Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by sebmellen | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

sebmellen

This is a stunning article. Imagine if everyone focused their deplatforming efforts on sites like this.

- DDOS attacks, if those don't work aggressively go after Cloudflare or their DDOS shield

- Pressure their payment processors to deplatform them

- Get Visa and Mastercard to drop these sites

- Once they have no DDOS shield, pressure their hosting providers to drop them

- Set up landing pages to bump them out of search results

- Aggressively pressure Pinterest et al. to take down any posts with "Ripoff Report" or "Cheat Alert" in the name

A similar playbook to Gab/Parler, but efforts like this would really, tangibly help people and right a serious wrong that can affect anyone, regardless their beliefs or politics.

View on HN

Do you think that creating such laws magically solves the problem? You don’t think people will just adapt to accomplish their goals within the technicality of the law? Cyberbullying was a huge problem when I was growing up and laws were constantly being passed. Did cyberbullying somehow become less prevalent or their criminals easier to punish? It seems like the problem has only gotten worse.

The reason is one of organization. Gab/Parler was intentionally trying to organize white supremacists. That is the entire goal and motivating raison d’etre. Cyberbullying like this is not some shared idealogy but a personal vendetta. As such it’s impossible to solve with the legal system or technology - at best you get a punishment effect a small fraction of the time for such a small expense that punishment is reserved for extreme cases that devolve to real-world altercations as an add-on multiplier as it takes a significant amount of time and effort to convince authorities whose the party telling the truth. Slander and libel are already things but people can’t seem to acknowledge that you can’t legislate away the fundamental problem that communication is now cheaper and more widespread than ever. Imagine if you could anonymously distribute pamphlets in multiple cities with minimal effort with very difficult ways to trace it back to you. The problem here is people fail to recognize that there’s nothing technology can do to solve a fundamental human failure mode here. People get pissed off at each other, and one party starts slandering the other. The legislation needs to focus on making it easier to deanonymize. But such legislation is actually bad for the internet and doomed to fail anyway since technology makes it easier than ever in ever increasing ways. From a social well-being perspective, anonymity is critically important for those who legitimately speak truth to power (eg sources for reporters).

Sorry, I'm not sure what part of my post you're responding to — I didn't mention anything about laws.

I also don't really fundamentally disagree with any of what you say in your post, I think it's a rather accurate appraisal of the situation.

That said, as it comes to Gab/Parler, I think a lot of the problem is technology related, and could theoretically be fixed by social media platforms adopting non-user-antagonistic content-ranking models. If the algorithm behind your platform maximizes time on site, it will maximize anger, outrage, and quick dopamine hits.

If the algorithm (or moderation process) functions differently, that's not the case, and I think we see this to some extent in HackerNews (not saying it could scale to Facebook level though). I hope other "ethical social media" platforms like Okuna (https://about.okuna.io/) will follow.

Just read about Okuna, sounds like the first real alternative to FB I could get my non tech friends behind. Sounds really good.

> Do you think that creating such laws magically solves the problem?

Creating laws has done a lot to solve the related problem of "mugshot sites". They're illegal in enough states at this point that they're approaching impossible to run -- which is a good thing; they were a morally bankrupt extortion scheme.

It’s a bit of a stretch to claim that Gab and Parler were “intentionally” trying to organize white supremacists. But I agree with your point that people will always find a way to be cruel to one another, regardless of the underlying technology.

It's not. It's made clear in the court filings in the AWS lawsuit, as well as background research into the founder and funders, as well as the data dumps from the site hack/scrape.

Vigilantism like calling for DDOSing is not the answer.

The reason why we don't focus on deplatforming sites like this is precisely because it's a concrete problem with a concrete solution. If instead you're a culture warrior fighting "fascism" or "the alt-right" you'll never run out of blue check marks to deplatform and your personal influence will never stop growing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com