[nostromo]

Most Twitter users, as best I can tell, aren't actually complaining about what they see. They are complaining about what others see.

In their view, they have the "correct opinions" and have not been biased by any algorithms or moderation. Meanwhile, the people that disagree with them are the ones being duped by algorithms, bad moderation, and bad actors.

That's why there's a huge censorship movement right now in the US. People aren't saying, "protect me from what I want" -- they are saying, "protect others from what they want, but leave me alone." Which is, of course, entirely hypocritical.

[ska]

> Most Twitter users, as best I can tell, aren't actually complaining about what they see. They are complaining about what others see.

FWIW this doesn't match my experience at all, but I've hardly made a study of it. What I mean by that is that the limited complaints I have heard are mostly about a) bad quality advertisement targeting and b) political targeting, also mostly bad quality.

"quality" here meaning accuracy of the targeting, not a comment on the content.

[prawn]

Nor mine. My complaints are about what I see. I don't want an overload of ads, and especially not irrelevant ads. I don't want suggested content/topics. I don't want suggested follows. I just want to see tweets from the people I chose to follow. Same with Instagram.

But I think the reason they push against this is that is risks people losing interest as the sort of people I follow aren't strong/consistent content creators. They're just people I know personally and want to stay in touch with. Twitter wants to be a firehose of stuff that fires me up. Instagram wants to be endless TV channels of constant content. Whereas I like being able to get up to date on everything my friends have posted, and then go back to what I was doing.

[stickfigure]

Oh come now. I constantly hear this concern from my friends (almost exclusively left-of-center).

And they aren't totally wrong? I have a qanon-er in my family; she's carefully curated her media sources to guarantee a pure, steady stream of nutjob garbage. The thing is, censoring twitter/facebook/youtube makes no difference - these people will find their fringe no matter how hard they have to look. At least on youtube there's a chance the algorithm will show some non-bullshit.

I don't know what "the answer" to any of this is, but I suspect we all need to be a bit more tolerant of online stupidity.

Also: If your social media feeds are showing you crappy content, you are to blame. It's incredibly easy to like/dislike/hide-like-this content. My feeds are fantastic. I suspect the people complaining about their feeds actually like garbage and even more so like to complain.

[twoWhlsGud]

Old joke: "If you owe the bank $1M it's your problem, if you owe the bank $1B it's theirs". New joke: "If a few citizens become radicalized/crazy in ways that threaten the very functioning of your society it's their problem ... "

[pessimizer]

...but if the majority of citizens act in ways that threaten the very functioning of your society, you may live in a monarchy or oligarchy.

[toofy]

i’m not sure why this would be the only option you come to.

it’s much more likely that folks are concerned because the populism wishes to destroy pluralism.

[ilyt]

> Also: If your social media feeds are showing you crappy content, you are to blame. It's incredibly easy to like/dislike/hide-like-this content. My feeds are fantastic. I suspect the people complaining about their feeds actually like garbage and even more so like to complain.

I'd imagine most people have reasonable assumption than YT will only show you more stuff that you like (as in press the like button), not that any engagement, even downvotes, will continue to put more shit into your stream.

Ever wondered why YTbers ask for comments and don't shy from saying "if you didn't like it, downvote and tell me in the comments"? That still drives engagement and that is all to algorithm.

Once you get it, it's easy to keep the shit you don't want in the stream, but not everyone is well versed in algorithmical ways so it's not that hard to get into algorithmics hole

[shadowgovt]

> these people will find their fringe no matter how hard they have to look

This is likely true. Most of the discussion around "the algorithm" is mainly centered around whether there's something about the way the major online sharing channels are selecting what to present that acts as a funnel towards QAnon and other radical theories, not whether people already dedicated to finding such information can find it.

[pixl97]

YT: "you searched WWII", recommended video is "how to become a nazi in 2022"

I had to click do not recommend this content on a ton of videos.

[shadowgovt]

Precisely. If I had to hazard a guess, I think their algorithm is hyper-optimizing for linkages, and when linkages are broad but tenuous, it hyper-optimizes for the ones with only the slightest dominance.

