The delights and the dangers of deplatforming extremists | Hacker News Reader

The delights and the dangers of deplatforming extremists

conversationalist.org

29 pointscratermoon47 comments

This post was suprisingly more nuanced and well-balanced than the comments seemed to make it out to be.

The author notes the effectiveness of deplatforming when it comes to reducing the ability of extremist groups to radicalise others, but also discusses the problems with adopting it as the main tool for enacting social change. In particular, that we, as a society, are outsourcing the global gatekeeping of free expression to unelected malevolant american mega-coorporations.

Overall, I thought this was a good article that identifies and reasonably evaluates a lot of the simple traps that permeates such discussions about free speech and social media.

Definitely worth a read.

> Substack, the subscription newsletter platform, now hosts several “deplatformed” people who are thriving, like “gender critical” activist and TV writer Glen Linehan (who was kicked off Twitter for harassing transgender people),

I think she's referring here to Graham Linehan [1], the Irish writer (Father Ted, Black Books), who now posts mainly on Substack [2].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/jun/27/twitter-clos... [2] https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/

There's an Spanish Twitter user, who mostly writes against, gender equality regulations in Spain and violence against women, by men.

I'm yet to see a rude or unpolite message by him. He's composed, respectful and logical and exposes his reasoning calmly.

But, as he is vocal against the goverment (no matter the party in charge, is the same) and mainstream media, he's been suspended by Twitter several times.

It's puzzling to me he's been categorized the same as real misfits, trolls and so.

But seems like speaking against the majority has costs, no matter the epoch you live in.

Here's an idea where I legitimately can't decide whether I'm serious or not: let's deplatform everyone. I think we could all use a timeout.

(Obvious retort: "After you!")

Now we're getting somewhere!

I voluntarily deleted my Facebook and recommend you do too.

Instead of facebook, I now invite my far right friends over to my house where we can say exactly what we want in peace. And then we eat dinner with our copious children and discuss homeschooling, while marvelling at the rates of anxiety disorders in our leftist friends and acquaintances.

> Instead of facebook, I now invite my far right friends over to my house where we can say exactly what we want in peace. And then we eat dinner with our copious children and discuss homeschooling, while marvelling at the rates of anxiety disorders in our leftist friends and acquaintances.

Sounds nice. I've been trying to do something similar, arranging more campfires and such for discussion late into the evenings. Toss in some cigars and a bit of fine whiskey, you can have quite civil conversations with even a fairly diverse group. Those who tend to get riled up also tend to calm themselves down a bit with the whiskey, and having something else to do with your hands (cigar, pipe, etc) means that it's a lot easier for people to simply sit back, relax, and watch a chunk of conversation flow past.

And it doesn't involve a bit of internet, cell phone, etc. I try to encourage people to leave their cell phones elsewhere. It's far more interesting as well to discuss with what you've got in your brain, instead of being able to shell out to "Well, this guy on YouTube says..." (I don't care to listen to him, either now or later).

> I voluntarily deleted my Facebook and recommend you do too.

Yup, already done.

If we could shut down all the major social media platforms for six months, then evaluate after, we might just leave them shut down.

More and more people are opting out of them, either entirely, or by just not engaging with much. Those who remain extensively posting on certain places (Facebook comes to mind) are the literal addicted - they can rail on about how evil Zuckerberg is, how he's committing treason, will be jailed soon, executed, but... to actually stop using Facebook? Unthinkable.

The best one can do is just disconnect from it as much as possible. It's a far saner existence.

This is one case where I'd happily go before you.

In fact, I've been permanently banned from Reddit, never used Twatter and Fecebook, quit Imgur because it just became too fucking dumb, now HN needs to ban me and I'm free... to start my own blog and shitpost without worries :D

The article puts a finger on a couple troubling aspects of deplatforming:

> …I am not convinced that censorship is an effective tactic for social change. Nor do I believe that it is in our best interests to entrust social media corporations with the power to moderate our discourse.

> The negative effects of deplatforming have not been studied as thoroughly as the positive effects—which is not surprising, given that the phenomenon is only a few years old. But there are a few clear possibilities, like the creation of cult-like followings driven by a sense of persecution, information vacuums, and the proliferation of “underground” organizing…

In short, deplatforming a leader of thought some people find objectionable is not only bad in the same way suppressing free speech is always bad, but it destroys trust in communication; confirms and strengthens their followers' belief that their leader's ideas are both a) right, and b) dangerous to powerful people; and it drives the leader and their followers away from more generally-approved sources of information.

I see this frequently among right-wing types I associate with. It has become a badge of honor to be banned from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and for many there is no longer any way to evaluate truth except, "Does it confirm my biases?" The thing is, many of the people don't hold what I would consider "extremist" beliefs at all, but are being increasingly driven that direction by social and traditional media's attempts to control objectionable thought.

I’m not sure I have heard deplatforming being touted as a long-term way to fix anything. All the efforts so far seem very “last-ditch”, which probably doesn’t bode well

That's because de-platforming doesn't actually fix anything. Instead of refuting the idea on its merits and allowing there to be a logical destruction of extremist views, de-platforming just turns people into "martyrs" for their cause.

