[mc32]

Here’s the thing. On dedicated forums we know the protocol. We don’t want spam and we don’t want politics.

If it’s a political forum we expect all civil exchanges to be treated equally. So a proponent for Owls and a proponent for sawmills both get their say and one doesn’t get “deranked” or de-monetized because it’s not the popular opinion or the au currant opinion. We don’t expect one political candidate to be artificially ranked and another artificially buried in the results.

Now, if I’m on the Hillary blog, yes, of course I expect the org to manage the commentary to fit their narrative. I don’t expect Zuckerberg or Pichai to turn their orgs into the Hillary blog or the Donald blog.

[crooked-v]

> If it’s a political forum we expect all civil exchanges to be treated equally.

The problem here is that bad actors intentionally take advantage of this by supplying an endless stream of 'civil' arguments for entirely abhorrent stuff. This includes usually feigning ignorance and claiming they're 'just asking questions'† when objections are raised, even though it's the tenth or fiftieth or five hundredth time the same thing has come up.

† https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions

[drdaeman]

> even though it's the tenth or fiftieth or five hundredth time the same thing has come up

Immediate thought: merging topics is drastically different from closing or deleting them.

Slightly off-topic below:

Generally speaking, I would love a technological solution for QA redundancy. Saw way too many long forum threads that have asked same/similar questions over and over. Not politics and not from bad actors, but e.g. reviews of new devices etc, where everyone and their dogs asks about, say, battery life, every 10 pages. StackOverflow-like QA platforms provide some structure to this, but are limited to objective answers. For example, there's no SO for book plot reviews/discussions and SO format isn't really appropriate there.

[archgoon]

Given that there will always be an influx of new people; and that most people will not be familiar with previous discussions, I'm not convinced that most forums are being assaulted by bad actors. This seems to be more of a Eternal September problem.

Of course bad actors can abuse this; though I've always felt it would be good for the derailing comments to be removed with a polite dm message explaining that the topic had been discussed previously with links to said discussion.

[crooked-v]

It's definitely an organized tactic among some groups. For example, there's a literal neo-Nazi handbook† that advises members of that group to disguise their sentiments in civility and/or 'jokes' in order to sneak it into mainstream discussion.

† https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/19/neo-na...

[mc32]

Any movement can use those tactics. I wouldn’t be surprised if they also read rules for radicals too. Any group looking for influence is going to use tried and true methods.

So while many vile groups like the nazis and others seeking power, there are many other groups who hold unpopular opinions even unpopular and illegal outcomes (as presently held by the public), I’m not sure we want to suppress that. Much of what we have today as acceptable discourse and so on is because we allowed those voices which were considered degenerate or unacceptable one way or another.

We don’t need a new dogma telling us the way to think correct.

[paulddraper]

Just because Nazis use rhetorical questions doesn't make rhetorical questions bad.

[everdev]

> we expect all civil exchanges to be treated equally

Define civil :)

Take any hot button issue like guns, abortion, etc. where your stance on one side of the issue can be seen as immoral or life threatening to the other side. Take a passionate / borderline tweet from one side and you'll probably get a 50/50 disagreement on wether or not it's "civil". Now what? Block the tweet? Warn the user? How many people need to complain before it's considered a problem?

Now go a step further and look at the Westboro Baptist Church. They think that they're doing a public good by shaming those who have died (because they believe God punishes sinners and their families with death). They believe it's a sin not to tell the families that the recently deceased is a sinner. They believe they're communicating God's message. Now you'll probably get 99% agreement that it's uncivil. But now what do you do? Silence an unpopular opinion?

The problem is finding out where the line is for defining what's appropriate on a platform and what will be censored. Is it 50% + 1 consensus? 95% consensus? And who gets to decide? The users? The CEO? A board of censors?

These are tricky answers and different countries and companies draw the line in different places. But the devil is always in the details.

It would be nice if everyone agreed on what's civil and what's not, but unfortunately that's not the case.

[mc32]

So the WBC is an extreme case. Obviously it’s problematic. Their tactics are disgusting, and really it’s counter productive to their cause, though they are more like nasty trolls.

But we’re seeing issues where things are not problematic but because people are guilty of thinking “wrong”. If I want to discuss international politics and think we should liberate/invade country X or conversely we should leave country X well alone, I should not get penalized for articulating a point of view.

One thing I don’t understand is, if I follow janeblow@ I should not get offended by her tweets. I have the power to unfollow her, I can block her. I don’t see why people’s reaction id to get janeblow@ suspended.

[everdev]

> think we should liberate/invade country X

There are some people on the right and left that think that advocating for foreign war is problematic and counter productive. Some foreign wars in history have been justified and others have been out of greed or racism.

I think the point is we all draw the line in different places on what speech is appropriate which is why censorship itself is problematic.

[commandlinefan]

> and look at the Westboro Baptist Church.

That’s actually a great example of why viewpoint censorship is a _bad thing_, for everybody, including Twitter, you and me. Look, you and I both know that there are facts that are true that you can’t express for fear of being kicked off of public forums. In fact, even stating that there exist facts that are true but that you can’t express is toeing the line, even though nobody disputes that this is the case. Since you seem to be more or less pro-censorship, I’ll assume that you’re a bit left leaning, so here’s an example that’s suer to make you agree with me: imagine if publishing climate data somehow became (even more) controversial and people sharing (true, undisputed) global temperature readings found themselves being kicked off of discussion forums.

Now we have a situation where we have two sorts of people being deplatformed: the Westboro baptist church and people who think that the world is getting hotter. This paradoxically makes the WBC seem _more reasonable_ by association. Remember, censorship is retroactively self-justified - since it was censored, you don’t know what it is, just that it was something really bad, so it was bad enough to get deleted. We’re better off if anybody says whatever’s on their mind and, if it’s ridiculous, it gets mocked.

Does that leave some people who agree with ridiculous viewpoints anyway, no matter how often or thoroughly they’re debunked? Sure, but there are two possibilities: one, they’re in a small minority in which case they’re harmless or two, they’re actually a majority which suggests that they might actually have a point - and you, representing the intransigent minority, attempting to control them through censorship is EXACTLY why censorship should be opposed.

[everdev]

> Since you seem to be more or less pro-censorship, I’ll assume that you’re a bit left leaning

What gave you that impression? I was raising questions to show that any censorship (or definition of civil discussion) is problematic.

It's a tough problem because bad ideas can lead to bad things, but stopping good ideas can lead to bad things too. If we all agreed on what's good and what's bad this would be easy, but we don't.

I'd much rather live with the consequences of free speech than live with the consequences of censorship. But neither side should project claim it's a utopia.

[pornel]

> we don’t want politics.

HN doesn't ban discussion about encryption, which is a political topic. HN doesn't ban discussions about non-state-approved search engines, social media, and VPNs, even though in some parts of the world they're so "political", that they get people sent to "re-education camps".

Twitter's ban on political advertising suddenly reminded everyone how many things besides wars and elections are political. You can't advertise switch to green energy now, because that's about climate change, and that's political.

In practice "politics" ban means you still allow things that are political, but only ones that are ideologically aligned with the status quo.

[paulddraper]

Peter Thiel expressed a similar well-stated opinion in an interview (can't find it right now) a number of years ago about alleged political censorship by universities.

"I give a Catholic school leeway censor its students or professors to have a Catholic bias. It's on the label.

"It's another thing for USC to censor on a political left or right bias, without disclaiming such bias, or even professing a lack of bias. It's simply a dishonest influence on speech."