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Comment by birdsongs | Hacker News Reader

It's not deplatforming if campuses don't want to hear someone speak. This seems like a bonkers term to use.

200 deplatforms in a year? (There were 75 in 2003, the 30 year trend is gentle at best.)

There's almost 6000 higher education institutions in the US. This is fabricated outrage.

Even worse, it's "deplatforming attempts". If someone complains about a speaker, even if the institution doesn't agree, it seemingly goes on the list. In that context it feels even more ridiculous.

Yeah, it appears that several recent incidents that they highlight proceeded anyway. I would expect students to protest a Turning Point event at a university; that doesn't make it "deplatforming," especially if the university allows the event to proceed as planned.

Would you expect government officials to join deplatforming attempts, using their position to demand that universities listen? Because increasingly that’s happening as well, as reported in the second half of the article.

> Would you expect government officials to join deplatforming attempts...

Absolutely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Bad_Neighbors

Government officials applying pressure on cultural outlets is nothing new, but it’s been a long time since we’ve had them leaning on universities to reject certain on-campus speakers.

Oh good catch. Ok, so nationally, if each campus held only one event per week, we're saying 0.07% of all meetings had someone speak up against it. Less than a tenth of one percent.

I couldn't roll my eyes any harder. This certainly is a national crisis.

Math: 200/(50*6000)

I believe it is also per-speaker-at-event, not simply per-event. So if there is a panel of ten people, that counts as ten deplatformings.

So something like this from their recent list:

> Turning Point USA scheduled a “Freedom Built to Last: Honoring Charlie Kirk” memorial at Utah Valley University, featuring a number of prominent conservative speakers. Students for a Democratic Society at UVU opposed the event honoring Kirk and his political legacy. The university declined to cancel the event, and it proceeded on Sept. 10.

Even worse than that. They multiply by the number of speakers. One even can be five deplatforming attempts if there are five speakers.

How can a "campus" not want to hear someone speak? Can you explain how that works?

Ask me a question in good faith and I'll gladly answer.

You used the word "campus", because you didn't want to say that the students wanted to hear someone speak. You didn't want to say that, because it's clearly false: students are the ones who invited the deplatformed speakers in the first place. Sure, some other students didn't want them to be able to speak, but then we are just talking about differing opinions and a right of a minority students to hear voices that the majority wants deplatformed. By using the word "campus", you attempted to imply a presence of a non-existent consensus.

There's also a second reason why you used the word "campus": because when anyone speaks on a campus, the inanimate campus always hears it. If you said that the "students campuses don't want to hear someone speak", the obvious retort is that nobody is making them do it, they just don't have to attend. Of course, what is actually happening there is not that the majority of students don't want to hear those speakers, instead they don't want the speakers to be able to speak, and they don't want the minority to be able to listen. That's why deplatforming is so pernicious and evil, and why people like to play language games to minimize the illiberalism on campuses.

So much ascribed intent to a comment I wrote in 30 seconds about shit statistics. The math is bad, the reporting and conclusions are bad.

That's it, really, I'm not some evil wordsmith with an agenda.

But okay man, sure.

Not always. FIRE also gets pissed off when students complain about a commencement speaker, who was selected by the university administration.

Sure, it's not always students who invite someone, but that doesn't really affect much: students are not a uniform body, and even if they were, while university administration might want to choose someone they'll like, they also might want to choose someone who'll challenge them, and provide diverse perspective to counter such homogeneity -- as I understand it, diversity is an important value to university administrators.

Ultimately, the problem with deplatforming is not about mere complaining. Students complain all the time about everything. The problem rather is about public disturbance, heckling, and intimidation. That's what the student activists are regularly engaged in.

> Ultimately, the problem with deplatforming is not about mere complaining. Students complain all the time about everything. The problem rather is about public disturbance, heckling, and intimidation. That's what the student activists are regularly engaged in.

Weird then that FIRE regularly complains about students doing things beyond "public disturbance, heckling, and intimidation."

Yes, students engage in other wrong behaviors too. Not sure what your point is.

What’s important is the overall trend, the increasing involvement of government officials in deplatforming attempts, and the fact that such attempts are now bipartisan. This dovetails with recent polls showing increased support for using violence against speech by political opponents, across the spectrum.

> the fact that such attempts are now bipartisan

They were always bipartisan.

McCarthy. The Dixie Chicks. Teletubbies. Hell, the American Revolution saw people tarred and feathered for supporting the wrong side.

Humans have done this as long as there've been humans. Other ape species exclude shits from the troop just like we do.

I don’t have the data, but my own experience is that the left wasn’t using deplatforming much from Bush to Obama I, and the right wasn’t using it much from Obama II to Biden. Although that could just reflect who held institutional/cultural power at the time. So it could be cyclical.

When Biden asked Twitter to stop spreading the Good News about horse paste during the pandemic, it broke conservatives' brains somehow. I mean, they are furious about that. A lot of what has happened since then can be traced to their efforts to redress this perceived injustice.

Committed partisans will always put political tribe over fairness and equal treatment under the law.

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