Good. They can go be martyrs in their own little extremist shitholes and only affect the like-minded.

Maybe they can write books about their struggles in jail. I’m sure nothing bad could come from it.

The lesson of Hitler in this particular case isn't that Hitler shouldn't have been put in jail, it's that he should have been put in jail even longer.

Hitler was purposely given a short sentence and little oversight in jail, allowing him to meet with other fascists and write his book, by the judge and guards who were sympathetic to his message. Hardly deplatforming.

You say that and then act shocked when inevitably someone stabs or shoots a bunch of people.

They live among everyone else and many need help, never forget that.

Mental health does need a lot of improvement in the USA especially, and the police need access to extremists who are plotting violence, that is true. Social media is _not_ a good place for either though.

Nobody cares about the merits. That's not how arguments have worked for a long, long time. Now it's about red vs. blue, name-calling, post-hoc rationalization, and getting so wound up that every disagreement becomes an existential threat. At best you'll get some cherry-picked "evidence" that has a non-zero chance of already having been retracted.

Yeah. People apparently believe they're above debating these so called extremists. They've already decided who's right and who's wrong. There's plenty of people who aren't sure and who will wonder what's up when some community gets censored.

I also object to the way they censor others. People act like mobs on social media. Over the years I observed lots of open source developers get mobbed because they shared some wrongthink on Twitter or whatever, or because they refused to accept some code of conduct, or even because of innocuous comments. It sucks.

"I had Covid and it was just 3 days of mild fever"

This always attracts the panicky lil shits who think it's the end of the world and tell me I'm a dumb antivaxxer. There's more of them than me, so I'm an extremist now.

I've posted about vaccines before. Pointed out the fact that like everything in medicine they have risks and benefits. In the case of COVID-19 vaccines, we still don't fully understand either. We're discovering the risks as we go along by observing what happens to the humans who took those shots.

Apparently I'm an extremist spreading misinformation. Why else would I get downvoted?

You can't reason a person out of a position they didn' reason themselves into. By engaging in low effort obviously crazy stories like the Sandy Hook conspiracy, you give it credibility, you make it a two sided debate, on equal footing. If that worked we wouldn't have flat earthers and Q people.

Martyrs with very limited reach is a decent compromise.

It depends on what you mean by long-term, I'd guess.

Does it fix the problem completely? No.

Is it better than letting them spew unfiltered nonsense to everyone? Yes.

It worked out great to burn William Tyndale for heresy. Right?

I am not advocating burning people.

>” Is it better than letting them spew unfiltered nonsense to everyone? Yes.”

Just think of how much we accept as the truth today would be considered “unfiltered nonsense” in the past. Doctors washing hands between surgeries? Plate tectonics? Evolution? An elected executive instead of a King?

I can go on and on, but if society adopts a heavy handed approach to ‘heresy’ we’re going to snuff out any ability to change our views and genuinely reevaluate the beliefs we hold to be true. Otherwise we risk everything becoming pure dogma.

> Is it better than letting them spew unfiltered nonsense to everyone? Yes.

Do you have evidence for that belief, or does it just feel right?

The problem is that "extremism" just means "content that my team doesn't like."

Antifa calls for murdering AfD politicians, but that doesn't merit deplatforming? Please.

"Nothing to see here. Move along."

Reaction of all the Antifa fanboys. "No, there's no Antifa! It's a myth." Can you say "disingenuous"?

When you condone political violence by your side, you need to own it and stop being pedantic about how formal an organization it operates under.

But there are working definitions of extremists. I'm a fan of those that classify people with unbounded beliefs, or whose beliefs are not sustainable in the long term. Someone who believes that all sex is evil would be an extremists as that doesn't really work in the long term. Denying current climate change is not extremists, but believing that climate change is impossible would be. Someone who opposes a particular tax: not extremist. Someone who believes that all taxes everywhere should be opposed: extremist. Someone who thinks a president is a jerk and should apologies for something: not extremist. Someone who believes the president is a lizard and will never accept any apology: extremist.

> Antifa calls for murdering AfD politicians, but that doesn't merit deplatforming? Please.

Yeah. Somehow these extremists are protected from consequences while others are perfectly acceptable targets for online lynch mobs.

I remember keeping tabs on some drama I witnessed on GitHub years ago. Some developer posted wrongthink on Twitter and people wanted him removed from the project because of it. People who tweeted things like "kill all men" with a straight face. And they laugh at you when you point it out and denounce them for it. They know nothing's gonna happen to them.

"Deftly removing noxious propagandists is good" She writes.

Twitter notably didn't care until their reach became too much counterweight to the approved political philosophy and the analytics were showing sky rocketing monetization from these shock jocks.

Howard Stern can objectify every female that walks onto his set, but God forbid Hillary Clinton get relentlessly mocked by the right on Twitter.

I can't think of a time when censors were ever on the right side of history.

but hey, maybe this time is different!

de-platforming simply encourages new platforms to be built or adopted by the de-platformed, which in a way makes them stronger. it is short-sighted and long-term self-defeating. but hey censors gonna censor.

Looking forward to another constructive conversation between good faith protectors-of-speech and the folks bored or dumb enough to take their bait.

Surely this time we'll finally solve it.

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