[mrkstu]

Cockroaches thrive in the dark corners. Sunlight is antiseptic. And forcing ideas/speech into those dark corners don't keep them from growing, it merely allows it to grow unobserved and un-countered.

Ideas are the only counter to other ideas and how we communicate those idea is via speech. Suppression only invites martyrdom on the behalf of those suppressed, increasing their credibility.

[snowwrestler]

Ideas aren't cockroaches, they're plants. And sunlight helps poison ivy grow just as much as it helps tomatoes and flowers.

There's no plausible mechanism by which talking about an idea more and more, makes it disappear. That's all an idea is: something to talk about.

Now, if you want to argue that no ideas should ever disappear, go ahead, but don't cloak it in "antiseptic" language. Antiseptic kills things. If you're talking about antiseptic for ideas, you're talking about killing ideas.

[ilovecaching]

That's essentially John Stuart Mill's argument in On Liberty. Suppression of bad speech and thought only leads to a tyranny of the majority and can eventually lead to us forgetting what is bad versus good, just as we can't tell what darkness is if we only live in the sun.

[supernovae]

Google/facebook/twitter et all should just remove algorithmic approach to timelines and stop allowing them to be gained/bought and go straight up user wall/order/ time-based.

The algorithm will always favor manipulation...

honestly, i just wish users would go back to small communities and indy publishers... It's easy for me to find a music forum or jeep forum with people i want to hangout with but on facebook those that can game/manipulate get the most views and its ALWAYS selling controversy...

[OmarIsmail]

There is evidence that deplatforming works (https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbp9d/do-social-...)

[tux1968]

For some definition of "works" since the analysis doesn't consider unintended effects or potential adverse long-term consequences. This all seems joyful while the technique is being applied to those with whom we disagree, less so once the technique has been turned on you yourself.

Defending free speech means defending those we disagree with, and maybe even hate.

[OmarIsmail]

I think it's pretty safe to say that child porn would run a lot more rampant if it could be easily shared without consequence?

I understand that there's a different level of consequence we're talking about here (legal vs comment deletion) but how we treat child porn is the extreme for intolerance and I think it's safe to say child porn is less than it would be in the more "tolerant" alternative. And I actually do mean think, I don't have evidence, and I don't know, so if there's evidence otherwise that some society accepted child porn with the caveat of "this is bad" always being placed beside it and then saw it's usage and distribution drop I would find that pretty damn compelling case.

I would point to other comparables though. What causes a decrease in smoking? Did putting health warning labels on cigarette boxes decrease smoking? How did that compare to banning commercials and removing indoor smoking?

[leibwiht]

Ideological convictions are not the same as smoking or child porn. Proving that smoking is wrong is easy. Proving that an entire ideology is wrong is not even possible, because "right" and "wrong" in this sense are subjective - they are relative to a specific person with specific interests. You might think "well obviously 'right' is whatever is the best for the most people", but should you really always prioritize the interests of the group as a whole over its constituent parts? For example, should you suppress Tibetian/black/white/Uyghur/etc nationalism because secession movements are against the interests of their host nations? Your condescension is mind-boggling, putting a system of ideas on the same level as satisfying base desires in an antisocial way is ridiculous.

[snowwrestler]

Deplatforming is about deciding which ideas are granted resources (pushed above the cultural baseline), not who is punished for speaking (pushed below the cultural baseline).

People without platforms are still free to speak. If dang banned me from HN I could still go stand on the corner and read my posts aloud and no one would arrest me.

Free speech does not mean I'm entitled to someone else's platform.

[commandlinefan]

You're changing the argument, though (in fact, you're completely inverting it). The discussion _here_ is whether or not tech companies should be forced to police hate speech. You're trying to conflate that into whether or not they should be allowed to.

[snowwrestler]

This sub-thread is about whether de-platforming (voluntary or otherwise) works to limit objectionable content. That's what the Motherboard article above me is about.

[snowwrestler]

I have to admit it's pretty funny that I'm getting downvoted to gray.

Am I being censored or deplatformed? ;-)

I'll see myself to the corner...

[gaius]

Free speech does not mean I'm entitled to someone else's platform.

But if a platform wants to be a "common carrier" and not a publisher with all the responsibilities thereof, it doesn't get to make the distinction, so actually in a very real sense, you are entitled to use the platform of anyone who wants to be a common carrier, by definition.

