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Comment by ganeshkrishnan | Hacker News Reader

The paradox of tolerance is that we must always be intolerant of the intolerant.

You are always FOR free speech until the speech starts hurting you. ie would you be tolerant of isis posting on FB?

Yes, so long as they aren't breaking the incitement to violence clause.

The problem is, by being intolerant (even of the intolerant), you're intolerant. So if the "paradox of tolerance" is accurate, then we must not tolerate you.

"But", you say, "they were intolerant first, so they are the ones who should not be tolerated!" From your perspective, sure. Maybe not from theirs, though. That gets you to a cycle of each side being sure that the other is intolerant, and therefore that their own intolerance is justified. Maybe this "paradox of tolerance" isn't the right way forward, even in the face of intolerance by others. You should be better than them, not imitate them.

Worse, if each side can think that the other side started it, well, what if the other side is right? What if you actually are the problem? Using the "paradox of tolerance" as your justification is a handy way to justify your own intolerance, and never have to examine yourself.

Neo-nazis and their ilk tend to be pretty explicit about wanting to kill specific groups of people as part of their ideology, something which your hypothesis seems to overlook.

This alleged "paradox" is just a convenient sledgehammer with which those in power can hit the powerless over the head to keep them quiet.

No, it’s a solution to the problem that if you are tolerant of everything someone will eventually whack you with a sledgehammer. To avoid that you don’t tolerate those who are violently intolerant, which in the US takes the form of the “Imminent lawless action” doctrine.

That, actually, has nothing to do with that BS "paradox" and well predates it. Indeed, you can't do illegal things, and inflicting violence on others is generally illegal. What the "paradox" is used for is to silence those with inconvenient opinions -- if you've followed discussions of the Damore affair, "paradox" has been trotted out as justification for "punching him in the face" multiple times. But on the other hand, to use the simplest example, US is quite tolerant of speech (in the 1st amendment sense) and hasn't turned into communist or other dictatorship. USSR, or China, or Nazi Germany on the other hand did not tolerate any "intolerance" -- that did not turn out too well.

Indeed, you can't do illegal things, and inflicting violence on others is generally illegal.

If someone is consistently threatening violence at some point you need to make the determination about how to deal with that. You can of course do nothing about it but if the person eventually goes ahead and commits violence you now have a bunch of injured or dead people, which seems a worse ill to me than deplatforming.

You think deplatforming is going to stop him from killing people? It might make it more likely - he may convince himself that the deplatforming is part of the great conspiracy against normal people, and he has to strike a blow against it. (On the other hand, it makes it harder for him to convince others to join him.)

Don't deplatform him. Investigate him. Get a warrant and find out who's listening to him. Find out what's going on in their private communications - are they making actual plans, or are they just talking?

Deplatforming is about the laziest and least useful possible response. As Fins said, deal with the violence (including plans to commit it).

Deplatforming and investigation aren't mutually exclusive, not sure why you'd think so.

If someone is threatening to commit violence, there are already perfectly effective legal ways of dealing with it. If anything, if you do deplatform them , noticing that speech becomes significantly harder, while they become more radicalized (and if Zuckerberg did not exist, anti-semites would have had to invent him; but he does exist).

To go back to the original article, though, it is interesting that they are banning white nationalist content. Does it mean that any other nationalist content is just fine. And can I start an Even[0] separatist movement on FB, calling for eradication of the whitey? We'll start with Russians, of course, but after them we're coming for you! /s

If I didn't have better things to do, a conspiracy theory of FB (they did elect Trump, as everybody clearly knows) being in cahoots with Stormfront and specifically calling out whites to stir resentment almost writes itself here.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evens

Are you advocating for Facebook being legally barred from banning any content on their platform that isn't explicitly illegal? That's the only alternative I can think of.

Actually, I am for Facebook having the right to ban anything and anyone from their platform. But that does not mean that doing so would necessarily be a good, or right, or moral thing to do.

You only need to be intolerant of people whacking others with sledgehammers to avoid that issue. There's no problem with tolerating speech in your example. In general, the problem with anybody who is "violently intolerant" is the "violently" part. So when speech is a direct call to commission of a crime, or a conversation in conspiracy to commit a crime, we do not treat it as protected - but it's not because of violence of the speech itself.

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