pretty much. If you support this, you should know that if this ever gets legs despite its surface level appeal you will see a lot of people not supporting it, because it's exactly the kind of thing that led to Cambridge Analytica. So that'll be a good time to truly ask yourself which side of this tradeoff is the one you want to make.

The big historical problem with this approach isn't "the arbitrary CEOs of a few large corporations" making unfair decisions (not to say that this couldn't be a problem now or in future). It's that governments (both good and bad) have pressured those companies behind closed doors to censor content governments don't like but which they haven't (or can't) go to the trouble of making illegal. This creates a huge accountability gap - these are government decisions in reality but can't be challenged in the same way they could be if out in the open.

Yes my argument isn't one based upon history so much as a recognition that the stable state of our society seems to be destined to terminate in one where most human communication is mediated by the Internet not physical space. So whatever power structures, incentives, and ethics we lay down now are likely to echo far into the future, if not forever.

>If service providers want to deplatform centers of radicalization, I think that's ok.

The fact that there is widespread support, let alone demand, for subjective, unaccountable censorship is frightening. You don't understand this, "war on domestic terror" will include legislative attacks on encryption? That bad actors always use, create and amplify perceived crisis to expand their power and permanently erode our rights? You can be certain that when the center of radicalization in Washington DC decides to whip up another war that will kill a million people, they won't be "deplatformed" (as opposed to those "radicals" who will oppose that war, who most certainly will).

There was this blogpost a while back which I can't seem to find, suggesting that the division is between:

* people who view democracy as a set of values, and if you do not share those values then you are against democracy.

* people who view democracy as the democratic principles (voting, representation, freedom of assembly, and so on)...

In my world (I belong to the second group) democracy is freedom of speech, the exchange of ideas, and coming face to face with values and opinions that you do not agree with (in fact you may find them abhorrent), and thinking that that's the whole point.

I found it an enlightening take on the situation, and thought that I'd share it here.

I agree with your position with one caveat. The people in the former category view democracy not merely as a set of values, but as a set of -their- values. If you do not share their values, then you are against democracy. Ironically this is diametrically opposed to the core concept of democracy - its much more like theology. Adopt their dogma, conform to their orthodoxy, or you are an infidel.

> If service providers want to deplatform centers of radicalization, I think that's ok.

The thing is: left-wing radicalization is tolerated by the platforms, but right-wing radicalization isn't.

The day the bulk of far-left idealists advocate violence and racism, they won't be tolerated either.

Indeed. On reddit, r/chapotraphouse was also deleted a while back because it was (AFAIU) a casual tankie forum that didn't mind calling for violence, or at least insinuating it

The bulk of the right wing doesn't, either. Your bubble is showing. If the right wing weren't so frequently excised from the public sphere, it might be easier for you to see the saner parts of it — but the private censorship we've been seeing cuts with a blunt scalpel. I think it's better to expose the worst of it to public contempt, rather than isolate them and let them fester together.

> The bulk of the right wing doesn't

Look at the parent I responded to. This is a question of extremes, not mere left/right spheres. The far right / alt-right is fascist, racist and violent by definition: that's what makes them far-right. No one said being a conservative is violent.

I think that's a tendentious and not particularly useful definition of far-right. But you're right that in context, your statement makes more sense.

Offer a more useful one if an obvious one comes to mind. Because the common denominator among banned far-right communities on popular forums has been the aforementioned characteristics.

The right wing is all over the public sphere. I have a pretty good idea of what they're saying and supporting despite having a lot of the usual suspects blocked on Twitter. I have no idea what you think the "saner" part is, but the saner part is no longer in control.

> The day the bulk of far-left idealists advocate violence and racism

You mean everyday?

If the projection makes you feel better. Groups are removed on the basis of that behavior, not where they lean. You'll never show an example suggesting otherwise.

Not remotely true. /r/ChapoTrapHouse was banned a while back too. If anything, they target the left more.

As an excuse for banning T_D and a bunch of other right leaning subs at the same time, and then blatantly ignored ban-evading r/ChapoTrapHouse2 for months. When they finally took them down for ban evasion, it was an excuse to ban another giant wave of right wing subs.

  EDIT: Original claim is left intact for posterity, but it is definitely wrong and I misremembered.

Reddit has its moderation oddities but claiming they target the left more is bordering on silly. r/WatchRedditDie is a great catalog of politically biased moderation.

No, it was the other way around. T_D was already dead. The mods had already locked it and moved to thedonald.win. Banning it was meaningless, they just did it to make the /r/chapotraphouse ban look more fair.

Here's a list of subs banned that day with active user counts:

https://www.redditstatic.com/banned-subreddits-june-2020.txt

Chapo was the largest by a large margin besides /r/darkhumorandmemes (edgy jokes).

And you are just straight up lying about /r/chapotraphouse2. It was banned the same day, as was /r/chapotraphouse3 through /r/chapotraphouse49.

I must have misremembered. They were flagrantly violating some rule for months, and the million variants of the sub name were part of it. But you misremember too. T_D had not been "locked", unless you're talking about the quarantine in which case you make it sound like the same people that did it as moved to thedonald.win. Meanwhile r/ConsumeProduct and r/GenderCritical were huge losses, with no actual rule violations to cause them, aside from a few AHS brigades.

No, people weren't allowed to post submissions there. That's what I mean by locked. I guess I should say "restricted mode" instead. From wikipedia:

"On February 26, 2020, Reddit administrators removed a number of r/The_Donald moderators "that were approving, stickying, and generally supporting content in this subreddit that breaks [Reddit's] content policy" and called the remaining moderators to choose new ones from a list of Reddit-approved individuals. About the same time, Reddit placed r/The_Donald in "Restricted mode", removing the ability to create new posts from most of its users. Since then, some users of the subreddit had moved to theDonald.win, a separate site based on Reddit's old user interface."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald

From Heavy:

https://heavy.com/news/2020/06/the-donald-subreddit-moved-to...

Reddit admins did the same to Chapo before it was banned too. They replaced a bunch of their mods, chapo just kept going though, with some new rules and stricter moderation to try and stay unbanned.

So, what I said then. You were making it sound like the same people jumped ship as implemented those policies, and in fact they were the opposite sides. And restricted mode isn't locking; everyone can still comment, there's just a whitelist of who can make new top level posts.

Interestingly, I have seen Twitter thread from months ago predicting exactly what happened. Like, literally long time ago.

How did it let you slip into extremism?

Memes are mind viruses and a robust immune system built from exposure and defeating of them is a good protection from the bad ones, but a good way to prevent being infected by a mind virus is to just never enter places where most people are already infected.

Repeated exposure to things you know to be false or to bad arguments has been shown many times to shift your beliefs towards those false beliefs. It effectively wears your mind's defenses down. This 'repeat a lie enough and it becomes the truth' idea is a Trump specialty: 'Crooked Hillary', the wall, voter fraud, etc. Re: extermism, the far right's arguments are bad but if you're not actively exposed to counterarguments/lived experience it's easy to fall prey to such bombastic arguments that cities are crime ridden shitholes, BLM burned down everything, urban voting is rife with fraud, etc (not to mention even more harmful dehumanizing memes about minorities that further ingrain negative sterotypes). They offer a facile, comforting (to white suburbanites) view of the complex, often unsatisfying world that is easy to lower your defenses to.

Indeed. Repetition of phrases, images, or ideas - regardless of their truth - is the basis of propaganda and brainwashing.

Yep, I totally agree. I've always said that you can prove anything if you ignore enough facts. Law of Propaganda Design.

Just throw out anything that doesn't fit your narrative and keep your message on repeat and your audience will fall captive eventually since most are not open to doing their own fact-checking.

These website clearly radicalize some people. I too lurk from time to time on thedonald.win and far-right subreddits, you can see that over there reality is completely distorted, calls to violence are constant and they just feed off each other's insecurities, fears and hate.

Nothing good comes out of these places, regardless of where in the political spectrum you position yourself (except maybe downright fascists). Look at what happened at the Capitol, did he further the right's agenda? Of course not, if anything it put them in a much more awkward situation.

Reddit admins are enablers and they share a part of the blame. Remember how subreddits like /r/jailbait and /r/creepshots were allowed on the website for months, if not years (among many others I can't be bother to remember, including some extremely explicitly racist ones)?

Then it's always the same thing, some news outlet or politician talks publicly about how Reddit hosts fascists/pedos/racists or something like that and within two days you have bans and a heartfelt post by the admins saying how they felt that it was their duty to do something and "think of the children" and all kinds of bullshit.

Reddit is 4chan wearing a tie to try to look more business friendly.

These subreddits and websites don't host free speech, they host hate speech. I have zero issue drawing a line in the sand here. "First they came for the fascists, and I said nothing because I'm not a fascist, and the world was a better place. The end."

You claim "nothing good comes out of these places" - that's a strong claim to make. Here's my argument: having this stuff out in the open does have benefits.

Most people lurk. Lurking these sites has a lot of benefits despite the risk of being drawn into radicalization:

- It allows you to truly understand the motives of these kinds of people, and predict what they will do.

