When I, a white young boy, grew up in The South and saw the Klan, my father taught me to never do business with them, never enable their behavior, never let their organization rent rooms from venues I may own, and to decline all of their business even if they were paying extra to be your customer.
For as long as he could remember, and his father before him, the Klan and other fringe organizations would always cry and shed tears about how they were being pushed to the edge and ostracized from the local communities. Most of the town ignored these common pleas. We knew how to deal with them and ignore them, we had our inoculated culture. A few businesses were locally known to be "Klan friendly", but it should surprise no one that they are not rich mega-corps.
It seems that in the internet age, this sort of culture of inoculation has not been passed on to the outside world communities, though the far-right ideologies may have. It is normal to decline the business of people you don't want to do business with. It is normal for it to be the fringe believers -- the ones that by their own choice are pushing themselves to live on that fringe. It is the simple free-market economy of supply and demand telling them that their demand is not necessary.
However, my father also taught me to be careful with this pushing of the fringe. It is a delicate balance of liberty with liberty-destroying ideology. The paradox of tolerance, etc. It should be very closely watched.
It is a win for the far-right to have y'all here on HN "disagree with them but still believe they should be here and not on the fringe". They will shed tears in public and privately rejoice at the welcoming change. It is a grant of liberty they suddenly inherited with tech to have had such a huge audience and defenders of their speech on private platforms all this time. It is only now that the culture of inoculation is catching up.
We should watch it closely & carefully though. We shouldn't be shedding tears for them.
No, he didn’t. He shared the subjective impression which led him to stop the research, but not the results, or even the methodology used to classify content.
People reliably will come out to defend white nationalists in every topic it comes up here. And people denouncing white nationalists will be voted down.
> Just FTR we are pretty far from accepting the far right here on HN:
I read your linked piece but came to the opposite conclusions you posted here. Reading tptacek's comment indicates to me that he thinks HN's tolerance of white supremacist content is unacceptable ("I don't believe the status quo is really acceptable...")
I also wonder about his criteria for selecting what is white supremacist content and what is not. Most of the content I see on HN that I consider white supremacist or racist content is written in the form of dog whistles and not overt statements. I personally think the prevalence of that content on HN is somewhat higher than tptacek was catching.
> It is a win for the far-right to have y'all here on HN "disagree with them but still believe they should be here and not on the fringe"...
The "far-right" is becoming a broad term in media usage and will end up in the same place as "racist" where it is a category that catches the views of a good 40% of people. It isn't obvious that wins for the far right is a bad thing.
Nobody is going to lose sleep over the Klan being pushed off Youtube, but Molyneux is not a member of the Klan.
In a small town, everyone knows everyone, so it's easier to exclude them if you want to.
It's a lot harder online when you don't know people, they show up unannounced, they hide their true intent behind plausible deniability and dog whistles, and they just come back with another account when they get sprung.
Inoculation is a good idea. I think this blog post sheds some light on how targeted, intentional, and childish, many of the tactics are and being able to notice them is important. They very much rely on people letting them scatter their pieces all over the web as you say.
Agreed. There is much to reasonably debate about where lines are drawn in regards to which private platforms are de facto public squares, if any, and which are not; and what speech is a reasonable cause for being banned from such a platform, and what speech is not. But the fact that there is such a significant amount of hateful, violence-loving speech, and that it is continuously growing, simply overshadows the topic. I'll happily debate those subtleties all day, once we're not driving cars into groups of each other over identity politics, accusing people who are trying to vote of fraud while intimidating them with guns in person, threatening each other with civil war, gleefully mocking victims of politically motivated violence, and, most of all, once we no longer have a US president who encourages all of that hatred.
This is what I wish was more studied. I feel like social media are intentionally designed to cause people to share violent and toxic speech. I hangout on discord in few big servers and I rarely encounter anything outright racist. Might just be because they are all tech related or maybe a no politics rule change the atmosphere if enforced ruthlessly.
There could also be something about speaking in public vs speaking something in semi-private real time chat app. You have time to clarify what you mean or be more empathetic. On platforms like twitter, when I check engagement metrics for replies to the tweet. I see a decrease of 10x often which is to say a lot of people never see past the first tweet a person makes and since tweets are limited by length, they encourage people to respond from their own biases rather than looking at things optimistically.
I do wonder if there is a reasonable path to punishing a platform that is responsible for encouraging content that causes toxic behavior or higher "engagement".
So long as YouTube issues bans to users that are as egregiously racist as klan members I see no problem.
I don't know any of these people, but if they are undeniably white supremacists, then it's a hard sell to dispute this individual action.
But another argument lies in the policy of bans for certain types of speech, and that's the argument that's more pertinent. If we accept that YouTube can ban users for hate speech, then we also accept that YouTube is the arbiter of what constitutes hate speech.
The question at hand is if we can deem YouTube a fair judge.
If YouTube shows itself as an unfair judge, then let's criticize them for that when it happens. Otherwise, having a judge is much better than having no judge at all.
And herein lies the problem: Having pushed the purveyors of "unacceptable ideology" (whatever that may be, decided by whomever) into the black market, we now have made confronting it (by letting our value judgments stand to reason, which they will, if we let them) much more difficult. People behave as though they are completely powerless to stop bad thoughts from following the utterance of particular words in a particular order, which to me is as fundamentally insane as the idea that you can stop murder by simply banning murder, or that you can stop people from using drugs by simply banning drugs.
The central problem is that people are lazy as hell. The answer to this problem and indeed, most problems we face in society, is building and maintaining stronger communities, and encouraging critical thought and an educated and participatory citizenry. But this is incredibly hard, and is incompatible with most forms of grift which people have set up to enrich themselves. In the end, however, this is really a description of all of human history. It will always be the case that building and maintaining a "good" society is incredibly hard work, which most people reflexively don't want to do (in the same way that most people don't want to do the dishes, or take the shopping cart back to the shopping cart corral at the grocery store).
> However, my father also taught me to be careful with this pushing of the fringe. It is a delicate balance of liberty with liberty-destroying ideology. The paradox of tolerance, etc. It should be very closely watched.
Sounds like your father was an honorable man. Honest question: when does pushing the fringe go too far? Is it appropriate for banks to deny their business? Grocery stores?
I’m pretty sure we are all aware that anti-discrimination laws exist and have in the US for half a century. Political opinions don’t make for protected classes.
Ok, what if this person were a thug and he advocates for a "thug life" (as an arbitrary example, a gangsta rapper)? And let's say he committed a lot of crime and physical harm to other people?
Would you issue the same behavior towards him? Would you be very vocal about it?
On the surface, this seems like a silly example - it doesn't compare in practice. However, if you honestly, in good faith, think that it does, you absolutely should make an effort to form that argument.
Posting the most offensive examples of gangster rap lyrics to Facebook or Twitter could easily get you banned or at least flagged/shadow-banned if the songs were about killing people, contained a lot of misogyny, etc. Uncensored gangster rap would definitely violate TOS for a lot of these platforms and would probably get auto-banned by bots. A lot of this music gets flagged as 21+ only on YouTube. Many businesses ban it on premise, and many record companies won't publish it. That's part of why the really extreme stuff tends to have its own labels, stations, channels, sites, etc.
You're allowed to listen to it in private of course, just like you are allowed to read or listen to any racist material you want in private. There are loads of web sites that cater specifically to these circles, and even entire alternative social networks. Like the most violent and offensive gangster rap, it has its own safe spaces and is available to anyone who wants it.
Well said. I especially appreciate the distinction you're making between balancing liberty with liberty-destroying ideology.
This is the kind of difficult nuance that I rarely see in these discussions. One one side there's the free speech absolutists, whose arguments tend to ignore the fact that unmoderated propaganda, and hate speech tends to be more addictive, and spread ignorance faster then fact-checking can fix it. The consequences of this sort of callous attitude are literally genocide[1].
On the other hand, there's the 'cancel-culture mobs' (for lack of a better term) which are now censoring regular speech that disagrees, or appears to disagrees, or isn't sufficiently subservient to their opinions. Just yesterday I was sadly reading this depressing thread where Yann LeCun was run off twitter[2] for explaining how bias (in the social science sense) can be traced back to various steps in the ML pipeline (in this case, mainly a feature of the dataset itself, but also the choice of errors, bias vs variance, etc).
The inability to admit nuance is the only thing I can think both these groups share, and maybe what needs to be emphasized more.
Supreme Court rulings[0][1]. They consistently rule in favor of free speech and believe something along the lines of "defending the thought that we hate".
They even sided with the Westboro Baptist Church (the people with the offensive signs)[2] so they're pretty committed to "absolute" free speech.
In the USA, the reason is the 1st Amendment in the Bill of Rights.
Both in text & traditional interpretation, that gives them the right to speak & assemble – but not do other non-communicative actions that would be criminal no matter the motivations.
