Threads Bans Anyone for Mentioning Hitler, Even to Criticize | Hacker News Reader

Threads Bans Anyone for Mentioning Hitler, Even to Criticize

techdirt.com

23 pointstype019 comments

Oh my. There are legitimate Godwin's law exceptions including historical discussions. The problem is a lack of nuance, context, and/or sarcasm. This makes Threads much like old Twitter.

Old Twitter prevented anyone from using the Southern expression "tarred and feathered" in any context as if it was some obviously racist colloquialism. It was insta-banned with a Hobson's choice of "delete the tweet or we suspend your account indefinitely".

I'm always curious what strange leaps and twists of logic leads to people implement word-based censorship. Is it really "Hitler bad! Don't say Hitler!" or is there more going on here? And I assume this came across at least one person's desk before hitting the giant green DEPLOY button. Or maybe that's exactly the kind of approval process Hitler would have used...

Hitler’s character has been going through a revival of sorts amongst right wing white nationalists. You can find such posts on X.com. Threads doesn’t want that on their platform. They also don’t want the white nationalists to decry the fact that their posts about Hitler are deleted but posts condemning Hitler are not deleted. This will lead to things like what Texas tried to implement regarding social media platforms. Easiest course of action is to ban all mentions of Hitler.

The approach is ridiculous, though. Again, it's a word ban. When someone bans the word from being mentioned do you say "awww shucks guess I'm not going to be a white nationalist anymore?" No, you start saying Vitler instead and move on.

> They also don’t want the white nationalists to decry the fact that their posts about Hitler are deleted but posts condemning Hitler are not deleted.

One way to handle it is to stop fucking tampering with everyone's feeds. Then, if someone doesn't follow people who spout white nationalist gibberish, they won't get said gibberish in their feed. But no! That's not right! We have to show people things they don't follow to drive engagement and in the process effectively introduce algorithms that tamper. The end result is everyone wants the algorithm to tamper how they think it should.

Any social media company engaging in this tampering should be regulated, chastised, and/or systematically dismantled. But that doesn't happen, because people engage more when you show them things they never wanted to see in the first place, and engagement drives profit, and profit drives capital. And doing anything to upset capital is heresy.

They are in the position of not wanting pro-Hitler sentiments on their site. They also don’t want conservatives, who are now in power, to punish them. It seems like a reasonable decision to just ban the word altogether. It’s expedient; not ideal.

And doing anything to upset capital is heresy.

When in Ferenginar do as the Ferengi.

you've loaded the deck, but not to your advantage. when you say

>right wing white nationalists

they already like Hitler, there is no need for your claimed revival.

In the 1980s a very few percent of people admired Hitler or sought to bring about a revival of his image. There is a mainstreaming of this revival. What is happening now is a normalization of the idea that perhaps he wasn’t all that bad. That he had the right idea to some extent. The center of the country has shifted greatly to the right. People who normally would not be right wing nationalists had the center not shifted are now right wing nationalists.

there is zero mainstream revival of Hitler, if you see it, you're hanging around on the fringes

When I wrote there is a mainstreaming I meant that there is an attempt to make it mainstream. There are conservatives who say they’d rather vote for a rapist felon than a liberal. It’s an attempt to normalize certain viewpoints. I.E. voting for Hitler is better than voting for a liberal. The idea is that the worst of us is better than the best of you type mentality.

While I detest Musk, the overly-simplistic political correctness attitude of policing adult speech with a word ban list without context is, in my view, fascistic, illiberal, and wrong.

Why not instead allow people to block words and phrases they do not like, or have a one click filter? That way there is no censorship, and people are free to block out and not see/interact with words, phrases, and ideas they don't agree with.

But Musk explicitly bought Twitter (with Russian money) to feed propaganda to people.

If they can block and ignore people and phrases, it wouldn't work. That's why it's not allowed.

You can block and ignore people and phrases on X.

Reddit might be more your speed.

Nah, I'm so UG I use Lemmy, Mastodon and Tildes =)

The ol’ post WW2 order looking shakier by the day…

Remember people, it's not fascism if no one is allowed to call it that.

It's not fascism because Threads has many competitors you're free to use instead. Threads is not a government.

Similarly, it's not fascism for X to shadowban Democrats to help Musk get a cabinet position (or whatever Trump gives him).

It is morally reprehensible and outrageous, but it's not fascism.

If Meta/Facebook doesn't directly address this, I can only assume that they idolize Hitler.

saying hitler is the new drawing muhammad

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