Hacker News Reader

Comment by spaginal | Hacker News Reader

Are you of the belief that hatred and radicalization doesn’t exist in environments that lack free speech?

Lot’s of places on this planet have hyper radicalized portions of their populations that commit aggregious acts of violence, and they lack free speech.

Yet free speech is being used as the red herring to blame.

Unequivocally, your assessment of these forums causing the radicalization is wrong. Plain wrong. These people exist in any environment, they go into the shadows, they continue to lash out, and removing and restricting rights for every person DOES NOT STOP THIS BEHAVIOR.

View on HN

This isn't a free speech issue. We have free speech in most parts of our country without radicalization. This is an issue of a specific environment that actively celebrates hatred and awful behavior. "Free Speech" is a red herring. Just because it's legal to say this stuff doesn't make it okay to say it, and it's society's job to stamp out this kind of thing.

Something relevant here is that I believe that there is a significant amount of illegal speech on 8chan (or also twitter for that matter). Moving the discourse over to better enforcing current laws looks like an underestimated approach.

Clearly it is not illegal speech.

Regardless of that, is your solution to a decades old problem that pre dated the internet is to ban online forums that don’t tow approved narratives?

I think you will be incredibly disappointed in the results of your solution.

There is illegal speech on many platforms. Twitter is used for doxing for example.

I do not like companies being the arbiters of good, but in this case (as far as CF is concerned [1]) I believe they did no wrong.

They clearly state that they should not be in the business of policing legal content they host, but also work hard to make sure they are not hosting illegal content. This way is better than a twitter-like approach where you only pay attention to high profile situations.

(In many senses twitter is doing a good job, but in other senses they (and their employees) have a strong political bias that bubbles up to how they enforce policies)

[1] https://new.blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8cha...

Chicken and egg. Do these forums create the behavior or just create the outlet?

I think we have a fundamental issue with men and how they are treated from a young age in our society, and it has nothing to do with the chans.

You can look at the symptoms or look at the underlying pathology that creates the symptoms.

> removing and restricting rights for every person DOES NOT STOP THIS BEHAVIOR.

DUI laws don't stop DUI related accidents, but having and enforcing DUI laws decrease DUI related accidents. And while you can't prevent anything 100% of the time, you can actively work toward reducing the chances of something bad happening.

And I'm sure permanently banning everyone who ever gets a DUI from driving would also decrease DUIs, but there's an important line to draw with how we enforce those.

We should abolish DUI Laws,

If our ultimate goals are to reduce driver impairment and maximize highway safety, we should be punishing reckless driving. It shouldn't matter if it's caused by alcohol, sleep deprivation, prescription medication, text messaging, or road rage. If lawmakers want to stick it to dangerous drivers who threaten everyone else on the road, they can dial up the civil and criminal liability for reckless driving, especially in cases that result in injury or property damage.

Doing away with the specific charge of drunk driving sounds radical at first blush, but it would put the focus back on impairment, where it belongs. It might repair some of the civil-liberties damage done by the invasive powers the government says it needs to catch and convict drunk drivers. If the offense were reckless driving rather than drunk driving, for example, repeated swerving over the median line would be enough to justify the charge. There would be no need for a cop to jam a needle in your arm alongside a busy highway.

https://reason.com/2010/10/11/abolish-drunk-driving-laws-2/

That is the equivalence of saying murder laws prevent or reduce murder, when here we are discussing mass murder events.

There is an underlying issue in our society that creates this lashing out behavior, and hiding it under the precept of preventing radicalization instead of engaging it will not stop the behavior.

We are all adults here. I have children, as many of you do. When your children exhibit a bad behavior, do you ban it or engage it and fix it?

I can tell my children to stop doing something until I’m blue in the face. I can BAN the action from my home, but until I engage with them it’s meaningless and only serves to make me feel good while they continue said things behind my back.

My point is, let’s look at the deeper issues instead of the emotional knee jerk tripe of ban guns, ban speech, blame racism. We have a problem that requires more rational behavior and level heads.

Now apply that logic to the war on drugs. Tell us how the war on drugs has actually helped society and how similarly banning 'hate speech' will result in a net decrease in the damage these ideologies cause.

They may already exist, but that doesn't mean we should amplify their voices and give them the ability to recruit more to their cause and ideology.

Now, that's not to say disruptions of communication systems (e.g. censorship) is the right answer. But existence doesn't mean we shrug our shoulders and do nothing. At the very least you can stop encouraging and normalizing them.

Don't shout please.

Nasty people do exist in any environment, but in just the same way that network effects can enormously magnify things like charitable fundraising or the production of cat memes, they can also amplify the production of terrorism or other undesirable activities. Damaging social infrastructure which allows that is an effective way to impede recruitment and organization.

Ban free association then if you are worried about the wrong ideas being propogated to people. Build the police state and massive bureacracy that can enforce this at that the detriment to us all, or start trying to engage with these people and solve the fundamental problem.

If you think 8chan and 4chan haven't made it uniquely easy for groups like this to spread their message, you're being deliberately naïve. It's not about eradicating the behavior entirely, because yes, that's not truly possible. It's about making it more difficult for people to be recruited and radicalized. Just because you have the right to not go to jail for being racist doesn't mean you have the right to spread those views anywhere and everywhere, and when it has a proven link to encouraging violent behavior it crosses the line IMO.

If it was an ISIS board we wouldn't even be having this conversation, it would already be offline.

It is funny that you say that since 8chan actually had an ISIS-themed board.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com