As far as I know, the Klan doesn't actually exist anymore. In its second most famous incarnation it was a fraternal order like the Freemasons. But that disintegrated in the 40s. Since there's no legal enforcement of the brand anyone can and does use the title for cultural history reasons. Today there are dozens of disparate "KKKs" with no official continuity with the famous KKK that amount to a couple thousand people in a nation of hundreds of millions.
So what would you even be banning other than the word KKK itself?
Important to recognise that Stefan Molyneux is not far-right, whether or not the far-right are encouraged by his YT channel deletion. I would classify him as an atheist/libertarian.
I vaguely remember seeing that he’d endorsed Trump in 2016, which surprised me because it hadn’t been long at the time since I recalled him advocating completely abstaining from the political system.
I’ve not kept up with him, but it seemed like he was moving in a direction that was incompatible with the extreme libertarianism that brought him into the circles I frequented at the time.
If you break down political ideas into just left and right, the libertarian belief small government with strong property rights puts them fairly far right. Things are of course more complicated, and there may be other members of the far right who disagree with him on many issues, but he'd still be part of the broader "far right."
Is Stef still claiming to be an atheist? It seemed like he was making up with Christianity in recent years. Just the same, while he used to be an outright anarchist, he went all-in for Trump.
“The whole breeding arena of the species needs to be cleaned the fuck up!”
—Podcast FDR2740, “Conformity and the Cult of ‘Friendship’,” Wednesday call-in show July 2, 2014
“You cannot run a high IQ [white] society with low IQ [non-white] people…these [non-white] immigrants are going to fail...and they're not just going to fail a little, they are going to fail hard…they're not staying on welfare because they’re lazy...they’re doing what is economically the best option for them...you are importing a gene set that is incompatible with success in a free-market economy.”
—YouTube video, The Death of Europe | European Migrant Crisis, October 4, 2015
“...the Germans were in danger of being taken over by what they perceived as Jewish-led Communism. And Jewish-led Communism had wiped out tens of millions of white Christians in Russia and they were afraid of the same thing. And there was this wild overreaction and all this kind of stuff.”
—Stefan Molyneux describes the Holocaust in YouTube video, Migratory Patterns of Predatory Immigrants, March 20, 2016
That’s how you personally might classify him, but many would disagree with you. To my eye, for one, it seems quite obvious that Molyneux is a far-right figure.
I agree with this post for the most part, however the problem is they are not simply banning "the klan", nor it is "paradox of tolerance" as it seems we have moves beyond tolerance to acceptance.
The authoritarian left is promoting segregation, promoting speech codes, and also labeling any disagreement with their socialist / communist economic policies as "racist" or "nazi"
All of that said, before I can progress further I would love to know what you believe the "far right" is, because that is not a defined term anymore, every day conservative values and opinions (things like we should have basic immigration control, or should not have government run health care) are now labeled as "far right" and "racist" so it seems to we need a defining of the terms so I can know what you consider to be a "far right" position
They definitely shouldn't be here or anywhere. This is the right approach. Government power is not the only power and in contemporary times, not even the greatest power in most affairs. Megacorps have huge amounts of power. Often they use it to hurt people. I can't imagine a single american who hasn't been scammed by some megacorp like comcast, wells fargo, verizon, etc. But, sometimes their incentives align with those of the society at large. We should not hold them back by using the slippery slope fallacy. Most of the time, their incentives don't align with society's, so we should be thankful when these unregulated entities actually help society, even though that is never their goal. Yes, ideally this would be handled by government in some way, but our government is too inept to handle anything these days, including reigning in the power of these megacorps.
This sort of multiple-headlines-in-one-day undermines the argument for bans. In the Alex Jones case in particular it appeared he was being selected for a broader community image rather than actions on specific platforms.
Private companies can't (mechanically, not legally) determine who has a moral right to speak. If we had a magic method for figuring that out it'd have been a feature of politics since at least the Roman Empire. Instead we ended up with things like Robert's Rules of Order where the process is controlled as best as possible to let wildly contradictory opinions get aired.
Alex Jones lent a camera crew to Wolfgang Halbig when he travelled to Newtown, CT to harass the parents of the first graders murdered in the Sandy Hook shooting. Years and years from now those sites you're referring to will still bear the shame of not having banned him earlier.
Is there any evidence of this besides the announcements just happening on the same day? It could be companies waiting to announce these moves on Monday morning after days of seeing Facebook embroiled in controversy for not doing this. Or maybe one company decided to make this move and other companies fast tracked anything they had planned on this so they wouldn't be viewed as ignoring this issue.
We have no indication one way or another whether this is coordinated. We shouldn't just assume it is coordinated because it is happening on the same day.
> Seems odd for multiple independent companies to act in concert like this
Yes and no, this is less collusion and more to avoid platform hopping basically if one platform bans them they’ll flock to another even if the medium isn’t identical or the platform is not optimal for their use case any platform would do in times like these.
I’m pretty sure at this point when the behavior pattern is known the platforms inform each other of high profile bans.
The others follow suit to avoid being branded as the one that didn’t or worse as the one that accepted the now pariahs “with open arms”.
I don't know about that. Twitter didn't ban Molyneux and I've not seen people branding Twitter as "The platform that permits Molyneux". (Until me, just now)
Why? There is a massive political movement for racial equality happening all over the country. They are responding to pressure from consumers, which they very much should, because all of these companies have ignored these issues for decades. They aren't coordinating with each other in some conspiracy to silence white supremacists. The -people- want white supremacists to be deplatformed (a good thing!).
The pressure is more directly from advertisers. Major consumer brands don't want their advertisements appearing next to objectionable user generated content.
google legal frequently shares information with legal departments from other tech companies when it comes to moderating/acting upon content/users. in fact, the big tech companies' legal teams share information pretty regularly as they all deal with the same legal hurdles e.g. users from north korea, cuba, ITAR, etc.
it wouldn't surprise me if there was an informal discussion and a decision by google led others to also take action.
Please explain. In which districts in the United States are neo-Nazis affiliated with Stefan Molyneux, David Duke (former leader of the KKK), and Richard Spencer (who was videoed performing a Sieg Heil) up for election, as challengers or incumbents? I was not aware these men were employed by one of the two major political parties, or even one of the two smaller ones.
If the specific figures being banned are not affiliated with any candidate for election, even under a minor party or for local office, how is this "election interference"?
People doing political things you don't like is not election interference, anymore than some billionaire bankrolling right-wing SuperPACs is election interference.
Elections aren't held in a vaccum. People 'interfere' with them by persuading, spending money, and by choosing to give political ideas access to their platform.
Media agencies 'interfere' with elections all the time, by exercising their discretion for the last point, and by actively agitating on the first point.
And why would de-platforming racist white nationalists interfere with the election, anyways? Is there a racist white nationalist on the ballot in 2020, who will be hurt by this?
> Seems odd for multiple independent companies to act in concert like this.
It shouldn't, all social networks delegate banning "hate content" to the SPLC and ADL. It's much more efficient/effective to do things this way, and more importantly, it assures fair enforcement. Otherwise, you'd have the same content allowed on one platform, but banned on another. This approach is much better for the platforms and their users.
This happened a couple years back when they both made some big policy changes related to guns. I'm pretty sure it's just pressure from major advertisers they both share.
Act individually, and each company is dragged over the internet rage court individually, and as a bonus the last one to act will be roasted as "only doing it because all others did."
Act together, and they are accused of conspiracy.
I guess their PR teams decided the latter is less hassle for them.
I detest Donald Trump and everything he stands for and enables, but the idea of banning him from Twitch makes me imagine a world where he didn't get banned from Twitch and instead tried to pivot to being a full-time game streamer, and that makes me laugh at least a little bit.
It’s like the nuclear arms treaty. If one company doesn’t ban these accounts, it can gain all the users who subscribe to these people and benefit. All companies agree to potentially lose these users, so no one profits from doing the so called “wrong thing”.
Same thing with mask use in airlines. Some companies do not want to enforce mask use until all airlines do it, because they do not want customers opposed to masks leaving them for competitors that do not require masks on flights.
The public square is owned by private companies and they're enforcing anti-first amendment principles. One can't even argue that these banned people can move to another platform if they're all coordinating.
Leftist extremists are effecting public banishment of their rightist extremist opponents.
It wouldn't be as bad if leftist extremists were getting banned at the same time. The problem is that leftist extremists have bullied the mainstream left into extreme action.
Today, Reddit banned the Chapo Trap House left extremist group. From someone not involved in either extreme, it appears to me like they're being consistent and banning people for behavior and not politics. I've not heard anyone calling for George Will to be deplatformed, for instance.
People get regularly banned for racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and many other kinds of hate, whether their profiles say 'D' or 'R' or something else. If many of their profiles tend to say 'R' or otherwise have similar political views, that's not an indication of bias on the part of platforms.
First amendment only protects you against the suppression of free speech from the government. It definitely does not give you the right to say whatever you want, wherever you want. Private companies have complete authority over which speech is acceptable on platforms run by them.
but isn't the world of "private property" what the right wants? This kind of world, where there are no longer any public squares, but everything held in private is the world the right asks for. This is the kind of world we end up with. The irony should not be lost on them right?