If you send something controversial via USPS, they don't have any liability for it, and only in very exceptional circumstances would it be intercepted in transit. If they were responsible for everything they carried, the postal service would look very, very different. If it's illegal you can be busted at either end but the postal service itself doesn't care.

[mistermann]

> Free speech does not mean I'm entitled to someone else's platform.

You're thinking of the first amendment, there is a nuanced difference between that and the general principle of free speech.

I'll assume you happened to not be aware of this, but there are lots of people online who refuse to acknowledge that difference and continue to spout the "entitled to someone else's platform" persuasion meme, which is kind of what this whole discussion is about: power, or altering the course of future events. If one's ideas & principles are sound, disingenuously censoring opposing ideas shouldn't be necessary. I believe many pro-censorship people know this explicitly (but would never speak it out loud) and others "sense" it subconsciously.

[jshevek]

(Edit: I agree with everything else you're saying.)

Is the difference between the First Amendment and the moral principle of free speech really that nuanced?

It seems to me one has to be thinking strictly in terms of a single country, a single period of human history, a single document in order to conflate the First Amendment with the moral principle of freedom of speech. This is a very narrow view.

[mistermann]

> Is the difference between the First Amendment and the moral principle of free speech really that nuanced?

It depends if you're trying to win elections or internet arguments, or to ensure a healthy marketplace of diverse ideas exists, because that is the best way we know of to find the best solutions to problems. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube are where modern people "congregate" and get their "information". Cutting someone off of these platforms dramatically lowers the chances that anyone will hear them, that's the entire point of the action. Claims that dismiss this as no problem "because someone else's platform" are not just saying nothing illegal has happened, they are also essentially saying a free marketplace of ideas is not valuable. This is a very new development in western countries, and it's pretty easy to see how far gone most people are already, even on more intelligent forums like this. Partisan politics trump almost everything on certain topics, even one as important as this.

[gdix]

> though it may have some unintended consequences that have not been fully understood yet.

I think no one disagrees that it "works" insofar as it stops the bad person from getting their bad ideas out there. Opponents of deplatforming generally argue that the long-term reaction to the deplatforming is worse than the problem the bad person's ideas were causing. Better to counter the bad ideas with good ideas to do long term good.

[vertline3]

"Opponents of deplatforming generally argue that the long-term reaction to the deplatforming is worse than the problem the bad person's ideas were causing."

Not just that the reaction is worse, that the deplatforming erodes the spirit of free speech. I believe free speech is an important part of democracy.

[erik_seaberg]

Even apart from the Streisand effect, conspiring to suppress crappy ideas gives them undeserved credibility. "They didn't want you to hear this."

[albedoa]

That's a reasonable concern and may even be true for some instances, but in the case of Milo Yiannopoulos for example, he practically just went away. Milo himself says he spent all of his savings and lost his friends. Even his most ardent fans stopped speaking out about him.

Nobody is listening to his ideas enough to give them underserved credibility.

[cft]

How do you define "bad" person? Ungood? Doubleplus ungood?

[gdix]

The last one. Doubleplus ungood.

[mrweasel]

Has Alex Jones stopped his podcast? Has his sites shutdown? Have people how believes what he believe changed their minds? Sure, fewer random people are exposed to him, so? They'll find someone else to follow that says the things they want to hear.

I suppose it depends one what you goal with deplatforming is. If it's convincing people that the ideas that people like Alex Jones and organisations like Black Lives Matter (they're in the article as someone who have similarly been affected) are wrong or hateful then I think it will fail.

[jshevek]

I would not consider that "evidence that deplatforming works", in the context of the parent comment.

[manfredo]

I don't think this sort of analysis can measure the impact of deplatforming on people's opinions. While deplatforming may suppress the open dissemination of hateful ideas it's erroneous to assume these ideas become less prevalent as a consequence. This has happened in my workplace, for one. After the company made it clear it would not tolerate things like Damore's memo and Stuart Reges' article on women in computing, I and other people who agreed (or at least, aren't actively adverse to those views) shut up, and joined the chorous of people condemning them. But in private, it didn't change our views. If anything, it's made me even more skeptical of that sort of leftism.