Hypothetically: all sorts of people are interested in the history of World War II... it's a big war, it defined politics for over half a century, and it's taught every year in the history classes of at least a hundred nations. So you're looking at a topic with hundreds of "also likes" connections but no strong winner.

Perhaps there is a 0.000001% chance that if you watch a WWII video, your next video will be one on modern Nazism (including recruitment videos). I wonder if YouTube's algorithm boosts that small fluctuation in a sea of noise into a single recommendation result (or even grabs the top 5, but the signal is so noisy that this one still shows up in that top 5)?

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> Also: If your social media feeds are showing you crappy content, you are to blame.

Yes and no. Youtube radicalisation / algorithmic extremism is a thing, because the engagement-maximising algorithm has a strong bias for rabbit-holes, kooks, con-artists and incendiary nonsense. The "funnel towards QAnon" that the sibling comment mentioned.

Unless you lean hard against it - which first requires awareness of the problem and the skills or knowledge to spot it - it will be in your feed. "you are to blame" is to an extent blaming the victims.

[XorNot]

The sentiment I've heard a lot is "I'm not clicking on that, it'll take weeks to undo the damage to my recommendations".

[rchaud]

How many average users are even aware of this?

It took until 2021 for people to figure out that quote-tweeting politician hot takes to dunk on them, actually helped politicians' reach because Twitter counted it as engagement.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> How many average users are even aware of this?

An increasing number, but still very low. And awareness in itself won't solve the issue entirely. This is why the "you are to blame" sentiment is to an extent blaming the victims.

[unsupp0rted]

Please teach me how I can get YouTube to stop showing me videos about cars and food reactions. And American local news channels.

Dislike button does nothing.

Hide because I don’t like this video option does nothing. It hides that video and keeps recommending competing channels on the same topic.

Don’t recommend channel button blocks the channel so that three more competing channels on the same topic take its place

[joshka]

See https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6342839?hl=en&co=G...

[viraptor]

I think there's some nuance here though, where people do make a distinction between opposing views and harmful content. (likely not everyone, but still)

What I mean is, I don't care if someone reads a politician I hate. I care if they read a politician who enables the next pizzagate or worse. Or if they read state sponsored misinformation while thinking it's genuine opinions. And yeah, I do acknowledge there's some overlapping grey area.

[pessimizer]

The main takeaway is that you care what other people read, not about what people are making you read.

[kannanvijayan]

> The main takeaway is that you care what other people read, not about what people are making you read.

As do I, and you. I was pretty happy when all of those ISIS accounts that were spewing violence and hate got shut down. I'm sure you have your boundaries on what you'd want society to allow and restrict on public mediums.

The specific details of what those boundaries are will depend on your personal notion of what constitutes communication which can be considered abusive. As it will for any other person.

Copyright violations. Beheading videos. "Pornography" or pseudo-"pornography" involving minors. Direct threats of violence towards individuals or groups. Deepfakes generated without consent. Etc. Etc.

I guarantee you if we have a back and forth discussion we will discover where your boundaries lie across the myriad issues where people typically want to control public discourse.

[ilyt]

Right but I don't want some wanker at Twitter or Facebook office decide that.

If I want to press the ban/blacklist button on tag, account, group, or whatever social unit to not see it again that's my decision. Sure, some of them should be default (probably don't want people to get porn the second they sign up), but user should be in power to moderate and filter their own stream.

> Copyright violations. Beheading videos. "Pornography" or pseudo-"pornography" involving minors. Direct threats of violence towards individuals or groups. Deepfakes generated without consent. Etc. Etc.

3/4 of what you mentioned is illegal in most places in the first place so it isn't point of contention.

And that isn't really a problem. Site deciding this or that political view is now bad is.

You try to put removing the illegal/disturbing content in same category as worldview manipulation. The first is way more black and white than the second and should not be considered together, even if similar systems are used for them.

[nostromo]

This is an age-old panic that happens with each new technology.

The printing press was seen as dangerous. Then the phone, then TV, and then the internet. And now it's social media.

