[FranzFerdiNaN]

You don't discredit anti-vaxxers with speech. Same with flat-earthers. Same with fascists. You know what works? De-platforming them. Not giving them a voice in the public discourse. Not taking anti-vaxxers seriously and placing them at the same level as doctors because ''both sides'' and ''free speech''.

What has been proven again and again is that bad information drives out good, because it's so, so much easier to write bad information. So you need to keep a tight lid on people who spread actual bad information. If not you might end up as the US, with a reality-tv star as president.

[cf498]

>You don't discredit anti-vaxxers with speech. Same with flat-earthers. Same with fascists. You know what works? De-platforming them.

I would like a source on that. Dont take it personal, but I dont see how this is anything but tanky signaling to feel better about yourself. Here in Germany people were rather active in making sure the new far right party AFD wasnt given a platform. By now they are very close to being the strongest party in multiple states. All that deplatforming did there was giving them a quicker rise. You cant deplatform a large sections of society, you are only creating a stronger echo chamber for them by trying. And i have to remind you, the echo chamber only exists because we didnt want to talk to these people. Deplatforming attacks the people not the ideas behind them. Nothing good can (or ever did) come of that. On the contrary, it only strengthens the community under attack and gives them an enemy to connect over. The only reason its attractive again as a tactic is because its easier. Convincing people through a discussion is hard work. I am very much afraid of the day when people are no longer capable to have a discussion because they have forgotten how due to living in echo chambers their hole life. I dont have high hopes that large parts of the left still know how to convince people with arguments, which in turn doesnt give me high hopes for the future. So yes, pls dont fuck us all over I am really not interested in another Reichstagsbrand because people liked how they viewed them self when working on deplatforming.

[roenxi]

In summary, if you don't explain to people what the flaws are in their ideas and arguments are they may not ever discover them.

Deplatforming makes it look like their is no logical or moral counter. It is not an explanation of why the ideas are bad. Platforming and debunking is reasonably likely to expose bad ideas as weak.

[account73466]

Too many words to convince that guy. It is funny how one can tick people in thinking high of themself. For instance, they usually don't have a clue about vaccination, AI or climate but they know that there is a trend and as long as you keep the currently popular opinion, you will be on the right side. Up to them, the rest are dumb fucks and should be deplatformed. Obviously, most of them never worked in science and have no critical thinking which develops while reviewing hundreds of papers where people (mostly) lie in order to get things published.

[aduitsis]

Somewhat tangential, but there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance.

In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.

[bart_spoon]

Why do people constantly evoke this these days? People quote it like its scripture. Is there supposed to be some self-evident truth in there? Because I don't see anything that counters the ideas of person you are replying to.

[jeegsy]

Hear Hear!

[intended]

I can source it.

I worked on modding a political forum from its laissez fairs days to its current operating philosophy.

Bad speech regularly frowns out signal, and in times of crisis, will overwhelm the channel with emotion.

It’s easier to make vague funny one liners which reach the top of the page, drowning out that 8 page report on the telecom industry.

Bashing a political candidate? Channel crusher.

Once the channel is overtaken, crazier philosophies start opening up - nationalism, religious cleansing, minority targeting.

Start moderating to keep the demons away?

The banned users start forming their own sites and attacking you. Bread crumb arguments are spread to lead new users down a dark road and create more enemies.

Eventually what works is banning all known bad actors and mention of those sites.

[cf498]

The people are still the same and they are still around, all you did was keeping your livingroom analog clean and your existing userbase from being replaced by racists. We dont have that luxury with society at large. These people dont just vanish once they are no longer on your site.

[intended]

Nope - those people now don’t have a larger platform to indoctrinate people with cult arguments and mind hacks.

We’ve also isolated them, so it’s obvious to anyone objective who goes to their corner of the world what their priorities are.

Because once they are isolated, they create their own boards - and on those boards the metastatis of arguments is obvious.

Clear calls for ethnic cleansing, “the minorities did it.” Etc. were rife.

And here’s the kicker - even the mods on that sub forum started banning users.

So when the actual nazis have to ban nazis, is it counted as a win for the model?

[cf498]

Thats a theory which I dont see much evidence for. Let me give you another theory about its effect. I would propose, that at least since the rise of the internet deplatforming leads to people getting pushed into far right echo chambers. I think its not just ineffective, its highly counterproductive. This unreflected feelgood nonsense is fueling the growth of the far right.