- Understanding these motives allows you to address root causes that lead to this extremism. For every radical who storms the capitol, there are a thousand people who have slightly watered down but directionally parallel beliefs. This is good to understand so you can contribute to finding solutions to any justifiable grievances motivating their higher order beliefs (some won't be justified, some will), to help pull them in the other direction.

- Seeing this stuff full-on and not heard about through second hand accounts demystifies it. There are people like yourself who look at this, get a sense of revulsion from it, and then that both hardens their mind away from it and also motivates them to counteract it when they see people in their own lives starting to echo similar sentiments. If you don't truly grok the mental models these people have, you lack the prerequisites needed to disarm any version of them in the minds of people you care about. This isn't a sure thing, but anyone who doesn't will have no effect.

There may be benefits, but the harm - real and potential - dwarf anything you've listed.

That's not an argument, it's a claim. And it also is shifting the goalpost from the original post, but you're not the same person so that seems fair.

Say the investigation of the recent riots and deaths discovers that people connected and planned on the sites you are talking about. Would that move you from your current position? It seems like it would take what I've said from a claim to a simple description of reality.

If you're sufficiently motivated by the prospect of disarming an insane conspiracy theory in the minds of someone you care about to actually want to read and understand it, you [i] can certainly seek it out on obscure cult websites without seeing it recommended in your favourite social media feed and [ii] are potentially better off getting it second hand complete with rebuttals.

The people with slightly watered down but directionally parallel beliefs certainly exist in huge numbers, but they're the reason why such places are so harmful; they're much easier to radicalize than deradicalize, and they're the ones getting the content recommended to them or being swept along by the enthusiasm other people who share some of their views seem to have for it. And it'd actually be easier to understand their justifiable grievances if they weren't encouraged to connect them to pizza parlours or Jews.

> inadvertently slip into extremism

Hate when that happens..

It's happening on pretty much all sides simultaneously. Most people believe that escalation is a means to an end. It's not, resolution is made through mutual understanding and not vilification.

I'm not preaching tolerance here, but the more you understand your opponent the more you approach the inevitable conclusion: people are creatures of convenience, rarely going out of their own way for the sake of concepts like good or evil. If you want to change the way people act, the only way to really do it is to change what is convenient for them. Or to take certain conveniences away.

I loved it actually. Its was invigorating—like a cold shower. But this was years ago when I was in my 20s.

I don't go on 4chan anymore (or any social media outside HN [1]) and have mellowed out but it gave me the courage to call BS from either "side".

My theory is that 4chan hasn't become more extreme in the last 10 years. It's that "judgment-zones" like twitter and reddit have caused everyone else to become softer.

[1]: I'm serious, I didn't know about any stuff happening in the capitol until I saw it on HN.

Thinking you are not susceptible to becoming radicalized just shows you are basically at the kindergarten level of understanding how such radicalization works. Those least susceptible to radicalization are those who fear it for themselves the most, since they understand their innate flaws as human beings and their susceptibility to it. Nobody is immune to it, and the mass radicalization of normally good people over these past 4 years ought to be evidence enough that ignorance about the danger is widespread. (Everyone thinks they are not susceptible to it and only other people are - the people who say that I believe the most are the ones who have gone to hell and returned to tell the tale.)

> for example, by letting me inadvertently slip into extremism

You are right to worry - I remember reading an article about (FB?) moderators on anti-vaxxer pages finding themselves inadvertently internalizing that worldview, despite previously consciously not believing in it. The human mind appears to absorb information after repeated exposure, despite any conscious efforts not too - I assume it's similar to how the placebo effect works even when the person "knows" it's a placebo.

You’re not required to have an SSL cert behind cloudflare anyway, CF provides the cert the browser sees. You then put a self-signed cert on your origin and CF will accept it.

If you wonder why they are threatened consider parler and the things people post there.

Please forgive the language it is verbatim and I think threats of violence are more offensive than bad words.

> You had better be ready partriots! It is go time very soon. We must attack all central communications to big cities are democratic cities. Fiber optics telecom bridges supply routes we can starve those motherfuckers to death. The people are ready it is time.

>We got to give it until Monday but after that partriots we must take the fight to them, make that rally look small. Load your magazines gather your things it's time to go and take out the sorry bastards.

While we worry about the very legitimate question of what the limits of free speech are and how we ought not to create a situation where anyone serves as the gate keeper they are planning to kill us and install an autocracy.

The people screaming "Free Speech" are well aware of the content and viewpoints espoused by sites like Parler and T_D. The fact of the matter is that they are supportive of people being killed and white supremacist autocracy being installed.

I don't know what "T_D" is, but Parler doesn't "espouse" anything. It was founded as an alternative to the social media companies that are de-platforming right wing voices. That doesn't mean more than a tiny percentage on Parler are "supportive of people being killed". Actually I'd like to see some examples - have not yet seen anyone there advocate for violence. Parler actually does remove such postings so if you see something, report it.

T_D === /r/The_Donald. It's since migrated to thedonald dot win; however vile the content, one of the virtues of the censorship-resistant open web is that we're able to keep tabs on what they're discussing. They were extremely unsubtle regarding their plans for the 6th; if anything, we're lucky that it didn't result in even more violence.

I agree, that it's unfair to (a-priori) castigate free-speech-absolutist platforms; there are good-faith, civil-libertarian reasons for them to exist. Nonetheless, they inherently act as a moth-flame to specifically those people that are banned from more mainstream platforms; after all, what motivation would non-controversial communities have to migrate? I absolutely the right of such platforms to exist, but from Voat, to Gab, to now Parler, in practice they quickly skew towards conspiracies and "hate speech" and the like.

I consider SSC's heterodox "Culture War Thread" [0] to be the canonical case study in this pattern: "It's very easy to remove spam, bots, racial slurs, low-effort trolls, and abuse... But once you remove all those things, you're left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that's the scariest thing of all."

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread...

Ah, okay, thedonald.win. I have read some of their stuff and I didn't see anything "vile", nor did I see anyone calling for violence, but I haven't read the site in the last few weeks.

I will agree that "Voat" is a nasty place, but I'm not comfortable with shutting them down either, or cutting them off from pay processors and certificate authorities. This kind of game tends to come back and bite one in the ass. It's the old "First they came for xxx and I said nothing".

I recommend digging back into TD.W posts from the 4th and 5th; while most content wouldn't pass a strict test of an explicit threat, their clear intent was not to protest or express dissent, but to prevent vote certification from taking place, along with the usual invectives about "helicopter rides" and "Day of the Rope", etc.

The line is very tricky, as to what constitutes colorful metaphor, vs. explicit calls to violence. (My favorite satire on this dilemma: https://youtu.be/eg3_kUaYFJA) Regardless, the emotional energy and goals of that community on Jan 6th was extremely clear: to alter the due process of law by threat of force.

All that said, I'm quasi-absolutist on free speech issues, for the slippery-slope reasons you describe. Free speech doesn't end at 1A: it's a cultural value as well. Yet, it's also a tall order to enforce that value proactively: if a newspaper is not obligated to print every letter, should Twitter be obligated to let everyone have an account? There's a good argument for a "digital commons", and regulating tech giants as utilities; but the balance between an individual's freedom to share offensive views, and the freedom of service providers to choose to whom they offer service, is extremely murky.

> It was founded as an alternative to the social media companies that are de-platforming right wing voices.

"de-platforming right wing voices" is such a bad faith interpretation of what's happening and I'm getting really frustrated that the right continues to pretend they're being censored.

You can have different opinions on plenty of political issues. Taxes, healthcare, abortion, gun rights, military spending, education spending, etc. Arguing in favor of low taxes, eliminating funding for public healthcare, banning abortion, etc. will not get you de-platformed.

What gets you removed is racism, bigotry, and inciting violence. Of course, nobody thinks they're racist. Even Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer denies being racist.

> "the things people post there"

You mean, the things a tiny handful of people post there. Most posters are center-right and don't advocate violence.

I would also note that there's been plenty of talk of violence against conservatives on left-leaning platforms, Twitter especially but many others. These people are never called out even if they talk about "rounding them up and putting them in camps" and similar Nazi-like talk, even killing them seems to be permissible. I've reported lots of such tweets and sometimes they're taken down, other times, not.

> You mean, the things a tiny handful of people post there. Most posters are center-right and don't advocate violence.

Do they also condemn or apply moderation to violence being advocated? Or is it condoned? Honest question, I have not even remotely invested enough time (nor do I plan to do so) to understand this facet.

> I've reported lots of such tweets and sometimes they're taken down, other times, not.

I agree that such messages should be taken down and condemned just the same.

I'm saying that violence is not condoned on the Parler platform. I was a moderator for a while and this is quite specific. You can get on there and say Trump is an idiot or Trump is a saint and you will not be silenced. But you can't say "so-and-so should be killed" that's a total violation of TOS and will get you removed from the site.

I'm not familiar with Parler, but places like that in general, people just find the closest of threat / incite that passes moderation. And everyone who frequents there knows what is implied.

My personal "favorite" of such: "this country is not safe for you". Not a threat, just stating a fact.

Are you actually on Parler? It doesn't take 100% support for the actual malicious act think of it like a funnel.

Say 45% support their party

70% believes in the lie that the election was stolen

20% believes that violence is warranted

10% is willing to do violence.

