Study finds Reddit’s ban of its most toxic subreddits worked (2017)
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
As the article mentions, these people did not just disappear or change their mind. They just moved to more obscure places, where they can continue and be evem more motivated, because now they have been censored.
And you might still consider this to be a satisfiable definition for "it worked". Out of sight, out of mind.
Except that, these people are now relegated to an echo chamber far from public discourse where they will only reinforce their views without challenge. An echo chamber that is now suddenly more appealing, because it's forbidden.
Recently, in an episode of the Joe Rogan Podcast with Tim Pool, Jack Dorsey and Vijaya Gadde, Jack admitted that a woman that was part of the Westboro Baptist Church changed her mind only becasue she was allowed to be on Twitter and be exposed to other points of view.
So, from the point of society, I don't think it ever works to pushi extremists to the underground. Sure, Reddit does not have any obligation to give them a place to gather. But still, maybe it should anyway?
EDIT: Reading other comments here, I also got reminded of the fact that, before Hitler got to power, Germany had hate speech laws that explecitly forbid nazi propaganda. Many were sent to jail for that, which only contributed to their determination and their spreading.
So, if you are concerned that being allowed in the public allows them to spread their views, do not be so sure that pushing them away is going to stop them. You might just do them a favor.
What about all of the new people who would have more easily stumbled into those cesspools, but now have to take quite a bit more effort, and go out of their way, to go to other sites?
Sunlight isn't always the best disinfectant. Sometimes the disease requires treating things at a lower level, stopping the roots of the trauma, and not only treating the symptoms. De-platforming is an important and necessary component of fighting hate online.
I feel that the anti-vaccine movement had such a large resurgence because they had very public platforms. So, yeah, I agree with you.
Banning “fat people hate” makes hating fat people seem totally radical, fringe, and thus badass.
But punishment is a multifaceted thing. It serves for protection, but also virtue signaling and creating incentive. There's eye for an eye, too, the taliation principle, and that's what the grand parent comment lamments, I guess.
There are different theories of punishment. Satisfaction from reciprocating pain shouldn't be the goal, at any rate. Getting nevertheless to letting somebody have a taste of their own medicine as a way of irony, is much more difficult, but much more effective than selectively accepting the legitimacy of the method and forcing the taste.
Bullshit is saying "well, we can't possibly get rid of it, so may as well let it stay where ever it shows up."
“Bullshit” is taking the easy way out by mass-automatic-deplatforming instead of addressing the bad thought head-on.
I still disagree though - I think Reddit probably agreed with you for most of its existence, but evidence indicated that rationality and clear arguments weren't winning, and the virality of these ideas was too potent to be overcome by a few people who were willing to wade into the cesspool. So they drained the cesspool.
I agree with you that, if we could be sure that there would always be enough people to argue against racists, and do so calmly and rationally, then we would be better off not censoring racism, and instead letting the debate play out. But I don't think we live in that world.
On what grounds do you base your own sense of "rationality and clear argument" as superior to that of the apparent majority of people that you refer to as "the cesspool"?
In my experience, the majority is "I don't have any interest in arguing." Leaving the cesspool to those few who do want to argue.
If you believe that either (a) arguments against such people less clear and rational than the racists' arguments, or (b) such people are actually in the majority, then I believe we disagree on things so fundamental we can't have a constructive debate about Reddit's policies.
We might not, but denying the possibility only guarantees we move further away from it.
in this case, user/advertiser metrics
It's even darker than that. There is an organized effort to destroy any public forum that is a place of discourse. For the people and organization paying for the bots, troll farms and social media influencers discourse is exactly what they paying to get rid of. Considering that reddit doesn't have any other business model they had to start fighting back.
You've identified an example where being part of the open conversation led to a woman leaving a hate-driven community.
Other comments point to a scenario where it could be harder for people to find these communities online, as they would have to have significant motivation to find them. I've seen "playbooks" for white nationalist groups where they describe a slow ramping up of ideology that gradually indoctrinates people outside the overton window.
The question is, is the outcome more or less hate crimes if this type of hate speech is deplatformed?
You point to examples in Germany where the effect of deplatforming was negative.
Current forms of media, attention and culture are significantly different.
I'm not sure how to go about this research when each platform simply aims to maintain their own private, profit driven goals?
How do you measure it?
The fundamental fallacy you're making is that you're conflating the act of judgement with the act of sentencing. What a fine world it would be if your justice system were forbidden to sentence people under the expectation that the purpose of a trial were simply to convince the accused to never do it again.
It is irrational to declare that some behavior is 'bad', yet forbid anyone from suffering meaningful consequence for engaging in it.
Rational debate is how you decide which ideas are worth keeping. It is not how you kill the ones that aren't. (You've found that it works sometimes, but you should bet actual counter-actions work far more often.)
That's certainly happening these days.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/27/us/poway-synagogue-shooti... https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/04/27/sunnyvale-c...
Personally I usually don't take overly dramatic comments seriously.
Belief in free speech as a principle assumes that good and right arguments will win out every day in an open public forum.
A lot of people aren't going to be willing or able to actually engage with the real logic of an anti-racist argument. Instead, people use heuristics for this sort of work. In my ideal world, the question of "was this on a big site? or some little blog and/or known racist publication?" would serve as a useful heuristic re: what arguments to bother with. This is how newspapers generally settled out. Is it in the paper? If yes, then there are at least some standards. If no, e.g. if it's some vanity publication, then squint a little harder.
These sorts of things have happened every time we've had a big shift in information distribution technology. There's an explosion of ideas with no real markers to differentiate them, and mass chaos for a while as people sort it out. Then eventually people identify the signs of trustworthy info distributors, and it settles back down. If a platform allows racists to flourish, they're not going to remain a place that people can trust. I would like to see Reddit remain a place that has some amount of trust, so I'm happy they banned the really nasty racists.
But reddit is already compartmentalized. Subreddits for fringe ideas are those "plenty of little sites", especially when they are delisted from the front pages.
It's not like democracies last forever but I didn't think I'd be alive to watch the point at which people began to reject it.
This is demonstrably not the case. Just look at the chans.
Conveniently these sites are ignored or handwaved away or are somehow only because of censorship.
That may have been correct 50 years ago, but technological changes since then call it into question.
It used to take a fair bit of effort on the part of information purveyors to get their information out to a wide audience. Generally you couldn't just come up with a bad or wrong argument and get it rapidly spread far and wide.
On the receiving end, it took a fair bit of time or effort to access information. We might regularly watch a scheduled TV news broadcast, read a daily newspaper, maybe also read a weekly news magazine to get a broader or deeper perspective, and also maybe read more specialized magazines for news and information on more specialized topics we were interested in. If we needed to go beyond that on a particular topic, we'd have to go to libraries or bookstores.
This combination of bottlenecks on both the production and consumption end meant that generally by the time bad and wrong arguments could start to get traction past a fringe audience there would have been time to develop good and right arguments to counter them, and that people would see those good and right arguments.
Nowadays, the barriers to widespread dissemination of the bad and wrong arguments are way lower. On the receiving end, instead of getting our information by setting aside time each day to read/watch a small number of high quality, consistent sources, many people get their news as a side effect of social activity. It is much less likely now that when they get a link to that bad and wrong stuff that they will also get a link to the good and right refutation. And remember, because the dissemination barriers are much lower now, they are getting the bad and wrong stuff on multiple topics, so even if someone does send them a refutation on one they might be too busy looking at the sensational bad and wrong stuff from another topic to go back and read the refutation of yesterday's stuff.
I think that most people recognize that it is important to be well informed. 50 years ago it took some work to be well informed, so we had to put some thought and effort into becoming so. Now, it is easy to think that you are getting well informed as a side effect of your other activities.
We weren't smarter back then, or less gullible, but there simply was much less of a grey area between uninformed and informed. Now there is a big grey area and it is easy to end up in it. The "let the good and right win out in open public forums" only works if the people in that forum who think they are informed actually are. If they are in that grey area, all bets are off.
The situation 50 years ago did have some problems, mainly that sometimes a thing that is actually good and right appears initially to be bad and wrong, and those barriers that helped keep bad and wrong things from spreading would also slow down those "really good and right but looks bad and wrong" things, too, so it took longer sometimes to adopt new good things.
We've removed that friction...but we've removed too much of it. You need some friction to slow down a bit so that people have time to evaluate and react.
Racism stems from fear, hate, and deeply embedded cultural tools. You can't "cure" racism through argumentation. Maybe, maybe, you can make people less racist in person -- but on an anonymous forum like Reddit, not a chance.
That's not a product of free speech, it's a product of teaching people how to evaluate thoughts they come across in the wild.
The mechanism I'm proposing is that the current generation has not been exposed to many of the toxic things that reinforced racist beliefs. Slavery, segregated schools, etc. Kids in school are taught why those things were bad and why racism is bad. While not all of society has abandoned racism, there's been enough of a push that the public institutions educating the next generation are making efforts to reduce it.
That's all just observational though. Around here it's not so much racism against black folks but rather against aboriginal folk (and to some extent, middle eastern folks). I hear almost none of that crap from my generation or the younger generations, and still hear horrible amounts of it from older generations. Yes, some people in those generations changed, but it sure seems like the "racism rate" is significantly lower than the mean in the younger generations and significantly higher than the mean in the older generations.
Edit: it's also quite possible that it hasn't gone away in the younger generations either, it's just not considered something that is acceptable to say in polite company.
Edit 2: and thank you very much for making me think more about this!
Don't you see the contradiction here? It can't be both.
Are individual people any less racist than in the past? Who knows? Probably unprovable.
But our perception of the world is not governed by how people are, it is governed by what people do. And every person has a choice to promote, tolerate, or suppress racism. Choosing the latter is what makes the world seem less racist.
Yes they are, because that is exactly what newly-insular racist communities will use to bolster up their ideological positions... Cherry-picked evidence that makes their position look rational.
The idea that no racist is thinking rationally is ridiculous.
To the extent rationality is what got them into their racism, that is exactly the amount that rationality can remove them from racism. By definition.
How has that worked in the past?
This will not end well.
What this ultimately accomplishes is that the public gets to be blissfully ignorant about the blemishes, but these people are operating in the same capacity as before without brushing up to challenges as much
The reason I feels strongly about it is open discussion with racists have led to conversion away from white supremacy that would not have otherwise occurred e.g. Davis - https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinc...
