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Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

Same. I've long worried lurking there was going to cause more harm than it's worth (for example, by letting me inadvertently slip into extremism) but the ability to predict what happened this week so easily and warn people about it who considered going was well worth that risk.

Also I read there they are losing their SSL cert or something, so that might be how centralized, non-legal authority manages to shut them down. (Which, it probably goes without saying, should scare the shit out of anyone who cares about the principles of the free Internet.)

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>Which, it probably goes without saying, should scare the shit out of anyone who cares about the principles of the free Internet.

Service-providers giving the boot to « problematic » users is as far as I know as old as the Internet.

Example?

I have about 30 examples, none of which will ever be shared on the Internet!

For example, I know that Hezbollah had problems finding an ISP back in the 90s.

When I worked at an ISP years back, if we had a DDOS attack against a customer the way we handled that was to drop all traffic incoming towards that customer's IP at our external peer level (meaning the bigger ISP we were getting most of the external Internet from). That was necessary so all of that DDOS traffic wasn't eating from the bandwidth available to all other customers that weren't being DDOS-ed. But it also meant that the DDOS-ed customer was losing all Internet access (which wasn't really much of a change considering that they were receiving a DDOS that filled all their allocated bandwidth).

Repeat customers that would get DDOS too many times (cybercafes would fall into that category often) would have to either pay more to cover for the cost of the network engineers dealing with the DDOS or get the boot.

From what I remember it's quite similar with many service providers, including hosting providers. Their TOS will allow them discretion to stop providing services to anyone that may negatively impact their business, it's not like there's any law that forces them to provide service to a customer.

Goatse

Back when I was a kid the red-headed step children of the Internet were the warez, neo-nazi, « revolutionary » (read bomb-making), spam and snuff sites. I'm probably missing a few categories. And that's just the contentious stuff. There are things that even the most zealous free speech maniacs would have a hard time convincing themselves should be allowed even a modicum of publicity. Child porn is the most blatant one.

So you're literally using banning child porn to justify banning political discussion: exactly what free speech advocates predicted when censorship hit the internet.

Plotting the overthrow of the government isn't political speech

Although more complicated than just "provider bans speech", this was an interesting case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_Technology_Center_v.....

Everything to do with warez for one, even sites that didn't directly host IP-infringing content, would very often get the boot because it's a huge hassle for hosts to deal with the amount of trouble these websites generate.

Yes and it's always been contentious, and as the Internet integrates itself more and more into our lives, the questions about which layers of the network stack ought to follow which principles are worth continually focusing on.

I've been on the Internet since 1994, and it has always been the case that if you made a sufficiently odious pest of yourself over a long enough period of time, that someone would contact your university, employer or ISP, and you would lose your account, or at least your access to Usenet.

You were always perfectly free to go find a new account elsewhere if anyone would have you. But there was always a point where if you passed far enough beyond socially acceptable behavior, your Internet provider might choose to stop doing business with you.

This was especially true in the case of harassment, attacks on network infrastructure, and criminal behavior.

Yes the "point where you passed far enough" is another way of saying there is contention, I'm not sure what your point is. If it was a zero or one state, there is no contention over it.

This is why *chan websites have gotten so popular. Being anonymous in everything you post is refreshing. Short of posting illegal content, almost anything goes.

"Refreshing" in the "great place to plan a coup" sense?

Eventually they are going to find that there's a limit to how much violence you can incite before getting slapped down, legally or otherwise.

No, anonymity is refreshing because a world where you are always on the record with your most formal identity with everything you say runs largely against the ways humans develop their worldviews: by trying on certain opinions, sorting themselves out, and participating in low stakes interactions where they can make mistakes and learn with minimal consequence.

This doesn't mean 'planning a coup' is one of these contexts, but you are focusing on a very narrow example of the broad social system impact of anonymity in online communication.

There's many reasons why I find it refreshing.

Other than anonymity, talking to people who have no incentive to karma-farm is very refreshing.

In websites like Reddit/HackerNews, the karma system gamifies posting. You "lose" if you post any wrongthink, and you "win" when you reiterate whatever is socially acceptable.

This means there are consequences to posting. In *chan websites, there is no consequence to posting your thoughts (or just trolling, because that's fun sometimes).

