People will never stop blaming human issues on businesses and devices. It's much easier to blame Facebook and demand they change that it is to get people to change.
The bigger question is, will they also ban content that would be construed as hate speech if you simply replaced the words “white people” with “[!white] people”?
Sure it is, because it sounds like Facebook isn’t committed to getting rid of all hate speech, just the kind that isn’t socially acceptable. Same with Twitter.
> One document trains content reviewers on how to apply the company’s global hate speech algorithm. The slide identifies three groups: female drivers, black children and white men. It asks: Which group is protected from hate speech? The correct answer: white men.
Facebook certainly did not invent the idea of protected classes, USGOVT and tons of news/social companies all use the exact same notion when determining what constitutes illegal discrimination and disallowed hate speech.
I really don't think this is the same interpretation of "protected classes" as the US government uses:
> White men are considered a group because both traits are protected, while female drivers and black children, like radicalized Muslims, are subsets, because one of their characteristics is not protected.
I'm fairly certain a state that tried to ban female drivers or (openly via legislation; this next one definitely happens in practice) punish black children disproportionately would find themselves in hot water with the Feds.
Attention everyone: this is a real problem. White nationalism and fascism is resurgent. It's real, it's around us, and it's not going to go away without a fight.
Regardless of your politics, Trump, Russia, China has enabled this to balkanize traditional institutions of democracy and cooperation (USA/NATO/UN).
If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.
It's actually not on the rise at all, in fact it is down; just like crime across the board is down. We live in arguably the most peaceful and tolerant time in human history. The number of "hate crimes" in FBI stats is up, but those numbers are often misleading. The only place I actually see a slight resurgence is actually in Europe, and it's largely a backlash against the Syrian immigration crisis...which will generally resolve itself as people move back now that the war is over.
China is...a different story, largely because Chinese culture treats rights in a much different light than the West. That being said, if you compare modern China to China of the 70s or 80s, it is vastly better.
Oh please! Just please!! NATO especially was never an institution of democracy. White Supremasists and Neo Nazis are in resurgence in Ukraine ever since your beloved US supported a hideous coup over.
Trump was elected by a free, fair, democratically held vote of the people. You may cry about the outdated electoral system, but well, the rules are the rules. He won fair and square.
> and cooperation (USA/NATO/UN).
Switzerland isn't a member of the NATO and have only joined the UN in the early 2000s. You don't need to be a member of every overblown bureaucrat club on the planet to be friends with other nations and trade with other countries.
If you belive that russian twitter bots and a $100k Facebook ad campaign can swing a US election with a total budget of $4 billion, you are delusional.
That's an absurd summary of the degree to which we know Russia interfered in the election. I recommend you read the entire Wikipedia article rather than the section I cited.
I was going to comment on here that the reason people calling for a ban on "white nationalism" concerns me is because every time I turn on the news somebody calls Donald Trump a white nationalist without any evidence. Phrases like "Make America Great" and "Learn to code" have been denounced as white nationalism. And here you are, a few pages in, saying exactly that...
Please stop with the ideological riler-uppers. They don't actually inform us of anything and instead lead us down a generic, predictable, reflexive road. We don't want that! We want specific, informative, and thoughtful. You can be outraged and still contribute something more substantive than rage.
> Our policies have long prohibited hateful treatment of people based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity or religion – and that has always included white supremacy. We didn’t originally apply the same rationale to expressions of white nationalism and separatism because we were thinking about broader concepts of nationalism and separatism – things like American pride and Basque separatism, which are an important part of people’s identity.
Good to see the Valley is starting to get off its "we are just a platform, all information should be free and neutral no matter how bad, so we're not responsible" extremism of the past few years and understand that some forms of speech are harmful should not ever be encouraged and accelerated on any platform or technology, ever.
To the people that say "Where does it end?" – that's pretty easy. Let's start with curbing speech that encourages harming others.
They've been dragged kicking and screaming into this realization but we'll take it.
> To the people that say "Where does it end?" – that's pretty easy. Let's start with curbing speech that encourages harming others.
This may come as a surprise to you, but this response will not be comforting to those with genuine concerns about civil liberties. Avoiding the question of where to draw the final line with the question of where to draw the first one just implies that you intend to draw more lines in the future.
White nationalism isn't even remotely like ISIS propaganda. I am no fan of that ideology for sure but it's actually about something very different than most people think and most people haven't actually spent the time understanding their argument before they form an opinion about it.
Edit: Find it pretty crazy that this can't even be discussed without people accusing me of all sorts of things.
Stochastic terrorism? It's still a terrorism pipeline.
It's all well and good for you to say "white nationalism is very different from what most people think," but that doesn't stop the OP from being right.
Nationalism of all kinds root from an insecurity, and white nationalism in particular is proppogated in colonial societies to encourage the alienation of brown colonial workers via, among other acts, stochastic terrorism.
"We don't encourage people to commit terrorist attacks, we only encourage them to do what it takes to ensure the survival and dominance of the white race."
It's an ideology and it doesn't in it's essence include any form of violent action at least according to ex their US leader.
There are however idiots who support that ideology who end up spewing their hateful crap out on the internet and in forums.
Those are two very different things and unfortunately people who are otherwise smart people like here on HN aren't able to separate the two which is why I am being downvoted simply suggesting it's not that simple.
ISIS ideology is about killing the infidels and actually doing it, White Nationalism as an ideology about the survival of the white race. Look it up on wikipedia and you will find that it's not the same as the idiots who spew their hateful crap.
You're doing exactly what literally every expert on white nationalism says that white nationalists do to make their abhorrent views appealing to a wider audience.
Either do some self-reflection or admit you're a white nationalist.
If the theorists and proponents have such a difficult time separating an ideology from attempts at violent implementation of a program based on that ideology, then perhaps the violence is in fact part of the ideology after all?
... that's wrong, scientifically and morally. Stop trying to gaslight us all into believing this "ideology" is anything other than backwards thinking, ignorant, hate filled nonsense.
it doesn't in it's essence include any form of violent action at least according to ex their US leader
Who would you consider that to be, please?
ISIS ideology is about killing the infidels and actually doing it
I really hope you're not going to offer a 'no true Scotsman' argument for why the people who do commit murders or other terrorism in support of WN ideology should be considered as separate from the people espousing said ideology even though quite a lot of them advocate exactly such action.
'Survival of the white race' suggests there is some looming danger of extinction, a position which seems to have little foundation in fact and mostly depends on the trope that non-white people are rushing to outbreed everyone else - ignoring abundant data showing that high birth rates are correlated with poor mortality outcomes and extreme poverty, and move in inverse proportion to economic security.
I might add that obfuscation and misdirection are key components of far-right recruitment strategies. Refer, for example, to the style guide from the editor of the Daily Stormer, which emphasizes the rhetorical use of humor, irony, and ambiguity to obfuscate the primary agenda while still achieving emotional activation: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/daily-stormer-nazi-styl...
I'm still having a hard time understanding the difference. From Wikipedia, as you suggested:
> White nationalists say they seek to ensure the survival of the white race, and the cultures of historically white states. They hold that white people should maintain their majority in majority-white countries, maintain their political and economic dominance, and that their cultures should be foremost. Many white nationalists believe that miscegenation, multiculturalism, immigration of nonwhites and low birth rates among whites are threatening the white race, and some believe these things are being promoted as part of an attempted genocide.
And the same paragraph with a few substitutions:
> [Sunni militants] say they seek to ensure the survival of the [caliphate], and the cultures of historically [Islamic] states. They hold that [Islamic] people should maintain their majority in majority-[Islamic] countries, maintain their political and economic dominance, and that their cultures should be foremost. Many [Islamic] nationalists believe that miscegenation, multiculturalism, [and] immigration of [non-muslims] are threatening [Islam], and some believe these things are being promoted as part of an attempted genocide.
ISIS may be comparatively more violent than white nationalists[1] but as far as ideology goes I struggle to see "two very different things" as you've suggested.
[1] At this moment in history at least - the Nazi party certainly fits the Wikipedia definition of "white nationalist".
Compare them to antifa. Should fb also ban anti capitalist content because some of us thinks its outright antihumanist just as much as white supremacy is?
This is the slippery slope you are walking down here.
I’m not walking down any slope as I haven’t said anyone should or shouldn’t be allowed to do anything. You said white supremacy “isn’t even remotely like ISIS” and that people only think that because they “haven’t spent the time understanding” so here I am trying to understand.
Yeah it is. I'd prefer not to post example content here on HN, but like most political movements ISIS/jihadis and white supremacists have both a public and private position, and the public one may often appear innocuous or reasonable at first appearance, although there are differences in recruiting tactics, eg https://cchs.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/zaxdzs2371/f/downloads/Na...
> it's actually about something very different than most people think and most people haven't actually spent the time understanding their argument before they form an opinion about it.
That was facebook's policy as of yesterday.
They changed it for good reason, and it was not a small reason to overcome that much inertia.
These recent white supremacist terrorists like the Christchurch attacker all have the same white nationalist memes and talking points on their social media. The Christchurch terrorist said in his own manifesto the white nationalist memes played a part in his radicalization. The white supremacist groups in their guides admit that the their ironic racist memes are propaganda to get people in their funnel and progressively radicalize them.
I'm glad that after these white supremacist terror attacks and seeing how these attackers all share the same things on social media, more people are waking up and realizing these memes are like ISIS propaganda.
Your comment is an exceptional example of fascist propaganda, and illustrates how it can spread in "polite society". It even includes a cute attempt to hide it by suggesting you're "not a fan". However, you're not even suggesting that they have a right to speech, but white nationalist ideology HAS MERIT and should be researched. Are you kidding?
It starts with an appeal to consider differences of opinion. The white nationalists ease in the ignorant by veiling their true beliefs by using dogwhistles like "white replacement" or "white genocide". This is commonly referred to as "hiding your power level" on white nationalist forums. They suggest that people of different races just shouldn't live together, or are somehow inherently incompatible. To people scared of the uncertainty of the future, or who are otherwise downtrodden, this is appealing. Suddenly you have an easy explanation for that fear.
In an more internet context, some join "just for the memes" but are gradually radicalized by the ideology. Then, someone acts on the ideology and kills a bunch of people, exactly what the memes were espousing in the first place. The world, for a short time, realizes what happened. But suddenly all of that is a joke, it's not real, it's just a difference of opinion again.
All of this ignores that the white nationalist ideology calls for an ethnostate, which inevitably leads to genocide. It's an inherently violent ideology, not just a "difference of opinion". It's exactly what ISIS wants; a state with absolute control by a particular ethnic group on racial or religious lines.
If this was just ignorant, take some time to research how hate groups spread propaganda. If it's not, follow your leader.
You are damn right I would ask people to research what things actually mean before they go claiming other people spread fascist propaganda.
I am perfectly capable of both trying to understand the world I live and why some people think what they think and at the same time disagreeing with them.
If you think you are helping fight their ideology by banning it you are going to be sorely disappointed. That will not end well.
One dehumanizes people based on religion and the other dehumanizes people based on skin color. They are both cars, one is blue and the other is yellow.
I guess someone who wants to live in a geographic area with people who are similar to them and share a common culture are "extremist" nowadays...this is very odd to me
I think email works really well as a federated solution. Mastodon is trying to make a Twitter clone that works more like email. That's the logical evolution here IMO. Eventually, we probably arrive at something truly decentralized on a blockchain governed by smart contracts, but that's not at all needed to replace the major platforms. A federated answer similar to email would be good enough. Then each server in the federation can choose what content to replicate or ban.
I have genuine concerns about civil liberties, but as others noted, there's a difference between using the power of government to prevent speech and a company refusing to provide a megaphone.
Well, we already have a point of comparison in how platforms handle content from groups like ISIS. The thing about groups who adhere to eliminationist positions is that they so obviously don't care about anyone else's civil liberties, so one could argue that respect for the rights of others is the ante required to sit at the social table.
We always draw a line somewhere when we write a law. Saying "I don't want to draw a line at all" is an attempt to abdicate our responsibility to protect weaker members of society under the guise of some higher ideal that is not threatened by good laws.
You're absolutely right! We unquestionably have a categorical imperative to protect our vulnerable friends, neighbors, and community members.
To those ends, I don't want to not draw lines. I want some kind of clear criteria and process around thw drawing of lines. Perhaps we could consider a system whereby we can make sure that the power to draw lines is not used against weaker members of society under the guise of some higher ideal.
> Avoiding the question of where to draw the final line with the question of where to draw the first one just implies that you intend to draw more lines in the future.
No, it just implies that we don't need to have the perfect final answer now. Maybe we'll draw more lines, maybe we'll find out we don't need to, maybe we'll decide that this line was drawn too far and pull it back. We don't need to pretend that we have all the answers yet—we don't even need to pretend we have all the questions yet.
Perhaps people might consider offering such elegant points as yours, instead of making the claim that the current line is correct and that's all that matters.
I would argue that the people who are concerned about "what future lines will be drawn" when the first line being drawn is banning white supremacists are the ones who should be making more elegant points.
I wouldn't doubt that there are genuine concerns, but what Facebook is doing has nothing to do with actual civil liberties, which isn't something that FB grants or could even take away.
You make this just about greed when it's also about toil. Nobody likes dealing with the filth that some people share. The armies of content moderators that have to deal with it don't have happy jobs.
This is a category of labor that formerly wasn't necessary, and yet somehow now it is. Why is that? How can we make it go away?
Perhaps the monetary incentives will provide motivation to solve it.
This isn't about sharing legitimate political views at this point, it's about helping prevent radicalization.
White nationalist content should be viewed no differently than content by the likes of isis. I think it's completely reasonable and responsible to ban it from the platform.
Saying that white nationalists, despite their inherently violent nature, deserve a platform is categorically support.
You're not acting as a neutral arbiter. Instead, you're saying that this group who spouts violent rhetoric, despite the fact that we as a society have said hate speech should not be tolerated, ought to be able to spread their message.
> despite the fact that we as a society have said hate speech should not be tolerated
Here's your problem. Free speech isn't about "we as a society".
"We as a society" had decided that the earth was the center of the universe before Galileo decided to defy "we as a society" to state something unpopular.
I'm not suggesting that there is any value in white supremacism like there was in Galileo's speaking of heliocentricism, but his lack of access to free speech protection meant he was persecuted for speaking the unpopular - the idea that you can ban "certain kinds of speech" is going to do precisely the same.
Where exactly is the line drawn at what is considered "white supremacism?" What if somebody says something which isn't a white supremacist viewpoint, but some loon misrepresents the view as if it were? You don't seriously think it will end at white supremacism do you? This is just the first step towards incrementally dismantling your right to free speech.
The solution to "bad speech" is "good speech", not attempting to issue bans. The Streisand effect is in full force, and each time you try to ban it, you accidentally give them more leverage. The solution is to ignore. Stop advertising for them! That's all you're doing.
That doesn't mean that we should ignore actual hate crimes - but can we get back to a sane world where people are innocent until proven guilty, and where we have a legal system where judge and jury get to decide the punishment for crimes - rather than bored, virtue signalling keyboard warriors.
At one time, advocating for gay rights or saying god doesn't exist was considered offensive. Only two decades ago, major television networks wouldn't allow jokes critical of Christianity to remain advertiser friendly. A recent episode of The Simpsons had Jesus beating Homer with a sign that said "Love" (standards and practices from 20 years ago wouldn't allow 'Jesus' to even be said in a comedy, which is why "Great Zombie Jesus" was cut out in later edits of the Futurama episode Atlanta).
It is offensive speech that has lead to civil rights, gay rights and independence from autocracy. What is and isn't offensive tends to change over time.
I don't know about you but I am perfectly capable of holding two parallel opinions at once.
I can both think their ideas are absurd and at the same time support their right to have those ideas.
That's the very definition of free speech in the US. There are many ideas and messages I don't think should be spread that doesn't mean I am against people being allowed to spread them.
You don't know what kind of fire you are playing with here if your think your position is the rational one and have a good outcome.
>Saying that white nationalists, despite their inherently violent nature, deserve a platform is categorically support.
What? There's no room to support the right of certain people to speak without "supporting" them? "Deserving a platform" is a total red herring here. There's room to worry about the largest platform in the world suppressing speech without claiming that those it suppresses "deserved" that platform.
>despite the fact that we as a society have said hate speech should not be tolerated
I can't believe you are serious at this point, because it is just so obviously untrue. Have you read what people have had to say in this thread at all? Are you aware that the position of the ACLU is that not only is "hate speech" to be tolerated, it is protected by the First Amendment in the US? https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/free-speech-can-be-mes...
I say this as someone who's pretty okay with Facebook taking down white nationalist stuff. As big as it is, Facebook simply isn't big enough to create major worries about controlling speech. My problem is that you're not making an argument here at all; you haven't really come to terms with the fact that quite a few reasonable people disagree with you.
You can't show a woman's nipple on Facebook, but you could show white nationalist propaganda. They never genuinely cared about being a platform to begin with.
I miss old Tumblr. It was the last true bastion of a lot of different ideas. Now it's just like everything else: trying hard to be advertiser friendly.
> To the people that say "Where does it end?" – that's pretty easy. Let's start with curbing speech that encourages harming others.
"Speech that harms people" and "speech that hurt people's feelings" are so closely related and sometimes people (intentionally or unintentionally) mix them up.
Are you saying that white supremacists only hurt people's feelings and does not have real and tangible outcomes? Look to Christchurch or the innumerable attacks/murders/gig economy fascism in the US perpetrated by the far right.
You're right the two aren't equal, that's why pro-ISIS content is banned and pro-Islam content isn't! In fact, you could generalize this to a rule: extremist philosophies advocating violence are banned on Facebook. Islam isn't an extremist philosophy advocating violence as practiced by most of its adherents. But the parts of it that are (ISIS for example) are banned. Similar to white nationalism. Where exactly is the fallacy?
What makes the political aspects of Islam any less extremist than White Separatism? It sounds to be like Facebook has brought down the banhammer on the non-violent part of that as well.
There is no non-violent component of white nationalism. It advocates the extermination of non-white people. If you think otherwise you are either a white nationalist or seriously misinformed.
The problem is your definition of "white nationalism". The article explains the difference between violent white supremacy and white nationalism:
> Our policies have long prohibited hateful treatment of people based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity or religion — and that has always included white supremacy. We didn’t originally apply the same rationale to expressions of white nationalism and separatism because we were thinking about broader concepts of nationalism and separatism — things like American pride and Basque separatism, which are an important part of people’s identity.
Literally the next sentence you neglected to quote says this:
> But over the past three months our conversations with members of civil society and academics who are experts in race relations around the world have confirmed that white nationalism and separatism cannot be meaningfully separated from white supremacy and organized hate groups.
There is no meaningful difference between white nationalism, white separatism, white supremacy, and hate groups. They are the same thing. So... I mean... did you read the article?
That's the question I'm asking: if we accept that these beliefs are on a spectrum and that white separatism (or more generally pro-white politics) slide inevitably into violent white nationalism, who's to say the same doesn't apply to orthodox Islam? Specifically the above poster referenced Christchurch as an example outcome of the former, I argue you can't do so without considering the many examples of the latter.
White nationalism, white separatism, white supremacy, and hate groups are not a spectrum; they are the same thing. There's no difference.
There is a difference between orthodox Islam and extremist violence: just because some violent extremists are Muslim doesn't mean all orthodox Muslims are violent extremists.
You believe it's literally impossible for someone to advocate for separatism, pan-Europeanism, or protection of white culture without being a violent hate group?
Yes indeed! Those views inherently advocate for the genocide of non-white people (and even some people who are white but are "degenerate," like gay people, trans people, Jews, or whatever ethnicity they believe isn't sufficiently "white"). I do believe that some people don't understand what they've gotten themselves in to, but all white nationalism is essentially advocating for the broad extermination of many people.
>Are you saying that white supremacists only hurt people's feelings and does not have real and tangible outcomes?
Are you going to extend that same logic to devout religious followers that want a government aligned with their religion and think non-followers should be forcefully re-educated or killed?
> "Speech that harms people" and "speech that hurt people's feelings" are so closely related and sometimes people (intentionally or unintentionally) mix them up.
Maybe make this argument when we aren't talking about literal Nazis. Advocating harm is their entire schtick.
>To the people that say "Where does it end?" – that's pretty easy. Let's start with curbing speech that encourages harming others.
But that is not where they're starting though, is it? They're going much further:
>Today we’re announcing a ban on praise, support and representation of white nationalism and separatism on Facebook and Instagram
Praise, support and representation not of speech encouraging harm, but the ideology itself, reprehensible and ass-backwards as it may be.
This sentence indicates they're picking and choosing which ideologies to censor.
This is wrong (opinion), antithetical to American notions of freedom of speech (opinion), but Facebook has a complete and unalienable right to do this on their platform (fact). Despite that right, things should nevertheless be accurately labeled. This is censorship of political thought, not censorship of "hate speech" as most reasonable people define it.
If you broaden your definition of "encouragement to harm" as strongly as you have done, what other ideologies fall under the exact same umbrella? Marxist-Leninist "revolutionary vanguard" idea certainly seems to fit the bill perfectly. Let's ban that too!
Again, Facebook absolutely has the right to censor political views using whatever arbitrary rationale they want. I just object to dressing it up with PR euphemisms such as "Standing Against Hate". They're not doing it to stand up against hate (Facebook is a cesspool of very thinly veiled hate against immigrants, for example). They're doing it for political expediency and PR.
> Marxist-Leninist "revolutionary vanguard" idea certainly seems to fit the bill perfectly. Let's ban that too!
Wait, are you thinking there are masses of people who are okay with Facebook deplatforming white nationalists that are going to be upset if they did the same to Leninist vanguardism?
> They're not doing it to stand up against hate [...]. They're doing it for political expediency and PR.
I mean, sure. But I'm so used to FB doing the wrong thing, that them doing the right thing for self-serving reasons seems like a welcome change of pace. Maybe someday they'll even do the right things for the right reasons?
Totally with you on the accurate labeling: this isn't censorship.
This is deplatforming, which is entirely different.
> This sentence indicates they're picking and choosing which ideologies to censor. [...] This is wrong [...] This is censorship of political thought, not censorship of "hate speech"
Are you saying that hate speech comes off of a vacuum?
In this context, that's simply a neologism for private-sector censorship. Again I want to reiterate that I don't think the private sector should be prohibited from censorship. But using euphemisms like "deplatforming" distracts us from the fact that it is private-sector censorship, and from drawing our conclusions about these platforms, how widely representative they are, and how safe our own speech is on those platforms from future "deplatforming". Thankfully I'm not anti-immigrant, pro-theocracy, anti-abortion, communist, don't hold views like 'homosexuality and transsexuality are not genetic', etc. But if I were, I'd be worried.
Please don't dress up your very much arguable opinions and arbitrary definitions of common language as some sort of fact. Your efforts to single-handedly redefine what censorship means are probably better spent making major changes to the wiki article on censorship[1], since it mentions explicitly governments and private organizations may engage in censorship in the first two paragraphs. Or perhaps writing letters to the EFF[2] demanding they take down their articles on private censorship.
It's really hard to prevent "we should do what it takes to maintain the dominance and survival of the white race" and "we should do what it takes to establish a white ethnostate" from being received as a call to violence.
If we're being intellectually honest, we know that they know full well that they're not getting a white ethnostate from peaceful participation in the political process.
Firstly, if someone thinks they can create a white ethnostate without violence, that's their political opinion. You may think that's native and stupid, or even that the person holding it is being duplicitous, but that view in itself is not hate speech.
Secondly, as I mentioned elsewhere, such rationalization can be used to ban a whole lot more speech than just "white ethnostate". Why is Marxism-Leninism still on Facebook? For that matter, since we're not limiting it to overt calls for violence, the mental gymnastics can be effortlessly applied to any calls to overthrow any government, when it's obvious that this cannot be done peacefully.
You probably meant 1970s. Either way, that's a curious metric to decide what to ban. Why must we wait for tragedy to strike in order to act? And furthermore, why must this tragedy be recent, and how recent?
I say we decide first what kind of speech to ban (clear incitement to violence, for example, or something broader), and then proactively ban it to save lives.
There was a ton of marxism/communism related violence in the US in the 20's, mostly centered around labor strikes. In general, that period saw much more violence and instability than the 70s. There was a literal battle win West Virginia between striking miners and the government:
> Why must we wait for tragedy to strike in order to act?
Actions of the government (or other actors WRT policy changes) are given legitimacy by serving as a response to perceived existing problems. In essence, if there is no tragedy, there is no legitimacy to the action. Without legitimacy, the policy change carries less weight and is not effective. This is a basic reality of policy implementation.
The actions of banning white nationalist speech on tech platforms are given legitimacy by the recent NZ shooting, where
(1) the shooter made numerous callouts to the white nationalist subcultures that these platforms foster (subscribe to pewdiepie, etc)
(2) The content the shooter generated and streamed spread widely across nearly all distribution channels (FB, youtube, reddit, etc) despite censorship efforts,
(3) We know that wide distribution of the extremist type of content that this guy distributed (whether its white nationalist, ISIS, or anything) in his actions inspires more people to extremism.
Marxists have done enough harm thorough the history to justify ban. Stalin, Mao, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Khmer Rouge are just few examples off the top of my head. Just because they didn't do anything violent recently shouldn't mean they are allowed to spread their ideology.
Not sure we need to go full House of Un-American Activities for a threat that's largely subsided before the time of internet platforms. Your last sentence is phrased as some sort of absolute truth, but I wonder when you say: "they are allowed", I can't help but ask: "by whom"?
The militant "left" was a real problem in the 70ies and had been so since early that century. Death toll: 10s of millions
Militant "right" is always a problem. Death toll: millions. Mostly "others" (jews, east Europeans, disabled people)
Militant "Muslims" are a problem in large parts of the world and has been so for centuries. Death toll: not sure. Ironically most Muslims lately.
And of course: militant "Christians" was a problem in certain centuries. Death toll: hundreds of thousands. Ironically mostly Christians?
I write "left" and "right" here because I find it unfair to blame concervatives and ordinary socialists for something that is more about being totalitarian than about more or less tax or ownership.
Same goes for religions to a certain degree (although there's no doubt that for example old Norse (viking) religion was very focused on war compared to Christianity).
> if someone thinks they can create a white ethnostate without violence, that's their political opinion. ... that view in itself is not hate speech.
This is certainly an opinion as well, but my view is that the concept of a white ethnostate alone is hateful. Whether or not one can or can't be created without violence is immaterial.
Should people be able to talk about a hypothetical white ethnostate in academic, research, or news-reporting capacities? Sure. But simply promoting a white ethonostate as something that is wanted is, IMO, hateful.
No, free speech has to do with being able to speak freely. If you are prevented from doing that by private means, it's in no way better than if you are prevented by the government, and for exactly the same reasons. If free speech has any value and not just an empty slogan, then it should have value in the face of privatized censorship too. If your freedom has value, would you feel better if you'd be in a private prison than in a government one? Probably not. Why should it be different with speech?
Imagine your ISP blocked your every message that disagrees with their political stance. Would it console you they're doing it as a private company, or would you demand regulators to come and stop it?
A better way to consider this is to ask: what about the platform's freedom of speech? Simply because you have a thought and post it on the Internet doesn't mean that someone is required to retransmit that thought for you. If they decline to do so, they're not censoring you, they simply don't find your content worth platforming. You are not guaranteed an audience for your ideas and they are not compelled to provide you one.
> Imagine your ISP blocked your every message that disagrees with their political stance.
This is substantially different from what is being talked about here: censorship versus deplatforming. No one is removing white nationalists from the Internet, Facebook is simply saying they won't retransmit their ideas. You can still find them if you desire and they still aren't illegal to express.
> This is substantially different from what is being talked about here: censorship versus deplatforming
What parent post was talking about is "free speech". The claim was that free speech is only about absence of governmental coercion. This is precisely wrong - absence of governmental coercion is one of the necessary conditions for the free speech to exist, but it does not equal it and does not ensure it.
> No one is removing white nationalists from the Internet,
We have already seen hosting companies to remove people from the internet for other reasons. Same with banks and credit companies cutting off certain companies from banking services, etc. I do not see how white nationalists would be an exception. I do not see how the ultimate goal is not exactly this - removing white nationalists from the Internet. Practical implementation of this goal could be hard, but getting within 99% of it - banning them from the space accessible by 99% of people without technical knowledge of darknet and such - is not.
If it is functionally impossible to speak in a way that anybody can hear you, is it still a free speech? Is "go build your own Internet" really a free speech?
I've recently read about the infamous "Green Book" - a guide for a non-white traveler in the US which specified which hotels, restaurants, gas stations, stores, etc. would serve them. There weren't many, and even when there was no governmental coercion (there were "sunset cities" but even if one avoided them) travel turned into a real hassle. Was that situation normal? I do not think so. I feel deeply disgusted by it.
You can create very bad situations even without governmental involvement. I feel that is what Facebook, Twitter and others are creating right now - even though for completely different reasons than those that gave birth to the Green Book. You could say the people being affected by it now deserve it, as they'd probably impose the same on their opponents if they could - and you probably would be right that they would. But shouldn't we try to do better? And the history teaches us these things start with the outgroups but never end there. Already disagreeing with any of the positions of transgender activists is verboten. How long before criticizing Green New Deal, or Keynesian economic theory, or the mayor of the town whose policies Facebook supports, or any other subject the benevolent overlords declare sacred becomes verboten?
> This is precisely wrong - absence of governmental coercion is one of the necessary conditions for the free speech to exist, but it does not equal it and does not ensure it.
No, this is entirely sufficient for free speech.
> If it is functionally impossible to speak in a way that anybody can hear you, is it still a free speech?
Your definition is absurd; essentially you are demanding that "freedom of speech" include not only that you can legally say whatever you want, but that you also are guaranteed a place to say it and an audience who must listen to you. At some point, the freedom of the venue to choose what goes on there, and your audience members to select what they hear, must matter.
> I feel deeply disgusted by it.
You and I both! This is why we have laws ensuring equal access to private services -- however, those laws are based only on characteristics we have determined shouldn't prevent your access (race, sexuality, religion). Having bad ideas does not mean you're part of a protected group.
> But shouldn't we try to do better? And the history teaches us these things start with the outgroups but never end there.
This is a slippery slope argument. We already abridge the speech of people who are maliciously trying to create harm (falsely yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is a classic example). Yet despite this we still have substantial freedom of speech today. The fact that we don't allow people to incite panic seems to coexist quite happily with our current rights and privileges; claiming that somehow preventing white nationalists from speaking on Facebook, or credit card companies refusing to take their money, will somehow lead to the death of free speech is just fallacious.
Frankly we have, socially and legally, always placed limits on speech. The fact that it hasn't been done perfectly doesn't mean we just throw all restrictions out; it means we should always try to weight the good of free speech against the ills that speech can cause.
> but that you also are guaranteed a place to say it and an audience who must listen to you.
I never did that. There's a difference between "audience must listen to you" and "audience would want to listen to me but unable to because I'd have to build a new Internet to do it".
> only on characteristics we have determined shouldn't prevent your access (race, sexuality, religion)
So we agree that denying people access to private services can be not OK even if it's not done by government coercion? But only if it's because of racism? If it's because of other forms of prejudice not listed in the list, or because of their non-membership in the ruling party, that would be ok?
> This is a slippery slope argument.
It is. We know for a fact that the slope is slippery. We witnessed the descent many times. We know how it works. We are observing the narrowing of the bounds of what is acceptable on major social networks right now. Should we refuse to believe the experience and our own eyes because "it's a slippery slope argument"? Yes, it is - because the damn slope is very slippery!
> (falsely yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is a classic example)
Very bad example. That decision by Wendell Holmes was overturned decades ago. But if you knew what the actual case was about, you'd be even more wary to use that quote. The case sought to ban American Socialists from distributing pamphlets opposing draft. If there's any case for free speech to be protected, the case of political speech opposing government action forcefully sending people to die overseas is that case. So maybe when you complain about slippery slope arguments, you don't realize how far the slope actually gone. Do you actually want to be jailed for criticizing the government? If you do, keep using that example.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
> "audience would want to listen to me but unable to because I'd have to build a new Internet to do it".
We are talking about Facebook here, right? Do they have to power to remove your content from the Internet entirely?
> If it's because of other forms of prejudice not listed in the list, or because of their non-membership in the ruling party, that would be ok?
It depends! It is entirely legal to discriminate against someone because they're stupid or ugly. Is that okay? Obviously we have to rule on a case-by-case basis.
> We know for a fact that the slope is slippery. We witnessed the descent many times.
Facebook has banned content it doesn't like since the inception of the platform. You have no more of a right to post there than have your articles be published by a newspaper. They aren't a government and can't police your speech, but they can (and should) decide what they post.
> Very bad example.
Except it's still actually illegal? The rest of your argument simply doesn't apply, since Facebook is not the government.
No, Facebook is just one facet of it. We've seen deplatforming from every major social network, bar none, from Paypal, from Patreon, from banks, from credit card companies, from hosting providers, DNS providers, CDN providers... Virtually every piece of internet infrastructure is subject to deplatforming. And it's not just if you do something - if you provide services to people that do something controversial, you're out too.
> It depends!
You write "it depends", I read "if the mob likes you, you're ok. If they don't - well, you're screwed". Maybe it's a comfortable existence for somebody who never had a controversial thought, but it's certainly far from something I'd call "free".
> Obviously we have to rule on a case-by-case basis.