The fear of power of racists operating on a platform like reddit is overblown by virtue that racists seem stronger without it; strongest with echo chambers.
EDIT: since I can't reply to you, yes, by definition, it's seeking it out.
I've seen plenty racists on reddit, they're still around post-censorship.
Putting racists on open platforms stops the second, and if you're so interested in changing their minds, nothing is stopping you from searching them out to do so.
Daryl Davis went I to people's homes and met them in person to befriend and sometimes "convert" them. It wasn't accidental cross pollination. He explicitly reached out.
What if said "on-the-fence" individual visits stormfront? Who's to argue against it there? No one.
> nothing is stopping you from searching them out to do so.
Except there is. Racist forums are walled gardens. They're safe-spaces for white supremacists. They don't invite dissent.
> Daryl Davis went I to people's homes and met them in person to befriend and sometimes "convert" them. It wasn't accidental cross pollination. He explicitly reached out.
In person, correct. If this is to be analogous to the real world, other users on a popular social media platform like reddit are your neighbors. And obscure radical forums are like impenetrable cult compounds. You can reach them out online, when in plain view, but this isn't as easily accomplished in every medium.
More importantly, you're framing racism as an infectious view that could plague just about any innocent bystander. It's more fragile than that, in terms of logical merit (there is none). I think the exposure makes it more vulnerable.
This applies equally to a subreddit. Except now the walled garden has a funnel, since people can accidentally get exposed, but can't see any dissent.
> It's more fragile than that, in terms of logical merit (there is none). I think the exposure makes it more vulnerable.
You're assuming racists will play fair. That's naive. To frame this a different way, I assume that racists will act in their own self interest. If Reddit wasn't useful to them, they wouldn't use it. But here they are (were). Clearly they think it ads value. They've put a lot more time and energy into analyzing their best path forward, and it apparently involved Reddit. Why should we freely give them that ammo.
> What if said "on-the-fence" individual visits stormfront? Who's to argue against it there? No one.
But getting to stormfront is much, much harder than getting to /r/ conspiracy (which has almost a million subs), hanging out for a while, and seeing someone go off about gassing the Jews or the censorship of data on human skull size comparisons, clicking on their profile, and seeing that they also post to /r/sig_heilo_there or greatapes or whatever it is.
And that person was already subscribed to conspiracy, so the ideas that the man is keeping the truth about Jews/affirmative action/the imminent subjugation of white people. It is infectious, despite your disbelief. And then as you are more radicalized, you get invited to a private discord, or to hang out with the cooler people on stormfront. So now this person who, on their own would never have ventured onto stormfront (because who does that) is a member. Radicalization is a process. And if you ever run in to try and stop it, you'll be banned, because they control the subreddit.
Let me rephrase what you're advocating for: allowing white supremacists to freely propagandize will make it easier to prevent the spread of white supremacy. Do you believe that to be true in general (say for extremist religions, or even for nonextremism?)
Like terrorism, so hate.
Those appear contradictory.
Because even on a platform like reddit, these aren't front-page items nor anything that will casually be brought to attention. If you want to share piece of shit ideology, you have to find piece of shit subs, and they're micro communities.
The reason I think the proximity in that instance helps is users are more likely to interact with users from other popular subs. I've seen racists spring up odd places, get downvoted into oblivion, but will engage in argument. In my view it's more important that they engage with the rest of the population.
While it's easy to be a critic and call someone else's view bullshit because you haven't seen evidence, it's not really adding anything to the discussion, it's just being needlessly inflammatory. You could accomplish the same thing by saying something as simple as "The evidence shows it worked for Reddit in isolation, but whether it works globally is unclear. Has anyone seen evidence that it does or doesn't? My gut says it doesn't."
Now when someone goes to analyze and respond they're not starting to argue with someone who dismissed something they may not be familiar with as bullshit right out the gate. It's better to keep an open mind to either possibility under a lack of evidence.
The inchoate pain these latent hate group members feel could be resolved in another way by accurately portraying the source of their problem, and giving them a realistic way of solving it. However, often in our society, we don't provide these things. Therefore, they remain susceptible.
When a hater that tells a powerful narrative gets together with others, this becomes dangerous. The group now validates their beliefs and it becomes self-reinforcing and actionable.
Deplatforming prevents hate groups from getting new recruits by making these stories and groups harder to access. It also is a message to the more marginal members that what they are doing is shunned and they should think hard about what they are doing. Essentially, the idea is prevent these small scale problems from turning into a social movement that would be highly destructive.
Is it a bandaid? Yes. We have to work much harder on our social and economic problems to make sure everyone is included in society and can live a decent life. That would remove much of the impetus for joining hate groups.
Arguments about whether deplatforming has merit should be automatically deplatformed via machine-learning in order to teach everyone a valuable lesson in civics. At least, if I were to create a Hacker News or a Reddit or a Facebook or a Twitter, that would be one of the first things I would build.
Could you think of a reasonably achivable study that would be able to falsify your belief that deplatforming doesn't reduce global hate?
My story is anecdotal, but I can't believe that it's a rare occurrence, because that's basically the mechanism that underpins all fringe organizations based on a shared false worldview. You need people to constantly validate and reinforce that false worldview, or reality will smash that worldview. Barring a subreddit may push a fraction of the active subredditors to another platform if one exists, but the marginally attached subredditors will just fail to follow and the hold that echo chamber had will fade as the echos grow fade to silence, and they won't catch anywhere near as many new people.
1. not deplatforming is based on a belief ("sunlight is the best desinfectant, etc.) that, as far as I can tell, isn't supported by much evidence either, at least as far as it's larger-scale effects.
2. it's possible, for example, that having these ideas out in the open and easily accessible actually increases the effect of them radicalising/convincing people who previously didn't have much of an opinion on or care about these issues. This might outweigh the effect of those already radical being exposed to alternative ideas.
3. building on this, I find that generally the 'better' and less hateful ideas are more nuanced and complex, and thus much harder to convey. Especially in online environments like reddit/twitter/etc.
4. there's the 'bullshit asymmetry principle'. it's much easier to produce bullshit arguments for bad ideas than it is to counter them. it also strikes me as much easier to get ensnared by hateful and/or bad ideas than it is to 'escape' them. A bit like how cults work.
5. access to these ideas via Reddit and the like removes one rather important element: collective shaming and having to accept the consequences of particular ideas. While in theory this is a good thing, in practice it can easily lead people down dark paths in isolation.
Having grown up deeply religious, and having spent a lot of time in all sort of fringe communities, I suspect that the net effect of not deplatforming is negative. Ideas are perhaps kind of like viruses. With the internet and places like Reddit, they can propagate freely without the mediating effects of interpersonal contact and various degrees of ostracism or other consequences. They also have a reach that they never had before.
Despite all that, I'm not arguing that we should do something about it. I don't know, and still lean towards accepting this new reality with all its consequences, or at least making sure we have a better understanding before we 'curb' things. But I'm much less optimistic about this new, internet-enabled state of things than I used to be.
Apologies for all this being a bit of a ramble.
Someone from 1500 would be very much concerned about censoring "heresies", because they'd believe that people are easily swayed and manipulated by evil. I think we know that dumb ideas, are just that, dumb. There's a reason why these types of extreme ideologies, are just that, fringe beliefs. Because the vast majority of people recognize that them for the idiocy that they are.
If we can tradeoff exposing normal people to extreme ideas, and extremists to mainstream thought, that's a great tradeoff. Many, many more of the latter will be convinced than the former.
I’m not disregarding it at all. I’m directly confronting it, and calling it both naïve and insufficient as a strategy for improving society.
Bad actors have weaponized our elevation of “the marketplace of ideas” to an ends rather than a means, and so it’s both necessary and appropriate to recontextualize it, and where it makes sense to call forth.
Unless, of, course, the disease is cancer.
I think expecting the behavior to disappear is an unrealistic goal. Marginalizing it certainly makes it less appealing because it's clear it's not widely socially acceptable.
> Except that, these people are now relegated to an echo chamber far from public discourse where they will only reinforce their views without challenge. An echo chamber that is now suddenly more appealing, because it's forbidden.
Again, this has always existed in society and always will. The less chance of people being exposed to it via a big public outlet, the less chance new people will be intrigued.
The aim isn't to end extremism, it's to make it clear it's not acceptable via the platform.
So, how did the 18th Amendment in the United States, i.e. Prohibition, work out? Surely, the broad public support and commitment to marginalizing alcohol, enough to get a constitutional amendment passed (no small feat), has been successful in making the US a booze-free country today? No?
Marginalization only works if it's something people aren't deeply committed to and tribalism, the root of many of these toxic behaviors, is far too deeply ingrained in human nature for marginalization to work.
Even so, cigarette smoking was similarly marginalized (though not outlawed, making it a better analog) to great effect.
Yes, that’s a good thing IMHO.
Sounds like a thinly veiled version of the Politician's Syllogism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism
An extremist is, by definition, someone going to extreme ends to reach a goal. I don't think that holding an extremist's opinion is directly extreme. Having extremist ideals just makes for a latent extremist. That's radical, not extremist. That's still tendentially bad, anyhow. But so is ignorance, and so someone knowing only one side of an argument is merely ignorant, not necessarily latently radical. Ignorance doesn't need a medium to spread. Quite the opposite, it needs barriers. YMMV though, as bias is such an important topic in learning. It might count as barrier as well, if figuratively speaking.
This is what we want.
When the users moved to other Reddit groups, they did NOT exhibit the same level of hateful behavior. some of this was due to better moderation. This contradicts your view that they simply go away to deeper holes away from moderating influences, and supports your point that moderating influences do provide positive influence.
The other key finding is that "bigotry is easy and those who cherish it are lazy". So, merely removing the cesspool removes a place for them to swim, and they often simply don't bother to go find or create another cesspool. So, overall activity is reduced.
As the article suggests: it's likely they found an off-reddit outlet for the stuff they no longer were able to do on reddit and continued to use reddit for their other interests (well, they left reddit at higher rates, too). That is, if you want to make sure that Twitter's hate speech rules work and make "the world a better place", you also need to look at gab.ai & co at the same time to see whether and how much of the hate speech "moved" and how much simply stopped.
