[wkjenjkwenf]

Sure, it reduced tensions on reddit, but what about tensions everywhere else? The author doesn't care about how toxic Youtube is, he cares how toxic the US is. Pushing these radicals onto radical websites only further radicalizes them. That should be an axiomatic fact, yet nobody seems to understand it.

[Barrin92]

>. Pushing these radicals onto radical websites only further radicalizes them. That should be an axiomatic fact, yet nobody seems to understand it.

First off, that's not an axiomatic fact, that's the definition of an empirical question. Secondly, even if it was true, who cares? You can't enlighten every crazy person on the planet, it's a waste of time. The goal of effective policy is to isolate radical elements to a point where they can't target mainstream communities of people who hold malleable beliefs. That is effective prevention.

I also see absolutely no evidence that the thesis of further radicalisation is even true. Here in Germany we have taken fairly strong, preventative measures to tackle hate speech and conspiracies online. It seems to have mostly worked, we have I think, one of the least polarized populations right now, broadly speaking. Insofar as there are fringe elements in their dedicated spaces, because they are in dedicated spaces, they can be monitored.

edit: another important point I forgot to mention, a lot of radical activity today uses commercial platforms for revenue to further fund their cause, maybe nowhere as evident as in the US where that sort of political activity seems to be a legitimate business. Depriving extremists of those revenue streams alone probably does significant damage to their cause.

[darepublic]

You're not engaging with the articles main point, that this censorship and exclusion is not evenly applied, and that it is rather conspicuously applied along political lines. There are many non scientific, ideology driven ideas that have been bullying their way into every facet of communication these days. Labelling people who resist this trend as fringe radicals who should be segregated and monitored is frankly disgusting.

[rayiner]

For example: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2019... (AOC: “the world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change.").

This is flat-earth conspiracy theory level falsehood. And it’s a falsehood about an extremely politically and socially important issue that if widely accepted could have massive repercussions. Is YouTube going to censor it?

[millstone]

This is hyperbole and AOC would be the first to acknowledge it. If "the world will literally end in 12 years" were to take root, then it would be a massive problem for society, not just YouTube.

[Ma8ee]

That might be hyperbole, but some people in Australia or California might not think she’s so far off already today.

[factotvm]

Predictions are different than lies.

[factotvm]

According to the downvotes, my statement must be false and predictions are the same as lies.

If it’s been proven false, don’t say it. If it can’t be proven false, carry on, as that’s not against the terms and conditions.

Or, a false equivalency between saying the election was stolen, and saying the world will end in 12 years if we don’t do something.

[rayiner]

“Proven false” clearly isn’t the standard. Nobody has proven the election fraud claims false. (Or the Hunter Biden e-mails story.) Like AOC’s misinformation about climate change, the conclusions are just extremely unlikely based on the facts we know. That’s been a high enough bar for censorship.

[Barrin92]

>and that it is rather conspicuously applied along political lines. There are many non scientific, ideology driven ideas that have been bullying their way into every facet of communication these days.

Yes, but not all of them are equally dangerous, so there actually is no reason to assume they ought to be evenly treated. There are ideologies that lead to people shooting up a restaurant or behead non-believers in the streets, and then there are people who are just annoyingly woke, or to take that example from the comment below, are overly cautious about climate change.

There's a difference between something that is merely non-scientific or silly and something that gets people killed or threatens democratic society or peaceful transition of power. That false equivalence seems prominent in US discourse when it comes to identifying and dealing with radicalism. The numbers of domestic terrorism in the US by political orientation actually make that very clear as well.

[borepop]

Isolating fringe radicals who explicitly aim to topple democratic systems is vastly preferable, in my opinion, to the actions of those fringe radicals to intimidate voters, threaten elected officials and poll workers with violence, and openly foment civil war that could bring untold misery to millions. It's not all that different from how the lectures of Anwar al-Awlaki were removed from YouTube back in 2017. Not every idea, no matter how pernicious, needs to be given room to flourish.

[tasogare]

> Here in Germany we have taken fairly strong, preventative measures to tackle hate speech

Only when those speeches are formulated in German.

[cambalache]

> even if it was true, who cares?

So what did you ban them in the first time?

> The goal of effective policy is to isolate radical elements to a point where they can't target mainstream communities of people who hold malleable beliefs. That is effective prevention.

