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Comment by kcplate | Hacker News Reader

Exposure to many viewpoints, including wrong ones, provides a counterbalancing effect. When you actively try and suppress information you create a “forbidden knowledge” effect where people seek out silos where extreme and wrongheaded information gets passed without the “sunlight is the best disinfectant”—-it grows faster…becomes more wrong, more extreme, and more dangerous.

Seems to me in my experience after decades of watching and participating in online discussion extremism really only became more problematic when fact checking and active efforts to suppress took hold. Whatever the good intentions may have been, the results were worse.

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There's some academic research to the contrary; banning /r/fatpeoplehate and /r/coontown on Reddit reduced incidents of hateful speech across the platform.

https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/6zg6w6/reddits_ban... / https://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf

"Sunlight is the best disinfectant" is a great pithy slogan, but modern society needs bleach and chlorhexidine sometimes.

> There's some academic research to the contrary; banning /r/fatpeoplehate and /r/coontown on Reddit reduced incidents of hateful speech across the platform.

That does not imply it reduced hateful speech overall, maybe the censorship just increased antipathy and drove that speech underground or to other platforms where it couldn't be seen.

"Off Reddit" is a win. Recruitment in neutral-ish venues like Reddit is critical for extremist groups; people aren't starting on Stormfront.

That's still just a conjecture of a meaningful effect. Recruiters are able to change tactics in response you know. You're just naively assuming that those old tactics worked better just because reddit itself changed, but it could very well be the case that the more extreme rhetoric only attracted people who were already extremist and turned off moderates, but a more moderate approach that's now required could funnel more moderate people into an extremist pipeline.

"Off reddit" is just a win for reddit's PR, and that's why they did it, and no other reason and no other effects can be inferred.

The claim you are addressing is a separate one from the fatpeople hate story.

And that claim is evidenced, It’s not conjecture. I dont have it handy on me, but we have mapped out the ways people are recruited, and things like fatpeoplehate, coontown, are the funnels for groups to find new recruits.

Here’s one - https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3447535.3462504

There’s several others on things from ISIS to hacktivists. The mechanism is the same, heck - “red pill” is the term for this, it’s actually quite known.

Not necessarily. If it drives the content off Reddit but onto another platform that's friendly to only these extremists and their views then you may just end up radicalizing the members of the original banned subs even more.

I don't know if that's what happened and there's probably a lot more research to do here but I'm not convinced that deplatforming is actually a good outcome societally without more data.

So your example is two places that were intentionally moderated to be hateful and also suppressed the non-hateful speech in those subreddits?

So removing a censored platform eliminated the problem? Amazing how that works!

No, you should actually go and read the paper. It didn't just reduce the type of content posted in the subreddit, they tracked individual users that were active and their behavior overall changed, including in other subreddits compared to before.

Essentially what it showed was that if you pull people out of a particular echo chamber, then that had a sustained effect on how they behaved. Which is evidence contrary to the often made claim that they'd just leave and go somewhere else. It's in line with the theory that the internet fosters extremism because it enables insular pathological communities that in the analog era you'd have been slapped out of long ago by people who aren't nuts.

> Essentially what it showed was that if you pull people out of a particular echo chamber, then that had a sustained effect on how they behaved.

So…silos and echo chambers are bad. Seems to me that was part of my original point. I am suggesting that censorship of information leads people to the silos.

So you are saying, that things got better when people were banned.

Because when they got banned, many other communities saw improvements as well, not just those?

No I am saying that when you censor/suppress debate in the public square you drive people underground where they land in echo chambers and develop extreme views because they don’t have public debate.

You don’t need to ban people from echo chambers if they don’t land there in the first place.

Your solution is reactive to a problem you caused. My solution is don’t create the problem in the first place.

So I have done the leg work to see what happens and it turns out that if you give space to extremist views they overtake other conversations and dominate the community.

What people don’t seem to grasp is that all speech is not equal, and that our brains react very predictably to certain arguments and content.

For example, your argument is not supported by the paper, which I have read. Because the paper shows behavior of the bad actors changed across the site, and became less hateful.

However the argument is complex, and goes against commonly held beliefs, such as sunlight is the best disinfectant etc.

More exposure results in more reinforcement of popular ideas, until something happens externally.

When you feel the need to censor or suppress information all you are doing is admitting that your argument is just not as persuasive as the opposition and requires handicapping. People see that as the same thing as your argument being false which is why they always work their way tirelessly around your efforts to suppress and censor.