This study confirms that pushing criminals out of one neighborhood "works" - for that one neighborhood. Reddit is such a neighborhood, Twitter is another.
But it DID show that providing cesspools does increase the behavior of swimming in cesspools, AND show that moderation has an effect.
Providing mainstream venues for anti-social behavior increases that behavior and harms society.
Sure, it may still exist at the fringes, but the further it is pushed off into the fringes, the greater the effort needs to be made to engage in the behavior. The dedicated haters will still make the effort, but the vast majority of lazy bigots will just drift along elsewhere, without enhancing & aggravating their bigotry.
Similar to smoking in the US, it hasn't been banned, just strongly discouraged in public, and it is now a fringe behavior.
Yes, that's about the study. The article does suggest it:
Of course, it’s not so simple as all that. Naturally, many of the users who previously spewed racial slurs at CT just moved over to Gab or Voat, where their behavior is proudly fostered.
> The dedicated haters will still make the effort, but the vast majority of lazy bigots will just drift along elsewhere, without enhancing & aggravating their bigotry.
Again, that's what needs to be proven. All we know is that they didn't see it on reddit at the same rate, not that it happened less or that fewer new people engaged in hate speech, or that those engaging in it stopped.
When you make something fringe you invite people to fetishize it. All you do is up the ante. Sure, some normies will stop being racists because there’s no longer a place to be racist. But other guys will fetishize racism and shoot up synagogues.
Is the benefit of subtracting normies from racist movements worth the cost of creating people who fetishize racism??????? HARD FUCKING QUESTION IMO!
I think we’d be better off with a million people who are “kinda anti Semitic but not anti Semitic enough to write books about it” than one Henry Ford.
It isn't only subtracting the normies from the racist movement, it is also preventing the medium-core bigots from 'practicing', honing, and exaggerating their racism.
If we are to attribute a cause to the rash of current racist murders lately, they are clearly NOT from Reddit recently banning two subs, but far more likely from the entire environment being pushed towards more open racism & bigotry from the chair of the POTUS, to a major Faux News source, to rampant online environments like 4Chan, Voat, etc. Far more likely that these enhanced cesspools and the more approving political environment are the cause than merely one source going offline (particularly since they started occurring before they went offline).
There are plenty of people who thought that it wouldn't work to that extent, either. They claimed that allowing a subreddit for toxic topic X at least had the benefit of segregating proponents of X; and that if such subreddits were banned their inhabitants would infect the rest of Reddit. But that didn't happen.
I remember when posts from r/FatPeopleHate would regularly make the front page. Then FPH was banned, and you know what, we didn't see it metastasize elsewhere, we just saw many fewer FPH-style posts, which I'd say is a good thing.
(inb4: "found the Walmart shopper"!)
But what we DID see, for a while at least, was a lot of people sympathetic to that subreddit arguing in any way they could think of that the ban was either inconsistent, not needed, unfair or wouldn't work. But what do you know, by and large that content kind of just went away.
So it wasn't necessarily the ban that got rid of FPH but rather the "Fat Acceptance Movement" losing steam.
I guess your argument for the decline in activity not coming from the ban, but scaling up and down in relation with the prominence of fat acceptance, would have to be that the ban coincided with fat acceptance losing steam around the same time, which I don't think to be the case. (It's also a way of talking that seems to equivocate on whether the behavior was acceptable, since it can be explained as a response to something else, and I think its unacceptability is important enough that it needs to remain clear in any conversation about it.)
I don't have an obvious way of measuring the relationship one way or other. But the face value version of events, which is just that the ban worked, full stop, requires fewer coincidences.
First, it makes it much harder for them to radicalize and recruit new people. There is a lot of circumstantial proof that mere exposure to fringe ideas can convert a lot of people, even folks we wouldn't necessarily consider "borderline". Look at YouTube's autoplay algorithm and various conspiracy theories like Flat Eartherism, or stories we've heard of Facebook moderators needing to get rotated out to avoid radicalization.
Second, in moving to less popular platforms, less dedicated, existing members are lost as they stay on the old platform for other content. Voat is a good example of how these alternative platforms aren't always self-sustainable. If more of the popular platforms took a hardline stance, it scatters the miscreants to the wind, where their numbers dwindle and they hopefully, eventually evaporate.
It's not a complete solution and requires too much cooperation between adversarial corporations, but it's a start.
Reddit already provided these groups with an echo chamber that was public facing, and a platform that exposed them to other points of view. That didn't do anything though, people largely don't have their views changed just because they are around others with different view points.
>An echo chamber that is now suddenly more appealing, because it's forbidden.
If it's out of the public eye, people are less likely to know it exists right? Yes maybe people who do hear about such "secret places of discussion" are likely to be drawn to them, but the number of newcomers who are even exposed to such groups are significantly cut down by simply not being accessible.
That's actually the law today in Germany. The Weimar Republic itself focused its censorship on limiting the distribution on what today we'd consider middlebrow pop-fiction and pornography, but generally excluded matters of politics and religion. It did have laws against anti-semitic speech, but anti-semitism itself as already extremely widespread so it was like a fan blowing against a hurricane.
Anti-semitism was highly popular at those times (e.g. Poland, Russian Empire, US).
Nazi party were also popular in Britain (at that time) and other countries.
Why would Weimar Republic specifically outlaw their nazi propaganda?
Am I missing something, or is that specific paragraph related to only a short period of time?
Most of the popular subreddits have become sterile echo chambers with homogenization of opinion. HN is just as vulnerable to that.
Both Reddit and YouTube are general purpose sites. Very, very few people go on there to discuss the e.g. racist beliefs they already have. But the algorithms on these sites ends up exposing people to extreme views - there are many, many examples out there of people watching an innocuous video on YouTube only to immediately suggested a 9/11 conspiracy video or a barely concealed white supremacist tirade.
If that content were removed from YouTube and Reddit people wouldn't be going underground for it, because they wouldn't be looking for it.
(and as a more general thought, invoking Nazis here isn't all that useful. Just because X had Y effect once in history doesn't mean it will every time. Germany has outlawed Nazis since the end of WW2 and guess what... they haven't taken over again.)
Counter to that, Italy has a provision in its Constitution that forbids the reconstitution of the fascist party and now we have at least two that declare themselves as such (and have a few seats in the parliament), and one that, despite not being explicitly fascist, has more or less similar ideals and methods, has the relative majority of consensus in the country and is governing right now.
EDIT: did I write something false, inflammatory or off topic?
is that a counter point, or just an example of Italy's government being impotent? if it were china, the members of those parties would all be dead already
Nor have they taken over in any other country, regardless of being banned. Because their ideology has already been exposed for the bullshit it is. The ban did nothing.
These kind of bans are not about doing favors or not, they are about maintaining a site that you can live with as a company or private forum owner. It has been like that online on every public forum since the dialup BBS system days.
If on the other they plan to commit crimes, then that's a matter for police and the public prosecutor's office, not for private companies, no matter where those groups go or meet.
The irony of HN having this article on their front page while they engage in the same bullshit behavior is just delicious.
Maybe HN should learn from the site that's over 1,000x bigger than themselves.
Oh, wait, dang and stcb aren't that smart.
On the other hand, having those communities on popular platforms makes them more easily accessible. As the market grows, it makes new audience susceptible to have similar view.
Citation needed.
or demotivated, because they are fewer in number (most stayed on reddit) and have been censured
and the ones who stayed -- now their radicalizing pals are out-of-sight, out-of-mind
There's proof that Reddit is now a happier place. The commenter must prove, using evidence not fear mongering, that the negative effects of deplatforming outweigh the positives.
I think deplatforming is especially good on Reddit. Take subreddits like The_Donald. People who go there are constantly barged with blatantly false information. If The_Donald was banned they would be forced to integrate with the rest of Reddit (exposing them to more true information) OR a smaller portion of them would go to voat, but that smaller portion couldn't be saved anyway.
It ruins the whole point of reddit. The mods are very biased on some subreddits that aren't even based on extreme ideas and they have so many unnecessary rules they can lock any thread they want for any reason just because they don't like it.
Reddit has become a cesspool for discourse. There are a couple of good subreddits but that's because they are based on discussion (e.g /r/casualconversation)not the subject of discussion.
Many subreddit don't want reasonable discourse. They want a safe space full of "yes men" that fall in line with and reinforce their beliefs.
Only marginally.
If you read the paper (http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf), you can see that ~20% of the users of the banned subreddits became inactive vs 10-15% in control communities. The difference for users that deleted their account is of the same magnitude.
The users that stayed had a dramatic drop in hate speech.
Also, people end up believing disinformation that is often repeated. Silencing those opinions probably has a net positive effect on society.
Which might mean that they don't engage in hate speech as much, or that they do the hate speech thing on another platform and follow their normal hobbies on reddit.
If those users found other outlet for hating, they didn't do so by reducing their reddit activity.
The fact is, we don't have a way to track users between platforms.
There's a finite amount of time in a day.
So for 1) they must have been doing something during that time they were off reddit. They could have picked up cooking or moved to a non-hating online platform. If so, that's a win anyway.
For 2), that's possible, they would have to do it by reducing another activity. Given that reddit is designed to eat all your free time, I find it unlikely.
They could have a drop based on the belief that it is being punished. Is there a study on what impact this would have on their beliefs? Does it weaken them, or does it make them believe that others are scared of the truth and thus encourage their beliefs more?
Having them practicing other thoughts will let their brain gradually collect the garbage (unused synapses go weaker and are ultimately pruned over time).
Some people may end up ruminating those thoughts anyway, but I'd expect them to be a minority (the propensity for long-term rumination is linked to mental issues that are somewhat prevalent, but not that much).
Removing the social validation will help most people withdraw from the problematic thoughts.
Sometimes to learn more, sometimes to further convince themselves, very rarely to change their mind.
When the right group of people are waiting to reply to everything with zealotry, it's easy to go from •leaning• toward a viewpoint to full on embracing it and becoming a zealot.
And let's face it, hate is the most effective weapon for this.
But if we slide towards a dystopian future where Big Tech is basically an oligarchy governing important chunks of society without due process and the democratic checks and balances we would expect from a governing body, things look pretty grim.
