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Comment by lanternfish | Hacker News Reader

This relies on an EA adjacent market fallacy where we can resolve all moral action down to funding actors of various moral alignments - there's no reason to believe that the end utility (or whatever metric) of the action is linear w.r.t amount of cash moved.

Garage band EvilWebsite.com is going to appreciate that 5$ way more than the SPLC or whatever.

This isn't to say that the policy is strictly bad, I just worry that it reinforces pretty negative patterns. Carbon offsets barely work, and that's an actual market - bigotry offsets are a dark line to walk.

(edit - misread the policy; it's not about matching cash flows through the service to offending websites, it's donating profits from offending costumers. That seems more consistent to me.)

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Although I agree with you that there's no reason to expect an equal dollar amount to produce a balanced outcome, I disagree completely with the conclusion. The paying party is a random website saying an offensive opinion, and the receiving party is a professional activist organization designed to turn dollars into utility. Why would you figure that the former is exerting more influence per dollar?

Maybe its unfair pessimism, but I definitely believe that Kiwifarms (ex) is way more efficient at turning money into targeted hate than - say - the Trevor Project is at countering it.

I guess my sense is that if you actually want to counter this kind of harm, you have to do so on a fundamentally structural level, and the host in question is the structural enabler.

And some of their listed organizations also turn money into targeted hate. So the offensive website gets double impact.

I think a major part of this policy is that the hosting site does not want to (and does not want to be seen to) _profit_ from what they consider to be repugnant customers. It's not a bigotry offset policy: It's a self-modulation to preserve the integrity of their principles all the way to the end.

Oh shit I totally misread the policy - I interpreted "payments to such accounts" to mean donations etc. made through channels that the host supported. As written, it's not really an offset, and really just a way to wash hands, which honestly I probably support more.

That's funny, I made the same mistake on my first reading. I had to slow down and go back over it!

Thank you. I used to fancy MFFAM for it’s seeming cleverness. But tobacco taxing basically does the same. And you could literally pave a road with its residue of good intentions. We’d all be hosting CSAM and pour the revenue into government programmes, but we don’t, because we know it to be more effective to prevent damage than trying to fix it afterwards.

You didn't get it. CSAM is illegal, hate speech not.

Unless you come up with a court order. They are not the police and are not judges. Let the professionals do their jobs.

CSAM is legal where you live?

Even if it doesn't do much from an economy perspective, the simple idea that the offending websites are paying for a cause they are against may have an effect.

Imagine you have a website about Vim and you realize you are paying for the promotion of Emacs.

I don’t agree, the FAQ answer doesn’t relate « moral alignment » to monetary value. I think it simply states that advocating for free speech doesn’t mean falling into relativism, assigning the same value to all positions and endorsing the most extreme ones. Pretty refreshing in the current context.

They hope to offset some sort of imperative burden (presumably moral) of hosting onerous content by countermanding the effect of hosting that content with paired monetary support of its adversary. My consideration is that pairing effect there is extremely weak - maybe so weak that the policy is on net dubios.

Where's the fallacy? They set no expectations on fully offsetting. It's a compromise.

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