It's a purge. It won't stop with these three. The censorship will continue to get worse and be disproportionately applied to those on the right until all is left with the world.
Conservatism has a place in society. I'm not endorsing any of these guys viewpoints nor am I associating them with conservatism in general, because it's a broad group of over 100 million people in the U.S. with a diverse range of opinions that lean to the right. It's extremely important that society be balanced and not tilted to the extremes of either ideology. This process of selective banning and purging will not end well for Silicon Valley. The problem is they are not approaching the left's extremists with the same fervor. In fact they're turning a blind eye to the vicious hate against cops and conservatives on their own platforms.
And a lot of this hate is disproportionate to reality. That is, the perception of the problem exceeds the actual statistical problem.
I'm of the strong opinion that a society needs it's left and right brain to function properly and constructively in order to tackle the diverse set of problems we face. If there is no push-pull give and take between these two groups, then society will become unstable and increasingly more polarized.
I'm a free market capitalist, but with Silicon Valley's recent muscular intervention into free speech, and the overwhelming propaganda power they possess, I fully support the break up of big tech monopolies in social media, search, and app stores.
Literal white supremacists and nazis however, do not. Those people should be pushed so far off any platform that their only option left is to be the crazies screaming on Times Square that the end of the world is coming.
These people actively contributed to fostering hatred in societies, And no, you will not fight them off with debates. The time it takes you to rebuke a single one of their arguments means they can spew a dozen more of theirs.
By the way, it's not free speech. The government isn't banning them.
It reminds of how in China, the CCP keeps around a few minor political parties to maintain the illusion that they aren't running a one party state. Any political parties which threaten the authority of the state are banned. The eight minor parties are like the token conservatives (think people who voted for Evan McMullin to protest Trump). The banned parties are everyone else.
I have a vision for what could end up happening. We will see a bifurcation of Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Reddit into a conservative and liberal version. There appear to be many (apparently unsuccessful) attempts right now to do exactly that. The recent swath of bans could change that however.
It's not too dissimilar to message board culture from the aughts. You essentially had federated versions of Reddit. It looks like we're destined for that again because people can't stop peeing in the grownups pool.
Twitter, YouTube, Facebook serve a global audience - but the “conservative”/“liberal” dichotomy you describe is unique to the USA.
If social media companies will be bifurcated as you say, it’ll be a tiny fraction of their American audiences - leaving the rest of the world sticking with the mainstream. Those smaller Ameri-centric sites will fail to reach critical-mass needed to sustain themselves in the long-term and hopefully those movements will fade into the background.
Your comparisons to the *chan imageboard splintering is apt, but look at how the more extreme chan sites have been having in finding a web-host (with enough capacity) to host them.
>The problem is they are not approaching the left's extremists with the same fervor
This is a false equivalence. The worst of the alt-right are far, far worse than the worst of the extreme left (antifa, maybe? Though there is no alt-left).
Good riddance to them, I say. If you want to lead the KKK, and advocate for a white ethnostate, I won't lose any sleep when you can't post videos trying to convince others of the same evil ideas.
> This is a false equivalence. The worst of the alt-right are far, far worse than the worst of the extreme left (antifa, maybe? Though there is no alt-left).
(FWIW: I’m quite pro-BLM. I don’t believe in guilt by association. My point is that there are high-profile people in relatively mainstream organizations that are proponents of murderous leftist dictators.)
Right! "We are allowed to discriminate because the ones we discriminate against are really bad and we aren't". Every oppressive movement in history started like this.
>The worst of the alt-right are far, far worse than the worst of the extreme left (antifa, maybe? Though there is no alt-left).
Nah, there are plenty of people advocating for explicit ethno-separatism on the far left -- just look at Louis Farrakhan and his lefty pals. They just don't have very big YouTube channels. People more-or-less naturally ignore them except when they turn out to protests to hijack an ostensibly liberal or socialist cause.
It does. I've also been confidently assured by my conservative friends that conservatism is a very different politics from racism, fascism, and neo-Nazism. I would not really consider the question of whether I myself am a human being or, as Richard Spencer has posited, a "soulless golem", to be a conservative vs liberal fight.
it's not a free society. there are lots of laws and regulations in place. Saying this is a free country is a useless platitude.
Gab (twitter alternative) was just blacklisted by Visa last week. There is no recourse. What, should these people build their own consumer credit company too?
I wholeheartedly agree, and I've not heard of anyone calling to censor conservatives. Most or all of the people being de-listed are people who are breaking their platforms' terms of services. They might happen to be mostly conservative, but it seems like today it's mostly conservatives who are breaking the rules and calling for violence, doxxing people, etc. Reddit just kicked out some leftist groups for doing the same stuff, as was appropriate.
From a EU perspective, US Conservatives are pretty extreme though (not to even mention the religious variation).
There seem to be some idea here on HN that racism/white-supremacy bullshit is somehow comparable with an oppressed scientist being persecuted by a dogmatic clergy for their new found facts. That maybe, in the future, these ideas will prevail and become acceptable again, when the oppression slowly subsides.
Is this really what you think racism is? Some oppressed idea that needs a room because maybe it's actually a bit correct and we'll only know about it if we don't suppress the racists?
But these things are objectively wrong. The above scenario isn't there. If you somehow think so, I think that says more about you than those that want to be intolerant towards intolerance. Please explain yourselves.
You can't be a free market capitalist and then deny a free capitalist business their own terms and conditions as to whom they choose to do business with.
I'm what you might call a "free speecher" and I think both of these are wrong.
Luckily the "ban Howard Zinn" bill was never actually passed, and actually led to far more people reading him (Streisand effect there):
> Rep. Kim Hendren’s bill to prohibit use of the late Howard Zinn’s books in Arkansas public schools died quietly in committee, of course, but it had great unintended consequence: Some 700 copies of Zinn’s book, “A People’s History of the United States,” were sent free to teachers and librarians throughout Arkansas thanks to the controversy.
Perhaps that is what it might take for the people who are receiving a taste of their own medicine to stand up for free speech. I doubt it, but it is nice to remind them that they don't have a leg to stand on.
Well. We had several ideological purges earlier in 20th century, and I can tell what will happen next:
every netizen will be triaged by a progressive troika, and sent to rehabilitation and education camps. Internet versions (excommunication), or real life ones .
Conservatism has a place in society. Racism, bigotry, hate, and white supremacy do not.
The fact is that American "conservatism" now is so run through with hate and vitriol and othering that no one can tell where one starts and the other begins.
The logical fallacy that this is a "slippery slope" is ridiculous, and the number of people who are crying about losing the "freedom" to attack, incite, and threaten others is astonishing. The number one terrorist threat in the US right now is right-wing militant groups, condoning threats and violence towards anyone who thinks different than them.
It's pretty clear to most that deplatforming people with hateful, violent, and dangerous messages is less of a threat to society than allowing them to keep spreading their vile hate. This isn't some arbitrary thought experiment or a white-room theorycrafting; people are dying because of this kind of hate.
Conservatives who distance themselves from hate and bigotry and violence are fine, and I can live with those people, but the American far-right are a blight on society and private corporations are within their rights (and, I would say, responsibilities) to actually enforce their own policies against these people.
I don't think people would have a problem with this if the political public squares (YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, etc) - and that IS what they are - applied these policy changes to everyone equally.
What's happened is we've already gone over the edge. Racism has been redefined to only be effectively possible by white people in the West. The intention of this change is racist in itself.
Putting aside freedom of speech, what people likely have a problem with is all the OTHER racists on YouTube NOT getting banned and instead being PROPPED UP.
These bans are political, not civil justice. If these racists were A) a real problem, and B) not singled out as a faction among multiple other racist factions, then people might believe this is fair.
To those that contend that criteria A has been met: The modern rise of white supremacists in the West is being spurred by racist politics; it's almost as if they want to corner these people into extremist ideas.
I am an adherent to Daryl Davis' way of dealing with racism, and that's by understanding the root causes of it and addressing them.
These bans are a farce, and meant to consolidate far-leftist power - not liberal power.
> I am an adherent to Daryl Davis' way of dealing with racism
For those who are unfamiliar, Davis is a black American who has directly befriended and changed the minds of a number of Ku Klux Klan members. He has a collection of their former robes that serve as trophies. In my view, he's a stunning role model.
He is definitely an inspiring story, but I wouldn't call him a role model. It is not the burden of each person who is a minority to befriend those who hate them, and his approach is undeniably a dangerous one.
I get the impression that your comment is trying to paint any retaliation against racism online as itself a racist act. Is this right? It's hard to tell between the meaningless platitudes and strawmen you've set up for yourself.
I read your comment and wrestled with the dilemma of making the effort to rebut vs just down-voting you and walking away.
Firstly, your comment contains a bunch of unsubstantiated opinion.
"...we've already gone over the edge". What edge?
"Racism has been redefined...". Where? By whom?