I have no solution to offer, unfortunately.
EDIT: Despite all the cynicism, I do think we are still on the healthy side of things :)
I do agree, though, that Google and others wield a lot of power by being able to permaban a whole account/person for an alleged incident on just one of their platforms. Where "banned on YouTube" means, for example, that your Android phone no longer works.
Competition for fringe discussion exists today so our society is healthy (thank goodness). If a true monopoly is allowed to form in these platforms, we will have a big problem. Thankfully we have anti-compete laws. Unfortunately it feels like we are flirting with monopolies when vertically integrated companies like Apple and Google have a very large market share (from Android to YouTube, as you mention).
My favourite Sci Fi that deals with that dystopian future is a little-known show called Continuum. The oligarchy begins when governments go bankrupt and get bailed out by corporations in exchange for political power in the form of a "corporate congress". Fantastic show. Still sticks with me.
That's true. That "somewhere" might become TOR because everything else is well regulated. In the end, you can technically also always meet like minded people in your basement to do whatever the government doesn't want you to do in public, so there's always "somewhere" ;)
We're already there and we didn't need to enter a dystopia. All big platforms (Google's YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, you name it) follow the same exact lines on politics and speech.
(btw, funny that the English UK dictionary from Chrome doesn't include the word dystopia ;P)
You know, this is a really interesting observation. Oftentimes in these debates about moderation, people argue that you can't do it because these platforms are already de-facto public platforms. Meanwhile, in this thread's conversation, the main argument seems to be that pushing people off mainstream platforms won't work because they'll enjoy the exact same opportunities at another platform.
That doesn't imply a contradiction from any particular person, as long as they only embrace one argument or the other. But both have been used in defense of Not Moderating Trolls, and both can't be right.
I concede that companies can make it harder. Hard to really stamp it out though.
If we can all agree (not that we should, but if we DID agree) that there are platforms that are de-facto public spaces, and we want to take away their ability to moderate the way they currently do, then let's work to make them actual public utilties/spaces/whatevers, so that the standards they are subjected to are formalized and not pushed and pulled by weird momentary energies of this or that internet controversy.
Or work to decentralize them, again, so that the issue of how moderation happens isn't just attached to this weirdly specific cultural moment where it's hard to figure out the sincerity of the motivations.
Or just reject the whole argument outright.
I agree tech's concentration of power in a few large companies is a big problem. I just don't think it's a significant concern for freedom of speech. Hopefully we'll return to enforcing pro-competition laws vigorously.
If you create your own website are you going to get Facebook-level traffic? No, of course not. But you wouldn't in 1998 either because there just weren't that many people interested in visiting your website. Facebook didn't make them less interested, because they never had that interest to begin with.
If I run a health food store, I don't cry because an ice cream shop opened up across the street. I don't cry when I see how many people walk right past my door to get to the unhealthy treats. I know I'm in a niche market, and I know that ice cream will always be more popular than kale and wheatgrass. The people who go for ice cream aren't going to go for kale and wheatgrass anyway, so I'm not losing customers to the ice cream shop. The ice cream customers are not my customers.
What the ice cream shop did was put more people on the sidewalk. They didn't steal my customers, but if I have a really good value proposition I may be able to steal some of theirs. That unhealthy ice cream shop is a good thing for my business, even if it's a bad thing for overall community health.
Then again, I also worry that no one seems to want to make a neutral platform or service/piece of infrastructure any more, and everything seems to be designed as a pseudo platform/publisher instead.
Would we even create the telephone/email/postatal service infrastructure we use today if it didn't already exist? I suspect the answer is no. I suspect we'd end up with something like Slack or Discord or Facebook Messenger where the corporation can step in and ban people for wrongthink. No one wants to sell a dumb pipe or what not any more.
Did you notice that you just said that civil rights laws prohibiting racial and sexual discrimination are wrong and that the US is an unhealthy society because of them? Perhaps you do believe that, which is fine, but if you don't, then be careful making bold statements with a scope wider than what you're really thinking of. It sounds grand and important to make a general declaration of what's right and wrong, but the reason it sounds grand and important is because it carries so much meaning. If you don't really mean all of it, then it's more honest to stick to the specific concept you do want to say.
Reddit today: effectively bans (quarantines) /r/waterniggas simply because of the subreddit's title. It was quite literally a joke subreddit about being hydrated. Doesn't ban subreddits like /r/hapas.
Edit: The problem with reddit is that it's wildly inconsistent about banning subreddits. Insane subreddits can exist for years, but only will get banned once they start to become popular enough that they start to get noticed.
A fair amount amount of people went from reddit to voat because at the time voat was new, had signups open, and advertised itself on free speech. Note that I DO NOT support the likes of voat- I am describing the event that happened.
edit; changed substantial to fair amount
Luckily, we're collectively beginning to grow past the naïve belief that free speech is a virtue in itself, an ends, and understand it properly as a means, a tool, which we're all obliged to use ethically and responsibly to make our society better.
You are free to not use reddit, or create your own reddit.
There's plenty of material in the philosophical world about freedom of speech in regards to censorship by private parties and other people.
There is no real argument that a company like Reddit must adhere to free speech. No one forces you to use facebook, reddit, or any other website.
I think most people's idea of free speech doesn't align with what you are saying.
Obviously you should be allowed to boot people from your house for being an asshole. And many businesses should probably also have the same right.
But there's also the ambiguities that mean it should be as simple as 'private property overrides everything else'. Some companies are utilities, and can't dictate whether someone can use their service based on personal views (electricity companies, water companies, telephone networks, etc). Sometimes someone's role means they can't be that selective about what they hear, like how a judge found it was unconstitutional for Trump to block people on Twitter. And there are issues about either public vs private property (like for company towns) or instances where a company is so large and has such a huge share of the market (like a monopoly) that you could argue whether they should be able to pick and choose what they like.
It does not mean "I can say what I want and you have to leave me do it".
Free speech is a tool, like democracy and discussion and rhetoric and liberty and communalism and a thousand other things besides, which we should judiciously and precisely in order to make our society better.
Or do you mean to say that isn't censorship?
Free speech is an amoral tool, which can be used to improve or degrade the human condition, when wielded appropriately. It's our job to decide when and how to use it, and not act naïvely and pretend it's a virtue in itself.
Soviet censorship vectors were able to wrap dissenting viewpoints as "counter-revolutionary" or "bourgeois" without regard for the consistency of content to the wrapper.
In the US, most people have always had an understanding that speech should be used responsibly. The early Internet was overstocked with utopian idealists, me included, who thought this new age of instant communication meant that good ideas would quickly triumph over bad. That led to a lot of naive policies.
In practice, that didn't work. We hoped for a great age of dialog and understanding. Instead, we got an era of "don't read the comments", because it turns out the small number awful people are perfectly willing to spew awful talk all day long driving out the reasonable people who have better things to do. Now anybody running a significant platform knows they need to deal with abusers and monsters or they'll end up a cesspool.
The same utopian thinking has often gone with new technologies. Standage's "The Victorian Internet" makes clear that the telegraph was seen with the same rose-colored glasses. It was going to end war! To knit humanity together into a great brotherhood! Spoiler alert: it didn't.
The problem with reddit is that it's wildly inconsistent about banning subreddits. Subreddits like these can exist for years, but only will get banned once they start to become popular enough that they start to get noticed.
It also sounds reasonable to me. At small scales, especially with novices, it's good to let people experiment, find their voices, build the right audience. But once something's of a certain size, it's unlikely to change its character much.
That's not how subreddits work, though, since they require a a name and almost always have mods that shape the content. /r/waterniggas at 300 people is basically the same at 20,000 people. So if the rule is subreddits should not have "nigga" in the title, then all subreddits with that name should be quarantined (or not allow the names to contain that word).
Subreddits don't tend to change topics or "voices" but they can and do worsen in quality. Instead of posts with original concept C being upvoted, posts with content similar to C but not really get upvoted by the more general audience that comes with larger subscribers. I think /r/bonehurtingjuice is a pretty good example. At first it was excellent but now basically any anti-joke (which is different than bone hurting juice jokes) gets upvoted there.
What does this say about the validity of the questionable study linked here that applauds "deplatforming" and only examines a few short-time consequences? Great success, sending more people from reddit to their own hate platform that will grow and exploit synergies among groups of particularly toxic people.
Fox News seems like a rather good analogue of this. Despite promulgating information and opinions considered false and unacceptable by many, they are quite successful both financially and at exerting political influence. Shaming and shunning them and their viewers only hardens their viewership's belief in the truth of what they say.
By shunting the "basket of deplorables" off to Voat/Gab, we might be inadvertently creating the next Fox News.
If Joe Bloke suddenly starts tunneling a lot of crap to 8chan... might be time for the constable to drop by for tea and persuasion.
Isnt that just a more powerful soft censorship tool?
If the net effect is that certain people left Reddit for a platform inviting the worst of Reddit, and then didn't stay there either, that seems like a win.
It just died off since then, since 1. nobody really quits reddit, and 2. the aforementioned events made voat culture, well, not great.
Do you think the group of people you called cesspool will just accept that ? In their perspective by banning them, they are the one being oppressed. Of course they are going to fight back and try to create/move to alternative platform.
> Gas the kikes Race War Now is not an illegal threat. The supreme court has ruled that a threat needs a place and a time to be considered actionable or illegal. example: We're gassing the kikes at the Freemont Synagogue on 5th avenue, Tuesday.
This is the most upvoted comment. We can say things like "it's a matter of perspective", but sometimes things are simply objectively shit.
edit, to those of you who think I'm exaggerating, here is one comment in that thread out of many:
"Fucking faggots...meanwhile Antifa gets run of every liberal city in the country while the nigs murder us daily...and we aren't even allowed to talk about clownworld."
Pretty much any place on the internet that promotes itself solely on being a "free speech zone/place" is trash. Theoretically they should be fine but in practice they just always attract assholes and people who want to say very edgy things. Someone should coin it, "the law of internet free speech zones" or something.
It has nothing to do with agreeing or disagreeing. Proper places of discussion don't have comments like "gas the kikes isn't technically hate speech so we should be allowed to say it here". You can always go ahead and host such a place if you want, but I'll stick to HN, Tildes, and Reddit instead so I can have reasonable discussion.
