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Comment by mlyle | Hacker News Reader

Yah. IMO-- only the most directly dangerous stuff -- incitements to violence-- should be removed. If you chase them out of Twitter, they'll make an even worse echo-chamber.

> Their legal cases are rejected. The mainstream media refuses to take them seriously.

> If you deny them the usual channels, is it surprising that they take the other route?

On the other hand, if what they're asserting is crazy and unsupported by fact, what's the alternative? Report it uncritically as part of "both sides"? Listen to them in court and give them relief anyways?

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Parler has been hosting TONS of incitements to violence and seems to refuse to take it down (or is at least extremely slow to). I don't see why it's particularly crazy that Apple would want to avoid the liability from that.

FWIW, I think alternatives to Twitter, like Parler and Mastodon, are a good idea, but Parler acts like they have a fair takedown process when it's evident that it is not working particularly well.

Yah.

It's like, before the_donald was banned: at least there was a grownup in the room reining it in some and it could be seen. But if you wholesale kick out the extremists, they make their own happy place where there's nothing to slow them down at all.

(And then, in turn, you end up playing wack-a-mole with those cesspools, asking Apple/Google to deplatform them, etc.)

What I'm not sure on is the effect of making a community smaller. If you have 10 million people in a tepid cesspool, shutting down that cesspool might make 100k of them move to a more extreme location, while the remainder stop being exposed to that influence. The remaining smaller community is more extreme, but primarily because it has only the more extreme members of the previous iteration.

Sort of like how doomsday cults get more fervent with each incorrectly predicted apocalypse. The cult gets smaller, but those that remain are the true believers.

It's not quite that simple; it's not zero-sum. Whacking one mole breaks up recruitment and kills momentum. People on the fringes lose interest and don't bother to find out where the core moved to. When the next mole comes up it's smaller and more divided, so you whack that one, and again, smaller, more peripheral, less momentum. That gives people who have peeled off a chance to get re-integrated into more sane communities rather than being bathed in constant toxicity, so they crawl back from radicalisation. At least, that's how it works below a certain size, and is why it's worth doing these things early, before they get to the_donald sort of numbers.

I'm talking about kicking them off Twitter, etc. They end up finding places that are even worse echo chambers than conventional social media.

There's people in my town who are like this. The "oppression" even fuels their narrative.

Better to keep them in the mainstream discussion, respond with ridicule, and use moderation to squash the overtly dangerous stuff, IMO.

Those places have to actually exist, though.

And ridicule doesn't work, clearly. Vanity may work for less-devoted people, but when you live in a deeply red state and are surrounded by Trumpers, there's no way you're going to speak up IRL, or break through the power of numbers in that social sphere.

> Those places have to actually exist, though.

There's enough people believing this that they're guaranteed to come into existence if you deny them access to mainstream platforms.

> but when you live in a deeply red state and are surrounded by Trumpers, there's no way you're going to speak up IRL

You can't interrupt the in-real-life contacts by any means (short of despotic ones).

But there's a certain number of people that will stop polluting an online space if they're being laughed at. But when you force them to create their own echo chamber even the more timid and susceptible to social pressure will be unbothered.

Echo chambers means nobody new is listening. They can't grow. That's a win.

Then you go after the echo chamber.

The flip side of that coin is that it also makes it harder to recruit people from broader platforms.

When the_donald left reddit, it became impossible for them to get their propaganda seen on the front page of reddit and seen by people who might join them. People won't casually stumble into a cesspool of lies and BS. Now they have to know it exists and actively seek it out.

I just googled "the donald" and they aren't even on the first page. Seems like deplatforming kind of worked....

This is exactly the point. Reduce vitality.

> I just googled "the donald" and they aren't even on the first page. Seems like deplatforming kind of worked....

