Agreed, and this should be the retort to any curtailing of free speech in the name of safety. Its the same argument as allowing “the_donald” to exist on Reddit. You will not stop an ideology by denying them a platform. Better to debate them in an open forum, even if they are evil. The only way to counter bad ideas is with good ones.
There was a recent /r/science article that suggested the banning of coontown and fatpeoplehate resulted in less hate on the platform as a whole. Would you argue this hate moved to other avenues of the web? I'd bet some of it did, but some people just stopped being so hateful on the internet once their cesspool went away.
It's conflation to compare coontown with the_donald. Go there right now. You won't find "kill the jews" posts. You won't find "kill the gays/black people" posts. You'll find a ton of supportive people with a particular worldview--and there's nothing wrong with that.
If you assume the people you disagree with are "insane" or disregard them as "full of hate" then you'll never understand why they think the way they do and the division in our world continues unabated.
It still blows my mind that people who support the currently elected president, are considered a hate group. If the other candidate had won, would we consider her subreddit a hate sub? Would we care what the losing party thought about her subreddit? We all know the answer to that: "No." I have never before seen an election where "only one candidate is considered a human being."
I was curious and peeked over to see what's currently popular over at the_donald. Some of the top-voted recent links:
* "UN Globalists are on suicide watch after President Trump's speech"
* "One of the best quotes of the speech. Socialist cucks BTFO!"
* "This tweet from David Brock's cucks is less than 2 weeks old and has already aged terribly."
* "Can you imagine a world without Islam?"
* "HE TRULY IS A GOD AMONG MEN" (God-Emperor Trump)
* "Since 9/11 there have been ~35,000 deadly Islamic terror attacks; that's an average of 2,000 per year... So let's (A) NEVER FORGET, (B) PRESS F, and (C) DRIVE. THEM. OUT. FROM. THE. EARTH!"
The_donald is dramatic - maybe to the point of low-grade hysteria. There was an excellent quip from the election:
SALENA ZITO wrote (about Trump)
the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.
You can map the same thing onto his subreddit. If we take them seriously but not literally, they're not wrong.
People with a globalist view really disliked Trump's speech.
There's a matter of opinion about a line in the same speech that his supporters apparently liked.
I'm not going to weigh in on David Brock.
Some God Emperor silliness. FWIW, the God Emperor of 40k led humanity very well up until the point of the Horus Heresy and every God Emperor depiction of Trump is one prior to the Emperor's wounding so it's well intentioned (at least).
And Islamic terror is the most deadly religious ideology in the world right now. Perhaps it's not the wisest thing to be concerned about but it's avowed enemy of America , democracy, and limited government so it's an almost perfect outgroup for self-styled American patriots.
Bill Maher, once heralded as an extreme left liberal (who supported gay marriage and marijuana legalization in the early 90's when nobody thought either would ever happen), consistently talks about the "threat of Islam to democracy". Is he a neocon now? And should we remove his speech to "reduce hate" the same way you're suggesting the_donald be removed?
You pivoted away from the topic. Bill Maher case may be interesting to discuss, but doesn't change whether the_donald calls for hate. Which actually looking at the subreddit shows it does.
Either Bill Maher (a liberal hero) is a racist islamaphobe, or, the_donald users who share the same views as him... aren't islamaphobes.
Because unless we're not talking about Islamaphobia, what else did you actually see that could be considered "hateful"? Because on that same sub you'll find people of all colors, and most religions discussing things. You'll find legal immigrants. You'll find ex-Muslims and atheists. You'll find gays. You'll find women. You'll find Brits. You'll find lifelong Democrats and Libertarians. You'll find ex-"Bernie Bros" who were furious at the DNC's betrayal of Bernie Sanders. You'll find people who grew up under Communist rule. I know, because I've seen every single one of those on that sub and almost every one of those demographics has posted a picture of themselves with a MAGA hat at one point or another.
If you want an actual white supremacist sub, you're thinking of /r/uncensorednews which actually lists Jews with (((triple parenthesis))). That's a pretty sharp contrast to the_donald. But it wouldn't be, if the_donald was as hateful as been claimed.
You can always find a worse place. There are places worse than 4chan too, but I don't see how that's relevant to the_donald being hate filled / fuelled.
There's islamophobia, there's cherry picking of news about rape claims, infowars crap about illegal immigrants which is just hate mongering, posts like "let's trigger illegals and show some love for our ICE agents".
I'm not going to link to that dump specifically because they don't deserve the publicity. If you don't see this as hate mongering, we disagree on a very fundamental level.
