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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

It's surely better than the current situation of literal neo-Nazis openly talking on YouTube about “white genocide” and how the “Jewish question” must be “solved”, without Google seemingly so much as batting an eyelid.

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I'd rather have the neo-Nazis spewing their bullshit out in public, where everyone can see how stupid it is. Driving something underground only makes it more attractive in the end - after all, if it was wrong The Man wouldn't need to suppress it, right?

The problem with allowing neo-Nazis to spew their bullshit alongside the Diet Coke and Mentos videos is that it creates a normative appearance: "this isn't being removed, so there is something tolerable about it, so maybe it's not so bad."

> Driving something underground only makes it more attractive

See, I think you're wrong, and that the secret to attraction is visibility. As an online advertising company would know.

But don't the neo-Nazis and ISIS already have visibility? Again, all I think this does is add the allure of the forbidden fruit.

Maybe. It's good to try an experiment to find out what the results are. They can always revert policies.

Arguably, the backlash from prior instances of political suppression is part of why we have the Orange Idiot as POTUS.

Many people experience political suppression nearly everywhere online simply because they do not know how to communicate in a civil and honest manner. The backlash is not due to political suppression by companies, it is due to the basic fact that they are not welcomed in most online communities. Official censorship policies tend to reinforce in them a belief in the conspiratorial nature of such rejection, but it is not the cause of the rejection. Nor is it actual evidence of conspiracy.

You can argue whatever you want as cause. Hypotheses are easy. Evidence is hard.

"spewing their bullshit out in public, where everyone can see how stupid it is"

And IP addresses can be logged :)

They'll just move to another platform. If Google banning such content is good, isn't passing laws to require websites to ban such content better?

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