Consider the fact that deplatforming (primarily of right wing speakers) in the US became significantly more prevalent around 2014, and 2015. It didn't help in the 2016 election.

[halfnibble]

Deplatforming works until new "free speech" platforms like Gab arise to replace the old.

[snerbles]

Not without the old taking measures to keep that from happening.

Gab itself has been deplatformed to a degree, Google and Apple banned their mobile apps and their DNS registrar threatened to yank their domain over certain user posts.

[TimJYoung]

Only if you assume that everything that a given person says is bad/unwelcome. But, people aren't like that, and hold all kinds of different views on different subjects, some of which they may have extensive background in, and others that they are just pulling out of their nether regions and are subject to all kinds of biases.

For example, despite what anyone thinks about what Trump says (I think he's an idiot and a clown), he does occasionally say something that isn't complete BS (please don't make me try to find such an example).

You just can't go down that route and expect a good outcome. In fact, I would argue that you're going to end up with the opposite result that you intended because you'll, inadvertently, end up giving more attention to idiotic ideas than the ideas actually deserve.

[criddell]

> Ideas are the only counter to other ideas and how we communicate those idea is via speech.

A lot of holders of bad ideas have no interest in rational debate. For those people, sunlight is an energy source, not an antiseptic.

When ISIS posts a video of a beheading, there isn't a lot of reasonable discussion going on in the comment section.

[mrkstu]

Those aren't just ideas- those are vicious actions. I don't think giving access to those we are actively at physical odds with is within bounds of debating ideas.

I doubt the founding fathers were inviting Quislings to their debating societies during the revolutionary war.

[criddell]

Well, if you don't have a problem with ostracizing groups like ISIS or white supremacists, then maybe we don't disagree that much.

[mrkstu]

Are we at war with white supremacists? ANTFIA? Venezuela?

Equating ISIS with supremacists is equating a nuclear bomb with an M80 firecracker.

[criddell]

Well that brings up an interesting question: is the US at war with ISIS? I know Congress authorized action against the Taliban and Al Qaeda and maybe that's all that's needed to go after other groups.

[weregiraffe]

>Cockroaches thrive in the dark corners

Viruses thrive through exposure to new hosts.

See, you can prove anything using an analogy.

[basch]

I like to think of facebook type algorithms as amplification, not suppression. Its not what content gets deranked, its what content gets promoted to the top.

The question is, should "bad speech" be amplified, promoted, propogated, broadcast, surfaced, and repeated, ON PURPOSE; just so it can get rebuked, debunked, dismissed, and exposed?

(I agree with you, the answer is closer to "The Remedy to Bad Speech is More Speech ... Marketplace of Ideas" however, the question being discussed is more akin to "Theres a limited amout of space at the front page, and people have limited amounts of attention to give, WHO gets the megaphone, and for how long". Its the inverse of "the robust debate principle recognizes that sometimes in a crowd of speakers it is necessary to turn down the volume of certain loud and clamorous speakers in order to give others a chance to speak." Facebook and the algorithm DO DECIDE who to turn the volumn up on, who to promote to the top. They already arent neutral, they already exhibit preference and bias for certain ideas.)

Others are arguing that this is flipping the argument, BUT we are talking about algorithmic placement moreso than true censorship. If someone is allowed to post something but it NEVER makes it into someone elses Newsfeed, is it as good as censored?

[Skrillex]

The primary issue with this argument is the imbalance of the situation. There is an enormous difference in the amount of effort it takes to make a false claim (that sounds nice enough for people to believe without evidence) and the amount of effort it takes to refute said claim, especially if the refutation hinges upon mechanics that most people do not understand. In the unlikely scenario that most of the people who listened to both arguments happened to accept and understand the right one, there is still another huge hurdle. The fact is, the short, wrong claim is optimized for remembering and regurgitation. It is easier to remember that than to remember the complicated refutation, or even remembering that there was a refutation. Even in the ideal scenario where all other parties accept and remember the good argument, the person espousing the false claim can simply leave and continue to make the claim. When also taking into consideration the fact that most people do not have the knowledge and eloquence to make the good argument in the first place, it seems intuitive that the bad argument would still easily make its rounds.

[ceejayoz]

Bleach is a better antiseptic than sunlight.

There's some evidence deplatforming works:

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbp9d/do-social-...