Let's say I think Google is a threat to individual rights. Are their on their right to prevent people with "malleable beliefs"(how condescending) to listen to that message? Is that what you want? A corporate-controlled Internet and society? If you think they are free to go elsewhere you must know that the natural direction in unfettered capitalism is that the winners accumulate more and more in bigger conglomerates. That is an extremely dangerous game, courting a fascist society, in the original meaning of the term.

[jb_gericke]

As opposed to? Government controlled or moderated media would be devoid of agenda? I also don't see how capitalism is to blame, we are already seeing new social media platforms emerge pandering to the other side of the partisan spectrum. At the end of the day, YouTube and their ilk have executive decision making over the content they surface. I don't believe they should be beholden to some 'higher' journalistic ideals around objectivity. As a consumer if I'm not happy with their policies (extending well beyond content moderation), I'm obliged to go elsewhere. Whether this drives further polarisation or results in the creation of fringe or radicalised groups is actually besides the point.

[jessah]

Everybody understands that. But reach is taken from them. That's a extremely important effect. Way more important than the radicalisation, because if these people seek out new platforms to radicalize them self, they would likely have done so in every case. The danger of radicalizing a bigger part of the population is what is at stake here.

[ehsankia]

There are 3 scenarios:

1. Someone who is radicalized digging deeper

2. Someone who is radicalized changing their mind

3. Someone who is not radicalized getting radicalized

#1 is bound to happen, #2 has no chance of happening, so at this point, preventing #3 is the way to go. Keeping these already radicalized people on Youtube achieves nothing. On the other hand, keeping them on Youtube gives these them a huge platform to spread misinformation. Newsmax nad OANN don't have anywhere near the reach Youtube does, especially outside the existing bubble.

[swirepe]

#2 can happen. It happens when a person is shown that whatever they are feeling isn't the result of something inevitable

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C22&q=red...

[seppin]

Honestly if the choice is between no bans and allowing the current trends of radicalization continue, almost any outcome is preferable than what we've seen happen the last 5-10 years.

[throwaway3699]

Really? Things only really hit the fan when the bans scaled up. I don't ever remember things being this bad 5 years ago.

[seppin]

unprovable/unknowable and subjective analysis. Youtube banning people doesn't radicalize them, radicalizing content delivered to million of people on youtube radicalizes them.

A point so simple it feels silly to point it out, but here we are.

[cmroanirgo]

Most content is "delivered" in the form of suggested videos from within youtube itself and other social graphs that seem unwilling to concede that they might be part of the problem itself.

The rate of spread is a problem of YouTube's own devising based on clicks, views and likes. Remove this gamification and you'll see less engagement, hence less scale of radicalization.

With youtube labeling people "radicals" is a deliberate polarising term designed to do little more than tar and feather people into a specific box. Just like segregation, just like Protestants, just like the German Jews... Etc. It's very unflattering.

[greenflame7]

Radicalization doesn’t just happen it has to make deep intuitive sense to that person based on their own prejudice. You can’t convince a normal person to kill people by showing them a bunch of videos but you can convince people not to believe hanlon’s razor and therefore deepen their hatred by false attribution of malice where none exists

[ehsankia]

Antivaxx and other conspiracy theories on the internet weren't anywhere as big anywhere else either, you're trying to assign causation where there is none. Youtube didn't start banning antivaxx until way way after it was already massive and out of control.

[lawnchair_larry]

How is newsmax “radicalized”?

[TylerE]

They're a firehose of hyper-partisan swill not supported by facts.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/newsmax/

"Overall, we rate Newsmax Right Biased and Questionable based on the promotion of conspiracy theories and pseudoscience as well as numerous failed fact checks. (M. Huitsing 10/8/2017) Updated (11/12/2020)"

[greenflame7]

Neither is MSNBC, CNN, or FOX and they havent been for quite sometime.

[koolba]

> The danger of radicalizing a bigger part of the population is what is at stake here.

The real danger is that, one day, your own ideas are the ones considered too radical.

[Animats]

The real danger is that, one day, your own ideas are the ones considered too radical.

True. Worse, the acceptable range of opinions within both the US right and the US left have narrowed.

[stormcode]

I used to strongly believe this but now I think we've moved beyond having a public discourse and into things that are not protected speech. The president and others inciting violence against people doing their jobs, and those that are megaphoning those claims and calls to action deserve to be shutdown and deplatformed before someone is killed.

[greenflame7]

You should go meet the people that you are afraid of, you might find them not as bad as you’ve been told.