Who is "we" and why you have to rule? I don't particularly like to be ruled by "we", and be judged on its whims. OK, frankly, I can live without Facebook, I left Twitter long ago and could leave Facebook behind too. But it wouldn't stop there, would it? Intolerance to existence of contrary opinions never just stops because these opinions are now located under different URL. If it were possible, having them on Facebook wouldn't be a big deal from the start - just don't subscribe to people you don't like, ban them if they come to comment, and you'd never read their content. But the point is not that - as long as it exists anywhere, it must be suppressed. The only real end to it is elimination of the offending opinion, anything less is good, but ultimately always unsatisfactory. You may say "ok, what's bad in complete suppression of white nationalists"? Well, nothing in this mechanism has "white nationalists" anywhere, it would work against you or me as well as against anything else. Lack of freedom can be very comfortable when the rulers do the same things you wanted to be done anyway. It very soon stops being comfortable when they don't. Are you sure you'd never say anything anybody could find some problem with? Maybe decades later?
> Facebook has banned content it doesn't like since the inception of the platform.
And the list of banned things grows constantly. Yes, I know. That's exactly what worries me. Not because I like white nationalists - quite the contrary - but because one day whoever decides what to ban may dislike one of my thoughts.
> Virtually every piece of internet infrastructure is subject to deplatforming.
This is essentially the marketplace of ideas working as intended -- if your idea sucks you get booted out of venue after venue. Maybe the problem isn't the venues having standards, maybe it's your idea being bad?
> If they don't - well, you're screwed
How is not being able to tell people your bad ideas "being screwed?" You aren't being jailed, your property isn't being seized. People are telling you they don't want to hear what you have to say, but you can continue saying it to anyone who bothers to listen to you. No one is obligated to hear or agree with anything you want to say.
> Who is "we" and why you have to rule?
Platform owners specifically, citizens in aggregate. We judge the ideas we want to hear and tell people we don't want to hear that we don't want to hear them. This isn't exactly some radical new concept either.
> Well, nothing in this mechanism has "white nationalists" anywhere, it would work against you or me as well as against anything else.
Except it literally has "white nationalists" in the rule itself. How about we ban them? And then rule, on a case-by-case basis, on whether other things should be banned? Like pro-ISIS speech? Or pornography, which Facebook also bans?
The idea that nothing at all can be banned, because Facebook might ban the wrong things, is absurd. If your ideas are bad and no one wants to listen to you, the problem is your ideas, not that Facebook can ban things. No one should be compelled to hear bad ideas. And before you ask, yes, Facebook can decide what ideas it considers are bad on behalf of its users. If you don't like that, don't use Facebook -- problem solved.
"The Court held that government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.""
Of course, this is still applicable to the government, not private corporations, again. Private corporations can deplatform whatever they like for any legal reason.
"Imminent lawless action" is not the same as "shouting some words". People shouted "fire" in theaters hundreds of times - e.g. during plays - and nothing happened. Only when it causes - or is imminent to cause - the actual action, can it be punished. Just as saying "shoot him" is not restricted speech - unless you are saying it to an accomplice who then murders a person. There needs to be an independent lawless act, and speech needs to be used as a prerequisite or a tool for it.
> Private corporations can deplatform whatever they like for any legal reason.
No, free speech is free speech. The fact that, legally, free speech is handled differently if you're the US government vs. a private entity is immaterial to the definition.
But also recognize that (unregulated) private entities have a right to decide what speech they do and don't want to be a platform for. That's the big distinction here.
If you want to make this argument maybe pick someone besides literal nazis to make it with.
Last I checked we kinda had a bit of a scuffle from 1940-1945 that stated, "This ideology is not okay and responding to it with violence is acceptable."
They're getting booted off the platform most people use to talk to grandma, not getting literally booted in the face. Unlike what they advocate for.
Are "literal" nazis only who this new rule will be applied to? The accepted definitions of both "literal" and "nazi" seem to have drifted significantly in the last few years.
> not getting literally booted in the face. Unlike what they advocate for.
Funny, this type of story about people advocating for literal violence against non-whites is extremely common on the internet, I've heard it recounted I don't know how many thousands of times in the last few years, yet I've literally(!) never once encountered an actual instance of it anywhere I browse. Ironically, I have encountered hundreds of examples of violence being advocated against white people, although in the vast majority of cases the proponents themselves were white.
Could you possibly provide any examples of such statements on relatively mainstream sites, and also note whether you encountered it organically or found it via a google search?
> Are "literal" nazis only who this new rule will be applied to?
White nationalists are literal Nazis, so... yes?
> Could you possibly provide any examples of such statements on relatively mainstream sites, and also note whether you encountered it organically or found it via a google search?
Were you asleep for Charlottesville or all the coverage of it? White nationalists literally marched with torches chanting "blood and soil" and "we will not be replaced." What do you think those messages mean to non-whites? What do you think they're advocating for when they say those things?
> White nationalists are literal Nazis, so... yes?
a) No they aren't.
b) Even if they were, you have no way of knowing how this rule will be applied.
> Were you asleep for Charlottesville or all the coverage of it?
Would you consider the Charlottesville incident "mainstream", or common enough (and manifest in some form on Facebook) that Facebook must police user-posted content on its site?
Try to not treat this like an internet argument that must be won, and try not to exaggerate the frequency of rare (as far as I know, I am seeking a reasonable, fact-based argument in order to change my mind) incidents like Charlottesville, or conflate the specifics of what happened there with unsavory words that don't literally (actually) meet the claim of advocating violence.
Make no mistake, I'm definitely playing Devil's advocate here, but if the facts are on your side this (making the case that literally advocating literal violence) should not be overly problematic.
Or, if you would like to lower your claim to something like "frequent and possibly increasing dog whistling" (without arguing about the technical boundaries of that) on Facebook, that seems like a fairly reasonable claim.
Indeed they are! Or at least there's no difference meaningful enough in their political ideologies to draw a distinction. Obviously I'm not saying they're a member of a political group originating in 1930s Germany, but when someone calls someone else a "Nazi" colloquially, that's not what they mean either.
> b) Even if they were, you have no way of knowing how this rule will be applied.
So we shouldn't have rules because they can be misapplied?
> Would you consider the Charlottesville incident "mainstream", or common enough (and manifest in some form on Facebook) that Facebook must police user-posted content on its site?
Yes? Or what of Christchurch? Or the Quebec City mosque shooting? Or the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting? These incidents (and the literal dozens more like them) received tons of mainstream news coverage and the perpetrators 100% subscribed to white nationalist views, exactly the kind which Facebook seeks to deplatform. They believe that by removing these people from their site they might reduce incidents of these shootings. Do you think they're wrong?
What amount of violence needs to happen connected to one ideology for Facebook to ban said ideology? Facebook has banned child pornography, doxxing, and pro-ISIS content from their platform too. How much of that has to be posted before a ban is justified?
You can not like that Facebook can make decisions like this, but it is entirely their right to choose what to platform. If you don't like it, you can make your own platform. That it doesn't have the audience Facebook does is your problem, not Facebook's.
> Indeed they are! Or at least there's no difference meaningful enough in their political ideologies to draw a distinction.
Is that so? The Nazis were a large, organized group with a distinct leader, a fairly specific shared ideology, and track record of action - you would have us believe the same is true (no meaningful difference) of modern day white nationalists? And that there's evidence of this?
> but when someone calls someone else a "Nazi" colloquially, that's not what they mean either
col·lo·qui·al·ly
adverb: colloquially
in the language of ordinary or familiar conversation; informally.
This is what I mean about the common misuse of the words "literal", "Nazi", "alt-right", and in my mind this excuse is similar in quality to the "I'm not really racist, I have black friends" argument. Have you ever stopped to consider if this type of "dog whistling" is contributing to the problem in any way? Do you care?
> So we shouldn't have rules because they can be misapplied?
Your words, not mine. The question was "Are "literal" nazis only who this new rule will be applied to?".
Have you no concern for possible second order effects of poorly thought out and biased censorship? And when I say censorship, I'm not referring to the First Amendment.
> Yes? Or what of Christchurch? Or the Quebec City mosque shooting? Or the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting?
For every single "white nationalist" incident you cite, I can cite several similar racially/religiously motivated crimes committed by non-white people. If the incidents are the problem, why is the enforcement (and news coverage) racially biased?
> These incidents (and the literal dozens more like them) received tons of mainstream news coverage
The coverage was mainstream, but is this behavior or these beliefs mainstream/common? How sure are you that these incidents are caused by incitement on social media? Have you ever considered that both the incidents themselves as well as the increase in "dog-whistling" propaganda on social media (I've yet to see examples of advocating violence) might both be effects of something else? Do you care?
> and the perpetrators 100% subscribed to white nationalist views, exactly the kind which Facebook seeks to deplatform.
Is that so, or might that only be what you presumed or were told? I haven't read the whole manifesto, but this fellow seemed to have much more complex and nuanced beliefs than those held by "100%" of "white nationalists".
I assume this is a "white nationalist" propaganda site of some sort, but to me the actual words of what this madman wrote are what actually matters, not who publishes them:
Is what's written there mainstream white nationalist views? Personally, I have absolutely no idea, so I'm willing to consider any evidence you have supporting that idea.
> They believe that by removing these people from their site they might reduce incidents of these shootings. Do you think they're wrong?
They might be right, they might be wrong, unlike you I make no claim to know. What if they are wrong, and censorship aggravates these already mentally unbalanced people even more, driving them to organize (perhaps in the physical world) underground where it's difficult to see what they're up to or thinking? Is this worth considering when setting policy?
> What amount of violence needs to happen connected to one ideology for Facebook to ban said ideology?
> common misuse of the words "literal", "Nazi", "alt-right"
It's not misuse if it's common usage, it's simply usage you disagree with. Obviously when people say "Nazi" they don't mean "members of a 1930s political party," they're making a statement about something else. If you find the usage of these words confusing that's on you, not the words or the people using them.
> Have you no concern for possible second order effects of poorly thought out and biased censorship?
Not particularly: if those things happen, let's protest those instead of wringing our hands and worrying about the poor slippery slope.
> And when I say censorship, I'm not referring to the First Amendment.
Deplatforming is not censorship. You are not guaranteed an audience for your speech. White nationalists can still say whatever they want, and they can even say it legally. But they can't say it on Facebook, and it's not Facebook's responsibility to let them any more than it is to let pro-ISIS people post their content.
> If the incidents are the problem, why is the enforcement (and news coverage) racially biased?
This is irrelevant to the discussion at best and disingenuous at worst. Facebook can ban multiple kinds of content, including pro-ISIS content (and it does). White nationalism being banned is what we're discussing here.
> How sure are you that these incidents are caused by incitement on social media?
I believe that social media is helping incite these incidents, so I do legitimately believe the amount of people participating in hate crimes will be reduced as a result of this. Do you really think that people aren't radicalized by communities on the Internet? Communities that might exist on Facebook?
Of course, I also think it doesn't matter if that's true or not. No discourse of value is being lost by banning white nationalism, and Facebook already bans a plethora of other (totally legal) content because they don't think is appropriate on their platform. If you want to read white nationalist speech, it still exists. This merely means you can't read it on Facebook anymore. How this is a tragedy I simply cannot understand.
> Is that so, or might that only be what you presumed or were told?
Yes, it's so. Read the manifesto.
> Is this worth considering when setting policy?
No. People can (and will) do anything in response to anything; maybe white nationalist groups will make Zuck their #1 enemy over this. You can't control the actions of other people, especially crazy people, so catering your policies to them seems absurd.
> For the sake of improving the quality of discourse, can you sense any legitimate concerns in what I'm saying, or do I seem to you like yet another ignorant racist, little different than those who might frequent Charlottesville rallies?
I don't really see many legitimate concerns arising from banning white nationalism from Facebook. As I've said multiple times, Facebook already bans other kinds of speech they disagree with. I get defending free speech is a thing, but Facebook is not the government and they can ban whatever speech they like. They don't control the entire Internet or even a majority of it, and they can't prevent you from hosting your content somewhere else, so... I just don't see what's being lost here, except white nationalist content on Facebook.
And even if they do go ahead and decide to ban other content, I mean, A) let's cross that bridge if we come to it and B) who cares? It's just Facebook, they don't control the entire Internet. Make another site if you want to discuss what they deplatform.
> It's not misuse if it's common usage, it's simply usage you disagree with.
Your or my personal agreement on what the definitions should be are not the problem. The meaning has changed for only some users of the words, resulting in widespread misunderstanding, I would argue resulting in further (and completely unnecessary) political polarization. Words not having shared meanings seems sub-optimal to me.
> Obviously when people say "Nazi" they don't mean "members of a 1930s political party," they're making a statement about something else
But no one knows what statement they're making because we no longer have a shared dictionary, so people resort to their imaginations.
> If you find the usage of these words confusing that's on you, not the words or the people using them.
This suggest the problem is my lack of ability to understand, when the problem is there is no longer a common definition. There are certainly multiple popular definitions, according to which political ideology you subscribe to.
> instead of wringing our hands and worrying about the poor slippery slope.
It's not me who's "wringing my hands" - I'm not promoting or supporting any policy change, you are. I'm simply asking questions.
"Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient". Censorship can be conducted by a government, private institutions, and corporations."
Well look at that, once again our definitions don't match. Care to share the URL for the authoritative source you're using?
> You are not guaranteed an audience for your speech.
As I said: there is a distinct difference between the First Amendment and the general principle of free speech. You only have a "guarantee" to free speech in the limited context of the first amendment.
> This is irrelevant to the discussion at best and disingenuous at worst. Facebook can ban multiple kinds of content, including pro-ISIS content (and it does). White nationalism being banned is what we're discussing here.
I thought the principle behind your argument was the harm - maybe the principle is race after all?
> I believe that social media is helping incite these incidents, so I do legitimately believe the amount of people participating in hate crimes will be reduced as a result of this.
A perfectly reasonable theory, what evidence of this do you have? Are you well read on the topic, or is this just a casual opinion that sounds about right?
> Do you really think that people aren't radicalized by communities on the Internet? Communities that might exist on Facebook?
I certainly do, but I'm concerned about everything that could lead to radicalization. History is full of examples demonstrating the strange and complex behavior of individuals and civilizations. Are we over-simplifying this situation? Should we freely discuss such things with open minds?
> No discourse of value is being lost by banning white nationalism
Completely agree, but is that all there is to it? Can you think of any possible undesirable reactions (regardless of the soundness of the logic underlying the motivation) to this type of policy?
> If you want to read white nationalist speech, it still exists. This merely means you can't read it on Facebook anymore. How this is a tragedy I simply cannot understand.
The tragedy is if this further inflames emotions, "righteously" or not, and someone shoots up another church. That's what I'm worried about.
> This suggest the problem is my lack of ability to understand, when the problem is there is no longer a common definition.
The only misunderstanding seems to be yours. We can clearly identify white nationalists as actual Nazis, no redefinition required.
> Censorship can be conducted by a government, private institutions, and corporations.
No one is saying that corporations can't censor things. I am saying that this is not censorship. Facebook deplatforming you is not the same as censoring you.
> maybe the principle is race after all?
The only thing we're discussing here is the deplatforming of white nationalist content from Facebook. Bringing other races or religions and their extremism in is totally tangential at best, and actively disingenuous at worst.
> Are you well read on the topic, or is this just a casual opinion that sounds about right?
There are many examples in the news recently. Here's one I read just the other day: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/22/trumps-rh... White nationalist speech creates hate crimes; the correlation appears clear to me. Of course, it also seems logical to me without any sources, so sources are just a nice bonus.
> Can you think of any possible undesirable reactions (regardless of the soundness of the logic underlying the motivation) to this type of policy?
Essentially your argument seems to boil down to: we shouldn't create good policies because crazy extremists might have bad reactions to them. But crazy extremists have bad reactions to everything. We should be trying to deplatform and deconvert extremists instead of catering to their sensitive tastes. If that offends them and causes them to lash out, that is unfortunate, but they'll do that anyway. At least if they do it to this there might be less of them in the future.
> If everything is random, why even bother with policies like this, or any at all?
While you can't control how people react to what you do, you can do what you believe is right and hope it has a good outcome in the future. Facebook apparently agrees with me.
> The only misunderstanding seems to be yours. We can clearly identify white nationalists as actual Nazis, no redefinition required.
a) With no standard definition of the phrases?
b) Some people may be able to, but can Facebook accurately and fairly (despite no standard accepted meaning of many terms) police speech (remember, we're not dealing with people wearing white hats at a rally, we're dealing with speech, which is subtle), at scale? Sure everyone can agree at the extremes, but when it's close to the middle, then it's complicated. It's like "I know pornography when I see it."
> No one is saying that corporations can't censor things. I am saying that this is not censorship. Facebook deplatforming you is not the same as censoring you.
"Today we’re announcing a ban on praise, support and representation of white nationalism and white separatism on Facebook and Instagram, which we’ll start enforcing next week."
I'm not saying they don't have a right to do this, it is their platform after all. I'm not even saying that it is necessarily or certainly a bad idea. You and I disagreeing on this is fine and healthy. But how can you interpret "you can't say <x>" as not censorship? I asked you earlier for the definition of the word you're using, and you didn't reply. I ask again: please tell me the definition you're using for "censorship", with a link to the source.
> The only thing we're discussing here is the deplatforming of white nationalist content from Facebook. Bringing other races or religions and their extremism in is totally tangential at best, and actively disingenuous at worst.
No, that's the only thing the article is discussing. The HN discussion, and our thread in particular, are discussing broader principles of free speech and fairness, possible downsides of these types of decisions, etc.
>>> I believe that social media is helping incite these incidents, so I do legitimately believe the amount of people participating in hate crimes will be reduced as a result of this.
>> A perfectly reasonable theory, what evidence of this do you have? Are you well read on the topic, or is this just a casual opinion that sounds about right?
"To test this, we aggregated hate-crime incident data and Trump rally data (a different variable than our topic of conversation, but again, no need to bother ourselves with precision or details) to the county level and then used statistical tools to estimate a rally’s impact. We included controls for factors such as the county’s crime rates, its number of active hate groups, its minority populations, its percentage with college educations, its location in the country and the month when the rallies occurred. We found that counties that had hosted a 2016 Trump campaign rally saw a 226 percent increase in reported hate crimes over comparable counties that did not host such a rally. Of course, our analysis cannot be certain it was Trump’s campaign rally rhetoric that caused people to commit more hate crimes in the host county."
This line of conversation is my point. You're debating someone who is acting in bad faith. You've already lost the thread because he's just going to come back with more circular bullshit.
Could you please explain how I'm acting in bad faith? Perhaps cite a few key exchanges to demonstrate.
> he's just going to come back with more circular bullshit.
Asking people to justify their claims, and pointing out falsehoods or logical errors in their responses, is "circular bullshit" now?
I clearly stated I am playing Devil's advocate.
I concede points where they are valid.
I make no (other than conversational) claims without backing them up, how many claims has OP made without providing evidence for?
The discussion is curtailment of free speech (the general principle, not the First Amendment - try to get someone to even admit there's a difference without changing the subject) - I am arguing that we better have very good reasons for it, supported by evidence. Fashionable popular opinion is not evidence.
> Let's start with curbing speech that encourages harming others.
You've already disproven your "that's pretty easy" note. Who defines "harm"? The goal posts seem to move damn near weekly on this. That's the problem that can't be solved as easily as you purport.
It ends, as it always does (and must) with massive hypocrisy on the part of the arbitrary censor, since "harm" is so poorly defined that it ends up being replaced with "whatever seems fashionable today".
> It ends, as it always does (and must) with massive hypocrisy on the part of the arbitrary censor, since "harm" is so poorly defined that it ends up being replaced with "whatever seems fashionable today".
You are defending literal nazis. Their idea of speech is Christchurch. Deplatforming that is absolutely the correct move.
What does that even mean? Like last I checked a whole big chunk of the world may have gone to war for a few years over the subject of, "Nazis are bad."
Kicking them off Facebook isn't anywhere close to that large of a response.
If your argument for restricting free expression can just as easily be used to justify, say, Hollywood studios blacklisting communist screenwriters, that's another thing to consider.
>Let's start with curbing speech that encourages harming others.
Based on numerous past incidents of corporate behavior (not specifically from Facebook) I do doubt a fair and unbiased application of such a standard. Politically we cannot even agree on what constitutes harm or even murder (abortion being an example of such disagreement). How then is it possible to fairly ban speech that encourages harm when we don't agree on what constitutes harm?
Unfortunately, most of the time we aren't privy to their definitions. If they publish them publically to a literal extent then they MIGHT actually have to follow them! No company wants to have to follow their own rules, it's a Schrodinger situation.
Not to mention that as we've seen with Twitter the rules don't really matter. The name of the game is selective enforcement and zero accountability because you can always blame the algo/users for not reporting enough.
Isn't selective enforcement kind of inevitable? There is no algorithm that can follow code of conduct 'rules' perfectly. You are always going to be able to find instances where the rules aren't applied perfectly.
* If they publish them publically to a literal extent then they MIGHT actually have to follow them! *
Conversely, to the extent that they are public and transparent (eg I think twitchy is pretty specific about feedback for content removal) people will game that information and either refine their content to fit within the letter of the ToS while spreading it as widely as possible, or seek to litigate the decisions depending on what's least costly.
While I agree with you, Tim Pool (as well as many others) made a good point recently about the fact that when platforms are as powerful as being able to influence elections, maybe allowing them to define the structure within which we communicate might not be a good idea.
I am a free market guy, so for me these companies ought to have the right to determine the parameters within which their users can operate on their service. However, with things such as EUCD and GDPR rules, introducing competitors to the established networks becomes harder and harder for each day, which only benefits the existing platforms. So when the platforms are biased and competition is hindered by red-tape and regulations, we cannot expect alternatives to popup that can compete with said entities.
All of this leads me to believe that things will only get worse as I don´t see a way out of this clusterfuck we´re in.
Well, read the top comment in this dicussion: They're not saying "if FB wants to kick arbitrary people including me I'm fine with that", they use "bigots" and "anti-vaxxers" as examples. Another important element is a constant refrain of "but platforms with no restrictions end up as a cesspool".
> We can see what definition is
"seeing the definition" just means seeing some flowery language which may or may not be the full truth when it comes to individual cases. If people don't pay attention to the fact that they don't actually know, and don't seem to care, who exactly is booted off these platforms and why, exactly and on a case by case basis, and just take the word of platforms like FB or Twitter for it, they're in for a rude awakening when they end up on the wrong end of it themselves.
The amazing achievement of not being a racist or an anti-vaxxer doesn't make up for the failure to clearly speak out against the hypocrisy of a company that on the hand hand fights democracies that want to protect citizens against tracking [0], to mention just one color in the spectrum of shit they're up to, while on the other hand bragging about how they're not evil. Facebook can do what they want, people and use their "services" all they want, and roll their eyes about "outrage over FB" all they want, but then they also need to own it.
The virality of violence is a bad aspect of network effects. I think we agree online calls for actual violence should not be promoted.
What I have a difficulty understanding is how and who will define "violence". Inciting direct violence is one thing, but people like expanding definitions. Is expressing support for one state which wants to overthrow another state "violence"? Is supporting China (in some aspect) but which none the less persecutes some people, "violence"?
Is buying almonds violence because it deprives some people in some areas of California of municipal water violence?
What about suppressed minority groups in Sudan who oppose a regime, or likewise South Sudan? Are they proposing and promoting violence?
An uprising in Teheran, is that violence? Suppress it? Are they pro regime, are they anti-regime? Is it fluid, is it at times both? What do you do?
There's emerging evidence that emotional contagion via social media is a real phenomenon, and indeed much commercial exploitation of social media arguably depends on that. That has many positive aspects, such as meeting my appetite for heartwarming videos of cute animals, but it can also be leveraged for less wholesome purposes.
Definitions are absolutely fluid, not least because the science of measuring and mapping such contagion in virtual spaces is currently in a fairly rudimentary state. We're building our technological infrastructure out much faster than we are developing an understanding of how it impacts our future.
I would say that if the mainstream narrative is that your ideology shows up in a bunch of mass shootings then you get pushback. We thought it made sense to take down ISIS content, now it makes sense to take down white supremacy content.
Presumably this wouldn't be happening if not for the dozen or so mass shootings with oddly similar perpetrators in the past 5 years.
That's definitely one interpretation, I left that as an option when I said "mainstream narrative". Facebook wouldn't ban leftist groups unless the mainstream narrative is that antifa shoots up rural churches.
I'll skip over over your answering "where does it end" with where we start, but more importantly:
This is a game, because it initially masquerades as using the definition of "harm" any reasonable person would use, while simultaneously working the other end to redefine and vastly expand the concept of "harm".
We're now supposed to recognize unpersoning, microaggressing, belittling, twitter-mentioning as harm, and it's naivete bordering on manipulative to try to and make the case that our understanding of harm will not continue to expand
This form of hateful speech will not stop. The only immediate consequence is that it will go underground. The bigger consequence is that it will be much harder to for authorities to monitor. Under the previous status quo, it was an intelligence treasure trove. Suspected future terrorists would openly tell everyone their thoughts, their location, and more importantly their friends and associates. All of that will be gone now.
If they go underground it makes it a lot harder for them to radicalize idiots on facebook. Sounds like a win to me.
The average person isn't exactly curious about different ideologies but when facebook and youtubes algorithms throw it in their face constantly? Probably something we want to fix.
I don't believe that the average person is interested in racist ideology. The people it tends to attract are disaffected white males. They tend to have poor education and poor job prospects i.e. no hope for the future. My guess is that they were already radicalized before being heavily exposed to racist ideology online. They will still be able to cluster online. It just won't be under our watchful eyes anymore. It'll be similar to how pedophiles cluster online.
I hope that you're right and that I'm completely wrong about this.
The average person (which includes these disaffected white males) is an idiot. They'll pay attention to whatever facebook and youtubes algorithms puts in front of them without question.
There are always disaffected people, but throwing this crap at them day in and day out for ad dollars is just throwing gasoline on a fire for a percentage of the insurance money.
Do we really know who is right here? Do we have data on much social media helps extremist groups grow vs how social media surveillance helps authorities catch and disband members of these groups and their plots?
Their alternative destinations are pretty predictable, and their social networks are already closely monitored and infiltrated. The aim is to keep the cost of re-establishing their networks above that of tracking them.
Awfully easy to answer questions like this by going straight to "Nazis" or "terrorists" or "child molesters," isn't it? When a complex social problem seems that obvious and straightforward to resolve, that's when you really need to challenge your own thought processes.
> Let's start with curbing speech that encourages harming others.
Raising taxes would certainly harm me. In fact, in much more direct way than impotent babble of bunch of idiots obsessed with the color of their epidermis. So I guess we should start with banning any speech advocating raising taxes?
> Raising taxes would certainly harm me. In fact, in much more direct way than impotent babble of bunch of idiots obsessed with the color of their epidermis. So I guess we should start with banning any speech advocating raising taxes?
So impotent that they never walked into a synagogue or mosque and shot up a bunch of people. Oh wait...
The GP's example of raising taxes might be surprisingly hard to refute.
For example, if the U.S. government's tax revenues were much lower in the 1960's, would they still have invaded Vietnam? Perhaps not entering Vietnam would have saved far more lives than are lost to domestic mass-shootings.
My main point is simply that causal relationships between policies and (various definitions of) harm can be highly speculative and messy.
Okay, but "can be speculative and messy" doesn't suddenly mean we can't make any judgments at all. Here the relationship seems quite clear. Why can we not act here, just because a theoretical example exists where it might be more complicated?
Let's make it easier and less messy. Supposed there's a policy that you know for certain would harm me and certain other people, but would not produce any other effects. Let's say there's a law that says I must pay a special tax that will be distributed among ice cream makers of the city. Ice cream is no Vietnam war, right? Nothing that awful. And if I don't like ice cream, such law is obviously not good for me. It's not entirely fictional examples - we have hundreds, if not thousands, redistributive laws on the books. They hurt some people, arguably help others. Some people claim these are positive-sum laws, some thing zero-sum or negative sum. But whatever it is, somebody is getting hurt - and not just by reading some unpleasant speech.
Should people be banned from advocating for or against such policies on Facebook? I mean, if one advocates for, it would hurt one set of people. If one advocated against, it would hurt another set of people. If you say we must raise taxes, you will be repugnant to Libertarians. If you say we must lower taxes, you will be repugnant to welfare state proponents. Should we just limit ourselves to posting cat pictures on Facebook? Nobody would disagree with cats, right? Right?
A lot more Muslims kill each other (sectarian violence). Should Facebook ban expressions of Muslim superiority or Shia/Sunni superiority? Forget about protecting Westerners. Why not do it just to protect other Muslims? Yet I don't see that happening any time soon. Why the double standard?
Facebook already does ban a lot of extremist content, including pro-ISIS content. This protects both Westerners and Muslims.
Leaving that aside, banning white nationalism does not prevent Facebook from banning other content it considers extremist in the future, regardless of what you see happening any time soon.
So we should ban all people who have same thoughts with somebody shooting people? OK, we've just banned: Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, Atheists, Communists, Anti-Communists, Socialists, Libertarians, Maoists, Trotskyists, Marxists, Environmentalists, Bernie bros, Republicans, Democrats, Independents... Pretty much everybody. Except for you of course.
If their members regularly go out and start shooting people in synagogues and mosques which their pathetic online 8chan friends cheer them on? Eeeeyup, boot their asses right out.
> If their members regularly go out and start shooting people in synagogues
But they do. Not all of them in synagogues and mosques of course, some of them do it on stadiums, night clubs, buses, trains, buildings, and some use explosives, poisons, cars, etc. But adherents of all ideologies above committed acts of murder. So, by your logic, every adherent of such an ideology should be banned. Or just those that visit 8chan? It's hard to tell these days.
> Let's start with curbing speech that encourages harming others.
No doubt, explicit threats or advocacy/conspiracy to violence exist, and should not be tolerated.
However, there are countless complicated grey areas subject to interpretation and potential bias. Was Kathy Griffin advocating violence by holding up a mock Trump severed head? Is “Abortion stops a beating heart” a coded message to inspire violence against abortion doctors? What about “Eat the rich” or “The only good billionaire is a dead billionaire”?
My favorite edge case is this WKYK sketch, which is clearly satire, yet trivial to indict as an explicit call to unlawful violence: https://youtu.be/eg3_kUaYFJA
How can it be consistent when some of the very same people that consider white nationalist speech as harmful encourage the spread of antifa's ideals?
I'd rather everyone feel free to share their ideals so I know who to avoid. It's going to happen anyway, and I'd rather it not be restricted to behind-closed-doors, so to speak.
I realize I kicked up a hornet's nest by accidentally omitting one word: "physical" – I meant to say let's start by stifling speech that directly calls for _physical_ harm.
The next would be maybe an argument of banning speech that _indirectly_ calls for physical harm, since that leaves room for interpretation. Calling for a white ethno-state indirectly calls for physical harm to all non-whites. Why? Because how the hell else are you going to move us out, other than by force? Are you planning to pay each of us $2 million to leave the country? Obviously not.
The third would be all other forms of hate speech (which arguably would cause even more debate).
If you want a negative example, check out Voat. It started as a "less moderated/censored reddit" and quickly filled with actual nazis and other vitriol. A business cannot survive on "We accept hate speech" in the same way 4chan has never really been a business proposition; Nobody wants to look like they are supporting hate speech so advertisers won't go near it with a ten foot pole.
IMO, this is a good thing, and implies there is at least some decency in the world
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
With respect, putting a bad idea in quotation marks doesn't make it a good idea. Mencken was extremely intelligent, but applied over-broadly, the concept embodied in this quote implies we should defend even murderers against the oppression of banning murdering.
I much prefer "Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake."
On the other hand, a website doesn't need to be a good business proposition to be a good platform. In fact some might say being a good business proposition is outright opposed to the values needed in a good platform.
(In case it's unclean, I don't think Voat or the .chans are good platforms either.)
I'd encourage people to please read the post before they comment. It seems that this isn't actually Facebook targeting a specific ideology, it is removing a previous rule that excluded that ideology:
> We didn’t originally apply the same rationale to expressions of white nationalism and separatism because we were thinking about broader concepts of nationalism and separatism – things like American pride and Basque separatism, which are an important part of people’s identity.
I've been plenty critical of Facebook in the past, but this post is refreshingly honest. I hope it's followed up by some discernible results.
I don't think this is correct. They seem to be saying that they allow posting about nationalism and separatism, and white nationalism content was allowed under this umbrella, but now they specifically disallow white nationalism and separatism.
Honestly though, posting about any serious separatist movement has a good chance of violating their "terrorism" community standard:
"Any non-governmental organization that engages in premeditated acts of violence against persons or property ... in order to achieve a political, religious, or ideological aim"
You can't tell me with a straight face that if Facebook existed 50 years ago, Sinn Fein would be allowed to post on Facebook, because they were not the IRA.
I guess you must have brushed over the part where it says:
> Our policies have long prohibited hateful treatment of people based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity or religion – and that has always included white supremacy. We didn’t originally apply the same rationale to expressions of white nationalism and separatism because we were thinking about broader concepts of nationalism and separatism – things like American pride and Basque separatism, which are an important part of people’s identity.
Very specifically, it points out that they are not just "doing one", they are bringing one in line with a broader policy that is applied to many different types of hate. So I'm really not sure what point you're trying to make.
Why not just ban all nationalism or nationalistic posts? Depending on ones relative position it's hateful towards others. But regardless:
> Our policies have long prohibited hateful treatment of people based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity or religion
I'm just saying this has always been selectively enforced at FB, the reason they are speaking to white nationalism now is because of recent current events and they are in the spotlight. I feel this is purely this is a convenient PR campaign.
