The AskHistorians subreddit banned Holocaust deniers (2018)

It makes all the difference whether you ban speech by content from a particular forum, or try to ban it everywhere. The latter is poisonous and counterproductive even when the content in question really is wrong and vile. By my skim of this article it explained the former kind of ban and then slid straight to advocating the latter.

That's a good start! I'd like to see banning of antisemitic JAQing of other topics such as: - The USS Liberty Incident - Holodomor - Aliyah Bet for starters.

The framing of "just asking questions" as something insidious is insidious.

People should be allowed to ask questions. It's only when they do that we get good answers. In the absence of dispute, everything, even a fact, is reduced to dogma.

These days J.S. Mill is often framed (by those arguing against free speech) as saying that "free speech leads to truth". But Mill was no fool and that was not his argument. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Liberty:

> First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.

Mill says that, without disputation, we cannot get to truth. This is not the same as saying that disputation will always lead to truth. Mill also makes an important distinction (that we no longer recognize) between correct opinion and correct opinion that is rationally grounded.

A good piece of information to have when considering discussing this rule is that AskHistorians doesn't just ban Holocaust denial, but all ahistorical denialism. Your comments questioning the Armenian genocide will also be deleted.

An excellent article and one that lays out convincing points why, when choosing between absolute free speech and silencing the crazies, the latter is the lesser of two evils.

This paragraph is probably the most relevant quote:

> But more insidious, more frequent on both our forum and the internet at large, is the technique known as “just asking questions”—in internet parlance, “JAQing off.” Designed to further Holocaust deniers’ aim of spreading their talking points, this involves (a) framing a denialist talking point in the form of a good-faith question and (b) calling for “open debate.” This lends itself well to the question format of our subreddit. Inquiries about what materials were used for gas-chamber doors, why early editions of Elie Wiesel’s Night don’t mention gas chambers, why the death toll of Auschwitz allegedly changed over time, or simply what proof there is for the Holocaust (discounting all testimony and postwar material) might seem innocent at first glance. They are not. They are designed to call often minor details into question and to create doubt among readers less familiar with the history of the Holocaust. Deniers want to provoke an audience into making the mental leap of “If this detail is suspicious, what else might be wrong?” This is a Trojan horse for a slide from denial into hatred. When we remove such contributions, what deniers will inevitably do is to call for “open debate” and sling accusations of censorship and violations of free speech.

For some reason this reminds me of the website kuro5hin and how trolling was perfected into a sort of discussion-malware there. With Holocaust denial, it's discussion-malware with a highly targeted purpose: recreating the societal situation where another Holocaust can occur.

Imagine growing up in Germany and having your history be whitewashed so you barely know the atrocities your society committed... oh wait! I’m from California! We had our own genocide of the Natives that was sanctioned by the gold rush government. Anyone remember panning for gold in elementary school? Yeah... those were bad times if you weren’t white. Also, the California Genocide was closer in time to the Holocaust than the Holocaust is to today.

Do have to hand it to Eichmann though. Totally different level of scale of atrocity...

Still should probably get a new name for the 49ers football team...

So is that bullet point list their definition of holocaust denier?

Well, it makes sense.

You, and everyone else that is able to read this, is literally sitting in front of a globally connected information box, and with a few key taps you can easily bring up archival records and video footage of the holocaust.

So when managing a community that revolves around experts, you have a fundamental duty to their time, the experts won't have all day to answer questions and it makes sense that they would want to answer the interesting or detailed questions. It's not the position of them to have to refute a stance that is taken against what is basic and widely accepted knowledge in our society, and in opposition to what is really high quality evidence.

Now, I think this is different with theoretical fields, like with economics. Because while economic theories rely on practical data, it is a human-made system and therefore can be contested -- did we build it right? That is a melting pot where rich debate can take place, because there has been so much academic and theoretical debate over the last 100 years and much of it is not widely-known.

For example, I doubt many people here will be aware of Meiksins-Wood's book The Origins of Capitalism -- in which she contests that capitalism was not a naturally occurring system -- that is a rich book with a lot of good and firm arguments, and it is worth a discussion.

Whereas with holocaust denial, what exactly can you retort? The argument against the denial boils down to "We have facts, here they are", and the argument in favour of the denial boils down to a rejection of those facts -- it's not very interesting or unique (After you've seen 2 or 3 holocaust denial arguments, they all tend to boil down to one of those three), and it's certainly not something that is worth experts wasting their time over. Much like "the earth is flat", these are situations where people are willingly taking a decision to disbelieve 50+ years of knowledge, and where there is no other interpretation if you actually understand and observe the evidence.

With things like holocaust denial, flat-earthism, you really have to nip them in the bud. They are essentially toxic ideas and people do not go to them out of nowhere.

I have a friend who started disbelieving in germ theory, but she arrived to that viewpoint from the position of having a medical condition that was untreated, for whatever reason it got better when she started drinking fruit-smoothies and using a water filter, that then led her to reading Natural News, and her prior was: "Well, since the medical establishment couldn't cure my illness, what else are they wrong about?". Now, that would have been perfectly fine if she had discovered someone like Ben Goldacre, who works for the Royal Academy of London, and has a medical degree, and works to point out the faults in modern medical practice. Instead, she found a source of misinformation that is known for misquoting official sources and deriving information out of thin air (I used to argue against people who were invested in NaturalNews when I was a teenager -- one of the sources I was presented with boiled down to self-hosted edited papers scraped from pubmed).

Likewise, I didn't believe in climate change when I was younger, because I was brought up by someone who was otherwise cogent, but in this instance she bought into climate change denial, and that influenced a young, impressionable me.

The thing about it is my friend's (and the much younger me's) arguments are like an McEscher drawing, there is no structure, there is no reasoning present -- while it presents itself as reasonable, if you dig into them you will find no architecture, it is just random facts cobbled together that confirm her prior (That doctors and the common body of knowledge are wrong) and ostensibly (to her) prove you wrong. What debating these ideas with her does is prove her contention that she is right, and that everyone else is wrong -- and worse -- it spreads the idea. It exposes new people to the brain worms and allows it to take hold in them.

The only thing left at this stage is damage control -- I was lucky, I was still young and impressionable when I found rational wiki, and the arguments there convinced me to the opposite, but I had to find that by looking -- debating just convinced me in the opposite direction, and likewise with my friend.

So as someone who previous believed in shit like this, we have to stifle and shut down these debates, because they are beyond debate -- no matter what evidence you throw at these people, it will only confirm their believe that you are the delusional one, and drive them further into the hole, while at the same time exposing other people to their McEscher-esque arguments.

The solution to bad ideas is more ideas, not less.

At issue here is a fundamental problem that humans have been struggling with since recorded history, who decides what's true?

When we have demonstrated bad actors at every level of discussion, from authoritative sources down to internet trolls - how do we identify truth, especially with all of it's nuance, without degeneration into a Ministry of Truth, and punishing dissent?

While I understand that the constant battle against misinformation and disinformation is exhausting, isn't that what you're signing up for by engaging in a medium that encourages discussion?

If you don't want discussion and contrasting viewpoints, perhaps you're better served by publishing a blog, or a book, or academic paper where discussion is much slower and involves published responses?

Edit: the irony of a comment like this being downvoted isn't lost on me. That's ok, I knew when I wrote it that it would be.