[scoopertrooper]

Regardless of the morality, I suspect that it will prove to be quite efficacious. Banning this kind of nonsense from mainstream platforms will certainly not reduce the toxicity of the existing radicals, but it will curtail their ability to spread their message and recruit.

These movements did not materialise out of a vacuum. Their growth and replenishment of strength is largely contingent on permissive mainstream platforms on which to set up shop.

I think platforms like Youtube and Facebook have shown the dangers of democratised mass-broadcasting. There were dreams at the dawn of the internet that enhanced access to information would create a better informed citizenry, but rather it has just exacerbated our worst traits as a society.

I don't know what the solution is really. The current situation is untenable in America, but how does one unpick it without resorting to totalitarianism? I'm somewhat partial to ending anonymity on social media posts, so at least people must stand publicly by their positions and can't create sock puppets to inflate their message.

[FreeTrade]

Pseudo anonymity is probably fine, but web-of-trust solutions to help quarantine armies of sock puppets and manipulators would be really useful. Can't imagine why Twitter/FB won't implement. (Ok. I can imagine)

[chongli]

Doesn’t Facebook already have a quasi-WOT? People on Facebook generally see the posts of their friends and those they follow, plus ads. That doesn’t stop fake news from rippling through the social graph.

How would a “true” web-of-trust be superior?

[scoopertrooper]

I can't see any benefit to even pseudo-anonymous political discourse on open mainstream mass-broadcast social media in a free society. If your message has a reach on the order of hundreds of thousands of people, then you should be able to stand by what you say.

[stale2002]

Let's say the government does something bad. Say it starts an unnecessary war or something.

I want people to be free to criticize that without being worried about being targeted by the government or it's supporters.

It is extremely important that people are free to criticize the government, while being as immune as possible to retaliation for that criticism.

[scoopertrooper]

If it gets to the point where we have to fear the government retaliating against us, then that government would have probably already shutdown or blocked the popular social networks.

[colordrops]

It's not a binary development. There are stages to getting to that point.

[stale2002]

Do you think this is new or something?

The government has a documented history of retaliating against people regarding speech issues.

There was a long period, know as "the red scare" in which this happened.

There are many forms of "in between" retaliation, that is in between a democracy and an authoritarian government.

And it is important to also protect people against these in between consequences, by allowing them to be anonymous.

We don't have to straw man the situation, and talk about a dictatorship that kills people.

Instead, we can also say that lesser forms of retaliation are also bad, such as the kind that happened during the red scare.

[kiba]

No, they showed the danger of popularizing and amplifying the most virulent messages, which usually are hatred and paranoia. If it were just a randomly uploaded youtube video that showed up on the front page, it would be much less likely to be picked up.

Instead, we have the possibility of the recommendation engine recommending videos en-mass.

[bccdee]

Doxxing and harassment are already huge problems on the internet; a zero-anonymity policy would be terrible for marginalized groups because it would make spokespeople and activists extremely vulnerable. Imagine that whenever you said anything on the internet, every Trump supporter with a phonebook could find out where you lived. Then imagine you're (eg) trans.

Beside, plenty of far-right reactionaries are entirely unafraid of attaching their names to their beliefs. Just look at the stuff people say on Facebook. And consider that you don't need to publish your name in order to listen to a far-right ideologue -- only to be one. And it doesn't take many ideologues to reach a large audience.

I don't know that there is a solution, outside of "encourage platforms to effectively deplatform bad actors." This has been successful in the past in dealing with movements which recruit heavily through social media, like ISIS — the difference is that social media companies have feared partisan backlash from conservatives if they apply these strategies against the far right.

This risks suppressing free speech, but I think this entire issue is a result of us wanting to treat social media companies as perfectly neutral universal forums. The notion of unbiased platforms needs to be abandoned, and social media monoliths need to be split into distributed, federated platforms, like email or Mastodon. This way, platforms can moderate to their heart's content: excessive moderation of any particular instance is less of an issue because users can always move to a different, better instance, but people who were justly banned will be isolated from the general public in their own servers.

This model will have challenges, foreseen and unforeseen, but it's got to be better than the current media oligopoly. At the very least, it's progress.

[scoopertrooper]

To be clear, my comments were limited to mass-broadcast over social media. If people want to form small clubs within which to share lived experiences without fear of societal retribution, then I'm fine with that.

> make spokespeople and activists extremely vulnerable

As you've demonstrated, anonymity is an imperfect system of protecting such spokespeople, so they should have greater legal protections. Reducing the spectrum of internet anonymity would actually support this goal as it'd simplify applying existing legal protections such as restraining orders within the internet domain.