Not that it's an easy topic to control or address all the platforms have issues with this, but FB is being opportunistic for press.
This is the problem with this type of censorship, who get's to decide what is defined as "hate" speech. Facebook, who is run by it's own set of individuals with their own set of beliefs. It is their platform, their servers, they can do what they want, but Facebook as a company should not be defining what constitutes "hate" because we obviously have a stratification of morals in this country and what could be considered hate to one person could be considered perfectly charitable to another.
I imagine that's because it's sometimes subjective and difficult to define. We tend to focus on the obvious cases, but not all of them are. What about the discussion of e.g. race and it's correlation to IQ? How about discussion of trans issues and viewpoints which contradict what trans activists want to hear? Are we allowed to talk about biological differences between men and women which some find offensive?
They are all valid topics to discuss civilly, but some believe that even having a discussion is racist/homophobic/sexist. My fear is that it will move beyond what we've legally defined as hate speech and into "don't hurt people's feelings" territory.
I don't know as much about hate as I should, perhaps, but it seems arbitrary to make rules about what's hate and what's not.
This part, especially, from the article...
We also need to get better and faster at finding and removing hate from our platforms. Over the past few years we have improved our ability to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to find material from terrorist groups. Last fall, we started using similar tools to extend our efforts to a range of hate groups globally, including white supremacists. We’re making progress, but we know we have a lot more work to do.
My question is, how are you going to know when you're done? What would Facebook look like if they didn't have any more work to do on hate?
I'm honestly asking this.
This is my favorite bit, from right at the top:
"Hate speech in the United States is not regulated, in contrast to that of most other liberal democracies.[1] The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that hate speech is legally protected free speech under the First Amendment. The most recent Supreme Court case on the issue was in 2017, when the justices unanimously reaffirmed that there is effectively no "hate speech" exception to the free speech rights protected by the First Amendment."
I like that part too, because it also brings up the notion that US version of near absolute free speech is not the only on that exists. That other countries have banned hate speech without falling into totalitarianism, banning legitimate political discourse, or falling into the other traps that a "slippery slope" argument pushes.
==What happens long-term when the people whose memories of the horrors of the early 20th century die off?==
Surely you could think of race/religious/class based horrors that have occurred since WWII. There have been genocides in places like Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Yemen this century. There is an ongoing one in Darfur, Sudan [1]. Rwanda [2] and Bosnia and Herzegovina [3] had genocides in the 90s.
Curiously, some of those horrors are actually counterexamples to the way we think about these things. For example, the Rwandan Hutus were historically oppressed by the Tutsis as well as European imperialists (who reinforced the dominant position of the Tutsis). Prior to the genocide, it would have been relatively easy to write off Hutu nationalism as sympathetic and understandable while being more concerned with Tutsi nationalism (especially since there were Tutsi militias roaming the countryside.)
Likewise, I don't know about Bosnia, but it would be pretty understandable to sympathize with the Serbian attitude towards Croatia declaring independence from Yugoslavia because the last time Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia, it was to literally collaborate with the Nazis. So Croatian nationalism would have seemed vaguely fascistic and threatening, but Serbian nationalism, not so much.
The reason censorship doesn't actually prevent genocide is because any ideology that's popular enough to actually inspire a genocide is too popular to be censored.
==The reason censorship doesn't actually prevent genocide is because any ideology that's popular enough to actually inspire a genocide is too popular to be censored.==
Do you have a source for this claim?
It seems to me that in every case where "ideology" plays a large role in people doing horrible things to each other, one of the common threads is propaganda (often built around de-humanizing the opposing side). Post-WWII Europe might be the best example of what a society with "censored" or regulated propaganda looks like.
> It seems to me that in every case where "ideology" plays a large role in people doing horrible things to each other, one of the common threads is propaganda (often built around de-humanizing the opposing side). Post-WWII Europe might be the best example of what a society with "censored" or regulated propaganda looks like.
My argument is that you cannot trust anyone to apply a fair standard for which propaganda could lead to people doing horrible things to each other and which propaganda could not. The far greater risk is for such a mechanism to be hijacked by the very demagogues it is intended to disarm.
It's easy. First, you pick out the most extreme and unpalatable examples of your opposition. Then you scapegoat them as a public menace worthy of censorship. Then you exploit the powers of censorship you've received and apply them more broadly. The rise of Hitler[1], for example, followed this literal pattern--he convinced the people that the Communist Party was enough of a public threat that they should be banned, received the executive powers necessary to do so, and then banned the Social Democrats too, for good measure.
It's understandable that post-WWII Europe has the particular set of scar tissue necessary to prevent the rise of another Hitler. The only problem is that Hitler himself rose to power on the back of the scar tissue that post-WWI Europe developed to prevent the rise of another Lenin.
The US has plenty of history of censorship. The "imminent lawless action" standard was only established in 1969. Prior to that, for example during and shortly after World War I, teaching people how to evade the draft or advocating for them to do so was commonly prosecuted as "sedition". Eugene V. Debs ran for President on a Socialist ticket a number of times, many of which were from prison because he had been convicted of sedition.
This seems absurd to us today, but it was justified the same way people justify banning hate speech today. Even the cliche about "crying fire in a crowded theater" was coined in one of the Supreme Court cases that upheld the laws against sedition, as well as the more general arguments about whether the enemies of open, tolerant societies should be able to weaponize that openness and tolerance against them. If you squint, a lot of the rationale against banning hate speech looks a lot like they're just trying to make the world safe for democracy.
(Was the German Empire really an existential threat to the safety of democratic, open societies around the world? Is white nationalism?)
IIUC, it becomes discerned by US law if someone acts on violent rhetoric. Then, the violent rhetoric can be used as evidence that the actions were part of a hate crime.
I'm 99% certain this is wrong. The boundary is "imminent" "lawless" action.
If your speech inspires someone to shoot someone an hour from now, it's legal. It wasn't imminent. If you speech will inspires someone to commit a non-violent but illegal action immediately, such as buying some drugs, it's potentially illegal (outside of 1st amendment protection).
I agree with you. Apologies; I was unclear. Scenario in my head: actor (a) spreads hate speech, actor (b) goes and kills someone named as the hated party by (a).
Unless (a) directly incited (b) (via the boundary test you cited), (a) isn't legally guilty of anything.
But if the law discovers (b) heard (a) and acted because they believed (a)'s rhetoric, (b)'s crime rises past just violent crime to hate crime (because their reason to commit violence was a hate-crime motivation).
>I don't know as much about hate as I should, perhaps, but it seems arbitrary to make rules about what's hate and what's not.
It is arbitrary. This is a closed for-profit platform, run by decree. In the interest of shareholders, it can (and ought to) make whatever rules it wants, as long as they don't violate any laws.
Yes, well said. That's a fair point.
If I think about my response to an announcement that said, "This kind of content is being banned because it reduces our shareholder value." I can't argue with that.
I think, "Sure, you're running a businesses. It's a business decision. Good on ya."
It's the moralist explanation that confuses me, and your comment helped me see the real decision free of the spin and justification that cam with it.
There is merit to maintaining an open environment. Censorship makes the censored content seem lucratively dangerous; it looks like the powers that be are afraid of what some people are saying. I think it is best to let bad arguments fail on their own merit. The problem is that most people are unable to recognize a bad argument.
Except they are not censored. If these groups feel like they want to espouse these dangerous ideas they still can. They don't need Facebook to do and the rest of us can ignore them. But at the moment Facebook's and Youtube's algorithms put some of this crap front and center in your browser. To the unsuspecting this can seem like validating and endorsing those ideas.
Of course! But when China says you're free to discuss the Free Tibet movement in any other country but China, we rightly call it censorship. What makes this any different? Or, I suppose, what makes the differences one of kind and not of degree?
In a lot of ways, Facebook is as much of a country as the Vatican is.
The analogy holds no water, it is infinitely easier to broadcast your speech on another platform (or make your own platform) than to deal with state level censorship. Publishing them on a company's dime and expecting platform neutrality is preposterous.
It's not easy to make a new platform. it's insanely difficult. These big social media companies have huge moats at this point, due to network effects and scale.
When other things have such powerful network effects we force them, through the state, to treat people fairly. For instance, utilities like water and electricity are natural monopolies because of the limited physical space for the infrastructure. Social networks aren't quite the same but there are powerful similarities.
> Of course! But when China says you're free to discuss the Free Tibet movement in any other country but China, we rightly call it censorship. What makes this any different?
If you talk about a Free Tibet in China, you risk having your legs broken and your family put in camps.
If you violate Facebook's ToS, you might get banned from their website. Then you can just type literally any other website into your address bar and be on your way.
They are indeed differences of degree, not kind. I don't know of any culture that has embodied 100% free speech through-and-through, it's all degrees of what you can say and what you can't.
The key difference is the penalty: is it going to jail or some people roll their eyes and stop being your friend?
I don't think it's ever going to be "people enthusiastically try to understand your positions and respect them". That has been the ideal in the US, but historically I can't find the pages in a history book where it's been largely true.
Free speech is an interesting ideal but historically there's always been "acceptable speech" and "discouraged speech", where discouragement comes on a spectrum between "outright banned and prison" to "people don't invite you to parties".
In hunter-gatherer days if you had extremely antisocial ideology your tribe probably just left you in the desert and you died.
I want to be sympathetic to this sort of thing in the general sense. I really do.
But... I'm not at all sad that Daily Stormer has trouble staying online.
Free speech means you're allowed to say whatever you want. It doesn't mean that anyone has to give you a platform to say your piece. It doesn't mean that people can't react negatively to what you say. It doesn't mean that there are no consequences to what you say.
Assuming there is reasonable diversity in your options for platforms[0], and yet you still can't find a place for your speech, maybe you're just an irredeemable asshole and should change your views[1].
[0] The current availability of this is certainly debatable.
[1] Maybe you're not and you actually are being unjustly oppressed and censored. But I don't believe that's the case with the Daily Stormer.
You are proving the OPs point. No government compelled cloudflare to stop providing services for the daily stormer. They stopped because most people don’t want services from your neighborhood white supremacy DNS provider and that was what cloudflare would be known as if they did.
Should the government compell private internet service firms to service anyone?
An argument can be made that if the ability to use the web is a human right[1] then yes, governments have a responsibility to ensure their citizens can actually use it. You can make an analogy to (private) providers of healthcare denying coverage to patients they find disagreeable.
I would really appreciate if people making terminology arguments could cluster int he same subthread instead of (likely inadvertently) resetting numerous individual subthreads with the same point.
These groups aren't censored, full dead stop. Corporations have a TOS. IF you don't like it you can take your speech elsewhere. Governments are different. You are free to chose a private platform other than Facebook, Apple, Google. You are not free to chose a different government.
The problem is that an open environment cannot work when there are bad faith interlocutors actively seeking to undermine that open environment. There's a famous Sartre quote that deals with the paradox of tolerance in regards to anti-semites.
Either they are presenting valid arguments or they aren't. If you have the mental tools to analyze and quickly dismiss arguments it doesn't matter if they aren't acting in good faith.
> Either they are presenting valid arguments or they aren't.
I agree. But one problem with bad-faith actors is they can bring productive discussion to a near standstill, due to the time / attention / emotional-energy costs.
I should preface this by saying that I'm kind of a "strict Constitutionalist" so to speak.
In my view all these arguments people are making about "open environments", or "bad faith actors", or extremism or what have you are completely irrelevant. A privately owned, NON-governmental, environment is allowed to be as "open" or as "closed" as they please. If a "bad faith actor" wants to act in "bad faith", (whatever that is?), then that's their prerogative. That's their Constitutional liberty. (You ever consider this? Who, exactly, is defining what "bad faith" is anyway?) And extremism in content is fine, you don't like it, don't look at it. (Or in Facebook's case, don't have it on your system. That's fine. That's FB's Constitutional liberty.)
The Constitution really does provide room for obvious solutions to all of the arguments people are making. There's really no need to get bent out of shape about a lot of these things.
The trouble is that today, these companies have a monopoly on distribution. People who are banned go to other sites that capture extremists views (Gab/Voat/4chan).
At some point, platforms need to realize there is a moral value in allowing different view points so that they can discuss and be seen. Otherwise, people leave for more "open" platforms that breed exclusive extremism. It then further divides the split.
The other issue is that these platforms are so big that they literally dictate narrative in many cases, or at least to their audiences.
>The trouble is that today, these companies have a monopoly on distribution. People who are banned go to other sites that capture extremists views (Gab/Voat/4chan)...
If the banned go to Gab and 4chan, then there is no "monopoly" on distribution. The Constitution is what allows for the alternative options to even exist. It's GOOD that we have the alternative options. That's not a "bad" thing.
And what is wrong with people going to "open" platforms that "breed exclusive extremism"? I don't see anything Constitutionally wrong with that. (Keep in mind, you or I not liking something does not mean it should be Constitutionally restricted.)
What is the moral value in allowing group X to threaten the very existence of group Y? I don't mean saying that group Y should be kicked off Platform.com, I mean threatening to kill group Y IRL.
Yes, it's like book burning. It makes the banned content more enticing. This is the big issue with New Zealand banning the recent shooters manifesto. What if news organizations want to read it to report on it (even if it is just to say, this is why he's a nutjob)? Banning his manifesto grants it more important. It shows the government is afraid of it for some reason.
Mein Kampf is still available for purchase in NZ. I've personally looked through his manifesto and think it should be discussed in schools, so students and teachers can explore his breaks in logic and contradictory statements. If you understand people like that, maybe you can identify them early on, or encourage attitudes in general that would prevent those xenophobic ideas from developing.
Copycat violence is a thing, when you offer people to make a political statement and then get immortalized, history has proven that people will take you up on that.
Secondly regarding the most recent NZ manifesto, it isn't a well argued thesis as much as a dump of memes and shitposting.
You don't solve nazi ideology with reasoned debate. You don't solve it with deplatforming either but I doubt facebook is going to start throwing bricks so I'll take it.
There was reasoned debate from ballpark 1932-1938, when the Nazis have roughly 40% of the vote to go into a coalition government then somehow levered that into total control of the German state but that's more evidence for your argument.
You don't debate literal Nazis who want to kill or enslave everyone who isn't like them with ideas. You debate them with the US Military. Deplatforming is just a palatable middle ground.
"Move fast and break things" doesn't quite work even in the SV bubble. Letting somebody as demonstrably immoral as Zuck do it in real life does not look like a good idea.
Better not let him iterate the overreach in the first place.
There was a time when the FB newsfeed was chronological, and just showed what your fiends posted as they post them.
It seems like less blame for the world's problems could be put on FB if it was just treated as a dumb bulletin board. Why not go back to Facebook being a "dumb pipe?"
Facebook went public and now has an obligation to shareholders to make money so that means replacing the dumb pipe with highly targetted ads and articles
How does that change Facebook's dilemma? Facebook faces PR pressure because they host the content at all, serving it chronologically or non-chronologically makes no difference. Who is complaining that the problem is really that Facebook serves white nationalist content in the wrong order?
You'll be disappointed here. They are specifically targeting white nationalism/separatism. They specifically exclude other types in the article.
> We didn’t originally apply the same rationale to expressions of white nationalism and separatism because we were thinking about broader concepts of nationalism and separatism – things like American pride and Basque separatism, which are an important part of people’s identity.
So separatism is only bad if it targets non-whites?
So when Basques and Catalans say they want to leave because the rest of the country, especially the south, is full of half-moorish lazy fucks, that is cool.
Guess the same about the two halves of Italy.
I don't care as I don't use Facebook, but it's a double standard.
> So separatism is only bad if it targets non-whites?
I can't speak for Facebook, and I'm not super with-it on the conflicts in Spain, but it seems like they're making the distinction between "we want our own country" and "we want our own country and we want to violently purge everyone else from it".
But they don't say that, and if they did, you certainly wouldn't need any new policies to ban them. There are the 8chan lunatics, but outside that there are a wide range of views on what the white nationalist end-goal is and how to achieve it.
I'm reminded of the Sargon v Richard Spencer debate here. Sargon's line of attack was essentially this: You advocate for an ethnostate, people will not react well to the non-violent policies you publicly advocate to bring this about, thus there will be violence, therefore your rhetoric is violent. Even if you approve this line of reasoning, you have to admit that it can be applied to any separatist movement anywhere in the world.
Nor should they. I helped run a large, active web forum for years. We found general rules and moderator discretion were far more valuable than a list of 800 different "you can't do foo" specific rules, because the bad actors tie up all your time lawyering about the specifics.
As long as you're admitting that there's no general principle being evenly applied here, and it is entirely discretionary on Facebook's part, we have an understanding.
e: But it's not an arbitrary exercise of power when I do it!
"Race" is a de-facto cultural category, at least in the U.S. It's not merely a description of someone's outward appearance; the reason people even care about the construct in the first place is its social aspects, which happen to be rather pervasive. It's not obviously wrong to advocate for separatism on the basis of such things, nor is separatism per se hateful or violent.
Except you can't, which is why for example "Islamophobia" is a thing. Things that should be ideologically separate are inevitably tied back to race/ethnicity, because nobody seems to know how to separate race/ethnicity from ideology in debate. Just listen to how much flak Sam Harris gets on the subject.
As a Canadian I would be horrified if they banned all speech related to separatism. Quebec should absolutely be entitled to rant about wanting to separate themselves from the rest of Canada. That's not extremist speech, there is no realistic risk of violence from that speech, it's just a widely held (slightly less so recently) political opinion about how we should organize ourselves into political bodies.
I don't know what issues Spain has with separatism, maybe there are some legitimate ones, but not all separatist groups are inherently bad.
As an anti-racist conservative, the most fun I have on the internet these days is arguing racists out of their beliefs on the armpits of the internet. I relish my downvotes there. I would be bummed about these beliefs being banned everywhere because I wouldn't get to exercise my Internet debate skills to make a positive impact on the world without worrying about trampling on somebody's right to an echo chamber.
What does it mean to be an anti-racist conservative, and what do you think about the conservatism movement in that you have to use that extra qualifier?
The vast majority of both conservatives and liberals are passive about the vast majority of issues. It would make sense that if you are actively seeking out specific conflicts, you can add an anti- prefix. If the parent specifically seeks out and engages with racists then they are much more anti-racist than the average person irrespective of political alignment. The conservative side definitely does not include "arguing with people on voat" as a platform.
> The vast majority of both conservatives and liberals are passive about the vast majority of issues.
While this might be true, it doesn't necessarily mean that the views held by conservatives and liberals as a whole are comparable.
I cannot for the life of me imagine someone being called a pro-racist liberal, it just doesn't compute. But someone who looks the other way and claims to be conservative? Sure, plenty of those folks to go around.
> The conservative side definitely does not include "arguing with people on voat" as a platform.
While true, I think the author recognizes that sadly conservatism doesn't often include anti-racism in its platform which is what my comment was trying to highlight.
Most conservatives claim to be anti-racist, and then go on to support systemically racist institutions such as gentrification, police militarization, union-busting, or charter schools.
Not everyone has equal abilities. Societies function best when they are set up to find a place for everyone in a color blind way where they can live up to their full potential doing whatever they're adequately capable to do to contribute to society.
On these boards many people believe all members of a given race have the qualities of their worst members. I try and dissuade them from this by showing many counterexamples and that they should really focus on convincing all member of society to call out bad behavior in whatever groups they associate and have influence with to improve society. My beef with progressives is there is too much special treatment given to ones own group just because they belong to that group by virtue of their birth and this allows bad behavior to go unpunished and uncondemed.
> and this allows bad behavior to go unpunished and uncondemed.
This is interesting, I haven't quite heard this before. What examples of bad behavior go unpunished or un-condemned beacuse of special treatment to a minority group?
A minority female music performer recently bragged about drugging and robbing men [1]. If a white man did this, his career and freedom would be over, but since she's a minority woman she may get a pass. Other minority women should call her out and criticize her and demand that she be brought to justice, and many conservative ones do, but there's a risk of the whole thing just blowing over because certain members of her affiliated groups are willing to give her a pass because of "her circumstances."
Edit: Upon re-reading your comment, I realize you give no account to such things as "circumstances," which means you're no empiricist. If circumstances count for nothing in your estimation, under what framework do you pass judgement?
Hmm, maybe this is a matter of vocabulary. Are you including supporting policies with unintentionally disproportionate impact in your definition of racism?
If so, you're going to find a lot of misunderstanding with conservatives when discussing the topic.
The entire conservative cohort pleads ignorance across the board, from denying human-caused climate change, to denying human-caused segregation and poverty.
If I did not include allegedly unintentionally racist impacts in my analysis of conservative policy, I'd be granting them the benefit of the doubt on which they, in bad faith, rely. Plausible deniability is, perhaps, the second tenant of conservatism. Ostensibly unintended consequences cannot be, after a millennium of this charade, left unattributed.
None of the things you listed is racist. Correlation is not causation. If you want to use that list to argue that conservatives tend to support policies that hurt the poor, that would be more reasonable. Racism is treating someone differently because of their race. Things like affirmative action are actual systematic racism. I'm all for programs to help poor people. Such programs will naturally be more beneficial to races who tend to be poorer, often because of historical racism they have no control over (ie slavery). But racism is always wrong, no matter the incarnation.
I consider myself a free speech absolutist. Or very nearly so.
But that runs both ways. Not only do I think that almost all (to borrow a mathematical term) speech should be permitted, but also that the onus is on the speaker to make themselves heard or to find an audience. No company or platform owes them anything.
In earlier times, that meant that no newspaper or printing press was required to print everything sent their way. Today it's the centralized websites that also don't have this obligation.
If FB decides to ban bigots, or YouTube wants to kick anti-vaxxers off their site, so be it. You can host your own video if you'd like, or maintain a personal blog site.* You are not entitled to widespread distribution. Never have been.
* Which leads to a place where I'll agree on obligations: root infrastructure like DNS or network connectivity. Those are the common carriers of our Internet.
I don't understand your position. The 1A is fulfilled—in word and spirit—to your satisfaction so long as government puts up no barriers to speech, even if private, quasi-monopolistic firms filter speech to their own ends?
I think you do understand it, yeah. The only caveat to that is the private control of what I believe to be public infrastructure. The wires that connect all of us.
What makes the wire public infrastructure and facebook not? What would facebook have to do to become public infrastructure, or comcast have to do to become not?
One is contracted by the US government to provide public infrastructure (and AFAIK still hasn't fulfilled their end of the agreement), and the other is an entity that operated and grew organically to provide a service that the government didn't ask for.
I don't know what Google's contracts and agreements are with local municipality, so the short version of my answer is that I don't know how i'd classify Google Fiber myself.
For a more general point of view, i'd take into account a lot of factors such as:
- who "owns" the service, both from an "on paper" POV and who builds and maintains it
- what does the contracts between the entity and the government say
- did the government pay for a service to be built by the entity, vs the entity asked for permission to build the service, vs the entity built the service using non-government-permission-required resources
- what was the spirit of the relationship between the entity and the government
- who will be using the service
- is the service a government-allowed monopoly
- etc.
Facebook does pass some of those tests (eg. the "public at large" is the target userbase for it), but fail a lot of the other tests at least in how they operate in the United States. Comcast's general laying out of wire + offering services over that wire passes a lot more of those tests and puts the service into public infrastructure in most folks' eyes.
It doesn’t matter if it grew organically. All large social media companies should be nationalized and required to prioritize the first amendment above everything else. This nationalization should be done on principle alone as a precaution, not as a punishment. The prior owners can be happily compensated with billions from US taxpayers. Anyone should be happy to receive such an amount if it means they get to retire early, and anyone upset about it clearly had a sinister agenda to hide. Something like this will happen before 2024. I’m glad no one will see my unreadably gray comment, I’d hate to ruin the surprise.
Comcast can't do anything to no longer be public infrastructure. Rather, municipalities would have to rework their regulations to allow anyone that follows a defined process to install the same infrastructure that Comcast has.
Likewise, Facebook would become public infrastructure when the government puts regulations in place that make it impossible or prohibitive to start a new social media site.
How do patents interact with it? If facebook got a patent on some new VR technology that allowed face to face interaction at a distance, and didn't license it out, would that turn the relevant portion of facebook into public infrastructure? What if they licensed it out but only to other people who also won't serve people saying <x>?
Clearly not a definitive answer but some elements to think about:
Facebook's business consists in promoting some of the content their users put online (the content that makes them win money) so they cannot claim to be a neutral carrier.
Comcast cannot be asked to filter content since what they carry is encapsulated at least and encrypted most of the time.
You could compare it to the street vs a private hall - everyone has the right to walk on the street, but not to automatic admittance to private venues.
Now the problem is that social networks in many respect fill the old function of the 'town square' which was a common area accessible to everyone. That commons area has effectively been divided up in the name of capitalism, in parallel to the Enclosure Acts which destroyed the British commons, so now we have a large number of (private) platforms instead.
There are of course protocols don't suffer from this problem of private capital and monopolistic control, but (like land for the commons) protocols without infrastructure can't compete effectively against platforms' huge network effects. The practical upshot of this is that extremist groups will usually just head for other less discriminating platforms, eg there's a lot of white supremacists on Vkontakte (though I'm not sure how this will pan out if Russia rearranges its internet connectivity with the rest of the world).
Right. Freedom of speech logically cannot be unlimited for everyone at all times. That's why government protections of freedom of speech tend to be limited in scope.
His position was that government should not stifle speech, but that a private company should not be forced to re-print it. There's a big difference between prohibition/regulation and coercion of speech.
I think the interesting case is the presence of a monopolist (and I take no position here as to whether any particular company is a monopoly or not). Other [classically] liberal principles like freedom of contract have been abrogated in such cases, largely out of the realization that competition and choice are what generally make such private exercises of power acceptable.
There was a time in history where everyone could start a newspaper. Pre civil war in the US, the modern day price of a printing press was $10k and almost everyone in a town would buy papers and take them on a journey across America. That's how information spread back then.
By WWI, the cost in today's dollars for a newspaper grew to several million. People can't live off small papers today. They live off Patreon and YouTube. They depend on distribution platforms in a way we didn't before.
If Amazon bans your books, it's effective censorship for people who only read eBooks. Sure you can distribute the epub/mobi DRM free, but few people are going to bother with that (or know what to do with the file).
What? The reason starting a newspaper became so expensive is because of a much larger, national distribution model. You're still free to buy a $10k printer and sell newspapers in your hometown. If it doesn't contain hateful, violent rhetoric, you can even advertise it on Facebook!
If Amazon bans your books, you can still buy the book elsewhere, or get it from the author's site. Just because a piece of information isn't in the medium that you prefer to consume doesn't make it "censorship." It's not on Amazon that "few people are going to bother with that" when they ban you for violating their ToS.
Your example of the Daily Stormer is interesting, because it illustrates two ways in which the Internet as it is set up today allows corporate censorship. The first is the one you describe: hosting companies and domain registrars can refuse to do business with you based on content. The second is one you don't mention: ISPs can (and virtually all of them do) prevent you from hosting content on your own servers at your own IP address. This wasn't the case in the early days of the web: most early websites were hosted on personal machines in people's homes or offices, connected to the Internet with their own personal or small business connections.
A truly libertarian Internet would still have the first issue, because of freedom of contract. But it wouldn't have the second, because having an IP address reachable from anywhere on the Internet and hosting any content you chose would be a basic right. (One could argue that having a DNS routable name for your IP address should be part of that right too, but the absolute requirement is the IP address: anyone can reach you with that even if there is no domain name corresponding to it.)
But Google and Facebok can ban your website and you would not receive any visitors. And you probably would lose old visitors who don't use bookmarks and type your site's name into an address bar.
I must have missed the part where Google and Facebook are obligated to ensure people can find your site via their services...
All of this seems to be something along the lines of "it's inconvenient, so it's bad, and [they] shouldn't be allowed to make it inconvenient on _their_ platform".
By all means Facebook can decide to be a publisher if they wish. That does mean though that they shouldn't be able to hide behind DMCA safeharbor. If they want to prioritize content they need to accept the responsibility that comes along with it.
A popular argument for Net Neutrality posited that allowing non-government monopolies to exercise free-reign over what they've built will result in free speech being infringed. Here is an article and call-to-action from the EFF:
While I agree that Net Neutrality is necessary, the argument given in this EFF article seems to contradict itself with regard to FB, Twitter, et al. The article notes that social networking sites have been used by people to coordinate in order to get their viewpoints heard. But then it says:
"What does this have to do with net neutrality? Simple: all of these services depend the existence of open communications protocols that let us innovate without having to ask permission from any company or government."
But anyone who uses FB or Twitter does have to "ask permission" from those companies: the companies own the sites, not the users. And the idea that FB, Twitter, et al are based on "open communications protocols" is obviously wrong.
If the argument is that FB, Twitter, et al should have to use open communications protocols, let anyone use them without asking permission, etc., then that is an argument for ending FB, Twitter, et al as private companies and making them public utilities run by the government. I'm not sure that's a good solution. It seems to me that a much better idea would be to encourage competition in free speech platforms on the Internet, so that people do not have to depend on FB, Twitter, et al to coordinate and get their viewpoints heard.
There's a fundamental difference between an ISP and an edge provider. The service provider is like a system of roads whereas the edge providers are destinations.
As long as the roads are free, it should be fairly easy to buy a plot of land and build your own destination. However, if the road company won't allow you access, it stops being feasible.
Now in this analogy, large edge providers are campuses with internal roads that they control and many entrances and exits. They too can become a problem when they grow large enough.
So therefore, I would think keeping the road system neutral insofar as the connections it allows would be the first priority. Making sure edge providers don't subvert the system either by growing too large or by organizing to control the main system of roads would be of similar but lesser importance.
Moreover, if the main roads aren't neutral, there's no reason to make campus roads neutral.
>But that runs both ways. Not only do I think that almost all (to borrow a mathematical term) speech should be permitted, but also that the onus is on the speaker to make themselves heard or to find an audience. No company or platform owes them anything...
This!
A thousand times THIS!
People seem to think that free speech absolutists were saying that Facebook should be forced to host extremist content. For my part, I wasn't saying anything of the sort. Facebook has rights too, and as a free speech absolutist, I will jealously defend Facebook's rights as vigorously as I defend the rights of the Nazi/Confederate/whatever you want to call them.
(I think I agree with you on the "almost all" part though, because I do think pedophilia should be stamped out wherever we find it. But that's just MY line in the sand. Others may draw the line somewhere else.)
Facebook and others are not responsible for what their users upload and enjoy the legal protection that comes from it.
If they decide that they are going to be curators of content on their platforms, they are no longer a mere service provider, but a publisher. They might find those protections vanish, which would more or less destroy their platform.
You're misunderstanding (or deliberately misrepresenting) what free-speech absolutists are saying. Nobody is saying that Facebook should be "forced" to host any particular content, any more than anybody is saying that homedepot.com should be forced to host any particular content. What we are saying is that Facebook is no longer a platform for free and open exchange of idea and is engaging in censorship - and it's open season to point out that everything that they _don't_ censor (e.g. calls for violence against politically unprotected groups) is something that they explicitly condone.
Based on the evolution of the web, indeed, it looks like new businesses will be made out of this.
With this banned group, I am concerned about what social scientists call the 'backfire effect', where beliefs turn even stronger and bolder. For instance, this happens with groups of people who hold conspiracy theories; when society rejects them, the conspiracy theorists double-down on their beliefs.
I think you're right. Every time you censor something you create market pressures for a way to host content that's more difficult to be taken down or traced back to a source.
It's why I think censorship is self defeating, it will eventually lead to a populace being competent enough with certain tools to side step the censor, and you can't walk that back.
The key thing you're missing is recruitment. White supremacists need access to the larger platforms in order to recruit new adherents to their bigoted ideology, which is significantly harder to do if they're forced into "underground" spaces. De-platforming works -- if we make it clear that hateful ideology isn't tolerated in large platforms, then people have to actively seek out such ideologies. If such ideologies are already frowned upon in the public sphere, it makes their recruitment much more difficult.
Totally agree, recruitment will be much more difficult. It's what happens to many conspiracy theorists over time. Their recruitment takes the hit in society.
The key thing you're missing is recruitment. Gloabalists need access to the larger platforms in order to recruit new adherents to their bigoted ideology, which is significantly harder to do if they're forced into "underground" spaces. De-platforming works -- if we make it clear that hateful ideology isn't tolerated in large platforms, then people have to actively seek out such ideologies. If such ideologies are already frowned upon in the public sphere, it makes their recruitment much more difficult.
They existed long before the internet and will exist even if they’re banned from it. When it comes to racism, a lot is spread through family and friends. Get to know certain people long enough and they’ll do the old ‘look both ways and say “they don’t want you to know this, but the truth about (x group of people) is...”’ routine.
Ban what these clowns say on the internet and it might end up giving them more power, since it lends to the “they don’t want you to know” aspect.
All true, but it's a fact that they recruit through the internet and have had a digital organizing strategy since the 1980s. The armored car robberies mentioned herein were used to finance a nationwide chain of bulletin boards known as Aryan Nations Liberty Net.
Recruitment matters because groups that don't recruit successfully eventually lose momentum, are penetrated by spies, or dissolve into infighting over everything from leadership status to money to women. In fact, the biggest mortality risk for RW extremists seems to come from their own peer group, though I don't have stats for this offhand.
Certainly those attitudes and ideologies will continue to exist in the face of deplatforming, but raising the costs of recruitment, retention, and operation seems to be an effective strategy.