Since you brought it up, lets look at the topic of ethnic cleansing and how deplatforming would treat different people and what the result is. Say someone was never interested in politics or isnt that old and has some naivete left traveled to an area with extreme ethical or religious conflicts witnessing it first hand. An intimate view of decades old conflicts where parts of the civilian population are at each others throats and in some places even the threat of massacres is still very real if it werent for massive police or military presences. Take your pick from northern Ireland to some places in the Balkans to the variety of African conflicts with an unimaginable level of hate in some areas. Picture school children needing a police cordon on their way to school to escort them through screaming protesters because they have the wrong ethnicity or religious affiliation. Once people are personally affected or witness something they find atrocious they get motivated to think about it. How could the situation be improved? Talking with the people in the region he hears a specific mantra very often. As long as we still live door to door this conflict will continue. So the persons asks himself what could be possible solutions? The current situation is clearly intolerable to anyone with a sense of empathy. The person reads up on the conflict and its a decades or even century old issue. Quite alot was already tried, you can read books upon books of articles how the situation might be improved and about the numerous campaigns that were already completed. And still here we are today. So what were other regions that had the potential for ethnic conflicts but which are now resolved peacefully? A short look into the history books and you learn this was often achieved by deportations. You might not even have to look far, the formerly German provinces in Poland or Czechoslovakia dont have a any conflicts today, on the contrary. So apparently moving one of the groups is the solution. Sure this was often accompanied throughout history with atrocities, but back then horrible regimes and dictatorships were in power, now we have a properly functioning governments, those atrocities are a day of the past. Just horrible stories from the darkest days of humanity. We never had such a peaceful period in Europe and everyone knows we reached the end of history. So why not relocate one group and ensure permanent peace? So he asks, why dont we just deport every xyz in zyx?

My worry is, how many people on the left are still capable to explain to him why deportations and ethical cleansing are not just not a reasonable thing to do? Why his conclusion is wrong? Instead of just screaming Nazi and publicly shaming him? Could you? With deplatforming he is told that what he is talking about is called ethnic cleansings and he is a horrible Nazi for even mentioning such a thing. So he gets banned and has to look elsewhere for a solution to the problem he witnessed. He finds one of the isolated fringe boards. They are the only place to talk about it. While granted there are alot of Nazis, who cares, you find morons everywhere and they get banned on the platform as well, so he is obviously not in a Nazi board himself. He talks a while and finds some people who agree with him, who tell him that the mixing of inherently different groups is the core issue. He saw it himself after all. You just have to look as far as the Identitarian movement who put a lot of effort into discussion guidelines on how to convince people. Believe me if i tell you, they do know how to debate with someone, you cant cling to the cliche of the drunk skinhead.

That is of course a rather unbelievable story, who witnesses one of those conflicts after all? They are often shitty holiday destinations. But how many have had negative personal encounters with people who fit the role of a migrant or Muslim? The story is the same everywhere with every topic, we dont live in a perfect world and the far right is readily available with easy convenient answer for perceived or real problems. Are you still able to convince someone in a discussion about refugees and womens rights? And with convince I dont mean explaining someone why it is wrong to say something. What deplatforming is is peer pressure. You dont convince anyone with that. You just convince them that you have no answers yourself and to keep their mouth shut till an opportune time arrives. Before the internet that meant never being able to talk with anyone about that in your village or town because the neighbors might find out, with the exception of maybe a more extreme pub round. Your only real option was to look for a straight up Nazi Kameradschaft in the wider vicinity. That was a big step to take. Today they can easily look for more "reasonable" people or even join a major party. Deplatforming at its core leads to people getting targeted for what they say. The people get combated, the ideology behind it stays untouched. If we want any hope for the future that doesnt include a civil war or living in a fascist dictatorship we should look hard at switching that. Combating the ideology and convincing the people. Granted those debates are difficult and furthermore, a horrible past time. Most people dont want to talk about such atrocious things and dont want those discussion to happen in their living room. Just not having these discussions and excluding people who want to talk about it is much easier. Especially if you can feel good about yourself by going the easy way. The person vanishes from your view and becomes someone elses problem. Until they are all our problem.

