[fighterpilot]

Hitler convinced almost half the country to vote for him because of speech that drummed up resentments stemming from the Versailles Treaty and the depression, channeling and anthropomorphizing those resentments towards Jews, the lugenpresse, the military establishment, and so on. So you've missed my point, which is that town square offline speech can directly cause pathological outcomes when it is weaponized by bad faith actors.

The belief that sunlight is the best disinfectant is nothing more than empty sloganeering and it flies in the face of everything we know about social contagion and the willingness of humans to be led astray by tribal hatred.

Town square offline speech didn't lead specifically to mass shootings historically only because this particular medium of terrorism is a modern fashion trend, so it follows that it's a phenomenon that's going to be motivated online more than offline in the modern context.

[notchFilter54]

And your argument is that if the venues hosting Hitler's speeches had Reddit's moderation policies then Hitler would not have been elected?

[fighterpilot]

You're trying to draw analogies between modern technology and the old town square. You should stop doing that because instant distribution to a billion people isn't the same thing as a speech to a thousand.

I provided examples of speech in the old town square leading to pathological outcomes, but we are in a very different regime now and analogizing too much isn't helpful.

[notchFilter54]

So who should decide what moderation policies we have for the public? The general populace, who as you say would elect literally Hitler, or the government itself of which Hitler was once a part and used these very moderation mechanisms to suppress the Jews? The tyranny of a minority of special moderators like perhaps a nominally communist censor committee may have? We allow Naziist speech to exist precisely because we don't want the government or the tyranny of the majority or minority choosing what political speech is allowed, such as outlawing speech that doesn't promote Naziism.

>You're trying to draw analogies between modern technology and the old town square.

No I'm trying to find out how you want to apply moderation strategies to "reduce the likelihood" (my apologies if I misquoted your deleted comment) of democratic election of those who some censors decide have the wrong political views or speech.

>You should stop doing that because instant distribution to a billion people isn't the same thing as a speech to a thousand.

Are you also one of those that thinks the first amendment doesn't apply to the internet because the founders never imagined something that distributes so much faster than the printing press could exist? I know this is a straw man but I can't help but think this is where this is leading.

>And your argument is that if the venues hosting Hitler's speeches had Reddit's moderation policies then Hitler would not have been elected?

The fact that you didn't answer this question (well you did, but you deleted it) really is an damning answer of itself.

[fighterpilot]

> So who should decide what moderation policies we have for the public?

There's three possibilities:

(1) No moderation at all, beyond what's illegal.

(2) Private voluntary self-regulation.

(3) Government censorship.

In my opinion, (2) is the lesser evil, which isn't to say that it doesn't have its own pitfalls. (1) is infeasible due to the 8chan experience, and our understanding of social contagion and human tribalism. (3) has a much bigger slippery slope risk.

> The fact that you didn't answer this question

I deleted my answer because these analogies are too tenuous. You're trying to compare modern social media with how information spread 90 years ago. How can I map "Reddit's moderation policies" onto 1920s beer halls and Der Sturmer and newspapers? You can't do it. We're in a new regime and we need to reason about this new regime from first principles.

[notchFilter54]

We're in agreement, although I might add (2) is essentially the same as the censorship policy in the Weimar Republic under which Hitler was elected, where public censorship was nominally and constitutionally illegal [1] (except in narrow circumstances, such as anti-Semetic expression) and any censorship essentially relegated to private and/or voluntary regulation

> How can I map "Reddit's moderation policies" onto 1920s beer halls and Der Sturmer and newspapers?

The same way the first amendment is applied to both beer halls and the internet. There's not a single rule in Reddit's content policy that cannot be applied to a beer hall [0]. If you fail to find a way to apply these rules you're either not putting in any effort or you're a lot dumber than you sound (methinks the former).

Given that what you advocate for is virtually identical to that under the Weimar Republic, I assert your chosen policies would have little to no effect on the election of Hitler.

[0] https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy

[1] Ritzheimer, Kara L (2016). 'Trash,' Censorship, and National Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Germany. Cambridge University Press.

[fighterpilot]

I know that the Weimar Republic had anti-semitic censorship laws. I made almost the same argument that you are making just 2 months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27865484

"My understanding is that pre-Nazi Germany had hate speech laws, and it didn't seem to work there?"

I abandoned my views on this question for a few reasons:

- The Weimar Republic laws either weren't effective at preventing distribution or they weren't actually enforced. The continued circulation of Der Sturmer is evidence of this. The judiciary was known to be heavily biased in favor of the far-right, where less than 10% of far-right political killers were convicted and the majority of far-left political killers were convicted.

- Online censorship is far less likely to create martyrs than the visual/emotional imagery of imprisoning people.

- Online censorship is far more effective at preventing distribution.

- Failing to censor online leads to automatic mass-distribution due to the consolidation of eyeballs in a small number of venues. Failing to censor offline does not. There is less scale to be had offline.

- Online censorship that we're talking about is private and voluntary. It is not in the same category as government censorship as far as downside risk is concerned.

> Given that what you advocate for is virtually identical

It is not "virtually identical". As I've said, the context is extremely different. You can't draw an analogy as much as you keep trying.