"The intention of this change is racist in itself". Who's intention? The 'racism redefiners'? If they're a large group, how can they all have a unified intention? Is there some manifesto you can point to, or something that exposes the 'intention'?
"What people likely have a problem with...". The use of the word 'likely' tells me you're just guessing here.
"...all the OTHER racists". This implicitly acknowledges the banned people mentioned are in fact racists, but it sounds like you're defending these racists by pointing out that there are different racists being treated differently. "Stop picking on OUR racists! There's some other racists over there too!".
"These bans are political...". How are these political? Do you have any data to show that takedowns vs takedown requests vary significantly by political view.
"If these racists were A) a real problem...". If racism is a problem, and these people are racist, then by definition, these racists are a problem. Given you've acknowledged (implicitly above) that these people are racists, then you must be suggesting that racism isn't a real problem.
"...singled out...". Do you have evidence that no other 'factions' (to use your word; I'd say 'flavours') of racists have not been taken down? Remember, some being left up doesn't mean that none have been taken down.
"...then people might believe this is fair". While I'm sure some people don't believe this is fair (you might be one of them), do you have any evidence to show that this is a commonly held view?
"The modern rise of white supremacists in the West is being spurred by racist politics; it's almost as if they want to corner these people into extremist ideas." This has to be one of the most atrocious arguments I've ever heard. Let's leave aside that the racist roots behind many political groups (e.g. Klan, Nazis) go back decades if not way into the 19th century. Your argument here is like saying that a rise in domestic violence is being spurred by feminist ideas.
"...they want to corner these people into extremist ideas". No one is making racists more extreme. Racist ideas and 'theories' (to the extent that these exist in any cogent form), are largely unchanged over time. What has happened is that the bulk of western society has been, and continues to, redefine what is 'acceptable'. Racists now (like chauvinists) find themselves on the other side of a shifting boundary. No one has 'cornered' them, they just haven't moved while society has.
"I am an adherent to Daryl Davis' way of dealing with racism". Good. His approach is centered on educating racists. However this approach is not at all at odds with blocking hate speech from virtual 'town squares' (which are actually 'corporate plazas').
"... meant to consolidate far-leftist power". Firstly, to consolidate power, the far-leftists would need to be in power. Manifestly untrue. Secondly, unless the Communist Party of America are still alive and kicking, there is NO party that I'm aware of that would be considered far-left by any reasonable person outside of the US (where political definitions are so skewed they no longer make sense).
I'd also point out that the fact you are using a throwaway account to post makes me doubt that you have any intention of engaging honestly on this subject.
Keep in mind that YT had been funneling viewers towards extreme, bizarre, fringe videos for a long time - including quite a bit of hateful content. This is something of their own doing.
The recommender seems like the biggest problem. The algorithm attempts to maximize engagement, and this extreme content really engages the crap out of some people. The recommender throwing this stuff in people's faces is probably not very good for society.
Back in the day, if you wanted to buy a porn magazine, you could do it but it would be behind the counter, possibly out of sight entirely. It was legal to buy, but it was not being "recommended" to you by the store by virtue of giving it visible shelf space.
I suppose that there is some section 230 argument about why YouTube can't do that, because then they would be exercising editorial control. I'd say that they already are exercising editorial control by having a recommender. I'd much rather have humans exercise that editorial control than an algorithm which is essentially psychopathic. It's an editor that is trying to addict viewers.
My money is on it has the opposite effect, and by banning these people it moves their fans onto fringe platforms that will shuttle them towards even more bizarre/fringe/extreme views.
Here's a study that shows it pushes people towards more moderate videos.
YouTube exposes these ideas to hundreds of millions.
Those fringe, extreme platforms are both unknown and already have the stigma or being fringe, extreme platforms. Take a look at Gab, and how The_Donald got laughed out of it because they were not white supremacist enough.
So, yeah, I think I can live with the white supremacists clearly identifying themselves.
I listened to "The Rabbit Hole" podcast series this past weekend produced by the NY Times. They actually interviewed YouTube's CEO about this and they have realized that and have made changes to move away from that.
I'm not sure what you are watching, but I have never been funneled to anything even remotely like that.
YT sends you videos based on your watch history. If you watch hate videos to see what kind of stuff people are saying then you should delete them from your history to avoid YT finding you more.
Multiple experiments have demonstrated that as you follow recommendations it drives you more and more towards extreme content. If you don’t follow recs it obviously has no “drive” to keep you on as you’re not following the journey. Basically the recommendations system always tries to drive you towards slightly more “engaging” content.
Zeynep Tufekci, amongst others, published about it back in 2018.
I think you're right. I don't watch anything political on youtube, and don't receive any political recomendations. Instead, youtube seems to be trying to "radicalize" me into becoming a CNC machinist, presumably because I watch plenty of videos about manufacturing.
Christ, spez is getting hammered in the announcements. I mean seriously, he's basically saying it's alright to be discriminatory against the "majority", whatever that means. Dude doesn't even clarify what that means, just skirts around the question.
Lot of people are wondering why r/BlackPeopleTwitter or r/politics haven't been banned despite blatant racism or calls to violence. People are pretty pissed at spez, to say the least.
Also, kudos to that one user pointing out how 10 mods oversee 90% of subreddits.[1]
I've linked the thread[0]. The comments pointing the insanity are highlighted
What a trainwreck but oh well, enjoy being the next Digg plebbit.
Edit: "Spez, answer the fucking question. So is it according to reddit policy, a white person can’t say “all black people are bad” but a black person can say “all white people are bad”? If this is the case, this is racist" (LMAO)
You literally have to send a picture of your black skin to the mods of r/BlackPeopleTwitter in order to be added to the country club.
Imagine a subreddit forcing people to send pictures of their white skin to the mods. People would be outraged.
The only good way to use reddit these days is to unsubscribe from all of the default subreddits and only subscribe to small subreddits dedicated to your hobbies/interests. Everything else is garbage.
"You literally have to send a picture of your black skin to the mods of r/BlackPeopleTwitter in order to be added to the country club."
Is this really true? I quit Reddit years ago, even though some of the tech specific subs were awesome. Just couldn't stand supporting a site where the mods were so abusive. I remember the tipping point was a guy on there talking about "Foundational Black Americans", and essentially shitting on recent African immigrants as being second tier to black Americans descended from slaves. It was so vile, and they did nothing about it. He was bullying a second generation Nigerian American about her political beliefs. The mods told me it wasn't hateful to attack someone for their parent's national origin. Which is patently absurd.
The same guy also basically stated that any human who is descended from people who came to the US voluntarily is "white", no matter their ehnicity. It was shocking they allowed this kind of bullying. Ethno-nationalism is horrifying to me.
This policy ("send a picture of your black skin") sounds like what they found they needed to do prevent black voices from being drowned out on a site so overwhelming white as reddit. If they'd found white people were capable of recognising that maybe bpt wasn't about them I doubt they'd need that policy.
Not sure if you're missing it, but yeah, reverse racism is not a thing. The concept of racism is meaningful in the historical and societal context of systemic oppression. A black person saying "all white people are bad" is not feeding into and exploiting hundreds of years of prejudice stacked against an under-privileged group.
Edit: a black person in the US, different cultures are different contexts.
Racism is racism no matter what direction it's pointing. You don't need to have experienced hundred's of years of prejudice to experience racism. Racism is treating someone differently because of their race. It is wrong full stop, no matter the status of the perpetrator or the victim.
It's really unfortunate to see downvotes for this. The belief in reverse racism in America is pretty widespread and I imagine we'll eventually see people understand what it means to say it doesn't exist.
The rejection of reserve racism isn't a reaction based on anger like "they hurt me first and more so I can hurt them." That's not what this is about. It's about not minimizing the prejudice black people suffer from every day by comparing it to having to send a picture of your black skin to be a mod in the subreddit mentioned above.
It's about understanding that racism is NOT just an instance of prejudice against someone based on color. It's the entire fucking system and culture we have in America that oppresses black people. It's about the system of power and authority that oppresses black people. When we reserve the word racism for this it follows that it's ridiculous to believe in reverse racism. There is no system that oppresses white people in America. It does not exist.
Is it shitty to be treated differently because your skin is white? Of course. It sucks and it's your right to feel hurt by it, but don't call it racism. Prejudice yes, racism no. Why is this distinction important? Again, because the instances of racism that white people complain about simply do not compare to what black people go through. Using the same word for these things minimizes what black people go through every god damn day.
A black person saying "all white people are bad" is a bad thing, but ultimately not a societal problem. The issue is the power dynamic. After years of institutional racism, institutions are racist (shocking!). That's the issue. There are far more white people in power and any one of them being racist has a much wider and more devastating effect on PoC.
I haven't watched Stefan in a long time, is he now producing content in the same register as David Duke & Richard Spencer ? It did not seem to be the case a few years ago.
I used to listen to Stefan Molyneux about 10 years ago because he had some interesting views on free market economics. Now I look him up on Wikipedia and find out he's turned into a white nationalist. What the hell happened?