Right – but then consider what its popularity might be today if AfD-aligned content had been banned by Facebook and other platforms from the start. Parties like the NPD have been around for ages, but unlike the AfD they were kept out of the Overton window and never managed to grow to significant numbers.
And how exactly would you define it to ban it? Germany already has some of the most extensive hate speech / anti-extremism laws in Europe. I mean, it's not just censorship, but e.g. outright bans on parties expressing certain views in their platform, or even just insufficiently democratic internally, and with various specialized institutions that enforce all that proactively. And all that wasn't enough to prevent AfD from operating legally.
Facebook can just ban them by name without any explanation, of course. Are you suggesting that it's a good thing - that, because we seemingly can't write fair laws on this, we should delegate both the laws and their enforcement to private industry, where it can be done without any checks and balances?
"Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're really in favor of free speech, then you're in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favor of free speech." - Noam Chomsky
Thank you. Free speech isn't just an amendment for the government, it's a principle for society.
If Facebook were a television station with limited air time for a single track, it would be perfectly valid for them to decide (reasonably) who gets air time. However, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have infinite tracks and time. I don't think the OPs argument is as strong, with that in mind.
There is a huge difference between your website in which you post in your name, and Facebook which was created as a platform to allow billions of people to post in their name.
the difference is that youtube/facebook are not publications themselves, but platforms that allow you to publish. So you already aren't deciding what to host, as a user-content driven site, you by default allow anything, then naturally hopefully for moral reasons but necessarily legal ones, you ban illegal content. Beyond that, it still is a privately hosted thing so I'd still agree that your self run user-content based site may ban whatever it likes. However when you reach a general use size, where people rely on your platform for free speech, things certainly feel different. I'm not sure what the right move is, but I don't think its as simple as "my private site is my private site, thats the end of it"
What about the legal risk associated with letting the Frog Brigade post their terrorist cookbook on your platform? Does Zuckerberg have to come to their house and load the bullets into the gun for them so they can make a statement about how angry they are? Because he made an app for people to cheat? I fail to see the connection.
>What about the legal risk associated with letting the Frog Brigade post their terrorist cookbook on your platform?
Like I said, banning illegal content is the first step that anyone ought to take. Generally this is done via moderation staff of the site + user submitted reports. If you're providing a free platform and terrorists start using it as their communication channel, then you're only at legal risk if you do nothing to stop them. However, I'm imagining things like the NZ shooter's 8chan post, where a direct threat is made or a direct implication of violent acts to come. Posting a "terrorist cookbook" actually is a good example, as its sort of right on the line. It seems to be the sort of information that only has negative uses, on the other hand its just information, as opposed to an actual threat. I'm not really sure if such things should be allowed... it could be helpful to terrorists which is bad, but also censoring information is nearly impossible and almost always seems the wrong way to go.
>Does Zuckerberg have to come to their house and load the bullets into the gun for them so they can make a statement about how angry they are? Because he made an app for people to cheat? I fail to see the connection.
As do I...I really don't get what you're trying to say here, can you restate?
>I'm not sure what the right move is, but I don't think its as simple as "my private site is my private site, thats the end of it"
Well get back to me when you've worked out exactly when a private entity shouldn't be able to decide what content they allow. This ambiguity is really too difficult to figure out.
I don't know, or I'd know what the right move is! For this, its sort of a "you know it when you see it" thing, as facebook/youtube/twitter are major platforms used by everyone, and so they feel a lot more like an online town square than a private space. So they are definitely past the line, and ought to have different rules on what content is allowed/disallowed than smaller lower population platforms.
The problem is, if they are forced to allow "any legal content", they'll be overrun with spammers and other no-goods, and the users who just want to keep up with their family will all leave.
Absolutely not! I'd be interested in knowing how you came to the conclusion that was my argument.
Rather, it is important for society to support free speech, not just the government. While society is under no obligation to, it's unhealthy to censor speech.
It's even worse when society self censors free speech, and then pretends to still advocate it.
I was taking the point to an extreme. You're saying a society should support free speech so Facebook should let the white nationalist content stay on their site (by their own good will, not forced by government). Is that not accurate?
Deciding what I allow on my site is an exercise of my free speech. Why is hosting white nationalist free speech more important than my free speech to not host racist content?
What's the exact threshold? Just curious so I can make sure to stifle my business growth so as not to give up my free speech to not host racist content.
It's the publisher vs platform debate. If you're curating content based off of promoting your company's vision of acceptable free speech, then you become a publisher and a whole different set of rules apply to you. You're liable for much more in the eyes of the law.
You can't cherry pick the advantages of both and hide under the guise of being an open platform.
I think the terminology we have here for publisher and platform don't exactly fit this scenario. I think it'd be wise to find a new label and set of rules that better fits this type of company.
If you want to take that tactic it's probably just better to reframe the argument.
Most of the problems that come from being a massive social media juggernaut like facebook/twitter/etc come from those services being free.
Being free is what makes them massive monopolies and gives them such broad reach. I think 99% of the problem cases AND the lack of competition in the market could be plugged by breaking the ad-supported/VC-supported model and forcing these companies to charge something to their customers.
How does the amount of bandwidth capable for carrying channels relate to whether something should be carried or not in a legal or constitutional sense?
Carrying white supremacist content has a cost to both Comcast and YouTube/Facebook. Nobody expects Comcast to carry the KKK channel and yet they have hundreds of channels and clearly space to carry it. So why aren’t they compelled to do so if Facebook is?
Comcast is few-to-many model, Facebook is many-to-many.
A few content producers create the content that Comcast could potentially carry. Comcast selects what they want to provide to their many customers. Comcast has never marketed themselves as a place where anyone can have their content provided to subscribers. Facebook has, in fact that is the essence of what they do.
To answer your first question, the constitutional response would be "it doesn't". Legally, I'm unaware of any edge cases, except potentially some net neutrality related things. (I'm not very certain about NN.)
My point, however, is that this is neither a legal nor constitutional obligation, but a social and voluntary obligation to a free society.
Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter also have as their primary purpose the propagation of information and messages by and among their users. It's not some incidental or secondary feature. It's what they do. And they promote this to the public with almost zero barrier to entry. Yes they are still private entities, but like a hotel that is open to the public, they become constrained in the restrictions they can impose since they have chosen to be in that business.
Yelling fire in a crowded theater and calling for the killing of americans are not protected by the first amendment and never have been. They are calls to violence. So no, his free speech didn't collide with national security, his call to violence collided with the full weight of America's call to violence against him.
"Shouting fire in a crowded theater" is a quote from a Supreme Court decision that put American citizens in prison for the crime of protesting against the draft during WW1.
That decision has since been overturned, thankfully. But it would be good if people who keep coming back to this phrase remembered where it came from, and what it was already used to justify.
What is the alternative to a private company making their own decisions on what to allow on their platform? A blanket order to not ban any content whatsoever?
Facebook and YouTube are private corporations and have no obligation to platform any idea. They have the freedom to remove any content on their platforms they like, and your freedom of speech doesn't trump theirs. Of course, you can continue saying whatever it is you like -- you just have to find a platform for it yourself.
There's a difference between supporting someone's right to speech and handing them a microphone and gathering up an audience for them.
There is some room for human judgment and give and take here, at this time there is absolutely no shortage of platforms that allow anyone to broadcast any awful thing they can dream up. Email, web sites, street corners, I believe there can be different standards for different places.
There's no shortage of street corners to protest on. Why are you mad that we pepper spray you when you try to protest in front of the bankers' offices?
Good old Chomsky. I really like his views on this topic. However the question leads down a rabbithole.
Absolute freedom is a contradictory concept. How can you kick an unwanted visitor out of your house because you don't like what he's saying? Aren't you infringing on his rights? Someone needs to draw a line.
So what about a social media oligopoly? How dominant does Google need to be before you have to tell them to allow freedom of speech.
It's a centuries old debate initially had out by Hobbes and Rousseau.
Hobbes' famous phrase from Leviathan "bellum omnium contra omnus" (the war of all against all) describes absolute freedom as being problematic indeed. Rosseau provides an answer in The Social Contract to say you can't have a war of all against all, you instead need the state to be responsible for being able to imprison people and collect taxes on them and this alleviates (generally speaking, to a large degree) the problems absolute freedom present.
A big problem is oligarchic in nature: if you believe that ISPs should be classified as common carrier utilities that should not be permitted to limit or censor the data you receive within reason, then the oligarchic content hubs should similarly be common carriers of speech.
I don't have a rock solid argument on this, this is just an equivalence I'm asserting.
ISPs are utilities because you only have one option for ISP (running a wire to your house). Content hubs take less than a second to switch, there is no lock in.
The lack of ability to switch providers is what makes it important to have regulations, not just the fact that it is labeled a common carrier.
There is a public lock in. You can switch to another content hub like you can move to a new town for a different ISP. I think that's at the heart of disagreement here: do these content hubs count as public spaces for unregulated communication, or as private spaces, regulated at the will of the owner of the space? For many, due to the population present, other content hubs are not the same thing as facebook/youtube/twitter.
What lock in? There is no friction in typing in a different website's address. Just because other people use Facebook doesn't mean you're locked into that. People watch different TV shows, different movies, read different books, this is no different.
No one is stopping you from making your own forum or website.
That you chose to put there, on someone else’s computer. Other than you and your friends’ and family’s willingness to do work, there is no lock in, and I don’t believe that’s a useful way to define lock in.
So the fact that in the 90s you put your sentences into Microsoft's proprietary .doc format, or that you decided to run your business on Microsoft Windows computers is not lock-in either? What definition of lock-in would you propose that would include the above which is widely regarded as lock-in, but exclude FB as lock-in?
Chomsky’s position is that the burden of proof is on state violence to justify itself, and I think he would agree it’s clearly justified in that case.
However, that’s a very narrowly scoped restriction (and it’s also not clear that such distribution is a type of “speech”). A more appropriate question would be: would Chomsky support free speech for an advocacy group such as NAMBLA, or for creating mangas that depict drawings similar to CP? Those are exactly the type of speech/expression that are clearly vile, yet should still be protected from interference by state violence, from the civil-libertarian perspective.
I suspect that Chomsky would consider child porn - or at least the part of it that is illegal - not speech in this sense.
Speech is the process of communication ideas. Porn is the process of sexually arousing someone remotely. Criminalizing the latter is not criminalizing the former.
There has to be a point where "criminalizing a number" doesn't really work.
A HD-DVD master key is one thing, a huge binary file is another. HD-DVD master key requires specific "numberness" to work, while a binary file can still convey similar information yet be a completely different set of numbers. if I take two pictures in rapid succession of a still life, the two pictures' jpeg data and checksum hashes aren't going to be even close to matching.
That's all fine and good until somebody burns a cross on your lawn. Pretty sure you're not going to be happy with their free speech rights at that point.
Free speech absolutism is naturally at odds with property rights absolutism. The question then becomes under which circumstances should one be given precedence over the other.
I am in agreement with you on this point. FB isn't obligated to give anyone a publishing platform.
People with hateful, racist rhetoric are can certainly attempt to fully self host their shit content on their own servers. Essentially all they need to do is figure how how to run their own authoritative DNS servers, and their own http daemons. Various publishing CMS that work on a common LAMP stack server are GPL/BSD licensed and require no external connections to any platform services.
Hopefully, ethical ISPs will refuse to host their VMs or dedicated servers, so they'll have a bit of a harder task to find a publishing platform. But if you spend 30 seconds googling "russia VPS" you can find VM services which don't even disconnect customers for hosting virus/worm/trojan/botnet command and control sites, so the racists can go there.
I see what you mean, but it does seem different because FB or YouTube are not publications, but public forums, public communication spaces to publish as a person. Things published on youtube are not on behalf of youtube. Basically FB and Youtube and things like it form space where content fills in.
> Things published on youtube are not on behalf of youtube
Tell that to people using YouTube. YouTube will end up being inextricably tied to whatever content is uploaded using their platform as long as they are the ones who manage its display and recommendations.
This is discrimination of opinion, strange as that sounds.
There is a reason we don't see signs up like; 'No Blacks', 'No Gays', 'No Jews' in private establishments. Its because its not allowed, we either have a list of protected groups - or a general rule that forbids banning anyone because of their 'group'.
If we don't fairly quickly extend free speech into these platforms, then we will have to eventually legislate a list of protected opinions.
> There is a reason we don't see signs up like; 'No Blacks', 'No Gays', 'No Jews' in private establishments.
Could you imagine the immediate public backlash against this type of behavior by a private establishment? I don't think the law is doing the heavy lifting here.
May I suggest reviewing the history of the civil rights movement? That sort of discrimination used to be normal in large parts of the US and was overcome through a combination of civil disobedience and legal challenges.
A large number of people are still alive back from when Jim Crow laws were still actively in effect. In 1957 the president had to send the 101st airborne to Arkansas to escort black children to school and seized control of the state's national guard because they were being used to block desegregation of schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine
A non-trivial percentage of Americans would love to have these signs up and are kept from doing so by the law. The women's movement, LGBT rights, and minority rights are actually a fairly new thing, and are still not without controversy in the US.
The cakeshop very much did not "refuse to serve gays", and really there is absolutely no self-consistent way one could agree with FB deciding that certain content is "racist" and banning it while insisting that Masterpiece Cakeshop is in any way obligated to make wedding cakes for someone whose wedding plans they do not agree with.
I'm not speaking about Facebook at all, never mentioned Facebook anywhere in my comment or in this thread, and have not made any statements about the validity of speech restriction in any context so I'm not sure why you're mentioning that. I'm speaking to a general issue brought up by the parent.
As for your comment, the cake shop has a product they are letting people buy (in effect, serving them). They are willing to produce that product for a certain group of people for a certain activity (celebration of a state recognized marriage) based on their identity. They are not willing to produce that product for another group of people for the same activity (celebration of a state recognized marriage) based on that second group's identity. Now you can argue that the shop is within their rights to do that for religious reasons and the Supreme Court would agree with you, but it's still refusing service based on identity and you know it. If you want to split hairs and say they "refused to provide COMPARABLE service because they were gay" as the buyers may have been able to buy other products then so be it.
This is a thread about Facebook, isn't it? And the parent,m or GP by now, very much alludes to it, or platforms in general.
In the bakeshop case though, I do not think it has ever been alleged, that they ever refused to serve anyone cakes just for being gay. I think the whole case hinged on the question whether making a wedding cake is significantly more than just selling a cake off the shelf to anyone who comes in (I am really not sure if, as a matter of principle, private entities in a free society should be compelled to do business with anyone they do not want to, be that marrying gays or cynical coders who go by "Fins" though). So no,I don't think saying that they "refuse to serve gays" is a proper characterization.
It's the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and it has its limits just like everything else. Namely employment and "places of public accommodation". If you read the SCOTUS opinion on Masterpiece Cake Shop you will see "public accommodation" mentioned a LOT.
So, I'm certain you will find legally hung signs with racist and discriminatory content in certain places.
> If we don't fairly quickly extend free speech into these platforms
That's outside the scope of the First Amendment. It may not even be possible to pass such a law without infringing on those platforms First Amendment rights... I would expect the SCOTUS to strike any such law down.
No, it’s a solution to the problem that if you are tolerant of everything someone will eventually whack you with a sledgehammer. To avoid that you don’t tolerate those who are violently intolerant, which in the US takes the form of the “Imminent lawless action” doctrine.
That, actually, has nothing to do with that BS "paradox" and well predates it. Indeed, you can't do illegal things, and inflicting violence on others is generally illegal. What the "paradox" is used for is to silence those with inconvenient opinions -- if you've followed discussions of the Damore affair, "paradox" has been trotted out as justification for "punching him in the face" multiple times. But on the other hand, to use the simplest example, US is quite tolerant of speech (in the 1st amendment sense) and hasn't turned into communist or other dictatorship. USSR, or China, or Nazi Germany on the other hand did not tolerate any "intolerance" -- that did not turn out too well.
Indeed, you can't do illegal things, and inflicting violence on others is generally illegal.
If someone is consistently threatening violence at some point you need to make the determination about how to deal with that. You can of course do nothing about it but if the person eventually goes ahead and commits violence you now have a bunch of injured or dead people, which seems a worse ill to me than deplatforming.
You think deplatforming is going to stop him from killing people? It might make it more likely - he may convince himself that the deplatforming is part of the great conspiracy against normal people, and he has to strike a blow against it. (On the other hand, it makes it harder for him to convince others to join him.)
Don't deplatform him. Investigate him. Get a warrant and find out who's listening to him. Find out what's going on in their private communications - are they making actual plans, or are they just talking?
Deplatforming is about the laziest and least useful possible response. As Fins said, deal with the violence (including plans to commit it).
If someone is threatening to commit violence, there are already perfectly effective legal ways of dealing with it. If anything, if you do deplatform them , noticing that speech becomes significantly harder, while they become more radicalized (and if Zuckerberg did not exist, anti-semites would have had to invent him; but he does exist).
To go back to the original article, though, it is interesting that they are banning white nationalist content. Does it mean that any other nationalist content is just fine. And can I start an Even[0] separatist movement on FB, calling for eradication of the whitey? We'll start with Russians, of course, but after them we're coming for you! /s
If I didn't have better things to do, a conspiracy theory of FB (they did elect Trump, as everybody clearly knows) being in cahoots with Stormfront and specifically calling out whites to stir resentment almost writes itself here.
Are you advocating for Facebook being legally barred from banning any content on their platform that isn't explicitly illegal? That's the only alternative I can think of.
Actually, I am for Facebook having the right to ban anything and anyone from their platform. But that does not mean that doing so would necessarily be a good, or right, or moral thing to do.
You only need to be intolerant of people whacking others with sledgehammers to avoid that issue. There's no problem with tolerating speech in your example. In general, the problem with anybody who is "violently intolerant" is the "violently" part. So when speech is a direct call to commission of a crime, or a conversation in conspiracy to commit a crime, we do not treat it as protected - but it's not because of violence of the speech itself.
The problem is, by being intolerant (even of the intolerant), you're intolerant. So if the "paradox of tolerance" is accurate, then we must not tolerate you.
"But", you say, "they were intolerant first, so they are the ones who should not be tolerated!" From your perspective, sure. Maybe not from theirs, though. That gets you to a cycle of each side being sure that the other is intolerant, and therefore that their own intolerance is justified. Maybe this "paradox of tolerance" isn't the right way forward, even in the face of intolerance by others. You should be better than them, not imitate them.
Worse, if each side can think that the other side started it, well, what if the other side is right? What if you actually are the problem? Using the "paradox of tolerance" as your justification is a handy way to justify your own intolerance, and never have to examine yourself.
Neo-nazis and their ilk tend to be pretty explicit about wanting to kill specific groups of people as part of their ideology, something which your hypothesis seems to overlook.
Wow! I guess both sides are the same in every situation in which two groups disagree, and there are no right answers to anything. I'm shocked it was so easy to prove this, once and for all!
It sure would be inconvenient if anyone pulled back the curtain on this intentionally-vague comment to show that you're equating "Nazis" with "People who disagree with Nazis"!
Those who are actually observant rather than just snarky might notice that I said no such thing.
What I actually said is, first, when you don't tolerate intolerance, you become (at least in technique) similar to the people you are fighting. And second, don't be so sure that you aren't the bad guys. And the more absolutely sure you are that you're the good guys, the more I want you to back off and take a really hard look at whether that is actually true, because the bad guys can use exactly your logic (or at least gameskrishnan's) to convince themselves that they're the good guys.
What utter garbage. So many centuries of war and suffering, millions and millions of pages written on the events of the 20th century and still there’s people taking themselves out of the equation and saying that actually, the guys loving freedom and who would rather not live under fascist rule are really the bad guys. Please educate yourself and read about all our collective achievements and try to understand where the vehemence of people not wanting to tolerate nazis comes from.
This opening, along with your straw man in the second sentence, shows that you're not debating this topic in good faith.
It would be nice to think that every horrific event in history was simply a case of bad people knowingly doing bad things.
Sure, sometimes it is, when we're talking about a lone actor or despotic leader who just wants to bring about destruction and misery for their own pathological reasons.
But at least as often, everyone thinks they're the good ones fighting for a just cause. As has often been said here before, one person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. One person's liberating saviour is another's tyrannical occupying force.
It might be easy for us to look at 1930s-40s Europe and judge which side was right and which was wrong, but to an ordinary German or Italian citizen or soldier who didn't have a full understanding of what was going on, and just knew that their country had been economically depressed for too long, it wasn't so clear.
And in plenty of other major conflicts since then, the rightness or wrongness of each side is very hard to discern.
This is not suggesting that racism or bigotry is ever to be endorsed or validated.
But bigotry is usually an expression of a deeper distress that has nothing to do with the target of the bigotry. It's often just scapegoating for a largely unrelated problem.
By paying attention to what the real source of that distress is (e.g., post-WW1 misery), it's possible to respond to the real problem and prevent the bigotry and consequent horrors from developing at all.
No, it's objectively garbage to take yourself out of the equation and accept fascism like it's not going to hurt anyone. I'm not going in retrospective here and say my judgement would have been perfect 80 years ago. I say we need to learn from past developments and mistakes made in the course of history. Stop abstracting away the problem at hand which is White Nationalism and other fascist thought becoming more and more acceptable.
> By paying attention to what the real source of that distress is (e.g., post-WW1 misery)
You think you have it all figured out and you 'get it' now. That's naive in my opinion. And I'm not talking about good and bad, some kind of universalist dualism that informs my every action; I'm talking about being concerned about my friends that may or may not fit certain views on human existence that fascist thought provides. At least try to get where I'm coming from instead of throwing out useless internet jargon ('strawman') without even understanding why I'm reacting so harshly.
> You think you have it all figured out and you 'get it' now
I've spent over 7 years undertaking a variety of formal approaches to deep personal introspection, and I've never felt less like I can, or anyone can, "have it all figured out".
But one thing I've learned a thing or two about is the tendency to ascribe the greatest threats and wrongs to some easily-identified "other" without paying adequate attention to the failings and risks in our own group and within our own self.
For what it's worth I spend vast amounts of time thinking about what kinds of approaches to eradicating bigotry and oppression might actually be effective, and what role a humble individual as myself might be able to play in moving the needle over the long term.
To suggest that this is a matter I believe is "not going to hurt anyone" is about as wrong as you could possibly be.
Counterpoint - if every media, platform or provider blocks the content, and the only audience you're allowed to speak freely to, is to yourself - is it still "free speech"?
I'm not saying we're there yet, but we could be at some point.
You literally have the right to go stand on an actual soapbox outside your government offices and yell at people. That's what's constitutionally protected.
I think your attitude is still extremely mild. It doesn't matter if we believe ourselves to be neutral, there are groups that consider themselves our opponents, and will work against everything we stand for. And, unless we decide to fight back or at least stop helping them to promote their agenda (which is often incompatible with values widely shared among secular / educated communities), they will prevail in some manner. See also: 2016 U.S. election.
> to promote their agenda
> ...
> they will prevail in some manner.
As it takes two to tango, so does it take two sides to promote something: one that is doing the promotion and the other that is following the promoter. If the argument is that people are so fickle they will eat up whatever is being directed at them, join the ranks of the promoters, who will thus prevail, then woe upon us. I prefer to think of ourselves as somewhat more capable of resisting insane and malicious messages.
> * Which leads to a place where I'll agree on obligations: root infrastructure like DNS or network connectivity. Those are the common carriers of our Internet.
And payment processors, and credit card companies, and mobile carriers, and instant messaging providers.
I’d agree with all of those except instant messaging providers. The others involve massive capital investments to replace them at all; a small IM server can be run on a $5 VPS.
The town library is not required to carry every book. Librarians make curation decisions; that is what we pay them for. It is still a tragedy when small groups of activist Puritanical community members get enough political leverage to remove the books they don’t like. The reason it’s a tragedy is not unrelated to “free speech.”
Why do they have the right to use power to suppress viewpoint opponents with 100% flexibility in claiming an individual has wronged a group with no evidence, no clear definition of what the terms are, and no recourse?
It seems like terms like this and hate speech often boil down to “people that are effective at calling out my bullshit”.
It is unethical to with no evidence call republicans or classical liberals Nazis, and then use that as a justification to abuse your power to shut them up. Why not make an argument instead?
On this topic I really recommend Frankfurts [1] terse one hour read arguing that there are three types of statements; attempt at truth, attempt at lies, and attempt to just bullshit people with no regard to relate it to truth. This kind of attempt fall in the third category.
It is quite telling how this is getting downvoted with no argument. Always judge people on their actions, and especially how their actions impose upon others.
Edit: and then this is also downvoted with no argument. A better demonstration of why this facebook policy is a terrible idea could have not happened.
It's not a novel argument, it begs the question from the outset (boil down to “people that are effective at calling out my bullshit”), and ignores objective evidence about the content and aims of the speech in question.
Bullshitting is what many talking heads do on TV, YouTube and tumbler to generate content required for their job. Basically, truth seeking has not done its job on it so the person doesn’t know if it’s true or not.
People are right now most often in a biased content bubble and judging content from what they learn by emotionally mistaking what they learn from possibly bullshit content as objective might lead to injustice.
Most of us agree that people might say bad things and that it would be great if they didn’t, but my claims was that facebooks judgement of the content is unlikely to be objective because:
1) no clear definition of terms like white nationalism and hate speech is a recipe for bias. What liberal or republican haven’t been called a alt-right/Nazi at this point?
2) because of #1 there is a risk that a company that has a clear ideological tilt will most likely end up suppressing viewpoint opponents when the definitions are unclear, because too much is up to subjective judgement and no due process protects against these biases
3) no recourse is bad when things go wrong
In due process it’s the process that reduce bias so that we don’t get the mistakes of mobs of the past (eg people that think they are objective while not having an accurate mental model of what they judge), although it can’t eliminate it.
How do you think facebook has ameliorated these concerns so that they can be objective?
I'm just telling you why your earlier posts got downvoted. I'm not interested in how Facebook has ameliorated these concerns until I see how they do at achieving their stated objective.
It is the stated objective that is highly problematic, because of the lack of truth seeking and humility in how they pursue their objective.
I think another outcome for Facebook is more likely because they seem to be forgetting that they are not the ones creating Facebook, rather they are capitalizing on part of the activity in the relationships amongst their users as long as they can express something relevant to them on Facebook.
They are effectively attempting logical rationing with a lack of emotional meaning to their relationships, and overvaluing what one can learn from subjectivity without truth seeking.
As they said I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Exactly, and I am surprised they don't know they should have a better process that is feels fairer to their customers. This seems to be treating customers too logistically, without enough regard to your own potential mistakes and biases.
The question here isn't whether Facebook/Twitter/etc. have a right to control what is on their platform, they absolutely do. The question is whether there should be safe harbor provisions that protect them from legal repercussions of what they do choose to allow on their sites.
A case can be made to protect someone who allows all comers, who increases the reach of the public to communicate with each other, and who extends the scope of public discourse to be protected from the legal consequences of what their users say. The same case is a lot harder to apply to an institution that curates the content they choose to publish. By way of comparison, telephone carriers, an industry that exerts no editorial control, are largely not legally liable for what customers say over the phone network. Newspaper publishers, who have absolute editorial control, on the other hand are legally responsible for what they publish.
Which of these are Facebook and Twitter? My answer is that the more they limit speech that is not legally criminal then the more liability they should have for what they allow.
The problem is that, for a paper or a TV network, control scales. You can pump your network TV signal out twice as many antennas, and still control every frame of video.
For the telephone network, control does not scale. There is no way for the phone company to censor what happens in one billion daily phone calls. It can't be done (until we get adequate speech recognition, but that's not an answer that I want to see applied in this way).
Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are like the phone company, not like newspapers and TV. Censorship does not scale.
Twitter, being text, could think about trying to automate censorship. The problem is that people do all kinds of typos, circumlocutions, innuendo, and dog whistles to get around such things. Words are really flexible, so it's a hard problem.
Facebook and YouTube are worse. They can try to have automatic assists, but pretty much the only way it can be done is via user reporting. Even that doesn't scale all that well.
I think the main argument against that can be made is that the Internet is now so complex that the forbidden speech can easily be silenced entirely, if you start your own blog independent of FB. Especially with DDoS attacks, it can become prohibitively expensive to stop those and the core/root internet infrastructure simply doesn’t stop it. It’s basically a paid add-on and if you want to do it yourself you will need both funding and/or technical expertise.
Either way, I’m still in support of Facebook and others removing this type of speech as I think it’s a net negative to society to amplify it in this day of discovery algorithms.
Seems like we also need to do more to improve the core infrastructure so that you don’t need 5Tbps of bandwidth to keep your blog online.
And CNN, MSNBC, Vox, HuffPost, Slate, The Guardian etc. are not required to carry content that doesn't align with their political agenda. I'm not sure I understand your point?
With media outlets there are plenty of alternatives. There are no direct alternatives to Facebook that provide the same services at that scale and reach.
This is obviously part of a much larger campaign to silence disagreeable speech. You aren't a "free speech absolutist" if you aren't alarmed by this. You admit that people have a right to use of "root infrastructure", but registrars and hosts are already discriminating against people for legally protected speech.
PS: Observe the downvotes without comment. These are the adherents to the school of thought that advocates not caring about reasoning with people who disagree with you. Everything is simply a bare power struggle in which considerate words are not the weapons of choice.
> If FB decides to ban bigots, or YouTube wants to kick anti-vaxxers off their site, so be it.
Will they get rid of Mark Zuckerberg? If there is any single bigot driving that company into the ground with both illegal practices and bigotry, it's him.
Precisely. I worked on a college newspaper. It was common , had been going on for years and years in face, that a specific hate group would send an order for advertisements, and threaten to sue if we didn't print them. They were usually Holocaust denial ads w/ anti-semitic conspiracy theories. We never printed them, but some schools inevitably did, failing to understand this aspect of free speech. Everyone gets to speak. But if you want a microphone, you have to buy or build it yourself.
Bad example. The college newspaper acts as an editor and has to review what content to publish before it's being published. The college will be held responsible if there's misinformation or something of criminal nature being shared.
FB pretends to be a medium of information for anyone and they don't moderate what is being published before being published. They do however have an obligation for content being distributed after if it's breaking the ToS or the laws. They have to take that down after the fact.
Here the controversy as I see it, is to prevent a group from publishing if it's been labeled as "hate", or "white supremacist" content, where the labeling aspect is very subjective and arbitrary.
> The college will be held responsible if there's misinformation or something of criminal nature being shared.
This is precisely the dynamic that is driving facebook. I don't think the comparison to a newspaper is perfect, but I do think it's apt. In both cases, neither venue is obligated to give anyone their own soapbox to stand on. That was my point.
I agree with the spirit of this totally, if I run a coffee shop I sure as heck would kick out white nationalists and would support other coffee shops having that ability.
There’s a weird side to this though that if you want to host a video let’s say YouTube is the place for it. Or if you want to organize a group Facebook is THE place for it. Well what if your group is about shutting down Facebook? Facebook could close it. Heck FB took down Elizabeth Warren’s post critiquing FB.
I think these mega corps need to be broken up so they don’t get so much power in deciding what is and isn’t allowed on the internet. Sure they make good choices like this one but they also make tons of other choices that are only because it benefits them.
I like your comment, I only disagree with the word "spirit". I believe this policy is a slippery slope. No one likes these groups but alienating them, creates a precedent/a policy that legitimizes removal of the one element of our existence that allows for our individuality(spirit). Silence of that which we loathe is failure to embrace our own capacity for loathsome behavior. We all like and dislike different elements in our life. I am a married man; is this not discriminatory to the rest of society. When a corporate entity profits this much off the indoctrination of public, they should be obligated to enforce the tenants of said republic.
“It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.”
“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years.”
Why now? After all, we've had all this supposed white supremacist content available all these years and now it's somehow a threat? Are more white people getting fed up being the tax cows of the world or what?
You're right. The correct solution is for everyone to stop using the services providing by companies when they begin the downwards censorship slide. Unfortunately most people value using facebook in the >$1000/year range.
I think if they allow public signups then they should not have the ability to censor anybody, except by court order or to comply with the laws of the users region.
Because of course "anything I don't agree with is hitler" is a problem and an inevitability. Its fine if they do not allow public sign ups and all people they are publishing are considered employees or enter into contract with the company but facebook, twitter etc. are different animals and I really don't see how anybody supporting free speech can support facebook inhibiting the speech of certain people.
By doing that you're effectively turning these websites into 4chan. Can you imagine a website like Hacker News if no moderation was possible, nobody could get banned and nothing could be removed without a court order? You'd just have every thread spammed by bots.
That's the problem with unmoderated online discourse, cheap inflammatory posts are easy to make and draw a lot of attention while in-depth analysis takes time to write and to read. Why bother coming up with a clever retort if you can just spam "no u" and "fuck off" until those people are driven away?
In my experience no moderation doesn't result in more varied opinions, instead it turns into an echo chamber where the bullies take over. Again, look at 4chan or some of the most popular, less moderated subreddits. It's pretty crap.
The ideal state of affairs is when you can have multiple platforms, moderated in different ways as they compete for customers in a free (i.e. competitive) market, where such moderation, or lack thereof, is a part of their pitch to new customers.
But we let companies monopolize whole segments of the market. And then every such segment becomes a vast echo chamber of whatever the prevailing public opinion at the moment is.
I am no longer a free speech absolutist. And the reason I am not is the sort of abstract, angels-on-a-pinhead bullshit arguments that fill the responses to the parent post. The more it can be abstracted to "free speech", the less oxygen there is for discussion of the real harm caused by white supremacist thought and white supremacist actions.