Start with a population of over 330M and you get over 2 million insurgents.

Peace requires those funnel steps to be way smaller.

I am of the potentially unpopular mindset that we need to get our hands dirty to preserve our freedoms from these people. Worrying about being a gatekeeper when these people gladly, and openly, threaten our peace and lives is ridiculous.

Let's shut them down, shut them out and generally rebuke them. History shows that higher order ideals generally need to be preserved with actions when words have failed, and make no mistake we are past words with these folks.

I agree but there are 300 million in the US. The actual insurrectionists are like... 200 people? Maybe 2,000?

Shutting down anyone talking pro trump in the whole country will have downsides, and just make them more angry. Prohibition isn't an answer that will work.

Hopefully sending all of the insurrectionists to jail will help.

I made this likening to the situation the otherday.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Hall_Putsch

"Maybe 2,000" was a precursor event to the rise of Nazi germany.

There are actually more like tens of millions of people who support replacing our democracy with autocracy on the basis that they believe we are stealing their country from them.

A tolerant society should tolerate everything but intolerance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Your anecdote is irrelevant, You can find all kinds of deranged behaviour on any platform.

Speaking of gatekeepers, however, I wonder, how soon Google and Apple will boot Parler from their AppStores?

Called it:

"BREAKING: Apple is currently threatening to ban Parler -- the free speech alternative to Twitter -- unless the service enacts draconian censorship policies demanded by left-wing Big Tech oligarchs, according to two sources familiar with Apple's threats."

[1]: https://twitter.com/seanmdav/status/1347660160806825984

That's the danger in going to such lengths to shut down disagreeable viewpoints. People say "make your own website", but that becomes a race to the bottom when we start politicizing server hosts and ISPs. When you completely shut people up, that doesn't mean they're gone, and now you don't know what they're thinking. Meanwhile you're actually tyrannical because a monopoly on information makes the mass 80% believe that everyone thinks like the MSM, which isn't true, then everyone is surprised when it turns out there's lots of people who don't support the establishment.

What other options do you have if you can't educate or have intellectual discourse with people who are fabricating reality or deeply believe in conspiracy theories? It's like trying to pull someone out of a cult like Scientology.

Of course, attempt to engage to improve the situation and help someone obtain ground truth on their own from legitimate information sources, but when it's obviously hopeless insulate yourself against those who could harm and move forward. You don't have to support the establishment, but you also don't have the right to violence because you feel slighted.

What I would prefer is removing moderators, aggressively fighting bots, and putting reasonably neutral parties in the moderation position.

The second part of that is hard/expensive, but it is a path forwards to some level of discourse between the people using these subreddits and everyone else. Driving these communities to different sites means that people get in much stronger filter bubbles, that's probably not a good thing.

To take the example of /r/conservative on reddit right now, the subreddit currently bans anyone who says anything at all critical of Trump, and mostly only let's people who have a history of saying supportive things talk. That's not good for reddit, or the country as a whole. But if reddit just removed the current batch of moderators and those rules, and had someone enforce some reasonable standards of discourse but not enforce politics, I think it could turn into a force for good.

To put it in your own terms, my preferred solution is to try and make it possible to "have intellectual discourse with people who are fabricating reality or deeply believe in conspiracy theories", instead of just making it so those people go fabricate their reality elsewhere.

A problem that has demonstrability arisen with even neutral moderation is that, no matter the moderation criteria, a vocal subset of those who are affected by that moderation will still complain loudly about being censored. This applies even to moderators removing death threats and calls to violence. There are many examples of complaints that doing so is censorship even though it is hard to make a good faith argument against the justifications for removing such posts.

"Don't let perfect be the enemy of good"?

I'm not claiming this is a perfect solution, I'm sure you're right there would be complaints, and I'm also sure that no perfect solution exist. It's just not that easy to deradicalize people, and it's just not that easy to deal with people actively attempting to deceive and radicalize the public. I do think it would probably be a superior solution to what is being done right now, where there are even more complaints, and you get increasingly "strong" filter bubbles.

The problem is not just that the people deciding what gets edited/blocked could, at some point in the future, be Nazis or Stalinists or whatever - bad people censoring the good to make their propaganda be the only thing that's heard. That's bad, but the real problem is this: You can be wrong. You can be wrong when you're absolutely sure that you're right, and you can be wrong on things that really matter. Be very careful about blocking "wrong" viewpoints, because you can be wrong about what's "wrong".

Note well: I am not at all saying that Trump supporters are right. I am saying that you are not omniscient enough to be qualified to decide what should be blocked. Nobody is.

> if you can't educate or have intellectual discourse with people who are fabricating reality or deeply believe in conspiracy theories

Why do you want to go to great lengths and "educate" people on your point of view?

Because otherwise they will try to overturn elections and install one party state.

Or because their opinions leads them to construct bombs or shoot people.

This is a textbook example of a straw man.

How is it strawman? Those are actual real world actions people commited, because of their opinions.

Not even month ago. Ignoring yesterday, there was plan and attempt to execute Mitchigan governor last few months. There was Nashville boombing, likely due to whatever conspiracy theory that man believed.

Even Elliot Rodger had opinions largely from incels chans.

Let me use another scenario. 1969, Brazil. Members of a revolutionary group kidnapped the US Ambassador. After that, and a few other incidents, the government used the same argument you presented to review and approve contents of newspapers, magazines, radio shows, movies and correspondence.

Do you believe it is OK to do this, in order to disrupt their planning? Do you believe it becomes not-OK if the target of domestic terror is a tyrannical government?

The very same situation has happened across all of South America throughout the 20th Century.

[1]: https://www.insidehook.com/article/history/kidnapped-why-an-...

You asked following: "Why do you want to go to great lengths and "educate" people on your point of view?"

The only strawman in this thread is the one made by you in the comment I am responding to now.

How is it a strawman, it literally just happened a few days ago.

They may be referring to the first statement, which in my experience doesn't seem true. I've never heard conservatives, Republicans, or Trump supporters argue for a one party state. That may be my failing, however.

What do you think it means when you lose an election, and then try to disrupt the democratic process with the goal of having the loser of the election retain power?

> I've never heard conservatives, Republicans, or Trump supporters argue for a one party state.

Trump praised China for paving the way to make Xi Jinping's presidency permanent

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trump-china/trump-praises...

> “He’s now president for life, president for life. And he’s great,” Trump said, according to audio of excerpts of Trump’s remarks at a closed-door fundraiser in Florida aired by CNN. “And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday,” Trump said to cheers and applause from supporters.

Which IMO implies support for a one-party state.

> "Or because their opinions leads them to construct bombs or shoot people."

Who exactly is "they"? Anyone who disagrees with you? Anyone who votes for a Republican candidate? Trump supporters? Some subset of Trump supporters who say the election was fraudulent? What about Trump supporters who say the election MAY have been fraudulent -- do they also get silenced?

This is a slippery slope. You either have freedom of speech, or you don't. Muzzling people who have ideas you consider dangerous has a way of blowing back in your face; in fact it almost guarantees violence, when people feel they are not allowed to vent.

They are people who put bomb in RNC and brought one to capitol a day before yeasterday. They includes nashville bomber and whoever organized Mitchigan terrorist plot.

They are also proud boys starting fights. It is not like US would have shortage of organized political violence lately. It is pretty easy to find "they".

Your evidence is quite flimsy.

The Nashville bomber was one guy committing suicide and he even warned in advance.

The Michigan kidnapping plot was about 5-6 idiots who did not represent some kind of farflung organization.

The Proud Boys have not started fights, to my knowledge. They have marched peacefully down the street holding U.S. flags and the like, and been violently attacked by antifa elements. They show up at left wing/antifa demonstrations but don't attack; they fight back when provoked. They've been demonized by left wing news as "white supremacists" ironically even though their leader is a black guy.

So when you say "it is pretty easy to find 'they'", you need to support that statement. It's pretty easy to make stuff up, too, and I believe a lot of people are being censored on the basis of hearsay and madeup nonsense.

The people who literally stormed the capital earlier this week, some of whom brought equipment like zipties with the intention of kidnapping/hostage taking. Those specific people who we all literally just saw doing the thing on basically every TV Channel while some of them literally livestreamed themselves doing it. This is in no way ambiguous at all.

Facts. We're talking about educating on facts, not fiction or subjection positions.

Which facts? Could you elaborate?

There is no proof of material voting fraud or irregularities, for example. If you believe otherwise, you are fabricating a reality. If you communicate these lies to others, you are contributing to a disinformation campaign.

> There is no proof of material voting fraud or irregularities

And is there proof that there wasn't fraud? Does the burden of proof fall upon them or the government?

Um you can't prove something didn't happen .... when in fact it didn't happen. How is this not common sense. It's not suddenly fraud when the worse president in American history loses an election.

> Um you can't prove something didn't happen .... when in fact it didn't happen.

I think you can, to a certain degree. For example: by making the mail-in system more trustworthy, or by eliminating it.

My country (Chile) only uses on-site voting and no one alleges fraud because we know that it would be incredibly hard to steal an election with this system. The system is transparent, votes are counted publicly the same day of the voting.