Are they popular ? They may be infamous, but I feel most of the brain matter has been evacuated from English-speaking boards a decade ago and they at best sustain their existing demographic.

With "Problematic" being subjective, it is indeed scary.

Problematic as in contrarian view?

It's as old as any "service" has existed, nevermind internet.

If you go into a store or cafe and start shouting at the top of your lungs, the owner is free to refuse service, kick you out and/or even ban you from ever entering their store again.

What's the difference between that store owner and an ISP?

You're free to go to any other store that will have you, and is ok with your shouting. If it turns out there are no stores ok with it, whose problem is that? Should store owners be prohibited from refusing service to anyone, no matter what their behaviour?

You can start your own store, so long as you can pay rent, have suppliers that will sell you goods, etc - but again, no one is obligated to do any of that.

(I get there's protected classes that prevent discrimination based on things like age, gender, ethnicity, etc, but that's a separate issue, and tangential to their behaviour which is what we're discussing here.)

That's not really true. The early-ish internet saw plenty of, say, communists peering with Hayek libertarians inside Exodus cages, and other such unexpected arrangements. You also had LUGs, lan parties, BBSs and IRC channels that had very diverse users, but tolerated, and even thrived on, offensive speech and trolls. The community's glue was love of the technology and the medium, with political, ethnic, or other tribal interests being anywhere from completely unimportant to secondary.

Damn near every channel on 2010 EFNet or DALNet would be deemed in violation of most of 2020's TOS. To say nothing of mid-90s EFNet. Whoo-boy, the eggdrop bots logging those channels could get probably a thousand well-known, well-respected developers and network engineers working at FAANGs today fired, if someone took the time.

Not to mention many of us would be quick to identify the people in the logs as fucking crazy people, only to realize we're reading words written by our teenage selves.

> Which, it probably goes without saying, should scare the shit out of anyone who cares about the principles of the free Internet.

I worry more about Google et. al. killing the free and open internet by creating centralized walled gardens. I worry more about legislative attacks on encryption, about the overzealous use of copyright law and the sorry state of intellectual property generally.

If service providers want to deplatform centers of radicalization, I think that's ok.

I worry about all of that as well, but the problem with your last point is you are opening the door for network providers to be the arbiters of what is considered radicalization or not. They shouldn't be the decider of that, our laws should. If the FBI tells them to shut something down with a legal order, and our society has concluded it is just, so be it.

In the limit what you would get is a world where speech is basically under the influence of people who, for all intents and purposes, are operating infrastructure services the whole world runs on.

Those downvoting me I guess feel they trust the arbitrary CEOs of a few large corporations to never deem their actions online of worthy of being censored. Just because you want to live in that world doesn't mean I ought to accept it.

Eh, curation and moderation is a valuable service that many are willing to pay for.

The issue isn't that service providers are arbiters, the problem is that there are so few service providers that one can meaningfully choose from due in large part to the difficulty of taking one's social network along with you.

If service providers had federated communication then it would be a different story.

I agree with you, my argued solution to most of the problems surrounding the Internet is regulation which will create emergent conditions to incentivize decentralization. The design of the Internet got us about 90% of what we needed, but we need our government to close the final 10% of the gap to realize the full benefits of the thesis of the Internet, much like anti-trust laws are a pre-requisite to realize maximal benefits from capitalism. (Not getting into an argument about that here, it's just an analogy in this very narrow sense of regulation leading to outsized benefits.)

What sort of regulation would you like to see?

I've heard folks suggest making it criminal to share or sell user data, for instance, which would be the death of freemium services.

I haven't thought much about the lower level network stacks but I think social media platforms of a certain size ought to have certain legal requirements to do things that incentivize interoperability or allow competing platforms to emerge (perhaps non-commercial ones.) Primarily things around APIs and data formats.

So a regulatory body that would enforce secure, private, and open sharing of user data between services at the user's behest? Sounds good to me.

Yep pretty much. If you support this, you should know that if this ever gets legs despite its surface level appeal you will see a lot of people not supporting it, because it's exactly the kind of thing that led to Cambridge Analytica. So that'll be a good time to truly ask yourself which side of this tradeoff is the one you want to make.