Each time the arguments are the same. People worry that the "wrong people" will have the ability to share ideas to a broad audience.

And yet each time we've shown that more speech is correlated with an expansion of civil rights and liberal governance.

[dsfyu404ed]

You can credit the printing press and increase in accessible information to the literate classes with the enlightenment, broader literacy, modern banking and a whole lot of other good things but the backdrop of all these developments was 100-300yr (depending on how you count) of religious and succession wars as some power was taken from the catholic church and the rulers that were closest to it and redistributed to a broader set of local rulers.

It was definitely a step forward for humanity but it wasn't all unicorns and rainbows.

[toofy]

> Then the phone, then TV…

doesn’t the FCC heavily limit broadcast television and radio who and what behaviors are tolerated? like very heavily, no?

and aren’t there limitations on what you can and can’t do with a telephone?

[Karrot_Kream]

You might be thinking of the Hays Codes which were voluntary or the Fairness Doctrine, which was repealed by the FCC in 1987.

[ska]

> Oh come now. I constantly hear

Path dependence, it's a funny thing.

[wallfacer120]

If you haven't noticed the chorus of coastal media types asking for people they disagree with to be prevented from speaking in any public forum, then you are truly oblivious.

[shadowgovt]

I've seen them asking for private forums to stop giving such folk a platform, because an organization can choose to do what it will with its private property.

But public forums? No, I can't say I have. In fact, I remember witnessing a President giving a large speech in a public forum that was followed by a riot at the Capitol (whether said speech was causal to the riot is still a matter for the courts). Nobody challenged his right to give the speech until the question of whether it was "incitement to riot" came up, and that challenge is unrelated.

[ilyt]

Define "public forum". Because both Facebook and Twitter have way more range than most of what would be defined as "public forum" does

[shadowgovt]

Range doesn't make something a public forum. Generally, control of the space by the public (or their delegates) does.

A letter to the editor of the New York Times has the potential to be seen by 343,000 households (a number down from 1.3 million). This never made the New York Times' letters page a public forum.

Twitter, for example, was at least previously accountable to shareholders. Now, it's very much a private forum.

[ilyt]

And New York Times have competition in the space.

There is no meaningful competition to what Twitter or Facebook does. If you stifle voices on that platform majority of the country won't hear them.

Them not being technically public is the problem in itself , they function like public forum for opinions but one that is manipulated by corporation.

[jshen]

Or maybe we’re all in filter bubbles, including you.

[ska]

> "chorus of coastal media types"

KIIS-FM has a choir?

[Animats]

> I dunno. Mostly I don't want to see ads. I liked Facebook when it just told me what my friends were doing. I don't want a "news feed" from a social network.

But the news media suffer from a huge punditry to hard facts ratio problem.

Today's first-screen news stories on major outlets that didn't begin as a press release or punditry:

* Fox: "Remains of missing toddler Quinton Simon found in landfill, mother charged"

* Washington Post: "Covid deaths skew older, reviving questions about ‘acceptable loss’"

* New York Times: "Antiwar Activists Who Flee Russia Find Detention, Not Freedom, in the U.S." "Exhumed Grave Near Kherson Shows Occupation’s Brutality"

* New York Post: nothing.

* Reuters: "Hawaii's Mauna Loa volcano erupts for first time in nearly 40 years".

* The Times (of London): nothing, because they have such large ads and banners that the content is hidden.

* South China Morning Post: nothing, again mostly because of oversized banners.

* Le Monde: "The unflinching gaze of Ukrainian drones in Bakhmut"

* CNN: multiple stories, because the first screen has many headline links and small banners.

Some of this is optimizing the use of screen space for revenue, not information.

[jrmg]

I liked Facebook when it just told me what my friends were doing. I don't want a "news feed" from a social network.

I have the completely un-researched and un-backed opinion that Twitter changing its prompt from "What are you doing?" to "What's happening?" in 2009 has had an unappreciated, oversized negative affect on the world.

[cxr]

I hold an opinion that can be considered somewhat opposite[1].