If you get to the point where you feel you need to censor, suppress, or outright ban voices to be heard, you have already lost the communication high ground and no matter how true or good your opinion/idea/position. It will lose in the court of public opinion…and frankly should…because you did not put the appropriate effort in to be persuasive.

Someone shared a picture of a dead baby in my community a few days ago. They were part of pictures describing the conditions of an ethnic conflict that is largely unremarked upon.

As mods, we removed it, since it’s traumatic to simply see it, and it’s out of scope for our community. It’s not an ‘acceptable’ argument and it was removed. That was censorship.

Should pro beastiality arguments be allowed? Am I admitting the anti beastiality argument is not as persuasive as the beastiality argument, when I choose not to give them space in my communities?

What about when children are engaging with an experienced cult recruiter?

Users are spamming your community with random content, to bury headlines about a heinous rape case that makes the ruling party look bad. That’s fundamentally more speech and it is acting as an antidote for ‘bad’ speech.

How do you address roving bands of users who go around Reddit, and downvote all negative news about China and India on r/worldnews? The demographics and time they are online, are sufficient to shift the news.

What would your conscience have you do? Have you been in a position to make similar decisions? I have, so I can give these examples.

This.. isn’t an attempt by me to prove you wrong. These aren’t hard questions, but pretty common place ones. Its just that all mod choices are essentially censorship.

I believe you are defending a principle. If you choose not to moderate/ censor in those examples I would respect you for holding to your principle.

If you decide to censor, I would be fine with it too. Because you would still be making a decision based on a principle.

I’ve struggled with the idea of censorship since I first volunteered as a mod nearly 15 years ago.

I valued free speech as a core principle to enable humanity succeed and thrive.

I have, stopped seeing free speech as an end to itself. I had to reconcile the limited options with the results I saw in communities.

I hated it. Eventually I had to ask why we value free speech in the first place.

And we value it because we value a fair marketplace of ideas. I see the goal as being able to have fair debates and exchanges of ideas between normal people.

And they suffer failings and weaknesses possible in any market place. So the goal is to ensure the marketplace is effective at being fair.

Perhaps you would have a different idea, and I am happy to hear it. If only to see a different solution.

And if you agree with me to some degree and also think that having effective market places is a good idea, thats fine too.

We Sure as heck need the average person to decide what principles need to be held up, and at what costs.

> I believe you are defending a principle. If you choose not to moderate/ censor in those examples I would respect you for holding to your principle.

I am of the opinion that net positive benefit of free expression outweighs negatives when it’s allowed and the negatives of censorship outweigh the positives of it when it’s practiced.

Also, generally I think civil people will simply reject spaces where uncivil discourse or “not appropriate” content to them is present. If I was a moderator I can see where that would create a challenge of balance towards censorship, because you would want your forum to thrive and not dry up from the garbage.

Ultimately it’s not a decision I would need to make, I don’t moderate anything, nor would I. Even here on HN, I only upvote. I am not a fan of how HN handles the downvoting (content dimming), but at least I can still see it if I choose to. I also use a feed reader for HN post delivery so, flagged/dead posts still make it to me and I can choose whether those posts are worth my time.

you should definitely mod!

I think its pretty critical that people who believe in Free speech get their blasted hands dirty.

I cant be amongst the few people trying to communicate the stupid complexity of this issue! If you believe in free speech, then you really really have to see how the sausage is made, so that you can articlate the issues to people who believe the same thing!

I'm serious! To an extent I know its uncomfortable to be put on the spot, but please at least consider it.

Back to our main point:

>I am of the opinion that net positive benefit of free expression outweighs negatives when it’s allowed and the negatives of censorship outweigh the positives of it when it’s practiced.

I would like to think we both agree, but there is much that hinges on what you mean by positives.

I ended up reading everything from court cases to research papers to reconcile the options mods have, with the principles of free speech. I eventually had to lean heavily on the analogy of the market place of ideas from the Abrams dissent, to reconcile the two.

That means the good engendered by free speech, is primarily to enable the exchange of ideas - which in turn is what serves the ultimate goals of humanity. Free speech is a subordinate principle to the free and fair exchange of ideas.

To illustrate -I can and do have users flood the front page with content, to suppress content that is hurtful to their ideas and image. This is speech meeting more speech.

Any action I would take to stop this, is censorship and the prevention of the free expression of users. This happened over and over again, for all content critical of positions by the ruling party.

The frameworks I had to figure out helped me navigate this choice, but how would you approach it?

would you stop the users who are coordinating the multiple submissions of topics to prevent visibility of a post?