The big historical problem with this approach isn't "the arbitrary CEOs of a few large corporations" making unfair decisions (not to say that this couldn't be a problem now or in future). It's that governments (both good and bad) have pressured those companies behind closed doors to censor content governments don't like but which they haven't (or can't) go to the trouble of making illegal. This creates a huge accountability gap - these are government decisions in reality but can't be challenged in the same way they could be if out in the open.

Yes my argument isn't one based upon history so much as a recognition that the stable state of our society seems to be destined to terminate in one where most human communication is mediated by the Internet not physical space. So whatever power structures, incentives, and ethics we lay down now are likely to echo far into the future, if not forever.

>If service providers want to deplatform centers of radicalization, I think that's ok.

The fact that there is widespread support, let alone demand, for subjective, unaccountable censorship is frightening. You don't understand this, "war on domestic terror" will include legislative attacks on encryption? That bad actors always use, create and amplify perceived crisis to expand their power and permanently erode our rights? You can be certain that when the center of radicalization in Washington DC decides to whip up another war that will kill a million people, they won't be "deplatformed" (as opposed to those "radicals" who will oppose that war, who most certainly will).

There was this blogpost a while back which I can't seem to find, suggesting that the division is between:

* people who view democracy as a set of values, and if you do not share those values then you are against democracy.

* people who view democracy as the democratic principles (voting, representation, freedom of assembly, and so on)...

In my world (I belong to the second group) democracy is freedom of speech, the exchange of ideas, and coming face to face with values and opinions that you do not agree with (in fact you may find them abhorrent), and thinking that that's the whole point.

I found it an enlightening take on the situation, and thought that I'd share it here.

I agree with your position with one caveat. The people in the former category view democracy not merely as a set of values, but as a set of -their- values. If you do not share their values, then you are against democracy. Ironically this is diametrically opposed to the core concept of democracy - its much more like theology. Adopt their dogma, conform to their orthodoxy, or you are an infidel.

> If service providers want to deplatform centers of radicalization, I think that's ok.

The thing is: left-wing radicalization is tolerated by the platforms, but right-wing radicalization isn't.

The day the bulk of far-left idealists advocate violence and racism, they won't be tolerated either.

Indeed. On reddit, r/chapotraphouse was also deleted a while back because it was (AFAIU) a casual tankie forum that didn't mind calling for violence, or at least insinuating it

The bulk of the right wing doesn't, either. Your bubble is showing. If the right wing weren't so frequently excised from the public sphere, it might be easier for you to see the saner parts of it — but the private censorship we've been seeing cuts with a blunt scalpel. I think it's better to expose the worst of it to public contempt, rather than isolate them and let them fester together.

> The bulk of the right wing doesn't

Look at the parent I responded to. This is a question of extremes, not mere left/right spheres. The far right / alt-right is fascist, racist and violent by definition: that's what makes them far-right. No one said being a conservative is violent.

I think that's a tendentious and not particularly useful definition of far-right. But you're right that in context, your statement makes more sense.

Offer a more useful one if an obvious one comes to mind. Because the common denominator among banned far-right communities on popular forums has been the aforementioned characteristics.

The right wing is all over the public sphere. I have a pretty good idea of what they're saying and supporting despite having a lot of the usual suspects blocked on Twitter. I have no idea what you think the "saner" part is, but the saner part is no longer in control.

> The day the bulk of far-left idealists advocate violence and racism

You mean everyday?

If the projection makes you feel better. Groups are removed on the basis of that behavior, not where they lean. You'll never show an example suggesting otherwise.

Not remotely true. /r/ChapoTrapHouse was banned a while back too. If anything, they target the left more.

As an excuse for banning T_D and a bunch of other right leaning subs at the same time, and then blatantly ignored ban-evading r/ChapoTrapHouse2 for months. When they finally took them down for ban evasion, it was an excuse to ban another giant wave of right wing subs.

  EDIT: Original claim is left intact for posterity, but it is definitely wrong and I misremembered.

Reddit has its moderation oddities but claiming they target the left more is bordering on silly. r/WatchRedditDie is a great catalog of politically biased moderation.