> Pretty much any place on the internet that promotes itself solely on being a "free speech zone/place" is trash.
Twitter is equally trash and has plenty of Anti-White, Anti-Jew (mostly in Arabic but nobody talks about it) and Anti-Men rhetoric, Violent threats towards Children and people get a free pass because they have a blue checkmark by their name and the "right" politics.
Also the term Hate speech is an ill defined term, which is used when convenient if someone has the wrong politics (e.g. centre-right, libertarian, conservative or religious). The terms is soo badly defined in law that people in the UK are going to prison for posting offensive rap lyrics on facebook.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921
> Proper places of discussion don't have comments like "gas the kikes isn't technically hate speech so we should be allowed to say it here".
Absolute garbage. This is snobbery and nothing more. I would argue that by just siloing people on the internet it is actually making discussion in general more problematic. In the past, we used IRC, AOL chat room and other things with no moderation. If someone was just being rude all the time, people just ended up ignoring them and they left ... I miss the old internet.
Voat is very small luckily, that may be the reason why you're hearing so few of it. If you visit the frontpage, it's full of jewish conspiracies and "gas the jews", as expected.
The owners posted last week a message telling some of their users to stop inciting violence as the Feds were in contact. Given that Voat is ultra-toxic now it's not going to be possible to moderate every piece of content ever posted.
Just read that thread and it's crazy how much it has festered since then. Everyone there just seems so angry all the time, there are zero positive posts on the front page. How do people live their lives so angry all the time?
The groups are:
1. Groups that were kicked off Reddit for hate or questionable sex, went to voat, and got shut down there, too, or are still there but get very little activity.
An example of one that got shut down would be /v/jailbait.
An example of one that just gets very little activity would be /v/coontown. It goes months between posts.
2. Questionable sex groups that are somewhat active. /v/loli is an example.
3. Groups on neutral topics that get regular posts, like /v/technology or /v/funny or /v/science.
4. Hate groups with regular posts. (I assume these exist. I've never actually seen one, because I only go to voat when some disucssion elsewhere points to it, and that has never taken me to an active hate group).
The two kinds of people are:
1. People who came there for the hate groups.
2. People who came there for the sex groups.
The people who came there for the hate groups also post in the neutral groups, so the comments in /v/technology or /v/funny are full of hate stuff. The hate people seem to stay out of the sex groups.
I can't tell if the sex people also post in the neutral groups. My guess is that they probably do not.
The Voat groups for things like science and technology have nothing that sets them apart from the corresponding Reddit groups except the hate comments.
Sex is much easier to compartmentalize than hate. If you like something that most would find unacceptable sexually, there is no reason for that to come up when you participate in, say, a technology or science discussion. You can go to Voat for those sex groups that aren't allowed on Reddit, but stay on Reddit for everything else.
Hate group people, on the other hand, are more likely to let it leak out, and so get banned from neutral topic Reddit groups, and so have to go somewhere like Voat for those topics.
I'm surprised a bit because the mainstream music is filled with the word nigga but also the n word. Isn't it workings against the idea of not using these words?
E.g., as a mild example, terms like "nerd" and "geek" were pejoratives that were adopted and reworked. E.g., Geek Pride: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_Pride_Day
As with most of these slurs, positive in-group use is ok, but negative out-group use is still generally seen as abusive. I might talk about my geeky ways or refer to my fellow geeks. But I'd still bristle at non-geeks using the term in its original pejorative sense.
The N word is of course much more extreme given America's ugly, unresolved history around race, but it's the same rough deal.
I think this is quite dubious. "Nerd" and "geek" or even "freak" were never pejoratives in the way that the other word was. You could sympathetically say of someone, even as an outsider "He's a bit of a nerd/geek". But it would make no sense for one who was sympathetic to say something like "he's a bit of a "-- well, you get the idea. (This is also why I don't even claim or pretend that I'll ever understand this whole "reclamation" deal. I do accept that free speech is a thing and that a social ingroup can do whatever they want amongst themselves, but I still find it somewhat in poor taste, and counterproductive to its goal.)
The first step to understanding the reclamation is understanding just how offensive the n word was and is today. And the culture that surrounded it.
For non-Americans this topic is a difficult issue to get into because it involves unpacking and understanding so much history and culture.
Yes, which supports what I said, contra what GP said. You can't just take such a vile word with such vile connotations attached and "rework" it harmlessly like you could with "geek"-- that's just not how human psychology works, and an IAT or such would easily bear this out. You'd have to wait for the whole semantic field of the original word to become basically forgotten, then you could freely reclaim it.
(There is such a thing as dysphemism shift, but it tends to happen randomly or to be driven by language-internal forces. "Yankee" used to be a (mildly) derogatory term, but it became popular and neutral because there was no sympathetic term for "a U.S. person" in the lexicon - so "Yankee" moved into that space. But even this is a rare phenomenon; you can't just "make this happen".)
Nerd started to be "reclaimed" in the 80s and 90s, and there was a time period were it was still used pejoratively by non-nerds while being used positively by nerds.
"Yankee" by the way still has very strong negative connotations in the south particularly among older people. It's a very good example of a word that is still used by outsiders derogatorily, but insiders don't find it offensive at all.
Your belief that you know way better than marginalized people what their experience is and what is good for them? That has a name.
No, it was the same way, not just the same degree. E.g., a geek was originally the sideshow circus freak who bit heads of chickens and ate live insects. That comparison was not favorable, especially in the 50s and 60s, when conformity was strongly enforced.
I'm guessing you are young enough that you have only experienced the rise of tech. For some flavor of the early days, try Levy's "Hackers": https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003PDMKIY
I disagree...people of all ethnicities can say any word they like whenever they want...there might be social consequences, but there isn't anything inherently wrong with saying a word
With an "er" on the end, it's almost always a racist term.
Either way you spell it, it's pretty much only acceptable for black Americans to say it.
Isn't it somewhat racist?
If you're saying that it's racist because only one race is allowed to say the word:
No, I don't think so. It's not really a racial thing, it's a race and a culture. Not all black Americans say it, not all black Americans agree with it, and not all black Americans can get away with saying it. It's a kinship thing. My wife's female friends can say "you're such a bitch" but no one else would be able to say that to her. My coworkers and friends call me a nerd, but if someone I didn't know called me a nerd I would take it as an insult. They haven't earned that right. It's an offensive word unless there is a kinship developed where I know you're not saying it in a hurtful way.
If you're saying it's deemed racist for non-black Americans to say the word, then yes. Saying it with an "a" would be deemed less racist and more of a very rude faux pax by many. Others may see it as very racist. Also depends on the context it's being said in.
Also the fact people keep writing "the n word", "the word but with an a" feels like communicating with children. Just write nigger or nigga and be done. The sky won't fall. You can't analyze or criticize something you can't name. Especially when forbidden words change every 10 to 15 years because people will just start using other common ones as insults. A simple example would be how "despite", "kings" and "queens" were used to mock black people (not just north-american one) on r/cringeanarchy (which ban must be why this was reposted).
All I was trying to do was to explain to a non-American how Americans view the word. The wrong person saying it to the right person could easily get that speaker killed, that's the power the word has in some communities. You can say it online all you want and you can argue that it doesn't have power, but there are many neighborhoods in America where saying it with an "a" or with an "r" will result in a murder that no witnesses will corroborate.
I see that first hand from Jeff Hoogland, he twitch for a living and his niche is magic the gathering. His channel is very civil and he moderate the heck out of it. His motto is that he's responsible for the discourse so he have to moderate it. He disabled youtube comment for awhile because he doesn't have the time to moderate it. Then later on he enable comment and all the youtube comments were very civil, I believe his twitch rules just transfer over because all his fans know how to behave.
Tangentially-related? I'm pretty sure this crosses the line of being tangentially-related to racism. https://i.redd.it/ua1ukmoi8ls21.jpg
If it were a few idiots, they'd be easy to ban. I've moderated a controversial sub for years and I guarantee you that a few idiots are easy to ban way before they reach the stage in which they're comfortable with posting shit like this. They know that they won't face any consequences.
I don't know who you're trying to fool by claiming this shit isn't common on t_d, but you're not fooling anyone.
To whatever extent there was an actual debate with neutral parties, I think it was likely inflamed by these kinds of actors, and the fact that there's no there there at the end of the day isn't entirely surprising, even in light of significant debate on the question.
If it's so bad and wrong, it shouldn't have a leg to stand on, surely?
There are kernels of truth unaddressed by the champions of so-called-good because they undermine the groupthink. That's the real catalyst for conversion in the rabbit hole funnel. Having a subreddit is just a convenience.
That said, I wanted to point out something that the people saying that this is a win are ignoring with their "fewer recruits" idea: The more you censor someone, the more they're likely to actively proselytize, I think.
I also saw someone saying that censorship could be a tool for the betterment of society and I'm kind of horrified now at this thread so I didn't read any further.
Is something a "toxic" viewpoint when it's holders take action that is harmful? Certainly that's why racism is bad, but what about more controversial opinions? People who spread the belief that abortion is OK are encouraging more people to get abortions, which the pro-life movement equates to murder (and therefore harm). What about meat consumption? Vegans and PETA-types would label this harmful as it involves the death of animals. What about weed? LGBT normalization?
This labeling of speech as being "harmful" is necessarily subjective. What happens when operators of major discussion platforms decide that things besides racism are too "harmful" to permit discussion of? Seeing that limiting the discussion of ideas shapes how a population propagates them (taking this study's claim at face value), do we really want to normalize this sort of censorship? Is it even moral for site operators to manipulate people's perception of reality like this by censoring what they see to shape a population to be politically homogeneous to the operator's views?
I mean, it's kind of like kicking the KKK out of your local YMCA. Sure they go have Klan rallies elsewhere but at least my kids aren't bumping shoulders with them anymore when they're using the water fountain between basketball games.
Like being a computer hacker was (and still to some extent is)? Sorry, no. People like to gather into in-groups and exclusivity makes it more attractive.
Sweeping dirt under the rug doesn't destroy the dirt; you just wind up with a bigger and bigger lump of dirt under the rug.
Short, sweet, memorable and cuts through all the BS and leaves only understanding.