I frequently hear that defense of the_donald subreddit, but it seems not to be backed by facts.
Yes, it is extremely important not to dehumanize our political opponents and to understand all the terrible things that made people be disillusioned with the establishment and vote for Trump.
But the_donald community is definitely extreme in their fundamentalism, way beyond just being supportive of Trump's political agenda. Looking at their front page does actually show islamophobic and sexists posts and frequent calls/cheers to violence, contrary to your claims.
"It's conflation to compare coontown with the_donald. Go there right now. You won't find "kill the jews" posts. You won't find "kill the gays/black people" posts. You'll find a ton of supportive people with a particular worldview--and there's nothing wrong with that."
Go read the comments. You will find plenty of that stuff.
"If the other candidate had won, would we consider her subreddit a hate sub?"
False equivalence. I don't recall Clinton ever saying she wanted to jail her political opponent. I don't recall her campaign ever retweeting literal white supremacists.
> I don't recall Clinton ever saying she wanted to jail her political opponent.
This part isn't really fair. If I want to jail my political opponent because she's my political opponent, this is a big problem, but if I want to jail her because she's committed crimes, that's perfectly fine.
I don't have a dog in the fight either way. I dislike Democrats and Republicans alike. There's enough publicly available evidence that she mishandled classified documents. If I did that, they'd lock me up and throw away the key.
It flabergasts me that otherwise reasonable people can say what you're saying. Is it confirmation bias? Is it a media that while rarely outright lying, just avoids mentioning anti-Clinton facts? How?
> There's enough publicly available evidence that she mishandled classified documents.
In the same way that many people did before her and in the same way that people continue to do now. Are you proposing to prosecute everyone the same way?
Why is it suddenly an issue when HRC is doing it but not when Gowdy and Chaffetz do it? Or when almost the entire Trump administration is doing it? Or when the Bush administration "lost" 50M emails they were supposed to have kept?
Hint: If you only have a problem with it when HRC does it, you probably want to check your sexism and misogyny settings.
I don't want to see everyone prosecuted, just the people who break the law. Why does Hillary get better treatment than Bryan H. Nishimura?
I'm unfamiliar with your accusations against Gowdy and Chaffetz, but if they did something similar, I'd support their prosecution, too.
I had to remind myself of Bush's email scandal. It looks like, in the end, since the emails were found, there was no law broken? I'm unclear on this point. But the point is, that if they broke the law, somebody should have been prosecuted, then, too.
Your arguments seem to be going in the direction of "the other side is doing it, too." That's not a defense! It especially doesn't do anything to convince me, since I'm not on anybody's side.
And I would feel the same way if it were a male republican we were talking about. Do you really think you can retreat to accusations of misogyny every time somebody says something negative about a woman you support?
> Why does Hillary get better treatment than Bryan H. Nishimura?
The cases aren't comparable. One was a wilful mishandling of classified documents; the other was a widely accepted way of dealing with email.
> since the emails were found, there was no law broken?
A Senate committee said "[T]his subversion of the justice system has included lying, misleading, stonewalling and ignoring the Congress in our attempts to find out precisely what happened." That sounds like they broke the law.
> "the other side is doing it, too."
Not really - it's more that "Oh, look, the female candidate is getting slammed for things that everyone in USGOV has done, is doing, and will do whilst the male candidates and aides ... do not."
> And I would feel the same way if it were a male republican we were talking about.
Then presumably you are now calling for Kushner's indictment?
When numerous investigations turned up jack squat regarding her doing anything wrong, calling for her to be jailed IS calling to jail her simply because she's your political opponent.
> resulted in less hate on the platform as a whole
The study is interesting, but this is decidedly not what it says, and you should be wary of overinterpreting its arguments. If you look at the definition of hate speech they used, it was defined as "the vocabulary of the subreddits in question". This isn't a general complaint about hate speech being slippery and hard to pin down, it's a criticism of the fact that defining it as the specific vocabulary of the subreddits in question is a huge confounder. What the study's conclusion boils down to is:
"If you ban a subreddit, the exact vocabulary (in-jokes, etc) of that subreddit declines."
Well, duh. This is an especially tautological result for communities that have such a rich vocabulary of in-jokes (and slurs) :(
There's not much in the paper to suggest that the emigrants from coontown and FPH aren't expressing the exact same ideas elsewhere, without using the exact same lexicon that they developed in their original communities. I would be surprised if this result didn't replicate for pretty miuch any community that has its own internal vocabulary and in-jokes, such as nominally pro-social-justice subreddits or even narrow political subreddits like /r/anarchism or something.