No, it was the other way around. T_D was already dead. The mods had already locked it and moved to thedonald.win. Banning it was meaningless, they just did it to make the /r/chapotraphouse ban look more fair.

Here's a list of subs banned that day with active user counts:

https://www.redditstatic.com/banned-subreddits-june-2020.txt

Chapo was the largest by a large margin besides /r/darkhumorandmemes (edgy jokes).

And you are just straight up lying about /r/chapotraphouse2. It was banned the same day, as was /r/chapotraphouse3 through /r/chapotraphouse49.

I must have misremembered. They were flagrantly violating some rule for months, and the million variants of the sub name were part of it. But you misremember too. T_D had not been "locked", unless you're talking about the quarantine in which case you make it sound like the same people that did it as moved to thedonald.win. Meanwhile r/ConsumeProduct and r/GenderCritical were huge losses, with no actual rule violations to cause them, aside from a few AHS brigades.

No, people weren't allowed to post submissions there. That's what I mean by locked. I guess I should say "restricted mode" instead. From wikipedia:

"On February 26, 2020, Reddit administrators removed a number of r/The_Donald moderators "that were approving, stickying, and generally supporting content in this subreddit that breaks [Reddit's] content policy" and called the remaining moderators to choose new ones from a list of Reddit-approved individuals. About the same time, Reddit placed r/The_Donald in "Restricted mode", removing the ability to create new posts from most of its users. Since then, some users of the subreddit had moved to theDonald.win, a separate site based on Reddit's old user interface."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald

From Heavy:

https://heavy.com/news/2020/06/the-donald-subreddit-moved-to...

Reddit admins did the same to Chapo before it was banned too. They replaced a bunch of their mods, chapo just kept going though, with some new rules and stricter moderation to try and stay unbanned.

So, what I said then. You were making it sound like the same people jumped ship as implemented those policies, and in fact they were the opposite sides. And restricted mode isn't locking; everyone can still comment, there's just a whitelist of who can make new top level posts.

>free Internet

A private company choosing who to allow on their platform? Seems like the freedom to me. And in the absence of any government action against these domestic terrorists (they have been planning exactly this violence for weeks), it's great to see private companies step in and take action.

You're oversimplifying this as well as constructing a strawman argument which implies it's a simple issue. It's not. You are on Hacker News, do you think people here are think that the framing you make is objectively the singular one that has any moral standing?

What a fantastic rant

The private companies would very much like to allow them, as they pay their bills and are a big customer. They are choosing not to allow them because they are being strong armed by a part of the political establishment that considers the spread of the information this websites want to share as dangerous for the country or its citizens.

So yeah, there's some government action against this domestic terrorists and it's resulting in private companies banning their websites.

You can agree with the action or not, I think it's a good idea to have infrastructure in place that thwarts the spread of dangerous misinformation, but that shouldn't be censorship. It should be easy to access education and mental healthcare to help people be strong against misinformation on their own and without the long arm of the law having to babysit them.

> A private company choosing who to allow on their platform? Seems like the freedom to me.

I wonder when people stopped thinking. By the same argument, should they be allowed to block all black people?

As reprehensible as it is, legally they absolutely are. Remember how country clubs didn't / still don't allow woman, african americans or jews? Common carriers (stores, hotels, etc) are treated differently, and is very much debated. (ie can a bakery deny service based on sexual preference.)

>can a bakery deny service based on sexual preference.

It is a little more nuanced than that. Bakeries were not denying anybody based on sexual orientation.

If a gay man went to get a straight wedding cake, a non-wedding cake, or a wedding cake for a gay wedding that did not have anything to indicate it was for a gay wedding the bakers would not have denied them.

Your first sentence implies I am speaking with a time traveler who doesn't realize they just fell out of their time machine 50 years in the future :) It is definitely not legal to bar people from your business based upon race.

> domestic terrorists

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that you don't have a lot of exposure to terrorism. A bunch of idiots breaking into the Capitol and… mostly wandering around taking selfies? Not really very effective terrorists. It was a stupid, pointless move, and illegal — but a long, long way short of terrorism, except possibly on the very fringes of some three-letter organization's idiosyncratic definition.

I think you can stretch the definition of terrorism to meet them (the congress was evacuated in fear, it influenced political events) but the lesson of 2001- is that any dilution of the term of terrorism is no free lunch, and we ought to understand what will happen if we endorse our leaders treating something as terrorism vs another form of illegal act.

That's an excellent expression of my concern. Also, people who agree with some but not all of the ideas held by "right-wing terrorists" suddenly become terrorist sympathizers, and their friends "associate with known terrorists and terrorist sympathizers". Imagine the context you've heard those phrases in on the news, and what you thought was okay when it happened to those people.

Yes, given this and the actual reality of the situation, I take the stance that we ought to respond to claims of terrorism around this (by our leaders, not individuals) with ridicule and derision, despite any merit, given how dangerous it would be to allow this to be treated by the authorities as a moral justification for a domestic War on Terror.

> mostly wandering around taking selfie

And the ones not taking selfies were running around with zip ties and IEDs. Just because some of them were idiots, doesn't mean they all were.

Edit: how do you think these "idiots" got in? https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=20m04s&v=cJOgGsC0G9U

Is there proof they had actual IEDs? Zip ties are bad, but they're not in the same universe as IEDs. If they had IEDs I'd be way more open to the idea of characterizing this as terrorism, and all that comes with it.

Edit: It sounds like the cops say they found IEDs. I'll be following that closely to update my view on the proper response to this.

Edit2: Actually the report is that the IEDs were not found at the Capitol or as part of that but near the RNC and DNC offices elsewhere, and a pipe bomb was found in a car. So there is no evidence that the people who entered the capitol were carrying bombs. The specifics in this case matter.

As in let's encrypt is going to blacklist their domain? Sounds unlikely.

It doesn't really matter. If this starts being a problem, we'll use a decentralized web of trust for SSL. It doesn't have to be centralized.

Yeah I'll admit I didn't follow it completely and didn't care enough to investigate. I'm sure it'll bubble up here if it does with more details just like when they got nuked from Reddit. Arguably sites like this one are a good way to gauge the true robustness of the Internet - given the situation this week they clearly now are in the realm of law enforcement, but up until these rather insane events to me their continued presence was an existence proof that speech on the web is still in a good place. Now if they get taken down I won't judge it too harshly against that thesis since they basically fomented a theoretical insurrection by the letter of the law, even though in practice the "coup" turns out was never a real threat given how ridiculous things went once the dog caught the car.

These website clearly radicalize some people. I too lurk from time to time on thedonald.win and far-right subreddits, you can see that over there reality is completely distorted, calls to violence are constant and they just feed off each other's insecurities, fears and hate.

Nothing good comes out of these places, regardless of where in the political spectrum you position yourself (except maybe downright fascists). Look at what happened at the Capitol, did he further the right's agenda? Of course not, if anything it put them in a much more awkward situation.

Reddit admins are enablers and they share a part of the blame. Remember how subreddits like /r/jailbait and /r/creepshots were allowed on the website for months, if not years (among many others I can't be bother to remember, including some extremely explicitly racist ones)?

Then it's always the same thing, some news outlet or politician talks publicly about how Reddit hosts fascists/pedos/racists or something like that and within two days you have bans and a heartfelt post by the admins saying how they felt that it was their duty to do something and "think of the children" and all kinds of bullshit.

Reddit is 4chan wearing a tie to try to look more business friendly.

These subreddits and websites don't host free speech, they host hate speech. I have zero issue drawing a line in the sand here. "First they came for the fascists, and I said nothing because I'm not a fascist, and the world was a better place. The end."

You claim "nothing good comes out of these places" - that's a strong claim to make. Here's my argument: having this stuff out in the open does have benefits.

Most people lurk. Lurking these sites has a lot of benefits despite the risk of being drawn into radicalization:

- It allows you to truly understand the motives of these kinds of people, and predict what they will do.

- Understanding these motives allows you to address root causes that lead to this extremism. For every radical who storms the capitol, there are a thousand people who have slightly watered down but directionally parallel beliefs. This is good to understand so you can contribute to finding solutions to any justifiable grievances motivating their higher order beliefs (some won't be justified, some will), to help pull them in the other direction.

- Seeing this stuff full-on and not heard about through second hand accounts demystifies it. There are people like yourself who look at this, get a sense of revulsion from it, and then that both hardens their mind away from it and also motivates them to counteract it when they see people in their own lives starting to echo similar sentiments. If you don't truly grok the mental models these people have, you lack the prerequisites needed to disarm any version of them in the minds of people you care about. This isn't a sure thing, but anyone who doesn't will have no effect.

There may be benefits, but the harm - real and potential - dwarf anything you've listed.

That's not an argument, it's a claim. And it also is shifting the goalpost from the original post, but you're not the same person so that seems fair.

Say the investigation of the recent riots and deaths discovers that people connected and planned on the sites you are talking about. Would that move you from your current position? It seems like it would take what I've said from a claim to a simple description of reality.

If you're sufficiently motivated by the prospect of disarming an insane conspiracy theory in the minds of someone you care about to actually want to read and understand it, you [i] can certainly seek it out on obscure cult websites without seeing it recommended in your favourite social media feed and [ii] are potentially better off getting it second hand complete with rebuttals.

The people with slightly watered down but directionally parallel beliefs certainly exist in huge numbers, but they're the reason why such places are so harmful; they're much easier to radicalize than deradicalize, and they're the ones getting the content recommended to them or being swept along by the enthusiasm other people who share some of their views seem to have for it. And it'd actually be easier to understand their justifiable grievances if they weren't encouraged to connect them to pizza parlours or Jews.

> inadvertently slip into extremism

Hate when that happens..

It's happening on pretty much all sides simultaneously. Most people believe that escalation is a means to an end. It's not, resolution is made through mutual understanding and not vilification.

I'm not preaching tolerance here, but the more you understand your opponent the more you approach the inevitable conclusion: people are creatures of convenience, rarely going out of their own way for the sake of concepts like good or evil. If you want to change the way people act, the only way to really do it is to change what is convenient for them. Or to take certain conveniences away.

I loved it actually. Its was invigorating—like a cold shower. But this was years ago when I was in my 20s.

I don't go on 4chan anymore (or any social media outside HN [1]) and have mellowed out but it gave me the courage to call BS from either "side".

My theory is that 4chan hasn't become more extreme in the last 10 years. It's that "judgment-zones" like twitter and reddit have caused everyone else to become softer.

[1]: I'm serious, I didn't know about any stuff happening in the capitol until I saw it on HN.

Thinking you are not susceptible to becoming radicalized just shows you are basically at the kindergarten level of understanding how such radicalization works. Those least susceptible to radicalization are those who fear it for themselves the most, since they understand their innate flaws as human beings and their susceptibility to it. Nobody is immune to it, and the mass radicalization of normally good people over these past 4 years ought to be evidence enough that ignorance about the danger is widespread. (Everyone thinks they are not susceptible to it and only other people are - the people who say that I believe the most are the ones who have gone to hell and returned to tell the tale.)

> for example, by letting me inadvertently slip into extremism

You are right to worry - I remember reading an article about (FB?) moderators on anti-vaxxer pages finding themselves inadvertently internalizing that worldview, despite previously consciously not believing in it. The human mind appears to absorb information after repeated exposure, despite any conscious efforts not too - I assume it's similar to how the placebo effect works even when the person "knows" it's a placebo.

You didn’t need to look at those sites to predict what was going to happen.

I disagree, as someone who observed this site as well as everything else, I can tell you at least for me my prior was heavily influenced by the shift in tone, sentiment, and desperation I observed there relative to the usual din of more front-facing social media grifters.

Oh, I think that’s just a convoluted way of saying you lived in a bubble.

It was quite clear that this was going to happen. No one on my timeline is shocked at all. In fact, I’ve been complaining about these deplorables since 2013 (even before the phrase was coined).

What bubble are you referring to? Saying it was obvious now doesn't say anything about having good predictive ability. My recollection is up until about Monday, most people were asleep on this. And then around Tuesday the zeitguest was this was going to be a dumb clown show. The number of people claiming that violence was inevitable and the capitol was going to be stormed, outside of the obvious circles, was in my experience marginal.

I wasn’t trying to offend you. Everyone lives in a bubble or several.

My timeline consists mainly of 80% American minorities and 20% graduates from elite US universities (with some overlap between the two groups obviously). What about yours? No one on my timeline was surprised. And if they were, they were privileged white people (no offense just being honest when talking about Harvard/MIT grads).

These insurrectionists complained all year about wearing masks. Some of them even shot retail workers because they were so upset. How could you not see this coming?

It’s sort of hard for me to tell based on your comments. Do you live in the U.S. and where about? I could see how one would be surprised if they lived abroad and only used mainstream social media to gauge what’s going on.

But if you’ve lived in the U.S. and read any of the think pieces in mainstream newspapers or even popular Medium articles over the last 4 years, you would have likely learned about the surge in domestic terrorism committed by white supremacists. There were so many articles, especially this past year in the summer. How could you not have read any of them?

Well, I do know that those sort of articles get downvoted on HN and don’t surface to the top. I’m not sure why articles with titles like “FBI confirms a surge in domestic terrorism” aren’t important to HN. (That was sarcasm.)

I literally had a conversation with dang@ the other day about this, and he didn’t believe me.

I live in the US. The specific thing I am talking about here is a) the expectation the protest would turn violent and b) the expectation that the protestors would storm the capitol. This thread is already too deep and I'm getting a bit burned out on responding to everything here, but in general my own bubble (point taken, no offense intended) implied the former was unlikely (through the eyes of centrist Republicans) and the latter was a fever dream but never actually could manifest in reality.

Oh, I see. My bubble was well aware of how violent these people are and were going to be. I mean, they like guns. They talk about killing people all of the time. They look and sound crazy. These are the people whose ancestors (adults and children) had picnics while watching men being hanged in the early-to-mid 20th century.

And my bubble was well aware that they were going to storm the Capitol because protestors often try to get past the police barricade and the police were going to go easy on them.

Note: I wasn’t downplaying that visiting sites like the one you mentioned was helpful. I do that from time to time as well to troll them but also to get the full perspective.

> I mean, they like guns. They talk about killing people all of the time. They look and sound crazy.

Nonsense, you've built a straw man. Maybe you've been hanging around 4chan too much and assuming that a subset of swamp creatures from the low parts of the internet represent the millions of Americans who support the President, but I assure you the overwhelming majority of conservatives are nice, hard-working people.

30+ people died as a direct result of the media-condoned protests over the past summer, led by blm/antifa and associated groups. Did your bubble predict that? Do you think those killings, burnings, lootings, violent behaviors were justified? If so, why is it ok for one group to protest in such a manner, but not the other?

Shouldn't we as a society, especially including the mainstream media, have a strict and principled standard that we apply?

deleting my comment as parent seems to be uninterested in discussing an opinion that goes against their own.

dang@, where ya at?

No, your comment was just inappropriate. dang@ is the moderator.

And I don’t have discussions with delusional people. I wrote a super long reply to someone else as you clearly saw. But they weren’t talking like brainwashed people.

But if you did want to delete your comment instead of being passive aggressive, please do so.

daniel957, I deleted my comment because of YOUR passive aggressive response to whistle to the moderator. Nothing I said was threatening, harassing, or otherwise outside the scope of a discussion on a very sensitive topic in this country.

This is a public discussion platform and not a one-sided filter bubble. Many people will have different perspectives and it is indeed healthy to listen to and consider them, even if you disagree.

You made a throwaway to spout your conspiracy theories. How can we have a discussion?

which part is a conspiracy?

You’re not required to have an SSL cert behind cloudflare anyway, CF provides the cert the browser sees. You then put a self-signed cert on your origin and CF will accept it.

Interestingly, I have seen Twitter thread from months ago predicting exactly what happened. Like, literally long time ago.

> Which, it probably goes without saying, should scare the shit out of anyone who cares about the principles of the free Internet

Big tech companies are largely left-leaning internally (which isn't surprising since California is the most left leaning state), so there is nothing to fear as long as you lean left yourself, (i.e. I guarantee you won't be censored for left-leaning speech any time soon).

That is definitely not true

It is definitely true. There are hundreds if not thousands of right-leaning voices that have been silenced on left-leaning platforms like YT, Insta, Twit, & FB.

I’ve yet to see a single right-leaning voice that was silenced for being right-leaning. Without exception, every one I’ve seen silenced was for calling for violence, using ethnic slurs, or otherwise violating the site’s ToS. It seems possible to me, even likely, that if more right-leaning accounts are being banned then it’s because more of them are breaking the rules.

Also, I find the idea of classifying FB as left-leaning to be laughable.

> otherwise violating the site’s ToS

Your list was pretty narrow in scope until this one. ToS could contain anything and be used to censor speech for any reason.

Because I respect the rights of private property, I have to allow social media sites to post rules at the entrance explaining what you’re allowed to do. As long as they enforce those rules evenly, then you know what you’re signing up for when you register an account.

I’ve not heard any legitimate, evidence-backed claim that any of the major sites are enforcing their rules unfairly. Instead, the claims are usually along the lines of:

“I got banned for saying we should do violent stuff! And yet they allow this other ideologically opposite person to have an account!”

“Can you point to a specific post where the other person is saying we should be violent?”

“No, but everyone knows they support it!”

Well, “everyone knows” isn’t evidence.

Would you respect the right of a restaurant to kick out a black family? After all, it's private property.

Suppose it's a white family but they're wearing MAGA hats and the restaurant denies them service. That's nearly acceptable among a broad swath of the population today.

Now suppose it's your mom wearing a MAGA hat (you may not like that she wears one but it's her right, no?) and she gets denied service in a Starbucks. Maybe someone gets violent with her and knocks the hat off her head. Maybe the server spits in her coffee. All of which has happened. Are you still comfortable with "private property"?

Suppose you wander into a restaurant wearing a "Biden-Harris" T-shirt and they say "Get out!" Are you okay with that?

I could keep going, but you get the picture. We can't have a "freedom for me, not for thee" attitude. It has to be universal.

In every one of those cases, I support the nonviolent person. But still, we were talking about social media, not the physical world. None of that addresses whether the right is more or less likely to break the ToSes of social media sites.

"definitely"? Even if true, how do you know either way?

Well, it depends on who's the One True Left. Most TERFy folks also identify as left wing and structure their arguments around historically progressive concepts like anti-essentialist conceptions of gender, but they're already kind of on the chopping block.

We need a name for this, when USA conservatives are so sheltered from political thought that they can't tell the Left from the Centre-Right. Lots of leftist stuff has been censored in 2020, yet one repeatedly encounters this blissfully ignorant sentiment.

https://twitter.com/sunraysunray/status/1320078487970041856

In practice, those big firms are more tiptoeing around right wing then around left wing.

Also in practice, there is way bigger outcry over right wing reedits being banned then left wing reddits. Each time reddit banns a bunch of subs, there is discussion about right wings ones - including on HN. Nobody cares about left wing subs being banned, that discussion never appears.

For the record, I am fine with both left and right reddits being banned right now. But I have yet to see free speech advocates to fret about toxic leftist and feminist places being closed.

How did it let you slip into extremism?

Memes are mind viruses and a robust immune system built from exposure and defeating of them is a good protection from the bad ones, but a good way to prevent being infected by a mind virus is to just never enter places where most people are already infected.

Repeated exposure to things you know to be false or to bad arguments has been shown many times to shift your beliefs towards those false beliefs. It effectively wears your mind's defenses down. This 'repeat a lie enough and it becomes the truth' idea is a Trump specialty: 'Crooked Hillary', the wall, voter fraud, etc. Re: extermism, the far right's arguments are bad but if you're not actively exposed to counterarguments/lived experience it's easy to fall prey to such bombastic arguments that cities are crime ridden shitholes, BLM burned down everything, urban voting is rife with fraud, etc (not to mention even more harmful dehumanizing memes about minorities that further ingrain negative sterotypes). They offer a facile, comforting (to white suburbanites) view of the complex, often unsatisfying world that is easy to lower your defenses to.

Indeed. Repetition of phrases, images, or ideas - regardless of their truth - is the basis of propaganda and brainwashing.

Yep, I totally agree. I've always said that you can prove anything if you ignore enough facts. Law of Propaganda Design.

Just throw out anything that doesn't fit your narrative and keep your message on repeat and your audience will fall captive eventually since most are not open to doing their own fact-checking.

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