The electoral service is one of the few public institutions that I deem competent and actually trust in my country, and I think I'm not alone.

To be honest, now politicians are trying to impose mail-in ballot system, but that not the electoral service's fault. That's idiot politicians trying to ruin something that works.

This idea of massive voter fraud isn't something that had entered the conversation until it was used as an imaginary defense for someone who has been unable to accept any loss or defeat or even apologize for any mistake he has made. (He also used it when he won, of course. But it is a unique construction that has been manifested into being by him.)

This is a man who, in what any normal person, could admit was a mistake when tweeting about a hurricane having effects in Alabama. Instead he doubled down, tripled down, forced federal employees to make statements that he was right. He even drew sharpie on a map to extend the prediction cone because it didn't show what he said.

There is a clear pattern of behavior here.

Additionally, those who are alleging massive voter fraud in public did not make those statements in court, because it would have actual consequences. Every state certified their results, including those with republican leadership.

So you either have to buy in to extraordinary claims of all kinds of (in many cases provably false) of voter fraud and a massive apparatus (Deep State) working against Donald Trump or accept the much more obvious and plain result.

If you listen to the call with Georgia, when the Secretary of State pointed out that they had investigated several of the claims, Trump's response was that the investigators were either incompetent or actively working against him.

It goes beyond the pale.

As always, it falls on the entity making the claims. See Russel’s Teapot for more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

To me it seems that the real core problem is that people believe in their own imaginary realities that are in disagreement with what's considered to be objective facts (let's keep solipsism aside please), and not the speech (ability to communicate ideas) itself.

I mean... why is it that if someone tells me that Sun rises in the west virtually everyone just ignores this as an obvious nonsense, but when someone says... a more nuanced but nonetheless proven-false controversy (I'd intentionally refrain from any examples - even the ones that were already provided - to avoid even a possibility debating any of those), some don't outright dismiss it.

Maybe I'm a weirdo, and maybe it's simply not possible with humans - but I still hope for a society where (argh, okay, let's invoke Godwin's Law) the next Hitler won't happen not because of some speech laws but because simply no one would listen to the lunacies seriously.

That's not up to you. Real intellectual discourse isn't your way or the highway. You, like anyone else, has the potential to be wrong, and you're probably wrong a lot more than you think you are. If your arguments don't sway people, that's neither your failing nor the failing of those you are trying to convince. When you censor people, that only emboldens them, and proves to everyone that yes, there are people who want to censor discourse.

Yes, you are inherently fighting in support of the establishment if you are censoring ideas that the establishment doesn't support. You can't have it both ways.

Violence is one thing, but you're also lumping in violence with conspiracy theories, which in turn constructs its own form of orthodoxy. This is why I don't support censorship to such a degree that it invades the public space; all it does is promote a religion of some kind, whether it be Christianity or "the science is settled". By the way, violence only ever seems bad when it goes against your sensibilities. If violence supported your world view, statistically speaking, you are likely to justify it. America was founded on violence, and lots of people throughout the political spectrum believe that the violence was justified. If you build a system that is so technologically perfect that it extinguishes violence from the public space, then you have created a system of slavery.

Let's stop pretending that we're against violence and admit that we're against violence of certain agendas.

> If you build a system that is so technologically perfect that it extinguishes violence from the public space, then you have created a system of slavery.

I intuitively get the point you are trying to make (sovereignty, "government has a monopoly on violence," yadda yadda), but I don't think it reflects the real, both contemporary and historical, systems of slavery.

Chattel slavery in the antebellum South's relied on extrajudicial violence. International sex trafficking is inherently violent. Modern slavery most often occurs in areas with widespread, violent conflict. Why should we be worried about "benevolent AI overlords" going rogue when historically civilizations with high percentages of unfree people were extremely violent?

> Why should we be worried about "benevolent AI overlords" going rogue when historically civilizations with high percentages of unfree people were extremely violent?

I think you're making a false comparison. There's at least 2 different kinds of unfree regimes, the first being monarchies and dictatorships that use force in a top-down manner to control their subjects, and the second being the system of mind control which enslaves people by feeding them simulations that convince them that they are sufficiently free and safe. The latter version of an unfree regime still benefits from creating a form of slavery, but it's slavery of the mind. Imagine a civilization comprised of figurative Uncle Toms of the system. Sex trafficking is concerning, but it's a form of slavery that can only work in the 21st century by staying underground

Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding your point.

> the second being the system of mind control which enslaves people by feeding them simulations that convince them that they are sufficiently free and safe. The latter version of an unfree regime still benefits from creating a form of slavery, but it's slavery of the mind. Imagine a civilization comprised of figurative Uncle Toms of the system.

I'm a bit confused by the figurative language used here. Did you have a specific example of this, or is this a hypothetical? I think this type of thinking has its, but I think it's important to contextualize it. For example, you can say that a gambling addict gambles against their will, but I wouldn't say that they are enslaved to gambling institutions (unless I was purposely being hyperbolic). But I agree that many systems of slavery had a degree of self-regulation among the enslaved.

> Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding your point.

My framework is this: violence is a necessary part of slavery, because to a certain extent enslavement requires the enslaved to choose between continued slavery or extreme violence/death. If you remove state violence from the equation, slavery still usually exists, and often flourishes due to the lack of a countervailing force. In "top-down" situations, where a system of slavery has implicit or explicit state support, the state doesn't have to explicitly enact the violence itself, it can simply declare a certain segment of the population "extra-judicial.

I think authoritarian, low violence states like Singapore have numerous human rights issues, but I wouldn't go so far as saying that the entire body politic is enslaved.

>Modern slavery most often occurs in areas with widespread, violent conflict.

This is completely wrong, China and India top the list with 8 million and 3.8 million slaves respectively.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century#St...

But those two states account for roughly half of the total world population. According to your link, the US has 400,000 enslaved peoples, which is still less per capita, but the US is a lot more developed than India and China.

From the linked source:

North Korea has the world's highest rate of slavery, with about one in 10 people enslaved, followed by Eritrea (9.3%) Burundi (4%), Central African Republic (2.2%), Afghanistan (2.2%), Mauritania (2.1%), South Sudan (2%), Pakistan (1.7%), Cambodia (1.7%) and Iran (1.6%).

In retrospect, I should've said "violent conflict OR extreme poverty"

> people who are fabricating reality

good luck on forbidding all religious speech and fiction on the internet!

Look at history, it’s just one damn tragedy after another and all without the supposedly super powerful influence of internet filter bubbles and radicalization. The internet isn’t the problem, this is just what humans do. Every age has blamed their problems on the latest technology while being willfully blind to the problems within their own minds. You can’t fight this with censorship or gatekeeping or trusted news sources, trying to force your beliefs on other people just adds to the misery because you’re flawed and ignorant too, everyone is.

But those tragedies happened after series of radicalisations, pretty often after groups intentionally spread lies and hate, when people closed themselvea into bubbles and so on.

Pretty often the new technology was the vector by which those came, simply because bad actors seem to be quicker to take advantage of new technology.

Also historically, censorship and gatekewping were overall succesfull strategies. I am not saying that it is good thing to do all that much, there is danger in overdoing it, but historically it was effective in suppressing viewpoints.

They’re successful only because they are accompanied by physical violence. If we go down this path again prepare for a repeat of history at the hands of those you give this power to, it’ll probably take a few hundred mega deaths before we learn our lesson again.

Tor hidden services now for drugs AND crazy. Alternatively freenet not just for pedophiles anymore!

Admittedly, I don't know what you're getting at precisely. The dark web is certainly an alternative, but it's not exactly a viable one. Tor is basically the manifestation that every right can be abused in some way, especially with low moderation.

Think of the availability of decentralized services that are hard to ban as a pressure relief valve for good and bad things. If we we ultimately make it to hard to share legitimate things those things go underground long before they go away.

If we look and find that freenet and tor hidden services are only full of kiddie porn, drugs, and crazy we haven't swung to far towards censorship.

Right now the crazy is right in the open and hidden services are only for things that are actually already illegal like child porn so it is premature to suppose we are being too restrictive. Based on the fact that we almost lost our democracy we probably need to Crack down more on the hate, lies, and inducement to violence.

When you have to go somewhere secret to hear someone suggest we need to massacre some jews we may be approaching an actual balance.

Incitement has been a limited carve-out from the First Amendment pretty much from the beginning. Stating a political view is different from threatening your opponents with violence.

The current standard is "imminent lawless action" which is a pretty high bar. Incitement in many cases does not meet that bar.

Well, perhaps that should be revisited, given that there's history and precedent.

Perhaps it's fine as it is.

> we start politicizing server hosts and ISPs

I suspect we're not very far off. However, completely anonymous, decentralized, uncensorable network ideas like Freenet, TOR, I2P never really took off only because they needed a critical mass to support them: they're not technologically infeasible, they just didn't have enough support to get off the ground. If half the users of the "normal" internet are banned from it, they're going to start discovering peer-to-peer systems - that's what happened with the internet itself, after all.

> When you completely shut people up, that doesn't mean they're gone

It does mean that they cannot effectively find other people with the same opinion, cannot organize, and cannot spread their opinion effectively. Suppression of opinions _works_ (unfortunately, I must say).