Or would you let that behavior continue?

Or would you find a way to signal boost the content that is being suppressed?

> you should definitely mod!

I am way too old, opinionated, and my ability to “suffer fools gladly is long in my past”

But, I do appreciate your point that it’s good to see the sausage being made. Then again, I am a person who knows exactly what is in scrapple and how it’s made, but when I am in Philly if I go to a diner it’s what I order and scarf up every morsel.

It’s not the knowledge of how it’s made.

It’s the reconciliation and articulation of principles reasoning.

Look you may not do it.

But there is a contradiction at the heart of modern American society between principles and how conversations actually function online.

And this needs to be articulated by normal people for normal people. Otherwise it’s always going to be an imposed reality,

Or think of it this way. Unless people who care about free speech don’t reassure mods that the consequences of not modding are acceptable - that they will also be the conscience keepers when inevitably society turns around and says “oh you should have modded more”

And that has to be an informed choice.

And consider that you are crotchety and old but get annoyed by free speech discussions.

You aren’t crotchety and old and annoyed by discussions on ancient Roman mining methods.

There’s things we can be sort of arsed to do which are within range of our interests.

This is within range of yours.

I acknowledge there would be conflicting forces and its a complex machine, but knowing myself and how important liberty has been to me for my entire adult (and even before as a teenager) life, I am confident that I would not interfere and would rather let a forum wither and die or leave moderation of it if the content presented fell outside my moral belief system rather than get in the way of people communicating where they want to communicate.

> would rather let a forum wither and die

That doesn't "get in the way of people communicating where they want to communicate"? If 99.9% of a forum likes the "no child porn" rule, that's not enough?

Exactly where did I advocate breaking the law in this thread?

I respect your preference not to, and I’m not going to push further.

I hope you understood why I would make this plea specifically to people arguing for their principles.

Maybe it reduced hate on this single metric, but the complaint is more about the errors in fact checking.

And single subreddits aren't really convincing about the reliability of fact checkers if their independence is in question. In the end they do rely on a truth-authority, which is problematic, especially for political content. And Meta reported that political demands increased.

>Exposure to many viewpoints, including wrong ones, provides a counterbalancing effect. When you actively try and suppress information you create a “forbidden knowledge” effect where people seek out silos where extreme and wrongheaded information gets passed without the “sunlight is the best disinfectant”—-it grows faster…becomes more wrong, more extreme, and more dangerous.

Fact checkers don't suppress information, they add context and information to posts others make and provide the exposure to many viewpoints that echo chambers often do not have.

People haven't stopped posting wrong and biased information with fact checkers, they just have the counterpoint to their bullshit displayed alongside their posts on the platform.

>Seems to me in my experience after decades of watching and participating in online discussion extremism really only became more problematic when fact checking and active efforts to suppress took hold. Whatever the good intentions may have been, the results were worse.

My decades of watching is exactly the opposite. Extremism is and was rampant long before fact checking, and fact checking really only served to push some of the most extreme content to the margins and to smaller platforms that don't have it. It concentrates it in some ways as many of these opinions fall apart quickly when exposed to truth and facts.

> Fact checkers don't suppress information,

I think some moderation is important, but misrepresenting fact checkers (damn ironic actually) doesn't serve us. Of course fact check suppresses information! That's the whole point. Sometimes it results in straight up deletion, but even when not it results in lowered reach aka suppression of what the algorithm would normally allow to trend, etc.

>Of course fact check suppresses information! That's the whole point

Its not. The fact checkers in this case, and almost all cases we're discussing ADD information that challenges the posted data, not censor or restrict it from being posted.

Outside of illegal content that is. Content deemed illegal was removed by moderation teams, this was before fact checking, and will continue with community notes with little to no change.

Yes I am aware of what a fact checker is supposed to do and am aware of what they really do.

What they really do is spin information.

> Seems to me in my experience after decades of watching and participating in online discussion extremism really only became more problematic when fact checking and active efforts to suppress took hold. Whatever the good intentions may have been, the results were worse.

Seems like the opposite. Traditionally we only had siloed forums which were often heavily moderated by volunteers who considered the forums their personal fiefdom, read every single thread and deleted stuff for being "off topic" never mind objectionable, plus the odd place like /b/ which revelled in being unmoderated. Then you ended up with more people on big platforms that were comparatively-speaking, pretty lightly and reactively moderated. Then you ended up with politicians weighing in against moderation with the suggestion even annotating content published on their platform was a free speech violation, let alone refraining from continuing to publish it.

