I love the idea of a site that doesn't give Nazis a voice. This is apparently somehow a controversial idea. It is becoming exhausting.
Also its's a little funny to see these platforms rise up that are censorship resistant...whose intended audience is the least likely to be censored for their ideas on the mainstream platforms. Part of the reason all these alt platforms get the Nazis is because of this...its like building an alternative for Reddit because it censors leftists.
Given that actual Nazi's were a historical phenomenon that ended in 1945, and that bona fide neonazis are few and far between), this is code for:
"I love the idea of a site that doesn't give people I disagree with a voice. This is apparently somehow a controversial idea."
Yes. It always has been. Orwell called it even back in 1944 (where real Nazi's still existed):
"It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else."
>It is becoming exhausting.
Tell me about it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/world/europe/us-capitol-r...
Yeah, so? What part of this is not already covered by my "few and far between" comment?
And what part of that anecdotal isolated example proves that Nazis are anything like a real presense in US politics, or that the people deplatformed and silenced are kept to Nazis or people of that kind?
Would you point to some persons wearing a "class war", "kill the rich" or some questionable communist leader (e.g. Stalin or Mao), or "Camp Gulag" t-shirt in a liberal rally as excuse to deplatform people?
(And I say that as a European, sympathetic to communism, leftie - just one that can't stant cant).
Was Donald Trump - a ho-hum president compared to Reagan as concerning the social damage his Reaganomics did, and less hawkish compared to Clinton, Bush, and Obama - a nazi (and thus 40% voting for him Nazi supporters)? Or is it just either hysteria or a code for "people we disagree with politically" (and can use the real-world equivalent of Godwin's law to to yield political wins over)?
That should be controversial.
Why is it hard to understand how hypocritical it is of most groups screaming about the DC riots when those same groups are tactly supportive of worse over longer periods of time?
At no point did I say "being anti nazi" is bad... I said being anti-extremist while being pro-extremist is... questionable.
It sounds like you see an equivalence between "rioting" and "rioting". I get what you're saying, but I'm also pretty sure that the people you're calling hypocrites have a more nuanced view than that and differentiate based on context and cause and don't consider "white supremacist Q-conspiracy-lie-believers rioting" (which this was) to be equal to "people rioting because police officers keep killing in circumstances that don't warrant it without serious repercussion" (which the BLM riots were).
We can also note that many of the BLM riots only turned violent _after_ local police started shooting gas, pepper balls, and rubber bullets at crowds. But even if that weren't the case, the causes and contexts would still be different.
It seems to me like the people you're talking about are in fact neither anti-extremist nor pro-extremist. They're anti-white-supremacists and anti-police-getting-away-with-murder. Those are not contradictory positions.
> groups screaming about the DC riots
I haven't seen anyone screaming about context-free "DC riots". I see people screaming about "white supremacist Q-anon-lie-conspiracy-believers rioting in DC trying to capture or kill congresspersons and overthrow a (mostly-if-you-ignore-voter-suppression) fair democratic election" and I think that makes a big difference.
It's not the riots that these people are worried about. It's the reason for the riots, and the reasons are not equal.
What's nuanced about supporting violence/rioting/looting/etc while fighting violence being hypocritical? My main point remains "you were silent while 100's of millions in damage was done and now you're mad about 6 hours of less violent protests and a single building being damaged?"
> reasons aren't equal
Reasons aren't equal... but there is plenty of reason to pick apart the hypocrisy WAY beyond DC vs Portland riots. I can point out many "police brutality" stories that aren't really when facts come out. (IE: "hands up, don't shoot"). I can do the same to most of the 'non contradictory' positions.
It's important to stand up for what you believe in peacefully... it's also important to try and not be a hypocrite while doing so.
I stand against the hypocrisy in the other positions you mentioned as well even if not mentioned in detail. The hypocrisy destroys the message.
Let's take eugenics as an example (intentionally controversial given you brought up the Nazis); and in this example all we're doing is replacing "voice/free speech" with "eugenics". Everyone agrees someone policing who gets to reproduce or not is a bad idea because such policing is impossible to do objectively/fairly/morally/ethically.
Why is such policing any easier or less important for political views and discussion? It's not. Policing people's opinions and silencing, censoring, or removing content is just as impossible. Is some message a very out of taste troll, sarcasm, some inside joke, intentional smearing, discussion of a controversial topic? Well, any sense of objective discussion there goes out of the window because a _human_ has to police it and until we can quantify with exact precision and accuracy through a machine the meaning behind human communication (we can't yet(?)) this is an impossible (for now) problem to solve.
We cannot even ask Siri/Alexa to do complicated tasks.
(a) what is "hate speech" is a vague term to be filled by whoever yields the power to define it (could be anything from talk against religion, to conservative worldviews, to class-war ideas, to racist beliefs, to complaints against politicians, and so on).
(b) what is a minority can also be vague and politically determined as opposed through raw numbers, and the power of a minority could be more than its size tells us (e.g. the 1% is a class-based minority, but most don't have an issue with going against them. Similarly, in certain cases it's one or more minorities that have the power against the majority - e.g. the fewer white-spanish descendants over indians and mulatos in some Latin American countries, or the white 20% against the blacks 80% in appartheid South Africa).
So, no, it's not clear cut that it's "in a society's interest to limit hate speech against minorities".