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Comment by bomewish | Hacker News Reader

Kinda curious how the policy might apply to communist accounts. Should they be banned too or is communism less directly associated with mass killing and is more in the legitimate ideology territory? Historically as practiced communism has involved mass murder of class enemies for political reasons.

I initially supported the idea of banning Nazi accounts but then this thought experiment occurred to me and I couldn’t come up with a coherent view. Why ban one and not the other? Yet banning communist accounts would seem a bit much. Hence no coherent view.

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> Should [communists] be banned too or is communism less directly associated with mass killing

From the article: “What does ‘Nazi’ mean, or signify? Many things, but among them is ‘Kill all Jews.’

Atwood doesn’t call for banning Nazis per se. She wants something done about calls to violent action.

Which has a shockingly low applicability to the actual accounts that will get banned by the policy; a number of the writers (like Cremieux or Hanania) being called Nazis ARE Jewish or are notably philosemitic. It’s a joke.

> has a shockingly low applicability to the actual accounts that will get banned by the policy

What policy? There is no policy? Nobody is being banned.

This argument is akin to saying we can’t block spam because otherwise we’ll block all political messaging. Like, no. We can just block the former. Just because someone on the planet can’t distinguish them doesn’t mean we all can’t.

"Nazi" is too broad a word in today's vernacular. Many people legitimately believe Joe Rogan is a Nazi. Our society's excitement at labeling people we disagree with as "Nazis" makes it difficult to have discussions like we're having now.

> "Nazi" is too broad a word in today's vernacular

This is true but irrelevant. The standard is calling for the extermination of Jews. Substack moderating sex workers' posts but not Nazis' (specifically, people calling for the exterminatino of Jews) is inconsistent; that's what Atwood is calling out.

> Should they be banned too or is communism less directly associated with mass killing and is more in the legitimate ideology territory?

Yes, I think so. It is possible (and, I mean, even basically the default) to be an ideologically consistent communist without any interest in mass killing; that's far more difficult for literal Nazis.

> Historically as practiced communism has involved mass murder of class enemies for political reasons.

I mean, to some extent, what ideology _hasn't_? It's not a core and necessary component of most ideologies, though.

I assume this depends on who you ask. I bet you could find some Nazis who would say they loove the ideology but they're not too keen on all the killing. Same for lots of communists. So this is basically personal beliefs & interpretations of these ideological systems. Implications for platform moderation unclear.

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