Molyneux, precisely, does not advocate specifically for a white ethnostate where Spencer does. However, Molyneux doesn't oppose one on principle, which for most is too close for comfort so he gets branded as one.
I understand for many that is evidence of guilt but logically speaking that's not the same thing.
Why is everyone making surprised pickachu face about white nationalism as our culture encourages black nationalism and every other kind of racial tribalism? The problem isn't the color, the problem is the nationalism.
Most likely, he always had these beliefs, but he knew they were socially unacceptable so he kept them to himself. When a massive and lucrative potential audience developed on YouTube, of course he's going to be there to go after those views.
If you believe that free markets result in a fair outcome, eventually you have to come up with an explanation for why black and brown people have much lower economic and social status in Western capitalist countries. Broadly speaking, there's only a few possibilities:
1. Free markets can result in unfair outcomes in the face of prejudice or historical inequalities.
2. Racial inequality is caused entirely by government regulation.
3. The system works fine as it is, and some minorities just deserve lower status because they're lazy or have low IQs or something.
The most hardcore Libertarians reject (1) because it could potentially justify government intervention. Most of them turn to (2), but since that's a bit of tough argument to make, a few go to (3) instead. And once you decide that minorities are just inferior, it's a pretty straight line from there to white nationalism.
He went bad about 10 years ago. Before that he was halfway decent, however he did have some problematic tendencies, which I'm afraid were amplified and pushed out anything good.
Someone mentioned him to me as a sort of anti-government philosopher. At some point he popped up again breaking down the treyvon martin incident and everything about it seemed pretty gross. Eventually he popped back up again (to me) and got popular with the rise of trump
I also listened to him ten years ago. Every week or two I'd pick a new channel to watch to death while working, so I've probably consumed 40+ hours of content.
I heard bits and pieces over the years since that gave me the same reaction - what the hell happened. Although in retrospect the seeds were probably there even back then.
One thing that came out later was him emotionally explaining to the camera that the problem with the world is that women choose assholes to date. Another was his violent fantasy about what he'd do to his mother. That these kinds of outbursts didn't lose him his audience pretty much tells you all you need to know.
It's a shame, as there were a few pieces that stuck with me from when I watched it that I think made me a better person.
It was the first time I'd personally been exposed to ideas (mainly because I was young) like never hit children, it's OK to cut contact with an abusive family, that circumcision on babies is wrong and that you should structure your life to spend a great deal of time with your children if you want to be a parent. They've all pretty much stuck with me until today.
Plus a bunch of interesting in theory libertarian stuff, although I'm so far away from many of his positions it's almost comical (I'm the kind of person that wants high income and capital gains taxes and 100% inheritance taxes to fund a basic income), I find it a good diff on current society.
It's a shame, because if he had progressed towards cuddly-bear Molyneux instead of I-want-to-run-a-cult Molyneux, I think he could have been a positive force instead of the target of what is a pretty well justified ban today.
I gave him a chance because my cousin is one of these "anarcho-capitalism" guys (which is a contradiction, anarchy means lack of a control system or gov't, and capitalism is a power structure) and loved Molyneux. I've always been more of a fan of Richard Wolff and his project, Democracy at Work.[0]
But a less serious intellectual than Dr. Wolff (of Yale, Harvard, Stanford), Peter Joseph of the Zeitgeist Project has made Stefan look foolish.[1]
And an even less serious intellectual than Peter Joseph has caught out Stefan (me), he's one of those that says "communism kills people", but yet "guns do not kill people". If inanimate objects don't spontaneously kill people Stefan, neither do ideas. He's beneath a lightweight on his ability to think clearly.
He carried the momentum of the 2016 meme wars and funneled impressionable anti-establishment pro-Trump types. He was much more focused on eternal truths when his channel was philosophically centered, but self-examining one’s own eternal destination does not get many clicks.
There is a pretty straight line from 'free market economics' (aka exploiting people who are already down) to white nationalism (aka shitting on people that are not 'white' enough). No need to be surprised.
This "adjacent" concept has no meaning. Paraphrasing a point I made on Twitter recently:
- Richard Spencer: evil. Created 'alt right' movement.
- Ben Shapiro: called 'alt right' because he's right wing
- Joe Rogan: called 'alt right' because he talked to Ben
- Bernie Sanders supporters: called 'alt right' because Joe endorsed Bernie.
Ergo: by this logic Karl Marx could be considered 'alt right'
Molyneaux might be awful, he might be fine. But the argument one way or the other must be made on his own merits, not those around him.
----
Edit: Replying to dralley due to rate limit:"
I have included an example where there are four links. But 'adjacent' is a plainly silly idea if there is only one link.
If 'adjacent' being silly isn't already obvious, you may be very left wing (since 'adjacent' seems to be a popular argument on the left).
So consider: former KKK member Robert Byrd is in a photo being friendly with Hillary Clinton [1].
Is Hillary Clinton alt-right adjacent? Plainly Hillary Clinton is not alt-right adjacent. That argument would be absurd to make. Guilt by association is evil.
To determine whether Stefan Molyneux's ideas are good or bad, we should consider Stefan Molyneux's ideas. Not anyone else's.
You've included a video of Stefan Molyneux speaking. That's good - we can find out what he has to say for himself. What someone else has to say is irrelevant.
If I had to rank them, I would agree that David Duke and Richard Spencer are a little more blatantly racist than Stefan Molyneux, but why does that matter? If they're all violating the hate speech policy, then they should all be banned, even if David Duke is violating it more.
Not at all but Molyneux disagrees with so many left-of-center ideas that the effort needed to effectively detail how Molyneux is different is great, so he gets lumped in with them.
"If we had been allowed to talk about race and IQ, the invasion of Iraq would never have occurred, because no one would have been under the illusion that a Jeffersonian Republic was going to emerge from a population with an IQ in the 80s.
Opposing science got >500k people killed." - https://twitter.com/StefanMolyneux/status/108248906874151321...
This is not directly related, but I saw the policy:
"videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status"
I'm curious if anyone know the root of "veteran" on this list? I am just not familiar with that kind of -ism (veteran-ism?).
I'm surprised that makes the jump from employment/labor law to speech/politics policies.
Strawman: If I were a politician campaigning and were to say something like, "Veterans do not deserve benefits and I don't think we should fund veteran benefits" or "Veterans do not deserve our blind respect", am I now discriminating and will get banned from the platform?
You can't discriminate against someone for having served in the military in the US. Someone who served in the military is a veteran.
Also, the phrasing of their policy is strange. Apparently you can argue all you want that racial group X is inferior all you want, but if you don't try to exclude them from something, that is okay.
Readit News
For as long as he could remember, and his father before him, the Klan and other fringe organizations would always cry and shed tears about how they were being pushed to the edge and ostracized from the local communities. Most of the town ignored these common pleas. We knew how to deal with them and ignore them, we had our inoculated culture. A few businesses were locally known to be "Klan friendly", but it should surprise no one that they are not rich mega-corps.
It seems that in the internet age, this sort of culture of inoculation has not been passed on to the outside world communities, though the far-right ideologies may have. It is normal to decline the business of people you don't want to do business with. It is normal for it to be the fringe believers -- the ones that by their own choice are pushing themselves to live on that fringe. It is the simple free-market economy of supply and demand telling them that their demand is not necessary.
However, my father also taught me to be careful with this pushing of the fringe. It is a delicate balance of liberty with liberty-destroying ideology. The paradox of tolerance, etc. It should be very closely watched.
It is a win for the far-right to have y'all here on HN "disagree with them but still believe they should be here and not on the fringe". They will shed tears in public and privately rejoice at the welcoming change. It is a grant of liberty they suddenly inherited with tech to have had such a huge audience and defenders of their speech on private platforms all this time. It is only now that the culture of inoculation is catching up.
We should watch it closely & carefully though. We shouldn't be shedding tears for them.
Just FTR we are pretty far from accepting the far right here on HN:
tptacek shared some interesting research he'd done a couple of hours ago and it might be of interest to everyone here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23681929
No, he didn’t. He shared the subjective impression which led him to stop the research, but not the results, or even the methodology used to classify content.
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I read your linked piece but came to the opposite conclusions you posted here. Reading tptacek's comment indicates to me that he thinks HN's tolerance of white supremacist content is unacceptable ("I don't believe the status quo is really acceptable...")
I also wonder about his criteria for selecting what is white supremacist content and what is not. Most of the content I see on HN that I consider white supremacist or racist content is written in the form of dog whistles and not overt statements. I personally think the prevalence of that content on HN is somewhat higher than tptacek was catching.
The "far-right" is becoming a broad term in media usage and will end up in the same place as "racist" where it is a category that catches the views of a good 40% of people. It isn't obvious that wins for the far right is a bad thing.
Nobody is going to lose sleep over the Klan being pushed off Youtube, but Molyneux is not a member of the Klan.