Taking that option away from people scares me a lot more than the MAGA mob. People storming government buildings can also be a good thing (uprisings against oppressive governments). It wasn't in this case, obviously, but the damage this mob caused, including the lives lost, is nothing compared to the absolutely terrifying situation of a totalitarian government and all communication platforms being "curated".

> Moreover, they've gotten threats from their ISP that they have to delete certain posts or be shut down. (which seems scary to me)

Have you never heard of the DMCA?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25682785

Wikipedia was threatened for having B709D3A0CD2FEC08EAFCCF540D8A100BB38E5E091D646ADB7B14D021096FFCD on a web page.

ISPs are frequently threatening to disconnect customers who serve files, and sites that are large enough to have their own connectivity have had this for 20 years.

This one for example

https://slashdot.org/story/00/05/11/0153247/microsoft-asks-s...

"Under the provisions of the DMCA, we expect that having been duly notified of this case of blatant copyright violation, Andover will remove the above referenced comments from its servers and forward our complaint to the owner of the referenced comments. "

Except in this case, this isn't a copyright violation. I have never heard of a case of a website being shut down by an ISP for advocating violence. If that was the case, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter or any social media platform wouldn't exist.

So copyright violations are worse than advocating violence?

> Moreover, they've gotten threats from their ISP that they have to delete certain posts or be shut down. (which seems scary to me)

Agreed - though I find it's more of a headache than scary. On end, I don't like the fact that increasingly internet infrastructure is acting as a de facto judge in deciding what speech is and isn't allowed. I empathize with both parties. ISPs don't want to host speech they feel is abhorrent, and I'd probably do the same thing were I in their position.

I'm much more accepting of platforms like Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, et. al. taking down groups and banning members than I am of infrastructure providers doing the same. The former kicks people off of large communities, but people can still put together their own websites. When it gets the the point that I might not even be able to serve plain HTML that I wrote myself, because nobody will even let it go through the wires that's when I start thinking utility regulation in ISPs, DNS, etc. is necessary.

Cloudflare's CEO was very humble when taking down sites. When talking about taking down the Daily Stormer, "Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet... No one should have that power.” [1] I largely agree, though I'd offer the caveat that something needs to have this power but it should be an institution like the courts rather than individuals in corporations.

1. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/17/cloudflare-ceo-says-removing...

> ISPs don't want to host speech they feel is abhorrent

But where does this end? Does the phone company want to allow conversations they find morally reprehensible? Does apple want to send iMessages that denigrate their company?

After all, they are private companies! /s

It's actually a serious and legitimate question. Freedom from speech also means freedom from compelled speech. A government can't pass a law to make a Mom and Pop shop sell a certain magazine. And corporations enjoy the same freedoms: I'm very confident that the government could not pass a law forcing Twitter to overturn bans. And ISPs possibly have the same freedom from compelled speech.

I'm no lawyer, but I think the distinction is in utilities. The postal service, for instance, can't just refuse service to people they don't like. Same with power companies. I'm not sure how phone providers and ISPs fit into this. But I think it may be useful to have ISPs, payment providers, and maybe also DNS and DDOS protection providers be considered utilities. My basic measuring stick is that putting HMTL and CSS out on the internet should be protected akin to the ability to send letters through the mail.

Passing your speech through an ISP is not the same as compelling the ISP to speak.

Hosting a website and facilitating their traffic are forms of speech, since the ISP chooses to do so.

That's a form of initiative, not speech.

Democracies usually protect the freedom of initiative too, but it's a different protection, with very different exceptions, and companies usually have it much more restricted than speech.

But social media has their cake and eats it too.

They're granted immunity from lawsuits from the government because they're a dumb pipe, but then they censor/promote as if they are a publisher.

A business can't sue facebook for allowing a BLM riot to organize on its platform that destroyed their storefront, and similarly they have no recourse when said business gets a facebook page deleted because they complained about it.

Yes. If you were running a news stand, should you be sued if one of the magazines you're selling ends up inspiring a riot? If you refused to sell a certain magazine should people be able to sue you or otherwise force you to stock their paper?

Freedom from compelled speech is the default. Requiring people or organizations to host speech is the exception, and is limited to things like utilities and cigarette health warnings.

Making Facebook or Twitter a utility is very coarse grained. They would have to allow all legal speech. They wouldn't be able to ban users for nudity or porn, or explicitly espousing Nazism (actual Nazism, not the much more expansive post 2016 definition of "Nazi"). Both of these things are legal in the US, and a utility would have to permit them. If social media is made a utility, then social media is going to become 8chan.

That's why I think it makes the most sense to apply utility status at the infrastructure layer not the application layer. Social media companies can still moderate, people on the fringes can spread their message on niche applications or on sites they build themselves.

If you carefully remove the half of the news you don't like, and your users are most of the country, sure, you deserve antitrust scrutiny. Why are we pretending that Facebook is some slack-jawed Ohioan that doesn't know exactly what it's doing?

It ends where we decide that it ends. There is no slippery slope here. The protections for political speech and the cultural values around speech are incredibly high friction surfaces! If anything the slope is towards free space and historically, any curtainments of it have been temporarily.

> I empathize with both parties. ISPs don't want to host speech they feel is abhorrent, and I'd probably do the same thing were I in their position.

I don't emapthize with the ISPs here. Internet access has become a utility which is required to participate in many parts of the economy and society. Utilities should not be allowed to refuse to service someone who is using the service legally.

If someone is hosting illegal content, that's a different story.

Ironic that their guy was the one behind the attacks on net neutrality. Might have helped in their case with their ISP.

A smart Republican would nave realised that big internet companies are against him, and would have made plans accordingly.

If Trump had been competent, he wouldn't have attacked net neutrality, he would have said net neutrality is a wonderful idea, and extended it to other layers of the protocol stack.

He would also have got on board when people like Elizabeth Warren talked about breaking up Facebook and Amazon.

"delete certain posts"

Presumably violent threats?

Guess a lot of racist stuff, based on things I saw on Twitter

Yea, specifically advocating for the Capitol building riots on Jan 6th

Is it OK to silence people now?

Actually yes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action. Not saying what happened on /r/donaldtrump actually met that criteria (that's up to a court to decide), but the precedent to silence people (by the government no less) is definitely there.

So you are against the freedom of speech principle?

Is everything supposed to be black and white?

Following the arguments put forth in the rest of this thread, it is possible to support free speech while still arguing for exceptions and being against free speech absolutism.

Such an argument against an entire whole does not logically follow from the given argument that specific exception should be made.

What gave you that impression? Moreover, what do you mean by "the freedom of speech principle"? It can mean anything ranging from "you can literally say anything you want and the government should protect you while doing so (eg. punishing companies that refuse to transmit your speech)", to "most speech, excluding a laundry list of exceptions like hate speech, copyright infringement, defamation, heresy, certain ideologies, etc."

What is hate speech?

Everyone, please stop engaging this person who is arguing in bad faith, and only seeks to waste your time.

If you think it can't have exceptions, do you think libel and slander laws are a travesty?

I think you will find very few people defending free speech in the face of "actually planning crime".

Of course. But the problem lies in what constitutes crime. Few years ago, interracial marriage was crime. Should ISP's be shutting down forums where couples can find the social safety that they long for?

Would you support the silencing if leaders of the Augusta Civil Rights Riot were using forums, or Reddit, or FB, to organize themselves?

There is a reason why freedom of speech, without any limitations, is so valued in the free world. Those in power will always use "crime" and "think of the children" as tools to sway the public into weaponizing the government.

Ah yes, the "free world" that is the USA. Sorry, as a German with "plenty" of limitations on free speech (from denying the holocaust, to "insulting") I can't empathize too much.

Imagine a situation where people are credibly planning an armed assault on, say, Citibank, in public forums.

Do you believe it is OK to disrupt their planning? Do you believe it becomes not-OK if the target of the domestic terror is the seat of our government?

Do you believe it is OK to do this, in order to disrupt their planning? Do you believe it becomes not-OK if the target of domestic terror is a tyrannical government?

[1]: https://www.insidehook.com/article/history/kidnapped-why-an-...

Arrest the conspirators and thank them for their candor.

> one of the top websites in the US in terms of traffic

> constantly DDoSd

Hmm...

I never heard of thedonald.win and took a peek over there just to see what a cesspool of banned users looks like.

JFC. It's a circus of terrible thinking and baseless anger over there. If that site is getting a lot of traffic, you folks who consider yourselves above such things better start fighting for what is actually true and good, because what is not true and not good is exactly what is festering over there, and if they don't get their vote, they WILL get violent again, just see how they attacked Lindsey Graham at the airport just now for breaking rank on principle... and sweeping these folks under the rug will not eradicate the cancer

I don’t think it’s irrelevant. Keeping it off Reddit means that less gullible teenagers (which are a large percentage of Reddit’s user user base) will come into contact with it.

I just browsed that site for a couple minutes, and content aside, it’s amazing how much better it is on mobile than Reddit.

citation for the top websites by traffic? (not seeing them here https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/US)

OP likely posts to the site regularly. An thinks the site is an excellent place full of patriots that just so happens to want to stop an evil ring of pedophiles that just so happen to be filled with all of Trump's political enemies.

