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Comment by eksemplar | Hacker News Reader

What both sides though? The alt-right isn’t in opposition to anything mainstream, they are anti-democratic and should be treated the same way antifa, farc, isis and others are.

Every time democracy fails to shut down movements like the alt-right, things end badly for democracy itself. The most used throve is stuff like nazism and fascism, but history actually have a lot of better examples.

Because both Napoleon and Caesar effectively ended democracy with applause, unlike Hitler.

I think it’s extremely dangerous to treat anti-democratic forces as equal to democratic ones. I’m a conservative by the way, so it’s not like I’m not conserved about the liberal bias in the tech sector. But the debates we have these days, about forcing platforms to include outright anti-democratic values is crazy.

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The problem is that then you have to decide what's 'anti-democratic'. You won't find 50 opinions that differ from your own. On top of that, it can then be used as justification to censor almost anything you don't like.

Sure, right now you'll think there is a clear criteria. But in 25, 50, or 100 years from now, people could have easily twisted it to mean whatever they disagree with.

I don’t decide what’s anti-democratic though, we have guidelines for that provided by the United Nations. I mean, it’s been seen and done before throughout history, so it’s not exactly hard to spot.

Attacking the free press is one criteria.

Labeling everyone that disagrees with you the slightest as enemies, is another.

I mean, assuming this leak is real, then googles stance on censoring is extremely centrists, letting them appease both sides of the political spectrum. But that’s not what breitbart or the alt-right really wants, they want google to only appease their radical views.

Ironically, it’s a lot easier to get banned from alt-right forums than it is from YouTube. All you have to do, is disagree with whatever dogma they spin, because they aren’t even remotely interested in a democratic discourse.

Of course, looking at history, no one have ever really stopped movements like the alt-right early enough to save their democracy. So America is probably rather doomed.

> Attacking the free press is one criteria.

> Labeling everyone that disagrees with you the slightest as enemies, is another.

You do realise that you're

- attacking the free press by asking for censorship?

- Sort of labelling other people that disagree with you (in this instance: disagree with democracy) as enemies (of democracy)?

That's of course very inconsistent.

But it also assumes that "the current form of democracy is the best we can ever have".

Democracy needs criticism, especially since what we have is a 19th century system that assumes information dispersal and real-time voting is practically is impossible.

Well, yes. But I don’t think censoring the alt-right is problematic if they can’t stay within whatever policies companies set. You’re not denied access to a supermarket either, but if you start intentionally pissing in their floor, then you’d get thrown out.

Of course I come from a region of the world, where people like the alt-right won, and eventually started putting centrists in prison camps.

You seem to be very confident that you can so accurately judge whether someone is "alt-right"(a nebulous label, at best) that you can censor them preemptively. Where does this confidence come from?

Further, does espousing an anti-democratic idea make someone alt-right? How sticky is the label? What if you did it 10 years ago? Especially with how much of our lives we record nowadays, an accusation like this becomes an easy-to-wield cudgel to shut down political opponents. This rapidly leads to a race of gotchas, where we look for anything that lets us cram someone into one of the "bad" labeled boxes(racist, sexist, alt-right).

Lastly, how effective is the censorship you are proscribing? Can you achieve total censorship within the scope of a democracy? Does it actually inhibit the spread of the ideas you loathe, or simply put them out of your sight? What about the radicalization you are causing by censoring these people? You haven't convinced them to stop, you've just muzzled them publicly, but they can still create private clubs and gatherings. What problem have we solved after implementing this censorship?

The free press in Germany seems to be doing ok, even though they aren't allowed to print hate speech.

This. In some ways, we sort of see that with the PC movement itself. Like when people attacked Scott Kelly for quoting Winston Churchill, the OG anti-fascist, who opposed real life fascists, for God's sake: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45789819

Why aren't those criticisms valid? Scott Kelly seems to think they were.

Edit: quoting him to make this clear: I did not mean to offend by quoting Churchill. My apologies I will go and educate myself on his atrocities, racist views which I do not support.... It's a tweet embedded in the same article.

People's view of leaders change over time. In Australia Churchill was seen as an evil colonialist for his role in the Gallipoli debacle until he was rehabilitated during WW2.

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