I put the safety of society at large first. And if you think that's oppressing you, maybe you should ask yourself why.
You clearly have done answer in mind since you've already conceded the core argument. Who do you think? I'm good with the discourse between the public and Facebook leadership in so far as it targets widespread social norms and ignores the few loudmouths.
I guess I am remembering it wrong but I thought sticks and stones were dangerous but words could never hurt me. (Calls to action dont hurt me either, but I can see how one could categorize them as dangerousness due to the resultant action)
Words inspire action. That's why it matters. To paraphrase the Supreme Court, the problem with shouting fire in a crowded theater isn't the shout, it's the dangerous stampede that follows.
And those who deliberately inspire violent behavior with their speech are very, very careful to make sure it's not an explicit call to action. This is not new. "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" has been around for a long time.
> Are you suggesting there is no such thing as dangerous speech? Are you suggesting that having someone decide what speech is dangerous is actually worse than the dangerous speech itself?
How is that working out in the People's Republic of China? They have a very concrete definition of what dangerous speech and have legions of people to decide whether individual instances are dangerous and to remove them.
Clearly, their system illustrates the hazard of your viewpoint.
Ah, but does it? China is currently going through a period of peace and incredible growth (per capita income has grown about 130x since 1960, in constant dollars). The people are safe, secure, and enjoying opportunities their grandparents couldn't even imagine.
And I suspect that if you polled in China, you'd find a majority agree with the regulations on speech, and sincerely so (not saying yes out of fear). Meanwhile, things are much freer than they were. I'm currently reading a Chinese novel, The Three Body Problem, set partly in the Cultural Revolution, and it pulls no punches about how awful it was.
Even here, on an American-centric discussion full of grossly privileged white American men, you'll find most agree on some regulation of speech. It's just a question of degree.
Sometimes we'll get it wrong, and need to correct it. That's fine. We're capable of that.
What's not fine is throwing up our hands at even the concept of performing that judgment, because it's subjective or whatever. That cedes the public square to extremists, which results in a shittier society.
And observational data suggests that American society (and global society) has gotten better, not worse, at this judgment.
When we started this game, we had slaves, who were defined as three fifths of a human being for purposes of political representation of slave owners. Voting was restricted to white land-owning men. It's getting better.
All of the above, and more. Organizations like Facebook can decide to deplatform white nationalists, and we can vote with our clicks or whatever in response to that. You and I can get on message boards and advocate for what we think is just. Over time we all shape our society in our image.
You're WAY too hung up on this "who decides?" question, ignoring the reality that either someone has to decide, or that no one should decide and society should simply not regulate speech in any way, ever.
And you're still dodging the fundamental questions I asked you a while back. You're just playing devil's advocate in the details. It's a lame and boring argument.
"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Consider this a warning, as we eventually ban accounts of repeat offenders.
Because the safety of society at large, especially if we look at the perception of it rather than the real goals, can translate directly into oppression of those who are perceived to be a threat. The whole "build the wall" thing is pitched as being about safety of society, for example. There are people in this country - including prominent elected politicians representing party that dominates state legislatures, and that has broad popular support in most those states - who sincerely believe that BLM and CAIR are terrorist organizations. There's that whole "BDS is anti-Semitism" thing, and some countries already have laws on the books that make it a felony to participate.
Would you say that the political and judicial system of our societies is fair, or is it biased against minorities? If it's biased, why do you expect it to enforce any such "safety of society" laws in a way that is not similarly biased towards the groups that already are the beneficiaries of that society?
I'm going to respond to this comment because my response is just kind of in general to the whole conversation this spawned.
In what way is facebook more of a public space than hacker news, reddit or any public forum, message board or website where users can sign up and post content?
You couldn't post a bunch of white nationalist comments here or on most other sites without getting banned.
Why would and should facebook be treated differently than other websites? Having a large amount users and money doesn't suddenly make them a public entity. The fact people use their real names and identities doesn't(they're not the only site that does this). Them tracking you across multiple websites and aggregating and selling your data doesn't either.
What is it about facebook that causes people to have this misconception?
If this were ISP's, DNS providers, even hosting providers really shouldn't be able to(as far as i'm concerned, but that's a different discussion and does happen), but facebook doing this is the same as any other website that allows user discussions and user content setting rules.
There's an internet outside of facebook. People making the choice to reside entirely there doesn't automatically make them any different than other websites.
It's the users that choose to give them this power over things by using their service. Though...i know not entirely not entirely...pre installs on phones and things like the free data facebook messaging in the Philipines puts things outside.individual users control sometimes. But that's on poor government regulation and other phone manufacturers.
And...i'm not a big fan of facebook. I find them shady and greatly distrust them. But, part of that is because I understand they're a shady private corporation with zero obligation to the public. Pretending otherwise is unhelpful.
One thing that I've been thinking about, and I'm curious on your thoughts on, is Facebook's "Internet.org" project.
If you're not familiar, Facebook is offering low-cost (or free) internet access in less developed countries to a hand-picked selection of sites [0] and has roughly 100m users. [1]
It's been argued that they're essentially acting as an ISP and are significantly violating the principles of net neutrality. [2]
You say "people [are] making the choice to reside entirely there", but for millions of people around the world, Facebook is the only social media platform available to them at a reasonable cost.
Should operating this platform be enough to treat them differently? I could see arguments both ways.
I've never heard of that specific program. The only one like that I really knew about was the free data stuff in the Philipines because of a friend of mine there. I know in that specific instance it comes down to basically non-existent regulation over carriers and ISP's and a lack of any real choice.
If Facebook is becoming a defacto ISP in countries it should be subject to the same regulations and really should be required to follow net neutrality rules. Though I don't think those exist in a lot of developing countries(or I guess America also...).
In the end though, it's those country's governments allowing facebook to do this.
These are my realistic thoughts on the matter.
My own personal thoughts...
That shit's downright evil. Government's should absolutely not be allowing facebook to do this. But I feel the same way about ISP's in general owning content providers and favouring their own services.
This practice would be the same as Ford or gm owning a bunch of gas stations and giving preferential prices to drivers of Ford or gm vehicles. I honestly don't understand why it's looked at differently when it comes to internet companies or technology in general.
If a social media company wants to be an ISP or a an ISP wants to be a content provider or host, they really should not be able to give preferential treatment to their own content and companies that do this should be scrutinized heavily for bullshit.
I think it's because Facebook is both more visible and personal than other platforms. Horrible, racist, violent, and outright evil content has existed on the internet since its inception. The difference is that journalists don't browse 4Chan and I imagine when people see content on anonymous forums they're better able to rationalize it because they can come up with a multitude of excuses for the poster. It's a little more surreal to see "real" people openly and publicly calling for the extermination of non-Aryan people.
I think that's why Facebook has been getting more criticism and attention in the media than Reddit or Twitter, despite wielding comparable social influence. On the flipside, I also think that's why people are more outraged about the "censorship" issue. If you ban a Reddit user you're just banning some username. If you ban someone on Facebook, you're banishing a person and stifling their voice.
The slippery slope arguments are sensationalist. Facebook had many motivations for implementing this policy, some of them undoubtedly motivated by money, but ultimately I would argue they implemented it because American and western society pushed them to. To the extent that western society has unequivocally decided that racism is very bad and not good, this policy change will also not push us over the edge into total censorship because that's not what we want (and I think it would be difficult to take the stance that that's the direction we're heading in.)
I would think it has to do with the invisible/nonexistent/impersonal nature of Facebook moderation.
If there’s no face, if the site is designed so you never feel like a guest on someone else’s website, you'll assume you’re in control of the social rules.
> Why would and should facebook be treated differently than other websites? Having a large amount users and money doesn't suddenly make them a public entity.
Because FB is not targeted at specific communities of people like HN, and less so reddit, it's welcome to everyone. Everyone is in fact actively encouraged to join. That's their mission. Private spaces that are open to the public often have first amendment protections:
"But that runs both ways. Not only do I think that almost all (to borrow a mathematical term) speech should be permitted, but also that the onus is on the speaker to make themselves heard or to find an audience. No company or platform owes them anything."
Thank you - that is very succinctly put and is a reasonable and actionable standard that I hope more people will subscribe to.
That being said, I can't imagine how difficult and frustrating it will be for facebook (and others) to police any kind of definition for "white nationalism" which seems very vague and open to all manner of misinterpretation.
In earlier times, that meant that no newspaper
or printing press was required to print
everything sent their way. Today it's the
centralized websites that also don't have
this obligation.
...
You are not entitled to widespread
distribution. Never have been.
This sort of pointing-to-the-past-to-pave-the-future is disturbing to say the least. We don't apply the received wisdom of the past blindly to issues of the present much less the future.
All else being equal, the history of what was allowed to say (and what was not) in newspapers, radio or television is rife with examples of heavy handed editorializing, gate-keeper-ship, outright bias and favor and misguided attempts to selectively allow what truths are judged to be fit to be heard by the masses.
Those were the dark ages for the dissemination of information.
Do we really want to go back to those ages or even a shade resembling what was considered acceptable practices back then?
Heck, most of that stuff happens unimpeded in large parts of the world today, as I write this.
Do we want tell those countries and regions that its okay to sieve and favor what's allowed and what isn't in their public discourse, if a substantial majority of their populace finds it morally repugnant?
Won't those places and people, then apply their own standards of morality in that judgment, which could be diametrically opposite to ours?
Is this the example we want to set for the world to follow?
So what are you advocating? That we force private entities to publish speech, and allow no recourse to enforce social norms through private action, only through government? That seems far more dystopian than the past that you are speaking out against so strongly.
If I recall corrrectly, early in the history of the commercialisation of domain names (1990's), for a time the sole appointed registrar Network Solutions would not accept domain name registrations that contained certain "offensive" words.
That seems reasonable. Let them set up their own website. What's that? No one wants to be a hosting provider for a bunch of neonazis? Well, they better go and set up their own hosting provider.
And before you know it, you need to build an iron mine because no one wants to sell you steel for the basic infrastructure of the town you were forced to build because no one was willing to let you enter their store to even buy groceries!
At what industrial level is it okay and not okay to exclude someone from that?
Censorship isn't an 'answer'. Don't ask me what the answer is, though. I leave that to smarter minds.
"If FB decides to ban bigots, or YouTube wants to kick anti-vaxxers off their site, so be it"
Would you take a similar stance if Facebook banned LGBT content or YouTube kicked atheist videos off their site? I am not saying you wouldn't, but both your examples seem to be a bit one sided.
There's many arguments that can be had either way but the one that always resonate for me is this:
Once you ban speech on any ground that isnt directly putting people in danger, even real nazis for example, they DO NOT disappear. They still recruit. They still operate. You just don't see it.
The people they recruit are suddenly in a bubble where they DO NOT see the opposite view point. Their opinions become unbalanced and they become radicalized. You now have more hard-core nazis.
In this case, I believe FB does this for 3 reasons:
1. many people inside FB believe in censorship and that you can forbid people to speak or think and that it makes the problem disappear. Many people in tech actually believe this.
2. FB sees this as good marketing, and good to retain eyeballs on their platform, specially vs the "we reached out and FB refused to ban nazis, FB is siding with nazis"
3. FB wants to control speech so that they can ask money when you want to be heard. Effectively, this means "media company X pays X so that their message appears more often". The more you control speech on the platform the more you can push for sources of content that will actually pay you money.
> 1. many people inside FB believe in censorship and that you can forbid people to speak or think and that it makes the problem disappear. Many people in tech actually believe this.
That sounds like you're making many assumptions and implications that aren't borne out by evidence. Why do you leap to this conclusion rather than:
"Many people inside FB believe that they don't want the platform they've built and created to be a platform for views they feel abhorrent, and if this means that those views need to feel an alternate home, that's not their problem"?
I agree. I've always been in the camp favoring freedom of speech and the marketplace of ideas. My thinking became more nuanced when I read the book Twitter and Tear Gas by Zeynep Tufekci [0].
Changes in technology alter the playing field for culture—and we've seen this in practice as the Internet and social networking have caused a fundamental shift in what it means to censor information. Censorship used to mean putting the newspaper under state control or blockading the radio station to prevent the message getting out.
Today it's much harder to censor a message by completely suppressing it. But it's also much easier to swamp the signal in noise, by flooding the communication channel with disinformation and distractions [1]. A group doesn't need to be large or powerful to muddle the truth of an issue, especially after accounting for the effects of filter bubbles and confirmation bias.
So to preserve the marketplace of ideas, we need more nuanced approaches in thinking about what communication is permitted. One approach that has been gaining support is in making a distinction between "freedom of speech" and "freedom and reach" [2].
> You can host your own video if you'd like, or maintain a personal blog site.
Making that argument would require Facebook to admit there's an internet beyond their walled garden. So far they seem happier to be grilled on national TV in front of congress than make that admission.
Do you think that a website like the daily stormer should be forced off the web? And should payment processors be required to allow them an account? (for server donations, etc).
I think we're all about free speech but one thing we are learning is that social media allows nearly anyone to weaponize "free speech". I don't know what we should do, if anything, but I do know social media in it's current form is not good for society.
Facebook at the end of the day is a company that can do whatever they want. It would be different if the government were enforcing this.
There is a clear difference between white nationalism and white supremacy.
I'm no fan of Britain turning multicultural and all the child rape and stabbings that it brings, but I don't think that the white race is superior to others.
Brexit is around the corner spiraling Britain down to chaos not seen for a hundred years. America is hurting its closest allies with a joker that pathetic dictators love to watch. Meh. Anonymity is still very important for the web. Until FB moves away from the 'face' part of their book, it's a terrible outcome for the Internet any day even with all kinds of curation that they are announcing now. Anonymity = Free speech.
Brexit is good for Britain, but bad for the EU. The only chaos is in parliament which is betraying the British electorate by going against their vote to leave and trying to remain at all cost. They will meet their maker at the next general election and any decisions they're making now will be overturned anyway.
The world actually enjoys watching Donald Trump because they see the USA as a world leader, and look up to it as an example. If the USA is doing great, then other countries can do great too! Making America Great Again is making the world great.
On the other hand, you have "progressive" dominated cities like San Francisco which have become cesspits, and the world is definitely not thinking "I wish we were more like that!" Quite the opposite - the real jokers are the democrats fighting for the title of the most degenerate.
I fully support scrubbing hateful content from any place where it appears.
I think people should take note though, that this is the exact point in time when the machinery for censoring and filtering the internet is being implemented. Although hateful speech is a great use case for this technology I can't help but wonder what it will get pointed at next. This isn't the kind of development that can sit back idly after performing its primary function.
The arguments for censorship and "deplatforming" follow the fashions of the times. In one era, the notion of screenwriters inserting subtle communist propaganda into Hollywood films was terrifying enough to motivate an industry blacklist. In an earlier era, advocating resistance to the draft was considered dangerously treasonous. Somehow these threats always seem less severe in hindsight than they seemed at the time, though.
I think that's an interesting argument, but I also think you need to consider the type of tooling and the reach of content in today's world. The apparatus that we have for tracking an identifying individuals and their media consumption habits gives unprecedented control over perception at a very granular level.
It also sounds like the events that you mention were dealt with quickly and severely, maybe they would have been more severe threats given the space and time to form more completely.
My fear is that we'll get to a point where people won't know about the suffering or injustice that is occurring in the world without physically going to the places where it's happening. Or that people will have to go to extreme lengths or break the law simply to escape their filter bubble.
> It also sounds like the events that you mention were dealt with quickly and severely, maybe they would have been more severe threats given the space and time to form more completely.
In the case of draft resistance in the world wars, perhaps. We did win those wars within 2 and 4 years of the US entering them, respectively.
In the case of the Hollywood blacklist, the Communist screenwriters became a cause celebre and, once the anti-Communists went overboard, were rehabilitated within Hollywood. This is despite the fact that they were members of an organization under the control of the USSR under Stalin. To some extent there was even an informal counter-purge of Hollywood conservatives who supported the blacklists and investigations.
> My fear is that we'll get to a point where people won't know about the suffering or injustice that is occurring in the world without physically going to the places where it's happening.
Ah, back to the last hundred thousand years of human history!
I am very much pro free speech. In the sense of nothing should be disallowed. I think platforms should be built in a way that there really cannot arise an ultra-(right/left/X) bubble. Facebook should build mechanisms like they can be found here on HN. If I would write something really offensive I'd get downvoted and eventually my post would vanish. That feedback by the community is extremely important, because I get to learn what goes and what not. Just deleting unwanted opinions makes things worse. People build up aggression against "the system" and feel censored by the wrong mechanisms. If I, however, see that the majority dislikes my opinions I know where the problem is.
I suspect there is some value in pushing such content off of large sites to reduce the surface area available for recruitment.
I used to think that pushing such content off a site or forum was futile and calling it for what it is on a site had value, I'm not sure that is the case anymore.
If you look on platforms like reddit and such where you have groups in subreddits calling for race wars, general hatred, and violence and of course the lesser efforts to just normalize hate takes place... there's no discussion anyway. In their own subs any hint of anything less than absolute commitment to their talking points of the day, ever changing theories, and general hatred is an instant ban from their subreddit(s). Then they venture out spam their fake news articles / take over other subs and push their message with endless streams of new accounts. There is no discussion, just constant spam, memes and etc.
We've seen topics like Gamergate, incels and such (while not that tasteful to begin with) quickly pulled to the extreme and go from something about "gaming journalism" or general angst to an identity movement steeped in fear / hate, harassment, and for some actual violence.
I suspect there may be some value in ushering these people away, if only to prevent recruitment of some others who otherwise might avoid their message that fear or dissatisfaction with life and other problems can be explained with hate.
The terrifying thought is that this might be a product of scale more than anything else.
Because of the bullshit asymmetry principle, it's easier to produce propaganda than debunk it and "call it what it is," so any sufficiently large and scaled platform will almost certainly eventually be flooded with propaganda bullshit.
>Gamergate <went> from something about "gaming journalism" or general angst to an identity movement steeped in fear / hate, harassment, and for some actual violence.
It blended very quickly from the start, but the claims about "gaming journalism" while hallow as far as their actual activity, was IMO a semi legitimate claim as far as some of the initial outrage..... but really it moved on quickly and didn't matter.
I spend most of my time on Reddit, and you’re spot on here. Deplatforming is the most effective way to fight the spread of hate. It’s literally a cancer, and it’s goinf to take the chemo therapy of stepping on the toes of free speech to protect our country and society.
Sucks, but that’s what it takes - especially when they wrap themselves up in the flag and hide behind the first amendment to spew their hate.
Not if your speech is advocating for the erosion of the rights of others’ speech. Just as there is a paradox of tolerance, there is a paradox of free speech, and the hate groups use it to great effect in this country.
>You are not forced to look at subreddits that offend you.
I think this is the greatest misconception about the push for de-platforming. The goal is to remove the platform from becoming an echo chamber for racism/hate/violence not to stop people from being offended by content they dislike.
By removing mainstream sites as options to promote hatered/racism/violence it's likely that it will make a measurable reduction in people joining these groups as there will be less traffic.
have to agree here. deplatforming is definitely not the answer. To use a crude but fundamental analogy, if you want to reduce the concentration of something you need to dilute it not separate it from the rest
I think it’s the best tool we have, and we can either use that tool or twiddle our thumbs while this problem gets worse.
As for your dilution analogy, deplatforming does have that effect because it breaks up the filter bubbles of the hate groups. It makes the media feedback loop of hate more difficult for those caught in that. From the perspective of those considering the hate, their input has been diluted.
There have been a few informal studies that have shown its effectiveness. Additionally, the mechanism for action is clear - deplatforming actually breaks up the very filter bubbles that allow hate to become organized. It makes it harder for those seeking to spread hate, and gives more of an opportunity to consider alternatives for those who are perhaps caught in the drain of that bubble.
In that case, we should ban /r/politics, the_don, shitredditsays, latestagecapitalism, news and worldnews, and every other obviously partisan subreddit, because by time they're obviously partisan, they're downvoting and banning any dissent shared within their community, and thus are spreading hate of everyone who doesn't conform to their extremist bubble standards. We should also perma-shadowban all users who contributed any posts or comments to any of those communities, because they are agents of hate. We should only leave the most abstract or concrete communities focused on real things with nothing but objective curiosity, like gaming, or DIY, or buildapc.
I think the current discourse if far more polarized than it was maybe 5 years ago. I think your assessment is delusional if you think your country and society got saved to any degree. On the contrary.
I’m describing the spread of hateful ideas as a cancer, not the people themselves. We use the description of “virality” to describe the meme or idea, not that the people sharing are viruses. Same thing here.
Why not ban all racist nationalism entirely? What is unique about white nationalism versus Chinese nationalism in China, or black nationalism in South Africa? There are many racist movements all around the world.
Only banning white nationalism is giving fuel to the white nationalist belief that whites are being unfairly targeted. That's not something we should encourage IMO.
The notion is that the history of European colonialism and imperialism "justifies" black and Chinese nationalism as a countermeasure to white supremacy.
There's a "punching up" vs. "punching down" model that pretty much explains most "hypocrisy" on this issue. For instance, even subtle hints of anti-Semitism expressed by white Westerners (e.g. being anti-George Soros in particular) are condemned far more vehemently than anti-Semitism expressed by black people or Muslims, because of the perception that Jews, being perceived as predominantly white and Westernized themselves, are more privileged than blacks and Muslims but less privileged than white Gentiles.
I don't agree with this mentality myself because the tides can turn a lot faster than your ideological model of privilege and oppression can change to reflect it, but it's similar to the ideas that are commonly expressed on the left and serves as a decent predictive model of their attitudes.
Facebook found specifically that such power dynamics are exceedingly contextual, though the role of Western European culture as effectively globally predominant puts an additional burden on anyone arguing for Western European superiority.
Back in 2008 Facebook began writing a document. It was a constitution of sorts, laying out what could and what couldn’t be posted on the site. Back then, the rules were simple, outlawing nudity and...
Just because white nationalists are white, doesn't mean that they've received any kind of largesse because of it. If you look at the demographics of white nationalists, it will be largely overrepresented by poor whites from marginalized, backwater communities.
Let's talk about the word "cracker". In the US, it's a derogatory term for white people that was coined by black people. The etymology is that a "cracker" was a white man who was hired by the plantation owner to crack the whip at the black slaves. Even in white society, these "crackers" were pretty much what we'd call "white trash"--they had effectively zero social status, received no largesse, and lived in poverty themselves. Literally the only thing they had going for them was that they were white, which meant they were the ones cracking the whips and not having the whips cracked at them. Which only made them all the more eager to crack the whips and do the dirty work of oppressing black people. Being white was literally the only thing these people had to be "proud" of. And so, the most evil people weren't necessarily the plantation owners (who were evil in a detached, hypocritical way), but rather the crackers (who were evil in a directly hateful, sadistic sense). A plantation owner could come around to the idea that slavery was wrong, as Washington and Jefferson did, and merely live in a state of complicated hypocrisy. A cracker is a pure mass of utter racial animus.
The same dynamic remained after the abolition of slavery, and it's the same dynamic that you describe.
I don't think you understand the concept of "privilege" very well.
Privilege is basically the logical inverse of discrimination. If driving while black means getting pulled over more (discrimination), then driving while white means not getting pulled over more (privilege).
Hope this clarifies how even poor whites are "privileged".
>The notion is that the history of European colonialism and imperialism "justifies" black and Chinese nationalism as a countermeasure to white supremacy.
One could equally well point the the anti-colonial resistance in the Balkans and the Caucuses against Ottoman imperialism. The result of which were massacres and genocides up until 1925. You could still buy white sex slaves in Istanbul in 1915: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_Ottoman_Empire#...
Agreed. There isn’t necessarily a strong black or Chinese nationalism movement in the US, but it does make sense to target the behavior of ethnic nationalism as opposed to any specific brand of it. It’s:
‘We don’t like it when individual ethnic groups in our multi-ethnic empire presume to have privileged rights over all the others’
Chinese nationalism probably should be banned in China (but not the US) for the same reason that white nationalism should be banned in the US: the racial designations "white" and "black" are completely arbitrary terms, not grounded in any scientific fact, and are social constructs based around an in-group (whites) wielding political, economic, and cultural power over an out-group (blacks). "Irish" is an ethnicity. "Lithuanian" is an ethnicity. "White", on other hand, is most definitely not an ethnicity, and identifying as such implicitly supports the present racist status quo, because the white in-group already wields overwhelming power in American society[1]. White nationalism asserts that only those Americans who identify as white are "real Americans", and therefore explicitly advocates for the exercise of white cultural and political dominance at the expense of all other out-groups. And at its most extreme, it advocates genocide as a means of accomplishing its vision.
The terms attempt to classify people based on an arbitrary collection of visually distinct phenotypes rather than fundamental genotypes -- however, the One-drop Rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule) works only on the basis of the latter. This inconsistency alone makes the terms scientifically irreconcilable.
Well, that straw man is obviously useless, which is why the bad old days had an intense vocabulary for all the different proportions of mixed race. Research today shows that people's classifications generally lines up with genetic ancestry. So, for example, doctors are well served to judge racial/genetic makeup by appearance when diagnosing and treating patients. Likewise, if you want to make an ethnostate or the opposite, it's certainly a useful concept. (American immigration laws by design do the opposite, using national quotas as a proxy for race.)
The one-drop rule doesn’t constitute a straw man fallacy in this context, because it is already baked into the most common american definition of “white” vs “black”. If you choose to define these terms any other way, you are forging your own path (and for what purpose? attempting to grant more validity to racists?)
Chinese nationalism is behind the cultural genocide of the Uyghur people (over 1m in camps)[1], brutal suppression of Tibetan political movements[2], and mass murder of political prisoners for the purpose of organ-harvesting[3]. The CCP uses cultural nationalism to get away with brutal suppression of non-Han ethnic minorities. This should not be overlooked, but it should also be obvious that this doesn't exonerate or excuse American white nationalist movements in any way.
"White nationalism" is just a rebranded, softer term for "white supremacy". The word "nationalism" itself doens't mean just nationalism, it means literal Nazi ideologies that might not be present in other forms of nationalism.
I'm personally a fan of them taking a more fine-comb approach to banning certain forms of expression on the platform, rather than just saying blanket "The idea of nationalism is banned".
>Only banning white nationalism is giving fuel to the white nationalist belief that whites are being unfairly targeted. That's not something we should encourage IMO.
Well its easy to believe in something that is simply true.
Did you read the sentence right below that conveniently cropped screenshot?
| Searches for terms associated with white supremacy will surface a link to Life After Hate’s Page, where people can find support in the form of education, interventions, academic research and outreach.
1,697 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 454 ms ] threadhttps://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-hate-speech-cens...
> One document trains content reviewers on how to apply the company’s global hate speech algorithm. The slide identifies three groups: female drivers, black children and white men. It asks: Which group is protected from hate speech? The correct answer: white men.
> White men are considered a group because both traits are protected, while female drivers and black children, like radicalized Muslims, are subsets, because one of their characteristics is not protected.
I'm fairly certain a state that tried to ban female drivers or (openly via legislation; this next one definitely happens in practice) punish black children disproportionately would find themselves in hot water with the Feds.
Attention everyone: this is a real problem. White nationalism and fascism is resurgent. It's real, it's around us, and it's not going to go away without a fight.
Regardless of your politics, Trump, Russia, China has enabled this to balkanize traditional institutions of democracy and cooperation (USA/NATO/UN).
If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.
China is...a different story, largely because Chinese culture treats rights in a much different light than the West. That being said, if you compare modern China to China of the 70s or 80s, it is vastly better.
(Otherwise I agree that in almost everywhere, people live the best time humanity has had.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Trump was elected by a free, fair, democratically held vote of the people. You may cry about the outdated electoral system, but well, the rules are the rules. He won fair and square.
> and cooperation (USA/NATO/UN).
Switzerland isn't a member of the NATO and have only joined the UN in the early 2000s. You don't need to be a member of every overblown bureaucrat club on the planet to be friends with other nations and trade with other countries.
We don't know that, and will never know that. This is a helpful resource for understanding why:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...
> Our policies have long prohibited hateful treatment of people based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity or religion – and that has always included white supremacy. We didn’t originally apply the same rationale to expressions of white nationalism and separatism because we were thinking about broader concepts of nationalism and separatism – things like American pride and Basque separatism, which are an important part of people’s identity.
To the people that say "Where does it end?" – that's pretty easy. Let's start with curbing speech that encourages harming others.
They've been dragged kicking and screaming into this realization but we'll take it.
This may come as a surprise to you, but this response will not be comforting to those with genuine concerns about civil liberties. Avoiding the question of where to draw the final line with the question of where to draw the first one just implies that you intend to draw more lines in the future.
Edit: Find it pretty crazy that this can't even be discussed without people accusing me of all sorts of things.
It's all well and good for you to say "white nationalism is very different from what most people think," but that doesn't stop the OP from being right.
Nationalism of all kinds root from an insecurity, and white nationalism in particular is proppogated in colonial societies to encourage the alienation of brown colonial workers via, among other acts, stochastic terrorism.
It's a lot like ISIS propaganda.
Can you explain what you mean by this?
"We don't encourage people to commit terrorist attacks, we only encourage them to do what it takes to ensure the survival and dominance of the white race."
There are however idiots who support that ideology who end up spewing their hateful crap out on the internet and in forums.
Those are two very different things and unfortunately people who are otherwise smart people like here on HN aren't able to separate the two which is why I am being downvoted simply suggesting it's not that simple.
ISIS ideology is about killing the infidels and actually doing it, White Nationalism as an ideology about the survival of the white race. Look it up on wikipedia and you will find that it's not the same as the idiots who spew their hateful crap.
Either do some self-reflection or admit you're a white nationalist.
If it quacks like a violent duck ...
... that's wrong, scientifically and morally. Stop trying to gaslight us all into believing this "ideology" is anything other than backwards thinking, ignorant, hate filled nonsense.
I am sorry, but you are either ignorant, or being intentionally deceptive.
Who would you consider that to be, please?
ISIS ideology is about killing the infidels and actually doing it
I really hope you're not going to offer a 'no true Scotsman' argument for why the people who do commit murders or other terrorism in support of WN ideology should be considered as separate from the people espousing said ideology even though quite a lot of them advocate exactly such action.
'Survival of the white race' suggests there is some looming danger of extinction, a position which seems to have little foundation in fact and mostly depends on the trope that non-white people are rushing to outbreed everyone else - ignoring abundant data showing that high birth rates are correlated with poor mortality outcomes and extreme poverty, and move in inverse proportion to economic security.
I might add that obfuscation and misdirection are key components of far-right recruitment strategies. Refer, for example, to the style guide from the editor of the Daily Stormer, which emphasizes the rhetorical use of humor, irony, and ambiguity to obfuscate the primary agenda while still achieving emotional activation: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/daily-stormer-nazi-styl...
> White nationalists say they seek to ensure the survival of the white race, and the cultures of historically white states. They hold that white people should maintain their majority in majority-white countries, maintain their political and economic dominance, and that their cultures should be foremost. Many white nationalists believe that miscegenation, multiculturalism, immigration of nonwhites and low birth rates among whites are threatening the white race, and some believe these things are being promoted as part of an attempted genocide.
And the same paragraph with a few substitutions:
> [Sunni militants] say they seek to ensure the survival of the [caliphate], and the cultures of historically [Islamic] states. They hold that [Islamic] people should maintain their majority in majority-[Islamic] countries, maintain their political and economic dominance, and that their cultures should be foremost. Many [Islamic] nationalists believe that miscegenation, multiculturalism, [and] immigration of [non-muslims] are threatening [Islam], and some believe these things are being promoted as part of an attempted genocide.
ISIS may be comparatively more violent than white nationalists[1] but as far as ideology goes I struggle to see "two very different things" as you've suggested.
[1] At this moment in history at least - the Nazi party certainly fits the Wikipedia definition of "white nationalist".
This is the slippery slope you are walking down here.
So far I’m pretty unconvinced.
That was facebook's policy as of yesterday.
They changed it for good reason, and it was not a small reason to overcome that much inertia.
I'm glad that after these white supremacist terror attacks and seeing how these attackers all share the same things on social media, more people are waking up and realizing these memes are like ISIS propaganda.
It starts with an appeal to consider differences of opinion. The white nationalists ease in the ignorant by veiling their true beliefs by using dogwhistles like "white replacement" or "white genocide". This is commonly referred to as "hiding your power level" on white nationalist forums. They suggest that people of different races just shouldn't live together, or are somehow inherently incompatible. To people scared of the uncertainty of the future, or who are otherwise downtrodden, this is appealing. Suddenly you have an easy explanation for that fear.
In an more internet context, some join "just for the memes" but are gradually radicalized by the ideology. Then, someone acts on the ideology and kills a bunch of people, exactly what the memes were espousing in the first place. The world, for a short time, realizes what happened. But suddenly all of that is a joke, it's not real, it's just a difference of opinion again.
All of this ignores that the white nationalist ideology calls for an ethnostate, which inevitably leads to genocide. It's an inherently violent ideology, not just a "difference of opinion". It's exactly what ISIS wants; a state with absolute control by a particular ethnic group on racial or religious lines.
If this was just ignorant, take some time to research how hate groups spread propaganda. If it's not, follow your leader.
I am perfectly capable of both trying to understand the world I live and why some people think what they think and at the same time disagreeing with them.
If you think you are helping fight their ideology by banning it you are going to be sorely disappointed. That will not end well.
I don't think so. One wants a caliphate, one wants an ethnostate. The end result is the same for anyone who isn't part of the extremist in-group.