You can look up the stats yourself.

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/thedonald.win

Over the last 90 days it has gone from a global Alexa Rank of 6000, to 2400. And is apparent about 400 in the US.

In my subjective opinion that is a large amount of growth.

you mean to tell me a well known place that crazy people congreate and organize to plan treason and insurrection in plain sight gets more traffic when the President calls for the overturning of a democratic election... who would have thought

So you agree with the original commenter, then, who said that there was large growth for the platform? Cool. Glad you agree. That was their point.

> Irrelevant

They allowed the group to build and grow then once they moved off they killed the sub?

I meant this new ban is irrelevant. Any Trump presence on reddit is minor after the initial ban earlier last year.

I love doom scrolling as much as the next guy, just make sure to get some mind bleach. Find a nice fiction podcast or take up electronics. Both sides will consume your mental health if your not careful.

I'm actually looking for a good podcast. Do you have any recommendations?

Our Fake History -- it's a historian deep-diving into various historical myths, their origins, and the scholarly consensus around the truth (at least as we understand it).

It's utterly fascinating.

http://ourfakehistory.com/

Nick's Non Fiction

Try https://soundcloud.com/cum-town

Electronics for me. Highly recommended.

It's a self fulfilling prophecy / feedback loop. Censorship creates fear of authoritarianism --> anti-government fears --> kooky crazies supporting trump --> censorship

Alexa rank 2400 global and 400 for US.

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/thedonald.win

Just what I was looking for! Can you give some context on this too? Like what else is about ~400 in the US?

I can't give you much context, sorry. I just shared the numbers to save others from googling.

Hacker news is 6500 globally, and 2600 in the US, if that is any kind of context.

Alexa is one of the oldest analytics companies to publicize top rankings for websites. Today was the first time I noticed they've been bought by Amazon.

You can look around their top 50, (which they are calling top 500 for the clicks) for global and country level web traffic here: https://www.alexa.com/topsites

> one of the top websites in the US in terms of traffic

There's something odd going on with their traffic. I've been on the front page of Reddit and thedonald.win at the same time, and either virtually nobody on that site reads the articles or the upvotes counts are being massively inflated: the upvote to pageview ratio is waaaay lower on thedonald.win then I've experienced on Reddit and HN.

Clodflade is protecting quite a lot of shady and terrorist websites/forums.

I bet they are violating multiple (inter)national laws since years.

> Also, please don't judge me, I just have a morbid curiosity to see what these people are talking about and how they think.

I read thedonald.win daily too. It feels like r/watchPeopleDie, some sort of morbid curiosity. Currently they're claiming Trump's concession video yesterday was deep faked. Very entertaining and scary at the same time.

Did you see his neck move weirdly though? Totally not a morbidly obese man just struggling to fit inside a collared shirt.

You've given some good pragmatic/technical reasons why Reddit might not want to host that stuff, apart from ideology.

> Also, please don't judge me, I just have a morbid curiosity to see what these people are talking about and how they think.

To be afraid of being "judged" for your relatively tame and objective comments speaks volumes about the state of our increasingly polarized culture.

I have the same curiosity but it is more about being worried that the balkanization of the Internet will have serious negative outcomes down the line, such as what we saw 2 days ago, except progressively worse.

Everyone IMHO should be peering into other bastions of thought

Alexa says that thedonald.win ranks... #2404 globally, and #419 in the US.

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/thedonald.win

For reference, this is higher than infowars (#507 in the US) but far lower than Breitbart (#72 in the US), to name other, um, right-wing conspiracy-promoting sites.

This is also lower than amazon.ca in the US (#354), apparently. That probably says something.

This is a different subreddit than /r/theDonald, which was banned earlier.

Yeah, this is a win. You can go to this guy's party at his house. And I don't have to worry about the guys at his party wandering into mine. And vice versa.

To stretch that analogy: all is fine, except for "this guy's" neighbors, they are in for a terrible night. And when the crowd at "this guy's party" is heated up and collectively starts harrassing people on the street, it gets even worse.

My point: Fine indeed, as long as they "stay there". But they won't. This goes for any online community: it has effects outside of that community.

What's important is that nobody interacts or challenges one another. Otherwise, our feelings might get hurt.

This is actually crucial. When I go to see cat pics, I don't want to discuss whether Evil Jew Bankers Are Stealing America's Future.

It isn't an offence thing. It's just ... boringly dumb. It's just like I'm not going to start a conversation in this thread to review my basic backstitch.

The last place I worked paid hard-earned money during a recession to migrate their properties off of CloudFlare because they were providing CDN services to the Proud Boys and the CEO had made some equivocal statement that they didn't think it was their responsibility to police content. It's an interesting topic and possibly a genuine slippery slope about what sort of responsibility service providers have over their customers use of their platform. It's one thing for dangerous content to be hosted, moderated and monetized on a platform like facebook. But what about just caching it blindly?

You're joking, right? I for one am proud of Cloudflare for taking a stand against cancel culture, because one of these days it could hit you or me and I want to support people who will stand in behind me in the name of free speech.

The irony is he's also wrong, cloudfare canceled daily stormer and made a big fuss about it.

Is "cancel culture" defined as being anti-Nazi or something? "Cancelling" is absolutely an expression of free speech.

Creating a cancel culture is exactly what the Nazis did to push their agenda.

I can be anti-Nazi and pro-free speech.

I think it's disingenuous to say "cancelling" is an invalid tactic and more than saying violence is an invalid tactic. Cancelling Nazis is as acceptable as shooting them by thousands was in the 1940s. I don't think it's at all unreasonable for us to be able to draw a line at what kind of speech we consider harmful. And saying the line is Nazism is an easy starting point.

Sounds like terrible leadership. I'm sure gmail is used to send child porn every day, should you cancel gsuite?

Companies like cloudfare are supposed to be dumb infrastructure, not your political cudgel.

Matthew Pierce from Cloudflare has notoriously dropped 8Chan after its content contributed to three mass shootings [1].

Will Cloudflare continue to protect thedonald[.]win? I think we should call Cloudflare out.

https://twitter.com/philipithomas/status/1347621982758719489

[1] https://stratechery.com/2021/trump-and-twitter/

Seeing how they call for war, killing people, and overthrowing the government daily if not hourly I can’t imagine why CF continues to provide them services. Truly, you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. I mean you probably will on some of the *chans but it’s pretty freaking bad over at TD win.

> please don't judge me

I'll say it out loud: though I despise Trump and mourn the damage he and those enabling have caused, I spend more time online looking at pro-Trump, conservative and Republican focused material than anything else. I downvote none of it, even the legit crazy/scary stuff, and in the rare cases I comment, it's carefully worded to be neutral or even sometimes conciliatory, though always honest.

It scares me that many people feel the need to apologize for openly admitting that they looked at material from 'the other side'.

More often, people will refrain from posting their actual, perhaps nuanced views entirely, due to the fear of being judged/attacked/whatever. Didn't Paul Graham write an essay about that?

My wife was writing a research essay to present to our local Toastmasters group, which she is a relatively new member of. She was going over the talk with one of the senior members, one on one, on zoom, and she mentioned, in passing, that our family is going to delay getting the Covid19 vaccine a couple of months, because we've been exercising (essentially) phase 0 (extreme) lockdown consistently since last March. We can do that because we're blessed with the ability to work and (for our son) go to school from home.

The person my wife mentioned this to just lost her shit, and went into a verbal rampage about how to delay getting the vaccine is akin to being an anti-vaxer, how it was immoral to not get it as soon as humanly possible.

To be clear: If any of me, my wife or son came into contact with other human beings with any frequency, we'd get the vaccine as soon as possible. We're not afraid of it.

But others need it before we do.

However, that 'nuance' was entirely lost in an emotional, knee-jerk reaction which reminds me of so many other things we see today.

Was there voter fraud in the 2020 US presidential election? I'd bet my life on it; that there was at least a single single incident of fraud. Did that fraud in any way change the outcome of the election? Of course not.

Apologies for the tangent.

I want to encourage everyone to consider looking carefully, deeply and compassionately at what 'the other side' writes and says. It's not easy to do, but I believe it's a necessary, critical work that all of us need to honestly engage in.

What kind of political governance doesn't take kindly to any opposing views and doesn't tolerate debates?

Authoritarianism in general.

However, the paradox of tolerance fully applies.

I always see the paradox mentioned, at what percentage the tolerant actually flips to become the intolerant?

Are you asking, at what percentage DO the tolerant actually flip to become the intolerant? This is a good question, though probably impossible to answer with any precision.

I fear that it happens a lot more frequently than most people are willing to admit.

Eg. The nazis could argue to themselves that they are just getting rid of the intolerant.

Well said. It is hard work too.

Quality post. Thanks for it.

I've been lurking on that web site since before the riot and it had the most extreme content. Law enforcement should get involved.

They were openly writing about throwing liberals off helicopters etc...

I do not even think it is morbid.

70 million people voted for Trump. Understanding them better is not a bad thing.

Does not mean agreeing with them.

And yes, same.

I don't know if those Donald sites are good for that. That is the small Q-anonish minority that was at the capitol. Most of the discussion is not exactly tethered to reality.