Besides, why should I, if I am a forum administrator or company running forums, force myself to run forums for users with world views that are completely opposed to what I can stand behind with my conscience? By providing them with a forum I support those people and groups. Why should I support people whose views I find disgusting and appalling, and, in addition to that, not helpful for the discussions of the majority of regular users? I cannot find any reason why.
In general, no. The analogy is deeply flawed. You ban people on forums because of their actions, and you delete posts because of their content. That's just social interaction. In contrast to this, the baker made it 100% clear that he singled these customers out because they were gay and not because of their actual behaviour at the baker shop. They behaved well like any other customer. If they had spit on other customers, shouted annoying gay parade songs with megaphones, or incited for violence against straight people, then the baker would have had all rights to kick them out of his shop. Only, they didn't do anything like that.
I hate having to explain this to you, but the golden rule of netiquette is that you should only say online what you would also be willing to say aloud, so that everyone else can hear you, to a bunch of strangers in a bar. It may get heated at times and barkeepers are more or less resilient to abusive customers, but at some point they will kick you out of their place if you don't stop annoying their customers. Moreover, no barkeeper is obliged to host a bunch of Nazis, Stalinists, or pedophiles, and most places will use their house right to expel those toxic groups.
Social networks have the same right and use it in the same way. That is part of their responsibility, which is indeed higher the more users they have, as you put so eloquently. Just like the barkeeper, they have a responsibility to protect their main user base against morons and notorious troublemakers.
On social networks, the other users can block the people they don't like or not enter the offensive group. But being personally offended isn't really why people want banning. If that were the case, they'd be quite happy with optional personal filters. It would be even better because they could tune their own filter to suit their personal tastes. But nobody is calling for that because what they really want is to prevent 3rd parties from being influenced by ideas that they don't agree with. In a bar, you can't just mute somebody who's shouting so that's where the analogy fails.
You've missed the crucial point, namely that not every discrimination against minorities is on a par and not every minority needs to be or should be protected. I've seen this flawed rhetoric used recently by by the "alt right" Nazi movement, who love to turn arguments around because they are essentially cruel and trolling. These are not good arguments, though, and you shouldn't fall for them.
The right answer to these fake arguments is to say "no."
No, ISIS sympathizers, Nazis, Stalinists, or pedophiles do not have a right to be protected as minorities exactly on a par with gay couples, catholics, or divorced mothers with three children. If a minority incites to crimes or violence or does not follow basic principles of civil discourse, then they are not going to be protected and there is no need to be tolerant towards the intolerant.
What the baker did was wrong because gay couples are not a violent hate group. It was wrong, as an action, independently of the baker's personal opinions. Gay couples are de facto not a violent hate group or criminals, and at the same time there are many reasons why they should be protected as a minority. When taking a look at examples like the baker case, you need to also bear in mind that someone can be a racist, antisemite, misogynist, and so on, without knowing that he/she is one. In fact, that's the most common case. You should also take into account that every working democracy has a duty to protect minorities in order to prevent a "dictatorship of the majority." The protection of minorities is a building block of democracy, not a DLC add-on.
> If that were the case, they'd be quite happy with optional personal filters.
You're talking about the private motives of forum participants, but these have no substantial bearing on what these companies and private site owners do. While I'm personally fine with ignore functions and you can already do that on Reddit, it is widely accepted that this is not a general solution, because the filters only work for yourself. That means that the whole world will see the replies by toxic users to your own posts. That means that all forums will look, for the outside observer, as if the worst scum of the earth and all obvious trolls had "won" every argument. Of course, people find this idea unpleasant. I understand that very well, even though I'm personally fine with kill files like on Usenet. The problem is that nobody wants to join such a forum, once a certain threshold is reached, only trolls and extremists will find it appealing. Kill files don't help against this effect, which in the end will destroy your forum.
The primary motive of companies and private forum owners for bans and post removals are thus proper and perfectly normal. Civil discourse has rules and these are enforced everywhere. There is no substantial difference between online and real life discourse in that regard and there shouldn't be one. Forum owners have all right of the world to ban hate groups and toxic users and you still haven't explained why they shouldn't have this right. It's their forums.
> But nobody is calling for that because what they really want is to prevent 3rd parties from being influenced by ideas that they don't agree with.
Everybody wants to do that, including all extremist groups on earth. It would be irrational - or at least, pragmatically incoherent - not to have this desire. But again, I don't think that's the reason why companies ban forums and remove posts. Their main goal is to keep sites usable and pleasant enough for their user base to go there. There are plenty of examples of forums that completely failed, because they didn't moderate heavily, and one of the reasons why HN is so good is the heavy moderation.
Apart from keeping the forums usable for the general target audience, there is another, more mundane reason for bans and post removals, of course. Some of the banned subreddit were questionable under US law and downright illegal under other jurisdictions, and Reddit could have gotten into serious legal trouble in other countries if they didn't ban these. The same holds for companies like Google and Facebook.
For example, displaying Nazi symbols and Nazi propaganda or supporting Nazi or terrorist groups is illegal in Germany, and German authorities can ask for the immediate removal of posts and forums dedicated to such activities. If companies like Reddit, Google, or Facebook wouldn't comply, they could be forced to close down access to their websites in Germany, and they don't want to do that, because Nazis are not their target audience. You may think about these laws whatever you want - they were passed after WW2 under strong influence from the US -, but the reality is that they exist and companies have legal advisers that check for compliance.
> ISIS sympathizers, Nazis, Stalinists, or pedophiles
from
> gay couples, catholics, or divorced mothers with three children
?
Without a general rule, it looks like you're just repeating whatever random confluence of social pressures led to your belief.
You mentioned inciting crime and civil discourse, but not every member of those groups will be doing that. Somebody saying "I like Stalin" isn't inciting any crime or violating any rules of civil discourse, yet you'll want them banned just for their belief. So there's something else you're judging them by that you're not saying. Personally, I think you're judging them according to their group stereotypes. It's particularly evident in your classification of pedophiles. Surely you know that pedophilia is a condition people just have through no fault of their own. Why punish people for their sexuality? I think you're confusing pedophiles with child molesters because you apply the stereotype to all of them.
> there is no need to be tolerant towards the intolerant.
Can you explain how that's not obviously contradictory? You must have two different meanings for the word tolerant. What are they?
Your argument about toxicity ruining forums is disproven by the lasting popularity of Reddit which uses subreddits to allow variety and keep offensive things isolated from general passers by. They are effectively an implementation of the personal filters I was talking about. It's also disproven by the internet as a whole which has both 4chan and Hacker News coexisting without turning the whole world off the internet because it's all toxic.
I'm not talking about breaking the law. That's a separate issue. I would be fine with companies just obeying the law. If I didn't like the law, I'd challenge the law, not the companies for complying with it. Really, they need to provide different filters for different countries, which they do. In some countries, promotion of homosexuality is illegal. You may think about these laws whatever you want, but the reality is that they exist.
> and all obvious trolls had "won" every argument.
Here you've admitted that your real intention is what I suspected. To control the thoughts of other people. You want everyone to conform to your personal political beliefs. You're afraid of free speech because people might be led away from the one correct set of beliefs that you personally have somehow been gifted with (despite growing up in a world with free speech). Don't you see the arrogance of that?
Anyway, my main point is that I think big social media companies have so much power over so many people that they should be required to give greater freedoms to their users than small forums are. Kind of like how anti-trust laws restrict the behavior of big companies but allow small ones more freedom.
I'm not even talking about morals here, this is a fact that holds in every society. There are social norms, including norms that govern discussions. Break the norms and you'll be sanctioned for it.
>> there is no need to be tolerant towards the intolerant.
> Can you explain how that's not obviously contradictory? You must have two different meanings for the word tolerant. What are they?
No, it's one meaning and there is no contradiction. The phrase was coined by Sir Karl Popper.
Tolerance is not an absolute moral principle, it is a normative concept that is only reserved for those people who are tolerant themselves. In that sense, it's quite similar to respect, which also is not deserved unconditionally but needs to be earned first.
If someone wants to beat you up, you do not have to be tolerant towards this person. If someone calls for the destruction of your society (as e.g. Steve Bannon has done) or calls for violence or crimes, then you do not have to be tolerant towards this person. In fact, you should not be tolerant towards such a person. You should be tolerant towards Muslims, because they are 1.8 billion people and vast majority of them is peaceful, but you should not be tolerant towards Muslim terrorists. You should be tolerant towards Christians, but you should not be tolerant towards Christians who are intolerant towards atheists or who call for killing doctors who help with abortions. And so on and so forth. You should get it by now. It's not really complicated and there is certainly no contradiction involved.
> Somebody saying "I like Stalin" isn't inciting any crime or violating any rules of civil discourse, yet you'll want them banned just for their belief.
No, maybe I wasn't clear enough. I mentioned these groups as examples of groups that (usually) call for violence, the destruction of our society, or crimes. I do not want to ban such persons in general. Posters should be banned if they violate the basic laws of civil discourse (be kind, don't troll, don't be a racist, don't call for violence, etc.) or intentionally instigate violence or promote crimes.
What I also said, however, is that the decision of what to ban or not to ban should be left to the forum owners. If I have a forum and don't want Nazis to use it as a platform, I have the right to ban them, just as I have a right to ban motorcycle enthusiasts from my rose gardening forum. Users of private forums aren't entitled to anything.
> Here you've admitted that your real intention is what I suspected. To control the thoughts of other people.
Not at all. As I've stated very clearly, everybody has a certain desire to muffle voices of people who they think are obviously wrong and it would be incoherent not to have this desire. You have that desire, too. However, I've stated clearly that this is not the motivation of companies and private forum owners, and it certainly is not my motivation. As I've said before, I'm fine with kill files. I was trying to lay out the actual reasons to you why companies and forum owners ban forums and remove posts, not laying out some ominous personal motives. See below about my personal attitude.
Your reasons of why forum owners, especially companies, ban forums or remove posts are imaginary and based on your own prejudices. You have presented 0 evidence for this interpretation, which is fairly implausible and obviously coloured by your biases. As I've said, companies like Reddit are primarily concerned with the legal situation and with the practicalities of keeping their forums attractive. They are companies who want to attract the largest number of mainstream users, not some fringe wackos and extremists.