I guess someone who wants to live in a geographic area with people who are similar to them and share a common culture are "extremist" nowadays...this is very odd to me
To those ends, I don't want to not draw lines. I want some kind of clear criteria and process around thw drawing of lines. Perhaps we could consider a system whereby we can make sure that the power to draw lines is not used against weaker members of society under the guise of some higher ideal.
No, it just implies that we don't need to have the perfect final answer now. Maybe we'll draw more lines, maybe we'll find out we don't need to, maybe we'll decide that this line was drawn too far and pull it back. We don't need to pretend that we have all the answers yet—we don't even need to pretend we have all the questions yet.
Perhaps people might consider offering such elegant points as yours, instead of making the claim that the current line is correct and that's all that matters.
This is a category of labor that formerly wasn't necessary, and yet somehow now it is. Why is that? How can we make it go away?
Perhaps the monetary incentives will provide motivation to solve it.
However, at least Facebook now admits their political bias and people can make informed choices.
And no I do not support white nationalism.
White nationalist content should be viewed no differently than content by the likes of isis. I think it's completely reasonable and responsible to ban it from the platform.
Saying that white nationalists, despite their inherently violent nature, deserve a platform is categorically support.
You're not acting as a neutral arbiter. Instead, you're saying that this group who spouts violent rhetoric, despite the fact that we as a society have said hate speech should not be tolerated, ought to be able to spread their message.
Here's your problem. Free speech isn't about "we as a society".
"We as a society" had decided that the earth was the center of the universe before Galileo decided to defy "we as a society" to state something unpopular.
I'm not suggesting that there is any value in white supremacism like there was in Galileo's speaking of heliocentricism, but his lack of access to free speech protection meant he was persecuted for speaking the unpopular - the idea that you can ban "certain kinds of speech" is going to do precisely the same.
Where exactly is the line drawn at what is considered "white supremacism?" What if somebody says something which isn't a white supremacist viewpoint, but some loon misrepresents the view as if it were? You don't seriously think it will end at white supremacism do you? This is just the first step towards incrementally dismantling your right to free speech.
The solution to "bad speech" is "good speech", not attempting to issue bans. The Streisand effect is in full force, and each time you try to ban it, you accidentally give them more leverage. The solution is to ignore. Stop advertising for them! That's all you're doing.
That doesn't mean that we should ignore actual hate crimes - but can we get back to a sane world where people are innocent until proven guilty, and where we have a legal system where judge and jury get to decide the punishment for crimes - rather than bored, virtue signalling keyboard warriors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtWrljX9HRA
At one time, advocating for gay rights or saying god doesn't exist was considered offensive. Only two decades ago, major television networks wouldn't allow jokes critical of Christianity to remain advertiser friendly. A recent episode of The Simpsons had Jesus beating Homer with a sign that said "Love" (standards and practices from 20 years ago wouldn't allow 'Jesus' to even be said in a comedy, which is why "Great Zombie Jesus" was cut out in later edits of the Futurama episode Atlanta).
It is offensive speech that has lead to civil rights, gay rights and independence from autocracy. What is and isn't offensive tends to change over time.
I can both think their ideas are absurd and at the same time support their right to have those ideas.
That's the very definition of free speech in the US. There are many ideas and messages I don't think should be spread that doesn't mean I am against people being allowed to spread them.
You don't know what kind of fire you are playing with here if your think your position is the rational one and have a good outcome.
We're not talking about having an ability to have an idea, we're talking about responsibly deplatforming hate speech.
> You don't know what kind of fire you are playing with here if your think your position is the rational one and have a good outcome.
I can say the same of you and your naive belief that the fascists will be beaten by triumph, will, and logic.
No you cant say the same about my position. Why do you think we have the 1st amendment? Do you understand what lead to it?
What? There's no room to support the right of certain people to speak without "supporting" them? "Deserving a platform" is a total red herring here. There's room to worry about the largest platform in the world suppressing speech without claiming that those it suppresses "deserved" that platform.
>despite the fact that we as a society have said hate speech should not be tolerated
I can't believe you are serious at this point, because it is just so obviously untrue. Have you read what people have had to say in this thread at all? Are you aware that the position of the ACLU is that not only is "hate speech" to be tolerated, it is protected by the First Amendment in the US? https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/free-speech-can-be-mes...
I say this as someone who's pretty okay with Facebook taking down white nationalist stuff. As big as it is, Facebook simply isn't big enough to create major worries about controlling speech. My problem is that you're not making an argument here at all; you haven't really come to terms with the fact that quite a few reasonable people disagree with you.
When their speech is to advocate violence against every other group that isn't like them? No there isn't.
White nationalism is a... Politics?
"Speech that harms people" and "speech that hurt people's feelings" are so closely related and sometimes people (intentionally or unintentionally) mix them up.
If you are looking for examples, search HN comments that begin with "I'm hesitated to say this but" or "I know this sounds XXX"
> Our policies have long prohibited hateful treatment of people based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity or religion — and that has always included white supremacy. We didn’t originally apply the same rationale to expressions of white nationalism and separatism because we were thinking about broader concepts of nationalism and separatism — things like American pride and Basque separatism, which are an important part of people’s identity.
> But over the past three months our conversations with members of civil society and academics who are experts in race relations around the world have confirmed that white nationalism and separatism cannot be meaningfully separated from white supremacy and organized hate groups.
There is no meaningful difference between white nationalism, white separatism, white supremacy, and hate groups. They are the same thing. So... I mean... did you read the article?
I did. The snide comment is unnecessary.
That's the question I'm asking: if we accept that these beliefs are on a spectrum and that white separatism (or more generally pro-white politics) slide inevitably into violent white nationalism, who's to say the same doesn't apply to orthodox Islam? Specifically the above poster referenced Christchurch as an example outcome of the former, I argue you can't do so without considering the many examples of the latter.
There is a difference between orthodox Islam and extremist violence: just because some violent extremists are Muslim doesn't mean all orthodox Muslims are violent extremists.
Are you going to extend that same logic to devout religious followers that want a government aligned with their religion and think non-followers should be forcefully re-educated or killed?
Maybe make this argument when we aren't talking about literal Nazis. Advocating harm is their entire schtick.
But that is not where they're starting though, is it? They're going much further:
>Today we’re announcing a ban on praise, support and representation of white nationalism and separatism on Facebook and Instagram
Praise, support and representation not of speech encouraging harm, but the ideology itself, reprehensible and ass-backwards as it may be.
This sentence indicates they're picking and choosing which ideologies to censor.
This is wrong (opinion), antithetical to American notions of freedom of speech (opinion), but Facebook has a complete and unalienable right to do this on their platform (fact). Despite that right, things should nevertheless be accurately labeled. This is censorship of political thought, not censorship of "hate speech" as most reasonable people define it.
The ideology itself is an encouragement to harm.
Again, Facebook absolutely has the right to censor political views using whatever arbitrary rationale they want. I just object to dressing it up with PR euphemisms such as "Standing Against Hate". They're not doing it to stand up against hate (Facebook is a cesspool of very thinly veiled hate against immigrants, for example). They're doing it for political expediency and PR.
Wait, are you thinking there are masses of people who are okay with Facebook deplatforming white nationalists that are going to be upset if they did the same to Leninist vanguardism?
I mean, sure. But I'm so used to FB doing the wrong thing, that them doing the right thing for self-serving reasons seems like a welcome change of pace. Maybe someday they'll even do the right things for the right reasons?
...yeah, probably not. But still.
This is deplatforming, which is entirely different.
> This sentence indicates they're picking and choosing which ideologies to censor. [...] This is wrong [...] This is censorship of political thought, not censorship of "hate speech"
Are you saying that hate speech comes off of a vacuum?
These two concepts do overlap.
In general, that logic calls for deplatforming every topic that people get outraged over.
In this context, that's simply a neologism for private-sector censorship. Again I want to reiterate that I don't think the private sector should be prohibited from censorship. But using euphemisms like "deplatforming" distracts us from the fact that it is private-sector censorship, and from drawing our conclusions about these platforms, how widely representative they are, and how safe our own speech is on those platforms from future "deplatforming". Thankfully I'm not anti-immigrant, pro-theocracy, anti-abortion, communist, don't hold views like 'homosexuality and transsexuality are not genetic', etc. But if I were, I'd be worried.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/01/private-censorship-not...
If we're being intellectually honest, we know that they know full well that they're not getting a white ethnostate from peaceful participation in the political process.
Secondly, as I mentioned elsewhere, such rationalization can be used to ban a whole lot more speech than just "white ethnostate". Why is Marxism-Leninism still on Facebook? For that matter, since we're not limiting it to overt calls for violence, the mental gymnastics can be effortlessly applied to any calls to overthrow any government, when it's obvious that this cannot be done peacefully.
If it were 1920 I'm sure the Marxists would get banned for stirring up terrorism.
I say we decide first what kind of speech to ban (clear incitement to violence, for example, or something broader), and then proactively ban it to save lives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
> Why must we wait for tragedy to strike in order to act?
Actions of the government (or other actors WRT policy changes) are given legitimacy by serving as a response to perceived existing problems. In essence, if there is no tragedy, there is no legitimacy to the action. Without legitimacy, the policy change carries less weight and is not effective. This is a basic reality of policy implementation.
The actions of banning white nationalist speech on tech platforms are given legitimacy by the recent NZ shooting, where (1) the shooter made numerous callouts to the white nationalist subcultures that these platforms foster (subscribe to pewdiepie, etc) (2) The content the shooter generated and streamed spread widely across nearly all distribution channels (FB, youtube, reddit, etc) despite censorship efforts, (3) We know that wide distribution of the extremist type of content that this guy distributed (whether its white nationalist, ISIS, or anything) in his actions inspires more people to extremism.
The exact same people "not allowing" white nationalist content, of course.
Militant "right" is always a problem. Death toll: millions. Mostly "others" (jews, east Europeans, disabled people)
Militant "Muslims" are a problem in large parts of the world and has been so for centuries. Death toll: not sure. Ironically most Muslims lately.
And of course: militant "Christians" was a problem in certain centuries. Death toll: hundreds of thousands. Ironically mostly Christians?
I write "left" and "right" here because I find it unfair to blame concervatives and ordinary socialists for something that is more about being totalitarian than about more or less tax or ownership.
Same goes for religions to a certain degree (although there's no doubt that for example old Norse (viking) religion was very focused on war compared to Christianity).
This is certainly an opinion as well, but my view is that the concept of a white ethnostate alone is hateful. Whether or not one can or can't be created without violence is immaterial.
Should people be able to talk about a hypothetical white ethnostate in academic, research, or news-reporting capacities? Sure. But simply promoting a white ethonostate as something that is wanted is, IMO, hateful.
Imagine your ISP blocked your every message that disagrees with their political stance. Would it console you they're doing it as a private company, or would you demand regulators to come and stop it?
> Imagine your ISP blocked your every message that disagrees with their political stance.
This is substantially different from what is being talked about here: censorship versus deplatforming. No one is removing white nationalists from the Internet, Facebook is simply saying they won't retransmit their ideas. You can still find them if you desire and they still aren't illegal to express.
What parent post was talking about is "free speech". The claim was that free speech is only about absence of governmental coercion. This is precisely wrong - absence of governmental coercion is one of the necessary conditions for the free speech to exist, but it does not equal it and does not ensure it.
> No one is removing white nationalists from the Internet,
We have already seen hosting companies to remove people from the internet for other reasons. Same with banks and credit companies cutting off certain companies from banking services, etc. I do not see how white nationalists would be an exception. I do not see how the ultimate goal is not exactly this - removing white nationalists from the Internet. Practical implementation of this goal could be hard, but getting within 99% of it - banning them from the space accessible by 99% of people without technical knowledge of darknet and such - is not.
If it is functionally impossible to speak in a way that anybody can hear you, is it still a free speech? Is "go build your own Internet" really a free speech?
I've recently read about the infamous "Green Book" - a guide for a non-white traveler in the US which specified which hotels, restaurants, gas stations, stores, etc. would serve them. There weren't many, and even when there was no governmental coercion (there were "sunset cities" but even if one avoided them) travel turned into a real hassle. Was that situation normal? I do not think so. I feel deeply disgusted by it.
You can create very bad situations even without governmental involvement. I feel that is what Facebook, Twitter and others are creating right now - even though for completely different reasons than those that gave birth to the Green Book. You could say the people being affected by it now deserve it, as they'd probably impose the same on their opponents if they could - and you probably would be right that they would. But shouldn't we try to do better? And the history teaches us these things start with the outgroups but never end there. Already disagreeing with any of the positions of transgender activists is verboten. How long before criticizing Green New Deal, or Keynesian economic theory, or the mayor of the town whose policies Facebook supports, or any other subject the benevolent overlords declare sacred becomes verboten?
No, this is entirely sufficient for free speech.
> If it is functionally impossible to speak in a way that anybody can hear you, is it still a free speech?
Your definition is absurd; essentially you are demanding that "freedom of speech" include not only that you can legally say whatever you want, but that you also are guaranteed a place to say it and an audience who must listen to you. At some point, the freedom of the venue to choose what goes on there, and your audience members to select what they hear, must matter.
> I feel deeply disgusted by it.
You and I both! This is why we have laws ensuring equal access to private services -- however, those laws are based only on characteristics we have determined shouldn't prevent your access (race, sexuality, religion). Having bad ideas does not mean you're part of a protected group.
> But shouldn't we try to do better? And the history teaches us these things start with the outgroups but never end there.
This is a slippery slope argument. We already abridge the speech of people who are maliciously trying to create harm (falsely yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is a classic example). Yet despite this we still have substantial freedom of speech today. The fact that we don't allow people to incite panic seems to coexist quite happily with our current rights and privileges; claiming that somehow preventing white nationalists from speaking on Facebook, or credit card companies refusing to take their money, will somehow lead to the death of free speech is just fallacious.
Frankly we have, socially and legally, always placed limits on speech. The fact that it hasn't been done perfectly doesn't mean we just throw all restrictions out; it means we should always try to weight the good of free speech against the ills that speech can cause.
I never did that. There's a difference between "audience must listen to you" and "audience would want to listen to me but unable to because I'd have to build a new Internet to do it".
> only on characteristics we have determined shouldn't prevent your access (race, sexuality, religion)
So we agree that denying people access to private services can be not OK even if it's not done by government coercion? But only if it's because of racism? If it's because of other forms of prejudice not listed in the list, or because of their non-membership in the ruling party, that would be ok?
> This is a slippery slope argument.
It is. We know for a fact that the slope is slippery. We witnessed the descent many times. We know how it works. We are observing the narrowing of the bounds of what is acceptable on major social networks right now. Should we refuse to believe the experience and our own eyes because "it's a slippery slope argument"? Yes, it is - because the damn slope is very slippery!
> (falsely yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is a classic example)
Very bad example. That decision by Wendell Holmes was overturned decades ago. But if you knew what the actual case was about, you'd be even more wary to use that quote. The case sought to ban American Socialists from distributing pamphlets opposing draft. If there's any case for free speech to be protected, the case of political speech opposing government action forcefully sending people to die overseas is that case. So maybe when you complain about slippery slope arguments, you don't realize how far the slope actually gone. Do you actually want to be jailed for criticizing the government? If you do, keep using that example. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
We are talking about Facebook here, right? Do they have to power to remove your content from the Internet entirely?
> If it's because of other forms of prejudice not listed in the list, or because of their non-membership in the ruling party, that would be ok?
It depends! It is entirely legal to discriminate against someone because they're stupid or ugly. Is that okay? Obviously we have to rule on a case-by-case basis.
> We know for a fact that the slope is slippery. We witnessed the descent many times.
Facebook has banned content it doesn't like since the inception of the platform. You have no more of a right to post there than have your articles be published by a newspaper. They aren't a government and can't police your speech, but they can (and should) decide what they post.
> Very bad example.
Except it's still actually illegal? The rest of your argument simply doesn't apply, since Facebook is not the government.
No, Facebook is just one facet of it. We've seen deplatforming from every major social network, bar none, from Paypal, from Patreon, from banks, from credit card companies, from hosting providers, DNS providers, CDN providers... Virtually every piece of internet infrastructure is subject to deplatforming. And it's not just if you do something - if you provide services to people that do something controversial, you're out too.
> It depends!
You write "it depends", I read "if the mob likes you, you're ok. If they don't - well, you're screwed". Maybe it's a comfortable existence for somebody who never had a controversial thought, but it's certainly far from something I'd call "free".
> Obviously we have to rule on a case-by-case basis.
Who is "we" and why you have to rule? I don't particularly like to be ruled by "we", and be judged on its whims. OK, frankly, I can live without Facebook, I left Twitter long ago and could leave Facebook behind too. But it wouldn't stop there, would it? Intolerance to existence of contrary opinions never just stops because these opinions are now located under different URL. If it were possible, having them on Facebook wouldn't be a big deal from the start - just don't subscribe to people you don't like, ban them if they come to comment, and you'd never read their content. But the point is not that - as long as it exists anywhere, it must be suppressed. The only real end to it is elimination of the offending opinion, anything less is good, but ultimately always unsatisfactory. You may say "ok, what's bad in complete suppression of white nationalists"? Well, nothing in this mechanism has "white nationalists" anywhere, it would work against you or me as well as against anything else. Lack of freedom can be very comfortable when the rulers do the same things you wanted to be done anyway. It very soon stops being comfortable when they don't. Are you sure you'd never say anything anybody could find some problem with? Maybe decades later?
> Facebook has banned content it doesn't like since the inception of the platform.
And the list of banned things grows constantly. Yes, I know. That's exactly what worries me. Not because I like white nationalists - quite the contrary - but because one day whoever decides what to ban may dislike one of my thoughts.
> Except it's still actually illegal?
You basing that on what? Certainly not on decision of Wendell Holmes, since he never decided that (it was a rhetorical flourish for him) - so on what exactly? http://civil-liberties.yoexpert.com/civil-liberties-general/...
This is essentially the marketplace of ideas working as intended -- if your idea sucks you get booted out of venue after venue. Maybe the problem isn't the venues having standards, maybe it's your idea being bad?
> If they don't - well, you're screwed
How is not being able to tell people your bad ideas "being screwed?" You aren't being jailed, your property isn't being seized. People are telling you they don't want to hear what you have to say, but you can continue saying it to anyone who bothers to listen to you. No one is obligated to hear or agree with anything you want to say.
> Who is "we" and why you have to rule?
Platform owners specifically, citizens in aggregate. We judge the ideas we want to hear and tell people we don't want to hear that we don't want to hear them. This isn't exactly some radical new concept either.
> Well, nothing in this mechanism has "white nationalists" anywhere, it would work against you or me as well as against anything else.
Except it literally has "white nationalists" in the rule itself. How about we ban them? And then rule, on a case-by-case basis, on whether other things should be banned? Like pro-ISIS speech? Or pornography, which Facebook also bans?
The idea that nothing at all can be banned, because Facebook might ban the wrong things, is absurd. If your ideas are bad and no one wants to listen to you, the problem is your ideas, not that Facebook can ban things. No one should be compelled to hear bad ideas. And before you ask, yes, Facebook can decide what ideas it considers are bad on behalf of its users. If you don't like that, don't use Facebook -- problem solved.
> You basing that on what?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
"The Court held that government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.""
Of course, this is still applicable to the government, not private corporations, again. Private corporations can deplatform whatever they like for any legal reason.
> Private corporations can deplatform whatever they like for any legal reason.
Legally, they can. Morally, they shouldn't.
But also recognize that (unregulated) private entities have a right to decide what speech they do and don't want to be a platform for. That's the big distinction here.
Last I checked we kinda had a bit of a scuffle from 1940-1945 that stated, "This ideology is not okay and responding to it with violence is acceptable."
They're getting booted off the platform most people use to talk to grandma, not getting literally booted in the face. Unlike what they advocate for.
Are "literal" nazis only who this new rule will be applied to? The accepted definitions of both "literal" and "nazi" seem to have drifted significantly in the last few years.
> not getting literally booted in the face. Unlike what they advocate for.
Funny, this type of story about people advocating for literal violence against non-whites is extremely common on the internet, I've heard it recounted I don't know how many thousands of times in the last few years, yet I've literally(!) never once encountered an actual instance of it anywhere I browse. Ironically, I have encountered hundreds of examples of violence being advocated against white people, although in the vast majority of cases the proponents themselves were white.
Could you possibly provide any examples of such statements on relatively mainstream sites, and also note whether you encountered it organically or found it via a google search?
White nationalists are literal Nazis, so... yes?
> Could you possibly provide any examples of such statements on relatively mainstream sites, and also note whether you encountered it organically or found it via a google search?
Were you asleep for Charlottesville or all the coverage of it? White nationalists literally marched with torches chanting "blood and soil" and "we will not be replaced." What do you think those messages mean to non-whites? What do you think they're advocating for when they say those things?
a) No they aren't.
b) Even if they were, you have no way of knowing how this rule will be applied.
> Were you asleep for Charlottesville or all the coverage of it?
Would you consider the Charlottesville incident "mainstream", or common enough (and manifest in some form on Facebook) that Facebook must police user-posted content on its site?
Try to not treat this like an internet argument that must be won, and try not to exaggerate the frequency of rare (as far as I know, I am seeking a reasonable, fact-based argument in order to change my mind) incidents like Charlottesville, or conflate the specifics of what happened there with unsavory words that don't literally (actually) meet the claim of advocating violence.
Make no mistake, I'm definitely playing Devil's advocate here, but if the facts are on your side this (making the case that literally advocating literal violence) should not be overly problematic.
Or, if you would like to lower your claim to something like "frequent and possibly increasing dog whistling" (without arguing about the technical boundaries of that) on Facebook, that seems like a fairly reasonable claim.
Indeed they are! Or at least there's no difference meaningful enough in their political ideologies to draw a distinction. Obviously I'm not saying they're a member of a political group originating in 1930s Germany, but when someone calls someone else a "Nazi" colloquially, that's not what they mean either.
> b) Even if they were, you have no way of knowing how this rule will be applied.
So we shouldn't have rules because they can be misapplied?
> Would you consider the Charlottesville incident "mainstream", or common enough (and manifest in some form on Facebook) that Facebook must police user-posted content on its site?
Yes? Or what of Christchurch? Or the Quebec City mosque shooting? Or the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting? These incidents (and the literal dozens more like them) received tons of mainstream news coverage and the perpetrators 100% subscribed to white nationalist views, exactly the kind which Facebook seeks to deplatform. They believe that by removing these people from their site they might reduce incidents of these shootings. Do you think they're wrong?
What amount of violence needs to happen connected to one ideology for Facebook to ban said ideology? Facebook has banned child pornography, doxxing, and pro-ISIS content from their platform too. How much of that has to be posted before a ban is justified?
You can not like that Facebook can make decisions like this, but it is entirely their right to choose what to platform. If you don't like it, you can make your own platform. That it doesn't have the audience Facebook does is your problem, not Facebook's.
Is that so? The Nazis were a large, organized group with a distinct leader, a fairly specific shared ideology, and track record of action - you would have us believe the same is true (no meaningful difference) of modern day white nationalists? And that there's evidence of this?
> but when someone calls someone else a "Nazi" colloquially, that's not what they mean either
col·lo·qui·al·ly
adverb: colloquially in the language of ordinary or familiar conversation; informally.
This is what I mean about the common misuse of the words "literal", "Nazi", "alt-right", and in my mind this excuse is similar in quality to the "I'm not really racist, I have black friends" argument. Have you ever stopped to consider if this type of "dog whistling" is contributing to the problem in any way? Do you care?
> So we shouldn't have rules because they can be misapplied?
Your words, not mine. The question was "Are "literal" nazis only who this new rule will be applied to?".
Have you no concern for possible second order effects of poorly thought out and biased censorship? And when I say censorship, I'm not referring to the First Amendment.
> Yes? Or what of Christchurch? Or the Quebec City mosque shooting? Or the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting?
For every single "white nationalist" incident you cite, I can cite several similar racially/religiously motivated crimes committed by non-white people. If the incidents are the problem, why is the enforcement (and news coverage) racially biased?
> These incidents (and the literal dozens more like them) received tons of mainstream news coverage
The coverage was mainstream, but is this behavior or these beliefs mainstream/common? How sure are you that these incidents are caused by incitement on social media? Have you ever considered that both the incidents themselves as well as the increase in "dog-whistling" propaganda on social media (I've yet to see examples of advocating violence) might both be effects of something else? Do you care?
> and the perpetrators 100% subscribed to white nationalist views, exactly the kind which Facebook seeks to deplatform.
Is that so, or might that only be what you presumed or were told? I haven't read the whole manifesto, but this fellow seemed to have much more complex and nuanced beliefs than those held by "100%" of "white nationalists".
I assume this is a "white nationalist" propaganda site of some sort, but to me the actual words of what this madman wrote are what actually matters, not who publishes them:
https://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/31759-...
Is what's written there mainstream white nationalist views? Personally, I have absolutely no idea, so I'm willing to consider any evidence you have supporting that idea.
> They believe that by removing these people from their site they might reduce incidents of these shootings. Do you think they're wrong?
They might be right, they might be wrong, unlike you I make no claim to know. What if they are wrong, and censorship aggravates these already mentally unbalanced people even more, driving them to organize (perhaps in the physical world) underground where it's difficult to see what they're up to or thinking? Is this worth considering when setting policy?
> What amount of violence needs to happen connected to one ideology for Facebook to ban said ideology?
Then we shou...
It's not misuse if it's common usage, it's simply usage you disagree with. Obviously when people say "Nazi" they don't mean "members of a 1930s political party," they're making a statement about something else. If you find the usage of these words confusing that's on you, not the words or the people using them.
> Have you no concern for possible second order effects of poorly thought out and biased censorship?
Not particularly: if those things happen, let's protest those instead of wringing our hands and worrying about the poor slippery slope.
> And when I say censorship, I'm not referring to the First Amendment.
Deplatforming is not censorship. You are not guaranteed an audience for your speech. White nationalists can still say whatever they want, and they can even say it legally. But they can't say it on Facebook, and it's not Facebook's responsibility to let them any more than it is to let pro-ISIS people post their content.
> If the incidents are the problem, why is the enforcement (and news coverage) racially biased?
This is irrelevant to the discussion at best and disingenuous at worst. Facebook can ban multiple kinds of content, including pro-ISIS content (and it does). White nationalism being banned is what we're discussing here.
> How sure are you that these incidents are caused by incitement on social media?
I believe that social media is helping incite these incidents, so I do legitimately believe the amount of people participating in hate crimes will be reduced as a result of this. Do you really think that people aren't radicalized by communities on the Internet? Communities that might exist on Facebook?
Of course, I also think it doesn't matter if that's true or not. No discourse of value is being lost by banning white nationalism, and Facebook already bans a plethora of other (totally legal) content because they don't think is appropriate on their platform. If you want to read white nationalist speech, it still exists. This merely means you can't read it on Facebook anymore. How this is a tragedy I simply cannot understand.
> Is that so, or might that only be what you presumed or were told?
Yes, it's so. Read the manifesto.
> Is this worth considering when setting policy?
No. People can (and will) do anything in response to anything; maybe white nationalist groups will make Zuck their #1 enemy over this. You can't control the actions of other people, especially crazy people, so catering your policies to them seems absurd.
> For the sake of improving the quality of discourse, can you sense any legitimate concerns in what I'm saying, or do I seem to you like yet another ignorant racist, little different than those who might frequent Charlottesville rallies?
I don't really see many legitimate concerns arising from banning white nationalism from Facebook. As I've said multiple times, Facebook already bans other kinds of speech they disagree with. I get defending free speech is a thing, but Facebook is not the government and they can ban whatever speech they like. They don't control the entire Internet or even a majority of it, and they can't prevent you from hosting your content somewhere else, so... I just don't see what's being lost here, except white nationalist content on Facebook.
And even if they do go ahead and decide to ban other content, I mean, A) let's cross that bridge if we come to it and B) who cares? It's just Facebook, they don't control the entire Internet. Make another site if you want to discuss what they deplatform.
Your or my personal agreement on what the definitions should be are not the problem. The meaning has changed for only some users of the words, resulting in widespread misunderstanding, I would argue resulting in further (and completely unnecessary) political polarization. Words not having shared meanings seems sub-optimal to me.
> Obviously when people say "Nazi" they don't mean "members of a 1930s political party," they're making a statement about something else
But no one knows what statement they're making because we no longer have a shared dictionary, so people resort to their imaginations.
> If you find the usage of these words confusing that's on you, not the words or the people using them.
This suggest the problem is my lack of ability to understand, when the problem is there is no longer a common definition. There are certainly multiple popular definitions, according to which political ideology you subscribe to.
> instead of wringing our hands and worrying about the poor slippery slope.
It's not me who's "wringing my hands" - I'm not promoting or supporting any policy change, you are. I'm simply asking questions.
> Deplatforming is not censorship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
"Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient". Censorship can be conducted by a government, private institutions, and corporations."
Well look at that, once again our definitions don't match. Care to share the URL for the authoritative source you're using?
> You are not guaranteed an audience for your speech.
As I said: there is a distinct difference between the First Amendment and the general principle of free speech. You only have a "guarantee" to free speech in the limited context of the first amendment.
> This is irrelevant to the discussion at best and disingenuous at worst. Facebook can ban multiple kinds of content, including pro-ISIS content (and it does). White nationalism being banned is what we're discussing here.
I thought the principle behind your argument was the harm - maybe the principle is race after all?
> I believe that social media is helping incite these incidents, so I do legitimately believe the amount of people participating in hate crimes will be reduced as a result of this.
A perfectly reasonable theory, what evidence of this do you have? Are you well read on the topic, or is this just a casual opinion that sounds about right?
> Do you really think that people aren't radicalized by communities on the Internet? Communities that might exist on Facebook?
I certainly do, but I'm concerned about everything that could lead to radicalization. History is full of examples demonstrating the strange and complex behavior of individuals and civilizations. Are we over-simplifying this situation? Should we freely discuss such things with open minds?
> No discourse of value is being lost by banning white nationalism
Completely agree, but is that all there is to it? Can you think of any possible undesirable reactions (regardless of the soundness of the logic underlying the motivation) to this type of policy?
> If you want to read white nationalist speech, it still exists. This merely means you can't read it on Facebook anymore. How this is a tragedy I simply cannot understand.
The tragedy is if this further inflames emotions, "righteously" or not, and someone shoots up another church. That's what I'm worried about.
> Yes, it's so. Read the manifesto.
The link I included sur...
The only misunderstanding seems to be yours. We can clearly identify white nationalists as actual Nazis, no redefinition required.
> Censorship can be conducted by a government, private institutions, and corporations.
No one is saying that corporations can't censor things. I am saying that this is not censorship. Facebook deplatforming you is not the same as censoring you.
> maybe the principle is race after all?
The only thing we're discussing here is the deplatforming of white nationalist content from Facebook. Bringing other races or religions and their extremism in is totally tangential at best, and actively disingenuous at worst.
> Are you well read on the topic, or is this just a casual opinion that sounds about right?
There are many examples in the news recently. Here's one I read just the other day: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/22/trumps-rh... White nationalist speech creates hate crimes; the correlation appears clear to me. Of course, it also seems logical to me without any sources, so sources are just a nice bonus.
> Can you think of any possible undesirable reactions (regardless of the soundness of the logic underlying the motivation) to this type of policy?
Essentially your argument seems to boil down to: we shouldn't create good policies because crazy extremists might have bad reactions to them. But crazy extremists have bad reactions to everything. We should be trying to deplatform and deconvert extremists instead of catering to their sensitive tastes. If that offends them and causes them to lash out, that is unfortunate, but they'll do that anyway. At least if they do it to this there might be less of them in the future.
> If everything is random, why even bother with policies like this, or any at all?
While you can't control how people react to what you do, you can do what you believe is right and hope it has a good outcome in the future. Facebook apparently agrees with me.
a) With no standard definition of the phrases?
b) Some people may be able to, but can Facebook accurately and fairly (despite no standard accepted meaning of many terms) police speech (remember, we're not dealing with people wearing white hats at a rally, we're dealing with speech, which is subtle), at scale? Sure everyone can agree at the extremes, but when it's close to the middle, then it's complicated. It's like "I know pornography when I see it."
> No one is saying that corporations can't censor things. I am saying that this is not censorship. Facebook deplatforming you is not the same as censoring you.
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/03/standing-against-hate/
"Today we’re announcing a ban on praise, support and representation of white nationalism and white separatism on Facebook and Instagram, which we’ll start enforcing next week."
I'm not saying they don't have a right to do this, it is their platform after all. I'm not even saying that it is necessarily or certainly a bad idea. You and I disagreeing on this is fine and healthy. But how can you interpret "you can't say <x>" as not censorship? I asked you earlier for the definition of the word you're using, and you didn't reply. I ask again: please tell me the definition you're using for "censorship", with a link to the source.
> The only thing we're discussing here is the deplatforming of white nationalist content from Facebook. Bringing other races or religions and their extremism in is totally tangential at best, and actively disingenuous at worst.
No, that's the only thing the article is discussing. The HN discussion, and our thread in particular, are discussing broader principles of free speech and fairness, possible downsides of these types of decisions, etc.
>>> I believe that social media is helping incite these incidents, so I do legitimately believe the amount of people participating in hate crimes will be reduced as a result of this.
>> A perfectly reasonable theory, what evidence of this do you have? Are you well read on the topic, or is this just a casual opinion that sounds about right?