Similarly, a commenter from Reddit[2] writes:

> I haven’t personally met anyone active on Twitter for years. There are very specific types of people that want to be sharing things in that way and from my experience they are very narcissistic.

> Not that Reddit doesn’t have their share of asssholes, but I find that because it is anonymous it is also more tolerable. At least it was the case until a few years ago, now Reddit became very popular and the quality of the posts has declined immensely in almost all subs.

> Twitter is just a bunch of people self promoting themselves as more intelligent, more informed, more socially and environmentally conscious, etc. Basically IG for unattractive people.

Already implicit in the "What are you doing?" prompt is the hallmark of modern social media that focuses on positioning individual personality and punditry over common, for-the-greater-good, "kitchen table" discussion in service to a given topic—the focus is on you, the contributor, rather that taking backseat to whatever it is that you're supposed to be contributing to. I'm not sure that this can be rolled back at this point, though.

1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31180315>

2. <https://old.reddit.com/r/samharris/comments/z59ccj/annaka_on...>

[rchaud]

That change in language was likely prompted by a boost in news media relevance for Twitter after the Iran protests against then-leader Ahmedinejad in summer 2009.

Prior to that, I had not heard of Twitter. I was on Facebook and Digg and that was about it.

[98codes]

For me, it was never about what I did see, it was always about what I didn't see. Want to show me extra stuff that you think matches? OK, but FFS let me see the stuff that I have purposefully, manually subscribed to/followed.

[k__]

That's true.

My timeline is pretty chill.

But when I look what's trending in my country, Twitter is a garbage fire.

[0x457]

Hmm, I see a lot of trash that I don't want to see "suggested" by twitter in my feed on the time. The thing is...I don't care that others see it, like it, retweet it. It just, personally, I don't want to see content from accounts I'm not subscribed - I don't care how many of my accounts, that I follow, follow those accounts. Like, 2/3 of my feed is not from accounts I follow: promoted tweets and suggestions.

That's why I quit. I still log in from time to time to keep my handle alive and check out some crazies...

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

^ and this sentiment is repeated by everyone who thinks they're smarter than everyone else.

So now where are we?

[BizarroLand]

Isn't it odd that we are both always perfect and always getting better with time?

I don't know anyone who consistently looks at their own thoughts and opinions from a self-critical eye with the goal of probing their mental models for flaws in the structure for the express purpose of fixing their logical or factual errors, but surely we do gradually over time.

That is probably a very difficult thing to do all at once, although I suppose it does happen little by little. Surely, no matter how rarely or in what brilliant glimpses we get time chisels away our ignorance so long as our ignorance is more pliable than the steel of the chisel of our self-education.

I doubt many adults feel as though they have suddenly sprung fully formed from the womb of childhood, fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of perfection, and yet most of us feel that as of right now, our small flaws aside, we are as close to perfection as we have ever been or possibly ever will be.

[ilyt]

Eh, I think many of them are fully aware that it is the platform that pushes views that agree with them, hence any notion of removing "moderation" seems like helping "the enemy" get a hold.

[jrmg]

I don't think that's correct. I think most people are complaining about what they see, and how they feel when using Twitter.

I'm basing my opinion on:

- The experience of seeing people move to Mastodon and comment on how much more pleasant they find it (I do think this might be fleeting - more because they're seeing only early adopters than because there's intrinsic 'bitterness' missing on Mastodon, at least compared to 'old Twitter').

- My own experience of Twitter. It just makes me anxious and angry now. Every time. Yet I keep going back! It's transformed from a pleasant place to converse and browse to somewhere where everyone is angry at everyone else all the time. I'm fairly liberal in my opinions, so usually people I see are angry at either right wing folks or other left wing folks being liberal in slightly different ways - but I do also see the retweets of angry right wing tweets with the "hey, isn't this opinion SO WRONG" opinion. This is with the 'chronological' feed. With the 'algorithmic' feed, it's _even worse_: I now get more angry people I don't know on both sides of the spectrum, and I don't see the non-angry normal conversations or life updates from people I do follow (presumably because they're low-engagement).