I'd suggest that your sentiments map very nicely onto a rationalist view of the world but poorly onto reality. I think this more generally falls into a bias some hyper-logical people propagate, that since they assume they make decisions primarily with logic, that others must do the same as well.
It inherently assumes that A) people vulnerable to being recruited into a suicidal death cult are thinking logically, and B) such people can be logically talked out of their ideology.
If instead one assumes that emotional connection is the primary driver of the recruiting success in question, it follows that disrupting this pipeline would yield more success than attempting to reason with talented recruiters who aren't trying to have a fair and logical debate.
Sure, just like you could convince McDonald's to go vegan with a few carefully worded arguments...
ISIS doesn't use twitter to debate you. They use it strictly for outbound propaganda.
Even if you could somehow convince those running ISIS accounts of the folly of their endeavours, these are likely to be a tiny fraction of ISIS' people. There are a few dozen social media people in their ranks, but the idea that the bulk of them even have access to Twitter is somewhat laughable.
Denying ISIS such propaganda outlets is useful in fighting them. Proof by the free market theorem: they wouldn't use Twitter if they did not consider it better than the alternatives. They are also better informed about their situation, so they're more likely to be right than anyone else. Denying them this possibility must therefore be damaging to their cause.
This idea that extreme ideologies are somehow damaged by access to mass media is among the most ridiculous infatuations HN has embarked on, informed almost exclusively by wishful thinking. An ideology that is pushed underground is, and this is almost a truism, strictly worse off than one that has access to these tools.
See the recent reddit paper for some numbers, or consider something like r/the_donald: does anybody really believe that community would have been more powerful if it had been relegated to their own platform early on?
Again, exploding people with bombs and using trucks as bullets is already illegal. More to the point, it's important to not conflate extreme ideologies with specific groups which use those ideologies. ISIS uses Twitter to recruit people to ISIS. There are many violent extremist groups that aren't ISIS, and would love to see it's demise.
Agree it's better to debate in an open forum. Free speech should permit the exchange of all ideas, even "evil" ones. But isn't it a bit disingenuous to compare r/The_Donald to ISIS, since the latter is inciting violence?
> Agreed, and this should be the retort to any curtailing of free speech in the name of safety
There is no free speech issue here, Twitter isn't operated by the government, neither is Facebook or Reddit. My point is, people are still free to set up their own servers at home, running their own app, their liberty to do that is not harmed by Twitter rejecting content. On the contrary, it's an opportunity for free speech advocates to remember that.
I don't think Free Speech has ever meant being required to publish others speech. Freedom of the press was meant to ensure you can say what you wish via pamphlets or starting your own newspaper, wherein you own the method of speech. That is why it was fundamental to Free Speech.
One has never been able to compel a publisher to publish them.
You may have a different concept, but to my way way of thinking that has always been the connection between the First Amendment and Free Speech.
But, since you asked, businesses that offer services to the public can refuse service to anyone UNLESS they're refusing a member of a protected class, for being a member of a protected class.
White restaurant owner kicking out a black lady because she's belligerent/drunk/whatever -- fine.
White restaurant owner kicking out a black lady because she's black -- not fine.
Religious bakery owner refusing service because it's Monday -- fine.
Religious bakery owner refusing service because the customer is gay -- not fine.
Freedom of speech is really something that must be contextualized, for it to be a useful term.
In all contexts, freedom of speech is considered a 'right', but in some contexts it's a positive right, and in others it's a negative right.
In the US constitution, it's a negative right. The First Amendment states that 'Congress shall write no law ... abridging the freedom of speech.' In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it's a positive right:
"everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice". [1]
If Twitter were subject to the UDHR, it would seem to me that people would be entitled to use Twitter as a free speech platform. We are lucky that this is not the case, because that would surely violate Twitter's property rights and its employees'/investors' right to self determination.
To dissallow Twitter to shape its own content/user base strategy would be unethical.
The concept of Free Speech also includes that of Free Association. As in, Twitter gets to decide who they want to associate with. And in this context, associate with means use their platform.
>The only way to counter bad ideas is with good ones.
Absolute rubbish; bad ideas spread through people, thus you need to be able to reach people when you counter bad ideas, but people generally aren't controlled by their rationality, they are attached to ideas and stick with them. The idea that if only for example Jewish interest groups had debated the Nazis more, then the Nazis would have been shown to have bad ideas is ridiculous.
Some ideas, as Marcuse put it, block the democratic process and this blockage may require apparently undemocratic means to remove.