The difference between antivax sentiment now and circa 2005 isn't that nobody ever determined that they weren't having that nonsense on their forums or closed threads with links to Snopes back then or that it's become difficult to find any references to it outside antivaxxer communities since then. Quite the opposite, the difference is that it's now coming from the mouth of a presumptive Health Secretary, amplified on allied news networks and now we have corporations running scared that labelling it a hoax might run the risk of offending the people in charge. Turns out sunlight is a catalyst for growth

> The difference between antivax sentiment now and circa 2005

The antivax movement literally grew exponentially when vaccine information started to be actively censored on the largest social media platforms and you think that is because there wasn’t enough censorship? People were literally driven into antivax information silos because a bunch of idiots decided that vaccine criticism should be forbidden in the public square

Wow.

Sorry, but I live in a country using exactly the same social media providers as you, subject to exactly the same (actually pretty limited) censorship and without widespread, committed and politically-aligned antivax sentiment

People in the US didn't need to be "driven into antivax information silos", because those antivax information silos were their favourite talk show hosts and some of the country's most prominent politicians. Turns out that promotion of antivax sentiment as an important issue that must be discussed and constant attacks on public health officials doesn't "disinfect" people against the belief that there might be some truth to it...

So you are arguing for exactly what? You don’t want freedom of speech? You don’t want body autonomy? You want authoritarian control of the populace?

Not sure where you live, but if those are the things that are important to your leaders and people, I wouldn’t want to live there or even visit. Sounds awful.

I don't recall expressing any of those sentiments you've attributed to me, but I'll note it's quite a shift on your side from "sunlight is the best disinfectant" to "your country's mainstream media and politicians didn't encourage antivax sentiment enough to reduce vaccination levels or increase death rates to US levels? Sounds horrible"

I note that the original topic was about Zuckerberg being so afraid of his corporation being censured by the incoming government that he's pledged to move his moderation team to a state which voted for them and refrain from publishing any "fact checking" notes in Facebook's name lest they conflict with the government and its supporters. That doesn't sound like a libertarian paradise either

> I don't recall expressing any of those sentiments you've attributed to me

Perhaps I misunderstood your intentions then.

If you believe that antivax debate was in the mainstream in the US and there wasn’t an active attempt to suppress just because some voices bled through the censorship, you are simply wrong. Zuckerberg even noted in this announcement that pressure from the Biden administration to censor speech was significant.

My consistent point here is that censorship drives extremism because it suppresses the debate where the debate wants to take place and pushes the conversation to those interested in the topic to siloed echo chambers. That definitely happened around vaccines in the US over the last 4-5 years. I know that happens for a fact and have personally tried to gently encourage people I know that felt the censorship frustrations and leapt to other platforms to still read all sides before making decsions.

Whatever Zuckerberg’s internal motivations are on this change of policy, I don’t care. Community notes seems to be a better way than suppression. Others may have a different opinion and thats ok. I encourage them to freely express it and would never support any one trying to shut that debate down.

How wrong of me to think that high-profile politicians and wall to wall cable news coverage are anything other than little-noticed voices bleeding through the all-pervading censorship of... two internet companies deleting a handful of accounts after people had pointed out how many million likes their dangerous medical advice was getting and some algorithmic "are you sure you want to link to this hoax?" interstitials. Really, the argument that Meta's moderation was futile and inept (even more so than its policing of scam ads and spambots) has far more credibility than attempts to portray it as some evil internet police forcing people to hide out on tiny islands of antivax.

It seems a little unlikely that people who decided to delete their Facebook account and seek out an echo chamber because they didn't like seeing FactCheck.org links slapped on vaccine function would have nevertheless listened very carefully to FactCheck.org or the public health officials their favourite politicos were slagging off if only they were able to d̶e̶b̶a̶t̶e̶ post misleading memes about public health on Facebook first. I mean, the anger at third party fact checkers is explicit rejection of the idea there's anything to debate.

Anyway, regardless of whether self-proclaimed fact checkers actually live up to their label, it's difficult to describe a corporation bending the knee to an incoming administration that's determined that corporations shouldn't link to them as a victory for free speech or enabling controversial viewpoints to be debated as opposed to merely promoted on internet platforms. Must be wonderful for Zuckerberg to be able to express himself freely without any threat of censure whatsoever on the day he announces that he'll be firing his his moderation team so he can relocate it to a state the incoming administration considers less susceptible to wrongthink

> a corporation bending the knee to an incoming administration

Funny how you aren’t critical of when Meta bent their knee to the existing administration by participating in the censorship requests. I guess that was ok…because you supported that action?