- I _do_ think about how this affects others, you're right - and I imagine that those with more right wing opinions are in much the same state as me, but more 'opposite', and _even more angry_ because right wing accounts seem to be more likely to be aggressive than left wing ones. So, yes, I am concerned about what others see - but only in as much as I'm concerned about what everyone sees and how the current political climate is descending into an angry selfish madness where no-one is prepared to actually listen to anyone else. I do think this angry selfish madness is more prevalent on the right, especially in mainstream politics.

Maybe my experience is not the majority one, but I think you should take it into account.

[toofy]

> My own experience of Twitter... it’s transformed from a pleasant place…

yep. this is what many of these people just continually fail to understand.

it’s just not fun being around abusive, abrasive, anti-social people constantly.

its not complicated. it’s not scandalous. it’s not shocking. people don’t enjoy being around anti-social rude people.

when they’re given an alternative where the promise is less shitty behaviors (the current iteration seems to be mastodon) then people go there, and this drives a certain group of people crazy.

what we should be asking is why it bothers them so strongly when some people say “i’m personally going to move away from that rude abrasive person over there.”

why are they so insistent that we spend our free time around abrasive assholes? they’re adamant about this. why?

[justlikeplace]

Sounds just like Hacker News.

[bitwize]

Read Marcuse's "Repressive Tolerance" to see why this is the case:

https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repr...

The tl;dr is that if you actually want to move toward a society of free and equal human beings and eliminate oppression, "free speech for all" is not how you go about it. One side of the political spectrum supports equality and emancipation, the other is opposed to it. Therefore the speech of one side must be tolerated and supported; the speech of the other must be squelched and restricted.

The internet has had its time to experiment with free speech for all, and now we have Nazis. Social media companies saw greater value in muzzling the Nazis than they did in hewing to outdated libertarian internet values.

[petermcneeley]

> Therefore the speech of one side must be tolerated and supported; the speech of the other must be squelched and restricted.

This sounds like a distinction between say a friend and an enemy. Sounds like a political concept I have heard before.

[cfraenkel]

Too true. "Do as I say, not as I do." also comes to mind.

[hutzlibu]

"of free and equal human beings"

The problem starts with how you define those two(or any political expression). Because by many definitions, they are contradictory.

Equal chances? Money gives people advantages, so all should have the same money? Even if all would have the same money, some are born smart and some are born dumb. Genetic equalisation?

Pretty much against the idea of "freedom" like I know it.

When people are free, some will party all day, some will work like a dog.

So some will get rich. Some will get by, some will starve.

Unless you mean strictly "equal in front of the law", which we supposedly have, but we all know that the one with the more expensive lawer (or any lawer at all) has a big edge. So de facto we are not even equal in front of the law.

The big question is, how and what would you change about it?

I would actually start with free speech, because when people cannot speak freely, they will start speaking in code. And this will just make the whole political discussions even harder, as it will blur the definitions even more. I think this is mainly what we have on the internet. Lots of talk and lots of people thinking they are right, but only little actual communication and adressing the core problems because people are mostly talking about different things.

[sien]

And read Marcuse for gems like this :

"They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements that promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or that oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc."

That is, if you oppose the expansion of government you should have your right to free speech removed.

From : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Marcuse

Which shows the problem with idea of 'we must remove free speech for hate speech' because one of the originators of the idea intended that free speech should be withdrawn from people he disagreed with in ways that many or even most people in most Democratic states would find abhorrent.

[kneebonian]

> The internet has had its time to experiment with free speech for all, and now we have Nazis.

Interestingly enough did you know that the original Nazis came about before the internet ever existed, way back in the 1930's, further did you know Nazis existed prior to the internet as well. It is true, in fact one may argue that there is no real correlation between the existence of Nazis and the internet, just their visibility.

But in a less sarcastic vein, I can only speak from my personal experience, but from what I see the more we try and suppress speech that some do not like, whether labeling it as hate speech, misinformation, or whatever else has produced in fact the exact opposite of the intended result, where more people are willing to tolerate actual Nazi's, question official information more readily and tolerate real racism more because the label became so broadly applied that it lost any meaningful effect.

