Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcphilip | Hacker News Reader

No provider wants the cesspool to be pinned on them. I get that emotionally, but this is nuts. Obviously they have the right to make these moves, but god knows what happens when the new administration starts reflecting on the role played by Big Tech in this mess. Washing hands long after infection, so to speak.

What happens when congress uses these moves as evidence that Big Tech acknowledges the need to take responsibility for harmful content and then expects the same moves made for much smaller stakes?

View on HN

Do you think that by NOT responding to such violence, a Democratic congress wouldn't say "regulation is needed, since Big Tech is dropping the ball"?

Which is more likely, congress deciding regulation is needed when Big Tech acts proactively to take care of the worst of it, or congress deciding regulation is needed when they don't do anything?

This is the dictionary definition of the slippery slope logical fallacy.

Absolutely, but funny how often the fallacy plays out time and time again.

In three years, the slippery slope has gone from deplatforming a tiny handful of online Nazis to deplatforming the President and an app with 10 million users.

I'm not sure the concerns of censorship change due to who or how many are espousing the toxic calls to violence. Nazi Germany had a Chancellor/Dictator, with 8.5 million in the Nazi party in 1945. The reason it's okay to deplatform Nazis today is not because their numbers have dwindled.

Well, in three years the president has gone from claiming that there were more people at his inauguration than there actually were, to undermining democracy by persisting for months in his claims of election fraud despite failing to produce any evidence for it in the courts (while ignoring a pandemic that is currently killing 3000 people a day in his country). How about that for a slippery slope?

There’s no truer fallacy than slippery slope cause however far you slide, there’s always further if you don’t look up.

The more I study human history, the more I am convinced that the slippery slope is not a logical fallacy.

There are principles and once those get principles get trampled in the name of expediency, it becomes easier for the next person the trample them further.

Like when the American right-wing came up with the "domino theory" to justify paying any cost to defeat communists in Vietnam, since to failing to stop them would inevitably result in communists ruling the entire world.

And then the US lost the war, went home in disgrace, and the promised cascade of falling dominoes never happened.

Part of the reason why the dominos did not fall was that it extracted a very high cost. Vietnam was devastated by the war. Same thing with Cuba. Although not a direct invasion, the US sanctions on Cuba extracted a high cost.

Sometimes resistance can make a slope less slippery. With Donald Trump’s election in 2016, I believe the US was on a slippery slope to a very bad place. A lot of stuff were being normalized that should not be (overt racism). However, there was a lot of opposition and resistance which has probably helped stabilize the situation.

So no, just because a lot of resistance keeps you from sliding down the slippery slope, it does not mean the slippery slope is not real.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com