If it worked, why is the same radicalized set of viewpoints seemingly growing in vitality?

the donald crowd has moved on to stuff like duckduckgo etc. This is the point the divide will grow with such tactics. and the donald is the first website in duckduckgo

That's because you use google, and vast majority use google... You kick enough people off, guess what their will be a conservative google, people who grew up in conservative households will use the same. What you suggested works when the numbers are small, but when its 50% of the population it's very likely they will make their own ecosystem. Tech giants became monopolies based on good faith...

> On the other hand, if what they're asserting is crazy and unsupported by fact, what's the alternative?

How is this any different from the entirety of human history? America has gotten along quite fine without a central Ministry of Information directing what people should and should not believe is true. It is especially galling to think that some content moderators in the very narrow slice of society in Bay Area tech is qualified to do that job.

We've reached the point where the American left is afraid of the idea of free speech.

> We've reached the point where the American left is afraid of the idea of free speech.

Debating the merits and demerits of free speech surely has to fall within free speech. From what I've seen, free speech often gets raised as an unquestionable ideal and kills off sometimes uncomfortable discussion.

Karl Popper tells us about the paradox there...

Thanks for an interesting rabbit hole.

> How is this any different from the entirety of human history? America has gotten along quite fine without a central Ministry of Information directing what people should and should not believe is true. It is especially galling to think that some content moderators in the very narrow slice of society in Bay Area tech is qualified to do that job.

I agree that information being concentrated in a few platforms is harmful. But are you saying that you are owed having your speech amplified by others?

Remember our founding fathers starting opposing media outfits to slander each other? I don't think they were willing to print each others' stories verbatim.

> We've reached the point where the American left is afraid of the idea of free speech.

Not only that, but people like you and me who comment in defense of it are fading from the major platforms. For each of us who grew up with free speech as the cornerstone right in a free and just society, there seem to be many others who did not ever care about this, or actively seek to destroy it for the benefit of their own group.

It's worth remembering just how many warnings that this would happen eventually we have been left historically. Centuries of being reminded that people would come for these rights if we did not defend them. I never thought it was going to have to be our generation, though.

I'm concerned about major platforms gaining in power as gatekeepers of everyday communication, but-- I don't believe any party should be compelled to repeat your speech. It wasn't that way in 1791 and it shouldn't be that way now.

I do think that Twitter and Facebook need to be exceptionally careful and use their powers more sparingly, but there's absolutely no reason that they should have to repeat people literally coordinating and normalizing shooting elected officials, like many threads on Parler are at the moment--- speech that almost everyone agrees is not protected by the First Amendment anyways.

< I don't believe any party should be compelled to repeat your speech

Freedom of speech shouldn’t necessarily be compelled by law to be allowed by online platforms. But freedom of speech is not just a legal principle and individual right, but considered by many of us to be a core American cultural value. It seems reasonable for there to be public outcry and negative response to a company suppressing free speech. Free speech doesn’t include provable lies or inciting imminent violence which unfortunately I believe occurred this week.

> but considered by many of us to be a core American cultural value

Free speech includes being able to -not- utter things of your choice, too. No one will join me in decrying that my local paper will not publish my 30 page treatise on Flat Earth.

Yes-- power concentrating with a few gatekeepers of speech in tech is troublesome. That's what makes their moderation decisions so worrisome: that they're so empowered.

> Free speech doesn’t include provable lies

I think most provable lies are included in free speech, actually.

> or inciting imminent violence

Yup. But we kicked all the people off the mainstream platforms for things that were less than this, so now those platforms have less power to suppress the cries for violence.

where's is the line drawn between incitement of violence and thought crime? If i write a short story calling for the murder of my neighbors but claimed it as a work of fiction is that ok?

> central Ministry of Information

And there is no ministry of information. The 1st amendment protects us from governmental interference, not a private party discriminating based on content.

Deplatforming is happening because of cultural pressure and values, people still have the ability to create organizations with different values. The history of 1st amendment lawsuits is filled with examples of speech that was really offensive at the time, lawsuits were won because the government tried to restrict it.

Diversity in beliefs is valuable, but private parties should be able to have standards. I find an argument that companies should be forced allow speech that violates their standards because it is political dangerous.

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