None of it is inclusive.

I personally am very liberal when it comes to speech.

And yes, all communities are good for understanding people better. Does not mean agreeing with them.

It does mean being able to know who one is dealing with. That matters to me.

I don't think it's entirely fair to suggest that thedonald.win represents the 70 million Trump voters. It represents the attitudes of a few million of the weirdos, distorted further by roleplayers/trolls and international infiltrators.

Your average Trump voter is just a normal Republican. They voted for Trump because there was an R next to his name and defended him because he was on their team. The Democratic voters would be no different if the dems ran an equally ghastly candidate. (They obviously have not done so, and I am not making the claim that's random. I'm not saying 'both sides are the same' in this post.)

It might be useful to understand the thedonald.win crowd, but it ain't 70MM of your countrymen, Americans.

You'd be surprised that Trump supporters are outside the Republican realm. If you spent 5 minutes on TDW you'd see they hate most establishment Republicans. This isn't new either, it started with Ron Paul and then the Tea Party movement.

I'd say overall the majority on TDW are leaning more towards libertarian than conservative. Certain things like freedom of speech, 2nd amendment rights, limited government and spending are shared ideals. Other things like pro-marijuana, pro-life, Christianity are depicted and respected but differ between supporters and less popular then the ideals everyone agrees on.

I thought the race for Washington State's Insurance Commissioner was pretty instructive on this point. No one serious from the Republican party ran because no one really objects to the existence of the current guy, so the guy who ran with the R next to his name was, not making a lot of sense in the voter's guide. (He was going to hire 168 people to do his job, 1 hour at a time, among other things that didn't make a lot of sense). He still got 35% of the vote.

We understand them well enough. No need to hear why people's civil rights need to be brushed aside to make room for a white supremacy.

I don't think ISPs should be in the business of deciding what content is allowed or disallowed. If there's illegal content, that's a different thing. But politically disagreeable content? Infrastructure and utility services should not be permitted to make decisions about that even if they are private entities. And I extend this to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. since they all are so big that their ability to censor and control speech is comparable to a government's power. And if you can't exercise speech on those platforms, which are now the public town square, then you effectively don't have that right. Put another way, they are utilities and should be regulated/treated like a public entity.

the people on these communities creates their alternative reality. selectively avoid news/information that can burst their bubble. its the same with /r/politics. both living in massive bubbles with complete opposite realities.

the difference is that r/the_donald is more violent. They cordinate gatherings, "attacks", a violent protests.

r/politics which is liberal bubble is more peaceful but both these communites censor opposing views and is dangerous to democracy

>Also, please don't judge me, I just have a morbid curiosity to see what these people are talking about and how they think.

Why not just tour your local Psychiatric Ward?

Please keep downvoting. I bathe in Maga-Moron tears. Poor Snowflakes.

Isn’t it strange that you have to make a disclaimer like “please don’t judge me?”. Quite literally 1/2 of the USA voted for Trump, should you automatically be ashamed of that?

(It’s easy for me to say ofc, I have no horse in this race)

There are plenty of Trump voters (Republicans in general) who would actually find the contents of that website abhorrent. I would say these people represent a minority (albeit a large one) of Trump supporters.

Which is fine when the leader in question ignores those minority opinions.

The problem here is that the leader is going out of his way to specifically engage and this minority group by committing as many atrocities as possible.

> Quite literally 1/2 of the USA voted for Trump

No, they didn't.

Approximately 23% of the US population voted for him. Typically I don't like this arguement, the rest of the population would probably have voted along much the same proportions as those who did.

I don't think this is true. It's been shown over and over again that the more people who vote, the more likely Republicans are to lose the election. This is why Republicans have gone all in on their disenfranchisement efforts.

Whatever you assume about how they would have voted, they didn't “literally” vote.

And the assumption that people who choose to vote have an equal distribution of political views to those who choose not to vote is ludicrous; people who, if they voted, would only vote for someone who isn't a major party candidate are going to be vastly overrepresented among nonvoters simply because they are more likely to feel participation is futile; it would be less inaccurate than assuming equal distribution—but still inaccurate—to assume every eligible nonvoter is equivalent to a vote against at least all of the major party candidates.

> the rest of the population would probably have voted along much the same proportions as those who did

According to Pew, the non-voter block is much less white, less educated, and poorer than the voting population. You can probably make several cases for which way that block breaks, but I would certainly not say they would vote proportionally the same as voters.

voter turnout * share = .667 * .469 = 0.312823 or did you count in people not eligible to vote? like kids and foreigner?

They definitely didn't need that disclaimer.

And it's a lot more complicated than who you voted for out of two choices.

There are always more than "two choices". This "two choices" bullshit is the cause of Trump's entire presidency.

If you're looking at it from that point of view, nowhere near half voted for Trump.

And the real problem is first past the post, not the way you look at the votes.

Half of the US has been told to not follow the news.

Hacker News is a news site so I imagine little to no one on the Trump train is here.

Have a read though this and other related threads. It’s been surprising to me.

I'm an active reader of threads on YC, and maybe I'm just lucky but I have yet to see anyone spouting MAGA based conspiracy theories. I did get downvoted one time for saying Trump invented the term Antifa (Which is absolutely true. I did a google search by date to verify.) but that's as close as I've seen.

The downvote might be because the Antifa fact is inaccurate according to wikipedia:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa_(United_States)

Just because it's not mentioned in Wikipedia doesn't make it false.

I think you got downvoted because the term/group Antifa has existed in several forms since the 30s, it was a movement started in Germany in response to the rise of the SPD between WWI and WWII.

That I did not know. I just know no one was using the term online before trump started calling the BLM protestors antifa. (However, there was a single tweet with an #antifa hashtag 2 days before trump used the terminology. I figured he saw the tweet and it inspired Trump to pick up the term, but now I do not know given the historical back stop.)

Three year old article [1]. It was used in leftist circles a lot for a long time and especially in the last four years.

[1] https://www.theroot.com/white-supremacists-killed-more-peopl...

Google trends: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

You gotta go father back than that article.

Not in the Trump train themselves, but there are definitely a lot of libertarians on here who believe in absolute free speech - a position that is seen as borderline ridiculous from an European (specifically: German) perspective.

That's refreshing to hear. I'm not pro manipulative speech (and manipulative news), but in the US free speech is seen as a very strong positive culturally, regardless where you are on the political spectrum.

We'll see if that attitude changes once the US has a one or two ethnic/cultural genocides that was preceded by a lot of hate speech against said ethnic/cultural groups.

That is to say, the US attitude towards free speech is not somehow the result of some very wise collective, it simply hasn't had the history to affect its attitude towards it in the same way that European countries have.

We'll see...

Ask a Native American (or one of dozens of other groups whose vilification enabled their oppression and murder), or maybe read a history book? We Americans aren't less experienced than Europeans; we're just more committed.

How many Americans today are aware they (well, their ancestors but that does carry responsibilities to younger generations) are guilty of mass murder and ethnic cleansing? And how much of that genocide was preceded of much hate speech? (how much were the free speech protections a factor in said genocide)

I think you may be right that ethnic genocide alone may not be enough to change a whole population's opinions around free speech rights, that there may be additional factors required such as general awareness of how bad it was to engage in such acts and what contributed to those acts.

I am not Native American, but perhaps I can answer your questions about USA culture in general. Lots of people know about the genocide in an intellectual sense, although that doesn't affect their politics and they don't appreciate reminders.

Free speech protections weren't obviously relevant to the genocide as it has occurred, although it wouldn't surprise me to learn e.g. that a native counterpart to Frederick Douglass had been silenced unfairly. As for speech in the other direction, the worst things were said (and done) by the "greatest statesmen" [0] so I doubt that corporate speech codes would have been much help. If it isn't too presumptuous of me to observe, it's unlikely that such things would have done much to slow down Hitler or Mussolini either.

[0] https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/nice-day-for-a-genoci...

Well, I'm European and also believe in absolute free speech. Doesn't seem that ridiculous to me.

Quite literally? Biden had ~81mm votes, Trump had ~74mm votes - and the US has a population of ~330 million.

Edit to add: Downvoting facts?

They're downvoting everyone who is pointing out that Trump did not win the popular vote. This is frustrating given it is absolutely relevant, even if it is somewhat of a nitpick; the statement that "half of the US" voted for anyone is genuinely misleading.

The rub is always: association with the group is association with the worst of that group.

Their worst right now is much worse than expected, I would be ashamed to be associated.

> Their worst right now is much worse than expected, I would be ashamed to be associated.

This doesn't follow. Trump has been promoting violence since 2016. There have been multiple attacks carried out by Trump supporters. Most Republicans think the election was stolen thanks to Trump. Anyone who was surprised by this hasn't been paying attention to the blatantly obvious signs that have been on display nor to the repeated warnings by many, many people saying this is where things were headed. I'm in no way surprised this happened. Why were so many other people?

It does follow if you think that most people that voted for Trump didn't actually think that Trump means most of the things he says. Which matches up with what Trump supporters say in interviews regarding Trump's stance on topics that even many of his supporters don't agree with. They will generally say something like "yeah, I don't agree with what Trump says about X and Y but I vote for him because of Z".