> “We’ve been running a research project over last year, and when someone relatively famous gets no platformed by Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, there's an initial flashpoint, where some of their audience will move with them” Joan Donovan, Data and Society’s platform accountability research lead, told me on the phone, “but generally the falloff is pretty significant and they don’t gain the same amplification power they had prior to the moment they were taken off these bigger platforms.”

> There’s not a ton of research on this, but the work that has been done so far is promising. A study published by researchers at Georgia Tech last year found that banning the platform's most toxic subreddits resulted in less hate speech elsewhere on the site, and especially from the people who were active on those subreddits.

https://mashable.com/article/milo-yiannopoulos-deplatforming...

[avivo]

I wish this were true. Sadly, evidence may not bear this out. If it did, then e.g. YouTube wouldn't be in a constant battle to take down ISIS recruiting content...

[kadendogthing]

Not only is this analogy bad (sunlight helps plenty of bad things grow, things even detrimental to our survival as a species), but it assumes that you're dealing with rational actors. Stop naively assuming this. It's a bad assumption. There are people out there who will argue in bad faith and have no interest in reasoning or truth. And there are people who will fall victim to those bad ideas. Religion, terrorist factions, general cults, hell we can barely keep our own actions in check while we actively harm the environment.

The idea that if you just say the right, True (TM) thing then people will flock to it so not only naive it's so obviously wrong if you look at a laymen's perspective on basically any subject. It's also just a waste of time for the subjects typically in question. The communication of ideas has changed. It's a chaotic free for all. We've over done it. It's time to have a serious and reasonable conversation about the current state we find ourselves in, least we shoot ourselves in the foot with blind, headstrong optimism about ideals that don't much the reality of human nature.

In before someone references 1984 blindly and displays the ever-popular dystopia-prediction fetish that's so prevalent in these conversations.

[mrkstu]

I think the onus is on those who would silence debate to prove the immediate harm they are advocating isn't the worse alternative. There is a reason why prior restraint on speech is almost impossible to compel in American courts.

I find it curious that those who apparently are in such a rush to suppress Bad (TM) ideas adopt the worst ideas of fascists in order to do so.

[kadendogthing]

>I think the onus is on those who would silence debate to prove the immediate harm they are advocating isn't the worse alternative.

We've always relied on editorial control for the most part in all of our mediums to make sure that the information being disseminated is reasonably accurate and fit for public consumption. It's not a fascist idea and has absolutely nothing to do with fascism or any type of propaganda for any political party. There's no need to be so absurdly hyperbolic over what is quite frankly, a common sense mechanism when dealing with the proliferation of ideas.

We know that disinformation spreads faster than the truth on several new, internet media platforms these days. The onus is on the people who would so eagerly disregard common sense filters that have been time tested, for them to prove that the danger and harm currently being caused by this new wave of disinformation in every single subject matter will be worth it now, tomorrow, and for the foreseeable future. Take the following:

* Vaccines, health.

* Environment

* Economics

* General politics.

In which subject are the ideals your espousing helping us? Because in each of those subjects I can point you towards real life, damaging consequences that have come about because of unfettered Bad (TM) ideas that spread over modern mediums.

This isn't a theoretical problem. It's happening right now, today.

[notyourday]

How is this argument differ from the following one:

(setup - 1950 but we have facebook/twitter/youtube/instagram)

Most of the population thinks that people promoting same sex relationships are just hell bent on destroying the good and wholesome America and demand that the leaders of LGBT of the time be deplatformed from that twitter/facebook/youtube/etc.

[kadendogthing]

How is the argument the same? You can't just ask me to do all the work for you while you just presume your statement is factual with no supporting evidence. Though I've gone ahead and responded because I feel very passionate about this issue.

To answer the heart of your point: any kind of editorial/screening system isn't perfect. We'll get things wrong. We always have, always will. It's still better than what's happening right now on these mediums where we know some portion of the population are "getting things wrong" and we're just allowing it to happen in a free fall fashion. "Do nothing" is never the answer, never has been and probably never will be.

To address your specific example: It's not based on what most of the population thinks. Qualified opinions are a thing. We can talk about what makes a qualified opinion, with your example or any other subject. Notably we see these types of opinions in your example gaining momentum because we're allowing certain groups of people unfettered access to an audience. It's really a bad example in my opinion, but I understand and sympathize with the point you're trying to make.