> Beside, plenty of far-right reactionaries are entirely unafraid of attaching their names to their beliefs. Just look at the stuff people say on Facebook.

Perhaps, but that far right ideology must receive social promotion through 'likes', 'shares', and other such mechanisms in order to spread their message. Why is it necessary for these acts to be anonymous?

I sincerely don't understand how further decentralisation or federation could help resolve the problem. It just seems to me like you'd be making the moderation problem harder as you'd be shifting the burden from a few large companies to many small companies.

[bccdee]

You're advocating to remove any ability to communicate anonymously online with the intent to shame reactionaries into not saying reactionary things. What you don't understand is that the reactionaries think they're right, and they're proud of their beliefs. They flaunt them; they print them on hats and wear them around. They have no shame.

Meanwhile, the people who are actually threatened by this are the people reactionaries are victimizing — closeted gay and trans people, for instance. They lose their ability to find supporting communities online because as soon as they engage with a forum like that, such as for instance a relevant subreddit, their participation is broadcasted to everyone they know in real life. It's easy to say "they should have greater legal protection," but they already have legal protection. It's already illegal to murder trans people for being trans, but trans people are nonetheless subject to a massive number of hate crimes. Isolating these people and making it impossible for them to reach out when they're in abusive home life situations is a terrible policy.

And this is just one example of a group for whom the loss of online anonymity would be hugely damaging. You've massively underestimated the harm which being de-anonymized online can cause (that's why "doxxing" someone, or releasing their personal details online, is such a serious threat to their safety).

[toofy]

> I think platforms like Youtube and Facebook have shown the dangers of democratised mass-broadcasting.

Does anyone know of any good research on the early days of radio? I have a suspicion we had a similar problem before regulation due to the overcrowded airwaves.

If you know of any good books that cover this era let me know please.

[Ottolay]

Maybe because it's not an axiomatic fact. There has been niche radical internet communities for ages. It has only been with the radical communities coming into the mainstreams ones (reddit, twitter, and facebook)that the radical communities exploded.

[saurik]

I think the idea is more like this: you have two clubhouses, one that has 10 super radical people and one that has 190 people who are less radical. If you take the most radical 20 people from the 190 and force them to go across the street and spend all of their time with the super radical people, those 20 people probably will become somewhat more radical. Now, the 10 people possibly become slightly less radical as maybe do the remaining 170, which might balance things out a bit? But the people who are saying this makes people more radical are concentrating on the idea of taking people on the verge of being super radical and saying that they now only get to hang out with each other and the people who were thrown out of the mainstream long ago... it isn't that that group will "grow" past the people handed to it, but that the people given to it will become radicalized (which might be more dangerous than accepting everyone into the same system and attempting to have them all adjust a bit towards the mean).

[ardy42]

>> Sure, it reduced tensions on reddit, but what about tensions everywhere else? The author doesn't care about how toxic Youtube is, he cares how toxic the US is. Pushing these radicals onto radical websites only further radicalizes them. That should be an axiomatic fact, yet nobody seems to understand it.

> Sure, it reduced tensions on reddit, but what about tensions everywhere else? The author doesn't care about how toxic Youtube is, he cares how toxic the US is. Pushing these radicals onto radical websites only further radicalizes them. That should be an axiomatic fact, yet nobody seems to understand it.

Oh everyone understands it, but there's a trade-off you're not acknowledging:

1. Letting these people stay on twitter, YouTube, or reddit gives them an audience to recruit. The people in these toxic groups then may be less radical on average, but there will be more of them overall.

There also will still be highly radicalized members, and the sympathy of the less radical gives them support that could allow them to do more damage.

2. Quarantining them to Gab or Parler or whatever denies them the recruiting opportunities. The dead-enders who migrate will become more radicalized, but their numbers will be smaller, and perhaps decline over time, due the the lack of new blood.

[roenxi]

Who are "them" and "these people" here? Republican voters? The Republican leadership?

Even if the plan is to marginalise Republicans by selectively suppressing their views on YouTube, it seems questionable if that will provoke the same response as banning "fatpeoplehate" and "coontown" from Reddit. Tensions are likely to increase.

[ardy42]

> Who are "them" and "these people" here? Republican voters? The Republican leadership?

