Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Nevermind that Daryl Davis has literally converted over 200 KKK members: https://www.rt.com/viral/371340-meet-black-man-kkk/

THAT is how you beat fascism. Not censorship.

Lazy programmers trying censor via bits and bytes are never going to accomplish in a million years what Mr. Davis already has.




And Jack Churchill captured Nazi outposts with a longbow and a broadsword, but if allies armed every soldier with longbows and broadswords, something tells me that we'd be under Nazi occupation to this day.

Some great things are done by great people, but they don't necessarily scale well.


This misses the point (that the author of OPs post nailed). It doesn't matter that it doesn't scale. It works, and censorship doesn't.

Do you want a (difficult) method that works (personal involvement and direct conversation), or a simple, easy, lazy one (deplatforming/cancel/censorship) that doesn't?


Censorship comes with its own problems, but if your position is that it flat out doesn't work, you'd need a more convincing argument.

Nazi censored. Stalin censored. Xi censors. Seems hard to explain if censorship doesn't work.


>Nazi censored. Stalin censored. Xi censors. Seems hard to explain if censorship doesn't work.

Nazis also killed the speakers. Stalin killed the speakers. Xi kills the speakers.

Citing mass genociders as "censorship works" is hilariously bad evidence of censorship working when terminating the speaker most definitely works.


Sure it worked. Using a nuclear warhead works to solve your ant infestation, too.

We want something that works and that doesn't have the nasty side-effects. Nazi, Stalin, and Xi's tactics aren't the answer we're looking for.


200 people isn't very much. Twitter has 192 million users. Assuming (extremely generously given that twitter is on the Internet and has a userbase that skews younger) that twitter matches America's partisan divide, it probably has around 90 million users.

It seems unlikely that at least a thousand people out of 90 million aren't gullible enough to be swayed by hellbanning.


Show me proof that twitter censorship has converted even ONE racist/nazi and I'll entertain this notion.

"it seeming unlikely" hardly compares to a man with 200 trophies to prove his method works.


Hellbanning has a history of working well for deradicalization of online communities that were a lot worse than twitter is; Jeff Atwood has a good post giving a brief look at the history of it: https://blog.codinghorror.com/suspension-ban-or-hellban/


That's not proof that any one actual person was deradicalized, which was the metric.

Mr. Davis has 200 examples. I'm only asking for one. His method works. The deplatformers' citation of their own platforms only proves that they control their own platforms, not that any extremist view was changed.


That does show that people were deradicalized; read the Metafilter thread linked.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: