You can't censor away extremism or any other problem

This is such a terrible idea. All this accomplishes is causing extremists to find echo chambers where they will never actually know what they're doing is wrong. It's much better to keep extremists in mainstream platforms so they can be called out and atleast informed that they are wrong. Your solution is totally backwards and accomplishes the opposite of what you're hoping for.

That handful of people you find on a forum more devoted to whatever the topic or niche is than everybody else. The people that are there, every day all day immersing themselves in it.

They're fairly far and few between and wherever you are, you'll find a handful of them.

The rest of the more vocal people tend to be the 'hanger ons'. The ones that are into it as long as a bunch of others are, but will lose interest if the community fades.

Then there's the flyby people. The people who just kinda pop in from time to time, but aren't really all that into it.

People seem to forget, we call it 'extremism' because it's at the extreme end of what humans consider acceptable. Most people in general are not 'extremists' with anything otherwise we wouldn't call it extreme. It would just be normal.

Everyone seems to just label someone as an extremist for a tweet, or an idea, or some words, where in reality a good majority of people being labeled as such are more than likely just normal people saying some dumb shit.

Everybody's done it, nobody's perfect anywhere, everybody believes ridiculous things from time to time, everybody's said things they shouldn't, it's just a part of being human. It doesn't mean they're this, that or the other kind of extremist.

I'm reminded of Daryl Davis, and the way he de-radicalized KKK members. He did it by talking to them, engaging them in speech. It feels like hate speech censoring could actually lead to more radicalization as people feel persecuted and become even more radical than if you had let them talk. It's a hard problem because you can get radicalization if you allow people to create their own echo chambers of hate. How do you balance trying to avoid creating these kinds of echo chambers, versus creating radicals by pushing them to other sites where there are no restrictions?

It's tiring hearing the "megaphone" meme. It's a loaded term and means more than its literal meaning.

There are extremists on the left and the right. If you only only target extremism on the right, you might think you're doing a service, but in fact you're going to make the problem worse.

Here come the downvotes.

The problem is that this is a very slippery slope. Who gets to decide what's OK and what's not?

And plenty of irrational ideas that became widely held.

I recently thought of a great example: If the goal is to reduce extremism, one of the lowest-hanging fruit would be to censor all videos of police misconduct. There is no question that seeing the George Floyd video radicalised a number of people. If your solution is that a few tech giants should have memory holed that video as it began to go viral, I'd love to hear you explain yourself.

I don't understand why everyone is saying this. There is not extremist content in north korea.

People usually shut that down in a way that makes it clear they haven't considered the point and don't respect the opinion. It does not make me question that opinion, it makes me despise them more. Where twitter to stop permitting discussion of drug laws, I would not change my mind.

A group that has the numbers, with mild views that can dilute your message with reasonable doubt, challenge certain aspects of your extreme yet be broadly acceptable to a much wider audience including those tending towards your side – that's poision for an extremist.

Therefore, their solution to that is tribalism, polarization, and shaming for any hint of non-compliance with the extreme's dogma.

End result is that the vast majority of moderate people do not participate in debates on sensitive topics, leaving the field open for polarizing demagoguery. All that's left is to make more topics sensitive to get an advantage there too, and that's progressing very well too.

If they're not willing to be reasonable (like, you don't get to "dialog" about whether or not genocide is appropriate), then the best and most moral course of action could very well be to stop them from recruiting your friends.

In the context of tech, this is the essence of deplatforming. Twitter and Facebook cannot censor, since they are not governments. However, as private entities, they can decide not to let you use their service. That's their private property rights in action.

A teacher asks some student to stand up and raise his hands before him. The teacher stands in front of him and does the same, touching the students hands. Then the teacher starts pushing, and the student uses force to stay in place. Then the teacher uses more force, and so does the student.

Finally the teacher asks: "Whay are you pushing me?". "Because you were pushing me!"

This is exactly what is happening here. You cannot expect people to give in once you start pushing.

The second is what you are doing in your post.

In this regard, it's absolutely a "viable approach": By making it low-status to be right-wing, or even by not carrying right-wing views on popular private platforms, it makes the right-wing destined to lose out somewhere along the line simply due to the youth not wanting to associate with them.

It's a waiting game above anything, and on a long enough scale it looks like the winner is clear here, for better or worse.

In terms of "adults", they are few and far between. There will always be biological adults, but so many adults are emotionally stunted that it's difficult for me to give them the title. Just as domestically raised cats are more child-like than cats that have spent their lives on the streets, the average life of an adult in the west is replete with comfort and novelty so as to keep them from building maturity and character. This makes them incredibly easy to be shamed into doing whatever is considered acceptable by the society they're in.

But telling people they shouldn’t insult and denigrate people for immutable physical characteristics is not shaming them, but if it is that’s a weird aspect of the interaction to focus on.

The problem is that A) this process is more useful for advancing within the ideological block than for advancing the ideology's goals, and B) there's a "Laffer Curve" of sorts for paying "moral taxes" in following behavioral norms. The internal dynamics of a movement is going to set the level by true-believer dynamics where outrageously high demands are acceded to, while the general public is going to respond to that level of demand of "well, if you think I'm a bad person for saying 'Latino" instead of 'Latinx', that's your problem".

> "Neither does boxing people into this, that and that category do any good."

a good first start is to follow the latter maxim when discussing the former issue, particularly when it comes to issues of power and influence. you're already lost when you speak in terms of left and right. those are distractions from the real coercions impinging on our freedoms daily, from the desire to stagnate and wield (more) power. you need to pierce that construct, disregard it entirely, to understand and orient your resistance and dissatisfaction toward the rightful source.

two people chosen randomly are going to be vastly more similar than different, no matter where on the artificially-constructed political spectrum they are. this is how we know it's constructed and not real.

the left-right dichotomy, like all dichotomies, collapses our thinking into detrimental zero-sum tribalism pointing us against each other rather toward the real source of conflict, power-wielders, creating an artificial, seemingly-insurmountable gulf, that fractures the populace and shields power further from the will of the people (that's us).

a power structure can do awesome things, and sometimes we need it to do those awesome (positive) things temporarily, but stagnated, amassed power can do a lot of awesome, negatively-externalizing, and self-serving things not in the interest of the many (especially the future many).

the way to think about power is as flows, not stores, and especially not as individuals, which is where our primitive brains betray us constantly. to harness power, we must allow it to temporarily coalesce when and where it will do good, and dissapate steadily so as not to stagnate, and corrupt, in any one set of hands.

How often did I end up in a room full of urban, university educated people looking down on the white rural common folks.

The common people are not always common by choice. It's not necessarily by choice that they can't follow wonkish academic stories about the history of race to understand modern issues. It's not necessarily by choice that they can't see all the shades of gray of advanced morality and sort out complex issues about gender and race. These are the type of people that need to see a moral guide every week just to follow a simple morality where they can't process much beyond stereotypes.

The best AIs out there are not able to simulate advanced empathy. It is highly complex and involves multilevel recursive counterfactual meta-cognitive logic (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4eDzqS2rbcBDsCLZ/unrolling-...). Given the level of complexity, I don't expect everyone to be able to intuitively get it.

A lot of people are intellectually underprivileged and too often, sjw like to scorn and mock them for their handicap.

The way I see it, Trumpism is made of an evil right wing elite that has managed to capture a large swath of simple minded folks party because these simple folks were pushed away from more reasonable political affiliation.

Populism doesn't have to be negative. The US constitution starts with We the People, not We the Scholars. Yes populism means unsophisticated views but these could be aligned with reasonable policy as much as right wing policy if the left didn't show so much contempt for the intellectually and morally disadvantaged. Democracy means you need unsophisticated people to vote with you to win elections.

And it's ultimately hopeless. No matter how hard we try, someone on the left will scold. Oops.

This seems manifestly false. A lot of adult behavior can be changed by scolding, a lot of society runs on scolding.

I'm a pretty rational and strongly opinionated person. You won't change my opinions with scolding. But if someone says "don't talk so loud, you'll wake the baby", well, you can certainly change my behavior. But even more, a lot of people do not operate at anywhere near this the level of rationality and a wider area of their behavior can be changed by scolding. Which is to say the population of fully adult humans is a lot less than the population of humans above the age of majority.

And sure, you can't control everything with scolding, you can't replace the police and the army with scolding but scolding, peer (and non-peer) pressure, etc is a tool in the hands of all the different incarnation of "society".

Because then these bad ideas fester in dark places and emerge as an entrenched ideology that is more difficult or impossible to respond to before they have resulted in adverse outcomes.

> I may agree that most censorship is wrong but it does work. It worked for centuries to help maintain systems of inequality.

It seems you’ve answered your own question then. Censorship is bad because it sustains systems of inequality.

> It worked for centuries to maintain familial control and enforce sexual monoculture in many countries. Information control works so well, it prevents people from even understanding themselves or what they really want in the face of ideologically imposed values.

You are attributing effects to censorship when material circumstances and ideology contributed in large amounts. Its much easier to destroy ideas by burning books when all the books are manufactured by skilled craftsman using their hands.

> We are steeped in a culture of Hollywood telling us what the lessons of history are about. One of the off repeated "hopeful" messages we are fed is that you can't kill an idea but my reading of history has led me to the other conclusion entirely. That controlling the conversation, its constraints and determining the status quo are profoundly powerful tools.

You can’t kill an idea but you can delay it or make people too terrified to spread it openly.

Whether that's good or bad is for history to decide. Recently I saw some guy watching video about terrorists executing some prisoner. He got it via whatsapp. That video was pro-terrorist, they obviously are trying to recruit more people by spreading their propaganda. Of course I would prefer such kinds of conversations to be silenced. The thing is, it can't be silenced. Russia tried to block Telegram, they poured lots of IT resources, they used DPI and other methods but they did not succeed and did lots of collateral damage in the process by blocking innocent websites.

I think that genie is out of the bottle already and we have to learn how to live with it. IMO governments right now are trying another method: they put lots of disinformation, hoping that average folk won't find out which one is true. Not blocking specific information, but making it hard to find and distinguish truth from false. That works for me, I already stopped to trust most of the information on the web.

They may think censorship doesn't work but can still do damage, such as by lowering the standing and integrity of the left, damaging the liberal commons, or paradoxically making censored ideas more appealing.

Because the unintended consequences are harmful to bystanders. Probably more harmful than to the intended targets, since they're already socially ostracized for their openly bigoted views. Take, for example, the recent upswing in deplatforming. Most of the statistical data seems to suggest that the masses have become more afraid to speak openly, but it doesn't seem to have actually stopped extreme racists from saying racist things.

Because instead of treating the disease (terrible dehumanizing ideologies) it treats the symptom (them talking about it).

Instead of a fire, it creates a bomb.

>It worked for centuries to maintain familial control and enforce sexual monoculture in many countries. Information control works so well, it prevents people from even understanding themselves or what they really want in the face of ideologically imposed values.

It worked before the Internet.

>controlling the conversation, its constraints and determining the status quo are profoundly powerful tools.

In the short term. Determining the status quo isn't up to censors. It's up to society. And while censors have some power, they're not omniscient, so they always get circumvented eventually.

I've read a screenshot of some anonymous post that goes like:

"There's a general phenomenon I've noticed on the internet. Any forum with free speech and little to no moderation becomes right wing. Leftist ideas cannot exist without censorship and moderation."

Which I think misreads the situation slightly. When sites censor people, it pushes those censored to other sites. Concentrates them. When all sites censoring have a left bias, both the censored and uncensored areas become echo chambers. Censorship then is segregation, but instead of having water fountains for blacks and whites, you have websites for lefts and rights. The only reason sites like gab and parler exist is because twitter censors.

If you really believe in equal rights and desegregation, you would not censor people based on their diversity of opinions. If you really believe diversity is our strength, then you tolerate diverse opinions, even if you find some of the opinions repugnant.

As the article points out, it's not a question of "should" you censor. It's a question of "can" you censor. Clearly censorship fails in the worst possible way. It further radicalizes both sides. If you read both /r/politics and patriots.win, it's like both groups live in two entirely separate worlds. When you isolate populations their evolutions take separate paths.

And that's how it is ultimately dangerous. Censorship leaves you with two groups of radicals with no common ground. At some point, those two groups meet and that's when bad things happen.

Because the process itself involves heaping lots of social costs on people in the attempt to hurt their narratives, and that normally we would consider this bad? I mean, if we concede that literally throwing people in prison is ineffective then shouldn't the argument for not throwing people in prison be obvious?

> "I may agree that most censorship is wrong but it does work."

that's at least falling for an availability bias. we have a extraordinarily tiny, highly-fragmented, and highly-idealized view into history. the more reasonable null hypothesis would be to assume folks had a range of opinions on any given topic, but their behaviors were modulated through social norms and coercion.

Extremism has no natural quantification. This statement is nonsense.

> With the help of two liberal pollsters, Joshua Ulibarri and Celinda Lake, we conducted 15 focus groups with members of various Hispanic communities across the country and ran a national survey. We also polled large cohorts of whites and African-Americans. The results are sobering. We began by asking eligible voters how “convincing” they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points. Among other elements, the message condemned “illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs” and called for “fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.”

> Almost three out of five white respondents judged the message convincing. More surprising, exactly the same percentage of African-Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos. These numbers do not translate directly into support for the Republican Party; too many other factors are at play. Nevertheless, the results tell us something important: a majority across the groups we surveyed did not repudiate Trump-style rhetoric as obviously racist and divisive, but instead agreed with it.

"Liberal pollsters" and "progressive" opinion writers perceived this example of "Trump-style rhetoric" as "dog whistles" and "obviously racist and divisive" but most Black and Latino people agreed with it.

Murder, theft, cigar smoking in enclosed spaces... you name it, the only way to counteract malignant behaviors is to punish transgressors in order to obstruct the activity to the extent that a) we prevent it from growing, and b) we can tolerate the persistence of the activity at some diminished level of intensity.

Free speech requires us to strike a balance, like fighting crime. Driving hate speech underground successfully hides it from public view so that folks who don't want to swim in that cesspool can avoid it, the same way we hide porn from eyes who want to escape it. And the fact is, ever smarter tech methods can do this increasingly well, despite what Facebook claims.

As a liberal myself, we've become increasingly unwelcome in the United States' only viable left of center political party.

We've allowed regressive, illiberal religious fanatics to take over our party. Just like the Republicans allowed regressive, illiberal religious fanatics to take over their party in the 80s. In both cases, they were considered useful idiots to be appeased while the adults in the room winked and nodded at each other. In both cases, the game theory quickly devolves into pandering to them, and increasingly alienating segments of the population. The wokies have increasingly demanded Mao-like public concessions from elites, and have been universally successful in getting it. This echoes what the evangelicals were able to demand and solicit from GOP members in the 80s-today.

The worst part about this is that the coalition of regressives on the left is so fractious, because they are all so obsessed with immutable characteristic driven identity. Any time an argument or policy that helps one identity group is proposed, another identity group complains they aren't getting the attention THEY need. Because it's such a fractious coalition, elites within the party apparatus and their allies in the press desperately try to spin certain elements of reality. An example of this is the startlingly weird coverage of the violent attacks against vulnerable Asian Americans in US cities. The fact that they are perpetrated exclusively by young black men is deliberately obfuscated, with significant efforts to conflate the attacks with a narrative of ascendant "white supremacists".

This video is from a mainstream, respected news outlet. It's utterly shocking in it's blatant obfuscation of facts to serve a narrative bias: https://youtu.be/1lyVzQsXLl4

Meanwhile, the opposition to the fractious regressive left, are feeding off of this. They are recruiting, and are gaining moral license to justify violence. This is extremely dangerous. These right wing extremists, who they are increasingly awakening at an alarming rate, is far more cohesive as a group. Antifa are mainly annoying, and when they use violent tactics, can be mildly dangerous. But they are weak, untrained, and unorganized compared to their right wing counterparts. In the US, they can easily acquire weapons, but the expertise to use them is not easy to come by.

Liberals like you and me need to stand up, and boldly and loudly and aggressively speak out against any and all forms of regressive, illiberal leftism. If we don't, 2022 is going to be an absolute bloodbath electorally, but far worse is the increasing opposite reaction these lunatics will solicit from the right. Trump's voters aren't going to just go away because the tech companies have banned them. This article clearly points that out.

Pretty much every candidate for high office I can remember has run on a platform of fighting SOMETHING (nazis, communists, terrorists, socialists, crime, etc). Extremism is good for business, if your business is self-promotion.

Chess set sales were up a huge percentage when the Queen's Gambit became popular. Daenerys became a somewhat popular baby girl's name after Game of Thrones became popular. These are super simple, super obvious examples, but you can find more.

They're not guaranteed to work, but they do work.

I had exactly the same thought. The argument is deeply flawed.

> Social norms matter, and legislation can reinforce those norms.

Brexit is a great example for this phenomenon. Directly after the vote, xenophobia and homophobia increased significantly in the UK. It need not written into legislation, the signal of a common understanding is enough to change behaviour.

Society has never had your back. In so many other areas including this one. What we have is interest groups as people within society. And these groups will always have different and sometimes directly opposing ideas.

Thinking that society or even the law has your back is an error in logic.

Again, about toxic social spaces. There is much reason to place Twitter & Facebook as toxic just as much as Parler was. Platforms aren't necessarily toxic, people are. And to be frank, this is a media consumption choice. If you unintentionally visit Gab today and feel the majority of the content does not align with your values and beliefs. Close the tab and visit another platform. Freedom of speech needs to encouraged in any modern society and should be protected as a human right. Anyone who tries to influence your thinking by diluting this, is seeking to control and weaken your mind for their own gain.

I'm sure detonating high explosives on their heads and putting bullets through most of them had nothing to do with it!

> Despite this, the number of new accounts created dropped significantly after the first round of suspensions in September (section 2.5.4), and while we do not have complete data to make a positive assessment, it appears the pace of account creation has lagged behind the pace of suspensions.

Lack of something doesn't prove it's gone. So they realized they couldn't use twitter. Did that change their views? Did it change their minds? Citing a lack of participation in a hostile platform proves nothing except that twitter controls twitter.

How does this do anything but support the OP's argument? OP argues that hate speech laws are futile because those in power get to decide what is hate speech and how it is enforced and it is always possible for the wrong people to be in power. Has-Geog Maassen and the overall failure you highlighted seems like a perfect example of this seeming inevitability in practice.

And then suddenly, for no reason at all, someone incredibly well aligned with everyone you deplatformed rises to power.

Yeah I found that a bit of a strange point. I don't think the goal of Germany's anti-hate laws was to magically and completely eradicate extremism. It was to prevent them from getting powerful enough to take Germany back down the path to darkness that they did during the Third Reich.

Not to say that I think their model should replicated or exported, just that I don't think that's right lens to view it through. Just like saying, 'Well the Civil Rights Act didn't eradicate racism, what's the point?'

It did not lead to the Fourth Reich, on the contrary, public opinion has shifted to the left in and after the 70s.

The right wing backlash you see now is a direct result of the insanity and totalitarianism of today's "left", which is really a smoke screen for the corporate-directed suppression of the middle classes (both black and white).

This Popper statement, made in a completely different era, is overused to shut down opponents and justify censorship.

The J K Rowling mess as an example: clearly someone historically very tolerant. Writes some articles about some areas where she disagrees with the current thinking. Is immediately cancelled. I don't see much tolerance there? Who, exactly, is being intolerant here? Or is it just everyone? Maybe I should not tolerate this any more?

We've totally lost the ability to have a civil discussion about anything with anyone where the participants can disagree about the subject. Part of this, I'm convinced, is that social media doesn't actually allow a discussion. Everyone is screaming in the town square.

That idea is frequently abused by people who don't know what tolerance is. These people conflate "tolerance" and "approval". What they actually oppose is disapproval (they only disapprove of people who disaprove). For them, being "against homosexuality" is intolerant. "Preferring Christianity to Islam" is intolerant. "Making a distinction between trans women and biological women" is intolerant. But this is all wrong. Tolerance is only possible in the presence of disapproval. To tolerate something is to put up with it.

A devout Christian who considers homosexuality a sin but who works with, is friends with, is neighbors with a gay couple is an example of tolerance. He doesn't like homosexuality but he puts up with it.

An example of intolerance is someone who tries to "deplatform" other people for disapproving of this or that. People can approve or disapprove of whatever they like. The qustion is whether they put up with it. As long as they do, they are tolerant.

In short, the paradox of tolerance doesn't hold true at all when we're talking about blanket freedom of speech. If we were talking about anarchy, blanket freedom not just of speech but of actions, then yes the paradox of tolerance comes into play. Some

Except people who want to draw certain cartoons.

Do you even think through your statements?

So... people who believe in “free speech” as a moral value will disagree with your first paragraph — and hence, your entire post.

You assume your conclusion, so your argument fails to be persuasive.

“I disagree with what you say, but I’ll fight to the death to defend your right to say it” is a maxim of free speech — and a bold declaration of the exact opposite of your message: if we want a free society, we have a moral duty to aid the freedom of others — not suppress it.

The point you are making is just not relevant. Not even tenuously.

This succinctly expresses a feeling of mine I hadn't been able to put into words so beautifully. Thank you!

But a warning to those who downvote: It's a trap! By doing so you're agreeing with me.

However, I think that in the case of the monopolies being discussed here, it's different. The issue is that they "enable" speech in a generic way. They don't enable this or that speech in particular. They also don't force A to listen to B's speech. If anything, they do the complete opposite, what with the whole "echo chamber" situation. I think this is the whole meat of the "platform vs publisher" debate.

A newspaper or other media have to actively "enable" something. When they publish speech A, they choose to not publish speech B. It's often an "either / or", at least for questions of space. They produce whatever speech they print / show. It's theirs, it's their point of view.

However, Facebook, Twitter and other similar companies only put out a tool. This tool is then used by this or that person to speak this or that argument. FB doesn't actively and directly help speaker A anymore that they help speaker B. Also, as an FB user, no one forces you to listen to B's speech if you don't care for it. Your right not to listen to speech you disagree with is not infringed. If I publish a story on FB, it's my story, my speech, not Facebook's. Just as if I shout in the town square it's my speech that I shout. It doesn't become the mayor's speech because it's in his town or the square's architect because he built it in such a way that my voice can physically be heard.

If you consider that FB has some right to prevent people from speaking "wrong" views, then why stop at FB? We should come up with ways to help other companies to prevent their product from being used for speech and other actions they don't agree with. Like the power company. Maybe they don't like their electricity being used to spread some "wrong" ideas. I'm pretty sure the local bakery isn't all that happy either to support some X-ist fanatic.

Where do we draw the line?

It is 100% infeasible for me to contract any of the canon taught in my office: diversity is a top priority, women are oppressed, etc. I don’t even disagree with all of it, but I do know that I don’t have the option of doing anything but earnestly nodding my head at the diversity events.

This doesn't work if every platform - whether they have market power or not - are compelled to censor by mobs. Most recently, Glenn Greenwald wrote about journalists trying to get Substack to censor its authors [1]. Well before, Signal employees tried to make their company have an anti-extremism policy [2].

The fact of the matter is, most people don't know enough about censorship to fight against it, and so small groups of dedicated people can create enough of an uproar in their circles about something to make it untenable for any major platform to speak about it, simply because those platforms now have to contend with a vocal minority pushing a narrative. This has been a very common tactic in India, where I'm from: interest groups will object to a movie or a book loudly enough to de-facto, and even sometimes, de-jure censor it. Most recently, a Netflix series lead to a controversy as it dared to show teenagers doing drugs. This lead to Netflix being notified buy the Indian equivalent of the CPS, and was directly caused by people complaining about the show on Twitter. [3]

There is a pardadox of tolerance with respect to free speech. We cannot expect to maintain freedom of expression if we treat everyone who actually expresses themselves as a sinner.

1: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/journalists-start-demanding...

2: https://www.theverge.com/22249391/signal-app-abuse-messaging...

3: https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2021/mar/11/netflix-...

I think there is such a thing as critical communication infrastructure, and even if it run by private companies, it should be protected from censorship. Whether all of FB or just private messaging fall under this is more debatable, but there have to be clear limits on what a company that facilitates communication between 1 billion people can do.

I think there actually is such a moral obligation.

And good health of the society requires free exchange of ideas and freedom to debate this ideas without fear of being persecuted and punished. Yes, even if you're end up being wrong - in fact, freedom to be wrong (excluding, of course, recognition that you're wrong) is vital to any proper debate, since if being wrong implies one's destruction and punishment, no serious and honest debate is possible, and no serious and honest truth-seeking through free exchange of ideas is possible either. You'd either fear to express your ideas, if you're powerless, or use your power to suppress other's ideas and punish them, if you're powerful - and that would have no relation with whose ideas are better.

Only when the exchange of ideas are free, and only when ideas can participate in this competition without prior approval by powerful incumbents, any healthy democratic society is possible.

And yes, whoever in power in such society, which now includes the big tech leadership, have moral if not legal responsibility for it - a responsibility that they are not only neglecting but blatantly violating right now. Censorship by powerful monopolies is as wrong as censorship by the government, and we need to stop hiding behind this stupid idea "but it's not government, so we can ignore it".

Furthermore, your calculation of someone's reach isn't entitled to be the standard of how reduction of reach is to be applied.

In fact, you don't even own the audience or the platform that you claim you have the right to deny others from using.

You have absolutely no say, sway, or stake in anything you are discussing. You're just hiding behind a Google lobbyist's buzzphrase and pretending you are targeting people you don't like.

The two major credit card companies that dominated could have canceled anti-war "haters'" credit cards in the name of patriotic support of the just cause, banks closed their checking accounts, the major airlines refused to fly them, and so on, and those on the left with your principled commitment to the right of "monopolies and near monopolies" to enforce their political preferences would have had no major objections--as long as it really is a general principle and not just a pretense.

Is the government or some other absolute authority censoring wrong? Yes. Are powerful monopolies (or near monopolies) wrong to censor? No, because they have the same speech rights as others

And yet I suspect that this support for the "freedom" of the most powerful to silence, control, and enforce their will is not really the general, politically neutral commitment to everyone's freedom of choice that it pretends to be.

The urge to preempt what an audience hears is suspect.

I don't disagree with this as stated. But the reality is different. When the tech-oligopoly has a mono-ideology and they all censor the same people, and then pull the rug (hosting) out from under competing platforms, and then rip up the signs (dns) pointing to alternatives, and then siege the opposing cities (payment processors ban them) it becomes a much worse problem. That moves from the theoretical to the practical.

> Are powerful monopolies (or near monopolies) wrong to censor? No, because they have the same speech rights as others, the problem there lies in the market power of the monopolies, not their speech.

Yes, because it's not just websites. It's infrastructure and finance colluding with the presentation layer. At what point do we all agree that it's a problem, and admit that the powerful aren't always right?

Free expression is a moral right.

And what is a platform anyway? A wordpress site? A twitter account? An IP address? A bank account? A megaphone? A street corner? A sign? How far are you willing to go to shut other people up because you disagree with them?

> Calling to silence others (that is, encouraging them to take your view of not giving them an audience) is fine as long as people have a choice on how to respond.

How did we turn so quickly to this view? When I was growing up, everyone would have blanched at the suggestion that attempting to "silence others" is a-okay. It wasn't that it was illegal. It was that it was a strategy that would only occur to weak, ineffectual people who were afraid to argue on the merits.