Unfiltered, unstructured information from unqualified sources tends to prey on our darker nature more often than it appeals to our better senses as people. To kind of expand on implementing practical systems around how we actually function as humans, in a lot of ways the "bad" part of human nature is why we've structured many western governments with explicit separation of powers with checks and balances. There are just some things we gravitate towards as humans that just aren't "good." James Madison in fact said the state was just a reflection of human nature, for the previous reasons. In a lot of ways, we have historically treated information dissemination in the same manner, checking and preventing the worst of our nature when broadcasting and consuming information via editorial controls and trusted, proven sources.

[notyourday]

> To address your specific example: It's not based on what most of the population thinks. Qualified opinions are a thing. We can talk about what makes a qualified opinion, with your example or any other subject. Notably we see these types of opinions in your example gaining momentum because we're allowing certain groups of people unfettered access to an audience. It's really a bad example in my opinion, but I understand and sympathize with the point you're trying to make.

Who qualifies the opinion? The opinion of those that wanted gays muzzled in 1950s were very qualified opinions.

Hell, during the Obama's first term in the office he publicly opposed gay marriage as the President of the United States.

Notice that your comment is being slowly greyed out and my question is already in the negative with you being the only person who actually responded rather than attempt to downvote it into oblivion. And this is on HN, not Reddit.

[marknutter]

Prove to me that you argue in good faith and are a rational actor.

[kadendogthing]

I thought it'd at least be a few responses before someone went for the typical "got'em" style of response that inevitably relies on Missing the Point, but I guess not.

I don't need to prove that to you. Even in your own odd request, you didn't even make the feeble attempt to pretend that you're running a popular media platform. We are talking about extremely popular platforms that inherently give credence to any view points espoused on those platforms, view points that can have far reaching effects. To give you a very specific area that we're touching on, it's internet demagoguery.

Editorialization is not censorship, nutter.

[mrkstu]

I don't in any way expect that Twitter has reviewed a tweet for content and approves of the content therein. Equally so for Facebook et al.

The platforms ubiquity makes them the Hydes Park / Public Square of the modern age- if anything they should be regulated to be content neutral rather than be encouraged to silence certain viewpoints.

[Vraxx]

That's just not true though when you consider that these platforms have algorithms that will determine which posts get more visibility than others (trending is the most obvious of these). I don't think this would be even half as much of a debate if we had an electronic platform that could actually be the modern public square of the US, but instead we have only private entities attempting to provide this, and they are decidedly not protectors of free speech (that would be our government). The extension of this is that even if the government did provide such a platform, there would likely still need to be rules because as much as you like to think we have unfettered free speech, you still can't stand in the middle of the public square and call for the death of another individual or you can't shout "FIRE" in a movie theater when there is none.

If we actually had a government run system, we could ensure things like accountability for your ideas that you self publish in such a public square because the government itself would have the servers that contain the data. The constitution would limit the government from censoring this platform, but it wouldn't limit the government from implementing more effective methods of processing abuses of free speech such as libel by having an immediate record of what was said. My main point here is that it's easier to agree on what if any free speech limitations should apply if there isn't this proxy layer of "Well corporations can do whatever they want with their servers" and "Well these laws don't apply to what they said because nobody is speaking in the domain that freedom of speech applies to"

[orthecreedence]

> If we actually had a government run system

We do! Buy a domain, point to your home server, and go to town. Any unlawful messages you spew will be met with seizure of your domain and/or servers, but otherwise you're free to promote or discuss any ideas you see fit.

If you're talking about a government-run social network, that's an interesting idea. I was actually talking about this with someone a few days ago, but with regard to a government run (or government funded) news/journalism publication that reported on facts (as opposed to felings and clickbait).

I think these government-run services would eventually become victim to people's calls for them to be removed...either they are too biased, or not biased enough. A social network in particular...I cannot imagine a social network built and run by the government that ANYBODY would actually want to use.

[tzakrajs]

Cockroaches are also hardy and reproduce at an incredible rate. We've seen some cockroaches like white nationalism, that would've atrophied as demographics change, spread more rapidly. We now have a solution for a problem that we wouldn't need without the solution. Great.