Finally I also heard one interesting theory that part of the reason one side of the political spectrum is currently struggling so much is because the other side had even their moderate views censored from twitter, whereas another side was treated in a much more lenient fashion. The result was only the most reasonable and centerist voices of one side were shared, whereas the other side had many of their most radical and vocal members airing their views for all to see, which was a turn off to many, whereas the most extermist content on the other side was hidden and squelched.

[nostromo]

This is the exact logic used by Joseph McCarthy, and I think it's safe to say that was a failed experiment.

> Therefore the speech of one side must be tolerated and supported; the speech of the other must be squelched and restricted.

This is actually how you get Nazis. You know, the real ones that existed before the internet. Not 4chan weebs trolling boomers online, but the ones that would jail or kill you for having the wrong opinion or wrong affiliation.

[ska]

That seems a-historical. The way you get the real nazis is by not acting soon enough when they target/vilify/'other' marginalized groups, or attempting to get a foothold in political institutions.

[bitwize]

It is ahistorical. Germany outlawed Nazi ideology and went 80 years without renazifying; the danger of such was very real after WWII. Marcuse, a German Jew, was considering the real, immediate, terrifying problem of how to prevent another Holocaust.

[nostromo]

You're cherry picking.

Look at Joseph McCarthy and see a counter-example. He used the exact same logic: to prevent a Soviet-style totalitarian government in the US, we had to be intolerant of everyone left of mainstream Democrats.

It destroyed many peoples' lives, most of who were not at all sympathetic to Soviet-style communism.

Similar to your example, we could also argue that McCarthy was indeed effective at preventing Soviet-style communism in America (since the US still has free speech and there has not been another holocaust). But in both cases we don't have convincing evidence that suppressing speech was actually helpful.

[woooooo]

Worth adding on that McCarthy knew exactly what he was doing and didn't care. It raised his profile. (Source: master of the senate, caro)

Those who validate dirty pool in pursuit of the greater good will always be enabling people like that.

[pixl97]

Being moderate is a delicate balance where foes seek power in whatever way possible. With this said I get quite concerned when someone says it's their freedom to plot the end of my existence.

[int_19h]

Germany still has plenty of open Nazis for all their efforts at censorship. Something like the infamous march in Charlottesville was breaking news when it happened precisely because it's so unusual, but much larger neo-Nazi marches happen in Germany on a regular basis.

[trillic]

A bit of a paradox, but a tolerant society does not tolerate intolerance.

[HPsquared]

It's a logical contradiction. There seems to be some overloading of the word "tolerance".

[googlryas]

It's not, it is just a term in common usage taken to the extreme in an attempt to be clever, in contravention of all conversational norms. I don't think there is any definition of tolerance that is mathematically sound and absolute.

It would be like saying "a peaceful person would never punch someone in the nose". But what if you needed to punch someone in the nose because they were trying to kill you for no reason? That doesn't mean peaceful people don't exist, or that peaceful people need to let random people murder them. It just means that the determination of peacefulness is contextual.

[petermcneeley]

Yes such overloading leads to paradoxes. My favorite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unexpected_hanging_paradox

[drdeca]

Huh, does the unexpected hanging paradox come from such an overloading? It isn't obvious to me how it is. I don't mean that in a way to suggest that it seems unlikely to me. It seems quite plausible to me that it is. I just don't see in what way. Could you elaborate on how it comes from an overloading?

[SideburnsOfDoom]

FYI, I think that you missed that this idea that "a tolerant society does not tolerate intolerance" is better known as "Karl Popper's paradox of tolerance" You can find it under that name, numerous articles, from Wikipedia on down (1). Since 1945. it's widely known and accepted. It's not an actual contradiction, most "paradoxes" only appear that way on a superficial inspection.

it would be like saying, as the sibling comment did "a peaceful person would never punch someone in the nose" ... except that a society that aims for peace, and is beset with violent people, is going to have to quell that violence. This might involve reserving the right to punch the punchers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

[Andrew_nenakhov]

You are conflating protection from violence with protection of free speech. Paradox of tolerance is a hypocritical concept used by people to excuse their own intolerance.