You have a hypothesis, that deplatforming stops the spread of far right ideology. Thats a hypothesis we can easily test, we dont have to rely on your gut feeling how your policies affected the rest of the world around you. I think we can agree that we are just witnessing for the past few years an extreme rise of the far right across the globe. We are faced with openly far right parties which have made unbelievable rises in parliament and are in quite a few places on the way to becoming the strongest party and with that, will someday likely be the government. They already are the government in some places. Openly authoritarian politicians get elected and unthinkable thinks are happening like separating children of migrants from their parents and putting them in prison camps. And children dying due to lack of care in those facilities. I am sorry if i have to burst your bubble, but the current situation is a fucking emergency, the house is on fire and what we are currently doing is clearly not working. That leaves us with the question why deplatforming, exclusion and public shaming currently doesnt work? There are basically a few options as i see it (shamelessly stolen from a infamous German blog for people who are bored at work).

1) The strategy is valid and would work if it wasnt for those traitors in our midst who dont go along.

2) The strategy is valid and would work we just have to convince more people to join in.

3) The strategy is fundamentally broken and does not work.

4) The strategy is working, we just have to wait to see results.

If you see more options, please do share. I mean it. The situation is to damn severe for 4) we cant go on pretending like everything is fine and the situation being no different from combating the emergence of a Nazi youth club in small towns in the 80s or moderating a voluntary association in form of a board. If you have hopes for 1 or 2 i have to disappoint you. As an anti authoritarian myself let me tell you I sure as hell wont rally behind censorship. There is no authoritarian solution to the problems we face. While my view of the state of the world is granted horrible, I am sure i am not the only one who thinks this way. While the divide in the left between authoritarians and anti-authoritarians was not really a topic for the generation after the fall of the Soviet Union it is very real.

[intended]

So you are mistaking my facts for a hypothesis, it is not. I’m a moderator on an active forum and have been for a while. This is what happens in reality.

Your hypothesis On the other hand is worth following if you have substantiating facts that back it up.

[ajscanlan]

>It’s easier to make vague funny one liners which reach the top of the page, drowning out that 8 page report on the telecom industry.

>Bashing a political candidate? Channel crusher.

I see this all the time on Reddit in subs like /r/politics and /r/news, sarcastic quips get thousands of upvotes and dominate the discussion with no room for any dissenting opinions. Makes it real hard to find out who's being genuine in their approach and who's towing the party line for upvotes. Reddit isn't great for discussion though.

I suppose my question is, what stops your forum from becoming an echo chamber? Are "vague funny one liners" and "Bashing a political candidate" considered bad speech even if they're not leading to crazier philosophies? Would the hundreds of one liners about Trump in /r/politics be considered bad speech? Where can I find genuine discourse?

[intended]

No where.

Recognize that political speech is too valuable for political actors to leave to its own ends.

They will create tools and ways to influence it, and the internet allows for maximal influence and personalization.

I suggest an entirely more radical approach in future.

Make a prediction on a topic of your interest. Ask others to do so as well. Put it up in a public location. Set a time limit.

After the time limit see who’s prediction came true.

Talk through action and proof. Any idle political conversation represents a poisoned pool or a soon to be poisoned pool.

Right now maximize for threat awareness and not for open conversations, because the bad actors have the bigger guns.

[bart_spoon]

> The banned users start forming their own sites and attacking you. Bread crumb arguments are spread to lead new users down a dark road and create more enemies.

> Eventually what works is banning all known bad actors and mention of those sites.

How do you reconcile these two? Because it seems like the first defeats the second.

[azangru]

> You know what works? De-platforming them. Not giving them a voice in the public discourse

Many people (me included) find this approach very unpalatable because of how inherently authoritarian it is. (Ironically, this suggestion often comes from the same people who are concerned by how underrepresented some groups are in the public discourse and how the voices of those groups are not heard, and want to artificially amplify those voices). If you have studied history of any repressive regime where dissenters were deprived of any conventional platform and were reduced to circulating their ideas in the underground, you might empathise.

It's absolutely fine not to take certain groups seriously. But it feels (to me) deeply unfair to undermine their very ability to speak.

[dariosalvi78]

Wait, de platforming is very different than censorship.

Examples: Should climate change deniers be given the same space as actual science?

Should communists (to not only focus on far right) be invited to every serious talk about economy?

[azangru]

> Should ... be given the same space

> Should ... be invited to every serious talk

Of course not; but "inviting to every X", or "giving the same space" is very different from disallowing X to share the same space (especially if said client change deniers or communists are prepared to have a conversation using roughly the same epistemological tools as actual scientists). There is no onus on platform providers to ensure that every opinion gets the same attention as others; my argument is that they merely let others be.

[yakshaving_jgt]

That's been proven? Where? Because at least anecdotally, I recall reading so many stories of people who were talked out of a cult by having better information presented to them.