> You want everyone to conform to your personal political beliefs.
False. One of my colleagues is a Social Darwinist and Nazi, and I have no problem discussing with him, because he adheres to the basic rules of civil discourse. He does not insult other people, at least not directly, does not call for violence, and is at least clever enough to not overtly call for genocide, etc. Ironically, another colleague of mine is an ardent and 100% convinced communist and has personally defended Stalin in conversations. Again, no problem on my side. They are both extreme idiots who persistently get every conceivable fact wrong, and they both have unpleasant personalities (which I've always considered a coincidence). They are annoying, but that's about it.
I don't care about other people's political beliefs, as long as they do not endorse violence or threaten it, keep it reasonably polite - I don't care the occasional insult either - and as long as they do not actively work on destroying other people's lives. If they threaten violence or actively work on destroying democracy, or are just intentionally trolling or insulting people, then they should be banned. Their political beliefs are completely irrelevant to this decision. I'd just as readily ban a trolling rose gardener who calls for trampling other people's roses as I'd ban a Stalinist preparing death lists of political opponents.
As I've tried to explain to you (but you refuse to listen), the reasons why someone ought to be banned are not political, the primary goal of such measures is to keep civil discourse possible. If the number of toxic users is too high, this is no longer possible, and these tend to bunch up in questionable forums. This has been proven again and again on every conceivable forum I've been on since the mid 90s. It's not possible run a public pseudonymous forum in a sustainable way without heavy moderation. Apparently, too many trolls and extremists have too much time at hand, possibly because many of them are unemployed.
> Anyway, my main point is that I think big social media companies have so much power over so many people that they should be required to give greater freedoms to their users than small forums are.
You're focusing on the responsibility of companies towards their users and I agree with that, the hurdles for banning should be higher for these than for small forum owners, because they have a greater responsibility. However, companies also have a responsibility to their own staff and to society as a whole. The sad fact is that once pseudonymity is in place, many people forget the rules of basic civil discourse and decency, and at the same time social control mechanisms from face-to-face communication are no longer in place. These need to be replaced by moderation and, if necessary, by banning, or else the quality of the conversations deteriorates drastically and quickly.
I know people who measure the quality of online arguments and it turns out to be far worse than anything you encounter in face-to-face communication. The evidence is damning and quite shocking. Most people do not even argue online, they mostly just voice their opinions and insult others. Take that into account, too. Companies have a responsibility to improve the quality of discourse. (This also means fighting clickbait, viral ad campaigns, fake news etc.)
> If a minority calls for violence, [or ...], then the general duty to protect minorities need no longer apply to this minority.
That's quite different. You should have just said that in the first place. Banning people for calling for violence/etc is completely different from banning them for their beliefs or sexuality which is what your first statement said. I still don't agree with it though.
> No, it's one meaning and there is no contradiction. The phrase was coined by Sir Karl Popper.
I'm sure you know my confusion, but I'll say it more clearly. If you're intolerant of the intolerant, then you are intolerant yourself, so according to the rule, nobody else needs to be tolerant to you. From your examples, it looks like you do have two meanings of the word "intolerant", contrary to your claim. There's intolerance of tolerant people and there's intolerance of intolerant people. The first is not allowed and the second is. So perhaps you should have said "There is no need to be tolerant towards the intolerant of the tolerant.".
> Posters should be banned if they violate the basic laws of civil discourse (be kind, don't troll, don't be a racist, don't call for violence, etc.) or intentionally instigate violence or promote crimes.
This is OK for a rule to maintain a stable society, but it's a society which can't change if it's applied everywhere. For example, if the society didn't already have gay rights then it wouldn't gain them because nobody would be able to talk positively about it. That would be promoting crimes. That's how it is in Saudi Arabia - you're not allowed to promote homosexuality and your rule would entrench that cultural norm. Another problem is the definitions of racism, trolling and kindness are subjective so they would end up simply being whatever arbitrary cultural norms the society already had. Your idea seems to be simply "if it's my forum, I can do what I want", but that misses my entire point about the scale of the influence that Facebook/Twitter/etc have on the world. I don't think Mark Zuckerburg should just be allowed to delete all criticism of the Republican party from Facebook, for instance. You think he should because his forum, his rules.
> If someone calls for the destruction of your society
That's incredibly subjective. I don't know what example you're thinking of with Steve Bannon, but where do all these examples fit? It sounds like you want to ban calls for all of them! "Build a motorway through that suburb" "Texas should succeed from the US" "Alcohol should be allowed" (would destroy an alcohol free devout Islamic society) "Open borders" (would destroy a society by reducing the shared cultural values) "No immigrants" (would destroy society adapted to ongoing immigration) "Invade Iraq and remove the government" (destroyed a society) "Wipe out ISIS" (destroyed the society of ISIS) "Imprison people for possessing cannabis" (destroyed black society in America) "Ban people who call for destruction of your society" (would destroy their online society) Nearly any grand social change would destroy a society in some way. How do you judge what's allowed and what's not? That's too big a question to just make a blanket global rule for on all the big social media sites.
I think there's important value in public, anonymous, social-norm breaking discussion. It allows the status quo to be challenged without the person being subject to personal real world retaliation. Trolls of the type that say knowingly false things to anger people and then laugh at them have value because knowledge of their existence helps people to stay reasonable and not succumb to expressing blind anger at opinions they don't like. Instead, you're encouraged to respond intelligently and honestly knowing that at any point the troll might say "Haha, just kidding, I don't really believe that but now you've shown that you can't defend your belief and are irrational yourself!" I've learnt quite a lot of things by arguing intelligently with trolls. Not things they told me, but things I researched myself in an attempt to convince them. A clear example of this type of troll is a flat Earther. Do you intolerantly dismiss him as a troll or improve yourself by convincing yourself the Earth isn't flat by some means other than appeal to authority or popularity? I think those are the reasons most people believe the Earth isn't flat and are the same reasons most people used to believe God created the Earth. So they're not very good justifications for a belief.
> If I have a forum and don't want Nazis to use it as a platform, I have the right to ban them, just as I have a right to ban motorcycle enthusiasts from my rose gardening forum. Users of private forums aren't entitled to anything.
I agree but I've already explained that "I think big social media companies have so much power over so many people that they should be required to give greater freedoms to their users than small forums are."
Your rose gardening forum is a "small forum".
"Thousands of communities, endless conversation, authentic human connection." Would that mission statement be more true for Reddit, Tumblr, Image boards, IRC channels, random internet forums? and the conversation is boring, its feels just like tech Twitter where everyone has to make sure they thoroughly vet their posts for the sake of their future and avoid getting slam dunked on. At least it's usually up and down arrows and ban hammers instead of verbal assault.
Please convince your communities to abandon ship to self hosted, more intimate communication platforms.
I don't agree, a lot of people seemed to think the Streisand effect proved that you can't control speech / content on the internet once upon a time.
The hardcore haters, trolls and extremists will find other platforms, but the majority of toxic users are passive readers, or occasional commenters who randomly stumble upon subreddits, and aren't going to dedicate themselves to another platform.
Still, I do agree with banning most of those subreddits in defense of people who might get distressed and deeply offended.
I can assure you plenty of people "live through such anger and hate on a daily basis". The Diet Coke version of this is Fox News, where on their hard-news shows they literally hard-cut to commercial when, after a shooting at a synagogue guests so much as mention that Trump et al. encourage racism and anti-semitism. It is systemic and systematic and the way this stuff poisons the brains of the people who are soaked in it is very, very real. We underestimate it at our peril--because the full-on, undiluted thing is a hell of a lot more powerful a drug.
My point toxic != someone that I disagree, your are generalizing.
For example, in the game Overwatch, "toxic" got mostly used as "this person does not play with the characters currently recognized as the most optimal". Just playing the game differently than the pros/current metagame was literally considered toxic by a non-negligible amount of people.
When someone says "ban this person for being toxic", one has no idea what they actually mean. To some people, even respectful trash talk is "toxic". By catering to people calling things "toxic", one encourages witch hunts by people.
Your own post is an example of toxic <posts,comments,behavior> not having a standard accepted definition: "For me toxic comments are comments that ...".
Say the word online, troll it has a well known definition, I don't care if you or that dude there is using it wrong, the definition is clear and the majority of humans are using it right.
Second if a community decides that behavior X is not allowed then that community will ban X and fck your freedom of speech or whatever , on the community forum,sub-reddits, IRC the community rules apply, you don't like it don't join the forum,sub-reddit
A normal word with an accepted definition doesn't get randomly abused like this.
No, within games and on twitter "toxic" is used in a variety of ways by a variety of people. I used one somewhat common example but not everybody agreed on that, because they had different arbitrary definitions of what being toxic is.
It has no standard meaning anymore. What's toxic to me isn't toxic to a random person on reddit or on twitter, and that's what the problem is. I'm not discussing "trolling".
Can you give an example because you make no sense or you are stating something obvious, yeah communities do not agree with toxic things because they are bad.
The toxic meaning is clear in the context of each community, if you don't agree then don't join, if you want to join follow the rules, if you just want to join and not follow the rules and you want to create harm then you are toxic.
I think there's some room for common sense as to what communities should be given a platform and which shouldn't, for example I don't tihnk /r/coontown should be given a platform in western society which is overwhelmingly anti-racist. But the moment you start banning communities based on criteria that go beyond basic common sense of your society, especially of you do so based on vague and ill-defined rules, you're no longer being a neutral platform. If Reddit wants to be a community as such that's fine, but from my perspective that's explicitly not their branding, and it doesn't seem to be the opinon of Reddit users as agood whole either.
Not the full reddit platform, it is a private thing and a business, if keeping toxic sub-reddits on would make them money and good PR then they would keep them , it was a business decision and if it is legal then it is nothing you can do then move your community elsewhere.
I also don't like when business ban perfectly legal things like adult content but what can you do? Make a law forcing business and private people host things that they don't want, if you had a forum and someone would spam it with disgusting images don't you want the freedom to remove that? Reddit is not a monopoly, we have forums and they even work better for some content type
To pick an example that won't upset any people (ok, not many people), if someone shows up in Common Lisp threads on HN with the sort of chauvinism that destroyed comp.lang.lisp, that's toxic and I'm going to moderate even if I share their views about Lisp. This is a real example btw. I found https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9813527, but there have been a bunch of cases.
