Hacker News Reader

Comment by drnonsense42 | Hacker News Reader

This, in a nutshell, is the ivory tower conversation silicon valley liberals have been having with themselves for the past few years to justify their ever-creeping censorship. 90% of the people on the site should not have been banned in the first place. Obviously the overwhelming majority of people having this conversation at these companies are liberal and it just happens to turn out that everyone who needs to be banned is a conservative, and we’ll throw in a few people like Farrakhan who give the democrats bad optics.

View on HN

I disagree with your idea, that basically conservatives think only they get banned from twitter. I'd describe it as people making repeated hate speech, threatening, and/or misleading information that leads to death. A liberal example of a banned twitter person is Naomi Wolfe, writer of the "Beauty Myth". The problem for facebook and twitter and similar things is that accelerating inflammatory speech that outrages increases people's use of the system. It's really hard for them to get a lot of use without just resending the outrage of the day.

The problem with this binary thinking is that centrists as well as moderate progressives and moderate conservatives play no role in any of this.

I'd say quite a few, if not most, moderate progressives are not at all on board with extreme wokism. Similarly, moderate conservatives may not be too crazy about Trump or "alternate realities".

This massive group, which is most people, and pretty much all sane and reasonable people, have no place in social media like Twitter. The silent majority. They can't even express a single critical thought about their own "side" nor engage with political opponents. They're scared.

Rather than doubling down on this battle of which side should be censored, the very point should be to reduce extremism and its reach on both sides. Not just "your" side. Sane people should dominate conversation.

Woke is an undefined term, it's just the latest way to identify someone or some idea you don't agree with without really saying what it means. It's a strategy to avoid having to wrestle with complicated and difficult problems in society. I agree with you that reducing extremism and encouraging communication is really important, something we should all strive for.

From the context of my comment you very well know what I mean: far-left.

Yes, there are people who use the term too eagerly, just like there's people that use the term "alt-right" or "far-right" too eagerly. But we all know what woke means.

You’re proving my point. “Hate speech” is defined by a very small group of nerds, who are in the 4th sd of privilege with white liberal jesus syndrome and who’ve spent most of their lives on computers or on vacation posting about how oppressed their lives are by christianity or patriarchy or some other malarkey. In other words, free speech is a better alternative to the people making decisions having god complexes while being completely detached from most of the rest of humanity.

There is such a thing as hateful speech. The people who yelled the n word at football games at the opposing team when I was in college, that's just ok with you? No issue? Abhorrent maybe? My semi-integrated high school had a semi-racist 'school song' too, sung before every game or pep rally.

I'm from the deep south, perhaps you are too, but there is definitely a thing known as hate speech, and there's definitely a thing where the leaders of a town are happy to keep black people down, including using derogatory words. Their speech reflects their views on life. I disagree that we are improved as a society for them being able to make such comments in the public sphere.

If that were in any way even remotely representative of what is being defined as hate speech and weaponized, you might have a point. Tangentially, I’ve noticed a few occasions where rule enforcement for racial slurs seem to get bent quite often for the right democrats. Hard to trust the gavel-wielding infant cabal when there are multiple sets of rules. This is why free speech exists, so the bad apples in California don’t poison the rest of the tree.

It's not just conservatives who are banned, it's also gender critical feminists, or anyone who questions "trans women are women". GC feminists are often quite left in their politics. The other thing that has happened is lots of threats aimed at GC feminists that DON'T get deleted. The mods find these do not violate twitter standards.

And more often than not, banned not for harrassment or abuse, but for simply describing material biological reality. It's maddening.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com