Hate Speech’s Rise on Twitter Is Unprecedented, Researchers Find
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
An organization that was created to help a Jewish rapist/murderer escape justice said so ? Well that's an unimpeachable source !
I'm still waiting for that. To actually work. At all.
Well, people who are upset can just continue doing what they were doing before; pretending they weren't there. They'll just have to work a little harder at it now. Or they can, now that we can see the horrifying extent of the problem, work to start cleaning it up. None of the civil rights movements succeeded because their members sat around pretending their opposition didn't exist.
The weakest form of criticism by far is to restate someone's argument in bad faith then proceed to beat the strawman into submission, because no, that's not what I or anyone is objecting to.
I am saying that the "sunlight is the best disinfectant" (which is the straw man you were taking a swipe at, if we are going to that level of debate) has more nuance to it than magically making the deplorables disappear. Many of us are programmers here; among the first things we do to respond to an issue is to expose and assess the full extent of the problem before working toward a solution.
You're right that there's work to be done, but you fail to consider that moderation and deplatforming is a legitimate and effective part of that work. You claim to want to expose and assess the full extent of the problem while giving those who engage in hate speech access to the largest possible platforms for engagement, recruitment and radicalization in existence, ignoring the degree to which their access to those platforms is a literal measure of the extent of the problem.
You also likely assume the balance of power between truth and lies, reason and radicalism are equal, when history (as well as the incentives of social media platforms) demonstrate that it tilts very much in favor of lies and radicalism. Which is why attempts to "clean up the mess" with engagement and debate didn't work before, which is why they don't work on any "free speech" platform now, and why they won't work in the future. Deradicalization can't succeed unless the rate at which hate speech spreads and its capacity to normalize violence and radicalize people can be contained, and that can't be done without moderating and banning it from the large platforms which do exactly that on a global scale.
The problem with the "sunlight is the best disinfectant" line of reasoning is that the top priority of free speech absolutism isn't the safety of marginalized and oppressed groups, or the elimination of hate speech and misinformation, but vigorously defending the freedom of the oppressors to continue their work unabated. Fundamentally, free speech absolutists aren't really looking for a solution, because any effective solution by definition would undermine freedom of speech.
You will never eliminate negative elements in society through repression. It doesn't work if humans do it to themselves, it most certainly doesn't work when humans do it to others. Compassionate action is the only resolutely effective method. We can see this in prisons that practice remedial action vs punitive and even in day to day life conversing with others. When has punishing hate with hate ever worked throughout all of human history? The very idea is ludicrous. If I discharge a flamethrower on a forest fire, what do you expect will happen?
Dudes (looking at you Buddha) living thousands of years ago told us this and we're still playing these same games of self-delusion.
Didn't work when it was used against the civil rights movement or the LGBTQ rights movement, which society tried to keep in the closet. Doesn't work against media piracy & torrents. Hasn't even worked against the far right, as the Trump presidency or the recent gain of control by Republicans of the House of Representatives shows. I do not buy that it's particularly effective and suspect that it will continue to get less effective as the internet evolves. "The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." as Gilmore said.
Now, if Musk's changes to Twitter results in further growth of the far-right, and I mean actual growth of the membership of their movement demonstrably attributable to Twitter, not more nasty tweets, I'll cheerfully admit I'm wrong. But that seems rather unlikely.
> "You also likely assume the balance of power between truth and lies, reason and radicalism are equal, when history (as well as the incentives of social media platforms) demonstrate that it tilts very much in favor of lies and radicalism."
If we have to curate what the public sees to prevent "lies and radicalism" from taking hold, that's attempting to exert direct influence over their their worldview. That's essentially anti-democratic given that democracy assumes that the electorate is smart enough to sort out the information they are given and make intelligent voting choices.
I'd rather believe that people are better than to need someone to ban things for them, even if progress is slower than we would like in getting civil liberties extended to more people. And, if I'm wrong, we're all doomed anyway regardless of how much banning is done.
> "...free speech absolutism isn't the safety of marginalized and oppressed groups..."
Good thing I'm not a free speech absolutist then. I merely think it's well demonstrated deplatforming has been largely ineffective and has made deradicalization more difficult by amplifying the us-versus-them mentality on all sides. Better to get everything out into the open and fight it in the open.