> There are many examples in the news recently. Here's one I read just the other day: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/22/trumps-rh.... White nationalist speech creates hate crimes; the correlation appears clear to me.
"To test this, we aggregated hate-crime incident data and Trump rally data (a different variable than our topic of conversation, but again, no need to bother ourselves with precision or details) to the county level and then used statistical tools to estimate a rally’s impact. We included controls for factors such as the county’s crime rates, its number of active hate groups, its minority populations, its percentage with college educations, its location in the country and the month when the rallies occurred. We found that counties that had hosted a 2016 Trump campaign rally saw a 226 percent increase in reported hate crimes over comparable counties that did not host such a rally. Of course, our analysis cannot be certain it was Trump’s campaign rally rhetoric that caused people to commit more hate crimes in the host county."
You can find a correlation in data for anything you want to support, see: http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
> he's just going to come back with more circular bullshit.
Asking people to justify their claims, and pointing out falsehoods or logical errors in their responses, is "circular bullshit" now?
I clearly stated I am playing Devil's advocate.
I concede points where they are valid.
I make no (other than conversational) claims without backing them up, how many claims has OP made without providing evidence for?
The discussion is curtailment of free speech (the general principle, not the First Amendment - try to get someone to even admit there's a difference without changing the subject) - I am arguing that we better have very good reasons for it, supported by evidence. Fashionable popular opinion is not evidence.
If you remove "unalienable", then yes, that's correct. Future legislation and regulation could definitely change that.
You've already disproven your "that's pretty easy" note. Who defines "harm"? The goal posts seem to move damn near weekly on this. That's the problem that can't be solved as easily as you purport.
The day facebook bans advertising about abortion will be the day I believe that line.
It ends, as it always does (and must) with massive hypocrisy on the part of the arbitrary censor, since "harm" is so poorly defined that it ends up being replaced with "whatever seems fashionable today".
You are defending literal nazis. Their idea of speech is Christchurch. Deplatforming that is absolutely the correct move.
This whole conversation centers on the relationship between speech and action. Equating the two will confuse the discussion.
Kicking them off Facebook isn't anywhere close to that large of a response.
Based on numerous past incidents of corporate behavior (not specifically from Facebook) I do doubt a fair and unbiased application of such a standard. Politically we cannot even agree on what constitutes harm or even murder (abortion being an example of such disagreement). How then is it possible to fairly ban speech that encourages harm when we don't agree on what constitutes harm?
Conversely, to the extent that they are public and transparent (eg I think twitchy is pretty specific about feedback for content removal) people will game that information and either refine their content to fit within the letter of the ToS while spreading it as widely as possible, or seek to litigate the decisions depending on what's least costly.
I am a free market guy, so for me these companies ought to have the right to determine the parameters within which their users can operate on their service. However, with things such as EUCD and GDPR rules, introducing competitors to the established networks becomes harder and harder for each day, which only benefits the existing platforms. So when the platforms are biased and competition is hindered by red-tape and regulations, we cannot expect alternatives to popup that can compete with said entities.
All of this leads me to believe that things will only get worse as I don´t see a way out of this clusterfuck we´re in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCBRHOg3PQ
Edit: why the downvotes? :S
> We can see what definition is
"seeing the definition" just means seeing some flowery language which may or may not be the full truth when it comes to individual cases. If people don't pay attention to the fact that they don't actually know, and don't seem to care, who exactly is booted off these platforms and why, exactly and on a case by case basis, and just take the word of platforms like FB or Twitter for it, they're in for a rude awakening when they end up on the wrong end of it themselves.
The amazing achievement of not being a racist or an anti-vaxxer doesn't make up for the failure to clearly speak out against the hypocrisy of a company that on the hand hand fights democracies that want to protect citizens against tracking [0], to mention just one color in the spectrum of shit they're up to, while on the other hand bragging about how they're not evil. Facebook can do what they want, people and use their "services" all they want, and roll their eyes about "outrage over FB" all they want, but then they also need to own it.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19499598
What I have a difficulty understanding is how and who will define "violence". Inciting direct violence is one thing, but people like expanding definitions. Is expressing support for one state which wants to overthrow another state "violence"? Is supporting China (in some aspect) but which none the less persecutes some people, "violence"?
Is buying almonds violence because it deprives some people in some areas of California of municipal water violence?
What about suppressed minority groups in Sudan who oppose a regime, or likewise South Sudan? Are they proposing and promoting violence?
An uprising in Teheran, is that violence? Suppress it? Are they pro regime, are they anti-regime? Is it fluid, is it at times both? What do you do?
This gets very dicey very quickly.
Definitions are absolutely fluid, not least because the science of measuring and mapping such contagion in virtual spaces is currently in a fairly rudimentary state. We're building our technological infrastructure out much faster than we are developing an understanding of how it impacts our future.
Presumably this wouldn't be happening if not for the dozen or so mass shootings with oddly similar perpetrators in the past 5 years.
Why isn’t Facebook banning leftist propaganda when groups like Antifa regularly use it as justification for political violence?
This is a game, because it initially masquerades as using the definition of "harm" any reasonable person would use, while simultaneously working the other end to redefine and vastly expand the concept of "harm".
We're now supposed to recognize unpersoning, microaggressing, belittling, twitter-mentioning as harm, and it's naivete bordering on manipulative to try to and make the case that our understanding of harm will not continue to expand
The average person isn't exactly curious about different ideologies but when facebook and youtubes algorithms throw it in their face constantly? Probably something we want to fix.
I hope that you're right and that I'm completely wrong about this.
There are always disaffected people, but throwing this crap at them day in and day out for ad dollars is just throwing gasoline on a fire for a percentage of the insurance money.
How do you know? or are you confusing "alternative destinations" for facebook and twitter?
I think taxes should be higher.
Whoops, did I just encourage harming others?
Welp, there goes the Declaration of Independence.
I feel like maaaaaybe there's a few steps in between the two.
Awfully easy to answer questions like this by going straight to "Nazis" or "terrorists" or "child molesters," isn't it? When a complex social problem seems that obvious and straightforward to resolve, that's when you really need to challenge your own thought processes.
Raising taxes would certainly harm me. In fact, in much more direct way than impotent babble of bunch of idiots obsessed with the color of their epidermis. So I guess we should start with banning any speech advocating raising taxes?
So impotent that they never walked into a synagogue or mosque and shot up a bunch of people. Oh wait...
For example, if the U.S. government's tax revenues were much lower in the 1960's, would they still have invaded Vietnam? Perhaps not entering Vietnam would have saved far more lives than are lost to domestic mass-shootings.
My main point is simply that causal relationships between policies and (various definitions of) harm can be highly speculative and messy.
We went to war over it.
Should people be banned from advocating for or against such policies on Facebook? I mean, if one advocates for, it would hurt one set of people. If one advocated against, it would hurt another set of people. If you say we must raise taxes, you will be repugnant to Libertarians. If you say we must lower taxes, you will be repugnant to welfare state proponents. Should we just limit ourselves to posting cat pictures on Facebook? Nobody would disagree with cats, right? Right?
Leaving that aside, banning white nationalism does not prevent Facebook from banning other content it considers extremist in the future, regardless of what you see happening any time soon.
Weak meme, 2/10.
But they do. Not all of them in synagogues and mosques of course, some of them do it on stadiums, night clubs, buses, trains, buildings, and some use explosives, poisons, cars, etc. But adherents of all ideologies above committed acts of murder. So, by your logic, every adherent of such an ideology should be banned. Or just those that visit 8chan? It's hard to tell these days.
No doubt, explicit threats or advocacy/conspiracy to violence exist, and should not be tolerated.
However, there are countless complicated grey areas subject to interpretation and potential bias. Was Kathy Griffin advocating violence by holding up a mock Trump severed head? Is “Abortion stops a beating heart” a coded message to inspire violence against abortion doctors? What about “Eat the rich” or “The only good billionaire is a dead billionaire”?
My favorite edge case is this WKYK sketch, which is clearly satire, yet trivial to indict as an explicit call to unlawful violence: https://youtu.be/eg3_kUaYFJA
How the heck are they going to deal with pro separatist or uzbekian socio-political issues?
What FB has realized and is realizing is how to play the PR game, because they have to.
----
And if that means getting rid of Nazis, more power to them.
How can it be consistent when some of the very same people that consider white nationalist speech as harmful encourage the spread of antifa's ideals?
I'd rather everyone feel free to share their ideals so I know who to avoid. It's going to happen anyway, and I'd rather it not be restricted to behind-closed-doors, so to speak.
The next would be maybe an argument of banning speech that _indirectly_ calls for physical harm, since that leaves room for interpretation. Calling for a white ethno-state indirectly calls for physical harm to all non-whites. Why? Because how the hell else are you going to move us out, other than by force? Are you planning to pay each of us $2 million to leave the country? Obviously not.
The third would be all other forms of hate speech (which arguably would cause even more debate).
IMO, this is a good thing, and implies there is at least some decency in the world
I much prefer "Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake."
(In case it's unclean, I don't think Voat or the .chans are good platforms either.)
> We didn’t originally apply the same rationale to expressions of white nationalism and separatism because we were thinking about broader concepts of nationalism and separatism – things like American pride and Basque separatism, which are an important part of people’s identity.
I've been plenty critical of Facebook in the past, but this post is refreshingly honest. I hope it's followed up by some discernible results.
Honestly though, posting about any serious separatist movement has a good chance of violating their "terrorism" community standard: "Any non-governmental organization that engages in premeditated acts of violence against persons or property ... in order to achieve a political, religious, or ideological aim"
You can't tell me with a straight face that if Facebook existed 50 years ago, Sinn Fein would be allowed to post on Facebook, because they were not the IRA.
> Our policies have long prohibited hateful treatment of people based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity or religion – and that has always included white supremacy. We didn’t originally apply the same rationale to expressions of white nationalism and separatism because we were thinking about broader concepts of nationalism and separatism – things like American pride and Basque separatism, which are an important part of people’s identity.
Very specifically, it points out that they are not just "doing one", they are bringing one in line with a broader policy that is applied to many different types of hate. So I'm really not sure what point you're trying to make.
> Our policies have long prohibited hateful treatment of people based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity or religion
I'm just saying this has always been selectively enforced at FB, the reason they are speaking to white nationalism now is because of recent current events and they are in the spotlight. I feel this is purely this is a convenient PR campaign.
Not that it's an easy topic to control or address all the platforms have issues with this, but FB is being opportunistic for press.
This is the problem with this type of censorship, who get's to decide what is defined as "hate" speech. Facebook, who is run by it's own set of individuals with their own set of beliefs. It is their platform, their servers, they can do what they want, but Facebook as a company should not be defining what constitutes "hate" because we obviously have a stratification of morals in this country and what could be considered hate to one person could be considered perfectly charitable to another.
They are all valid topics to discuss civilly, but some believe that even having a discussion is racist/homophobic/sexist. My fear is that it will move beyond what we've legally defined as hate speech and into "don't hurt people's feelings" territory.
This part, especially, from the article... We also need to get better and faster at finding and removing hate from our platforms. Over the past few years we have improved our ability to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to find material from terrorist groups. Last fall, we started using similar tools to extend our efforts to a range of hate groups globally, including white supremacists. We’re making progress, but we know we have a lot more work to do.
My question is, how are you going to know when you're done? What would Facebook look like if they didn't have any more work to do on hate? I'm honestly asking this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...
This is my favorite bit, from right at the top: "Hate speech in the United States is not regulated, in contrast to that of most other liberal democracies.[1] The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that hate speech is legally protected free speech under the First Amendment. The most recent Supreme Court case on the issue was in 2017, when the justices unanimously reaffirmed that there is effectively no "hate speech" exception to the free speech rights protected by the First Amendment."
What happens long-term when the people whose memories of the horrors of the early 20th century die off? That is still an open question.
Surely you could think of race/religious/class based horrors that have occurred since WWII. There have been genocides in places like Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Yemen this century. There is an ongoing one in Darfur, Sudan [1]. Rwanda [2] and Bosnia and Herzegovina [3] had genocides in the 90s.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/witnessing-genocide-in-sudan-08...
[2] https://www.history.com/topics/africa/rwandan-genocide
[3] https://www.history.com/topics/1990s/bosnian-genocide
Likewise, I don't know about Bosnia, but it would be pretty understandable to sympathize with the Serbian attitude towards Croatia declaring independence from Yugoslavia because the last time Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia, it was to literally collaborate with the Nazis. So Croatian nationalism would have seemed vaguely fascistic and threatening, but Serbian nationalism, not so much.
The reason censorship doesn't actually prevent genocide is because any ideology that's popular enough to actually inspire a genocide is too popular to be censored.
Do you have a source for this claim?
It seems to me that in every case where "ideology" plays a large role in people doing horrible things to each other, one of the common threads is propaganda (often built around de-humanizing the opposing side). Post-WWII Europe might be the best example of what a society with "censored" or regulated propaganda looks like.
It's my own opinion.
> It seems to me that in every case where "ideology" plays a large role in people doing horrible things to each other, one of the common threads is propaganda (often built around de-humanizing the opposing side). Post-WWII Europe might be the best example of what a society with "censored" or regulated propaganda looks like.
My argument is that you cannot trust anyone to apply a fair standard for which propaganda could lead to people doing horrible things to each other and which propaganda could not. The far greater risk is for such a mechanism to be hijacked by the very demagogues it is intended to disarm.
It's easy. First, you pick out the most extreme and unpalatable examples of your opposition. Then you scapegoat them as a public menace worthy of censorship. Then you exploit the powers of censorship you've received and apply them more broadly. The rise of Hitler[1], for example, followed this literal pattern--he convinced the people that the Communist Party was enough of a public threat that they should be banned, received the executive powers necessary to do so, and then banned the Social Democrats too, for good measure.
It's understandable that post-WWII Europe has the particular set of scar tissue necessary to prevent the rise of another Hitler. The only problem is that Hitler himself rose to power on the back of the scar tissue that post-WWI Europe developed to prevent the rise of another Lenin.
This seems absurd to us today, but it was justified the same way people justify banning hate speech today. Even the cliche about "crying fire in a crowded theater" was coined in one of the Supreme Court cases that upheld the laws against sedition, as well as the more general arguments about whether the enemies of open, tolerant societies should be able to weaponize that openness and tolerance against them. If you squint, a lot of the rationale against banning hate speech looks a lot like they're just trying to make the world safe for democracy.
(Was the German Empire really an existential threat to the safety of democratic, open societies around the world? Is white nationalism?)
This is, of course, entirely a matter of opinion.
If your speech inspires someone to shoot someone an hour from now, it's legal. It wasn't imminent. If you speech will inspires someone to commit a non-violent but illegal action immediately, such as buying some drugs, it's potentially illegal (outside of 1st amendment protection).
Unless (a) directly incited (b) (via the boundary test you cited), (a) isn't legally guilty of anything.
But if the law discovers (b) heard (a) and acted because they believed (a)'s rhetoric, (b)'s crime rises past just violent crime to hate crime (because their reason to commit violence was a hate-crime motivation).
It is arbitrary. This is a closed for-profit platform, run by decree. In the interest of shareholders, it can (and ought to) make whatever rules it wants, as long as they don't violate any laws.
In a lot of ways, Facebook is as much of a country as the Vatican is.
When other things have such powerful network effects we force them, through the state, to treat people fairly. For instance, utilities like water and electricity are natural monopolies because of the limited physical space for the infrastructure. Social networks aren't quite the same but there are powerful similarities.
If you talk about a Free Tibet in China, you risk having your legs broken and your family put in camps.
If you violate Facebook's ToS, you might get banned from their website. Then you can just type literally any other website into your address bar and be on your way.
The key difference is the penalty: is it going to jail or some people roll their eyes and stop being your friend?
I don't think it's ever going to be "people enthusiastically try to understand your positions and respect them". That has been the ideal in the US, but historically I can't find the pages in a history book where it's been largely true.
>can not accept cash donations via any payment processor
>has had their domains revoked from multiple providers
>is only barely able to be able to protected from (numerous, expected) DDoS attacks due to being kicked off Cloudflare, etc.
There comes a point when a person is not free to express their content on any platform on the web despite a lack of government censorship.
In hunter-gatherer days if you had extremely antisocial ideology your tribe probably just left you in the desert and you died.
But... I'm not at all sad that Daily Stormer has trouble staying online.
Free speech means you're allowed to say whatever you want. It doesn't mean that anyone has to give you a platform to say your piece. It doesn't mean that people can't react negatively to what you say. It doesn't mean that there are no consequences to what you say.
Assuming there is reasonable diversity in your options for platforms[0], and yet you still can't find a place for your speech, maybe you're just an irredeemable asshole and should change your views[1].
[0] The current availability of this is certainly debatable.
[1] Maybe you're not and you actually are being unjustly oppressed and censored. But I don't believe that's the case with the Daily Stormer.
Should the government compell private internet service firms to service anyone?
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/4/12092740/un-resolution-con...
I agree. But one problem with bad-faith actors is they can bring productive discussion to a near standstill, due to the time / attention / emotional-energy costs.
Words are an antidote to sticks and stones which stop people from breaking others bones.
In my view all these arguments people are making about "open environments", or "bad faith actors", or extremism or what have you are completely irrelevant. A privately owned, NON-governmental, environment is allowed to be as "open" or as "closed" as they please. If a "bad faith actor" wants to act in "bad faith", (whatever that is?), then that's their prerogative. That's their Constitutional liberty. (You ever consider this? Who, exactly, is defining what "bad faith" is anyway?) And extremism in content is fine, you don't like it, don't look at it. (Or in Facebook's case, don't have it on your system. That's fine. That's FB's Constitutional liberty.)
The Constitution really does provide room for obvious solutions to all of the arguments people are making. There's really no need to get bent out of shape about a lot of these things.
At some point, platforms need to realize there is a moral value in allowing different view points so that they can discuss and be seen. Otherwise, people leave for more "open" platforms that breed exclusive extremism. It then further divides the split.
The other issue is that these platforms are so big that they literally dictate narrative in many cases, or at least to their audiences.
If the banned go to Gab and 4chan, then there is no "monopoly" on distribution. The Constitution is what allows for the alternative options to even exist. It's GOOD that we have the alternative options. That's not a "bad" thing.
And what is wrong with people going to "open" platforms that "breed exclusive extremism"? I don't see anything Constitutionally wrong with that. (Keep in mind, you or I not liking something does not mean it should be Constitutionally restricted.)
Mein Kampf is still available for purchase in NZ. I've personally looked through his manifesto and think it should be discussed in schools, so students and teachers can explore his breaks in logic and contradictory statements. If you understand people like that, maybe you can identify them early on, or encourage attitudes in general that would prevent those xenophobic ideas from developing.
it should be discussed in schools, so students and teachers can explore his breaks in logic and contradictory statements
How about the explicit calls for assassination of specific individuals, among other direct incitements to terrorism?
The fact that NZ has a censor is abhorrent.
Where were the free speech advocates back then? And why are they so vocal now that the extremists are a different skin color?
Secondly regarding the most recent NZ manifesto, it isn't a well argued thesis as much as a dump of memes and shitposting.
How did you reach that conclusion?
History repeats itself and people on the left want to pretend you solve this problem with the debate club.
People respond with their best arguments when they are confronted with bad ideas.
People respond with censorship attempts and violence when they are scared that their own positions are weak.
Go back to infowars.
Better not let him iterate the overreach in the first place.
And of all the ways FB is making the world worse, "letting Nazis have a soapbox" is least of their problems.
It seems like less blame for the world's problems could be put on FB if it was just treated as a dumb bulletin board. Why not go back to Facebook being a "dumb pipe?"
> We didn’t originally apply the same rationale to expressions of white nationalism and separatism because we were thinking about broader concepts of nationalism and separatism – things like American pride and Basque separatism, which are an important part of people’s identity.
I'm not saying it should be banned, but "American pride" being an important part of people's identity is really part of the problem.
So when Basques and Catalans say they want to leave because the rest of the country, especially the south, is full of half-moorish lazy fucks, that is cool.
Guess the same about the two halves of Italy.
I don't care as I don't use Facebook, but it's a double standard.
I can't speak for Facebook, and I'm not super with-it on the conflicts in Spain, but it seems like they're making the distinction between "we want our own country" and "we want our own country and we want to violently purge everyone else from it".
I'm reminded of the Sargon v Richard Spencer debate here. Sargon's line of attack was essentially this: You advocate for an ethnostate, people will not react well to the non-violent policies you publicly advocate to bring this about, thus there will be violence, therefore your rhetoric is violent. Even if you approve this line of reasoning, you have to admit that it can be applied to any separatist movement anywhere in the world.
Nor should they. I helped run a large, active web forum for years. We found general rules and moderator discretion were far more valuable than a list of 800 different "you can't do foo" specific rules, because the bad actors tie up all your time lawyering about the specifics.
e: But it's not an arbitrary exercise of power when I do it!
And in your rush to snark you skipped the part that calls out "American pride and Basque separatism" as important things to leave alone.
Except you can't, which is why for example "Islamophobia" is a thing. Things that should be ideologically separate are inevitably tied back to race/ethnicity, because nobody seems to know how to separate race/ethnicity from ideology in debate. Just listen to how much flak Sam Harris gets on the subject.
I don't know what issues Spain has with separatism, maybe there are some legitimate ones, but not all separatist groups are inherently bad.
While this might be true, it doesn't necessarily mean that the views held by conservatives and liberals as a whole are comparable.
I cannot for the life of me imagine someone being called a pro-racist liberal, it just doesn't compute. But someone who looks the other way and claims to be conservative? Sure, plenty of those folks to go around.
> The conservative side definitely does not include "arguing with people on voat" as a platform.
While true, I think the author recognizes that sadly conservatism doesn't often include anti-racism in its platform which is what my comment was trying to highlight.
What makes you actually anti-racist?
On these boards many people believe all members of a given race have the qualities of their worst members. I try and dissuade them from this by showing many counterexamples and that they should really focus on convincing all member of society to call out bad behavior in whatever groups they associate and have influence with to improve society. My beef with progressives is there is too much special treatment given to ones own group just because they belong to that group by virtue of their birth and this allows bad behavior to go unpunished and uncondemed.
This is interesting, I haven't quite heard this before. What examples of bad behavior go unpunished or un-condemned beacuse of special treatment to a minority group?
[1] http://archive.fo/gzsKg
Robbing johns is heroic.
Edit: Upon re-reading your comment, I realize you give no account to such things as "circumstances," which means you're no empiricist. If circumstances count for nothing in your estimation, under what framework do you pass judgement?
If so, you're going to find a lot of misunderstanding with conservatives when discussing the topic.
If I did not include allegedly unintentionally racist impacts in my analysis of conservative policy, I'd be granting them the benefit of the doubt on which they, in bad faith, rely. Plausible deniability is, perhaps, the second tenant of conservatism. Ostensibly unintended consequences cannot be, after a millennium of this charade, left unattributed.
You know what is undeniably racist, though? Affirmative action, a policy supported primarily by liberals.
But that runs both ways. Not only do I think that almost all (to borrow a mathematical term) speech should be permitted, but also that the onus is on the speaker to make themselves heard or to find an audience. No company or platform owes them anything.
In earlier times, that meant that no newspaper or printing press was required to print everything sent their way. Today it's the centralized websites that also don't have this obligation.
If FB decides to ban bigots, or YouTube wants to kick anti-vaxxers off their site, so be it. You can host your own video if you'd like, or maintain a personal blog site.* You are not entitled to widespread distribution. Never have been.
* Which leads to a place where I'll agree on obligations: root infrastructure like DNS or network connectivity. Those are the common carriers of our Internet.
(Both yes and no are certainly valid answers, I'm just curious about how you view this)
For a more general point of view, i'd take into account a lot of factors such as:
- who "owns" the service, both from an "on paper" POV and who builds and maintains it
- what does the contracts between the entity and the government say
- did the government pay for a service to be built by the entity, vs the entity asked for permission to build the service, vs the entity built the service using non-government-permission-required resources
- what was the spirit of the relationship between the entity and the government
- who will be using the service
- is the service a government-allowed monopoly
- etc.
Facebook does pass some of those tests (eg. the "public at large" is the target userbase for it), but fail a lot of the other tests at least in how they operate in the United States. Comcast's general laying out of wire + offering services over that wire passes a lot more of those tests and puts the service into public infrastructure in most folks' eyes.
edit: formatting
Likewise, Facebook would become public infrastructure when the government puts regulations in place that make it impossible or prohibitive to start a new social media site.
How do patents interact with it? If facebook got a patent on some new VR technology that allowed face to face interaction at a distance, and didn't license it out, would that turn the relevant portion of facebook into public infrastructure? What if they licensed it out but only to other people who also won't serve people saying <x>?
Facebook's business consists in promoting some of the content their users put online (the content that makes them win money) so they cannot claim to be a neutral carrier.
Comcast cannot be asked to filter content since what they carry is encapsulated at least and encrypted most of the time.
Now the problem is that social networks in many respect fill the old function of the 'town square' which was a common area accessible to everyone. That commons area has effectively been divided up in the name of capitalism, in parallel to the Enclosure Acts which destroyed the British commons, so now we have a large number of (private) platforms instead.
There are of course protocols don't suffer from this problem of private capital and monopolistic control, but (like land for the commons) protocols without infrastructure can't compete effectively against platforms' huge network effects. The practical upshot of this is that extremist groups will usually just head for other less discriminating platforms, eg there's a lot of white supremacists on Vkontakte (though I'm not sure how this will pan out if Russia rearranges its internet connectivity with the rest of the world).
By WWI, the cost in today's dollars for a newspaper grew to several million. People can't live off small papers today. They live off Patreon and YouTube. They depend on distribution platforms in a way we didn't before.
If Amazon bans your books, it's effective censorship for people who only read eBooks. Sure you can distribute the epub/mobi DRM free, but few people are going to bother with that (or know what to do with the file).
I've written about this before:
https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-...
If Amazon bans your books, you can still buy the book elsewhere, or get it from the author's site. Just because a piece of information isn't in the medium that you prefer to consume doesn't make it "censorship." It's not on Amazon that "few people are going to bother with that" when they ban you for violating their ToS.
A truly libertarian Internet would still have the first issue, because of freedom of contract. But it wouldn't have the second, because having an IP address reachable from anywhere on the Internet and hosting any content you chose would be a basic right. (One could argue that having a DNS routable name for your IP address should be part of that right too, but the absolute requirement is the IP address: anyone can reach you with that even if there is no domain name corresponding to it.)
All of this seems to be something along the lines of "it's inconvenient, so it's bad, and [they] shouldn't be allowed to make it inconvenient on _their_ platform".
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/06/attack-net-neutrality-...
"What does this have to do with net neutrality? Simple: all of these services depend the existence of open communications protocols that let us innovate without having to ask permission from any company or government."
But anyone who uses FB or Twitter does have to "ask permission" from those companies: the companies own the sites, not the users. And the idea that FB, Twitter, et al are based on "open communications protocols" is obviously wrong.
If the argument is that FB, Twitter, et al should have to use open communications protocols, let anyone use them without asking permission, etc., then that is an argument for ending FB, Twitter, et al as private companies and making them public utilities run by the government. I'm not sure that's a good solution. It seems to me that a much better idea would be to encourage competition in free speech platforms on the Internet, so that people do not have to depend on FB, Twitter, et al to coordinate and get their viewpoints heard.
As long as the roads are free, it should be fairly easy to buy a plot of land and build your own destination. However, if the road company won't allow you access, it stops being feasible.
Now in this analogy, large edge providers are campuses with internal roads that they control and many entrances and exits. They too can become a problem when they grow large enough.
So therefore, I would think keeping the road system neutral insofar as the connections it allows would be the first priority. Making sure edge providers don't subvert the system either by growing too large or by organizing to control the main system of roads would be of similar but lesser importance.
Moreover, if the main roads aren't neutral, there's no reason to make campus roads neutral.
This!
A thousand times THIS!
People seem to think that free speech absolutists were saying that Facebook should be forced to host extremist content. For my part, I wasn't saying anything of the sort. Facebook has rights too, and as a free speech absolutist, I will jealously defend Facebook's rights as vigorously as I defend the rights of the Nazi/Confederate/whatever you want to call them.
(I think I agree with you on the "almost all" part though, because I do think pedophilia should be stamped out wherever we find it. But that's just MY line in the sand. Others may draw the line somewhere else.)
If they decide that they are going to be curators of content on their platforms, they are no longer a mere service provider, but a publisher. They might find those protections vanish, which would more or less destroy their platform.
When was this ever not the case? Violent imagery and sexual nudity are already not allowed.
???
It never was.
I couldn't watch porn movies on Facebook.
Point is, even if you find the content questionable, it's still allowed to be shared, as long as it's within the laws obviously.
I mean this was the approach they were taking to White supremacist material until now, which was why people were giving them a hard time.
With this banned group, I am concerned about what social scientists call the 'backfire effect', where beliefs turn even stronger and bolder. For instance, this happens with groups of people who hold conspiracy theories; when society rejects them, the conspiracy theorists double-down on their beliefs.
It's why I think censorship is self defeating, it will eventually lead to a populace being competent enough with certain tools to side step the censor, and you can't walk that back.
Ban what these clowns say on the internet and it might end up giving them more power, since it lends to the “they don’t want you to know” aspect.
Recruitment matters because groups that don't recruit successfully eventually lose momentum, are penetrated by spies, or dissolve into infighting over everything from leadership status to money to women. In fact, the biggest mortality risk for RW extremists seems to come from their own peer group, though I don't have stats for this offhand.
Certainly those attitudes and ideologies will continue to exist in the face of deplatforming, but raising the costs of recruitment, retention, and operation seems to be an effective strategy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Order_(white_supremacist_g...
https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/assets/pdf...
Look at Germany and its Streitbare Demokratie policies. Then look at how AfD polls.
Facebook can just ban them by name without any explanation, of course. Are you suggesting that it's a good thing - that, because we seemingly can't write fair laws on this, we should delegate both the laws and their enforcement to private industry, where it can be done without any checks and balances?
If Facebook were a television station with limited air time for a single track, it would be perfectly valid for them to decide (reasonably) who gets air time. However, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have infinite tracks and time. I don't think the OPs argument is as strong, with that in mind.
Like I said, banning illegal content is the first step that anyone ought to take. Generally this is done via moderation staff of the site + user submitted reports. If you're providing a free platform and terrorists start using it as their communication channel, then you're only at legal risk if you do nothing to stop them. However, I'm imagining things like the NZ shooter's 8chan post, where a direct threat is made or a direct implication of violent acts to come. Posting a "terrorist cookbook" actually is a good example, as its sort of right on the line. It seems to be the sort of information that only has negative uses, on the other hand its just information, as opposed to an actual threat. I'm not really sure if such things should be allowed... it could be helpful to terrorists which is bad, but also censoring information is nearly impossible and almost always seems the wrong way to go.
>Does Zuckerberg have to come to their house and load the bullets into the gun for them so they can make a statement about how angry they are? Because he made an app for people to cheat? I fail to see the connection.
As do I...I really don't get what you're trying to say here, can you restate?
Well get back to me when you've worked out exactly when a private entity shouldn't be able to decide what content they allow. This ambiguity is really too difficult to figure out.
Rather, it is important for society to support free speech, not just the government. While society is under no obligation to, it's unhealthy to censor speech.
It's even worse when society self censors free speech, and then pretends to still advocate it.
Deciding what I allow on my site is an exercise of my free speech. Why is hosting white nationalist free speech more important than my free speech to not host racist content?
It's no longer _your_ free speech.
You can't cherry pick the advantages of both and hide under the guise of being an open platform.
Most of the problems that come from being a massive social media juggernaut like facebook/twitter/etc come from those services being free.
Being free is what makes them massive monopolies and gives them such broad reach. I think 99% of the problem cases AND the lack of competition in the market could be plugged by breaking the ad-supported/VC-supported model and forcing these companies to charge something to their customers.
Carrying white supremacist content has a cost to both Comcast and YouTube/Facebook. Nobody expects Comcast to carry the KKK channel and yet they have hundreds of channels and clearly space to carry it. So why aren’t they compelled to do so if Facebook is?
A few content producers create the content that Comcast could potentially carry. Comcast selects what they want to provide to their many customers. Comcast has never marketed themselves as a place where anyone can have their content provided to subscribers. Facebook has, in fact that is the essence of what they do.
My point, however, is that this is neither a legal nor constitutional obligation, but a social and voluntary obligation to a free society.
Please point out a single society that has upheld absolute Free Speech as a principle for any significant period of time.
The United States has even killed its own citizens when their free speech collided with national security: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/magazine/the-lessons-of-a...
That decision has since been overturned, thankfully. But it would be good if people who keep coming back to this phrase remembered where it came from, and what it was already used to justify.
There is some room for human judgment and give and take here, at this time there is absolutely no shortage of platforms that allow anyone to broadcast any awful thing they can dream up. Email, web sites, street corners, I believe there can be different standards for different places.
Absolute freedom is a contradictory concept. How can you kick an unwanted visitor out of your house because you don't like what he's saying? Aren't you infringing on his rights? Someone needs to draw a line.
So what about a social media oligopoly? How dominant does Google need to be before you have to tell them to allow freedom of speech.
What about network neutrality?
Etc etc...
It's not so easy to answer this question.
Hobbes' famous phrase from Leviathan "bellum omnium contra omnus" (the war of all against all) describes absolute freedom as being problematic indeed. Rosseau provides an answer in The Social Contract to say you can't have a war of all against all, you instead need the state to be responsible for being able to imprison people and collect taxes on them and this alleviates (generally speaking, to a large degree) the problems absolute freedom present.