The principle is sound, but it’s a principle.

The mechanisms of online speech show us a few other issues.

For example certain ideas are far more “fit” for transmission and memory than others. Take a look at something as commonplace as “ghosts” or the idea of penguins. Ghosts are in all cultures, and they are essentially people with some additional properties. Penguins are birds that dont fly.

Brains absorb stories and ideas like flightless birds easily, because they build on pre existing concepts.

Talk about spacetime, or multiple dimensions and you aren’t going to have the same degree of uptake.

So when I put certain ideas into competition with each other, all else being equal - the more suited for human foibles, the more successful the idea.

People also dont make that much effort to seek out forbidden knowledge. Conservative main stream media has made many things forbidden - 1/3rd of America isnt aware that Obamacare and the ACA are the same thing.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant for certain breeds of germs. Many others get on just fine.

In my many decades of online existence, which includes being on multiple sides of moderation, extremism was on the rise from before, because we had created the arguments and structures that thrive on it.

Content moderation was a hap hazard effort created out of necessity to stall it.

Personally - I hope this works. Moderation sucks, and is straight up traumatic. If we can get better, more effective market places of ideas, then I am all for it.

I care about the effectiveness of the exchange of ideas. I see free speech as a principle that supports this. But the goal is always the functioning of the marketplace.

> Seems to me in my experience after decades of watching and participating in online discussion extremism really only became more problematic when fact checking and active efforts to suppress took hold. Whatever the good intentions may have been, the results were worse.

This is just overtly and flatly wrong. I reject your experience fully because over the past few decades the internet has become more open, not less. We openly debated people that believed vaccines caused autism and gave them microphones. Every single loud asshole and dipshit was given maximum volume on whatever radio show or podcast or social media platform they could want.

You can reject my experience all you want but the reality is that between 2020 and 2023ish the world’s top social media platforms became less open about specific kinds of information and actively tried to censor and suppress any contrary information to a government opinion/narrative about certain subjects. During this time certain forms of extremism exploded in popularity as people were driven to information silos to find and learn about the information that the social media platforms were trying to suppress. Those silos generally didn’t have censorship but they also didn’t have contrarian voices either. So when folks landed in those silos all they heard was the assholes at the loud volumes and without the contrarians, followed those assholes.

Specifically to vaccines, the antivax crowd was pretty minimal to a some nutjob soccer moms, holistic medicine fanatics, and RFKjr until you stopped having conversations with them, because you folks who want or believe that censorship is good silenced the debate and did not follow them to the forums where they went to spread their ideas to continue the debate.

I am absolutely convinced that the growth in the antivax movement is directly tied to the censorship effort (and the desire of the government to not be completely honest about the vaccines at the time).

No free lunch here. Social media is different from systems in the past cuz it give everyone Free Broadcast capability.

In the past people were told they had Free Speech, but they didn't have Free access to Broadcast Media (newspapers/radio/tv/movie studios/satellites). It was always up to someone else with Access to Broadcast(one to all messaging) to prop up voices they thought was important.

Shannon's Information theory tells us Social Media as a system can't work cause - once you tell people their voice matters, give everyone in the room a mic, plugged into the same sound system, and allow everyone to speak, firstly you get massive noise, secondly as a reaction people will scream louder and louder and repeat their message more and more. Noise only compounds. The math says it can't work. The way people are debating about this is under an assumption that it can.

> The math says it can't work. The way people are debating about this is under an assumption that it can.

Yet here we are…the math seemed to work overall just fine minimizing the anti-vax movement until someone started externally futzing with the numbers to try and force a specific result to that math. When you do that apparently more of your components run off to form other equations and no longer participate in your equation then before you tried to manipulate the messaging.

You are not going to get everyone to agree with you…ever. But suppressing and censoring debate in the real world example of vaccine acceptance to try and achieve that result backfired spectacularly by galvanizing and growing that movement far far beyond what it was…or should have ever been.

Minimal? Again you are just objectively wrong. The antivax movement had been growing since the 90s, RFK Jr didn't exist in a vacuum. The entire reason why there was push back against the COVID vaccine in the first place was because this movement was there already, much like the movement against abortion.

You are rewriting history to fit your viewpoint which is wrong. The reality is that you are wrong. And those silos that people moved to were equally sinful of censoring voices and banning people not aligned with their beliefs. Even now Musk has no problem censoring and banning people off Twitter for being too mean to him.

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