> Is the government or some other absolute authority censoring wrong? Yes. Are powerful monopolies (or near monopolies) wrong to censor? No, because they have the same speech rights as others, the problem there lies in the market power of the monopolies, not their speech.

By what principle is it wrong for the government to censor? Once you've answered that, please explain how that principle magically stops at the government.

The point is - we have laws for speech that enters the criminal realm.

Go google of a picture of the Minneapolis police department engulfed in flames shooting out 50 feet over the top. That was certainly a strongly predominantly left driven action.

It's just, we had decades of wars and (justified) propaganda that thoroughly discredited fascism and their style of racism so it's easy to see how the right extremes is bad.

What the extreme left is doing on the other hand is a more modern variation of racism and totalitarianism. It's ostensibly driven by noble concepts like social justice but in reality devolves into racial discrimination, dogmatism and tribalism as is seen on far right, just with a different dogma and different racial preferences.

Maybe you find that particular dogma more agreeable, or maybe the ends justify the means for you, I dunno.

But if you genuinely look at the discussion on Twitter or Reddit and you don't see extreme left views upvoted as often as extreme right I don't really know what to tell you. I guess people on the far right don't recognize their own crowd as an extreme either, it's just normal and common sense to them too, dismissing any rough edges with the same excuses.

You want specific examples? Try being public about not fully supporting BLM. Not the literal slogan itself, but parts of everything else the movement and their leaders come with. See if anyone catches the nuance of your opinions as you're branded a racist for not falling in line. You don't even need to say anything racist, even a modicum of doubt in the dogma is seen as dogwhistling your obviously racist views.

Do you see a lot of sexism or racial slurs / offenses in what you personally read on the internet? I don't, but the parts that I frequent what I see are mostly leftist racism and sexism, blaming white people for what other white people did, generalizing straight white men as privileged, "sounds about white"... No, none of that rings a bell, or none of that sounds bad or important because <reasons>? Try switching white to black and see how that holds up. Feeling righteous and having noble reasons for racism and sexism doesn't make it right. That's how all racism is justified and never in history has it been the right way to go about treating people.

It's such a generic statement that it's meaningless and could apply to any group of opinions.

It would help, if you would the issues the left should soften up on.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26432620.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26432675.

The urge to label them fascists and make them seem monstrous and unworthy of engagement is the impulse leads to civil war.

You can't tweet at them though.

2) How do you determine that a specific person you're dealing with can be specifically categorized into that bucket?

3) Are you calling them that name because it accurately defines that person's identity and behavior or is it because this tag is a really easy tag to slap onto people so you can deal with them very easily without having to think too much..

Like if I call someone a simp, beyond me insulting him and conveying I don't like him, it doesn't really mean anything..

not like he's going to become one (whatever that would mean) because I called him that..

Science is an excellent framework, leftists are very good at it when it’s about criticizing the opponent, and we are very good at it when we want to criticize the PC of the moment. Now we need to converge.

Please don’t despair. Please don’t give up discussing and trying to sort out truth from pollution.

1. Declare people who disagree with you fascists 2. Declare that it's impossible to dialogue with fascists

Then it all becomes very easy.

How else are you supposed to respond to a comment like this?

I'd suggest you might try the other path, as Chomsky also suggests:

> “If you're in favour of freedom of speech that means you're in favour of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise. Otherwise you're not in favour of freedom of speech.

> There's two positions you can have on freedom of speech, and you can decide which position you want.”

[1] https://youtu.be/4-oV42OMQoE?t=408

This is the story of Daryl Davis, a black man who convinced 200 KKK members (yes, real violent racists, not just people who disagreed with you on tax rates) to change their ways. If a black man can do it by talking to KKK members, maybe it's after all possible for you to dialogue with your neighbor about tax rates?

THAT is how you beat fascism. Not censorship.

Lazy programmers trying censor via bits and bytes are never going to accomplish in a million years what Mr. Davis already has.

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.