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It's a lot harder online when you don't know people, they show up unannounced, they hide their true intent behind plausible deniability and dog whistles, and they just come back with another account when they get sprung.
Inoculation is a good idea. I think this blog post sheds some light on how targeted, intentional, and childish, many of the tactics are and being able to notice them is important. They very much rely on people letting them scatter their pieces all over the web as you say.
https://medium.com/@DeoTasDevil/the-rhetoric-tricks-traps-an...
There could also be something about speaking in public vs speaking something in semi-private real time chat app. You have time to clarify what you mean or be more empathetic. On platforms like twitter, when I check engagement metrics for replies to the tweet. I see a decrease of 10x often which is to say a lot of people never see past the first tweet a person makes and since tweets are limited by length, they encourage people to respond from their own biases rather than looking at things optimistically.
I do wonder if there is a reasonable path to punishing a platform that is responsible for encouraging content that causes toxic behavior or higher "engagement".
I don't know any of these people, but if they are undeniably white supremacists, then it's a hard sell to dispute this individual action.
But another argument lies in the policy of bans for certain types of speech, and that's the argument that's more pertinent. If we accept that YouTube can ban users for hate speech, then we also accept that YouTube is the arbiter of what constitutes hate speech.
The question at hand is if we can deem YouTube a fair judge.
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The central problem is that people are lazy as hell. The answer to this problem and indeed, most problems we face in society, is building and maintaining stronger communities, and encouraging critical thought and an educated and participatory citizenry. But this is incredibly hard, and is incompatible with most forms of grift which people have set up to enrich themselves. In the end, however, this is really a description of all of human history. It will always be the case that building and maintaining a "good" society is incredibly hard work, which most people reflexively don't want to do (in the same way that most people don't want to do the dishes, or take the shopping cart back to the shopping cart corral at the grocery store).
Sounds like your father was an honorable man. Honest question: when does pushing the fringe go too far? Is it appropriate for banks to deny their business? Grocery stores?
Wait what? I would love to hear your take on this then,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
Would you issue the same behavior towards him? Would you be very vocal about it?
You're allowed to listen to it in private of course, just like you are allowed to read or listen to any racist material you want in private. There are loads of web sites that cater specifically to these circles, and even entire alternative social networks. Like the most violent and offensive gangster rap, it has its own safe spaces and is available to anyone who wants it.
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This is the kind of difficult nuance that I rarely see in these discussions. One one side there's the free speech absolutists, whose arguments tend to ignore the fact that unmoderated propaganda, and hate speech tends to be more addictive, and spread ignorance faster then fact-checking can fix it. The consequences of this sort of callous attitude are literally genocide[1].
On the other hand, there's the 'cancel-culture mobs' (for lack of a better term) which are now censoring regular speech that disagrees, or appears to disagrees, or isn't sufficiently subservient to their opinions. Just yesterday I was sadly reading this depressing thread where Yann LeCun was run off twitter[2] for explaining how bias (in the social science sense) can be traced back to various steps in the ML pipeline (in this case, mainly a feature of the dataset itself, but also the choice of errors, bias vs variance, etc).
The inability to admit nuance is the only thing I can think both these groups share, and maybe what needs to be emphasized more.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...
[2] https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1274782757907030016
They even sided with the Westboro Baptist Church (the people with the offensive signs)[2] so they're pretty committed to "absolute" free speech.
[0]: https://www.oyez.org/cases/1968/492 [1]: https://www.oyez.org/cases/2002/01-1107 [2]: https://www.oyez.org/cases/2010/09-751
Both in text & traditional interpretation, that gives them the right to speak & assemble – but not do other non-communicative actions that would be criminal no matter the motivations.
So what would you even be banning other than the word KKK itself?
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I’ve not kept up with him, but it seemed like he was moving in a direction that was incompatible with the extreme libertarianism that brought him into the circles I frequented at the time.
“The whole breeding arena of the species needs to be cleaned the fuck up!” —Podcast FDR2740, “Conformity and the Cult of ‘Friendship’,” Wednesday call-in show July 2, 2014
“You cannot run a high IQ [white] society with low IQ [non-white] people…these [non-white] immigrants are going to fail...and they're not just going to fail a little, they are going to fail hard…they're not staying on welfare because they’re lazy...they’re doing what is economically the best option for them...you are importing a gene set that is incompatible with success in a free-market economy.” —YouTube video, The Death of Europe | European Migrant Crisis, October 4, 2015
“...the Germans were in danger of being taken over by what they perceived as Jewish-led Communism. And Jewish-led Communism had wiped out tens of millions of white Christians in Russia and they were afraid of the same thing. And there was this wild overreaction and all this kind of stuff.” —Stefan Molyneux describes the Holocaust in YouTube video, Migratory Patterns of Predatory Immigrants, March 20, 2016
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-problem
The authoritarian left is promoting segregation, promoting speech codes, and also labeling any disagreement with their socialist / communist economic policies as "racist" or "nazi"
All of that said, before I can progress further I would love to know what you believe the "far right" is, because that is not a defined term anymore, every day conservative values and opinions (things like we should have basic immigration control, or should not have government run health care) are now labeled as "far right" and "racist" so it seems to we need a defining of the terms so I can know what you consider to be a "far right" position
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/29/reddit-bans-pro-tru...
https://www.engadget.com/twitch-suspends-donald-trump-accoun...
Seems odd for multiple independent companies to act in concert like this.
The reddit bans wave was leaked in advance. The more actors involved in a coordinated action the harder it is to keep a secret.
Original leak: https://old.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/hh1pjd/redd...
Private companies can't (mechanically, not legally) determine who has a moral right to speak. If we had a magic method for figuring that out it'd have been a feature of politics since at least the Roman Empire. Instead we ended up with things like Robert's Rules of Order where the process is controlled as best as possible to let wildly contradictory opinions get aired.
Has this been announced or was this just speculation?
Is there any evidence of this besides the announcements just happening on the same day? It could be companies waiting to announce these moves on Monday morning after days of seeing Facebook embroiled in controversy for not doing this. Or maybe one company decided to make this move and other companies fast tracked anything they had planned on this so they wouldn't be viewed as ignoring this issue.
We have no indication one way or another whether this is coordinated. We shouldn't just assume it is coordinated because it is happening on the same day.
Yes and no, this is less collusion and more to avoid platform hopping basically if one platform bans them they’ll flock to another even if the medium isn’t identical or the platform is not optimal for their use case any platform would do in times like these.
I’m pretty sure at this point when the behavior pattern is known the platforms inform each other of high profile bans.
The others follow suit to avoid being branded as the one that didn’t or worse as the one that accepted the now pariahs “with open arms”.
This time has not elapsed.
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it wouldn't surprise me if there was an informal discussion and a decision by google led others to also take action.
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If the specific figures being banned are not affiliated with any candidate for election, even under a minor party or for local office, how is this "election interference"?
Elections aren't held in a vaccum. People 'interfere' with them by persuading, spending money, and by choosing to give political ideas access to their platform.
Media agencies 'interfere' with elections all the time, by exercising their discretion for the last point, and by actively agitating on the first point.
And why would de-platforming racist white nationalists interfere with the election, anyways? Is there a racist white nationalist on the ballot in 2020, who will be hurt by this?
It shouldn't, all social networks delegate banning "hate content" to the SPLC and ADL. It's much more efficient/effective to do things this way, and more importantly, it assures fair enforcement. Otherwise, you'd have the same content allowed on one platform, but banned on another. This approach is much better for the platforms and their users.
Here is an HN link from it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16643040
Act together, and they are accused of conspiracy.
I guess their PR teams decided the latter is less hassle for them.
Same thing with mask use in airlines. Some companies do not want to enforce mask use until all airlines do it, because they do not want customers opposed to masks leaving them for competitors that do not require masks on flights.
Leftist extremists are effecting public banishment of their rightist extremist opponents.
It wouldn't be as bad if leftist extremists were getting banned at the same time. The problem is that leftist extremists have bullied the mainstream left into extreme action.
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Conservatism has a place in society. I'm not endorsing any of these guys viewpoints nor am I associating them with conservatism in general, because it's a broad group of over 100 million people in the U.S. with a diverse range of opinions that lean to the right. It's extremely important that society be balanced and not tilted to the extremes of either ideology. This process of selective banning and purging will not end well for Silicon Valley. The problem is they are not approaching the left's extremists with the same fervor. In fact they're turning a blind eye to the vicious hate against cops and conservatives on their own platforms.
And a lot of this hate is disproportionate to reality. That is, the perception of the problem exceeds the actual statistical problem.
I'm of the strong opinion that a society needs it's left and right brain to function properly and constructively in order to tackle the diverse set of problems we face. If there is no push-pull give and take between these two groups, then society will become unstable and increasingly more polarized.
I'm a free market capitalist, but with Silicon Valley's recent muscular intervention into free speech, and the overwhelming propaganda power they possess, I fully support the break up of big tech monopolies in social media, search, and app stores.