And to be fair their stance is not totally unreasonable. On both isles of the political spectrum most voters for some candidate ignore at least part of what the candidate says _and_ does. No candidate perfectly matches up with what you think should be done, that's normal and expected, democracy isn't perfect. A part of this process is trying to guess what the political candidate really thinks/believes vs what they say just to gain political capital. All people living in a democracy learn to do this early on. I guess for many Trump supporters they guessed that even with all the seemingly violence inducing rhetoric it wouldn't end up with a mob assaulting a federal government institution. Mistakes were made. :)

My point still stands. Anyone surprised by violence from Trump supporters have not been paying attention for the last four years. All the warning signs have been there. You've got documented evidence of Trump and his followers setting small fires for four years and half the country shouting "HEY WE'VE GOT A FIRE!" suddenly people are surprised that the building is burning down around them? Mistakes were made, the President and supporters everyone has been warning about do the thing everyone has been warning about and try to stage a coup. Oops!

I don’t paint every Democrat as a supporter of the violence and property damage that happened over the summer.

I think the vast, vast majority of people believe in non-violent protest and giving people room to express their views and hurt and frustration in non-violent ways.

I think politicians and the media is largely responsible for trying to paint groups they don’t like with an overly broad brush, and we should outright reject that as Americans.

The political flame war has to stop. The vast majority of Democrats and Republicans are in fact reasonable, kind, loving people who still believe in America even if it’s no longer popular to admit it.

The challenge is the fringe voices are amplified a million times more than the center-mass.

I read an interesting Twitter thread last week on how housing policy in SF is basically totally dominated by 6 people, private citizens, who scream down anyone who would dare to offer an opposing view, and are successful in setting policy with these tactics. I don’t know if that’s fully true, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least.

There seems to be a poll floating around that 45% of republicans supported the storming of capitol hill. Of course polls can be twisted to deceive, but if we take that at face value, that is not a small "fringe"?

My personal poll of around 20 Republicans found only a single supporter. Sure that's not scientific, but that's such a difference I doubt the number is that high.

>Isn’t it strange that you have to make a disclaimer like “please don’t judge me?”. Quite literally 1/2 of the USA voted for Trump, should you automatically be ashamed of that?

I dont have a horse in the race neither other than stock market.

It's not that strange. It's why elections are supposed to be confidential. Public opinion is always going to shift. During Clinton's reign we had the clinton crazies who hated him. George W bush? Did anyone like him? Obama derangement was readily labelled racism. Now Trump derangement is very strong. Biden will have his haters, that's coming.

However, the derangement is real and even the illusion you're for trump will gain you hate.

> Obama derangement was readily labelled racism.

Because so much of it was tinged with racism

> Now Trump derangement is very strong

Yes some people are under the mistaken impression that there's anything good about Trump and therefore suprised when he doesn't seem to care for the future of our democracy and our country even a tiny bit

Nitpick: 1/2 of the US did not vote for Trump. In 2016, of the eligible voting populous, only 54.8% voted in the election. Of them, the popular vote was lost by Donald Trump, who got around 63 million votes.

So even winning, it doesn’t really need to be that close to half of the U.S.

Not to say that isn’t a sizable chunk or anything.

Approximately 22% of the USA voted for Trump this election.

And 1+% voted for Biden.

23.5+% voted against Trump.

voter turnout * share = .667 * .469 = 0.312823

or did you count in people not eligible to vote? like kids and foreigners?

Yes, they said "1/2 of America" so I replied with the actual percentage of "America".

Is it just me or is downvoting tdons' comment bad form given YC's guidelines? Is there something I'm missing here?

From the guidelines:

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

lol. That has to do with comments like, "Wow, look at that comment's downvotes!" not asking about guidelines in relation to votes. Of course, there is room for interpretation on this one.

Of course it's bad. It's just that no one cares because most people downvote comments they disagree with.

Popularity does not imply morality. 46.8% of people voted for Donald Trump (not "quite literally 1/2"), a man who is a known fraud, morally bankrupt in business and personal life, and who has shown himself to be incompetent in office. People who voted for Donald Trump should be ashamed of their vote.

That said, reading what people are saying in an effort to understand and to de-radicalize is not something to be ashamed of.

Hopefully the wonderful moderators on this board reprimand you for posting political flamebait and attempting to use hacker news for political or ideological battle.

I hope the wonderful moderators don’t just censor anyone who happens to say something you don’t agree with or hurts your feelings.

> a man who is a known fraud, morally bankrupt in business and personal life, and who has shown himself to be incompetent in office.

Are you talking about donald trump or joe biden?

> People who voted for Donald Trump should be ashamed of their vote.

Using your logic, those who voted for corrupt biden should be ashamed as well.

> That said, reading what people are saying in an effort to understand and to de-radicalize is not something to be ashamed of.

Have you taken a look in the mirror. People like you are what's wrong with the country. Extremist and blind to their own faults.

We had two choices this year. Maybe I'll phrase it in a way you can understand. On the one hand, we had a "corrupt, evil rich privileged white male" and on the other hand, we had a "corrupt, evil rich privileged white male".

People like you whine about rich privileged corrupt white males all the time and yet are slaving over a rich privileged corrupt white male.

I'm rather tired of the "both sides" rhetoric. One candidate refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power. One candidate has a history of racial bias (Central Park 5, apartment zoning, Judge Curiel, etc.). One candidate openly asked for and received aid from a foreign nation. One candidate built up a mob and pointed them at the Capitol in an attempted coup.

On the other hand, one candidate lost a son to drug overdose. One candidate had debunked conspiracy theories regarding their other son's interactions with Ukraine.

Do I think that Biden is perfect? Gosh, no. Do I think he is a good person? I don't know if it is possible to be a truly good person while holding any high office. Do I think that Biden is a better person and a better choice than Trump? Absolutely.

> I'm rather tired of the "both sides" rhetoric.

That's what Republicans and Trump supporters say too. You are tired of it because it's true.

> One candidate refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power.

Neither candidate committed to it. The DNC was going to do exactly what the RNC did.

"Hillary Clinton said in a new interview that Joe Biden should not concede the 2020 presidential election “under any circumstances," anticipating issues that could prolong knowing the final outcome."

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/hillary-clint...

> One candidate has a history of racial bias (Central Park 5, apartment zoning, Judge Curiel, etc.).

Yes and Biden help push a law that sent millions of minorities to prison.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-controversial-19...

> One candidate openly asked for and received aid from a foreign nation.

Are you for real? Biden and his son's ukraine, russia, china, etc endeavors are just as bad or worse.

> One candidate built up a mob and pointed them at the Capitol in an attempted coup.

Right. And no rioting from biden's side.

The only people who think like you are brainwashed political zealots. You are part of the problem. The only difference between you and a tea party or trumpist is political party affiliation. That's it. And it doesn't really matter because DNC and RNC are ultimately on the same team. They serve the same master. And it isn't the american people.

But whatever, you do you and keep up the good fight.

I may be mistaken, but you sound like the type who cries about "privileged white males". But man, you sure do love Biden.

Virtually no one who voted for Biden is excited about him. They're just voting out Trump.

The false equivalency narrative you're spewing is tiresome. Trump's record is an unprecedented disaster. There is no equivalent.

Is Trump's record so bad that local election officials would be justified in cheating in the election to prevent another term, hypothetically?

No one is justified in cheating. Incidentally, no one has. Though voter suppression appears to have been attempted in certain areas.

Trump cheated in 2016, did he not? The republicans have been cheating for many decades (legally in some cases, illegally in others), necessitating the voting rights act, have they not? Is voter suppression not cheating?

After 30 years of internets I've seen no evidence that a majority of people have the capacity to distinguish between analysis and advocacy.

It's a little strange indeed -- the US is at a very polarized time, where discussing such a mainstream thing as supporting Trump is treated like a breach of decorum by some. Very surreal in some ways.

That being said, identifying that the support for Trump is about 50/50 does not _really_ tell the right story here with thedonald.win -- this isn't a representative of the ~half of us in the US who voted for Trump (or would if we voted)...it's a representation of a small, extreme culture, part real and part just trolling.

I doubt OP would have apologized quite so hard for watching Fox News. Fox News's editorial content is somewhat to the right of the average Republican voter, but not by nearly as much as thedonald.win -- that's something that represents mainstream Trump voter (aka Republican voter) worldview.

"Upvote if you still believe Trump will be our President for the next four years. People are forgetting this man is a genius and has always been ten steps ahead. Now is no different."

This is one of the top threads on that site RIGHT NOW. Its easy to judge someone participating in that discussion.

WOW, I love the design/UI of theDonald.win

It is clear, simple and harmonic.

Kudos for the design. I wished reddit would like that way.

> they've gotten threats from their ISP that they have to delete certain posts or be shut down

Wow, that sucks. What ISP is that? Why can't they just take the money and host the service without censoring other people?

What isp offers that?

There's consequences.

> Moreover, they've gotten threats from their ISP that they have to delete certain posts or be shut down. (which seems scary to me)

Not to me, because free speech, even in the US, was never "absolutely free" speech - incitement to riot is punishable by law, for one.

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