I had in mind white supremacists, QAnon, Boogaloo Bois, etc. I don't think the people making false and baseless claims about the election being stolen from Trump can easily be dealt with this way, because too many high-status people have joined that bandwagon.

[shawnz]

I think it's an important consideration what happens to other platforms but I don't agree it's obvious that the net effect of the bans will be negative like you are implying. I think it's pretty disingenuous to say that the problem is that people just "don't understand" your argument.

[habeebtc]

I dunno if you have explored the wingnut parts of the internet... But a huge amount of it runs off youtube via embeds.

The youtube ban impacts the most wingnuttiest parts of the internet directly.

[glennpratt]

I believe the US has gotten more toxic recently, in part because more and more liars and charlatans have technology enabled bullhorns. They flood feeds with garbage content that takes sober headed folks too long to wade through. It's not all political, but this is happening on the left and the right.

In other words, no, what you claim doesn't seem axiomatic at all.

[ABCLAW]

This doesn't really accord with any of the research and literature on the topic that I've seen, from the initial studies of forum bbs community lifecycles to more modern online marketing community analysis.

Do you have any quantitative analysis to cite for this or is it just your feeling?

[tesmar2]

The article on HN about the ban got something like 3 /thousand/ comments, very high for HN. I don't think these people are out of the mainstream, I think a big nerve was hit.

[austincheney]

> Pushing these radicals onto radical websites only further radicalizes them.

Alienation. Yes, this will create some self-feeding echo chamber elsewhere far away and out of sight. I am fine with that. The only people bothered by that are thought police who cry that somebody online might have a disgusting opinion.

[diebeforei485]

I agree. This may be a business decision to keep the media (and regulators/lawmakers of certain political stripes) happy, and it may indeed lower tensions on reddit in the short term, but it may not result in lower tensions as a whole.

[TylerE]

Frankly? I don't care. Let the Stormfronters, incels, et al go off and rage somewhere where I'm not.

[11thEarlOfMar]

Are you saying that people who voted for Trump are radicals?

[11thEarlOfMar]

It's interesting. My question is getting a number of both downvotes and upvotes and for the moment is even. But no replies. So I'll go on.

In my view, 'zealotry' crosses over to 'radicalism' when the threshold of violence is crossed. We generally are concerned about radicals in religion or politics because we fear they will or have committed violence in the name of their cause.

Yet... there are far (far) more instances of violence on the record against Americans who support Trump than by them. Up to and including murder. In fact, there is so much political violence against them that congress created a list of violent political acts and entered the list into the congressional record[0].

Who is committing this violence and why?

Here is about 10 minutes of research:

- One of the murders, Lee Keltner, a hatter in Colorado:

https://www.denverpost.com/2020/10/17/lee-keltner-protest-sh...

- In this assault, the first is mild. The student punched in the face could have had knocked teeth out:

https://wjla.com/news/nation-world/rising-political-tension

- Punched in the face for wearing a hat in Russian. The assailant couldn't read it, but attacked once the wearer told him the translation:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/man-beaten-up-in-california-re...

- [0] And here is that seven pages of a Political Violence Report, official congressional record:

https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU00/20190409/109266/HHRG...

- The other murder:

https://katu.com/news/local/patriot-prayer-founder-man-shot-...

- Here are three more assaults, including an 81 year-old man:

https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/02/28/maga-hat-wearing-vic...

- This was a serious beating, an art gallery owner:

https://abcnews.go.com/US/york-city-gallery-owner-attacked-w...

- Citing the Berkeley assault, this guy wrote and app to help conservatives find safe places to dine out:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/11/need-safe...

- This is attempted murder:

https://abcnews.go.com/US/man-arrested-allegedly-driving-van...

Regarding the 7 page listing of more than 200 various acts of political violence, including attempted murder, against conservative politicians; I searched for the same document produced during the Obama administration and could not find one. From that I infer that during his administration, neither conservative nor liberal politicians saw political violence as enough of a concern to list it and enter into the permanent record of the United States Congress.

Political and religious violence and oppression was one of the primary motivators for the United States to seek independence from England. We are going backwards.

[joshuamorton]

Any congressperson is free to enter something into the congressional record. That alone should hold no sway. As for this list, it includes tweets comparing trump to hitler as acts of "violence", and the fbi disagrees with your top-line conclusion that Trump's supporters are victims more often than assailants.

[Bud]

The author doesn't care about anything other than making a few cheap dollars with mendacious lies.

[lawnchair_larry]

This is obviously incorrect