I disagree with white supremacists, anti-vaxxers, and people who defend sex offenders.
I also disagree with think that JSON is more readable than YAML, that C++ is a good language to teach beginners, and that Apache is more user-friendly than nginx.
Only one of these groups is "toxic" to me. But just "people I disagree with" is not an accurate representation as to why I find them toxic.
i.e. They cause actual harm to the general public.
To begin with, "causing harm" is still essentialyl subjective. An anti-vaxxer wouldn't think they're "causing harm" at all. You're still basing yourself on whether or not you agree with someone or not.
It's not about whether you think you're causing harm... It's about whether you objectively are.
Anti-vaxxers have led to the resurgence of diseases once thought to be extinct.
White supremacists carry out acts of terrorism/violence against people of color, and lobby against laws that would improve the quality of life for minority groups (sometimes, they are actually the elected officials voting on these laws). And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
People who defend sex offenders let alleged rapists get elected to the highest legal office in the land just because of party affiliation.
That is in no way comparable to using Apache over nginx.
Not my personal view but I will point out that from the point of view of a vegan or PETA, raising animals and slaughtering them for meat and other animal products is causing harm. And you cannot objectively deny that the deaths and incidental suffering of those animals is not harm. Are they justified in considering you (assuming you consume animal products) toxic and immoral?
Your heuristic is not meaningful.
Yeah an anti-vaxxer won't think they're "causing harm", but they are. They're the reason we've had a major resurgence in measles cases for the first time in 20 years.
The article, GaTech, and HN seem to be skirting around that issue.
Also, Chinese efforts to fight freedom of speech and punish religious people worked very effectively to reduce criticism of the government and prevent people from attending churches/mosques.
Interestingly, the first city we tried didn't upvote or downvote very often but the posts that disagreed with the view of the thread quickly, within a day or two, found their posts banned or shadow banned--that is, their posts appeared to us as going through but, in reality, did not appear to anyone else.
Some of the city subs, where the person slightly disagreed with the thread but mostly said they didn't understand the points, always found their posts either listed at the bottom, were downvoted, or got themselves banned but it took longer--perhaps a week or two.
No person agreeing with the thread was downvoted or ever banned which is to be expected. However, the whole point of our doing this was to prove our expectation that reddit is a biased culture that only lets those in who will agree with the crowd and won't let opposing views in. At least in the /r/city threads we chose but we noticed the same behavior in many technical subs, too.
I wish we kept the data but none of us visit or use reddit in any way, for these reasons and a few others, and we only scribbled the notes on paper somewhere.
Bans from a specific subreddit are instituted by the mods of the subreddit. I can easily picture the mods wanting a sub to be run in a certain way, and if you run afoul of them, you are out.
Account suspensions from reddit and shadowbans can only be done by reddit admins. Why would they even care about whatever politics are happening in some tiny sub?
Thus my point. Except the comment is not how they are run but that opinions expressed that don't tow the line are cut from the tree.
From the paper:
> Hate speech and harassment are contentious topics, lacking clear definitions. As discussed above, the European Court of Human Rights notes that “no universally accepted definition of the term ‘hate speech’ exists” [48]. They adopt a definition including “comments which are necessarily directed against a person or particular group of people”, focusing on race, religion, “aggressive nationalism and ethnocentrism”, and homophobic speech [48].
> This definition provides a useful starting point, but it is difficult to operationalize at scale. We therefore take a usage-based approach: given that Reddit has banned the r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown forums, we focus on textual content that is distinctively characteristic of these forums. Using an automated keyword identification technique, we build lexicons of keywords for r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown, which makes it possible to track whether the words in these lexicons become more common in other forums after the ban. Next, we manually inspect the automatically generated lexicons, and identify a subset of terms that are especially oriented towards hate speech. These manually refined lexicons are sparser, but offer higher precision.
The Tldr here is that they defined hate speech as "the subset of terms heavily used in these subreddits, manually filtered by the authors' subjective (and opaque) assessment of hatefulness". My beef actually isn't with the subjectivity of the latter part: I think the reliance on the ill-defined concept of hate speech does a lot more harm than good, but I acknowledge that plenty of people think it's valuable, and that's a non-central hill to die on here.
The real issue with the study is that starting your definition of hate speech with "the lexicon of banned subs" is a fatal confounder:
Many subreddits, particularly free-flowing ideological echo chambers, end up with distinctive lexicons: specific phrases, terms, and in-jokes that people bring up to solidify feelings of community. This isn't a novel insight, since it's how most communities (and indeed relationships) work. the phenomenon is exacerbated for ideological echo chambers, and not just the ones in the right which are more likely to align with people's definition of hate speech: you can find the exact same phenomenon on exho chambers like LateStageCapitalism or ChoosingBeggars, and a milder version on most subs that are less general-interest than eg r/movies.
The study's conclusions essentially boils down to: "if you ban a sub, the distinctive lexicon of that sub becomes less common".....duh? It provides very little signal about the way the amount of hate speech evolves, as someone from fatpeoplehate could easily be spewing the same vile content elsewhere, and just use the term "hambeast" less in favor of a more broadly-used slur like "pig". This isn't a possibility that the paper even attempts to address, and it's conclusions in light of this fatal flaw are downright dishonest.
It's depressing how often people cite this study uncritically. As always, _read the papers behind articles before you cite or share believe them_, particularly when they're reliant on undefined, impossible to measure definitions like "hate speech". If authors at "papers of record" like the NYT are regularly too dumb or dishonest to accurately describes papers' conclusions (or at least describe their limitations), a rag like TechCrunch is DEFINITELY not something you should take at face value.
they shoved these toxic groups elsewhere. they didn't go away.
The move has therefore managed to reduce the exposure that non-active participants have to toxic behaviour, and the normalization of said behaviour as something acceptable/tolerated.
When various less-desirable groups existed on reddit, it was easy to monitor and gauge their size and their beliefs. It was possible to engage with them on some levels. Now they are scattered across various difficult to observe channels and are fully enclosed in an echo chamber that amplifies their beliefs that much more.
The early days of large social platforms like Reddit was the only time in the last several hundred years when it was possible to get a reasonable estimate of what segment of the population held what beliefs, including the less popular ones. Being able to get an objective view of that distribution was the first step in qualifying and addressing the underlying issues.
Instead we are sweeping those demographics under the rug again, and destroying the ability to study and interact with them.
We have a lot of evidence that marginalising sufficiently large groups leads to tremendous backlash when they reach critical mass, e.g. almost every revolution in history. I think we can agree that doing exactly that which failed every time before is not a productive avenue.
> having hateful views
Let's not conflate hateful views with 'toxic' views. The term toxic refers to any unpopular view. In addition to hate speech, this includes various sexual preferences, political views, anti-science movements, mens rights groups, etc.
Is this a terminological distinction you just made up? In the usage I'm familiar neither "hateful" nor "toxic" is a term of art.
Not sure how the distinction between 'hateful' and 'toxic' could possibly be contentious.
Harder to track also means harder to find. Sounds great to me. Let's make sure anyone who worms their way into those dark places knows without doubt that they're detestable, that civil society stands united against them. Maybe with some time, the boredom of the next generation can be directed to less evil ends.
Seems like a lot of comments here don’t want to do anything because it won’t completely eliminate the idea.
I don’t expect these ideas will ever be eradicated but my issue has always been that these platforms, especially Twitter and Reddit and especially YouTube, present these “underground” ideas alongside “mainstream” ideas and amplify it and suggest it to people that otherwise would have never stumbled upon it. And they present to the user as content of equal quality to ideas that are actually based in science and real research, not manipulation and cherry picked data.
The internet has plenty of space for everyone, but we don’t need to raise bad ideas to the same table as good ones. Just as we shouldn’t be covering “intelligent design” alongside evolution to our kids as an equal alternative.
The nirvana fallacy seems like a very popular defense for gatekeeping changes to something.
>we don’t need to raise bad ideas to the same table as good ones. Just as we shouldn’t be covering “intelligent design” alongside evolution to our kids as an equal alternative.
If you don't find it surprising that people can be influenced by their social environment (spoiler: you shouldn't), this seems like an unavoidable conclusion.
The "marketplace of ideas" is an idea that puts a little too much faith in rationality. It seems as dysfunctional as other markets in that a lot of people make irrational decisions, which have consequences, without caring about (or noticing) the externalities.
Reddit has never been as hateful as it is today. Take a look at /r/politics sometime. Do you see love?
People jump down your throat if you dare disagree with the hive mind. Those expressing the most popular opinions get to bully the minority. Fighting back will get you banned for incivility.
The censorship has also had a chilling effect on creativity. People create garbage content afraid to publish anything controversial. It’s becoming as boring to read as Facebook.
Second- no of course this isnt effective. Its effective at removing people from the platform. But it is not decreasing "hate speech" (which is nonsense newspeak anyway) its just pushing it out of the mainstream. And for those of you making the argument that it is reducing peoples exposure to hate speech which stops its proliferation... Nonsense. In a free society everyone gets to dicide what they do and don't believe. You cannot control peoples thoughts by reducing their exposure to the bad thoughts.
Good people will not be convinced by bad arguments. Bad people will be bad either way.
I hate this so much and reddit is not NEARLY theplace it used to be. Now it is a liberal echo chamber which is all too happy to collectively shout down any divergent thinking. It was alwaysthat way to an extent, but it's so bad now that I finally had to delete my 6 year old account.
This is already the case in the big subreddits but there are still islands of freedom here and there.
Actually, yes, you can, quite literally. Falsehoods repeated ad nauseam are convincing in the long run (do you remember the second Irak war and the WMD hoax propagated by the government? Half the US still believes that one).
In a meeting, a single person making the same argument three times is almost as convincing as three people making it once.
Etc...
We're not as free as you imagine.
I think the comparison to a law forcing the homeless out of your neighborhood is apt. It works, but you must recognize that you are using power to harm people you don't like, not just improving the world for everyone. Like police power, it sometimes does improve the world for everyone and sometimes it grows to do more harm than good. In this case the result is good, but the fact that everyone just thinks "I like the result so censorship powers are good" is a step down a slippery slope.