This is unrelated. If it is your home, you are free to protect it by any means.
And there's no paradox of tolerance with speech - you can tolerate intolerant speech just fine, so long as you police the actions.
A big problem is oligarchic in nature: if you believe that ISPs should be classified as common carrier utilities that should not be permitted to limit or censor the data you receive within reason, then the oligarchic content hubs should similarly be common carriers of speech.
I don't have a rock solid argument on this, this is just an equivalence I'm asserting.
The lack of ability to switch providers is what makes it important to have regulations, not just the fact that it is labeled a common carrier.
No one is stopping you from making your own forum or website.
The fact that all your photos, content and friends are on one platform and not the others, obviously.
However, that’s a very narrowly scoped restriction (and it’s also not clear that such distribution is a type of “speech”). A more appropriate question would be: would Chomsky support free speech for an advocacy group such as NAMBLA, or for creating mangas that depict drawings similar to CP? Those are exactly the type of speech/expression that are clearly vile, yet should still be protected from interference by state violence, from the civil-libertarian perspective.
Speech is the process of communication ideas. Porn is the process of sexually arousing someone remotely. Criminalizing the latter is not criminalizing the former.
A HD-DVD master key is one thing, a huge binary file is another. HD-DVD master key requires specific "numberness" to work, while a binary file can still convey similar information yet be a completely different set of numbers. if I take two pictures in rapid succession of a still life, the two pictures' jpeg data and checksum hashes aren't going to be even close to matching.
Free speech absolutism is naturally at odds with property rights absolutism. The question then becomes under which circumstances should one be given precedence over the other.
People with hateful, racist rhetoric are can certainly attempt to fully self host their shit content on their own servers. Essentially all they need to do is figure how how to run their own authoritative DNS servers, and their own http daemons. Various publishing CMS that work on a common LAMP stack server are GPL/BSD licensed and require no external connections to any platform services.
Hopefully, ethical ISPs will refuse to host their VMs or dedicated servers, so they'll have a bit of a harder task to find a publishing platform. But if you spend 30 seconds googling "russia VPS" you can find VM services which don't even disconnect customers for hosting virus/worm/trojan/botnet command and control sites, so the racists can go there.
Tell that to people using YouTube. YouTube will end up being inextricably tied to whatever content is uploaded using their platform as long as they are the ones who manage its display and recommendations.
On social media, don't you need to find your own audience?
This is discrimination of opinion, strange as that sounds.
There is a reason we don't see signs up like; 'No Blacks', 'No Gays', 'No Jews' in private establishments. Its because its not allowed, we either have a list of protected groups - or a general rule that forbids banning anyone because of their 'group'.
If we don't fairly quickly extend free speech into these platforms, then we will have to eventually legislate a list of protected opinions.
Could you imagine the immediate public backlash against this type of behavior by a private establishment? I don't think the law is doing the heavy lifting here.
A large number of people are still alive back from when Jim Crow laws were still actively in effect. In 1957 the president had to send the 101st airborne to Arkansas to escort black children to school and seized control of the state's national guard because they were being used to block desegregation of schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine
A non-trivial percentage of Americans would love to have these signs up and are kept from doing so by the law. The women's movement, LGBT rights, and minority rights are actually a fairly new thing, and are still not without controversy in the US.
As for your comment, the cake shop has a product they are letting people buy (in effect, serving them). They are willing to produce that product for a certain group of people for a certain activity (celebration of a state recognized marriage) based on their identity. They are not willing to produce that product for another group of people for the same activity (celebration of a state recognized marriage) based on that second group's identity. Now you can argue that the shop is within their rights to do that for religious reasons and the Supreme Court would agree with you, but it's still refusing service based on identity and you know it. If you want to split hairs and say they "refused to provide COMPARABLE service because they were gay" as the buyers may have been able to buy other products then so be it.
In the bakeshop case though, I do not think it has ever been alleged, that they ever refused to serve anyone cakes just for being gay. I think the whole case hinged on the question whether making a wedding cake is significantly more than just selling a cake off the shelf to anyone who comes in (I am really not sure if, as a matter of principle, private entities in a free society should be compelled to do business with anyone they do not want to, be that marrying gays or cynical coders who go by "Fins" though). So no,I don't think saying that they "refuse to serve gays" is a proper characterization.
It's the former. There is no law, at least in the US, that forbids banning people from private property for group membership in general.
So, I'm certain you will find legally hung signs with racist and discriminatory content in certain places.
> If we don't fairly quickly extend free speech into these platforms
That's outside the scope of the First Amendment. It may not even be possible to pass such a law without infringing on those platforms First Amendment rights... I would expect the SCOTUS to strike any such law down.
You are always FOR free speech until the speech starts hurting you. ie would you be tolerant of isis posting on FB?
If someone is consistently threatening violence at some point you need to make the determination about how to deal with that. You can of course do nothing about it but if the person eventually goes ahead and commits violence you now have a bunch of injured or dead people, which seems a worse ill to me than deplatforming.
Don't deplatform him. Investigate him. Get a warrant and find out who's listening to him. Find out what's going on in their private communications - are they making actual plans, or are they just talking?
Deplatforming is about the laziest and least useful possible response. As Fins said, deal with the violence (including plans to commit it).
To go back to the original article, though, it is interesting that they are banning white nationalist content. Does it mean that any other nationalist content is just fine. And can I start an Even[0] separatist movement on FB, calling for eradication of the whitey? We'll start with Russians, of course, but after them we're coming for you! /s
If I didn't have better things to do, a conspiracy theory of FB (they did elect Trump, as everybody clearly knows) being in cahoots with Stormfront and specifically calling out whites to stir resentment almost writes itself here.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evens
"But", you say, "they were intolerant first, so they are the ones who should not be tolerated!" From your perspective, sure. Maybe not from theirs, though. That gets you to a cycle of each side being sure that the other is intolerant, and therefore that their own intolerance is justified. Maybe this "paradox of tolerance" isn't the right way forward, even in the face of intolerance by others. You should be better than them, not imitate them.
Worse, if each side can think that the other side started it, well, what if the other side is right? What if you actually are the problem? Using the "paradox of tolerance" as your justification is a handy way to justify your own intolerance, and never have to examine yourself.
It sure would be inconvenient if anyone pulled back the curtain on this intentionally-vague comment to show that you're equating "Nazis" with "People who disagree with Nazis"!
What I actually said is, first, when you don't tolerate intolerance, you become (at least in technique) similar to the people you are fighting. And second, don't be so sure that you aren't the bad guys. And the more absolutely sure you are that you're the good guys, the more I want you to back off and take a really hard look at whether that is actually true, because the bad guys can use exactly your logic (or at least gameskrishnan's) to convince themselves that they're the good guys.
This opening, along with your straw man in the second sentence, shows that you're not debating this topic in good faith.
It would be nice to think that every horrific event in history was simply a case of bad people knowingly doing bad things.
Sure, sometimes it is, when we're talking about a lone actor or despotic leader who just wants to bring about destruction and misery for their own pathological reasons.
But at least as often, everyone thinks they're the good ones fighting for a just cause. As has often been said here before, one person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. One person's liberating saviour is another's tyrannical occupying force.
It might be easy for us to look at 1930s-40s Europe and judge which side was right and which was wrong, but to an ordinary German or Italian citizen or soldier who didn't have a full understanding of what was going on, and just knew that their country had been economically depressed for too long, it wasn't so clear.
And in plenty of other major conflicts since then, the rightness or wrongness of each side is very hard to discern.
This is not suggesting that racism or bigotry is ever to be endorsed or validated.
But bigotry is usually an expression of a deeper distress that has nothing to do with the target of the bigotry. It's often just scapegoating for a largely unrelated problem.
By paying attention to what the real source of that distress is (e.g., post-WW1 misery), it's possible to respond to the real problem and prevent the bigotry and consequent horrors from developing at all.
> By paying attention to what the real source of that distress is (e.g., post-WW1 misery)
You think you have it all figured out and you 'get it' now. That's naive in my opinion. And I'm not talking about good and bad, some kind of universalist dualism that informs my every action; I'm talking about being concerned about my friends that may or may not fit certain views on human existence that fascist thought provides. At least try to get where I'm coming from instead of throwing out useless internet jargon ('strawman') without even understanding why I'm reacting so harshly.
I've spent over 7 years undertaking a variety of formal approaches to deep personal introspection, and I've never felt less like I can, or anyone can, "have it all figured out".
But one thing I've learned a thing or two about is the tendency to ascribe the greatest threats and wrongs to some easily-identified "other" without paying adequate attention to the failings and risks in our own group and within our own self.
For what it's worth I spend vast amounts of time thinking about what kinds of approaches to eradicating bigotry and oppression might actually be effective, and what role a humble individual as myself might be able to play in moving the needle over the long term.
To suggest that this is a matter I believe is "not going to hurt anyone" is about as wrong as you could possibly be.
I'm not saying we're there yet, but we could be at some point.
No one has to pay attention though.
As it takes two to tango, so does it take two sides to promote something: one that is doing the promotion and the other that is following the promoter. If the argument is that people are so fickle they will eat up whatever is being directed at them, join the ranks of the promoters, who will thus prevail, then woe upon us. I prefer to think of ourselves as somewhat more capable of resisting insane and malicious messages.
And payment processors, and credit card companies, and mobile carriers, and instant messaging providers.
It seems like terms like this and hate speech often boil down to “people that are effective at calling out my bullshit”.
It is unethical to with no evidence call republicans or classical liberals Nazis, and then use that as a justification to abuse your power to shut them up. Why not make an argument instead?
On this topic I really recommend Frankfurts [1] terse one hour read arguing that there are three types of statements; attempt at truth, attempt at lies, and attempt to just bullshit people with no regard to relate it to truth. This kind of attempt fall in the third category.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt/dp/0691122...
Edit: and then this is also downvoted with no argument. A better demonstration of why this facebook policy is a terrible idea could have not happened.
People are right now most often in a biased content bubble and judging content from what they learn by emotionally mistaking what they learn from possibly bullshit content as objective might lead to injustice.
Most of us agree that people might say bad things and that it would be great if they didn’t, but my claims was that facebooks judgement of the content is unlikely to be objective because:
1) no clear definition of terms like white nationalism and hate speech is a recipe for bias. What liberal or republican haven’t been called a alt-right/Nazi at this point?
2) because of #1 there is a risk that a company that has a clear ideological tilt will most likely end up suppressing viewpoint opponents when the definitions are unclear, because too much is up to subjective judgement and no due process protects against these biases
3) no recourse is bad when things go wrong
In due process it’s the process that reduce bias so that we don’t get the mistakes of mobs of the past (eg people that think they are objective while not having an accurate mental model of what they judge), although it can’t eliminate it.
How do you think facebook has ameliorated these concerns so that they can be objective?
I think another outcome for Facebook is more likely because they seem to be forgetting that they are not the ones creating Facebook, rather they are capitalizing on part of the activity in the relationships amongst their users as long as they can express something relevant to them on Facebook.
They are effectively attempting logical rationing with a lack of emotional meaning to their relationships, and overvaluing what one can learn from subjectivity without truth seeking.
As they said I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
FB has become too large and ubiquitous, they shouldn't be all of those.
A case can be made to protect someone who allows all comers, who increases the reach of the public to communicate with each other, and who extends the scope of public discourse to be protected from the legal consequences of what their users say. The same case is a lot harder to apply to an institution that curates the content they choose to publish. By way of comparison, telephone carriers, an industry that exerts no editorial control, are largely not legally liable for what customers say over the phone network. Newspaper publishers, who have absolute editorial control, on the other hand are legally responsible for what they publish.
Which of these are Facebook and Twitter? My answer is that the more they limit speech that is not legally criminal then the more liability they should have for what they allow.
For the telephone network, control does not scale. There is no way for the phone company to censor what happens in one billion daily phone calls. It can't be done (until we get adequate speech recognition, but that's not an answer that I want to see applied in this way).
Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are like the phone company, not like newspapers and TV. Censorship does not scale.
Twitter, being text, could think about trying to automate censorship. The problem is that people do all kinds of typos, circumlocutions, innuendo, and dog whistles to get around such things. Words are really flexible, so it's a hard problem.
Facebook and YouTube are worse. They can try to have automatic assists, but pretty much the only way it can be done is via user reporting. Even that doesn't scale all that well.
I think the main argument against that can be made is that the Internet is now so complex that the forbidden speech can easily be silenced entirely, if you start your own blog independent of FB. Especially with DDoS attacks, it can become prohibitively expensive to stop those and the core/root internet infrastructure simply doesn’t stop it. It’s basically a paid add-on and if you want to do it yourself you will need both funding and/or technical expertise.
Either way, I’m still in support of Facebook and others removing this type of speech as I think it’s a net negative to society to amplify it in this day of discovery algorithms.
Seems like we also need to do more to improve the core infrastructure so that you don’t need 5Tbps of bandwidth to keep your blog online.
With media outlets there are plenty of alternatives. There are no direct alternatives to Facebook that provide the same services at that scale and reach.
PS: Observe the downvotes without comment. These are the adherents to the school of thought that advocates not caring about reasoning with people who disagree with you. Everything is simply a bare power struggle in which considerate words are not the weapons of choice.
Will they get rid of Mark Zuckerberg? If there is any single bigot driving that company into the ground with both illegal practices and bigotry, it's him.
Precisely. I worked on a college newspaper. It was common , had been going on for years and years in face, that a specific hate group would send an order for advertisements, and threaten to sue if we didn't print them. They were usually Holocaust denial ads w/ anti-semitic conspiracy theories. We never printed them, but some schools inevitably did, failing to understand this aspect of free speech. Everyone gets to speak. But if you want a microphone, you have to buy or build it yourself.
FB pretends to be a medium of information for anyone and they don't moderate what is being published before being published. They do however have an obligation for content being distributed after if it's breaking the ToS or the laws. They have to take that down after the fact.
Here the controversy as I see it, is to prevent a group from publishing if it's been labeled as "hate", or "white supremacist" content, where the labeling aspect is very subjective and arbitrary.
Who's to decide the labeling?
This is precisely the dynamic that is driving facebook. I don't think the comparison to a newspaper is perfect, but I do think it's apt. In both cases, neither venue is obligated to give anyone their own soapbox to stand on. That was my point.
Or rather, it's the public perception of what FB should be and FB is stuck in the middle juggling with politics.
Obviously if you're a shareholder then you want to play it cool with the medias and portray a good image of the company.
I just think it's bad policy.
There’s a weird side to this though that if you want to host a video let’s say YouTube is the place for it. Or if you want to organize a group Facebook is THE place for it. Well what if your group is about shutting down Facebook? Facebook could close it. Heck FB took down Elizabeth Warren’s post critiquing FB.
I think these mega corps need to be broken up so they don’t get so much power in deciding what is and isn’t allowed on the internet. Sure they make good choices like this one but they also make tons of other choices that are only because it benefits them.
“It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.”
“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn,
Because of course "anything I don't agree with is hitler" is a problem and an inevitability. Its fine if they do not allow public sign ups and all people they are publishing are considered employees or enter into contract with the company but facebook, twitter etc. are different animals and I really don't see how anybody supporting free speech can support facebook inhibiting the speech of certain people.
That's the problem with unmoderated online discourse, cheap inflammatory posts are easy to make and draw a lot of attention while in-depth analysis takes time to write and to read. Why bother coming up with a clever retort if you can just spam "no u" and "fuck off" until those people are driven away?
In my experience no moderation doesn't result in more varied opinions, instead it turns into an echo chamber where the bullies take over. Again, look at 4chan or some of the most popular, less moderated subreddits. It's pretty crap.
But we let companies monopolize whole segments of the market. And then every such segment becomes a vast echo chamber of whatever the prevailing public opinion at the moment is.
You're not. You're a coward.
I put the safety of society at large first. And if you think that's oppressing you, maybe you should ask yourself why.
Are you proposing that nobody can decide what speech is dangerous?
Are you suggesting there is no such thing as dangerous speech?
Are you suggesting that having someone decide what speech is dangerous is actually worse than the dangerous speech itself?
If you're not suggesting any of these things, then how do you get out of the proposition that someone has decide?
> how do you get out of the proposition that someone has to decide
I agree ultimately some subset of people would need to decide. My question is who?
And those who deliberately inspire violent behavior with their speech are very, very careful to make sure it's not an explicit call to action. This is not new. "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" has been around for a long time.
How is that working out in the People's Republic of China? They have a very concrete definition of what dangerous speech and have legions of people to decide whether individual instances are dangerous and to remove them.
Clearly, their system illustrates the hazard of your viewpoint.
And I suspect that if you polled in China, you'd find a majority agree with the regulations on speech, and sincerely so (not saying yes out of fear). Meanwhile, things are much freer than they were. I'm currently reading a Chinese novel, The Three Body Problem, set partly in the Cultural Revolution, and it pulls no punches about how awful it was.
Of course you would, polls like all speech are tightly controlled.
Sometimes we'll get it wrong, and need to correct it. That's fine. We're capable of that.
What's not fine is throwing up our hands at even the concept of performing that judgment, because it's subjective or whatever. That cedes the public square to extremists, which results in a shittier society.
When we started this game, we had slaves, who were defined as three fifths of a human being for purposes of political representation of slave owners. Voting was restricted to white land-owning men. It's getting better.
You're WAY too hung up on this "who decides?" question, ignoring the reality that either someone has to decide, or that no one should decide and society should simply not regulate speech in any way, ever.
Good luck with the latter if you ever have kids.
"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Consider this a warning, as we eventually ban accounts of repeat offenders.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Would you say that the political and judicial system of our societies is fair, or is it biased against minorities? If it's biased, why do you expect it to enforce any such "safety of society" laws in a way that is not similarly biased towards the groups that already are the beneficiaries of that society?
It using the gas company’s platform to heat your racist meeting place allowed?
Facebook is a Privately Owned Public Place more than it is a platform.
In what way is facebook more of a public space than hacker news, reddit or any public forum, message board or website where users can sign up and post content?
You couldn't post a bunch of white nationalist comments here or on most other sites without getting banned.
Why would and should facebook be treated differently than other websites? Having a large amount users and money doesn't suddenly make them a public entity. The fact people use their real names and identities doesn't(they're not the only site that does this). Them tracking you across multiple websites and aggregating and selling your data doesn't either.
What is it about facebook that causes people to have this misconception?
If this were ISP's, DNS providers, even hosting providers really shouldn't be able to(as far as i'm concerned, but that's a different discussion and does happen), but facebook doing this is the same as any other website that allows user discussions and user content setting rules.
There's an internet outside of facebook. People making the choice to reside entirely there doesn't automatically make them any different than other websites.
It's the users that choose to give them this power over things by using their service. Though...i know not entirely not entirely...pre installs on phones and things like the free data facebook messaging in the Philipines puts things outside.individual users control sometimes. But that's on poor government regulation and other phone manufacturers.
And...i'm not a big fan of facebook. I find them shady and greatly distrust them. But, part of that is because I understand they're a shady private corporation with zero obligation to the public. Pretending otherwise is unhelpful.
If you're not familiar, Facebook is offering low-cost (or free) internet access in less developed countries to a hand-picked selection of sites [0] and has roughly 100m users. [1]
It's been argued that they're essentially acting as an ISP and are significantly violating the principles of net neutrality. [2]
You say "people [are] making the choice to reside entirely there", but for millions of people around the world, Facebook is the only social media platform available to them at a reasonable cost.
Should operating this platform be enough to treat them differently? I could see arguments both ways.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet.org
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/25/internet-org-100-million/
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/27/16050446/facebook-net-neu...
If Facebook is becoming a defacto ISP in countries it should be subject to the same regulations and really should be required to follow net neutrality rules. Though I don't think those exist in a lot of developing countries(or I guess America also...).
In the end though, it's those country's governments allowing facebook to do this.
These are my realistic thoughts on the matter.
My own personal thoughts...
That shit's downright evil. Government's should absolutely not be allowing facebook to do this. But I feel the same way about ISP's in general owning content providers and favouring their own services.
This practice would be the same as Ford or gm owning a bunch of gas stations and giving preferential prices to drivers of Ford or gm vehicles. I honestly don't understand why it's looked at differently when it comes to internet companies or technology in general.
If a social media company wants to be an ISP or a an ISP wants to be a content provider or host, they really should not be able to give preferential treatment to their own content and companies that do this should be scrutinized heavily for bullshit.
I think that's why Facebook has been getting more criticism and attention in the media than Reddit or Twitter, despite wielding comparable social influence. On the flipside, I also think that's why people are more outraged about the "censorship" issue. If you ban a Reddit user you're just banning some username. If you ban someone on Facebook, you're banishing a person and stifling their voice.
The slippery slope arguments are sensationalist. Facebook had many motivations for implementing this policy, some of them undoubtedly motivated by money, but ultimately I would argue they implemented it because American and western society pushed them to. To the extent that western society has unequivocally decided that racism is very bad and not good, this policy change will also not push us over the edge into total censorship because that's not what we want (and I think it would be difficult to take the stance that that's the direction we're heading in.)
If there’s no face, if the site is designed so you never feel like a guest on someone else’s website, you'll assume you’re in control of the social rules.
Because FB is not targeted at specific communities of people like HN, and less so reddit, it's welcome to everyone. Everyone is in fact actively encouraged to join. That's their mission. Private spaces that are open to the public often have first amendment protections:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=139661
Thank you - that is very succinctly put and is a reasonable and actionable standard that I hope more people will subscribe to.
That being said, I can't imagine how difficult and frustrating it will be for facebook (and others) to police any kind of definition for "white nationalism" which seems very vague and open to all manner of misinterpretation.
All else being equal, the history of what was allowed to say (and what was not) in newspapers, radio or television is rife with examples of heavy handed editorializing, gate-keeper-ship, outright bias and favor and misguided attempts to selectively allow what truths are judged to be fit to be heard by the masses.
Those were the dark ages for the dissemination of information.
Do we really want to go back to those ages or even a shade resembling what was considered acceptable practices back then?
Heck, most of that stuff happens unimpeded in large parts of the world today, as I write this.
Do we want tell those countries and regions that its okay to sieve and favor what's allowed and what isn't in their public discourse, if a substantial majority of their populace finds it morally repugnant?
Won't those places and people, then apply their own standards of morality in that judgment, which could be diametrically opposite to ours?
Is this the example we want to set for the world to follow?
If I recall corrrectly, early in the history of the commercialisation of domain names (1990's), for a time the sole appointed registrar Network Solutions would not accept domain name registrations that contained certain "offensive" words.
And before you know it, you need to build an iron mine because no one wants to sell you steel for the basic infrastructure of the town you were forced to build because no one was willing to let you enter their store to even buy groceries!
At what industrial level is it okay and not okay to exclude someone from that?
Censorship isn't an 'answer'. Don't ask me what the answer is, though. I leave that to smarter minds.
Would you take a similar stance if Facebook banned LGBT content or YouTube kicked atheist videos off their site? I am not saying you wouldn't, but both your examples seem to be a bit one sided.
If the current executive branch decides to get tough, they could withhold section 230 exemptions from the private companies.
The net effect would be to destroy the companies platform as no company in their right mind would operate with that potential liability.
Once you ban speech on any ground that isnt directly putting people in danger, even real nazis for example, they DO NOT disappear. They still recruit. They still operate. You just don't see it.
The people they recruit are suddenly in a bubble where they DO NOT see the opposite view point. Their opinions become unbalanced and they become radicalized. You now have more hard-core nazis.
In this case, I believe FB does this for 3 reasons:
1. many people inside FB believe in censorship and that you can forbid people to speak or think and that it makes the problem disappear. Many people in tech actually believe this.
2. FB sees this as good marketing, and good to retain eyeballs on their platform, specially vs the "we reached out and FB refused to ban nazis, FB is siding with nazis"
3. FB wants to control speech so that they can ask money when you want to be heard. Effectively, this means "media company X pays X so that their message appears more often". The more you control speech on the platform the more you can push for sources of content that will actually pay you money.
Of course, these are just my opinions, and stuff.
That sounds like you're making many assumptions and implications that aren't borne out by evidence. Why do you leap to this conclusion rather than:
"Many people inside FB believe that they don't want the platform they've built and created to be a platform for views they feel abhorrent, and if this means that those views need to feel an alternate home, that's not their problem"?
Changes in technology alter the playing field for culture—and we've seen this in practice as the Internet and social networking have caused a fundamental shift in what it means to censor information. Censorship used to mean putting the newspaper under state control or blockading the radio station to prevent the message getting out.
Today it's much harder to censor a message by completely suppressing it. But it's also much easier to swamp the signal in noise, by flooding the communication channel with disinformation and distractions [1]. A group doesn't need to be large or powerful to muddle the truth of an issue, especially after accounting for the effects of filter bubbles and confirmation bias.
So to preserve the marketplace of ideas, we need more nuanced approaches in thinking about what communication is permitted. One approach that has been gaining support is in making a distinction between "freedom of speech" and "freedom and reach" [2].
[0] https://www.twitterandteargas.org/
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-tech-turmoil-n...
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-is-not-the-same-as-f... .
Making that argument would require Facebook to admit there's an internet beyond their walled garden. So far they seem happier to be grilled on national TV in front of congress than make that admission.
Facebook at the end of the day is a company that can do whatever they want. It would be different if the government were enforcing this.
I'm no fan of Britain turning multicultural and all the child rape and stabbings that it brings, but I don't think that the white race is superior to others.
Brexit is around the corner spiraling Britain down to chaos not seen for a hundred years. America is hurting its closest allies with a joker that pathetic dictators love to watch. Meh. Anonymity is still very important for the web. Until FB moves away from the 'face' part of their book, it's a terrible outcome for the Internet any day even with all kinds of curation that they are announcing now. Anonymity = Free speech.
The world actually enjoys watching Donald Trump because they see the USA as a world leader, and look up to it as an example. If the USA is doing great, then other countries can do great too! Making America Great Again is making the world great.
On the other hand, you have "progressive" dominated cities like San Francisco which have become cesspits, and the world is definitely not thinking "I wish we were more like that!" Quite the opposite - the real jokers are the democrats fighting for the title of the most degenerate.
I think people should take note though, that this is the exact point in time when the machinery for censoring and filtering the internet is being implemented. Although hateful speech is a great use case for this technology I can't help but wonder what it will get pointed at next. This isn't the kind of development that can sit back idly after performing its primary function.
It also sounds like the events that you mention were dealt with quickly and severely, maybe they would have been more severe threats given the space and time to form more completely.
My fear is that we'll get to a point where people won't know about the suffering or injustice that is occurring in the world without physically going to the places where it's happening. Or that people will have to go to extreme lengths or break the law simply to escape their filter bubble.
/tinfoil hat
In the case of draft resistance in the world wars, perhaps. We did win those wars within 2 and 4 years of the US entering them, respectively.
In the case of the Hollywood blacklist, the Communist screenwriters became a cause celebre and, once the anti-Communists went overboard, were rehabilitated within Hollywood. This is despite the fact that they were members of an organization under the control of the USSR under Stalin. To some extent there was even an informal counter-purge of Hollywood conservatives who supported the blacklists and investigations.
> My fear is that we'll get to a point where people won't know about the suffering or injustice that is occurring in the world without physically going to the places where it's happening.
Ah, back to the last hundred thousand years of human history!
To me, this sounds like you _don't_ fully support this development. And rightly so. It'll soon be technology in search of additional applications.
I used to think that pushing such content off a site or forum was futile and calling it for what it is on a site had value, I'm not sure that is the case anymore.
If you look on platforms like reddit and such where you have groups in subreddits calling for race wars, general hatred, and violence and of course the lesser efforts to just normalize hate takes place... there's no discussion anyway. In their own subs any hint of anything less than absolute commitment to their talking points of the day, ever changing theories, and general hatred is an instant ban from their subreddit(s). Then they venture out spam their fake news articles / take over other subs and push their message with endless streams of new accounts. There is no discussion, just constant spam, memes and etc.
We've seen topics like Gamergate, incels and such (while not that tasteful to begin with) quickly pulled to the extreme and go from something about "gaming journalism" or general angst to an identity movement steeped in fear / hate, harassment, and for some actual violence.
I suspect there may be some value in ushering these people away, if only to prevent recruitment of some others who otherwise might avoid their message that fear or dissatisfaction with life and other problems can be explained with hate.
1. [The Pewdiepipeline](https://youtu.be/pnmRYRRDbuw] 2. [Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34858587-kill-all-normies)
The terrifying thought is that this might be a product of scale more than anything else.
Because of the bullshit asymmetry principle, it's easier to produce propaganda than debunk it and "call it what it is," so any sufficiently large and scaled platform will almost certainly eventually be flooded with propaganda bullshit.
Minimum wage human shit-sponges with limited mental health benefits are the current industry standard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6TrKkkVEhs
According to ^this video, gamergate actually started out as the latter and only later claimed to be the former.
Sucks, but that’s what it takes - especially when they wrap themselves up in the flag and hide behind the first amendment to spew their hate.
> hide behind the first amendment
I think people need to hide behind first amendment, you misunderstand what it is.
I think this is the greatest misconception about the push for de-platforming. The goal is to remove the platform from becoming an echo chamber for racism/hate/violence not to stop people from being offended by content they dislike. By removing mainstream sites as options to promote hatered/racism/violence it's likely that it will make a measurable reduction in people joining these groups as there will be less traffic.
As evidenced by what?
From everything I see, deplatforming creates filter bubbles, which lead to radicalization, which lead to hate.
After the rise of deplatforming tactics in the last 5 years, American society is more radicalized than before.
As for your dilution analogy, deplatforming does have that effect because it breaks up the filter bubbles of the hate groups. It makes the media feedback loop of hate more difficult for those caught in that. From the perspective of those considering the hate, their input has been diluted.
http://genocidewatch.net/genocide-2/8-stages-of-genocide/
You’re engaging in behavior with truly horrifying antecedents.
Only banning white nationalism is giving fuel to the white nationalist belief that whites are being unfairly targeted. That's not something we should encourage IMO.
There's a "punching up" vs. "punching down" model that pretty much explains most "hypocrisy" on this issue. For instance, even subtle hints of anti-Semitism expressed by white Westerners (e.g. being anti-George Soros in particular) are condemned far more vehemently than anti-Semitism expressed by black people or Muslims, because of the perception that Jews, being perceived as predominantly white and Westernized themselves, are more privileged than blacks and Muslims but less privileged than white Gentiles.
I don't agree with this mentality myself because the tides can turn a lot faster than your ideological model of privilege and oppression can change to reflect it, but it's similar to the ideas that are commonly expressed on the left and serves as a decent predictive model of their attitudes.
Radiolab covered this recently:
Post No Evil | Radiolab | Duration: 1:11:45 | Published: Fri, 17 Aug 2018 07:20:00 -0400 | Episode: http://www.wnycstudios.org/story/post-no-evil/
Media: https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/radi...
Podcast: https://www.podcastrepublic.net/podcast/152249110
Back in 2008 Facebook began writing a document. It was a constitution of sorts, laying out what could and what couldn’t be posted on the site. Back then, the rules were simple, outlawing nudity and...
Let's talk about the word "cracker". In the US, it's a derogatory term for white people that was coined by black people. The etymology is that a "cracker" was a white man who was hired by the plantation owner to crack the whip at the black slaves. Even in white society, these "crackers" were pretty much what we'd call "white trash"--they had effectively zero social status, received no largesse, and lived in poverty themselves. Literally the only thing they had going for them was that they were white, which meant they were the ones cracking the whips and not having the whips cracked at them. Which only made them all the more eager to crack the whips and do the dirty work of oppressing black people. Being white was literally the only thing these people had to be "proud" of. And so, the most evil people weren't necessarily the plantation owners (who were evil in a detached, hypocritical way), but rather the crackers (who were evil in a directly hateful, sadistic sense). A plantation owner could come around to the idea that slavery was wrong, as Washington and Jefferson did, and merely live in a state of complicated hypocrisy. A cracker is a pure mass of utter racial animus.
The same dynamic remained after the abolition of slavery, and it's the same dynamic that you describe.
Privilege is basically the logical inverse of discrimination. If driving while black means getting pulled over more (discrimination), then driving while white means not getting pulled over more (privilege).
Hope this clarifies how even poor whites are "privileged".
One could equally well point the the anti-colonial resistance in the Balkans and the Caucuses against Ottoman imperialism. The result of which were massacres and genocides up until 1925. You could still buy white sex slaves in Istanbul in 1915: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_Ottoman_Empire#...
‘We don’t like it when individual ethnic groups in our multi-ethnic empire presume to have privileged rights over all the others’
Vs.
‘We don’t like it when just white people do it.’
1. http://www.mdcbowen.org/p2/rm/reports/cerd.pdf
1. a Chinese nationalist can post about China while living in the USA.
2. You don't need institutional power in order to do harm to other people.
3. How do you handle cases where power is evenly split? 60/40? 70/30? Who gets to be racist?
The USA is a unique case in the world and should be exception, not the rule.
I'm personally a fan of them taking a more fine-comb approach to banning certain forms of expression on the platform, rather than just saying blanket "The idea of nationalism is banned".
Well its easy to believe in something that is simply true.
https://imgur.com/a/fSm1pHa
It's perhaps an unintentional example of the difference between advocacy (banned) and education or discussion (not banned).
Very interested in how Facebook will distinguish between them when both use identical words.
| Searches for terms associated with white supremacy will surface a link to Life After Hate’s Page, where people can find support in the form of education, interventions, academic research and outreach.