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Comment by heartbeats | Hacker News Reader

But they already are. The crazy screamer on the street corner causes an actual harm to you. To avoid 8chan is trivial; just don't go there.

That people get radicalized going there seems like a poor argument. If I understand you correctly, the principle is the following:

1. Someone holds acceptable views.

2. They visit 8chan.

3. They now hold abhorrent views.

Why should 8chan be blamed for this, or rather, what did they do wrong here? Don't you agree that people have the right to hold opinions without interference, and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers?

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Radicalization is not about opinions, it is about convincing the radicalized to undertake acts of violence and threats thereof for a political purpose. You get, yeah, that these are also places where these little shitheads gather and decide who to brigade (the aforementioned "oh, hmm, that lady has opinions about video games, let's try real hard to destroy her life" dreck that the various chans indulge in when they're bored), that geek each other up to the point where somebody thinks sending a SWAT team at somebody is a great idea? And that the management is shockingly hands-off about letting them do it and have been for years now?

Swatting is quite illegal anyway - and so is plotting a 'swatting' online, by the "clear and present danger" standard. Free speech is irrelevant to this. Brigading might be a problem but both sides are doing it, so why blame only 4chan and the like while letting Twitter and Tumblr off the hook?

> Radicalization is [...] about convincing the radicalized to undertake acts of violence and threats thereof for a political purpose

I haven't heard it used that way. Wikipedia, abbreviated:

> Radicalization is a process by which an individual comes to adopt increasingly radical political, social, or religious ideals and aspirations that reject or undermine the status quo or contemporary ideas and expressions of the nation.

As in, adopting extreme views. And that raises the question: if you have 100'000 people and tell them all to go read Mein Kampf, then some of them will undeniably go, "yeah that Hitler guy seems like a pretty smart fellow". What is the solution? It can't be to say that extremist speech should be banned. If so, we have to burn most of Western philosophy.

And it seems like "it is morally justifiable to use violence to achieve political means" is just another political belief, correlating strongly with the strength of your political views. So all you are saying is that some political views should be banned. I don't like this.

> And that the management is shockingly hands-off about letting them do it and have been for years now?

The management did nothing wrong. Each site has a different vibe. In the case of imageboards, it's usually 'anything which isn't explicitly prohibited by law'. It's worth noting that 4chan bans the behavior which you describe.

Even if they didn't, it raises an important question: where should the line be drawn?

It seems easy to think of 4chan or 8chan as a discrete entity, which should be shut down. But say that we had some physical entity, like a pub, which for some reason attracted an extremely racist clientele who liked to go have a few drinks and then beat up the immigrants.

Should the pub be held liable for this? What about serverless mailing lists, where I manually put everyone on the list in the "reply to" field, or Usenet? Should that be 'shut down' too?

The thing I don't like about this is that both counterparties are willing. If you're spamming someone, you have person A who sends to person B, but person B doesn't want to hear from person A.

With an imageboard, you have person A who sends to B, C, and D, but B, C, and D all want to hear from A. Should they be stopped in this endeavor?

Let's take a concrete example: how about people swapping recipes for chemical weapons and discussing their efficient deployment against unknowing civilians? Or people discussing and developing (largely anonymously) the logistics of mass shootings, with a view to maximizing the body count?

They're just having a chat. It's unethical to censor them. Perhaps they should be brought in on some other charges, but there's nothing illegal about talking. They're not threatening to kill anyone, are they?

In practice, you see this as well. There's a lot of people posting on the Internet about how they're going to do this and that, but in practice most of them are just blowing off steam.

I get why a site like Facebook which wants to have community standards would like to enforce it, but it should be up to the proprietor.

They're not threatening to kill anyone, are they?

Yes, that's kind of the point.

This article was written by Mike Godwin, the creator of "Godwin's Law", which you've just helpfully illustrated.

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

>the aforementioned "oh, hmm, that lady has opinions about video games, let's try real hard to destroy her life" dreck that the various chans indulge in when they're bored

What are you referring to when you say this? Because if you're referring to Gamergate then that's quite a mischaracterization. I'm not saying that bad things weren't done during it, but it wasn't about hating on women in video games.

And aren't most swatting incidents unrelated to chans? Mostly it seems to have been about people getting angry at one another playing video games or related to streamers of video games. Does that make Twitch complicit?

>but it wasn't about hating on women in video games.

Are you saying it was about integrity in video games journalism?

I wish I could express a figurative glance over the top of my reading glasses without an image macro.

To some degree? Sure. But if it truly was about hating women talking about video games for being women, then how come some of the idols of the movement were women themselves? If it's all about misogyny then shouldn't they hate people like mombot just the same? This is why I said that it's a mischaracterization.

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