[Spare_account]

I think if you're pushing back on the GP to ask for evidence, it is intellectually dishonest to go ahead and make your own un-founded statements. Can _you_ link to some of these stories to reinforce your point?

[yakshaving_jgt]

Yeah, fine.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leah_Remini#Scientology

- https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-used-to-be-opposed...

- https://www.self.com/story/from-anti-to-pro-vaccine

As far as challenges of the put your money where your mouth is kind, this one was pretty easy. So easy in fact, that you should take a moment to reflect on why you were so quick to get on a moral high-horse of burden of proof.

[Spare_account]

It was a reasonable request. You appear to be upset about being asked for supporting links, despite having made the same request yourself. I genuinely don't understand that. I'm concerned that we're drifting too far away from the orignal topic though, so there may be limited scope to explore this aspect of things here.

[SkyBelow]

>It was a reasonable request.

Was it though?

Let's break down what happened.

A: Claim X. B: Can you support X? Claim not X. C: Can you support not X. You should provide support for not X before asking for support of X.

Is it really reasonable to call out B for not providing support and not call out A for the same? B was the first to ask for sources, but A made the claim without sources. It also seems like if B only made the claim not X and didn't ask for sources, they would have been less likely to be called out themself.

So is asking people who ask for sources to provide sources really reasonable when we don't make the same request of people who are making claims without any sources? It seems to give a first move advantage and thus wouldn't be reasonable.

[Spare_account]

Sorry, I've only just seen this. Your breakdown doesn't reflect what happened here. You would be correct if all B had said was "Support X".

What we saw above was:

A: Claim X

B: Support X, I've observed Y.

C: Support Y too, please.

In this particular case, Y was arguably the inverse of X but it was nevertheless described as having been observed many times, but without any sources.

[ClumsyPilot]

You just provided anecdotes, so stop attacking the other person and consider that he is right.

You would have to prove effectiveness. i.e. out of 100 anti-vaxers, 90% stopped believing in bullshit. If it works on 1 person out of a million, that's pretty useless.

But it is well known fact that piling on more information does not change entrenched belief, it has been subject of peer-reviewed research for decades. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont...

[yakshaving_jgt]

I was the first to point out that all I have are anecdotes. I did so under the perspective that I am sceptical of their claim.

I do not have to prove anything. As I have already said, the burden of proof lies with the person making the claim, i.e., not me.

Even as a child in primary school, I learned in science class that theories are rarely proven, because it is so easy to disprove a supposedly proven theory by providing counter-evidence.

This is all somewhat tautological anyway. If you don't believe that people ever change their mind when presented with better information, then why are you even bothering to comment? Isn't it futile?

[ClumsyPilot]

> why are you even bothering to comment? Isn't it futile?

Haha, quite possibly. I mean, even with the best will in the world, can you file commenting on HN under 'useful activity'?

[bart_spoon]

> You don't discredit anti-vaxxers with speech. Same with flat-earthers. Same with fascists. You know what works? De-platforming them.

This isn't necessarily true. I was listening to a podcast about conspiracy theories and how misinformation spreads (the name of which is failing me right now), and in one episode there were some scientists who were dealing with a particular subsegment of the conspiracy theory crowd who would make wild claims about their scientific field. Trying to blackball them or shut down their voice was often all that was required to add fuel to their fire because "obviously these scientists were trying to suppress them because they didn't want the truth getting out".

What ended up being much more effective was inviting some of the conspiracy theorists to speak at one of their scientific conferences. It ended up completely taking the air out of their claims, because none of them were willing to get up and try and defend their ludicrous theories against a bunch of trained experts.

Short of creating an iron grip on all interaction with information a la China, deplatforming people is temporary, as creating and finding a new platform is easy and simply leads to a more concentrated echo chamber for their ideology to fester in. Voat, Gab, Hatreon, 4chan, 8chan, etc. There will always be another platform that opens up in response to other platforms shutting them down. And soon instead of having the original fake news or hateful ideology in the public, you now have a distilled, more extreme version of it leaking into the public.

I don't know what the perfect solution is, but simply deplatforming people isn't going to be it. It will likely be something more like drowning out conspiratorial ideas with high volumes of truthful ones, rather than simply trying to cutoff the oxygen of the conspiracy theorists.

[SkyBelow]

>You know what works? De-platforming them.

Evidence seems to suggest that the current attempted solutions are not working.