Literal white supremacists and nazis however, do not. Those people should be pushed so far off any platform that their only option left is to be the crazies screaming on Times Square that the end of the world is coming.
These people actively contributed to fostering hatred in societies, And no, you will not fight them off with debates. The time it takes you to rebuke a single one of their arguments means they can spew a dozen more of theirs.
By the way, it's not free speech. The government isn't banning them.
Free speech is a principle outside of the 1st amendment.
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It's not too dissimilar to message board culture from the aughts. You essentially had federated versions of Reddit. It looks like we're destined for that again because people can't stop peeing in the grownups pool.
If social media companies will be bifurcated as you say, it’ll be a tiny fraction of their American audiences - leaving the rest of the world sticking with the mainstream. Those smaller Ameri-centric sites will fail to reach critical-mass needed to sustain themselves in the long-term and hopefully those movements will fade into the background.
Your comparisons to the *chan imageboard splintering is apt, but look at how the more extreme chan sites have been having in finding a web-host (with enough capacity) to host them.
This is a false equivalence. The worst of the alt-right are far, far worse than the worst of the extreme left (antifa, maybe? Though there is no alt-left).
Good riddance to them, I say. If you want to lead the KKK, and advocate for a white ethnostate, I won't lose any sleep when you can't post videos trying to convince others of the same evil ideas.
Nope it’s just equivalence: https://panampost.com/panam-staff/2020/06/23/the-links-betwe...
(FWIW: I’m quite pro-BLM. I don’t believe in guilt by association. My point is that there are high-profile people in relatively mainstream organizations that are proponents of murderous leftist dictators.)
Nah, there are plenty of people advocating for explicit ethno-separatism on the far left -- just look at Louis Farrakhan and his lefty pals. They just don't have very big YouTube channels. People more-or-less naturally ignore them except when they turn out to protests to hijack an ostensibly liberal or socialist cause.
There are people that support Stalin and Mao, which is just bad as supporting Hitler.
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It does. I've also been confidently assured by my conservative friends that conservatism is a very different politics from racism, fascism, and neo-Nazism. I would not really consider the question of whether I myself am a human being or, as Richard Spencer has posited, a "soulless golem", to be a conservative vs liberal fight.
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Gab (twitter alternative) was just blacklisted by Visa last week. There is no recourse. What, should these people build their own consumer credit company too?
https://news.gab.com/2020/06/19/gab-blacklisted-by-visa/
I wholeheartedly agree, and I've not heard of anyone calling to censor conservatives. Most or all of the people being de-listed are people who are breaking their platforms' terms of services. They might happen to be mostly conservative, but it seems like today it's mostly conservatives who are breaking the rules and calling for violence, doxxing people, etc. Reddit just kicked out some leftist groups for doing the same stuff, as was appropriate.
> I'm a free market capitalist
"...except when I disagree with it."
There seem to be some idea here on HN that racism/white-supremacy bullshit is somehow comparable with an oppressed scientist being persecuted by a dogmatic clergy for their new found facts. That maybe, in the future, these ideas will prevail and become acceptable again, when the oppression slowly subsides.
Is this really what you think racism is? Some oppressed idea that needs a room because maybe it's actually a bit correct and we'll only know about it if we don't suppress the racists?
But these things are objectively wrong. The above scenario isn't there. If you somehow think so, I think that says more about you than those that want to be intolerant towards intolerance. Please explain yourselves.
Like where were you guys when Arkansas literally banned Howard Zinn? What about when South Carolina banned the words 'climate change'?
Sorry but you all just don't come across consistent enough to be taken seriously.
--
[1] https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/ark-bill-introduced...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/12/north-caroli...
Luckily the "ban Howard Zinn" bill was never actually passed, and actually led to far more people reading him (Streisand effect there):
> Rep. Kim Hendren’s bill to prohibit use of the late Howard Zinn’s books in Arkansas public schools died quietly in committee, of course, but it had great unintended consequence: Some 700 copies of Zinn’s book, “A People’s History of the United States,” were sent free to teachers and librarians throughout Arkansas thanks to the controversy.
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2017/04/04/how-kim-hendre...
Until I realize that some people are now defining silence as complicity with white supremacy. So let's hope that definition doesn't spread, right?
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except they're banning liberals:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr...
The fact is that American "conservatism" now is so run through with hate and vitriol and othering that no one can tell where one starts and the other begins.
The logical fallacy that this is a "slippery slope" is ridiculous, and the number of people who are crying about losing the "freedom" to attack, incite, and threaten others is astonishing. The number one terrorist threat in the US right now is right-wing militant groups, condoning threats and violence towards anyone who thinks different than them.
It's pretty clear to most that deplatforming people with hateful, violent, and dangerous messages is less of a threat to society than allowing them to keep spreading their vile hate. This isn't some arbitrary thought experiment or a white-room theorycrafting; people are dying because of this kind of hate.
Conservatives who distance themselves from hate and bigotry and violence are fine, and I can live with those people, but the American far-right are a blight on society and private corporations are within their rights (and, I would say, responsibilities) to actually enforce their own policies against these people.
What's happened is we've already gone over the edge. Racism has been redefined to only be effectively possible by white people in the West. The intention of this change is racist in itself.
Putting aside freedom of speech, what people likely have a problem with is all the OTHER racists on YouTube NOT getting banned and instead being PROPPED UP.
These bans are political, not civil justice. If these racists were A) a real problem, and B) not singled out as a faction among multiple other racist factions, then people might believe this is fair.
To those that contend that criteria A has been met: The modern rise of white supremacists in the West is being spurred by racist politics; it's almost as if they want to corner these people into extremist ideas.
I am an adherent to Daryl Davis' way of dealing with racism, and that's by understanding the root causes of it and addressing them.
These bans are a farce, and meant to consolidate far-leftist power - not liberal power.
For those who are unfamiliar, Davis is a black American who has directly befriended and changed the minds of a number of Ku Klux Klan members. He has a collection of their former robes that serve as trophies. In my view, he's a stunning role model.
This article describes his approach in more detail: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/the-aud.... If you search his name, you'll find a lot more, including a fascinating documentary: https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/accidental-courtes....
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you havent been around the internet enough if youre still defending these shitheads go to bitchute and binge varg videos no one cares
Firstly, your comment contains a bunch of unsubstantiated opinion.
"...we've already gone over the edge". What edge?
"Racism has been redefined...". Where? By whom?
"The intention of this change is racist in itself". Who's intention? The 'racism redefiners'? If they're a large group, how can they all have a unified intention? Is there some manifesto you can point to, or something that exposes the 'intention'?
"What people likely have a problem with...". The use of the word 'likely' tells me you're just guessing here.
"...all the OTHER racists". This implicitly acknowledges the banned people mentioned are in fact racists, but it sounds like you're defending these racists by pointing out that there are different racists being treated differently. "Stop picking on OUR racists! There's some other racists over there too!".
"These bans are political...". How are these political? Do you have any data to show that takedowns vs takedown requests vary significantly by political view.
"If these racists were A) a real problem...". If racism is a problem, and these people are racist, then by definition, these racists are a problem. Given you've acknowledged (implicitly above) that these people are racists, then you must be suggesting that racism isn't a real problem.
"...singled out...". Do you have evidence that no other 'factions' (to use your word; I'd say 'flavours') of racists have not been taken down? Remember, some being left up doesn't mean that none have been taken down.
"...then people might believe this is fair". While I'm sure some people don't believe this is fair (you might be one of them), do you have any evidence to show that this is a commonly held view?
"The modern rise of white supremacists in the West is being spurred by racist politics; it's almost as if they want to corner these people into extremist ideas." This has to be one of the most atrocious arguments I've ever heard. Let's leave aside that the racist roots behind many political groups (e.g. Klan, Nazis) go back decades if not way into the 19th century. Your argument here is like saying that a rise in domestic violence is being spurred by feminist ideas.
"...they want to corner these people into extremist ideas". No one is making racists more extreme. Racist ideas and 'theories' (to the extent that these exist in any cogent form), are largely unchanged over time. What has happened is that the bulk of western society has been, and continues to, redefine what is 'acceptable'. Racists now (like chauvinists) find themselves on the other side of a shifting boundary. No one has 'cornered' them, they just haven't moved while society has.
"I am an adherent to Daryl Davis' way of dealing with racism". Good. His approach is centered on educating racists. However this approach is not at all at odds with blocking hate speech from virtual 'town squares' (which are actually 'corporate plazas').
"... meant to consolidate far-leftist power". Firstly, to consolidate power, the far-leftists would need to be in power. Manifestly untrue. Secondly, unless the Communist Party of America are still alive and kicking, there is NO party that I'm aware of that would be considered far-left by any reasonable person outside of the US (where political definitions are so skewed they no longer make sense).
I'd also point out that the fact you are using a throwaway account to post makes me doubt that you have any intention of engaging honestly on this subject.