Restrictions on free speech are much more dangerous than any hate speech. You won't get a new Hitler by blocking speech you don't like. It's the opposite: new Hitler will start with blocking free speech. That's what every authoritarian regime does first.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> You are conflating protection from violence with protection of free speech.

No, I am saying that they are "like" each other. It's a comparison not a conflation. Mr Popper is absolutely not conflating anything - his original formulation is very much about speech.

> blocking free speech. That's what every authoritarian regime does first.

You mean, after they become the regime, and get a lock on the power to block free speech; which in turn is after using the free speech ability to emit the divisive populist rhetoric that propels them to that power? There is no regime ever, that blocks free speech before it is voted into power. At that stage they're only to happy to use it. The shutting it down comes later.

So, not first at all then. That was Popper's point.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

"paradox of tolerance" is a hypocrisy. If you are intolerant only to the intolerant you are not tolerant, it is as simple as that.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

There's absolutely nothing hypocritical about e.g. "defending peace". It's realistic. between Karl Popper's well-known writings on the subject, and one accusatory sentence from someone on the internet, I'll take Karl Popper.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

To your knowledge, you have just used a fallacy called "Argument from authority", a popular demagogue technique.

Just because someone wrote in length that white is black, white does not become black. Likewise, intolerance does not become tolerance.

You do not tolerate something => you are not tolerant.

You oppose free speech only for really horrible people => you oppose free speech.

It's really binary, and wherever Popper wrote, it does not change this simple truth. But, of course, you can hypocritically pretend that it does.

[tpm]

You probably should read Popper before dismissing his ideas. If you don't want to, it's fine, but in that case it's hard to take your dismissal seriously.

Like more or less anything real, this is not a simple binary problem.

[marcosdumay]

No, it's hypocritical. You defend the Rule of Law, or Democracy, or some people's self determination.

But if you start framing things as "defending peace (by force)", you may quite possibly have your arguments taken over by the people attacking whatever you want to defend. Because they can use the argument just as well as you.

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

It's still a hypocrisy, but so what.

People say it like it's a damnation of the idea. Things in life are fuzzy, that's why it's literally called a paradox.

The most tolerant people in the world are not going to be ok with a 20 year-old having a sexual relationship with their 12 year old daughter because of the danger involved. That's the paradox of intolerance, that everyone has a limit, and if you have no limit, someone else will pick it for you and cause damage on their terms.

We don't generally tolerate violence in the west. Yes, it's an intolerance, but it's for the greater stability of society.

but I have absolutely seen people use the paradox of tolerance to argue for some shitty opinions, so it must still be dealt with care. You can imagine a KKK member using it to defend their choice of not allowing blacks to be free of lynching.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

It's ok to be intolerant at some things. What's not ok is to be intolerant and still claim to be tolerant. That's hypocrisy.

Also, do not equate actions and speech - and we're mostly arguing about free speech here, right?

[bryanlarsen]

You do realize that both "paradox" and "hypocrisy" have the same basic definition, don't you? They both mean "self-contradictory", the biggest difference is in connotation, not meaning.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

No. These words do not have the same basic definition.

Hypocrisy: The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess; falseness. [0]

Paradox: A statement that seems to contradict itself but may nonetheless be true. [1]

Every time I see someone here mentioning someone the paradox of tolerance, it is to support restriction of speech for someone else. (someone really bad, of course - fascist, antivaxer, racist, you name it), and these people always hypocritically consider that they support free speech, just not for those bad people.

[0]: https://www.wordnik.com/words/hypocrisy

[1]: https://www.wordnik.com/words/paradox

[bryanlarsen]

I'm not sure how you can accuse people of hypocrisy for being intolerant of the intolerant when they just told you they're being intolerant of the intolerant.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> Most Twitter users, as best I can tell, aren't actually complaining about what they see. They are complaining about what others see.

I don't see any evidence for that

> In their view, they have the "correct opinions" ... the people that disagree with them are the ones being duped

This is getting very straw-man

> That's why there's a huge censorship movement right now in the US

Oh really, is there?