EDITED: s/taken left up/left up/
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Back in the day, if you wanted to buy a porn magazine, you could do it but it would be behind the counter, possibly out of sight entirely. It was legal to buy, but it was not being "recommended" to you by the store by virtue of giving it visible shelf space.
I suppose that there is some section 230 argument about why YouTube can't do that, because then they would be exercising editorial control. I'd say that they already are exercising editorial control by having a recommender. I'd much rather have humans exercise that editorial control than an algorithm which is essentially psychopathic. It's an editor that is trying to addict viewers.
Here's a study that shows it pushes people towards more moderate videos.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.11211.pdf
Those fringe, extreme platforms are both unknown and already have the stigma or being fringe, extreme platforms. Take a look at Gab, and how The_Donald got laughed out of it because they were not white supremacist enough.
So, yeah, I think I can live with the white supremacists clearly identifying themselves.
https://www.nytimes.com/column/rabbit-hole
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4hq5uVsb5k
YT sends you videos based on your watch history. If you watch hate videos to see what kind of stuff people are saying then you should delete them from your history to avoid YT finding you more.
Zeynep Tufekci, amongst others, published about it back in 2018.
Lot of people are wondering why r/BlackPeopleTwitter or r/politics haven't been banned despite blatant racism or calls to violence. People are pretty pissed at spez, to say the least.
Also, kudos to that one user pointing out how 10 mods oversee 90% of subreddits.[1]
I've linked the thread[0]. The comments pointing the insanity are highlighted
What a trainwreck but oh well, enjoy being the next Digg plebbit.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/hi3oht/updat... [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/hi3oht/updat...
Edit: "Spez, answer the fucking question. So is it according to reddit policy, a white person can’t say “all black people are bad” but a black person can say “all white people are bad”? If this is the case, this is racist" (LMAO)
Imagine a subreddit forcing people to send pictures of their white skin to the mods. People would be outraged.
The only good way to use reddit these days is to unsubscribe from all of the default subreddits and only subscribe to small subreddits dedicated to your hobbies/interests. Everything else is garbage.
Is this really true? I quit Reddit years ago, even though some of the tech specific subs were awesome. Just couldn't stand supporting a site where the mods were so abusive. I remember the tipping point was a guy on there talking about "Foundational Black Americans", and essentially shitting on recent African immigrants as being second tier to black Americans descended from slaves. It was so vile, and they did nothing about it. He was bullying a second generation Nigerian American about her political beliefs. The mods told me it wasn't hateful to attack someone for their parent's national origin. Which is patently absurd.
The same guy also basically stated that any human who is descended from people who came to the US voluntarily is "white", no matter their ehnicity. It was shocking they allowed this kind of bullying. Ethno-nationalism is horrifying to me.
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I'm not Spez but that's a good way to get me to ignore your question.
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Edit: a black person in the US, different cultures are different contexts.
The rejection of reserve racism isn't a reaction based on anger like "they hurt me first and more so I can hurt them." That's not what this is about. It's about not minimizing the prejudice black people suffer from every day by comparing it to having to send a picture of your black skin to be a mod in the subreddit mentioned above.
It's about understanding that racism is NOT just an instance of prejudice against someone based on color. It's the entire fucking system and culture we have in America that oppresses black people. It's about the system of power and authority that oppresses black people. When we reserve the word racism for this it follows that it's ridiculous to believe in reverse racism. There is no system that oppresses white people in America. It does not exist.
Is it shitty to be treated differently because your skin is white? Of course. It sucks and it's your right to feel hurt by it, but don't call it racism. Prejudice yes, racism no. Why is this distinction important? Again, because the instances of racism that white people complain about simply do not compare to what black people go through. Using the same word for these things minimizes what black people go through every god damn day.
Are you one of those that thinks history begins in the US 250 years ago?
I understand for many that is evidence of guilt but logically speaking that's not the same thing.
1. Free markets can result in unfair outcomes in the face of prejudice or historical inequalities.
2. Racial inequality is caused entirely by government regulation.
3. The system works fine as it is, and some minorities just deserve lower status because they're lazy or have low IQs or something.
The most hardcore Libertarians reject (1) because it could potentially justify government intervention. Most of them turn to (2), but since that's a bit of tough argument to make, a few go to (3) instead. And once you decide that minorities are just inferior, it's a pretty straight line from there to white nationalism.
I heard bits and pieces over the years since that gave me the same reaction - what the hell happened. Although in retrospect the seeds were probably there even back then.
One thing that came out later was him emotionally explaining to the camera that the problem with the world is that women choose assholes to date. Another was his violent fantasy about what he'd do to his mother. That these kinds of outbursts didn't lose him his audience pretty much tells you all you need to know.
It's a shame, as there were a few pieces that stuck with me from when I watched it that I think made me a better person.
It was the first time I'd personally been exposed to ideas (mainly because I was young) like never hit children, it's OK to cut contact with an abusive family, that circumcision on babies is wrong and that you should structure your life to spend a great deal of time with your children if you want to be a parent. They've all pretty much stuck with me until today.
Plus a bunch of interesting in theory libertarian stuff, although I'm so far away from many of his positions it's almost comical (I'm the kind of person that wants high income and capital gains taxes and 100% inheritance taxes to fund a basic income), I find it a good diff on current society.
It's a shame, because if he had progressed towards cuddly-bear Molyneux instead of I-want-to-run-a-cult Molyneux, I think he could have been a positive force instead of the target of what is a pretty well justified ban today.
But a less serious intellectual than Dr. Wolff (of Yale, Harvard, Stanford), Peter Joseph of the Zeitgeist Project has made Stefan look foolish.[1]
And an even less serious intellectual than Peter Joseph has caught out Stefan (me), he's one of those that says "communism kills people", but yet "guns do not kill people". If inanimate objects don't spontaneously kill people Stefan, neither do ideas. He's beneath a lightweight on his ability to think clearly.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/user/democracyatwrk
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaP2GJvZlWY
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/indi...
a little teaser:
> Screaming 'racism' at people because blacks are collectively less intelligent...is insane
> The whole breeding arena of the species needs to be cleaned the fuck up
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Stefan_Molyneux is also great.
- Richard Spencer: evil. Created 'alt right' movement.
- Ben Shapiro: called 'alt right' because he's right wing
- Joe Rogan: called 'alt right' because he talked to Ben
- Bernie Sanders supporters: called 'alt right' because Joe endorsed Bernie.
Ergo: by this logic Karl Marx could be considered 'alt right'
Molyneaux might be awful, he might be fine. But the argument one way or the other must be made on his own merits, not those around him.
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Edit: Replying to dralley due to rate limit:"
I have included an example where there are four links. But 'adjacent' is a plainly silly idea if there is only one link.
If 'adjacent' being silly isn't already obvious, you may be very left wing (since 'adjacent' seems to be a popular argument on the left).
So consider: former KKK member Robert Byrd is in a photo being friendly with Hillary Clinton [1].
Is Hillary Clinton alt-right adjacent? Plainly Hillary Clinton is not alt-right adjacent. That argument would be absurd to make. Guilt by association is evil.
To determine whether Stefan Molyneux's ideas are good or bad, we should consider Stefan Molyneux's ideas. Not anyone else's.
You've included a video of Stefan Molyneux speaking. That's good - we can find out what he has to say for himself. What someone else has to say is irrelevant.
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/clinton-byrd-photo-klan/
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You don’t see nearly as much “white women with East Asian men,” whose offspring would tend to have higher IQs on average.
Hmmm..."
- https://twitter.com/StefanMolyneux/status/107731491210229760...
"If I believed in the toxic racist lie of “white privilege,” I wouldn’t have worked so damn hard to succeed.
I would’ve just waited for my racial dividends to pour in and make me successful without having to lift a finger.
“Privilege” is hard work and providing value.
Try it."
- https://twitter.com/StefanMolyneux/status/127693246131906969...
"WOMEN!
STOP taking vain pride in the fact that men want to have sex with you.
You didn’t personally earn those hormones.
Stop pilllaging evolution designed for pair-bonding for petty self-regard."
- https://twitter.com/StefanMolyneux/status/127673601190155878...
"Ladies vote you into socialism.
Men have to fight their way out."
- https://twitter.com/StefanMolyneux/status/127659441227816141...
"If we had been allowed to talk about race and IQ, the invasion of Iraq would never have occurred, because no one would have been under the illusion that a Jeffersonian Republic was going to emerge from a population with an IQ in the 80s. Opposing science got >500k people killed." - https://twitter.com/StefanMolyneux/status/108248906874151321...
EDIT: added a second quote
Wow can people change.
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I'm curious if anyone know the root of "veteran" on this list? I am just not familiar with that kind of -ism (veteran-ism?).
Strawman: If I were a politician campaigning and were to say something like, "Veterans do not deserve benefits and I don't think we should fund veteran benefits" or "Veterans do not deserve our blind respect", am I now discriminating and will get banned from the platform?
Also, the phrasing of their policy is strange. Apparently you can argue all you want that racial group X is inferior all you want, but if you don't try to exclude them from something, that is okay.